TBPN - How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, Some Personnel News, Absolute Dawgs, Build that Ego

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we are covering Max Meyer's latest edition of Arena Magazine. You've heard us talk about it before. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of literature that you can buy. Quarterly magazine from Max. If you don't know Max, great guy, great follow on X, some great posts, talks about a lot of different things. works with Joe Lonsdale at 8VC and has started publishing

this beautiful magazine all about techno-optimism, technology companies, business, making the moon estate. Everything. He covers tons of stuff. And it's just beautifully, beautifully made.

You really have to go and pick one of these up. He has a deal. It's not that expensive. I think it's $100 bucks a year, $25 bucks a pop. And it's something that you could just have on your coffee table

and people could leave through. and it's just it's so well and you know what the best thing about this is monetize from day one beautiful ads in the very first edition see that ramp ad in there yeah fantastic this ramp ads great um there's a great levels ad there's tons of tons of beautiful ads in here which we love to see um yeah this is just a good example of even if you're monetizing through your users you should still you know directly via subscription still run ads right i want to see more substacks paid substacks running ads. Yeah, exactly.

And he said something interesting where he's like kind of building this community of advertisers. I think one third of the tech stack that he uses to build the magazine and run is an active advertiser. So it's kind of like a one hand washes the other situation. But there's just a beautiful layout. You can just see that you just don't get this in any other magazine. It's just very, very rare. And it's just so, so fun, so many interesting pieces.

No, it's the same level of, I don't know, when I was a kid, I subscribed to popular science. Yeah. Which these days is probably like popular propaganda. But the same level of excitement that I used to get as a kid getting popular science in the mail, which was just like euphoria. Yeah. I get this with arena now. There is one, I have to take one issue with this. It's printed in Canada.

Canada. Canada? Where? Yeah. It's some far off place. And so hopefully they can clean that up because I don't know what's... That actually feels a little off off... You wouldn't want it to rub off. No, no, definitely not. Put on some gloves. But a ton of interesting articles in this edition. They have a whole deep dive on Rahul, who you might know as... Ligma. Mr. Ligma. The Ballad of Rahul Ligma. Rahul Solonwalkar and how he built his company and it goes through his prank at X, formerly Twitter, outside with the box, one of the greatest moments in tech history. The reaction time on that is incredible and only a real poster could have done that

because oftentimes when a news breaks, you have 20, 30 minutes to get a banger out. Yeah. And he didn't even just get a banger. He physically got there with a box. I had dinner with him the night before this happened. Yeah. And he was not playing. He wasn't talking about.

No, it was up the moment. Just like most posts are created in the moment. And the acting, like you can see it on his face that he's just like so sad that he got fired. It's so funny. And there was a time when, when like these types, there's a whole movie about this. It's called like the other guys or something where this, this comedy troupe basically figured out how they could go on the BBC and they would act like they were oil. executives and be like, yes, we're really sorry for what we did. We're giving away $10 billion dollars and the stock would drop and they would get sued. They didn't have any money because

they were just trolls. And it was like amazing. And this was like that. This was like that level. Well, the funny thing I remember that happening and I and I knew Daniel like I'd met up. Oh yeah. I'd actually, funny enough, met up with him at Erwin once. And so watching that unfold live, I was like, wait, this is this is like obviously not real. But even a large part of X like didn't know that it was a prank. everybody was pranked at once, and it took like a while for people to be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, these are posters.

These are not. He was texting me as the day went on, kind of talking about like, hey, all these journalists are like hitting me up now to like tell my story. We were like, do not say anything. Just like let the meme live. You crushed it.

And it just led to all these incredible meetings. I mean, here's a picture of him with Jensen Wong. Here's a picture of him with Elon Musk. Yeah, it's amazing because they both parlayed that into building like very unique. very interesting businesses. Yeah, exactly. They didn't get hooked on the stunts.

They didn't become content creators. But it's just fantastic. And I mean, there's a bunch of other cool articles in here. There's one, I mean, look at this, there and back again, celebrating the, the catch. The catch. The catch of all time. Fantastic.

Just so, so nice to see these in print. Then a beautiful ad for Intercom. Nice. And some questions about camera. Yeah, I guess the question is like, if you're, you're running a scale up or even an early stage company, why are you not advertising in this magazine right now? Because it's such a way to signal to the tech elite

that you get it and that you're cool. Yeah. Even if your brand isn't even that cool by itself. Yeah. And it's a really lovely tour of like the new generation of tech founders, like Norse Dicke's in here for Orchid Health. And you'll see her and, other people mentioned in this in this article also in like the jason carman s3 video series but then now

this lives in like the print world as well and there's a few different um kind of like it's almost like the media junket when you're doing like a promotion for a movie you'll go and you'll do like jimmy kimmel and then fallon and then colbert or whatever yeah the the tech version of that is like you do a jason carman s3 you do you go on dorkash or you go on to you know some other podcast and then you write an article for Max in Arena. Yeah, if I was a Series A stage founder right now, I'd be trying to get a feature in this magazine at all cost, because how do you get in front of a more curated group of people in tech?

Yeah, San Francisco strikes back. And just like wonderful layout, wonderful, wonderful to look at. Open source defense capital, mission to Europa. Just beautiful. I love this. I'm excited to read through this more. I just received it in the mail two days ago. But we wanted to do a deep dive today on kind of the lead hero piece of this edition.

And did you read the actual letter from the editor where Max writes America Punk, the whole thesis of this particular edition? The first page here? The second page. So the first page is Max introducing the corporation name, a message. from the president of the intergalactic media corporation of America. Very bullish on making humanity multi-planetary. But what I found interesting was his article on America Punk,

just this idea that you can wind up. And this really struck a chord with me because his basic thesis is like, good things are good, but it's sometimes boring to say that. And so he kind of walks through like capitalism is good for a bunch of reasons. it's lifted two billion people out of subsistence poverty, and it's the greatest engine for human flourishing since we've captured fire.

And people will say, oh, no, that's bad. Going to space will be very expensive. The idea of learning is racist. Western medicine is racist. And so there's these wars between like, you know, bad things are good, good things are good. But at a certain point, it becomes boring to just say good things are good. It's boring. Like really boring.

It's a tautology. It's what your dad believes. And once you admit that good things are. good, then you have to spend your time making and defending good things, which is hard because good things are often hard to do. Well, it's funny because it actually became countercultural to be like, no, capitalism is amazing. It did. Right? Like I feel like as a 28 year old, I grew up in a school system in which the teachers, which ironically the American public school system, the teachers were saying like, here's all the issues with capitalism and like really fixating on the issues,

not talking about the advancements in medicine, education, housing, all these different things that have allowed for human flourishing. Yeah. And so Max argues that, but even if defending good things isn't very interesting, it's still important. And so good things need to be made cool again. America needs to be made punk. America needs America punk.

And so as one of the world's best things, America has a problem. It's currently very boring to defend America. As of now, supporting America means your dad waving a flag on the 4th of July. your mom scolding you to be more grateful at dinner. Defending America means a solemn forced flag day singing in elementary school. But if you wanted to defend America in a cool way, how would you go about doing it? And his answer is that you'd celebrate rebelliousness, the spirit that made the country. There's nothing cooler than a rebellion, and that's America punk.

And so he wants to separate it from these visions of the future that are like steampunk, cyberpunk, atom punk that are too narrow around a particular technology and refocus on the spirit of the American people. which I think is very, very interesting. So grab a flag in a magazine, tell your friends to join the party, because if good things are good, then defending good things is better together.

And then he says, thanks to everyone. Well said. And it's just a very, yeah, it is an interesting thing that, like, techno-optimism has become consensus. There's this idea that, you know, everyone is posting, like, oh, the next four years are going to be amazing,

unbridled techno-capitalism. I mean, that is very much a, we are in somewhat of a bubble, even though it's, it overlaps with the real world, but we still need to continue doing it, even though it's mainstream within technology now. Yeah, but there's something about like when you're on top of the world

and you're just winning and it's very consensus, like there's nowhere to go but down. Yeah. That's very risky. So I think he's right to identify that we need to think deeper about what like raw, raw technology actually means. Yeah, which I think it's good that he's thinking now instead of a year when people are like, oh yeah, it's boring.

Like, I'm not into this. I'm not motivated by this. Yeah, and that ties into Joe's piece, though, which is it's not enough to just be excited about technology. You actually need to, and I think a lot of our, a lot of the technology beaners out there are starting to realize that there is, you sort of can reach a level of impact in the private markets and then to have the next order, you know, of magnitude of impact, you need to get involved with government.

Yep. because it's a huge, huge critical aspect of our society. And the people that run the government and the decisions that they make have a massive impact on our quality of life. And so many different systems from mental health institutions to prisons. This is a massive shift from a decade ago where Bologi gave that talk at Y Combinator called Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit. Are you familiar with this? So there's this, I forget what his name is. There's some philosopher.

and he basically said like when you're living within a society that has a particular government, you have a few options, voice, exit, and something else. I'm blanking all of this. But basically it's like you can stay and fight and try and reform the government or you can leave. And Bology was part of the libertarian crew that was like, let's go to maybe New Zealand, let's do C-steading, let's do ice-steading, let's do interplanetting. let's do interplanetary colonization.

Let's leave because things are so broken, we can't fix it. And that was the dominant thesis of most Silicon Valley elites for a long time. And only recently I feel like people have shifted. No, my personal sort of personal anecdote here during COVID living in L.A., things were getting so dark. I mean, it sounds silly saying this, but like they couldn't, they didn't let you go to the beach. really basically couldn't be outside. It was crazy.

I was like, why am I living in California if I can't go outdoors and be away from people? And Joe left California during that time. And I got very caught up in that. Like my experience in like April of 2020 was like on Zillow looking at property in Austin and Miami and getting very caught up in that. And fortunately, I decided to stay in California and sort of like try to have a small impact And that ended up having being like, you know, I ended up backing like a city councilwoman who came in and made a tremendous impact on the west side, right? Ended up more recently supported our new DA, Hawkman, who is, you know, going to do it, have an incredible impact sort of cleaning up the city, making crime illegal again, doing things like that.

And so I decided to say like, no, I was born and raised in California. I'm staying here. I'm going to make it better. even in small ways. And if people with agency just decide to leave, things will just get worse and worse and worse. Yeah, yeah. So we need it up.

It's Albert Hirschman, exit, voice, and loyalty. So you can leave the government that you're under. You can have a voice and try and change the government, or you can just be loyal to the government. And I think no one in tech wants to do the last one. That's why I couldn't even think of it. Because no one's advocating for that. But it is interesting that Joe went through a period of exit

with regard to California. but has chosen to opt for voice within the confines of America. He didn't exit the United States. He didn't exit the United States. And he started whatever, University of Texas or what's the name of? University of Austin. University of Austin, which is like, hey, we actually need to, you know, create these sort of like hideouts where we can build the movement without, you know,

so you can think of them as kind of like long America short California, which is like a totally reasonable trade. Yep. And so this is fascinating because, you know, you think of him as like, you know, Palantir, like almost PayPal Mafia-esque guy, very libertarian. And yet he's writing this article that's literally called How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. And so you, you know, the the drumbeat of the technologist and the libertarian for so long was just spend less, spend less, spend less.

And he's completely reframing this thought experiment to say what happens if you get a dozen top entrepreneurs in the United States together and just tell, just ask them, How would you spend a trillion dollars? He's not talking about buying artwork or planes, the type of things lottery winners might spend a new fortune on. Rather, how would they spend public money to strengthen the future of American society? And suppose further that you could skip the red tape,

how would it be different than the way we currently spend trillions? And so he breaks this down into nine parts. And I love all of these. They're very pragmatic, but they're also very techno-optimistic. and it's just a fascinating tour of all the different problems in America right now and how you could go about solving them if you were very aggressive with the spending, but also very laser-focused. So the first proposal he has is for $200 billion.

The small price of $200,000. Crushed traffic and the cost of living in our 50 largest metropolitan areas. And so his argument here is that the average traffic, the annual cost of traffic congestion in Texas, has reached over $1,000 per commuter in wasted fuel and time, with the average commuter losing 54 hours in traffic each year. And L.A. residents, as you well know, lose over 80 hours in traffic per year. For you, it's probably 80 hours a month.

80 hours a month. No, for me, I wouldn't say I lost it because I'm either doing deals or listening to Founders podcast, right? There's no. It's all about frame of mind. Yeah, yeah, frame of mind. Or are charging $10,000 an hour on intro. Yeah, exactly.

If you're making money while you're on the call, then you're good. Yeah. But basically, you know, he's saying, Los Angeles can't build a subway tunnel for less than a billion dollars per mile. How could 200 billion meaningfully improve 50 cities? The answer is competence. I once wrote the mayor of Austin about new technology with proven economics, tunneling. And so he's advocating for building more tunnels, most likely through the boring company.

So the boring company is like that sleeper company in the Musk portfolio. Everyone hates it. Dude, if you go on YouTube and you search like boring company update, it's just all of these communists posting videos of Elon Musk with a clown nose on. And they're like, it's not working. It's not working. And it's like, you don't realize that you're giving him the attention. Like you could have made those same videos about Tesla for 10 years.

Yeah. And they like were barely shipping any cars. Yeah, yeah. It's like you don't understand how this works. Like he spends 20 years on something. And then all of a sudden it's like, fuck, there are tunnels everywhere. Like there are maybe too many tunnels. Yeah.

It's like most people would say like there's too many Tesla's out there now. Yeah. So my roommate work for the boring company. My roommate, the first year I lived in L.A. out of school. And yeah, he ended up moving to Vegas because that was like where they could get a deal done. And they're building out a bunch of tunnels there. So I'm excited. And people love to harp on it.

Oh, the tunnel got some water in it. It's flooding. It's failed. And it's like, maybe, maybe not. Maybe he'll just keep working on it. And he'll just fund it forever until it works. But the very like fundamental economic, physical. like the laws of physics around the project to me are just so obvious because it's like you have a

resource which is essentially land underneath cities that's extremely valuable that no one has access to. Yeah. And so if you can get access to it, that's incredibly valuable. Yeah. Theoretically, there's way less laws if you go 100 feet underground than above ground where it takes a billion dollars to make a mile of track because there's so much regulatory burden. approvals needed and, oh, we need to buy, we need to, like, buy this person's property for some egregious price because, like, you know, 10 square feet of it, like, touch where the track would be,

all that kind of stuff. So just the solution is just, like, go underground. And I think there was this, there was a, there was a change in the law where you used to, if you bought property, you used to own, like, technically, essentially everything from the core to the earth all the way to the sky. Yeah. And then eventually they said, no. there is a cap so planes can fly over you and stuff. And they did that underground. It used to be that if you owned a piece of land, you could pull as much water from the aquifer below you as you wanted.

And now everybody's like, no, this is actually a shared resource. Like you can't just pull as much as you want. Well, have you ever been on the red line out to Harvard in Boston or Cambridge? It's the craziest thing. So you're on this train that's just going straight,

like subway. It just works really well. And then all of a sudden it slows down and starts screeching. goes as you're pulling into Harvard. And the reason is because in 1776 or something, George Washington wrote a letter to Harvard and said, I am granting you this land permanently, no matter what,

cannot be revoked under any circumstances. And so they own the land like forever and all the way to the core still. They have some like, they have some like different definition of what real estate means for them. And so when the. subway came, they were just like, no, which is really stupid, because it would have been so much better for everyone if they'd just been like, yes. Cell phone.

But, but, but, but yeah, it like, it like screeches around the corner to get there because crazy. Because they were like, no, like you can't, you can't dig under us. Yeah, that's our dirt. We own everything. Yeah. And, and, and our proof is a letter from George Washington. Like, because they were there before, before the country.

Yeah, yeah. It's older than the country, I'm pretty sure. I think it's like 1600. It's crazy. So, Joe maps out a couple more stats. He says, while saving over 90% versus above ground infrastructure with costs of a single tunnel about 10 million per mile, adding a second direction in some places as well as stations and egress about every mile brings the total cost to 25 million per mile.

In 2020, we mapped out a sample Austin system for $1 billion connecting the airport, several downtown locations, and the Q2 soccer stadium. The project has more connections than the proposed $5 billion above ground rail line at a fifth of the cost. For $5 billion, it connects a much larger area. And the interesting thing with tunnels is it's actually like a very good fit for like robotaxies. Because it's such a more controlled environment. You're not going to have like a dog run through the tunnel or like some kid come out of school or run out or like cars doing crazy stuff. The current Tesla like could easily do that.

No problem. And is like that's kind of what's what's happening. Yeah. And every time you think that like I would love to see like the Walt does. Walt Disney had his like, you know, master plan multi-year of, like, how all of his companies interact. Like, I'm sure Elon has his version of that. He's like, we're building the robo taxis, which will be ready when, like, all of my tunnel networks, like, come online. And then, like, all every, you know, 50% of people that move in the United States will be in, like,

in one of our tunnels or, like, one of our cars or both at the same time. It really is just, like, Musk Inc. 100%. So let's go to number two. Joe Lonsdale says, for 100 billion, take back our prison system from incompetent bureaucrats. So as America has two forms of Stockholm syndrome in its approach to criminal justice. Coming from the extremist left, there is a desire to coddle violent criminals and allow repeat victimization in the name of social justice. But across the political spectrum, there's another problem, the total capture of the prison system by bureaucrats, unions, and corporations whose incompetence we tolerate.

Speaking of Stockholm, when the American criminologist Francis Cullen won the Swedish government Stockholm Prize, he proposed to spend $10 billion in new prisons. His framework was as follows. Ten prisons will be developed, each funded at $1 billion each. The competition of proposals would be undertaken in which states would partner with criminologists and prison experts from around the world as well as from private enterprises to set forth a model for prisons. Each prison proposal must be shown to a rational scientific and to nourish the development of prisoners. In each proposed prison, each prisoner must be engaged every day in activity, education, work, or treatment, and there would be ongoing process and outcome evaluation by a team of researchers.

The Cohen framework is a fine start, but if a bit idealistic, not all prisoners need to be nourished. Some are hardened killers to be locked away, but approximately 600,000 people leave prison each year, and an estimated 95% of prisoners will eventually return to our society. Yeah, this segment on like paying for, there's been a few, well, yeah, paying for performance, like almost like recruiter style where if you work with a recruiter in tech and they don't find you anyone good and you don't hire anyone you don't really you know maybe you pay a little bit like a small retainer but you don't pay much and the same concept is is being has been applied it was applied in he talks about how it was applied in arizona where the state allowed county governments to

collect up to 40% of the cost savings to the state when fewer people under their parole and probation supervision went back to prison and so that incentive just allowed made the institutions actually care about the long-term outcomes of their prisoners, which I think is fantastic. Palmer Lucky actually said that he was thinking about doing private prisons before starting Anderol. And Anderol was just like a much bigger, much more important job. But he thought that there was interesting. And it is crazy that he, I mean, he mentioned that like maybe five years ago. I'm surprised that no one's run with it.

And we haven't seen like a venture-backed prisons. startup but that sounds like a task for will monitis probably well and fio can do that yeah maybe for their next their next big one yeah i mean like if palmer's throwing out ideas like that you would think but it's not enough to just say like oh palmer like validated the idea so i'm running with it like it's it takes a very special person to be able to do that and thread the needle yeah yeah the and also it's you know how i'm sure it's a very rough like industry to work in like my mom was a nurse in prisons and like it's just brutal at every level like from like the sheriff department like while she was there I think the sheriff like went to prison because he was like super corrupt like well what about all those there were a handful of

of tech elite that went to prison because they were paying to get their kids into schools and so we need to go after those people who are like experience the prison system and be like hey like let's make a change here martha stewart you understand you understand the product right like let's like makes it this better but you know when people will will post a picture of like a Nordic prison. Oh, yeah, like, they'll try to like critique it and be like,

look how nice this prison is. like, like, I'm sure that people just want to go to prison. It's like, nobody wants their freedom taken away. We, our prisons should be places that allow,

in general, like there's people that are too far gone. I strongly believe that. That just need to be locked up forever. Like they just, you know, fail the test like you, you know,

you should be gone. But then there's this whole contingent of people that obviously should be in an environment that is conducive to personal growth, to learning, to even just being in a mental state that allows them to think more positively about life, right? And like build their self-esteem back up because, you know, going and being thrown in effectively a dungeon is not going to be conducive to the mindset that you want those people when they are, those 600,000 people that are released every year, you want them to be in a mindset where they don't hate the system, right?

Because then they're just going to continue to rebel. I wonder what Martin Scroley thinks about prison reform. I bet he would have some very interesting takes. He talked to, I mean, he talked about, he talked about at Hereticon. He talked a bit about his, his experience in prison and why you have Diddy and SBF in the same, in the same prison in Brooklyn.

But longer, longer conversation there. Yeah. Let's move on to part three. Joe says, for $100 billion, build 21st century mental health institutions. So very related to the previous point. We'll read the lead in here. At the peak of institutionalization in 1955, nearly half a million people in the United States were in mental hospitals.

The 1962 book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the movie two, dramatically changed how Americans viewed that system. And not totally without reason. The system had obvious defects. and needed reforms. But generations later, after we ended nearly all institutionalization, we have a serious crisis in our society. Many people with serious but treatable mental illnesses that would have benefited from institutionalization have been left to prison and the street. So this was the thing that stood out here. This guy, Christopher Rufo, found that in his home state

of Washington, the per capita number of state mental health hospital beds had declined by over 90% since the 60s. And anybody who's been out in the real world, like, would probably guess that, like, our mental health issues have not sort of reduced by 90%. And you can see that on the streets. And, you know, I know, I was talking to a CEO that, like, a very successful, like, founder CEO talking about his, you know, families, like battles with, you know, bipolar. and how alone you feel when you're dealing with that

because there's no, it's literally like, it is 100% on the family to provide that level of care and there's almost like no quality resources that can help kind of like address that. It's incredibly challenging to deal with. That's interesting because at least in California, there's this story that might be somewhat apocryphal that like all of the mental health institution closures

are due to Ronald Reagan. Yeah. And I'm not sure how, true that is, I'm sure it was like a process, but it's fascinating because it's actually a very libertarian and somewhat right-wing philosophy. But if you look on a political compass, there's like left-wing libertarianism, right-wing libertarianism. They're kind of two different things culturally. But there is a libertarian argument to say, you know what, keep the government out of everything, keep the government out of my mind, keep the government out of what I do. If I want to sleep on the

street, that should be my freedom. But the argument that I've heard that's much better and much more convincing to me is that, no, like, as a society, we have a duty to step in and help people who are suffering. And it is unacceptable to let someone do drugs to death on the street. And we have a moral duty to step in, even if that does have a little bit more of an authoritarian bent relative to the libertarian, like, you can just do whatever you want. But it's odd that the libertarian position has kind of been adopted by the left to some degree because you would normally think that of someone who's like, well, no, I don't want my tax dollars going to a mental institution. And no, if I go crazy, I want to be able to do whatever I want. Like, stay out of it. That's kind of a libertarian

position. And yet it's become like the standard on the left very oddly. Yeah, which is why I mean, I think this entire piece is a very interesting perspective from Joe, who's very libertarian in general to just like, like, okay, I'll, you know, run this exercise of how you might. You might because the money's going to get spent one way or another. It's like a venture back startup. Like if you raise, like the United States raises like five, six trillion dollars a year. Like they're going to spend the money. Yeah, yeah.

Let's go to number four. Proposal number four is for $50 billion. You can make our inner cities a place where children thrive. Lonsdale endorses Brad Gersner's idea to give every American child. Oh, whoops. That's the wrong one. Lonsdale proposes spending $50 billion to. replicate successful community programs like the Harlem Children's Zone.

I hadn't heard about HCZ. Have you heard about this? No. Because it's funded by Jeffrey Canada and Ken Langone and Stanley Drucken Miller. And it covers an area of 100 blocks in Harlem. And apparently it's been remarkably successful and very, very high ROI. And so his argument is just like we need to scale the one program that's actually working, basically just like put more wood behind fewer arrows.

confronting issues directly, such as a need for male role models and addressing maternal drug use. The program has significantly improved test scores and future income prospects for participating children. And there was some stat in here about, yeah, I love this one. The benefits to the public are enormous. Converting a high school dropout to a high school graduate is worth more than $250,000 in public costs over a lifetime. Incredible. So, like, hugely, this is exactly like where the government is. should be investing.

Yep. So I love that. Scaling such models would involve rewarding programs that achieve measurable positive outcomes, aiming to reduce intergenerational poverty and creating environments

where children can succeed. Love it. There's some great pictures from the Harlem Children's Zone. Yep. Step five is for $100 billion, give every American child a stake in our economic future.

Yeah, so this has been something that Brad over at Altimeter has been talking about for years and is actually making some substantial moves on because it's really not that great of an investment to give every new child in America a thousand dollars in an index fund the day that they're born. And over time, through compounding,

it'll become a very meaningful amount of money that would help them buy their first home, pay for college, and teach them about the power of compounding growth, which we understand here on this podcast because we went from zero to a thousand, followers on X in, you know, a few weeks. And we're going to get to that second, you know,

thousand follower mark 2000, you know, in about seven days. So people, like the more that we can educate the youth in this country on compounding growth and be able to not just like learn about it, but experience it directly. I think that'll be very powerful. Yeah. It is really hard to get hooked on long-term compounding growth. Yeah. Like it's so easy.

to experience the euphoria of buying a lottery ticket. Like I still remember the day I bought my first lottery ticket and I was like, I'm going to win. Like this is happening for me. It was the only lottery ticket I ever bought. But for that week while I was waiting for the numbers to come up, I was like completely delusional. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was like, of course I'm not going to win. Like this is so stupid. I should never do this. But it's very hard for something that grows slowly. So imagine if like over the first 10 years of your life, you're just watching this account go up and up and you're just like. And not being able to touch it. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. Because like the other thing is psychologically at a very young age. We're, you know, we obviously love bubbles and speculation and, you know, being risk on. But kids are getting exposed to meme coins in like middle school now, which is like an unregulated lottery. Like they, you have to be 18 to buy a lottery ticket, right? Yeah. So these kids are able to go in middle school buy Salana meme coins.

And, you know, they think they're going to turn $17 into $3 million like that guy did with. with peanut, but it's teaching this sort of like experience of instant gratification and low effort for potentially extreme R-I. But it's basically just encouraging, you know, gambling or lottery ticket buying. So it's a big issue. Step six in Joe's plan is for $50 billion, restore the American industrial skill base. Yeah, so this, this, this, this reminded me of. a few episodes ago, I was talking about a guy that I used for like handyman stuff. Oh, yeah.

He was telling me like, oh, I'm learning how to like build websites. And I told them, I was like, that's great. But like, you realize there's infinite other things that you could do that you're probably already like more competent in that if you just really specialized, you could make a very meaningful like six figure income and have like very little competition in doing that. We don't need people that. We don't need more people that know how to build websites, right? We need more people that know how to do like, you know, I think somewhere in this article.

The example is tooling engineers. So he opens with Apple CEO Tim Cook once remarked, in the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers. And I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. And this is why they're kicking our ass on, you know, iPhone and electronics manufacturing. Because there's so many integrated parts and there's so many, you know, little CNC engineers, There's little, you know, all sorts of little tools that need to be made and the tools that make the tools. Like there's like 20 layers deep in the supply chain and we've just lost so much of that.

Yeah. And I think we're in this amazing moment in time where we have like a bunch of friends of the podcast that are building, you know, people like Aaron, the DRAC kid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I forget his name. Phil. And Phil, right?

So people like Aaron and Phil that are building manufacturing company here in the U.S. Hadrian, deterrence. So many important companies, but what they're going to run into, like a big challenge is not even just making these new manufacturing systems, but is a talent thing, right? Like how do you actually find people that are qualified? And a lot of these companies will end up in a place where they're like, we have six open roles that are all six figure jobs and we don't know where to find these people. Right. And it's actually good for the people that do know how to do it. But a lot of those people are retiring, right?

And they're not. We need a new influx of manufacturing. manufacturing talent and these are very like they are jobs that require you to like use your hands and use your body but they're jobs that will give people real dignity over going and working at Chipotle you know or going and working in the McDonald's drive-through because you're being very productive you're like producing things that matter not just producing junk food yeah and there are some risks have you heard of the sonoran desert institute sdi have you heard of this. Okay, so it's a very popular sponsor on gun YouTube. So gun reviewing YouTube,

they often say, if you're interested in getting into like the manufacturing gunsmithing, you should go to the Sonoran Desert Institute, which is an online college, blew up during COVID, and they teach you like the basics of how to use machinery and use tooling to become a gunsmith and work in the arms industry. Very cool idea. And the economic model works very well for them because their GI Bill compliant. And so if you come back from the military and you have GI Bill dollars that you could put towards college, you can put that towards SDI. Now, there was a bunch of criticism recently about SDI not actually driving better outcomes

and kind of just giving you like very basic high level stuff. Gunsmithing is such a, you need to do, like a lot of these things like are better suited for an apprentice model. So I want to see trade schools that have government incentives that then feed you and do apprentice programs. And people, like I always tell, you know, I told, you know, my handyman, buddy, I'm like, go find somebody who's very talented at one specific thing and offer to work for them for $30,000 a year and do 12-hour days and do that for two years.

And you'll come out of that being close to an expert, right? Like, you'll learn enough during that period. Yeah. So Joe's solution here, he points to Texas in 2014. They aligned incentives and funding for its technical colleges and started paying the schools based on how much the student earned. They can fake graduation rates. They can fake teaching skills, but they cannot fake the results, income.

This approach resulted in a doubling of the total amount of money being made by students in just six years, money that goes back into Texas through local taxes. When bureaucrats have a strong financial incentive to deliver better results, they will. And I love that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of, you know, just like there was an explosion of like effectively trade schools for software engineering. The same exact thing. You could do that for machining, plumbing.

electrical work, all those sort of like, you know, specialized categories. So let's go to number seven for $200 billion, one of the bigger ideas, create better funders of science in America. Lonsdale proposes allocating $200 billion over 10 years to establish new competitive funding bodies for scientific research, challenging the dominance of institutions like the National Institute of Health. He argues that the NIH has become risk-averse and bureaucratic, often stifling innovation by creating alternative organizations that reward high risk, high reward research and empower young

scientists, the U.S. can invigorate scientific progress. This is something we were just talking about in that group chat. Yeah, I think venture capital has like stepped in here to some degree because they'll be like, you know, the long journey team will like give some like researcher basically like 200K to two cap to be like just work on this like weird idea for a couple years. And that's like cool and we need that. like that's risk capital, but our government should also be giving like basically risk capital to like important sort of scientific pursuits. It goes to that discussion we were having in that group chat about like invention versus discovery. Just this idea that, you know, some of the biggest breakthroughs in science have been more discoveries than inventions, not very diligent. It wasn't really

else working at something. Yeah, lizard venom. Yeah, lizard venom is a good example with Ozempic, but even penicillin, I think, it's this, our friends who are referring to it as the gentleman scientist, the person who's just experimenting and testing things and then just lucks upon something really, really, really remarkable. So many important discoveries. And it's, and it's very hard to facilitate that these days in the traditional academic institutions or the typical tracks where it's like, there's a certain amount of time, you have to publish a paper, you have to get this many reviews and this many citations, and it's become too rigid. And so he does. definitely wants to pull it back from that.

So one thing that, you know, he suggests is saying that like a public scientific funder would be filling in and funding research gaps where innovation isn't profitable. And so there's so many, there's so many drugs that potentially have impact in like areas that they weren't initially like approved for that are non-profitable to fund research in because you might have to spend $20, $50 million, like proving out that something works. and then it's not, it's a generic drug. So there's no like margin to be made or like edge or like IP that you can create. And so there's so many different areas where that applies. And honestly, it's like the, oftentimes like bro scientists that are like doing this like research like on themselves. Right. In many ways like Brian Johnson is doing a lot of this on himself where he's just like,

I'm going to spend millions of dollars like figuring out how to sleep like five percent better. Because that's going to deliver like the best. I mean, some of the greatest. I mean, we're seeing this all over the place where I think, Gwern is probably one of the most respected, like, researchers on stimulants. Josie Zainer developed, like, her own vaccines during COVID and was, like, testing stuff on herself. It's crazy. And then Ala has, like, one of the most, she has one of the largest data sets on, like, sex-related social science.

Yeah. Can put out research that's, like, way, way more robust than anything you'd see. Yeah. So there's this weird, there's this weird model shifting to just, like, these independent researchers. But yeah, I mean, I think Joe is hopefully, it seems like he's optimistic about retooling some of the funding that does come from the government to drive innovation within these organizations. But let's go to number eight. He says, for $100 billion upend the energy future and put degrothers out of business. And his argument is that if you invest $100 billion to revolutionize the energy future, and put degrothers out of business.

sector by promoting abundant clean energy production, particularly through nuclear power and carbon capture technologies. He criticizes the nuclear regulatory commissions, obstructive processes, and advocates for its reform. And I've heard this so much from all the nuclear folks that there are, like when you're getting a new reactor design approved, you have to have an actual hearing for things that are completely uncontested. Yeah. Yeah, there's, they had a funny quote in here where the NRC was bragging and they said the 12,000 page application took less than 42 months to review. Can you imagine being the guy like building something and put together this like 12,000 page application that probably like could have been, it probably could have been an email, you know? Yeah, exactly.

And then you wait 42 months, you know, just to figure out if like you're good to go. Yeah. That is just like criminal, in my opinion. It's terrible. And he includes this incredible graph here of the cumulative nuclear construction permits and operational plants over time. And you can just see that after the 70s, the number of new operational plants just completely flat lines. And there's just no new development.

And I think it has started to tick up again. But it's nowhere near like the asymptotic curve that we thought we'd be on with energy two-tube-meter. So very, very depressing, but hopefully there can be, you know, really significant overhaul of the NRC. Joe advocates for starting by abolishing the NRC's awful incentive structure, conceived as a cost-saving measure, but which has backfired awfully. Congress forces the NRC to fund its budget through fees paid hourly by the very companies that regulates, not unlike a law firm or consultancy. If you were funded to regulate by the hour, how long would you take? It's like the worst possible incentive. Same thing with like the cost plus model within defense.

Yeah, very, very bad. If you're getting paid based on how much something costs, like you run up the costs. Yep. And let's go to number nine. Personal favorite. For $100 billion, give back the rest of the money. What a statement. Lawnsdale recommends returning the remaining $100 billion to the American people,

emphasizing the value of individual liberty and economic freedom. He believes that citizens are better equipped than central planners to allocate resources efficiently by giving the money back, perhaps through tax rebates or direct payments, individuals can make their own choices stimulating economic growth and just demonstrating trust in the populace. Yeah, so he positions this very well, which more people should understand, is that when the federal government does things like a quote-unquote stimulus check, they position it as a payment or a tax rebate. And that effectively implies that the money was never yours in the first place. But it was. It was your money that the government effectively

took from the citizens and the businesses, institutions in our country. And, you know, I think that the government should position that more of like, hey, we're giving you back. We sort of overtaxed. It's your money. I always like to spend it how you wish. Did you know that every single year, the United States government collects enough money and tax revenue to give every single citizen a 100% tax rebate? Is that? They could give every single person 100% off their taxes, but they keep the money for all these projects. It's just a total, it's just a tautology because obviously, whatever they take from you, they could give back. But it sounds shocking. It sounds very shocking. It sounds like one of those stats that's like, oh, you know, if they could give everyone a million

dollars. But no, it's really like whatever they're taking, they could just give back. So they have to justify what they're giving. And it has to make sense. And I think he has some great proposals there. Yeah, people don't realize that like income tax was illegal for a while in U.S. history, right? It was like it was something that the founding fathers were very against and the foundation of the country in many ways because it was like us telling the Brits, hey, look, like we don't, we don't like these taxes. Yeah. Let's, let's end this. Yeah, we've kind of like wound up with such a hodgepodge of like corporate taxes, income taxes. There's taxes on all over the place and people wind up moving around the country to find like their optimal blend.

But I think, I think it's the most interesting thing with with this is, is definitely to close on is that there's a shift from just burn it all down, stop everything to let's be more efficient with the money. Yeah, and I honestly like that I think Bellagie, it's more incremental. Bellagis like consistently had extremely interesting ideas and been right on a lot of stuff. Yep. And the area that I just strongly disagree with him on is he's like very like pro like exit. Like let's just leave and like rebuild from the ground up.

And I think that experiments like that should be run. at the same time, we want the best and brightest in America to be focused on how do we make this place a better place for everyone. Exactly. So it's a great movement. I love it. Well, thanks to Max for publishing that in Arena Magazine. You can go pick it up and give him a follow because it's a fantastic publication. Subscribe to the magazine.

Subscribe to the magazine. Before we dive in, should we indulge in a beverage? Yeah, sure. Always have a bunch of it. Oh, and thank you to enchilada's surfboarders. We received some beautiful coosies that we're enjoying very much. They're certified for milk only, but we're drinking Celsius in them. We'll figure it out.

Hopefully it works. How do I do this? So today we have organic coconuts. We always, let's see, it's a product of Thailand. So it came off the boat. I like that they send it in the nature's packaging. And no, you pull that off and then you go like that as you break it. And then you can pull this little thing off.

Okay. pull off the top then you got a little straw here little microplastics take this off and we record for many hours here in the studio so it's good to have a little we're like endurance athletes that need a little

like sugar boost along the way so these are delicious I think I got a little coconut meat in mind so it's you too I'm pretty jammed up jammed up, but we'll make it work. And thank you to Melissa's organic coconuts. That's good.

Delicious. Delicious. I love that. Do we, I think we have some. Let's go to some DMs. Do we have some personnel news? Oh, yeah. So we have a new segment on the show, some personnel news where we are tracking the biggest

moves, the biggest pickups, who's entering free agency, who's getting long contracts in tech. And our first deal or move. of this show is? Yeah, I mean, this is breaking news in the tech world, folks. We have a major move happening, and it's shaking things up as we speak. Brandon Jacoby, yes, that Brandon Jacoby, former product designer at Square and Cash App. The guy who's had his fingerprints on products used by millions of people is officially

making the leap. And after an absolutely electric stint as a first hire at Party Round where he built a product that was the talk of the town, Brandon Jacoby is now joining. You heard it here? second X. You heard it first on X. That's right. X just landed an absolute stud. And I think it's worth telling you a little bit about Brandon Jacoby. This guy is a grinder. We're talking 20 hour days in Figma every single day. If it's 1 a.m. If it's 4 a.m., Brandon is there locked in, pixel perfect, making magic happen. Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows their way around Figma

better than this guy. His taste, impeccable, attention to detail, unmatched. low ego, high output. We're talking about a technician, a craftsman, a relentless perfectionist. An absolute dog. So what does this mean for X? Well, they're bringing in a player who doesn't just make products. He makes phenomenal products. He's been in the big leagues, building for millions of users, and now he's suiting up to take X's game to the next level. This isn't just a higher. This is a franchise altering move. An absolute dog by every definition. Watch out tech world. Branden Jacobi's coming and he's ready to dominate. You have any details on the contract?

Yeah, I mean, he's an absolute dog. I think, you know, the deals weren't released. The details weren't released of this deal, but you probably think it's, you know, four-year deal, maybe one-year cliff. Seven-eight figures. Big, big deal for him. I mean, just look at the stats he's picked up. Former rookie of the year contender, potential future Hall of Famer, pushed millions of

pixels every year in, day in, day out. Extremely technical, extremely detail-oriented. And I'm really excited to see what he does this season. He's coming to a platform that we all use and love. It's the foundation of this podcast and our livelihoods, and we're excited to get this level of talent working on the product that we spend hours in that feed every single day. So thank you to Brandon for this move. And congrats to Axel on the pickup.

Big pickup. Big pickup. That's great. Let's go to some Q&A. We got a DM. We got a question from Mickey with the Blicky. He says, hey, guys, VC Mickey here. I got some great advice last week about Angel and Venture.

and starting small. I decided to take your advice and basically put my entire net worth into XRP. It's now up almost 80% over the last week. Can you guys offer any tips for risk management?

Man, my only advice here would be rotate out of that. Is this real? Did XRP really moon? I can't tell me's joking. I don't know. I love it. I love the...

It's up like 100%. Here we go. I love that risk on attitude. Here's what I would say. If I were Mickey, I'd be rotating into other risk assets like early stage startups. But, and the reason for that is I think that illiquidity is a feature when you got something like

XRP that's moving 100% in a week, get into something that's illiquid, get into something that's marked on maybe like an annual basis, something like a seed stage startup, just so you can go focus on other things, right? A lot of people get caught up into day-to-day price action with crypto. And that can be a huge distraction from actually creating enterprise value. you in your job, in your, in your company. And so anyways, get into something in a liquid, lock it up, lock in the gains. I like that. And it's a good move. Yeah, good luck out there. Our next DM comes from an anonymous poster who writes in, hey, do you have some time to

enlighten me on your experience with creating a consumer package goods company? How did you validate the market? I have a group of talented individuals that hit me up about an idea. I shared publicly, and I'm evaluating taking next steps. What do you think? How do you validate the market for a consumer packaged goods company? I've been through this a few different times, and I kind of broke it down as there's two different ways. One is kind of the Brian Johnson way.

You start talking about the idea and the problem that you want to solve extremely publicly become the face of that problem. So for him it's longevity. For Jocko, you know, it's performance in the gym, this like athletic militaristic style and then that fan base will will buy kind of anything from you the other is more product led more product driven where you're doing real r&D locking up a supply chain kind of like what the ridge wallets did a lot of our early stuff that lucy was around like fda applications patents stuff like that took a long time to get it going we weren't the face

of nicotine yeah and to some degree we still aren't but we have like a very narrow set You're kind of the face of name. Yeah. But it came later. Yeah, but it did come later. It wasn't like we went like, you know, influencer or brand first and then kind of were able to sell a commoditized product. We had to do something unique.

So I think a lot of it's like, well, what's your edge in this product? Can you be like an operational beast? Yeah. And then grow slowly. But what do you think? Another example. So launching Rora water filters actually tomorrow. that's an example of validating that opportunity was looking at the market, you know,

consumers are already spending billions of dollars on water filters. So it wasn't a question of do people buy water filters, are they going to want one? And so what we did with that is we took a popular water filter called a Berkey. And we looked at it and we said, how can we make this better on 10 different dimensions, right? So we made it way, way, way more effective. we went and did the hard work of getting it proved out that it actually works. And then we made the design better, the usability better, all these different things that we knew consumers cared about. And so we've spent somewhere in the seven figure mark on testing and R&D to get the product where it is today.

But we know that the product is going to be a hit because we took something that was already out there that consumers liked generally and we made it dramatically better. And so I think if you're most consumer product, Uh, you know, a friend of the podcast, John Fio has made products over the years that were like first of a kind, something like he made like the gravity blanket and something like that's much more binary of like people weren't really buying weighted blankets. Like they weren't really a thing until he created it. Um, but a lot of consumer products are like, you know, even, you know, looking at this on the table. It's not like people were already buying coconut water. It was like, hey, can we sell them the same product just like in the, in the original packaging.

Yeah. One of my favorite stories from Fio is, when he launched the moon pod, which is a, it's basically like a big bean bag, but it's even bigger and softer. He realized that he shot some video of, I think it was like a woman falling backwards and getting caught by the bag and just like falling into this really comfy bag in slow motion. And that one asset probably drove like a hundred million dollars in sales on Facebook. And he just knew that like that it was just a few frames. It was like almost like an animated gif. And it was, you know, a few seconds and it just stopped you in the feed. And so having that, like, what is the hook?

What is this one thing? So there's a bunch of different ways, but to validate the market, it can be like, it's so big and so obvious. And you have some innovation or you're so charismatic and you're this, you know, heroic influencer who's going to have millions of fans buying whatever you sell. Or you have some hook that you just know will go viral. There's a lot of companies that have done like stress tests or some other stunt. Liquid Death, a good example of like the brand just stood out so much that I'm sure if you ask them, how did you validate the market? Those guys behind Liquid Death would just tell you, well, like we looked at our brand deck that we built. We were laughing and we knew that it was going

to be good because it was, it was unique. And it was just going to pop. Like they just knew. Yeah. Every, um, uh, my wife invested in a company called Graza. Have you seen them? Yeah. Which is like a squeeze bottle, olive oil. Yeah. Yeah. And she invested in that company. pre-launch and she looked at that being like I know people like olive oil yep they have this like new form factor that was popularized by chefs they're going to put it into this new form factor yep and it's going to work really well on social because it's such a like dynamic way to use olive oil and so that was and they got to I don't know what their metrics are they'll probably do like a hundred million next year like some crazy number and so um you know sometimes with with consumer products

like I've found it's very binary like sometimes I look at something and I'm like this will not work. They launch it and it flops. And then sometimes I look at something I'm like, this will not work and it launches and it just rips. And timing has a big part to play in it. But then you need to look at like what is your edge with the product. Like with Lucy,

it was like early focus on like the regulatory aspect. With Rora, it was like, let's just spend longer and be more obsessed with design and efficacy than any other company and testing than any other company in the market. And then something like Grazo was like even more simple of like, let's just change the packaging. sell the exact same thing and it'll work well on social.

Yeah, it's kind of like, I mean, you should be able to boil it down to some sort of elevator pitch that just makes sense and you have a lot of confidence around. Yeah. What are you doing that's actually different? Yeah. And if it's just like, oh, we want to launch this because we think it's cool, like, you know, yeah, get out of there. You need to be able to articulate it much better.

Also, like, people that are considering building consumer products, like you need to go into it. Like, yes, if you have a hit consumer product, you can scale it very, very quickly now. Like, Fio is like a good example. of that when someone works like he scales it very quickly but more consumer products like like ridge ridge.com they'll do like 200 million top line this year but just operational excellence over almost like a decade and the first you know in like the third or fourth year was like a five million dollar business but it's like what what game are you playing yeah you have to understand like are you still going to want to do this product if in the first year you do 500k the second year you do a

million the next year you do three million the next year you do three million and then the next year you you do 10 and the next year, like, are you still going to be wanting to play that game if it's not a rocket ship? It probably means less venture capital. And it probably means higher ownership for the founders over the long term. You look at the stories of like Red Bull Monster, like these guys, they grind for years and years and years and then they pop because they're in a big market. And they do have the branding and formulation cracked, but they own enough to make it worth

it. And as long as you get, I think the real key for those consumer goods companies is like you have to work super extra hard. to get the first, to get over that first hump where you can actually be taking a salary that makes your life, like, worth living, basically. And then once you're flying business class and like covering your expenses, your kids are in good schools and stuff, then it's like, okay, well, I can grind and compound for a very long time. Yeah. But those first years where you're just making no cash flow and it's just brutal, it's just tough. Yeah. And I think that, um, it's very valuable. I think that the,

category that is, is the biggest trap is beverage because people look at a beverage like, Celsius and they're like, oh, Celsius does billions of dollars a year. They're like, oh, it's so simple. I can create an energy drink. And it's so... Went to every single CrossFit gym for like four years straight. Yeah, and did tastings for 12 hours a day. Yeah, it was laughed at and like product defects and problems and all this stuff. Anything that looks easy, I can guarantee you it's like deeply competitive. And beverage is an example of that. It's like the most cutthroat industry. Exactly. So we have a new segment on the show. Reply Guy of the month. Let's go. go.

Every month we're going to try and give an award to the biggest reply guy for the show. So get out there, reply to every post that we make, quote tweet us, retweet us, like us, all on X, send it around. Give us your best replies because you're going to want to win. You're going to want to win. You're going to want to win. This is a great honor. You're going to be on the wall here in the studio.

So this month's reply guy of the month is an intern at Red Letter AI. He's 18 years old. I see great things in his future. He says he's ex-future founders. He's at the University of Houston, studying econ and finance. Love that. He says he's right. EAC, views are my own.

And I didn't even know EAC would have, there was like left EAC or right E-A-Had. But cool for clarifying. He's out in Houston, Texas, and he has a wonderful, wonderful header image of Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, and Tim Cook hanging out together. I could see him in that same group at some point,

you know, if he keeps accelerating like this. For sure. And so this month's reply guy of the month is Amit Blesha. Yep. Congrats, Amit. You are the reply guy of the month. And he's a great honor. I love this about his profile.

I mean, good numbers for such a young kid. He joined in April of 2024. He's only been on X for a couple months. He's already got over 1K. This is the reply guy territory. Yeah. You got to be the reply guy to get to 1K. Then you can start doing the inside jokes, grind your way up to 10K.

And once it's 10K to get to 100K, it's got to be the cringe threads. And then once you're past 100K, it's just fake news all the time. He's on the path. He's in some community that's highlighted on his profile that just says the tealists. And it's only two members. He has like a community. It's just like him and one other dude. Him and his dog.

His absolute dog. His absolute dog. Like could just be a DM, bro. But I like that you're publicizing this. And he's followed by another friend of the show, Red Bull, futurist. Yeah. Also a great future.

So, congrats to Ameet. You are the reply guy of the month. There's never going to be another first honorary reply guy of the month for,

yeah. And to be clear, reply guys is the spiritual thing. Like you can be a woman. Yes. Whatever gender can be a reply guy.

Your thing could be quote tweets. You don't actually have to reply. It could also just be spamming our DMs constantly. Yep.

There's a bunch of ways to get here. And there will be many more. Many more. Many more. Let's go to the time. line and then we're going to start working in some promoted posts. Because we ran a poll and you guys wanted at least 60 ads in every episode.

So we're going to do our best. Try to get there. It's going to take us some time to get there, but we're going to do our best. Let's go to Nicole whisk off. She says, the gift that starting from rock bottom affords you is having an insane appetite for risk. You've been there before. You can crawl your way out again if you need to.

I like that. I don't know. Yeah, she talks about coming from nothing. What a badass story. Now she's running, what, 50 million AUM? No, I mean, that's the last fun. That's the last fun. So it's more.

Quite a bit more. Yeah. Let's go. Yeah, I mean, this just goes back to the Josh Wolf quote, chips on shoulders. Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. Let's go. We need a big Josh Wolf. Yes.

Yes. He's going on Mount Rushmore of pithy thought leaders. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love it. Yeah, I think that I honestly, resonate with this so much that at a certain point, you need to know when to not go risk off, but like not continue to risk at all. I remember when you're...

Post-YC, our burn rate was 3K a month for three people. Isn't that insane? That's amazing. Because we paid our rent a year in advance. Yeah. Because we were just like, just take that out of the bank balance so we don't even have to think about it. Yeah. And I think we were like a credit rent.

So we just take the, and I think our, I think our rent in the tenderloin in this like complete, disgusting hovel of an apartment. It's technically a one bedroom. It had a closet that one guy was living in. I was sleeping in the living room. And it was $1,500 a month. And every time I sell someone in San Francisco, like, oh, $1,500 a month per bedroom, like, that's not bad. I was like, no, $1,500 a month for the whole thing. The whole thing.

In San Francisco. Yeah. But it's like if you're willing to go down to living on 3K a month for 3.000. for three people that can write software and build stuff and just get stuff done and call people just willing to do all of the different problems. It's like, yeah, there's just no way you can be stopped. Because you can get 3K a month from so many different places. I think more, like, it becomes really challenging when you have a family. Because then like your kids are in school, like there's like real fixed costs. And I think people don't really recognize that. I tell founders

this all the time. Like if you're like, if you're 28 and you want to like start a company and you're deciding, well, should I work for like this company? It's like, no, like go like so risk on right now because four years from now you're going to have a kid or something like that. You're getting married and like your fiance's dad is going to be like sitting you down and be like, all right. Like the startup thing was like cute, but like you're about to like marry my daughter. Yeah, yeah.

You got to like, you know, really get together. But more, more founders should like raise a $50,000 angel round and like go live in like the middle of nowhere. Seriously. Just like grind and grind and grind and grind. I mean, my first fundraise was $17,000. And me and my co-founder made it last six months. We almost made me want to hit the size gong for a second.

With a tiny little. There you go. The tiniest little size gong. But yeah, I mean, we made it work. Like we spent a lot of it very quickly and then stretched it out ever so slightly. No, I remember running the calculus, you know, coming to L.A. being like, if I don't make this happen, like I have $1,200 a month to spend. Yep.

I have exactly until this date. to like be profitable and like be like able to pay myself more and if I don't like I'm dead yep uh let's go to Gabby Goldberg a second time on the show she willed it into existence I think I think third I think maybe third but she's a regular at this point yeah she's a regular but uh we we love gabby here uh she says part of full deserves more credit for making random gatherings great again and it's a photo of the Jeremy Allen White look-alike crowned in Chicago. There was a Jeremy Allen-white look-alike contest, including a toddler, dressing up like chefs from the TV series The Bear.

Have you watched The Bear? I have not. I watched the first season. It's pretty good. Not a huge. TV guy. Mostly founders' podcasts. Unfortunately, no video.

So I can't stream it. But no, it, Partifle has gone, like, extremely mainstream. Yeah. Like you have this like it just would be a tech thing. And like it kind of proves that like tech is mainstream. You can start something and like build it like the tech audience and then expand out from there. I think even like a lot of things like Woop and ORA Ring were like very like insular like tech community products. But in many ways this is I think we should go dig up like the VC thought leadership of like blog posts.

Like it's time to unbundle Facebook. Right. Because I think about like Facebook events. That was the thing. That was the alternative to Partifle. And Partifle... Maybe X should pick them up and roll that in. X should pick up.

X should absolutely pick up Partifle. Partly because I think it would be a... I don't think they're monetizing yet. Last I checked and the CEO's like jokes about this quite a lot online. She's like, you know, we're just like giving this thing away. We're glad people like it. Do you know, like paperless post, which is like kind of like the billionaires partifle, is extremely expensive.

You have to buy tokens to invite everyone. They have some sort of like digital currency that intermediates things. And it's so expensive. When I see that, if I'm getting invited to like a VC dinner and it's paperless post versus Partifle, I'm like, okay, I like this.

I think it's going to be some ballers. It depends. It could be some boomers or some ballers. Boomers and ballers. Yeah, yeah. That's one of the other. Let's go to East Village guy. He says,

why are you a grown man telling me which AP class you took. So he's talking about like accounts payable classes, like to learn how to do ramp stuff? To learn how to do your books? To close your books. Okay. That seems totally reasonable. I would love to know what AP classes people take, especially if they're going to be working in a finance org, like high performanceing, a high performance finance org. Ramp should actually do more to get into the college curriculum. Right. Yeah. You should be able to take AP. That's the number one. That's the number one if you're in. AP AP AP. A dance placement accounts payable. This is what we need to be taken. Exactly. I can honestly start.

I've never had anybody tell me what AP classes they took. It's kind of an interesting thing to know, though. I wouldn't be mad if somebody told me. Especially with something interesting. We appreciate continuous learning. So if you learn, if you took some AP dinosaurs class and like you're still obsessed with dinosaurs and now you're getting into dino, excavation, expedition. Investing in dynos.

Then that's cool. That's cool. I like it. I don't see a problem with it. East Village guy. Take it easy. Aaron Sloanov, repeat guest on the show, says, I'm convinced that basic business, economics, money, education should be mandatory in middle school.

Here we go. He needs to be taking advance placement accounts payable. And it's a quote tweet from Union Made who says, I worked an eight-hour shift today on register and made $168 before taxes. I rung up $3,500 in sales in those eight hours in my little cafe with no seating in South Brooklyn. and so they're kind of complaining. I hope he was wearing gloves for all those receipts that he was touching. For sure.

Unless his T's really high. And then in that case, you should use the receipts to kind of bring that testosterone down from the Phafos. Yeah, people always say this that like, oh, they should teach, you know, how to do your taxes in school. And I couldn't disagree more. I think that you should definitely just be studying like the great books and Shakespeare and the Aeneid and the Iliad and the Aeneid and the ASEA. Yeah, because there's nothing in life that, those are timeless. Education is like a force.

function for learning things that you're not going to have to learn in life. And most people will graduate school and never think about Shakespeare again. Exactly. When it couldn't be more important. Yes. And there's a million ways to pick up this on the job very quickly. There's so many other resources. There's a million different ways to consume basic business education through nonfiction.

And there's so many great startups that will do your taxes for you. Exactly. I actually very much disagree with this take. And I think that schools should focus me. much more on, I think this is a little bit of what's happening at the University of Austin, kind of a return to the classics. Yeah, I mean, I have the great books series right there. Yeah, and just facilitating like my-

It's very hard to find time to read Tolstoy. Yeah. Like, that's not something that I'm forced to do every April. Yeah. But I will be forced to learn a little bit about the tax code. Yeah. And I can figure that out. Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm, I'm fine with going back to. And school is like a forcing, like, like, let's force people to do things that are, that are, like, interesting right my dad was a high school teacher and he taught a class project make which was some combination of like robotics and programming and wood wood shop and things like that and so they would like build and launch rockets like out on the football field yeah like do things that like maybe that the nerds will do on the weekends but like the average students should be exposed to that kind of thing yep that's great um and schools you know have a have a role to play there yeah so the sales bull says we fire hr and pay the sales team double and it's the picture of Don Draper. This should be, this, this is funny coming from the sales guy. He's like, he's like, give me it, give me a raise. Yeah. Give me a raise.

Yeah. Uh, but anyways, usually paying your best sales people double is like pretty good, uh, good way to spend money. Yeah. It really resonated 12K likes. People are really, I'm unsurprised that his following is. Yeah, but I think this is less how much people love sales guys and more how much people hate HR.

Yeah. because HR is always seen as like a drag on the company. But, I mean, it's getting easier and easier with more like automated HR tools. Like you can, you can build a pretty sizable company without a dedicated HR person for a long time. Yeah, you're on Rippling and then, you know, it has so many bugs that you want to, you know. Yeah, yeah. I think I think you could, yeah, I mean, it's interesting that there's not more, like there's the outsource CFO, like, where they call partial CFOs. It's weird that there haven't been more of those for HR.

No, there are. There are. Because that seems like much more like in line with like the startup ethos than brings. There's a lot of like $300 a month. You get the software and will help you. And there's a personal consultant that comes in. Is it good? It's funny because like Chimoth got like so much shade for being like HR should be like your legal team.

But like the, but like the biggest HR issues that people have like tend to be better suited for outside council to like deal. with because it's like end up being like extremely charged you know issues with with employees. I wonder if there'll be a little bit more of like a re restructuring of where HR sits in the organization as we go into like the next generation of companies like how a lot of marketing teams have technical people on their staff now like recruiting is obviously super critical in the HR function and then the general counsel of the legal stuff is super critical. So maybe you should kind of disaggregate into a finance person that does the compliance stuff.

Team building. Legal person. Yeah. And then the team person, the team building honestly should just be an extension of the CEO and the culture. So I would want a CEO's chief of staff to decide we're doing a happy hour because the CEO likes this place and this would be great for the CEO to come and meet with all the employees. And then the recruiter should honestly be living within the functional units of the engineering team

and live right there and be technical. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I could see like the HR function kind of just diffusing without throughout the organization instead of building up like this massive longhouse in your organization.

Massive longhouse. Yeah, massive longhouse. Yeah, yeah. Go over our HR team is over at the Longhouse building. Yeah. You can use the map. It's like, that would be a good name for the outsourced part-time consultancy for HR.

Yeah. Just like Longhouse consulting. Yeah, yeah. Like let us be your long house. Yeah, yeah. Longhouse is a service. T.O. says, New Life Goal, having a tweet printed by the Tech Bros Pod. Well, congratulations, Tio. It's happened. Today is the day you got your post printed. I don't know how to pronounce XEat. I think we live online. Is it Zet? Zed. We live so online that like I couldn't pronounce cryptops either. Somebody pointed out. I don't even know Tio, Teo. Who knows? Former like Dylan who'd been on the show pointed out. You know how you could say like, oh, I'm on tech Twitter. I'm on, you know,

like crypto Twitter, Finn Twitter. There is not that same language for X. Sure. Like I'm on Tech X. Tech X. Tech X. I'm on FinX. It doesn't exist and it's actually a key barrier to growth right now because we all of us on tech Twitter, tech X, maybe we just make it TechX. TechX sounds like Ted X, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Really, really dumb. version of time. I mean, the base version's already really great bad. We actually need to add Ted X to our enemies list. Oh, it's so bad.

There's smart people that have gone up there, but by and large, by and large, some of the worst takes of all time. The most blue-pilled shit I've ever seen. The worst takes of all time. Oh, did you know cancer was cured every single time? Every year they have someone stand up and say cancer is cured. It's like, come on. It's not cured.

We're not there yet. Let's go to Jen over at Anderol. She says, it's live. Anderle exclusives.com. So they did a drop. Anderle has selected eBay for charity to host this auction. 100% of the proceeds will benefit Blue Star families. And so did you see this?

They're auctioning off pieces of wreckages from tests that they've run. So amazing. It's basically loot crate drops. There's different tiers. There's rare, epic, legendary tiers. And they're not using it as a profit center. They're using it to give back, which I think is really cool. I don't know.

Maybe they should be using it as a profit center. I think I'm actually pro-profit. I just think I just am in favor of companies that generate so much, so much profit from their core products that they're able to use that same skill set to give back. And obviously, Blue Star Families are fantastic. And it's a fantastic charity. We love Blue Star families. But I just love that it's a very unique, a very unique drop.

We've been talking about this how like every company has a T-shirt. Yeah. But only Xcel nicotine pouches has a briefcase. and a watch and a Rolex and more brands and more companies should lean into understanding like what is the expression of your brand

in terms of merch I was talking to another founder of a unicorn who I was saying like like you're yeah you're a tech company but like what if your tech company was a car like what car would it be and don't tell me it's a Tesla because that's what every single person says

I'm a tech company the avatar of my brand is a cider truck. And it's like, that's fine, but that's also just the avatar of the Tesla brand. You need to express yourself differently. And are you an F-150 or are you a Corvette? Like, those are two wildly different cars. And you should be able to immediately say,

based on your brand, oh, we're more of a Corvette than a F-150. Yeah. Or whatever. The Aurora systems of Porsche 9-11 of water filters. There you go. And so this is a merch drop that feels uniquely Anderl. as opposed to just a t-shirt, which I'm sure they'll be selling and they'll sell other merch. But when I think of like the merch that I want from Anderl, I think of like hiking gear,

like almost tactical gear, not like fully military gear. Stuff you can wear on the range. But something that's like that. And I honestly don't even care if it's just them going and finding a great brand and just like, honestly just throwing like an Anderle pin on it. That's what Founders Fund does a lot. They'll give out these bags and there's just a pin on it. But they're really nice bags, and I really like them.

You're much more likely to use them. Exactly. And you can always take off the pin if you want. They didn't have to go and get some white labler to make them a fake version of the bag. They just give you the actual bag with the pin on it. But it's still like an avatar of the brand, and it's still an expression, which I think is really, really cool. Yeah, and brands need to know what they're actually doing with like non-core products, like merch. It's like you want to be building connection to the broader community.

and like likeability. Yep. And usually a shirt is not the best way to do that. You can get a lot more coverage by doing something like this where somebody's like, oh, I actually own a piece of Anderil's like drone system. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's really cool.

And I always love artifacts. We have a lot of artifacts in the studio here. And a lot of the investors at Founders Fund have like a whole set of artifacts from like, oh, this commemorates like the SpaceX deal or the Anderl deal. And I think that's really, really cool. Yeah, and I like this too, because if you're very on,

line on X and like accelerationist you know defense tech oriented getting a piece like from here would be amazing but they can also go give this to a politician and be like you know throw it on their desk and be like this paperweight don't forget about us yeah this was blown to it's a great paperweight yeah well let's stay on defense tech and go to ben coleman he says quote we have a five star general on our board of advisors true story and it's the uh inglorious bastards meme of the guy holding up three the wrong way because Germans do the three this way. You know this way? Yeah, yeah. And so it's detecting that you're not one of us.

Yeah. And we know that it's not real. Because, of course, you can't have a five-star general right now because it's not a time of war. Right. Right. So very embarrassing for whoever he did that. Yeah, what I've seen in defense tech is like a lot of, there's people that will be publicly

out there of like, oh, I'm a general. And then they'll use that to like get sort of advisory opportunities. And then once they're actually in the deck, then they're like, well, and I actually like put this like very specific title like eighth brigadier blah blah blah and it's like ends up being much more specified and it doesn't sound nearly as cool and so bless their hearts are sort of like using that like high level title to like land private market opportunities yeah I wonder how valuable having a four-star general is on your board because we hear stories about some really helpful people like Chris Brose at Anderol like

was McCain's chief of staff, came in, like really runs that organization, like full-time employee, like very, very beneficial. But then you also hear stories about, like, didn't some general join the board of, I think Mattis joined the board of Theranos. And like, it was like, what does you know about that? It was very controversial at the time.

And like, if you're a board member, like, you should know. I think that was the story of Mattis or something. But yeah. Yeah. Before we dive into the next one on the subject of defense tech. We have a promoted post from Allen control systems. They say looking for a fast-moving high-growth opportunity in defense tech. We are hiring for several roles across engineering and operations. A few of our featured openings are senior mechanical design engineer, electrical

embedded engineer, and an unreal systems developer. You can view all of Allen control systems openings and apply at Allen control systems.com slash company, numeral sign careers. improve your links ACS you guys can do better than that but anyways fantastic company ACS is building AI gun turrets and gun systems for counter drone use so they basically have built a product that can take out you know without any human intervention drones that are you know fast moving across the battlefield and so amazing opportunity they have their their first products is very defensive, but going to save many lives on battlefields across the world. So thank you to ACS for innovating in this space. Thanks to ACS. Let's go to Jason Liu. He says, if you stayed in Canada,

were you truly that ambitious? Got him. I love, I love some hate on an un-American country like Canada. Very un-American. It's objectively one of the most un-American because so close. They could just say, hey, we want to be part of this awesome team. We want to join up. 51st. Let's come over here. I would be surprised if Canada doesn't try to front run the moon to become the 51st state, right? Interesting.

Yeah. Does that be kind of like a, you know, the moon's going to get a lot of attention once it becomes a state. Yep. And, you know, it would be the first new state in quite a long time. The 50s is like a nice round number. Being that 51st state, big opportunity, I can see a lot of competition for it. Yeah. That's a lot.

And Canada, we would welcome you with open arms. I know a lot of friends of the podcast, Jeremy Gaffon, Sanporee. Jeremy's from Canada? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because he was at tiny. He was at tiny, remember? It's in Vancouver. Okay.

But he, like, grew up there? He's born there? It's brutal. Brutal. Base in New York now. Okay, good, thank God. Thank God. We got a good one.

So he is ambitious. He didn't stay in Canada. No, but there's something to be said for like, at the same time, we would welcome Canada, but I respect all the Canadians that are staying there and trying to make it better and fix the place. Yeah, no, I agree. We love our Canadians. All my favorite Canadians are U.S. residents, but that's also because I spend more time with them. Yeah, exactly.

And Shopify, fantastic company from Canada. Fantastic company. And University of Waterloo, Fantastic Engineering. Also good. Lots of respect. and a lot of companies have like engineering hubs there. Yeah. And it is a beautiful country.

So we love Canada. Let's go to unusual Wales. They say, Ken Griffin of Citadel says he's invested in nuclear and it's the future. I love these accounts just show they just like say something that's just like could potentially be like very out of context because it's a big account. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. fact. Ken Griffin is a long nuclear. I want nuclear powered high frequency trading, right? Like I want, like, I want to be giving these high frequency trading companies, we need to be giving nuclear power to market makers, right? To increase financial innovation and the speed at which money moves. I actually wonder if energy is a big, big issue for the high frequency traders.

Like, I know that Jane Street is advertising on Dorcasch Patel's podcast, trying to recruit, I believe Kuta engineers and machine learning engineers. So they've done a lot of AI stuff, but I'm not sure how scale-bound they are right now. A lot of their early stuff was very deterministic. It was written in this programming language called O'Kammel. Well, and a lot of their strategies were location-based. They were like, how do we get to within 10 feet of where the trade is being executed?

You know that on the NASDAQ, they have a rule where even if your server is closer, there's a thousand feet of cable between you and the main. server no matter what so that everyone has a level playing. Laws don't work. So we're going to like physically enforce this. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's Flashboards has a great anecdote about like digging this huge tunnel across.

Probably a good business to be selling a thousand exchange to stock exchange. It's probably a good business to be selling those like thousand foot cables because they probably need to be replaced all the time because it's like, yeah. Hey, it's too slow. I need to. Yeah. It's got to be fresh. But yeah, I mean, if the trading algorithms wind up moving to something that looks like an LLM where it's very scale-bound, like you're going to see huge data center buildouts to, it's going to be a new race, just like the LLM stuff.

But I haven't heard anything about that. We should dig into that more to see. I mean, I think at this point he's probably just making the bet on the fact that the LLM companies and the consumer AI companies will need energy for their data centers. So he's investing in nuclear. But this is interesting because, you know, a year ago, people started talking about, okay, what's after Nvidia? Envidia is pumping. Yeah.

Energy is clearly key. Maybe nuclear is the next thing. But it was very much like a cocktail position. People talked about it, but they weren't actually moving the market. Now the market's starting to move and some of the nuclear stocks are starting to go off. Well, we talked about this before. But they're still not as crazy as Nvidia. It's worth bringing up again.

Four years ago at Hereticon, nuclear was a heretic. You know, being pro-nuclear was still heretical. Now it was the most normy take that you could have. So, yeah. Ken Griffin is just kind of putting a stamp on that. Yep. Let's go to Sarah Hess. Second time on the show.

Can't beat these margins. It's a screenshot of the rare Anderol relic, recovered crash component from Anderol R&D tests. And the bid, I mean, it hasn't even ended. There's still three days in this, and it's already over $1,000. It's pretty awesome. Amazing.

And, yeah, margins are fantastic. Going to those families. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because it's essentially free since it was just wreckage anyway. but yeah i wonder if anybody figures out that like the actual metals and like if you got the right piece like the metals itself would be like worth like more yeah tungsten and break it down melt it down some enterprising uh you know very online person you know they do that with uh like

hypercars when they're whenever there's a crash there's a community that will find okay yes like a la ferrari crashed in this place let's go and dig through the rubble and like figure out if like maybe some random piece got thrown clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like a thousand dollar piece. It's like, it's like diving for treasure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Supercar crashes.

A whole community because like if you get one, you know, like clutch or something, be really valuable because they don't make them that much or something. Yeah. That's great. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from Nico runs a company called Default. 76% of qualified leads, book an inbound meeting with default. We try to help customers think of demo requests as ones who fall into two buckets.

Demo qualified and two not demo qualified. Most of our customers only show a scheduler to leads who qualify for a demo. So Nico's building an amazing platform, an enterprise product called Default that helps other enterprise companies sort and qualify and book demos. So he's been at this for quite a while, backed by Kraft. now is starting to see some pretty fantastic results, became buddies with Nico a few years ago at this point, and their execution has been fantastic.

So if you're dealing with processing inbound leads, go over to default, hit up Nico, DM him on X, and he will get you. He's the kind of guy that if you DM him right now, he'll jump on to do a demo of the product with you in like five minutes. Well, if you're qualified. If you're qualified. So he'll qualify you.

That's part of his job and what default does. So thank you to default. Let's go to Val. He says something that would let us buy and trade seconds from future ad slots would be lit. And so he's pushing us to let the average viewer and fan invest and profit from our enterprise. Future ad spots. That's actually kind of interesting. Like if you want to go long technology brothers,

you should be buying up our 2026 Q4 inventory and then reselling it when the time comes. That's great. So yeah, maybe if somebody wants to create a platform market for this, we'll potentially get behind it. Yeah, yeah. Where it's like we could be doing the show live on spaces and we're like, oh, we actually got a higher bidder or hit the printer. Print it out. Yeah, yeah. You can buy, if you buy the ad slot within, you know, it's kind of like a car auction.

where like after the two-minute thing gets down if nobody does it. It can buy the slot. But then you buy the slot. Once it's physically printed, like it is locked in. It's locked in. The price is locked. Yeah, he was saying you wanted to invest and I said, would he prefer a SPAC or a shit coin or both? Both at the same time hasn't been tried yet. Not real.

But Trump is kind of experimenting with it. Liberty coin and Truth Social. He's kind of got both. Yeah, yeah. And then also lots of merch drops. He doesn't do ad reads though. He should have an ad product. I'm actually,

so, so can you actually, is brought to you by my pillow? Is there something? Is there a reason that Trump has not done his own podcast? Because the guy clearly likes very profitable. The future, I'm telling you.

The future is the president will have a podcast. The president will have a podcast? 100%. We should create a polymarket for that. Will Trump have his own podcast by 2027? Well, I think J.D. will. And I think J.D. will bring on his, his, like,

associates and whoever he's thinking. Like, think about all the buzz that's been happening. around like who's going to get Department of Transportation, who's going to get commerce, who's going to get defense. And it's, and the way these people are introduced, it's usually like a screenshot of a press release that goes viral. People are like, who's this? There's like a couple mainstream media write-ups. And then a video clip will go viral from whatever that person said on some other podcast. So like, they'll be like, this is the new Secretary of Defense, like so based or so terrible depending on who is posting. And it's just a clip from them on a

podcast, but how much cooler would it be if you could just watch, you know, Trump or whoever the president is sit down with the person and say, hey, American people, I'm thinking about this person for Secretary of Transportation. We're going to talk for an hour. And then you're going to roast them. Roast them in the comments. Yeah, roast them in the comments. We'll have a poll.

But Trump, if Trump had his own podcast, he could get that podcast to a $100 million run rate just on ads. Oh, totally. Which would be, which would be a hundred times. the run rate of truth social. Oh my God. And maybe he could take, you could be the first podcast

to go public, right? He could. And then you could just have, like, you could just be a, you could have all of America own a piece of, yeah.

So anyways. I mean, this is the thing. Like, didn't Churchill, no, it wasn't Churchill. FDR did like the fireside chats.

Those were really popular. Well, you know how there's like, America, weekly things. I think even Obama did stuff that was like weekly dispatches about like,

here's what's going on. Well, I feel like these are less of a thing now, but isn't there like present? accounts for there's like there's an X account that's for the first lady yeah yeah yeah there's at POTUS and there's at Donald J. Trump yeah yeah yeah at POTUS changes hands exactly exactly so Trump's like I'm not going to blow this like if Trump if Trump was actually

on the at POTUS account just ripping bangers that account he's like I'm not going to 10x this for my future like for somebody who's going to use that audience against me like in like four years yeah I would love to listen to a podcast. I could see J.D. booting up at POTUS again, though. I mean, I think Vivek Ramoswami is going to do it because he's already doing vlogs and he clearly understands like the modern media stuff. He's buying BuzzFeed. He can use all the BuzzFeed, you know, resources to kind of craft his own media strategy and really level up from there.

Go to John Fio. He's been on the show before. The Fiorentino family. He says, hospitality. He's quoting Tony Seguera, who says, President Trump at Real Donald Trump is requiring Volodymere Zelensky to wear a coat and tie when he meets the president going forward. And John says, in the same way you weren't trusted if you didn't show up in a slouchy hoodie to a meeting in the last 20 years, we're about

to snap back to suits as a filter. Speaking my language. Speaking our language. You'll want to make sure you're wearing a Fiorantino. label soon because he has a suit company. So John came in very clutch at Hereticon. I didn't have time to get my own suit, sort of ironed and dry cleaned at the hotel. So I was able to wear Furentino label suit. It was fantastic. Got a lot of compliments, turned a lot of heads. It's great. And it was all thanks to the fine fabrics and fit of his label. But yeah, I think it's kind of funny that you remember these like memes where like if your VC is wearing shoes like this like they're gonna like try to buy 50% of your company or like if your VC like is even wearing a suit at all

like you're fucked you know and I think that like trends obviously oscillate from one side to another like very dramatically yep and it became like the thing to wear like allbirds and joggers and like hoodies and and that so clearly is just like wrong yeah right it's the same thing when you have over 50 million at AUM you need to wear a tie. You were you called me like very upset the other day because you sat down in business class on a flight next to somebody and they were just dressed like very sloppy and you were like physically ill from just being like in their presence saying like this is so wrong. You should know that if you're flying business class you should be wearing at least a collared shirt. And you know we hope that we're on the forefront you know with people like Fio and you know our

own podcast. We hope that we're on the forefront of a new movement in tech to just like dress, uh, dress for the, for the, for the job. So if you see a tech, a capital allocator out there in casual clothes, maybe on a podcast,

just send them a nice note in the replies. Just tell them like, you know, love what you're saying. Love your business model, but would it kill you to put on a suit? Exactly. Exactly.

Let's go to Josh Miller. You're a capital allocator, not an HVAC technician. Exactly. Let's go to Josh Miller. He says, I've said before and I'll say it again, Again, from antitrust to AI agents, 2025 will be the year of the web browser.

More and more signs by the day. Interesting. So I think this was in response to news. I think that there were actually, yeah, Chrome potentially being forced to spin out, which is very, potentially very wild just because Google is so, and all of Google's products are so deeply integrated into Chrome at this point. It's hard to imagine a Chrome that's not. that's sort of like account agnostic it's probably not that hard to build but you know that

alphabet is spent alphabet's strategy was like hey like search is our golden goose let's build up these sort of like walls all around it via android via Chrome so that like we have we're building up this sort of like fortress and uh if it gets spun out that'd be cool like Chrome has probably billions of users yeah and the perplexity CEO was joking about buying it yeah yeah yeah Which would be funny. Very funny. Which would be a great scene of the simulation. But yeah, like, you know, Josh and the browser company, like, it's called the browser company for a reason.

They were set up to, like, innovate in this area. Oh, he's the CEO of the browser company? Yeah. Oh, that makes sense now. Yeah. Yeah. So he, you know, they built a fantastic browser. They're now focused on, they're now focused on building sort of agentic browser products.

Got it. I'm at, you know, they haven't shared a ton yet. But it's, you know, products that will browse for you on your behalf. Well, then this is kind of interesting because just recently they said that they were kind of pivoting away from ARC as a core browser product, but he's still very bullish about the web browser broadly. He just wants to find a browser company needs to do. Find a SPAC. There's like hundreds out there. SPAC, buy Chrome.

And suddenly Josh doesn't have to compete with the big, bad Chrome. He can just be the Chrome. I wonder how much Chrome is worth. It's probably not cheap. As a standalone business. I mean, I'm pretty sure the, isn't the deal for, doesn't Google pay Apple like $10 billion? So you buy Chrome and then you license just to be the default search engine on iOS. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's 20. I thought it was 20 billion. Yeah. So think about Chrome's got to be like almost in a similar install base size and even maybe even more valuable or somewhere valuable. So like you have $20 billion of essentially just net income. Like you run a multiple on that. Like it's a 200 billion. million dollar asset like something in that range like it's a lot it's not it's not hard

would be a big spec yeah it's gonna be tough i mean i guess they could just do like a demurge and just have two tickers and they're just two different companies well what it would it would be have to be but then what isn't then the new companies like if they're beholden to their shareholders isn't the most profitable thing that you could do just go relicense the product back to google like you're talking about yeah that's exactly what i'm do. And if you can't do that, then it's worth way less, right? You'd have to look at like Mozilla and some of these other big browsers and be like, well, what is this actually worth? Yeah. Very interesting. Let's go to Jason Carmen.

Fantastic filmmaker, a good friend of mine and of the show. Jason says, most people don't realize how big of a deal, Starship is. Ahead of Today's Flight 6, here's a first look inside a new series I'm working on called Frontier Films. The first one is all about new space. And this actually got reposted by Elon. Big. I mean, it's amazing. Jason has crushed it and he's making, like, the documentaries are better than Netflix stuff now.

Yeah. Like, it's funny. No, if Netflix is smart, they'll go and say, hey, the next series you do. They should. Just give it to us. HBO, honestly. Yeah, yeah. Because, um, no, he's on that path and it's honestly the path that all media is going

on. Yep. To get, to actually break into traditional media and, like, get the Netflix or the HBO or be on TV. You got to be big online first. Otherwise, like, you just don't understand attention. And like, it's just too risky. Yep. So Jason is, and, yeah, I think, like, he's carved out his own niche of, like, I am a filmmaker.

Yep. In technology, which, like, the fact that when you think filmmaker and technology, I think of you and Jason. And in many ways, like, you were, like, a YouTuber, right? More of a YouTuber. He's, like, filmmaker, multi-platform. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, his whole background is filmmaking. I kind of, like, chose YouTube because it was some white space.

A lot of people had substacks, and I was like, I want to do something different. I like, I'm kind of a camera nerd. This guy's been, like, making films for his entire life, like dreaming of making films. And so I'm super excited for where he was going with it. And it's funny because there is already a Netflix documentary about SpaceX, but it wasn't made from the perspective of someone like Jason who's actually worked inside of a space company at Astronis and really gets it and really talks to the founders and the investors and understands the whole three days.

So it's just going to be so much better. And you just know that it's going to, it's going to, it's going to, rip. And he has a whole, he has a whole bunch of different products now. Like, he started with the S3 series doing these, like, kind of micro company deep dives on like pretty early stage companies, but they were really, really polished, really great interviews. Then he did his interview series. Then he also did some flashback stuff where he did Bell Labs. And now he has these frontier films. And so he's, he's like fully building a, a new movie studio, essentially, like truly going into. And showing like how efficient it can be. Like he doesn't have some massive

production company. Well, it's because he's actually. an individual contributor. He knows how to use a camera. He knows how to use a microphone. He doesn't need to spend $100,000 on every single thing because he knows how to do it himself. He can do it solo, but then that allows him to hire the best. And so it's going to be massively successful. He embodies the technology brother's mentality, which is doing it for the money, right? He's doing it for the love, but like this guy is going to make millions and millions and millions of dollars, making important films pushing humanity forward through, you know, he's basically a marketing channel for a lot of really important companies.

So thank you to Jason for doing what you do and doing it for the money. Thank you, Jason. Let's go to Gary Tan. He says, this company went from zero to 500K ARR in the last eight weeks. Lots of people do AI due diligence for private equity, but this is the first one that outputs all the analysis

natively in Excel files that analysts slash principles can understand and modify from formulas up. And it's a repost of YC congratulating one of their portfolio companies. Yeah, so this makes a lot of sense. Like any time you can go after like this company is replacing people that today make between like 80 and like $250,000 a year doing like just like keyboard work like modeling. And it's one of those things like it will probably maybe already is or very soon will be better outputs than like the humans that would do it. And for like a 10th or like you know even 5% of the cost something. But importantly it still allows you to have a tunable model at the end of the day.

It's kind of like, what was that company that Teagueis bought that was, it was a Canolest, I think it was the name. And Canalist would allow you to download a DCF that was kind of pre-populated with the metrics. There's always been Excel templates for various public companies. You can get like a Cap IQ or Bloomberg integration to pull all those formulas in. But allowing a company to do this in the private markets with just like the proprietary data. And so much of the work is just scraping stuff out of differently form. differently formatted Excel sheets, just doing the translation.

And that's where AI is like so valuable right now, just taking a bunch of messy stuff and copying it over and cleaning it up. Like that's where AI really, really flourishes. If you're an analyst or an associate and you're worried about AI taking your job, you should be looking at this being like, no, it's not going to take my job.

I'm just going to do more deals, right? So before it might have taken you a week to build this model or 24 hours, now you're going to be able to build it and get on to the next one. Yep, yeah, yeah. It's just going to increase of a lot. It's everything that we're seeing in art,

in filmmaking where you can accelerate with some AI generated music or some AI generated content of where I fill in the background. Like there's still artistry. They're still going to be creativity. Yeah, you're making it back and you need the right image for a certain slide. Exactly. And it's going to be the same thing with building these models. It's going to be something where you're just using this to fill in all the annoying

problems that you would normally have to grind at for nights and weekends. and you can grind on nights and weekends on more deals. More deals. We love that. Go to Pavel, Delian's brother. He says, very misunderstood by tech outsiders. A low-intention meeting with a successful person is net worse for you than not meeting with them at all.

Networking is default harmful makes you look like an NPC unless you have a clear agenda. That's a good point. Never heard this before. Yeah, so anybody that meets Delian go, oh, you're Pavel's brother. I should do that. Bavles is, oh man. But anyways, yeah, I think people don't. There's this obsession in tech of like trying to like climb the ladder and oh,

if I just meet this person and get in the room with them, I can like do something. And it's like people even use cold email to a fault. Like use cold email when you have a specific thing that you're trying to do with somebody or you have a specific way to like add value to what they're doing or something you can offer them or something you can ask. Just it's a total waste of time to like meet people when there's no thing to. do together. Exactly.

So like don't, nobody wants like, people in tech are generally like friendly, open to, you know, outsiders, whatever it's awesome. But don't like waste somebody's time

by just being like, hey, I'd love to talk. Yeah. It's like nobody wants to just talk. We want to do things. Naval talks about this. Like what,

like you have an extremely high opportunity cost. There's that idea that like, you know, your coffee meeting should be worth like $10,000. Yeah. And it's okay to come in with like, hey, look,

I have an opportunity that together we could make a million dollars is one percent chance that it goes through. So yeah, this is a $10,000 meeting as opposed to just like, I want to just pick your brain and figure it out. Yeah, it's also important to understand like if you're, if you're at a conference and there's like somebody like a bean air there, right? And you're like, oh, I really want to meet this person. There's going to be like 20 other people like crowded around that person. And you have to understand that all those 20 people are like kind of making that that person's life worse.

Yep. Because they're just coming at them with just like a bunch of bullshit. And it's better to just be like, you know, not approach them then and cold email them or get a warm. intro months later and be like hey you know we overlapped at this conference didn't get a chance to talk social proof right there that you were in the right room and then you can launch into your like I'm building this thing I'd love to like run it by you and that's going to be a lot more effective of like actually building a relationship than just like you know coming on to them and be like oh I want to be friends yeah and something like a fine line about like being too transactional like only talking to someone when there's something to yeah but I always I always talk you know I was talking

with Sebastian for Ropi yesterday and I told him something that I believe pretty strongly is like if you're a busy person and the person that you're meeting is a busy person, you're only going to spend a lot of time with them if you're actually working on something, right? Like the best friendships are usually founded on like something for doing something productive together. And so I don't think it's wrong. It's not even necessarily transactional, but I don't think it's a bad thing that there's a lot of people in my life that I'm like if I work on a specific deal or company or even in this situation we spend like 20 hours a week hanging out and we wouldn't be doing that if we weren't making this podcast and like there's nothing wrong with

that yeah like we were friends before and we're friends now but um it's great to find reasons to be friends yeah let's go to Liz Wessel noted angel investor in ramp well secondary to that I think she's a general partner at a big venture capital firm, but less important than just ripping an angel check into ramp. Big. She says, why do so many people become investors slash partners and suddenly grow enormous egos? It's so obnoxious, you're not the only one who's special. Your founders are.

I mean, I got to disagree with you there. Yeah. I mean, you're incredibly important. Capital allocators are very special. Imagine if all the capital allocators in the world just cease to exist, our entire global economy would come crashing down. Yeah, yeah, we always say that, yeah, the working class gets far too much credit and so do that, so does the founder class. Yep. We need to, to, there's so many, with businesses that are R&D intensive, they cannot exist without. So I don't care if a founder

has a pretty deck or a good idea or great pedigree. Yep. If they don't have a $5 million seed round, they're never going to achieve their dreams, which makes the venture capital is absolutely critical to the process and they should have a colossal ego. I don't think you should have a big ego if you have like a microfund like $400 million or something like that. But if you're getting up into the billion dollar AUM range, like build that ego up. Yep. You're just as important as.

Like jokes aside, there is something very valuable about being a young founder and interacting with an extremely high ego investor because at least there is some alignment there most the time. So you can kind of get some reps in, deal with some sharp elbows and deal with like, it's almost lower stakes than dealing with a high ego public company CEO who's going to buy your company or something like that. You've gotten the reps in and just realized like what a big ego is and how to deal with it. But yes, obviously it's a little silly, especially if you haven't actually earned it and you've just become a partner because of your career. I actually tell there's a specific investor friend of mine who has a few billion a um and he like hide like hides a lot of his like

material success from his founders and i'm like dude you realize that like people want to work with other winners right so like if you're a winner and you're crushing it like other people that are already winners or want to be will want to work with you yep so i don't i think it's important to just kind of like shadow that wall yeah and yeah obviously having a huge ego is like not like there's no there's no need for that. Yeah. But I do think that ego is an edge and we went through a period of business history where ego, like go ask like Michael Ovitz.

Like, hey, like, what do you think, you know, did you have a big ego when you were building CIA? And he'd be like, yeah, I had a big ego. Like, that's what drove me every single day. Yeah. I mean, there's also. To have a big ego and be kind. Yeah, of course.

Of course. There's also a big difference between like materialism and like having nice things and having a big ego. Like, those can be very different. You can have a $100,000 watch and still have an appreciation for a really interesting Cassio that costs $100. Right. Totally. And being someone who understands like taste and an opinionated decision making even and not just saying, oh, like this person has like a really expensive hueblow.

Yeah. That's not going to cut it. Right. No. So. Yeah. The other thing is there's a difference between you can have a huge ego and still be very respectful. So a GP that's managing billions of dollars, they can have a huge ego because they're managing

billions of dollars. They can still be respectful of founders, respectful of their time, kind and when they pass, you know, or kind if, you know, and respectful if there's a tough situation. So the key is to build, build the ego and, you know, become a better, kinder person. I really wonder who this sub-tweet is about. It's clearly about some investor partner, someone who just made partner on like, you know, for no reason and is now just like running. around being like, you fucking work for me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully it's not happening at her fund. Bucco Capital Bloch. He's been on the show before. He says, I heard someone say, here for the income, not the outcome today at work. And that pretty much nicely sums up what happens in tech when stocks really start ripping. 2021 vibes everywhere with 1K lights. Yeah, a lot of people have been talking about, I mean, just the general.

We're just, we, who knew? when 2021 and 2022, early 22 were happening, it didn't feel like we'd reach that level of frothiness again for at least a decade. And we prayed for a bubble. Like how many hours, right, were we praying to have another bubble and to get AI this quickly and in many ways get, you know, there's even a bubble in tech podcasting.

Yeah. No, but I do think it's this thing where these companies get to a certain size and suddenly it's become so hard to sort. Like I was talking to a founder today who's thinking about starting his own company, you know, interviewing and would likely get an offer with OpenAI. And he was looking at it as like, well, I could go to Open AI for a year, invest like a couple million dollars of stock and then be an Open AI shareholder. And then just build my company. So that's like the reality of like here for the income.

Yep. Not the outcome. He doesn't necessarily, like he's just getting it as like a call option basically. Mercenary. Mercenary. But he's going to start a company. So good. That's great.

That's great. Let's go to Megan Niveold, first time on the show. She says, so once a Zempec gets to be cheap, will rich people start being fat again? So you know how it used to be a status symbol to be overweight, like in the early, you know. I have a joke with some of my friends when they get fat. We say, looking prosperous. Looking prosperous, my friend. Looking prosperous.

Yeah. So the real contrarian move here. Yeah. Peter Paul Rubens. If you want to. If you want to. fat people and it was a luxury. It showed that you had enough income to afford nice foods.

Yeah. And so the real edge of your capital allocator out there, add pronouns to your bio. Yep. And get overweight. And you'll really stand out and kind of make a statement of like I am contrarian. Yeah. For sure. I wonder if there will be a future where just like we discovered this miracle pill in OZempic,

there will be a miracle pill that will allow you to be extremely obese. but suffer none of the health consequences. That's alpha. That's alpha. So you can just be physically intimidating. Yeah. Just walk around at 400 pounds. You're having to go to Patek and get like customized like w like bands because like it doesn't fit around your wrist.

Yeah. I do. I do wonder. Have you been through like a heavy like mass gaining period? Oh yeah. Many times. There was a period. When I first started going to the gym when I was 18, I would eat at this at the college

cafeteria three times. a day. I would wake up, have a protein shake, go to the gym, go to the cafeteria. Then I would get two peanut butter sandwiches that were bred with a puck of peanut butter. It was like a burger size. And I would eat two of those before lunch. At lunch, I'd go back to the cafeteria, eat a whole meal, and then I get two more sandwiches. And then I would go to dinner and then I have one more sandwich and one more protein shakes. I was like literally having like 5,000 calories a day. It was just absurd. It's fantastic. And everybody should go through that. It's character building to go through because you're every single bite you're like, I'm going to throw up.

Yeah. I feel sick. You got to go through it. Look prosperous, everybody. Prosperous. And then go through a cut, converted all the muscle and become a mass monster. Mass monster, a size lord. And then take a Zempec and get peeled and walk around at 5% body fat.

We have a huge move in the talent world. This is actually massive. Fred Ersum, the founder of Coinbase, is welcoming Jeremy Barron Holtz, who doesn't have an ex account, sadly, as a co-founder of not. Nudge, link to his post before, below. And so Jeremy Berenholtz is former Elon Musk associate at Neurrelink, and I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he was truly one of the most impressive people I've ever met. An absolute dog.

An absolute dog. Really, really incredible. And Nudge is building an alternative to NeurLink focused on improving. Yeah, it's a non-implanted device. So I think it's a headband. that improves memory or something with the brain, interacts with the brain in some way, electrical stimulation. But fascinating, fascinating guy.

Went to Stanford, was in the military. And I met him, and he looks just like the typical, like, San Francisco, like, thin programmer guy. And he was telling us that he's, like, extremely goal-driven. Yeah. He sleeps for, like, two hours a night. Insane. And I was like, this is fake.

Like, there's so many red flags. Like, I just don't buy this guy. what he's saying. And he was like, no, I'm extremely goal-oriented. Like when I want to work on something, I just work on it constantly. And if I sleep, I'll just wake up and be like, I need to keep working on this. It's insensible. And he was like, yeah, one time I got really into working out.

And I got in this incredible shape. And I looked like a professional bodybuilder. And we were like, yeah, right, dude. Like, you're so skinny. Like, this is impossible. And he showed us a picture. And he was like the most jackd dude I've ever seen. It was insane.

Amazing. Insane. And so he just, he was working with the Natch, he was working with the FDA stuff. He's electrical engineer. working on neuroscience, working on programming. You can go look up his GitHub. He's written a bunch of programming code.

He is totally the real deal. Like really, really fascinating person. And so huge pickup for Fred. I hope he leaves his mark on the Nudge. Like, I'd love to just put on the Nudge headband and just like get some, you know, even like 60% of that like, you know, mindset. It really, he really is like a special, special person. Like I left being, it was a big, like it was the Founders Fund CEO summit.

And there are a lot of very impressive people there. But he was someone that really, really stood out as a very, very interesting, like long-tail person. Yeah. And I was very bullish on him. So, very excited to see more about this company. And I hope we learn more about him. He's very quiet and he's, uh, he was featured in one Ashley Vance article about, um, about

Neurrelink. And hopefully there's more because I think the way he thinks about artificial intelligence and math and everything, it's like extremely valuable. and there's not enough of this intellectualism that actually boils up. He's a very, very interesting thinker. So, rooting for him. Big pickup. Let's go to Andre.

He says, a preview of my new book, pre-order for $39.99. And it's two screenshots. It's how to build generational wealth on X.com. And the first page is you can post the plane with red dots. You can quote tweet anything with this picture of the plane with red dots. It always does numbers.

Even if people have no idea what it means, they will like and retweet to feign that they understand what's going on. And I think I replied to this, but like I would, I would actually read this book. I think it's amazing. Yeah, yeah. There are so many of these formats. And he should charge more. He should charge more. He should actually do it, or he should do it at least, at least a huge thread of all the most viral slop. I do think, yeah, viral slop. It's the, it's the iPhone. This is the best, this is the best feature Apple ever made, and it's filling in the text message two-factor authentication code. And the book could come with like a down like a link to like a dropbox yeah could download all but they're not like

high res they're all like reposted like burnt in jpegs but they're super compressed and grainy no i do think this is there's a lot of people that go on x and just start like posting and just like otherwise like very intelligent people that just do not understand how the platform works sure sure and like couldn't for the life of them like create a banger even though they have good ideas yeah yeah And so, yeah, this could be like, you know, a book, a cohort-based course, like in-person events, summits. Get on Wop. Yeah, three, get on WAP. Get some Wi-Fi money going.

Yeah, yeah. There's a 360-degree business to be built here. I think so. And you'd help a lot of people get post-economic just from posting. I think so. I mean, we've seen some of those creator paths. They get pretty big. Yeah, yeah.

Pretty big. You could fund your whole startup on it. Let's go to Keshev. He says, Paul Graham's whole life. I need money to paint. Learned programming falls in love with Lisp. Works briefly at Interleaf, starts VioWeb to fund his painting lifestyle, sells to Yahoo for life-changing money, moves to California, then New York, tries painting, can't focus properly, feels lost, discovers writing essays online, creates YC, this is temporary, then I'll paint, builds hacker news, gets stressed running online community, leaves YC to paint, tries painting in 2014, gives up mid-painting, codes bell for four years, returns to essays and Lisp, moves to the UK, quote unquote, four a year, never leaves. It's so funny. There's so many people like this where it's like they have this, this idealized passion of themselves, like what they could be,

but they're just like born to allocate capital or born to post or born to write or code. And he just clearly has so many, so many fantastic skill sets. Yeah, yeah, painting was always a fever dream, but thank God it stayed a fever dream because otherwise we wouldn't have Y Combinator. And we'd live in a world where if you made a good app, you'd never have 50 competitors launch next year.

And you wouldn't have 50 VCs lining up to write your seed checks. You never would have gotten the safe. You never would have gotten the two on 20 seed round. The impact he's had. I mean, I always think about YC as more, less of an investment vehicle. Like they've had the impact on the investing space, obviously. But YC has become essentially a union for startups. Yeah.

Because if you are a VC and you fuck over one YC company, you go in their database. Every YC company hears about you. And instantly you're ostracized from the entire community. And it's such a large community now. And the collective bargaining approach of going, everybody goes out for two on 20. It's like that's just the price, my friend.

It's funny you say two on 20 because like when I went through it was like one on 10 and then it was like one and a half on 15 and now it's two on 20. But even back in the day with one on 10 that was probably felt like people were like, well this is like egregious. 100%. It's always been, it's always felt egregious. Yeah. It's always felt egregious.

Yeah, yeah. We'll know the money supply is expanded when Y-C companies are going out. They're like, yeah, we're going for $10 on $100. There was one company in my batch who raised at 80, and everyone was like, wow, this is wild. And there's always like one company. How did they do, though? I don't think they actually did that well, but their numbers were crazy. It was like this company viral.

They did like viral videos. And I think they had a ton of revenue. Really? The guy who did it had been building like online advertising tech since he was a kid and had like a bunch of like just made a lot of money through like online advertising so was able to get the business to like a pretty big size do we have a promoted post promoted post from our friends over at ramp why settle for individual ingredients when ramp gives you the full financial operations sandwich they have corporate cards expense management accounts payable procurement travel look at a sandwich it

looks fantastic we haven't eaten yet today it looks fantastic it's making my mouth water and you it is a It is a great way to articulate the value of Ramp that it's the CFO suite. It's a bundle of tools. It's a compound startup. It's multiple products all wrapped up in one. But my problem is that I don't think Ramps a sandwich. I think it's a nine-course prefix with a wine pairing at the French laundry. I think it's premium.

And when I think of Ramp, I don't think just some sandwich that your mom made for you and threw in a plastic bag on your way to school. I think, you know, begging for a reservation. greasing the Mater D, valet parking, your turbo S, walking into the French laundry, shaking hands with the chef, sitting down and enjoying an omicasse. Totally. So we're up, good post, but step it up with the classiness because I want Ramp to be a premium brand. Yeah, their social media manager is fantastic, always good for a laugh, but yeah, nine-course meal,

wine pairing. and the chef will even, you know, the chef will even come out and say hello. Kareem will send you a note and say, thanks for being a ramp customer. This is true. Eric will send you a note. Eric will see a note. Eric really is the CEO that comes around. Eric will come and sit down at your table and, you know, have a conversation and make sure that you're, you're, your, your, an NPS score is 100.

I've always said that about the way Elon runs Axe now, where if you have a banger, he will come around and, like, just drop like a crying face emoji in the replies. Just be like, and then it'll break your phone. And it'll break your phone. But it feels like the chef coming out and being like, is everyone enjoying the meal? Is everyone enjoying the bangers today? Like here's what's going on. And I just love that about the way he uses the product.

Because no previous CEO, not even Jack Dorsey, who was like totally in founder mode during his whole career. Like he didn't use the product that way. And Elon really used the product where he clearly consumes the stuff and comes out and is like, oh, is the soup good tonight? I'm tasting it. Oh, like, let me have some of this whiskey, too. Like, we'll share some of this.

Like, is the wine working? Oh, it's a little cork. Like, let's adjust the algorithm. Yeah. It's good. And I think the ramp guys are doing the same thing. Let's go to Logan Bartlett. He says, Micro Strategy has now passed its dot-com bubble stock price and is an $82 billion

business. Get him on the podcast, Logan. This is an $82 billion software company. You interview the largest public company. company tech CEOs, you got to get Saylor on the pod. Get him on the pod. Get him on the pod. No, micro strategy has a fantastic business model for every dollar of Bitcoin they buy.

They get $3 of enterprise value. And so if they're smart and they're serving the shareholders, they'll just do that over and over and over forever. Yeah. And then if Sailor's like really bullish, he'll do a take private at a nice premium. Yep. Because he's just like, I'm so long. I'm happy to pay, you know, three extra.

Yeah. for the Bitcoin. Because I could use more leverage on the take private. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, the funny thing is that there are a number of companies that have done this exact chart, Akamai. Do you know Akamai?

The networking company, they invented like IP routing and stuff as like this MIT company. Fascinating. And they were worth like $20 billion during the dot-com boom. A couple of the guys sold. They only worked there for like six months during the runoff. It just became generational, generationally wealthy. And then it took the company like, 20 years to build back up, but it was a solid business with solid technology.

And so they finally got to their peak, like, more recently. It's a bit of a different story with macro strategy, but respect, respect. At least like, you know, having that up and down, like, you get like a nice, you know the number that you have to hit again to get any level of respect. Yeah. Yeah. We go to TCP, tech CEO Pepe. He says, daily affirmation, I will fire an intercontinental ballistic missile.

I love this. I believe you'll be able to do it, although the ICBM might not be holding a nuclear weapon inside of it. It might be SpaceX point-to-point. You might be riding on that. You might be going from New York to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Yeah. But ICBMs, I saw another post.

SpaceX is just a wrapper around ICBMs. I like that. Make the ICBM useful again. We need to be firing these things off. They can't just be sitting on nuclear submarines. doing nothing. I know. Total waste. Total waste.

Yeah, you can just, you know, in the same way that you can just do things, you can just manifest things and you can just affirm things. Yep. I think it's a very, you know, it's been well studied to this point. Like, you should be leveraging this in different ways, but don't do it in the ways that, you know, that people in L.A. do it where they're like, I am healthy. I am happy. I am, like, I step it up.

You step it up. You know, I will find the $100 million dollars hidden in my computer. I will find the $100 million hidden in my computer. Oh, speaking of that, let's go to Atlas Creatine Cycle. It's a screenshot. It says there is a hundred million dollars stuck in your MacBook. Your job is to figure out how to get it. And he says there is a hundred million dollars stuck in SF. Your job is to break up with your GF, move there with your best friend and start a GPT rapper. Yes. Let's go. More rappers. There aren't enough rappers. There are enough. Genuinely. Genuinely. Just go. If you don't have a good idea, go make it, go make a, go make a

app in the app store called chat gpt chat dot com gpt or something like that and it's just chat gpt reskin put in the app no it's not even chat gpgd is llama probably yeah yeah it's llama and just charge charge the most yeah have some you know put put some good branding on there spend a ton of money on paid ads yep if you spend a dollar on paid ads and you generate a dollar and one dollars of revenue just keep doing that you know till you're a bean air or send you're you know until you're a Beaner or Scenti. There's nothing stopping you. You don't need to be that creative.

You just need to work harder. Yep. I love it. Thanks, creatine cycle. Always good to have you on the show. Let's go to Isaac. Isaac says, this time two years ago, my timeline was filled with business banter,

hot takes, bad takes, random shit posts. Now it's crickets. I came to Twitter for business shenanigans and more and more it feels like it disappoints. I won't be leaving, but I hope it changes. Well, I mean, you're disrespecting X by calling it Twitter.

That's your first mistake, Isaac. Yeah. Also, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe he has like a old version of. Why don't you start posting business banter instead of complaining? So, Isaac is a friend and fantastic entrepreneur. He actually made his first million selling swords online. Really? Oh, sick. Okay.

He has a company called Mini Katana that he bootstrapped using these like crazy viral hacks on YouTube, making original content. He's now building. a candy company. I think that Isaac, I've said this before, but he's really like the Willie, like he's the next Willie Wonka. Awesome. So if you have all the VCs out there that have like a Willie Wonka thesis, go find Isaac. His company's awesome. His facility where he manufactures everything is like only a few miles from here. But yeah, I, I haven't necessarily experienced this. Like the four year page like definitely. It's a little messy. Especially during the election.

It's all politics. But that's why we're doing the show. Like follow. But use that. Tech Bros. Pod. Like we are posting business hot takes. We never post bad takes. A lot of random shit posts. But there's a lot of content.

No social commentary. No political commentary. We never talk about politics. Purely business and technology. Exactly. And so the comment section, even on this post, I met, you know, when we quote tweet this, there's going to be a lot of like, you know, hot takes. Yep.

Anyways, you know, good to call this out. But use the not interested button. When they try to put some slop in your four-you page, say, not interested. Not interested. Not interested. It does require curation. You're building a Zen garden.

You want to avoid some things. I mean, I have a series of lists now. I often look through the 4U page a little bit. I find that like the first 10 posts are usually pretty good. And as you go farther down, just get sloppier and sloppier because it's just randomly sorting. But then switch over to the following tab. Got some good people in there.

I also have a list just for the people that I know post great stuff. I want to see everything that they post. So I put that in there. Also, just spend more time online. That's probably the problem. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friend Jackson Dahl. Jackson says, I'm excited to announce.

Oh, this big. Dilectic podcast and interview podcast with the sharpest, most creative and original people I know. He says, I like to spar with people on their ideas and push them deeper ultimately to understand what makes them themselves. He's already got episode one out. He's got a cool graphic here. And Jackson is somebody that has one of those people where you talk. to like very high like in insights per minute right so if you're having like a 10 10 minute conversation with him you're going to have like a bunch of interest he's going to give a bunch

of interesting point of point of views and take so uh podcast is awesome listen to a little bit of the first episode um and uh anyways very uh i think this is just like he he's one of those things very strong like uh founder market fit in the context of like a podcast like looking at this as like a media business, like he's going to have no problem, just like making the show fantastic. Is he monetizing already? I don't know. I hope so. I hope so.

Maybe we should be the first advertiser. Maybe. As much as we like to juice our show with ads, like we should be advertising quite a bit. I agree. I agree. Jackson, if you don't have any advertisers yet, we'd love to get involved. Let's go to Adam Graham. First time on the show, he says, the amount of high quality content that Tech Bros.

pod is putting out is insane. Bangor after banger. This is why they're the most profitable podcast. Hell yes, Adam. Let's go. This is exactly why we do everything that we do. We do it for the money, really. We do it for the money.

If there's bangers as a byproduct, then that's fantastic. Yeah. And high quality content, if that's what makes the money, we'll do it. But just to be clear, if low quality content's more profitable, expect some low quality content. Here and there. Yeah. But good to have you as a fan, good to have you as a follower, good to have you on the show. Welcome to the Tech Bros community.

Thank you. Thanks, Adam. Thank you, Adam. Let's go to Nick Carter. He says, locked in and pulled another all day or today. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

The only time I've ever taken naps during the work day, like I was like probably like devastated. Like I've had to be in like a really bad spot. Yeah. To be so strung out. I take like one nap a quarter. on like a Sunday and it's wonderful but I'm not a daily napper. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Naps are, I get it if you're like Paul Graham and you're working on your painting career

and you're trying to get like a, you know, a burst of energy for the afternoon. But I don't know any, you know, if you're a killer, if you're an ass, when you're on enough stimulants to kill a horse. That's a big part of it. I think anybody's like, oh, I should take a nap. It's like try a caffeine. Try 600 milligrams of caffeine and four milligram nicotine pouches all day long. There you go.

You won't be inclined to nap. You'll be pulling all day or every single way. All day or daily. But I love Nick. Quintessential, you can just do things guy. Did the boxing match. Did the investigative journalism. Huge capital allocator.

Love Nick. Amazing. Does a bunch of cool stuff. Fantastic. Student of capitalism. It's good to my colleague Bridget Harris over at Founders Fund. She's quoting Peter Thiel. It says,

The Wall Street Banks are long the trade deficit. because the bigger the deficit, the more money they make. And she says, obviously, bigger trade deficit equals larger volume of cross-border payments. Stable coins could be hugely helpful here in helping smaller banks compete with cross-border flows. Large banks have no incentives besides defensive to switch because of this dynamic. Lower fees equals less profit, among others. Has to be a smaller player slash new entrant with nothing to lose plus favorable legislation because the incumbents won't cannibalize themselves under unless press.

comes from the outside. And love you, Bridget, but you made a terrible mistake. You included a link to Spotify, which is banned on X. And that's why you only got 99 views. So turn this into a clickbait thread, repost it. I'll retweet it. And we'll go to the moon. We'll cover it again.

I think you got a thousand likes easy on this. If you just make it a little bit more incendiary, you need to call someone out. Piss some people off. They're the reason America's stagnating. This is the problem. You've got to be much more aggressive. But honestly, a very thing. thoughtful post and something that really digs into all of the features of stable coins and all

of the different factors going on there. I was not aware of all this, but it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, there's, it's, it's going to be interesting with stable coins. So far, it seems like the fees, uh, you know, stripes obviously made their move into stable coins. We'll see like what the, you know, I've seen like some stable coin products that just still have like similar fees to like traditional payment processing, but it'll be a pretty cool experiment to run to just be like, all right, if you can move money basically for free in the sort of trustless way, how much does that accelerate the velocity of money?

And I would imagine it'll be pretty significant. Yeah. I mean, it still seems like we're pretty early in all of the crypto stuff. Like even Bitcoin, it's unclear, like is it putting pressure on certain parts of the U.S. government? Like, it's become a political issue

and there's pro-Bitcoin or anti-Bitcoin communities, but we're not, we haven't really worked through because we're not on the gold standard. like if Bitcoin displaces gold, how does that really trickle through the rest of the American economy? Like, not sure. Well, now there's rumors of the strategic Bitcoin Reserve. That would be big. Yeah, very interesting.

But Bridget has a fantastic post on pirate wires deep diving the, the stripe acquisition of, it was a bridge. Yeah. It's confusing because it's Bridget and Bridge. But the Stablecoin platform that got acquired. And so you should definitely go read that if you want to learn more about Strait label coins. Let's go to the founder of Perplexity. He was demoing a new perplexity product for shopping, which I love. You can just take a picture of something and then Perplexity will go and find the product that you're searching for. And in this case, he asked what watches does Jeff Bezos

wear? And Perplexity helped him realize that Bezos is often wearing the Omega Speedmaster a professional moon watch and another watch. And he says, should I buy this? And I think the answer is absolutely you should buy it. We need more technologists and founders who are watch guys. We've seen this happen with Zuck. He's rocking a fantastic F.P. Jorn.

We know some capital allocators who were rocking Patex and Nautilus and Aquanauts at this point. But it's still underd disgust and there's still major alpha in getting into the watch game. It needs to be more a part of the conversation. Exactly. Exactly. So I highly recommend this. You need to differentiate. You're in brutal competition with every other big tech company, bro.

You need to stand out. Get a nice piece. Statement. Get a hitter. Get a hitter. And then every time you go and shake someone's hand, when you go shake Jensen's hand for those GPUs that you need, he's going to be like, ooh, who, who, ooh. Because even people that aren't watch guys, they're still going to notice and respect it.

Exactly. And it's a way to make an impression. Yeah. So I say pull the trigger. Let's go to Yarden, Schaffir. He says, I'm outside the club. A drunk girl is yelling her opinions on Rust. I have hit Peak San Francisco.

Wow, 7K likes. There we go. Tech is mainstream. People like Rust. I've never written a line of Rust. I know it's a very popular language, really popular with crypto, I think. I'd really appreciate it if people can stop being transphobic in my comments. Go do that someplace else if you must.

Yeah, of course, this turned into a culture war issue. It's more of an issue. As soon as anything past 1,000 likes, it turns into a... You're in the dark territory. Culture war zone. Dark X. Try to keep your likes under 1,000 if you don't want politics and social issues. You want low-tamangers, just the people that are consistent or else it's going to get

to you crazy. But, yeah, I mean, this is... It's interesting. Because sometimes, like, the drunk girl outside of a club, I remember in Miami, seeing a drunk girl talk to a bouncer about Bitcoin, and it was right at the peak when Bitcoin was at 20K, and then it immediately sold off afterwards. So there is a little bit of like when your barber is giving you stock, or your taxi driver's giving you stock tips, like maybe that's a signal.

But this is a signal that SF is back. I think so. The fact that somebody went out in San Francisco presumably past 10 p.m. is a really bullish sign. I wonder if that's real or if it was just like an imagined scenario. You can just make up things. You can just make up things. Let's go to Beth Jaisos.

He says, bioac is the next Overton frontier. Few. Yeah, so, you know, we've been, you know, you've been a strong proponent for literally years for genetically engineering bears to domesticate them

and also make them, you know, allies for us. And also biohacking and stimulants and all sorts of stuff in that world. But yeah, it's interesting to see where this goes. What's interesting is like the Overton frontier. Is he just saying like, that is where the point?

political issues are being fought right now, like over IVF, over what Norse Dikki is doing it, Orchid, over like genetically engineering babies, like that type of stuff. Because Overton, I usually think of the Overton window as like the what is acceptable to say politically. So it seems like what he is saying here is maybe that there are things that are going on in the bio-accelerations community that you can't talk about or you would be canceled if you talked about. And this is like the rumor that there are genetically engineered children. in China right now, but not in America. Have you heard this?

Yeah. And so it's interesting that it's like maybe we're going to have to have a national conversation about the morality of bio in the same way that we have had it around AI. Yeah, there needs to be a conversation. There's certainly could get on the hat for this. Put on the tinfoil hat. But there's many people, like, you know, one of the, you know, sort of pushback against this, there's many people that believe that Lyme disease was created in a lab.

Because it basically spread out of this small area around, like Long Island. Sure. There was an island off of like Montauk area. Interesting. And dogs would wash up on like in Montauk that were like a dog combined with a pig. What? Like very weird. This is the most crazy.

Very weird stuff. But Lyme disease also spread out from sort of like that was the geographic center. and the ticks that initially had it were sort of spread out from them. I'm terrified of ticks and Lyme disease whenever I'm on the East Coast. I always avoid going for hikes and stuff. Huge West Coast alpha, like having less ticks. There's something scary about having something so small have such a huge impact on you. No, it just almost destroys your life.

Like spiders your life. And snakes, I'm not a fan. Anyway, hopefully we'll hear some more stuff about biological accelerationism. I think we need a good blog post from somebody. I mean, a little bit of that's happening with Neurrelink and probably Nudge and a few other programs. So putting all that together into kind of like, we need like a packy deep dive or something. Be cool. Some things just need a packy deep dive.

They do. Jeff Lewis says, I believe that in the future will be governed predominantly by algorithms. Phase one, algorithms accumulate power 2000 to 2020. Phase two, governments attempt to rest power from or align themselves with algorithms, 2020 to present. phase three, algorithms become the government. So Jeff has a special talent for looking at, you know, there's that phrase like how do you, how to predict the future is to like sort of like look at the present, right? And in many ways, like he positioned this tweet in a sort of like incendiary way of being like 2000 to 2020, right?

Algorithms gaining power. But yeah, you know, I buy this. I feel like we're already seeing the governments align themselves with different algorithms. You saw that this election cycle. But I would just say, I want to live in a world where the Temcheck algorithm runs the country, right? Vibes-based governance. And Jeff, we've told you this already, but bring back Temchek. We need it.

Some of the best VC content market. I know you're not a VC. Fantastic. Best VC content marketing in the game. It was fantastic. classics and some low tamp bangers in there. Yeah, this is kind of the Brian Johnson question right now. He's been asking a lot of people.

He says that don't die as an algorithm and that's what he's really creating. And also he's been asking a lot of people, like, if you could guarantee that an AI would give you like a better life outcome, would you submit to the AI to the AI dictator? And it's a very interesting philosophical question that I think we'll be digging into more over the next few years. So definitely the right question to be asked. asking. Yep. Go to Matt Turk.

He says, okay, but we dramatically improved our podcast game. And it's a response to TechCrunch. In 2023, VCs returned the lowest level of capital to their investors since 2011. And so the, 20203 was not a good year for venture capitalists. But there were a lot of great podcasts that came out of this era. Actually, I would say that in many ways, maybe the carry checks were lower, but big funds were still being raised. The fees were high. The fees, you know, stayed stable.

And so why not put those fees into a sure SM7B or some cinema cameras or a lovely set? Yeah, yeah. Why not? But yeah, we do need more venture capitalist podcasts. I've noticed this when I've looked at like if you're a VC or a company and you want to go do a press junket, it's actually pretty hard to go do 10 solid interviews that have, you know, a reasonable following. If you're a celebrity and you're promoting a movie, you can go do Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert, like you can do NBC and CBS and the view and all of these different things to promote your show.

And they all have large followings. And in terms of like VC world, there's really not that much. There's like a few shows that are pretty big. A lot of them don't have guests. It's not like you can just call up all in and go on. 20VC does this. There's the tech crunch one, but it's not like you're going to go and get these sort of like super influential hosts. Yeah. And it is really important for founders to be able to work their way up and start with a smaller show and then parlay that into the bigger show and then wind up on the big show. But it's really, really hard.

Yeah, the same way that tech founder Donald J. Trump finally was able to clause way up onto Rogan. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there needs to be a similar path, but it's hard because Dorcas is so focused on AI. And Lex occasionally, he had the cursor founders on. but he hasn't, I don't think he's even had Palmer Lucky on. There's like, like there's not really that many just general tech shows. Like Logan Bartlett, a great show, but it's like now narrowed down to just like public company, SaaS CEOs, which is cool.

Yeah, and that's why we started this podcast. We felt like the technology industry needed a podcast. It did. It did. So, yeah. Let's go to the real estate god. The real estate god says, craziest thing in America is that the average person could two to five X their salary simply by taking a sales role, but they're too scared of people telling them no 20 times a day.

Interesting. That's true. It's funny. Sales is one of those things. And a lot of things if you're getting told no 20 times a day, like you should just like stop doing what you're doing because the market is telling you like you're doing something bad. Like it sucks. But sales is like one of those things like the no tolerance needs to be extreme. Mostly because sometimes like even customers that want your product like don't want to deal with you right now or they just have 10 other things that are more important.

So you're never going to break through. Someone else shared something recently that was like, oh, in the future, I forget who posted this. But in the future, you're going to be getting 2,000 email, like perfect cold emails a day from all the outbound sales agents. And Salesforce is going to be like taking you out to like a steak dinner. And they're like, so we're going to renew your contract. We're going to increase it like by. like 50%, like here's, you know, just sign right here. And you're like, all right. Like, I guess, I guess is what we're doing. It's fantastic. Let's go to Jen. She says,

overheard three tech bros discussing how much money it would take for them to replace their girlfriend. Thing is, none of them even currently have a girlfriend. Boom, roasted. Roasted. Roasted. God. Technology brothers, tech bros, get girlfriends, dude, figure it out. friends. And, yeah, don't let people over here you talking about embarrassing things. Although, could be imagined. Could be a fake overheard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You never know. You never know. It's a proven. That goes in the how to post bangers, how to create general, traditional, well, on X. You know, Red Bull Futurist exemplifies what a technology brother is.

He's over here talking about wanting to have 10 children, right? So he, he can't, there's nothing, like, no AI girlfriend, you know, friend. dot com is not going to replace, you know, having a loving wife and partner and mother of your children. Until there's some crazy bioaccelerationism and some artificial loom. Yeah. Artificial wounds. It's good, Jenny Fielding.

She says, a pre-seed company that raises a modest round should not be burning more than 50K per month. This is a hill that I'm willing to die on. Well, you're going to die. Don't die, Jenny. There's money to be made. Yeah. But this goes back to your $17,000 precede.

Oh, yeah. If we were burning 50K, that would be one week. It would be out of money one week. One week. Yeah, I think that this is the challenge with venture, right? Money that is a raise gets spent. Yep. And it's ridiculously hard.

You know, one of my portfolio companies just raised around basically off of a lot of momentum. Yep. And there's already this like, oh, well, we could hire this person. Like, this person's amazing and look what they're going to do. And then suddenly this company will have added like a million dollars a year of burn that they didn't really need or maybe they could have pushed it back, you know, down the road. So, yeah, this is where like YC's like dogma is just absolutely correct.

Sure. Which is just like keep burn incredibly low. And it's so hard, you know, as somebody who started a company in 2021. Oh, I never even realized that. YC. PG wrote this post and I believe it was called don't die. And now Brian Johnson's using that in like the literal sense. But the original PG thing was just don't die, don't run out of money.

And as long as you do that and you stay an entrepreneur eventually you'll figure it out. Yeah, there's a company that I backed in 2021. And the only three people invested in the company. YC or I invested in one other guy invested in then YC did their round. and they've pivoted like 10 times, but all of their updates are like, we pivoted again. And it's like monthly burn, like runway.

And it's just been going, it's been like 8K a month burn plus like server costs. And their runway has just been like dwindling down like very slowly, but they've taken so many shots. I'm eventually expecting to get an update from them. It's like,

we have 10 million of ARR. Yeah. Like we pulled it off. I love that. But they would have had way less shots on call. Yeah, but I mean, seriously, it is difficult to create an act. axiom around burn rate because if you're doing something that's R&D intensive or you're going to spend a lot of money on lawyers or you're acquiring a domain or if there's something weird going on like it's going to be very bespoke some companies are completely justified in burning a hundred K a month out of the gate and some companies shouldn't be burning more than 10k out of the gate it just really depends on what you're doing and who your team is and where you are but in general I agree you should be conscious of your burn so great

We certainly are at this podcast. And let's end with one more promoted post and then we'll go to Lulu. This promoted post is from DuPont Registry. DuPont has a 2024 9-11 GD3RS. This is not the first time we've had DuPont as a promoted post and not the first time we've had a GD3RS on here. This one is a paint-to-sample pastel orange that comes fitted with custom 1016 Industries Carbon Fiber Kit.

This car looks fantastic. We eventually will be doing a transcontinental race as technology brothers, probably with a ramp branded car. Yeah, Gt3RS. Probably Gumball 3,000. Gumball 3,000. Maybe the Dakar as well. Yeah. So there's a few big races coming up in our pipeline.

And we're certainly going to be, I'll be driving a Porsche. You might be driving something American, but that will be, we'll each die on that hill. But anyways, fantastic example. Thank you to DuPont. And how much is it? It's listed at 490,000. Wow, an absolute steel. I mean, at that price, you can't afford not to buy it.

Yeah, they're basically giving this away. I would make sure to, you know, get your PPI. Yeah. Because, I don't know, pastel orange, PTS, this could easily get into the 500s. But thank you to DuPont. And I mean, if you're, I mean, an entrepreneur or then you can pick it up. But if you're, you know, a capital allocator with some small $400 million fund, like that's a no-brainer.

No-brainer. Let's go to Lulu. She says, taste aside from a purely strategic perspective, this brand marketing is disastrous for Jaguar. For context, jaguar sales have been plummeting down 70% in the U.S. in five years. Did you hear that they took a year off of making cars? Yeah, yeah. They just are not making cars for a full year because they're completely resetting.

Up to 2018, Jaguars were actually growing quickly, doubling sales in a few years, and she breaks down all the disaster that came from this post that was called Copy Nothing, and it was a very abstract ad looked like a, I don't know, like a music video almost, with a lot of interesting characters. It got a ton of attention, and I think Lulu's post got more than the Jaguar post. It was like. Lulu got 16K on this,

and she kind of breaks down the problem that Jaguar used to be the iconic image of an old-school British gentleman. Think Sir Roger Moore. It was James Bond level car, and then they kind of messed around and wound up with kind of shifting from being in the luxury and classic,

classic sophistication market with competing with Bentley and Aston Martin. And then they shifted down to premium competing with BMW and Mercedes in a more crowded market. But Jaguar SUV sales are cannibalized by their own sister company, Range Rover. And now they're not upscale enough to compete in the luxury market and not cutting edge enough to compete in the premium market.

Yeah. So they have this sort of, they need to focus on the cars. Yeah, they have this vicious cycle where you have lower sales, which means you can invest less in our industry. and you're not even producing parts at the same scale, which means that the parts end up being more expensive for you.

And it's this crazy, vicious cycle. And then it almost feels like this campaign is not like a nail in the coffin, but how do you completely turn off an entire new generation of automotive enthusiasts where I've never once considered buying a Jaguar except every now and then you'll see, like, a Jaguar is like leasing and they're like, we will pay you $1,000 a month to lease this car. They're like so like bottom, like the least, like they can't give these cars away. Yeah.

They stop making cars for a year because their sales were like basically zero. Yeah. Like car, people don't realize like sales volumes on cars are like are not even that high. Like the waymo's jaguars. Yeah, the waymo's are jaguars. Maybe waymo should just buy them. Yeah, because at least they can make cars. Yeah, because they say you can make cars.

That seems like the end of the road here. Yeah, that, that seems like. like the end state, that's the only time you really see a Jaguar, but I saw something that like, if they wanted to revamp the brand, they shouldn't have done this crazy video, they should have hired someone like who Hyundai hired, who was the former developer at the M label at BMW, and he created the N group at the performance group of Hyundai. And they're creating like insane cars like the ionic 5N. Have you seen this with like the fake noise and like all the car guys love it, even though it's electronic, even though it's electric vehicle, it sounds like a V6 and it like shifts like a V6

has this fake DCT in there. And then they're also doing this crazy Envision car that looks like a super nostalgic one. Yeah, super nostalgic. And so there are a bunch of ways that they could have gone into the vault and brought something back that stood out and made a statement as a car. Yeah. But they just chose not to. Maybe this would be the start of something new, but it was a very weird brand direction. No, it did. Somebody was commenting, and I think this was accurate. Like, it's almost like they were expecting, like, a Kamala win, and they had invested,

like, tens of millions into this campaign. And they were just like, all right, we already made it. Like, we bet the house on this. And then everybody's like, no, like, you realize that, like, Trump won, right? Yeah. But we don't talk about politics on this podcast. So we will leave it at that. Jaguar could be a good acquisition target for us at some point.

point. The history of the brand aligns with a lot of our ethos. So somebody will bring it back. Sometimes it just takes an extra decade. Yep. Thanks for watching. Subscribe or else you'll be relegated to a life of flying on net jets. Ouch. Have a good one. Bye.