TBPN - Billionaires Xmas List, Disneyland Buyout, Gifting A Mclaren F1, Too Big to Fail

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordi, how are you surviving? There are fires all over your house. Give us the breakdown. Fortunately, not over my house, John. But yeah, thank you to everybody that reached out over the last 48 hours. There is a big fire raging in Malibu. Luckily, it's not a few miles from my house, but got enough distance that we were never directly under threat.

But yeah, loss didn't have power for the last couple of days. I was able to get Wi-Fi from my neighbor, so I was sitting on the edge of my house, with their permission, of course, but sitting on the edge of my house, making sure I could still get posts out on the accounts. But yeah, it wasn't an excuse to miss recording today, rolled out of bed, took the one road out of Malibu that was still open and made it to the studio. Fantastic. As we always do.

and got a shave courtesy of the Jonathan Club where we record. Fantastic. Now we're on the mics. Fantastic. Blessed. Yeah, I think while you were scrambling around Malibu trying to find Safe Haven and deal with all the chaos there, I was relaxing at Disneyland, which was great. You were.

I was. A little Tuesday Disneyland with the three-year-old. It was fantastic. Highly recommend it. It's fascinating. It really makes you. appreciate authoritarianism. Totally.

There are metal detectors now to even get into downtown Disney, which is just like a mall where so you can't even go shopping without getting through the metal detector. So you know it's just perfectly safe there. Everything is perfectly clean.

There's just people everywhere. Total surveillance state. You sacrifice all your rights when you go in. But I've realized that, you know, in light of recent events, they need to put metal detectors outside of Manhattan. It needs to be a prison colony. No, that's why.

That's why being in Dubai, the UAE broadly is so nice and relaxing because you walk around. And given you have this feeling when you enter the monarchy, I shouldn't even call it a country. It's a fiefdom almost. You have this feeling that you're entering a highly secure place that's run in a highly competent way, where there's one guy who understands that it's my responsibility as king to keep, keep, you know, the people safe. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, a billionaire reached out to me and was like, you guys shouldn't talk so much about luxury goods. You live in America. You can only do that in Dubai or Singapore. Yeah, or Miami. It's like, you need to be in a place with strong property rights, John. Stop what you're doing. And I was like, I'm not afraid.

I will put on a bulletproof vest every day. Yeah, and nice watch. Driving nice cars, wearing one. watches or whatever, it's motivating to try to get our country safer and more secure and use the leverage that we have. Yeah. But it won't be on this podcast because we don't talk about politics. But Disneyland is an interesting place to reflect on like the American populace. It's, I read something that it's like the most perfect representation of maybe the world demographics or at least American demographics. Like one of every type of person is represented.

obviously there's a dearth of Patex, a plethora of Tweetybird tattoos, and the whole experience leaves you thinking you need to go turbo-long, Novo Nordisk. But these are our people. And what I came away from it with, with this idea that it's like, this is our team for America. Yeah. And we can't just reset and start fresh. These are our compatriots.

These are our colleagues. And we need to work hard to make. make America a fantastic place for everyone. And so it's inspiring. But one thing that kept hitting my mind as I was walking around Disneyland was that it is, you know, people think of it as expensive, a couple hundred bucks to get in. The price always goes up. Everything's expensive. But they are fantastic at price discrimination. So a couple hundred bucks to get a ticket in. But for maybe if you, if you spend a few thousand dollars on your family, you can buy basically every single fast pass and all the lines go from like 60 minutes to like 10 minutes. It's great. So clearly they

figured out that there's a whole group of people that are willing to pay or then there's the 20k. I was about to bring that up. Yep. Yeah. So if you pay something like 20K for your family, there is a Disneyland employee who will walk you around and walk you directly to the front of every line. Do they wear a tux though? No, they're they're a cast member. So they're in kind of a very like it's like almost old-timey Hollywood like pinstripes and bow tie type thing. Great, great, that works. They'll educate you on what the best flow is,

answer any questions, give you extra history about the park. It turns it into a really crazy experience. But every actor or actress that works on a Disney show gets a, gets one of those free. And it used to be unlimited.

It used to be whenever, whenever you wanted to go to Disneyland, if you were on a Disney show, or a star in a movie, they would just, yeah, come get the $20,000 experience. But apparently Kim Kardashian was so obsessed with Disneyland. She was going every single month. And they changed the rule. But now she just pays because she loves it.

And I was thinking about that. I was like, that's incredibly humanizing. You know, people are very like, oh, Kim's like this, you know, Machiavellian, like crazy, like, you know, person who's like so driven. But like, I love that for her. I love that. Yeah. Just loves Disneyland. And giving that experience to her children.

Yeah, exactly. And so my... That would be actually savage, though. She was like, no, we're not bringing the kids. It's my Disneyland. This is my doom. Yeah, yeah, yeah, amazing. But I love that Disneyland, you know, you can go and have an experience for maybe

200 bucks. You can go on an experience for 2,000 or 20,000. And that spread is the same product. And there's the $5 million product. Yeah, you can do a buyout. Yeah. We'll get to. out of the whole thing.

And so, and I think, I think actually Citadel did a buy out there. I'm pretty sure they bought out all of Disney World or something like that, some hedge fund, maybe Goldman or something. But, yeah, so just a fantastic example of price discrimination when they have a product that people wouldn't normally think is like consumption-based. Like, obviously, AWS has price discrimination because the more service you use. There's a lot of, there's a lot of mid-sized companies out there that probably spend, let's say they spend a lot of money on their holiday party, right?

maybe they spend $500,000, right? They have to fly a bunch of people in, and, you know, there's some events and maybe performers and big catering fees, locations, all that stuff. Those companies should start just doing a Disneyland buyout every 10 years for retention purposes. To be like, well, it's been eight years.

Like, you've got to get to the buyout. Exactly. I like this. That's better. It costs the same amount of money. That's great. But if you took that 500K that you're spending every year invested into the markets,

you'd also get, you know, potentially, it'd be even less than doing the events every single year. That's one of the best things about Hereticon. Like Founders Fund, that's not an annual thing. It happens like, it's happened twice now. And it was like, everyone was like last year's Heritcon, but it was actually like three years earlier. And it happens very randomly.

It's not an annual schedule. So it's like when you get the invite, you have to say yes because it's not just going to happen next year. Whereas the holiday party, you get invited, I'll catch the next one. But my challenge to the listener is, what could you be doing today to, to drive more price discrimination.

Like we're going to launch a merch store at some point. You can bet your life that there's going to be something in there for 50 bucks. There's going to be something for 500 bucks. And there's definitely going to be something for 5,000 bucks in there. Absolutely. Because you need to be capturing the value of the entire breadth of your audience. And it's obvious if you're in a consumption B2B software product. But if you're not, you know, what can you be doing?

We'll have venture, you know, we'll have venture debt products for, for entrepreneurs. We'll have even, you know, venture fund like line of credits, right? If you have, if you're doing a capital call, but you haven't the capital, you know, you need a little bit extra time to fund an investment. You know, we'll have products for you, right? So full spectrum of products for this audience. I mean, a venture fund is the, is like the best way to price discriminate in an audience of founders

because the higher value, the founder, the more money you make when you're invest. Yep. And I think that's why so many content creators have built funds on the back of it. Yeah. And run ads. It's very, very hard to capture the full value of your audience. You look at what Ben Thompson has done in Strateree, you know that there are major like, you know, multi-millionaires at Meta who subscribe to Stratoree. Yeah. For $200. Yeah. Yeah. And they easily can be pay. They make decisions that lead to 100 million, hundreds of millions of dollars and spend various infrastructure products. Yeah. Now, he's very, happy with how much the big book of business he's built up and he likes not having that

conflict of interest with the ads. So it's kind of made sense for him. But if you really wanted to maximize the value of strategic rate, it would just be ads and a venture fund. For sure. Anyway, moving on. So go and figure out how you can squeeze more money out of your best customers because they have it. Do it in a way that's aligned. Nobody, nobody's spending the 20 grand at Disney is unhappy that they're spending that money. They're getting a great experience out of it. Yeah. So let's move on to it's the holiday season. everyone's thinking about what gifts to get for their loved ones, their friends, their colleagues.

And we're going to do a bit of a gift guide. We've talked about the information's gift guide before. It was an absolute disaster. I don't think they had a single item on that list that was over $1,000. Disaster. You're going to need a little bit of bigger budget to follow along today, but there should be a lot of interesting items and interesting selections. Something for everyone in here.

There really is. There really is. So we're going to run through a few different archetypes that might, match folks in your life and give you some guides for what type of gifts you should be putting under the Christmas tree this year. Let's start with the absolute size lord, the billionaire, the Deca billionaire. You're shopping for the man who truly has everything. What do you get them? Hard to shop for. Hard to shop for. I say we start with cars and I think you got to go McLaren F1. How can you not? It's going to be a $20 million car, but it has incredible.

incredible history, both in the automotive world and in the tech world. Yeah, and it's something that someone can appreciate, even whether they're into cars or not, right? Yeah. You don't need too much time to explain the significance of the McLarence F1 until somebody is getting really, really interested in the vehicle. And as soon as you sit in that middle seat, it's not left hand drive, it's not right hand draft, it's center draft.

And the best part, you can take two friends for a ride because it seats three in the front seat. Yeah, and it's funny because I, I, Wishmore. Did you ever, we had an old, like, you know, like country farm truck growing up that had three in the front. And some of my best memories are with my dad driving, you know, me or my little brother in the middle seat. And then the right seat. And we need to bring back car. I think it's really dangerous. I think it's why they probably killed it. But they're actually are bringing it back. Hyundai is releasing a new palisade that has nine seats. Hyundai is cooking right now. Okay, absolutely. They basically ripped off the, the Rangerover with the new Palisade. Like, they're just like, it's our,

this is our silhouette now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the interior, we're going to take all your colors and textures. Yeah, it's because in Korea, if you have a nine passenger vehicle or more, you can use a bus lane.

No way. And so they were like, let's just put nine. But do you have to have nine? I don't know if you need to have nine in there, or you just need to have nine seats. I think you just need to have nine seats. And so they're just like,

it's technically a bus, so you can just take it. And then they were like, yeah, let's just sell this in America. So it has the bench seat in the middle. And you can just pull it up. So yeah, if you're if you're shopping for the size lord, get them a McLaren F1. And then of course we have to get them a watch. And we highly, highly recommend picking up a graph diamonds hallucination.

For $55 million, it's the ultimate and jeweled watches over 110 carrots of rare colored diamonds. It's true with the top. And for context, I think a lot of people that listen to the show follow us on X as well. and this was the watch that we recommended Mark Hendrisen actually get eight of if he's going to follow the 2% rule. They only made one, but you'll have to commission. But you can, this is the kind of piece that you can commission. Like, it's not a, it's not really the kind of thing you walk in off the street and say,

hey, can I get a graph diamond's hallucination? You know the funniest thing about the hallucination? It's a quartz watch. Really? Yeah, it's not mechanical. Wow. Yeah. You're like, I got to change the battery at my $55 million watch.

It's great. It's a good reminder that you have a $55 million watch. So every once in a while you want to be like, oh, yeah. Got to change the battery. Okay, let's move on to guns, which is obviously something you'll be gifting to loved ones this year. And for the absolute size lord, the gigacad, the deck of billionaire, we're going with the Cabot Guns, meteorite 1911 pistols. There may be $4.5 million for the pair, but I have some copy for here, and it's fantastic. The timeless design of the 1911, the ageless significance of interstellar materials, the innovative techniques.

of an all-American gun company, a trinity of circumstance fused together into the perfect embodiment of a transcendent vision. After billions of years of travel, a meteorite hurtled to Earth in Namibia during Earth's prehistoric times. Unknown to Western civilization until the early 1800s, pieces were used by the ancient Nama people in the construction of tools and weapons. In 2015, its destiny not yet fulfilled, the hands of cabot guns, master craftsmen, wrapped around a 77-pound piece of unshapen metal and so began a transformation. We too, like the men of your, saw in it the potential to shape earthly perfection from materials from the cosmos. What a fantastic, what a fantastic marketing language. This reminds me a while back I was looking into, I wanted to get,

I wanted to get a 1911 with a trigger made out of shark tooth. Oh, that's great. Like basically, which is totally possible. Yeah, totally. It's certainly not easy, but in the world of high-end custom firearms manufacturing, which I happen to have a little bit of experience in anything is possible. So I think that's really going to stand out

if you get from the meteorite pistols. Yeah, the meteorite can't go wrong with meteorite pretty much anything. Okay, then we've got to move on to vacations for the size lord. What are we getting them for a vacation? We recommend a box at every Formula One race. This is going to run you $3 to $5 million. but they're going to be able to enjoy it for not just one month, but basically the entire year.

They will not be able to almost go a single month without thinking about you, which is the goal, right? If you're buying something for a beaner, you want to be top of mind, whether it's just a friend, or you have some type of business relationship with them, or if you're another beaner and you're actually competing kind of PVP to try to accumulate the most assets, getting your rival beaner box seats for every F1 event. That's a good way to distract them. Exactly. Not to mention, you know, I think a gift like this is great. You know, most of our B and our friends are not going to be going to every single race.

Like F1 can get boring, right? It's definitely, especially if for Stappen, you know, continues his tear. And, but it's the kind of thing you can, as a BNair can re-gift it, they can say to their, you know, second or third cousin, hey, do you want this? I can't make it. Yeah. Like, I mean, the box holds 50 people sometimes. Yeah. You know, they can bring all their friends.

and they're reminding, they're reminded of you. It's kind of like getting someone like an old magazine subscription. Every time it shows up, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm still enjoying that present. The graph diamond's hallucination might still be just sitting in a jewelry case somewhere. The McLaren F1 might be wrapped in a garage somewhere, but those F1 tickets are going to keep coming up, coming up, and they're going to be on the circuit. And they're going to thank you. So pick it up. And then, of course, you have to get someone a horse.

And so for the size lord, we recommend Thoroughbred, Rating. horse. Ideally, uh, derived from the Fusachi Pegasus line, the 2000 Kentucky Derby winner. It's one of the most expensive stallion deals ever. Uh, the bloodline was syndicated for 60 to 70 million dollars in 2000. So, uh, just really top tier racing bloodline. And I think that's something that they could really enjoy. Um, and they'd love to have a horse under the Christmas tree. Should we move on? Yeah, it's a trophy. It's a trophy horse. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Everybody should have one, at least one. And it's a conversation starter. Yeah.

If you're having somebody by your property. Let's do American Dynamist next. And then we'll move on to one of yours. So for the American Dynamist, the capital allocator who's focused on making America great again, we are focused on American products, things that speak to revitalization, reindustrialization, America, manufacturing, hard tech. Yep. And so for the American Dynamist, we recommend a M1,000. 34 minigone by Dylan Arrow. It's going to run you 200 to 300K.

They're pretty rare on the civilian market, but it's an electrically driven 7.62 millimeter rotary machine gun. It's iconic and extremely rare due to NFA regulations. But you've seen it in movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger carries. You played it in caught. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The minigun is iconic,

and it'll look great mounted on the back wall while they're taking Zoom calls. Every defense founder will say, hey, this investor has a miniser. gun, they take American Dynamism seriously. And I want their check. I want them in my round. Yeah. And it looks, I mean, it would look fantastic on a cyber truck. If your buddy buys a cyber truck is sort of a novelty thing to add to that novelty,

having a mini gun strapped to it. And maybe you, maybe you know, work with someone like Allen control systems to make it fully autonomous. That'd be fantastic. Yeah. So let's move on to cars for the American dynamist. The cyber truck's a great one. I'm also extremely bullish on the Tesla Roadster second general.

You get them the allocation now. I think it's going to happen. It's been way delayed, but Elon is on top of the world. The stock's ripping. He knows where the regulation is going. I think he's going to get it done. And I think those will be delivered pretty soon. So that's good one. Come on though. Come on though, John. Yeah. What else do you? How can we not go with the Ford GT on this one? If I'm going to take an AD capital allocator very seriously, them pulling up in, you know, I want something, I want them pulling up in something culturally significant. And 4GT is not a perfect car by any means. You know, there's a bunch of ways you could sort of poke holes in it. But it has history at Le Mans. Yeah, you can go watch for it versus Wright. There's a whole movie about this history. The silhouette is unbeatable. It is.

It is fantastic. It feels American, but it almost feels like a cousin of Lamborghini. And if you are, let's say you've got a portfolio founder that's running hot, they're doing well. you think they're going to get you a nice markup. Taking them to the airport in your Ford GT or picking them up is a great way to make a statement and say, hey, when you're raising your next round, make sure I get my pro rata, super pro rata,

and ideally get a chance to lead that next round. And that's a GT is a good way to stick in that founder's head. And they often come with not necessarily a pre-rap, but a livery. And so that livery, I think it just kind of opens up the world of customizing a little bit more. You know, the classic is the blue stripe, but you could throw a red, white, and blue livery on there,

and it wouldn't look tacky on a Ford GT because you're used to seeing some stripes, you're used to seeing a little bit of a design on there. Or if Catherine Boyle is driving it, maybe a white with an orange, you know, stripe down the center would be cool. Be very cool. Or just throw an eagle decal right on the front,

like it's an old Ford Mustang. Yep. That's fantastic too. Yeah, I love that. We've got to keep it in America. This is tough for watches. A lot of Swiss, a lot of Swiss watches out there. If you're going American,

you're going to want to stick to RGM and get the Pennsylvania series Turbion. It's going to run you 100K, very limited annual production, but it's one of the greatest American-made watches out there. There are movements built-in-house, and it's just an amazing

example of American craftsmanship. And I really do believe that if you care about American manufacturing, you can't... You've got to put your money where your mouth is. Exactly. If we start pouring money into RGM, they will catch up eventually.

Yeah. Like the market is a weighing machine over time. Yeah. And so we've talked about this on the show a lot. Yeah. You can't just rely on the government to stimulate the economy. It's on every single one of our listeners, every single American to find to stimulate the economy in a way to bet on the future that they want. Yeah. And then for vacation, for the American Dynamist, what's the most American vacation you could possibly do? We mentioned it earlier. It's the Disneyland Park buyout. It's going to run you a couple million bucks. but you get a one-night private event at Disneyland in Anaheim or Disney World in Orlando, and you get the entire theme park reserved for you and guests after hours. No lines, personalized shows, fireworks, character meets, and unlimited rides. Second on the list here deserves an honorary mention would be heli-skiing in the remote Alaskan wilderness. Yeah, for the more athletic. One to two weeks, 100 to 200K, private helicopter, untouched powder, luxury, base camps, gourmet meals,

avalanche certified guides. And you're keeping it in America. Extreme, you know, exotic skiing while staying American. Exactly. I love that. And it's just a good reminder of like, this place is ours. Exactly. It almost shouldn't be, right?

Yeah. Russia almost had a, could be Russian, could be Canadian. But we have it. You got to go explore it. And I look forward to doing our first live show in Alaska. I've been. It's fantastic. The Alaskan fans are crazy.

I'm extremely bullish in Alaska. I love Alaska. They are always sending DMs and offering to send down. fish and things like that. Okay, so let's wrap up with the VCs for a minute and move on to the seed stage founder. Jordy, what do you got for me? Oh, man, this was hard. Seed stage founder, you know, maybe you're pulling in 80, 100K a year.

You're pretty oriented around the work, you know, not less time on the road, more capital constrained. You know, if you give somebody a McLaren F1 and they don't have the income or the net worth to sort of support it. That's kind of like a cursing them in a way, right? It might cost you a few hundred grand a year just to maintain properly. But so yeah, we'll go down the list for a gun. I'd say, you know, most of the Seed Sage founders I know, they do have glocks.

They're pretty much a stock glock. It's a $600 gun. Sure. Get them, have them take that Glock down to Arleigh Arms and upgrade every single element of it. Strip out all the internals, externals, and just and really sort of, of upgraded. Arlie is sort of like the Brabis or the AMG of firearms. And so you can turn that base Glock into something that's really significant, meaningful. They can customize the exterior, you know, customize the grip, all that kind of thing. So that's an easy one. A few thousand dollars

can really turn that into a special piece for them. For watches, I would go with the, I'd go with a Cardius Santos. It's like, you know, this, this watch is something that I feel like it gets a lot of hate, but it has like this great. I love the Santos. It's got great. It's got great legacy from the aviation world. It's not like a new watch, right? It's been around for decades and decades and decades.

It's not just not a new watch. It was the first watch. The first watch. Louis Cartier. That is right. That is right. Louis Cartier was contacted by a pilot, Santos. I don't remember the full name,

but he was using a pocket watch while he was flying and said it was very difficult to take the pocket watch. out to measure his time and you need him for speed. What if you could have it on a wrist? And Louis Cartier made the first watch and named it after him, the Cardier-Santis. Also worn by Gordon Gecko in Wall Street in a beautiful gold. Fantastic watch. It's beautiful.

It comes in a variety of different sizes regardless. You know, even if you're in the 1,000 pound club, you can still get on your wrist. And yeah, it's not going to be so much more than two weeks of your salary that other people would say, like, why is this guy wearing this watch, right? So I'm not going to put him in it and make him look gaudy or anything like that. For cars, this one is a very personal choice for me, but I think it's the right choice. The first sports car I ever purchased was a 997, 9-11. I bought it for $32,000 on bring a trailer, felt like I stole it, and put easily more than 10,000 miles on it in the first year that I owned it,

did not have a single issue with it. It cost me like literally under $1,000 in maintenance, gave me millions of dollars of enjoyment. It was just like one of the best cars I've ever owned. And so this is a car that looks, you know, that's got some legacy to it. It's timeless and it's going to cost you less than a Model Y, right? So great choice for a seed state founder.

And if you want an upgrade, it'll hold its value a little bit better, go Targa. Targa. The Targa is really holding their value. Yeah, because, you know, Even the grindiest founders that I know, they'll still take a couple hours on Sunday to take a, you know, take a little drive up the coast. Pop the top off. Pop the top. And so anyways, for vacation, yeah, what do you do? This one's bold. I'm going, I'm going Eastern Europe. Okay. Great developers there. Sure. If you have everybody on your team. A little work play action. No, if you're a seat stage founder, you should never take a true vacation. Do not go off. Do not go offline. Yep. If you're burning out, it's because your product's not working.

And you're not doing your life's work. And you're not doing your life's work. It's not, you don't need a vacation to fix that. So go to Eastern Europe, grape food, wine, views, everything, and meet, you know, meet some, hire some new developers or hang out with some existing ones. And just avoid Western Europe. That's great. And, of course, this one's going to be bold.

so we had been some recommending some eventing horses, some race horses, generally thoroughbreds. But for the Seed Stage founder, I'd go with a mini horse. And the reason for that is I think you could really get some yield out of it. It's not, you could sort of keep them in the second bedroom of your apartment if you needed to. But on the weekends, if you got a little younger cousins or siblings or anything like that, let them go rent it out to kids parties. and you could earn some yield on it.

So the food for that mini horse might cost you a few hundred bucks a month, but I think you could get a few hundred bucks per party to rent out that mini horse. And so anyway, some potential yield there. And you can make it the company's mascot. There's a famous story about the hedgehog at Facebook. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You could be your mascot during the weeks and on the weekends it's working. You could probably go viral with that on X. You post, oh, yeah, yeah, grinding with the mini horse today. just developer next to the mini horse. That's going to get engagement page from everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great.

Okay, I love it. Marketing value and then some yield help pay off your ramp bill at the end of the month. That brings me to my wild card gift. This is an easy one. There's no excuse not to get this for the Seed Stage founder in your life. Set them up, you know, write them a nice card. But in the card, it's the phone number of your favorite ramp SDR. I love it.

It just says, give them a call. I already told them you're going to call. They will take care of you. Yep. Get set up on ramp. It's painless. It takes a few minutes. And companies, on average, save 5% a year.

So that was an easy one to add in there. I love it. Okay, let's go back to me. I got two, and then we'll go back to you. We're going for the up-and-coming general partner at a venture capital firm. Probably not a liquid billionaire yet, but has probably driven maybe a billion dollars in returns for the fund. I would hope so.

And so, you know, this is a person with taste. They need to move up in the upper echelon. of class and style, and they need to let people know that they've arrived. But you're not going to be breaking the bank like you would with the deck of billionaire-sized lord. So for gun, we're starting with the Magnum Research, gold-plated Desert Eagle 5.0. Great. Great conversation starter.

So under 10K, potentially. And yeah, it's iconic. You can still carry it in a board meeting, which I think is important. There needs to be a threat of violence in board meetings. We've discussed this. You need to know, oh, you think we should pull forward our sales targets. Are you willing to die for that? Right.

Are you willing to put everything on the line for what you're saying? Or are you just saying about this before? Your board meeting should look like at least once a year, like an all-out brawl. Exactly. And almost having, you know, if every board member has a firearm on them, it can, It can kind of keep people more productive because there's this threat of violence beyond just, you know, throwing blows. And if you're a founder and you walk into a board meeting and, you know, in your suit, you got a holster, there's a gun. And one of your board members says something.

It's just like, oh, so you don't respect the Constitution? Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are we doing here? Ask him to step down. Yeah. So I think that's a great choice for the, the up and coming GP for the car. We're going to want to go with the Rolls-Royce-Cullin-Black badge.

Very versatile car. Great for driving around, even the whole founding team. So you can pick them up, take them to the Rosewood, write a term sheet, you know, show them the ropes, introduce them to Silicon Valley and still do it in comfort and it's not going to be loud in there. So you'll be able to have a conversation about the business. Yeah, it's a good car too. if you do you know if it's it's fun to drive yourself but when you your drivers around they can drive it you can back um and uh yeah it's hard hard to go hard to go wrong with that and then if you need if you need a sports car which probably do maybe get this up and coming gp Porsche gt3 rs or maybe a decar i would go with the decar okay um it's gonna stand out more in sandhill road yeah and and

northern california has always had that sort of rugged outdoorsy element to it. It's like a Patagonia vest as a car. As a car. Exactly. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's the kind of thing you can drive it up to Tahoe. Yeah, I go to Tahoe. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Driving to the Nevada side. Yep. Or you can take it hiking, you know, go up to Tam and take a little loop. Snow this week in Tahoe? I'm not worried. Not worried at all. Yep. Yeah, that's great.

Now for watches, there's a couple different options. obviously the protect Philippe Nautilus 5726 great watch definitely recommended to any up-and-coming GPs highly recommend gifting that you're not going to get negative feedback on a gift like that it's just going to be received really really well but if you want to mix it up get them the Rolex Daytona 62 39 Paul Newman can I tell you why I like that pick John what why do you like that so Daytona just by itself is it is a high production watch, right? It's coming out all the time. Yep. And so, you know, you can pick up a Daytona for, let's call it, 25, 30 grand. It is at the higher end of Rolex's lineup, right? Well, will they retail for something like, I forget what their actual retail price, somewhere between $12,000 and $15,000? So the retail price is low. Market value for a basic Daytona is somewhere around $30,000. And so the reason that Paul Newman Daytona is so great is to the untrained eye, it's just a regular Daytona. It's like, oh, but depending on the room that you're in, you can say, no, this is

a Paul Newman, Daytona. Yeah. So it's one watch for founders and it's a different watch for LPs. Exactly. Exactly. So you're at YC Demo Day? Oh, he's just got a Rolex on. He's just a normal Yeah, it's an everyday Rolex. You go to LP day. Everyone's like, this guy knows what's up. Yep. Makes a ton of sense. You can wear that thing anywhere. Now let's go to vacations. What are we getting for the, for the up-and-coming GP, the Rising Star and Venture? I say we go to Antarctica and we take a luxury icebreaker adventure. That is something that will be good on the gram. Yep.

That will be something that will be good in the boardroom. Yep. When you're having to Zoom call into a board meeting. Starlink. You can say, yeah, sorry, guys. If there's any noise in the background, it's the ice breaking from my luxury ice breaking adventure boat. Little controversial.

I don't know if people are cool with breaking ice these days. Isn't that kind of anti-invitamentalist? Is it? I don't know. I don't know. I think it'll reform. But it certainly sounds fun. Yeah, yeah.

And just the noise. It's almost like a symphony of ice. Yep. We're big fans of the symphony in general. And then if the GP in your life isn't, doesn't like the cold, we recommend switching it up, going to Egypt and doing a private archaeological dig. Yep. You get some exclusive permits to historical sites.

You work along the Egyptologists, maybe take a private Nile River boat, luxury desert, camp, curated museum visits, a week or two in Egypt, it's great. It's not going to break the bank. It's only two and for the GPs, like they're probably, you know, they've chosen the venture path because they're degenerate gamblers. Maybe they don't go to, they don't do it in Vegas or sports betting, but venture in many ways is gambling. And so the great thing about an archaeological dig is that you might dig up something worth well beyond what you paid to go on the trip. So you could almost position it as an investment. Yeah. Yeah.

And then for horse, it's a little bit trickier. You could go with a lucetano. You could do something dressage, which is a little bit outside of the norm. You could also just go with thoroughbred, maybe a Stalin prospect, maybe some just mediocre stud fees, don't break the bank, something that they can still enjoy at the track every once in a while, but it doesn't become their whole life. I wouldn't be that mad at going the Arabian route either,

depending on where your LP base is, that might be more of a, that just might be more aligned with where you're going to want to take that horse. Yeah, it also depends on what their lifestyles like. Maybe they're building a ranch. Maybe you want to get a quarter horse, something like that. There are plenty of great options, but don't miss out on getting them a horse because you don't want to be caught.

A horse, much like getting them, you know, year-round tickets, boxes to F1. It's something that they're going to be with for years, years and years and years and have, you know, many, many memories with. Yeah. So I have one more and then we'll finish out with yours. We have for the crypto millionaire, for the crypto Sente, for someone who's done very well in crypto, what do you want to get them? It's going to be a little bit wilder. They're the absolute most risk on.

We're going off-chain with this one, folks. Yeah, we're going off-chain. So for the gun, I'm going Che-Tac-M-200 intervention. It's the 406 caliber, sniper rifle, anti-material. There you go. Take down an SUV or a Toyota Hilux with it. It is over the top. It's going to look great on the Instagram, great on TikTok.

It's going to be iconic. A lot of these folks are anonymous, so you're just going to see some hands in the photo. But you're going to know when you see this gun that they mean business. It's a statement piece, for sure, for sure. And then in terms of cars with crypto, it's super important to stay in the Lambo ecosystem, obviously. But Hurricon played out. And then we don't really know how the new, how the new Lamborghini, lineup is going to age. And they also haven't released the limited editions yet. So instead of

going upmarket, I say go back, get the Eventador SVJ or maybe even go back further, Kuntash. Yeah. The SVJ is such a fantastic car. I do know one of Salana's earliest investors is a proud owner of an SVJ. He doesn't, he doesn't post about it online. I wish he did. And they're just not making any more of those. It's one of the last pure, purebred Lamborghini V-12s. And it doesn't have, it doesn't have any hybrid junk in it.

It's just a pure play, naturally aspirated V-12. And so in the last cycle, you know, every crypto bro had a rapt Huracan. This one, it's going to be the Temerario. Yeah. But if you go back, get the Adventador SVJ,

you still, people still know this guy made his money in crypto because it's Lambo. That's the, that's what the brand's known for now. But this guy made money, even earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I like that.

And the kundash, it's a little difficult to drive. So, you know, stick with the, uh, stick with the event store SVGA. Keep it simple, folks. And then for watch, of course, we're going Richard Mill, the RM 0,056, Sapphire Turbion. A racing machine on the wrist. A racing machine on the wrist. It's a $2 million watch, but it has a fully transparent sapphire case, housing complex terbion movement.

Avant-Guard materials and design. Can't go wrong. I mean, it's so flashy. But it's exactly what you need if you made your money in crypto. You're going to have NFTs. They're going to be over the top. You need something on your wrist that you can display the RM. Yeah.

And the only thing I would say with all these choices is do your best to try to buy the asset on chain. Yes. Yes, definitely. You can still take custody of it, but it'll mean a lot to that person who's made, you know, made their livelihood in crypto that you went the extra mile for it to be a real world asset. You know, you bought it on chain. Yep. You know, it's just, it's a really way to say, you know, crypto's real.

Yep. And it's very valuable beyond just speculation. Exactly. I used it to buy this gift for you. Exactly. And then for vacation for the crypto, the crypto chad, we go to the Caribbean super yacht regatta. You charter a cutting-edge super yacht and you race alongside famous regattas personally,

personal sailing coaches, private island stops, lavish on board entertainment. What could be more? crypto than getting offshore with your money. There we go. And for horse, this is going to be a wild pick. I say you go draft horse. Wow. Clydesdale, bit of a meme. A bit of a meme horse. But it could be if you were launching like a new L2, you could make it the mascot. Exactly. It's big. It's robust. It's from the Budweiser commercials. It's not actually an American horse, Scottish. It's hilarious. Anyone who is big, so you need a Clydesdale. Complete myth. Unless you're 5,000 pounds, you can ride a normal horse.

But the Clydesdale stands out. So that's my recommendation for the crypto bro. Great, Rex. And look, we get to, and with probably our favorite category. So the last category is technology journalists. And how do you shop for somebody like this? It's tough. They are opinionated.

They're in the, they're in, they're highly online. they know what they want in life and they're going for it, right? And they usually come from fabulous wealth. They come from fabulous wealth. So it's like, how do you get them something that they don't already have? But anyway, so we're going to try to keep it sort of reasonable. Our goal with these gifts are things that they would buy for themselves, you know, as well, right? So it's sort of staying in line.

You want to get something that maybe they had their eye on or would have had their eye on. So starting at the top for Gunn, I'm going to go with a little bit, this might be a controversial decision, but I'm going to go for a taser off of Amazon Prime. So you can go, if you don't know this, you can go buy a taser on Amazon. And the reason I go with Taylor, Taser is a lot of journalists historically. Taylor? Is that a Freudian? Yeah, it's a Freudian.

Taser Lorenz. Taser Lorenz. She tases me for talking too much shit. It's funny. But, but yeah, journalists have at least, you know, generally been sort of against the Second Amendment. And so you don't want to get them a regular gun and have them get offended by that. So I'd go with the taser. They can daily drive it.

They can bring it in any situation they want. They can keep it in their purse, backpack, briefcase, just right in their belt. But very versatile and gets a job done in a pinch situation. for watch, I'm going to go with, this is the only time I'm going to ever recommend somebody to get an Apple Watch, but I'm going to go recommend an Apple Watch with an Hermes leather strap. And the reason for this is the Apple Watch is great. These people are hyper online.

They're getting scoops or getting tips. They need that on-risk notification. But because journalists so often come from fabulous wealth, they're going to be. want to stress it up a little bit and get an Hermes leather band. So I think I think that's a great option for a journalist. For a car, I would, for the journalist in my life, I would prepay a Maserati lease for them. Again, people grow up around money, going to private schools, you know, being driven around by private drivers and expensive cars. And so a Maserati is a luxury vehicle, but it's somewhat accessible.

It's, you know, you could probably get a one-year Maserati lease for them for like 25K or something like that. Are you talking like quadri-porte? Something like that? Yeah, honestly, the whole range, it's hard to lease a Maserati for more than $1,000 a month. Yeah. And so you're not really going to go wrong with something like that. And it still gives, you know, the car is going to break down dramatically over that year, but they still get the experience of feeling like they're in a fine Italian, you know, sports car, elevated sports car.

Vacation, this isn't going to surprise anybody. Get them a round trip tickets to Idaho. So they can just kind of poke around Sun Valley and just kind of sit around the edges. Yeah. And just kind of observe and try to get, pick up some scoops and tips on the fly. And get a business class seats, right? Like it's for them, they're used to flying just regular old economy, a business class ticket to Idaho. Unless they're with their family, of course.

Unless they're with their family in that place, they're certainly not flying commercial. And then on the... But you could pair with that while they're going to Sun Valley. You get them a Canon 5D and 70 to 200 lens so they can take some... They're going to need a lot of Zoom. They're going to need a lot of Zoom. So, yeah, telephoto lens. The lens should be like at least...

Yeah, exactly. And that's another reason to go business class because they should have the ability to check that without an extra charge. Exactly. If you're getting somebody a gift, you don't want them to have to spend a bunch of money out of pocket to experience it. So the horse, again, this is not going to be surprising. A lot of technology journalists had a prior life as horse girls. Well, when you come from money, everyone in the family is into equestrian. Yeah, and when you come from that level of wealth, it's just sort of a given.

But I'm going to go with an event. All right. We're going to use, we're going to take a break. No, when you come from that sort of background, I'd go with a top level eventing Hanoverian and 75, it's up to $200,000 plus horse. It's exceptionally versatile across dressage, show jumping, and cross country.

And, yeah, the top bloodlines in this category are dominating all the international eventing podium. And they can kind of take it wherever they want. They can do disage. They can do jumping. It's an open book for them. It's versatile. It makes sense. Yeah. And then lastly, you know, if said technology journalist is not already working at the information or newcomer,

I would get them subscriptions to both so that when newcomer and the information gets scoops, they can just quickly repurpose them and get them out so that they can stay, get kind of the... Yeah, a gift for their career. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the way to level up and stay on top of the stories that matter. So it makes sense.

Wow, we did it. Yep. The last wild card that I would throw in before we close out is maybe you're strapped for cash. Maybe you're not going material goods. If you are shopping for anyone on this list, just get them a guy. You know, everyone has a guy, guy for real estate, guy for lawyer, guy for Antichrist. Just take your guy, give it to your friend. Just be like, here's my guy.

Put him in a group chat. Let him run wild. Yep. That's great. Well, we got to move on to some personnel news because we got some breaking news from the heart of America's industrial revival, NAAIA. The New American Industrial Alliance has officially launched. This isn't just an announcement. It's a call to action. NIA is bringing together founders, investors, and policymakers to restore America's industrial might and reestablish our nation as a global powerhouse. Jordy, what you got for me? Here's the deal, John. For decades, American industry has been on the ropes. Jobs shipped overseas,

resources untapped, and bad policies stifling innovation. But the N-A-I-A is flipping the script. They're proving that de-industrialization was a choice and that re-industrialization can be too. They're- But N-A-I-A-A is flipping the script, proving that de-industrialization was a choice, and re-industrialization can be too. Well, it all started back in June with the inaugural reindustrialized summit in Detroit brought together hundreds of builders, investors, and government officials. That summit wasn't just a meeting. It was a movement, a rallying cry for American greatness. And today, that movement became a force with the launch of NAA.

NIA is here to be the voice, visionary, and vanguard of America's industrial resurgence. What does that mean, John? Cutting red tape, incentivizing investment in critical industries, protecting America. American workers and streamlining government contracting. Simply put, NAA is doing what it takes to put American builders back to work and innovation back on the map. And this alliance is already stacked with heavy hitters. Members include Palantir, 8VC, Y Combinator, Hadrian, Allen control systems, and many more. It's a roster packed with companies and investors who are betting big on America's future. Austin Bishop, the driving force behind NAA summed it up perfectly. He said, John, it's time to

build in America, it's time to re-industrialize. So what's next? Well, you can go follow NAA on X and visit their website at new industrials.org. Whether you're a builder, an investor, or just someone who believes in the power of American industry, this is your chance to join the movement. NAA isn't just about restoring what we've lost. It's about building what comes next. The future of American industry starts now. Let's get to work, John. Very exciting. Stay tuned. I love those guys. I did not get a chance to go to the reindustrialist summit. Same. I was busy.

But I think I'm going to the next one. They don't think they've announced it yet. Oh, well, definitely be a huge hit. And I was talking to one of the organizers when I was in D.C. And it seems like it's going to be.

I think we need to give, I think we need to give a talk about the posters driving reindustrialization. I like that. And just give a full market map. Yeah. Of what's going on. I mean,

I do think, I do think we could crush there in a sense that just like, there's going to be a lot of kind of, kind of, you know, default people talking to their book, like what's investing like. in this sector, what's the government strategy, what's the founding strategy? But then we cut across all that, which is some wild random shit.

I mean, posting matters a lot. It does. Yeah, the memes are powerful. Every meme has a potential to convert somebody that would have gone and worked at. Especially in college. Like, there are so many new grads who are super into the reindustrialization thing, specifically because they've seen the gundo phenomenon and the posting. And it really is valuable.

Yeah, I couldn't make it this last time. I, um, my second child decided to come. Yeah, same. Literally, like, within a week. We were both in the same boat. But we'll be there next year and very excited for Aaron and Austin and the whole team over there. Yeah, they're great. Well, congrats to them.

But we have more breaking news. Breaking news in the world of AI folks. Devin has officially entered general availability. That's right. Cognition Labs has just announced that they're cutting edge AI software engineer is now available to all engineering teams. earning it just $500 a month. No seat limits, Slack integration, IDE extensions, and even API access. Devin's stepping on to the big stage, and it's already making waves. Let's break it down, John. Devon is more than just an AI. It's your newest team member. This tool isn't just

helping engineers write code. It's debugging, building, deploying apps, and even knocking out small but pesky tasks like refactoring and documentation. Think of Devin as your all-star utility player ready to step in wherever you need it most. So where does Devin really shine? Teams are already using it for everything from fixing front end bugs to drafting first pass pull requests. And here's the kicker. Devin works best when you give it tasks,

you know how to do yourself. Share detailed requirements and invest in coaching it along the way. It's not just automation, it's collaboration. The numbers don't lie, John. Devin has already proven its metal, completing real world coding jobs, contributing to open source repositories, and even passing practical engineering interviews at top AI companies.

From refactoring codebases to handling integrations, Devin is stepping up where humans might hesitate. Cognition Labs has made sure Devin integrates seamlessly with your workflow. Whether you're tagging Devin in Slack to squash bugs in real time, or using its IDE extension to tackle bigger refactors. Devin's designed to save you time and keep your team focused on the big picture. We can't forget about the enterprise potential, John. Devin is already helping engineering teams at scale with custom solutions available through Cognition Labs sales team. You know I like talking to sales teams, John.

I do believe it's a cure to mail loneliness. I love it. So what's the verdict? Devin isn't just a tool. It's a game changer. At $500 a month, it's a small price to pay for a massive boost in efficiency and productivity. Engineering teams, it's time to draft Devin to your lineup. Head to app.devin.a.ai and start building with the AI.

engineer of tomorrow today. I love Devin. Did you know that Devin is now the number one committer of code at Ramp? Crazy. Amazing. If you're not, if you know that and you're not bullish on Devin, what are you doing? Yeah. Fantastic team.

Spun out of Ramp. Yeah, Spun out. Spun out. Neil was there. I think there's a bunch of other co-founders too, but you know, certainly like a brainchild spiritually because it was, yeah. But fantastic team, absolutely stacked with IMO gold medal They have an insane amount of like math and just next level engineering talent.

It's a fantastic team. And they've executed really well. And the interesting thing is that they've really focused. Have you seen the actual UI? Yeah. It's like it's really, really fascinating how they've built this. They focused on the user experience so much. And they, I don't think they've gotten bog down.

I love how the product can work with itself. Yeah. So basically you can put two Devons together and they just are like working in tandem. And that's kind of what happens when you just ask chat GPT to reason through something. It's kind of talking to itself internally. That's what the 01 model is. But they really haven't gotten bogged down with like, oh, we need to train some custom model from scratch.

It's going to build this data center. They've just been like, let's use all the best tools in the box, but then make this very, very specific for this problem. And it's just had, you know, immense impact, especially on like the grunt work tasks. I heard this interesting story about Scott was telling me that. There are now some, I believe, ramp SDRs that can, if there's a problem, they can, while they're on the phone with you, they're non-technical guys, they can at Devon, hey, this customer's having this problem. I think the code needs to be changed a little bit. Like, can you go in and fix this? And while they're on the call, they're solving it. It's like a movie. So cool. Yeah, it's, it's always been cool to me because the work, the workflow that they basically built is the same workflow that people have with junior engineers where they have to very, very clearly define what they're trying to do. tell them to go do it.

They go attempt to do it. Maybe they hit a wall and you explain, oh, you do it this way. And then they work around it and then eventually get to a PR that can then actually be shipped. Yeah, I was talking to Scott about this. Like there's, when Devin launched, there was like a lot of like just the reaction was so emotional. It was a lot of fear about like this is going to put all engineers out of jobs. Obviously, that's not true. It's very collaborative.

And really, it's just you get to do more and more, you know, higher leverage work. but it's particularly interesting to me that kind of like the aspirational vision for Devin and what the world looks like post Devin mirrors Scott's life very closely in the sense that like if you go back to that very early video of him doing those insane math in his head it's like he was essentially just a calculator

like he was like an algorithm right and now he's an ideas guy he's a CEO he's he's using he's operating a much higher abstraction layer. Yeah. And I think that that's what the customer of Devon should feel. They should feel that I'm not being replaced. I'm being amplified and I have better tools.

And that's very, very exciting. Yeah, I'm excited to see how a lot of people scoffed at their varying valuations. But opening up access to this, just knowing already that it's so actively contributing to ramp, if it's the number one committer, that means that at the very least it's worth probably 500 to 600K a year, right? Like in a very low estimate. And so they're starting out, the product seems to be pretty accessible.

It's $500 a month. Yep. But I can imagine that, I can easily imagine a future where people are, you know, their bigger customers are spending a million dollars a year on Devon. Yeah.

I mean, it'll also be consumption-based, like you could date a dog or like an ADBRA. Yeah. And the other stuff that's wild is it just opens up. It's like it's an engineering tool that allows you to tackle projects that historically were just not at all. even really on the roadmap of like, hey, we need to like completely migrate this system over here

and that's going to take a year and now, oh, we could actually do this in a month and a half with Devin and a much smaller team. Let's tackle that. So it's actually, it's not just replacing, you know, or empowering team members. It's allowing you to tackle tasks that otherwise were not really cost efficient or not effective. Yeah, you're starting to see posts about this where it's like the age of tech debt is over. Like, yeah, yeah. There's, no return on squashing tech debt today because the AI will solve it in the future. And moving on, we got a size gong story for you folks. Breaking news, an absolute blockbuster in the world of AI and language learning.

Speak, the AI-driven language tutor app has just closed a massive $78 million series C round led by Excel, pushing its valuation to a jaw-dropping $1 billion. That's right, unicorn status for a company that's shaking up the game. game in ways we haven't seen before. Let's set the stage, John. Speak isn't just your average language app. No games, no gimmicks. This is about real deal fluency. Using cutting edge AI, speak gives users a conversational partner that adapts to their unique accent, delivering real-time feedback that's changing how people learn. It's not just about picking up vocab. It's about building authentic speaking abilities, and that's a game changer. And let's talk about this funding round. Excel leads the

charge with heavy hitters like Open AIs startup fund, Coastal Ventures and Y Combinator all jumping back in. That's $162 million raised to date. Proof positive that Speak isn't just talking to talk. It's walking the walk. Excels Ben Quozo now joined the board calls it one of the few consumer AI companies actually turning promise into revenue. Big words, but the numbers back it up. Eight figures of revenue and closing it on profitability. What's next for speak? Expansion, expansion, Expansion. Southeast Asia, Europe, the U.S. speaks coming for all the markets, and by the end of next year, it's aiming to support the world's most popular languages. And let's not forget their growing enterprise side. Eight of the top 10 largest employers in Korea are already on board with

speak for business, teaching workforces English, and boosting global reach. Okay, Jordi, the co-founders, Connor and Andrew, they're on a mission to build a generational company. And judging by the accolades, like winning Google Play app of the year in APEC, they're off to a red hot start. Zwick even teased 2025 as 10X crazier with new features and worldwide launches. That's wild, John. Bottom line, this isn't just a win for Speak. It's a moment for AI innovation in the consumer space. 78 million says Speak just isn't part of the conversation.

It's leading it. Stay tuned because this story is far from over. Let's hear it from the Size Gong. You love to hear it. Go download Speak in the App Store today. It's fantastic. I wasn't super aware of speak, but I did see Delian posting about it because apparently he lived with them. Did you see this?

I think he lived with these guys. A handful of people. One of the open door, I think was it, I think he was saying he lived with them as well. I always loved, yeah, yeah. When I saw the round, I hadn't heard of the company either. And I was seeing it like, oh, look at this new like pre-launch AI consumer app that suddenly is worth a billion dollars. But it makes a lot more sense in the context of like they've been around for eight-ish years or something like that, grinding, had a thesis on AI and language learning for a long time. And so that's just another example of a lot of the companies that are benefiting the most from AI today were started a long time ago before language models were even top of mind for

anyone in tech. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure there's like a lot of people that would be like, oh, well, you could just learn language by talking to chat GPT. But there's something about the UI that matters. and there's something about, yes, the power users will figure out that chat GPT can do that, but for a lot of other people having a track, a memory, a plan that's customized to you,

it's just like Devin. You know, it's like you could use the one-size-fits-all model, but having a more unique resource, unique plan makes a ton of sense. And the workflow matters a lot. For sure, for sure. Well, let's move on to the DMs. We don't have that many questions, so keep sending them in. but Eliano over Palantir asks,

did Coogan deliver your gift for me? And I didn't. I forgot it in my car, but I brought it today. Palantir brought us a bunch of merch. We got some paddle tennis paddles back there, which I love. They look great on the set.

And we have some hats and shirts from Palantir. So thank you to Palantir. We got a beautiful hat. Do you want the Army or the Navy hat? I got you the Army hat. I like Army. I like Visiting the Desert. It's functional.

Yeah, these are great. Oh, yeah. There we go. Locked in. I feel like a $100 billion company right now. 170, I think it's, I don't know. It's a lot. So, yeah, we got to rock these shirts.

I don't know where the size is. Thank you. Thank you, Elio. I know, you're the best. We're looking good. Merch Lord. We're going to be playing good. They are crushing out on the merch side.

They have, you show me the stats. Companies are having a merch off. Yeah. Wait, so for revenue-wise, their merch sales are you saying. Yeah. Like, he, he, like, pitched Palantir. I was like, I just want to bring the merch store back and we just do something. We have so many fans, so many, like, day traders and, like, retail investors who are in the stock and, like the company, like carp.

Like, let's get them some stuff. Yeah. And every time they put stuff up, it just goes viral on X and Reddit, and it's big. That's great. It's great. I highly recommend having merch. And the thing that I like about their merch is, like, you know, we talk a lot of trash about, what is that, racquetball or? Pickleball.

But they didn't just pick pickleball randomly. Palantir actually works with the company that makes those. So they did like this collab. And of course the Army Navy hat makes a ton of sense because they're big in the Army Navy game, which I believe is happening this week in D.C., the football game. And so we're very thankful to Palantir,

very thankful to Eliano. I did a workout with him in D.C. It was great. It was like visiting a far-off culture and understanding how another man lifts who's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's jacked. Yeah, and he's very against kipping pull-ups, which we are as well.

I actually did pull-ups with him. He's very good at them. Strict pull-ups, I'm not. Got to be strict about it. Had to learn, had to learn. Got to work on those. It's hard when you're tall. But let's move on to the timeline.

John 6-8, by the way. Massive stack of posts to go through. So let's start with Wasteland Capital, who says, absolutely insane amount of work in this world is going to format PowerPoints. Okay. And I would argue that it's very, very important work. And, you know, we talked about this on the show last time.

It's communication. I think it was Don Valentine. Talks about how Capital follows stories, right? And so, DAC is a form of storytelling. In fact, I think it's the highest form of storytelling there is, right? Because condensing a very complex idea or business into 20 slides is not easy. Yep. I've spent countless nights in Figma over the last year, just like helping my portfolio companies make decks, making decks now for TB. But, um, uh, decks, like, you've got to have,

if you're a company planning to raise any amount of money or sell any products at all, which every company is, uh, you got to get good at this game. Yeah. You got to have somebody on your team that's truly cracked at it. Yeah. And, I mean, the amount of work that's going into just formatting them will decrease with AI and better tools. But I still think there's, I still think there's something, I've tried a lot of the different AI decks and there's nothing like the, uh, dynamic of working with a fantastic deck designer. Yep. Devin, who we work with.

Um, just like that dynamic. That's like saying like, oh, you know, if you're driving rally car, it's like saying like, oh, I don't want my co-pilot. I'll just use an AI. Yeah. It's like you want your guy, your co-pilot, making the deck with you, and you can just make so much more engaging, interesting materials. Yeah, the way I'm thinking of AI plugging in is like much better spell check.

Extra, like just, oh, rewrite. Oh, this line is just a little bit too big to fit on one line. So it's hanging on to two lines. What if you just switch this word? It would fit better. Oh, like, you know, like you accidentally indented this an extra couple pixels, just taking it to the pixel perfect. perfect level, even just if you have a whole bunch of photos, being able to integrate those,

pull those really easily, just better UI workflows, all that stuff should get much easier. Let's go to Coastal Country Club, they say, received a wedding invite that specifically said on the dress code line, no Apple Watches, please. Wow, 200K likes. I'm really happy to see how much engagement. Incredible. Because I think we're entering a new era. And we've obviously been. But it's not a dress watch.

It's not a dress watch. It has no business in the aisles of a wedding. Yeah. It's going to be beeping and like taking phone calls and showing like, you know, your latest tweets. Yeah. You're going to miss some incredible moment because you're checking. You're checking some timeline.

You know, your hinge notification is popping up on your watch. But anyways, we're happy to see that. that the movement against Apple Watches. One thing that I'm really disappointed about with the Apple Watch is that, do you remember when they first launched it? There was the Apple Watch Edition, solid gold, 10K? I don't. You don't remember that?

I don't remember that. So they launched them at like a couple hundred bucks, maybe the most expensive one was like a thousand, but then there was one that was 10K. And they were like, we're going to go. Can we buy an unwrapped version of that? Oh yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you can definitely buy them probably on eBay. But it was, they understood. that watches have this luxury value. But the problem is, is that the software and the hardware is getting so much better that you have to refresh your Apple Watch every year or every few years. Apple loves that.

So then it was like, okay, I have this gold thing. Whereas if you buy a gold Rolex or a gold Cardier Santos, like it's going to have its same value. It's going to do the job just as well, telling the time 20 years, 50 years from now. It's still going to work. Sure, there might not be as much like water resistance. The tech does get better in these Swiss watches.

But Apple kind of missed that, but they need to bring back the Veblen goods. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Apple should have a product that's, you know, up there just in pure Veblen status. Yeah, not, not just based on the RAM. Yeah. Let's go to Lulu. She says, lots of founders wondering the best day to schedule a launch. There's basically no clear day between now and the holidays.

It's wall-to-wall with announcements, not even counting news curveballs like today. Just pick a day and go for it, rely on creativity to break through. This is funny because I didn't even see this because this was the day that they found the CEO shooter. And the timeline was flooded with that. And it was impossible to break through. And I had another friend who his launch like kind of leaked. And I was like, well, like, no one found out about it. Because no one saw that article at all because it was the busiest news day.

So you do kind of need to avoid like the bombshell days. Like, you know, maybe delay your launch a day if it's, if you notice that something crazy is happening. the timeline. But in general, yeah, done is better than perfect. Get it out. And then the beauty of launching and getting drowned out is that if by definition, if no one, if your post doesn't go viral and doesn't get seen by everyone, well, no one saw it. So you can just post it again and people see it for the first time. Everyone thinks, oh, this post only got a thousand views. Everyone knows I'm bad at posting or something. He's like, no, no one saw that. By definition. So you can just post again. And so, I don't know.

Yeah, I think, I mean, yeah, basically every company that has news that they want to deliver is looking at doing it in the next week after, you know, I don't know, I guess you kind of have next, the rest of next week. But yeah, just expect there to be competition. But like good launches don't happen by accident. Even the companies that are that have like exciting news that people are excited to hear about, they're still making sure that they get 20. their investors to share it on the launch day, right? You need to, like, punch through the noise and make sure you're not just leaving it up to chance and, like, betting that it might go viral or something like that. And even asking, like, the second order, like, when the cognition, Devin, GA launch happened,

I got multiple texts from people who were closer to the company saying, hey, here's the tweet, like, can you amplify it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so having... That's why even a company of Devin's size and with that much hype is not leaving their launch to fate. They're not just like, oh, I hope the algorithms on our side. And you see it just immediately.

It's like, oh, 300 retweets. It's like, that doesn't happen by accident. Like, clearly people were lined up ready to go. Yeah. Which is great. Jack Prescott says, carp mogging with the Cartieres. And he tags us.

Thank you for tagging us. Thank you. If you see something like this, a dripped out technology brother, tag us. Post it, tag us. We love to see it. Great pick. Carp is a style icon in so many ways.

Yeah, he really is the OG dripped out technology brother. We saw him wearing a fantastic Potech Philippe Nautilus. That we, We clocked and put on the timeline. We got in front of him, unfortunately. Yeah, and I'd like to see more. This guy's running. We don't know what it is today,

$100 to $200 billion public company. We'd like to see more paparazzi following him around, getting, doing like, fit pick analysis. I'd want to see what, wrist checks. Let's see the whole, let's see the whole thing. But great, great pair of sunglasses and, yeah. I got to go to promoted post. We got a promoted post from Cushi.

We wanted to promote this today because she says a $100 million early stage fund in SF is looking for a new associate. DM me if interested. So we just wanted to put this out there for our listeners. If you are looking to join an early stage fund, there's one in SF. These types of opportunities don't pop up too often because oftentimes these smaller funds, just don't have that many people. So if you're interested, go send her a note and she will connect you. Let's go to Paki McCormick.

he says anti-capitalist and then throws down about a million red flag emojis. Great post. Great post. It is very cringe to be an anti-capitalist. Obviously, capitalism is incredible. But also just weird to frame yourself in the negative. Like, just say what you want the world to look like. Yeah, yeah.

I'm just against the system. Exactly. It's like, pick a different ideology and then just be that instead of just being like, I'm mad about the current system. Yeah, it's hard to take anybody that's, purely anti-capitalist seriously, unless you're living in the wilderness in the woods, not benefiting from any aspect of modernity or our capitalist system. But if you're, if you're eating your little oink-oink grain bowl from Sweet Green and you're saying that you're an

anti-capitalist, like, I'm not going to take you seriously. Sweet Green raise like $500 to a billion. Yeah. Well, we need a new term. We have the champagne socialist. We have the limousine liberal. We need something, the aristocratic anti-capitalist. We need a we need a term for the anti-capitalist. We need a, we need a term for the anti-capitalists that defangs them because they actually benefit immensely from capitalism. The Luigi. The Luigi. His parents were in healthcare or something like that? That story is so wild.

I'm holding my breath to understand it all, but we'll see. Sean Frank says, meta doesn't acquire, it copies. We have all benefited from the meta-copy machine. Snap is a threat, we get stories. TikTok taking off, we get reels. X looks viable, you get threads. Chat GPT, AI search bar.

this does is create new ad space for us. The greatest blessings in this industry start as a threat to meta, written by me in our free newsletter. Interesting. Yeah, Mark, Mark has, in many ways, he's such an interesting entrepreneur because the first product wasn't necessarily, allegedly, like wasn't really his idea, right? Like he was sort of approached to build this thing because he was like the tech guy. Yep. And then he's all of their, since then, like many of their most popular products were copycats of other products that were succeeding. Yet simultaneously, if you look at the Red Book, he has had this sort of like decades-long vision for his company that only a generational ideas guy could actually have, right?

And he's been like right over and over and over about all these different DECs. So interesting to be like the copycat founder who clearly is just better at executing and more of a visionary than the people that originally had. had the ideas. Yeah. And I like Sean's take here because he's really identifying the core meta strength, which is the ad platform and how great their ad inventory and matching algorithm is, is that there are plenty of other platforms, but none of them have the ability to actually drive

real ROI. Yeah, we don't know what if we'd even be using Instagram today if meta hadn't bought it. It's really, really hard to build that liquidity. Yeah, you could have easily. imagine Yahoo buying Instagram and ads never really working and the product like part of the reason yeah I mean then you just get it out of the box like they launch a new product and it's just like cool that's more ad inventory for Ridge yeah Sean's company and and you they know on day one it's going to work reliably and it's not going to be this whole like oh experimental budget let's do some

brand advertising yeah let's throw 20 grand a month at it's like you can throw a lot of any amount at it and you're going to get the dashboard it and it's going to be accurate. Yeah. And that's just really hard to build internally. And that's why you see like even Netflix, like when they launch, it's like all this craziness around their ad platform. Let's go to Ola Leh Lehman. He says, this is hilarious. He says, day of a European in 2025, wakes up, likes a meme on X gets arrested, tries to use AI, blocked, drinks water, bottle cap gets stuck, opens browser, 48 cookies, wants to watch a workout on YT, blocked, buys coffee, pays 50 cents extra for the cup, clicks to buy a product, no EU shipping, starts a website, gets fine for GDPR, orders meat, gets

shame for destroying the planet, tries to start a company, gets sued, repeat. Mogged, self-mogged. What's crazy about this is like, you hear about all of these things individually, no one's ever put it all together like this in such a way that's so embarrassing and so crazy. It really captures why there's no $100 billion company in Europe that was started in the last like 50 years or something like that. Bad. Bad.

Not good. Crazy. Beck Shaw says, days like this on Twitter feel like a bird got into the classroom. 200K likes. Yeah, this was... 200,000.

I mean, everyone was seeing the exact same timeline. It was crazy. It was just like memes, jokes, fights, conspiracy theories, news reports, everything about the shooter. What a crazy story.

Makes sense. It's interesting how we didn't historically process these sort of wild events through humor so intensely so right away it's like when historically like significant assassinations there wasn't like people like billions of views on memes in the first like 48 hours so it's interesting how like all of humanity now processes processes these sort of like crazy events yeah yeah like I want to say like 20 or years ago, maybe even 15 years ago, there'd be a news story and then you'd have to wait

like a week and South Park would come out with an episode, making fun of it. And that was, or maybe you'd get the daily show the night of making fun of the news a little bit, but it was so, not compressed. Yeah, but they weren't going to make fun of something that was super dark. No. Whereas now people will take a deeply dark, sad topic and immediately start making jokes about it. Like even I saw today, there was like somebody filming Luigi coming out. of like some type of, I don't know where he was going. And somebody was yelling like, it's Mario.

Just like that maybe. In real life. Yeah, in real life. But clearly like done almost for the internet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it does feel like it's feeding back into the traditional media. Like SNL had a segment on their news show. I forget what it's called, whatever their news segment is.

And they did make some jokes about the show. shooting, which was interesting because it is really, really dark story, but they still had to cover it in some way. Let's move on to Amjad Masad over at Replit. He says, whoa, and he's quoting a post about Google's Willow Quantum Computer. And he says, it lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch, Deutsch, Deutsch. 7,000 likes. Fascinating. Did you follow the quantum computing news?

The craziest part about this is that was Google putting out. Yeah. It was Google's official press release. We have discovered that we live in a multiverse. By the way. In our press release. Yeah. Now sign up for cloud computing.

Yeah. That is crazy. Yeah, I'm just interested to see how what Google's like roll out with this product, who gets access. Is it just Google that's going to get access to it for the first 10 years? Are they going to make it widely available? It seems almost dangerous to make it widely available. There was a lot of, I think, like, Bitcoin speculation.

Well, crack. Yeah, Bitcoin, like, crashed seemingly on that news, like a few percentage points. Maybe it was unrelated. Yep. But, yeah, it's interesting to see, okay, we've created this, like, you know, this ultra-powerful chip now who gets access to it. Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest, some fastest supercomputers, 10 septillion years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the

universe. Fascinating. Imagine being the team running that test and you start the test and you're like, oh, this could fail, it could take like a few minutes or it could take 10 septillion years. Imagine running B2B software on a quantum computer. Imagine running ramp on a B2B, on a quantum. heavenly. That's the way to do it. I love it. Will Manitis post a screenshot and highlights this quote, there's always something happening in the world that creates an opportunity to try and

fix a business and build a business. Mr. Rainwater told the Dallas Morning News in 1994. It was one of the few interviews he gave. Speaking on CNBC, Mr. Bonderman recounted Mr. Rainwater's investing philosophy. If you couldn't pencil it out on the back of an envelope, it wasn't worth doing. Yeah. I like that. Yeah, the best business ideas for the next 10 years are not always the most complicated. And oftentimes you can take a lot of inspiration from the past. If you literally just read old business biographies and you learn about some guy who cornered some strange market and levered it into building a massive public company, like many of those same types of opportunities are available today. And there's there's the classic trap for people that want to start companies or people

that think they need some ultra-sophisticated, complicated idea that needs like 10 pages to explain. And it's like, no, having something super, super like cognition. Yeah. It's just an AI software engineer. Yeah. You can collaborate with. It's not like, it's very complicated under the hood, but the core idea you can write on a single. Yeah, and the value equation. Just like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like, You pay money, it does things for you. It's very, very simple. And that's the case for so many of the great businesses. Starts very simple ideas.

Let's go to Sam Altman. Sam says, a few months ago, Robin Hood sent me a gold credit card with extremely high-quality details. I thought it was a ridiculous marketing stunt at the time, but now it's an example I give when talking about great design. I love that. So is this to have to do with their acquisition they acquired X? Didn't they acquire X?

Oh. X card or forget what it was called. I thought it was just for like their biggest spenders on their credit card. No, I know, but I'm pretty sure they acquired like a big, they acquired a Robin, I need perplexity. I wonder how much this cost though, because with the really nice cards, my fear would always be if you lose it, it has a lot of value. It's got to be really expensive. I think it's $1,200 or something like that. Okay. Maybe they charge you if you lose it or something because.

Yeah, so the Robin Hood Gold card is a credit card that was formally known as an X1 card. which was a company that Robin Hood acquired. Got it. And yeah, I'd just like to see, I'd like to see tungsten cards coming out from the major players. Like we got to go level it up a little bit. I agree. I agree.

You got to stand out. I mean, every card went metal recently. Yeah. Basically every card is some sort of metal. So, yeah. Got to go into the rare metals. Yeah. Tungsten.

Go rare. Let's go to John Fio. He says, if someone stops posting on Instagram, it means they are probably in a great place mentally. If someone stops posting on Twitter, it means they are probably about to commit national headline-worthy crimes. It's a good sub-tweet of the situation.

Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. So Instagram is a place to... It's a dating site. For many, as a dating site,

it's a place to kind of just brag about your life. Yep. And X is a place to share your thoughts. So if your thoughts get so extreme that you can no longer share them. And you're somebody who historically was sharing kind of stream of consciousness, which is a lot of the best posters are just sort of sharing what they're thinking, stream of consciousness style. And so if that turns off, like they either locked in and with their business so hard

or we've seen posters that are our friends go silent while they're selling their company because they don't want to say something that's going to like botch the acquisition or whatever. Obviously, there's some good reasons to stop post. But in general. But yeah, and you see this with with with fund managers who are down bad. They'll stop posting like a lot of the like very popular GPs. Yep. One went kind of dark for 2023 because they were just like going through it.

Yeah, but now they're back. Many of them are back. Many of them are back. Got a few markups feeling good again. Yeah. Yeah. You got to get back on the horse. I mean the best people that make it through always through it restart.

Yeah, posting through it's always good. But, but restarting the posting just to. kind of liven up the serendipity engine, get it more contacts. Yeah, in many ways, like Chamoth would have stopped posting with how much hate he got for all the SPACs, but instead he launched a premium substack. Oh, he did? Yeah, yeah.

That's right. He's got like a ton of subscribers. But also, I mean, there was a forcing function there, which was like he wasn't going to stop doing all in. Yeah. And so no matter how much, like, you know, he got kind of hate for different things, like the Uyghurs comment and all the different stuff.

But, you know, he had this forcing function of, like, his boys being like, get on the mic. Stay in the game. It's great. Podcaster's high. Podcasters high. And it worked. It worked. He's still in the game.

Love it. Reggie James says, oh. I got to stop you, John. Let's do it. You know what the show is about. Of course. It's about driving the bottom line. We got a promoted post from our friends over at Cognition.

We talked about them at length earlier on the show. And they're jumping in here to talk about how. New Bank refactors millions of lines of code with Devin, reducing a large-scale ETL migration from an estimated one-and-a-half-year project to just two months. Devon successfully delivered 12x efficiency improvement on engineering time, helping reduce a developer toil for New Bank engineers as they scaled to 110 million customers. C.Y. Vitor Olivier, New Bank CTO, is excited about the future of software engineering with Devin. And anyways, fantastic case study. This is the kind of case study that any startup would dream of, and it's why Devin has the hype that it does.

Yeah, so it would be very hard. Even if you were able to hire a bunch of new grads, you put them on that project, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated. It's going to be hard to have a sexy feature to work on, right? Even for the resume. And we're excited because now any developer in our audience can go sign up for Devin today,

and start getting access to the same quality of tool. Just $500 a month. Yep. So hit up cognition and tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Reggie James. He says, one retweet can send your message to a completely foreign digital land. Well, welcome to our foreign digital land, Reggie.

Well, Reggie's at home. Reggie's at home here as an OG technology brother. But now, everybody that's had a tweet go viral will experience this. Um, we've, you know, uh, we, we, we had a tweet yesterday about Lena Kahn. Oh yeah. And eventually it got retweeted by people that came into the, like, and that drove people to start dunking on us. I don't know if you saw that. A bunch of people were like defending Lena Kahn. Really? Interesting.

Like she's sticking up for the little guy, whatever, which I didn't totally get. Yeah. Um, but anyway, so yeah, any retweet can send you into a totally different audience that wasn't necessarily the intended audience. And that's the magic of X, you know. It's fantastic. And stuff like that, I want stakes on X. I want there to be the threat of getting retweeted into oblivion and then having to lock my account and turn off my DMs because I'm getting so many death threats. That gives me stakes. That gives me skin in the game.

I don't want to be in an echo chamber. Poster's high. I mean, I got canceled in Alaska Twitter once, which was great. I said like Alaska's amazing and we should all move there. And both the right and the left, the lefty Alaskans were like, we're like, stay out of here. is our land. Like, you need to acknowledge the land that you're, you know, going up here. And all the right wingers up there were like, you wouldn't last a day in here. Tech boy.

Yeah. Exactly. And they were like sending me pictures of their guns. I can see Russia from my house. Yeah, being like, if you come up here, you wouldn't last a day. Like, you'd freeze. Like, you're some Silicon Valley button. And you're like, hey, I got a cabot meteorite. Yeah, 1911. I think I'll do just fine. Yeah. Say that to my chitak in 408. Say that to my mini gun. My intervention. Let's go to Delian. He says, there's this consensus talking point in Silicon Valley that at this point, all tier

one VCs are founder-friendly. On the other hand, in my seven years in VC, I have personally had to use our legal rights from the shares we own to block other tier one VCs from firing founders three times. This is crazy. He's told me some of these stories. I don't know all three. But it is crazy. I mean, the founder-friendly thing, it really just became a meme, and it was so easy to put up a blog

post, and then no one calls anyone. out and no one really says anything publicly because you're all syndicating deals and you don't want to really piss off anyone else. But it is true. Like there are some bad actors out there. And a lot of it's like rational based on the fun dynamics. You know, incentives matter. There aren't necessarily that many evil people in Silicon Valley. It's really just the fact that when incentives get misaligned and there's a partner who has their career riding on a particular deal and they feel like this CEO is really screwing things up, their natural. reaction is, you know, they're backed into a corner. It's a fight or flight response and you have

to have your fund set up in a way that you can actually take the zero if it is crazy and your brand can take the L of backing a company that blows up and move on. But if you're, if you've staked your reputation as a VC on this one company, you've put so much of your money in there and you think that there's a solid business there and it's just the leadership that's wrong, which could be true. It's really hard to say no. So it's tough. This is. why YC is like actually a very positive. Yeah. It's a union.

Yeah. It's a union for founders. Basically. Yeah. If you, if you do something bad to a YC founder, like every single YC founder is going to find out. Yeah.

And that's like thousands of founders a year. A year. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it goes on the, goes on bookface. Like,

Gary built that thing. And like, there's a whole database of VCs and with ratings. Like, how, how'd they do? What they do to you? All this stuff.

It's crazy. Yeah, anyway, we've got to get more stories at Adelian and leak those here. Anonymously, of course. Of course. But let's move on to Jack Randall. He says, the New York Stock Exchange 10 years ago versus today, same but different. And he now works with the co-founder of Robin Hood. He's there with Vlad Tennev and the other co-founder.

And they're starting a new company. And Jack's working on it that is setting up. solar panels in space that will beam down the energy via laser. No way. To ground stations. Yeah. Because I saw that other company that Shaw McGuire back that was doing selling daylight at night. Yep.

Yep. So I like that we're getting all of these new weird, weird things that are not just... I think it was in Andreessen's like call for startups, this idea that like launch is getting so cheap. Varda is one of the first movers, but there will be other companies that are doing things that are completely off of SpaceX's roadmap. but leverage the launch capabilities. There's some people that are trying to do

computing in space because of the temperature. There's people doing the energy and the light and the... But this is specifically harnessing the energy and then beaming it down with the laser. And all of these startups, it's like, I'm like, this seems insane. Yeah. But I never actually talk trash

because it's like, I haven't built a spreadsheet to see if this actually works. Like, it's possible. I don't know what assumptions need to come true. Like, does launch need to go down to, like, $100 a kilo, $10 a kilo, a kilo to, like, make it make sense? But, like, that could happen. I don't know what the assumptions are. But, you know, all these people are smart.

I mean, this guy started Robin Hood. It's like a huge company. Like, I don't think he, like, missed a zero in his spreadsheet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He thought it through. Also, that level of execution with Robin Hood in an industry that competitive, you don't reach, you get lucky along the way, but you don't reach that level of scale by accident. Yep. And so, yeah, the other thing that just should be said with any of these, any space-related

company is like, it's hard enough to launch B2B software and you're like making this new feature and you launch it and you launch it and there's like bugs and like this button's not working for these users and all that stuff. And if you're launching stuff into space, the stakes are so much higher. Yeah. And if you have any of these like tiny sort of marginal errors, it can just end in total failure. Oh, yeah. And so the kind of caliber of people that are doing this and are going to be successful at it are just giga chats.

Yeah. Like you have to be, you just have to be on another level to actually do this successfully because you can't just like ship and like let's see what happens. It's like you have to ship with intention. You make a bunch of money and money in fintech. I mean, this is an age old story. Oh, yeah. They made their money and money. Basically.

I mean, that's the story of Elon with SpaceX. Like made his money in PayPal. Yeah. Dumped it all in something crazier that required a massive backstop. And the Robin Hood guys have enough money to back up the truck if they need to, if they really believe in it. And that's amazing. And that's just something that I think the rest of the financial community will rally around and be like, yeah, let's do it. It's great.

Let's go to Alex Cohen. He says, incredibly funny that European AI regulations are so backwards that the Taliban gets access to new open AI products before Europe does. That's just so brutal. I can't believe this. I don't even know if this is true, but, you know, somebody says, bring it to Europe, please. If you were going to follow the laws. Yeah. It probably is true.

But is this true? How can the Taliban have access? I mean, who knows? I mean, it's certainly less of like a regulatory overhead. So if you can, maybe if they're not, even if they don't have a server there, if they could VPN somewhere. Taliban loves memes and language models. Mem coins and language models.

Awful. Either way, I'm excited to see more about Alex's new startup. He's got a voice AI company in the healthcare space. It's called Hello Patient. Had a cool launch video for it. So excited to see what he does there. Yeah. Great poster too.

Great poster. Let's go to Jared Madfus. He says, Jack Founder Thesis, which you talked about on the show earlier. He must have been listening because he was like, I got to post that. No, no.

No. So I talked about it. I think somebody sent it to him or he listened to it. And then I kind of butchered it. So I was like post it. Let's give it some proper coverage here. So he says the Jack Founder thesis is, I have never lost money investing in.

in elite technical founders that are in the 1,000 pound club, composite of their bench press, squat, and deadlift over 1,000 pounds. They are simply too big to fail. That's the best line. Too big to fail. Great post. Just unreal. And then in the thread, he actually gives examples of the founders.

No way. That's amazing. So anyways, Jack Founder thesis, if you're investing in technical founders and you're a little bit lost in the sauce, maybe you're non-technical, just follow, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Jared's thousand pound club model, and you'll do well. Okay, let's go to Gary Tan. He says, I want this and I would fund this too. And he's quote tweeting Andre Carpathie, who says,

one of my favorite applications of LLMs is reading books together. I want to ask questions in here generated discussion, notebook LM style while it's automatically conditioned on the surrounding content. I love that. Yeah, Tyler Cowen had a post about chat GPT, 01 being a fundamental paradigm shift in how people read books. And I found this to be true. I was at the Nutcracker.

And while I was there, I was on my phone. And I was like, I feel like I'm kind of being disrespectful. It feels like I'm texting. But I'm really like asking the AI for the backstory to actually enrich this experience. And I am, I'm actually more engaged than someone who's just sitting there watching but zoned out. I'm actually locked in. And so I think that they, yes, we need more, more applications.

The interesting thing is that for most books, you actually don't need special conditioning. And Tyler pointed this out was like, a lot of times you're reading a book and you're like, oh, I need to like find a PDF and then load that into chat GPT in order so that it knows the books that I can ask a question, tell it that I'm on page 67. But a lot of times like it kind of already knows and it knows everything.

And so you can just ask questions. And it really puts the, the onus on like figuring out what questions to ask. And that's really important to the inquiry. Tyler had this whole riff on the he as a professor at at GMU George Mason it used to be about him teaching students and now he grades the students based on what they teach him. Yeah. And so his job is just to ask questions and you ever answers them the best. I saw something else about a professor who was saying he encourages his students to have these language models write the right.

the essay that he's tasked with them, and that's now the average essay, and your job is to write something that is much, much higher quality than what the model put out. And when I saw this post from Gary, I made me think of Daniel on like the readwise team, because that feels like something. They already have this huge, huge customer base of sort of pretty online readers and rolling out some type of software like this seems like they could have a pretty strong edge there. So Daniel, when you listen to this, go back to the original post, check it out. But obviously you can use chat chit, but probably still an opportunity to build something bespoke.

And so if you're looking for an idea for the next YC batch, start hacking. Start DMing Gary. Let's move on to Pixel Mothman. They say, while my AI friend is spooked by ghost, TriRamp is dominating X. Based Beth Jzos is pulling more monthly views on X than Forbes. and I'm haunted by Tech BrosPod not featuring any of my Zetes, tweets, ex-sweets. I don't even know. I don't know either, man.

Well, that changes now. That changes now. You're on the show. You're on the show. You're officially a guest. First of many. We will follow you back. We're excited to have you on.

I think one of the more insightful things here is I bet you Beth does get more impressions than any of these like big legacy. He's a beast. I swear he has the notifications like turned on. to the point where like if someone he likes posts, he like gets a push notification. You know that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like the alarm bell. He is quick with... He's quick with it. Yeah. I hung out with him a little bit in Miami just for a minute, first time meeting him. He wasn't on X right then, but he must be given that he's quick on the trigger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he was just absorbing takes from the community there. He also gave a talk and a debate about AI Doom. Yeah. Fun, fun poster. Okay, so this is the post that I wanted to cover about GM shutting down Cruz. This is a wild, wild post. And I screenshot it because I thought it might get taken down.

I don't know if it's still up. So this is Kyle Vote, the founder of Cruz, went through YC. He's one of the Twitch co-founders with Justin Kahn, Dalton, not Dalton, Michael Seibel, Emmett Shear, I believe is the news. And after he started Cruz, which was this self-driving car company, they started with the Audi A4, they eventually built their own cars. Then they get acquired by GM pretty early for a billion dollars. Great outcome. And then they're working internally.

And he was at the company still building, even though they were internal. They had a ton of resources. And they were live in San Francisco. And they were a competitor to Waymo. And then they had, you know. And I remember he left. And it was like, I think it was a surprise to a lot of people. So this is him being able to say, speak his truth finally.

So Kyle says, in case it was unclear. clear before, it is clear now. GM are a bunch of dummies. And Rune just says Lamau. And then Salvino Armani says, you sold them a layup $100 billion business and those redacted clowns still manage to fumble. Brutal. Dunked. Yeah. I mean, how can you not be in the self-driving game? How do you shut that? The CEO, Mary Barra, I believe that's her name, GM, said, like, we're not in that business. It's expensive. Blah, blah, blah. We're in the car making business. I get the GM is struggling, but like you got to bet on the future. We need the only way to leap from.

We need a re-industrialized poster to acquire GM and return it to glory. Seriously. LBO GM. Yeah. It's not going to be cheap. Yeah. Who knows? Anything is possible.

They've been bankrupt like 25 times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So who knows? Okay. Let's go to Arvin Srinivas. Srinivas. I'm going to struggle with that name for a while. The perplexity CEO and founder.

He says, P. Marka, can you wire me $1 billion? Because Donald Trump says, Does any person or company investing $1 billion or more in the United States of America will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including but in no way limited to all environmental approvals? Get ready to rock. And so, yeah, the race is on. You need to acquire a billion dollars of capital ASAP. You need to size up those fundraisers, guys, because the gates of innovation are wide open. And you must push.

I don't think, I don't think Andresen is an investment. investor in perplexity yet? Oh, they aren't? And so when I saw this, I was like, are they just kind of like joking with each other? Because like around is in the works. Maybe. Because like it seems like a company that A6 and Z should be in.

And that would be kind of like a funny thing, even especially if a term sheet had already been cited and of like, hey, can you give me a billion dollars? So I don't have any inside info there, unfortunately. But we'll probably find out soon enough. Well, let's go back to GM because George Hotz dropped a great analysis on the cruise situation. George writes, today GM pulled funding from cruise robo taxis.

I called this five years ago. I remember him calling this. If you had been paying attention, self-driving has played out exactly like I said it would. Tesla will win and comma AI will take second with an open source solution like the smartphone market with iOS and Android. Today, Tesla has the biggest fleet and we have the second biggest. Tons, I have a comma AI car. It's fantastic. Yeah, why don't you give some backstory on comma?

So, yeah, comma is a open source software. that George and his team at Kama maintain. It, you buy a device that's essentially a smartphone that he makes internally in a, in a office in San Diego. I toured it, it's amazing. And it has a camera, it has a front-facing camera, a couple rear-facing cameras that look out on the road. It takes in those images.

It runs it through a neural network, through an AI model, and it figures out where the lane lines are. It draws a path for where your car needs to be. And then it sends that signal to your car, signal to your car over the OBD2 port, which is the diagnostic port, kind of the USBC for cars. Yeah. That if you come into the shop and they want to know what's going on with your car, they plug in there, but you can control the car through there. And so it works with hundreds of different cars, gas, electric, all sorts of different cars. And it's a fantastic product.

Like it is so much better than the stock system in Mercedes, BMW, Audi, everything except for Tesla. It's way better. It keeps you dead center in the lane. It's insane. Like you do, I've driven this thing for hours, hands in the lap, feet on the floor. Just sitting like I'm a passenger. It's amazing. It's so, so good. We should put it in a P1.

I'm trying to get him to put it in better cars because it's he obviously they focus the. From a marketing standpoint. Obviously they focus on like fast cars have always been good marketing. Yeah, they focus on like the most popular cars. So it's a lot of like Hyundai's and, uh, and Hondas and you know, just random cars. But you put that thing in a Rules Royce. Like, that's what you want. He has a Rules Royce.

And it doesn't work because it has mechanical steering. So there's a lot of cars that aren't compatible. And now there's cars that are encrypting the OBD2 port to lock out comma, which is such an anti-feature. It's so hostile. So we need a boycott of any car company that's disabling comma. And then we need comma to start being sold in dealerships. The only thing I would say is if you're a manufacturer and you're allowing. people to add this open source self-driving functionality?

Does that open you up to any risk? It shouldn't. It shouldn't. But it's America. Oh, like now Apple's going to tell you what phone case you can put on. Like this is America. Like let me be free, you know? Right to repair is important.

Let me hack on my stuff. This is George's lineage. He was the first guy to jailbreak the iPhone. He was the first guy to jail break the PlayStation. And that's essentially what he did. he's jail broke cars. Yeah. And so he's built this fantastic product that I highly recommend to anyone.

It's like a couple thousand bucks. It'll upgrade your driving experience incredibly. So he continues to say, tons of self-driving car startups have shut down with zero to show for it. Ghost autonomy raised $240 million worth zero. Argo AI raised $3.7 billion worth zero. Investors are now going to waste billions. I don't even know about Argo. I know.

Investors are now going to waste billions on humanoid robots. Can anyone stop this train wreck? It is just as obvious as last time. comma is the furthest along with the scalable tech needed to solve self-driving and eventually humanoids. We have end-to-end method shipped that 10K people are now driving with, myself included. You can buy it on our website. And we have state-of-the-art learned world model simulator tech, which is a lot more pure than what Tesla is doing. Self-driving is a couple years from its alpha-go moment. Again, nobody will believe me because believing me isn't the hype way. It doesn't allow for

brain dead idiots to throw billions of dollars at large-scale garbage. It requires 10 to 100 very smart people carefully fixing the bugs in a fully end-to-end software stack. That's just how the problem is. By the way, if you are one of those 10 to 100 smart people who actually wants to solve self-driving, not whatever crews did for the last 10 years, come work at comma. We have the most straightforward hiring page I've ever seen. Hiring is a challenge and bounty-based. And potential brother of the week here let's put them to the side uh yeah fantastic uh george is uh amazing to talk to and hang out with brilliant thinker um and i think he's i think he's right that uh the the model that will win is very very tight do you are you familiar with like end to end

self-driving basically the the AI takes in images and there's no so the default way to do uh self-driving is you use the AI to understand the world and basically uh i identify the lane lines in the images, but then you translate those into like something that, like a video game world. And then you're using C++, not machine learning, to mathematically calculate what the accelerator should do, what the steering wheel should do. But you don't need to do. You can actually go end to end and have a machine learning model from start to finish. Just look at the images and decide what the output should be. Just translate from, if you see this, apply breaking pressure. If you see this, apply the accelerator. If you see this, steer left, steer right. And that is

where Tesla is going. That's where comma already is. And everyone else is just completely messing around with like crazy models that don't scale. And so you're saying that's what Waymo is doing even with their full like LiDAR setups. I'm not sure what the latest and greatest with Waymo is, but George has always been bearish on Waymo because they had at one point they had a cone guy whose job it was, was just to write software to identify cones. And that's an example of like they were able to throw so many resources at it that they had a cone guy, a stoplight guy, a dog guy, a dog guy. You know, and their whole job is just build a model that just identify a dog.

It's good to have guys, but more so like you got your guy for private security. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Or something like that. Yeah. And so the, the, the, the, the model of trying to get every edge case in, in Georgia's world is that that is a failing.

strategy because eventually, like you won't, eventually you'll get to, oh, there's an order of magnitude more edge cases and then there's another order of magnitude edge cases, but scale allows you with a scaled machine learning model to capture all of those essentially and learn the actual underlying behavior of a human. So yeah, still very bullish on comma. The company's too small, should be bigger. It's fantastic. I love it. It's a long term. So he's already thinking long term. for a long time. So he's saying, like, we're two years out from the top of the go. I kept to ask him, like, why don't you go and raise a billion dollars? He's like, because that wouldn't pull things forward. Like, this stuff just takes time. We need great people working on it. We need to just collect the data, continue. Like, there's nothing that we can do to pull this forward. I want to own a lot of my company and I want to solve this. That's all I care about. Very cool. Let's go to Jason Liu. He says, this is my first angel investment of 2024, Augmental. I'll be onboarded Friday and soon be. able to shit post on Twitter with my mouth. Okay, so I know nothing about this company,

except that it seems very clear that it's a human machine interface that uses the retainer form factor or emiseline form factor. So I'm assuming you get to talk into it. I think we talked about this on a previous episode. Maybe you get to whisper into it. Yeah, I was talking about like, you know, with the AirPods, it can be very distracting to like talk. But when you get your wisdom teeth out,

you could essentially like put a microphone in there and then be talking or whispering. You lose the wisdom of the wisdom teeth. Yes. But you add the wisdom of language models. Exactly. So then you can just whisper and the AI can take that in or the phone call or transcript or anything like that. Imagine having friend.com in one of your molars.

Because you can wear it your piece that no one can hear, but talking is still disrupted. People will hear what you're saying. But if you're just able to whisper and it can pick it up, that's pretty powerful. So this seems like a better solution than going in for anesthesia and getting your wisdom teeth out. Just pop the retainer in. So probably an interesting thing. Huge, huge pushback on the form factor. I'm sure people will be like, it's disgusting.

It's like getting moldy and stuff. But I like that someone's trying it. Yeah, Jason, let us know how it goes once you're post-ad us using the mouthpiece. Yeah, interesting. He made the angel investment and he is getting onboarded, but hasn't actually used it yet. I'm excited. Great picture, though. Let's, oh, this is great.

Let's go to Everett Randall. He says, have never been more bullish on a podcast slash X account than Tech Bros. Pod. Can we get a coin going so the early adopters can invest? Thank you, Ev. We really appreciate the shout out, the love. And we replied back the best way, if you want to benefit from the show by LVMH stock. Yep.

It's just a fantastic proxy. Yep. And we see that stock. We don't give stock tips or anything like that. We're not Jim Kramer over here. But yeah, we're buying a lot of champagne. We double quite frequently. And so we expect that those sales to really help the French conglomerate.

And it's great to be supported by another member of the Holy Trinity. Totally. Over at Kleiner Perkins, one of the Holy Trinity firms, fantastic. I think we got Sean McGuire next. Hopefully we can get Sequoia on board with the tech bros pod movement. And then I think it's in the bag. In the bag. Let's go to Sean.

He says, you can't make this up. The information runs a provocative headline asking if SpaceX's valuation is irrational. But their math is off by a factor of $1,000. $350 billion divided by $2 times $4 million equals $43.7.7. 5K. This also doesn't count Starlink Enterprise and Gov revenue that's, or that it's doubling year over year. And so, of course, they're not, they might write the dealmaker newsletter, but over at the information, they're not deal makers. They're not dealmakers. Not a lot of Excel over there, a lot of Microsoft Word. Well, here's what I'd like to see. Let's get Sean a position

at the information as executive editor, contributor, and just run the articles by him before you put him out, he will catch it. I think so. He would have caught this. He's effectively like he's doing he's doing the work for them already. He should get paid for it. But I respect Sean, a capital allocator putting the information in the truth zone. That's important. There's a reason people have been calling it the misinformation. We obviously don't promote that. But, you know, with errors like this, it kind of makes sense that people refer to as the misinformation sometimes because this is a big Big mistake. Hopefully the issue of Mayaculpah and just shut the entire operation down.

Let's move on to Tren Griffin. He says SpaceX share value, Sierra sales values the company at about 350 billion. Tender offer includes $1.25 billion of stock at $185 a share. Bloomberg. Employee liquidity for the win. We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price. Yeah, it's good.

Get those employees liquidity. I mean, the company is 20 years old. Like, yeah, yeah. It's like you could be. Wasn't exactly a speed run. You could be a new grad and your company's still not public. It's like you're 45 now. You have a family and like college to pay for.

Like, yeah, this is not, this is not, oh, some C stage founder who wants to do some cheeky secondary and buy a sports car. Yeah. This is, you know, I need money to pay for my kids education. Yeah. Yeah, it's not, it's no longer cheeky secondary. But, you know, if I work there, it'd be hard to sell. It's a pretty good company. Yeah.

Let's go back to John Fio. He says, America has totally forgotten about small town America. We're about to remember that this life is not only possible but better. The next wave happens in small town America, full stop. This is the next frontier. And he shares a picture from Portland, Maine. Yeah, I love that Fio actually lives in a small town. It's very cool that he went into that.

I mean, Nashville is not exactly a small town, but it's certainly smaller than New York. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's moving that direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is great. He'll eventually be the mayor of a small town somewhere. And, uh, yeah, I think it's, I think it's, I mean, this every once in a while, a post will pop up and it, and it'll be like, there's not a housing crisis. You just don't want to live in Idaho.

It'll be like a $300,000 house. Yeah. It just is like beautiful four bedroom house on an acre and like near, you know, walking distance to the city or whatever. And so, yeah, I think. I think we're, the whole remote work trend is actually a multi-decade trend where people know, you know, it's still like underhyped in many ways. And it hasn't had the level of impact that it will when people realize like, oh, I can go move to a small town with a group of my friends and make it,

you know, make it something new. Let's go to a promoted post. Promote a post. We got to promote posts here. This one is from Will O'Brien, friend of the show. He says join the Ulysses founding team. Come be my right hand on the GTM front at our base here in San Francisco and help us scale our technology around the world. We are reducing the cost of doing critical ocean activities like how SpaceX is reducing launch costs.

We've developed technology that reduces the cost of seagrass restoration by 10x and close one million of revenue. This is just the start. Ulysses is on a path to power every ocean task and become critical infrastructure for the $8 trillion ocean economy. Our mission is to steward the ocean for an abundant future. This was top of mind for me. There was a post that went viral this week. I think Steinman covered it and Will covered it as well, talking about how China has these floating cities where they'll just show up somewhere

and just like completely strip all life out of the ocean and just like kill everything, ship it back to China. And Will was maybe a little bit shit posting, but talking about wanting to prevent that and some of the technology that he's building. So Ocean Economy is $8 trillion. If you want to work at a potentially a future trillion-dollar company, go work for Will,

the SpaceX of the Seas. And tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Preston Holland, the private jet guy. He says, seen in a group, Lull, and it's a post that says, I have a large social media influencer that is looking for an empty leg from Miami. to Philly in exchange for incorporating the jet or broker company into the video and being tagged and included in all posts

250k followers on Instagram 900k on TikTok 150 on YouTube is anyone interested in being involved I can provide all the analytics for each of his pages DM me with interest funny why not try yeah you miss 100% of the shots you don't take yeah the thing I would respect it's not like a super small time it's not like I think 900k on TikTok gets you square into the influencer bucket. You're no longer a micro influencer. Yeah. You know, micro influencers is still that 10 to like 100K range somewhere in there.

So anyways, good, good shot on goal. There's seven, is there seven million full-time influencers in the United States, something like that? So these people need to fly private sometimes. Empty legs are a great way to do that. I love it. If you're just getting into the game. Let's take a quick break.

We'll be right back. We are back. And let's go to a post from David Senra. David Senra writes, Brad Jacobs has started eight different billion dollar businesses. He was kind enough to invite me to his home, and we had an incredible two-hour conversation that felt like 20 minutes. I made an episode about what I learned. Episode is available now. Highly recommend going and checking out the Brad Jacobs episode on Founders Podcast.

It's in your RSS feeds. It's on Spotify. David's a good friend of the show. Godfather of podcasting in many ways. and it's just, it's, it's really, like a testament to the power of podcasting that this was able to happen because of all the work that David's put into his show. He spent years and years studying the great entrepreneurs. Yeah. And for every, for every episode that he does like this, he gets 300 people reaching out saying, can we do, can I, can I do an episode with you? And so he's

saying no to like 99% of them. Oh yeah. And then a handful actually are worth doing. and you end up with content like that. But Brad Jacobs is an animal. He has like a very methodical way that he builds billions of dollars of enterprise value. And he's done it over and over and over. Yeah. And he wrote a book.

So David's able to cover it. How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, I think it's called. It's great. It's such incredible name for a book. But it's amazing because, you know, David, like so many of the books are by founders who have passed away. And it's very much like a history show. But he's in many ways, like, caught up to reality

and covered so many people that now. how the great entrepreneurs of this generation are like, I want to talk to you. I looked up to Rockefeller. I looked up to Steve Jobs. We've talked on the show a lot about how if you're doing anything in startups and venture and you start asking for people to sign NDAs, it's like a very negative signal. Brad Jacobs has basically published his entire strategy and methodology for building billion dollar companies.

And he's willing to put it all out there because it really is so much comes down to execution that he can write out exactly what he does. And he's still not worried that other people are. going to attack his business, his existing companies, or go after new opportunities that he want. So anyways, tons to learn from that book, though. It's great work from David. Let's go to Gabby.

She says, whoever did all this to the photos app needs to be tried at the Hague. It's so real. Have you tried? I mean, it's awful. The whole iOS 18.1 is the worst update that I can ever remember. I posted about this myself. One of our listeners said that it was LinkedIn coded. but I was angry.

But the Photos app is truly abysmal. Like I go in there knowing exactly what I want to get and it's like playing whackamol, trying to just find like the right section of the app. I will steal man it. I think that they are going through transition and they want to get away from all the hard-coded UI entirely and they want it just to be a search bar at the top

and they want search to be so good that you can actually just search for dog video and it will automatically filter for videos and it has dog in there. No, I totally get what they're trying to do. I wish there was a way. I still wish there was a single place that gave you the feed of photos because that's really what I want.

I don't care about the AI organization. Yeah. And there's all these times when I download a video, an image from the internet and it has a different date because that image was created a year ago. And so it just goes way back. And I'm like, where is this thing? And I wind up saving it five times. I wind up just taking screenshots and then those are messy.

It's just a disaster. And the video, the video functionality of the camera completely broke for me. I had like five or so different like moments with my children that I recorded. And then before realizing that like it no longer saves videos for me. So standing by for an update there. Yeah. That's great. Let's go to T.J. Parker.

T.J. says the best chance Democrats have in the next election is running Alex Karp. I love that. Karp is the man. Very thoughtful philosopher. Been on the left for a long time. Strong Democrat. but understands the importance of the Western order and has been... And great style, too, which matters.

Yeah. The problem is that he's just running too important of a company to step back. I don't think he could do it. Yeah, but he's got a lot of runway. Yeah. But I would love to see it. I would be happy to support carp in a future election. I hope it happens.

Let's go to... Hold up, John. I got to jump in here with a promoted post. If there's two things we love on this show, it is capital allocators and watches. We just wanted to jump in here and support Bill Ackman. He says, a little bit of shameless promotion

for my favorite watch company, Braymont. The Braymont Submariner, submarine, 500 meter automatic and camouflage ceramic, perfect for the toughest city streets and underwater operation. So I love that he's showing that this is a versatile watch. Yep. I'm sure Ackman wears these in boardrooms during activist campaigns,

and even when he's getting wild over the weekend, doing some underwater operations. So anyways, fantastic-looking watch. I wasn't familiar with Braymont, but now I am. And thank you for promoting fine watchmaking, Bill. And I believe he's an investor in the company, or he owns the company.

I would hope so. At a certain point, you know, we have the 2% rule for a capital allocator of his size. The only option left is to buy the whole company. To buy the damn thing. By the damn thing. Let's close out with Daniel Doyon. He says,

Technology Brothers only want four things in life, and it's disgusting. And it's a picture of a beautiful woman with a baby, a private jet, a wonderful Patek Philippe Grand Complication, and a Ferrari 296, I believe. Fantastic choices, Daniel. You definitely have taste. He is living it. Go check out his company, Readwise.

Oh, yeah. And thank you for being a listener and supporter of the movement for loud opulence. Yeah, we love it. We hope to see more of those. Send us your photos. Send us your ideas. DMS questions. We'll answer them on the show.

Follow us on X. Subscribe to us on YouTube. We have video on Spotify now. So go check that out if you're listening on Spotify. And we have to jump because our tailor is here. Not a joke. We are actually getting fitted for new suits. So it's important

Stay safe out there Show would not be possible Without suits Thanks for listening Thank you Bye