TBPN - Arsonist In LA, The Government Files, I'm Rich and Need Help, Why B-Naires Love Diet Coke

Episode Date: January 10, 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.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - La Fires Update (03:45) - A Time for Truth and Reconciliation (Deep Dive) (30:45) - I'm Rich and Need Help (From TB) (01:04:45) - DM's (01:13:25) - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are still surviving the Los Angeles fires, thankfully. Both of our homes are still standing. But the story has evolved over the past 24 hours. And it's looking like there's a lot more arson going on than people previously thought. There's rumors that the whole Palisades fire started via arson. Didn't Andrew Huberman catch someone clearly doing arson? Yeah, caught some arsonists very clearly.

And then our vice president, Ben, had to step out earlier this morning because an arsonist literally burned down his next door neighbor's house or something like that. Well, here's what here. So people are really taking advantage of the chaos. Totally. In the same way that in the, you remember summer 2020. Oh yeah. When the riots were happening, people were just saying, oh, there's protest riots.

I'm just going to start looting. Yep. So what people are doing now is they're going into neighborhoods lighting fires, waiting for people to evacuate. and then starting to rob the houses. Yep. And they're on networks with scooters and motorcycles and rented cars. And so it's just full chaos. There's, I was seeing in a group chat that multiple neighborhoods in Malibu have caught people just coming in actively trying to start fires.

So now people are just, you know, trying to basically make citizens arrests. Yep. Full chaos. So some recommendations. for the listeners. Security systems, ring cameras, ADP, whatever you can do. There's not a lot of great stuff there.

Sauron is coming, thanks to Kevin Hartz, over at A-Star v.C. He's starting a home security firm. It's not fully live yet, but maybe go get on the wait list, if that's something that you're interested in, you're trying to defend a home.

Most, the top recommended weapon for defending a home, AR-15. Don't over-complicate it. We joke about a lot of crazy weapons here. You don't need the meteorite 1911s. And an AR will do the job. So maybe go pick one of those up. Also support Andrew Huberman and citizen journalists who are doing reporting on X and buy some Mattaina.

Yerba Mataina. I love this stuff. And it's Huberman's brand. If you're not familiar, he acquired it alongside another Andrew Wilkinson at Time. and so they've been growing that and we love so if you see something record it and throw it on the timeline we saw just a crazy car crash and police chase outside or bended outside of our studio and got some footage of that through that on the timeline and just kind of letting people know what's going on and obviously stay on top of the fire watcher yeah it's a really crazy energy in the city right now you got

ash floating through the air feels like it's snowing air quality is terrible it's uh it's miserable and chaotic. You were actually okay with there being a lot of sort of P-FOS microplastics floating around because your T's been so highly. You were trying to level it out and take the edge off. Yeah. But anyways, not good

for kids. I went down to South Bay or took the family down there yesterday because the air quality was slightly better. Yeah. Not good for kids. It's rough. So yeah, everyone stay safe out there.

and yeah, do whatever you can to help other people that are in trouble. Check in on everyone in L.A., please. So, yeah, completely unrelated to the fire. We're moving on. We're trying to move to the tech stories that we love and think are interesting. Today, there was an op-ed posted by Peter Thiel in the Financial Times. For those that don't know, who is Peter Thiel? Oh, I thought you're going to say, what is the Financial Times?

What is the Financial Times and who is Peter Thiel? No, I'd be interested. I'm sure we have at least one brother in the audience. Well, it says it right here. It says the writer is a technology entrepreneur and investor. And he's a writer. Yeah, he's a writer. He wrote a book, zero to one.

The power law of business books, the only book you really need to read again and again and again. Founder of PayPal, founder of Palantir, incubator of a ton of different stuff through founders fund runs founders fund, big venture capital firm invests personally and is tied to a ton of other venture capital firms. And any time a reporter, a tech journalist wants to make

something sound crazy and mysterious, they always go, oh, Peter Thiel back this company. Yeah, yeah. And most of the time he invested in a fund as an LP or his family office invested in funds. So it's like very clear that he didn't necessarily invest in the company. But they always bring it back and say,

it's Peter Teal backed. He's been a bogeyman of the left for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. I've gotten to the point where I will sometimes throw it in like teal backed or teal sponsored because it's like it's just such a meme at this point. Yeah. And a lot of times they'll try and correct that.

Like like the name of the fund is Founders Fund, not Peter Teal's Founders Fund. Yeah. He's one of three co-founders and there's multiple GPs and of course he's a huge force in the firm. but it is its own entity and everyone including him would like it to be represented as its own thing.

Yeah, but that doesn't fit the narrative. He also has TIL Capital. Yeah. And so this is an interesting article we wanted to cover it on the show. It's called A Time for Truth and Reconciliation and it's talking about what's going to happen in the new Trump 2.0 presidency.

And so the lead is, in 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump's election victory was, quote, not the apocalypse. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apocalypsis, meaning unveiling, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump's return to the White House augurs the apocalypse of the Anson regime's secrets. The new administration's revelations need not justify vengeance. Reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation, but for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth. And this feels very

tied to actually Eric Torrenberg's prediction, which he shared with Molly O'Shea and that other analysis that we looked at, Mikhail Basu Trevedi wrote those. And Torrenberg was saying he's predicting that there will be a Twitter files for the government. Yeah. That there is now that Elon's more involved and the Trump team is more aware of what they want to dig into, that there will be more documents that are declassified, more analysis of where the bloat is exactly. And it could be anodyne, just like, oh, like, you know, you see these reports all the time where it's like, oh, for some reason there's like some bus driver who's making 500K and you're like, how did that happen? That's kind of odd. Like, it seems like an aberration of like the government or, you know, or we talked

about it in defense where it's like a toilet will cost $86,000 or like a screw will cost 20K. And all of those should come to light. But he also goes on to talk about some of the bigger kind of conspiracies and secrets within the government that people are clamoring for. And how do we grapple with stuff? Well, and it's interesting here because the audience very clearly was not TechX, right? He could have just posted this. Yeah. It's a long form post.

He could have put it on a blog somewhere. an interview with a tech person. Like he could have gone on Rogan to talk about it, but he also could have gone on a tech-specific show. Yeah. So it seems, yeah, it's an interesting choice to say, I'm not going to go to rec. I'm actually going to work with Financial Times

and try to get this in front of a new audience that isn't necessarily rabidly consuming every word. Yeah. And so the Financial Times read by capital allocators, investors, business people, all over the world. Very international audience. Very international audience. Beautiful.

We should get a. subscription here. It's pink. Pink sheets. You know this? Yeah. Yeah, that's great. So he says, the apocalyptic is the most powerful means of resolving the old guards, or most peaceful means of resolving the old guards war on the internet. A war the internet won. And I, and I love that because I haven't, I haven't actually internalized that idea that there really was this massive war between go, we hear it with going direct versus traditional PR. We hear this versus, you know, censorship versus free speech. What is the town's

mean, how do companies operate on the internet? Bitcoin. There's so many things that come back to this internet. And we've heard, you know, even Lena Khan and breaking up Amazon, it's just been a massive war in a bunch of little microcosms. And the war on the internet, this is a Kugin's Law coinage, I think. The war on the internet is how we should be thinking about what happened from the dot com crash when the companies were seen as jokes and toys to now when they are ascendant. They are the most powerful platforms and the people that founded them and invested in them are the most powerful people in the world full stop. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the the phrasing is is pretty on point too because the internet is made up of platforms and individuals and profiles and it really was profiles like

individual profiles were attacked the platforms were attacked. The platforms were made to bend the rules of their platforms and and go against like you know we saw this Trump got booted off of Pinterest. Yeah. like wild and spot and uh shopify and shopify so it's like you can't sell anything you can't even organize pretty pictures yeah it's so fun yeah like they didn't want them doing anything it was like full it was so clear that every big tech CEO is in a group chat together and they were like look we like one of them was like we probably got to do this and a bunch of them were pressuring each other the pentressing is so funny it's almost just like i i want to be a big tech company too like oh you're you're you're banned you imagine though if trump was like okay i'm banned

on an accent, I'm banned everywhere. I'm not going to do true social and become, and create billions of dollars of value. I'm just going to post on Pinterest. It's like pretty pictures with him, like, smiling and then like handwritten. Yeah. So he goes on to say, my friend and colleague Eric Weinstein, Weinstein, calls the pre-internet custodians of the secrets, the distributed idea suppression complex or the disc. The media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the Dysk prison upon the death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide,

suggesting that disc had lost control of the narrative. That was fascinating. I remember... It doesn't feel... It feels like he died a few years ago. It doesn't feel like 2019. I was telling I was telling someone like, yeah, it's crazy that Epstein died at the tail end of the last Trump administration. So there wasn't really time for a reconciliation within that. And it immediately turned over. And it was very hard to say, oh, was that before COVID? After COVID, it was 2019. But do you remember when you first learned about Epstein? I remember just as an individual? Yeah. Like when did the story break in your mind? to be the articles where there were there were almost like puff pieces back in the day of who is this

mysterious financier but it was pre i feel like i started to at an idea of who he was prior to understanding that he was obviously yeah yeah oh interesting i i found out about him through just straight up like conspiracy theory charts of like of like those parameds and it would be like aliens era 51 and like Jeffrey Epstein is conspiracy. Because when the whole PizzaGate thing boiled up, there was a lot of like, this is completely fake. But if you dig into the 4chan threads on PizzaGate,

it's like 99% Epstein focused. And PizzaGate was like a, like an extension of that where like the conspiracy theorists were clearly onto something with Epstein, but then they kind of ran with it a ton. And then that deranged guy like actually shot up that pizza parlor that didn't have a basement or whatever. And then everyone was like, clearly the whole thing is fake.

And that was partly wrong. But I remember explaining it to people. Do you want the hat? Yeah. I mean, I needed the hat at the time. I remember going to a New Year's party in like 2015, 2016 or something. And telling people like, oh, have you heard about this Epstein thing? The Black Book?

All these people are flying on these planes. Like maybe Chris Tucker's involved. It's like the weirdest story ever. Bill Clinton's been out there a bunch. and and everyone was just like, okay, dude. You're also like 20 or 30 years older than me. Apparently. And everyone was just like, okay, dude, like that's a crazy conspiracy.

And now it's like, oh, yeah, I watched the Netflix documentary on Epstein. Like, of course it's real. That's a hard thing is after you've watched documentaries, which shows specific stories, they paint this thing, it's like, what is my memory of like real-time reactions to what was being shared versus what did I just see after the fact? Yeah. Such an odd time. But yeah, I mean, it really did become like just normie.

Like, it's not a conspiracy theory anymore. It's just history. There was an island and there was abuse and stuff. And it doesn't seem like it's a conspiracy theory either that there has been a widespread effort within the government to control the information around that case and prevent it from being widely known. Yeah. Well, that's actually where T. goes on to talk about. He says, it may be too early to answer the internet's questions about the late Mr. Epstein, but one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

65% of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, like an outlandishly postmodern detective story. We have waited 61 years for a denouement while the suspects Fidel Castro, 1960s Mafiosi, and the CIA's Alan Dulles gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure. We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about COVID-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci's senior advisor, David Morin's, we learned that the National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. Nothing, wrote Baratio in his medieval

plague epic the decamerin it is so in it is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it so do you remember this they were misspelling words intentionally the same way over and over so that when people would make a freedom of information act request that emails wouldn't surface because it was just they would always they were like very consistently had like c o v d i yeah just oh i just flipped the letter but i do it every single time so you search COV-ID, nothing shows up. Yeah, exactly. But COV-DI is like the keyword.

Interesting. So crazy. That is crazy. In that spirit, Morin's and former chief U.S. medical advisor Fauci will have the chance to share some indecent facts about their own recent plague. Did they suspect COVID spawned from U.S. taxpayer-funded research or an adjacent Chinese military program? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese

caves to extract novel coronavirus? is gain of function research a byword for a bioweapons program? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media? Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned acts without American backing in a tragic, in a tragic comic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? We were complicit in Australia's recent legislation requiring age verification.

for social media users, the beginning of the end for internet anonymity. Did we muster up even two minutes of criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, annoyance, inconvenience, and needless anxiety. We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania. Interesting. Yeah, I remember when COVID first broke, and it was so funny because now it's become

this like cause of the left like you got to Taylor Ryan's like you got to still wear a mask in 2025 etc but it came from Bology who's like firmly on the right and libertarian and at the time before like there was like a multi-week period where only tech was taking it seriously and some of the scientific community and so my co-founders or PhDs in bio at Lucy and and they didn't see it they're not super political guys they didn't and see it through like this political culture war lens. And so immediately I remember coming in and, you know, talking about it. And we kind of knew that, okay, this is gonna be crazy.

Like the, what's the R not? The viral coefficients very high, et cetera. But we just drew out a two by two graph and we were like, okay, is it Chernobyl or is it Fukushima or Pearl Harbor? Like is this, is this an attack or an accident? Is this intentional or an accident? And then on the on the y-axis you put,

is this bioengineered or is this of zoonotic origin? Because you could literally go and get a bat or a pangolin and then just be like, this pangolin is sneezing. Let's take it, let's release it, right? And that doesn't require any bio lab,

crazy science, like amazing, but it's still like very deliberate. Yeah. Then there's the other one where it's like, yeah. If you look at the wet markets in China, they are extremely foul.

Yeah. So immediately. You could easily imagine that something would happen, that it wasn't. that there is a, there is a, could make a case that it was totally natural. That was and is still somewhat like the default narrative that's being pushed is, came from an animal, totally accidental. Yeah.

But if you look at the story, at the very least, it's like, well, the Chinese government knew that something was spreading and they didn't raise their hand and say, hey guys, we got a thing going on over here. Yeah. They actually like, I think they killed the doctor or something. It was like bad. Or they definitely were silencing people who were talking about it on social media, which is bad for us. And it's like, even if, even if they did have Chernobyl, they did

the bad thing of being like, no, no, no, we don't have an accident going on over here. And that's annoying. And that's expensive. And they, and they did, we do know that the U.S. funded the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronavirus. Yeah. So we do know that that was happening. And so that takes it into like the, it's from the biolab type of thing. Yeah. This is engineered. Maybe there's gain of function going on where they're trying to juice it up. And, and, and then there's the question of, okay, so maybe there's an argument for, yeah, go do the research, create the super bug, and then create the antidote for the super bug. And then if the real super bug comes out randomly, you have the antidote ready to go.

Cool. I can be like, okay with that under the right circumstances if it's clean. But it's like, did they have a Chernobyl-esque accident where they were doing this research and then it got out, which was like, you can't talk about that at all. And then, and then the worst of all scenarios, is this was engineered and released deliberately for a bunch of different reasons. And you can talk to a bunch of people that think about that. But what's weird is that this matrix of like four options, it was just like immediately like it's got to be one of these four. We should talk about all four of them.

This isn't conspiratorial. Like what's actually going on with there's so little evidence. It's so unclear. You can't just immediately be like 100% zoonotic accident. Yeah. And yet that was what you forced to say. The fog of war like really has taken. quite a long time to dissipate.

In some cases, never, right? Even with the JFK stuff, there was all these documentaries that were produced that each had their own take on the story. And so the result was that a bunch of information was put out there, but everybody was still deeply confused. And you could make a case. And even with the fires this week,

I was hearing yesterday from a close family friend that somebody was saying that their friend and the police force was saying that there was arson for the Palisades' fight. fire. And then it's like, well, we know there's arson for the Kenneth fire, but it's still unclear. Other people are saying that fire started in somebody's backyard and just ripped. And I did this on the solo episode. I was like, how do fire start? There's a bunch of different ways. Lightning strikes. That's like the all natural version. There's power lines. So it could be on the

electrical company. It could be arson. It could be someone having a fireworks or a backyard barbecue that went wrong. There was a video of a kid. There's a bunch of different reasons. throwing a bunch of gas on the fire. Yeah. So like that can be human and criminal. It can be a human accident. Like you could just be having a barbecue one day and something goes wrong or and it's not even. Yeah, it's not even negligent.

It's just it's just a complete accident, freak accident, but it's caused by a human. But like you should be able to immediately discuss all of these. And that was just not on the table for the first couple years of COVID. There was actually an interesting turn of events when I noticed, do you know Johnny Harris? He's, yeah, he's, he's, he's constantly putting out of misinformation. Yeah, I mean, he's very, like, left wing. Like if you look in the comments of his videos, it's all, this is, here's five reasons why you're completely wrong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. I mean, for a long time, he was like, I felt like he was kind of the cultural center of YouTube in the sense that, like, the average YouTube viewer was very, they're very well produced, but also just in terms of politically. Like, he was basically center left. And for a long time. he couldn't talk about the lab leak theory.

And then a couple years in, it was like Rogan had talked about it a bunch. They put the community notes on it. And then eventually it got to a point where the New York Times was reporting on the lab leak theory. And then Johnny could put his... Just the fact that the disc was so adamant at making sure that nobody thought it was a lab leak

almost makes you think that... Yeah. She does protest too much, is the phrase. Yeah, we should keep this. Yeah, yeah, we need this here. for this. For sure. We pulled out the tinfoil hat, which we put on when we're talking about conspiracy theories. Let's move on. Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Mark Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan's podcast that the Biden

administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system? Were an IRS contractor illegal leaks of Trump's tax records anomalous or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy hinges on their politics. And can one speak of a right to privacy at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands

of warrantless searches of Americans' communications? South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission. But answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would benefit both Trump's chaotic style and our internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it's still believed

in the right-wing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded. So I think what he's saying there is like Trump wasn't going to declassify stuff because the right-wing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie, does that mean a deep state that is against the right-wing? so if they declassify things, they won't be able to get stuff done because the deep state will be working against them. I think so. I think that's what he's saying.

I'm not exactly sure about that one. I was a little confused when I read that. He goes on to say, our Ansan regime, talking about the Biden administration and all the Democrats in charge, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historic faith in the arc of the moral universe. But by 2020, they hope to write off Trump as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rearguard action of a struggling regime, and it's struel.

Mogged. Mogged by words. Every now and then we get mugged by the English language. That's a German word, I'm sure. Come on. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past. And that is really interesting when you think about 2020 as an aberration of the previous this regime in the sense that Biden was like super old and they didn't have a primary to try

to install a common. It was like it was very like, you know, just like like thrown together. It felt like it was kind of chaotic and thrown together at all times. And so yeah, I mean, I think everyone agrees that like the left will have to like completely retool. How does Bernie and AOC fit in? Like completely rethink the strategy if they want to move forward and be successful because the foundation has really, really cracked. Yeah, it's interesting to this week. I can't imagine that the images coming out of L.A. will be good for Newsom's political career because they feel like sort of visual summary of his, you know, time running California. And he was a front runner to go for 2028. Yeah, in Polly Market. He was with the Democrats, he was like

3%, 5% like hovering around there. Like maybe they'll throw him in. Yeah, yeah. Even you're saying this last election. Yeah, it was like, oh, maybe Kamala won't do it and Newsom will be the one. or Michelle Obama. The one thing, the only thing that I appreciate about Newsom is he, oh, he knows how to put himself together in a crisis. He always looks good. We still put on our suits. Yeah. And he has fantastic taste and food.

That's true. He loves a five-star restaurant. Yeah, there was an AI generated image of him at Nobu. Like looking at the disaster on his phone while the Nobu was like burning. This is great. Burning down. He was going to Michelin Star restaurants in the middle of the fire. The future demands fresh and strange ideas.

New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered our deepest questions, the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the United States, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt. So this is going back to the deepest question to Teal is what is the cause of technological stagnation. Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions. But as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country.

It is no longer even a great one. Sad. That hurts. You can admit that and still love our country. Yeah, for sure. Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history, the study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called is more treacherous and more important. The apocalyptic our fights over 1619, referencing the 1619 project.

but it can resolve our fights over COVID-19. It will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins, but with the truth, it will prevent us, it will not prevent us from forgiving. Very interesting. So I think a little bit of the takeaway here is that

the obsession over the JFK assassination might be a little bit of a distraction from moving forward. and there needs to be more of a focus on the recent history, as he says. There was a fascinating. Did you see... Yeah, the future demands fresh and strange ideas. To me, that's Greenland, right? Yeah, that's a very good example.

The Arctic is melting. We want control over those trade routes. And so related to this, Mark Zuckerberg just went on Joe Rogan. The episode just dropped this morning. And there's a quote here from Autism Capital. I didn't have a chance to print it out. But Zuck says, people in the Biden administration would call up our team and scream and curse at them.

The emails are published. It's all out there. They wanted us to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV. You know that one? Yeah, yeah. At some point, Biden gave some statement where they said that Facebook was killing people, and then all these different agencies and branches of government started coming after our company. It was brutal.

And so that's kind of the Zuck vibe shift that we talked about on Monday, where he appointed Dana White to the board and also announced community notes and moved the trust and safety team from California to Texas and then also got rid of giving the latest. Completely eliminated DEI. Yeah. No more DEI or organization or targets.

Yeah. So you can see that this is like echoing through. And it's fascinating because when when Zuck came out there was a lot of criticism like, oh, he's like late to the party. Like Brian Armstrong was being brave about this. in 2020. But if you talk to Brian, he's like, no, like, it's great that he's here in like four years. It's not that long. Like, what we don't want is like the holdouts who have, who like haven't

realized that the world has changed and aren't willing to shift. And so like, I think that this is the Palmer Lucky thing with everyone's working on defense now. Like, it's fine. If you had a DEI program that was a mess in 2015, like move on and figure out what's actually a good way forward. You just don't want to be fighting tooth and nail to maintain the previous regime that was obviously very destructive. But fascinating article, highly recommend. I mean, we reread it all. But it is free on the Financial Times. Fortunately, not paywalled for you bootstrap founders out there who are trying to keep burn low. Even though we recommend getting the paper delivered in print every day, you'll be able to read this one for free, which is great.

Should we move on? Beautiful. Let's talk about a super viral problem, super viral post that went out, I believe on Monday, maybe Sunday. Venei Hiremath says, I am rich and I have no idea what to do with my life. Here's a blog where I talk about leaving loom, giving up $60 million, larping as Elon, breaking up with my girlfriend, insecurities, a brief stint at Doge, and how I'm now in Hawaii self-studying physics.

And for those of you who might not know, Lume is a Chrome plugin that allows you to record your screen, record your face cam, and match those together. It's actually very useful if you need an employee or you need to send someone a little video of, hey, here's how I want this process done. A lot of sales guys use it. I've used it a bunch for async design feedback.

if I get some design work done and then I can't talk through it live. I'll just send a three minute video being like change this, change this, this could be better. I don't like this color. It's just a way more flowing than trying to write out an email. It's just way easier. Yeah, it's interesting. I actually think

most of the time when I get a voice note from somebody, it annoys me because I'm like, well, you saved yourself time and now you're going to waste my time because you could have just summarized this over text. But when you get a loom, Typically, there's actually some like meat in there. It could be convenient because it's saving you a phone call.

When somebody sends you a voice note, they're saving themselves time. Yeah, it's often saving you a Zoom call because it's the whole screen share aspect of it is really important. Yeah, Lume is saving you for a Zoom call. Typically, it's hard for me. If you're giving that type of design feedback, you need to not only put all of your thoughts into words perfectly and then also share screenshots of, okay, this is the button I'm talking about, draw on it. It really does save a lot of time. It's a great product. And so they raised a lot of money.

They grew the company, really big. I think the biggest venture round was like over a billion, like 1.5. And they sold for a billion. And it was still a great outcome for the founders, very clearly. The guy made a lot of money. And so let's look at his blog post. He says, life has been a haze last year. After selling my company, I find myself in the totally unrelatable position of never having

to work again. Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don't have the same base desires driving. me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don't know what to do with it. And honestly, I'm not the most optimistic about life. I know this is a completely zero-eth world position to be in. The point of this post isn't to brag or gain sympathy. To be honest, I don't know what the point of this post is. I tried to manufacture one. I have an idea that's about. I know the thing that you can chase. Vinay, I got your solution right here.

Stay tuned. Then I recognize the irony of creating purpose out of a blog post when I don't currently have much conviction or purpose in life. So I'll just go ahead and explain my current situation for my own selfish purposes to push myself to be completely and awkwardly vulnerable to a blob of nameless strangers on the internet. Last March, I had no idea what to do with my life. I found it very hard to give up a $60 million pay package. I had already made more money than I knew what to do with, but your mind does funny things when you start to consider numbers like this.

So I decided to go to the redwoods and figure it out within five minutes of my first hike. the trees smiled at me and whispered their simple wisdom. What's the point of money if it not for freedom? What is your most scarce resource? What is your most scarce resource if not time? I would leave to do something, anything to be alive again. I had no idea, but I was hell bent on making sure everyone knew I had it all figured out. So he spent two weeks after his tenure, two weeks after leaving an intense 10 year journey. He did what any healthy person does and met with over 70 investors and founders in robotics. Wait, wait, one, one note. So at Lassie and the company that bought Loom, they owned Jira, right? Yeah. So that's a little bit of context here. So he was like working

at the company that makes Jira, very miserable software to use, was so painful that he couldn't stay for a couple years to make 60 million. An MBA level contract. Yeah. That just shows, honestly, one thing he could have done is said, hey, millions people use Jira. I got to make it my life's work to make this product say, hey, I don't want to work on LUM anymore. I'm done screen sharing. I want to fix Jira the cause of so much suffering in the world. I've always said this,

that you should never sell your company, but if you do, you should be sure that you're on the track to be the CEO of the acquiring company. And it's a completely different mentality. If you're a big company. Like, could you see Dylan Field being the CEO of Adobe if that deal went through? Absolutely.

Would that be good for Adobe? Shareholders? Probably. Yeah. Would that be edifying for Dylan Field? Probably. Yeah. Would he be able to bring his team upward and change the whole?

Or Dylan looking at Adobe being like, I want to work with Scott Belski. Yeah. And I'm sure the two of them were like devastated. But the big, the big problem is, is like, of course, if you're like, you know, the company struggling, like get a, you know, aqua hire done or so. you're stuck and you just need an exit, like do that. But if it's a deal where, you know, you're getting, you know, one to 10% of the company, they're like, you know, on a market cap basis, set your sites higher and actually set yourself up to go in and dominate because

you want to be a leader. You want to be at the top. You've been at the top your entire career as a founder. Just because they stuff you in an office with an earn out and a boss. as like VP of innovation or whatever. Yeah. If you're a real killer, you can get back on the corporate track and talk to the board and get the CEO fired. Take over. Hostile. Yeah.

Get hostile. Interesting technique. What's the best way to get your boss fired? If you want to move up and you know that it's just a corporate ladder and you just want to move up, best way to get your boss out of the picture, find a bunch of recruiters to recruit them away to a better job. That's great. So find executive recruiters. Oh, yeah.

My boss doesn't work if you're joining a founder mode. I think at last year is a founder mode company. I don't think they're responding to, hey. So I heard I saw you work in SaaS. Yeah. But certainly if you're in the middle of the ladder, works every time. Every time. Yeah.

Great, great strategy. And recruiters are always looking for edges and insights. Yeah, it's nonviolent. Yeah, it's nonviolent. It's not aggressive. It's just a little. And then, oh, I'm getting a lot of job offers. Actually, I'm going to have, are you going to be okay?

I'm going to leave. You know, I don't want to abandon you on this team. You're going to have a lot more work. You're like, yes. Really? Yeah. Interesting news. That's like a Dwight from the office style.

Or maybe Jim would do that to Dwight. Yeah, it's good. So he breaks up with his girlfriend, realizes that he's very insecure. Maybe the purpose of the post was, it was more of like using it as a dating app, kind of like a call to help for e-girls. Getting close to my theory. Call to help for e-girls. Like, hey, any e-girls out there? Yes. I'm very lonely and lost. And I have $100 to $200 million. Yes. Like, reach out. I'm all being in Hawaii. So I think the, I think the, maybe not the purpose of the post, but like the missing thing here is essentially fame and recognition. You know, like,

Loom is a cool company. We know about it, but it's not something that people talk about like Tesla. It's not a consumer product. Even smaller, even like a kettle and fire has more mental mind share than Loom, even though it's probably a smaller company. Because they sponsor UFC. And so if you're just running into a random person in a bar and you're like, I'm the founder of kettle and fire, they're like, oh, I saw that at Arawan. Like, that's amazing. That's sick.

Cool. I get that all the time with Lucy. people will be like oh I use those vouches and we have like you know tons and tons of customers much harder with a Rick Rubin loves Lucy exactly exactly like that doesn't happen as much and so and and and that's a weird ego thing but it's real and there's this thing where a lot of people want money and then once they have money they want political power and once they have political power they want fame and they kind of dance between all of these and and so first off I think I think like it's fine to want a public presence, to want to be known, to want to be widely loved and respected. And so, you know, you're a good writer. I want to hear, I want to read more of these blog posts. So I would say, like, turn this into something. Give this a try. Yeah. Maybe this will work. And, and, and, and yeah, create some content because there's already so many content creators, but you have the, you have the,

the bona fides to put some cool stuff out there. And then also just in general, I, I have this philosophy that it's very difficult when people focus on just one metric of success. And they say, my happiness is tied just to my net worth. Because if you get to the top of the mountain, you have nowhere to go but down. And the real best thing, are you familiar with like the Shepard scale or Barber Pole? I've talked to this theory. So basically, if you watch a Barber poll... He's just making stuff up, by the way.

This is good Coonslaw. but um barber the like the barber pole theory of happiness is if you look at a barber pole it's it's like striped like a candy cane right yeah and if you watch it it it looks like it's going up endlessly yeah what's really happening is that it's getting the other side and then it's kind of restarting the cycle and a shepherd tone does the same thing i can i can play it uh it sounds like really really crazy when you hear it um because the it's basically a whole bunch of scales um uh that are playing at the same time. And so it sounds kind of like this.

You hear how it's like sounding, it sounds like it's going up. Yeah, yeah. You can listen to this for hours. And it just goes up and up and up and up. And it's because some of them. Kind of sounds like it's summoning a 60 Mesoamerican demon. It really does sound weird. But I like this as, it's like a fractal pattern.

Like you see the fractal pattern. Fractal patterns just continue. It's going to make me start juggling. Yeah, continue endlessly. And so I believe that you need kind of that philosophy in your life because things are, there's certain metrics. Like if you have, you know, your family life, your fitness, your fame, your wealth, all of those, they're going to reach the top of the mountain and eventually some of them are going to decline.

but if when you're when you're cresting in your business career, you're having grandchildren and you're getting more and more joy out of just the size of your family. Or when you're really young, it might be hard to make a lot of money. But if you're in peak physical condition, you're like, this is amazing. Eventually you're going to hit 50 and be like,

yeah, I can't bench press what I could when I was 25. But at that time, your business career is going to be even better and you're going to be making more and more money. So you'll be able to focus on like the new thing that's good. And so you need to be balancing all of those different sources of wealth, the types of wealth, so that you're raising one while the others are in decline if they happen to be. So you can always refocus. It's literally just moving the goalposts on yourself, on what makes you happy.

What are you about to say. You wrote some stuff down. I mean, yeah, we can kind of get into, I would say, not, I don't think he's asking for our advice, but, you know, we've never. You're getting it anyway. You're getting it. We've never been hesitant to give unsolicited advice. I mean, a few things. I mean, one, it's very normal for somebody who's hyper success and career oriented and mission-oriented like entrepreneurs are.

Yep. To feel very lost when that journey ends. And landing at Alassian and then becoming a cog in the Jira machine, it feels like very much like, okay, I'm no longer having this forward momentum. I went through that on a much smaller, much, much smaller scale after we joined Roe, where I just didn't feel like I was, I was like I'm 20, whatever, I was 26. Yeah. Okay, 27 at the time. I'm like, okay, I feel like I'm at the, my career is picking up, felt like it was really

ramping up. And then it felt like I slowed way down. Because I was like, okay, I have a boss for the first time in my life. I'm working at a company where I, I barely, I only know. know, like five out of like 250 people. Yeah. It just felt, it felt very strange. I felt, I felt lost.

And I personally ended up doing the same thing where I left earlier than we had originally structured. So, uh, I think it's totally normal to feel lost. And, uh, it's cool because he's now crowdsourced a ton of ideas and brought all this interest and intrigue into what he's doing. Yeah, you should go read the whole post. I think he went on to work at Doge. and figured out that he didn't really like that.

He went into robotics, but felt like he was larping as Elon, and then he wound up moving to Hawaii and is teaching himself physics, which is... Yeah, and so I think the high-level, like, thing that I think every entrepreneur, it's different where for him,

he's post-economic now. Yep. Doesn't need to start another company. He doesn't need to get a job somewhere, doesn't need to work in the government. So I think the strategy overall should just be to do cool stuff. So that could take a bunch of different forms, right?

That could be Elad Gill making monuments, right? He's still doing his thing on the investing side and incubation side. Could be doing a grant program like Justin, Brother Mares, where Justin gives away money to people to try to change their life. On the post-economic thing, I love that word. It's a very good phrase for not needing a job. But I feel like I kind of hate it in the sense that when I look at the people, that I look up to and respect, they are obviously post-economic in the sense that they're like

billionaires, but they are not post-economic in the sense that they're still players. Completely players in the game. And to the point where if they have a down year, it's emotional. If they have an up-year, it's amazing. They're really thinking about how to allocate their capital across every asset class. And like they're thinking about it just as much as, you know, they're still trying to stimulate the economy. Yeah. They're still active participants. They're still playing the game.

Yeah. And I think a lot of it happens when it's always hard when you jump multiple orders of magnitude in a very, very short of time, essentially overnight. I've noticed this with like if you ever hire someone and you're running like, let's say, a 100 person startup, you can usually hire someone who's been at a 10 person startup or maybe even a thousand person company and they can kind of jump in. But it's hard when you pull someone from a 10,000 person organization and you're to a 100 person organization because everything about that job is different.

Instead of like if you're at a 10,000 person organization and you're a leader, like you don't have a person for everything. You have a team for everything. Yeah. And at a 100 person organization, just think about like is the Wi-Fi down. You might have an IT person. If you go down to a five-person startup, it's like you're doing it yourself. You're going to the best guy to get a start. Yeah. And if you're at a 10,000 person company, it's like, well, we have an IT team. And it's saving of money. You jump up. There's three orders magnitude. It's like, as opposed to, you know, a little bit more of like what we've experienced in our career where it's like a more gradual accumulation of wealth. And so you're more acclimated

to it. It's not this sudden wealth syndrome that's going on. Yeah. The other thing that I've seen, especially in LA, the kids who got really big on social media. Yeah. Like as teenagers and then got jaded and didn't convert it into a business or anything like that. Those people, really struggle because they've had the pinnacle of attention and wealth and not necessarily wealth like income like cash flow like cash flow yeah it's just like so they got a hundred k check from go from youtube this month so if you're a teenager making a hundred k a month and then 10 years later you stop doing youtube because you didn't care about it and then you have to money doesn't even feel real in the same way so this happens in crypto people that get ultra wealthy from crypto

They didn't really have to work hard to do it. Totally. They were smart and they got, had some luck. Those people end up just feeling incredibly lost because they're chasing that. Yeah. They're subconsciously sort of still chasing that high, even if they're not playing a game that allows them to get that high. I mean, we've talked about this with the, in the opposite case with like the PayPal Mafia. Like, why is the PayPal Mafia so special?

Obviously, like they're all really talented business leaders and technologists. But specifically, it's like they were kind of forced. to sell their company after IPO, they got liquidity, but then they all had like these revenge narratives of like, I've been wronged. Like I could have been running something that I think PayPal's peak market cap is like $100 billion could easily be a trillion if they were still there. And it was like they got that kind of taken away from them with all this chaos.

And so they all went back in immediately because they had so much to prove. Because they were like, we were the dot com wonder kids and we didn't get our full bite at the apple. Yeah. And so that's very different than the. And they basically all went back to Z. zero and all ran it up to public companies. Yep.

Exactly. Proving that luck counts for something. That's the goal. You get a couple hundred mill. Yeah. So, I mean, there's so many things like, imagine if Mr. B's had started his content creation career with $100 million already in the bank. Oh, yeah.

And so imagine, so do something like that. I think that it's not, wouldn't be the worst idea to do a Peter Rahal style. Sure. Deal where let's say Vanay buys. Give some background on Peter. So, so, well. Yeah, so Peter Rahal started RXBarr, sells it, like raises very little money, sells it for like $600 million. Yeah. Proceeds to wait like basically, I think like five plus years after his earn out and all that stuff.

Does like a bunch of growth equity investing, some venture investing. And then basically starts the same company again, more focused on protein called David. And now he's running it up again. It'll clearly be somewhere probably $5002 billion outcome again. It's a way better product. And it's amazing product. It's so good. Peter's sending us some today, I think, so we're going to be eating it here with our Matina. I looked at the macros. It has like 40 grams of protein and like 200. We should see if we can survive on Matinas and... Easily.

Roar water. Easily. And Volta, goo. Volta and Cetal and Fier and David protein bars. You can't survive on that. You thrive on that. So I would say, Venei, your strategy was spend all your money. Yes. And it creates such a crazy lifestyle. you know, bloat and burn that you need to get back in the game just to survive. I'm happy to run through that, but let's finish up your... So the Peter Rahal thing is like, Peter Hall. Rebuild loom. Rebuild the same company. Yeah.

You know, build a loom that just, that automatically generate, AI generates the videos. You don't even have to record it. Yep. And it's something that you know, you can hire all the best people. You already know all the products. And you get back on the treadmill. It's totally greenfield. It's great.

Run it back again. Yep. So I'd like to see that. I mean, that's also Nikita Beer. That's also a bunch of people that. have done that stuff. It's not just, it's not just Peter. The thing with, so, so there's a mushroom on his blog, which is a, is a bit of a red flag for me because psychedelics are very dangerous. You know, they've been widely promoted by other podcasters and there, you know, people can

experience tremendous benefits from them. But doing them while you're very lost and don't know what's going on can give you a bunch of false signals around what you should actually do. And you're hallucinating. Yeah. So there's, it can tell you true. that feel real that aren't necessarily real. Yeah. And so even... It's like the opposite of grounding yourself. You're literally like having an out-of-body experience.

You're like away from the ground. You feel like you're flying. The way to ground yourself is like go back and spend time with your family and your extended family. There's a certain point, it's like you're, even if you're running this life of like, you know, you never have to work again. Well, like, they're going to have real life problems and vicissitudes and all different type of things that they need to work through and that can just make you a lot more

human if you're actually like engaged with your community and then your friends and and you know whoever's in your in your network really growing that stuff will actually help you get keep stay grounded um but did you have anything else before i go into my plan yeah just think uh studying physics in hawaii very cool study your own physical form right yeah really into bodybuilding, get your IFBB Pro card, for sure. Compete with, you know, someone like Keith Rubei. Yep. Get to the absolute pinnacle of that.

That's an entire mission that's not necessarily economically driven. But do you know how many workouts Keith did last year? Like two a day. So like 700. It was like, I think it was over a thousand. It was the most insane stat. I looked at it and I was like, this can't be real. I mean, I understand he works out every single day and he had a number of days worked out.

It was like 364. I guess he missed one day. Yeah. But it's like, how do you do three workouts a day, dude? Unreal. Yeah, mass monster arc is going to be fantastic. But yeah. Get jacked.

I mean, there's just like, yeah, there's a lot that the, the get inspired by Nat Friedman, take 500K and create a public good out of it. Yeah, yeah. So there's just so much stuff you can do that's not directly economic. Yeah. That can have tremendous impact can be very motivating. And when I look at this stuff, these are all things I'm, very excited to do that we're excited to do through the show.

Yep. And anyways, what do you got there? You know, one thing that we love doing is spending money. And the timing for Venei to come into this wealth also during as loud opulence becomes a dominant trend and quiet luxury is sort of fading into the background. It's great. The timing is pretty perfect to start spending some, some cash, especially, you know, on the equestrian side, which I'm sure you'll get into.

Yep. You know, it's not easy or inexpensive to have a stable of championship winning racehorses, but he has the resources to do that. Exactly. So, so yeah, I broke down kind of how I would spend the first 200 million to really get you back on the hedonic treadmill because it seems like he's kind of fallen off. And once you move into, you know, a Manhattan penthouse, you're going to be meeting people in the elevator saying,

if I was just one floor higher. Yep. I should get back on the grind. Maybe I should call up atlasian and say, or you see them an elevator and they've got some bags of them and they're like, where are you going? They're going to my house in Aspen. Exactly.

And you say, oh, what neighborhood you're in? You look it up on Zillow and it's $50 million entry price. Yeah, exactly. Like, well, that's quarter of my assets. I got to actually get back in the game. I got to get back in the game. So I broke it down into a couple different categories. You start with the real estate portfolio.

Obviously, you're going to need a lot of properties. I recommend a mention in Malibu, probably 25 mil, a Miami Ocean front estate. You might be able to get that for 10. Manhattan Penhouse is 30. Aspen ski chalet is 15. Hampton Summer Estate, 20. Lake Tahoe, Lakefront home, 8 mil.

Joshua Tree, contemporary retreat for five. And then you're going to need something in Hawaii. That's going to be 12. And that's just in America. You might want the bugout village, some property in Montana or Alaska. You might want to go to New Zealand. That's going to be expensive. But it's beautiful.

Careful gentrifying Alaska, though. They will. They will come for you. you. And so that's going to take $125 million out of your pocket. Obviously, you can use debt, but you don't have a lot of cash flow at this point. So you're trying to burn down that. Yeah, but the purpose is, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that's justification for the next thing. And not to mention at this number of homes, you need, you basically are running a company again, which is right. So you're going to get that. You're going to get daily one-on-one, stand-ups.

Yep. You're probably need a full-time real estate agent. Just slack for your, you know, yeah, you might want to put to put an agent on the payroll and say, give me a little less commission, but, you know, I'll give you some cash flow. Yeah. I mean, running an efficient family office is in, in of itself, a status symbol because so many of them are mismanaged and have tons of hangers on that are just collecting checks and doing nothing. You're also going to need some cars.

I mean, you'll need these cars in every single house, but... I would say three for every house. Yeah, but if you're just to build one three-car garage, you know, you're going Bugatti-Sir-Sir-Heron, Conix-Egg Jesco, Rolls-Royce Cullen, Black Badge, that's $7 million right there. And then you copy-paste that a couple times with different... Yeah, and you get some funky stuff. Get an old Ford Bronco drop-top, you know? That's not going to completely run up the bill on you, but it's going to occupy your time.

Oh, and the key here is by... Life is all about buying the right things, right? People say, oh, spend your money on experiences. Well, you know, a one-of-one Bronco that's been refurbished. Yep. and rebuilt is an experience every single time you get in it. It's an experience when you look at it in the garage, right? Yep.

And anyway, so keep going down on the list. Yep. And so for watches, you could get a Patech-Fleap Nautilus, 59-90, Rolex Daytona Paul Newman, Richard Mill. You're in for 1.3 Mill right there, just with the starter collection. And you might want 10, 20 different.

We didn't even get into Daly's, beaters, dress watches. There's so many different options there. In terms of firearms, I mean, you can't go wrong with the meteor right now. In 11th, we talked about those from Cabot Guns. A singer, 1911 could be 150K. Go down to Arley. Go down to Arley in Beverly Hills.

Get a shotgun. A browning 50 Cal. That's going to be 50K. You're going to need licenses. This is all going to take up not just money, but time. Yeah. And so while you're thinking about your next act, you're also. Key to a happy life is a busy life.

Exactly. You don't want to be too. You want to be busy. You can easily spend $5 million there. Then on horses, you're going to want to start breeding race horse. ideally from the American Pharaoh line. But then you're also going to want a high-performance quarter horse for cutting an Andalusian dressage stallion

and Arabian show champion. It could also be cool to go out to Omaha, Nebraska. Yep. And literally by every home surrounding Warren Buffett. That would be very cool. Sort of like a castle wall type setup where you build basically, you know, for Vennay, he would be able to look down on Warren Buffett and start picking up through osmosis.

He's got to manage his family office. Yep. Pick up some investing techniques. But you'd also be able to bog one of the world's, you know, most successful and wealthiest, you know, men, which Vinay might like. He hasn't done that before. If he sees you walking around the neighborhood, strolling around on top of your quarter horse, you know, he's going to have to stop and say hi. Absolutely. Or if he hears the pull up in your Camry.

Yeah, if you pull up in a, yeah, he's in the Camry. You're in the Jesco. Yeah. Every time he starts his camera and you hear it kind of start up, you start up the Jesco. The Jesco. Yeah, exactly. And then the quarter horse gets a little skittish. Yeah, yeah.

The Jesco's ripping. Then, you know, obviously build a wine collection. You're going to want an expansive seller featuring Top Bordeaux first growths, Lafitte, Moutin, Petrus, iconic California cult wines like Screaming Eagle, Scarecrow. This blends revered old world European traditions with cutting edge American vines. Intature, a bit of a culture. You're going to spend $5 million on that easy. And get a Somalié.

Get a Somalié full time. $150k a year. Have them travel with you. Yeah. Which we'll get into how you're traveling because for 200 mil, it's really hard to justify a G650. So you might have to go fractional private jet ownership. Talk to Preston. But there are some good options there.

You've heard us, you know, talk about net jets before. Sort of a touchy subject for our audience. But if you've spent this much on cars and guns. and houses, it might just be the right mix for you. Until you get that second, you know, this is the base hit. We're looking for the home run that gets the BBJ. And then, of course, art collection. You're going to want a curated set of works.

You could go Andy Warhol, Basquiat. You could go older and it's just going to get more expensive. But you could easily put up $50 million just decorating your homes. Each home. Yeah. So he's going to really have to stretch and try to budget. I'm assuming a lot of debt comes in here to really multiply it. A lot of leverage.

Maybe you're actually in control of maybe a billion dollars of assets. Kind of a five to one debt to equity ratio. Yeah, one thing that's priceless too is having an enemy, you know? Yep. If Vene has had enemies, they've basically been forced to listen to the soundtrack of his success for the last few years. Yep. But picking new, bigger enemies. Yep.

you know he could pick somebody like Rick Caruso he could try to come in and start competing and outbidding Rick Caruso I mean the other side of this is that he's working for atlasian you could go and say you know what DHS you got the Aston Martin Valkyrie I'm going to beat you on the track you run base camp it's directly competitive it is

I'm going to crush you on the track I'm going to get three Valkyries I'm going to engine swap a couple of them lower them modify them you know that shot of the DHH has of his like crazy view. Yeah, make it even better. That's right in the fire. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, no way. I hope he's okay. I hope he's okay. I like to joke around, but that is rough if that's true. But yeah, I think DHH, he puts a lot of time in on the track. He has some amazing records and I'm sure he's going to break all of them with his new Valkyry. You know, get your own Valkyry. Break his records. Show him who's boss and then go back to Atlassian and say,

we're coming for every single base camp customer. And I will be CEO of this company once I destroy base camp. Yeah, Basecamp has said they'd never sell. But if you take... If you take 100% of their customers, they will go out of business. And DHS will be forced to sell his Valkyri to you. Yeah. But you'll already have three.

Yeah. And... I think you can have too many Valkyries. No. You want a corner of the market, really. Because you take them, you race them so fast. You're crashing a bunch of them. But every time you crash one, lowers the amount.

It raises the market price. So there is an efficient point where crashing the Valkyry, drunk driving or off-roading it, taking it on the Dakar, taking it on the Gumball 3,000. This can actually be positive for your net worth. Yeah. And that's great. The other option would be to pick a low status nemesis. Just I'm sure this post went mega viral. I'm sure there's some haters, some quote tweeters.

Pick one of them at random. Go one by one. Revenge is a desk bit. Make best serve call. Yeah. Ripping apart their careers and their... Oh, you're starting a little lifestyle business? Wouldn't it be a shame if I raised $500 million and destroyed you?

Exactly. You got a blank check. Yeah, we didn't have it on here, but raising a mango seed round, it's usually a good way to cheer you up. I agree. So, and he could definitely get that done in a day, you know, in a few hours. Or we would back his manga. Start a hedge fund.

I mean, the growth fund, it depends on who you want to talk to, but, you know, the seed fund, you're talking to a lot of founders. Some of them are going to be, like, very low quality just by nature. Some of them are going to be amazing and you get in early and that's cool. But like, if you really just want to hang out with really interesting entrepreneurs who are already de-risk, like growth fund. Yeah. Raise a big growth fund and just rip checks into blue chip companies and you'll be on the phone

with all the best people and hang out with them. And it's fine if you make one investment a year so you can study physics and then rip checks. Totally. Totally. It's great. Anyways, Veney, proud of you. Proud of you for talking about your feelings. Good luck on 20-minute DC.

Let us know if you want to join the show. Call in. We'll come hang in Hawaii. Yeah. And we'll go shopping with you. We'll take you shopping. We'll take you shopping. Bring your checkbook.

Bring your wire instructions. Because the check is just going to be too many zeros to fit in the box. To fit in the check. Yeah. Bring one of those big checks, actually. Yeah. Bring a huge check. Bring your little your UB key or whatever.

So you can just rip stable coins. We're going to Mercedes. We're getting you an AMG1. We're going to Ask Martin. We're getting you a Valky. We're going to Bugatti. We're getting you a Turbion. We're going to Mercedes.

We're getting the SL 300. Goal win. We're going to Ferrari. We're getting to F80. We're going to McLeary. We're getting the W-1. We're going to Geneva and we're buying the Potech store. Yes.

Making them an offer they cannot refuse. Yes. I mean, we talked about who's the hedge fund guy that bought a watch company. I love that. He owns the watch. Oh, it's the guy who's always getting angry. Perfect. Your herbivolife.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why can we not remember his name? Pershing Square. Is this fun? Bill Ackman. Bill Ackman. It's hard. It's hard.

It's hard. This is not an AI-generated show, folks. Sometimes we've got to, sometimes we blank. Sometimes we get mugged by the English language, and other times we just blank on someone that we see every single day on the timeline. Okay, so we got some Q&As. Let's go to questions from the fans, from the brothers, from the brotherhood. Ben Kohler, our vice president,

posted some behind the scenes footage of you dancing and me playing Tetris. And Chris asks, what kind of shoes are on Jory's feet? And is this a real word? Is this the word for what you were wearing? I don't know. Category of shoe.

Chris has been deeply within this world of a high-end equestrianism. And he's very, he's very, he's grown up and loud up among. I mean, his profile photo, he's wearing a tucks. Yeah. Love him. So anyways, I'm wearing, uh, those are some Botega, Veneta slides. I picked him up a couple years ago, which are my favorite shoes. Yeah.

Kind of wear, dress him up, dress him down. You can wear them to the beach. You can wear them, uh, to a nice dinner. Uh, but we, uh, I actually love the shoes so much that, uh, we are working with, uh, my friend Devin to develop our own, uh, TV branded version of those exact slides. Fantastic. Chris, keep an eye out if you don't want to spend $1,500 on the Btegas. You can get these.

We're going to make them a lot more accessible, but still very fairly priced. So if you head to the Botega Vanana store, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Yeah, the Botega store actually made it in the Palisades. Oh, that's great. We bought them. Yeah, everything around that development burned down except for the Btega. Wow. Well, emergency supplies. Yeah.

We got another DM. It says, I'm joining a startup about over a billion dollars in market cap. Should I focus on a narrow set of skills or try and work across teams and functions? What do you think, Jordan? Wow. You're joining something that already has a billion dollar market cap valuation. This, you know, screams corporate. athlete to me.

Somebody that needs to get in there and make stuff happen. Work cross-functionally. Yep. You know, own some key product areas, strategies, whatever you need to do. But I think go in there as an athlete. Outwork everybody. Train your mind. Yep.

Get into the office earlier. Be flexible. Leave later. If it's a work from home, flexible work policy, never work from home. Yep. Just don't. Yep. Show up on Saturdays.

Yep. you know, Slack, you're the CEO on Sunday morning at 5 a.m. and say, want to get a work heading. Door to the office is locked. Could you come open it up for me? And if they say, you know, oh, you might be able to get somebody from maintenance over there. Just say, if you have a second, it'd be great. If you could just get down here. So like, establish that level of, you know, seriousness with your, not only your CEO, but, you know, everyone else on your team. that you, it's free to outwork everybody. It costs a little bit of time, but it's free to outwork your peers.

And if you're in an organization like that, you're joining, there's hundreds of people already. You need to really put yourself on the map. Yeah. When I first got introduced to the term corporate athlete, it was from a CFO I was working with who was describing some of the finance folks, like the strategic finance guys that would come in. as corporate athletes in the sense that they were good at spreadsheets, but that skill set of analysis, management strategy could be applied basically anywhere in the organization.

You can drop that person in the marketing team, run some analytics, see what's working, cut things, but also on the product side, really anywhere. Yeah, it's like a midfielder. Yeah, and we've seen this. I mean, we were just talking to Calvin over at Ramp. I think he was on the engineering team. Now he's running marketing.

That is a transition that I think people think is like so crazy, but it's actually a... Have good taste. Yep. Good decision making. Yep. Deeply analytical. Yep.

Very hard work. And ability to drive outcomes. An ability to study the experts. Like if you want to learn marketing, go listen to Andrew Huberman. Go look at Rob Mower's feet. Yeah. There you go. So yeah, I think the obvious, yeah, obvious answer here is sleep on an eight sleep,

your corporate athlete, sleep on eight sleep, get those. sleep scores up. Wear a whoop band. You know, track your stress throughout the day. If you're not getting stressed, you're not working hard enough. You're not taking on enough responsibility. Yep. So make sure you're stressed.

Chug your Ramonte constantly. And it's free to outwork your peers. So go get in there and do it. Yeah. I got another question. I didn't get a chance to print it out. But it's essentially here. I have it here.

I am a, I'm working at a VC firm and I'm considering joining the Trump administration. I'll be working for one of the billionaires. that's heading up one of the organizations. What can I do to stand out as I join the admin and really make a statement on my first day at work? What do you think, Jordy? When you're coming into a new organization, how can you earn the respect of your boss

and how can you set the tone for what might be a short stint since these political jobs, usually it's for your stint at most? So going into the admin in this case? Going to the admin. So what I would do, working for a big shot in a different. roll how do you how do you stand out so when you are watching a sporting event yep who do you notice in the

crowd guys with the chest painted with the american flag chest and face face painting is key okay chest requires you to go shirtless not every office environment is that conducive to being shirtless yep but the thing that you can obviously do in the situation is paint the american flag over your face and add stars to it so like don't just settle at 50 stars because that just shows you're not very ambitious. And you're not tapped into the discourse. So take the picture that you posted. Yeah.

Yeah, you're not tapped into the discourse if you're not putting 54 stars, right? Yeah. So moon, Greenland. Panama Canal. Canada. Panama. Let's spend, I actually spent a bunch of time in Panama surfing over the years. And great place.

We could add them. Okay. So, yeah, show that ambition, 54 stars plus at least, full face paint, hair dyed, yep. Mohawk. Yep. and you're going to actually want to shave the side of your face to get the flag to fully stretch around your face, right? And then leave the hair, you know, dress set up, make make yourself look like a stallion.

And then just do that every day. So it's going to cost you. You're going to have to find, you know, bring in a Hollywood makeup artist, bring them out to D.C. And, you know, pay them whatever it takes, right? And Doge, they've got these sort of rotating appointments to where you're only there for three months. So if the makeup artist costs $500 a day, only there for three months, very worth it. You're going to be a little bit in the red, but you can probably day trade your way back into the greens. That's good.

That's good call. So my advice was gift your boss a gun on day one, AR 15 that's wrapped with the American flag. Because there's a lot of, Ben. Do you want to make a statement? Yeah, because there's a lot of, you know, we're still in the post-pandemic, work from home era, even if everyone's in the office, you know, a lot of what the government's doing is communicating with organizations that aren't in D.C., corporations, and other arms of the government. And so you're going to need a nice Zoom background. You put an AR-15 on the background.

Just immediately lets everyone know your 2A. Yeah, and a good thing is, you know, even in the government, they do work from home quite a bit. Yep. So if you know you're going to be on Zoom calls, go get a Starlink, post up at the local range. Yep. And when you're not talking on the call, be drilling the target. 100 yards, 200 yards, 300 yards, mile out. And that will just show a level of, you know,

you're going to relate to your peers better that might enjoy guns. People don't enjoy guns. They're going to say, well, this guys could defend me in a hostile situation. So it's a good way to build, you know, relationships and establish dominance on Zoom specifically. And don't, don't mute either. Yeah, you want to hear the shots ring out. There's already so much AI that goes into the boy. processing on Zoom. I'm sure it'll handle the loud noises. But yeah, you want to make a statement.

You want to come in, let people know what you're all about. Get the cadence up. Well, speaking of America and international relations, TikTok says it plans to shut down the site unless the Supreme Court strikes down the law forcing it to sell. So TikTok will not sell. And A.G. Hamilton 29 says the fact that China slash the CCP via Bight Dance would rather choose to close the platform than give up control of it in exchange for a substantial payday kind of tells you everything you need to know about what they see is the real value of it. Yeah, Simon said in poker they call that a tell. Simon's been right a lot lately.

He has. I got to give him credit for that. Yeah, I used to be the owner of BandTalk.com. Yeah. Sold it for about what I put into it. I thought it wasn't getting banned. Now somebody's going to make an absolute killing. I talked about this.

You could make kind of a vampire app where you clone, you know, TikTok and sort of recreate the social graph for people and just say, hey, come over here. Start posting. But I hope it gets banned. It's absolutely insane that, you know, we wouldn't want China directly controlling, you know, one of the top three largest media companies. and that is in TikTok is objectively one of the biggest media companies, even though it's a social media platform. Yeah. So it's absolutely insane.

Yeah, the comp is, would you be okay with the USSR controlling NBC during the Cold War? Yeah. No. Obviously not. Unfortunately, I've spent time in China, and they do not allow our social media platforms over there. Yeah. So there's just a little bit of reciprocity there. Yeah, yeah, let's just keep it even.

It's also just extremely redundant at this point because every feature has been. copied by YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. And so there's a lot of people that are like, but what about the small businesses that are built on TikTok? The attention will just shift. The attention will shift. They'll be okay. If you were, if you were building your small business on the CCP's platform. Yeah. And not thinking about, you know, going elsewhere. Do you see those recent like deep dives on TikTok shop, how people are just like straight up selling drugs like via the TikTok shop? It's like, there's just no moderation. That's the thing. China has no interest. And, you know, there's probably like the number one fentanyl dealer is probably TikTok.

Yeah. It's wild. Anyway, let's move on to Anne Lee Skates. She says the Consumer Founders secret AI master plan. Give us some context on Ann? Anne's great. She was at Andreessen. Help lead our round and now has her own fund.

Cool. Very, very sharp on all things, consumer. She was a part of the group that did whatnot. She was raised a new round at $5 billion. So an absolute dog of a company. Yeah, no need for TikTok shop. They're probably going to be way up after the TikTok thing. Yeah, yeah.

That's interesting, actually. Yeah, I'm going to go scoop up some secondary right now. As we know, 2025 is the year of agents. Much has been said about relationships with AI agents as the new moat. But the big platforms of tomorrow will be what I call trusted recommenders And Signal, she's quote tweeting Signal, says, The next generation of companies will be full stack, vertically integrated from content creation to software delivery.

This is the ultimate play for customer loyalty, engagement, and retention. It aligns. Yeah, so Anne is saying, I just pulled it up because it's actually a thread. It doesn't seem like we got it. AI changes the strategic modes, revenue, and profit generation of internet companies. Intimate AI meets human relationships via trusted AI agents will emerge across many consumer verticals and apps. I just would say like this is the,

obviously the most exciting time to be a consumer investor in a really long time because many of the biggest outcomes in venture are consumer. Look at like Coinbase, chime, things like that. And so, you know, perplexity valued at almost $10 billion. They're very agentic in many ways like the browser company. A lot of their new stuff is more focused on that. Yeah. And so her, her theory here is that AI agents will become effectively like recommenders.

So like recommending actions, recommending products and purchasing decisions, you know, helping you develop habits. You could have styling apps. We saw this launch last week. There's going to be everything from agent agentic relationships for consumer fintech that's like recommending you the right mortgages, right? So you're not going and just Googling. You're like in an app being like, hey, I want to get a mortgage.

Yeah, everybody who's talking about building something that was, look at everything in your credit card statement and help you understand which credit cards you should be using for what. Should you switch to a different credit card, that type of stuff? All that makes sense. Yeah, so. Yeah, and Gary Tan in the comments tagged happenstance, which is, I believe it's, yeah, it's a YC company that's basically helping you find connections within your network and get intros. and stuff like that.

So I would say this is probably the most exciting time to be a consumer investor. It shouldn't even call yourself a consumer AI investor just because AI is going to impact everything. So shout out to Ann. Thank you for the thread. They make these shows possible. That's great. Let's do a promoted post. Promoted post from SIE, SAC,

SIE says, looking for someone who knows the ins and out of CAD and PLM, while also really enjoys teaching, training, and enabling other engineers. The job will help up-level and accelerate the 1,000-plus hardware engineers here at Anderall Tech. Roll in the thread. So, Sai is over at Anderol. And this looks like a really cool opportunity for somebody who likes teaching other people and upskilling their peers. So go send a note to Sai over at Anderrol and check it out.

That's great. Let's do a bucket poll. We got Antonio Garcia Martinez, who says, Trust Fund Kid in SF, LARPING as a VC is such a type. And Jonathan says LP equals loving parent. Loving parent. There are, I do think it's, I do, you know, we are pro nepotism, but we're generally pro helping people.

Yep. So if you have children, family, friends that you want to help, help them, and then also help a bunch of random strangers. And I think that's the great part about tech is there's, you know, you know, to use a random example, somebody like Vene, right? Yeah. If he has a family member who is, you know, starting a new startup. Set him up with a fund. Set him up with the, you know, invest in their company.

But he's also going to help somebody who he doesn't know, right? And that's a beauty of tech. So if you want to get into venture investing and you have some loving parents, make them your LPs. Also, I mean, a million times better than LARPing as a philanthropist, nonprofit person. It's also way cooler. I mean, we could do a whole episode of like how we want to, you know, how we want to approach finance with like our kids. Sure.

But I do think it's cooler to, you know, invest in your child's fund. Like if I invest, if my daughter wants to go into venture, say, cool. Here's a $10 million fund. And you're going to get management fees, but that's a lot cooler than just giving them a trust fund. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, I mean, like you got to build the track record at some point. The first investments are probably going to be rough. They're going to figure all the stuff out.

Better to figure out on your parents' dollar. Incinerate your family's capital. Hopefully not that bad. I mean, if you're in SF, a lot of ways to return the fund. If you get lucky or in the right group. All it takes is one. All it takes is one. Many solo GPs quit right before a hundred bagger.

Yep, exactly. Let's get a near-Sayan friend of the show. She says, I've never met a self-made billionaire who hasn't drank Diet Coke. Love this. Great post. And we got to do a whole deep dive on Diet Coke. We maybe do like Diet Coke episodes where it's every new thousand listeners. We should be drinking Diet Coke.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I realized why Diet Coke is so powerful and why it uniquely helps billionaires more than just the average person that just goes and gets the Diet Coke from, you know, McDonald's. Yeah. and here's why. So Diet Coke has about, I believe, 30 to 50 milligrams of caffeine.

And so it's a very low dose. It's not like a Celsius. It's not going to take you to the moon for two hours and then you're going to crash. But if you're a billionaire, you will have someone bringing you Diet Coke constantly throughout the day. And you will have a fridge with Diet Coke all the time. And when you get in your chauffered car, there will be a Diet Coke waiting for you. That's cold. There will be Coke on board.

Whereas if you're just living a normal life, you might have a few Cokes throughout the day. The billionaire's Diet Coke habit, the billionaire, Coke habit is, is constant stimulation right at that 30 milligram level. Yeah, and it's so good because think about it. So 300 milligrams of caffeine right at once for a lot of people doesn't feel that great. Yeah, you're jittery. But 300 spread throughout 10 hours. It feels fantastic. Exactly, exactly. So it's basically the extended release version of caffeine. Yeah. And so there's been a little bit of a horse race in the energy drink category to get more and more higher doses of caffeine. Yeah. But maybe the secret to true outperformance.

That's why I like the Yuramante, because it's 100. And so you can drink a couple of those. Could we get a couple of people? Yeah, let's get a couple more caffeine beverages on the set. We're thirsty. I'm genuinely thirsty. I need some more caffeine. I can feel myself dropping.

I wish I had five Diet Coke's in front of me. But I do think that there is something specifically powerful about... I was at the shotgun on a diet coat. That's probably terrible with the carbonation. It's so bad. Oh, out too. is, thank you,

Ben. And so, oh, so good. And so there is something very specific about the continuous nature of consuming

Diet Coke that you see Elon and other billionaires do. Yeah. And that's actually harder to do. It's not just a cost thing because you can go to Costco and get a whole flat of Diet Coke. It's like you have to rearrange

your entire lifestyle to have cold Diet Coke available to you all day long, but if you do that, you will have the perfect level of caffeinated blood in the brain the whole day. So I love that. Promoted post? On NIR. Oh,

okay. So NIR says, we are very excited to release our LLM wrapper. Hopefully this month, I think it will be the most novel and interesting interaction. Normal people have had with LLMs so far by a favor of 10. Remember when the iPhone was new and there were all those app guys and they just made an app and somehow pulled in millions of dollars with no effort? Well, guess what?

days are back and all it takes is a good rapper. That's so sick. Claude and I call it the art of the rap. That's so sick. Neer has a new app coming out. Go follow. If there's a wait list, get on it. We want to support Neer.

You know, they also had the Nvidia fund. There was just a 10-year duration fund that just buy Nvidia. Okay. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's up. Yeah, 300% crushing it. Amazing. But you can't sell for 10 years.

You just have to hold it. So very cool. But looking forward to this, here's a big clawed enthusiast. So I'm excited to see what the app is. Oh, this is a controversial one. We don't normally talk politics, but Riva's a friend, so we got to do it. Riva says, you do not. I don't think this is politics.

Okay. This is facts. Facts. Okay. Here are some facts. And it's centered around policy. Here are some facts for you. It impacts business owners, capital allocators.

Yeah. And a lot of tech is in California. Yeah. You do not hate California's government enough. California has the highest poverty rate at 13.2% of any state despite being the fourth largest economy in the world. This poverty, despite the state having an annual budget of $297 billion, the most significant state budget in the United States.

That poverty, despite the highest spending on public welfare programs in the United States, under just under a hundred billion annually. All of its failures, despite a progressive income tax system of up to 13.3% and a state sales tax rate of 7.25%, both the highest rates in the nation. Despite all those taxes, California ranks 48th for road conditions with 44% of roads rated in poor condition. Despite all those taxes, California rates, despite all those taxes, California education ranks below average in national assessments. for math and reading proficiency. Despite all those taxes, California's violent crime rate has risen by 16% since 2019, while most of the nation has seen rates declining. Despite all that money,

upgrades to state grid infrastructure have been slow to scale and have not hit stated annual targets. California's failures are endless, far beyond the fires. Do your own research and stop voting for this lunacy. Very sad. So growing up in the Bay Area and then living in L.A. as an adult, you don't even have to know those facts specifically to have experienced them. Like if you think of the wealth creation and the prosperity in many ways of the last two decades and the current state of things on the ground and just drive around L.A. I joke that the G-Wagon is so popular in L.A. because the roads are so bad that you need, you want a four-wheel drive with like good clearance

because you're driving around and it's just constant. And it's just pure government rot and incompetence, right? It's not a budgetary issue for any of these things. The LA spends a billion dollars. The city of L.A. spends a billion, it's not even the county. The city of L.A. spends a billion dollars a year on the homelessness issue. And the irony of the budget last year was that $500 million of it didn't even get spent. that they were trying to spend because they just failed to actually put it to work.

So we had the budget. The homelessness issue is still obviously terrible. And they just couldn't even put the money to work. Yeah. I always think about- If you're a VC, your LPs would be like, sorry, dude, you clearly can't get into any deals. Like, you're done. I always think about the, like, the government stuff.

I mean, people always say, you know, like, do we need more budget or less budget? And it always sounds like, oh, yeah, if we just had more money to solve this problem, it would be better. I think about it like the metaphor is imagine like one of those giant trash cans and you're trying to throw you know a crumpled up ball of paper into the trash can and and it's like yeah if if my tax dollar goes in the big bucket it's in the pool but I really need to get it into a solo cup inside the trash can in order to actually have an impact that's a good way to kind of put this in you know a way that the brothers will be able to understand and so crushed

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's like, you know, you throw your, you throw your dollar in the big trash can. There's a chance that it could go in the solo cup and actually solve the problem and actually repair a road. Yeah. But 90% of the time it's just going to get stolen. Yeah. And just get burnt or spent on something ridiculous. And you see that with the, with the California high speed rail and the fire stuff and just everything. It's interesting. They're not actually outcome driven, unfortunately. Yeah, I saw a whole thread as well that was basically arguing that our in a bit of, ability to put out these fires in densely populated areas is just a symptom of societal collapse. People have this idea of collapse as being these sort of apocalyptic scenarios, but just the nature

of having fires rip through highly residential areas and have the fire hydrants not work is a, there was another video of a helicopter just like dropping a bunch of fire retardant or water on just like on a person. It's like, you know, that's just like a fair mistake. Yeah. But it's, but yeah, this goes back to the, to the Peter article

that we wrote of like, let's stop rehashing, you know, the past and doing land acknowledgments for stuff that happened 200 years ago and let's focus on, you know, the next 100 years,

right? And how do we make the whole world better for everyone? Yeah. I do have a bit of like a insensitive hot take about the fires, but it's more of like a thought experiment. So I've always thought that

one underrated reason to support the Second Amendment is not, like if you talk to the Second Amendment, people would be like, you need the guns to hunt, I should be able to hunt, then they say home defense, and then the last thing they say is like, it's a backstop against a tyrannical government. So if the feds come,

you can defend your territory, if it's truly a tyrannical government. But I've always thought that maybe like there's a better argument around, like, if America is invaded, it would be a complete bloodbath because we'd have the best militias and the insurgency would be insane. Like just taking,

imagine, imagine the battle of Dallas. Like if Russia or China lands in Texas and is like, we're going to try and take over Texas. It's like they're going to have to deal with the military, of course. But then every single house that they go to is like filled to the gills with guns. Right. And so my thought experiment was like, should, like obviously everyone evacuated. And that was what the government recommended when the fire started.

And that's what was rational. And that's what we did. So I'm not saying that people shouldn't have evacuated, but just in terms of actual firefighting strategy, is there a world where everyone stays, or at least all the able-bodied men, stay, and just turn on all the hoses at their houses and just hose down every little ember that goes.

That's what my neighborhood does. We have our own, like... Everyone, it's like, firefight your own house as long as you possibly can. Then the firefighters show up, and they do what they can, and fight the brush interface. But everyone's responsible for like staying as long as possible

and get the women and children out with the priceless valuables and the pictures and stuff. But the able-bodied men stay and hose everything down and if they have a fire extinguisher, you just try and put it on an ember when it comes down. There's a tree. Just do your best. And if everyone's there just fire-and-fighting,

would that actually work or is that just a complete fool's errand? Am I an idiot? I don't know. No, I think it's high risk in that there would be a higher loss of human life. Totally. Because someone's going to, it would generally work.

I mean, so. But that's like a cultural thing. Like, like we don't think about a society. Like we think like evacuate, you know, which is good because like the houses can be rebuilt.

And the death hole was fortunately very low. It feels like a 9-11 event. But yeah, there was so low. Somebody was telling us in a group chat earlier that a friend of theirs stayed at their house in Sunset Mesa, which is like between the Palisades in Malibu and just fought and fought and fought and fought in every single house.

Burned. around them burn down but they save theirs wow she's almost like what's even the point like you want to live in the rubble of your neighborhood for three years it's like very toxic too oh totally yeah and um yeah my neighborhood has a volunteer fire brigade and they train you know like kind of frequently there's group of i would like to get that going in my neighborhood just like a little bit of a plan a what can we yeah i walk through with my neighbor being like he's like this is where the hoses are if I'm not here. Everyone in the neighborhood,

here's how you clear brush in your own backyard. Then here's how you fireproof your house a little bit more. My neighborhood uses goats to clear brush in the land above our neighborhood. I was saying that. Do we bring in like literally like 500 goats, which is super cool for the kids

because they get to see like 500 goats just milling about eating grass. I know there's going to be a ton of regulations about, oh, we can't get rid of the brush because it's natural. and it's hurting the brush species or whatever. And I'm like, I just want to turn goats loose everywhere. We need.

Yeah, we need an air drop millions of goats. Air drop millions of goats into the Santa Monica Mountains. Yeah. And I want to be, I would prefer that in the hearing stories of, oh, a goat shoot through that at my F-40 tire, you know. Yeah, I want the fattest mountain lions. Yeah, just feasting. Just obese mountain lions from eating all the goats.

But they just can't. They just get their fill and they just keep eating because there's just so many goats eating the brush and just turn them loose. And just stop, stop asking for permission. Just do it. Release the goats. Let's go on to this next one. This is more positive. We can move on from the depressing California wildfires.

And we go to Nicole Wiskoff, who says the at Tech BrosPod will be one of the top three podcasts in tech by the end of the year. Let's go. Thank you, Nicole. And I commented to Nicole because I said roughly 5% of our show is just covering Nicole's post. Yeah. So if she's correct, she's almost at 100K followers. If she's correct, it's becomes a huge part of her W Ventures platform. Totally.

Right? Where she can just count on a few times a week. I'm getting mentioned. My posts in front of, you know, the entire, you know, tech world. And print it. Printed is the key thing. Yeah, that's great. So anyways, love brother Nicole.

What are your top three? I was thinking about a new segment called Gun to Your Head, where I ask you a tough question. And we pull a gun. I added some squirt guns that looks like walks. Spurred guns would be good. And it's like right now, what's the last Founders episode you listened to? Tell me. I haven't listened to a few in a couple weeks.

Disseller's going to be mad at me. Re-listen to Dyson. Oh, that's good. But yeah, so we also were helping. I would love to be up there with Invest like the best, founders podcast, technology brothers. It's a dream lineup. It's a dream lineup. Yeah.

But, I mean, there's some stiff competition out there. Dwork Cash is on fire, obviously. That's about it. All in is in a crisis. But they'll figure it out. Anyways, private equity content. Loves you, Nicole. Bives the show and turns around.

Thank you for the support. We talked about that. Did you post this? Mark Andreessen saying, yes, I read it twice. His ID says his name is climate change. I just thought it was a good . Oh, because he's an arsonist? This is the arsonist that got arrested at the Kenneth fire, which sparked up yesterday around Calabasas. And basically two hours went from zero to thousands of acres. Yep. And everybody was like, how does this make sense? It was so far away from the Palisades fire and upwind, which didn't make any sense. Turns out arsonist. And, yeah, of course, Bernie Sanders is out there saying like, this is all. about climate change, which is, at this point, I find it, you know, we don't talk about politics on this podcast, but I find it deeply offensive that Bernie in Vermont wants to, to post and say

that this is all about climate change. Yeah. When it clearly is, there's a bunch of policy and political failures that, that, and just a lack of, you know, Newsom cares more about looking good in a crisis than preventing the crisis in the first place. She'd go to Greenland. Climate is going to be beachfront property. It's going to be the new Miami after climate change, Greeks have it. Miami. We're going to have this whole. Greenland, mountain in Alaska, water world happens. Yeah. We're chilling. Yeah, we won't, Greenland will really have been taken once the mega, mega VCs are setting up offices there. Yeah. We got to go to Greenland. It seems cool. Let's, uh, let's stay on Greenland. Go to

Bojan. He says, uh, Greenland is easy, time to play. on the hard mode and post a screenshot of the world and it's just Egypt. No, he's highlighting the Middle East. It's the entire Middle East. From Iran to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, Turkey, I think is in here. Yeah, that would be controversial. I'm surprised this has not gotten some more blowback because... Did we not already...

...sensitive... ...attempt that for 20 years? We did, in fact, attempt that for 20 years on... successfully. Didn't go super well. Although, wasn't Kushner talking about more of a realignment

between Israel and Saudi Arabia and some of the other countries? We don't talk about politics, but that was like a huge effort of the prior, the last admin. Anyways. So it's happening.

Well, let's go to crypto. Literally. Chezon says, I predicted the Thor chain collapse in 2023 when they launched their lending feature and it's happening now. The lesson people never seem to learn

is any system in crypto that can fail will fail. When you borrowed on Thorchain, they would sell your BTC collateral for their own token, Rune. If you repaid your loan, they would need to sell Rune for BTC to give you back your collateral. But this leads to a death spiral opportunity

as decrease in Rune price leads to more people wanting to get their BTC back from Thor chain, which leads to more Rune being sold, which leads to a decrease in Rune price, and so on. This is exactly what's happening. People thought Thorchane was a self-custodial, secure protocol,

it was the exact opposite. In fact, the founder today tried to shut down the app. There's only one secure option to borrow against your BTC, Lava, XYZ. It's simple, and there's no Ponziomics involved. All we've done is embed the logic for a standard over-secured loan into a smart contract so you can borrow without bridging or taking on external risks. Unfortunately, this will be a multi-billion dollar failure comparable to what we saw in 2022. This was predictable too.

It's basically what happened with Tara Luna, happening again. Kudos to Sunny A-97 for jamming with me about this in early 2024. Rough for anyone in Rune or Thor Chain. I've heard about this chain. I've never bought it or really dug in, but people weren't into it. Yeah, Rune, Thor Chain.

Is Rune involved with that? No, no, no. It's R-O-O-N. It's R-U-N-E. Very funny, though. He's moonlighting. There was some A-N-A-Count that was promoting this chain for a long time, and people really seem to like that.

guy and so I think it got a decent amount of pump and excitement and investment but it seems like it's collapsed. A decent pump like our back workout this morning. Yeah, that was a good one. Spamming, spamming delts. Let's go to a promoted post. Let's see what we got here. I got to jump in. We haven't talked about DuPont Registry enough this episode. This thing is, is, looks pretty fantastic. It's a one-of-one Custom 1994, Porsche 9-11. Oh, we're in dangerous territory. TJ's going to destroy us. The TJ's going to be pissed about this one, but it's just this thing looks.

Yeah, it's a rest of it. Oh, no. But the Speedster is just so, such a, such a beautiful concept. And I think Resto mods are great for non-car guys that want to larp his car guys. Okay. Like, look at my, look at my Resto Mod. Yep. I'm very much a purist. I'm not a Brabis guy.

I'm not a, you know, the closest I'll get. to an aftermarket is AMG, right? Yeah. Which used to be an aftermarket, you know, offshoot. I thought you were going to West Coast Customs. Yeah, but that's for the minivan. Yeah, and the engine swap on your F40. That's for the V12.

F40. The V12 F40. My F40 engine into my minivan. The V12 F40 is grail. But yeah, this thing, I love the speedster. I think it's an underrated car. And this thing's priced at only $589,000. Practically giving it away.

Practically giving it away, I mean, you could buy a house in like someplace like Dallas or you could buy this. Yep. You can't drive a house. You can't go on the TB 500 in a house. Yeah. You can do it in this Evo Max 9-11 spider. So, uh, enjoy. Thank you to DuPont Registry for, uh, you know, even sharing this in the first place.

bucket pull time. We got one. Samuel says they should rebuild L.A. to look. like Tokyo, remove what remains of the brush, chop down these fire-prone forests, and deck the place out in skyscrapers with an actual working public transit system. It's a joke post, but it's super true, super, super true.

A big part of what's driving these crazy fires is what's called living at the wilderness interface. So this is where I live. I literally live up against a mountain that if it gets fire, I'm blocked. But it's amazing because you can just go out, your backyard and go hiking and there's wild animals and you see deer and bears and possums and cougars and all sorts of cool stuff and it's like living in the forest. It's a contrast of like

it's very relaxing. It's very relaxing. It's amazing. I can go out of my backyard, walk up the hill and go straight on to a trail. But a little bit of the problem I think is that we wind up building out, not because people necessarily want to live near the wilderness interface, more just that, yeah, but that's a love of bears. Yeah, yeah, for sure. which we're working on domesticating. But it's more that the housing is expensive. There's nowhere else to build. And so you just build up until the mountains.

And then you're building like gridded out dense houses, all out of wood that just go up and one after another. And that's exactly what's happened. Whereas if you alleviate the housing pressure by building taller buildings in the core, downtown and surrounding area, well, then you don't need to be as dense once you get up into the mountains. and that leads to less fire risks. I just don't know.

I think that you could put up 40 new skyscrapers in L.A. And there would still be... I'm not talking 40. I'm talking... 4,000. 40,000. Like, I'm talking about, like, you walk around New York, every building is 50 stories tall.

That's like the average building. You just look up. And even in a place like San Francisco, they're still using every extra square inch of the entire place. So I just think that would still, we'd still have the same issue. We just have new skyscrapers.

I'm not opposed. Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe. But I don't know. I would still want to live where I live, even if there was, you know. True. But I would like, I really,

really do hope that this leads to a relaxing of building regulations and more aggressive permitting. Because, I mean, the permitting office is a beast. We talked about it, about my nightmare with getting some stuff permitted. But there's just,

it is crazy that we can all agree that some permitting rules make sense. That yeah, you don't necessarily if you're in some residential area, you don't necessarily want a skyscraper going up next to you. Yeah, Warren Buffett would be pissed if he built a literal castle wall around his entire. You might respect it. Who knows? Yeah. Depends on until he hears the engine roar, the V12,

you know? The Jesco. Then he's like, okay, that's W-16. I hear the Bugatti firing up. The Turbion. going or no the shirons got the W16 yeah the turbion has a V16 that's an insane engine and so you he hears the turbion he's going to be like respect the castle law I will I will I will deal with the castle wall but um it is crazy that that you know we can all agree that there should be rules around what you can build the problem is is that there's this crazy paper based you know analog workflow to actually getting things approved, where you have to send in a basically a PDF of your plan,

it has to get printed out, reviewed by a human, it takes a really long time. Like, there should be a plugin, literally in CAD, where as you're designing, it just tells you you're in violation of this code.

And then you can just design it, design it, and once the thing goes green, and everything is approved, and you're not violating any code, you have no code violations, you just hit print and just go do it. Yeah.

And it's just like, okay, it's automatically proof. But this is a symptom of, Of the bloat. This is why deregulation makes sense. Yeah. It's because you get so many laws that build up and build up and build up that it becomes

illegal to do anything. Exactly. And so if the laws hold over the next few years, I mean, the palisades is going to be empty for a decade. Like, it's just going to take forever to rebuild anything. But hopefully this is the opportunity to get a new mayor in, new team, doge it, kick a bunch of people out and completely change the rules. Yeah.

That would be great. Anyway, should we do this power bottom dad post? Ah ha ha, update from Oregon, 1,000-year empire, and he's posting a screenshot. A massive new lithium discovery on the border between Oregon and Nevada could supercharge the country's white gold rush. It is estimated that the newly discovered reserves under the ancient McDermott Caldera holds a whopping

40 million metric tons of lithium. The scale of the deposit is extraordinary, dwarfing other reserves worldwide. Just last year, lithium producers were thrilled to find a reserve of 4 million metric tons of lithium in the smackover formation, a geologic formation that spans the width of Arkansas.

Next to the McDermott Caldera, that now seems a paltry sum. China alone refined 60% of the world's lithium. Not for long. So yeah, he's saying one thousand-year empire with a lot of American flags. I guess we just found a ton of lithium. I didn't hear the story. I completely missed this.

There's this graphic of, you know, oh, we're using this natural resource. Yeah, yeah. We're running out of it. And then America just finds like 10 lifetimes worth of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It happens with oil. Yeah, yeah. And it's beautiful.

We're blessed as a country. It always was funny how people refuse to admit that there is a resource bottleneck around solar panels. Yeah. Like eventually you're going to dig up all the raw materials for solar panels too and you will run out. But I think it's just like way more than oil. So it makes sense. This is what. This is Peter.

Peter Zahan will often start listening to him and you're like, this guy's goaded. Yeah. It's very nice to listen to. He can talk about any subject. And then you start, he starts talking about stuff that you know about. And then you're like, wait, like this guy is just like spewing. That's a gelman amnesia. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But his, you know, his talks and writing on the U.S. and how blessed we are from a natural resource standpoint is timeless. I got to hear you. Like one more. I got to get on with my chiropractor who's ever from the East Coast visiting. Let's do Tannay.

He says, simple but neat example of a valuable AI feature that runs on device, Tinder's AI PhotoFinder, leveraging our vast data set spanning hundreds of millions of Tinder profiles and billions of user interactions we train a proprietary new AI model to sift through your camera roll in seconds and identify the photos most likely to succeed on the app. Importantly, we designed this system to run entirely on your device, so no images leave your phone unless you choose. This allows us to upload the highest standards of privacy and transparency.

That's cool. That's good. Hopefully it helps people meet each other, solve the fertility crisis a little bit, but Tinder's kind of lost the plot on the first. like actually getting people together for the long term, haven't they? It seems like it's just like a casual dating app. But I don't know. Not a great, not a great brand.

Not a great brand at this point. Yeah. But I'm sure some people, we don't have a lot of visibility into the apps right now. No idea. We have a group chat. Yeah. And no,

we had one single person in it. And then they just got in a relationship. Yeah, I mean, so it's like, there is an arc. There is an arc where like, even if you're the first person, to get married in your friend group.

Like usually it's like, oh, you got some single people. Like, let me swipe for you. Let me see who you're talking to. Like, I'll be the judge for you. People, like, a lot of girls do this at like, you know, they're girls nights. But, um, but, uh, you know, that is completely gone. Everyone's better. Why don't you mansplain girls nights?

Yeah. Delegated swiping is what you're talking about. Yeah, that's it. Delegated swiping. I do think somebody messaged me and they were like, I think there's an opportunity to do a delegated swiping app where you never, you can't swipe for yourself. It's only. your friends can.

Yeah. That's kind of cool. It'd be kind of a gamified version. A little gimmick, you might be able to get your first million users. Yeah. Who knows? I mean, the gimmicks were powerful in the dating app realm because there was the,

the Bumble had a gimmick, which was the only the woman could message first. Then Hinge had a gimmick, which was you had, it had to be like a second degree connection on Facebook. So you had like a mutual friend. Then the latter, remember, or was it the league? It was like you had to verify that you made over 100. K. And then there was Raya, which was like, you had to be a celebrity, basically. Which is such a funny number. Which is really funny. It is. Yeah, it is a funny number.

Because the, the girls that are really trying to find somebody that's, like, legitimately wealthy. Yeah. Like, would be so disfant to get on their wife and they meet the love of their life. And they're like, wait, you're on the league. But you make like eight grand a month. Yeah. Wait, why is this a dentist in Ohio on here? A dentist. Dentist. This HVAC consultant. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, like, there's so much inflation, like 100K is like, everyone. Anyway, promoted post. We got to, we're going to end the show after this. Okay. Sean Frank, dear friend, Sean's fire. Sean's house was at risk of a fire. Still reaching out to me, checking in on me. Great dude.

But he is doing a public service here, which he says. He's giving away the blueprint for 2025. Okay. which he says my tips for better life in 2025. Buy a effing Ridge wallet. I'm serious, man. You have seen our ads for a decade at this point. What?

You don't think you deserve a nice premium treat? You don't like carbon fiber or sick titanium wallets that can expand to fit one to 12 cards? I think you do. I love you and believe in you. Make this year your year by giving me $95 to $195. You can even use code Sean at ridge.com for slight discount. There we go.

And the thing that we love about Ridge more than anything, even more than Sean and more than the design of their products is just their profitability. This company prints cash, which is fitting for a wallet company. And their dedication to performance ads. When you're carrying a witch wallet, it says something. Connor is the top performance marketer of the last decade. Yeah. And these two guys are selling more wallets and pretty much anyone else on Earth.

So yeah. A lot of buying a specific consumer item is about aligning yourself with a brand and the team behind that brand. You don't want to support a company that's underperforming. Yeah. If you see someone in a Model 3 in L.A., you know that they bought that car because they support Elon. They believe everything he believes and they're politically aligned with Elon. And you can go up to them and say, you know, some of them have a bumper sticker that say, like, I don't like the big man. Yeah, but some of them are doing that sarcastically.

so you should still go up to them and say, I know why you bought this car, you're a big Elon fan. I get it. They love that. I'll see you in the tunnel. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. They love that. And, but it's the same thing with Ridge. You pull out a Ridge wallet. Everyone knows you take performance ads seriously. So go buy a Ridge wallet. Tell them the technology brother sent you. I'm going to finish the show by juggling.

DM, Sean, use his code, but DM him and say we sent you. And I will say I will not stop juggling until everyone listening to this. Subscribes. Subscribes and gives us five stars. Let's do it. And gets their entire group chats to give us five stars. That's great.

Thanks for watching. Thank you.