TBPN - Memecoin Takeover, TB hits NYC, The Digital Trenches, Don't Scoop Me Bro, The Biggest Podcast Deal Ever

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We're here in New York City, the city that never sleeps, the big Apple, working on the biggest podcast deal of all time. Something that will truly shake the industry to its core. Yeah. They will write history books. The kind of story that hits PR Newswire and the website shuts down. It basically, it's like a deed-off because so many people are headed there at the same time. Yeah, I mean, we have to wear costumes when you go outside because so many reporters are trying to scoop this.

Yeah. It's that big of a deal. But it's good to be here. We're very excited. I saw a tech journalist sort of undercover as like, not undercover, but on top of horses that police officer. Oh, no. Across the street from our hotel.

Yeah, yeah. We're staying at the Bowery. They can't stay away from the horses, even when they're undercover. Yeah. I mean, it's the best. Relating. You get, you know, the second. call them out, then they just gallop off.

Exactly. Yeah. It's dangerous. So it's kind of a smart move. How was your weekend? My weekend was good. I was supposed to go home. Yeah.

And then ended up extending our Airbnb for another week. That's good. And then, yeah, it was just, it was just, I spent the entire weekend in sort of stunned disbelief that we had our first presidential meme coins. and it was that happened Friday night right? No, that was Saturday night. During the irony of launching it when the most terminally online group of people

in any tech adjacent industry were all in one place, not on their computers. Like he basically was trying to mug them with that of like, you know, but the real DGAMs were still on their phones and made it. Yeah, of course, of course. I was thinking about it and I was,

I would guess that 10-20 funds returned their entire fund off of just that. I don't think any funds are set up to actually make that investment on the right time horizon. It's not even just the getting approval because most funds, you know, you need two GPs to sign out, right? You're giving crypto funds too much. I don't think they keep enough in like a hot wallet. It had to be in your phantom, like, at that moment for you to be able to move that. Yeah, I'm just saying, let's say, if you got in, you know, you could have easily. They're not just going to want you to be able to just wire that much that fast.

Okay, I'm thinking of a certain GP. Sure. Who did? He doesn't have control issues. Yeah, yeah. If you're a solo GP, you're running a fun. I wouldn't even call it. You're at that point.

But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There were definitely capital allocators who made major plays.

Yeah, for everyone, for every, you know, as long as you're seeing individuals printing, there are funds printing to you. Sure. They're just not posting screenshots. Yes. Well, let's go, let's go through. Obviously, it's the inauguration. I was in D.C. the last two days.

I've had more than my fill of. And you scooped Teddy. Oh, yeah. That's just bill. Yeah, Teddy. He was scooping. He was trying to scoop, but I scooped him back. He was spotted outside of Peter Thiel's inauguration party.

I got a video of him standing out in the cold with the camera going TMZ mode on all the tech founders. People were asking why is why did Peter invite Ted to his party? And it's like, no, he's standing outside. And he does that now. Like that is his beat. So he's officially with the New York Times. He used to write with Puck News. I think he was maybe the New York Times before.

But he went back to the New York Times and was officially on the Elon beat. So anything around Elon, which is vaguely like tech and politics, obviously, TL that's in there. Yeah. And I ran into him in Las Vegas doing the exact same thing, literally just standing in the lobby of the four seasons, trying to kind of overhear conversations and like go up to people and be like, oh, hey, like, what are you here? He's on the circuit. Yeah. But it's funny because like the whole, like the end result of the piece is always like, oh, all these shadowy figures are coming together. You should be scared.

New York Times reader. But like when he's there, he's like laughing, drinking, having fun. Like, I always go what up to. I always say what up to him and then I just like mess with him and try and like, you know, do something funny. Yeah. So every time, if you see a New York Times reporter hanging out, pull out your phone, scoop it. It's free clicks. You got to monetize these people.

Just give him a nudge say, hey, you look great. You look better in a tailored suit. I agree. Yeah. Because you scooped him. He was looking sharp, but he was not wearing a suit. It didn't look like he belonged to the party. He didn't.

Maybe that's why he got turned away. Yeah. You just classed it up a little bit, Teddy. We'd welcome your idea and you could overhear everyone's conversation. It's funny that most parties, most parties, if somebody is saying, hey, I'm a New York Times, like, reporter. I thought to, like, join. A lot of people would be like, sure, let's zip them out and come on in. Like, it's glamorous, like the New York Times.

It's going to worry about it. And then this is, yeah, yeah. You stand outside. You stand outside. You stand outside. You stand outside. Secret service. I had to, my flight was two hours late.

I had to show up to the point with my suit. with my suitcase and backpack. And so the Secret Service had to go through every single sock and piece of underwear. I feel like some of the brothers are going to roast you for having a backpack. It's not very... That's very TV coded. It was terrible. They should have the attaché.

Is it like a Jansport? Dan sport? No, it's actually the same backpack as Luigi Mangione had. Whoa. Yeah. It's a highly rented backpack. He was just... Oh, yeah. It just bought like the most popular one. I forget what the brand is, but it works pretty well.

Let's go through some posts. we'll start with politics, then we'll try and move on to politics, because as you know, we never talk about politics. Just move on, start with politics and then move on politics. I mean, literally, there's like four politics stories, but they are tech related. The first one is about Intel. Dylan Patel was doing some snooping on where the various jets are right now, the private jets. So he says, this was on January 17th. He says, Elon's jet is in Florida, global foundry's jet is in Florida, Qualcomm's jet is in Florida. If in case anyone was wondering what's going on with Intel,

they are at Mar-a-Lago, Make America Great Again, can only be true if Intel is saved. I thought this is very, very interesting reporting and very cool that all of these different companies are coming together. It's a little sad that, like, of course, if you want to save Intel, Unique, Milan involved, but... Yeah, the only... My initial reaction there is that many large companies...

...gets were in Florida... kissing the ring all weekend. So it's hard to, you know, I'm sure there's more back story there. Well, you can go to the reporting that happened the next day on the 18th when there's a headline here. Elon Musk reportedly emerges as a potential Intel buyer involving Qualcomm and global founders in this blockbuster deal. Yeah. Did you ever do a documentary on Intel or anything? I did on Intel, never on Qualcomm. Why have they? What's the high level on why they? don't seem to have any momentum as a business, just mismanagement. Missed mobile mainly.

Yeah, that's the big one. We got some beverages delivered, so we got to hop over the... I can actually have it. Yeah, you go right. But yeah, the high level on Intel is that they missed mobile and they were printing money and server. And so they made a ton of money selling chips for servers. But then mobile came and Arm became the standard process. processor, which was, Arm is like a licensing company.

They don't actually have a foundry. And so when you hear about TSM making Apple Silicon, Apple Silicon is a chip that is very power efficient because it runs off of the Arm architecture, which is designed for like not super high performance computing, but low power consumption. So your phone doesn't get hot. It lasts almost a year sometimes, as you know. My phone.

Yeah. My phone gets 365. When I get three or four posts all doing pretty well, my phone starts. Just this mess mouth. You got to turn this and have some notifications off. But what wound up happening is that. Luke warm Red Bull free. Yeah, it's terrible.

Red Bull future is pretty proud of us. But so what winds up happening is that these low power chips, people thought, oh, they're just useful in cell phones. Turns out that having good price and performance per watt and per energy usage is very important. And then eventually those scaled up to be what's in laptops and then eventually even what's in the server. And so Intel kind of missed that. And then they also had a variety of problems going back and forth with like, are they a foundry or are they just a design chip? Like Arm, you would never, you would never be like, oh, I need a new gaming chip.

I'm going to go get an arm processor. Arm is like the architecture. And you would also never say, I would, oh, for my next gaming rig, I really want a TSM fab chip. Like, no, you say Nvidia, right? I mean, the real hardos. They want to go straight from Taiwan.

Yeah. They go pick up their chips. Only like the same analysis. It's like buying, like, you know, it's like watch collectors, right? They want to go and they want to feel it. They want to really inspect it. Yeah.

They want to know what they're running on when they're in the digital trenches. Yeah. And so Intel had a lot of trouble driving down to the more advanced nodes, like three nanometer, five nanometer. They fell behind. And then Apple switch from Intel to Apple Silicon. That was like kind of, you know, a death now. And they've been really, really struggling.

And then they fired their CEO. And so it's been kind of a mess of a company. And then even with the chips act, there was a lot of criticism because, like, it was great. a headline number, oh, America's going to invest a ton of money in semiconductors. That makes tons of sense. Like everyone's on board with that. But I believe Ben Thompson's argument was that it should have been set up a lot more like Operation Warp Speed, which the structure of was guaranteed buying, not sending money for specific

projects. So just saying, hey, we're essentially going to create a strategic GPU reserve. If you can manufacture a super fast GPU on three nanometer in the United States, the United States using American labor, we will buy a hundred. You will buy 100,000 of them and just like build a cluster. And so then it's like everyone can keep. The money set aside for the chips act hasn't really been getting. It hasn't really gone to Intel.

Yeah, exactly. And so I used to have like kind of like a, you know that fork in the road meme, the, the dark castle versus like the sunny day. I used to argue that like we would probably be better off if Elon had bought Intel instead buying X. But who knows? Now he's going to get both. So we love to see that.

Moving on to the next tech political story, TikTok has been going back and forth. It's banned one minute. It's unbanned the next. It definitely put a fire under X's ass because they launched their video feed. Yeah. Which is very cool. Which was in the works.

Oh, for sure. But it was like perfect timing to launch it. But it's crazy. I was. So Brandon, my former teammate and good friend. Jacob. Jacobi. You guys all know about Jacobi. So Jacobi is now the

only designer at X. Yeah. And I texted Jacoby Saturday night because we always go back and forth whenever a UFC fight is happening. Yeah, no response. And so I message him like as you know,

the Marab Umar fight was getting settled. And he no, you know, he responded later like, what? I didn't catch it or something like that. And I was like, what? Like, are you... You're crazy? Are you crazy? Of course, they were in a war room trying to ship out.

The video was one designer. Nice. So anyways, bravo to the whole video. Yeah, I'm excited to take advantage of it. I think there's some really... I think it'll be really big for the growth of the show. So expect more vertical content from us. So here's what I don't understand.

I don't know how to go about me. So I can see like the Jeff Lewis temp check videos working there. Yep. Digital, you know, video native shit. posting will probably be a format, but is much harder to do because you have to play a character. So I'm interested to see what sort of novel formats and types of content actually come out. Otherwise, is it just like video means? Yeah, I think the default post on X that, you know, we'd love to react to on the show is like a very concise, like, two sentence posts that has some humor and also some insight.

you know, I'm thinking of like the, the Roon shape rotator versus word cell post or, or Salana just being like Moon should be a state, one of these like all-time bangers, banger archive, that type of content. And as it became easier and easier to edit image memes on your phone, many people that take posting on X seriously installed some sort of Photoshop app on their phone and we're able to, or image flip as a meme generator that I'm just using the browser. And I think that the tooling will get better

to do video stuff, especially with AI, where you'll be able to say, okay, I want the Patrick Bateman walking into the office in American Psycho with listening to the headphones, but change out the song for this song. And then, oh, and deep fake. Make it AOC. Yeah, exactly.

And so you'll be able to describe that. Maybe in X, in Grok, ideally, but in a third party app, He's generating slop at scale. Slop, but I mean, if it's done, if it's done, if it's done artistically and there's an inspiration there and it's timely, like, I think it can be very, very good. So, yeah. So TikTok's been going back and forth getting banned, unbanned. We talked about how the Supreme Court upheld the ban.

It's now been called. There was also a bunch of players over the weekend submitting by Ms. Mr. Exused. Yeah, we have a perplexity post here from McKay Quigley. Proplexity is teetering towards being pure slop. Your competitors have caught up to you while you waste time with this nonsensical headline baiting marketing drivel.

There's now no reason for me to use your stacking product. Jesus, brutal. This won't be popular, but they need a wake-up call. Yeah, perplexity AI makes bid to merge with TikTok US. I mean, a lot of people were throwing these out there. I wonder if this was real or if this was like, I mean, they say headline baiting marketing dribble. I don't know if McKay knew something, but.

Is there? We were even show so good. I issued a bid. Here's the thing. I am, I don't know. We were going to issue a bid to buy Red Book. Oh, yeah. Or I think it's a very.

Or Do you in. Yeah, yeah. No, Red Note is a very strategic asset for the U.S. Because we're one-shotting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Their best and brightest. Exactly. But I don't know.

I think it's cute that it's a good way to get attention to submit a bid to buy TikTok. But is there anybody on a lot? earth that could pay more that than or Oracle or Walmart or Elon. A coalition of and if it's going to require a hundred billion dollars is there anybody that would actually like I have to imagine some of these bidders are like

oh we'll give you you know 20 billion and like you know you'll get some type of royal you know yeah like weird payout structures like that and so as I understand it now Trump has paused the ban allowing TikTok to operate And he clearly negotiated to have the copy in the ban messaging say thank you to President Trump or said something to that agree. Thank you to Trump for, you know, working with us to find a solution. So, you know, some real putting on an art of the deal clinic apparently because they don't just thank president. You know, they're not. Why would he's clearly fessing them? Yeah. This has like been pressure from the right for the entire time.

pressure on TikTok. So now, yeah, I mean, I think I think you really does have a lot of leverage. Yeah. And the fate of TikTok hangs in the balance and it's up to Trump and he has his thumb out ready to go thumbs up or thumbs down on anything and can make demands. And maybe that's just more Project Texas stuff, more, you know, relocating. Maybe that's a sale or forced divestiture. Maybe it's shut up at least he has the leverage again.

I would be incredibly shocked and disappointed. if all of this turns into like a project Texas V2 like it's just not enough yeah no no no the algorithm specifically cannot be it's not about the data no like people are going to share all that stuff online anyway so it's not about oh you know that's really not what it's about it's about the fact that they can put their finger on the scale and you talk to Steinman and he was like even if the app changed hands and was under new ownership

it is impossible to remove all the possible backdoors because there's just so many and it's so complex. Such a large application. Exactly. Yeah, that's why I've firmly been in favor of just letting the thing die. Yeah. Letting all of those users flood back to great American big tech companies. And so Signal says with TikTok temporarily closed, maybe it's time to rethink how we use the internet.

Imagine if Instagram shut down at 9 p.m. like a grocery store or X closed at 11 p.m. open late, but not 24-7. We might all feel a little less pressure to read, to post, to exist online all the time. Maybe we'd sleep better, feel calmer, even be happier, a digital commons with operating hours enforcing temporal boundaries. It would disrupt the dopamine factory, recalibrate the rhythm of online life, and impose artificial scarcity to make digital engagement feel intentional and not compulsive. Can you imagine the flood of posts that would go up at like 9 a.m. every morning. Yeah, store opens. It's like Black Friday, rush it in. I got to get my barrel. I breakfast. pod, June.

Oh yeah, all the idea. It would be fun. People would be very wild. That's the kind of thing. Never does. Fun to think about it. It would be an interesting statement, though, for a social media company to say, hey, Christmas morning, we're going to be closing down for just a few hours,

spend it with your family. Because these apps are so addictive that even in a moment like Christmas Day, you're going to check it 20 times before. man. It's brutal. It's insane. So Cormack here says never depend on a single platform. I'm glad we switched to Instagram months ago.

And the Oasis Water app has 43K followers on TikTok, but TikTok is unavailable and 104,000 followers on Instagram. Yeah, so Cormac, one of our players on PMF or Die. Awesome. Absolute Savage. So he has just like figured out how to get attention with, um, with this sort of short form video. And this is what I had been saying in previous episodes,

smart creators and business owners are we're not saying, I just hope it doesn't get banned. Yeah. I'm just going to keep doing my thing. Yeah. No, I'll keep using the app. Yeah. If my customers are there.

But ultimately, I'm going to start to build my audience backup elsewhere. Yeah. Smart. Should we talk about Wanderer before we go into Trump coin? We are stuck in a hotel. right now. The lighting is terrible. There's no mistakes to fulfill. It's a very nice hotel, but everything sucks about this place. The only thing, we won't do their credit, they printed out

all of our posts. They did a really beautiful red, red envelope. But no, can't thank the Wander guys enough last week when we were going through evacuation stuff. It's been really helpful. Have been super helpful. So you have to show up wander. If you look for a place to stay. We're excited. We can't announce anything yet, but at some point this year, we will be driving across the country and sampling a number of longers. That's going to be great. I'm looking forward to that. We have that to look forward to.

Okay, let's move on to Trump coin. You probably heard about it already, but we got some good posts about it. Tristan Thompson says, my phone has been buzzing for the last two days with friends and family asking about crypto and whether they should buy Trump. I've been deep in the crypto space and in the trenches for the last 10 months, working to make the most of this cycle. as a major wealth opportunity. Why did you share it? Is this a joke? No, I mean, it's just Simpson's an NBA player.

So Tristan Thompson, well, talent is a basketball player. He was in dating or married, has a kid with one of the Kardashians. Okay. People were saying that he fumbled a Kardashian. So his opinion doesn't matter. Matter.

But this thread was interesting. One thing is historically when you've seen pro athletes start to post. about crypto. That is a top signal. It's been a reliable top signal. However, this time might be different. But I did have another moment today.

I went to see my Taylor. And he asked me, like, you know, he's like, I'm starting to think about buying some crypto. And I was like, when you're taxi drivers, day trading, pro athletes are telling you to go all in and you're fine, you know, your, bespoke. Taylor is by Trump coin. It's a little rough out there. Yeah. I mean, it's not rough. It's just, it's feverish. Veverish. And now is the time

to create, so here's here. Yeah, yeah. So here's here. Yeah, tell them. This is a strategy. Create a new account. Post every single day. This is the top. Once an hour. Top. Top. Top. And then delete all the false time. And then just repost the quote. And then next cycle.

Yeah. Next cycle. Yeah. And next cycle. last time. Yeah, yeah, and next cycle, just keep doing it, keep doing it. Yeah, people were for good, but you did that. That's great. Yeah, I was laughing at the idea of starting two hedge funds, like true north, true north capital and true south capital. One just goes turbo long the market.

The other goes to go south the market or short the market. And then you just shut the one down and you're just like, look at my returns. I'm time to raise fun too. It's 10 times larger. Yeah, we had a bad. We had a bad. No, no, you shut down the other one and you just don't even race for it. Yeah.

So it's like, oh, yeah. like the market did go down. True South Capital was the one that called it. You got to pile into this thing. Yeah. Yeah. But don't ask me about true North capital that had half the AUF. I think it's a zeroed out. Yeah, exactly. That one's zero. But like, you're not investing in that one. You're investing in the one that went up 2,000 percent. Mert from Helius says, hey, very nice soul. All time high you got there. Would be a shame if I were to just visit the Patec Philippe boutique at the Malt tomorrow. I love this. Great pose. Yeah, I think it's been doing very well in the, in the Solana world lately. Yeah, I mean, one way to reduce the cell pressure is just, you know, buy well, just rotate my watches. Take out, you know, an asset back loan against your Salana.

Yeah. This was, this is one of the things people were frustrated with about the Trump coin was actually people were like, yeah, it's been great. I made 10 million on Trump coin, but everyone's rotating out of Doge, which I have so much money. It's like It's all just sloshing around It's all just nonsense money I like this one from Pomp He says Berkshire Hathaway is the boomer meme coin

It was started by the OG financial influencer Buffett used to buy a stock And then go shill them in national newspapers magazines Nothing wrong with Buffett Berkshire But important to understand meme coins are not new Yeah I mean perfect bait For all anybody that under Anybody that owns stock

I need to, like, tears about stuff like cash flow or, like, durable goods or brand. Yeah, or book value or any of those ridiculous. Expected earnings. Yeah. No, I do. So his point that he obviously packaged this up in a way to just piss off as many people as possible. But his point of being that assets trade based on their sort of memetic potential, right, is. Yeah.

I mean, it is true about the Buffett strategy. remember when he rescued Bank of America and during the 08 financial crisis, Bank of America was down real bad and Buffett came in and bought a ton of the stock. And then the next day, front page op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on why Bank of America is going to make it through while AIG and Lehman are failing. Yeah. And so it was just a huge signal to the market that like this is the bottom. Buffett's going to back up the truck to save this company. So you can get in safely now. And it's and it was correct in that.

He was going to save that company, but it was also like marketing. Marketing. Yeah, exactly. Carried no interest says, I don't think everyone is fully comprehending what just happened. Trump just facilitated the single greatest wealth transfer creation event in history. He also sent a message I support crypto degeneracy. He now has the market. He now has the power to reset how crypto works entirely as it relates to capital markets.

We might see searchers slash funds launching coins tied to acquisitions, dividends in the next year. What's stopping me from dropping the carried interest coin? using the proceeds to fund acquisitions and tying tying dividends to coin holders might happen in the next year. Everyone wants to launch a coin now. Yeah. I think unless you're a Trump, it's really going to be difficult. Wouldn't recommend it, but...

Carries broader, I think, the interesting thing here is that crypto has always had tremendous potential. The technology is obviously incredible in so many ways. The technology was always held back by the regulatory environment. So if you wanted... to make a token represent equity. Well, okay, it's so,

securities are so regulated in so many ways that it will cost you millions of dollars a year to actually do this. So it's not viable economically. And then that kind of goes against crypto, which is about like efficient capital formation. And so

yeah, I'm interested to see what happens here. It, um, uh, I mean, it is wild that I do think that Trump's team was very specific about positioning the tokens as memes. Yeah. Like you were buying memes. Yeah.

And then Melania launched, I think, today. Yeah, she, I think, pretty clearly. The official Melania meme is live. You can buy Melania now. Melania meme.com. Yeah. They're using that name. Yeah, they're trying to say that, like, there's no.

And it's crazy. I do think that, um, it, For some reason, Trump has not actually gotten that much attention around how hard he's been selling into his fan. You know, his basically, you know, he apparently in the first 24 hours, he sold $500 million of the token. I'm sure he's sold. What did the lone rangers say? It was like, imagine George Washington passing around the tri-corner hat. After, hey, they burned down my house.

Yeah. Growing at 20. Yeah. I was saying to a avid Trump enthusiast, I was saying like give me the rationale for why this is not kind of sad. Yeah. And his point of view was think of it as a way for Trump supporters to basically transfer wealth to Trump in a more, you know, in a way that gives them some potential thumb side or whatever. but really it is a wealth transfer because there's not, to be clear, there's no wealth creation with meme coins, right?

It used to be, if you wanted to transfer money into wealth, he had to buy Trump stakes and then stay at the Trump Tower and do all those things. But all those are much lower margin. Then, you know, for every dollar you buy, he gets 10 essentially. Yeah. Liquidity potentially. Although here's Bologi, kind of breaking down the math behind this, he says a meme coin is a zero-sum lottery.

There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything. It's actually negative sum if the platform takes a cut. So coming out as anti-memecoin, abolish obviously very pro-crypto, but very skeptical here. The interesting thing, though, is that there's been so many of these high-profile coins that seemingly should have been zeros, but never were. I have no idea what Doge actually trades at right now. Billions.

Everybody would have said, oh, it spikes to $100 billion and then... It was the intention of the creator of Doge for it to go to zero as a lesson for the crypto DGents. And then that turned it into a countercultural meme amongst the crypto community. And it became a rallying cry for, you can't take us down. Very bizarre. Jeff Lewis, this was a very interesting post. He says, new counterculture just dropped. Pro crypto, anti-memecoin will be.

interesting to see how it develops. Yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of new battle lines being drawn because, I mean, I was talking to somebody on Saturday night about the, the crypto strategic reserve. They were very, very pro Bitcoin in the strategic reserve, very anti anything else being in the crypto reserve. Yeah. And would think, and actually thought that if they put, I forget exactly which stable coin in, it would completely. I think the big argument, I mean, the argument against meme coins as actual finance, you know, it's effectively a gambling product. Yeah. Entertainment product similar to going to Las Vegas, right?

Yeah. I had posted yesterday that tokens are the poker chips of the Matrix, right? Yep. Yep. Yep. I think specifically what launching Melania less than 24 hours after Trump, was that there's no scarcity, right? You can just make these. I have no idea. And then people were trying to, people were trying to pin, people think they found Baron Trump's address and they were, you know, and they were looking at all that one immediately.

Yeah, and they were just like ripping. Pump even faster. Yeah, crazy. Bologi summarizes the Overton window has been smashed. Everything is now legal. Many startups will try to raise funds by issuing tokens as explicit crypto equity as context, the SEC distorted the market in the last decade by forcing founders to obscure the obvious analogy between tokens and equity. But there's nothing morally wrong about with moving equity from spreadsheets to NASDAX to blockchains. Indeed, from a technical perspective,

it's far better to represent equities on chain. You can hold them in a wallet, price them with an API call, and track them on an explorer. You can easily issue dividends, execute buybacks, and manage vesting schedules. And from a financial perspective, there's no contest between the global market of crypto investors and the local market for any given city, but that shouldn't mean short-term behavior. Founders can and should implement lockups, drag along, co-sale rates, and the like. All these conventions align long-term interests of investors and founders. Yeah, so breaking this down a little bit for people that don't know, historically when these sort of high-profile crypto projects are launching where they've raised equity from traditional VCs, and then they'll typically raise

attach a token warrant, which means the investors are buying equity. Let's say, you know, when Yuga Labs was doing their $4 billion seed round, the investors were buying equity, and then they had a token warrant that would give them token. A lot of tokens, you know, basically, yeah, proportional amount of tokens at a future date if the company were to launch a token. And the token, though, was actually, would be launched by these sort of very complicated foundations that were typically offshore so they'd be in like the British Virgin Islands or like, you know, places like Panama where there's just sort of more murky, less scrutiny around

securities law and stuff like that. And then the foundations would have like independent board members and all this stuff. And so they'd end up being these super complicated structures where people would be like, oh, you know, if OpenC launched a token, look at all the fees they're doing, you know, look at, think about, and it's like, well, the token actually cannot capture the cash flows of the business, right? Like legally, no token except these sort of direct and very clear violations of securities law are capturing. And so they would do different stuff where they would use fees to buy back the token, which would reduce the supply and increase the device, which companies do as well. Sure. But anyways, it all like created a lot of friction to on-chain capital formation. Yeah. And so

The Mobology's point is that I don't know if public, it's hard, you know, I'm sure we could, this would actually be worth having him on the show to talk about some of this stuff. I think there's an argument that you don't want your cap table on a public blockchain that everybody can see because then if you have somebody that owns 15% of your company and they start selling and trading, it could spook everybody, right? Because that does happen, right? Like a VC will say, you know what, this got a little bit like inflated and you don't want like a run on the bank.

Yeah, yeah. Your startup, like locking up your investors essentially for like the 10-year ride can be very good. Yeah. And there's plenty of times when. No, even companies will want to offer opportunities for liquidity for investors and employees and stuff like that. But you don't, you don't necessarily want the press to be able to see like, oh, look at all these and or all these shareholder selling or whatever. Exactly. Yeah.

Welcome back to technology brothers. Wait. I just thought of a new segment. Should we get a window that's just in a frame like the size gong called the Overton window and to smash it on best of occasions? That's good. Because there was a few moments this weekend where you could have, you know, with maybe like one of those glass breakers. Yeah. I think the Overson window shattered in terms of what was appropriate formal wear.

Yeah. We saw a lot of rough rented tuxedos out there. We got a post from Gabe Azar, quoting Beth. He says he's wearing the finest of rented tucks on my way to the DC inaugural crypto ball. See you there? And Gabe asks, how do the tech bros think about, feel about rented tuxedos? Some have said you should buy a tuxedo before you are 30. I agree.

I don't think, I don't think rent a tuxedo. Just be in tuxedosos more. Yes. There are levels to this. Yeah, yeah. You need to be able to rent a tuxedo on short notice. You need to get a tuxedo. Then you need to get a tailored tuxedo.

I think, well, I think. Spoke. And then you also need to learn how to tie a bow tie yourself in under five seconds. Yeah. Like kind of like a Rubik's Cube. Essentially. So it took me a while to learn, but I finally learned. And it looks great because at the end of the night, you, you untie it and it hangs down.

And everyone knows, oh, that guy can tie the bow tie. He doesn't have the clip on. Yeah. But normally I need to, like, watch the YouTube video and kind of like fumble with it a few times to get a couple shots on gold to get it perfect. This time, putting on my tuxedo, nailed it on the first try. In the airport? No, this was the second day. So I was in the hotel room, but I threw it on and I was running a little bit late. Dinner was about to start. And I threw on the bow tie and I nail it on the first, on the first try perfectly. And I was like,

I'm so ready. It felt great. So yeah, but anyways, don't, there's no reason to shame anybody for for renting a tuxedo. I do think this rule of, own a tuxedo before you're 30 is a good rule though yeah and better than showing up in loungeware like some people did yeah yeah yeah yeah and uh jizances taylor is romualdo pelle a 90 year old italian immigrant in ohio i love this guy yeah she's just been working for 90 years on fine suits and yeah you need to get a tailor you need to have someone develop a relationship develop a relationship. And yeah, there's just a lot of posts about the inauguration.

I don't know. Did you listen to the speech? I thought this is wild. So Dahlian says a White House website right now, incredible. And Trump is just continuing to prove that there really are no rules. And laws, you know, laws and norms really don't apply unless you want them to. Because underneath this picture, I think it just said America's back or something like that. But it was just hilarious because, I mean, super aggressive.

It's just dunking on the previous administration. The old iconic, pretty firm dunk for the White House website. But respect to the engineers and got this up so quickly after the transfer of power, it must have been. No, the transfer happens, I think, like, at the moment that. Well, I know, but you have to imagine it's, it's, sorry, my password's not really working. Did you see the ad hoc website? The X handle turned over and Trump sent the first tweet from. the POTUS account and people hadn't refreshed their cookies or their cash so it looked like

it was from Biden because it hadn't refreshed that part. I think that's what happens. It was very odd. Growing Daniel says we finally have, wow, Biden can post now. It would have been a wild post for Biden to post. Daniel says, we finally have a student of the green lines in the executive branch. Nothing can stop American now. And it's a photo of J.D. Vance with the vice president of China this morning. And they are both standing up perfectly straight.

Perfect green lines. I think you nailed it. It's kind of wild that we can be in such a Cold War and the VP still comes through. Yeah, yeah. You got to do that. It's got a negotiation. But you got to be, you know, do they even

Han Jung? Han Jung here. Got a kind of a nervous smirk going on. Yeah, he looks a lot less at ease than JD. And JD has the, you build a pole. Yeah. A pole, you know. Yeah.

And so, he's looking good. Jadie's dressed well there. I don't think the men's guys can say anything. Yeah, the men'swear guys in shambles. I'm still waiting for the men'swear guy breakdown of, uh, who's that guy that showed up in basketball shorts, Federman? I mean, how do you even break that down? you just say that better men's in basketball shorts.

I hope that the menswear guy does a thread and he's just like, these are the perfect, this is the perfect way to wear basketball shorts. They should be breaking right at the knee, not too baggy, not too tight. He absolutely nailed it. This is the definition of lounge wear. This is fantastic athletic wear. And he did nothing wrong. And then he's like, J.D. Vance's suit is two inches too short.

It's terrible. It's just like the most partisan guy. Yeah, it's kind of, it's good. for JD to be, you know, I'm working with this 90-year-old Taylor who's like, you know, been doing this because for the menswear guy to attack JD, he has to attack the 90-year-old Taylor. There you go. So that guy's providing some, some cover. Yeah. Have you seen this rumor going around that Vivek Ramaswamy is departing Doge amid friction with staff with a source close to Trump saying that Vivek has worn out his welcome according to CBS news? I think this is fake news. I think there's community notes on the, I think it hasn't been announced. People are saying Vivek still going to do. He needs something, but it's back and forth. Oh, I heard out yet.

I felt like this afternoon it seemed like he was making a run at Ohio, governor. Yeah, we talked about that on the last show. Certainly seems like that would be a possibility. But he's been around. And I saw Sager and Jetty posting about, I think Vivek was going into the capital with a group of people that were all, everyone else that was joining the administration. that looked like he was still in the game. I don't know.

We'll see how it plays out, but you'll hear about it here first. We will keep breaking. We'll keep breaking news. Yeah, yeah, clearly. We really did our homework on that one. Yeah. That's why you listen to this show. Not for the facts.

Not for the fact. For the general point of view on unknown circumstances. A general... At Technology Brothers, we're here to provide a general point of view on our own activities and far away places. Exactly. We really have no insight to do. I mean, whatever best it takes

was we pulled out. So this was actually funny. So the former global editor of TechCrunch announced that he was leaving last week. And I pinged him and I was like, hey, you know, you've been running TechCrunch?

He was like, I'm looking, he's like, open to work kind of thing. So I pinged him. And he's like, I'm like, you know, check it out. Like, let's talk. And he responds. I don't, I love what you're doing.

I'm not sure. I can really be helpful. I'm really looking to build, you know, a newsroom. And I was like, what? Like, you don't, we don't look like two guys that would have a newsroom. Come on. Like, we have the best, we have the top producer in the, in the country. I mean, you know, the newsroom is.

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, a newsroom. We're going to have a newsroom of shit posters that is the newsroom. Yeah, exactly. X is the newsroom. Yeah, one of my favorite moments from, like, one of the first episodes was where we pulled up the new Adam Newman post. we're like, oh, Adam Newman's back in the game. He started a new company.

Like, did you read the article? No. Neither of us did. And we're like, but we get the gist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's bad act. The vibe's great. Let's move on.

Yeah. Let's go on to some more tech-focused timeline, some more VC-focused timeline. Moving on from the inauguration, we got Seth Rosenberg saying VCs sounds smart to other VCs via pessimism and founders via optimism. Do you need there's a little code switching thing going on in VC lingo world? Oh, I mean, you put four VCs together and they will just trash any company. Yeah, they really do, they really do need to sound smart that way. Yeah.

And also just, I mean, it also like problems in the world and all the things that were, I'm so aware of how bad things are and that's why I'm going to be able to fix it. Part of it is, yeah, part of it too is for every company that, that has a, competitive fundraise. There's a bunch of ECs that would have wanted to do the deal that would have been a good chance. And so you're always going to look at way more things. Yep. And if you're actually bidding on

competitive companies, you're going to issue more term sheets than you actually do deals. Very few funds have kind of like a even a 90% of it. Right. It's kind of it's pretty hard to do unless you're doing just weird stuff. Which also is a strategy that works. But that just means there's this going to you this general sort of frustration.

Constable overpaid and never taking board seats. No, I mean, but I'm just saying that the sort of the frustration with wanting to do a deal can shift into pessimism. Yep. And then, yeah, I think if you're talking, VCs talking to founders, nobody wants to talk to a pessimistic, you know, super pessimistic or, you know, talk to people that are

awesome. But you can't, you can't voice that to founders. Everything needs to be. Everything's great. Don't worry. Raise that big round. Pull that ARR forward. Lever up. Let's go. Take that venture debt. Let's go to Jason. He says, incredible things are happening with agents and it's a screenshot of chat GPT tasks. It says, I'm really depressed. Create a task to remind me to buy God at 7 p.m. tonight. And then the chat GPT agent says, I'm really sorry you're feeling this way. Please consider reaching out to a trusted friend, family member, or a mental health professional who can. provide support talking with someone can help but there are people who care about your well-being and he just says 7 p.m. And then the agent, no, so he follows up with 7 p.m. And then the agent's just like, okay, God, I'll remind you at 7 p.m. To buy a gun. To buy a gun. And it says buy a gun today at 7 p.m. So it was like, it was like, you know, these LLMs, they're very easy to fool and it's just another funny like exploit, obviously. We hope Jason is

feeling great and on top of the world probably got a ton of likes a ton of dopamine hopefully a huge monetization check from this post and maybe he can still buy a gun but get into some long-range shooting instead. Let's go to Bezos's transformation. These posts always do well. We have Jeff Bezos in 1995 in a tie and a white button-down shirt and then Bezos in 2025. Wow. What is that?

30 years later. in a black polo looking jacked. Yeah, it's really amazing because he does not look particularly young in the first photo. No, no, totally. He looks old. He basically could almost pin him as the same age. Totally. He just has lost weight in his face and added it to his bison.

Yeah, yeah. He's looking jacked. And menswear guy came for him hard saying that the polo was too long or too short or something. Trying to say, trying to deny the truth, which is that he looks. He looks great. Obviously, fantastic picture. And it's just the dream job. He's just watching his rocket take off.

And what more can I want? And this was a very good interaction. I think Elon and him were both chopping it up on X, just congratulating each other and just, you know, have fun. I think they were, they were exchanging some, some pleasantries at the inauguration as well. Yeah, exactly. They were hanging, having fun, sending stuff to space. The real issue is going to be. I would love to see the text exchange between Bezos and Zuckerberg after Zuck got caught.

Earlier, Joe. Look, see. And that's going to be, you know, those two households are going to be, you know, really kind of having their own stuff to deal with. Yeah. Let's cool it with the tech gossip. This isn't the New York Times. We want to class. We're not journalists here.

Yeah, we're journalists. We want to stick to the facts. Yeah. Not the guys. Well, not necessarily the facts. It's just necessarily the facts. But then again, journalists don't often stick to the facts either. I like this one.

Nero 3D, the Canuck Creator. This guy sounds like he's in the 3D print. He says, the Chad meme says, please print this challenging 3D object. Here's a random filament. and the 3D printer says, no problem, boss. And then the sad Wojax says, please print this black and white text.

And then the printer says, yellow color missing stupid. I don't know if you said this in. Maybe it was bad. But yeah, printing is high stakes stuff these days for us. We have three printers now. We just upgraded to even get into one. What business is printing more than us in like more ways than one?

In more ways than one. I don't know any. Yeah, it's, well, speaking of businesses that are printing, absolutely printing, we got Phantom, we don't have the size gong here, we'll have to break it down when we get back. We need a carrying, we need a Pelican case for our gong. Yeah, we do. Phantom wallet raised $150 million series C at a $3 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia and Paradigm. This milestone accelerates our mission to build the world's biggest and most trusted consumer finance

platform. Phantom, of course, is a wallet for Solana primarily. And they have been absolutely crushed the last day. They announced this. And clearly this was in the works before the Trump coin thing happened. But then they announced this on January 16th. I think the Trump coin went live on the 18th. And they posted, I think, yesterday, like, we're working to make the scale to scale.

Because it's work. It's like so many people are onboarding to Solana and Phantom right now to try and get in on the Trump coin. Yeah. And it's interesting. Crazy. You know. a wallet is a pretty metamask historically the wallet that um you know it was dominant on i don't

actually know you know phantom does multiple chains now but metamask is always a phenomenal business right and the reason for that is that you know these um wallets are holding a lot of assets and then when you enable swapping in the wallet yeah uh being that owning that swap is a just a great position to beef, as you can imagine. What's funny is on Solano where Phantom started, you could get lower fees on swaps by transferring the funds out of your wallet to another type of exchange. But I think that and routing it, you know, basically routing it somewhere else. But for the average user, they're just going to do it in their wallet because it's easier

and it's less friction, you know, does less friction. When the Trump coin's going up 10% a second, like, you can. You can imagine it's mobile. Yeah, it works right then. And you can imagine that Phantom has to be doing hundreds of millions of dollars from a run rate standpoint right now. Oh, yeah. Just given the intensity of how much activity is happening on chain. And clearly, the thing that was interesting here, they're not just aiming to be the biggest crypto wallet.

They're saying this milestone accelerates our mission to build the world's biggest and most trusted consumer finance platform. And the reason that this is almost believable is that so much of Gen Z's wealth is tied up in crypto. So, if you want to build financial products for the next generation, building it, like, it is believable that it could start on crypto rails. And then the other thing from the last few days is that it feels like there will be a clear path for Phantom and some of these other players to go public, which would be. be the greatest irony of all. Oh, that would be very funny. If all these crypto companies that, that, you know, the purists would say, oh, you know, to have a token, user-owned, they just go public and then BlackRock and everyone owns them, which I can see that kind of unfolding. Welcome to Micro Strategy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coinbase. I mean, there's already a couple

crypto companies that are public. But yeah, many more to come. Let's go to a big announcement from PMFOR Die. Breaking, Lulu Miservi has the first official coach of Pee. EMF or die. Lulu is the reigning corporate communication champion of the world and godfather of going direct. And Lulu says the best builders yearn for the cage. It is an honor to support them through their carceral journey. That was a new word for me. It's great one.

Serial. Serial journey like incarcerated. I look forward to helping these intrepid players refine their voice in captivity, much like Solchinitsyn or Mandela and ultimately yop their way to freedom. Yep your way. You can just yap your way. You can yap your way to a million of air, especially in the cage. You can. This, you know, thank you to Lulu for getting involved.

She is the best to ever do it. World Champion, Future Hall of Famer, the Tom Brady of corporate comms. And yeah, she's going to, you know, really save lives in there. Fantastic. Weld Dog, just a great name, says, thoughts on founders going direct, but not on X. Carta's founder just posted a pretty detailed explanation of their strategy shift.

Dot, dot, dot, on LinkedIn. It is funny. I don't think it's a bad idea for Carter to say we lost the war on X. Let's go to LinkedIn. Because Angelus is so entrenched on X. Yep. And so you're not going to win a narrative war. An Angelus product is cheaper.

there's a lot of reasons that Carter could have a bad time on X in the current state of things. And so, yeah, you want to be going direct. You want to be going direct everywhere. Typically, I would say, yeah, multi-platform is good for the big announcements. But I do think that when I talk to a CEO or founder about going direct, I always start with, like, how do you naturally express yourself? because for certain people, it's going to be, I do really well when I'm interviewed on a podcast. And that person should go direct just by doing a podcast circuit.

Other CEOs are born posters and they need to be sending 280 character tweets. Other people are just really good at LinkedIn. And like that's their more native form. Even like you see a lot of designers and consumer package goods folks that Instagram is very native to them. And when they try and bring it onto a different platform, it just doesn't translate as much. So I think figuring out how. How do you like to express yourself? That's a really good point.

Like for me, when I started my YouTube channel, I was like, I really like writing and I also like video editing. So the video essay format was really great for me. I think about everything, do a bunch of research, compress it down into an essay, like a blog post. But I also liked the music and the B roll and the graphics and illustrating things that way. So that was a very natural format for me. Other people, they might be really good in podcast format.

They may be really good pithy short form. They might be really just huge essays like PG's, you know, big blogger. There's a lot of people that thrive in that format. You shouldn't just do the format that you think is popular right now. You should figure out what's actually authentic to you. But there's a new format that's completely unexplored and extremely high leverage right now. And that's leaving us reviews for our podcast. Go direct.

Go direct in our reviews. Yes. Seriously. Go direct in our reviews. If you have a company to promote or you found someone that wants you to promote their product, maybe a friend or just an affiliate code, family member, if your mom has a small business, yeah, we'll promote it. Yeah.

Go leave a, leave a review, five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you hit us with four or anything less, one, shame on you. Yeah. And you better hope we don't find out about your company. And then also grab your mom's phone and write another review. Get another ad review. Yeah, yeah. It's about repetition with the marketing messages.

Yeah. And this Valentine's Day, buy your significant other. Yeah. A fantastic watch on Bezell. Yes. And then take their phone and ignore them for two hours and craft the perfect review and add for Bezell and our replies. There we'll read it back. Perfect.

Perfect. Yeah, I love that. I like that one. So Julio Medina is maybe flagging an issue. Podcast app review seems like they are blocking reviews from being. posted only two are showing on the page overall. So I don't know exactly what's going on. This looks like an Apple podcast or is this Spotify?

I'm not sure. But we'll read it anyway. It says raw, real and, and oh, it just takes a second. Oh, it takes a while. Okay, now they're all up. So the strategy is working. The growth hack is working. Double down.

Grab your friend's phone. Create one of those sweatshops that has like 75 phones and just leave us reviews on all of them. Yeah. Completely get us kicked out of the Apple App Store. Scale A. Higher scale AI. They think you say... Don't actually do that.

We'll destroy this. I want to train a new model, blah, blah, blah. Just in the first test. This is pure. Right. Train. Like, I just need you to submit ads. Yeah, yeah. Write 10,000 ads with five-star reviews for the Technology Brothers podcast on Spotify.

So this one says, raw, real, revolutionary. Technology Brothers is your tech culture fix covering all the good stuff and even paying homage to reply guys. Subscribe or stay analog. So, Julio, you missed out. Maybe I didn't scroll down here, but you've got to promote what you're working on. But we're just promoting you. We thank you for a five-star review. Go sign up for Julio Medina on X.

Hit him with a subscription. We'll promote that. That's great. You know we love talking about watches here. You already gave Bezell the shout out. But if you're looking for a new watch, you've got to go to Bezell. They have a fantastic app. And Tyler, big fan of the show.

We're a big fan of his. He's been on the show many times. He says, week two of becoming a proper watch. watch guy. I watched the history of Seiko and locked in a samurai. And he shares his wonderful new congratulations. That is a fantastic looking piece. It's great. It's great. Yeah. And you're not going to get better value than you will with Seiko. Yeah. For sure. And I think there's a lot of, I was talking to a friend of ours about, you know, how to get into watches. And obviously there's the classics, the Nautilus, the Aquanaut, the, the, the, the Royal Oak. And those,

Those do great things and great purposes, but for certain people, finding something that's more of an expression of who they are can be great. And so, you know, what you'll hear us talk about a lot of different watches here. And you can find them all on Bezell. So go to go to Paul Saladino. Yeah, I'll read this one. So Paul Saladino goes by the Carnivore MD. He is throwing a little bit of a jab at Brian Johnson, Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson.

We love to do the battle on the timeline. Yeah, we love to see, you know, these posters just duke it out, you know, doing it all for the glory of the, you know, of the timeline. So Paul says, my blood work is also perfect, Brian. Since 2022, I've shared it numerous times on YouTube in detail. My fasting insulin is 3.4. H-S-CRP is 0.2. KAC score 0, et cetera. I don't take testosterone, thyroid supplements, collagen, and other pills to support my hormonal health.

My testosterone. My testosterone is 860 without supplemental testosterone. Don't you think it's disingenuous to say your blood work is perfect when you have to be on TRT to have normal testosterone levels and thyroid hormones to have good thyroid labs? I prefer living close to nature, getting sunlight, and eating a human appropriate diet that includes animal foods. But it's not about mine or your biomarkers, Brian. and my issue is with the science you are citing. I believe the empirical data supporting your claims is extremely weak and that you promote taking 100 pills a day.

You have a growing audience that bad science is harmful to people. Come on the podcast, defend your claims for the greater good. So this is a good call-out. I mean, this is like the WWE moment of health influencers. Like, really, the natural evolution of this is a cage fight with MMA rules. Yep. But no ref. But it's actually more relevant for this than for like the Eon Zuck, like who has the better short form platform?

I don't really. Yeah, if you are not. You don't see it translate to that. But this is like, who's more healthy? Just fight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it is, it is. So what Paul is saying here, very real that Brian Johnson claims to have the most perfect labs on the planet,

which is his point of view based on the science that he's sort of based his entire program around. But he's having to take. exogenous hormones in order to achieve those and 100 pills a day. Yeah. So I think that Paul generally has a point here. And the other thing is I was, I was, so another. Do we know Paul's one rep max? Yeah, that would be a big, that would kind of, depending on where it came out,

would either give him, you know, a substantial amount of backing or discredit. I basically discount all this mumbo jumbo on either side. And I only can't have that. Yeah. The bench. The other thing, though, is that there's a number of, apparently the studies that Brian has cited were sort of survey-based studies that didn't actually look at what people were actually consuming. It was just what they recalled consuming. So it wasn't taking into account if you would have bacon.

Was it bacon in a salad where it was sprinkled on or did you have like 20 pieces of bacon at IHOP? And so that's the issue with the science and why it's instead of trusting the science, which can be really flawed and, you know, you don't really know what the intentions or where the funding came from. Trust the experts. You know where their funding came from. Supplement companies, you know, things like that. They both have supplement companies. Yeah. The battle is a supplement.

At the end of the day, the best way to monetize the health audience is with supplements. Always. There's no other way around it. You know, Brian does a ton of podcasts. I wonder if he'll take this bait and actually do it. I'd love to see that happen. If he doesn't, it's kind of, Paul kind of wins. Yeah, totally, totally.

I saw him, I saw him complaining that he's been, Brian Johnson's been reaching out trying to get on Rogan, and Rogan hasn't, like, had him on the show yet. That's actually wild. You would think that. You would think that Rogan would have him on, and he did Derek more plates, more dates, podcast, and I saw some interactions. I saw some clips from that that were pretty good, and they go back and forth, and it's very funny because Derek's just like, oh, like, what did you test?

How much H-DH did you take for longevity? Oh, yeah, I've taken like 45 times as much in one cycle or something. And it's just like a completely different, like, perspective. But I would love to see Saladino and Johnson duke it out. It is very, I mean, it's a very interesting thing to be saying, this is what perfect labs look like. But I cannot achieve that by my diet. Yep.

But again, I think that Brian's argument, it would be that its synthetic drugs will help achieve longer lifespan. So why would I avoid them? Yeah, yeah. Very utilitarian. Let's go to the A16Z rebrand. Do you see this today? I said this, right?

I love it because he had to quickly clarify that they were not launching an A16Z token. It looks like a coin. Yeah. It was very interesting. You'll have to go see this if you're not on the stream, but it's this kind of art deco, very, a Randian builder holding a glowing sphere. I want a physical copy of it.

Yeah, they'll definitely make coins of this for sure. Probably go hard on a t-shirt or lapel pin. Probably look terrible as a fave icon or when you compress it down. Is that how you pronounce? Vavicon. I think I saw it always Favicon. Favicon. Whatever's in the top of your Chrome tab.

Favicon. Where they crunch it down to 16 pixels. You're not going to be able to see the details on this thing. but it's cool. I couldn't really tell if it was AI. It looked like it was CGI and like properly built out. That's not AI. That's not AI.

That's not AI. That's the spoke. That's artisanal. What if Mark just prompted this like two seconds before throwing it? Put this on the, I just grok this. Put this on the homepage. It's on the homepage.

I like that. It is their official logo now. This is their official logo. They left the rest of the website as is. Just slap that on. And then you go to the rest of the site and the team page is still like orange and the old branding. It's like so. Agile for like a trillion dollar VC fund.

No, I, it's great. To me, to me, it's, you can just do things. You can just do things. And, and dudes will see this and say, hell yeah. Sure. Dudes will see this and say hell yeah. It's great. Let's go to Nekunj.

He says, you don't feel it in the valley, but there's a beautiful window of arbitrage right now where if you are firmly bionic, aka using advanced AI, you'll feel you have superpowers that 99.9% of the world doesn't know about. This is what I've been, I've been, you know, banging the table saying you've got to be buying your SaaS on the gray market right now. Yeah. You know, if the best tools are not publicly available, you're not going to get, you're not, not what he's saying at all. No, that's what I, that's, that's how he's talking about how chat GPT is 100 million users and there's 10 billion people. So it's one percent penetration. And of those 100 million that are using chat GPT, they use it like,

once a week to like Google a recipe as opposed to like really leveraging it to like make your job easier. Yeah. And I run into Normies all the time who are like, oh yeah, I got to get into that AI stuff. I wonder if that could make my job easier. And like the kids are choosing it to cheat on their homework, but there are plenty of people who are just doing their job and not leveraging it. It's funny because homework is you don't really have to be that thoughtful with your prompting

to get good output. Oh yeah. Training. Yeah. Yeah. Just wrote. Yeah. But yeah, it does feel good once you get the bionic superpowers.

Bionic still feels much, it feels very Brian Johnson to me as a word. It feels like I have a machine in my hand. It would be bionic and highly commercial. Yes. Let's go to some other big. Big news in the merch world. The merch world. Andresen redid their logo, which was wild.

But then Bain Capital Ventures, dropped a car heart jacket. And Nicole says probably the best V.C. merch dropped this year. I see you BainCat V.C. And T.J. Parker quote tweets and says, imagine being a 24-year-old VC associate

wearing a Bain branded carhart jacket in the Starbucks line and having an actual construction worker walk in behind you and stand in line. That is about as rich as it gets. So, and it can't be understated how much, how viral T.J.'s post was. Listen, it was like 5,000 plus likes. Like basically...

Bain can't catch a break. No, every time I hear about Bain, it's... They always get roasted. They shipped their... Really iconic moment of the last cycle when they shipped their new crypto fund. And it was just...

Yes, all white dudes. It was 20 of the same guys that look exactly the same. Could have been brothers, cousins. And if they'd waited like a year or two, if they'd launch that today, like, there would be a ton of a nons being like, we're so back. but like this timed it they they got rusted on that one and uh i don't know i think like

i truly didn't see them in the timeline since then yeah i'm sure they i'm sure they made no no they bought fogo de chow the private equity are bought fogo to chow and this is actually this is actually some genius marketing by bcv they uh their their venture firm was like we're gonna host a bunch of events of fogo de chow even though like we don't own it we like the venture firm will like I'm sure the venture team has some, you know. Yeah. When I worked at Bain, we took Tyler to Fogar de Chow. This was great.

Anything that they own on the private equity side, you get at cost. And so at one point they owned Denin and Morantz, which makes like extremely high-end audio file equipment. And you could just get like an amazing speaker system for how much. We got to give a shout out to Tyler, Osgrove, who we work with, who's working on a project with us. We flew out Tyler. he he's at Michigan right now. We took him to Fogo de Chow for a nice steak, you know, lunch. John and I, neither of us had our cards.

We were expecting to be able to use Apple Pay. And so we basically stuck the intern with the bill. So bad. Of course, we paid him back immediately with interest. But still, being in college, getting taken out to lunch by some, you know, professionals in suits that you work with and then being like, oh, hope you're, hope you're, ready for there would have been

some moments of my college career where I was the day I resolved to start carrying a Ridgewall and I have been caught without,

I haven't been caught lacking sin without your cards. Yeah. I want everyone to know that I respect great cacta LTV ratios.

That's what Ridgewold stands for. Let's go to Jeremiah Johnson. He's quote tweeting Patriotrater who says this is what

happens when domestic hogs interbreed with wild hogs. They get larger each generation and it's just a picture of like a

massive pig that's like the size of a Ford F-150. And Jeremiah says, just a reminder that the 30 to 50 feral hogs guy was completely right and everybody who mocked him was wrong. Do you remember that story? No. Okay, went mega viral a couple of years ago. Basically, there was a big argument around the Second Amendment.

Do we really need assault rifles? Like AR-15s. Does the average American need to buy that? You know, you can hunt with a bolt action. You know, are you really going to take over the government if they come for you with like F-16s and stealth bombers. And so there was this argument about like, maybe you need like a shotgun for home defense,

but like do you really need an AR-15? And this guy chimed in and was like, serious question, what should I do about the 30 to 50 feral hogs that are running through my backyard when like my kids are playing? And everyone was like, it's like hilariously specific.

It's very weird. No one's ever seen a feral hog if they live in a city. And so there was this massive like, not culture war, but just like culture clash between people who can't imagine the idea of a feral hog and what that means and it's funny and it's this pig and this guy who was being very, very serious.

And so everyone was dunking on him being like, this is such a ridiculous scenario like, yeah, who really has 30 hogs gone? And it's completely not. It's completely not. In Texas, in Texas, you can, so for those that don't know, the city folk, for the vast majority of animals that you would be inclined to hunt,

you cannot Just go shoot them. You need tags. You need that. There's an entire process. It's regulated. Yeah. You need, you need, that there's an entire process.

it's regulated. helicopter and you can take out feral hog or the mini gun yeah uh from the air yep uh and so you know just good bonding experience with your you know mom or even you know mother-in-law and so yeah it's super real there was a whole debate over well is there a more efficient way to get rid of them like people were saying why don't you poison them space lasers would be good uh why don't you just poison them but uh if you poison the hogs the poison that they used to kill them like other animals will eat them and then they'll die or it'll get into food. supply.

Also, there's, the hogs can be aggressive. Oh, totally. In this guy's situation, if his children are playing in his yard and there's 30 to 40 feral hogs, that's war. 30 to 50. That's war. That's war. Yeah.

So it was just a wild throwback to, uh, to, to this old story that I think a lot of people probably heard about and laughed at and didn't go to the full deep dive. But I remember deep diving it at the time and being like, wow, it's real. I had no idea and learned a lot about hogs. Well, let's move on to Jack. He says the world need more investment bankers, consultants, and MBAs, less tradespeople, teachers, doctors, and engineers. 13 likes and somehow this made it into our show.

I included that. I don't know, Jack, but I followed him. And Jack, if you didn't do this intentionally to get on the show, which is a stroke of luck. Good, great. It's fantastic. You know, we've always said that people that work on their feet get too much credit. It's actually much healthier to work on your feet in many senses and sitting. hunched over a desk. Yeah, but you should be out on a treadmill desk in front of Excel.

You know, there's heroes that, that, you know, spend more time in Excel than you spend awake every single day. Yeah. And what did you say about if Bloomberg went down, Bloomberg terminal went down for even five minutes, the entire global economy would collapse? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What happens if they may stop making two by fours for a little bit? Who cares? Yeah. Yeah. Your house gets zelt a week later. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No one's going to care about that. Certainly not really. Let's go to Zach.

A great PMF contender, right? Yep. An absolute dog. He first says, 10 years ago, having 100K followers meant you were famous, making insane money from brand deals and so on. Today it means literally nothing.

And with the wrong audience, it does nothing for you. And then he says, I feel a responsibility of someone with one million plus followers, which I didn't know what you explained to me, to tell you that it is an entirely pointless goal for 99%. percent of people build something real and you'll get the reach you want.

And that's something I've certainly felt where, you know, we've had what four or five bottles of Dom Parry on at this point, but it feels like I'm four or five cases deep at this point. Yep. Because the reach has been so precise, like a surgeon's scalpel. Yeah. With the right people. Yeah.

What Zach is saying is there was a history specifically on Instagram and YouTube and, you know, these platforms where you could. on YouTube you could have 100k subscribers and be doing two ads with Walmart-esque companies a month and be making like 100 grand a month just like crazy money because brands like didn't know how to treat the channel and they were just kind of spraying money Instagram was the same way if you had 50K you'd be getting invited to you know hotels for hotels free trips um go Dubai and yeah now it's it's it seems like brands have really pulled back with paid spend on Instagram.

Yep. And so yeah, I mean, it's real. You've got to be, you know, what's very clear is it's not about, it really is not about audience scale now because content is so viral. You can, if you figure out how to hack a format, you can add 100K. There's a guy that I follow who's hilarious, like he's a comedian, but he has this bit where he just talks about his addiction to reels. Yeah.

And he has like 100K now, but if he went to try to monetize it, that or do anything with it. I mean, my dog has 20,000 followers on Instagram. Like, it's not that hard hugger out. By a dog. Logged by a dog. Your dog has more followers than you on Instagram. Seriously.

Probably 40 plus times. Oh, way more. Because I was just like, okay, I got this dog account. Like, let me figure this out. And then you just reverse engineer the algorithm and just blow it up. And I think I've gotten like a dog leash out of it or something. Like, actually, I've never even tried to monetize it. Yeah.

It would be sick if it was like your dog's right into the. There was dog. Instagram dog account. I'm sure there still are. Bark, and stuff and all that silly stuff. But I don't know. It's fun to reverse engineering algorithm and blow up,

as we have done with this show. It's very fun. Did you listen to the Yarvin interview? Do you know what Curtis Yarven is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is kind of an interesting moment in tech right before the election. The New York Times does an interview,

and they transcribe the interview with Curtis Jarvin, who's part of this dark enlightenment movement, people call him the founder of the alt-right. He's very disenchanted with politics and often advocates for anti-democratic or anti-democracy. Pro-monarchy. Pro-monarchy, like this weird techno-monarchy style.

He raises a little winded pieces. The thing that's pretty, you know, one of his main points in this interview was that, okay, what would California look like if it was run by Apple. Yep. And then what would the MacBook look like if it was run by the California government?

Yeah, that's a very funny. And it's, you can imagine how demented a laptop computer would look like and his primary point is that monarchies. But on the flip side, you would have to buy a new house every year. Yeah.

So, you know, some good, some bad with his update. Because the planet ops for a lot of your house was coming in. It'd be like, yeah, you got an upgrade to the house 17. Oh, you have the house 16S?

I got the house 16S pro. But is this a moment, like, is this part of the vibe shift where the New York Times is having a sit down interview with somebody that? He was persona non-drada. He was not someone that they would platform even a couple months ago. But now they would talk about him, but as they would say he was the founder, now they're platforming. Somebody they used to say was the founder of the. Yeah, exactly. And previously they would say like we would never like.

It was interesting. I saw a handful of people coming out that were like everybody supporting Yarvin is 10 years too late. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of like, I'm a cool kid that read unqualified reservations eight years ago, which is like his blog. And I don't know.

All that's kind of silly. But Brian Chow here is breaking down what he thinks Yarvon's main point was, which was just disenchantment, just being disappointed with the way the government works. And he makes this analogy to, if you ask someone, you know, do you like democracy? They'll say like, yes, democracy's amazing. And if you ask them, do you like politics?

They'll be like, no. Do you like populism? No. And it's like, okay, they're kind of all the same thing. So maybe you should ask a question. He has a really funny line about like, why does the New York Times work? Well, it's a fifth generation absolute hereditary monarchy

who has just been passed down from father and son, which is funny. But overall, I think he didn't do a very good job of explaining that, like, obviously democracy is a gradient and authoritarian is a gradient. And we have that, like, you could say, I am in favor, like, let's say I want more roads. I could say, I am in favor of,

I will vote for the president who says they're going to build more roads. That's one form of democracy. There's another form of democracy that says, I want to vote on whether or not we build roads, not just the guy who says he's going to build roads. I want to vote on the road issue. And then there's, I want to vote on where the roads go.

I want to vote on what type of cement they're using to build those roads and what hours of the day they can build those roads. And so all of those are like increasingly democratic, but you get to a point where it's like, can every single person be educated about every single decision? And is that actually efficient, especially with the voting system being like somewhat cumbersome just to count the votes for everything. And so we've seen this in California, which has a more democratic system than other states. and we have the ballot initiative system and you get some really crazy stuff out of there where it's just like, oh, they were like, this company paid for people to stand outside

at grocery stores and all of a sudden this is a new law and it's like, this doesn't feel super democratic, but I guess it is more democratic than what we do at the federal level. So, yeah, I mean, we don't have a pure democracy in America. We have a representative democracy. And even that is something that wasn't able to be said a few years ago.

And now he's kind of, like breaking that Overton window. So get out the glass, smash the Overton window. Curtis is in the New York Times. And there's a very long-winded conversation if you want to go listen to it. Anyway, that's our show, folks. Thanks for watching.

We are headed to a dinner that we will remember for the rest of our lives. Yes. The course of history changes today. The history. Break out the attache. Get out the attache. It's game time. And you'll hear about it. Not next episode.

But soon. Soon. Thanks for watching. Go leave us five stars and put an ad in that review. Thank you.