TBPN - JD's Venture Portfolio, Lessons from Mark Cuban, Angel Investing Addiction

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. It is, what, November 7th today? And every technology podcast is clearly going to be obsessed with one topic and one topic only. You're going to hear about it on All In. You're going to hear about it on 20VC. You're going to hear about it on newcomers writing about it, the information stuff with it. It's undeniable. You can't get away from it.

OpenAI bought chat.com. Very, very strong brandable four-letter domain.com. Huge. Absolutely massive. Yeah. In the eight-figure range. 15 million. Yeah, a lot of speculation.

I don't think the actual number was released. It was cash in stock. Darmesh released it. Oh, really? I think so. I thought it was some mix of cash in stock. Oh, maybe. And he was positioning.

He was like, look, I'm a savvy investor. Interesting. I'd never lose money, but I don't like to make money on my friends. Yeah, okay. He said now I'm an investor in Open AI. Really? Oh, okay. I think he may have invested the domain.

Yeah. So, so, I mean, the context here is Darmesh. I think he's Darmesh Shaw. He's the founder of HubSpot. Correct.

And he, a couple months ago, acquired chat.com, and I think he said he paid 10 million for it. Yep. And he was like, I'm going to do something with it, but I'm not sure yet.

But I know this chat bot, chat interface is going to be big for AI. And so there's going to be an opportunity here. And that opportunity came along in the form of a call from Sam Altman. And so, Sam just tweets chat.com and that's it. I think OpenAI stole it. Oh, you think it's a steal?

Like I think it's a steel. That could be a $100 million. There's another big language model company that doesn't have their dot com. Oh, really? All the variations of it are owned by domain investors. Wow. And they're all asking for like tens of millions, tens of millions, mid-eight figures.

And they're kind of at a stand. still because they're just like they don't really want to take you know 40 50 million dollars of equity yeah put it into but um well yeah so i i want to debate i want to debate this a little bit because on on the one hand like chat dot com it's an iconic domain single word four letters it's like one of the best assets you could own on the internet on the flip side google has trillions of dollars they've never bought search.com. They didn't need to. Google became that.

And so the thing with chat GPT is that it was always like a bad brand name in the sense that people would mess it up. They said chat GPD, chat GDP, like they couldn't remember it. But once it got stuck in the mind, it was iconic, like Airbnb, like Google. All they're doing is redirecting it to chatgbt.com.

Yeah. So I think the domain was, they kind of stole it in the sense that if a savvy domain investor would have extracted a lot more value out of it. Yep. They'd been like give me $30 million and $20 million of stock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, but yeah, I think from a branding standpoint, when you scroll on TikTok, it's people talking about chat GPT, chat GPT, chat GPT, chat GPT, and that is AI to the normies. Yeah, but I wonder if they'll be able to actually build a brand or if they'll even try to build a brand around chat.com. Yeah, it's also very unclear. It's very, it's a dot com era throwback.

Yeah. Like pets.com. Yeah. And for a while, like, it became difficult to ask. actually get intellectual property protection around these single words. Like the famous example, yeah. You actually, the way to get real protection usually is to make the dot com your name. Yeah, Amazon.com was probably trade-marked.

They didn't own pets. They own pets.com. Exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, the escalator was originally made by the escalator company. Do you know this? No. So escalators, we just think of like, you know, any escalator you see in like a mall. Yeah.

But that was originally the brand name for the machine company that produced the first escalator. And they became so popular that the name became normalized and they lost intellectual property protection. And then Kleenex went through a similar thing where like just facial tissues, I think is like the technical term. Like Kleenex became so popular that everyone would just say like, oh yeah, just grab a Kleenex. It doesn't matter what brand. It's just Kleenex. But Kleenex actually fought back. And one.

And so now you can't use that term. But if we were to start a new escalator company and it was like, oh, which we might. Which we might. Because, yeah, we might want to roll up a couple of the small operators. And it's probably one of those things. Like there's only three or four manufacturers of escalators in all the US now. And so if we buy all of them, we can jack up prices.

Yeah. Like massively. I looked into stoplight manufacturing for a while. And there's only a few manufacturers and the same dynamic. And there's no technology in the, uh, stoplights. I wanted to do something where the stoplight would have a camera on it and if there was no one waiting for the red light, it would just switch the signal, right? And so it's like- Is that not how it works right now? No, no, no. You can pull up and just be sitting there and there can be no cross-traffic and you can just have to wait. So there's just all this like deadweight loss in the system when you're just driving around. Which hurts the economy. It does. Yeah, opportunity cost. You could be working. You get to work faster. So it'd be a very simple like product, but the distribution is really hard. because you have to sell the individual city.

It becomes like a flock safety type thing. It's really, really tricky. But so you're bullish on this at 15 mil, right? I think it's a good buy in the context of who the owner was, who the company is, the quality of the domain. I just don't see them using this domain in 10 years. Yeah, so in 10 years, you think people will be saying like, oh yeah, I'm using chat GPT.

The model has completely changed. It's now GPT 601F2. I don't care about that. I just know I use chat GPT and I go to chat.com to access it. I would just be pretty sad if AGI was at chat.com. Right. I don't know. Maybe there's something retro about that.

It's kind of a cool throwback to be like, yeah, we're going back to the dot com era. Like, do you know the story of MP3.com? No. MP3.com was like a dot com boom company that was. I thought I liked domains. I know. MP3.com was a bunch of guys in the dot-com boom. Basically, the business plan was Spotify, like music on the internet,

but they hadn't really built out any infrastructure. They IPOed the company and were worth like $4 billion on like, you know, 300K of revenue or something like that. Like the revenue multiples during the dot-com boom make the ZERP era look. One of the greatest bubbles of all time. It's incredible. It was incredible. I did some digging on MP3.com.

It's a fascinating. Everybody's always trying to poke fun at bubbles, and I think they should be celebrated, right? Because they're drawing that CAPEX forward and accelerating. Yeah. And clearly, like, with all these things, it's always just a matter of timing. Like, Spotify was the right solution at the right time. Napster was too early. MP3.com was too early.

Kalanick had his spin on file sharing. Oh, yeah, he did, right? What was that called, like Red Arrow or something? Yeah, something like that. Novitz was involved. Oh, really? They had a whole war. Oh, no way.

I didn't have this crazy. Ovitz took old Hollywood style negotiating into Silicon Valley, which was a big no-no. We're basically, long story short, he had committed to funding the business. They signed docs, and then he withheld wiring until the company was out of cash and then tried to renegotiate. And Travis did not like that. And they got this huge... It's hardcore. Huge war.

now Ovitz is an awesome super helpful angel investor that's great yeah I've been to his house yeah all all as well that ends well yeah he's like oh I have to play nice and not abuse people generational talent yeah yeah exactly okay well let's move on to the the top story we're talking about J.D Vance's portfolio and career as a venture capitalist why do you think he was important to educate the world about J.D. Vance's private sector career? Look, I think, again, same thing with Trump this week. People really focused on his political career, less focused on his career as a technology entrepreneur

and his success, you know, building social apps. You know, with J.D., it's one of those things. We didn't follow the campaign much at all. We were focused on the podcast and driving returns across the portfolio. But we did notice at one point that Tim Walls was talking to somebody at a rally and said he didn't even know what a VC was. And it made me think that, you know, VCs have this aura, this mystique. They're so cool. They're powerful, right?

And that makes it so that a lot of people that maybe aren't in our industry tend to be a little bit afraid of them. If a VC walks in the room, it might flinch. and so I think it's worth kind of breaking down that that private sector career and just helping people understand venture capital and why JD would give, you know, millions of dollars to a company with no revenue and just a cool idea, right? The other thing is giving people an understanding of how venture capital works, right? A lot of people think JD Capital is a venture capitalist. He's putting JD Capital. J.D. Vance. J.D. Capital is good.

J.D. Capital, yeah. What was the other one? Naria should be called. J.D. Capital. J.D. Cap. When he gets out of the government, he goes back into the private sector. Yeah, he'll be back. He'll be back. J.D. Capital. Yeah, but I think people have this thinking that venture capitalists always deploy their own money.

Yep. But oftentimes, it's only partly their money. Yeah. So his fund is a hard. He's since stepped back, but Peter Thiel's Cornerstone LP. And then, do you know Fallon, Donahoo? I think that's how you pronounce her name. She's really cool. She runs the firm now with, I think, one other person. But they've done a bunch of deals.

We should go through some of them. Acre trader facilitates farmland investments, allowing individuals to invest in agricultural real estate. Amplify Bio provides advanced preclinical services to accelerate the development of medical therapies, atomic industries who we actually know develops innovative manufacturing technologies to enhance production efficiency and quality.

Their whole thing is like reshoring domestic manufacturing. I think they're out in Detroit with a bunch of huge machines. Aaron's always texted me photos of these giant million dollar machines that he buys from like, you know, some Korean conglomerate or something. It's really, really, really sick.

Yeah, I think Aaron and J.D. were really early to trends that are now considered American dynamism. I was thinking about that. Like in many ways, his portfolio was. People often say like American dynamism is just shorthand for defense tech, but that's not it. It's this whole, it's this whole like American heartland revitalization thing. Yep.

And it was really about manufacturing. Yeah. Only more recently has it been about defense tech oriented manufacturing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And like Founders Fund has a bunch of that's there and has been like bouncing around that generally. And then Andreessen obviously like came up with the coinage for the word. But Nauria is really the fun.

It pays to own the brand. Yeah. Of course, but NARA is like really the fun that like designed the entire strategy around that from day one, which is, which is fascinating. Yeah, and I think if you go back to Jody's book, a lot of his investment strategy was oriented around revitalizing economies in America that were historically dependent on manufacturing, but that manufacturing got taken overseas. Yeah, yeah.

It's a cool, it's a cool portfolio. chapter assists in individuals in navigating Medicare options. Hallow is a Catholic prayer and meditation app. You can just see really all this stuff is. Surprisingly large business. Oh yeah. Yeah. This is all,

it's all very like in theme with like his, political platform. Another therapeutics company, Kiro, therapeutics focuses on developing gene therapies for various diseases. Rumble, the video sharing platform that competes with true social

and actually got started. Original free speech social bet. I think the NARA Rumble deal happened like three months before Truth Social. And you could imagine how that would have played out differently if... Yeah, one thing that stands out to me is that it's not a really big volume of bets, right? No, no, no. I mean, the entire portfolio on their website is 10, 11 companies. True anomaly.

True anomaly. True anomaly is a phenomenal company. Yeah, I wonder where they got in on True Anomily, because that's a multi-billion-dollar business last I checked. and my buddy Will is one of their biggest investors now, but he's personally put in new figures. And it says they're in Strive, manages investment funds. I think that's Vivek Ramoswami's company, right? I don't know.

Unless there's a different strive. I know that Vivek runs a firm called Strive and it would make sense that they're aligned. And then Value Base offers valuation services and financial insights to support business growth and investment. And so, yeah, they kind of have like a few different like areas. of focus, a lot of bio, a lot of manufacturing, and a lot of kind of like, just like, you know, like the Catholic prayer app, it's more like traditional American values.

It's interesting because no one, they're the only VC firm that's really like sent it on a thesis like this seriously. And like years ago. Yeah. Because it takes time to actually deploy. You can set up a, yeah. You can set up like an American dynamism ripoff fund tomorrow, but you wouldn't have a portfolio of companies like this.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting that, you know, venture capitalists. talk about, and founders talk about I'm building and investing in the future that I want, right? And a lot of people are in VC or strictly chasing returns, right? If you're strictly chasing returns, the actual best place you could probably focus is crypto. Like the median crypto fund has like much better returns than the median venture capital fund. For a lot of times, it was just B2B SaaS. You know, it was like there was this massive software boom. And the number of unicorns and decarcorns that came out of B2B SaaS is just like, undeniable. It's undeniable. There's just so many opportunities to be a hitter as opposed to you look at aerospace there's like one company

you look at defense there's like one company right now like yeah and and i think that uh we don't discuss politics on this podcast but a lot of people could do a political analysis of this portfolio and try to poke holes in it and say that what he's doing is a bad thing but i think if you go line by line on this every pretty much every single product has potential to benefit every american right Like even if you're not Catholic, if a hollow app has a million people that are using the product to help become, you know, better people and practice their faith, like that actually can have a positive ripple effect, right? True anomaly is something that's helping America. They build hunter-seeker satellites, which is cool. So they send up satellites and then use those satellites to take out other satellites because you can imagine in a major global conflict, one of the top.

priorities for all nation states would be taking out enemy satellites, controlling space, right? Yeah. So all these things are, you could make them political, but I would argue that many of those bets are generally, like, they're all like America first in their own way. The other thing that I like about this is that there's like a pretty significant representation of like advanced biology. Yeah. And there's this, there's a big meme.

We saw it with that Eric Newcomer post that it's like, it's like, you know, you know, like, yeah, like Trump might be, you know, pro deregulation, but the right wing is like super skeptical of science generally. And that's true about some things. Obviously, RFK is out there talking about, you know, tallow fries and like seed oils and stuff. But I think that there's a, there's like a silver lining there where you see that, like, there is some significant bio innovation that is, that's being embraced by the conservatives. and it's not just a party of, like, neoludites when it comes to biology, even though the biology stuff...

Yeah, it's not just build, build, build, frack, for, fack, for... Exactly, exactly. Like, there is some element of, like, okay, yeah, like, bio, when done right is, like, amazing. It's just that it can't be done, like, carelessly or only for profit or only for... Or only for... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So, cheers to J.D. The one thing that I think a lot of people are maybe a little shook by is just that... the hierarchy in the White House right now feels a little bit out of balance because normally you'd see, you know, the real estate guy being a little bit less prestigious than the VC. The VC should be on top there. So it's a little bit of a narrative violation that the real estate, the social media guy. Really, it's like you could think of Trump as like the investor with a podcast, you know, who's on the apprentice. I would argue that. He hasn't yet done as much podcasting, so he's still in the second wrong. But hopefully that flips. I would argue.

that the highest status occupation in the world is being the founder of a multi-billion dollar social media product, right? Because if you think about Zuck, Elon, Zuck, Spiegel, right?

These are people, Jack Dorsey, right? They end up gaining the most amount of cloud and influence and power because they control what is effectively the printing press, right? Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, yeah, if you want to say that Trump

just a real estate guy, like some people like to say. It's like, no, he's a technology founder first, at least when you look at his, personal balance sheet. Yeah, also reality TV star, you know, valuable. Well, let's go into Brother of the Week. But first, I need to tell you about Feed Ship. Established as the pinnacle of yacht craftsmanship, feedship has been creating world-class custom super yachts for the global elite since 1949,

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Before we dive in, we did get some pushback from a few of our listeners. We recently promoted net jets. And we just realized that many of our listeners, you know, it's not super relevant just because they have, you know, multiple private jets already. so we just wanted to acknowledge that. And if you do go to NetJets, just don't mention the podcast or anything like that. Just don't tell them we sent you. Yeah, Maricopa won't happen again.

Sorry about that. So let's move on to Mark Cuban. So brother of the week, why do you want to give him brother of the week? So Mark Cuban has done a lot of winning in his life. He's a technology brother. But this week was rough. And what I,

rough for him. And, you know, I don't know how he's handling it. We've seen his name popping around group chats, you know, getting out his sort of frustration in different ways. But ultimately, I just think this is an opportunity to say to Mark and to every one of our listeners, it's okay to get knocked down. It's okay to fail. If you look at our next president, this is a guy that has been knocked down many times, has come up short many times. So, you know, there's been conversations of Mark talking about a presidential run. And I just don't you know whatever happened this last week. It's in the past. Mark has

you know created a tremendous amount of enterprise value through smart investments and his own companies. And I just, even though his shark tank portfolio is underwater as well, I just want to say to Mark, you're the brother of the week. Get back up. Get back on the horse. Keep going. Lever up. Your bet lever up is a good way to kind of make it all back. Yep. It's never too late to make it back, make it all back in one trade. So, 2028 is around the corner. Feels far away right now.

Start planning now. Make it all back in one trade. Yeah. And good luck. You know, the interesting thing about more Cuban is there's this very, like, there's clearly a rivalry between him and Trump. There's all those clips from like the old talk shows where they were kind of beefing with each other and talking traction.

They were kind of in the similar milieu in the sense that Cuban was on Shark Tank. like the number two business show essentially. And then The Apprentice was like the number one business show. And so they were both like these billionaire entrepreneurs with, but with big, big media presences. But I think what's interesting and I don't know how accurate this is, but Cuban made his first big win on broadcast.com, which was radio on the internet.

This dot com boom, sold it to Yahoo for, I think, $8 billion. Amazing. And the product never went anywhere. Like Yahoo obviously declined and broadcast.com, I think either shut down or just the product never really like realized that valuation. But it's interesting because like you could. You could almost say he's a godfather of podcasting. Yeah, in many ways.

Which is honestly maybe what he should do to rebrand himself now after a big loss. It's to say like all you people talking about me on podcast like I created you. Yeah, basically. grandfather. But the really interesting thing is that like throughout the the 2000s and 2010s, he was almost too early to internet content. Because he started this company in like I think 97 and sold it in maybe like 99 or 2000. But it was too early. Meanwhile, during that era, Trump is just completely ignoring the internet, doing the apprentice, just doing traditional media up until literally this election where he pivots to the podcast.

podcast strategy and it works really well. But it's just so fascinating that like, you know, like Trump kind of like got the last laugh with with Cuban and like won this like memetic competition. Yeah. But only because Cuban, not because Cuban was too late to a trend. It's because he was almost too early. Totally. It's very, very interesting. Did you know that Jason Calacanis, his first company was Mark with Mark Cuban?

Either like Mark was like the investor or like a co-founder or something and they sold that like blog. company and so they like go like way way back it's fascinating did mark ever go on all in i think you did yeah yeah and there was and there was a big like kerfuffle over it because um uh i i think like jason was like teeing him up for stuff and he was beefing with sacks and there was like some sort of like debate over it uh but jason was framing it as like you know we're being more balanced here because we had trump on we'll have the we'll have the we'll have the comma surrogate on uh which makes sense but um yeah yeah just mark's gonna get back to winning soon I think so.

I think so. And I do think that the shark tank format is underrated. And I've talked to a lot of people who are in business content. Maybe they have like a podcast, like a business interview show. And they've said like, oh, I want to do YouTube and I want to be like the Mr. Beast of like business on YouTube. Yeah. And I've always told them like the format is shark tank.

Yeah. Like you need to do an episode where you're giving away money at the end of the episode every single time. It's very expensive because you actually have to be giving money away. but that's the way the Mr. Beast model works. You have to watch to the end because you want to see who wins. Like so many of Mr. Beast formats

are just, it's just American Ninja Warrior adapted for YouTube. Well, now we've told enough people that they should do that and they haven't. Maybe we have to do it. Well, yeah. But no, no, so we're not going to do the Shark Tank. We're going to do The Apprentice.

Did you see the comments? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone commented on the show. How do I be on The Apprentice? Well, you got to show some more hustle than just commenting. You got to get in my DMs. You got to fly. to LA and figure out where we record bang on the door exactly there's security downstairs

but if you're cut out to be on our show you'll you'll find a way through yeah you'll talk your way here hot tip wear a suit where is a dress code in this building yeah um but yeah i i think i think bring back the apprentice for the youtube generation bring back or revitalize the shark tank for the for the for the for the youtube generation uh the morning Brew Guy was doing a version of. That was more like man on the street. There was man on the street. Tell me what your business, 60 second pitch.

But I don't think he was giving away money. The only problem with that format is I love business so much. 60 seconds is not enough, right? Like I want. It's got to be the 20 minute, like the Bist or Beast or Beast format. Yeah. The funny thing that people don't realize about Shark Tank too is that they record, I think, with every company for like two, three hours.

You know the trick, right? They record for two hours. If you take the deal, they use the good clips. To make you look good. To make you look good. And if you don't take it, they make you look bad. Yeah. And so the real thing, you have to take the deal.

Take the deal. Drag. Drag. I don't know that. I know the person you're talking about. Back and forth, back and forth. And then after it airs, be like, you know, hopefully, you know, they can work it out.

Yep. Make the deal happen. Yeah. Because there's such an adverse selection problem. Like, you know, the power law companies are not showing up to Shark Tank. It's also weird products that do. well from Shark Tank. Consumer stuff, right?

It's all consumer, but then it's honestly a lot of, if you come out, it really is a reflection of the Shark Tank audience is more traditional America than any other sort of like business media, like oriented audience. And so if you come out there with like some new CBD drink that's like replacing alcohol, like you're not going to see a single like sale from it. Because the audience just does not care. but I had a friend of mine years ago started a company that was during the sustainability boom he made a collapsible metal straw that could fit into something that would be on your keychain

and for months after their shark tank airing they would just see the sales uptick when it would go live because people I guess like Midwest moms would just were like oh I'll take a straw that I can just like keep on my keychain It was great. Save the planet. Save the planet in the process. So, yeah. Anyways. We should definitely take a company on Shark Tank. Yeah.

Ideally, your gun store. Yeah. I know I'm like, I'm like trolling you. I know it's like a real business. But I'm like, we need to take, we need to take Arlie through YC and we need to get it on Shark Tank. Yeah. I know it's a real company and it's very disrespectful to joke about that.

No, I think real, I think real companies. if the audience is relevant to that company, they should. Imagine, yeah, customizing a firearm on mid-show, you know. Fantastic, yeah. So, cheers to Mark Cuban. You are one of the few brothers of the week so far, but soon to be joined by a legion of other technology brothers. Should we move on to some posts, the timeline?

The timeline. The timeline. So Trung Fan says, if you need a doomscroll break, check out my new podcast, caffeinated deep dives. One, drink three coffees, maybe a scoop of C4. Two, read a book. Three, press record for an hour. The first two episodes are here. iPhone and Calvin and Hobbs.

Oh, so this is like a real thing. This is not like a joke post. He's actually. He's a shit poster, but no, this is real. It's something that Senra has been pushing to do for a while, which is a long-form podcast. and while you have Senra focused on founders, you have business breakdown focused on businesses. Businesses.

You have invests like the best, focused on capital allocators. And now you have Trung, you have Technology Brothers focused on the timeline. You have Trung focused on individual products, which I think is interesting. Because everybody knows Apple, the company, and the founding story and all that stuff.

But I actually don't know the details of the iPhone, right? I know some high-level stuff. Yeah. I actually, you know, I know quite a lot of details, but there's like a whole layer deeper that you can go on all these products and the stories behind them and the individuals, right? Because like it's not just, like, it wasn't Steve Jobs that built the iPhone, right? There was hundreds of people that played a critical role in building that.

So, Trung's amazing. I'm going to follow this right now. This looks good. Trung's amazing, long time quality poster and writer and Jenner. and generally I think it's easy for posters to get caught up into like toxic timeline drama. But Trung has always stayed above it, you know, managing his empire. I like his first review on here. Smart threads, dumb memes, and an entertaining podcast.

That sums Trung up perfectly. Well, I'm looking forward to listening to that. Let's go to Sean Frank. Sean? Friend of the pod. Friend of the pod. Quote, yeah, just go ahead in 40. PX budgets starting 116, me to my media buyer.

Yeah, so Q4 is always challenging for consumer brands because CPMs go through the roof, just the cost of getting in front of each incremental potential customer goes way high. And then when you combine that with the election cycle, which increases spending, it has like a whole new group of people that are coming on and spending super, super, super aggressively. Yeah, they spend in a super tight. Literally a billion dollars. Yeah. Yeah.

So now you're not just competing with other brands in your category and other brands on the platform, but you're competing with this new elephant in the room, which is various political groups competing to drive voters to make certain decisions. And so it's very much the second that the election ends. I think Facebook actually has a policy that says you can't create new political ads now. so you can keep running old ads. Interesting. But they wanted to prevent people from using, if the election were to have gone differently

and there was more drama and controversy. Oh, use it to fundraise. Well, yeah, they didn't want people to basically use it to manipulate public opinion. Like, hey, like Kamala stole the election or Trump stole the election. And then it's sort of like, yeah, Facebook doesn't want anything. And so if you're a brand like Sean, Sean's company, the Ridge, and you're seeing good performance during the election. Connor runs their, all of their, is their CMO and is the best performance marketer

that I've ever known or work with. He was probably seeing solid results even during the election, but then when CPMs drop, they're going to be incredible. They could drop like 50%. And so you just want to just absolutely send it because you have from now until Christmas or December. Typically it's like December 20th is when like sales start to fall. I mean, I remember talking to the pebble guys. Do you remember this watch, the smart watch, the precursor of the Apple Watch? And it was a pretty big business. I feel like they were doing like $50 million a year in sales. Maybe more.com of smart watches. Yeah, it's rough. But yeah, I mean, they would do like 90% of their revenue in December. Yeah. Because it was just like a gift. And that's the, and that's the nature for a lot of these electronics companies. And so like you, it's just like you build up your inventory. You build up your ad budget and you got to be able to make a decision like this. So we're, so we're, and that's the nature. So we're, so we're, we're,

So 400, this isn't a joke. Like, this is actually what he's going to do. Yeah, something like that. We're launching Rora on November 21st, and we've been running campaigns to acquire, you know, people that are submitting using our Rora.com to do a water report. And we've been seeing fantastic results even during the election cycle. And now we're doing the same thing. Budgets went up dramatically basically yesterday.

That's great. amazing let's go to Wyatt Cavalier oh what a great name you know Wyatt is a cowboy name Cavalier literally means like crazy Wyatt Cavaliers posting a game fantastic he says I'm a single issue newsletter voter whichever of beehive and kit lets me upload and attach web P files first gets all my money and I think are these the two founders of the two companies I love this CC to the CEO okay so the reason this is interesting is kit kit was originally called convert kit okay oh yeah yeah that's right build in public yeah um build

in public uh you know like literally i remember like years ago they had a dashboard with all of their metrics yeah and i think that there's this thing that happens where build in public is cool because you get a lot of attention yeah and and sort of people are patting you on the back like you're legend but um the the problem is that everybody was looking at that business being like this business rate zero dollars. It's pretty much a commodity product, right? It's not easy to build, but like anybody can kind of like spin up the ability to send, you know, SaaS product to send emails.

And what happened is Tyler, who was at, yeah, he was at Morning Brew. Yeah, so he was at Morning Brew working on products, like literally building. And so he realized there was this white space around a more enterprise, Creator Convert Kit was more focused on creators and people like Tim Ferriss and things like that. He realized there was a white space of building like much more enterprise tooling for people that were, I'm running a newsletter, but I'm running a business. Yep. And he's taking the exact opposite approach.

I remember meeting. I met Tyler, Miami in 2021. And credit to him, I didn't under, I didn't see that white space at the time. I should have just backed him because he was like much more knowledgeable in the space. and he's taking the exact opposite approach is convert kit just raise like pre-seed seed series a I think they maybe have already done their B tier one investors all the way through like just like absolutely the business is crushing they're doing over a million a month they will I'm I would imagine they'll be bigger than

kit or convert kit within the next 24 months maybe even and there's probably so much energy in the employees they're seeing their stock get marked up their yeah talent magnet and like the challenge is Dank is really good at Twitter. Nathan, the other founder is really good at Twitter. Oh, really? They're both. Like, yeah, like I think that Nathan was doing it as his own way, like the sort of build in public, like in the hacker way. Dank is much more like full speed ahead. I'm going to publish my investor updates. Sure, sure, sure. He's doing it in his, his own sort of lane. But the challenge when you have two companies that are both good at one marketing channel. is it really does, I'm sure it sucked the sort of wind out of kits sales

where they're like, this was our biggest acquisition channel. Now there's another person in the room with us yelling to all the same customers, and you see it in tweets like this where people are literally just saying like, all right, founders fight for my business. And then they have to fight it out on the timeline. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Denk even says, like, I think we were able to get this live today. but how much money is all like ha ha because it's like if this guy's like I'm willing to pay 50 bucks a month

it's like well I'm not going to do anything yeah interesting let's go to mike salana um quote tweeting adam rubinstein things tech time uh so the new york times tech employees demanded unlimited break time pet bereavement it was a big meme and it was seen as like kind of ridiculous going into this election they were they were demanding other things but the the the the time timeline really focused on the most ridiculous things. And so Salana says, New York Times writers, Dark Days, a fascist dictator on the rise at home, and we will surely be imprisoned if we can't stop him. The fate of the world hangs in the balance. And then the NYT Tech Union says, my goldfish died. I'm going on strike. So here's why this is funny. So the tech world has had beef with the New York

Times forever. Yeah. I wish I could go read the New York Times the day that I was born. because they were probably like bashing some like dot com era founder. And so that's just like that's that's been forever. Yeah. The irony of it is New York Times is so anti-tech that even their own tech union is rebelling within the company on the most important day week of the New York Times' entire like whatever this decade arguably. So the infighting shout out to those to the tech workers in the New York. Times, you know, besides the sort of more memeable things that they're asking for.

Yeah. What's interesting is like the website stayed up. Like even though they were maybe on strike, like the needle was working. They're too good at their job. We didn't hear, yeah, we didn't hear anything about like, oh, like the New York Times sites like unreliable or breaking. It's because they were just, they have the polymarket API. I'm just feeding it in.

Just like polymarket minus 10. Yeah, yeah. Just like hard-coded adjustment. Yeah. Let's go to Elon Musk says, I'm doing a digital town hall on X tonight at 830 Eastern Time. And this is on the fourth, which is election day? Or was the election day? I think it was the night before.

And the top comment is, can you buy Canada? Oh, I guess this guy's probably in Canada. And it's like, I join the team. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I think. How do you get the X emoji? I need to figure out how to do that. I really like the way that looks.

You just have to copy and paste it. It's just some icon. I thought it was something where, you know, it was like hard-coded in. where if you like did some sort of code. I'm sure there's a character combination. Yeah, but you can get that. I got to get a shortcut for that on my keyboard. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, 47 million views, 191,000 likes. Yeah. Just so, it's phenomenal. So the reason that I included this, even though you could, somebody might say it's political and we don't discuss politics, is that what Elon is doing and trying to do with America is not political at all. It's actually applying the same methodology.

that he uses for company building, which is progress, being capital efficient, all these other things. Yep. You know, accelerating timelines, all these things. So I do imagine after we make the moon estate, Canada would be another good target for the United States. I think it's a long time. And Antarctica, low-hanging fruit.

Friend of the pod, this guy Sam Porier. was was when we were at center's event was talking about um uh just wanting um basically that like Canadians are getting so uh at least people in Quebec are getting so sick of how things are being run that even they're thinking about uh you know a separating uh there's been like a separatist movement I think within Quebec for a while um but uh but anyways um long Canada if we can maybe the play is along Canada now if Elon's going to turn there's a lot of land in Canada you can do a lot of rocket launches yeah yeah I didn't listen to any of the live streams I used to listen to Clubhouse all the time but I haven't listened to a lot on X but maybe we should

host some I think it'd be fine if only they're they weren't prioritizing XAI so aggressively oh is that what the top live stream is usually no I think it's more like uh oh oh you just get thrown into a grok flow instead of a clubhouse flow. I don't want to be in grok. I'd rather. I'd rather. Like there's too many. Yeah. It has some cool features where like if if me and you were doing the show on an X space like a live stream, we could highlight a tweet and then everyone who's looking could see this the tweet that were the post that we're like talking out of the time and I think that's like that's probably kind of cool. I know there's some people that have growth hacked it like crazy. That guy Mario Newfall I think is like everything's like breaking news every two seconds. But there's a lot of

people that have like Mario walks so we could run. Yes, yes, yes. Well, the P-God says, I'm hitting this

at the next closing dinner and it's three football players doing some sort of handstand or headstand. Yeah, so this is something that looks really good in slow-mo or pictures,

but if you actually see them do it live, it's sort of like a little bit silly looking because they're doing like a headstand with other hands, but this was more,

I think we need to bring back showboating to the workplace. Yeah, well, you know what? Elon hits him pretty crazy, like, poses. Yeah, yeah, he does that. And he's good with, like, the iconic, like, sync day, bringing the sink in, like,

creating these, like, viral moments, dancing on stage. You need to be creating viral moments in the workplace. Yes, yes. Well, maybe we just need to return. I was getting coffee with the head of investment banking at one of the big tech investment banking firms. And his office did not have a square inch of bare table because he had so many deals. toys. It was insane. Every single, every single surface was just covered with. I've always thought that we need deal toys for venture. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, people do it, but then it gets really embarrassing because

you have to throw 90 to 90% of them away. But it's like, oh, this one is really embarrassing. But with investment banking, it's like even if you take a company public and it didn't do that well after, it's like you still made $100 million on that deal. So like go off. 2021 holiday gift from a venture unnamed venture fund was a bottle of wine. that just said liquidity event on it, which was, which was great. I kept the bottle. Yeah, yeah, that's nice. Yeah.

Yeah, we've had a bunch of VC firms reach out about doing custom branded nicotine pouches as gifts. But that's very like temporary. That's probably like performance. That's just more like performance oriented. Yeah, it's something you want in the office. You want to give that portfolio company an extra little push. But for this, I mean, we have the framed $100 bill. We should definitely frame our first ad deal, which was a $300, $3,000 CPC.

PM. Although we should stop building in public. We should just insist that we're the most profitable podcast. If people figure out that we're charging $3,000 CPMs, we're going to invite a lot of competition. Exactly, exactly. There's going to be a bunch of knockoffs. I can already feel it. But we should do more deal toys. I mean, I love the YouTube thing. Like when you pass 100,000 subscribers, they send you a plaque. That's cool. That's probably the best thing YouTube's ever done. They send you, yeah, yeah, that was really, really smart. It's like kind of like a deal toy. And I was It's proof of work. Yeah, but more companies should do this.

Like, even just for Lucy, like I was looking through some of our top customers who have been with us for like eight years, no stop. And it's like, I haven't even thought to like send them a T-shirt. Like I absolutely should do that. It's like, it costs nothing. And it's like just a thank you. But you could get so much more creative with it than just a T-shirt. You could give them a deal toy or something or something really interesting.

Yeah, with the Doc Send. Like you send every potential investor, Vee. see a deal toy being like I got to glance upon the series B DAC in Doxend. Yeah. Regardless. And then they just have to deal with this like physical object. Physical object. And they throw it out.

What if they didn't do the deal? What if they got beaten out? But it's going to stay in their mind. It's going to stay top of mind because they close that Doxend tab. They forget about your company. But if there's a deal toy sitting there shows up at the office. Shows up at the office. And it's this glass monument.

Mischief did the reverse deal toy where they made, they did a drop once that had miniaturized versions of products that failed. Yeah, I saw that. I always think that's a little. I love mischief, but I thought that would win. Like the whole like, you need celebratory stuff. Yeah, not dunking.

Yeah, being obsessed with like the failure. It is very funny. But it's a little, it's not as exciting as, as the good stuff. The good stuff. Yeah, series C you should get artifacts from, like a lot of SpaceX investors have like, like cool model rocket.

and stuff that have been given out at various times. Next time. Enderol has like swords and stuff. Pre-IPO rounds, BC should give their founders like miniature feed chips, you know? Oh yeah. Like that kind of like lean into there.

Just like a little model one. I mean, which is like that's, you're so close to this. I feel like Nikita should give a model G-wagon to everyone that hits number one on the app store. No, everybody that spends a year with him on intro.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the G-bag. G-wagon. Let's go to Swen, I think. I don't know how to pronounce that. Jess Wen Lee says,

discipline is for those who lack obsession. And it's a beautiful skyline photo with a screenshot of a, or a photo of a MacBook with some text on it. What does it say? The original something of trading. I don't know.

Did you understand this? So this is a little bit of a hustle porn post, but the reason that I included it is that I think that the, if you're somebody that gets, when somebody's posting about, here's my knowledge stack, here's my second brain,

all this stuff, and you're starting to obsess over note taking apps. There's probably something, that's probably, the reason for that is that you don't actually care about what you're working on. Sure. It's,

it's, you have to expand, because if you truly, yeah, if you're thinking about, oh, I need to have more discipline, and you just don't care about what you're working on.

Like, I don't, it is not hard for me to roll out of bed and come here and record the podcast, right? Like, I don't, last week I had to drive through 100,000 people to get here, right? That's crazy. I even, I even destroyed my tire. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I had to replace it. Wow.

And so, so, yeah, it's about, um, obsession brings discipline, but not because you're disciplined, but because you're obsessed, right? Yeah. So you should just be obsessed first. Just find something that you're obsessed with first. And then the discipline will come naturally because the energy will come. Warren Buffett would use iPhone notes at stock. Yeah.

Right. A pen and paper. Yeah. He's not getting crazy. No fourth brain. Fourth brain. Second brain. Third brain, fourth brain.

Yeah. That's good. I've spent very little time in the productivity world. The one thing that I did get, I did adopt and I like is inbox zero. I do inbox zero where everything gets archived or replied to or delay, send, or remind me later. And then, and then, like, I just know that if it's in my inbox, I need to get to it at some point. And that becomes like the task list. See, I'm obsessed.

That works. I have 2,500 unread texts. Yep. And I always reply to the ones that matter to me. Interesting. So I don't, I don't worry about by trying to get to inbox zero with my text at least. Yeah. I would be dealing with a lot of things I don't care about, really.

So, yeah, just. Yeah, I mean, at a certain point, it just becomes completely unmanaged. Well, I was, I was talking to, I was talking to a billionaire a week ago that, uh, lost his email because he just got two, a beaner, yes. Because he, uh, he lost, he basically lost his email because there's just too much.

So he can't just, you just can't do it at all. Yeah. And then lost his text because he just got too many. Trump, you said prints out, yeah. Gets his email printed out for him. Exactly. And at the very least, like the printer is a little bit slow. So you, people can email,

you faster than you can print them. So the printer is a rate limiting factor. You can only see so much stuff. Maybe it runs out of ink. Maybe it runs out of paper. Eventually you can have, there's going to be some natural. Yeah,

there's going to be some natural prioritization. But yeah, now he just, the only thing that gets through is Twitter DMs. Because you have to be a mutual follower. So in order to contact this guy, you basically have to say something interesting so that he follows you and not do something stupid

where you get unfollowed. And then you can, And then you can contact him. And that's the only way. And that's the real cue of like how you get to him. That's good. So let's go to Nicole Wiskoff. She says, the founder of Wiskoff Ventures.

She says, launching a podcast feels 10x harder than launching a VC firm, humbled after incorporating and filming the first episode, mildly concerning. And then Alex Conrad says, now you are finally a VC firm. And she says, don't jinx it, Alex. What do you think about this? Which one's harder? Depends on who you are. I think for for you and our vice president Ben who produces the show this is like riding like the production value with technology brothers is intense right there's lighting there's heavy heavy audio optimization post work on this is not something that you're going to do on this is not your guys's first rodeo right and so for you starting up a podcast is like riding a bike.

But to anybody out there that thinks, oh, podcasting's easy, I would just say, you know, grab a mic. Yeah. Grab a mic. Give it a shot, right? Yeah. I do think that what makes it hard is that people don't think about the format enough or what the show is.

And so they wind up just doing kind of like, oh, I'll just interview my friends or like, it's like an interview show is just one. possibility. Like there are within the, within the podcast world, if you actually look at the podcasts, there are structured interview shows like Tyler Cowan, where he asks, he has every single question written out. He asks the question, lets them talk. Lex Friedman's very similar. Asks a question, lets them talk. Lex famously let Elon sit for like 15 seconds. You remember this? He asks Elon a question and Elon just sits there and think, and there's just 15 seconds of

silence on the mic. And everyone's like, wow, like he like really didn't jump in. Rogan, very different. It's a conversation. Rogan doesn't have a whole bunch of questions. He's just talking the whole time. So conversational versus like planned interview one-on-one. Then there's group shows where it's a bunch of people hanging out. The Pod Save guys that SmartList podcast is like four comedians. They still have guests on every once in a while. There's shows that don't have any guests like ours. There's shows that are scripted like, you know, serial and PR.

Senra's shows are basically solo. Solo and like objectively it's more of like an audio book by the end. Exactly, yeah. Anything else. And then there's also the acquired show where it's similar to Senra's thing, but two people and lightly scripted, like lightly planned, but not scripted word by word. But a lot of like the...

But a ton of research. Yeah, but a lot of those like true crime shows are like literally scripted, like every single word. And it's just an audio book. Yeah, it's an audio book. And then how much production are you going to do? Are you going to use sound mixing and bring in, you know, atmospheric sounds?

A lot of horror shows and true crime shows will have like moody music to set the tone. And just all these different formats and figuring out like what is the right format for your goal, what are you good at, like actually thinking that through and then sticking to that instead of just being like, I have a podcast, it's a Zoom interview show with just random people that I meet. That doesn't really work.

So until you do that work, you can just be like stagnating. And I've seen a lot of people launch podcasts and just struggle for years to get any sort of product market fit because they don't have dialed in. It should feel more like, same thing with companies where I give this example to founders where if you're if if you're working on a product that is not good or the market doesn't care about it or doesn't want it it's going to feel like pushing a rock like a really heavy rock uphill right which is like almost impossible like for a small

team if you're working on something that is getting real pull from the market that's a good product at the right time all the stuff it's still really hard but you're like pushing this heavy rock down like a a small slope. Yeah. Yeah, slight decline. And so, yeah, you have this momentum kind of like working with you. Yeah.

So yeah, I think that's... I guess the question for me is like, if you flip it around, like, what do you need to get right to have like immediate product market fit for a VC firm? Is it just like a bangor thesis or like a lot of it feels like

you have some preferential access to proprietary deal flow and so it's very natural for you to raise the fund because you are already seeing great deals and either angel investing or raising SPVs like very consistent. Yeah, she's Nicole's on her like so people were trying to dunk on this tweet which which people want a reason to dunk on anything but she's on her third fund right it's not her first rodeo it legitimately is probably much easier for her to set up a venture fund sure and

raise money, raise tens of millions of dollars from LPs so for her going and doing podcasting for the first time I think a lot of people as a stop doing new things. So everything they do is pretty easy. Like I make my coffee in the morning. I drive to work. I do my job that I've done for decades. And it's all like very easy.

And so it can be, and if you're naturally a talented person, it's usually a weird feeling when you're doing something and it's like hard. And didn't she also like publish like the exact funnel that she used to raise the latest fund? And it was like hundreds of pitches. Yeah.

And that's the equivalent of doing hundreds of episodes. Yeah. And so she's been very transparent with. She's building a public. Yeah, yeah, she's building in public, but doing it doing it the right way. Yeah, that's great. Let's move on to Tanei says market caps of a few consumer companies that were all multibillion-dollar companies when they IPOed in the 20 to 21 period.

Saunder at $32 million now, rent the runway at $36 million, Bain Capital Company, I remember seeing them at Bain. Allbirds, 88 million, BuzzFeed, 96 million, and Wish at 167 million. and then Brennan says market cap of Sonder is lower than the cash we raised for our series B in 2017. Is this like the founder of Sonder or something? Like we raised? He must have, he must at least have been there. I don't think that's a founder.

But yeah, I think there's some type of opportunity here. A lot of these companies are like you have to imagine that Sonder, I don't know if the board and everyone would be able to, approve like a take private, but last I checked, they had like hundreds of these corporate style like apartments that were basically like somewhere between a hotel room and an Airbnb. Yeah. And there must be like some value in there greater than than that number. And so I think a lot of these are, I think like Wish and stuff like that, these e-commerce seems like it's a really bad business.

If unless you're online, unless you have, unless you're Amazon or you have, um, have, have, um, have like a real brand. It seems like the middle is like really, really bad. Even if you have a real brand, like the brand, the e-commerce effort is merely a go-to-market strategy. And that's what we're seeing with Lucy where like we were 99% e-commerce for years. Now it's less than a third of the business. Yeah.

And then rent the runway is one of those things like when it launched. I think that in theory for, in theory, I don't know if they have men's product. I'm sure they have men's products now. Well, there's the black tucks, which is a competitive. competitor for Toxedo rental online.

And then I think they got kind of eaten up by those like buy and sell resale websites, like the Real, where it's like the economics, it sounds way more expensive, but it's actually pretty similar. If you just go to the Real Real, buy a dress for a hundred bucks, wear it,

take it back, sell it for 50. It's like you've taken a 50% loss, but that might be the same price as renting the runway. So the big issue with Run the Runway is that it is a lot, even though they've really dialed in like the receiving and dropping it off. The more money you pay for rent the runway as a consumer, the more work it is.

It's like, oh, great, I have these like three or four things that I have to like take and pack up and put DUP. And eventually they're looking at it as like, okay, I'm spending $2,000 a month. I could just like strategically build out my wardrobe and sell the stuff that I don't like, like you're saying. So I think it's one of those things like that is something that is probably great, localized small business in New York. for example where if you could subscribe to a closet New York where a woman could walk in

buy something, you're not buy something, rent three pieces that she likes, wear them, drop them back off and it's like right in their neighborhood that probably is like a pretty good business. But, you know, online, very logistics intensive. It just doesn't really make money. I remember my mom always saying that like maybe it was like the Italian way is to just have like one incredible suit instead of like 10. cheap suits and there you go.

This is a special occasion. And just always essentially building a power law closet where you don't, where you have very few things, but they're all extremely nice and you take very good care of them and you repair them and they're repair a bowl because they're made out of nice materials instead of just buying fast casual, fast fashion or whatever. I remember the most distinct moment. I was probably like 22-ish where I realized I'd stopped growing. Yeah. And I was like, wait, I can buy stuff that's going to.

Yeah, and effectively mentally depreciate it for a decade as opposed to a couple months. Yeah. Let's go to Saar. He says nice because he's tweeting a picture of an interaction between Jason Calacanus and David Freeberg. RFK is talking about how the Trump White House will advise all water systems to remove fluoride from public water. And Jason says, um, dot, dot, dot, science boy, can you vet this for me? Question mark. Parentheses, Friedberg.

And what I love, so Friedberg responds, mm, insecure boy. Why don't you use the internet to do some primary research yourself instead of outsourcing your thinking? And it's this massive ratio of, you know, 9,000 likes to 900 likes. And it's funny because it's like infighting. But what I love is that David Friedberg matched Jason's formatting to, like, it's pixel perfect. U-M-M dot dot-dot, three dots. Insecure Boy, Science Boy, comma.

And then even when they tag the person, Jason did open parentheses, space, at Friedberg, space, close parentheses, and Friedberg does the exact same thing with Jason. The attention to detail here is just fantastic. And I just like, it was like the mirroring of the meme. It's like, it's beautiful. Yeah, so here.

They've been beefing. I don't want to celebrate. I don't think it's worth dunking on them or celebrating. Clearly, they're going through a lot. Yeah. There's a group right now. Sacks is probably going to, you know, it's possible he'll have to die best and become secretary of state.

You know, who knows? There's a lot going on. But I think why I thought this was relevant is one of the biggest reasons that we started this podcast is frustration that Allend wasn't monetizing. And frustration from our friends that said, hey, we want to advertise to this group of smart pro-business individuals. Yep. And we can't get in front of them.

can you guys build a bigger podcast and All In that monetizes and we can sponsor. And I think the big thing is if All In had sponsors and they were generating tens of millions of dollars of revenue, which they can and should, they would not be fighting on the timeline. I mean, that could pay for a private research assistant for Jason to ask these dumb questions to. Exactly. They could have a vice president. Yeah. I don't think they do.

I think they have like a producer. I think they have a couple of producers, but I don't think they have a VP yet. So if, yeah, just thinking if I'm Feed Ship, and Feedship is sponsoring all in and I see two of their hosts fighting it out, I'm like, hey, we're here to sell boats, right? Yeah. We're not here to argue and poke fun at each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think there's more to this story and I'm sure it'll come out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, the Sutherby's clientele, like you don't want bidders. You want, you want them to be fighting with the, over individual objects. With the paddles, with the option paddles, not, not. not making a scene in the lobby.

So, yeah, it's tough. They almost waited too long, and you wonder, like, could they monetize now? Or has the ship sailed? Yeah. Has the feed ship sailed? Yeah. Oh, well, let's move on to Kyle Harrison.

He's it contrary, right? Yeah. Kyle says, VC, quote, we don't invest in chat GPT wrappers, founder. Our chat GPT wrapper has gone from 150K to 15 million of ARR in 12 months. VC will evaluation of RR in 12 months. VC will evaluation of one billion suffice. You know what?

I'll just leave the valuation line blank for you to fill in. And then Matt Turk says, ha ha, that's ridiculous. And also, is there still room in the round? So that was a perplexity sub tweet, right?

Oh, really? Chachypee rapper, 50 million, AR, one billion. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, but, but yeah, I would say VCs love to invest in founders and products that are genuinely loved. and people fucking love perplexity.

Yep. Right? Like it is a product that has replaced search in a small way with very, very, I don't think really anything has done that in my history and tech. Yep. So if something has a potential,

something like perplexity has the potential to disrupt the greatest business model of all time being search. Maybe they should buy search.com. Yeah, search.com. It's not resolving right now. Yeah, that'd be a good play. No one.

No one, it's using. it. And so anyways, I think perplexity is a fair bet at any price in the range of what he just described. Yeah, I mean, bullish on chat GPT rappers generally, not sure if they're always a good fit for VC, but the UI layer is important. And perplexity just gives a different UI. But yeah, a year ago, everyone was saying there's no value in the app layer. You're all getting commoditized now. I think this tweet was in response to open AI rolling out web search. Sure, sure. But people are still using perplexity.

I remember at the election party that we were at, everybody was either they had polymarket open or they had complexity. And it was just like much better sources of information. And it's interesting because, I mean, perplexity is 100% making more money than MP3.com. Yeah. Ever did. And a lot of that's just the cultural shift of like, yeah,

when you launch a product, charge $20. Actually, the founder of perplexity was on, I think Lex and was saying, like, I wish chat GPT had done $40 a month.

Because we just copied their business model. My only critique of perplexity is I haven't, I've never gotten an upsell. Oh, sure. I've never gotten pushed to give them money. Yeah. I used the product pretty frequently.

I used it a little bit. I kind of switched out of it. I had a problem with their voice dictation product where basically sometimes you could use and chatypti has this too where you can use whisper to transcribe something into text and then it becomes a text interaction or you can open up their voice assistant and then you're talking to the AI and it's not printing it out in text for you I like the text interactions because I want to see tables and data but I want to talk to it and so if that flow is confusing it like really breaks my experience but that's probably a little bit niche

Yeah. Let's go to Lindyman. Actually, we should probably skip this guy. He hates me. He hates you? Yeah, he blocked me. How to go? I don't know.

I mean, what's the tweet? It says gambling is so normalized now. People are casually betting on the election. It just took a few years after they made it legal. American society is perfect for betting. Lots of money. Lots of people sitting at work wanting some action. The only thing is this might be how you're Lindyman redemption because he would

appreciate it. we're sitting here in what looks like a newsroom. I hope so. I hope so. Paul, if you're listening, unblock me, man. I really like your posts. So yeah, American society is perfect for betting, lots of money, lots of people sitting at work, wanting some action, right?

Yep. And that was all leading up to, yeah. I think people need to see any type of betting as much as it is a financial activity. It's entertainment, right? So when I angel invest, that's an entertainment product for me. Sure, sure, sure. I'm like, I'm giving you a lot of money without the ability to get it back, except if you do super, super well, and I'm going to get updates every single month until something happened.

It's like the most expensive premium newsletter. Exactly. The investor update is like the most expensive substack. Exactly. It's a one-time 50K fee. Yeah, but I just like that we're now getting betting products for everybody, right? If you're a technology brother, you can angel invest. Yep.

If you're a D-Gen, you can do sports betting. It's an intellectual. You can bet on markets. You can do pumped-out fun. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you're a real D-Gen. I mean, the D-Gen levels are just 25 deep. Yeah, you can go to, you can be betting on like candy crush. Yeah, they're really degenerate is like going, is like having like your 10 screens and going long corn futures while you're betting on like Chinese tennis.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's great. So, Krimiou says, Elon starts his surprise Joe Rogan appearance by mentioning that he's one of the top 20 Diablo four players in the world, and there are only two Americans in the top 20, and David Ulovich quote tweets it and says,

I'm pretty sure Travis Kalanick was the number one we tennis player in the world for a period of time when people play wee tennis. There's a whole story of him playing left-handed with some VC. Yeah, faking it. Faking it and smoking him still. and just being like,

oh, he wasn't even playing with my correct hand. That's just so, it's just so funny because like, like Diablo, I get it. It's like kind of like a hardcore game. So,

Wii tennis is like just like, it's like a silly game, you know? Yeah, but that's the thing. You think that when I play Wii, it feels like a joke because everything feels like

you're in a big cartoon. Yep. But Travis had figured out that there was actually deep skill in the game. And I think that SBF, when he would be playing League of Legends while pitching,

smogging your VC by playing left-handed in wee tennis and just smoking them over and over, that's cool. Just going and playing some random video game. Yeah, yeah. SBF was bad. He wasn't one of the best. If Sequoia had figured out that he actually wasn't even good at the game, they probably wouldn't have invested.

But anyways, I think so the reason the quote tweet there brings up the fact, like somebody analyzing the fact that Elon is just spending a lot, probably, you know, probably, using an army of people to play for him. So he just gets to play with all the other top players. And apparently, if you're playing with other top players, you just rank up a lot more quickly. I think that this is a risk factor for Elon's reputation because he, the number one way that Elon haters try to discredit him is by saying he didn't build rockets, he didn't build X, he didn't do all these things.

and so to now be publicly like being like I'm the top 20 Diablo player in the world when in reality is probably a team of people is just like what's the point I don't know I mean I would I would honestly like flip it around and be like you know there's there's all this skepticism about like does he have the ability to perform at the highest level and he's like demonstrating that in a public place where like if you think that you're better than Elon it's everything and he just gets lucky or he just has some sort of thing that's a good point okay well then show up and beat him. You know, you could do that. And then Palmer says, it's a very interesting phenomenon. I was briefly one of the top 10 players in Sword Art online, Memory Defrag back when it was still

online. And my score in Pokemon pinball for Game Boy Color was several times higher than the Guinness World Record. Wow. Wow. It's amazing. I don't think I've ever been like top 10 anything. See, that's cool. Now he has Mod Retro. I was. I played a lot of Counterstrike and I got to, there's a, there's a, like a league called the Cyberathlete Amateur League and the Cyberathlete professional league, but the CPL was in person. And it was too expensive. So I couldn't go because it was in like Texas and you had to bring your own computer. And it was just like really tricky. But I played online. And I was always like there was open, which anyone could get into Maine, which was like once you were doing well, then there was invite only. And I couldn't get into invite.

I was in Maine. But then I switched games to day of defeat, which was a World War II like version of it essentially, slightly different. And that I actually got to invite in. I was never like really one of the top players, but I was really into that game, and it was fun. But again, like, it's hard when you don't have time. I don't know how he makes the time for it. It was always tough, especially because I was, there was some Olympian that talked about this. And she was saying, like, she does Olympic skiing and modeling and she's still going to school.

And the reporter was asking her, like, how do you do all of this? And the thing is, is context switching usually ends up being a break, even if it's very active. So Elon going from working on SpaceX to working on X to working on playing Diablo is actually like it feels like a break to him. It's refreshing. It's refreshing it versus just doing SpaceX for 14 hours. Yep, yep. It's actually harder to stay at a high level. Interesting. Yeah. I like that. Let's go to Nick. Dollars and data. He says, friendly reminder that Jane Street built a system to get the 2016 election results minutes ahead of the mainstream media and still ended up losing 300 million on the trade. And apparently, Sam Bankman-Fried involves his time at Jane Street Capital where he

built a system to get the election results earlier, which is wild that he was there doing that. And I guess it was reported in Michael Lewis as going infinite. What had been a $300 million profit for Jane Street was now a $300 million loss. It went from the single most profitable to single worst trade in Jane Street history. So it basically popped off of the news and then they held and didn't sell. Really? That's what I'm taking. That's what it seems like, yeah.

Profitable. Yeah, I just, I just think that guy, uh, pretty, they bet against the U.S. market. So they, they predicted that Trump would win early, but they didn't predict that the market would like the Trump win, which is interesting. You would think that you could interview a hundred capital allocators that control like a large time. Maybe there was a, yeah, preference.

Or maybe people didn't want to say at the time that they were, pro-Trump and they thought it was going to be good yeah i i wonder i know citadel like their global macro team has uh they do thousands of like ceo interviews every year um yeah i wonder if jane street has a similar function well you know the you know the french quant yeah he did his own polling he did his own polling and what he was the he claims i mean who knows if he was just degenerate or yeah and now he's sort of like making reconning oh yeah real data but he said that there was a difference between and polling between who are you voting for and who are your neighbors voting for and that gap was his edge.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was what felt different this time around than 2020. I was seeing like Maga Hats in Venice or in like Santa Monica. And it's like it used to be like if you saw that like that person would be getting yelled at. Yeah. I saw. And none of the,

I saw Trump flags. I saw like a mini Trump rally of like 20 people with like a big Trump flag like in Pasadena. Even California, apparently, was 40% of the popular vote in California went to Trump. Wow. Which is everybody for years has been saying. It's supposed to be a D plus 27, right? Which is like more like 7030, I think, maybe even more than that. Yeah.

Wow. It's wild. Anyway, let's go to Austin Peter Smith. No matter who wins this election, I'm going to build some B2B SaaS. Underappreciated tweet, just 74 likes. This is a good one. Yeah, yeah. He's been building this tool called Howie for the last year.

Oh, yeah. Howie's a product that acts as like your secretary, basically. So the same thing that your secretary does versus says, hey, John, you know, this person would like to meet with you. Can I schedule it for this? Howie's like a digital version of that. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay.

So you can CC Howie in on email, and then it just says, suggest times they can coordinate back and forth the person you're booking with can say hey uh that actually my day changed around can you do this day and how we'll just handle the whole thing so um it's basically making uh the kugan secretary experience maybe they should buy secretary.com yeah yeah it's fascinating because secretary has become like it was it was branded as like low status to be a secretary and so that got rebranded as an executive assistant but if you think about the most high status roles in the world, the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary. Secretary, it literally means keep the secrets.

Exactly. Yeah. It's the keeper of the secrets, apparently. And like literally secret Terry, like the person in charge of that. So it's actually like a very high status word and it is non-gendered. And so maybe we should bring it back. Yeah. Let's go to Rassett says, my post is the top post of all time in the R slash cursor in R slash cursor. Bro, what the fuck. zero coding skills my web app ranked number three on product hunt hi guys I was laid off for my job I don't know how to code I decided just to build things with cursor still learning didn't really know what to build so I just decided to build the most something something something and they don't even know about the viral tweet thing LMAO huh yeah the this trend is awesome right

which is that it's being easier and easier and easier and easier and easier to build software and just things in general and so it matters more of your raw ability to execute and pace and even marketing edge, this guy's doing marketing through posting. And I think the really interesting thing is that like I guarantee if this idea has legs, ranks on product hunt, he gets some early adopters, like there's going to be real programmers. It's going to be a tech company. There's going to be a lot of programmers.

They're going to be using cursor. There's going to be a lot of leverage there. But it's going to turn into a real software company. But you've just disconnected this need for the idea. guy to go convince a program or like take a risk and build something for equity and something that they're not sure about. And so it just gets so much easier to iterate and test new ideas. Yeah. So, very bullish. Crazy example here. Have a portfolio company that recently had, went to a hackathon. And instead of going as a group, they had the CEO enter and the CTO enter. And they both

built individual products that both did well in the hackathon, which and the CEO didn't have any prior real, he had never been a software engineer at a company ever. And now he's like competing against other like regular engineers and winning. Yeah. Because at a hackathon in the early stages, you're not solving really, really hard engineering problems. You're not coming in with like, oh, I need a new sorting algorithm or something. You're just like, I need to pull some code over here, some boilerplate over here, deploy this, like, just get something live that, like, does the basic bones of the thing that I want to demonstrate, is this valuable? Is this a product that people want? So, side note, cursors, the most painful miss of mine that I never took a pitch from. Sure. I realized, like,

about a year ago that the cursor CEO had followed me since, like, 2021, before the company started, and I didn't, I hadn't followed him back. And I just was like, oh, So stupid. Yeah. Oh, wow. Great product. Great product. Glad they're winning.

I mean, another example of like a UI wrapper essentially. Yeah. And it's actually model independent. I think you can choose whatever model you want. People like Claude 3. The fact that these apps are going model independent too just shows that value will accrue to the app layer and not the sort of commoditizable. Yeah, I mean, like, language model. Yeah, yeah.

The language model could be like the underlying technology in the same way that I think Netflix was built on GCP or AWS. and Snapchat was built on Google, cloud, but then they eventually built their own servers. The consumer doesn't know. Yeah. They don't care. James Stuber says, VC the other day told me,

we lost several really good founders to Factoria. They came back and just wanted to work in manufacturing, not SaaS. Do you think this is real? Do you think this is a joke? No, no. It's funny, though. It's like ayahuasca adjacent. Yeah.

Like you either lose yourself to ayahuasca and you go off to be a hippie. Yeah, I could see a, I could see a, SaaS founder playing Factoria and they're like, wait, I can like do the same, use my same skill set of company building to like just play this game in real life. Yeah. Like that's what Aaron's doing. Yeah. He's just like playing a real life game in Factoria. That's what we're doing it to Turrance. Yeah. I wonder if there's a like a dividing line between like the type of game that someone played as a kid and then the type of career path they follow. Like is there a difference between like the shooter who's maybe more of like the aggressive since guy versus the RTS game.

My parents were freaked out that I like Call of Duty as a kid because I... Now you own a gun store. No, but that was because... And they were just worried that I'd just like get, like, want to go into the military and all that stuff. But little do they know actually played way more StarCraft, which is much more entrepreneurial, balancing, you know, resources, resource management, conflict. So anyway, long StarCraft players. Yeah.

long Diablo players now. I wonder if there's going to be a boom in Diablo. We had a hackathon or a land party at Founders Fund. And it was a lot of Halo, a lot of counterstrike, a little bit of Smash Brothers. And I think there was maybe two people playing StarCraft, but StarCup's a little bit harder to set up for his longer game, I think. Super long. But I could see the next one. I played a little bit of Diablo 4 because shout out Lulu Misservi.

She gave me a free coupon code for it when she worked at Activision. I was like, thank you. But I played a little bit and I was like, this is like too much. I played Diablo 3. I never really played Diablo 2. That was like the one everyone loved, love, love, loved. But it was like a little bit more time. I'm waiting for another World of Warcraft scale game

where it felt like World of Warcraft was the most deeply addicting. Well, that's supposed to be Fortnite and then Roblox, right? Or Minecraft. Like Minecraft is very much the new version of that. But World of Warcraft, I feel like had a lot of adults that were deeply addicted. Totally. I guess maybe that's the case for Fortnite, too. I just am not.

I don't know. It's maybe true for Fortnite. I think it's probably less true for Minecraft. With adults that are addicted to video games. But yeah. Like, I mean, I guess they're making a Minecraft movie. They made World of Warcraft movies. So maybe it is pretty adjacent if they build it up.

But yeah, I understand what you're saying. Grit cult, who's been on the show before, dumps a whole list of problems and solutions. The fertility crisis, the solutions have 10 kids. environmental crisis buy a classic car ownership crisis become a landlord you laugh but it's real it's really more sustainable objectively to buy oh yeah because it's already it's it's not being produced by anything right yeah that's right yeah yeah and they last a long time more sustainable than buying a Tesla yeah interesting well not when Tesla starts launching V12's with gated manual shippers

which is coming it's it's the end of the arc for Elon very clearly uh education crisis homeschool We know many people that do that. Health crisis, gym obsessively. Unemployment crisis, go all in on crypto. Love it. Everyone scared, over leverage. Lack of nutrition, steak and eggs. And then Jack Butcher says,

100 year bull run. Any of these you disagree with? I just like this because it's all about taking personal responsibility for the problems that you see in the world. So a lot of people think that there's a lot of problems in the world like we should just do less. But the key is to do more.

but do more of the right things. Yeah, and all of these are things that you just do independently, mostly. I mean, landlord's a little tricky. No one's stopping you. Like Elon talks about the fertility crisis and actively works to fix it, right? Like takes personal responsibility.

He's not just saying you have 10 kids. He's having, he's having. And this is something we've seen with like the health crisis stuff. There's a lot of like kind of like trad influencers that, you know, complain about like the fluoride or seed oil or all this stuff, but then, like, you meet them and they don't go to the gym. And it's like, something's mismatched here. Like, you should start with yourself and, like, at least solve the problem with your world.

And then your family and then your community and then the city, the state, the nation. But if you're just jumping straight to the nation, like, you at least need to lead by example, right? Yeah. One guy at Hereticon. One guy at Hereticon that was, like, giving a panel on, like, health and, like, the, like, alternative health movement. He, like, was 37, I guess. straight up look like my age. Like he, like, I was like proof of work.

Oh, there you got. Yeah. So anyways, be like that guy. Is Brian Johnson or Justin Mayerson? No, no, Justin Mayors? Justin looks fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Proof of body.

Very important. Proof of work. Yeah, proof of body for any health claims. Like, yeah. You have to be able to say like, okay, this person's recommending steak and eggs. Do I want to look like them? If yes, then I will listen to them. This is the Andrew Huberman effect.

Chimoth Pollyhapitia says, these should return the exact same form of results, but they don't. So if you searched where to vote for Trump, it would give you stories about the election. And if you asked for where to vote for Harris, it would give you like an info form of where to vote. And you could just type in your address and it would immediately take you there. So people were saying like Google is biasing towards Harris. They're being more helpful to Harris voters than Trump. Obviously, it didn't matter in the election.

but the community note says the search results were different for Harris and Vance because Harris is a county in Texas and Vance is a county in North Carolina and it appears Google has corrected this issue. I do want to give Google the benefit of the doubt here. I just think there are so much scrutiny that they really, okay, okay, here comes the tinfoil hat. Here comes the tinfoil hat. I think there's so much scrutiny that they know. I just think that there was quite a lot of examples like this over the last two weeks, so much so.

that it's hard not to wonder if the woke mind virus within Google is still not acting up a little bit, even though the spotlight is on them. Maybe. That's all. It just seems like, yeah, if there's a whistleblower, there's so much scrutiny, like, they're trying to curry favor. Yeah, you can make the same argument that X is deeply political and up-ranks, you know, certain ideas. So I think it's, I think it ultimately is happening on both sides. Sure, sure.

let's go to Sean Puri He says host of my first million says The New Bachelor Party Trip to Turkey with the boys for hair transplants Where'd you get your hair transplants? Locally locally. Yeah I actually get I get weekly microtransplants

Where they're they just take like One centimeter by one centimeter And just transplant Just a little bit It's more sustainable You know I never have to like go through the whole wheat net No, I haven't had to do this yet, although I, I, uh, uh, function health tells me that I've like really, my hormone profile will, is conducive to hair loss. Okay. But my spirit is conducive to having great

hair. Interesting. So it's kind of like this, this balance between my hormones. Yeah. Yeah. Spirit and whatever. Um, but yeah, I haven't seen this yet. I do think that medical tourism is, is like a underrated trend. I think it's like, like, this, like, pretty investable trend. I knew some guys that were working on on sort of Airbnb for medical tourism, which is kind of a cool concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, if you want to go down to Mexico to get some dental procedure done, there's some dentists down there that are probably fantastic and there's a lot that are going to jack you up. Yeah, but knowing which one's good is important. Knowing which are good and having that user-generating. I was talking to Justin Mares about this with the, like, gLP ones were like widely available for like,

five years before they came to America. And a lot of rich people were going abroad to get them. And they're still really cheap on the black market. Yeah. A gray market. Yeah, very interesting. I have yet to lose my hair. And I don't think it's genetic in my family.

So I'm not super worried about it. But I did start getting a bald spot back here a while ago. And I was like, this is so weird. Like, I don't understand why I'm losing my hair back here. And what I figured out was that I was so, I was so interested in efficiency and shareholder value and just being on the gray. and not wasting any time that when I got out of the shower, I would take the towel and vigorously rub my head as fast as possible to dry my hair in like two seconds and it was ripping out my hair.

No, babies get that. Yeah, yeah, three month old, my three month's cradle crib cap or whatever. Yeah, yeah, same thing. Yeah, so here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, I should put the tinfoil hat back. Okay. Here's, here's what the hair, a lot of the hair loss epidemic is driven by. Sure. lack of sunlight to the head.

Sure. Sunlight makes life grow. Yep, but everyone's inside all the time. No one's working outside. Overuse of artificial fluorescent lights. Sure. That you can offset. These are cinema lights.

They're very high quality. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure they're good. Wearing a lot of hats, cuts off blood flow. Oh, and then a lack of physical touch. So if you're a guy,

go like this through your hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will just like massage my head multiple times a day. Okay. To stimulate blood flow because if you're like down 100x on the trade you're just like yeah you don't want to be pulling out your hair you don't want to be pulling out your hair yeah anyways if you're a brother um physically uh or spiritually

give yourself a little i mean it is it does feel like the hair transplant thing is becoming more normalized more democratized cheaper more reliable and so i think we'll see yeah and i think we will see more people start to do it earlier so you don't have those like billionaire transformations or it's like before money after money it's so obvious that they went and got their hair done instead it's like the person just doesn't lose their hair because they made enough money at 30 to like pay for the cheaper hair transplant that was like pretty reliable yeah but yeah the hair transplant stuff I mean it feels pretty brutal I know some people have done it and it's like your head's like bleeding for like days it's like raw yeah yeah I had a buddy do it and he kept leaving the house and I was like dude for all of us just like stay indoors for like a few days. Just chill. Just chill.

Just relax. You're going to be back on the road. Yeah. Nobody wants to see that. It's rough. Anyway. Boys trip. Sounds fun.

I don't know. I mean, any excuse for a boys trip. But hopefully not like surgery and just sitting around like, you know, being miserable. I'd want to do something fun. There's so many other things you could do. Yeah. Go visit feed chip and start designing your custom yacht. Exactly.

Eighth century wood chipper. says forget polymarket here's the real indicator palantir technologies jumped 14% the stocks over $50 and was this this was like right on election day I guess yeah to me what was amazing about this election as somebody who appreciates finance was just how many different ways they were to bet on the market doge coin doge coin was one bitcoin sollana yeah defense tech stocks. Even Google went up 4%. Even a big one was obviously all the companies that are potentially impacted by tariffs like Lulmin and things like that.

Truth Social. The stock got halted right before the election. You saw that. Yeah. Well, I think there was a big, it seemed like with truth, there was a big sell into the election. Sure. Which somebody was like, let's sell the, you know, that basically, yeah, it's going to get less attention now that Trump's elected. Oh, really? You think that's what it was?

It wasn't that they thought. I thought Trump was going to lose. I think you could argue that that was the moment of where people were pouring on investments because people thought he was going to win. Yep. And it will actually could just trade down now that he's going to be president again. And nobody's taking away his other accounts. Yeah, I mean, he's like live on every podcast and on X now.

Yeah, it's interesting. Also, the fact that all the defense stocks pumped is interesting because there's this narrative that like the, Dick Cheney endorsed. Yeah. Yeah, like Dick Cheney and the Democrats were going to be more pro-war, and in fact, the right wing would be less pro-war, so you would assume that defense budgets would get cut. But I think there's probably just like a return to the traditional balance

with the conservatives still continuing to promote defense. And I think it's good because I love Palantir, and I think it's important. Let's go to Mark Sisson. Is that how you pronounce it? He says, the best thing to do right now is lift some heavy-ass weight. Okay, so Mark, don't know him personally, but Total Legend, early to a lot of these sort of alternative health trends, and he has proof of body. Oh, yeah.

The guy is jacked, fantastic. Six-pack. I think he's in his 60s. He started a company called Primal Kitchen. Oh, really? No way. So he sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, great products. He basically took a lot of the sauces and other things like that that were unhealthy, took out the seed oils, put avocado.

oil and stuff like that but I'll I've seen him he works out at the gym next to my house I think he splits time between the west and the east coast but um the guy is just like a living example you're going to say hi living his values and um well no when he is in the gym last time I saw him he's like the mayor like everybody in the gym is like saying hi that's awesome and uh so anyways like he's proof of work the guy uh yeah the guy also just a good message I mean I think this was the fifth so this was like election night essentially or I think it was noon before the election and so a lot of people are stressed they're just going to be checking polymarket doom scrolling and he's just like just go get in the gym

yeah which is true it's good um just just get those endorphins flowing yeah it's important Morgan Housel what firm is he with again collab club fund is that right he's like it's like a big done very well yeah oh yeah he's a writer yeah he's written a bunch of books He's got some great books. He has a quote, the polls don't tell us much. Let's turn now to the degenerate gamblers to see if we can learn anything.

7,000 likes. Yeah, so here's the thing about evaluating whether prediction markets worked. They were right this time. Yeah. But even a day before, they were projecting that there was a 40, basically projecting there was a 40% chance

that Kamlo was going to win. And that was not like, yeah. I don't, I think this was a huge win for prediction markets from a liquidity standpoint. Sure. and how much attention they had. And most importantly, they were more accurate than the polls.

Correct. You could just be one point over. Correct. But at least it was the most correct source of information. There was not perfect. And I was saying this, okay, I thought that Trump was going to win. But I also knew all my most degenerate friends were going that are very generally conservative. And we're betting heavy on polymarket.

And I just figured that that would slam. it more, but the election was such a landslide that maybe it was perfectly accurate. Yeah, right? I don't know. What will be really interesting is if, is if in the future there's a, you know, a prediction markets are split 55, 45, 45, and they get it wrong. Yeah. Because I think everyone will be like, oh, it's worthless now. When really it's like a 45% chance should come up every once in a while, especially across like, you know, if you test 10 elections, like it shouldn't always be right. Yeah. But I mean, what a win and just like incredible. accuracy and also just the fact that they I think almost more of the value was this thing Shane was

saying on I think he was on CNBC today or or some sort of TV spot the founder of Polymarket was saying that like because polymarket was continuing to reprice the odds they were able to effectively call the election like three hours before the news media and the news media has this it's it's like you could say all these different things about like conflicts of interest and who's doing what and biases and who likes who or whatever, but it's just a fundamentally different economic incentive. Like if you're a if you're CNN, you are incentivized to sell ads and get watch time and keep people watching. If you're polymarket, you're incentivized for liquidity and providing correct prices. Yeah. And so it's just a very different like incentive structure. And so the the CNN coverage

and the mainstream media coverage was constantly like, well, you know, could still be a toss up. Like don't turn this off. Like let's go to this. district. Let's look at this. The party we were at, it was, I was standing between two TV screens. One had called it. Yeah. 30, 40 minutes before, which was Fox News. Yep. And MSNBC was just still just going, going, saying. But at the same time, before you even got to the party, like three hours before any of them called it, Polymarket was at like 85% for Trump. Yeah. It was like, okay, yeah, like unless something crazy happens, I remember Will was like getting nervous because Polymarket dip like three percent. Yeah, it went from 95 to 92 and he was like, I'm panicking or whatever. But like,

yeah, it's ridiculous. Just having that, having that early signal, even if it's just like three hours. And then I did see something where they had a screenshot of the polymarket map like a month earlier and it was dead on. Yeah. So I don't know if, I don't know if this made it into the stack, but somebody did an analysis of polymarket and turns out like 90% of users had a negative balance. What does that mean? Like 90% of people. that bet on polymarket in the last this election cycle lost money really yeah just at various times hopefully it made into uh yeah like maybe they were trading up it's probably more like people were just trading in and out oh sure sure sure i don't know um yeah who who knows but it's just again

when the liquidity is like the stock market if one person's winning someone else is losing interesting yeah yeah yeah a lot of other people are yeah interesting let's go to brian shesky founder of Airbnb. He says, Airbnb just reached two billion guests. It took it took 14 years to get our first billion and only three more years to reach the second. Thank you to everyone for giving us a chance. It's amazing. I like this. The first comment. Charlie Light says, congrats Brian. The first two billion customers is the hardest in my experience, smooth sailing from here on out. Charlie's actually a legendary poster. He had this account that probably had a first few hundred thousand.

Yeah. So he's joking. But no, I think it'd be good to rank YC companies based on customers because there's like, I don't know if any other, is there another YC company that has more customers than Airbnb? Can't imagine. Coinbase would be really big, but not. Meta didn't go through YC or anything.

There might be some company out there that's just like such a, such a general app that it's like 10 people that runs to do you. So I guess the other thing. that is interesting about this is the real number of people that have been a customer of Airbnb is actually probably significantly higher because how many times have you stayed in Airbnb and like you didn't book it or you booked it. Oh yeah totally. Yeah yeah yeah. Like come with you. Yeah. So it's probably more like they have like three and a half billion or four billion. Yeah. So yeah, pretty, pretty insane. Yeah. And what a journey. I mean during the COVID cycle,

just like completely losing everything. There's a possibility that at, at some point in history, Airbnb will have more users than than meta or Coca-Cola because Airbnb is actually like very geographically dispersed. So like there's countries that run on Airbnb and a lot of like tourism runs on it that will be using Airbnb, but they use some local social media and they have some like off-brand, off-brand Coca-Cola. So so yeah, getting to a tough spot where there's there, the Tam, they've got, they've, they've almost gotten 50, you know, they're approaching 50% of penetration. I wonder if any of the other Airbnb stuff will pan out.

They did experiences for a while. Did you ever see those? So you'd show up to a place and then you could have like kind of a tour guide recommend restaurants, kind of a like an Airbnb native version of like when you stay in a nice Airbnb, there's usually like a book that you open up and inside it has like recommendations of like what restaurants you should go to. but have you used Turo? Turo is pretty cool.

Before I could afford 9-11s, I would, I would, so Turo is hilarious because you're taking highly depreciating assets that are high-risk assets in a sports car and putting them on a website where the primary user is going to come joyriding. Yeah, joyriding. And I just don't understand people that take a car like a Porsche and put it up there because the clientele that's actually renting, were like 22-year-olds like me that are I was very respectful with the cars but still like they're driving them to like drive them and put miles on them it doesn't make sense whereas

a house you could have yeah a house you could have a million people come through a house and it would still appreciate right I don't know I mean people rent Airbnb's and throw parties it's the same problem as like true but like there's something to be something to be said of like if a house is appreciating 5% a year. Sure, sure, sure. And even if you need to put another 50 grand into the house every year. Yeah, I mean, I think like kind of, I guess like maybe the bull case for Toro is that a lot of the real serious, like, Turo managers, like basically run a business on Turo. Yeah.

Similar to the way people run businesses on Airbnb, they know the, like the sweet spots. Like the Porsche McCann is like a phenomenal value because I think you can get one for like 45K and it lists as like a premium Porsche. but it's cheap. And the same thing with like the Corvette, the C8, the C8, because it's like a mid-engine sports car, but you can get it for 70K or something like that. Yeah.

Why hasn't Airbnb moved in, have they... Into car rentals. Maybe it's just too different of a business, but it would be cool to just fly in, do, okay, I get a car, go to this Airbnb, I do everything I need. That's an example of Airbnb should get air.com and then do everything. That'd be cool.

that's cooler than chat GPT rebranding is chat. Yeah. I do love that. I mean, I don't know if we talked about this, but Chesky wrote this post about how like everyone should do a demo day every year at a big company. And when it was first proposed to him, he was like,

we're Airbnb. Like what are we going to announce? Like it's not like we release a new iPhone every year. Why am I getting on stage like Steve Jobs and being like this year we're doing something different? Because it's like kind of the same business every year. But it forced him to like think of. of ideas and get in the habit of driving towards, it aligns the entire organization around like some sort of milestone,

some sort of deadline, even if it's just shipping like their new, you know, fraud prevention service. It's like, okay, well then you can announce to the public, like if you're an Airbnb, you know, host, you're gonna deal with a lot less fraud because we just announced this new program. But then also they could do a bunch of cool stunty things. Like they built the house from up.

They built like a Barbie Oppenheimer house, I think, or something like that. And all of that stuff is like very gimmicky, but actually makes for good marketing. And so I like this. I think it could probably be misused by startups where they wind up leaning into just like, oh, we're like we just are constantly standing on state.

There was like a whole batch of AI companies that were like lurping as Steve Jobs with like no products. And it was kind of like, okay, like you guys got a ship. But like once you're, once you're in that middle phase where like you have product markets fit, you're growing, but you want to keep the pace of play up. You want to keep the- We should do a.

Yeah. We should do it. It's good. You know. Anderl does this very well. They're always launching these hype videos for their new products, and it just feels like there's a sense of motion that would be very different than them just being like, hey, we sold more sensor towers. We sold more of the same thing. Instead, it's like, okay, you're hearing about this thing.

You're seeing this video. Basically, yeah, companies need to think about every major moment as a launch, not just when they launch their company. That's the number one advice I give for companies in my portfolio that are how do we generate attention. You have a major, you have a major hire, create it like a launch. Yep. hype it up. Yep. Yep.

And also like bundling those things together because like even even if you raise like a decent series A or series B like 20 million dollars from like a decent firm like that alone might not be enough to get like a profile on your company. It might be enough to get like a tech crunch article, but that's not going to do anything. Instead it's like if you're if you're launching a new product and you're raising money and you got some interesting hire and there's also some interesting like personal angle with one of your customers and your founder has an interesting story and you're an expert in this industry. now and there's some mega trend going on that you're playing into it's like okay now you're

going to get the deep dive like Alex Conrad's going to show up and like talk to you because like there's more there than just okay yeah they raise money cool like one line like you need to give facts you need to give like a sense of motion and progress in the story yeah let's go to Keith he says rest assured guys I have checked the ballots and they do not contain PFAS or BFPA go vote so underrated 45 likes yeah yeah microplastics a disrespector Yeah, so this is a riff on receipts, which uses, like, thermo paper. And receipts are genuinely terrible. Like, there's zero ROI to touch them.

You should avoid them. Huberman recently did a deep dive, and he said one of his three things was no plastic bottles, but then also don't touch the receipts. People don't realize even the transfer from putting your finger on a hot receipt that's hot off the fresh. It's fresh. There's like a real transfer. And with hormones, like really, really, really. small amount of volume of, you know, hormone disrupting chemicals or hormones themselves

can have a dramatic impact on how you feel. So if you're a, I don't think we have any, I don't have any, think we have many cashiers in the audience. If you are a cashier, wear gloves. Yeah, wear gloves. And refuse receipts. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I guess the ballots don't matter because it's all printed like way ahead of time and maybe uses a good ink. Yeah, there's that. And you just hold the pencil far away. Yeah. But very on-trend comment. Let's go to DR22.

Deja-R-R-22 says, a lot of entrepreneurs are not business people because they enjoy the idea of business, but rather because they are repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else. I think there's a lot to be said about that on a soul level. It clearly resonated a thousand likes.

Yeah, I think people, there's a lot of benefits for work. working for someone else because if you're working for somebody else, you're effectively outsourcing all of the gnarliness that comes from running a business. Agency. Yeah, you're outsourcing. There's a lot of benefits, right? Your salary arrives right on time.

You don't have to be thinking about making payroll. You don't have to be thinking about some customer issue or HR issue. There's, you don't have to be with the, if the website goes down and you're not the web developer, it's not your problem, right? So I think the benefits of of and I think for a lot of people like going and working There's such a tried and like true path now like going to work at a good company Spending four years learning from the best like ramp has spun off like Devon yeah right early Cognition early ramp team and there's so many benefits but yeah I think for me and I don't know I don't

I don't even hate for me like I think this is is one of those things. Rage is one of them. If you have a lot of rage in your heart and you want to win and you want power and prestige, building a company can be one way to do that. If you just want to create things,

some people love creating things and companies are the best way to do that sustainably. Yeah, this definitely resonates with me. The desire. Yeah, after you interned at Bain and you were just like, I can't do this again, I need to be the MD.

Yeah, I could never do it. I used to tell people like, if you want to just be a successful entrepreneur, just never take a job. Yeah. Because eventually you'll figure it out. But as soon as you say, like, I'm taking a couple years off to go work at Google or something,

it's like, okay, this is the beginning of the end. Like you're going to get comfortable. They're going to do everything they can to keep you from going back in the gladiator pit. And so you're going to get complacent and tired, usually. The exception, of course, is going to work for like an extremely hot startup for a very short time because it's super entrepreneurial.

No, I have a former employee who could have just stayed in Fang. and decided to start a company and join a couple startups. And he would have done, he would be retired by now, even though he worked at good companies. Yeah. If he had simply just never left Google. Yeah, if he was a Fang PM, he'd probably be pulling in, what, a couple hundred K a month, right?

Yeah. Yeah. But it's bad for the soul. Yeah. Harts the spirit. Harts the spirit. Yeah, enjoy the idea. of business. Yeah, I mean, I did not fully understand the idea of business, really. I was truly

repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else. I mean, it also helped, like, after doing YC, like, you miss the standard recruiting cycle. So, totally. You're like not a target. No, not at all. And you're just in this weird space. And I actually had a friend who was like the first employee at Facebook and was just, I emailed him to just be like generally like, I want to work in tech. And he was like, I don't think you want to work at Facebook, even though, like, it's a great company. Like, it's too late stage. Like, they just want to hire people, like, out of the pipeline. I've never, I've never, I shouldn't say never now, but in the first three years out of school,

even though I was talented, hardworking, working in relevant spaces to startups. But just the fact that I had my business on my LinkedIn, you just don't ever, you know, recruiters know, I'm not going to go hit up the founder of, like this business because it's just like non their, you know, odds of them leaving. And they don't pattern match as like your next great engineering hire. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Liquidity. Liquidity says we need Blackstone to take America private, right size our cost structure, clean up the capital structure, and get us ready for an IPO before the next election. This does feel really real. It does. Do you feel like if, if Elon and

and can like bring in this like sort of efficiency that you brought to X. The whole country will it's the first time that I've felt not political at all, but it's the first time that we could sort of America's debt has been just running a running away like last week it added like a hundred billion dollars in a day. And it's very, very concerning and this feels like an opportunity to right size the government, right size our cost structure because nobody nobody's in favor of increasing taxation generally it feels like you have to be an anarchist to want to say like yeah we just need to raise taxes raise taxes that's that's the solution because then you get Europe and so yeah I think this is an awesome moment and this

is a meme but I think it's like legitimately real I think the the interesting kind of hot take is that the way to right size the, what is it, like the government, what's the income statement essentially for the government, it's like the government expenditure is like way higher than the tax receipts is not necessarily to like cut a bunch of spending and like fire a bunch of employees. Although that's like one way to get there, the real way is to extend the retirement age because that's where all the Medicare and and retirement benefits kick in. And I think it happened before and it dramatically changed the financials of the company. Everybody's healthier now.

Everybody should be retiring. You need Brian Johnson to come in, make everyone healthier. And then if you push the retirement, if you can push the retirement age out because everyone's living longer, well, then it's justified. But for the last, you know, what, 20 years life expectancy has been declining. And so moving the retirement age up is really like taking away like prime years. of retirement and it's like really going to put the squeeze. But if everyone's like, well, yeah, I'm going to, like, I don't, I don't mind that the government wants me to work or like the government

is incentivizing me to work. You can still retire whenever you want, but the government's incentivizing me to work till 70 instead of 65 because I'm going to live to 120. Here's how America like really gets its, you know, house in order is getting on ramp, right? Because if America ran on ramp, you'll be able to look through and be like, why are we paying Boeing $150,000 per soap dispensers? This is insane. That's like a real. Yep, that's a real thing.

And right now, the president doesn't have the visibility. And Elon's not going to be able to look at every single line item, but he needs software that helps him to be spending. Software, AI agents to go through. And imagine if America was getting one and a half percent cash back on all government expenditures. That's a whole new revenue source. It is.

Yeah. So, uh, Kareem, Eric, let's let's get America running on a range. We should. That's a good campaign slogan. Someone needs to do it. Let's go to SPOR. Spore says, yeah, I'm a full stack dev. The stack is Claude, chat, GPT, and perplexity. 29,000 likes. Wow. That's crazy. 29,000 likes means something's mainstream. Super mainstream. People understand that, like, this is the modern stack. Or maybe that's because, like, the number of people that consider themselves developers is, like, a niche. AI coding joke would not get 29,000 likes like a year ago, right?

So maybe the market's just expanding that quickly. Yeah. And then Peyton Casper says MFs are going to be arguing one day about whether they should ask Claude or chat GPT. It's going to be the new reactor view in some of my circles. It already, yeah. It already is. Yeah. Yeah. I don't see a problem with it.

I think it's good. I mean, the full stack was blended years ago with like, you know, putting JavaScript on the server. I'm we're going towards a future where there's artisanal developers that are handwriting code and they're going to be like they're just going to be like in their off like small subsection of the internet where they're talking about artisanal code and that's like the nat friedman website or like goren's website yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not even that like building technological digital masterpieces but all just by hand just one key at a time yeah you know um No AI slop. No AI slop. I don't know. It's a good stack. It's a good stack.

It's a good stack. A lot of people have fun. I think people are pumped up about it. I think, yeah. Go off. That's great. Let's go to Alex Wang at Scale AI, founder of Scale AI. It says Scale AI is proud to announce Defense Lama, American flag.

The LLM purpose built for American National Security. This is the product collaboration between Meta Scale and Defense experts and is available now for integration into U.S. defense systems. Read more. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, very cool. I think it is a wild turn of events because if you could go back and tell journalists five years ago that Meadow was going to be getting into defense tech, they would be like, this is so bad. Oh, yeah. You know, like, because Mehta went through the worst PR cycle of almost any company in history around the election and all that stuff yeah um and so yeah now honestly bull case for meta that that zuck is getting into uh defense tech yeah i mean it seems great i remember

the original uh are you familiar like the project maven story this whole kerfuffle at google so oh right like the pentagon had a initiative to um modernize technology using artificial intelligence and they called it project maven and um there were walkouts and yeah and and Google was one of the contractors on the on the project um but there were a lot of others like I think Palantir was in there I think scale might have been it's kind of unclear um but you can go and read the actual like subcontractors and everyone got a little piece of it google was one of them and then there was this massive walkout this open letter uh there were a whole

bunch of like new york times articles around it and it was very interesting because it was all framed as like Google is helping the government build like killer robots because like AI for defense means like, like, you know, automated drones, like killing people. But what it actually was was like very, very basic machine learning just to take the load off of like, like they're literally like, you know, like, you know how when these AIs get trained as like hordes of people in third world countries like tagging images and stuff. We were, because it's a critical national system, we were having like United States airmen do it, do this.

Like you go and work for the Air Force and your job would just be like, clicking on a box being like, that's a car, that's a house, that's a person, just to like label the data. Because it was all coming from satellites and drones. Because once the drones were flying around the Middle East, you needed to tag all that data and understand what was going on in it. And so we couldn't outsource it. And so it was just like very, very messy. So Google came in and was just like, okay, we're not building anything for you. We're just allowing you to use our TensorFlow API, which is for their machine learning system. And we'll just host you. We're just providing hosting. And the actual development was done by other companies.

But that was like too much for the Google employees. And so there's this massive walkout. And then eventually- And that's why I'm a $100 billion company now. For sure, for sure. And I think it's smart to do a custom LLM for this. Like you obviously need more security and more controllability and just more insight.

So building something on open source that can be auditable, but still deployed. I just wonder like where the first use cases of LLMs will actually be in the DOD. because like what we're seeing in what we're seeing in tech or like consumer is mostly like, you know, AI girlfriends and coding assistance. No, it's really dark. It's basically like you go to the LLM and you're like, what's the next, what's the most relevant like potential assassination that we can do globally?

Yeah. That most fits the narrative right now. I think it's much more banal. What I think it'll be is like you'll have like a ton of spreadsheets. and Word documents sitting there to like inventory, like the meal kits in some base. And you'll be able to just like type into the LLM, like, when will I run out of Gatorade?

And it'll just say like, you'll run out of Gatorade in June of 2025. Like, okay, order more, please. And it'll just go order more. And it'll save some, you know, poor soldier like, you know, like an hour of work basically. I think that'll probably be the real impact. But everyone always wants to jump to like,

It's going to be a killer robot. Defense llama. Defense llama. It's good. It's a good brand. I like it. I'm excited for that. I wonder how we'll see that roll out.

Let's go to Ben South. He says, I love SF. And he takes a picture from inside a coffee shop. And the guy has on the back of his laptop a sign that says, Marketplace Raising Preseed, have revenue. Say hi. Amazing. I think we talked about this guy, but didn't have him.

hold up and what people need to understand is if you get this guy probably is getting his round done faster than some tier one founder who's like already has a bunch of relationships because just based on the volume of angel investors that are probably coming up to him and talking to him and people within tech love to bet on underdogs they love to bet on people that put themselves out there. It's bold. So anybody can do this. It's free. You just have to be working on your startup, put a sign up, go to get moved to SF. And you have to be, I mean, you also have to be confident

because you know that you're going to get mocked. Like, I'm sure that this has like, you know, hundreds of quote tweets being like, this is the dumbest thing ever. And then a lot of people being like, this is cool. I like this. Yeah, but it's all about,

but if you're, Elon is, is, you have to know who you want to like you, right? It's not about having everybody like you. Yep. If, if a bunch of pro technology,

pro startup people on SF think what you're doing is cool and you want to raise money from them. You can have 100 VC funds that hate you. If one likes you. It's go time. It's go time. Adam Newman. So you pronounced this Goetia?

I always pronounced it gout. I don't know which one it is. Yeah, no, his full names. But Goetia says everyone watching the polymarket odds, silence model, a gambler is talking. And it was 100% accurate. We already talked about this, but Polymarket was correct. So cheers to the Polymarket team.

Goteer is amazing. Does he do? I he has some handle a crypto index fund and then they also have like a protocol built on top of base for liquidity I guess that makes sense the zero X but anyways yeah he's somebody who's

for entire time I've known him since I invested in 2021 head down just focused on product no token just grinding and it's been there was yeah there was about um so anyways this was this polymarket was a win for him because he's French.

Yep. But also the, they've had a ton of like regulatory, lack of regulatory clarity because of this last administration or crypto making everything that they're doing way harder. All they're trying to build is like, you know, their first product was an index product of like a bunch of different digital assets. Yep.

That was way harder than it needed to be. Security. And I still think you're maybe not allowed to even buy the index in the U.S. You have to be international. So hopefully that changes with the new admin. Yeah, I mean, this is Brian Armstrong's point always is like, we just want regulatory clarity. We just want to know what we can and can't do. Yeah.

Like the lack of clarity is so hard. And that's hard for the financial markets because how do you price this weird risk? Yeah. It's hard for builders because are you really going to go spend all this time building something that might get outlawed or might not? It's like this weird high volatility bad. Yeah. And the, yeah, there's a reason Gautier is building in.

in New York is because after the Frenchman won this massive bet on Polymarket, France is now trying to ban on the market. So like if people are winning, if people are, you know, you know, if something's innovative and fun, let's ban it. I do think that Polymarket, the result here is going to be very good for crypto. Like we were talking about how crypto needed to win, a big acquisition with Bridge. But Polymarket was accurate, bipartisan. I think everyone was using it regardless.

Yeah, if you think about it, we're only about a decade into crypto. And it's a coin-based IPO. Real use case. Yeah, Coin-based IPO. A billion dollar acquisition by bridge. Polymarket being the center of this election cycle. And just Bitcoin actually sticking around. All the crypto haters were like, Bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme.

It's going to zero. It's clearly not going to zero. Yeah. And so you now have stacked up a few of the core, the core pitches. which have always been, look, it's this decentralized currency that can't be hacked, true. It's maybe digital gold, true. There's actually use cases built on top of it, polymarket, true. Like, there's just a lot of different like wins that are stag.

Financial innovation in that. Very slowly. And Goet's first product is a token that is basically a collection of other tokens, right? Yeah, yeah. So there's like real innovation happening. There's real consumer use cases. Yep. Stable coins are here to stay.

Yep. Bitcoin all time high. Yeah. Hard to not be long crypto. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just like, so many haters will never be a use case. There are no use cases.

And it's like, well, at least we have one now. You know, very clearly. Very hard to deny that. Yeah. Lit News Network. Is this liquidity like affiliate? Oh, cool. Lit News Networks.

I just thought this was awesome. Yeah. Hold on. So Lit News Network says, breaking Florida votes against legalizing recreational marijuana 55 to 44 yeah I just thought this was so so based I think that I think that marijuana has some medicinal benefits but in general should not be publicly available or promoted in the way that it is yep and this it's all about this is our talk at Hereticon was all about there are drugs that are general you know every drug has

positives and negatives but there are drugs that can have a very negative societal impact and I think that marijuana is one of those when it when it's taken in extremely high doses extremely regularly in extreme concentrations is exactly what's happened yeah yeah and the new york times has been reporting on this where psychosis and medical episodes are like increasing dramatically and a lot of it's just because there's been this pressure like you talk to some you know uh hippie like grateful dead fan and they like cannot smoke modern weed Yeah. Like, what is this stuff?

This is a different drug. And that's true with pretty much everything. I mean, think about the difference between having a beer and drinking ever clear. The only thing is nicotine, you're getting a similar dosage today that you would have from a cigarette 50 years ago. And that's part of why it's Lindy. Yeah,

yeah. And it's part of, yeah, it's there, like, nicotine has this weird curve where, like, if you take too much, you just like,

you get, like, sleepy. You don't have like a, it's not, it's not like an increasing, yeah, it's not increasing,

uh, like result. Yeah. So there's been like a natural forcing function for there's less of a race to harder like more and more concentrated dosages, which is good. But that certainly hasn't been the case in the psychedelics. So good news for Florida. Hopefully more to come there.

Let's talk about Ross McKay. He says he's obsessed and he hosts a picture of a company I think called Cadence and it's just him like packaging stuff. So what's going on here? Yeah. So this is a, they make like a high. product. What I think is interesting about this post is historically Twitter and X were a place to

share words and Instagram was a place to share pictures. Yep. And so if you look at your Instagram feed, there's thousands of people like Ross that are posting like cool lifestyle imagery around their brand and things like that. And if you simply take the exact same content and just post it on Twitter, you get like comparably like much better engagement and and way less competition. Yep. So there's a bunch of people building hydration brands on Instagram. Yep. And just by going to X and sharing the same style of content, you can really like stand out and

build this sort of like cult following of people. And so Ross has done that. There's another brand in the fashion space that's done that really well, represent. And so I just think if you're building a lifestyle brand, there's a ton of alpha and going over to X and focusing on that as a channel, just way less competition. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, something about the, I don't know,

X has always had this thing with like the comments where there's really, really high status people on there and you can slide into people's DMs and stuff. It just feels a little bit easier than Instagram where, because there's like the quote tweet functionality, there's just a lot more vectors of like engagement and you can just find a conversation going on that's a little bit harder on Instagram.

because the comments are a little bit more buried. Yep. But yeah, it's cool. It's a nice photo. I've got to try the product. Is it just hydration or is their caffeine as well? They have it ready to drink and then they have, I don't think they're on to stimulants yet.

That's cool. I have some nice tattoos. I got to go see that photo in color. It looks good. Let's go to Naval. Naval says, upcoming deregulation wave will create an economic sonic boom. This is post-election.

Hopefully. hopefully um i think that uh there's a lot of you can just look at all the charts around introduction of new regulation and then you look at europe and europe as an example of what happens when you hyperregulate every single industry it just hurts innovation it hurts everyday individuals hurts the economy um i don't want america in 50 years to be the vacation purely a vacation destination for wealthy people in the Middle East or China where there's been the sort of renaissance of innovation. And so in the same way that Europe by nature of hyperregulation has propped up, you know, when you look at all of their public companies and their 10,100 largest

companies, I think all of them were started around 100 to 200 years ago. And if the United States were to continue at the rate, it has been from a rate. regulatory standpoint, that same thing would happen here without a doubt. And as much as I love that Europe has become sort of Cancun for people like you and me, I don't want that to happen to us. I agree. Yeah. What's interesting about this is like I don't even really know what the top deregulation efforts on the agenda are. It's make it easier for Elon to launch rockets. Yeah. But honestly, like the zeitgeist and the in the feeling. for the support felt more driven by just stopping more regulation.

Yep. And not actually, I mean, this is the same thing with the illegal immigration thing. You go back to the 2016 to 2020 era. There was not, it wasn't, we weren't in a negative net immigration era. Trump was, during the Trump era, there were still 400,000 border incidents or like interactions, which is how they measure it. And that, that increased under Biden, but the idea that, you know, you're going back to like, okay, we're going to see negative, like, outflow of migration is probably not the truth.

And, and, but I mean, it's still potentially, it's essentially bullish, even if there's just less new regulation because we just have so much already. Here's an example, though. People don't realize that a lot of the gasoline and oil used in California is actually produced in California. Sure. And California recently rolled out regulations to make it much harder to produce oil in the state, which is motivated by this sort of like sustainability movement. ESG, and I know a guy who's in the oil industry in California, and he's like, his business is basically like getting destroyed. California is still going to have to buy gas, right? We still have to buy oil.

We still need it for pretty much every facet of our life. And so it's that kind of regulation that's just like effectively motivated around religion, which is the religion of ESG and sustainability. Yeah. That doesn't make sense because the same people that are regulating the oil industry in California are going to drive their car to work. to work using oil. And it's like, make it make sense.

Yeah, yeah. It does feel like we're in the early endings of actually understanding what like a deregulatory policy would look like. Yeah. Like we've heard like drill baby drill, but what does that actually mean? Is there a specific law that's going to be rolled back

or across really every single possible facet of the administration? But I do agree. And I mean, the market is certainly pricing in an economic sonic boom. Like everyone's very excited and very bullish. The thing that I'm really excited about is the housing stuff. I hope that, and I think Ben Thompson was writing about this today, just this idea that if the administration is empowered to go in and deregulate at local levels, that's really powerful.

And that actually happened in California to some degree where California passed the ADU laws that allow, and they override local laws. So it's the state of California saying, Los Angeles, I don't care what you say. we need housing in this state. And so here you can build an ADU if it's this size and it applies to this and that. And so it would be very cool to see something like that at the federal level where the federal level says, you know what? Like we're not going to have any more restrictions on height.

And you can just build 10-story buildings wherever. If you can build a one-story building, you can build a 10-story building, like go nuts. Good luck to the good luck blocking this state government, federal, like local government, whatever. And then, you know, I think the housing ladder, like getting, I think that's a major, major issue. I think the millennial generation and Gen Z as well, getting to a place where you own a house is so important and has been so important through the American experience. It's the American dream. Our vice president was talking about how he, like, a lot of his friends who are in their 20s, just none of them own homes yet. Vice President?

Yeah, our Vice President. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, not J.D. Vance. Our Vice President, Technology Brothers, was saying that it's just unheard of. And a little bit of this is, I hope, can be swung by a number of factors. I mean, one is just build more housing. Two is what J.D. Vance was kind of teasing on one of these podcasts saying that he might want to make it harder for foreign investors to come in and buy property, which is interesting

because it's true supply and demand, right? Like what drives housing prices up? Yeah. restricting supply with a bunch of regulations and making it really hard to build, but also increasing demand. And this is what everyone always gets frustrated by. And Europe has done this, right? It's much harder generally in Europe to buy a home as a foreigner. Yes. And now you can still look on the European Zillow equivalent and you can be like, whoa, this house is $200,000. It looks nice. It's in a nice town. Yep. But it would be hard to go buy it

if you're not a citizen. And so just, and that's kind of the, the opposite of the process where people say, oh, we're gonna give you a housing credit. Oh, we're gonna give everyone the same amount of money to buy house. That's just gonna raise the price. So much about, we know this. A lot of issues.

Yeah, and a lot of issues of regulation is it just slows things down dramatically. So there's entire, if you could take a town in Georgia that is just decrepit, right? Totally like just falling apart, there's no industry. And you could say, hey, you can build your new factory here and we're going to fast track. Fast track it. And it's like it's a capital thing.

Right. Because if you need to fund some new initiative and it's going to take six years. And this even even locally in Malibu, there's people that that want to build a house. They have a plot of land. And it just doesn't quite make sense to get some construction loan when it's going to take four years and like you're going to be carrying this big cost and not being able to live there. So there's all this land that just doesn't get used.

I think the other kind of like set aside the politics issue, the cultural issue that might solve the housing crisis to some degree is there's been this massive shift. I think the Instagram generation and just the FOMO of seeing everything online has really driven this phenomenon where someone grows up in a suburb or, you know, Ohio or some kind of like, you know, third tier city, mid-tier state. But then they go to a college, they get a communication degree. and then they go get a job in Manhattan, and they can pay their rent,

but then they're not on the economic ladder to the degree that they'll be able to afford a house in New York. And they're like, why can't I afford a house? And it's like, well, you're in the most expensive city in the entire world and houses start at $2 million. But if you just went back to your community and built there, you'd be fine. Or even if you were just okay with like an hour-long commute

when you did need to come into the city, you'd be fine. Yeah, the Nick Huber guy always talks about this. He's constantly getting canceled every other day. but his, one of his, like, really good points is that you can afford housing just not in the places that you want to live. So I think there's kind of two angles with what could drive a cultural shift towards that. One is just like the trad memes of, like, being pastoral and, like, wanting to live in, like, a safer, like, chiller community, kind of less on the grid, a little bit farther away. That's why we're looking at opening up the Montana office. There you go.

And so, so just making not being in the most expensive city cool. anymore and seeing more Instagrams from people that have set up little houses in small towns throughout America, that will create like memetic pressure for people not to just be clawing tooth and nail over the Manhattan townhouses that are out there for 2Mell. But then the other one is just technology. Like Starlink makes it so that you can guarantee super fast internet anywhere in the United States, even if there's not great fiber coming into a town. Obviously with like new power generation, like the utilities are going to get better.

Self-driving cars mean that, okay, yeah, you could have an average. hour-long commute, but if you're in something without a steering wheel and you're just on your laptop and just doing work, sleeping even, like all of a sudden, that kind of stretches things out because, like, real estate is priced as a function of the economic opportunity around it. Like, the reason Manhattan real estate's expensive is great jobs there. I wonder if robotaxies will change sleep schedules where more people will start to do that like four hours on. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I wake up at 4 a.m. I hop in my robo taxi. I sleep for an hour and then I'm in the city and all of it's like scheduled out.

So like the car is actually traveling at 60 miles an hour the whole time. I'm not stuck in traffic. Offset. And then even like VR and teleconferencing stuff like that will also reduce the barrier. So you can keep like it's easier to keep in touch with someone on the other side of the country with, you know, group chats and VR and video games and stuff. And some of that stuff has, you know, deleterious effects at the extreme. But in general, it feels more possible than ever.

to go to Montana and be, and we know a lot of VCs. We know a lot of rich people that spend most of their time, not in the major cities, but there's no reason why a, like a young professional who wants to buy a home at 25

couldn't move there and then still compete in the global workforce. Totally. Let's move to Augustus. Augustus DeRico, founder of Rainmaker, says, you should know,

you should all know that we have a four-year window to go as hard as fucking imaginable, deadly serious, leave it all on the court. It's a miracle. We have another, shot at all. Press me to go harder. I will do the same with all of you. Alhamadula. I never

know how to pronounce that. How do you pronounce that? Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulia. Alhamdulila. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how can Augustus go any harder. He's going, he's already. I don't know. Pedal to the metal, I would think. But I like it. It's a good, it's a good reminder. Like, this is a window of opportunity. Like, like, regulation's not going to get worse. There's lots of opportunities like, you know, go hard, like try a lot of stuff. And it's just a reminder that you can do crazy stuff. Yeah, I don't there. There's a lot of talk in tech about taking advantage of technological cycles and moments. There hasn't been over the last 20 years as much emphasis around taking advantage of political cycles to the same degree, right?

It's clear that admins impact the economy, I think, right? You would hope that they're not just on autopilot. But yeah, I would say that there is a moment here across pretty much if you're building in heavily regulated industries, there's probably going to be a lot of opportunity there. If you're building, you know, crypto is like a good example where now there's polymarket winning is actually amazing for, all the type of like crypto people that got disillusioned with the industry because they were over, they just realized that it was only speculative. And so now there's more opportunities to.

Even some of the sharpest people were like everything's just regulatory arbitrage right now. I just take something. I put it offshore. It's like very zero sum. It's like not fun. But now people see that there's an opportunity to actually like just go back to the basics of like improving the speed of the financial system. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and with Augustus, there could be ridiculous opportunities, right? They might decide, hey, weather modification capabilities is super, super important. We need to emphasize this. And he's like, to my knowledge, close with like Steinman and there's going to be opportunities that come through that. So a lot of the... Early on, he was talking about how China is like reclaiming the Gobi Desert.

Is that the right desert? Yeah, they're terraforming it by just planting a ton of trees. Yeah. And just watering them and rerouting rivers and stuff. and they're just reclaiming all that land. And so when you think about the current administration, like, you know, I would be surprised if, like, there wasn't, there wasn't energy around, like, yeah, let's make Nevada a bread bowl.

Let's make New Mexico beautiful and no longer a desert. Yeah. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of, like, regulatory things. Like, oh, well, like, you're going to displace the lizards and the snakes or whatever. The rare bees. Yeah, the rare bees, which we can talk about. But hopefully, you know, there's enough energy. you to get through this and actually bring about a response.

And we've talked recently about how because the regulatory environment has been so bad, there's just not, there's been a lot of entrepreneurs on the sidelines that are like, I'm not going to do this because even if I get the product to work, like it's going to be impossible from a regulatory standpoint to get it through. So hopefully that changes. And a bunch of people that were on the sidelines come in. And, yeah, anyways.

Jake Chapman pours a little bit of cold water on it. 18 months after the transition, but before the government stops process midterms, stops to process midterms, nothing is promised after that. That's a little bit of a bummer, Jake. Come on, man. We're trying to get pumped up. We're trying to leave it all on the court. But I understand what he's saying. It's a good point. Anyway, always an inspirational poster, Augustus. Phenomenal what he's done to like the next generation of entrepreneurs. Yeah. It's really, it's really impressive. He's like created like his own little like YC cult, basically. Yeah. Fantastic. Rob Keel says, well, at least my boss will be in a good mood tomorrow. And he has the X-A-I badge because he clearly works at X-A-I.

And I love this because there are so many companies where there's a rule. Like, oh, the compliance officer says I can't tweet. I hate it. And clearly, Elon lives and dies by the post. Yeah. And he lets his employees post, and it's great. Yeah, post just post through it. Post through it.

Yeah, I read this. I don't know, I don't know Rob, but I, I, I almost read it as like maybe he was like disappointed. And now he's like, well, at least my boss will be happy. Oh, yeah, like maybe he wasn't happy. Which is cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's like, at least. Who knows?

That's great. That's great. I do think XAI is a huge beneficiary of like everything that's happened in the last week. But either way, it's good. I'm sure that X is an environment where people are allowed to share their views. Yeah. But because it's just not about that. It's about building X-A-I.

Yeah. And I mean, that's the thing that people miss with like the whole mission-driven company, leave the politics at the door. It's like, no, it's actually okay. Whoever you vote for, like we actually don't care. Yeah, yeah. But there was a lot of, there was a lot of HR teams that Wednesday were sending out notes that

were basically to the effect of whether you're celebrating or devastated, we're here for you, you know. Well, we sent one out to our team. but it was like whether you're celebrating or devastated like the shareholders come first get back to work yeah yeah yeah no no fucking slack yeah we we have a policy where if we employees need to you know send us a screen share screen uh screenshot of their screen time on their iPhone and if there's more screen time than there are you know we don't consider screen time working hours, right? Working is when you're at your terminal. Yeah.

Editing content. Breaking the keys on your keyboard. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we're a little bit hardcore about it. Okay, let's go to Fisher King. He says, Kamala skipped Rogan, but did Saturday at Live. She generally only did scripted, controlled events. She avoided long-form conversations that could reveal her as a person. Trump and Vance did the opposite. They took chances, showed themselves victory for transparency and new media. And so I've dug into this like very, very seriously. I went on, I went on on on Pirate Wire's podcast like back in March when Biden was still in and I said that the person who does the longer Joe Rogan interview will win the election. And and then later I went on and coined

the Coogan Parley, which was you go on Polymarket and you bet that Trump will do over two hours on Rogan, Kamala will do under two hours on Rogan and that Trump will win based on that. and whoever does more will win. And we should make a polymarket now for next election around Joe Rogan airtime. Yeah. So I've dug into this. And not only did Trump do more interviews, I think he did something like 18 major podcasts and Kamala did about six or eight maybe.

I think Barron was leading the strategy. But his podcasts were much longer. So when Trump went on Rogan, Rogan is a three-hour show. And everyone was like, Trump's old. He's, you know, he's not going to want to do a three-hour thing. He's going to cut it short. And this is something that happens with all the big political folks. Like when Bernie went on Rogan, he cut that short.

He didn't do three hours. He did like an hour and a half. Even when Benjamin Netanyahu went on Lex, he cut that short too. And a lot of these guys, they're like media train. They want to stay on the talking points. And they don't want to get caught in hour two and a half being a little bit tired and just like, freestyling, right? And that's the whole point of the Rogan interview is that you,

you can't stay on talking points for three hours. People have people trust people more that freestyle. Yeah. Well, there's the heart you freestyle and you expose your real self. When, uh, when police interview like pyromaniacs, they are suspected pyromaniacs, they'll just interview them and get them talking for like eight hours straight. And they'll just come in and talk and talk and talk because the people who are obsessed with fire, even though intellectually they know they shouldn't say like, I like fire.

Eventually they'll break character. just be like, yeah, you know what, it would be cool. Like, if we just like lit this table on fire. It's crazy. And so, and so there's something about like the long interview that just like, you, you, you can't stay in character for that long. It's like me and angel investing. I'm like, yeah.

Somebody has a good idea. I'm like, let's bet on this. Let's bet on this. Exactly. And, but so, so what's interesting is that the, the ratio of like podcast appearances between Kamala and Trump was something like three to one for Trump, but the ratio of hours spent podcasting was more like 10 to 1. Yeah.

And then because the YouTube algorithm weighs longer content as better for keeping for selling ads and keeping people on the site, longer content does better in the algorithm. So the Rogan three hour Trump interview got 35 million views, something like that. And the Call Her Daddy, they just posted a clip that was like 20 minutes. And so that one, even if a bunch of people watched it, YouTube's just saying, well, should I, should I promote the three-hour thing that I can sell 50 ads on, or should I promote the 12-minute thing that I can promote five ads on?

And so it's like Google, YouTube, like the algorithm is just expected value maximizing. And so the Trump one goes mega-viral and gets tons of views. And so if you add up, I was trying to run the math on this. I might do like a piece on this and actually run all the numbers. But so the Harris campaign spent a billion dollars. The Trump campaign spent like $300 million. But if you think about it, like, like how much does it cost to run a 30 second ad on Rogan it's like a hundred thousand dollars i

think so if you multiply that out for three hours of essentially an advertisement for trump right yeah well now you're at a single a single like if you were to go to rogan and say i want you to do a three hour episode on rora on just my product he'd be like okay well a 30 second ad is a that is a hundred thousand so uh a one minute would be 200 000 a 60 minute you know you could multiply it out and get to like $50 million. And then it also did 10 times as good as a normal episode. So that's like a $200 million value asset, just in terms of like impressions.

And there's a massive, massive availability bias where things that you're familiar with and you spend a lot of time with, you like that person more. And so just the fact that people were spending time listening to Trump and his surrogates, I think it made them like him more. And this is very different.

In 2016, CNN, NBC, they were all promoting Trump rallies because they got good ratings that could sell a lot of ads. But then in 2020, Trump got COVID. There were lockdowns. There weren't as many rallies and all the mainstream media

were like, maybe we shouldn't be promoting this guy. Maybe we shouldn't be publicizing his rallies. So he got way less earned media. And as a result, the average American just spent less time listening to Trump. Even if you're Trump skeptical, you probably still listened to 10 minutes across all the different things.

In clips, in little bits, maybe you turn on the Rogan for a little bit. You're like, oh, this socks is boring. but you listen to a little bit. And so I think it's really just attention is all you need going forward, the candidate that gets the more attention, the more views. And that's what the political spending is a proxy for. It's literally just ads that they're buying.

And those ads are just 30-second ads. And there's something, I feel like 2016 and 2020 were dominated by performance marketing, at least from that was what was being analyzed, is who had better performance marketing. and people felt like performance marketing was the future of political campaigning where you could just create an ad for effectively two people in one county to turn them against. And podcasts are so good at building narrative and likability and these things that really matter. Yep.

So that for every one person that watched the Joe Rogan appearance, they're telling they've then consumed so much content and so many talking points that they now become effectively a surrogate for the campaign, right? They're just out spreading the message. So yeah, I think there's something about the internet where long form content, a textbook gets digested into a tweet, a podcast gets that gets turned into an Instagram post or an Instagram story, right? And so the internet is all about just cutting down long form content into the smallest, most digestible piece of content.

Yeah. I think it's the future. I don't think that either major party will ever put up a candidate that isn't going to do a three hour Rogan. Yeah. And so my bet that I would put on polymarket right now is that the 2020, 2020, 2028 election is between J.D. Vance and AOC or J.D. Vance and Buttigieg.

Because AOC and Boudidijijh, both can actually sit and be real people for several hours. And AOC has done. with like the Twitch streams and stuff like she gets it she's uh she she's definitely like uh part of like the new guard yeah um uh let's go to Aaron Slo'dov he says time to reindustrialize and I like this because we talked about Josh Steinman tweeting good morning we're going to win every single day and this feels like the seed of a mantra yeah you know Aaron ran the reindustrialized conference yeah him and Austin Bishop yeah he's done a lot of stuff a lot of work around reindustrialization It's a very interesting coinage and buzzword.

I actually got in a fight with somebody about this on X because I said reindustrialize and they were like, well, there's no such thing as reindustrialization. The opposite of deindustrialization is industrialization. And I was like, I don't, A, I can just Google it. And there is a dictionary definition for reindustrialization.

So like you're kind of just wrong if you're being like literal. But also like everyone knows what we mean by reindustrialize. It's just branding. It's just branding. And so it's a great coinage. Yeah. And everybody can attach. slightly different meaning to it.

Exactly. And yeah, it was, it was, we, we were at, we spent election night with Aaron and he's just, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, wasn't like he was fist pumping or anything like that. Totally. Totally. But it was a good moment for him and rewarding to start to get, to have somebody like J.D. Vance, you know, in office who actually cares about this topic legitimately and it's not just voicing it over.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I hope to see this post on my timeline every single day. Yeah. Let's go to. Sheel Monot says, this is an incredible ad by Calm. During election night, Calm bought a 30-second spot on CNN where they just turned off the sound and just played like,

we're giving you 30 seconds of peace and quiet. This is the Calm app. We know that you're stressed out. Really in the zeitgeist, really capitalizing on the most, the moment that, you know, psychologically everyone who is watching kind of understands this is like a stressful moment. It's great for the CNN audience too because I think the Fox News audience was probably like starting to pop champagne. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the CNN audience was having a tougher night on average. But I like stuff like this. I like when these companies are agile and think about,

yeah, just taking a little twist. Like, I think at the Super Bowl there was a company that ran, I think they sold like hammers or something and they did like a one second ad and it was just a hammer smashing something for like one second or coinbase did just that QR code that was bouncing around like the DVD symbol and they kind of broke the format and it sticks out and I still remember it to this day whereas am I really going to memorize like the fifth Budweiser ad like that's kind of undifferentiated so lucy we need to be planning the 28 election yeah but it needs to be something that's like you know in the zeitgeist cutting against it like you can either be I'm sure most of the ads that ran that night were like you know

America's at war like this is why you need to buy this thing it's like in it's it's in with like the normal narrative and this one just cut completely against it so good good job and good spot by shield to like find this and clip this because I wouldn't have seen this otherwise so great curator Sean McGuire says the turning point was Elon buying Twitter do you agree feels that way felt like another turning point was making likes private because sure yeah revealed preferences. Yeah, a lot of people were even afraid to like anything that was against the narrative. So yeah, I think it would, but yeah, the acquisition or the take private was down, was upstream of likes and other changes that have happened on the platform.

There was a good article in Stratecre today about the election and Ben Thompson was basically just saying like, as a business, like individually, it's very hard to say that like X is like this massive win because he paid pre-ZERP prices for it and the stock probably would have crashed. He probably could have bought it for cheaper and then there was this advertiser, exodus and the whole business is going through like a business transformation. But if you view it as the Musk company's portfolio, like it's very accretive. And I think that's what pretty much everyone in the deal was aligned on. Like a lot of people invested because they wanted access to other Musk companies. Access to Elon. Or they wanted investment banking contracts. They want to be the one to take

SpaceX public or something. And whether or not X is a win for Elon, you could argue that it is, even from a regulatory standpoint right now, he has effectively purchased control of, not directly, but sort of indirectly. But yeah, right now, I think X has marked it around $20 billion. Sure. So on paper, they've lost $24 billion, something along those lines. But Elon's personal net worth went up $100 billion in the 24 hours. So, and many of the people that are big investors in X have exposure to the other companies. Yeah, yeah.

Are you familiar with the Japanese karetsu? No. So the karetsu, or this, a bunch of Japanese conglomerates that all own pieces of each other. And so they're like deeply, deeply intertwined. And Musk is like kind of building a little bit of that. He was deeply criticized for like the Solar City acquisition. And there's always a question about like, oh, if one of his companies doesn't do well, maybe one of the other companies will just buy it.

But maybe that's actually like a good strategy. And we certainly saw it play out here where, you know, buying one thing can have synergies with another, even though you wouldn't assume that a social network would have any impact on a space launch company. It was always obvious that when Tesla would brag about not needing to do ads, that their ad platform was Elon's own personal Twitter account. And so, yeah, if you're getting billions of impressions a year for free, you don't need to run as many ads.

And again, just run the numbers on the impressions of Tesla. Like how many cyber truck videos and like funny raps and funny hype videos and reels have you seen on X and really anywhere? Add all that up. It's probably more than Hyundai spent on the Super Bowl or like all the advertisements. For sure. Just in terms of attention. Yeah, exactly.

But they're not paying for it. But they are getting the economic value of those impressions. So it's the future. I can't believe I have to read this again. Creatine cycle, Atlas, a friend of the pod. writes on election night. Hopped up on Addy and a Zinn while gooning to polymarket and manifold one second charts in widescreen on my Applevision Pro while talking to three different LLMs and streaming those results

directly to eight different group chats of terminally online schizophrenics monitoring the situation. And Glark says, work harder. And then Atlas says, I have Fox News and MSNBC at both at full volume in my AirPods pros. It feels like the real argument for having six monitors is the election. The election, right? Because there's so many different things to bet on. You've got traditional media. You've got defense stocks,

Bitcoin stocks, yeah. Polymarket. You've got your boys. You've got your discords. You've got your signal chats. I was talking to Saga and Jetty who runs breaking points about this. And like the most perfect stack was the breaking points live stream. Have you ever watched this?

It's phenomenal. It's like they they all came from like more. or less like traditional media backgrounds, but have gone very like YouTube native. They're viewer funded, so they have like subscriptions and stuff. And so they're just like completely authentic, just making jokes, posting. They had this funny thing where it's kind of a left right show where Crystal Ball, one of the hosts, she had to wear a MAGA hat because she bet on Harris and Sager was going to have to wear a Harris T-shirt if he lost the bet.

And so they just have this like really fun rapport. They have a bunch of other people around the desk, and they're just like, they have enough of the technology where they have multi-cam. It looks like a CNN production, but it's like much, it's clearly not as high budget. But it's just really, really fast pace, really great. And while they're doing the show, they're doing lead-ins to YouTube clips. So they'll set something up. So they'll be like, oh, like, now we're going to, like, so he kept, during the live stream, he'd always, he'd stop and be like, oh, the producer's telling me to do a lead-in. So he's like, Donald Trump has been elected the next president.

We go live to like his speech And then they cut to the clip And then they react to it And it was just a live show But it was really really well done So it's like breaking points live stream X scrolling the timeline Polymarket

And that's all you needed And it's all independent alternative stuff And that was like by far The most entertaining Truest source of alpha The most accurate information Like the mainstream just turn on the TV Is like truly gone

So I'm excited Let's go Sarah and the kids are getting kicked out of the hotel You gotta go? Do we want to prioritize one or two more? Yeah. Let's, I really wanted to do Max. We can do them next time.

Shane. Let's do Roon. Let's do Roon and then Q&A. Yep. Okay. Rune writes, The Age of the Technology Brother is at hand. And what a perfect post to end on.

The timeline. The timeline. I couldn't agree more. Perfect time. Perfect name for the podcast. The Technology Brothers. Subscribe. haven't already follow us on X. We're also on YouTube and Spotify and you can get all of your

all of your takes and timeline analysis on there. So shout out Rune for the accurate analysis. Accurate. But the technology brothers are good. We're going to get you a question. Yeah, sure. Hey, John and Jordy. I recently started angel investing and I'm worried it's starting to impact my marriage. I've been spending less time with my wife and kids and more time wandering coffee shops and SF looking for founders building the next big thing. Not to mention I've sold two of our vacation homes to pursue this. How do you balance chasing unicorns and having a balanced life? Where to start? I think we would need, I think that there is an angel investing epidemic on the West Coast right now. I think that it's widely understood that sports betting is highly addictive. It's under discussed

that angel investing is also addictive. It has longer timelines, right? So, when you ape 50K into some kid with a deck in a dream, it might take five to 10 years. But I know people that wake up on the first of the month that are refreshing their email, like a rat waiting for that next hit, you know, hoping to see an update, hoping to get markups. And I think it's important for the innovation economy, but it's tearing families apart.

I do think that the first mistake that that listener made is selling the vacation homes. because some of the greatest angel investments ever made were made in vacation homes. There's the famous example of Travis Kalanick at, what's his name? The cowboy guy. You know him? He would bring people out to his ranch and they would hang out in the hot tub in Tahoe. Yeah. And so if you get the vacation homes and you start inviting people to come hang out and relax,

it's going to be much easier. Let the entrepreneurs come to you. My advice would be, I mean, the first mistake was selling the vacation homes. right. Yep. Should have taken out debt against the vacation homes and used that. Especially in this market, you can refinance. Yeah.

So that was probably a big mistake because even if you're paying 6% annually, you're going to get a higher return. 30, 40% higher R angel investing. So it's hard not to think of that as a poor decision. But ultimately, I'd say bring your wife and get her angel investing to you. Right. Have her put some money to work. Essentially, lever up, lever up against the vacation homes instead of divesting.

And bring your family into it. A lot of, you know, sports betters are out there. There's, you know, they're telling their wife, who do you want to win? She's like, I don't know, honey, like make a bet for me, right? And it's about kind of involving the whole family. My son's two and a half. He has five or so companies that he's deployed into. It's great.

They're kind of silly ones. He's like, I like this snack. Like, let's ape in. But there's something to be said about just invest. in products that you love, I have never really been misguided by investing in products that I love. That's great. Involve the whole family, lever up, and don't take yourself so seriously. Maybe get a third vacation home.

Yeah. Well, that's our show. I got to hop on with New York. I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.