TBPN - Alexis Ohanian, Will Manidis, Sam Lessin, Mistow Teel, La Sombrita, Optimism on the Timeline

Episode Date: March 8, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(01:47) - The Timeline (01:02:35) - Will Manidis (01:31:11) - Alexis Ohanian (01:57:53) - Sam Lessin (02:32:38) - The Timeline

We're watching TBPN. It is Friday, March 7th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We're talking about the U.S. Jobs Report, the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. We talked to Nick Carter earlier this week. We're going to go back, look at what we talked to him about, what he got right, what he got wrong. And a bunch of his new takes have already dropped on that timeline. We're going to be breaking him down. Also, SpaceX, they've been trying to launch Starship for a while, a little bit of a setback. but some promising zero for eight versus a permanent.

It's been a tough time, but teams still locked in, a lot of optimism on the timeline and we're going to break it all down. Also, I mean, got a shout out, Elon. He's a reply guy now. He has officially replied to the show. The timeline is blowing up.

We have the best week on X for the show in history. We are definitely going to have to do a Don Perignon episode soon. But we also have a bunch of call-ins. Wilmanitis is calling in. Alexis O'Hanian is calling in. Sam Lesson's calling in. Stay tuned. That'll happen about an hour from now. But until then, we are breaking down these

stories, the news. What's going on the timeline? What's up, Jordy? What do you think? Um, you're just excited? I'm just not, no, no thought, no mind. Just, just purely, uh, just sort of like getting into the flow. Fantastic. Golden retriever. I'm very excited to have Alexis on this week. He dropped some big news, uh, both around a bid for TikTok as well as bringing back dig. Yeah. I'm excited to get into that and hear it, uh, first person. But, um, and Sam left. I want to talk to him about the should we launch a meme coin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also I just want to hear who his favorite creator, who the, what creator is he the most bullish on like financially?

That's an interesting question. Yeah, that's a good one. And then his one-on-one billboard. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that segment will be brought to you by ad quick, of course. But we want to kick off the show with an absolute banger. Scoot's on the timeline, he's quote tweeting a very odd interaction between J.D.

Vance and Peter Thiel. JD, what happened to you? And it's the, it's not just the fat, childish JD meme, but it's a yassified version of that. And, and JD, do you want to do you want to do the voice? Okay. Yeah, this is a high risk one. Yeah. What, what are you talking about, Mr. Teal? Is that right? Peter says, my creation, my life's work. Is this really how it all ends? And Scoot says, imagine showing this to a regular person. And it's a very silly post. We don't talk about politics on the show. Fortunately, we have no regular people watching this show.

Yeah, exactly. If you're in, you definitely understand every layer of this meme for sure. But it's interesting. I do think it's weird how I was talking to Lulu about this. Like the JD meme has like completely broken containment and it seems like maybe it's bipartisan. Like both sides are having fun with it. Like it's both derogatory but also supportive. And even JD is like, yeah, get it.

It's cool. Like it's very different from the weird thing. I don't think we've ever seen this scale of you can imagine this then happening to every public figure. Yeah. Like if it works for JD. Yeah. It's also funny to do it with Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah.

Or like any like major celebrity public figure politician. It's also weird that it didn't happen with Trump because Trump feels very memeable. He feels very like he's always in these really iconic like. image is like the, obviously the assassination attempt, but even like the McDonald's photo was very, it was deliberately shot to look like pop art. And, uh, but he hasn't gone down this path, which is like this bizarre, like very online meme world. But anyway, hilarious post. Shout out scoaks. Uh, and it's good to be starting with a post. Yeah. Going back to our roots. We're doing guests now. Yep. Yep. But it's great to have, uh, start the show with the banger,

with a banger. Exactly. And it's, you know, it's else, uh, what other thing is good to start the show An ad read from Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with an inspiring view. Hotel grade amenities. Dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge services a vacation home but better. And they're doing a giveaway. Use code TBPN and you will be entered to win a free Wander trip, which is incredible. Wander.com slash TBPN. You just have to create an account you're entered in and start making the summer. plans. Yep.

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Invite a potential investor there. Impress them. Close the deal. Could, could net you $10 million in cheeky secondary. There you go. Anything's possible. Anything's possible. But let's move on to the jobs report.

Joe Wisenthal is the one to follow on this, in my opinion, from Blue. He says breaking 151,000 new jobs. Unemployment ticks up to 4.1. You know he's writing his own post because I've never seen anyone misspell unemployment as badly as he did. Amazing. Still did. Still did numbers. Fantastic poster. You know he's just ripping this and that's what makes him. Unemployment. Fantastic. Yeah. I don't know how Kay worked his way in there and also two So we have to do it. So we have a surprising number. We have a surprising number of listeners on Apple podcast. Yeah. And I feel like this is a good opportunity to give a quick disclaimer. Yes. Which is that the show is heavily centered around video now. Yes. And so you're going to get a better experience on Spotify. Yeah. YouTube or X. Yeah. Um, but we're trying to. So I'm just going to say it how Joe spelled it, which is unemployment. Uh, so. Yeah, that's great. So economists had expected 160k new jobs. That was kind of consensus. Uh, uh,

an unemployment rate of 4.4.0. So we miss that. Very unfortunate. You know, we want zero unemployment. We want everyone in America to have a fantastic, rewarding job and creating shareholder value at all times. So a little bit disappointing and stock futures were up a little bit, and then they went down. And in general, you know, mixed messaging on what this means for the beginning of the new administration and the economy. There's a report in the Wall Street Journal breaking it down. The U.S. And Lutnik has had some interesting quotes recently where he said, this administration is not focused on cheap goods or the stock market. Which historically, politicians would at least try to get you to believe that they cared about those two things. Yeah, that's kind of a rough quote because he didn't, he should have immediately said like, what is he focused on?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. To be clear, that's not a word for word quote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little misinformation there. But I think most people, most Americans should be comfortable with like a little ripping the band-aid off, a little bit of temporary pain in the form of a tariff or, you know, some sort of jobs dislocation in the future of, oh, we're going to grow at 10% GDP or we're going to have massive prosperity.

That's an awesome trade. People should be down for that if they think about it. But it's weird to be like, you know. Well, people are, people are also rightfully fixated on the present, right? If somebody's struggling financially, they don't really care about 10% GDP growth in 2030. They care about, you know, what's happening now and this year. So we are going to be having a special guest next week to break down the tariffs specifically because we're not venture capitalists.

And so we don't have, we can't really comment on tariffs. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we should call a VC. Yeah, we've got to call a VC for this one. Whenever there's like something really, really wonky, really difficult. Just like something you should have to spend, you know, your entire career studying. You got to call VC.

Because they will be up to speed for sure. Yeah, we need a sound effect button that's just like, you know, call a VC. Like I'm going to take my like call of the trivia or something. Yeah, that's great. Well, let's rip through some of this Wall Street Journal article. The economy added a seasonally adjusted 151K jobs in February. Labor Department reported Friday. Slightly below the game that economists polled by the Wall Street Journal,

expected to see. Still, this is up from 125K jobs in January. Economists believe that cuts to the federal government jobs under Trump came too late in the month to be captured in February figures. So, if you hear someone saying, oh, this is because Doge is laying people off, that, whatever happens there, if something's going to happen, it hasn't taken effect yet to be caught in this particular stat. So if you hear someone saying that, they're probably wrong. Of that, 3,500 jobs were lost the Postal Service, where employment often swings higher and lower from month to month, that's just kind of a natural process with the postal service. The remaining 6,700 jobs lost, represented the biggest drop in more than two years.

Morgan Stanley economists in a note Friday said they didn't believe the decline was a reflection of layoffs, but instead was the front edge of the freeze on federal hiring. Trump put a hiring freeze in place January 20 at the day he was inaugurated. And so, I don't know what else we want to go into here. Yeah, I mean, the Atlanta Fed had reported earlier this week that GDP growth was negative two and a half percent. And all this is kind of generally tracking the government spending is a major driver of GDP growth. And so when you start cutting it and cutting federal jobs and new hiring and federal, you know, card spend, as we saw this week, I think the Doge team had ran into an issue where they couldn't close. these sort of credit cards, but they could just put a dollar.

They'd cap them at one. One dollar. Very funny. So anyways. Strategists at Evercore ISI worry that uncertainty over contracts and grants is having an additional paralyzing effect on hiring at employers that are exposed to these funding sources or in need of regulatory approvals from agencies that are themselves public paralyzed by Doge review. And so, you know, anytime there's a lot of chaos in the resources.

the government or in the broader markets, companies tighten up because it's a little bit riskier to invest. Yeah, and overall, like a lot of this data, it seemingly has been like heavily politicized over the last decade, right? And so it's hard to really know what's what's truly real, you know, historically, you know, you'd see this sort of like payroll data, but, you know, then you'd figure out after the fact that some of it was associated. with you know contract work or or even things like you know we saw at different points jobs data featuring like door like door dash and sort of like on-demand labor which is is that

really employment or is it you know and how do you classify that but ultimately as you know we're going to have to wait till the experts like Joe Rogan weigh in on this yeah there's more here there's some more data here belt tightening by government workers who have lost their jobs or fear losing them has begun to show up. Card spending by Bank of America customers in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has slowed, according to an analysis conducted by the bank's economists. And there's also worries over tariffs, which we'll dive into next week. Even though the tariffs, I mean, it seemed like this week, it kind of like, they were on,

then they were off, then they were on and they were off. And there's the same thing with the Bitcoin Reserve that we'll get into. But it's all just like uncertainty, and that probably slows down most. business leaders, like decisions. A lot of business leaders are excited about the idea of like a deregulated environment, more opportunity, ability to run faster. I'll ultimately hire more. But it's like until it actually shows up and we get what we've asked for, we're not going to bet against that when, you know, we don't know where exactly the opportunities will lie. Yep.

Anyway, if you're looking to make investments based on what's going on in the market and in the economy, go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. They have high yield cash accounts, bond accounts, treasury accounts, options, indexes, you can play it any way you want, etc. They got something for everybody over there. Wherever you are on the risk curve, public's got something for you. And this show is for entertainment purposes only. But if you want investment advice, check out the all-in podcast. I'm kidding.

All good fun. Let's go over to Nick Carter. Let's go over to Nick. The Bitcoin Reserve and how things shook out. What was that? No, just already this post is great. So Nick posted yesterday evening, he said, So the government made all these L1 founders come to D.C. to kiss the ring.

And the night before published the news that they're not actually buying their bags after all. And anyways. So another comment here from Wando. What's funny about this whole thing, but I don't think many realize yet is that SACs got Trump to sign a piece of paper that essentially changes nothing because they already have those coins, tokens. Anyway, so I'm interested to see, I'm going to pull up like Bitcoin price action over the last 24 hours because, yeah,

it's, I mean, it's sort of up. I mean, it's still up over the last, it's up 10% over the last week. Yeah. But this certainly wasn't good, you know, necessarily. It bounced around a time. Long term for Bitcoin price action because it's basically saying, no, the government's not going to become a buyer. We're not using taxpayer dollars to buy Bitcoin.

And so the positive thing is there was sort of historical concern that at some point the U.S. government would come and market sell Bitcoin. Let's read through David Sacks official announcement. He now has, he's dropped his all-in podcast badge and now just has a White House badge. Yeah. And so I feel it, I mean, this is him, right? David Sacks 47 here. Yeah, I think this is the official. He's a gray checkmark now. Interesting. And so I think it's good to go to the source and then we'll build off of this with some other posts. Just a few minutes ago, Trump signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The reserve will be capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of a criminal or civil asset forfeiture. seatings. This means it will not cost taxpayers a dime. That was something that people initially reacted to very, very heavily. They were like, why are you taxing? Joe Lonsdale came out and was saying, it doesn't make sense to raise my taxes to buy this asset. A lot of people had had problems with that.

And so this completely integrates all of that criticism and really defangs that criticism, in my opinion. I think it seems extremely responsive to that reasonable criticism, which is cool. It's estimated. Yeah, and the timing was the big issue here, right? because if you're if if there's all this criticism and push back against doge right for you know doge is not a scalpel right it's sort of like broadly you know they're trying to be precise but then they're broadly just like cutting a lot of spend some of which is going to be waste some of which would have been probably needs to be reinstated you know etc so doing the doge at the same time as saying you know coming out and saying we're going to be buying cardano and xopi just doesn't make it doesn't make any sense

and so it was rightfully called out and and to sax's credit he went I think on Tuesday or Wednesday and was like, wait till you hear what we're actually doing. Exactly. And yeah. And so it is estimated that the U.S. government owns about 200,000 Bitcoin. However, there has never been a complete audit because it probably sits with like FBI has a little bit. DEA has a little bit like different groups have them. I mean, some like random, yeah, federal organization could have like seized a little bit and it hasn't been all centralized. Something like, oh, yeah, that's that that flash drive is sitting in evidence.

Like that's possible. It's crazy to think about, but it hasn't been centralized. This executive order directs a full accounting of the federal government's digital asset holdings. That seems like a great place to start. The U.S. will not sell any Bitcoin deposited into the reserve. It will be kept as a store of value. The reserve is like a digital fort Knox for the cryptocurrency, often called digital gold. Premature sales of Bitcoin have already cost U.S. taxpayers over $17 billion in lost value, because previously the government would seize. stuff from like the Silk Road and then sell it. And obviously there's been massive price appreciation since then. So that's what he's getting at. Now the federal government will have a strategy to maximize

the value of its holdings. The secretaries of Treasury and Commerce are authorized to develop budget neutral strategies for acquiring additional Bitcoin provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on the American taxpayer. In addition, the executive order establishes a U.S. digital asset stockpile consisting of digital assets other than Bitcoin forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings. So again, we're not going to go out and buy Cardano, but if the FBI winds up busting a drug trafficking ring that happens to own some Cardano, they're not just going to go and sell it immediately. They're going to throw it in the reserve. I'm not exactly sure that Cardano is like the one, but that's generally what the EO is like pointing towards. The government will not

acquire additional assets for the stockpile beyond those obtained through forfeiture proceedings. The purpose of the stockpile is responsible stewardship of the government's digital assets under the Treasury Department promises made. My read on this is that budget neutral strategies is equal to forfeiture proceedings, right? I'm trying to think of other scenarios in which the government would be able to acquire digital assets without in a budget neutral way other than seizure or forfeiture. I don't know. I mean, budget neutral? Yeah.

I really can't forgive anything. Right. I mean, maybe there's something else where, I mean, a budget neutral strategy for acquiring additional Bitcoin would be you bust the drug ring. They have a million dollars in cash and a million dollars in Bitcoin, and you seize both, and you immediately go and buy an extra million dollars of Bitcoin

instead of taking the cash. Yeah. That would be budget. neutral within this framework. Yeah, yeah. So maybe there's something where it's like a weak argument as to why that money should go towards digital gold versus just fighting crime. I agree.

I agree. So, yeah, I'm definitely in the wait and see category on that. Overall. I think it's great that they're, but really they're just signaling like, hey, don't worry. We're not going to raise your taxes and just start dumping money, like new, new money into crypto assets. Let's continue reading this and finish this out. Yeah.

Got to hopefully the admin search to let SACS lead comms specifically on this. Seems great. Because when he sort of announces these things, they tend to make sense. Totally. And when the announcements go out on truth, social, a little bit more chaotic. Yep. And so, Sacks continues. President Trump promised to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile.

Those promises have been. kept. This executive order underscores President Trump's commitment to making the U.S. the crypto capital of the world. I don't, I want to thank the president for his leadership and vision. I also want to thank the president's working group, especially Scott Besant and Howard Letnik for their help. Interesting. So I don't see a lot of, I think it feels like they got this to a good place, but I'm not seeing crypto capital of the world in this announcement. I'm seeing they like like I wouldn't call us the gold capital of the world because we have Fort Knox right I would call us the gold capital of the world because we have you know really clear laws around

how gold is regulated and like how you can promote it and what whether it's a commodity or a stock right like yeah like we have clear like legal stuff but all of that is harder it is a step forward it is that the government is going to hold digital assets yep and you know benefit from potential price appreciation of those assets, but they're also saying they're not going to sell them. Yeah, they're just going to, you know, hold them. Yeah. And so Nick Carter. Who knows how this will actually benefit. Nick Carter is, yeah. There is an argument to say that the taxpayers would benefit the most if the assets were sold. And then just refund the taxes. Yeah, refund, you know, more realistically just used to fund operations. Yeah. What does Nick Carter have to say?

He says, the announcement. could not have gone better. He's very happy about this. He says campaign promise kept Bitcoin Reserve clearly distinguished from alt coin stockpile. Bitcoin gets official U.S. government seal of approval. No other coin does. No taxpayer money spent to acquire coins, so no backlash. And future acquisition of coins likely left to Congress as it should be. And then he says, bonus if Satoshi really is the NSA, as I suspect, and they have one million Bitcoin sitting. on a dusty hard drive in Fort Mead. This EO just ensured that they don't ever sell those.

And so he's talking about kind of the market pressure that, like the government had 200,000 bitcoins. He thinks that the government has a million more bitcoins. But there was always this element of, well, what if Satoshi gets active and sells everything? That would create downward sell pressure. So that's always kind of baked into the price, I guess. Satoshi was bearish if Nick, if the NSA gets bearish and starts market selling. Yeah, exactly.

A million coins would be rough for the price. And so this should be somewhat bullish in the sense that, hey, yeah, those 200,000 coins, they're not going to be dumped anytime soon. They always could be. It was always, there's always a chance of that happens. And so that creates some sort of downward price pressure, but no longer. And so, yeah, should be somewhat bullish, but not, not, hey, let's go and 10x the price. Yeah. Which seems what the market is reacting to.

Yep. It's cool. Anyway. Well, you know what the market or what the government isn't market selling, John? What? Submariners. Let's go. And where can you get a sub-mariner?

The government, we're coming out and we're saying, you know, the government needs a strategic reserve of, you know, watchery watches. And they should be using Bezell to do that. Yes. Spending money on the ramp card. Yes. On Bezell.

Yes. They should take all of the gold in Fort Knox and convert it to gold, Cardier Santos. Yes, we're just going to meme it into existence. Yes. But if you're sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin and you're happy with it, why not take out a loan against it and go buy a watch? Which is something you can actually do now. But if you've made a bunch of money on crypto,

why don't you step up your wrist game, get a watch on. Transition from digital assets to hard physical assets. Everyone's, oh, yeah, Bitcoin's so good. because, like, you know, it's a store of value. If you had to leave the country, you could just take it with you. Well, yeah, you can do that with a nice watch too. I mean, you can hop on a flight. Sort of they'll hassle you.

Yeah. With watches. I don't know if you've, it's a real issue. Yeah, a little bit different if you've just memorized a seed phrase. But in most cases, it's still a fantastic option. And the place to go is bezel. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated, in-house by Bezels team of experts.

We love Bezzel. I bought a watch on Bezal. Jordy bought a watch on Bezal. I'm constantly scrolling. And our producer is looking for a watch on Bezal now. And it's been a lot of fun. I love Bezal. And yeah, go check it out. Download the app. Start scrolling.

It's fun. Scroll. Anyway, let's move on to Starship. Delian says, okay, the Starship blowups obviously suck, but damn are they beautiful? He shares a nice photo of the starship, a video, which we're still working on getting playing. We'll figure this out soon. But the videos are dramatic. The technology daily show has not figured out how to reliably play videos.

We got a lot of stuff going on here. There was actually a little bit of debate over this because people know that these videos go so viral that what they'll do is they will take videos from the previous crash. Of which there was seven. Yeah, yeah. So I think this was what, this was flight seven. This was eight. This was eight. So they'll take the flight seven crash and put it up and be like,

Flight eight just blew up and they're right that it did. But that's not the right video, but they have a good video and they know it'll go viral. I think this is zero for eight. Zero for eight. It's rough. I texted a size lord capital allocator that is invested, I think a couple hundred million dollars in the space economy. And I said, why, why does the rocket?

why does starship keep blowing up? And he had a very sophisticated answer, which is space is hard. There have been rumors flying around that it had something to do with a potential firmament. There was some of the biblical analysis. But not for this show. We're not going to deep dive that.

But it is, this is the challenge. I've gotten a bunch of space pitches. I'm underinvested in space personally. Sure. I just, you know, it's very, very hard. And when you think of just comparing, you know, a YC founder, you know, goes out and they're talking about some SaaS product, right, that they're going to make. And they ship a V1 and it doesn't work. Yeah.

The stakes are pretty low, right? You can just sort of like ship a V2. Maybe you spend a weekend, you know, staying up late. and get it done space. You ship your V1. It's extremely, extremely expensive if it doesn't work. In this case, they're on V8. It's still not working to the degree.

Like, I'm sure they're making incremental improvements, but it's just the stakes are so much higher. And the other thing that's very real is the pace of iteration is can't possibly be as fast because if you, you know, even if you're just benefiting from, the Falcon 9 and and and leveraging their sort of like payload capacity you're not getting you you sort of have one of these errors and then you have to wait months to get to get even a second shot and that could be millions of dollars it's a bunch of lost time not even factoring in the burn that sort of like op-x that you're going to incur during that period so stakes are very high

and it is even challenging for the man taking us to Mars. So, not easy. It's interesting because, so this is launch 8. Falcon had three failures, but they had a lot longer in between. So the first Starship test launch was April of 23. So we're coming up on two years of starship testing. Falcon 1, they failed in March of 2006, then March of 2007, and then August of 2008. And then in September of 2008, like later that year, they got Falcon 1, Flight 4 successfully reached orbit. And so there's this thing where, like they're on a time scale, they're hitting a similar, like it's taking them a few years to get this right. Yep. But they're just blowing up away more stuff because they're iterating faster.

Yep. Which I think is probably fine and good. Like I think obviously it's expensive and you want it to work the first time. But you'd rather just get through as many of the problems as possible and launch more. But it does feel more dramatic. Whereas there are plenty of companies that are like, yeah, it took us two years to iron this out because. it was really hard and we didn't make any mistakes during that time. Like at the end of the day, you just want to get the thing working. It doesn't really matter. Yeah.

So let's go to some reaction from the timeline. Sunday girl is taking a shot at old Elon. He says, if NASA had the failure rate that SpaceX does, Elon Musk would be firing everyone in Congress would be demanding to know where the money is going. And Kane chimes in and says, NASA doesn't build rockets. It's contractors, including SpaceX, do. SpaceX Falcon had three failures. In 458 launches, making it the most reliable rocket system used by NASA, Starship is still in testing.

And so, yeah, I don't even know if they're selling, I think it's still full test runs. Yeah. I believe one of the, sometimes they'll sell like basically discounted rates to be like, hey, yeah, there's like a 10% chance that this works. So we'll charge you one-tenth the price if you want to ride on this thing. Yeah. but Andy next yes we should have somebody on like I feel like Josh Wolfe would be a good guest to specifically talk about what is what is happening between obviously you have falcon nine taking payloads up reliably with companies like Varda yeah but then something sort of happens

with Starship specifically that um you know basically what is the actual uh what is actually happening that causes Starship to break up into hundreds of pieces and put on the incredible light show for all of us down on earth, but what is the exact sort of process? And is it been different every time or is it sort of reliably, you know, it would be, if you're working at SpaceX and it's sort of reliably doing the same thing, that's like somewhat comforting, right? Because it's like sort of a fixed problem that you need to solve. But, but we should actually, you know, we should definitely have somebody on the show to talk about it. Yeah. Andy next. Honestly, Sean McGuire would be able to, would be able to speak to it. Yeah. Scott Nolan.

worked at SpaceX early in his career, has done a bunch of breakdowns on this stuff. And then some of the other early SpaceX guys that have gone on to found other companies talk about this stuff and break it down. Be cool. Andy says, remember, the funniest outcome is the most likely, guys. You get to catch super heavy on the first attempt

if you accept Starship blowing up on the next five flights in a row. This is how the invisible hand of the free market keeps everything fair. Trust the process. I love. Good post. Zander says, Flight 8 hit me hard watching Starship fall after pouring everything we had into it cuts deep. It hurts because we care because we know what's at stake, but the pain is the price of progress will carry this loss, rise from it and push harder than ever onward. Hashtag Starship. Love it. Great post. 19,000 likes. Humanity is on Zander's side. He says the support has been overwhelming. Thank you all in moments like this. It means more than words can express. Every setback is painful,

but they remind us why we push forward and how many believe in this journey we'll keep going at Astra per Aspera. Yeah, and I like this John Edwards with the SpaceX tag. He says, never give up after Falcon 1, Flight 3. We learn the hard way that night is darkest before the dawn.

Keep your heads up, keep pushing, we're going to get there. So lots of optimism from the SpaceX team. Sam D'Amico has a funny one. Did you see this? So I don't know if you've heard of Law Sombrita, but it's this little shade that is built, I think, in L.A. Have you seen any of these? They're at like bus stops.

And it's a very expensive, very slow infrastructure project. And Sam says, fun fact, to fact, La Sombrita and Starship took the same amount of time. Democrats put an enormous amount of money into infrastructure investments like Chips and I don't understand. Is it, is it, it's meant to be an overhang? for one person or it's meant to be a chair if it snows a lot no no no it's it's a sunshade so you can go and stand under it but it's like a sunshade for just one person I guess and I think it's designed to be

like you can't destroy it basically it's like very like vandal resistant but it's just how did they come up with this thing it's just so ridiculous and I guess it's called lost some breath so it's very funny. Starship isn't and then Sam says Starship by the way isn't just the rocket but the entire city factory that produces it. And yeah obviously got to work out some other things. Sawyer Merritt summed it up. He said breaking SpaceX just successfully caught its Starship super heavy rocket booster in midair for the third time. They parallel parked a building. It's great. It's more than parallel parking. Yeah. It's playing catch with a building. And so I mean maybe this just a very stupid take, but it seems like catching the buildings, like the harder part and

like getting the rocket, getting this actual Starship just not to break up. It seems like... Stay in one piece. It seems like once they solve that, it's like pretty much game over. So I don't know. But Base Baron, of course, summed it up very well by saying the Blue Origin after party for the Starship launch is effing lit right now. I don't know.

I think they're all rooting for each other in a somewhat serious way. Funny to imagine, of course, we love Bays to Barron, having fun on the timeline, poking fun at the rivalry between. Yeah, space is such a different category. You know, if you're in a highly competitive market, let's say project management SaaS and your direct competitor has a product launch and it goes terribly and it gets rejected by the market. Like the stakes are pretty low there, right? It just doesn't, it doesn't set the industry back broadly. Totally. And so there's a competitive dynamic that encourages dunking and people don't want to see. other people do well, but Blue Origin and SpaceX, obviously Blue Origin is going to benefit from SpaceX's progress, right? Because they're sort of generating, you know, know how that, yes, it's, you know, actual IP for SpaceX, but at the same time, I'm sure you have, you know, like if SpaceX does

really well, there'll be a bunch of people that have learned how to do space better and they'll be able to go and start other companies and work at Blue Origin and all this stuff. And it's, it's good for the entire industry, so, and, and humanities. Yeah. But, even though they're blowing all these up, I still feel like, like, yeah, I'd probably go on one of these in like a few years, which is like the exact opposite of how I feel about like Boeing, you know, Boeing, like one like little like, like, you know, wing like breaks off and I'm like, I'll never fly on that again. Yeah. But it's different because it's like, I understand that like you got to blow up a lot of stuff to get to where, you know. How many successful.

Starship flights do you need in a row to feel good about jumping on? Probably three. Three? Yeah. Okay. I think I'd go on the fourth, maybe. To the moon or to the Mars? Anywhere.

To the moon, probably, I'd be like the second dude on the moon. I'd probably be the first one. I mean, people have already been, so, you know, if they send up some robots or something, I'll be the first human on the ship. I think it's pretty low risk. So if you just had your rocket blow up. up in front of the whole world. Yeah.

And you'd been pulling all-nighters. Where, what kind of... I'm crashing on an eighth sleep for sure. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to eightsleep.com. Use code TBPN. Check them out.

My sleep scores back up. I'm off the sauce. Back on the wagon. Off the wagon. On the wagon means you're not drinking. I did not drink last night. And I feel great. And I got an eight.

84, only missed on the routine. I think that's just because I'm all over the place with falling asleep. But I got almost eight hours. 7.48. You have me beat. And that was a fair and square. I don't have any excuses. My routine was at, you know, something like 93%.

I just didn't get the hours. Yeah. So I think it would be really interesting. Once we get a dialed, then we're doing consistent, you know, hundreds every night. the Dom episodes, I think that we might have an advantage here because we drink in the morning. And so it's fully out of your system.

So we could probably get Brian Johnson to approve that, right? Yeah. To be like, yeah, like, it doesn't count if you drink it at 11 a.m. But I think the real alcohol problem is when you're drinking, you know, right up until you go to bed,

then it's still in your system. Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's the secret. Don't drink, only Dom Paring-on and only at 11 a.m. After a major, major celebration. before noon before noon yeah only drink before noon uh anyway uh china is coming for our subiconductor supply chain we've talked about some of these companies i've been looking for i was thinking about doing a

thread on this like years ago um and trying to like break it all down it's very very hard yeah i mean i thought it would go super viral but um it's very very hard because um all of these chinese companies that work in the semiconductor supply chain they all have websites that look exactly the same and like they're very hard to translate it's actually hard to understand who the real players are if you don't speak Chinese and don't really work in the industry but nick says china will produce the entire semiconductor supply chain in-house obviously they want to try and do this they want to get away from tsmc they want to get away from taiwan this is what's driving ben thompson's pitch right now for rolling back the chips act let's keep china dependent on Taiwan so then

there is no incentive and the thought of a of a Taiwan invasion is is unthinkable. But if you cut them off early, they're going to have to pull forward their homegrown strategy. And as soon as they're successful, then it's game on, potentially. Hopefully not. So in design software, they got Imperian. In fabulous chip design, they got high silicon, unisoc and Byron. In lithography equipment, that's the competitor to ASML out in Denmark.

or where's ASML? It's in Europe somewhere. They have Smee and CETC. In Photo Resist, they have Dinglong and Rungda. And then in etching and deposition equipment, they have Naura, fabrication, SMIC, which is their equivalent of TSMC, packaging and testing.

They have two companies, Tongfu and J-Sat, NAND, which is the memory, and DRAM, also memory and HBM. They're competing with that S.K. Heinex, the South Korean company that makes all the memory that has been super important in the GPU scale out. I think here's, most people haven't been focusing. One of the counterpoints to Ben Thompson's argument, which is just that, you know, we should, you know, let China maintain their

dependence on TSMC is I have to imagine that China would have done this exact same thing, even if they had unlimited access to all the chips they wanted in the world from NVIDIA. you know, buying directly from TSM, et cetera. So I think this would have been the natural path in the same way that in the U.S., in an ideal situation, we would also have a full in-house, you know, Silicon supply chain, semiconductors, supply chain. I think that's true, except for the fact that when I looked down this list, like America is not really working on very many of these?

No, I'm not saying if we are. I'm saying we would like it. In theory, we should. Yeah, totally. But I guess there's a question of like how much political will exactly take. It's a huge investment. China seems to be willing to make that because they're kind of backed up against the wall. But we're not doing that in America. We are doing it kind of more broadly in the West. We've always kind of seen this. Even the ASML stuff. It's not an American company, but they built on a lot of American intellectual property, which is how I believe the Chips Act is enforced. It says that if you're on this restricted list, You can't buy products from companies that use American intellectual property, even though it's not an American company. They're an ally, and then they play ball with us. Yeah.

And so anyway, very tricky. So good time to build a competitor to one of these companies because they're coming. And we've seen this with, it feels like every few years, there's like, oh, China has a very, very serious competitor in Unitry, for example. Deepseek, all these different companies kind of pop up. Yeah, we miss this earlier this week. Unitree released a demo. of a humanoid doing kung fu, which was very cool. And I mean, the Unitri demos are looking so good now.

They often get flagged on community notes as like, this is AI or this is CGI, look at the shadow, it's not matching up. And then sometimes there'll be a fight over like, no, this is actually real. And I think obviously then people are also playing into it and making fake videos too. But in general, like it is real and the tech is getting very, very serious. and the production scale of that is also really risky. I wonder if they'll do... Yeah, it's an interesting situation where Unitri doesn't care if a bunch of CGI videos are released

because it's basically information warfare, whereas the other humanoid robotics companies would get completely dragged. They obviously can't produce any of these sort of falsified or sort of videos. but Unitri is happy to just sort of show off capabilities that may or may not even be real. Yeah. I wonder when we will see a, you know, there's like Chinese drone shows, fireworks.

It's like a dragon in the sky. It's all the drones flying in unison with LEDs on them. I wonder when we'll see a Unitary level demo of that with humanoids. You know there's like Soviet marches of like, oh, wow, they have a thousand like soldiers just marching down. the street. Like, like, Unitry is still in like the, oh, we have one cool demo. Like, but imagine you see a thousand of those and you're like, yeah, this isn't AI generated. That would be. Yep. That'd be a big moment. It's coming. And at that point, it's kind of like all the infighting between all the humanoid companies really doesn't matter. Yeah. And I become a bull on all of them.

Yeah. One of the challenges is that Unitri, Unitri humanoids are still pretty expensive. Like, I think that the, the solid ones. That's nothing. I mean, like, I'm just saying if you wanted to get a $1,000 and the good ones are more like $100K. Sure. And so you're looking at to get one of those demonstrations of $1,000. You're looking at potentially $100 million that you just have to.

If I'm the Chinese government, that seems like a steel. Steel. Yeah. Lunch money. Yeah, because you want to, you want to force the industrial capacity to say, no, don't just make one great robot. Make me $100,000. Even if they don't go anywhere, at least you got the reps in to scale up your manufacturing to that point. And then V2 make another $100,000.

But always be making $100,000 because the product is not one robot. The product is a machine that produces millions of robots. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, when that happens, I hope that there's like a little bit of unity between the American humanoid companies because it's game on. Yeah. Everybody's got to be building stuff. Yeah, I mean, you forget that like in World War II, like, people weren't like, oh, like, I care more about like, you know, my, my, my fighter jet needs to have a Ford motor engine. It's like, no, I do think there was, I mean, whatever will get me. I do think there was. Yeah, sure. It was more about reliability and people definitely had favorites around equipment. But, you know, in, in specific moments, it didn't really matter as long as the thing worked. Just built it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone who's helping is better than nothing. Totally. Totally.

We got some more agents. We got news from Sheeran, who is a writer for Bloomberg. She says, former leading deep-mind researchers coming out of stealth with a new startup aimed to build superintelligence starting with autonomous coding agents. They've raised $130 million from Lightspeed, CRV, Sequoia, Alex Wang, Reed Hoffman at a $555 million dollar valuation. a nice little round to come out the gates and a good little photo shoot they did here. Yeah. Another foundation model company.

I mean, this one seems aimed, you know, is more like an agent. So who knows if they're actually building an actual foundational model or it's more of sort of an orchestration type play. It's just crazy that this is another. one. Like there's just so many. I can't keep track. It's the first time you really do need the market map because there's just so, so many of these. But good luck to them. Hopefully they find an interesting, you know, go-to-market, interesting distribution channel, interesting product differentiator. We've seen that there are obviously a lot of different ways that you can differentiate the product and make it better. But it's hard to break through. It'll be interesting.

There's also news today that Google co-founder Larry Page is reportedly developing a new AI startup. Wait, why isn't he just doing it at Google? Yeah, yeah, that's a big pushback. He's launching a new company called Dinatomics, which focuses on using artificial intelligence and product manufacturing. Okay. That's so weird that he's not just doing it at Google. The company throws off like a trillion dollars in cash or something. Yeah, somehow I miss this until now.

I'm going to just read through it since we're talking. about so Google co-founder Larry Page has formed a new company dinatomics to upend manufacturing with artificial intelligence so his argument here would be Google's not focused on manufacturing sure I want to do something here yeah hence dinatomics page and a small group of engineers are working on ways to use large language models to create highly optimized designs for wide variety of objects and then have a factory build them so so sort of some type of autonomous I mean very cool conceptually use AI to generate you know schematics you know designs for something and then just build it autonomously.

The stealth company is run by Chris Anderson. These people said Anderson was previously the chief technology officer of another pageback company, Kitty Hawk, an ambitious project to build small electrical airplanes, potentially revolutionizing how people get around cities, a company shut down in 2022 amid failed prototypes and regulatory concerns. Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for the information. So, yeah, if Page is excited enough to, you know, incubate or invest in or be a large part of a new AI startup,

I'm sure the Google shareholders are sort of bummed that he's not rolling up his sleeves and getting back into, you know, probably the biggest opportunity in AI is just like Google having a coherent, effective AI strategy, which doesn't feel like they have right now because we've talked about this, you pay for Gemini and half the time you don't know where to find it. in the Google verse.

I wonder how he genuinely feels it's going at Google. Yeah. Because there was this whole report about, oh, maybe with the AI boom, the Google co-founders will get back involved, come more in day to day. And there is a view that you could have that, hey, Google is still, I think,

the number one website in the world. They can stuff generative AI into the search bar. they can adapt and iterate on the product. And they've made it through so many other challenges. People forget about these because it's the survivor bias. But there was a whole moment when people were saying that Google was going to be eaten much in the way that Craigslist was by vertical search. So the idea that like Yelp was going to be Google for restaurants.

And that was going to take, that was going to reduce the size of Google's market. But over time, Google just kind of destroyed Yelp and destroyed everything else. And so maybe he truly believes, I don't know if I believe it, but maybe he truly believes that like things are going perfectly. And I don't need to change anything there because like Google is succeeding in its mission of organizing the world's information. I mean, Gemini is doing great on eVals. They're doing great on CAPEX. They're building things out.

They have TBE. Meanwhile though, somebody, I think it was Schrelli was making the Google AI repeatedly hallucinate this morning. All he had to do was. was type in Sam Bankman-Fried UCSF. And it would like hallucinate that he had gone there. Or just like add the name of a college at the end. And it would hallucinate that the person you were typing went to that school. Which kind of makes sense that Google like like some something in the in the in the products is basically saying that when people Google this, they are expecting this outcome.

Yeah. even if it's false, right? Yeah, I feel like, I mean, I feel like the Google DNA for correcting those types of things is pretty strong. Do you know the story of how Google developed? I think it was like it's auto-complete or like spell check or something. They realized that if you just look through the massive Google data set of like, I mean, there's like billions of searches happening all the time. When someone, when someone searches for something and they don't get what they want,

they almost always just correct it themselves. And so when they type, when they, you know, mistype something or they, or they enter a fact that's incorrect, they will often correct it on the second search. So you can just look at like, this person's search for, you know, well, how did Joe Wisenthall spell unemployment with a K? Unemployment. And then the next search in immediately after will be unemployment spelled correctly. And then, and then they can just bake that in. And you can look across the entire data set and just assemble like this amazing auto-complete auto-fill, like, like prediction. algorithm and they should be able to do that with all the AI queries that they're getting because

they have to be getting a lot because they have good distribution so I don't know it's interesting though yeah I mean overall the thing with Google is is you it's seemingly you know many of their most talented builders continue to just spin out and start new companies and when you have the ability to go out and raise a hundred million dollars basically you know while still and stealth without any type of product. The, the, the, the, uh, there's clearly a lot of appetite to do that. Yeah, I mean, this is a perfect example of it. These guys are deep mine there.

Light speed. We, we, we can ask, um, Michael from, from light speed is coming on the show on Tuesday. And, uh, we can talk about how light speed even sets up their sort of in, uh, investment team. Specifically around these different investments because they obviously are big investors in Anthropic. Yep. Uh, reflection AI, this new company had a deep mine. is going to be competing directly or indirectly with Anthropic. I have to imagine,

maybe they're going to be using Claude in some way, but it's hard to really say at this point. And many of these companies on a long enough, not even on a medium term time horizon are going to be directly competitive. Yeah. It is interesting that so few VCs, it feels like so many, so few VC firms have really said, hey, we have our bet and we're happy and we're like sticking with it. Yeah. Like almost every VC firms when like, well, like, maybe I'll get two. Yeah.

And they're like, four to five feels like the right number. Yeah, four to five is really like the right of number of like foundation model companies that directly compete with each other and hate each other. It's very funny. But I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess there are plenty of firms that have figured that have that strategy and they're open about it. I know plenty of seed funds will say like, look, like we, we, we, we, we,

just we're going to invest in a lot of companies at the early stage you guys are going to pivot we love you will support you but like we're not going to play that is this competitive game at seed stage because it's just impossible yep when we're writing so many checks and so many people are like pivoting around and stuff uh but if you're like taking board seats and like really deeply invested uh i mean at the same time you know uh mark zuckerberg or mark andresn was on the board of Facebook. They invested in the Instagram competitor. What was that called hipstomatic? I think invested in that. I don't remember. And I think they also invested in, they also invested in Instagram and Dresen did because, but they couldn't write a huge check, I believe, because they were

invested in hipstimatic. But both of those companies were competitive with Facebook, which they also had a big slice. So I don't know. The whole competitive things, Trekkie. Just got to make money at the end of the day. Yeah, at the end of the day, I've never seen a VC that was invested in two companies actually have a tangible impact on one of them winning over the other one. I would say that overall, I think founders do have to be wary that investors do clearly pick favorites internally, but they do generally a very good job of not expressing that or showing that publicly. It's not like they're going out and saying, You know, we, if you're an angel investor, it's much easier to get conflicted, right?

Because you're not taking huge positions in companies. You're generally just wanting to back great teams and people that you like. And sometimes two people that you like decide to work on very similar problem areas, right? Yeah. Or they pivot into that area. So overall, I've never, I personally have never seen an investor, you know, materially damage a company because they were invested in one or the other. if anything, if anything, investors just want to see all their companies do well.

100%. And markets are big enough that, and there's very rarely like some sort of like secret that a company has that doesn't become obvious. Like the classic concern from a founder's like, oh, I don't want my competitors to know that this acquisition channel is like working really well. But anybody that's competing them that's halfway decent is going to figure out where they're spending money quickly. Yep. And, you know, leverage that channel themselves. And so it's not sort of like a real concern. Another one is supply chain stuff.

I don't know. I don't want my competitor figuring out how I get this product or service at this price. And again, that information will come out over time, right? Because usually the supplier will just be yapping like, oh, we work with this company, you know, and like trying to find other customers. So all these things at best you have sort of like a momentary gap between when your competitor figures out. what you're doing, how you're doing it, et cetera, and you can leverage that,

but usually it's not VC just sort of like forwarding, you know, an investor update or whatever. It also matters the carry structure at these funds because, I mean, a benchmark is an equal partnership, so there's not going to be as much, like, infighting between the partners, but some funds have, like, very specific deal-by-deal carry such that if you're invested in two different companies,

the firm cares a lot less about the winner, but the individual partners could be like, yeah, we're technically in two different companies that are competitive, but as a partner that only has major carry in one, like I really don't care about that other one or I actually want that other one to fail almost.

Yeah, so firms like light speed that are making investments, you know, broadly in a category are setting up, you know, very clear sort of firewalls. Yeah, yeah. I actually don't know about the carry structure

at most funds. It's kind of hard to figure out. It's mostly just like lore. We're going to need to wait for a newcomer to scoop it. Yeah, even that, like, it just doesn't leak out, really. It's pretty rare. It's pretty rare. Only benchmark has really, like, made it part of their, like, marketing, I think.

Yeah. Anyway, should we move to some breaking news from David Senra, Founders Podcast, dropped two episodes at the same time. We talked to them about this. That's serious podcasting. Serious podcasting. You know, David, you know, they say, you should never podcast weekly.

you should only podcast strongly and he is a strong podcaster he also doesn't have a fixed publishing schedule he doesn't which is cool he releases episodes when he finds them that they're ready yep i'm excited to listen to this one from uh just released or there's two from michael ovitz who is michael ovitz is a fantastic book i read it uh when i was i think in college or just uh just graduated and then i had the chance to meet Michael Ovitz in 2021. My buddy, Rompton, had me over with Michael at Michael's house in LA. One of probably the single coolest property

that I've ever been on in my entire life, anywhere globally, truly a one-of-one house. And he's got fantastic taste in all things, cars, watches, and art. Did he talk about his history with C. CIA at all, creative artists agency? I was just impressed with Ovid's ability to understand exactly our playbook with Party Round, which we were building, you know, party round at the time.

So he immediately, he immediately, you know, understood the opportunity. And it was just, despite having at that point already been out of CIA, he just, and mostly focused on investing. It's one of those guys that will just be doing very significant deals. for his, for his entire life. So excited to dive into this one. And you know one of the best things about these particular founders episodes? What's that? They open with ramp ads.

Right away. Right away. As soon as you click that in your RSS feed, David Senra is going to be dropping. He's one of the best ad smiths of all time. He is. He gives you a run for your money. He is. And, you know, he makes it clear.

Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards. Bill payments. Accounting. and a whole lot more all in one place. And so we love David, and we love that he's also partnered with Ramp,

also promoting Ramp. And I got to give a shout out to Logan Brand. He posted this morning at 5.40 a.m. He said, who's putting up numbers like TBPN, in the battle for earshare, it's hard to compete with the brothers when they just love it more. Hashtag Ramp.

And that's true. We love what we do, and we feel very lucky to be able to do it every single day. It was great. Well, we got three minutes until Wilmanitis is calling in. Yeah, we can quickly cover this post from Rex Salisbury. So he said, Amex is losing market share to companies like Ramp that have a better product.

Their answer, buy an expense management company for $600 million built by the founder of Concur and his son. Wonder how that will work out. And so Center, I had never heard of. I mean, it seems like it worked out really well because the founder got $600 million. Yeah, yeah. They just personally wired him $600 and that was it. Yeah. I mean, starting a business with your dad and then quickly selling it to a legacy incumbent, goaded.

Goaded. Congratulations on the deal. Good look. But ramp's going to beat you. Yeah, I mean, the challenge here is this does not. I never had the ability to or the opportunity to use Center, but it's hard to actually feel like this is that this is suddenly going to make Amex's product competitive with Ramp or alternatives.

And you know... Because the issue is Center clearly didn't have penetration within the sort of like high growth market. And obviously, you know, it's possible that they serve. a lot of mid-market companies. And so it goes into the big organization that kind of like languishes and dies. I saw some other posts about how, you know, is this a business acquisition? Like are they buying it for the, you know, customer base and cash flows? This is a product acquisition?

Like, is this going to make Amex's product more robust or is it basically an aqua hire? Feels, you know, way too expensive for an aqua hire. But the thing I like about this, I like to see M&A getting done. Yes. Center had raised a series C of $30 million back in 2023. So good to get some liquidity for the founders, the employees, and the investors. I do feel like, you know, Amix is like bleeding cash. They're spending $600 million on this thing.

If they really want to compete, they should get on ramp. Yeah. Because they need to control expenses and they need to save time and money to really compete. heat. And so Amex, execs, if you're the CFO of Amex, I'm sure you're listening, you should sign up for ramp. Check it out. Tell them the technology brother sent you. Tell them the technology brother's

anyway. I'm excited to have Will on. This is perfect timing. This is exactly how I wanted to time it up. We have two posts that we're coming in. I believe Will's here in the chat. Let's bring him in. Can we hear him? Will, how you doing? Welcome.

How are you guys doing? To TBP. There he is. You're a little out of frame there, Let's see if, there we go. There we go. You're perfect. Right away, I got to give you credit for something important, which is introducing John and I. Yes. You did it.

Thank you for the 70% equity in the technology brothers. I was really excited to tender that in this most recent round. We're really proud of what you guys have done. No, you had amazing insight and, you know, taste. I remember the intro was basically like, you guys are the only two people I like in L.A. You should meet something like that. So glad TPG could buy all of my equity in this beautiful brand in this last round at 200 times forward. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's amazing to have you on. You've been on the show many times before. As a poster. As a poster. First time as a guest. And yeah, we're looking forward to having you as a regular. Yeah. So I want to get your reaction to.

this post from from ela she says going for aimless walks is one of the worst things give me a coffee shop a bookstore friend's house i will walk eight miles no problem but around the block are you insane why would you want each step to be meaningless your outdoor time dumped into an empty void and i feel like you've had a couple bangers about about walking i have one here from you i've met many people who turned their lives around by walking around aimlessly for a couple hours a day. What's your take on walking? Would you recommend it to the next generation of Wilmonitis's? Yeah, I think you got to walk. Like, it's the only way to come across with yourself. You're sitting alone. You're silent. You're not staring at a wall. You're moving. I think Ayla's life might be meaningfully different if she's hitting, you know,

20K, 30K, K, 40 steps a day. Really the difference between, you know, boys and men happen in between that 10,000 and 20,000 step a day goal. So for Ayla, I prescribed, you know, 50,000 steps a day. That'd be a good start. Did you actually put up 20K yesterday? Like, are you on, are you in that tier? I feel like getting to 10K no-brainer. But what do you actually recommend? No, but to be clear, getting to 10K is extremely difficult.

It's very difficult. Our lifestyle now, which is show up to our building. We're going to get treadmills. So we're going to be walking while we do the show. Do you think that's a, do you think that's a suitable substitute for actually walking outside? Or should we just have a film crew? worthless activity. You got to be outside. You got to be a nature. It only counts if you're actually outside. It's not good for your soul. So you think we should have like a, you know,

TV camera production trailer following us while we shoot the show while we're walking around. Yeah, I don't see a reason why this desk can't be on wheels moving with you. Like this show should be happening in the loop, Central Park all day. That makes sense. Yes. Yeah. How is New York these days? You're beautiful. Springs here. Yeah. Already. The issue with New York is that 20K steps a day in the winter is like deadly, right? Like you just can't do it. But in the summer, like you can hit 40,000 step days, no trouble, right? Yeah, yeah. 40K days.

I mean, the last time I was there, you actually, the meme worked on me and I walked all the way from, I don't know, uptown to downtown and back. And it was fantastic. And it took like hours and hours and hours. But it was amazing. Doing the loop of Manhattan is like a great once a year of a tradition, right? It's a uniquely amazing or walk all the way down to the loop. Like that's, that's a perfect day in the city. Yeah.

Talk to us about hobbies. You've got one that we're particularly interested. in. Well, he won an award for it. Yeah. He's an award-winning. Award-winning model boat enthusiast. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think like the best hobbies in the world are the ones where the average participant, it's like 85 years old and post-economic. And I'm a proud member of Central Park Model Yacht Club selling, you know, comically small

and some comically large model boats. Really hard to get out on the water in New York. And it's much easier to get in the water in Central Park. you know you can sail around remote control go quite fast when some races it's a good time uh is that a model boat right behind you is that the sale of a boat six six six feet of model boat right behind me my office has been relegated to uh to storage um talk about the rise of christianity in tech i think uh you're you're tracking like a greater rise in christianity in the west right like i think we try this kind of post religious thing through the

80s, 90s, 2000s, and it just seemed like it led to universal depression. I mean, particularly in tech, Trace Stevens leading the way there, Trey and Michelle right on the West Coast, but I also think in New York, there's an incredible young Christian movement happening, like church of the city of New York is baptizing, you know, like a couple million people a week at this point. It's incredible how quickly this is going. The question is how you turn this into adorable movement that lasts over time. Slightly worried that it's going to be like a five-year wave, going to be trendy, going to fade out. Christianity is the most important. important thing that's ever happened to me. I don't know how we fade that out over 20 years,

but it feels like a relatively important thing to focus on. Are you worried about kind of Christianity becoming a LARP or cultural Christianity being a substitute? Yeah, this feels like the issue, right? Like, even when you go to service in San Francisco, it does feel a little bit like this is like a networking event, right? Like, why am I here for services and also pitching my startup? Right. It seems like it's good that there's like an elite, you know, an elite Christianity that, you know, elite somewhat lead cultural taste here, this seems good. But the fact that we're treating it somewhat like a golf club's a little concerning. I do think the LARP, like all love to the Gundoburows, but the things that come downstream of that feel not particularly great. That makes sense. What, where, what, which companies,

specifically in the private markets are benefiting most from the sort of, from AI within health care What companies are you excited about? I'm sure you get pitched pretty much every company in the space. If they're not pitching you, what are they even doing? What areas do you think are actually getting? Maybe not, you know, I would say like consumer adoption, but like real enterprise adoption. You obviously worked in this problem space for quite a long time. Yeah, I mean, the take I have here is that legacy healthcare companies are actually going to be the winners during this wave.

I think as you see kind of AI adoption happen in healthcare, you're starting to see widgets get adopted, right? Doctors requesting ambient scribes. You see big companies like a bridge coming out of that. But ultimately, ambient scribes are the front door to the electronic medical record system. They're certainly not the entire suite of software that a physician might use. And unlike the world we're used to in tech, the person who purchased this software and the person that uses software in healthcare are not the same person. Right, physicians who are using it, hospital admins procuring it, there's a big divide there, which means they have different competing priorities. I am radically more excited by the opportunity

of big legacy healthcare software businesses, taking modern AI innovation, installing it onto their user base and scaling that out, then I am any kind of novel then new startup. Like, I think we will see a thousand kind of AI-enabled executive fiscal startups happen over the next six months. I don't think any of them are going to last. I think we'll see a thousand pill mills. I will spin up over the next six months. I think they're all going to jail. Right. Healthcare is just not a place that rewards this kind of net new novel distribution plays. But I do think legacy distribution in healthcare is the most underpriced asset in the world right now. And if you can take that plug AI on top of it, very interesting outcomes.

Do you think there's alpha in being, you know, a young, cracked AI engineer, implementer, but instead of starting a company going to work for one of those legacy companies, working your way up becoming the CEO. Yeah, tremendous alpha. I mean, if you think about like how big, like install basis is the most underpriced thing in software right now. I think everyone's used to seeing these companies go, you know, zero to 100 and then, you know, probably back down to zero, right?

This is a Jeremy thing, the Iron Condor law or whatever, right? But I think there is like something really underappreciated about a company that has had like, you know, 140 million in reoccurring revenue over decades. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that switching costs at install case, that velocity and the ability to pilot software on top of that install base at scale. It's just something you can't beat. Like, I don't think you can do that from a net new startup that trust, that brand, that install. It's pretty cool.

Do you think any of the bigger VC funds, maybe going public, will have the money to buy into that and then drop AI on top of it? Hard to know. I mean, I think a lot of this is ground up adoption. Like I work at a large, you know, publicly traded EMR right now. And we're certainly seeing AI happen in every aspect of our products. but it's it's really a matter of making these tools successful right and I think as you see a commodification happen at the model layer right maybe open AI is not worth 140 billion dollars or whatever when you can sell a llama and run them locally and build these product features that we upscale software engineers in these companies and like very smart people go and work for them I think the outcomes will just be better yeah do you have any insight into why SBF is getting to podcast from jail because John posted about this yesterday which was a good line if if you can now tweet and podcast from jail is that not sort of putting out a signal what is the punishment yeah yeah like as a

bc yeah like time pulled off your sentence right like this just like punishment yeah what's your take on that broadly you always at least within the group chats you always have good takes here I just think SBF is, you know, this incredible fixture. I will be shocked to see if he serves this whole sentence. He has, like, very strong proof that if you donate enough money to the right people, you can kind of bend the world around you. I sincerely hope he stays in jail for a very long amount of time. Interesting.

Can you tell us, do you have any good anonymous? You don't need to name names, but good stories of frauds or malfeasance in the startup or financial world that you think might be illustrative or educational for the listeners. I mean, I think, like, I have a great tweet about this about kind of the deep tech fraud playbook of how to build, you know, a billion dollar company without shipping any technology. And I think we're seeing some incredible innovations happen in the deep tech fraud arena right now. Yeah. Where we have companies that are raising, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on technology

that does not exist, will never exist, and is plainly impossible on the face of it based on, you know, basic and rudimentary understanding of physics. Has that happened for years, though? I mean, that's happened for years with like Cylindra atherna. I was like, this playbook seems to be repeating itself forever. Yeah, but I feel like we're getting like incredibly tested, you know, playbooks here, right? The acquisition of mass amounts of LA based real estate, right, arm tattoos from the CEOs, biceps.

Like this is just like fundamental innovations on the art that we haven't seen a long amount of time. Got it, got it. Well said. Will, you are, are you 27 now? 26. 26. You've come of age in a kangaroo market. You've played it very well. The kangaroo market, for those that don't know, we talked about this on the show yesterday.

Historically, you had bull markets where things go up, air markets where things go down. Kangaroo markets, you're just sort of like bouncing all over the place. What's your general read? In my view, we've seen more top signals in the last three months than any point. in my adult life. What's, is there any more gas in the tank? Are we in a sort of like tech, tech super cycle? Or is it just down only from here on out?

I think we got a couple more 10x is left to go. I think the ceiling is far from where we're at now. I just think we have a couple, you know, 10x sell downs on the way too. It just feels like the rate of, you know, up down, up down is only going to increase fragility in the market's going to skyrocket too, right? just you see like billions of dollars in venture chasing, you know, clawed plug-ins that, you know, write some basic code for you. We don't understand how any of the stuff works. Fragility is going to go up. Markets going to cycle a bunch. Megasicle feels crazy. It just feels like if you're

not making money along that path, I don't know what you're doing. What are your thoughts on leverage right now? I, right, two great Jermigafon idea, two kinds of guys in the world, right? Cash Chad's leverage kings, right? I am a cash chad. I run my accounts net cash. I've never had leverage in my life no credit cards debit cards only right there are certainly guys that live on the leverage hierarchy are able to run that not my playbook two different kinds of people in the world interesting that makes sense uh just advice for young people advice for young people don't take out credit cards no credit card debt yeah okay by comically large model boats are a very good store of value i got another one speaking of young

people, do you think there's an opportunity to go downstream of the Teal Fellowship and offer funds to middle schoolers to drop out of middle school to pursue deep tech, hard tech, impactful projects? Well, I think he talked with Ramp employees, right? Like, we find every 14-year-old that works at Ramp, right? We find everyone that Zach Frankl has recruited from local Bay Area middle schools and we give them a million dollars to start an expense tech startup. I feel like that is just like clear alpha in the market right now.

We need to go younger. we need to go to the benches of ramp. Yeah. The benches are from the benches to the trenches. There you go. That's where we need to go. What are you reading these days? I know you've got rare books and manuscripts.

Maybe some of them you can't talk about. But what's top of mind? I am working on republishing an amazing book that I cannot say the title of, but it's a history of political corruption in Louisiana in the 1960s. it is, you know, so good that the author that wrote it was shot 14 times in the chest with a shotgun by the subject of the book. That's how you know you're writing something important. And that's how you know your writing something good. I recently purchased the rights to that. That should be coming at some point in the next two to seven years as soon as I figure out how to actually publish

this thing. But really focus on political history right now. I think there's a huge amount of alpha left there. What about a what about a book that's already in publish or already in print? Best thing I read recently was a Brent B. Shore recommendation that I am scrolling through my Amazon trying to find the name of. Okay. Oh, another good one, Santa Monica partners letters, letters on small cap investing, kind of a classic of the genre on finding undervalued businesses traded on very weird and esoteric markets. Yeah, for sure.

Talk to us about the transition from, you know, semi-illiquid startup founder to, much more liquid post-exit founder. Are you, have you been focused on getting a liquid again by making a high volume of startup investments? Are you more interested in? We've been focused on getting a liquid by buying very large model boats. I think this is kind of where the market's going. I think it is clearly an underpriced asset.

And I'm moving size in the model boat industry right now. Are you looking at any startups that might act as like marketplaces for model boats? You know, we're part of the dezzles. No, I think liquidity is a bad thing. You never want to mark to market. You never want to be able to liquidate assets. Ideally, the perfect asset is impossible to liquidate and impossible to mark. It's just like a black hole you put money into.

And this model boat I have my eye on built from wood from Henry Kissinger's desk in the West Wing. Just it's a perfect asset. It's impossible to mark. Cool. Impossible to mark. Awesome. Well, it's been great having you. You guys anything else?

we look forward to as the cycle you know continues to uh you know make progress and unravel we'd love to have you back on the show yeah to discuss it i didn't send us to collect my equity on the honor fries yep yes you deserve it you deserve it you worked hard for it yeah you did thanks well have a great Friday bye what a guy what a character yeah i mean the character on x is a very authentic representation of Will. That's always refreshing when you meet somebody that you sort of know online. Totally. That has a sort of online persona.

The online persona is, you know, exactly the same as the offline persona. He had some riff a while back about like VC ghost writers making like, like, $700,000 a year or something. And it like threw all the VCs into like a complete frenzy because they're like, are people doing this? Like, should I be spending this much money on my ghostwriter? Yeah.

Yeah, it's a fantastic way to manifest these things. I would really love to know if there was any truly exceptional posters that were just 100% ghost written

because ghost writing is pretty easy to track when it's sort of like mid posting. Oh, totally, totally. Yeah. Everyone can buy like the, The, yeah, the mid, the default, just kind of like the threads, the, the current thing, memes.

All of those are very commoditized. But truly inspired bangers, very, very difficult. For example, Pavel Asper Ruhav posts, I've got two and only two hiring criteria. One, do you have that dog in you? Two, are you nice with it? We got to put that in Bangor Archive. Not ghostwritten. I think it actually has been on Bangor Archive.

I think that's where I found this. But yeah, when we ran into Paul, he said the nicest thing anyone could possibly say about your posts. And he was like, do you guys write those? Yeah. Because he was like, you guys like, I love the account. Well, we specifically decided to turn it on. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Because we realized we were covering the top posters in the world. Yeah, we had to be. That we could compete. Totally, totally. You got to be in the arena. You got to be in the arena. Yeah.

Otherwise you won't be respected. Let's cover some posts. Alexis should be joining any second. Okay, so Y.C. Paul Graham? Yeah. Paul Graham says it will be Y Combinator's 20th birthday in four days. I'm pleased by how young YC still feels as an organization.

It would be dangerous for YC to become too established since YC is training startups. it has to remain startup-ish itself, but it requires a constant effort to stay that way. We talked to Gary Tan yesterday about that, and it's, yeah, it's so interesting because it'd be so easy for YC to scale up and become just a massive asset manager. But, of course, it would lose a lot of what makes it special. And I think Gary is, yeah, reinventing, what do they call it? like refounding the company when you take over. Like he needs to make aggressive changes.

And so people see those and they're like, oh, like, you know, AI's writing all the code or they're doing defense tech now. It's like no change would have been death. Yep. He has to take risks. And then some of those will be rolled back. Some of them will be successful. But you only get power a lot outcomes when you're when you're testing lots of like really high variance stuff. Yeah.

And the YC's in a situation where they are in a highly competitive environment, right? There's so many alternatives to YC's capital. You can go raise, if you're an exceptional founder, you could go and raise from the Collison brothers, from Airbnb founders, you know, et cetera. I truly think the biggest change was that when YC started, it was $17,000 and then it's scaled up and now it's 500. But Sandhill Road VC firms,

their doors were closed to Stanford Newgrads, which is unthinkable now. Every single Stanford New Grad can easily get a meeting at a Sand Hill Road venture capital firm that is completely ready to write a 500K check. Yep. And so all of a sudden, what YC is is not just, hey, we're willing to take a shot on a kid with a $20,000 check and see what they do. Like the Airbnb guys could not have gotten funded directly. Like they were not in the mold. There's some iconic pass emails out of the original.

where people like clearly weren't taking it seriously, weren't taking a meeting. It used to be if you wanted to start a company in tech, that meant you're going to build a website and building a website required racking servers and buying hardware. But of course, the cloud computing era happened right as YC started. And so all of a sudden there was a big opportunity

to do a whole lot more with a lot less. It's all the AI, it's interesting. It's like, did they go back to H. 18K because, you know, like they're giving 500. You made it work. Yeah. Like, like, maybe, you know, like, I'm actually, you know, I'm excited. I mean, I love that, you know, the YC founders get 500K and they can go and do stuff.

And I think it's great. But I think it's interesting to, to, I'm very interested in following what happens with PMF or die because they're spending a lot less. They're spending 25K, which is very much in like the 2005, the Alexis O'Hanian era of, of YC. Like, it is crazy that they, that he built Reddit with,

uh, yeah, 20K to start. Yeah. Wild. And, and you can still do that. And maybe you can do it more now because of the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, it's not quite as different as like, from going from Capx to OPEX. Yeah. Um, because it's, it's going from, uh,

hiring extra software engineers to write more code to paying a bill. So it's, so it's not a, it's not like a, a cash flow management change. But it is interesting. The Wilmanitis group chat is popping off, I assume. Judging by your face.

It sure is. They're live texting us. It's great. I say, I want to pull up this video and watch. Ben, I'm going to send it to you quickly if you can pull it up. I want to play the video of the Dig announcement that we're going to be discussing with Alexis. Yeah, let's play that. Jason Kerman's texting me.

Those live numbers look good, baby. I haven't checked them. but thank you, Jason. I'm glad that you're looking at my stats so that I know. I'm sure we'll review after the fact. What's the book that Reboy recommends? The score takes care of itself. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The podcast downloads take care of itself. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Jason fully believes that. Like,

he just goes and makes something like brilliant for like months and months and months. Yeah, it goes viral every time because he's not like over on, over engineering it. Anyway, Ben, let's kick it over to the Alexis O'Hanian video announcement. So what we've got today is dig.com. It's with two Ghee. DIGG.com. Now, actually give the power back to the people.

Dig rewrites the internet's front page. Tech darling dig sky rockets with millions of loyal users. I was not online for this era. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the show. Kevin Rose. Like none of those images of Kevin Rose on all the different, you know, magazine covers. No, I was pre, I was post-dig. I'm sure I visited it.

Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot. You don't want to live in the past, but now we actually have the technology to make better, healthier community experiences. This is a team up I never would have imagined 20 years ago. This is so funny. It makes sense that you would be relaunching dig.com as its original founder, but teaming up with Alexis Co. Oh, good shot. Oh, that's a great shot. I love it.

Whoever shot, this is really good. For a long time. Rightfully so. Like, I'm excited for this as like a media project, like a story. I don't know if I've been like, oh, I really need Dig right now, but I'm down. I think this is one of those things where the asset had been basically languishing. Yeah, yeah. And I remember I advertise on Dig at some point, I think, in 2018, 2019.

And it was, it was seemingly, like the content quality was down dramatically. Yeah. And so trying to return it to its former glory is a worthy undertaking. And then the other news from Alexis this week, we're basically just going to start covering it. Yeah. And we'll get some, at the very least, we'll get some good backstory. Oh, Alexis just tweeted that he's coming on in five. Okay.

I guess the audience. Guiltrip him in. Thank you, brothers. Thank you. Everyone tweeted Alexis. I want to cover the Alexis TikTok announcement. and then with him we can. Yeah, this is so funny.

I mean, we need a board of like people that have talked about buying TikTok. Add it to the list. Yeah, so I'll cover an article from. My true and hardline stance is I will support literally any American buying TikTok. I don't care if you have $5. If you say you're going to buy TikTok, you have my support. Yep. Because I'm there for it.

So we magic is real. We got at TVPN on TikTok. Yeah. And I think we're going to just post a video up there that says like posting this video every day until an American owns TikTok. Yeah, I think that's a good strategy. Because we're not really willing to sort of invest in building an audience on the Chinese platform. Yeah.

So I'll read this time article. It says Reddit co-founder Alexis O'Hanian has joined billionaire Frank McCourt's bid to acquire TikTok. McCourt's internet advocacy organization Project Liberty announced this week that O'Hanian an investor married to tennis star serena williams had joined a consortium called the people's bid for ticot alexis had posted i'm officially now one of the people trying to buy ticot u.s and bring it on chain ohanian said in a series of posts made on x project liberty says that it will provide more users more control over their online data if successful in its bid project liberty said the technology will serve as the back phone of the redesigned tic talk ensuring that

privacy, security, and digital independence are no longer optional but foundational. When asked by an ex-user on Monday, what he would call TikTok if he purchased it, Ohanian said, TikTok, freedom edition. Amazing. Under a federal bill passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by President Joe. Biden last year, TikTok was required to cut ties for the China-based parent company Bite Dance or face a ban by January 19th. And as our audience knows, Trump extended the deadline for TikTok to find new ownership until early April.

So we're really coming down to the line here. And McCourt has a consortium, which includes Shark Tank stars Kevin O'Leary. So we've got to get Kevin on the show to talk about that. He's got to get Trump's attention. I know Alexis isn't huge Trump supporter or anything, but he's got to get the attention of the president if he wants to get this. deal done, I say he goes and buys a bunch of billboards outside of Mar-a-Lago. That is a play. And you know where you would do it?

Ad-quick. Ad-quick. And you know what? Yes. Ad-quick. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm thinking what you're thinking.

You're thinking what I'm thinking? I'm thinking what you're thinking. Ad-Quick. Alexis is a big backer of ad-quick. And Alexis is joining the chat. So we'll bring him in and we'll do an ad-quick, ad-read. Ad-Quick is out-of-home advertising, made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising.

Only ad quit combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buy across the globe. Let's go. Welcome to the stream, Alexis. Thank you for being here. How you doing, gentlemen? Sorry. You're all good.

It was running late from the pediatrician. Not for me. But for my youngest. Of course. We understand. We have kids too. We're business dads too. Thank you for leaving.

It's important. Family first. Always. Always. I'm sorry. It was a tough one too because it was one of those immunization days. and I'm the parent who does the pain doctor visits. My wife does the sort of run of the middle normal ones.

That's rough. Poor dear. A lot of hand squeezing. So should we start with, should we start with TikTok or dig? There's a few things to talk about, aren't there? Yeah, yeah, busy week for you. I love it.

I love it. Well, we just watched the dig video announcement. And we have to find out who shot that video for you because the cinematography was fantastic. The reveal, when they pulled. To the side of the laptop and they reveal your face there. Perfect. It was our storytelling. Movie magic. So yeah, break it down. How'd this come around?

Was this just like a crazy group chat idea that then just got out of control and now you're just doing it? Gosh, how did it start? You know, I had never spoken to Kevin Rose until like five or six years ago. No way. And when we started talking, we just realized we had so much in common. I learned I had in all of that animosity and jealousy, a tremendous amount of respect for him that it probably took me a little bit more maturity to appreciate. And we just vibed.

And then every now and then he would text me and be like, hey, dude, do you think I should buy dig.com and resurrect the thing? And I was like, yeah, sure, go for it. In the way that one supports a friend thinking about a thing, that seems a little outlandish and a little crazy,

but it had gone through a few different owners. And actually, when it was first on sale, I had debated buying it. When the company went bankrupt and I told Kevin this later, I was like, I debated actually buying it and then just redirecting it to Reddit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this one last F you, but I'm so happy I didn't do that. And then, I don't know, five months ago, he was like, dude, I'm going to do it.

And I would love to do it with you. And I said, that sounds like a great idea. That's amazing. This sounds like a fantastic idea. Talk about so. And there you go. Talk about like the actual competitive dynamic between you guys back in the day because looking at like even looking at the video, you guys were clearly battling for cover stories on on

magazines and things like that. He was crushing us. It wasn't even, in my mind I thought it was a battle. Yeah. And this was a sign of being a first time CEO and frankly being focused on the wrong things in this regard. But I was so jealous of the fact that he was. was the Silicon Valley poster child. Remember, you know, we were in the first batch wide combinator, which was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working out of an apartment in Medford and then Somerville.

We had raised a total of $72,000 at Demo Day. And, you know, here was Kevin Rose, who was this tech celebrity who had millions raised from true Silicon Valley VCs. And yes, was on the covers of magazines, was getting so much press. And I felt like, I didn't feel like we were getting a fraction of that press and that coverage.

And I was very jealous. And again, I think focused on the wrong stuff, but it just felt like he was an easy, he was an easy target. And look, in his defense, he was first. Dig did come first. In our defense,

and I have the email to prove it, we did not know about it when we started regret it. It was about a month into the company we'd already launched. Yeah. That we'd finally learned about Dig. So shame on us for not doing enough competitive analysis. but they had about a seven-month, eight-month head start. And what can I say?

We won the long run, but now we both get a second chance, second chance to do it again. So what are you envisioning for the product? Have you announced anything or are you ready to think about what will be different? I mean, I'm sure you don't just want to re-resorrect it exactly as it was. Maybe for V1, let's say. Okay, the goal for V1 is just get a thing back online that makes people feel nostalgic for dig where we're left off maybe not version four but just before that sure and then modernizing some

the obvious stuff yep um but look this will not be you know the first version that gets out there is not going to be feature complete with some of the big you know forum platforms out there but it's going to hit the nostalgia notes and then you know some of the stuff we've talked about publicly is and this is what was going on in the chat which was you know technology it's cliche but in the last couple of years we've all had our brains melted by what software can do and AI in particular. And just even simply some of these foundational large language models are capable of doing some really dope stuff that if you were building a text-based forum software today and you built it from first principles and you said, okay, well, what are the most important

parts of this platform for the most valuable users? You know, it's the less than 1% of your user base that's actually doing the heaviest lifting of community management. And so how do you start there by saying, how do we build the best tools using AI so that you don't spend your job being a janitor having to go through an inbox of waiting through things that are violations of community norms or just violations of the terms? And actually, you know, and if you talk to enough of these folks and Kevin slyly ran ads, polling thousands of them to just say, what are the things you wish you had? What are the things that should exist? And it turns out, you know, even, again, using today's technology,

you can solve a lot of those problems out the gate so that as, say, a volunteer community manager, you're now spending the bulk of your time, not doing janitor work, but actually like doing the fun part of community building, right, coming up with cool contests, you know, highlighting memes and great submissions from the community. And so that's what I would expect to come pretty quickly.

Do you think... First version. Yeah, do you think that X, you know, killing links, you know, we all kind of understand that it probably makes sense for X as a business, right? But it's disappointing as a user. Is that part of what's creating an opportunity for Dig to come back and potentially thrive? You know, I had not thought of that.

It is so annoying that we all have to put it in the second tweet. But to your point, it does make sense from their standpoint. Look, at the end of the day, if you build a community platform well enough, I'd imagine, you know, at least a majority, more than half of the content that will be talked about will be stuff from the community, right? At Reddit, there were self-posts, and that was just an invention by some random Reddeter who guessed how to sort of hack and make self-referential links. But I do think there is an opening. As you mentioned it, yeah, there is an opening for like more traditional just link sharing. Like here is some cool thing on the internet. Go take a look.

And you know what, actually, as I'm thinking about it live, the other wild trend, You've seen this guy levels who's building, who's code-vibing the flight simulator. Yeah. Like, we've not fully processed apps as content. I love it. Yeah. And that might be, because right, how does one get to that app? Well, it's going to have to be a URL, at least for the time being.

And so maybe that's, maybe that's the other secular shift we're seeing is that people are going to be spinning up entire apps as content that will obviously need a place to get to in, and links. Yeah. Related to that, obviously, beachheads are super important when you're building a platform that can kind of anyone could use it. Reddit now has Reddits for all sorts of different communities. What was the first beachhead for Reddit and how are you thinking about early beachheads that could be interesting communities for Dig to kind of latch on to early on? I think the Reddit beachhead was Alexis. Yeah, it was you right? You know, being the-

great kind, guys. It was. I mean, it was. You weren't you like the first 20 users? Oh, yes. All right. Well, I mean, I mean it in both ways, right? You were in defense of that strategy, It was 2005. So you got to understand. We had to convince people that you would want to come here to this site, this Spartan site, and submit a link for other people to vote on. But we didn't have comments.

So it wasn't like we were like congratulating one another for our great posts. But yes, the first few months, we had a bunch of alt accounts we were posting under to make it look like there were different people, not just nothing over. That's my username over and over again, posting links.

But then, you know, again, it was also, it's hard to learn lessons from, because back then it was actually novel. And so like the first community needed to be R slash programming because we started it with a bunch of other developers as our early adopters. And then we realized Normies would not want to see like an Erlang tutorial on the homepage.

So so we shoved. We created those communities as a way just to basically keep the front page looking a little bit more open to everyone. But I do think I think the first Beachhead for Dig relaunched ends up being that, look, I'm 41, almost 42. It's like the, it's like the old head nostalgia for a vibesy internet. Now, you guys don't know that because you are so young. But for the graybeards, there was a time when the internet was just like a much chiller place. And I think it's the nostalgia for that.

So I assume it's going to be a lot of the like older geeks who are, you know, big dig fans who love, you know, video games and comics and, you know, a few other things that could be around here. I like the idea, this just general idea of the vintage internet, right? There's so much demand for vintage broadly in consumer products, vintage, vintage cars, right? Records, et cetera. Pokemon cards, right? Is that the one?

We got to ask you about chromatic? I was just playing on my chromatic here before. There we go. I do actually take this with me everywhere I go. It's amazing. Yeah. But yeah, it makes sense. You know, before we get into TikTok, I wanted to ask you,

how would you, if you were in control of X as, somebody who built, you know, one of the biggest social, you know, platforms in the world in Reddit, if you were in control of X, how would you control this sort of dynamic where this quote-unquote slop content is what this sort of stated versus revealed preference issue, right? Where on X people say they want to learn and get informed, but then the videos that actually, you know, get real engagement are, you know, some type of meme or it's J.D. Vance. how would you approach it because I think every X user given at least our corner of X were tech native many people are building similar products everybody's got an opinion what's

yours how would you is X perfect in its current state or do you see ways that uh that you would improve it so full disclosure you know I launched uh it's not a television series but a content series off season on X and partnership with X I probably use if you looked at my tracking on my apps, I'm sure I use X more than any other social media platform today. Totally. So I am, but why? The best question, right? Why?

Because the people and trends that I care most about in our little insular world, like that's where the news is made, that's where in order to do my job, well, that's how I rationalize it to myself. As a builder, as a tech builder, as an investor. It's work. It's a work app. I mean, it's work. No, it's obviously not.

But when I'm doom scrolling, I comfort myself saying like, no, actually this is helping me identified trends and things. Totally. And, and I know that it could be better. And it probably, I think it's more fundamental. And if you could apply this in different ways to I think, Instagram has its version of it, TikTok has its version of it, the algorithm rewards the thing that pushes to extremes, because it generates outrage. And people love gaming systems, especially when those systems mean more attention and more money. And so you see it across all these platforms. Some places it's a little bit more benign because YouTube is longer form content. You know, it doesn't feel as aggressive, but there's definitely a flavor of it there.

But I think as long as what you're optimizing for is me opening my phone and you as the developer or head of product trying to get me to spend as much time as possible, you're going to eventually end up with some version of the Algo feeding you more of the stuff that gets more of the attention and the outrage and whatever, which just feeds more. I think community platforms have the best shot that I've seen because what you're signing up for there truly is the intent of, I like this community, right? When a community website gets to scale, and I'll never forget,

so I started R slash gaming. And to this day, the culture of R slash gaming is a reflection of me, an old gamer, because what I was talking about R slash gaming was more nostalgic even back then in 2005 than what was the new game. And at some point, the gaming community on Reddit said, listen, old man, we want to know about new titles. So we're going to create R slash games, which is much more about new releases. And you could see a cultural rift in something that seemed pretty obvious, but like, or maybe subtle, but to the people in it was really important. So I think if you're subscribing to based on community, you're coming in with a different set of expectations.

And so you have a chance to build something that doesn't necessarily lead to the can you make a thing? that'll piss as many people off as possible, which is what Twitter does so on. I've got friends who I think kind of make a living shit posting. And it's an incredible art form. And I have to commend them on it. But like it's a symptom. The reason that exists and is so viable is it's a symptom of the platform just rewarding, you know, what gets you to, you know, stay in the app for longer. Yeah.

That makes sense. Talk, I mean, we got to hear about the TikTok bid. There needs to be a decision made by April. You're entering the mix. We love to see it. Break down kind of like your guys's angle, what you want to do with the platform post-acquisition and maybe some of the other people involved.

Sure. Well, look, you know, Frank McCourt's the big dog here. He called me up and was like, hey, I'd love to get you involved. And he already had, his instincts were around building something on chain, you know, using this and the massive user base of TikTok to, you know, basically overnight, not literally, but overnight bring a bunch of people into this world where they now actually control, like, say, their reputation online to a certain extent because they have the sort of currency they've created there with that account and that identity.

Look, it seems like Elon even replied to my tweet saying there are more people bidding on TikTok than not at this point. That's right. There's a lot of people. Yeah, and why not? I support them all, to be clear. I support them all. I want it.

I don't care if you have $5. If you have $5 trillion, if you're an American, I support you buying TikTok. Well, that's exactly. And that was my, that was my reply. As long as it ends up outside of the control of the Chinese Communist Party, great. It's a win. Like obviously, I'd rather us win. But any of those options, that's not Chinese controlled is a win.

And I've been outspoken about this for years. And it is what it is. But I do think there's something really interesting about, you know, we're at this point where, and look, I've been a day one seated Coinbase in 2012. like eat pre-sale like I have I've wanted to believe in a version of this future for a long time and right now you've got amazing CEOs like Brian Armstrong who've brought us so far so far into making it even just a standard and a store of value and I'm Bitcoin really specifically but like can we get to that next point where we have a technology that just sort of underpins a lot of people's lives

casually and and again no one's going to use any of these apps because of the technology They're going to use it because of what it does for them. And you either spend years building it up and, you know, everyone's got a version of it. Everyone's doing it. But nothing's really broken through or come close yet. This is such a fun hack to getting mass, mass adoption for this technology. That was the thing that was most interesting. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it, look, if it did come to fruition, you know, there's still lots of things to figure out and solve for.

But there are enough bright minds who are already in my inbox who are very, excited on the on the crypto front uh to lend their axes so uh so look i again as long as it ends up in american hands i'm thrilled but i'd obviously love for us to take a stab at it and really see what it takes to bring over a bunch of netizens to uh beyond chain world that'd be great we have five minutes uh i wanted to know are there any underrated reddits reddit communities that you think might be worth taking a little tour into like live no no not right now now just, I,

whenever I run into something with, there's a lot. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of crazy. As our kids watch this show. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hopefully it's a safe for work one. But every once in a while I find a Reddit where, like I got into 3D rendering and there was Reddit on the Houdini for. And it was just like, these people are the, they're the, the, CGI artists who do the,

the horses on Game of Thrones. And they're just amazing artists and they just know so much more, right? And I was just like, I need to know everything about this. And I'm getting really up to speed. Even with their meme. I learn through osmosis from that and I love when I find a little community

that I can just be like oh I'm not an expert I'm totally tourist but I love that stuff I'm wondering if there's anything that pops up even it's just like you know nostalgic like I don't know I see have a microphone there from teenage ears anything I got to remember the URL DIGG dot com oh yeah

that one there we go that one we'll be on there I'll be on there I actually have a I have another another question for you um you're like pretty much a pure play consumer internet guy right obviously in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the history of your investing career you've invested all over the place but you seem to be somebody who you know when others sort of you know sour you know

especially uh you know it almost became a meme of like consumer internet investing is just so hard that a lot of people just give up we it's very obvious now that there's a bunch of you know, we've seen this with, you know, one of the players that we have in PMF or die is taking multiple consumer apps to like millions of dollars in revenue and in super short period of time. How do you think about, you know, consumer investing now in the age of AI? You're sort of, in many ways, refounding dig, but I'm sure you're looking at, you know, hundreds of deals a month, I would imagine, or at least a quarter. What's most exciting to you right now? It feels like the kind of a moment that you'd been waiting for similar to crypto, but this feels like,

you know, obviously the next wave. Dude, it is, consumers definitely gotten exciting again. And look, I got weird, right? I think the best, the greatest gift that I've had with my investing track record is having a certain amount of freedom from LPs. And like 10% of our AUM is my own money too, which doesn't hurt. But like you got to think 2020, the year I left Reddit, one of the first investments I made was in a women's soccer team called Angel City, starting that team up for it cost a million dollars to buy a franchise back then in the same league today. An expansion fee, like literally just the amount paid to start a team was 110 million.

So the valuations have gone up. Angel City is now the most valuable women's professional team in the world at just shy of 300 million. And literally five years ago, that was the craziest idea. And I tweeted the entire grand plan and just said, this is an undervalid opportunity. It's venture scalable. Here we go. And so I love being told, I'm going to lose all my money and it's crazy. And so I found opportunities, to your point, in consumer that still, you know, turns out

the business model of a sports team is actually very similar to Reddit. But with AI, software got exciting again and shameless plug. The latest one that we just talked. talked about was called Doji. Now, I'm clearly not a fashionista, but this team figured out how to make AI avatars. I mean, look at those pants. Yeah. Figured about how to make AI avatars with just a few reference photos. Actually look, I mean, I could never. Yeah, it's a wild fit. This is, this is, this is going to be, and again, it all comes back to user experience, right? We spent a year or two seeing, oh, look at that. Like, we blew the Turing test out of the water. We're seeing all these

dope bells and whistles applications. And we're just now starting to see what people can do with that tech. And it's going to be fun. And I think we got through the first wave of like get rich quick apps. No disrespect. Hustle is going to hustle. I love no T no shade. But we're now getting into what's a consumer app that's not just going to make you,

I don't know, turn into a piece of cake and get cut in half. But what's an app that's going to make a fun social experience? And it might just be remixes of old things, dig. I know from another old consumer founder that you might hear another one of these types of stories in the next couple weeks, maybe it's out by Southwest. And I think you're going to get to see this rebirth of apps

that we all knew that can be demonstrably better now because of this technology. And then we'll see some new stuff like Dogey that just like this try-on app, there's a version of that that has existed and sucked for decades. And what it took was a few technological, breakthroughs and a great user experience and blah. And so yeah, it is a great time for consumer. It's a great time for hard tech. Um, I've done a few space tech companies now. I obviously love

hardware. Like it's, it has never been more fun to do this job. And, and again, the world does not need more investors. So if you hear this and think, oh, I want to do that when I grew up, start a company first. Yeah. It's so much better. You'll be so much cooler. It's better for society. You'll make more money. Like, do that and then come over the dark side after. That's great. We see you pop-up on paparazzi photos on the world tour. What's the next big event you're excited for? Is there anything on the

calendar that you're looking forward to in 2025? My wife was like, do you want to go to the Vanity Fair Party? And I was like, no, of course not. No, that was the last one I guess I missed out on. If you have a plus two, I mean, we'll tag along. You got to marry up, guys. That is the

secret. That's how I did it. No, I I there's there's nothing okay I don't know the yeah I don't know I'll just surprise you in fact if it's a true paparazzi photo I won't even know that it's happening yeah yeah yeah well subscribe to alami stock photos and you can see the latest of what Alexis is up here's a here's a good question I asked John this yesterday so starship uh you know uh disintegrated last night uh it's unfortunate but obviously they're iterating quickly how many uh how many successful uh space you know, sort of trips to the moon you need to see before you're going to get on it yourself.

John's answer was, was three. Does John have kids? Yeah, I know, I know. I know. He's got, he's got three. I have three kids and a very high risk. You have three kids now? Yeah, I know. Grats.

Thank you. Holy shit. This come a long way from the soil of days. I know, man. Yeah. It's wild. Wow. Oh, that's nuts.

No, I would not do that. Stoke, Stoke is my horse in that race. Okay. As an early investor there. And I love Andy. I love that team. I'd say the same thing.

SpaceX has changed the world. We're all in their debt. They've opened so many doors for humanity, civilization. But I don't need to be in the first million. Okay. I have no interest. I'm not interested. Now, a supersonic plane.

I told Blake when I sent the wire, I was like, bro, get me a seat on the boom. Let's go. Again, I don't need to be the first. Right. Let the professionals do that. But like that's way more appealing to me because space, no, alien and aliens were my favorite movies as a kid. And so no good comes from space as far as I'm concerned. And that's without even not knowing that xenomorphs don't really exist, no good comes from that.

That's why there's a pulse rifle on my wall. There we go. There we go. Yeah. I mean, always stay strapped at the pulse rifle. Anybody that has a man cave like yours is not in any hurry to leave. is truly, truly a work of art. Well, this was fantastic.

Thanks so much for joining the stream. We'll have to have you back soon. You're always welcome. I appreciate it. One more shameless plug. I want to say, and you guys, you got to keep me honest on this. Was I the first investor to ask if I could invest in this pod?

Yeah, you actually were. Yeah, you were. And I think it would have been, I think it would have be a thousand X. Yeah. And, uh, I'm still here, guys. I'm still here. You saw, you saw the potential. You were, you were, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,

knew these guys aren't building a podcast. They're building empires an empire. The TV verse. We appreciate the support for sure. You'd be one of our first calls if we ever did. It is so good. It's so good for the ecosystem. Y'all's vibe is perfect. The branding is on point. Like 10 out of 10. Taste, you've heard enough people say it. It is so true, though. Taste in this era is going to be a hundred times more valuable as intelligence, thank God, is getting democratized than a commodity. And so it's an amazing time to have great taste. And this is the timing could not be better for what you don't.

Here's our vision for it, since it's very relevant to you. We want to give, you know, interesting people that are doing big things, all the benefits of having their own big podcast with none of the work, right? Because, like, you don't, you don't want to, you know, you could work on, spend all this time making a podcast and maybe you even put sponsors on it, make a million dollars a year. It's not going to change your life. What if you could just come on TBPN

anytime you had big news because that is what we're setting up. The next time you've got news, I'd love to have you back on specifically when all the TikTok stuff is getting worked out. For sure. Hopefully you win it,

but whether or not, you know, I know you have some great points. We got Sam lesson here. It's a party. Relaxes, what's going on, man? What's up, Sam? Hey, dude, I'm sorry, I was gabbing with these guys.

Hey, Sam. No, I was walking some tennis balls. I was late. But we got microphones and white hats. You're like, you're my technology brother. Yeah, I mean, teenage engineering. That's the best. The subtle way to say I paid too much for my microphone.

No, you paid the exact right amount for quality. There you go. There you go. What's going on, guys? Alexis, thank you so much. Thank you for having me all. Peace guy. See, Alexis.

Not too much, Sam. How are you doing today? How was tennis? You know, I'm just, I'm only bombed because I really had this vision in my head. I was going to come join you guys and wear a tuxedo. I just didn't have time today. You guys have that iconic photo on your website. I think the slow, so everybody listening, just go to, go to slow.co.

It's just the partners, the partnership wearing tuxed. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a great photo. Ben, you should work on pulling this up. But, no, you have a good excuse. You were playing tennis. If you had more, if we had more time in the transition there, You could have, maybe we could have got Serena on for a second to give you some points.

I'm heading, heading, heading to Indian Wells in a few hours. Oh, no way. You guys are Sweden Wells fans? Yeah. We actually do nothing but, but do this show. We never go outside. Basically. Fair enough.

I'm just trying to fit the role of stereotypical venture capitalists for you. That's great. Come from tennis, go to tennis. Yep. Yep. We're a tuxedo. Whatever. What I like is the honesty, too many venture capitalists, like, try to basically,

they're larping like they're not venture capital. Exactly. You know, they put on like a, I advise my friends like, don't put up like a fake Zoom background to try to hide the fact that you're in this sort of like 30 million dollar home. You know, like just just embrace it.

Like founders want to partner with people that are very successful, right? So. It's just authenticity. I mean, we saw this with the SBF thing. Like people fake like, oh, I'm not rich.

And then you, it blows up because he was like complete fraud and the whole like, I don't know. I'm very short, like, faking that you're not, like, successful with your success. I am pro honesty and pro whatever. Authenticity. That's what it's about. It's not about, like, the flexing or, like, showing off. It's just about, like, just being who you are.

No, I agree. There's, hopefully you've got a full kind of 30 minutes here before you head to Indian Wells. I feel like there's a ton of stuff to cover. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about your billboard that you guys. Oh, yeah. We're very proud of our billboard. This is our first slow outdoor marketing. Okay. So if you're cruising north on the 101, you're going to see our billboard, which, you know, is a burning pile of money around a castle. And the, and the tagline is AI is not your moat. And it's just like we were just driving on the 101 and every fucking billboard is like AI this, AI this is just like piles of money burning on the 101. So we decided to burn a little of our own money to kind of make the opposite point. So it's fun. I like having a billboard. I think we're going to do more billboards. I love it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, billboards are extremely underpriced. Well, we're sponsored by a billboard company. Next time you buy a billboards, go to ad quick.com. And tell them we sent you. Tell them you. I love it. I love it. So talk about...

Outdoor advertising is the future, gentlemen. None of this targeted stuff on the internet. Yeah, no, it can go much more viral. It's a lot of fun. Talk about, yeah, basically break down some of the ideas behind the billboard. You know, we've covered every single big AI fundraise this year. We've covered the big companies. that are trying to roll it out. Some are doing it better than others. Just today, there was a new

deep mine team that spun out and raised at a $500 million valuation to do. Oh, cheap. Cheap. These aren't typical slow deals, but you have a good perspective on the market. Like, give us... No, look, we've been pretty consistent on this for two plus years. I mean, I wrote a decade in 2013, I'm sorry, not 23, 2023, not that long ago. That was kind of about with a moment of venture capital what the fuck venture capital and the basic point of it was don't confuse the fact that lLMs are powerful technology like there's stuff you're going to do with them that are going to be great for all sorts of businesses with the disruption itself being a good business my partner will says this a lot the big guy on the website he's always like just because technology is

disruptive doesn't mean that's where the money is made you have to think about the business model disruption and what's really going on and you know just I think we're in a super cycle of memetic venture capital money lighting on fire in AI right now because and there's a bunch of structural reasons for it we talked about then it's like LPs have too much money in too big of pockets they got to figure out where to jam it right GPs there's no there's no narrative that makes sense but guess what if your LPs are gonna pay you to jam money into AI companies and get paid the fees on it with a with a you know a go-fish

card it's not a bad deal right if you're willing to just spend a lot of money and so but we've just been incredibly sure this now it doesn't mean we don't love companies that are enabled by AI you know I like what I call AI cherry on top businesses, which is a business that fundamentally is great, right? It's fundamentally, but then there's a non-obvious ideally cherry on top, right, which is that AI gives it new leverage. You know, I'm working on a new company with Joe Lonsdale and their team, which is called Merit First, and that's an example of a company where like actually, structurally and sociologically, AI does add something new as a type of company that should have always existed. It was hard to build

before, now you can build. That stuff is all great. But this like large, model, fight to zero. I mean, it's just, it's kind of wild to watch, to be totally honest. Talk about Facebook's just met as opportunity broadly in AI. If you were still working at the company, how would you, you know, do you think they're, our position overall is like they're doing a lot of things right. There's been talked recently about, you know, having a standalone, you know, app, which could makes sense, but it doesn't even feel like they've been that aggressive with sort of productizing it. Productizing it. Well, yeah, my view I'm meta in AI is quite simple.

It's a classic, which I love, heads you win, tails you win situation, right? It's the best way to, the reason the stock has gone up so much. I think of anything is you look as an investor, you're looking around and you're saying, where do I definitely win on AI, regardless of how the brakes go? And the answer is going to be meta, right? They're unlike Google, aren't going to get disrupted in their core business on this. They don't have a search business. they don't have a lookup business to disrupt.

They have a shit ton of an engagement of attention, and they sell ads. And you know what definitely gets better with LLMs? Ads. The targeting gets better. The creative gets better. You just win, right? And so at that point, you know, the reality is, is like I think they're incredibly well positioned.

You know, people argue that these numbers are huge. They're spending on long, whatever. But you got to look at as a percentage of market cap. It is a tiny percentage investment, right, to cover their ass, right? And to make sure that whatever innovation happens, in AI, enough of its open source and the funnel is wide enough that it all ends up back in them. They don't get cornered and stuck out in the wilderness, right? But it's an incredibly, I think they're an incredibly good place. I think they're probably in the best place of any

large tech company. And I'd say moreover, like, you know, the way I've always thought about this and what I see is AI, unlike prior innovations, like unlike the transition from shrink rack software to the internet, is just so good for the big companies, right? It's easy to slot in. it commodifies equipment. You cannot think of a better extending innovation for a large company, right, that already has the infrastructure or the data center teams and the whole nine yards. Like, this is just all upside for them. And so I think what you see is like to be for them.

And low margin basically. Well, unless you're Apple and somehow you got stuck way out in the wilderness. But like they're in, you know, the Googles, the Amazon's, the Facebooks, I mean, meta's, they're in great shape. And then if you're a tiny company, there's just so much leverage all of a sudden that, you know, there is a lot of cost. There's all sorts of things you can do that's cool. You just don't want to be in the middle.

As with most things in life, you never want to be in the middle. And candidly, even companies like Open AI, or should we say nonprofits, like Open AI, the problem is they're kind of in the middle. They can't compete with the hyperscalers from just access to capital perspective. If this is a capital game, they're going to lose, right? So do you think... And if it's not a capital game and it's a deep seek open source thing,

they're also going to lose. The key in life is just never be in the middle. Do you think that SoftBank can realistically spend $3 billion on agents with Open AI this year? Look, all I can tell you this is I joke, it's a joke, but it's true. One thing we've learned, we've been doing slow for 10 years. Whenever soft bank buys, you sell, right? Like, they are the worst investors in the history of the world, right?

And so it's just like, I've watched them crush so many companies by overcapitalizing them, by get, they're like, you know, it's hilarious. I love their decks. But no, it's like, it's complete house of cards. How's it cards? Was it always that way? Masa's nuts, right? Every once in a while in his history,

he's been nuts enough to nuts his way into some amazing opportunity that saved his ass, right? But like, you know, I mean, he was the original lull deck guy. Remember his unicorn deck with the unicorns? Yeah, the egg. He's an incredible marketer.

So why haven't we seen Masa taking bigger swings, you know, in the early stage? It seems like... Because Mossa always comes in late and overpays. That's his thing. Yeah, right, but obviously with vision fund, like a massive infrastructure, just put a million dollars into every new company, just write tons of seed checks. Like, like, is it just an infrastructure problem? Like why they just don't index the entire seed market? Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, it's an interesting question. I wonder, so historically speaking, when big funds try to index the seed market, there are two problems. One is someone wakes up and does the math and like, this doesn't make any sense, right? Like, even if you have the. million dollar check at Seed, if you're trying to deploy billions of dollars, like, it's just an irrational business model because the multiples don't make up for the fact you have to move gross dollars, right? So the best case you're doing at Seed then is just marketing, right? You're like, I do Seed to Market. Yeah. Hey, Des. I'm on the Technologies Brothers podcast. You want to say hi? Yeah, come say hi. You know my wife, Jessica? Yeah, we came over to the pool house. Hey,

how you know? We wouldn't really be able to do the show without your team, uh, your team's coverage. We we basically feature your articles, you know, almost daily. So, thank you. And I'm grateful. Congrats on all the success, you guys. Yeah. So we're, town.

No, we subscribe. What do you want him for? No, we subscribe to the information. I have to think we're one of the number, we have to, I hope we're one of the number one referral partners because we,

we get the paid wall articles and then, and then we cover them, but we don't cover the full thing, you know, so we basically are, you know, pushing people behind the paywall. So it's great. We got to strike a deal. So I'll leave you guys, but then, you know,

let's do it. figure it out to it. Referral revenue your way. Well, no, no, we're just, we're happy to support. Happy to support. Great, great to meet. Oh, look that. It's a guest on the guest.

I love it. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm just delivering your mail. Thanks. Bye. Fantastic. Nice. Okay, talk.

I want, I want more hot takes from you on, on kind of all the, on all the hyperscalers. So what's going on with Apple? Are they just a luxury goods? Are they the LVMH of tech? Are they just going to kind of continue to make the same products forever? Are they done innovating? Look, here's the reality.

It's really hard to make phones, right? And like really hard, especially in the modern era. It's really hard to imagine that they're going away anytime soon because of that. At the same time, you know, I don't know if you guys get the Apple intelligence summaries your text, but they're like comically bad. They're hilarious. They're not really not tell you the opposite of what the text says, right? Like it is useless, right? And so I think it's valuable in that it's so funny because I'll screenshot them and send them into the group chat and be like, really you guys are talking about this or something?

And that's funny, but it's all it's purely accidental humor. It's insane, right? And so I'd actually think that I would argue that Apple's intelligence text message product might be the perfect exhibit for an antitrust case, right? Where you're like, you talk about consumer harm, right? Like the kind of bar for this. It's like this is what we're gonna get out of AI, right? Like it's comical, right? It is really funny as I love lulls.

So like I'm into it. I think it's funny. Yeah, it was the first time in L. I swear to God, Jessica's phone on their newest iOS update. It deleted all somehow like all the contacts. And so she now just has phone. Like it is comically bad. But the problem is on the flip side is like the camera's good.

Yeah, it's hard to make phones. Yeah. Right. So like I don't, I'm still like, and who no one likes green bubbles. Right. And so the reality is, is like, I think we're a long way away from Apple going away. But my God, are they in a weird place right now?

Right. It is unfortunately as a consumer, like, I just want better AI, and I know that they'll just be able to wait and just dominate the monopoly and then eventually roll something down. Yeah, like the very basic thesis is if LVMH is a luxury goods conglomerate and they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars, should the sort of digital tech equivalent, consumer tech equivalent of that be worth trillions of dollars?

Like, yes, like they're not going away. But look, LVMH is there. There was an interesting moment. You guys remember, I think this was like a few years ago where there was this moment where LVMH, or I guess the CEO of LVLB is the richest guy in the world, right? And somehow like it inverted and like tech was worth it. It was like a crazy inversion. You're like, wow.

So the meta story of our society right now is that it's not the innovators that are worth the most. The meta story is that it's like fake luxury signaling. That's the most valuable thing in the world. And that was not a good thing. You contributed to that with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, Facebook, right? Like, Facebook was a huge catalyst for, you know, tech becoming the number one source of wealth or no, no, no, no, luxury spending, right? Because now it wasn't like, oh, your watch or your car is no longer just like, you know,

being seen by your local community, but it can be seen by the whole world and you can sort of signal out, you know, status. Yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting social bandit because on one hand I'd argue that Instagram has made it so that the real luxury consumption is experience and travel and being hot, right? Like all of a sudden, like fitness is cool, because like you can say you're hot and being hot's like way more expensive than a watch right and so like actually that's the way like being well rested is the luxury good right um and like so you know kids kids are like the most expensive thing in the world so all these things that you can like now socially signal as like i'm fucking rich easily and like those certainly supersede your burkin bag like those that's like cheap luxury right um that's like mass luxury at best and so like there's this weird dynamics going on now you all on the flip side the reality is is like Look, I've got, I don't know, you guys, you guys play with the, the meta ray bands. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We don't have here. Freaking great. Yeah. Right. And like, I do think that you talk about luxury and fashion, like, if meta had released not Raybans, right, then like they wouldn't be as cool, even if they were exactly the same.

And they probably wouldn't have sold as well. So like, I'm not like a luxury guy. Like, I don't have perfect insights or taste on this. But there is, there's weird stuff going on about how you, what luxury really is, how you display taste, how you display taste, how you display wealth. And certainly things like Instagram had had a big impact on that. Related to the meta-ray bands, are you at all like a DAU, M-A-U of any other augmented reality or just like consumer hardware technology like Applevision Pro, Oculus, any of these products at all? Apple Vision Pro has got to be the most expensive product per minute of use in the history of the world.

I obviously bought one immediately. I used it precisely zero times since the first week I had it. It's an incredible demo, right? What do you think about it? I've actually tried to do the math on this. Like, it's more expensive than private planes per minute of use, right? If you looked at like the overall, like, so. I had the exact same experience.

I was a big Oculus. I think that Oculus is actually pretty good at this point. I, you know, look, I'm a Facebook loyalist, so I like bought every version. Yeah. I, like everyone else, played a bunch of zombie shooting games during the pandemic with friends. It was super fun. Like, I'm into it. I think it's a really hard sell, though, when, like, your life is pretty.

good right like I think the reality is like VR and like immersive experiences and all other realities are kind of great if your life sucks right because then you're like I'm gonna like live in a video game but like I think a lot of the problem that that type of stuff is like it's just it's not if you have a good life and kids and like do stuff like what's the point right go play real tennis instead of VR tennis yeah like I like we tennis but I like real tennis better yeah it's great that makes sense uh one more uh do you have a prediction around uh Google, do we have a new CEO there at all in the next five years? Are they all in on Sundar?

On Sundar? I don't know. Is that just like based in some news or rumor? No, it's purely based on, it's purely based on Google has not managed to release an AI product that hasn't been riddled with issues. And it feels like it does, you know, we, you know, you obviously can poke fun at Moss's picking ability. in column somebody that sort of signals the top or whatever, but, you know, OpenAI and chat GPT have hundreds of millions of users and, you know, maybe they're not replacing that sort of commercial search activity, but like much of the informational search, it feels like the

golden goose is threatened for the first time. It's a really good question. I mean, here's the way I think about it is Gemini is actually a pretty sweet product. The problem is no one uses it, right? Like, you know, so is like the notebook L.M product. Google actually has a bunch of very, very good products, right? I think their problem is they're so big and the marketing and like driving of those products is extremely hard for them. And yes, I think they are the company that more than any other company in the world is in the position of both being way ahead in certain elements of AI and like

has a huge advantage, but they also have the most to lose, right? And so I think that's a very challenging thing for any company. If you look at, you know, the history of companies like that, I mean, the best example from history is, was it Kodak, right, that invented the digital camera, right? Like, they invented it and like they fucked it up, right? And like, you understand why, though, right? Which do you have a bunch of these business concerns? Now, the interesting thing about Google is, I think Sundar's a very good guy and competent manager, managing an enormous infrastructure, but you do actually still have founders with meaningful control in the picture.

And I actually think that's good because I think to do really tough things. it's extremely helpful to have the broad sort of founders, right? The question is it just has to be wielded. And so I think the bigger question is you look at this, like, I think was it Larry Page of the letter about, please try to go to work 60 hours a week for AGI? Did you see this? It's like Larry launched a new startup today or yesterday.

It was like a wildly funny thing to leak, right? Because everything's going to leak. But it's like, I actually think it's less a Cinder question and more like, do the founders step up and just like broadsword this? Right? Because that is, if you, that is kind of, I think, what probably has to happen. And it's not a technology problem. Like, honestly, I think Gemini is actually probably, for a lot of things, the best product.

It's just, is like terribly marketed. Yeah. That makes sense. You know, you guys, you know, you've spoken out against, you know, venture becoming this sort of asset management business, starting to look more like, you know, private equity in some ways at the same time, you know, that's on the fun side. On the company side, we've seen the sort of venture-style roll-ups where people raise venture capital dollars to buy, you know, companies.

They're going to, and it's a great deal for the founder, right, to raise 20 on 100 and then just buy, like, profitable companies in theory. It's better economics than traditional PE, but you guys at Slow have supported, I'm blanking on the name of the portfolio company, but what's your portfolio? We've done a bunch, metropolis, team shares, whatever. I mean, like, so here's basically talk to you. One is I'm not act I am personally a snob about venture capitalists being asset managers because I don't think it's that creative or important or interesting.

I will say as a GP it's a great fucking business model right and so like the the seed business model we run is definitely less consistently and meaningfully profitable than like being a 16 Z in a platform there's no question right like so if you just want to make money as a and saying I earn DPI to justify more AUM is a very smart thing. to do. It's just not that fun, right? And so like I'd rather do the fun part of the business, which is saying I take money in, but I take in the money I know how to make lots of money on. And then I run around saying, ha, hi, I told you so I was right from seed. That's like more fun for me, right? And so I think you have to like separate those as like I do intellectually dislike it.

I don't think it's a bad business model. On the roll up thing, look, we started doing this before all the cool kids were doing this, right? So if you look at like the two probably most important deals we've done in this, one is team shares. We see that from zero. I bought four. I bought 10% of the company originally for $400,000, right? We've kind of bought up from there. They've acquired well over 100 small businesses. They built a whole platform for scaling them. It's a killer business.

It's kind of a, and they've done a lot of really smart stuff. But there is kind of a technology leveraged roll-up strategy to it. You know, you can look at something like Metropolis, which is another pretty iconic deal, which, again, we were the seed investors in. We were early seed investors in when it was a tech company. And we realized that it turns out that SaaS is a terrible business model, right, in a lot of verticals. It's, it's, it's, it's just like, everyone has this idea that SaaS is a great business model. It's not, right?

It's, if you get paid later, it's hard to sell. And, you know, the thing, if you think about something like that's a transformative technology, you go to a CEO and say, I have a transformative technology going to change your whole business. It's going to make you 50% profit. You can't then say, give me 40% of the profit, right? They're like, fuck you. We'll give you your SaaS fee. Right. So if you have an actually transformative technology and you can swing it, you're better off buying your customers, right?

and then deploying your technology. But that's predicated on actually having a better technology, right? And so this is the thing I think people get wrong is, you know, when venture capital's go fund rollups with the yada, yada, yada, there's some tech leverage in them or no tech leverage. That's ridiculous. And it doesn't make any sense. If you're a smart venture capitalist smart found,

you say, hey, I'm going to prove that I can be way better at this than my competitors than anyone else in the industry. And then by the way, it turns out for every reason, this is a hard software to sell. It's conflicted. I can't get paid what it's worth, the whole nine yards. Then going to P.E. folks and saying, hey, we're going to prove this out. We want cheap capital.

We're going to go buy all our customers. I think is a great strategy, right? So the kind of the devil's in the details in terms of how you do this. And we're into it. I mean, we did this one called TML, the lumberman factory. We're really excited about. We definitely do this, but we have a pretty specific bar on what this is. And it's not just like buying pool cleaning roll-ups.

Yeah. Can you talk about creators? I want to hear. We love creators. I mean, this is, yeah. I want to hear who you're bullish on and then what the anatomy of a deal that looks like a banger with a creator looks like. Yeah, so here's the basic upshot. As you guys maybe know, like we just announced this $65 million vehicle, which is pretty groundbreaking, right? What we invest in is not C-Corps. We invest in seed creators. So think I own a niche, right? I'm doing a million in top line. I've got a million followers. I'm growing really quickly. And here's the key fact is you do the breakdown. You're like, I'm an awesome creatives. I've built this community.

I am the leader of it. I'm admired. I have this scarce thing. I've low, you know, low, uh, cac on high LTV folks. It's fucking sweet. But you're doing a million in top line.

After expenses, taxes, you're living fine, but you don't have an investable capital. We're like, we'll give you the investable capital to build C-Corps and businesses, right? This is a new pattern of C-Corp generation and building we really believe in at

seed. Now, how do we get there? We got there because it's really hard to invest in seed creator businesses. Because the equity, and the value of the community has held us to have the company. And so Jane wakes up in five days and we love the community. We love her. She's like, oh, fuck, it's actually not this, it's that.

It's not Mr. Beastburger. It's fucking feastables. You do not want to be in that scenario, right? Like, no one wants that. It's bad for everyone. We want to be able to invest in as aligned a way as we possibly can with creators. And so we were like, look, we do this effectively with founders anyway. We don't take board seats.

We want to be first check in. We're trying to be collaborative, holistically with them. We want to be aligned with them. If they win great, if they lose, say, la Vee. What is the equivalent in creator? And that's kind of what we're bullish on. So I think, you know, it turns out in creator like most things, the transparent deals, the super buzzy ones, Masa style, they always get super overpriced, right?

Because everyone knows them and they say, oh, we like creator, creator important, buy creator, right? We're much more interested in providing capital where it's scarce, which is we think seed creators and we think on this model. What about putting those two things together? Have you thought about going to a creator and saying, hey, you would be perfect if you owned this business that already exists. We buy the business, give it to you, repackage it, and then you're kind of the marketing front end. Is that a crazy idea? It's not a crazy idea.

And we get pitched it all the time, actually, you know, in different verticals. Like you have the god of lawn care who wants to buy the lawn care companies. It's not crazy. But I do think it's complicated to get right, right? And I think like, you know, there's a thing I like to say about seed stage investing, which is no fucking bank shots, right? And the more variables that have to be right, Domino style, the less likely it is that the thing actually happens, right?

And so for me, it's like, so you want tech leverage and a roll up and we're gonna put a creator on top and da-da-da-da. It's like something will not work, right? And like that makes it a hard bet. Now, but it's intellectually not wrong, right? With kind of two follow-up questions. On the creator fund, do you guys have like a no zero's policy, right?

A lot of these creators generate revenue from ads, right? if you invest a million dollars and they generate, you know, a couple million bucks a year in ad revenue, like even if they don't make a banger company, like you'll get your money out eventually? Or how do you think about it? Here's the way we think about it. It's a great question. We're not that interested in your ad business, right? Like, we just don't really care. Like, there's no enterprise value generated in that. It's really nice, non-dilut of financing sometimes, but like it's not what we're playing for. We also are not interested in taking some creators last cent, right? Like, if you're just like, you're making a million,

bucks after you pay taxes and whatever else you're living okay we're not going to be and we're like hey uh by the way we want our 10% of your ad revenue we like we don't care now there is a scenario we do care about protecting right which is if you take our money you know we're doing the seed thing we start a few companies they don't quite work but in the process of spending our money because you marketed yourself and whatever else you get 10 times bigger yeah and then you're like you know i kind of just like super bowl ads i'm just going to do a bunch of super bowl ads and I'm going to make $15 million, $20 million next year on that. We'll want our piece of the upside on that in that model, right?

But like our whole thing is about alignment, and we're certainly not primarily interested in your ad dollars, right? It's not like a slope, you know. Now, look, it doesn't hurt that there's a non-delude of financing. Yeah, right? Yeah. It's a good net. Makes sense.

Mr. Beast is marks around $5 billion right now. It's a private mark. I wouldn't read that much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm assuming that everybody that's investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Mr. Beast or billions wants to get their money out eventually. It's hard to imagine anybody buying it, you know, outright, right? Do they, do you see Mr. Beast going public in the next few years? I am sure that's what he, they want to do. Like how is that? Is it a stock that trades, you know,

kind of like true social where it's just based around attention and, and does it? I think it's a mean stock. It's a meme stock if it gets out, right? It's just a meme coin on. steroids. You know, the reality is, is like, it's not, again, I actually credit Jimmy, Mr. Beast. He's done a few very important things for the creator space, right? One thing he did is he's made a lot of creators dream a lot bigger. And that's great, right? Like, I appreciate that, right, from a perspective. I also think, you know, he's really, I think, been a good example on a beacon of creators aren't just creators, like they can start businesses, like whatever. So there's been an aperture opening that he's really helped with that I think has been great for the industry. Now,

Now, that said, you know, I do think there's some structural problems with his quote-unquote business, right, as a creator of business. Like, I'll give you an example. Like, one, we care a lot about the LTV of customers, right? And his audience is so broad and candidly pretty poor, right? Which means that, like, they're not great customers, right? Like, there's a reason you sell chocolate because it's one of the only things you can sell to everyone that's cheap, right?

And like, so there's like, it's not like the best audience. It's also, you know, the reality is he does a lot of his media stuff, like, you know, everyone's excited that he gets a hundred million dollar Amazon contract, but then he spends more than that on the show, right? Like, and so it's like, it's just not clear to me that in the hyper competitive entertainment space with a broad general audience, that that's like an amazing business. But look, it is definitely a cult. And I'm sure there's a bunch of like 20 year old kids that will grow up and trade it like a meme stock, right? And like, that could be fine, right? It's just not like a thing where you're looking at you. Like, this is a money printing machine.

which is what I'm more interested in. To my knowledge, you're thinking about the slow creator program where you would want one of the creator's underlying companies to go public, but not the creator holding company to go public and that there's some brand risk to the creator if you're having a financial asset that's trading based on your popularity. And if your popularity goes down, you get even more unpopular because, you know. Yeah. So we've, I've been interested in this kind of how do you think about financing people with equity versus

debt for a very long time. I started my first company in 1999 when I was in high school. It's called LifeCapital.com. And the idea was basically some version of this, right? And so I think that thematically makes a ton of sense, right? As the world gets more unequal and outcomes are more discontinuous, debt financing does just broadly not make sense for people, right? The equity model, and we've invested in a bunch of versions of this, right, including some of that recently. So I do think it's a very interesting spit, specifically for the creator fund, again, you know, you kind of are, you know, you are what you eat, right? In this case, we like eat L.P. dollars and like from an eating LP dollar perspective and like what the structure is, the good

news is, we really think there's an opportunity to deliver normal ass C-Corps, skims, whatever you want to call it, right? That start with creators, but are perfectly huge, amazing companies to back from seed, right? And so that is what we do with that. Is there residual value to the Holdco pieces? Yeah, there totally is. Like in 10 years, because these are 10-year funds, do you have to figure out how to wrap that up or resell it or like retrate? Absolutely. But like, candidly, this market is moving so fast that the way I think about this is like, we're investing in launch pads for amazing C-Corps that are driven first and foremost by

amazing communities that are led by amazing founders that are creators. Like that is what we're doing. And yes, at the end of a 10-year cycle, which then has a bunch of extensions on it, you do figure out what you do with the residual assets. Yeah, that makes sense. I have so many other questions here. I mean, the main one is how quickly are you pushing creators to, are you thinking of these creators as a catalyst for the C-Corps that they're spinning out?

Because one thing I've seen from spending millions of dollars with influencers is like, oftentimes you'll spend $100,000 with an influencer. It performs well, like if it's sort of like a broad consumer audience. And then the performance can drop off over time because, you know, you know there's only so many buyers in the audience how do you think about you know the almost no creator is big enough to sustain a venture scale you know see corp by themselves right well it depends on verticals and how you're looking at it you know like when you think about creators it's such a broad space and used so broadly that I think you can you can mean a lot of

different things right and so look one of the dirty secrets which you know it sounds like is in the venture capital world entrepreneurs all day long will pitch you about how their CAC is very high, but the CAC will come down. Here's a secret. CAC always goes up, right? It always goes up. Like, the cat goes up, not down, right? And so, like, what you're experiencing is that.

It's like, if you spend money with an influencer, they're the people who want to buy the thing anyway, you reach them, it's cheap. And then you hit a wall, like, if it's just, like, a general product you're selling, right? And so you have to think about it as a launch pad from that perspective. You know, we want to back creator founders who come in and are, they want to be entrepreneurs. They're, like, pitch us business ideas. Like, they have their list. They're like, okay, like, I know my audience in lawn care, in terrariums, and you name it, better than anyone in the world.

Here's the 10 things that no one knows. And by the way, I can sell them. And I know it, I'm selling it to myself. Like, I'm the leader of this and I understand the space better than anyone. And I have access to the community. And they trust me. That's what we want, right? We don't need them to come in and be like, here's the business plan 100%.

In fact, we kind of just, but we do need that list. Because if you're coming and you're like, I'm a creator, I have the audience, but I don't know what to do. We're like, well, we don't, are you an entrepreneur? are you just going to make more media, right? And we're like, the media is fine, but the media has to support real businesses. Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Um, that's all I got for today. Uh, wait, last question. Who's a better grill master? You were Zuck? Oh, definitely Zuck. Okay. I had to know. I mean, look, I wouldn't seem bad, but like, I think that man has invested in the craft of grilling, um, in a way that I have not. I love it. I love it. That makes sense.

We'd love to have you as a regular. Yeah. Yeah. Anytime you go, want to reach out. I really love the show. It's super fun. I love what you guys have done and we love bullshiting. So it's great. You love the app. We love to yap. It's a match made in heaven. It's a match made in heaven. We'll have a fun. We'll have a buildboard someday. We should. Yeah, we should. That'd be great. Well, enjoy Indian Wells. Enjoy the weekend. Have a great time. I'll talk to you later. It's great. Have it gone. Bye. I noticed on his website, slow.co. It looks like they have the biggest guy and they made him sit in a chair. Which we're starting to do. Yeah, I've had to do that before.

Oh, wait. How tall am I, Jordy? 6.8. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. A lot of people just don't even believe it. They say there's never been a podcast, a 68 podcaster. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm kind of the Coden O'Brien of tech podcasting, I suppose. That's true. Many have said that. He's really tall. Let's go to speaking of physical appearance. Let's go to Ali DeBoe. She says, the only moat, it's not AI. It's drop dead.

Just good looks and generational wealth. I love it. Very TV-coded post. I had to throw it in there. She sent me a text message because she, we featured her show. She was actually getting dunked on, but we featured it. We had a lot of fun. And so thank you to Allie for keeping the timeline.

She knows how to post the perfect amount to, you know, get engagement. Engagement. A little bit engagement. And she's got a social app, I believe. It's for Swish. Swish. Yeah, for photo sharing. Yep, which is cool.

And they're partnered with some huge rolling loud, the largest concert or something like that, and they're powering it. She's really good at doing these like deals, even though it's a small company. Yeah. Teal Fellow too. Yeah, it was funny when Apple, Apple came out

and announced their sort of, you know, their photos app is rough. So I'm sure she's not super threatened by that. But they also came out with this events. Yeah, part of full. And it was, I think, competing with what Allie's doing too, but I don't see Tim Cook at getting deals done with Rolling Loud.

He's too busy at the John Summit show. At the John Summit Show. Backstage. Who knows? So Allie's in control, but great post. Oh, well, should we move on and finish out the timeline and wrap up the show? Let's do it. Okay, let's go to Visicon Versami.

He says, even kings and billionaires want to be posters and podcasters. King Charles is launching his own Apple Music radio show to showcase his favorite music. You know they brought the Brinks truck for that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Signing King Charles. I love it. I mean, we're a network.

Yeah. We should explore, you know, maybe he does some angel investing. Yeah. He could host, you know, an angel investing. I mean, we were pitching Trump getting back in the media game, you know, because he had his own reality TV show. We were talking about maybe JD's the first one with a podcast or something. Yeah. And who's the California guy who Newsom has a show down?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why not? Why not a radio show? show. I hope King Charles gets on there, introduces every song, takes requests, does some radio stuff. Why ends up doing the news? Who knows? Maybe we'll have them on the show. King Charles, open invite. Should we go to George Mack? Yep. My most contrarian belief, we could increase the global economy by two to three percent by installing large whiteboards in every home. I love George so much. This is such a funny, funny idea to just like, you want to you

mandatory whiteboard. I mean, George, if you don't know, I mean, he's a fantastic thinker and writer and poster. And he, he's, like, very into, like, modeling things out, creating frameworks, creating flow charts. And so, of course, he thinks, like, you know, you just need to be, like, one foot away from a whiteboard to whiteboard out the problem and solve your problems at any moment.

But we need to get a whiteboard in here. We don't do nearly enough whiteboarding. What's your take on the whiteboard walls? Do you think that paint is, like, toxic and terrible? I mean, I generally, I don't enjoy it. using whiteboards. You're figma only. I love kind of making graphics and figma and using that.

Figma maximalist. Yep. I've just never been, I love, you know, creative pursuits and writing and all these things. But I went to a Waldorf school. I ever told you about this.

You're familiar with Waldorf? They have like similar to Montessori. It's like the Waldorf Astoria? Yeah, yeah. Went to the school at a five-star hotel. tell. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's an educational philosophy. Okay. From Rudolph Steiner emphasizing a holistic approach to education that nurtures intellectual,

artistic, and practical skills with a focus on imagination and creativity. Oh, that's fun. So I credit my Waldorf education for, uh, my, uh, you know, a number of my sort of, um, creative abilities, but they forced us to paint and draw and knit and do all these things as kids. wasn't good at I didn't have the patience for drawing. I just didn't have the patience. So I thought I didn't like art. Yeah. I thought I didn't like, you know, creative tasks as a kid. But I just didn't like, I've never liked drawing, writing. And now you're an artist and your paintbrush is the Sure SM7B. Exactly. On keyboard warrior. Keyboard warrior. Keyboard warrior podcast. Twitter fingers. Yeah. Yes. But, but generally, I think that, uh,

people seem to love whiteboards. There should be more of them. Yeah, I like it. It would be fun to have one here that we could write on, you know, KPIs, stuff like that. Yeah. Let's go to Nick. He says, 500 people run the world, but they collectively use like 50 therapists and listen to everything they say. So really, 50 therapists run the world.

I think it's accurate? And then the follow up. And those 50 therapists have been trained by like five teachers. Oh, it's all downstream for something. Yeah. I don't know. It's funny. Funny conspiracy.

I wonder if this is actually true at all or just like something that was completely hallucinated. Yeah. Bill Minitis post. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine that this is true that like, yeah, Satya and Sundar are using the same therapist or something.

It's funny because therapy is so often, I haven't had a therapist since I was like in high school or something like that. It never worked. I was never big into that world. Or a Tom Cruise route. Yeah, just watch Tom Cruise movies and get fired up. I think it's more about talking out loud about the things that you're working through and coming to many of your own conclusions, right?

Or going for a long walk. Yeah, a walk. 50,000 steps. 50,000 steps. Bill and I is putting up 50,000 steps in a day five times. Most people's goals. It's so much. Big numbers.

Walking all day long. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on. Speaking of walking, running, going long distances, Zach says, package your obsession into one thing that compounds. One brand, one output, one core product. When all thoughts are directed towards one channel, a violent rainstorm is captured in one infinite well

that sustains and compounds beyond your wildest imagination. Good writer. He's writing a book. He is. Yeah. Oh, that's fine. Yeah, yeah. Cool.

Yeah. I don't he'll sell a ton of them. Yeah. I mean, he's over a million on Instagram now. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I mostly want to highlight his execution on his new consumer app, which is building kind of a social layer on top of these fitness trackers.

And good name too. He's called ORA, right? ORA. It's a very on trend. You were trying to get ORA farming to go viral and we were kind of, we were almost too early on it. I failed. But I think it's probably breaking through now and I think people will now start to get it, maybe. Yeah.

If you want to make money on aura farming, though, you had to be in it, you know, early months ago yeah probably probably should we go to emily is in sf okay i'll read this one pissed off a lot of people it did so uh timeline and turmoil folks timeline and turmoil not my content but uh let's see what emily has to say she says to me the greatest sadness of all is the banality of most people's lives i'll spend time with my non-elite friends and it's clear that they're it's clear that their lives are devoid of heroism and lore they lock in clock in but They fight no great battles and they dash no great foes. They drop by thy club or thy bar.

But find no great loves there. They travel the world but is by no means an adventure. They return home, but they are not welcomed by a triumph. No, all they have are their succulents and the pile of dirty laundry they failed to do before they left. Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Does the golden retriever long for great battles? Brother Will is in the comments here.

There was quite a lot of comments, but it's ranking people that are in the TB verse. And Will says, what's your network? Which is a great follow-up question to a post like this. I love it, yeah. But no, great, great. It's the Chad hominem.

Yeah. Good argument. What's your bench press? Yeah. No, I mean, I think. There is some truth here, obviously. There's always some truth to any, anything that becomes this controversial.

Yes, yes. There's no truth. There's no controversy. But again, we are in the You Can Just Do Things Era. So if you are surrounded by succulence, maybe, you know, lock in, clock in, go develop some lore. Let's invite Emily on the show. I want to see how the heroism and lore in her life, how she's locking in and clocking in and fight great battles, how she's finding great love at the club or the bar, how she's adventuring around the world.

You can just sign up to be the first person to go on Starship. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Flight 9 is coming up. Strap me in. You can just choose to change everything. The firmament has an 8-0 lead against SpaceX right now, but we're feeling good about the ninth flight. And Emily, take it on.

Yeah, let's do it. Anyway, fun post. I love this one from Palmer Lucky. We've talked about Call of Duty and how important it is to the global economy before. He says, the Call of Duty franchise has done more to engender support for U.K. U.S. military. cohesion over the past two decades than just about anything else, especially with military age males. Change my mind.

100% accurate. 100% accurate. Yeah. Who's that soap? McTavish. Do you not know the characters in Call of Duty? It's coming back to me now. Oh, a little three finger moment.

I can't identify soap McTavish. No, I remember what he looks like. I just go blanked on the name because I'm not a real gamer. Oh, oh, mocked. It's great. Yeah, we need more Call of Duty games. We should get a Soapitavish, like, sound effect. If I'm wrong on that, I'm dead.

I think I'm right. It's John Soap. No, you actually are wrong. I'm wrong. I'm wrong. I'm wrong. I'm wrong. The Buzzcut.

Oh, no, I'm wrong. Yeah. Okay, I don't know. It's someone from Call of Duty. I don't even know. I played the first Call of Duty, the very first one. When it came out, played College of Duty. Captain Price.

Captain Price, that's right. Captain Price. Oh, Captain Price. It's great. Anyway, wait, Ben, can you pull up best Captain Price moments? Yeah, can you pull up a Call of Duty compilation? Let's just watch that for the rest of the show. I want to see some 360 ghosts. Okay, I've got some quotes from Captain Price.

Yeah, yeah. Let's learn some lore. History is written by the victor. History is filled with liars. If he lives and we die, his truth becomes written and ours is lost. They say truth is. the first casualty of war. We gotta just start tweeting these out.

These are bangers. Shepard will be a hero because all you need to change the world is one good lie and a river of blood. I love it. I love it. We get dirty and the world stays clean. Yeah.

We get dirty and the world stays clean. The story of podcasting. Throw this on. Right. What the hell kind of name is soap, hey? How to Muppet like you past selection. Big Bird, this is brother six.

We're just watching college. These are core childhood memories. Yeah. Oh, this is so good. Open fire! I need a sound effect that says open fire. For sure, for sure. I mean, if AI takes all the jobs,

I think I'm going to be doing just fine, just playing College Duty on endless mode. I'll be fine. Loyalists are expecting us half a click to the north. Oh, God, Christ. are great. Anyway, Call of Duty,

what I would love to just take. What kind of name is soap, eh? How to Muppet like you past selection? I love it. I love it. It's great. To just go back to the times of being in time.

We've got to get soap out of here. Yeah. It's great. Shepherd is using Site Hotel Bravo. You know where it is. I'll see you in hell. It's great. Anyway,

moving on to something extremely important. A lot of pro-America V-C. out there have been asking us for car recommendations. We got a good one for you. 2018 Ford GT. Asking price $8,990. Giving it away. Finished in shadow black with reentry black white interior complementary by our anarchy forged wheels and Bowden Auto House titanium exhaust system. Go check it out. I really don't like the wheels. Those are easy enough to swap out. But this is a whole Bowden Auto House. This is like their their entourage. aesthetic, which for some is exactly right.

Not enough VCs with the Minori body kits and the stance underlighting. But we know what they say, John. You build a house one brick at a time. Truth is the first casualty of all. It's great. I don't know how many more we should do. Let's go to Yaxine. Of course, he's been on the show before.

He just says this is the most important website in the world. With the X tag. With the X tag. I love it. Yeah. If you're ever just having a low period in your timeline, just post. This is the greatest app. A bunch of people will come out.

The stands will support. Very self-referential. But you got to put up numbers every once in a while. You know, you love it. Should we go to Jeff Lewis? Yeah, this is an interesting post. He says, I now talk with categories of quote unquote people in this order of frequency. My family, my team at Bedrock, our broader bedrock business relationships across

entrepreneurs, LPs, top talent across industries, government, and others, ultra-close friends, LLMs, friends, other. So I just want to know what others is. Others like the HVAC guy. Yeah. Hopefully not too frequent. What I thought was interesting about this is that I use LLMs a lot. I don't think of myself as talking with them.

Like I don't think I'm having a conversation with Google. I don't think I'm talking to chat GBT or GROC when I use it. I feel like it's much more in the tool realm for me, but I'm wondering if I'm missing out on something. I know voice mode's getting better, but I haven't really gone down the Sesame Rabbit Hole or the voice mode where I'm really just like chopping it up with them for a long time. I did have a pretty good experience driving in and I asked,

I asked the voice mode on GPT 4.5 just to kind of like tell me the top stories in the Wall Street Journal, kind of break them down and then I could kind of steer it. But it was still a little awkward. It didn't feel like actually talking to a person or a friend. It was very much just like comes up and then you know, ask the next question. Should we move on to Blake Robbins? I thought this is a great take and under-discussed. Yeah, this is a great.

So we've talked about levels before. He built a flight simulator game. He vibe-coded it with a bunch of AI coding tools. Went viral. He's now making something like $56,000 ARR or something. He's climbing. He's making money. He's selling blimp ads in them.

He's selling F-16s. He has in-game purchases. It's very cool. And he's documenting. at all. But Blake has a good point here. He says the success of levels flight simulator game is really a story about effective distribution leveraging his massive audience, not just AI game development. And I think that's 100% right. And he is using that audience, but then the audience is remarketing his game by just raging at it and raging over the quality or his monetization strategy. And so

it's really a great story of not, you know, having distribution. But then you know, properly leveraging that distribution by building something somewhat controversial. I'd love to close it there, but we got one more. We've got to go to Nat Friedman, former brother of the week. Nat Friedman is preparing to transport scrolls to the scanner. He's not stopping. He's not resting on his laurels. He's scanning more scrolls. The scrolls must be scanned. I love it. And I'm very excited. So good luck to you on that transportation. Hopefully it goes smoothly. Hopefully they aren't. aren't damaged in transit. I've really enjoyed following the scroll story.

And, you know, we got to talk to more of these scrolls, folks. They're always super interesting people. The Scrolls universe, the cinematic universe of everyone working on the scrolls, Casey, Hanmer, a bunch of other people. Very fascinating. Anyway, the scroll verse. The scroll verse. Stay tuned for more.

We'll see you on Monday. And have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.