TBPN - Low T Levels at Y Combinator, Founder Burnout, Taylor Lorenz

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Hi there. This is Ben, Vice President at Technology Brothers, with a quick announcement. While filming today, we unfortunately had a small technical error that led to the first 19 minutes of this episode having poor audio quality. I speak on behalf of the organization, John, Jordy, and myself when I say that this will not happen again. We have already found the intern that was responsible and they will be terminated. Thank you for your understanding and back to the show. I'm here with Jury Hayes and today we are talking about My ramp card. I got a new ramp card.

And my last one was plastic, but they sent me the metal one. And you know why they sent it? Why? Microplastic avoidance, right? Yes. The biggest issues with a lot of these fintechs is they're sending millions and millions and millions of plastic cards out of the ether. Yep.

And everyday technology workers are having to use them oftentimes multiple times, certainly multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. And the amount of microplastic exposure from the average. you know, plastic credit card is really, we think it could be contributing to the testosterone epidemic. I think so too, yeah. Everyone always thought that, oh, you get a black card from Amex, it's metal, it's titanium, it's so cool, like it's a flex.

It's never about flexing. Not a status. It wasn't about flexing. It was about avoiding plastic. Exactly. Comes down to health. Health is the ultimate status symbol. It is.

You know. So if your body is highly estrogenetic and from all the, you know, plastic cards that you handling you know that's an easy thing to cut out and thank you to RAM I mean I was thinking that most of my credit cards have actually moved over to metal now and but my ID hasn't and why is the government poised me it's a big issue but you know back on the topic of ramp and the government we need to take a little victory lap because what was it last week you made you know kind of you know threw something out there maybe it was a little bit of a joke maybe it was half serious but we got some real

traction on your idea too. So break down the original thought of ran through the government and then tell me what the downstream effects have been. Yeah, look, government spends more money. The U.S. federal government spends more money than anybody in the world, right? That's true. Yeah. And they have more revenue than I think any other organization in the world. Yeah. I'm sure somebody will point out that I'm incorrect on that. But look, there's trillions. But look, Anytime you have a lot of spend, you're going to have a lot of waste and spend. Right now, it seems very obvious that the U.S. government does have a good handle on their spending, just in general. And there's a lot of ways to fix that.

You can get new leadership in that wants to sort of drill down budget by budget and kind of start to understand how money is being spent. But another way to kind of attack that problem is through software. So to tech-enabled financial services, we went through an era where Amex and a lot of, of the big corporate card players just wanted you to spend as much money as humanly possible because the more money you spend the more money they make. Ramp, you know, came out, I think only around four or five years ago at this point. I decided, hey, we're going to flip this on its head. How do we help companies save money? If our companies can save money, they'll become better businesses and through that they'll become better customers. So aligning that sort of incentive

structure with the company has proved to be very fruitful. And I think I think there's a strong case needs to be made that the federal government needs to get on ramp. Not just at the federal level needs to be mandated state level, county level, city level, you know, all the way down to your kids club soccer team should be on ramp. But we can start and really sit an example at the federal government level. And, you know, the campaign has kind of exposed some of the issues with how politicians like to spend money, right? It became apparent over the weekend that the Kamala campaign had been using rent. ramp, but, and as well as...

You would expect them to win if they were on RAM. Yeah, you would expect them to win, but here's the issue. So they blew through about a billion dollars in a few months, almost unprecedented. I think like half a million of that went to payroll. Yeah. But the big issue, they were on RAM, but they were also using a variety of other sort of payment. That's mistake. And so because that spend wasn't consolidated, how could they really get a grasp on their spending?

they're not able to fully unlock the potential of Ramps, you know, Ramps platform if they're just letting them. Yeah, I mean, what's crazy is like when you sign up for Ramp, like you get this SDR, something that help onboard you. And one of the things that they're working towards when they're telling you about the features is like getting you to migrate 100% of your spend. And if you think about it, like that Ramp SDR, like, could have changed history if he or she or she. A lot of people like to credit, David Sacks and all in. with, you know, Trump's specifically, but I think there's a good argument to say that.

Yeah, well, I was thinking about how like this year the whole narrative is like, oh, it's the podcast election. And I think in 2020, like we could seriously see like it's the Corbricard election where one one campaign comes out and says, hey, we're running on ramp and then the other, you know, when Cobble was on stage, you say, well, I have a gun, right?

Yeah. And so you could hear, oh, the other candidate, they're on ramp too. So then we get into the weeds and we start talking about, well, who's using travel? Who's using bill pay and then oh someone was lying about it and that's a national who you saw really leveraging the AI functionality exactly exactly like oh what's your close how how how which campaign is closing faster yeah then this is what the voters care about yeah like the podcast that's a proxy for this operation just efficiency exactly efficiency and so yeah i i i think everyone should pay attention

the podcast story the whole podcast selection you can kind of ignore that from now that's done the next thing we're going into the corporate card election yeah um Anyway, let's move into our top story of the week. The information featured my talk. Incredible publication. Didn't, yeah, incredible copy. I love that. Yeah.

No one loves the information. People literally realize that we're witnessing them first of the TMZ for technology. Yeah, yeah. That's like a special moment in time. Yeah, there's a broader narrative about like new media, but people have really done the job of understanding, mapping the new media, to what they were replacing. Yeah.

And in this case, like, I mean, yeah, it's clearly kind of the next generation, TMZ, which is fantastic. It was, you know. It was messy. You can't look away from. Yeah. Yeah. So in the, they did some election recapping and recapped a whole bunch of events related to politics, which we don't really talk about here. But because they didn't mention me by name, but they mentioned the name of my talk.

So I'll read. I mean, they wanted them, actually because there's. you've kind of grown a reputation of being a male podcast expert. Yes. Not just because you're one of the hosts of technology brothers, but you kind of have a firm grip on the industry. Yes. Well, actually, the first time the information interviewed me was,

you know, Abe Brown, he writes the weekend thing. I put out a tweet, which would have made it into the stock if it was posted today because it was a banger. It was, you know, we don't need any more Midas lists. We need an Icarus list. four VCs that flew too close to the sun. Some of my best work. And it really resonated.

Like Alex Conrad, who makes the minus list, was like, this is actually a good idea. And then we started, like, talking about it. And so I talked to Abe a bunch, and I was like, dude, like, if someone, I mean, A, if a, if a, if, like, Forbes said, like, hey, we're doing the Nicarist list this year of, like, the worst VCs, like, you would have an army of, like,

500 Stanford New Grad analysts working day and night just to keep the firm off of that list. People try to get on the minus list. Some people don't really care about it,

but most people fight to get on. The crisis PR industry, it would be the biggest event. It would be the largest wealth transfer industry from GPs to crisis PR firms. Yeah. I don't think that's past their expense

for that. Yeah, no, no. But yeah, love the information. No one loves the information more than I do. But they were recapping some of the political news, and they said, last week, the most far-out faction of Tech's burgeoning right wing gathered in Miami Beach for Hereticot, Founders Fund's celebration

of radical free thinking. Between talks like the Treadwife returns and the economics of doom, that one was mine. Teal roamed the crowds accepting preemptive congratulations for the coming election according to several people who attended and i don't know about that last part like i feel like people were not let's see the sources yeah i don't know it really wasn't about politics yeah it wasn't and also there were like tons of like tons of left like that it's like the whole point um and there were a lot of fights and that's the part of like the

debate club and like all that yeah the most heretical people at hereticon yeah are all of the less left-leaning attendees who were trying to jam their politics down the rest of this and it was very triggering not because of their viewpoint but because it was not meant to be a place to sort of discuss politics about policy right it was about the economy it was about how do we kind of increase global prosperity through non-traditional I do I do love that like my talk, the economics of doom, which was great. I interviewed Tyler Cowan. I love him. It was a lot of

fun. But we are two of the more normie people there, I think, in the sense that like we're talking about economics. He wasn't particularly doom-pilled. He's a professor. You're a male podcast expert. I'm a businessman. First and four of us. So, you know,

I'm not one of these like crazy biohackers who's growing you know. A third one. Yeah. Exactly. I'm not doing any of the crazy stuff that that I did see there. But I love that I made it. And I have no idea why they chose this one. I think it's mostly because when the PirateWire's team did the write-up,

they talked about like six different, like, our talks was too. The one we did on the PEDs in the Valley was too heretical. It just couldn't really need publish anywhere. Yeah. I got to figure out how to get them to issue of correction and say, it was the economics of Doom, hosted by John Coogan,

the host of Technology Brothers. and then link to us. Yeah. Tell you I did that. I changed the SEO one. Somebody wrote an article about me being like a toxic male podcaster. Something like that. It was like some sort of hit piece.

And when they linked to me, they link to John Coogan.com slash about just to be like, this is like about page, right? Yeah. And I wanted the SEO to go to Lucy so he'd sell more product. So I rerouted the link. No way. That's great. Yeah.

And so now we have an extra back link. The journalists would be on to that. Like, don't route to a domain that they control. Exactly. So a little tip out there for the listeners. I don't think we have a lot of journalists that listen. No, but get, I mean, I do have a thesis that the, a lie can get halfway across the world before the truth can put its shoes on.

Have you heard this phrase? Or if it bleeds, it leads. Yeah. And I think that if you're a startup and you want attention, you want press, you should be courting hit pieces. Yeah. And I think that there's actually an opportunity. Everybody's done that better than drive it. That's true.

Yeah. I mean, it's always used it to its advantage. Yeah, no, it tells like this heroic journey. Lulu is obviously the master getting good press. Maybe we need a Lulu for getting you guys get a press. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just go and make me, like, hated by 90% of America,

and I will monetize the 10% that loves me for countercultural reasons. Yeah. I think that's interesting. So to that effect, I had a great call yesterday with none other than Taylor Lorenz. Now what? Yeah. And she's writing a piece for the information. She's writing news.

She's writing for the information. She's writing for the information. We're so back. We're at a period of time where there's this massive power struggle between the information. information, newcomer, Bloomberg, Forbes for top technology talent. So it's an amazing co-sign for the information that they're able to pick up Lorenz at this moment of time. She's also been on TMZ a bunch. So think about that crossing.

It's amazing. I mean, if you needed more proof that the information is the TMZ attack. Yeah. Technology. That's it. That's it. So I don't think she's not working there full time, but she's writing a piece about the the bro podcast sphere, the male podcast sphere, which is why she called me to testify as a male podcast expert.

Yeah. And I wasn't sure if she was calling me because I'm a male who is a podcast expert or if I'm a male podcast expert. But either way, I was totally prepared to comment on the record. And we had a wonderful conversation. She's really great to talk to. She is. She's got great. Yeah.

Yeah. And. She's got an idea. And, yeah, I mean, like the critique of the tech elite that I completely agree with from the Keroswishers and the Taylor Runs is that too many tech billionaires are humorless. And they can't take a joke. And they get their feathers too ruffled when people come for them. Yeah. And you got to know that we are in the WWE era of tech.

And there's going to be some faces and there's going to be some heels, but you can't shut the game down. You can't have a villainless, conflictless society. Full circle moment for me because the first time I ever spoke to the New York Times was through Taylor Lorenz. To give my point of view on the call her daddy podcast. That's right. Wait, so we both talked to her about podcasts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing.

We are top source. Well, I'm the male podcast expert. I guess you happen to be a female podcast expert. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. No, I thought you wrote a great great Pete. This is back in 2020. It was like, I remember exactly where I was walking to Airworn from my apartment in Venice.

And everything, the whole world was shut down. It was just me and Taylor talking about podcasts, which was really an awesome moment. Yeah. A little check-offs got a little foretelling of the future. Totally. Fantastic. But she wanted to talk about the Bro podcast boom. and it really is a boom there is and and so there were some there were some there were some

like things that I disagreed with one is that just like you know if if the if the Democrats had run like a stronger candidate and that stronger candidate had done I I tend to think that the like right now there's this narrative of like there's this very consolidated cohesive massive right wing list of podcasts that lean right so it's like you start with Rogan then you go to Lex I would say the big ones to be clear are very much center right oh for sure I don't want to be barely right barely right barely right and Joe Rogan and there's tons of clips of Rogan yeah lifetime Democrat talking about all he loves Bernie all these other things it's just like in this election

they happen like the the the goal posts move to the point where like a lot of the big podcasts leaned right and so you have Rogan Lex Chris Williamson just Jesse Michaels with the alien stuff. You have Huberman. Some of those hosted Trump. You have Tim Dillon, Theo Vaughn, the comedians, Kill Tony,

Bussing with the boys, Aidan Ross. There's like this huge community. And what's interesting is that like, if you actually saddle those people down, they probably have a pretty wide spectrum of politics, but they all kind of just align with like general conservatism this time around. And Trump was like the candidate of that.

Whereas on the left, I think you actually have, just as much reach, but it's more fragmented. So you have Pod Save America, Comla didn't do it. You have Smartless with Jason Bateman, and that's a pretty like center-left podcast I would call it. Kamala didn't do it. It's more of a comedy show, but that's fine.

Like, you just need to be a politics show. You have the Daily, you have the Ezra Klein show. I was just looking at the top podcast, and it's not like, yeah, Tucker's up there. Rogan's up there. But so is the New York Times and Ezra Klein. Well, you have a thesis that's clearly turning into a law of Kugan's many laws, which is that the candidate that just simply records more podcasts hours. Yeah, more hours. Yeah.

Yeah. I read the numbers, and it's like 35 million views just on the Rogan episode. Average view duration on that three-hour episode was about 45 minutes. I talked to some people that I know podcast durations. And so you multiply that out, and it's just billions of minutes or something like that. or like, it's something like hundreds of millions of minutes. And the value of that is easily $600 million that was the, it made up for the funding gap. And so it's like if you're a politician, you can either spend $100,000 on an ad that reaches a million people or you can go do a podcast that reaches a million people.

And instead of getting a 30 second ad, you're getting 45 minutes. It's a 45 minute ad. And people just are. Yeah, this is why for all the businessmen out there, if you get an opportunity to get an opportunity to go on a podcast, even if it legitimately only has 100 engaged listeners, it's worth doing because that's an hour of time that you get to spend talking to people that are going to totally digest, like, what you're doing, why it's important, and why they should, you know, be into your product or service, whatever it is. And I give the example when I'm talking to

founders that asks me, hey, should I go on the show? It's not big, but what do you think? I said 20 years ago when a businessman had an opportunity to fly to St. Louis to get in front of 50 potential customers in a room, they would spend their entire day to go and do that. It's worth you getting on a podcast for an hour from Zoom and just having a conversation. We had only 100 people. Did you sit that email? We got our first request to go on as we got our first request. Yeah, we got our first request to go on a podcast as the technology brothers.

I think we should do it. The guy has like six episodes. Great. And it's like, so do we. On the come up together. Let's give it a try. So, yeah.

So, like, we kind of debated on that. I think on the, on the center left, you have those, like, you have those center left shows,

but then you also have the far left shows, like Choppo, the Adam Friedland show, Red Scare for Emily, Destiny. And it's like, you could see a Democrat candidate.

Like, Bernie would go on this stuff. He can get in the ring with, like, the Chapparralie. of guys and hold his own, but he can also hold his own with Ezra Klein. And so, so I mean, long story short, I think the future of the Democratic Party is more candidates like Bernie, more candidates like AOC, more candidates like people to judge. Less candidates that are just straight up media trained to stay on topic, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah. But the interesting thing was that Taylor was really asking this one question again and again, which is like, why do podcasts lean right wing? and I was kind of rejecting the premise for a while, but then I was like, okay, let's like steal man this a little bit and let me work through like what could have possibly thing. So first thing, I, you know, I tried to explain to her, you know, there's this concept called mansplaining,

and I told her that that's when a man describes something to a woman, usually condescendingly. And she was very happy to hear that. But then I moved on to kind of a more rigorous analysis, which is that there was a, there was a so so on YouTube like YouTube kind of leans left because YouTube's algorithmically driven less than RSS. And so so on YouTube the like there was a lot of right wing deplatforming that happened or deprioritization in like the 2016 to 2020 era. And then in 2020 there was a lot of there were a lot of right wing.

people or just center right that got their stuff deprioritized because they were talking about COVID and they'd get the COVID flag and then they'd get deprioritized in the algorithm shadow band and then there were a couple high profile right wingers who were straight up deep platform from YouTube right and so on YouTube you have this like you have this subtle pressure from YouTube they were never like straight up like banning everything but there was obviously like big move to rumble move to other platforms a lot of like maybe I'm not safe here if I talk about certain things I won't get as much reach

But on RSS in the Apple Podcasts app, it's way, way harder. Like the bar is much higher. Even if Apple and- You've got to do something really extremist. Exactly. Even if Apple and Google have the same politics and they both think that, oh, like Jordan Peterson shouldn't be on here or whatever, on Google, they can just, on YouTube, Google can just say, hey, he said this thing, let's just not promote him in the algorithm.

Whereas for Apple, it's like Alex Jones, we have to actively. take him out of the store. This is a much firmer line. It's not this like, you know, steering thing. And so I think that a lot of the conservatives kind of kept growing very fast on RSS, whereas they weren't able

to grow as fast on YouTube. And so that's kind of the balancing thing. And I think podcasts in general are much more impactful on opinion. We've talked about this. Oftentimes, real sort of content and ideas kind of start in these sort of, maybe they go from a

tweet to a long-form podcast and then they get cut down again into like a 20-minute YouTube video to a 60-second TikTok, you know, video. So I think one of the things, Taylor is obviously one of the top technology journalists in the world. Otherwise, she wouldn't be writing for the information. Yep. And one of the things about this election cycle and maybe the premise of her article might be a little bit off is that it became obvious this election cycle that the Republican Party was more oriented around technology, right? And big part of that is because some of the biggest donors to the Republican Party are technologists, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk. And so I think that a lot of tech ended up aligning with that side because it was the party that was pro-technology,

right? It was how do we get Elon permits faster so that he can launch more rockets? How do we maintain our edge around, you know, defense in the United States, right? How do we, you know, support our sort of emerging defense industrial base? So the alignment and the sort of maybe shift right in the mail podcast sphere, I think wasn't even political as much as it was a business orientation, right? Because it was just almost a survival mechanism. Sure, sure, sure, yeah. She was also drilling down on, like, why is Joe Rogan,

popular or why are these like Manosphere podcast popular and again I didn't have that's like asking like why is you know uh vio and the group chat popular yeah like we like him you know he's funny and he's got good takes right yeah I guess she was talking in like kind of a relative sense of like why why are the manisphere podcasts more popular than like female led podcasts but I kind of rejected that because I think that there are plenty of female led female hosted podcasts that are successful and I was actually telling her like we could be having the exact opposite scenario or the exact opposite conversation if the democrats had put up someone and i was thinking like okay so the like Kamala was uh like a prosecutor she could have gone on like my first my favorite murder you know that show that's i think that's

woman woman hosted yeah very interesting and she could have told some story about like the criminal gangs that she prosecuted like and it would be like the story of some criminal and she was actually involved and she's like co-hosting there that would have been super cool and super different It's super weird and like gotten some super fans. Yeah. And that's where I, that's where I want that to go. But I think it was just like that campaign was just way too media trained. And it was like stay on message, stay on message, stay on message.

When you get off message, your word salad. But like I just reject the premise that like she's word salad when she's like just having dinner with someone. She's clearly like a, you don't wind up in that situation just being dumb. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing I thought was interesting is Sarah told me that she heard hundreds of. of Kamala ads on podcasts, right?

And that they were spending aggressively on podcast advertising. Ads, but not, right? It's the 2008 playoff. I genuinely did not hear a single Kamala podcast ad. Because I only listen to one podcast. Founders. Technology brothers and founders. So two podcasts.

But I don't even listen to our podcast. We just record it live. We let our VP Ben rip it. And we don't do political ads. We do. Yeah. Yeah. Much more important.

ads. Yeah. We would do an ad if a candidate wanted to come on and talk to us about how they're leveraging, you know, fintech platforms like Ramp to run a more efficient campaign. We would do some type of integration like that, but not a straight political ad. I would also have both candidates on to talk about their watch collections. Yeah. You know, Trump has a fantastic Vachron Constantine. I'm sure. It's beautiful. Yeah. He has several solid gold watches. Tomo has a wonderful watch collection as well. She's got some... She's got good taste, actually.

Obama, through his administration, he wore a secret service watch that was gifted to him by the secret service. I just thought that was so cool. I don't think he's actually become a watch guy, and I think a lot of it was like, you know, the Everman, like you don't want to show up. Trump's whole brand is like gold-plated show. You don't have to have a watch. That it has significance, significance.

Yeah. And so that's where I would want to take the conversation. Yeah, and I, you know, one of, for me, Kamala has a thing for Hermes, right? Sure. And it's sort of under-discussed, but she's got, you know, she understands she's America, you know, she's an American politician, but she appreciates fine European luxury goods. Sure, sure, sure, sure. That's what you want out of a politician, right?

I mean, the other angle for us, if we were to interview the candidates, would be to talk about, you know, Donald Trump, the tech founder. And this is why it was so big when the All-In podcast had them on. Because they really stick to the unicorn founders. They're political, I mean, arguably more of a political podcast. Yeah, but it's great that they'll have tech founder on. Yeah. Like Donald Trump, the founder of Social, Truth Social.

Well, that's great. Let's move on to some Q&A. But first, I need to tell you about Steinway and Sons. Founded in 1853 by German immigrant Henry Englehard Steinway in a Manhattan loft, Steinway and Sons pioneering handcrafted methods are still employed today to ensure uncompromising standards of quality. Steinway is more than a piano. It's the ultimate expression of passion, tradition, and craftsmanship.

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But I bet you didn't know that you can have them ship you a physical template of the piano that you're considering buying to lay out in your living room or in your house to see where it fits. I thought that was really, really cool. I'm sure a lot of companies would just go over like the August. in reality thing, but I like that physical, like, you can lay out your whole room and it's like a cut out and you can see, okay, this is the one that fits. So anyway, we love Steinway here, but back to the show. Let's do Q&A. This comes from Ben. Oh, steadfast guides, John and Jordy,

hear my lament. For near eight long years, I have labored as captain bound to a vessel that will neither sink nor sail, a cruel jest played by fate. The golden dawns of ambition have now given way to Stygian twilight, the gleam of hope tarnished and bound in chains of mediocrity. Every course plotted, every wind sought yields only the same tepid tide, a stagnant pool where once roared an ocean of promise. The ledger of my soul bleeds red ink, the currency of resolve spent on visions that crumbled like clay under the strain of grasping hands. Tell me, venerable Jordi and John, is there a course uncharted, a horizon unclaimed that might deliver me from this purgatory, must I forsake this craft wrought from sinew and sleepless nights to chase an

uncertain new voyage? Or do I persist? A wraith bound to a dream now turned tomb until the last ember of spirit fades beneath the cold, relentless gaze of stagnation. I seek your counsel for the night deepens as my spirit falters, guide me before the darkness swallows what remains. Yeah. So if you've been building for, you know, in years, do you stick with it and hope that you'll have a breakout moment? Find that product market fit, go exponential? Or do you just try and sell your company, shut it down, get an aqua hire, and move on to the next thing? What do you think? This screams burnout to me. Yep. Right? Yeah. There's a lot of, you know, flowery language and, you know, the, Ben, the guy who asks this, clearly an exceptional writer. But look, the guy's burnt out.

Yep. He's sort of, I think any time as a founder, if you're, if you lose that sort of ultimate vision, right like he's getting to a point where he doesn't quite know the path forward and oftentimes as a founder you have multiple pass forward but if you're sort of there at this point where you can't make decisions one way or another and you're sort of just sort of stumbling along that doesn't feel good that's burnout you know this guy could go on a vacation it's not going to really do anything right because he's going to be on vacation yeah uh thinking about the fact that he's burnt out yeah so i actually know this guy and I was on a call with him and he came to me with a very like so he for just for some context they've raised like a decent amount of money there like he's paying himself a salary it's not huge but he's like paying the bills right and he's in kind of stasis right and so I he came to me with this idea of like oh I want to make some more money for the company I'm thinking about like it was essentially like lead gen like selling the like the leads that his company generates and isn't able to monetize and get down the funnel, like sell those off. And I was just like, dude, I don't think

you're thinking big enough. I think this is like not the right path. I think this is like, it'll be not a path to a venture outcome. Exactly. It's just, it's just not a path to anything exciting. It's just going to be mediocre. And so what I was telling was like instead of like burnout, I think you're right. But instead of going on a vacation, I told him he should just clear his whole calendar and figure out who the top 30 players are in his industry. The top three like public companies, CEO's, billionaire investors, like the big people, and you should just spend your entire month, the next month, just trying to get meetings with them. Just fly to where they are, trying. Like we saw this with the truth social thing. Go to Mar-a-Lago. Figure out, like, okay, this guy

owns a big company in this town. Go there, meet him, network. And then, and then like half the people I was mentioning, he was like, oh, yeah, that guy cold called me like three years ago when I was starting, when I was building this company. And like, you know, we never rent anywhere. I was like, call him back. And just try and see. how you can be helpful because it could be an aqua hire. It could be a deal. It could be something else. You do that for a month.

If that doesn't go anywhere, you call up Jeremy Gaffon, Gaffon and company. And this is exactly the kind of opportunity. You know, we kind of. Special situation. I think you showed me like one of the, he forwarded his investor update or something like that. Not a bad company, right? Nope. Five, six million of error are growing 30% a year.

that is a good business under most evaluations, but it's not a venture scale opportunity anymore. Yeah, it's tough when you've raised 15 mil. And so go to Jeremy. He'll, you know, help, help, you know, figure out all the different sort of stakeholders and find a win-win going forward. Yeah. Your VCs have different incentives than you do, right? You have, you've been in this business for eight years. You still care about the industry. You're an expert in the industry. And with the right capital stack and approach to growth, you know, this could, this business could eventually sell for $50, $60 million.

Yep. And it's going to take a little bit of time to get there. But if you kind of, it really is a kind of a, it's not, it's no longer a venture product, right? So you're sort of treading water and not embracing reality. And going with Gaffaun and companies is a much better option than just shutting the company down. And people kind of like know this deep down at the later stage where, you know, if you're doing 100 million ARR, it's like, okay, private equity exists. Everyone knows Bain, KKR, all these companies that are very obvious and they're probably calling you. Or strategic acquisition that could be very valuable or maybe try and take the company public.

But people don't realize at like this kind of zombie stage where you've done series A, series B, but never really hit escape velocity. Those two options still exist. It's probably just something more like an aqua hire and more like a special situations deal with somebody like Jeremy. So anyway, good luck to you, Ben. I hope you figure it out. for a month and then give Jeremy a call. That's what I would do. Yeah.

Try and get the aqua hire done. Try and get some weird deal done. Try and kind of just break something loose that's truly new and it bold and has the upside. Don't focus anymore. Like you've already built the business to the point where it's, your business is working. The business works. It's just not there.

So you need to either take a really big swing of the fence with like a new partner. Or do the aqua hire. Go mentor under somebody who's really successful. Then get back into it. Yeah. Or sell the. company and restructure the whole cap table with Jeremy or something. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline.

So our first post comes from Guy, who is quote tweeting us. He says, there's two Chad looking guys in a suit discussing Goblins tweet and my note, I lolled IRL. That's great to hear. That's great to hear. I mean, as much as we're here to deliver hard hitting business strategy, we're also here to deliver some laughs. Exactly.

And just because we're dead serious about the show doesn't mean you can't get some real enjoyment out of it. And here he says, please guys in suits, film yourselves earnestly discussing my tweets too. Well, here it is, Guy. Here it is. First of many, I would guess. Yeah, I think you're going to be in the regular rotation.

You have a long path in front of you. But yeah, Goblins tweet. I actually don't remember what Goblins tweet was, but I imagine it being very deranged and having a lot of jargon. You know, shit posting, shit posting gets shit posted about a lot. But it's serious, right? It creates trend.

It sort of influences the zeitgeist and it helps us better understand the world. Yeah, has a deeper meaning sometimes. So, cheers, guy, get out there, post more. Send us your best posts and it might be on the show. Let's go to Max Meyer. Max says, the upper Midwest is a 10 out of 10 region. It has everything. Chicago, a proper city, massive metro on an ocean-scale lake, West Michigan, a temperate area, warm enough to grow chardonnay grapes.

I didn't know that. The largest arable land region on earth and the greatest college towns in the USA. We should do a technology brother's meet up to do a wine tasting in the Chicago area. I think we should host a live show in this Iowa Stadium that he's posting at. That'd be amazing. A college tour. Will it fit 100,000 people? Yeah, that's the main problem.

I mean, maybe if we add extra stands, extra seats in like the in, field on the we could fit 110 but I mean we'd have to charge a lot it's going to be tight yeah we'd have to charge a lot but I mean you price gate eventually yeah we'll live stream it everybody should be able to go yeah it'd be great um max is max has been I think very vindicated the last few weeks yep uh the guy's been loud and proud about certain viewpoints that he has and uh I think he's going to be on the right side of history on this one. He was wrong about something, which I completely agreed with him on, and was that he didn't think Biden was going to drop out. And he bought, and he bought like a hundred bucks in the polymarket. Yeah, he put like, he put like a hundred bucks in polymarket when it was like,

you know, Biden did drop out 80 percent. And he was like, I think it's fake. It's not going to happen. It doesn't make sense. And I was like, dude, like good job putting your money where your mouth works. Like I believe that too. And we were both wrong. I'm glad he didn't put the full arena balance sheet on it because it's a great publication. It is. I think we have a copy here somewhere, but... It's laying around here somewhere. Yeah, Arena is fantastic.

We had it in the first episode. But yeah, I'm really excited for more editions of Arena. He should try to... He should potentially explore going to a daily newspaper, right? Because the new cycle moves quickly. I like something that you can just sit there and enjoy on the weekend and have, you know, a quarterly or monthly. But, yeah, obviously, like, ramp up as fast as possible.

It's the kind of thing that you get in the mail and you put it in your briefcase and you say, I'm going to bring this on my next vacation in a few weeks. And I'm going to just really sit down and enjoy this. Well, I mean, the design was fantastic. And the sponsors, he's monetizing. I saw a lot of great. A lot of great content. A lot of independent publishers say, oh, we're going to do fully reader supported.

It's like, no, Max understands that the best content in the world should be monetized. It should be supported by. companies that want to support the publication too because companies you shouldn't ban companies from supporting your publication right I was looking at the this week's economist ad on the back cubitus Cupidus yep yep yep it makes sense we could do a whole deep dive on the cubit and if you and if you read through the economists they do a great job balancing the ads like it's not overwhelming like a lot of a lot of publications but there's just enough and it's just nice and I'd love

look forward to flipping it. I look forward to that. Seeing it. Oh, who do they got this week? The ads are pretty, you know, in the economists, I would say that 80% of the ads are deeply relevant to me. Right. And so I look at it more like a service.

Yeah, it's the same thing for arena. Every single ad that they ran, I was like, this is cool. And I like this company more because they're supporting Max. So, cheers to Max. Thanks for everything that you do. Let's go to Shane Copeland, the founder of Polly Market. What a great story. So he posts this picture of him in 2020, four years ago.

He says, 2020, running out of money, solo founder, HQ in my makeshipped bathroom office. Little did I know, Polymarket was going to change the world. And man, what a setup. That is terrible. Yeah, yeah. That's a dark. Such a bad setup with an empty water bottle. And the mouse is a crazy mouse.

The mouse on the wicker basket is crazy. basket. And the plastic water bottle. I mean, I think Shane, somebody whose testosterone levels are probably so high that he needed to take off the edge and have some microplastics to bring it down a bit. But still, from the bottom to the top, the best part about this is that if you look at the image, it looks like he like got frustrated to punch the wall and was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. He probably did. It's a testosterone. That's probably why he punched the wall and then was like, okay, I need a plastic bottle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But man, what a run.

What a run for polymarket and just dominant. I think they got like 80%, 90% liquidity around the election, just complete down the law outcome. Yeah, what? Do we have any idea how much volume they did in the last month? I think it was like $3 billion just on the presidential election. Yeah. And I think, I don't know.

I think it's like 6040 election versus non. And now a bunch of, a bunch of sharp founders are actually creating markets to be able to short We have a post on that. Yeah. So we'll get... 3.6 billion on... Wow.

That's massive. Yeah. I'm going to be able to pull it up. It's too hard. There's too many here. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. We'll come back to that one.

But, oh, here it is. So Avi Schiffman says, never been more bullish on friend. Please bet against my failure. And he's using manifold, but I'm sure most founders will wind up on polymark. it pretty soon. And it says, will, friend, have 10,000 daily active users by November 8th,

2025? And it's at 50-50 right now. And you can go and effectively short his company. Because there's been a lot of trash talking. Yeah, for all the people, for all the people that think he spent too much on his domain. Yep. That was a big hot take. I think he, um, one word dot coms are back during the AI era. Obviously, Sam Altman saw what Avi did with friend and decided I'm going to get, I'm going to get chat.com. I saw a family just launched today, some crypto thing. Do they have their dot-com? I don't know, but.

I thought they had a .io. Okay. Maybe they have a dot-com. They had the, the Axe family. Yeah, yeah, which is, you know, at this point. It's actually funny. The branding of a one-word domain so strong in AI that I assumed it was an AI company. Yeah.

Like, oh, some app to manage your family, but I guess it's a crypto thing. Yeah, but I love this. I love this. Avi is so convicted. He's building a wearable for AI. Yeah, so Avi's building an AI wearable. You went viral. with this very controversial video about going and living your life in San Francisco, but also talking to your AI friend and having these like kind of Black Mirror-esque interactions.

And I think I think the video was tuned perfectly to be not quite just techno-optimistic. So it wasn't tone deafly. The people that made it and him. But yeah, he's also, he's a technologist, but he's also, he's not, he sort of has this understanding that technology is not always good. bad like sometimes it's sort of this neutral thing where there are going to be people if he continues to execute there's going to be people that are become madly in love with their friend.com you know wearable companion there's going to be people that just use it here and there and like

it's a part of their life and some people may use it's going to be massively positive for some people i'm sure it'll be negative for some other people and that's just the nature of technology not uh it's impossible to say that any technological product is inherently good or inherently bad. And anytime you get into like binaries, I think it's, but overall, like this guy is putting it all out on the line. He's doing this sort of build in public approach, but basically saying every single week, I'm going to win, I'm going to win, I'm going to win. Not not too dissimilar to Steinman, just sort of a different approach. Yep, totally. Love it. Well, good luck. Let's go to Lee Edwards. He says there hasn't been a better time to move to SF in 15 years. AI is here. In person is back. Tech

vibes are off the charts. Local government no longer run by psychotic clowns. Legal to build housing again. Equal marriage and abortion rights are the law. And he's quoting someone that says time to move to SF then. And I love this. I've always been super bullish on the Gary Tan, like anti-dum loop, boom loop. Let's make SF amazing. Like it needs to be. Yeah. So I was born in Oakland, Children's Hospital family, you know, it's been all around the Bay for generations and generations. The Bay had gotten so bad that when I was graduating college, I didn't even consider moving back. And in fact, I remember year over year as a kid, my family, we'd go from Berkeley and we'd go over the bridge into the city. I remember just going less and less and less as I got older.

And it was because we, our sort of like family tradition was to go into San Francisco, park our car and spend the entire day, just walking around the city, going to our favorite restaurants. And that just happened less and less and less as it got less safe and just less enjoyable to be there. And I just remember as we started really needing to dodge certain streets and neighborhoods, and it just became like, you know, it just became a little bit dark. And so I think for all the technology brothers out there, men and women, it's been this, over the last four years, you've had sort of Teal and Elon align and focus on the presidential election. you've had Gary focused deeply on San Francisco and having San Francisco, you know,

making a lot of positive progress on, on, uh, on things simultaneously having new momentum at the federal level. San Francisco is going to benefit massively from both of those trends. So if you are, you know, we're a media business, right? We're media businessmen. We almost have to be in LA. Yep. But if you are young technologists, it's hard to argue against building or company anywhere other than Silicon Valley. Yeah. There's, uh, the, the SF hate, I feel like was always a little overrated in the sense that most people, by the time they're having problems with San Francisco, they're in a stage of their life where they can move to yeah, Marin, Palo Alto, Atherton,

yeah, inclined village. It's really not an issue. It only becomes an issue once you have children, right? Yeah, but at that stage and I think that's probably part of why San Francisco got so weird was because I lived in the tenderloin at age 22. Yeah. It was 6 foot 8, 250 pounds. Like no one bothered me. You're 250, brother. It was fine.

Like it was, yeah, it was dangerous, but most of the people would be like in the middle of like wrong guy, like dealing drugs. And they'd be like, no, it wouldn't even mess with you. They'd just be like, do you play basketball? Like they would be so taken aback by my physical size that it was just not an issue. I remember going to some party in the tenderloin and there was a girl who was leaving and the girl who lived in the apartment was like, you have to take my taser. And I was like, whoa, that's crazy. Because I would just, why would just walk around?

But it's like total like privilege stuff. But then, but then once you have kids, you're like, okay, I can't live that life anymore. But you can move to Palo Alto or Atherton or Inclined Village. So here's what I want to see. I want to see billion dollar venture capital asset managers like General Catalyst and Injason Horwitz and people like Adam Newman, I want them buying up all the housing and SF, right? If you're really long SF, yeah, like I want Gary, I want Gary to be a slumlord almost, right? But not the opposite. No, no, I'm saying he starts as a slum lord. He buys up all these, you know, studio apartments that are upgrades them, upgrades them, bugs them. Yeah. And uses AI to process all that data so that he understands, oh, this founder hasn't slept in three days.

Get them a term sheet. Get them a term sheet immediately, right? Yeah, that's good. No, but I think one way to go long technology is to go long SF. Yep. That's what Gary's done. And if you want to benefit from that boom, fund the startups. Yep.

But then buy up all the real estate. So you sort of recapture some of that value because a lot of founders' paychecks end up just going towards their rent. Yeah. That's great. Let's go to Will Minitis. Will says, many remarkable businesses that could exist don't because venture investors refuse to get creative with structure. If you took PE structuring brain and applied it to early stage investing, you'd see dramatically larger outcomes in traditional industries ASAP.

And then Rune says that's exactly how we ended up with the convoluted structure of open AI. And then Will says, does the nonprofit flip have a comp in PE? No, right? I know the structured capped profit units are classic. Interesting. Yeah, so here's the thing. You meet something that's been happening recently is founders are going out and pitching VCs

and the VCs will tell them, is this a multi-billion dollar business or is this something that could get to 20, 30, 50 million of error off of like one or two rounds? And one of the challenges is a lot of those businesses, if the founders don't want to shoot for the multi-billion dollar outcome, they could take like two, three million dollars and just build a fantastic business,

but the VCs in theory should be able to buy a lot more of the company than they currently are. So they're buying like if you want to go and if you're a YC company and the founders just want to build like a fantastic business or a wonderful business as some people would refer to it. They're still getting two on 20 when I think. that if you wanted to take a much more sort of PE style approach, you should be like, cool, that's great if you want to do that. But we're going 50-50. We're going to be 50-50 or we're going to buy, it's going to be two on eight.

Yeah, you shouldn't give the same terms. But the issue is there's so much competition. There's so many seed funds, so many pre-seed funds. The founders can just go and take two on 20 from some fund that thinks it's going to be a monopoly, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so right now the issue is there's just so much competition that you I don't think you can get these sort of like PE what what Will's talking about is quite a bit more structure Yeah, he's thinking about bringing in debt earlier Essentially bringing in debt earlier you know there's like general catalyst buying health system Stuff like that I think all that stuff is cool but it's hard to do PE styles early stage because there's just so much so many different people that will give you that Yeah, three on 15 or two on 10 or two on 20 And I think that competition just drives up prices and all ultimately lowers returns.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I see it a lot in, in like, deep tech, hard tech, where there's someone running a machine shop. It's probably going to be a great business. It's super important, but it might not have, you know, monopoly supply. We talked about the drone motor company. Yeah. Something like that is, like, critical to the supply chain for so many companies,

but probably not going to have the margins of the FAP. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, how do you get the next generation of founders, like, excited and incentivized around that? Right now, the pattern is go lie to VCs. It's basically just tell them that you'll be a trillion dollar company. Yeah, and the issue is if you take money with this venture narrative,

you have to do a lot of things that your customers don't give a shit about. If you're making drone motors and your customers are like, you make great drone motors, I'm going to keep buying them. And then you're like, well, actually, we're drone motors as a service and we're going to go, we're going to go sell our software. And they're like, okay, well, I like you because you make good drone. mutters and I want more of those. It's funny because the classic business school case study is like XYZ company makes XYZ widget and they they do X amount of EBDA and like how would you

lever it up to ensure that they can maintain profitability. And yeah, I think I think yeah what Will's getting at is maybe there's more of these sort of businesses that look like a and co that just take a unique lens on venture which is to say we're focused on returns we're willing to make investments to generate that we think can generate returns that fit this profile because in PE there's a lot of PE funds that are that are like we don't want a 30x at all we don't care we just want these sort of base hits over and over and over and that's what we've told our LPs. So I think that what I was talking to originally about, there's so many different seed funds that will give you two on 12. Right. If you come in with a slightly different approach, there's

opportunities there. If you're just thinking about it from the lens of we care about returns first and foremost. And I think even Bryce from NDVC is taking this approach. He had created a really structured product historically with NDVC, but now he's just a $50 million fund that's saying we're looking for this unique type of founder that just wants to build a great business. And, you know, worst case scenario, you build a good business. Best case scenario, you sort of build this generational company and we'll make money either way. Yeah. So maybe more permanent capital, maybe more debt financing, less of like a 10 year with a couple

year extension timeline. And then potentially a different target around zero is like a lot of early stage. VCs are like, yeah, 90% of the portfolio is going to go to zero. A lot of the great growth funds right now have a no zero's mandate. They won't invest in something if there's any risk that it goes to zero and then they're underwriting against like a 20% IRR. And I wonder what that would look like if you said, I'm an early stage investor, but I do different structured deals. But my hurdle rate for zero is like less than 50% of my companies will go to zero. Yeah. As opposed to 90% because I'm unicorn hunting. Very different. The unicorn hunting is. Yeah, maybe that.

And that looks like leveraging. Yeah, it became so sexy. It was like, you know, if you can be the first investor in Uber and the rest of your portfolio is trash, like, that doesn't matter because you got the stamp of like you got into the. Yeah, that incentivizes yolowing where people are like, eh, this team's like, okay, but it's a good category. We want exposure to this. Like what's the, the sort of approach within venture world and angel investing of, I'm only part way convict. in this business, I'm still going to invest, which I've across like 50 angel bets, I've done that before where I'm like, I see some issues with this business, but I like the founder, so I'll do it.

Yeah. Or the team is not, is maybe like a seven out of 10, but like the products at 10 out of 10, let's do it anyways. And I think that, yeah, the venture investors that are like, no, we're going to be, because the private equity world is just much more serious in the way that they evaluate companies, right? Like they bring a seriousness to the asset class that is for many funds missing, right? It's interesting. Let's go to Bayeslord. Bayeslord says daily reminder that at least one of your needs to, at least one of you needs to start an IQ enhancement company as soon as possible. And my take is already been done.

Eight years ahead of you, buddy. Ten points. Eight years ahead of you. Ten points. Yeah, we know about the performance enhancing drugs for IQ. Caffeine, nicotine, some sleep, some exercise, high testosterone. No, it's funny because the original Lucy pitch was smart nicotine. Yeah.

Which intelligent nicotine, right? But yeah, I think it can take different forms. I think that I think there's a big business to be made what Bays is talking about selling to technology workers to say, like, we're going to take a cohesive look at how to increase your IQ. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Brian Johnson was talking about. And measure it. He was saying that, like, people care a little bit about their health and longevity,

but it's very abstract. But if you can tell them that you get on this diet and you will be performing better at work immediately, that has a much more acute ROI. And so you can kind of underwrite the hassle of doing the diet. And I think they'll probably be more of that. I think I'm not sure. Brian might be able to pivot into like becoming like the Brian Johnson of the mind might just be Brian Johnson.

Yeah. But it also might be someone new who's focused purely on that. Yeah. Instead of longevity or instead of health or instead of athletic ability. But yeah, I would I would invest in that business, a business that basically says like we're going to test your IQ and then we're going to continue to test it quarterly and we're going to do different modalities. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean that's a big thing that like because of the way the FDA regulates these products, it's very hard for us. Like we can't put caffeine in our gum that has nicotine. You can't mix actives. But if you're more of like a health clinic, you could actually prescribe caffeine, nicotine differently. You could like move through these things and actually take more of like a holistic view. In the same way that a lot of those men's health clinics look at your testosterone markers, your biomarkers, give your recommendation.

Exactly. Something like that for intelligence and performance in the workplace does seem very, very valuable. If somebody can pull it off. but it's a hard business and I don't think it's power law. I think it might be more of like, you know, it's a consultancy as a clinic. There's Andrew Hur does this at Fount Bio. You know him. Oh, yeah.

And again, his is a little bit more just general health focused. It'd be interesting to see one of those branded purely as performance in the workplace. Yeah. Let's go to Gabriel. Do you know this guy? He's in Australia. He's the man. I don't.

I think I follow. I'm obsessed with bodybuilding. Yeah. Great. Just great dude. Never met him in person, but all time poster. Yeah. So he says, I often stumble across an internet phrase,

I don't understand that has a natural humorous vibe or cadence, Longhouse, many such cases, etc. An anime avatar just told me to get in the crystal, it's a beautiful crystal. We'll drop that at the office and see how it goes. This was great at Hereticon. We were in a conversation. There was maybe six or seven people.

And I think that David Senra was only, he's like not online. right he's in books he's focused he's either recording the podcast or he's reading or he's with his family and so going to one of the most online offline events or or like networking it was funny because i'd have to be like i'd have to be like yeah that's that's what um basically like the longhouse means like yeah yeah yeah he's like oh okay okay yeah well that's why we're doing this podcast he'll learn all the brain rot terms through this yeah exactly this is really the bridged in the way that is the bridge every every time a brain rot term

or word breaks through to popular culture, there's already six or seven new brain rot terms that are replacing it on the timeline. And it is under way to service those, right? Like the traditional like Gen Z brain rot is like skibbitty toilet, Ohio. The Rizzer. The Rizler. But then tech has its own brain rot terms.

Like word cell, shape rotator. And it actually can be if you know those, those are like buttons that you can press in a pitch with a VC. whereas if you're saying the right brain rot terms, it signals in-group, right? So even if you weren't a PM at Uber or you didn't go to Stanford, you can still signal that you're a part of that.

This person's extremely online. I actually don't know what get in the crystal. It's a beautiful crystal. Do you know what that means? So I think we should, I don't know what that one means yet. We've got to figure that out. Gabriel, I want you to write in, tell us the truth. What does it mean?

What does it mean? It does it mean? And the replies to this video. I want an explanation. There's people that sort of index YC companies. There's people that, a buddy of mine, Joey is a teal fellow and he's got like a whole, you know, fun that's kind of focused on just backing teal fellows, which is super smart.

I think we should create the poster index, which is a fun that's just dedicated. It's a brain ride. If you can post bangers, it is a proxy for your ability to get attention, which can drive customers and capital and all these things. So there is a bit of a meme that it's like, oh, if a CEO is like posting too much, much the company must be doing poorly. So here's the thing. So here's the thing.

I think Augustus is the is, is, is every other CEO that wants to be a poster CEO should study him. Yep. Because all he's coming, he's coming out of the woodwork once every couple days. Yeah. Bangor. Back to business. Exactly.

Back to business. Yeah. So there's this like. Yeah. If I see somebody posting like, oh, there's like this, there's this meme that's going viral and everyone has their take on it. And so you like, he has, transform it into like, well, what if the Trump thing was about docu sign?

Like, yeah. You're just getting a thousand likes, but it has nothing to do with your business, and you're just trying to get, like, Twitter clout. Like, that's not what we're talking about here. Yeah. I think that if I see a portfolio company CEO's name four times in the timeline per day and they're not selling to venture-backed startups. Risky. Risky. It's a big, it's kind of a bit of a red flag.

There's a little bit of a balmer peak. Yeah. On the posting. Exactly. Let's go to John Fio. Oh, this one. sounds rough. So Adam Rankin posts, I promoted my GF and she's showing an engagement ring and so they're getting married. So congratulations to you, Adam. But Fio chimes in with something not controversial at all and says,

we got to pool all the couples that announced their marriage and or child in the form of a startup business joke and study them very closely over the next 50 years and publish the report. We all deserve to know how these ended up. I don't think you need 50 years. I think you probably need, I think you need 10. After somebody's crossed the sort of decade. I think he's underweighting like norminess. Like there's so much of this. I think a bigger part of the story here is, is something about the warp team attracts. And I love, I love Ayush.

But it attracts dunking. Yeah, yeah. Like that's like the dunk rate is, is crazy. They almost, it's good for engagement. One of their head of growth, I think, said he was potentially going to go Annon. Yeah. He's just too much dunking. Too much dunking.

But yeah, I don't, I don't know. I think there's, there's, you know, they make, they make warp where Adam works, makes payroll software for businesses. If he's trying to sell to more startups, one way to do that would be announcing. Make a startup joke. You want to make people feel connected to you, bring your marriage into the workplace and make a startup joke. Yeah. But no, I think, I think, I think. Fio might be under monetizing here.

He needs to, he needs to do. Yeah, no, I think Fio, I would study, I would, if Fio wanted to start a research group that just studied things like this, I would donate. That would be interesting. Kind of a Nat Friedman style. Yeah, exactly. Public good. I agree that there's something interesting there. But again, you know, it's marketing, bro.

He's got to pay the bills one way or the other. Let's go to Enchalada's surfboard. It says 90% of defense tech investors couldn't tell you the difference between. cots and gots if their vacation homes depended on it. Do you know these terms? COTS and GOTS? No. So I dug into this. It's commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf. And then some like early. So it's a dual. It's a dual. Yeah. I think a big big thing with defense. Yeah. So like yeah, exactly. Like no one knows this stuff. Yeah. But like, thankfully I wasn't betting my vacation. Like an early and oral person. And it was like some

early and or old joke that like turned into this like here's the I guess to simplify it so um a lot of defense tech investors when they're evaluating a business or they they're kind of deciding if it has sort of dual use applications like I um I'm an advisor to a company called aeon which makes tactical missile systems and I made that bet because no weed and Joe the founders are just phenomenal they've made like 10 years worth of progress in about a year. And so I don't consider myself a defense tech investor. But one thing that was very obvious with their businesses, there's no dual use, right? It's not like they're going to sell some missiles to the sort of retail market or commercial

market. And then it's all in on the USG, right? If they don't get the USG as a customer long term, the business isn't viable because then they can't even go international. Right. like they need to win that customer first. And so whereas deterrence, deterrence has like a bunch of commercial customers where it's a viable business even without partnering with the oil field or something, right?

Yeah. Got it. Yeah. I need to dig into more of this, but I think the COTS versus Gots thing is also related to Andrews's early like sensor tower development. Do you remember this? Like they built this sensor tower and they were using literally like off the shelf, gaming, Nvidia GPUs to run open source, like computer vision algorithms like ImageNet.

And so it was very much like hacked together from literally stuff you could buy it like a Best Buy. But they created a government product from commercial off the shelf as opposed to the way a lot of the previous primes would do it where it's like, okay, well, like does it run Windows XP? We have to use the stuff that's government off the shelf. And that creates a lot. I think that's a component thing. Yeah, yeah, it's more about like, do you have this attitude of like, can you just go to Home Depot and get the screw that you need?

Or do you need to acquire like the $150,000 bag of screws from Boeing, right? Well, didn't Andrewl do this with their latest suicide drone? Oh, I don't know. Where I think they were using, they had to use. I hope they'd call it that. Different branding. FPV drone. Yeah.

Interceptor. Tactical recon. It's a suicide. It's a kamikaze drone. It literally blows up as it gets to the target. But I think they ended up having to use Chinese components. Yeah, some of them. Because they don't make them here.

But obviously, as it gets into production, apparently there's only one tin smelting, like, organization in the United States, and they are only able to supply, like, you know, 5% of the tin. And so it's like, if you're in the business of like, okay, we need tin for something, it's like good luck cleaning up your supply chain, just wait 20 years for this one guy to like grow his business. Yeah, but there's a whole, there should be a whole cottage industry of people that are looking at all these deep tech, hard tech companies getting funded.

And being like, I'm going to go build PE style businesses to service these like basically like manufacturing businesses, businesses, sourcing businesses. But I think a big part of this is also just like breaking down the problem is something that's more manageable by like a startup engineering team. I talked to a guy who worked on the Blue Origin rocket engine versus and was comparing it to the Merlin engine designed by Tom Mueller at SpaceX. And one of the things that allowed SpaceX to iterate so quickly was that the, so when you see Starship go up, you see like the 36 engines. I think that's how many are like a bunch of engines. It's a bunch of smaller engines. Every one of those engines, I think at one point, I don't know if it's true now, but like could fit in a pickup truck in like the back of a pickup truck. in like the back of a pickup truck.

Yeah. Whereas the bigger engines, you need a crane. And so all of a sudden it's like the safety requirements, like just the risk, the level of equipment. Like anybody can drive a pickup truck. So if you need to take your piece of equipment. And so there's this question of like, how can you decompose something that is a larger capability, like an F-35, into a bunch of suicide drones.

Well, the suicide drones are going to be able to be, okay, the pieces are smaller. You don't need cranes for everything. When you start doing these mega projects, things really, really slow down. And so there's a, it seems like there's a lot of arbitrage right now and just, deep tech, hard tech startups, taking something really huge and then decomposing it into something that's more manageable and like a small. This is even, even Valor's trying to do just shrink down the size. Yep, the nuclear reactor.

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, the guy was talking to was actually building fusion avalanche and it's small enough to fit in a truck. And so he's just like super pilled on that and like really wants to build that. Anyway, let's go to Luke Metro, and a role employee. Love this guy. We need a little, God damn it. Completely unrelated to business.

We need a liberal Joe Rogga. He literally interrupted Peter Thiel's speech about wokeness to talk about how the parameds were actually x-ray power plants. What are you people talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Joe Rogan is liberal. Yeah.

And he's talked about that. Yeah. He endorsed Trump. Also, I think this just speaks to the fact that Rogan's like a one-of-one type of person. Like he's he's a comedian that can pull like a huge group of people. Yeah, he's tinfoil hat guy who loves aliens. He's very conspiratorial, but then also, you know, loves UFC. And he's kind of combined all these different disciplines.

And you can't just, like, you can't just copy the Joe Rogan experience. Here's a record. Here's a conspiracy. Here's a conspiracy. So Rogan is a liberal. He's voted Democrat, like his entire life. He said this recently. And Trump is a Republican, but Joe Rogan endorsed Trump.

Yes. And what is a link between Trump and Rogan? UFC. Oh, okay, yeah. Joe Rogan is one of the top commentators. Yeah. One of the top commentators for the UFC. Okay.

Trump is arguably the biggest. fan of the UFC, right? He'll leave the campaign trail to go be at a fight. And so maybe that's something there where Joe Rogan said, I'm going to put my politics aside and I'm going to back Trump because it'll increase the UFC's like notoriety and platform and put it on the map. Because I think that by the end of the next four years, UFC will be baseball will have to have sort of stepped aside. No longer America's pastime. America's pastime is combat and combat. sports well then maybe if you want maybe there's some precursors to building a liberal Joe Rogan you need a liberal UFC yeah and you need a liberal comedy circuit yeah so maybe the angles so the next four years

the the Dems go heavy into UFC aOC sitting in the front row or something different or maybe she starts maybe they become the bare knuckle party yeah or car jitsu have you said car jitsu that's good where they fight in the car that's yeah pillow fighting yeah or any of the slap boxing yeah they could do any of those but they need to carve out one of the fighting sports. Yeah and I think just we need it. And then the liberal Joe Rogan will emerge. We need a liberal, you know, we need a young Bernie who emerges through bare knuckle boxing. There we go. Yeah. That is probably the next Bernie. It's not going to come from some small town of Vermont. No, the next Bernie will be a slap boxer. Yeah. Let's go to Sahel Bloom. He says, a harsh truth. I wish I could tell my younger self. There is no such thing as later. The

journey to success is filled with later. I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll find more time for my health later. I have more freedom later. I'll enjoy myself later. The root of reality later never comes. It's just another word for never. Most of the things you say you'll do later won't be possible by the time you're able to do them. The kids won't be younger later. Either start designing your life now or live life with regret later. Okay, here's a good example. Yeah. Yesterday I made my two and a half year old son work the entire day doing the live. deliveries of Aurora systems to high profile celebrities around LA, you know, to sort of support the launch. And, you know, this was a Sunday. A lot of people aren't working on Sundays. And I realized

he's never going to be this young again and be able to grind this heart again. Like if I don't, if I don't like allow him to do this, he's never going to forgive me. He's going to be asking me when he's 12 dad 10 years ago like why did you let me chill on the weekends right like why wasn't I grinding why wasn't I figuring out uh you know he can't type on a computer yet but he can lift one of these systems that's great and carry it up a driveway and drop it off and ring the doorbell right he can do that so uh i think the lesson here is is however old your kids are you probably need to get them grinding harder and like yesterday basically yeah i think that's very maybe what this post missed, you know, it says I'll spend more time with my kids later.

I'll find more time for my health later. What about levering up? Yeah. You should be levering up now today. The returns you're generating today. Yep. Are because you levered up a month ago. You should be taking the most risky bets today, not later.

Oh yeah, I'll, I'll find a 100 Xer later. Yeah. Yeah. Not going to happen. Let's go to Sean Frank. He's been on the show before. I love him. He says, paid advertising doesn't build brand.

And then the crazy guy, I love this image. I don't think this is a real emoji, but it's so good. Okay, so Ridge was a company that historically would never spend money on anything that wasn't directly generating revenue. Right. So they were, and so Sean has basically been on this for approaching a decade. Yep. And it absolutely worked for them. while all these, well, you know,

all birds was doing brand marketing. These other D-To-C brands were doing brand. Pop-up stores. Yeah, pop-up stores, like big celebrity endorsements. So Ridge basically had spent probably $250 million on meta ads before they ever did a collaboration with like MKHBBD. Right. So that's brand marketing.

Yeah. Now they do some brand marketing in the form of sort of these like massive giveaways. and they maybe do like some of it more now but they're the the reason that this tweet holds weight and Sean is the the perfect uh example of delivering um delivering like real uh business lessons in the form of shit posts but the reason this holds weight is the is the ridge brand is stronger today than almost any d to c brand in their in their um in their in their in their in their in their category or cohort of like when they were sort of coming of age so and you know what's interesting is that like they these posts from both shana and Connor yeah build their brand so

much yeah yeah like I now I now associate Ridge with incredible performance marketing yeah and I and now I want to pull out a Ridge wallet just to let everyone know like I care about I I care about ads I'm not kidding like I I I I respect performance and I respect marketing efficiency yeah marketing efficiency yeah because it is like is is if when Ridge so Ridge was one of the companies to really focus on you know direct response creator ads on YouTube and I helped them do this yep back in the day and when when Ridge works with an influencer that says like hey guys today sponsors Ridge yeah I use the Ridge when I'm out fishing but it also is great on date night like use my code in the description that obviously builds a brand right they're aligning

with a content creator and you see who they're advertising with and who they aren't yeah and so the mkbhd stuff that tells you like mkbhd's whole thing is like super high production value super cinematic like really thoughtful analysis of these consumer goods and so being in that milieu is much more valuable than someone else that they could advertise on like it's just they they they they they've cultivated like what does your brand stand for like you could literally if you're thinking about building your brand just put together a mood board of popular influencers and then just go and sponsor them and then that will be your brand yeah and it's like yeah like what did you stand ridge has probably a million guys out there that love ridge because the ovan yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah is probably you know has for the last like whatever is since uh sean initially did the deal with him. It's probably objectively more of a wallet salesman than a comedian, right? He's one of the top wallet salesman in the world. Yeah, he can go and sell out comedy clubs, but he's selling wallets at a higher velocity than anyone else. I mean, it's the same thing with Red Bull. Like, you look at Max Verstappen and everything that Max Verstappen stands for with like this like relentless ambition, it's like crazy energy. And I just get like that's what Red Bull's brand is now because of that. And so, yeah, this, this, this, idea, yeah, very, very valuable and certainly underrated.

Let's go to Raul, zero interest rates. He says the first day in Williamsburg, and he sees a spray-painted sign on the concrete for an ad for Sonia AI therapy, listens better than your ex at Talk to Sonia and a call to action for the app store. What do you think about this, IRL advertising? Is this legal? Can you just do this? Why are we not?

Is there a company that will just go spray your spray paper? Yeah, there is. It's kind of like they don't advertise because it's very, I think it's illegal. Like it's basically like vandalism. Yeah, it's vandalism. I don't, I don't. But you could go viral like this. I mean, this got 40K views.

That's probably more than people just walking by. The play is to probably do that once in your backyard and then have a friend post it. And have it be interesting and weird. It won't go viral if it's just something boring. Like whatever was under here before. Yeah, I think this is, in general, I'm not a fan of this type of marketing. Sure. I think it makes the world more, you know, nobody likes ads more than me except maybe you.

Yeah. So we love ads. But in general, I'm not a fan of vandalizing property. We did a little bit of this at party round, like, but it was more like using an existing graffiti wall and putting an ad on that, which is designated as a place for graffiti. Yep. But, but yeah. Out of home is very interesting.

Uh, uh, I, I, I think that ad space that's under. utilizes the planes circling SF. Like I'd like to start a Technology Brothers advertising division that just that has planes every single day flying over SF. Yep. That you can sponsor, which is like for Sonia, it might be like you're, you get no women. Talk to Sonia. Right.

And if that was flying, if you're like a Meta PM and you walk out and you look up from your what's that app that they, that they all use that the, the like blind. Blind. You look up from blind and it's like you get no women talk to Sonia. That's like probably in just a QR code. You can zoom in and scan. I'm more fan of that. I do remember, what was it back in like 2018?

Maybe there was this like when bird, the scooters came out and lime. And it seemed like tech just realized like the sidewalk is free real estate, I guess. And you can just put stuff there. So here's a crazy story. So I was working with a startup. back then that I just moved to LA and I was basically like, you don't need to pay me. I just want to help out.

I'll do it for equity. And we started doing these sort of like marketing stunt things. And it was a skincare company. And so I had the idea to go put hotel like door hangers. And I went and put them in Santa Monica. I put them on like 500 bird scooters in a day. And within the same day, we got like a note from the, the, uh,

chief legal counsel or whatever from bird being it wasn't quite a cease and desist but it was like stop right now the next step it's so funny because like you're doing the bird thing to them yeah yeah it was perfect that's amazing yeah when that was happening I was like wait so it's just free real estate if you have wheels like can I just set up like a corner store on the sidewalk if it has wheels under it can I set up a gym or whatever I want like is there any business that you can't stop yeah it was it was of wild, wild time. And I think most cities wound up developing. Yeah, I'm surprised there wasn't like a bird

for snack bars. Yeah. Like people that are just like here. There's like a vending machine. Like I'm just going to put it right here. Let's go to Aaron Slodov. He says, it's still one thing. It's still underdiscust that I think birds birds like real downfall started with that social media account that was like death

to birds or forget what it was called. Yeah, I remember that. And that was some of the best entertainment of the era of your technological. brother because you could go see a bird get thrown off like an eight-story like skyscraper and that's just like that speaks to like the the childish teenage boy in everyone is so entertaining I remember following that yeah that was really really bad they should have sent the season just to them I'm sure they did but didn't because it basically just encouraged everybody to like yeah go viral like just do stuff and it just like made it feel like yeah it was so destructive like destroy the environment so

messy and yeah they're they're destroying cars if you run over them it was a mess um i was really happy when they banned them in my town uh but uh also like weird memetic stuff you know that the the founder was also named Travis and he was former uber guy so it's one of those things where it's like well of course you back traverse from uber yeah yeah Travis from uber yeah exactly uh it was a wild time um so erin slodov says uh creator economy should be reappropriated for manufacturing TBH. Yeah, I like this. This is good because it's like you're creating actual things instead of just content.

But also don't appreciate the anti-content slander, bro. This is a real job. Yeah. Well, Aaron is a content creator. He probably gets pretty decent ex payouts. Yeah. And he's written some big... And he's a manufacturer.

And he wrote that big piece for pirate wires, the industrialist manifesto, the techno-industrialist manifesto. I wanted him to punch it up and give it a more controversial name. name like you know B2B SaaS is dead or something like that yeah yeah get people angry but I couldn't get that across the finish line but very very good piece very long recommend you go read it we need content creators out there creating courses that say here's how to make a million dollars in manufacturing like yeah buy a CNC actually yeah stop the Shopify drop shipping your tic top shop tick top shop yeah Andrew Tate just started a little yeah start a little yeah

start a small-scale manufacturing business in your hometown. That is the way. We need to change the culture. Apprentice under some 75-year-old guy who's been making, you know, hubcaps for the last 50 years. Yeah, all those guys are going to end up shutting their business down. Take it over. They do like $300,000 a year in profit.

It's not really viable for the fee. That's enough to pay the monthly fee on a Lambo. Yeah. So you could literally be the hustle porn guy go and do that and actually wind up with the Lambo. Yeah. grow a little bit. Yeah.

Just don't bring in docusine. Just run. Run lean. Run lean. Those doxsign contracts, they can get up into the eight figures real quick. Yeah. Let's go to Patrick Blumenthal.

He says, my boy. Loud nightclub. So what do you do? Dron targeting mostly. Oh, loan marketing. Do you like it?

Well, it depends on the coverage area. Why? Well, most guys I know who are in finance, don't really like it. It's the American psycho scene. That's great.

This guy's just a meme machine. He's a machine. I don't know how he puts out so much of this stuff. Everything's hand Photoshopped. He has no one on his team. He's just like content mastermind. Well, he's a venture capitalist. Like he needs to be the media. He's supposed. But I mean, the dude's been to Ukraine like a bunch. Have you talked about this? Yeah, yeah.

I was on pirate wires with him a while back and it's pretty crazy. We did a, we hit the range together. Oh, yeah? Oh, cool. Yeah. He was telling me about that, I think. Yeah. He had to train up before his last mission. Yeah, American Psych is just like an endless pit of memes. It just like it really speaks to people.

Yeah, one of the most, I used to not really understand when my parents would be like, oh, this movie is a cult classic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But now you understand, like, when we show our kids Borat when they turn eight. Like, we're going to be like, it's a cult classic. Yeah. It is interesting. I wonder if there's something deeper here about, like, the defense tech guys being, like,

the modern Patrick Bateman. It still doesn't feel that, like, did you know that Christian Bale in American Psycho was like something like 25 years old? Then you should look this up. He was 25 when he's so bad. He's definitely in his 20s. And it's crazy because he's like he's playing, it's almost like he's playing someone older. Like I feel like. Totally.

He's playing like a late 30s. That seems right because he's like a, he was 25 in the movie. So Patrick Bateman, the character has to be over 25 just based on the track. Unless in the 90s, you could make. VP at 25. Was that possible? I know the youngest MD at Goldman Sachs ever made it's not was in his in his 20s. The character's 27. Wow. That's wild. So that might have been like a little embellishment by Brett East now. It's funny because last last night I had this wild moment where I pulled up to the gate in my neighborhood and the security guy goes, Jordy like my son just passed the bar. And I was like, that's amazing. And my second question was, Dude, how old are you? I thought you were my age. I seriously thought he was exactly my age.

I never asked. And he's like, dude, I'm 46. Oh, there you go. And he's like, yeah, I just had kids young or whatever. Yeah, that makes sense. But yeah, I feel like something about that sort of like 90s, early 2000s era movies, like all the actors and actresses. Wall Street was definitely this idea that you could go to Wall Street and finance in New York and in your 20s make it to the top. And that's 100% true in Silicon Valley and tech even today. But I don't think it's been true

in Manhattan finance for decades. No, because you have over time, you need to create a ladder to keep people in their place. Yeah. I know like a few guys that went and started funds pretty early, like hedge funds and they trade public stocks. But you still want to go work at a fund first. Yeah, exactly. So all of them are in their 30s by the time they do that. But. But, you still want to go work at a fund first. Yeah, exactly. Get that on your resume. All of them are in their 30s by the time they do that. But, man, what a wild time. It would have been, it would have been fun.

If Wall Street had been able to, like, keep that culture of, like, just such a meritocracy that, yes, a 25-year-old can be a VP or an MD or whatever, like, I think it would be a lot cooler. I think a lot of people would be going into it. Yeah. It would be much, much hotter. Make finance great again. Yeah, just more meritocratic, I guess.

But a lot of these, a lot of these firms have, like, Cal to the point where they're like they're not yeah because these guys if you're if you're 28 and you want to make 50 million dollars now yeah you raise a 500 million dollar fund with your absolute boy and you take you know that's that that's the only way to do it you can't just go do the right deals because the fees will get you're in a way by the the more senior partners yeah yeah yeah tricky oh well we'll bring it back so nate o'brien says, why would I pay an American $100,000 a year when I can hire someone just as qualified in Argentina for a quarter of the price? Okay, so Nate's smart. But when I, and I think this is generally a good take, I think more people need to be looking at.

Say, why not both? Yeah, why not both? I think my counterpoint to this is that I like working with Americans, like both recent immigrants, but also just, In person, in person, working in person is great. I like, I think that it's, it's, there's nothing that beats even what we have right now, right? Which is you, me and our vice president, Ben, in the same room. Yep. In an office, uh, making, you know, a, uh, a wonderful media business, right?

You can't generational, generational, you know, wonderful media business, very profitable. Um, you can't sort of. of like, you know, there's no amount of like awesome virtual employees that we could have that could recreate this feeling. Like you can't recreate it in Slack. So I just think part of the reason to pay a premium is so that you can all be in the same room together. And I think if you're operating a remote structure, then you really have to start questioning. Yeah. You know what? The cure for male loneliness, it's paying $100,000 to an American. Exactly. Exactly. They have to be your friend. And then they just have to, hey, you want to grab lunch?

You have to be hanging out. You got to. It's worth it. It's worth it. Yeah. Yeah. But I do think there's going to be this, there will be this sort of cultural movement over the next 20 years where people are like, you know, first it was buy American. Yeah.

Now it'll be like higher American. Like keep those jobs here. Yeah. But I mean, yeah, I mean, realistically, you need both. But yeah, I like that take. That's good. Cheers to Nate. Back to Will.

Will says, work dinner should be illegal. They rob you from your family. You pretend to enjoy drinking with strangers, get home late and feel horrible the next day. Work breakfasts are aristocratic. Separate lazy boys from early to rise men. Feel great when you get to work,

early, easily expensive. It's a great take. Great take. Great take. I do feel like that about most, the only time you should be having a work dinner is if you're closing a deal. Yep. Like funds wired, everything's done.

Yeah, it's a closing dinner. Celebratory, right? Yeah. Doing a work, uh, work dinner. Just to get to know someone is a waste of time. I always suggest lunch. Yep. I don't really like doing coffees that much because I,

I know the schedule I want to have caffeine on and I don't want to like plan meetings around that. Yeah, this is my hot take against the 996 thing. I'm all for working 100. hours a week, but I think you should work 666, almost. That's a little demonic, but I think you should not be working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. You should be working 6 a.m. or 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. get home, have dinner with the family, because then if you wake up at 5, you can hit the gym, you can go to work breakfast,

you can have a full eight hours in the office. We do. And then you can get home with a family, have dinner and play, watch movies, do all the things that you want to do with your family. Yeah. that early morning right before 9 a.m. It's really hard to have like true engagement with the family in the way that you can at dinner.

You go out to dinner, you can cook. There's a lot of more. We do the Hormozzi, you know, method, which is. Work first, family. No, nine, no, nine, five, seven. Okay. Nine to five, seven days a week. Oh, okay.

Right? So you can have the morning moment with your kids. You can have dinner, but you're doing eight hours a day every single day, which is much better than five days. a week doing 12 hours a day. You actually get more done doing the 9-5-7. Yep. I like that.

They should ban work dinners. Easily doable on ramp. Just ban any restaurant expense after 5 p.m. And unlimited before. Hopefully it gets implemented. Let's go to Ryan. I think it's pronounced Macintosh. Is that right?

It's spelled a little bit different than McIntosh. But Ryan says the doc you sign all hands and posts the Dune photo, which I love. It's pretty seemingly pretty accurate. How do they, what it? The funny thing is that I've literally made this exact same joke about the A16 Z all hands. Yeah. With a massive festival.

Oh, I pitched the full partnership. It's huge. It barely fit in the boardroom. Yeah. No, but, um, but man, the docu-sign thing like 5K likes, it's just like constant banger. Everyone knows every time. Yeah.

Hey, if you're an up and coming poster and you've been struggling to get hits, this is a doci-sign joke. Yeah, this is the modern. you know how people used to post the two-factor authentication screenshot from Apple. And they're like, this is the best feature Apple's ever made. And it would go viral every single time. So here's the real alpha. So Taylor Lorenz, when you listen to this, if you want to, you know, sort of regain

and sort of like sort of an olive branch to the tech community is to go and get hired by docketine and get pictures at their next all hands. because that would be an amazing. Yeah. Taylor Lorenz, investigative journalism, behind the scenes and a docusign. And what if it is like this? I could see it being like that.

They're like, hey, guys, we're going over to the Giants Stadium for all hands. Like the buses are, you know, and she's on the bus, like Project Veritas style.

I love that. Project Veritas. Yeah, we definitely need the information to do Project Veritas for DocuSign. What's going on? Yeah. What if it's all just like the most cracked engineers

you've ever seen? They don't have a single salesperson. They're just building the most deep tech. They've implemented. They built their own kernel, their own operating system. DocuSign's awesome. What if they have, what if they have, you know, custom silicon for signing? I bet they do.

All the way down. It's like Google has the TPU. Docu sign is the DPU. I think they need to. I think DocuSan should add. The docu sign processing unit. DocuSign should add autonomous drones that take off from the sort of centralized places. They need a humanoid robotics play.

Film you signing it. Yep. Or they have a little printer that like prints it out. Yeah. Well, if you need a notary, you need a notary in person. what if you could have a humanoid robot come to your house when you're signing the mortgage papers, the humanoid robot is acting as the whatever they call it. I want a dog.

I want a dog. The dog to come. Yeah, exactly. Notary. That's it. Yeah. Let's go to Bobby Goodlate. He says, success should be celebrated in tech, not demonized.

I want to see more startup founders looking like this post exit, not apologizing. And it's Elon Musk with his McLaren. F1. Okay, two things. One, Bobby is this authentically? Yeah. I was walking up to Faina for Hereticon. I see a fantastic blue Ferrari. Yeah, sort of really nice metallic blue. I don't know the exact color code, but fantastic Ferrari pulls up valet. Yours was red or black? Mine was gray. Gray, okay. S subtle. A little more subtle, yeah. It was a daily. You got to go red. with the Ferrari. Red or white.

No, no, no. Oh, what was his? His was, yeah, no, his was a four or five, eight, I think. He'll correct us in the comments. But, um, let us know. No, but Bobby's living the brand. He's sort of, you know, being a real leader here. Yep.

I think one of the challenges and the reason that supercars haven't become more popular in, you know, Silicon Valley is that it's, you just can't street park a McLaren or a Lamborghini or a or a Ferrari or a Bentley. And you're going to go to a coffee shop. to me with C-State founders. In Gary Tan, San Francisco, you're going to be able to street park, you know, an Enzo, street park a lot of Ferrari, street park your P-1. Yep.

And that's something that, you know, Sam Altman and Elon and Gary can agree on. Yep. And so they can all kind of like come together because we need safer streets in San Francisco. I mean, they also need to fix the streets and make sure there's no p-1 because you're driving a P-1GR. That's why the G-Wagon is such a popular car in Los Angeles is the streets are actually. so bad you need something that's four-wheel drive you need good sort of like yeah we need perfect pavement perfect pavement for the sports cars but yeah I mean there is this interesting thing where yeah it became this like status symbol to say oh I drive a Prius or whatever but I think people realize

that like the flashy cars you know I hope that people can realize that it's not like if you are an engineer and you respect engineering and you made money in technology and you made money in technology It's okay to respect the engineering of a car. Yeah. It's okay to appreciate something that's like, that's, that's like beautifully made. Yeah. Like after atomic. It's like, it's, it's, it's incredible.

It's like, it's iconic. And there's so much to, to love about this. You know the McLaren, uh, P1 or the, the F1, they, they wanted to reduce weight so much that the CD changer in the front trunk, they made special magnets for it. to spin, just to save like 50 grams from the CD changer. Yeah. They didn't take the six-disc CD changer out of the car. As a technologist, how can you not appreciate that?

Yeah, yeah. So here's the picture. So everybody would, everybody likes to say, you know, Sam Altman had this thing of he didn't know an equity in Open AI and all this stuff. The bull case was true now. But he, they would always post pictures with him in his car collection and say, see, he does love money. Look at him driving this P1 or all these other cars he has.

It wasn't never about money. It was about, you know, experiencing beautiful products. And that's why people don't realize about buying a supercar. You're buying a potentially daily experience with a one-of-one product. Something that's excellent. So if we want Sam to build safe AGI, you know, supercars are a perfect example of that. They go through rigorous safety testing. Yep.

to build this incredibly high-performing vehicle. Yeah. And we want anybody building AI to be experiencing a supercar, right? Because it's a good parallel for sort of AI safety. And you can have performance and safety at the same time. Yeah, it's very hard to imagine, like, living on the power law and driving a power law outcome without enjoying and respecting power law outcomes everywhere. Yeah.

And there's no car that's more of a power law outcome than McLaren. I want to see the average YC founder leaving Uber or META joining YC and sleeping in their supercar outside of the YC offices, right? This is what they say. You can't. You can't sleep in a GT3RS, but you can't raise a house. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Founders get supercarers. Please. I'm begging you. So this is a reaction from Sophie, NetCap girl, to a post by. Dakash Gupta. He says, recently I started telling candidates right in the first interview that Gretile offers no work life balance. Typical work days start at 9 a.m. and end at 11 p.m. often later, and we work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays. And Sophie says, posting stuff like this is so cringe. It's fine to have a culture that self-selects for people that will put in long hours. You want people

committed to the mission, especially in the early days of a startup. But posting about it is just status signaling grindset hustle thing. What do you think? Yeah, I've never known somebody that posts about how hard they work that actually genuinely works hard. And so. Except for us, but yeah. Yeah, but, but, but, but yeah, that's, that's, we feel that's a part of our mission to promote hard work. Yes.

But, but, but, but, but yeah, ultimately the people that work the hardest are not tweeting about it. They're not posting on LinkedIn. They're not doing that. They're legitimately working really hard. And if you ask them about their schedule, they'll tell you, oh, I do 9-96, I do 95, 7, whatever their schedule is. But yeah, Elon, when pressed on, tell us about your schedule.

You're doing all these things, right? He'll say, oh, yeah, I work 20 hours a day, seven days a week. But he's not out there, like, just logged another 20 hours. Like, he's a top poster in the world, and he's not being like, just logged 20 hours. Here's a link to our SpaceX job board. Don't apply if you're not. So I think, yeah, I think Sophie's right. It's a way to get attention.

Maybe that'll, maybe that'll work well. Yeah. But I don't think it should be coming from. I think that's the kind of thing you want. If you do an interview with a candidate and you're like, this person's great, you pass them to your CTO to interview next. And that engineer wants to ask the CTO, what's the work schedule? They can be like, oh, we, you know, we, we work really long hours.

People are online constantly, but it shouldn't be the CEO leading it being like, just so you know, like, to somebody who's like, the candidate's like, dude, this is one out of 30 interviews I'm doing. And like, I don't even really want to join your company. And now you're telling me like, don't join if you're not. It's just going to like. Yeah. Also, I mean, the timing on this stuff is like super important. Like a few years ago when Google was like, well, there's 20% time and family leave and pet leave and bereavement leave and like a million reasons to take time. And off it was pretty countercultural to be like hey actually like our startup works pretty hard yeah and that was novel and that got a lot of attention for the right reasons because maybe there was something there but then pretty quickly it became like okay now like it's kind of status quo and if you're just jumping on this train right now yeah it's like it's like coming out and being like I'm bravely anti-dei yeah yeah so you're not coin base like good good google good google stories so my little brother and my fraternity, he did an internship at Google in 2017. And I happened to be in the Valley working with a startup at that time.

This was like a summer period. So it was like a four, three to four month internship. And he, by the end, his manager was like, Peter, like, I really like you, but like, you objectively have done no work. Like, I don't know how I can sort of write a positive review. and Peter had in the lead up to that, in the lead up to that summer, he had maxed out a bunch of credit cards

to buy Ethereum and Bitcoin. Oh my God. And it absolutely paid off. Like, he just like became like very wealthy because of it. I'm sure he's, if he's listening to this, I'm sure he's like got his like,

whatever Bitcoin ticker right now. And he's just like still excited about it. But like the guy just basically like went so long crypto on credit cards that by the time he got to his Google. He was just like, yeah, I'm like, low-key, like the wealthiest kid that I know. And so he would graciously have me over to work out in the gym. Great. Sam and dinners.

Fantastic. And that was the only real, like, time that I spent at the Google offices. But it, yeah, it felt like a college where people were kind of like doing the bare minimum to actually, like, get by and just wanted to have fun and enjoy their time on campus. make sense let's go to nival he says good vc's should be their own media this is this is a banger because

yeah neval's the master of taking something that is widely how to get rich without getting lucky that thread phenomenal got him on joe rogan then eric turned his all of his tweets into a book he's like phenomenal at this yeah but taking this sort of yeah but he's talking about this but he's also lived it which is great yeah so many other vCs have done this well yeah i think um harry stebbing's yeah even the work that eric did on the book i think neval's known

for for posting being one of the top posters in the entire world uh in his own way right he's very oriented around brevity and taking big ideas and putting them into whatever i can't see from here but six or seven words yeah um but even the book eric's you know book The almanac over Nival Ravacant. That turned him into a, he's one of a handful of people that are true tech philosophers. Yep. And yeah, this is, this is why like. Think about it because I kind of knew Nival and the book was, you know, based on the tweets.

And so I didn't think the book was going to be that big of a deal, but it was. It was huge. Yeah, this is translated into a lot of languages and really opened up with the business. This is why anybody that's, that's an LP out there should. go and invest in Pat's fund, right? Pat Blumenthal, incredible poster. You're sitting here, like, whatever, 30 minutes ago saying, like, how does he keep coming up with this stuff? Yeah. He's just like, and Pat will get more impressions in the next year than most GPs in the world combined. And it just completely flips the model from like, okay, I need a horde of analysts,

cold calling companies to they come to me. Ventures all about likeability and access, right? And likeability. likeability plus attention gets you that access. Yep. And founders want to take money from people that they like. Yep. So if you're a likable person, you should be doing more media, more posting, more podcasts, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Let's go to TJ Parker. Former founder sold this company for billion dollars, I believe, to Amazon. Now at Matrix Ventures, right? Health, health tech investor. Yeah, health tech investor. phenomenal car guy. Great collector. Fantastic car collection.

Every time I post something stupid about cars, he always replies with some really good insight. I can bait him. I can bait him into telling me about cars. So he's got the coolest car club in America. Oh yeah, that's right. In Park City. Have you been? I haven't.

Okay, we've got to go at some point. He's, you know, basically spent a bunch of money, a bunch of his own money building out this incredible facility that's becoming the hub of car culture in Utah. And I think what he says, he had to take a while back that like really resonated, which is that Tesla should not be allowed to classify as a black car on Uber. Because there's nothing worse than like paying to like get like a black car on Uber. And then this guy pulls up in a model S and you're like, dude, like give me a break. But here he says, my two cents, don't bring your co-founder slash team to an initial meeting with an investor.

it's great to introduce them later in the process, but early on it cripples your ability to build a relationship. If they're complaining about not being included, you can show them this tweet. It's so funny, because this is clearly a sub-tweet where him, he had some, as an investor with a founder,

and he brought the whole team, and it was like a very messy conversation. No, but sometimes this can be, this can create, totally create, if you have two founders that are both people, people, and like good at fundraising, it creates this dilemma where, oh, it's an important conversation,

should both be on it. And I 100% agree with this. You can't two people cannot connect. Yep. Like if we had a third person here that was constantly budding in, like our rhythm would be totally thrown off. Totally. And yeah, I think that it's much, you're much better off. Take the first call solo. Take even a second call solo. Yep. As you actually build that relationship and that rapport and interest in in partnering, then bring in the rest of the teams that it totally throws up. the vibe. Typically, like, the co-founders and team are, like, operating. They have a ton of stuff to do.

They don't need to take a bunch of intro meetings with a bunch of VCs. No, it's a net, it's a totally negative signal if somebody is. Oh, yeah, my, my, my, my, my, CTO can totally be on 40 investor calls this week. Yeah, right. Yeah. No way. Yeah. Um, good post.

Uh, back to Aaron Sloadoff. He says, venture capital now. I just led a $50 million series B into my fourth calendar scheduling app this year because there's Zoom integration reduces meeting conflicts by 6%. The founder went to stand. and worked at Strip for eight months, so downside risk is basically zero, plus their deck had really clean margins.

Venture capital in the 1600s, which is funny, you want to go so back, so far back. I just funded an armed fleet to conquer the only islands in the world that grow nutmeg. If we seize their nutmeg trees and eliminate all competition, will make 60,000 percent returns and become more powerful than most European kingdoms combined. Man, this really resonated 14,000 likes.

Yeah. New venture capital is mainstream. Venture capital is very mainstream, and I think everyone's dissatisfied with the risk that venture capitalists are taking these days. Too many saved bets. Wasn't the first, there's,

remind me of the power law of that book. Yeah, Sebastian Malibok. Can I talk about like whaling with some of the first like venture? Yeah, whaling, you'd pay a ship to go out there. Here's a ship.

Here's a captain. Here's a team. Most likely it's not coming back. But if it does, you're rich. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And the carry model emerged from that. I think so yeah that's amazing essentially yeah amazing and you need a management fee every time every time you get a carry check you know think back into the 1600 light up your whale oil oil lamp and yeah yeah breathe it in breathe it I was at a nuclear conference I was talking to a guy who does like AI data center buildouts and he was talking about the importance of energy and just the fact that these AI like we should make a we should make a whale blubber candle to help VCs manifest carry checks oh that's good

I like that. Yeah. Like a little circle set up where they can just sit in the middle of it and just like kind of breathe in. Probably smells a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but his joke was that, was that like these hyper-scalers are so dedicated to getting energy right now

that they would burn whale oil if they had to. Totally. Because they just need energy and they'll just take it from wherever they can because it's such a race to get to the next order of magnitude. Yeah, we were talking about coal. you're not a serious AI founder if you're not like thinking about spinning up coal natural gas natural gas all this stuff

but whale blubber is the next frontier and uh... Nvidia is looking into this Yeah That unlocks the next scaling tier for sure Blubber.aI Blubber dot AI. Blumber dot AI

Okay let's get to Bryce He quote tweets David Phillips saying Vacation for founders don't fix burnout Address what's wrong You'll feel better And Bryce says You cannot vacation your way out of burnout. We already talked about this a little bit in Q&A.

It's true. Vacations, I don't know. Burnout. Not a fan. Burnout is a symptom that what you're working on is not working. Yeah. Like it's rare or you're having like massive people issues. Yeah.

I mean, Josh Kauffelman here, you can't even sabbatical your way out of it. Like yeah. You have to be working on something that's more Ikega, more life's work, more perpetual. Life's work, but also a lot of people are perfectly happy building a, a SaaS company, even if it's not their life's work. Okay. Then do they get burned out or not? If customers love the product, they're growing month over month,

and they have a great team around them, right? Because winning feels good. It's when you're not winning and you know you're not winning and you're just like getting, you're like chewing glass, chewing 10 different types of glass. Yeah. And you know it, but your burnout usually comes from knowing you're in a bad situation and not doing anything about it. Yeah.

I wonder if you looked at like the cases of burnout. How many examples can you find of someone burning out when, when growth rates are at all times high, all time highs. Yeah, I think you get strung out. Sure. But that's very different than burnout. But not burnout. Burnouts where I was used to 200% growth.

It's now at 30%. And it takes me 10 times as long to get one time. Yeah, burnout's like losing conviction in what you're doing. Or again, like if customers are churning nonstop and you're not doing something to fix that, then you're going to get burnt out. answer is just to, yeah, change, change what you're doing. Change like your main, if you're a meetings guy, switch to something else. If you're doing email constantly, switch to something else.

Like, jar yourself out of your pattern. Yeah, but all of those are like more like exhaustion, which I think is different than burnout. Okay. So how do you fix burnout? What's the top way? Burnout comes when you're not delivering for shareholders. Yeah. So the, I mean, the short answer is like start delivering.

I guess. Yeah, start delivering. No, it really is like a fundamental, like, reframe on that. Yeah,

like I'd love, and it's going to be different for every business. Yeah. Okay. Burnout. And again, like this is not,

when a founder that's building a great, a wonderful B2B SaaS company and they go do ayahuasca, and then they come back and they're like, well, I don't want to work on this anymore.

That's not burnout. That's mental illness. Yep. Self-induced mental illness. Yeah. Let's go to Delian. Delian says, In January of 2020, I decided to wear a MAGA hat in San Francisco every day for the full month.

I remember him wearing it once. I didn't realize he did it every day. Walking to every meeting. I felt that the country and my tech peers did not appreciate how the MAGA hat was a symbol of hope for the average working American, not a symbol of hate. Five years later, I arrest my case. Fascinating. I mean, I remember the backlash to this was intense, intense. Like a lot of people were really, really upset about this.

And what's interesting is that it was in some ways. is more controversial than Peter donating to Trump and speaking at the convention because the hat was more visceral of a symbol and it had been so, so controversial. But wow, what an arc to come back from. Fascinating. Yeah, the whole, Delian should frame this. Seriously.

Put it in the Founders Fund office. Purely as being willing to look stupid or silly. Brother of the week candidate there. Brother of the Week candidate for sure. He deserves a plaque for that. Because, yeah, the hate was very real. I guarantee you he had thousands of messages being like, you're an idiot. And I don't even think he had that many supporters.

It wasn't as, it wasn't as, like, it was still very contrary. And this year was very consensus where if you came out, if you were just some random VC or founder, which Delling kind of was at the time in 2020, I don't think he was a partner yet. And if you did that this cycle in 2024, you would immediately get like a, a quote tweet from like Elon and David Sacks being like, this is incredible. Welcome to the club. Yeah. You're some like, it was a way to actually climb the status ranks in tech, which made it a little bit more memetic, a little bit less contrarian. But yeah, the, the least, heretical people at Hereticon were wearing maga hats. Yeah. And Delian wasn't, he was wearing a red

hat, but it was make founders fun great again and to play on it. Yeah, yeah. Kind of, you grab someone's eye, a fresh maga hat. Exactly. Somebody like packed it up, put in their bag, brought it to Hereticon, snuck it into Fayina and then like took it off on the way up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it really is fascinating that that position became basically consensus in tech. I was talking to somebody who was saying like, I cannot believe this is somebody at FF who, you know, lived through the 2016 teal stuff,

which was like, I mean, there were protesters outside of his house. It was insane. So many hit pieces. And he was just saying like, I cannot believe, This was in the summer when everyone was like pro-Trump before Biden dropped out and Kamala wasn't even like an idea yet. I cannot believe that Donald Trump is the current thing. And he really was. He became the current thing.

It became like everyone just needs to be like, yeah, rah, rah, rah, wild. Speaking of contrarians. Speaking of contrarians, Gautier, I know how to pronounce his name right now. Goetia says Jarvis, buy $42 billion more Bitcoin. And it's Michael Saylor in the Iron Man helmet. just so vindicated. This guy was seen as such a joke for so long. And now,

and went and went on all, like, most of my memories of him are on these major trad media TV shows. She's being like, yes, I bought 42 more, $42 more million dollars over the Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah. No, but I mean, he's like, he's gonna, he's, he's been, he was, he did something that he wasn't.

wasn't saying publicly because I don't think he could have. Yeah. But it was a way that you could buy, buy exposure to Bitcoin without buying Bitcoin in the public, you know. It's so odd because there's, there's, there's micro strategy, his company, which I think essentially trades at the book value of the Bitcoin,

essentially. Bitcoin goes up 10%. His stock is up 10%. I don't think they do a lot of other business now. It's mostly just a Bitcoin holding company. But there's also the Bitcoin ETF, gray scale and a bunch of other, Black Rock has one.

And then there's also you could go and buy synthetic Bitcoin on Robin Hood or you could buy a real Bitcoin on Coinbase or you could self-custody and there's this wild gradient of like ways to get exposure to Bitcoin. I think all of that has been a big piece of what's driven the Bull Run is just more and more people can Yeah, but a good example of like he looked like an idiot for a long time and has been vindicated. For real. Hats off. For real. Okay, back to Nate O'Brien. He says one of the greatest threats to an entrepreneur is when they find themselves in the five to ten million dollar range of liquid assets you lose your hunger you get comfortable it's a dangerous spot to be in so here's what i would do and i was

lever up yeah lever up no i mean if i was uh yeah risk at all so that you feel like you got step one it's always lever up yeah uh start trading options like aggressively um but no i think my advice levering up where if you have five to 10 million like you could go and buy a hundred million dollar business. You could. And then you could just be the owner-operator of a pretty large business. And maybe that's great. Maybe you take that to a billion.

Maybe that's how you get there. As opposed to, I think what he's worried about is like, yeah, you buy a house and you wind up with all these costs. And you're just like, oh, yeah, like my life now just costs a million dollars a year. And so I'm not really growing or trying anything bold. Yeah. If I had a founder that pitched me for their seed stage company and they, and they were like, yeah, I've got about 10 million liquid.

I would invest, but I'd encourage them to give it away first because they're just not going to have that, you know, like the grind. They're not going to have that grind set. No, the, the, the another counterpoint because I think that Nate is right. But the other point of view here is that I've seen founders that already have a certain amount of wealth, be able to work on something for a long time. Sure. And stay convicted in it. Yep. without sort of worrying because they're not like this sort of like they're not operating from fear they're operating purely from winning yep and the example is i think yc did an analysis on their portfolio and they found that founders that came from money had a higher likelihood of success which

you could attribute to oh their parents had connections and provided capital and and resources and advice but it also is that they just were it's more in the state of when you have 10ish million in liquid, you're kind of in the state of play where the stakes are lower, right? Where you're just like, I'm just building this to win. I'm not doing it because I need it to, you know, pay my mortgage or I need it so that I can put my kids through college or whatever. So I actually think it can be, he's right that it could be, could decrease somebody's ability to really like grind, but it also could open them up to be like, all I care about

is winning. I'm going to win at all costs. I'm going to be willing to look stupid for some amount of time. so I think it can be a tool. Yeah, I like that. Your buddy Dylan says, posts a screenshot. Netflix finally gives up on interactive shows, pivots to Gen AI for games.

And Dylan says, Netflix is ending its interactive experiment, but I still believe the future of TV lies in content that you can engage with. We've seen it with HQ trivia, band or snatch, and to a certain extent, crypto the game.

I think that was his company, right? Yep. someone will do it at scale my guess live on screen betting while watching sports yeah i like yeah yeah yeah um anyway so dylan uh help build hq trivia into a monster yep uh then uh he i think he was at um or was he at he was at not uber eats but he was at um the one in l a bastion's company oh yeah um postmates postmates uh and then he after we started doing some party round drops and getting some attention. He DM me and he was like, like this looks like as fun as it was at HQ,

ends up joining the team. And then after party round, he ended up starting this interactive on-chain crypto game that went super, super viral and within six, he didn't raise any money within six months, sold it to uniswops, who's over at uniswap now, but super, super smart around media. And honestly, like, it's kind of insane that there hasn't been an HQ, like a phenomenon like HQ that's since HQ, right? You can't really think. Clubhouse a little bit.

Clubhouse, but that was like not, that was social media. Yeah. HQ is entertainment. Entertainment game. And it was something that even your, you know, your mom or your aunt or your uncle or whatever would be messaging about and playing. And it was like really in the zeit. Should we talk about bet on love or is that too much alpha? Yeah, yeah.

I think I brought it up. I brought it up to Dylan because I was like, you should do this. So yeah, Jordy and I had an idea. So Dylan's betting on the winner in this interactive entertainment at scale being live on screen betting while watching sports, which is already kind of happening with second screening where you're watching a football game and you're on draft kings or whatever the other one is to bet on the game while you're watching. but we,

Jordan and I were talking about how way underrated is maybe betting on something like The Bachelor. Because there's a huge audience there. No one's really modernized that format. Like the classic game show has been kind of revitalized by Mr. Beast.

But if you could have a dating show where you can bet on who's going to win and it's all done via polymarket or something. Not who's going to win. I want bets multiple opportunities to bet every single. Yeah, who's going to get voted off this episode, right? Who's going to get the first kiss or who's going to get the rose or whatever the whatever happens? I think that that would just be a very interesting, very different format.

And maybe there's a money component. Maybe it's just like long term. There probably is like a financial betting. But even just more audience participation, more interaction. That feels like the way things are going. If there's one thing, it's America. Americans love. One thing that's truly American is speculation, right? Even coming to this country hundreds of years ago was speculation in itself. So it's core to our culture. If you're an entrepreneur

that wants to build at the intersection of entertainment and speculation, make a reality TV show that you can bet on. I love it. Let's go to Sarah Hess. She says, startups at the Pentagon, I built a quantum AI autonomous drone, the Pentagon. Cool. Can it run on wind Windows XP and fit on a floppy disk? Yeah, this is, Sarah's very sharp around this stuff. And I think more plugged into the defense world, like actually plugged in, not just from a venture capital standpoint. Yeah, she worked in the CIA.

Yeah. Now an investor, classic pipeline, CIA to venture capital. Many such cases. You have to keep climbing the mountain. The question I have about this is like, should we be putting this on the government or should we be putting this on fucking Microsoft. Like, Microsoft, like, go in and pro bono, get the government on the latest and greatest software.

Like, just do whatever that work is instead of just continuing to charge XP licenses. Like, you have some sort of, like, moral duty. This is your way that you can give back, even bigger than your ESG commitments. Just commit to, I mean, we joke about the ramp, you know, a thing, like the government should run on ramp, but, like, maybe it actually should.

Yeah. And maybe that should be. a lower margin piece of ramps business, but it's how they actually wind up having a lot of impact. And same thing with Microsoft, like, get them off XP. Just go and do the work. You have the engineers. You have a million engineers.

Go deploy them, forward deploy them, and get the government on the latest and greatest. Yeah, but Palantir and Earl have done a ton of heavy lifting for all the startups now building in those categories because they've gotten the government on board with a lot of new technologies and done a lot of that heavy lifting. And the way they get paid back for it

is the companies that don't quite make it but build some great technology will eventually get absorbed by Palantir and Anderol and then they get the benefit of all that sort of CAPEX and investment and technology by other VCs. Now they have the AIP program. Have you seen this?

Where startups can build on top of the Palantir platform. So you're building SaaS. And there's going to be some really cool news about that. I was talking to the team. so we'll cover that later this week when it goes live. But really, really bullish on that. I love the idea of Palantir being like this data layer that then other companies can come in and build stuff on

because there's just so many, like you talk to people who work for the government during like the Palantir story and a lot of them are like, oh yeah, like I always like love the idea of Palantir, but like my unit never got access to it. I actually never interacted with Palantir while I was at NSA or CIA or DoD or whatever. And that shouldn't be the case.

The case is probably just that Palantir doesn't have the bandwidth to build, oh, procurement and all these different things. But like if you can create that abstraction layer and be like the Windows XP essentially, like that's really valuable. Yeah. The market is clearly repricing Palantir right now. Oh yeah. They just flipped. They just flipped Lockheed Martin, which is crazy. But one reason for that is that they are now, they could effectively become, own the app store for the DoD.

right, the Pentagon or the USG, right? Where, hey, if you want to build software and hardware and other products for the government, you need to build on Palantir. And long term, that's kind of the Anderil thesis as well with the lattice software. Totally. It's like everything that's equipment based will interface with this one thing. And you could see them opening that up at some point to a cruise missile or some other company where maybe they don't, maybe they acquire it, maybe they partner with it, but like there's some interaction.

I was talking to the Anderol guys about the technology that is used for communication systems. and they were just griping about like, it makes like HTTP look like rockets on. It's like insane how legacy these things are just to like set up a communication line to like get a green light on like is the F35 still in the sky. That interaction is just like the most like outdated system built in the 70s and just maintained.

Yeah. So yeah, Jacob Heller writes, Let That Sink in. Palantier just flipped Lockheed Martin. And it's funny because just like a week ago, I posted a screenshot that Shamsankar, the CTO at Palantir, created for his website about AIP and his second breakfast initiative. And it was the defense tech companies like Palantir relative to Lockheed, based on employees

and market cap. And Palantir was like kind of middle of the pack. But when you looked at market cap to employees, Palantir is like a few thousand and the other primes have like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. And so it was impressive then. But now it's just going to be like Palantir's at the top. They have the most market cap and the least employees. And like every metric is just the best.

It's like total power law winner. And yeah, just really, really remarkable story. I mean, like long grind. Like there was a time when Palantir was, I think, like kind of hanging out in like the single digit to 10, 20 billion range for like a decade. Because they grew and they got through like the VC thing. Oh, it's just consulting. Yeah, just consulting. There's no real platform play there.

and then the AI stuff happens and they actually have everything in. Yeah. And the other companies just can't compete because they did the hard work first. Yeah. So, yeah, super valuable. Congrats to everyone at Palantir.

And the culture there is the culture there from everything I've heard is ridiculous. It's crazy. We saw, we saw Eunice talking about like, you know, no kipping pull-ups. Like, how do you keep that going 20 years in? That's crazy. You would think they would have evolved

just to like a normie tech company. Yeah. And all the, all the engineers that historically would have gone to Google and then just decided when Google, you know, with Project Maven, right, decided to say like, you know, we don't want this a part of our

platform, create an opportunity for Palantir to hover up all those people that clearly care about the country and our patriots. Want to put their skills to use. Oh, this is a rough one. This might be the anti-brother of the week. The, the wag of the finger.

To Jensen Wong, the founder, CEO of Nvidia, he says he doesn't wear a watch. And he has a very, you know, this is a 37 second clip from a interview that he did where he explains that he, you know, the most important time is right now. And so he doesn't need to wear a watch. But he's missing a critical thing, which is that a watch doesn't tell you the time of day. It tells you the time of your life. It tells you where you are, not in the day. And it tells other people where you are in your life. Exactly. And so I think we got to we got to get this guy a hitter yeah i think that's uh yeah you were talking about how putin whenever he does an interview he places his watch on the table yep as a way to signal to the

world what kind of man he is if you weren't familiar with putin you're going to see his watch and start to get an idea of who he is just by his timepiece i i want to read more into that because i wonder if it's like almost like a threatening thing he's like taking you know you take your watch off before you get in a fist fight yeah and so he's taking his watch off to put it down to like be like if this interview doesn't go well like I'm ready to fight almost there's like a million things but it's also a status thing right it is it is he's probably got one of the better watch collections I think it might be the kind of thing in Russia where you want to have a nice watch collection if you're an oligarch but you don't want to ever be have it be nicer than

than the top dog sure sure someone who can challenge you yeah yeah you don't want to challenge Putin's collection but you would think that I mean I feel like jensen's like you know a hair's breadth of way from becoming a watch guy yeah so much a leather jacket does. Yeah. So much of what what NVIDIA does is precision manufacturing. And he should be able to respect the work of a Vachron, the work of a Patak, the work of an AP.

You should be able to get into that. We saw Zuck did briefly and developed a great wonderful collection. I'd like to see a one of one of one Nvidia GPU watch that you can see the intricate detail of the GPU humming. We got to get that made

and then we'll send it to them and then I'll come on the show. But yeah, also, I mean, he's famous for doing that jersey swap with Zuck. Do you remember that? Where Zuck was wearing some sort of like mountaineering coat almost, like very like puffy. And Jensen was wearing the leather jacket and they swapped jackets and took a picture. It was a jersey swap? Fantastic.

I mean, swapping watches. That would be very cool too. There's something there. But we'll get him soon. You can be redeemed, Jensen. within your abilities. It's never too late. So David Boscovic says,

I woke up in a cold sweat last night from a nightmare. I had spent all of our money on Google ads in one day because I had accidentally removed the limit on my tri-ramp card. Someone should figure out how to sell brand placement in dreams like this. It's a new frontier. Yeah, so I would wear one of those.

I would wear like a wearable. Sure. If it was going to project ads into my brain. Yes. at while I slept. So you can make more educated purchasing decisions. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm as a student, as a businessman, as a student of capitalism, I learn a lot from ads. I learn what's, you know, what, what's selling, what's not. I learn about my own taste. I learned about what I want to, want to purchase. I learn about products and services I can, I can buy to help grow technology

brothers, right? And so if I could sit down right before bed and put on my little wearable and have it be projecting ads into my dreams. I would pay for that, right? It's like, that's why I pay, I pay for X and the only downside of X premium is it actually shows less ads, right? Yeah, exactly. Which is a big bummer, but, um,

but yeah, I, I can relate to that nightmare. Um, and, and the ramp team says, our team is working hard to ensure your policy guardrail stay in place in your dreams.

There you go. They hired a good person to run their social media. Yeah. Um, Say Taylor says, you're not online enough. Couldn't decide it better myself. Simple, simple, simple. Yeah, I mean, part of our work here at Technology Brothers is to be almost like a brain rot shield for our audience.

So if you're worried about spending too much time in the timeline, we basically are a layer over the timeline to help surface the most relevant content and then provide hard-hitting analysis on it. But it doesn't always have to be that way. also be you're online for six hours you have an extra three hours at the end of the day throw on technology brothers you get another three hours of content well here's the thing sometimes a founder will call me and they say like hey I'm having a rough day this customer integration isn't going well I'm having this issue with my head of engineering whatever it is and almost always I tell them drink to Celsius have some some Lucy or Excel and go sit outside ideally in the sun if it's if it's daytime and just

scroll like give yourself a couple hours to scroll and just don't stop right I think all the fees have gotten to the point where they're not you're never really going to hit the end I remember that was like a 2010s era social thing where it'd be like you've reached all the content right but I haven't hit the end in a decade almost right so go outside get some sun caffeine nicotine and just scroll a little bit and I promise you like that that sort of creative juices will start flowing you're so start getting into this sort of problem-solving mentality and you'll make your life better. Couldn't agree more. Andrew Editor says,

First impression of my daylight co. The hype is justified. Shockingly responsive. Distractions non-existent. Decent chance this becomes my primary work computer. Oh, this is the high refresh rate e-ink screen. Yep. Tablet.

I saw this. So, yeah. Andrew, good buddy and was on my team. at a party round, phenomenal writer and works with a bunch of other startups now. So his primary work is meeting with companies that he works with through his

agency, Words. Words S-S-S-S-S-S dot com. Sure. And, you know, so he's primarily interfacing with clients and writing. And so daylight computers are really good product for that because it's a product

that is trying to take all the advancements in computer technology that we have today, but sort of like make it more analog. So they eliminate color. They make it less, basically less engaging overall so that in theory it helps you actually get more work done. And this is live. Like you can just go buy one of these. Yeah. So they've been working.

Yeah, I don't have mine yet. But they don't. They're working through like pre-we. order list, but they are delivering now. I use the product. I mean, it could never replace like this physical paper, but I mean, for other stuff. That's what they're trying to do.

They're trying to kill, they're trying to take out big paper. Good luck. Good luck. There's a lot of, um, but yeah, I use a product. Better chance taking down Apple on the iPad. Yeah. You're never taking this. My cold dead hands.

Yeah. Will you take my stuff and print. We'll cut down the trees ourselves. We have to. But no, I tried the daylight for the first time. I think it was over like six or seven months ago. Yeah. And this is one of those things.

Like a lot of the cool trends in technology now are, are sort of making stuff more analog, more retro, mod retro is an example, which is more nostalgic. Who knows if daylight is like going to be as big as Apple, but I'm so happy that it exists. And I want it to be a great company. And I think it would probably be a fantastic company.

Yeah, that was the investment. Anjohn, the founder, when I was talking to him, I kind of almost laugh when he told me the valuation. Yeah. But then he basically was like, look, like if we can become, if we can sell millions of devices, like this is going to be really cheap. Yeah. And I think that with the sort of anti-blue light movement, some other stuff like that, it has massive potential.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Shout out to Andrew and Anjohn. That's awesome. Let's go to Stephen Simone says, cheap drones aren't going out of style anytime soon. Thanks, Wired for covering Allen control systems. And Wired writes, the end. AI machine gun of the future is already here. And it's some sort of machine gun mounted on the back of a truck.

Yeah. So you know this company pretty well. Yeah. So I have an advisor to ACS. David Sacks, famous political podcaster. Actually, it was, I think, their first investor. Oh, really? He backed Steve's last company, I think it was.

But, yeah, Steve has been for the last, like, year and a half, two years, building anti-drone gun turrets. So one of the big problems in modern warfare is you have this proliferation of really cheap drones that can just fly across the battlefield and just and so they're very difficult to take out as a human because you're sort of aiming a gun. Shotguns

aren't long enough range. Rifles is just too hard to hit things. And so ACS has built this phenomenal product that can take out drones fully autonomously. So this is this is Terminator. Terminator's here.

It's mounted to the back of a Toyota pickup truck in Texas right now on the testing grounds. And they've just made some like really incredible progress over the last year all the way to there. There's some cool videos out there. They're public now. But you can see the ACS gun turret like taking out drones, taking out a bunch of Chinese drones, which is cool using them as target practice. and yeah they did a demo day recently for a number of investors and I was joking with Steve about it's pretty funny to think about like five VCs seeing the same awesome demo at the

same time and like looking around being like all right like I'm it's it's monoie mono now sharp bellos sharp elbows um so yeah I mean Steve is so yeah I mean Steve is I think uh I think he's to the, that, that's going to be, uh, look back as the, is the, is the TK of defense. Like, he's like one of one individual and, um, built a ridiculous team and, and on a mission. So it's awesome. Thank you to Steve for keeping us safe. Yeah.

Let's go to Zach. So gamer is up next as a word to describe the obsessed. Notice a lot with runners, athletes who compete hard and smart gamers. Gamers. I like that. There's a lot of gamer lingo that people, that Gen Z is adopted. Yeah, like I'm one shot. One shot it.

Yeah, one shot. One shot is that concept taken out. Yeah, I think we need to, so a gamer is going to take me a little bit to work it in. Yeah, it's tough. I, understanding the definition, I identify. I'm a bit of a gamer, you're a gamer or VP Ben's a gamer. But yeah, I want to bring the 360 no scope into the lingo. Yeah, what does that mean in a business context?

So if somebody, like, post a banger, tweet. And then somebody in the comments section replies, I'm going to sign up for your product right now and use it. That's almost like a 360 no-cote because a good post is this sort of like elegant thing. That's hard to do. You're doing a lot at once. Are you familiar with the term pre-made? No.

So if you go on like Counterstrike or Call of Duty and you're playing like the competitive modes like 5B5, 6 v6, normally you just get matched with random people. So it's very hard to coordinate because like who's the sniper, who's the machine gunner, a medic or whatever. But the way to really win is to make a quote unquote pre-made where you and your boys all are in the lobby beforehand. And so you show up. It's you and everyone knows like, okay, I'm going to go left.

You're going to go right. And we're really good on the comms. And we know not to fight and talk over each other. And you're going up against randoms. So if you have a pre-made, you're locked in. And when I think about the teams that show up with startups, like- and raise 50 million. Yeah.

Like Ander all very much a pre-made in the sense that you have Palmer. But then you also have like three pal and things. tier executives. It's like how was that not going to be successful? They really stack the deck in their favor. Right? So I'd like to see a company as a pre-made. I'd like to see, uh, company X accounts like start to use G-G. So like when ramp, when ramp launch launches a bunch of new functionality, I want to see Brex just reply to it and say GG. G-G well played. Yeah, G-G well played. And then you just delete their account. Good luck. Have fun. G.L. Yeah. I mean, there's so much gamer lingo we can bring over and it's a again it's like a way to signal like in-group so very valuable uh Sam

Gersten Zhang Gersten Zhang says wow A16 Z is hiring a full-time person just to keep track of carry and it's a job for their internal HR team so this is awesome because it shows the evolution of venture capital right it's becoming mainstream it's it's learning everything that traditional private equity learned in the 90s we're just re-learning it just like cryptos like speed running like financial regulation um so anyways uh bullish bullish for andresen i can't wait for them to go public uh so that so that everybody can can own a piece of that um monster um and i to me the signal is like we're getting ready to go public right like it's one thing when it's just the gPs and they're sort of managing carry internally they have a cfo they must right yeah

sure they do must have a huge finance team any any any multi-billion dollar a um fund without a CFO would be concerning. Yeah, but like it's interesting that we don't know their CFO. Like we know some of their comms people. Yeah, yeah. Like Margaret. Because that's when I'm ready for, I'm ready for Endreason, uh, earnings calls with the CFO.

That's going to be, we're going to have to do a live stream for that. Fantastic. I guess the question is, will the other funds, uh, go short, you know, Sequoia? They're set up to take long and short positions in the public markets. Oh, yeah, yeah. What if they're like, you know, what? We open a big short position. We're short again.

Just to try to attack. brand exactly exactly like Hindenberg research from a Sequoia and Anderson be devastating yeah yeah Sean would do that the VC infighting dark dark Sean dark dark dark dark Sequoia uh love Sean I think he's in the stack somewhere um Kate Clark tweets some personal news Bloomberg hires Clark to cover VC and startups so she was at the information she was at the information so this is this is why right now you know the technology publications you got TMZ the information you've got new newcomer new next generation they should have like a fantasy sports for tech uh journalism where you

like build your team and see who's getting where's the poly where's the poly market yeah polymarket on the trades and then there should definitely be like a draft day where you get the best posters and the information Bloomberg Forbes they all have to yeah you know they get rankings based on you know oh they didn't get that many views last year that at the top of the ranking they get to pick the best posters yeah right so there should be draft day there should be fantasy you should be able to build the team and ultimately bet on this. You should be able to gamble on it. Yeah. And you see like, you know, Kara Swisher has had a very antagonistic relationship with the technology industry. And I think one of the reasons is she watched all of her peers at the time become wealthy. So this competition

within different, you know, media companies for tech journalists is actually good. They're all going to make more money. I think I saw newcomers paying like 300, 350K to hire journalists. You know, I would expect Kate Clark is, you know, this, I would expect this is like a seven, seven figure contract over four years. You know, it's not NBA money yet. Yeah, but I mean, pretty soon we're going to start seeing the 360 deals, the sponsorships, like, you know, what kind of jersey are they wearing if they go to a conference, you know? Yeah. If they're going to be on Emily Chang's the circuit, throw some logos on that shirt or that blouse. But yeah, I think, I think journalists have, we think of these media companies as these sort of big brands that carry a lot of weight.

But like it's Bloomberg. Yeah, Bloomberg got her. Bloomberg is going to become much more relevant because Kate actually gets scoops. She does. She's very good. She like is not just like, you know, using Chad GPT to summarize what someone else talked about online. No.

Trade the information. Yeah, I'm excited for the shoe deals. I want to see like, you know, Laurel Piano or something. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you got an exclusive deal with this person. When you see them on CNBC, giving some squawk box. Like, oh, yeah, they're wrapping our gear. Yeah.

Be great. Ayush writes, new founder KPI dropped testosterone level. The average YC founder seed stage is 344 nanograms per deciliter. Yours truly 727 nanograms per deciliter. And did you see this underlying study? I know the guy who did it. Yeah. I think his name is Michael.

And yeah, not good. That's really low. Yeah, I think so here's what we got to look into. One, not surprised that Ayush has such high tea. It's probably why he's had some, some, a little bit of controversy. Controversies. But like the guys online constantly is grinding. His entire team is grinding.

He's like extremely smart and very just like hardworking. And that's probably because where his tea levels are at. But we got to go to Y Combin. do some investigative journalism ourselves because I would guess that they're handing out a little bit too much plastic bottle of water because how else can you explain 330 average that's the positive thing though is that those YCD should just be T-Bone stakes yeah exclusively no water no water even though's lindy yeah but yeah I the positive thing from from that study though is that it seemed like the the more venture capital the founders raised the higher their T levels were yes yes and so I think that's a positive trend, which tells me why a combinator should just invest more money in because there could be, it actually could be that more venture capital is actually just pulling up their testosterone levels. So they have so many unicorns in a batch, they should probably just start like investing real size, you know, like make the entry check $10 million.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a million ways to upregulate tea and they got to make a new trend. It's not the all birds. I'll tell you that. Justine Moore at Venture Twins says new A16Z investment thesis AIX parenting raising kids is one of our most challenging and important jobs every parent needs support sometimes but many can't access it because it's too expensive or inaccessible. AI changes this what we're seeing and then there's a market matter. Okay so two reasons that I think this is smart. One audio is a fantastic interface for kids. Yeah. Because parents don't want their kids on screens. I got this thing for.

for my son called a Yoto. I have one. I set one up. It's honestly. It honestly, my son locks in. Yeah. Like he puts on something and then he goes and reads books and stuff and just plays a Lego as well.

And he has all these custom cards. You can download any music and put it on a custom card. It's so great. It's so great. So anyways, for parents, like even 20 minutes of time where their kid is doing something solo is like massively valuable.

So parents will spend a lot of money for something like this. Yep. In general, parents will pay for anything educational pretty quickly for their kids. And then the other thing is like audio to date has not been the best interface for adults because we're ADHD. We have like we need things that are kind of like moving faster than audio typically provides. But for kids, it's just absolutely fantastic. And so I, I, what I've wanted to see is somebody, something like what Avi is doing for friend, but for kids. Because if you give kids this digital companion that has certain guardrails that can talk with them, that can teach some

things that they can ask questions to. Yep. I would love to back a company that's that's doing that specifically. I think there's been some toy companies that are integrating LLMs, which is cool. But yeah, like a little pendant type thing that has a speaker on it that they can talk to. Or even just a robot dog that follows you around, but you can also ask it. Yeah. What's that?

Unitree. Unitree robotics or Boston Dynamics. I want a robot dog that I can strap an AR2 that has a like, you know, speaker, a polycom attached to it. so I can talk to my kid. Protect the dog. Just protects the kid and hangs out. It's their best friend, man's best friend.

It's got an AR on it. I love it. And that's great. Anyway, so. Let's go to Andrea D. Huberwoman, PhD. She says, Y.C should add some cute ladies to the workplace. Purely for the sake of their founder's low T levels, of course. We're back on T levels at YC.

Back on T levels at YC. This is funny because, you know, Y Combinator has been criticized a lot for, for, not having enough women in the cohorts. But yeah, maybe this is like now a right-wing critique of the lack of feminine energy at YC. Yeah, I genuinely, so that the issue is YC is fully remote now. Oh, no, I think they went back in person.

Really? Yeah. Back in person? Okay. That was just during the COVID years. Oh, but do they actually have like an, you can't work from there every day? Yeah. But you can go in for dinners and office hours.

Yeah, I think this is probably. they're what they're dealing with is it is not just like a small issue like it's an epidemic right I would I would imagine that some founders are going to start not applying for YC because they have high T and they one don't want to be around men with low T because it's just a drag right and two they're worried if they join their T is going to drop dramatically sure or that they'll be they need to not they need to not it's not like oh adding secretaries is is one approach removing plastic bottle of water is another but they need to they need to try like 20 things at once and see

see what sticks because it's gonna that is why c is one of the greatest institutions to to be created within Silicon Valley in the last whatever is it it's almost 20 or 20-ish years now they got to save and I think Gary will I think Gary will get on it do you know this congressman waltz do you know this guy I feel like we had him in here previously This is funny because it's like a very Twitter native format, but it's from an official congressman's press Twitter. And so it says, Waltz, how much do you think the Air Force pays for this bag of bushings? USAF Secretary Kendall. I don't know, Congressman, Walt says $90,000.

So we've run into these again and again. There's just so many things. First, there was soap dispensers that exits called out. Yep. Now it's bushings. But it's also the seatbelts on the planes, the urinals, all those different things. They're all way, way, way, impressed. This is why Kimia's company is going to rip is because we're going to introduce competition

into the bushings market. Yeah. But look at this. I mean, he has, you know, one clip essentially from C-SPAN. It's a one-minute clip and it has two million views. Like, what, what, this is just the native, the poster native congressman or politician, just going direct and using the correct format and not just saying, Hey, I put out of press release.

Go to this link. It's like, I'm articulating the problem and I'm showing you evidence that I'm trying to do something about it. He just mugged. He just mugged the Air Force Secretary. It's a secretary. Yeah, it's wild. Hopefully it comes down. Need commercial off the shelf.

Cots versus Gots, baby. Cots versus Gats, let's go. Oh, here's Sean. This is a great one. So, Sean, so Elon Musk, you know, on the election night, I believe, says all-time high usage of this platform. And it looks like global user. seconds was over 400 billion on the election night. And Sean says, we at Sequoia invested $800 million into the X, take private. We were ridiculed for two years for it, but I'm confident we'll get

the last laugh. Never bet against Elon. And he was getting dunked on a little bit about this because I guess the stock is down in like private markets, but I think he's right. I think I think never bet against Elon. I think the, I think Elon Inc. Yeah. And they're investing on a 10, they're a venture capital firm. Yeah. They care about. Yeah. Sean cares about what the position is going to look like in 10 years. And it's a network effects company. Yeah. And right now there's so much momentum. Yeah. That that, that I would, I would be willing to bet my house that they'll make money on this investment in 10 years. It's almost like there's a refounding of the company over there because I remember when this happened.

Totally. And that was why we talked about the rebrand going. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The rebrand was refounding. And it's actually like they're going through the whole cycle that Twitter went through again, but which is like a completely new open book for monetization. And because when Elon bought it, I was like, you know, like there's a lot of people that are like leaving, but this makes me more bullish than ever on this is the best place to be if you're in tech. Yeah, let's go check in with all the journalists that posted their blue sky links. Yeah, it's fine. They might be doing well over there.

I know the numbers on threads are fine, but it's not the most important place. to be if you're in tech. And tech is always ahead of everything else. And so over time, we'll go through the same cycle. Dan Loeb is not on threads, ratioing people twice a day. And so as long as like the most high signal, most valuable alpha is there,

they can kind of climb up the ranking again of like everyone has to be on there because that's where the conversation is happening. Yeah. And the ads, the ads platform will get, yeah. All sorts of different things. But they're getting more money for sure.

Like, yeah. And especially Mark was tweeting out, basically calling out all the advertisers that sort of worked collectively to boycott X and basically saying that I think a lot of those advertisers will start to come back because they realize that what they're doing is not only sort of short-sighted, but potentially even illegal. Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting because the cost base for X has gotten so low. that if they can get the revenue side anywhere near back to what it was.

Yeah, it'll just be super profitable. It is $45 billion company. Yeah. Like they could be doing $5 billion in EBITDA and trade at 20x or something, 10 X. Like that's not that crazy to imagine. Yeah. One of my former employees, a close friend just had a bunch of different offers from every sort of like bag seven type company.

and he chose X. I know a lot of people like that. And so the reason to be bullish, besides the fact that Sean is bullish, is that and the whole election and everything like that is the talent. The talent magnet is real. The smartest people that aspire,

that want to work under a leader like Elon are going there. Let's go. Shiel Monat says a lot of fintech shit coes that went public in the Zurp era and were completely left for dead or quietly having monster years, many up 600%. And he cites Dave Inc., which is up 600%.

Neobank. Root Inc. Clover Health Investments, Corp, and Blend Labs. I actually know the founder of Dave. And yeah, rough go of it when they spacked and it went way down. And SoFi is ripping as well.

Yeah, it's amazing. I'm really happy for these folks that spacked at the wrong time and just had like a rough go but stuck with it. That's a great great. It'll be interesting to see if SoFi ends up finding finding its way and then Chimoth will be able to say like, look, if you just invested in all my SPACs, I did well on average. You did well, right? I talked to somebody who spacked and said that like

he did post-ZERP, but what he did was he on day one, he immediately unlocked all the investors and the founders had like a three-year lockup. And so that's cool. That created like a ton of downward pressure on the stock immediately. But got it out of the way. But yeah, got it out of the way. and there was never this like, you know, weight hanging over the company. And they were able to essentially tell their VCs like, hey, we got your return. You can distribute and your LPs can sell today if they want. You are like, we're clean of this and we're into the next phase. And it's like, now we got to build up as a public company.

And a lot of these companies is like, yeah, they're public. They're building. They have the money. They're growing. And I mean, I remember looking at Dave and being like, this is trading at like a third of book value or something. Yeah. I'm pretty sure they were trading for like $50 million and they had like 150 million in

cash. Yeah. And I was just like this is insane. Like it was like the the whole like spec meme became so negative for a while that things really work clearly undervalued. So I fully anticipate SPACs will be back for certain companies pretty soon. Let's go to Jason Lemkin. He says no downturn or recession at Smsara at 1.3 billion ARR, Clavio at one billion.

GitLab at 730 million, Palantir at 2.9 billion, Toast at 1.6, Data Dog at 2.8, Confluent at 1 billion, just a couple of examples. So there's just all these companies that are ripping, ripping, ripping, ripping, and growing ARRs 30%. Fantastic. It's so interesting. I mean, this is really a good tour of the fact that like this B2B SaaS. Turns out it's a good business. Yeah, and that there's not, even though there are power law winners, like the Salesforce or I guess Microsoft really. It was such a huge market that there's multiple hundred million, hundred billion dollars companies to build there. So really, really cool to see. And yeah, I mean, I think we could see the same thing play out in defense. I think we could see

the same thing play out in AI. And I think that like, yeah, if your fund is set up to, you have to get a trillion dollar company. Yeah, go for that. That's great. That's awesome. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be, you know, the seventh, biggest, you know, B2B SaaS company that has a billion dollars in AR growing 25%. Like, I would happily be that company. That's great. Yeah. Fantastic.

Let's go to Zane. He says, one of the best times in the history of humanity to, it's one of the best times in the history of humanity to start a manufacturing company is likely right now. So, yeah. So this guy's been sharing the gospel around manufacturing broadly, but also the fact that a lot of our onshore manufacturing is dependent on leaders that are at retirement age. Sure. There's that factor.

There's also the tariffs thing. Tariff's surreal. There's also just a new boom in a whole bunch of things that require manufactured parts. Like if we really do go into the humanoid robotics era, that's like a million different motors, a million different batteries and control systems. Yeah. Like, who's going to manufacture the tibia for this thing? It's going to be some aluminum rod.

Yeah, and the downstream effects of a company like Anderil over time having thousands and thousands of employees are that those thousands of employees experience all these small little pain points throughout different product cycles. And then they go out and say like, okay, I made my money in tech. But the next thing I'm doing is setting up this like small manufacturing shop outside of St. Louis. And we're going to make this widget and we're going to sell a lot of them. And that's going to be really good for the country. It's going to be good for them financially. it's going to be good for the companies that depend on these sort of smaller scale manufacturers. Yeah, I was at Andrew L. HQ last Friday, and I was overhearing some engineers have a little

meeting, and they're like, you know, somebody's like, I'm willing to bet on it. Like, we need to make it 26 millimeters or something. I have no idea what they were talking about. But like, you know, they're like making these engineering tradeoffs, widgets. And yeah, I mean, they're not going to be able to insource all of that. And then there's also just going to be the dividend of, you know, manufacturing and hard tech outside of defense. I mean, I think.

Yeah. We talked about the impulse stove. It's like a hardware company. It's never going to be acquired by Anderall, but, you know, we're going to get a new fridge company. We're going to get a new washing machine company. There was a guy making wheelchairs. Yeah, wheelchairs.

Yeah, exactly. We're going to get all these different engineering, hard tech, manufacturing things. You can just make things. It's going to be great. I'm really excited. Let's go to Clint Fiore. He says, no income tax for the rest of your life if you have birth four or more children, copying hungry in America.

and then he follows up upon further review and discussion with the commenters here. I'm editing this to be for the household income, not just the moms, rewards homes where one spouse stays home with kids, while other spouse works as well as one's returning to workforce. I would take it further, just no income tax, period. Yeah. No, I think it's a good incentive. I know a lot of people where kids are very expensive, right? Yeah, yeah. for every, we look at everything in supercars, right?

So if I see a guy with 10 supercars, I'm like, okay, you could probably comfortably have five kids. So with every, at least from like a carrying cost standpoint. And so I know a lot of people that have two kids right now. And if you said have two more and you can not pay income tax again, they're going to run the numbers. They'll make a financial model. And they'll see very quickly, we should have those extra kids. One, kids bring joy. So that's like just value add.

But two, if you can take that incremental income that's not being wasted through wasteful government spending on expensive bushings or $150,000 soap dispensers and invests that capital, it'll benefit them as well as the entire country. So anyways, great. Super pro. Paul Baum says, can Hollywood stop making slop now? And then Mopar says, no, you're going to watch Fast and the Furious 45 and you're going to love it. What do you think? This was an election. So Paul's had some great ideas lately.

This was post-election response, maybe in response to wokeism being, having peaked. But I don't know. I think like the problems in the movie entertainment industry are just so much bigger than politics. There's also just this massive lag on. productions because you need someone to start writing now and then that movie will get released in four years. The good thing is I hit up a copyright that I'd work with in the past. I actually, I think we got some of her help on Excel. Sure.

And I hit her up recently because somebody was looking for some copywriting support and she's like, I'm staffed on shows indefinitely. I don't have time. Interesting. I was like, that's good. Oh, that's great. We need more content. Yeah.

Yeah. I think the power loss stuff will still stay around the De Nivellev's. Yeah. Yeah, I would argue that there's small groups that are making cool, impactful films, right? It's just rare. Civil War by 24 was a big idea. I think it flopped, but that wasn't slopped, right? It was a big effort.

And Dune is a good counter example of like I actually don't. Or Oppenheimer. Like there's usually like one or two. a year. There just aren't one every month. Yeah. Barbie. Barbie. Yeah. What's Barbie? Barbie? Yeah, Barbie was a big moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gladiator. Yeah. It's coming out. Good reviews so far. We got to take the boys out. This is a note for all the listeners. Get your boys together and go to a movie. It's the best thing. We've done in LA a few times. Dress up. Dress up. Have some drinks before. Have some dinner after. It's just a fantastic time. It's a good excuse to get out of the out of the, out of the,

house a lot of what I realized was that a lot of our friends are married and their wives are more into sports than the husbands because sports have just become really popular and so if you say hey we're going to go watch the Dodger game well like everyone's going to want to come but you know very few wives want to go see the latest Jason State the movie so yeah yeah yeah it's an excuse to get the boys together basically and it's and and it's not as hard of a cell as being like we're going to get hammered and smoke cigars all night yeah and boys nights are a good way to counter burnout right Because burnout is usually a symptom of something not working in your business. But if you hang out with your boys, they can help give you that clarity, gas you up, give you that extra conviction to keep pushing through it.

So one movie night could save your company. It's great. Let's go to typed female. Sam Altman, we are a few thousand days away from building God. We will build suns on earth, unify physics, and resurrect the worthy dead. Also, we just bought chat.com. Yeah. Gary Tan.

Sounds like this will be really impactful for startups. Sam Altman, definitely, no better time to be a startup. I love this just Sam replied. It was like, this is funny. Because it does seem like there's a little bit of like attention there where it's like, okay, if we're going to get this like crazy future, like maybe like how can we predict anything? Open AI is developer tooling at its core, right? So if they do build God, like they've built an API into super intelligent. Also, it's just like startups are creation.

And so if the tools get better and better. better like you would want to create even if there is abundance you would want to make something or creative and and creating a company is like a expression yeah I do yeah I do feel like it's it's now that we have intelligence as a service it is difficult to predict the future yeah right especially with software and consumer products I mean whatever seven years ago you were like hey I think smokeless tobacco you know nicotine is going to be big we should do this and you turned to be very correct.

But it's harder to do that with software. I think it's becoming obvious. Like you probably want network effects. You want some type of lock-in. You don't want to build, trying to rebuild Salesforce right now. Could be an amazing business for five years. And then you get completely disrupted. Who does?

Yeah. Let's go to Keith Rubei. He says, should I post, this is post-election reflecting on his posting strategy. And he runs a poll. Should I post more about? health, fitness, music, venture capital, or politics. And venture capital won handily with 62%. Thank God. Thank God.

I disagree. I think that posting about politics is actually great for VCs, because you want to know what you're getting yourself into at the board dinner. Because it's all going to come out. And the last thing you want is someone who has some crazy political ideology that you don't align with. Yeah, but I feel like if Keith met somebody right now that had completely different political.

political views in him and was like truly on the opposite end of the spectrum. He might be like, you know what? You crazy kid? Give it a shot. I'll give you a few million. Give it a shot. Yeah, I love that. I do appreciate that he's been, he's become like my de facto personal trainer because

whenever I post on X about whatever workout I'm doing, he just immediately chimes in with feedback on how I could be doing better. I was like, you know, going for a one rep max today. And he was like, you should try three rep maxes instead. I was like, oh, like, you know, clean and jerk is the best movement. And he was like, it's too hard on your tendons. You know, he has a lot of whatever, whatever, I don't know, though, with Keith, is it, is it his incredible spirit and, and sort of energy that, that allows him to do these things? Or is it his health protocol, right?

Which one is, which one is, yeah, exactly, right? Because I think a lot of people, if they followed his sketch, would collapse in like the fourth day, right? And so who knows? Who knows? Yeah. Well, we know step one is lever up. Yeah, always.

Phil says, working with a new client, a 17-year-old founder, $10 million D to C brand, no Zoom calls, no in-person meetings, only meets over Blackop six calls. If it can't be discussed over COD, it's too complicated. The workforce is changing. 2K likes. What do you think? too cable.

This is something that's like amazing and could be the future or also could be like a harbinger of doom and this kid could be like I do think yeah do you think there's potential to be like hey

let's move the water cooler talk to Cod or whatever that the invoked video game is. You can go play smash with your colleagues. Yeah maybe Call of Duty is a new ping pong table

right? Yeah very sense for the modern I do I have had some breakthrough conversations actually so this is crazy so So Soilent when they moved to downtown LA, they opened up some desks for startups. And I was at, I don't know,

we ever talked about this, but I was, you had left the company, but I had a desk there and they had fantastic ping pong tables. So I would use at least once a day. So at first I was kind of thinking that Cod thing was silly, but how different is it to play ping pong versus cod? You know, one of my favorite pitches with a VC that I ever did was with Blake Robbins when he was is it benchmark. Yeah. And we played PubG together. No way.

A Battle Royale game. And it was fascinating because it felt like the modern version of going golfing. Yeah. So we talk about business, talk about the business, talk about building companies. But then we're also on the same team in this like fight for survival. So battle royale, there's, I think we were playing duos, 150 people on the map. So there's 75 teams. Yeah.

And if you get shot, you go down. but you can be revived. Yeah. And so there's always a question of, are you going to be greedy or thirsty? Yeah. Another good gamer word to adopt. Being thirsty is when you, you know,

get too hungry for the kill and you prioritize, you know, offense over defense. Yeah. And so I noticed, and what I really liked about him was that when I got downed, he would prioritize reviving me over like getting the extra kill of the glory. That's a VC. And I noticed myself thirsting all the time and being like,

fuck, we lost because I'm an idiot and I didn't play it right. But that's why that's why golf is actually genuinely really great way to get to know somebody, especially in a business context, because if you're how do they handle failure? If you play 18 holes and you see like, oh, like every fourth hole, he like undercounts is like undercounts or, you know, throwing his club, right. Yeah, or getting pissed. Yeah. Or yeah, doing anything. Or if they're too chill about it. Like they're not on the golf course or or in the back nine.

Hollering at the catty girl or whatever. Yeah, back nine. Yeah, there's a lot of ways to expose the truth about someone through. that. Yeah. It's much better than just a coffee meeting, which is just vanilla. Yeah,

and you get to walk the whole time. Yeah, I love it. So, yeah, maybe Cod is the future. Let's skip that. Man, Jarvis says,

man, Trump really lucked out having an autistic billionaire randomly choose his election as his next object of fixation, ha ha ha. And Elon responds. 50K likes,

and Elon responds with a crying emoji and Jarvis just says, love you, King. So good. Amazing. So funny. that Elon just got obsessed with the show. I can't believe this app is only $10 a month.

It's incredible. These are their actions. This has always been the case. I remember when I first got to Silicon Valley getting online and just tweeting with like Sean Parker and Jim Breyer from Excel. They were on stage and like they were posting about their, you know, investing initiatives. And I was able to just be like a reply guy and like chat with them. It was like crazy.

Huge alpha and being a reply guy. Basically, yeah. And it was super inspiring at the time. I was like, okay, like, at least these guys give me the time of day. Like, they're not like big dogging me, which is awesome. Yeah, so here's the thing. It certainly was not random, right? Elon was absolutely snubbed by Biden.

Totally, totally, totally, totally. Who completely disrespected the biggest American manufacturer of EVs by not inviting Elon to meet with him and the government on the issue. Same thing in California. California like basically made fun of him and told him to leave. And so, yeah, message received. He,

everything we just saw over the past. However many months was just a reaction to being disrespected. Yep. As a person, as a businessman and it was almost a, with his level of ambition, it was, it was something that he needed to do to reach his full potential because he's at

a scale where what the government thinks about him and his businesses is probably more important than anything else. Yep, that makes sense. Let's go to Yom Pelig. He says, hurt a leak from one of the frontier labs, not open AI, to be honest. They reached an unexpected huge wall of diminishing returns trying to brute force better results by training longer and using more and more data, more severe than what is published previously.

So the question is like, are we hitting a wall or are scaling laws going to hold? Here's what I would say. 90% of Frontier AI Labs quit right before they're about to make it big. Same thing in gambling, right? 90% of sports betters quit right before they're about to hit that crazy parlay. And so my advice to this frontier lab, to double down more data, more energy, get whale blubber as an energy source if you need it. Nuclear, coal, coal, wind, do it all.

Title, solar, everything. Title. Fusion. So here's what AI. AI labs have not partnered with SoulCycle yet to try to capture that energy. Yeah. I mean, we've seen the matrix. Like put the people in the pod, use their energy source.

They become batteries. The interesting thing here is like it's really hard to evaluate this because open AI is the most well funded. And so they're the ones, other than the hyperscalers, they're the ones that can actually go and build like the gigawatt data center. which is like a new thing that needs to be built. It like physically needs to exist before you can do that training run. XAI is pretty far along. They're building like the largest cluster. So it's like I feel like it's really, really hard to evaluate is scaling, holding

without actually running the experiment of like, we built the thing and this was the result. And the fear is that you, yeah, you 10x the power, you 10x the training and the GPUs. But then IQ of these models goes from like 105 to 107. And it's like that might be economically viable, honestly. It might be better at whatever it does. And it might be really, really valuable to do that. But it might just be like, okay, we're hitting really diminishing marginal returns. And we're not going to get this super intelligence where it's like, oh, yeah, just a couple orders of magnitude and then we'll be at 200 IQ.

And that's something that like no one, I've never really seen anyone make a really great argument for like clearly scaling is all you need and scale is really valuable. And scale improves the model. but what is the ratio between orders of magnitude in energy and data center size and actual real world applicability in IQ? Like what will it take? How many orders of magnitude to get to 150? No one really knows, I think, but we'll see. Let's go to Edmund. He says, does anyone ever think about how aesthetic it is that humans drink water to survive?

Like this clear, zero calorie, smooth liquid, pure, minimal, sleek, it's water, it's giving Lamere. It's giving modernity. It's good design. Water's Lindy. We have a lot of other alternatives. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you to Aurora.

We have a lot of other alternatives, but we, we humans, we keep coming back to water. Yeah. There is. Only they could put caffeine in it. There's that company, Orca, right? Oh, yeah. We've got to get some of that. Yeah, we've got to try that.

Demo that on the, on the pod. It's great. Let's go to Cody Sanchez. She says, I don't want passive income. want a fucking empire. Let's go, Cody. Let's go. Cody. Cody. Cody. Cody. One of us. One of us. One of us. Passive income isn't real. Yeah. Fake. If you're getting, if you're buying a job, if you're getting income, there's some level of management that comes with it. And even if you hire somebody to manage said income, like a CEO or an asset manager, things like that, you still have to manage that person. And even if you have $100 million

and you put it in government bonds and you're getting $3 million a year, it's like you will forever wonder, like, could I be getting 10%? Yeah, active income, nothing, nothing hits like active income. Working and getting paid, active income. We are pro active income. No, nothing hits like working hard and then making a lot of money from it. It's like the greatest drug on earth. So this is a great question. Adam Draper writes, where's the punk rock of the startup world right now. Twelve years ago, it was Bitcoin. And Matt dot crypto says, it's just funny, he doesn't say crypto, he says longevity, which I somewhat buy. I would say that it's been the Gundo. Nuclear. The Gundo really was like very punk rock and very countercultural and very

independent and very not an industry plant. It's crazy that the internet made it go mainstream. Very quickly. It was one year of punk rock and now it's like, they were getting a hit piece in like four months. Yeah. No, no, not a hippie. It's just like puffy. I know, I know. Like puffies after puffies. And now it's like everyone knows it. And it's like, okay, the game's over. But they were at one point when there was some coverage happening, they, they were worried, like, it was going to be, like, pretty negative.

I do think, I do think longevity and bio could be next. I was talking to Sebastian Malibi, the author of power law. And he was saying that the next big, like, book he wants to write is about bio investors. Yeah. Because it's a very, very different model, very different world. But, like, maybe it could change with AI. Maybe it can change with more financialization. but it is a very like untapped world that is kind of early but clearly very promising.

Let's go to Rajvir. He says on election day, Kalshi outspent the Trump and Harris campaigns on meta ads. Yeah, so this is one. I totally respect Kalshi taking, capturing the moment because their whole thing is much, it's much more about politics and polymarket. Polymark is markets for everything. Kalshi is much more focused on being. a legal, quote unquote, legal way to bet on the election.

So they should have spent millions and millions and they did. The funny thing, though, is they kept, like, congratulating themselves on hitting number one and all this stuff. And it reminded me of that meme where, like, it's like the guy, like, spraying champagne, like in his own mouth and was, like, third on the program or whatever. I think we've tweeted that. So, yeah, I think, yeah, we'll see what happens. Every company needs to continue to kind of reinvent themselves.

I'm sure Colchie will come back and kind of try to create like new markets and momentum. And maybe there's an argument that the way to do it is to is to build a ton of momentum around specific markets. Whereas polymarkets more like platform style approach. Yeah. This is a great one. Bill Gurley says stop using revenue multiples and you will have more clarity on valuations. And it's a reply to Jason Lemkin. For the math, the pencil out and venture capital, we probably need a rebound in public multiples.

VC probably can't make money at 5XARR public comps with Harry Stebbings. It's so funny because Bill Gurley's just coming in like the boss. Yeah, he's kind of, he's basically has the wisdom of Yoda now. He's the only VC from that era that's still extremely online, right? Yeah, that's true. And he's able to just pop in and be like, use it even a multiple, my friend. Oh, you think that's what he's saying? I that was the way I read it as I thought it would just be like a more nuanced analysis of like you know team market structure yeah yeah like monopoly characteristics but over over focus on any one metric is going to lead you astray yeah I mean revenue is really silly when you think about like all the other levers in a model yeah it's kind of crazy to lean on that but yeah let's go to this quote tweet of chamath en glorious capital says thanks Washington post but I only trust autism capital with my news is a serious tweet

a billionaire just wrote. So the crazy thing is how much impact this has. Wasn't that one account you said? Cremew. So he went from 70K followers to 200K followers off of this one tweet by Chimoth. It was a very well-written tweet. I canceled my New York Times

and Washington Post subscriptions and just reallocated the money to subscribe and follow the following folks on X who I believe help get me accurate news. And it was Autism Capital and then Cremew and then a bunch of other people. But what a phenomenon? The poster.

Yeah. And it's true. It's true. Like, you'll just get better. That's why we cover the timeline instead of we don't. We don't cover the news. Yeah, we don't. Let's go to Joe Lonsdale.

Roaring 20s Redux begin shortly. Jeff Lonsdale says, okay, but the PE ratio of the S&P 500 was around 9 to 11 in 1924 to 1925. Boo. I'm on Joe's team here. Yeah, yeah. Run it back. Run it back. Are they both Lonsdale's?

Are they literally brothers or something? They must be related. Okay. If they're not, they should partner up in some way. But yeah, Joe, I'm very bullish on the 20s. I think it's great. I think we're getting there. Yeah.

Yeah, beginning shorty. I think the optimism that there's obviously a massive amount of the animal spirits are back. There's a ton of optimism in the last week in the tech world. Yeah, that's great. But it actually began, I swear it began like, early in the in the 2020s right like there was some obviously a lot of froth froth and bullshit around COVID and markets and stuff like that but there was also the beginning of this whole movement of like we're going to make the world a better place not just with software and

apps but with real world products yeah that's when a lot of that stuff started it's interesting yeah there's also yeah I mean it's interesting because like during the uh the the the the the posseurp crash and the recession, like the fundamental economic drivers of the American economy were very strong. But if you asked people that consumer sentiment, they would all say, it's not working for me, it's not doing well.

And so this was termed by Kyle Scandlin, like the vibe session. And there was this idea that like the vibes feel off, even though we're not seeing like the American consumer collapse. And the American economy kept growing. And we had a very brief recession. We never went into a depression. All the domer stuff didn't come to bear.

So there's something about the fact that we have a very solid foundation to build on right now. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Okay, let's pass that. Let's do. UC Berkeley's Law School apparently had a course called Elon fought the law. The law won on offer.

Alas, it has since been canceled. That's so crazy. So good. That someone was going to teach a whole course on this. And they're just like, it doesn't make sense anymore. he actually won. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. I wish we could see what date it was actually sent. It would be amazing if it was canceled last week. I think it was. This looks recent. This is a recent screenshot. Spring 2025. Yeah.

Right around the corner. They were planning it for spring and just canceled it. Crazy. Yeah. I think the lesson here is he didn't try to fight the law directly. He fought it indirectly. Yeah. Also, a lot of things he won in the micro, like that Tesla shareholder lawsuit,

where the judge tried. to take away his comp package, which all the shareholders had approved, where if he got the stock price to like an insane number, he would get a ton of shares. He did it. Everyone was happy, but then one shareholder fought and like the judge ruled with them, but then he went back to the shareholders and got it done. Yeah. And so, yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with this because there aren't many examples. Shout out to the shareholders. Yeah, it's very, very rare. Yeah, shout out to the shareholders. Seriously. Let's go to Trent Griffin, I think he's like a public markets analyst.

He writes, Alad Gill, I see five layers of AI value. One, invidia and chips, two data centers, three models, four tools for deploying AI, and five workflow services. And I think he misses six, which is energy. Energy is like clearly the next thing. And it's been a little bit of a champagne or a cocktail position in the sense that people talk about it at cocktail parties. Oh, energy is going to be really important. Sam Altman's investing in it, but the market hasn't really moved on it.

but they're starting to right now. It's just starting right now. Seven posters, right? Without people like Roon and other top AI posters, almost none of this works, right? Posters are moving the market. I mean, in terms of AI value, there are legitimately dozens of people

that are going to build million dollar businesses off of AI related content. Yeah. Whether it's YouTube videos or how to, tutorials, courses, or podcasts, Like, there are a number of AI podcasts that have gotten really big. Alad Gill has a great AI podcast. I mean, he's monetizing it differently through a fund, but like, nevertheless, like, he is

part of the AI value chain, even as a capital allocator. Yeah. It is interesting. But of course, you got to boil it down five. You don't want to go too crazy. But, but that's a fascinating tweet. Let's go to Scotty Pippin. I didn't even realize he was still using X.

That's amazing. Scottie. So Scottie Pippin writes, just woke up from a wild dream, Satoshi Nakamomobo. He said, and he laughed at the price of Bitcoin. Too low, he said. I'm taking it higher. You haven't seen anything yet. Get ready.

2025 is going to be crazy. I love this trend of athletes, like retiring and then coming back to post. Yeah. Because you can have a whole cultural. He still has his jersey in the picture. Yeah, it's amazing. You can have this whole cultural resurgence, right? Because when people see Scotty Pippen in the feed, they're going to pay attention, right?

That's great. A.B. has done this, I think, really well throughout the last whatever year as well. Yeah. Bullish on Scotty and Bitcoin. Very bullish. Let's go to Nikita Beer. I can't help but feel like we're about to enter one of the most insane times to own risk assets. And Amit replies, is a Lambo a risk asset?

And I hate to break it to you, bro. It's not a hard asset. It's a hard asset. You want to get into the equity. As long as you don't put any too much mileage on it. Yeah, but most Lambos are depreciating. Very few. Maybe you get a kuntosh if you're looking for something,

but even that's not a risk. Yeah, I think Pachy was saying something earlier as well. He's like, I feel very under allocated to tech and crypto, even though his side from his media business is like probably 95% tech and crypto. Yeah. So yeah, the FOMO is starting. Yeah. Great time to own risk assets.

Nikita also knows he can risk it all. Yeah. And worst case, he'll just build another app and flip it. Flip it. Did you see his other tweet about millionaires in the post-ZERP era are pointless? Yeah. It's all about being a centi-millionaire is what, and we're going to call them senties. Yeah.

Which is very funny because, like, I mean, we know. Centars. We know a lot of centi-millionaires, and that's not the word they use. Like, we all know the word that they use. It's not senties. So he's kind of telling on himself that he doesn't know, like, the real word. Exactly. Yeah.

But hopefully he gets there. Hopefully he learns the real word. word he's kind of acting like one of those guys that moves to San Francisco and a San Fran you know you don't really sound like yeah a real a real sentie millionaire but someone will clue you in I would my I would caution you if you're in Lake Como don't drop senti because you know George Clooney's gonna spit out his screaming eagle if he hears you no I would I think Akita should get on to really capture the long tail of of his fans at can't afford intro yep created copy

trading subscription oh there you guys charge $10,000 a month. There you go. And some carry on it too, because I think he would have probably like 10,000 people that would be like, yeah, I'm going to yolo with Nikita. Hell yeah. I'm riding. I'm riding into the risk assets.

And this is the one we got to close on. Jay Alto says some creators do it for the clout. Some creators do it for the money. But this is why the real ones do it. And it's a clip of the founder of Patreon giving some long speech about who cares. We do it for the money. We just want to be ultra clear about this. If you're listening, you're going to hear a lot of ads

and you're going to hear a lot of monetization. So get ready. Buckle up. Lock in, lever up. Welcome to technology brothers. Thanks for listening. I think we've got to get on with Taipei. I actually have to get to Las Vegas

to meet with the new administration. As one does. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, everyone. Good doing business with you.