TBPN - New OpenAI Competitor, Airbus vs Boeing, LVMH and Trump, Meme Coins are Cooked

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. Today is Wednesday, February 19th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We're breaking down Valar Atomics, Isaiah Taylor's company. They raised a banger, $19 million seed round. Then we're moving on to Mira Moradi.

Sorry. That's awesome. I knew they were raising around. I didn't know what they were calling it. Yeah. So it got me good. You got my like authentic reaction. There's just nothing. There's, there's no better humor to me than raising around and then like naming it something that like breaks the sort of generalized narrative. Of course. Of course. Nineteen million dollars is just a typical series A. Yeah. And businesses, if you raise 19 million dollars will be evaluated as though you raised a series A. to some degree. But calling it a seat is just so Chad. Isaiah is Chad.

Kip is a Chad. We got to go and actually, we should just record a remote pod like from their warehouse. We should live stream it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that today? No, no, I don't know if it's today, but we will, we will definitely be covering the company

and we'll break that down. We're also going through Miramirati's new company. It has a name. It's called Thinking Machines. And the website is thinkingmachines. Don't use a W.WWWW. WV.T.combingmachines. Does not resolve.

You have to drop the WUWW. Yeah, so if you search thinking machines right now, I'll pull up their website, but if you click on the website, it will say this site can't be reached. So you then have to go into the URL box and delete the WWW part and hit return, and then you'll get the website.

So let's hope they're better at... Do they have, like, technology people on the team yet? Yeah, maybe they, I mean, I know. Fundraising people. Mir is the CEO now. Okay. So maybe they don't have a CTO and maybe they just, yeah. Yeah.

Not, not some of the greatest programmers in the world. We're in there. Anyway, IT can be a challenge even for the greatest companies. I mean, Open AI was struggling with the login page for a while. Remember when chat GPT launched and like it wouldn't keep you logged in. So you had to keep logging in with Google. So very annoying. Anyway, we're breaking down LVMAG and how Bernard Arnaud is dealing with the Trump presidency.

And then we're going to talk about Airbus and how they're coming for Boeing. It's an international global fight in the race for an airline that doesn't crash all the time. And then we're going to break down the timeline. So let's go to Isaiah Taylor. We got some breaking news. Congratulations to Valar Atomics. Big, big, big. Isaiah says, I'm excited to announce a $19 million seed round led by Riot Ventures, who you know some of those dudes over there.

Initialized Alley Corp with participation from amazing new partners such as Steel Atlas, Day 1 Ventures, Stiffel Bank, Naval Bologi, and Charlie Songhurst. We've also completed two important milestones. Yeah, absolute doggs in there. Great. So Isaiah says, first, we have completed the construction and pressure certification of our thermal prototype Ward Zero at our Los Angeles facility. The fastest in history, a thermal test unit has been developed and built.

Ward Zero will be unveiled next week at an exclusive event in L.A. So that's next week. Hopefully we can go. If we can't, we'll be live streaming it. covering it here on the show. Second, we're also excited to announce a coordinated research project with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute. The goal of this project is to develop and deploy Ward 1, our first nuclear reactor and the world's first operational gen 4 microreactor. This is just the beginning. The goal of Volar Atomics is to make the world's energy by building nuclear reactors

at planetary scale. To do that, we must set a pace. That's such a great tagline. Make the world's energy. It's very simple. You almost expected to be like, the world's energy cleaner or make the world's energy more. Just make the world's energy. Period. Yep. He's in the energy business. To do that, we must set a pace of building an iteration to rapidly scale and commercialize

our reactor architecture. Today we set that pace. I can't overstate my gratitude to the Val-A-Lar Atomics team in the last 12 months. They've proven themselves to be not only one of the most talented engineering teams in the world, but also the most determined. I'm inspired to work with them every day and to bring. their work to you. Huge thank you to everyone who participated in the seed. Delian from Founders Fund is in the comments saying congrats Isaiah Santiago, good friend of the show, noted.

Yeah, so if you remember, I don't know. This is great stuff team onward. I don't know why. I don't know even remember exactly why, but we owe Kip, who's on the Valor team, a bottle of Dom for something that he did last year. You remember that? It was like a brother of the week. Brother of the week. I think we were going to hand deliver it. And then he had to go to the Philippines for why. Yeah, that's right. So we couldn't do it. That's right. So congratulations to the whole team and congratulations to Kip, because we are going to be coming to the gundo at some point to deliver you a bottle of Don.

A bottle of Don Perri-on. Well, deserved. It's fantastic. Yeah, well, congrats to the whole team over there. I'm excited to see what they build next and get that stuff rolled out. Lots of exciting stuff going out in nuclear. I think like the big question is always like, like nuclear was was so contrarian and so like. offensive to venture capitalist that even like a few years ago yeah it was something that was

uninvestable and so you couldn't really raise any money even if you were experienced Isaiah is obviously like on the younger side more of like the the new like outside the box thinker he's got a few kids so that automatically adds a decade it does if you're in your 20s in tech and you have a few kids people will treat you as though you're a decade older that's true i feel like i benefited from that for sure degree just because you know having kids it's just yeah you are a different person after you have kids. Yeah. But my point here is that like nuclear energy as a category for venture capital investment

was extremely difficult to get done, contrarian, not easy by any means, very hard to finance, very hard to build. Okalo went through like years and years and years before spacking. And now it's like the hottest category because everyone's worried about AI and energy generation for data centers. It really is like in an environment that is, you know, you, in. in a world where there's maybe less regulations around nuclear 10 years from now, nuclear energy technology companies will be tremendously more valuable.

Of course. So like that is like the main, that's like the main sort of thesis right now. And so you could have, when Isaiah was starting the company, you have to imagine that in his view, a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now is sort of obvious at the time. Totally. It was like we actually need a lot more energy. Nuclear energy was demonized.

If you remember, somebody told me that's the woman that talks. about like that super pro nuclear on TikTok like she was at one of the first so she was apparently at one of the first heretacons yeah but then this year like new being pro nuclear wasn't heretical at all exactly it was just like the default yeah so she was kind of hanging out she was like I don't really have any new like things to bring you because like you guys all agree with me now yeah it's great so now like the problem is is like we need the energy today and even fast teams that move really quickly like Isaiah's you know you can't build these things in a weekend. And so now we're in this weird scenario where, you know,

everyone in the AI world, all the data center buildouts are like, hey, this stuff can't come to market fast enough. And it's like, hey, you know, the VC should have been back in this a decade ago instead of kind of sitting on their hands. Anyway, quick size gong for Isaiah. Boom. Great connection there, John. Thank you. Well, let's move on to thinking machines. So should we do the overview first? And then we'll give it. a little bit of background on Mira. Thinking Machines launched their website, thinking machines.aI. Reminder, don't use the WWW. It will not resolve. Yep. Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product

company. Interesting because notably, Ilius Sutskiver, SSI, is not a product company, purely focused on super intelligence directly. We're building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools that to make AI work for their unique needs and goals. While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. I agree. The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's public, people's abilities to use AI effectively. And despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize

to their specific needs and values to bridge the gaps we're building thinking machines, labs to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable. That was not very gripping copy, if I'm being honest. Would you think, Jordy? Yeah, you can tell they're not marketers. Yeah. But the aura around Mira and the business and the team is so strong that it almost doesn't matter. Yeah.

Like they clearly, like, didn't even set up their domain properly. Like, they don't want to have, like, I look at them as, like, probably being an assistant. similar boat to SSI. Sure. Where SSI by being the first to kind of come out and say, like, we're not going to do any marketing or really any launches or we're not going to release any products until we have AI or safe, you know, superintelligence. Yeah. Uh, they kind of like took that opportunity. And I bet you thinking machines is like, I wish we did that. Um, but, uh, but yeah, again, like, this is one of those things. If this was, if this was the first foundation model company, it would be gripping, but this is like language you could just copy and paste it

onto any website or hiring page. At this point, you know, I want to issue a challenge. If you're an open AI co-founder, I challenge you to start a company that's not a foundation model. Well, actually, so I was correct. So Mira was actually not a co-founder of Open AI. She just served as a CTO in many ways. But like, is it possible to work at Open AI and then leave and start a company. Yeah, your idea was to start like a supplement company. Exactly. Just like, it would actually, there's, there's a lot of alpha in doing the thing that, that doesn't make sense from a narrative standpoint, right?

Because if Miramorati had a supplement company, I'd be like, I'm buying all my supplements from this because like, she would only work on this if it was like the most important work. She's glimpsed the machine God and said, we need more creatives. It's always been underpriced to be diced. Exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, the question is like, you know, obviously. there are so many companies working on this exact problem right now. Yeah.

We, we, the only thing that's interesting here is like, where are they contrasting from the others? And it's now established that they will, like, thinking machines will have a state of the art model and probably a year. Oh,

yeah, absolutely. You would have to imagine that it's actually, so Elon had this sort of infrastructure advantage. And in many ways, Mira has like the actual hands on. She's a technical CEO who's going to know, exactly how to basically, you know, get back to the point where she was with opening eye, right? So it's not like starting over from zero.

So the question is, yeah, do they try and build something, a cluster? Do they try and work with one of the hyperscalers? There's a ton that would be happy to work with her, I'm sure, because it gives them more leverage. Because even if you're like, oh, yeah, we're Amazon. And we have, I think Amazon does have a custom, like, TPU style chip. And they are loosely aligned with Anthropic, but why not work with thinking machines and get more leverage over the Anthropics? I've seen anything. Of course. And so what does that mean? The hypers and the model companies are willing to just intermingle and mix.

Of course, of course. Yeah. And it's for, it's for good reason. So it's like, yeah, if I'm Amazon and I say, hey, you know, thinking machines, yeah, go out and raise $500 million. Send $100 million over to me. And yeah, I'll give you 20K GPUs and let you train a frontier model. The more interesting thing is like, where does the product go? Because I do think that there is really interesting opportunity for different product. functionality and different problem solving there. It's interesting because their website, AI that works for everyone, emphasis on human AI collaboration. Okay, that's exactly how chat GPT, more flexible, adaptable, and personalized AI systems.

Okay. You're not telling me anything here. Yeah, maybe you're adding, like it does seem that chat GPT is flexible, adaptable, and can be very personalized if that's what you want out of it. So, I mean, honestly, this, this is like an oil guy.

It's like, this is commoditized and it's like oil. Like our vision is to like provide energy that will power industry and automobiles for generations. Yeah. It's like just like every other oil company. Right. And it's like that's probably profitable. Congratulations. You're going to make a lot of money.

But like you're not doing anything new here necessarily. I don't know. It's interesting too. They say science is better when shared. So they're not committing to being open source. Yeah. But they say we plan to frequently published technical blog post papers and code. So the whole open source thing seems extremely fake now by this.

And also the whole idea that it's like Sam versus a unified block of anti-Sam's is also completely debunked because it's like, why don't all you guys just go work at Anthropic or SSI? Why do you all have your own companies? Oh, well, like it was probably drama between everyone here. Like everyone's like. Yeah. Yeah, but like so look at the current team. I'm just going to read some people out because it's absolutely stacked. Alex Gartrell.

Yeah. Former leader of server operating systems at meta, expert in Linux. Alexander, co-creator of advanced voice mode at OpenAI. Yep. And the segment anything model at meta. Previously post-modal post-training lead at Open AI. Yeah. Andrew, this is just an alphabetical order, by the way.

Yeah. ML Systems Research, Andrew Tulloch, ML Systems Research and Engineering previously at OpenAI at Meta. Barrett Zof, who's a CTO, formerly VP of Research post-training at Opening AI, co-creator of ChatGPT. Yeah. Next guy, Bryden, formerly post-training research at Open AI. And if you just go down the list, it's basically like the founding, you know, some of the most important people to work at opening eye. The question is just does this actually matter? because in 2005, you could have gone and said,

hey, we're getting people from Bell Labs and Yahoo, and we're getting people from AOL and all the top people. And we're going to have them build a social network that's better than Facebook. And it was like, nah, it didn't really matter. Like, it was actually just like a couple college kids could actually innovate and create something that took off. And it took off so hard that even when Google threw tons of resources at it for Google circles or whatever their product was called,

That failed. And then whenever somebody else came up, Isaac would just like buy it. And I don't know. It's like how much does the crazy stacked engineering team matter when it seems like there's a ton of crazy stacked engineers that they're over in China, building deep seek and they're at XAI and they're at the anthropic. And like we keep hearing that every single team is stacked and they can produce a frontier

model in a week. Well, yes. I mean, just going to, I'm still down the list. I'm going to skip a bunch of people. Luke Metz, research scientist and engineer co-creator of chat GPT.

It's like when you're putting the co-creator of chat GPT deep in your team list and not even giving him a picture, that's when you know the team stack. It is stacked. In many ways, they should just have their logo and then the current team

and skip all of this jargony stuff because that would be more, that would be more meaningful. But imagine the pressure right now on existing Open AI employees, no matter how long they've worked there and how big their plans are. Yeah.

You don't just have like one heavily funded competitor from a former team member that's recruiting you. You could potentially have four or five heavily funded foundation model companies, not even talking about perplexity and sort of like app layer companies that are trying to recruit you at all times. Yeah. So it's just like the craziest dynamic and they will make documentaries about all of this. We're sure. Well, she's got the stone coiled. gaze in the Guardian.

Let's move on to the profile of Mira because I think she has an interesting background in history. Let's do how OpenAI interim chief Miramir Maradi helped launch AI into the mainstream. Born in Albania, former chief technology officer

is charged with calming the waters after ouster of Sam Altman. When Miramirirati made an appearance on the daily show with Trevor Noah last October, Open AI was just a month away. from releasing chat GPT. Do you want to yeah like skip skip around here? Maradi as the chiefs come as the company's chief technology officer has been in charge of leading the teams that were pushing out the artificial intelligence chat bot that would throw the AI technology and debate over its usage into the mainstream on his show.

Noah asked Maradi how she grappled with the implications AI has for jobs. I got a cough. You can keep reading She says there were a ton of questions that we're wrestling with every day. Little did anyone know that a year later a person whose job would be affected would be Maradi's boss. Sam Malton. Now Maradi has replaced the Rising Star as CEO. Oh, she was CEO for a while. I forgot about that.

That's crazy. So many people have been CEO of the open hand. There was a little, what do you call it? Musical chairs for a bit there. Musical chairs for sure. in a surprise statement, the company's board of director said on Friday that Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board and that it lost confidence in his ability to continue

leading open AI. That line not consistently candid is just so perfectly general. And they never came out and said what it was. Yeah. That's the crazy thing, is that all the all the back channel communications. It's also not necessarily. Wait until you find out. Wait until you find out. You're going to, you're going to side with us. And then it was like he launched the best consumer product ever without really telling us. It's like, who cares? Yeah. So questions were made over exactly what happened between Altman and his company's board, which includes respected technology researchers and business leaders. Yeah. But the board said that Marotti can provide the company with a smooth transition as it looks for a permanent replacement.

And then they like immediately added Emmett. Yeah, Emmett was in for a while. For a few days. Which lasted. Yeah, for a few days. And then Sam was going to. So anyways, here's some backstory. Verotti joined the company in 2018 as vice president of applied AI in partnerships, positioning herself to play key roles in the company's development of its AI

chat bot systems and Dolly, which uses AI to create artwork. She was promoted to senior vice president of research product and partnerships in 2020 into chief technology officer in 2022. That makes no sense to me because ChatGPT launched, or GPT3, which was barely commercial, launched in 2022. So like the first two years, vice president of applied AI in partnerships,

like, I don't know, that's interesting. Like they must have known that the products were going to become highly commercializable. Yeah. I don't know. It'd be interesting to hear like what she was doing at that time.

Because it makes, it totally makes sense that it's like, I go-to-market role almost. Yeah. But everyone else was very surprised. They're like, oh, this research lab has something that they're selling now. Like, this wasn't in the plan. This is so, this is so shocking.

But it's like, yeah, maybe they knew back then that, yeah, like, companies would want to generate art for ads or whatever. Like they need to vend Dolly into places. Anyway, that's interesting. Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role. and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.

So this profile was written like during the turmoil basically in The Guardian. I guess this was November of 2023. We give a little bit of backstory on her. That's kind of interesting actually. Born in Albania, Marotti moved to Canada when she was a teenager to study at an international school on Vancouver Island. She got a mechanical engineering degree from Dartmouth and eventually made her way to San Francisco where she would lead product and engineering teams at leap motion.

Do you know the story of this? Well, I mean, the whole narrative of just being born in Albania and then ending up is in America raising billions of dollars and being at the frontier of innovation is just legit. Is one of thousands of any sort of like hardcore anti-immigration people is one of, you know, thousands, but a very high profile example of why immigration has made America such a dominant force. in technology. It's just, it's just a very unique thing about America that someone can come in and become. We need to, we need to reposition the pro, the super pro immigration people need to reposition immigration as brain drain. Oh, totally. And just being like, we are draining any competitive, potentially competitive economy of like all their best talent. I mean, that literally is what Elon's position is, uh, with the H-1B stuff. Um, but the reason I want to talk about lead motion is,

you know who the CEO of Leap Motion was? Uh, I don't. David Holes. No way. under mid-journey. And so, and Leap Motion was, I mean, great company. It was a hand tracker for virtual reality.

So it was this little USB stick looking device that then you would put your hand over and it would track your hands. You could put it on the front of a VR headset and very like DIY it into the Oculus back in like the hacker days. And it could do some basic hand tracking.

They tried to sell a company at Apple. They get completely rugged. Apple had, Apple had like, printed, like, welcome to Apple. Here's your email. Here's your corporate.

badge for everyone at Leap Motion allegedly, or like according to the reporting. And the deal fell through at the last second because I think David Holes went in and was like, I don't like this corporate structure. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not. I'm not. Like I'm out. Like, I'm out. No way. Yeah, something like that. He like turned them down and it was like kind of a mess. But then clearly he had just like incredible abilities to build and be a founder because even though Leap Motion, it wound up being kind of like an acquired or a different company and kind of sold. Yep. But it's just. crazy that she, yeah, yeah, that's the lead motion.

It's just crazy that she led product and engineering teams at lead motion because David holds, it's like all the top technical talent in the valley essentially wound up working on AI eventually. They all moved over there. And so then she goes to- They didn't move into crypto? Not many. All the best marketers moved to crypto, which we'll talk about that.

We have a story on that. Which is great from Nick Carter. During a brief stint at Tesla, she played a key role as a senior product manager in the development of the electric car makers model X. And so this is another interesting like sliding doors moment. She probably had meetings with Elon at some point. Yeah. Now she's probably got Elon's phone number. Again, you're leaving Open AI.

Why don't you go to XAI? You got to start your own thing. It's just interesting. Like there's one narrative where it's like, hey, all these people are super talented. They're all super entrepreneurial. They all run their own companies. get more equity, it makes more financial sense. But if it was truly like mission driven on like Sam, it was too chaotic, he must be stopped,

you would create an alliance, right? You would have to. Yeah. But they're not doing it. Yeah. So the revealed preference is that actually this is commoditized and this is just about money. That's my take on it. Yeah.

Or wanting control. The other, the counterpoint to that is wanting control over what will be a super. valuable important commodity. Asset. Yes, exactly. Commodity, though. Not this like God war. Because if we're really going to war over this and the robot army, it's like,

do you really think you want to have the fifth strongest army when Elon and Sam are like warring? Or should you just create or should you just pick aside now? Right? And actually go and win. So the game theory here, I think, I think suggests that this is more about money than mission. in general. That's my take. Yeah. Anyway, Marotti told Fortune magazine earlier this year that growing up in the other side of it is all these people are already so post-economic that potentially,

potentially there is still an angle of once you have more money than you could ever spend in your life. Do you want to just do the work that you really want to do without work? dealing with the sort of BS of having a crazy boss that you don't necessarily trust or you don't like or whatever, right? In some ways, this is like getting a tenured position in a, like a Stanford at a research lab. Yeah, yeah. But you cannot do that because Stanford will never give you a billion dollars to build a 20K GPU cluster. So doing the work of academia now takes the form of a venture-backed commodity research.

Yeah, there's totally a world where some of these foundation models spinouts from opening AI just. kind of twiddle their thumbs and do cool research but just never reach sort of commercial i'm not expecting that out of thinking machines or but sSI seems like it could be a good candidate for that there were a couple of those i mean i mean the sort of character right where it's like the guy kind of was like oh i got like insane product market fit but i don't really like the market so i'm out yeah i mean that was the read for for a lot of people that said that i don't know potential one shot but the guy i mean he just did dorcas like uh no he's he seems like illegitimately like a computer science genius.

Yeah. And so like, yeah, that guy should just be doing like computer science. He doesn't need to be worrying about like, how can we squeeze more, more pennies out of these like gooners that are like customers basically. Like it's not, it's not important work to him. And that's fine. And that's the nature of capitalism in America. And to be clear, I'm not, I'm not saying, oh, these people are in the money in it for

the money and that's a black pill. I'm saying it's a mega, mega white pill. Like it's the best outcome here. Yeah. It means that AI is going to go extremely well. It's going to generate a lot of economic value. It's not going to be some chaotic, you know, apocalypse situation. Because if you think it's the apocalypse, you don't act like this.

That's my take. It's like, this is not the behavior of somebody who has like, what did Ily see? You know, oh, like he saw, like he glimpsed into the ASI and realized that like we were all going to be killed. It's like, no, that was a marketing stunt. That era is over. And now we are in the oil extraction and commoditization perspective. and yeah, go get the money. It's great.

I encourage everyone to do this. This is fantastic. Get the bag. I'd already been working in AI applications at Tesla, she told Fortune, but I was more interested in general intelligence. I wasn't sure it was going to happen at that point, but I knew that even if we just got very close, the things we would build along the way would be incredible.

I wanted to be part of that. Moradi has often spoken publicly about AI's power as a tool, echoing sentiments expressed by. Altman, a key champion of AI technology in a world that has grown skeptical about the company's technology. There are a lot of hard problems to figure out. How do you get the model to find the thing, to do the thing that you want it to do? 100% true. Satya Nadella's in here talking about pumping up Maradi because I think he at that point was saying like, yeah, I'm kind of bullish on her. As a result, he wrote, Mira has helped build some of the most exciting AI technologies we've ever seen.

Obviously true. I mean, she's like clearly a goaded product and AI manager. Like there's no question about that. Interesting. Well, we will see where it goes from. It's interesting that Microsoft didn't invest in thinking machines. I don't actually know who invested. At the time,

at the time, it seemed like Satya had more loyalty to OpenAI. Yeah. And then more recently, you can imagine Microsoft would make direct investments in potential competitors given that Open AI is working with Oracle and other companies that are, now competitive again with Microsoft. It seems like Mira and Ilya left around the same time.

Ilya is raising, what, a billion with 500 from Green Oaks coming in. And Mira, it says here, I don't know how true this is. Can you look it up? It says secured significant venture funding over $100 million to support capital intensive large-scale model training. So. Which is interesting because that's a... She's behind them all a little bit compared to Ilya.

But who knows? I mean, like a billion dollar deal can come together in like two seconds in Silicon Valley these days. no it's possible it's possible she's just throwing a bone to a handful of early partners and then she's going to do the one on five billion like you know in a in a month yeah and like the crazy thing is that like but i don't i don't think it might not be a bad deal i mean obviously everyone's pointing to like the dot com narrative being like oh there's going to be one power law winner and all this is going to but if it's commoditized you know maybe maybe you just got to go drill

the wells get the GPUs just buy a bunch of GPUs I don't know. We'll see. Anyway, that's the story of Mira. Is there anything else we should cover in here? It's pretty interesting. I mean, departed in 2014 and then founded immediately. I'm just so fascinated by the fact that like it's just model company after model company after model company. And like just they all seem to believe the exact same thing, which is like these models are highly versatile.

But they also don't believe that this will be a power law. Do you, are you a DAU of more than one? LLM, no. Yeah. Only chat GPT is on my home row. Yeah. And then I use, I have Gemini Pro plus, like, that I can find. When I find it, I can use it sometimes, but it's very hard to access.

And I use that if it's like ingest a book because it has a million, million token context window. So that one feature is something I use. Perplexity every once in a while. grok every once in a while in X. I do like a grok for image generation is fantastic because there's no guardrail. So it'll just generate like, oh, you want a picture of Tom Cruise, you know, fighting Mickey Mouse? Like no problem. Yeah.

Which is like I think actually fine because it's very transformative and it's clearly satirical. Yeah. But all the other LLMs are terrified of it of IP infringement. Yeah. And I think Disney and all the IP holders are like, yeah, actually. we don't want to get in a legal battle with Elon Musk the president's first buddy. Yeah, yeah, the other thing is that Elon will post through. He will, he will, he will, he will post. Like, it's, it's every lawyer would advise Elon, please don't call Sam Altman a scam artist during the lawsuit because then Sam can go out and like sue for huge damages. He could say, you know, you prevented this $2 billion investment. Yeah, yeah. There's a million ways that can go wrong. But Elon being the world's richest man is willing to just take that risk.

And so he would do that to a major corporation too, right? I mean, just he he said F you to what, to like Disney and all the major to Bob Iger just for stopping advertising. Yeah. Not even like a suit. That was a crazy. Hey, look, X is getting a little wild for our brand. We're not going to advertise there. And he was like, I have a message for you.

and he flicked them off at that damn trimet. He said F off. Yeah, F off, right? Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. So, you know, I'm glad because sometimes, you know, the four-year-old son asks for a picture of a DreamWorks character interacting with a Disney character.

Yep. And you know what? I'm happy to abide. And you're going to have to come after me DreamWorks in Disney because, you know, sometimes Mickey Mouse wants to hang out with Shrek. There you go. I think those two are different. IP worlds. But they shouldn't be. And I should be able to instantiate them. And I think it's

very additive. And it's not a replacement for the real thing. It's clearly, clearly additive. Anyway, speaking of intellectual property and luxury goods, kind of, let's go on to the French billionaire working his Trump ties to spare his luxury empire. That's right. We're talking about LVMH and Bernard Arnault. Let's kick it off. Jordi, what you got? Yep. The day after President Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last summer, he received a call from a familiar French voice. It was Bernard Arnault, owner of the globe-spanning luxury empire. Arnault wanted to check in on the man he had known for decades. Trump was also in the middle of a fierce presidential campaign as well as several

criminal proceedings. The phone call from Arnault sent a clear signal. The luxury titan was sticking with Trump through thick and thin. With Trump, now in office and warning of steep tariffs on European goods. The question, yeah, of course. The question is whether Arnault can leverage his connection to keep his luxury conglomerate out of any trade wars. Trades would be a blow to Arnault's empire, whose largest market is the U.S., equal and size to all of Europe combined. Trump has called the European Union's trade surplus with the U.S. a quote-unquote atrocity, but he also leans on personal relationships to guide his policy, as every businessman in the world does. The ties between the families are extensive, dating to when the two patriarchs were up-and-coming property developers in Manhattan.

that's a whole other side of Arnaud's story. He was like in the real estate development world in the construction industry back in France. Darno's second eldest son, Alexander, has become friends with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Ivanka Trump, also a funny story. I made a, so back in 2021, we launched helpful VCs, which was that NFT project where we made 400, you know, crypto-punk style, you know, NFTs. and we put them online and we said, any VC that reposts this in the next four hours gets theirs for free, otherwise we're going to auction it off.

So of course, every investor, you know, NFTs were starting to become popular. They were like, I'm not letting my NFT get auctioned off to someone else. Everybody reposted it super viral. Alexander saw it and then one of a mutual friend of ours hit me up. And he was like, hey, could you, Alexander wants to make a cryptocurrency, punk style NFT for his dad, Bernard. Could you make him on? I was like, sure, it costs like 50 bucks.

I was like, here you go. So anyways, gave it. I had no idea. Anyways, because Alexander had, was tapped into Web 3 and had done some stuff with Tiffany's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They kind of, I think, approached it in the right way where they dip their toes but didn't go. Yeah, yeah. You know, they weren't saying like GM, wag me and stuff like that. So anyways. Alex Sequoia. You remember that? So Zsaquire rebranded as like the web

three faucet main net thing for a week. It was like at the actual top and then the SBF FTX thing happened. It was like, okay, back to normal. Back to the basics. Amazing. Ivanka Trump is a friend of Arnaud's daughter, Delphine, and a devotee of Dior. The brand

Delphine oversees his CEO. So for those that don't know, Bernard has done a fantastic job of getting his, all of his children, like running different brands in the empire. Yeah. So she runs Dior. The Arnaud's conglomerate even pays rent to the Trump organization which is a landlord for LVMH's Louis Vuitton store in Midtown.

So does LVMH do cosmetics because you were talking on the last show that Melania should do a cosmetics line? Yeah. If she doesn't have one already, she might. She did one. There we go. Yeah, that seems obvious. Yeah. Okay.

I'll continue here. During Trump's first term, our nose decision to expand handbag production in the U.S. and publicly promote the move with Trump, help the lecture industry largely avoid an initial wave of tariffs that hit. other European sectors. Why are you laughing? I just think it's the funniest game of checkers. Yeah.

Where Berno's like I just I just really don't want to get tariffs like, okay, open up production in the U.S. Yeah, yeah. I texted to Trump. Hey, do you see what we did? Yeah, yeah. Like here's why you shouldn't, you know, slap like a 15% tariff. Trump left office before a second salvo of tariffs could take a, take effect. Those levies with some dub the LVMH tax were designed to.

to hit luxury goods and retaliation for a French digital tax affecting U.S. tech giants. Yeah. Hey, Bernard, you got to get it together over there. Get your house in order. Ban the cookies. Let's cool it with the cookies. Yeah. The cookie banners.

The cookie thing is just, I made a joke about it when I was in France in late December, early January, and it just is so over the top. It's insane. It's just, it's just is. He should be running. Bernard should actually do this because you think about you walk in the Louis Vuitton store, are they going to be like, hey, just so you know, like you're in a store. right now, hey, there's a store, you might have an opportunity to buy something. Can you please, like, sign on this line that like you're looking at merchandise and you're in a store?

So it's like, yeah, I know I'm in the store. I know I'm on a website. I know the cookies exist. Like, why am I clicking a button for this? Yeah. It's unnecessary. Yeah. And it's the same thing that you would never see that in a luxury environment. Yeah. And Europe seems hell bent on making their entire internet. You have to imagine that Arnaud, yeah, you have to imagine that Arnaud is inspired to some degree by, you have to Elon and that if you have millions of dollars, you absolutely can influence the outcome of an election and make sure your guy is in. So, yeah, again, a lot of, like, the obvious thing if you're trying to avoid tariffs is to show Trump, look, we're investing in America, you know, we're going to, you know, develop, you know, production locally. This is an important, you know, sector.

But, but then the sort of more complicated way to do it is to say, like, I'm going to fix French governance. Yeah. And like, I'm going to get my guy in and I'm going to make sure we're not like launching these taxes on American, you know, digital goods and products. I still wonder like LVMH tax, I guess it's still hanging over Arnaud's business empire, it says here, like, of all the things to tariff, that seems like the safest. Yeah. Not just because like luxury goods aren't important, but literally because like they're not price sensitive in the same way.

Like they're not price elastic. And so, you know, if you tax cigarettes, people consume the exact same amount of cigarettes. Like, it's fine to tax cigarettes, basically. Yeah. And it's the same thing for luxury goods. I would imagine that if, if there's a tax on Louis Vuitton stuff, the price goes up, it becomes even more exclusive. They sell roughly the same.

Profits aren't majorly disrupted versus if you're taxing, you know, cheap. No, the main thing is. A little bit, it's like all of a sudden the American stuff becomes competitive again. So I was reading an article in the journal about the Chinese, like LVMH's opportunity in China right now. And they have basically, there's already luxury inflation that they set. The thing is that if prices have to go up, Bernard wants to be the guy that's raising prices and capturing that additional thing. He doesn't want to be raising prices because you have to account for this tariff or you don't

want the consumer to be absorbing more costs because of something that's not your margin. I feel like, yeah, like there's so many places where I would probably be pro tariff. just to make the American local industry more competitive. Yeah. You know, we talk about drones. We talk about, you know, DJI versus GoPro. We talk about, you know, all sorts of hardware stuff, Unitri versus Boston Dynamics,

all these different things that could, could, or the Tesla optimist. But what, like, you know, like a lot of these, I was looking at like, you know, Swiss watches versus American watches. Like there's one guy who makes bespoke watches. really in America. You're on the list. You should actually make sure you're on. You should make sure you're on the list because it's going to be like a deck game.

Yeah, it's RGW or RGM. I think RGM out in Pennsylvania. And then there's Hamilton, which is like a great and historical organization, but they're not at the same level as the Swiss guys. So it's like if you tax that, it's like Patec, Vashron and, and Adomar Paget are still, like, they're only games in town at that level. And I'm wondering like,

If all of a sudden Louis Vuitton is more expensive, what is more competitive in America? Like, do we just start rebuilding? Maybe it would be an opportunity for an American new luxury line to pop up. The thing about luxury, though, is it takes 100 years to actually build a luxury brand. Whereas if an American entrepreneur came out today and was like, I have a drone that's just as good as a DJI, not even better, just the same, same price. We're price competitive. and I would buy that one, obviously. But right now, it's like, okay, if I need a drone, like it has to work.

I have to go with DJI. Yeah. Because the other one is one from America that doesn't work and cost twice as much. Anyway, let's move on. The article mentions China. LVMH is counting on strong U.S. demand to power its growth in the coming years after sales in China, the second biggest market plunged around 20% last year. Yeah.

And you were telling me something about that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so... It tracked with iPhone sales perfectly, right? So many luxury product companies had been dependent on China for the vast majority of their growth over the past decade. And that just like slammed basically to a halt. Yeah. It is contracting now.

That has to do with like economic issues in China. Also the Chinese consumer kind of like finding their way and they're being actual consumer brands in China that are starting to be compelling. Yeah. To people locally. But yeah, there's caring group who, who's saying. were down like 30% or something like that. In China? In China.

Okay. That's interesting. I'd love to know how LVMH is doing over the past year to 10 years, if you could look that up on public. But there's some interesting information here. LVMH operates 14 factories in the United States already and is planning to pump more money into Tiffany, the iconic American jeweler it acquired in 2021. Yeah.

So in 2024, Caring Sales in Asia Pacific, including China, declined 30% due to weekly. can demand. And so there's this kind of caught people off guard to some degree because there's a bunch of stores that are already like badged, like have the branding of whatever, you know, sort of luxury brand is going in there and just nobody's moving in or they're open and like people just aren't coming through. So really tough, you know, scenario right there. Apple is having the same issues. Their sales are down almost double digits as of last year in China. And again, part of of the reason for that is that the iPhone in China is more of a luxury product than it is a utility. And we talked about this yesterday off the show, but Apple has huge advantages in the U.S.

They have their modes, which is like messaging, payments, the developer ecosystem. They don't have that in China because of WeChat and these sort of super apps. And so somebody can just trade for a cheaper phone and get like 99% of the utility that they would get from an iPhone. Whereas if you go off iPhone right now, it's like you're losing your iPhone. storage, you're using all your group chats, you're losing your calendar. A bunch of apps. Like you're not, you're going to, it won't work anymore.

So it is very, you're very locked in. So this is fun. He, he went to the inauguration ceremony and sat next to Bezos and mosque, who he's been like going up and down that was the richest man. He recently was knocked off and Elon is the richest one

now. Um, but he was flanked by his wife and two of his five children. Who would refuse an invitation from the president of United States to attend their inauguration. Arnault told reporters, besides, I've had a longstanding relationship with him. Like, we're bass buds. I love him, which is probably true. This article is based on interviews. Arnault first cross paths with Trump when the Frenchman was living in New York in the early 1980s. Arnaud had left France after the election of Francois Mitterrand. The first

socialist president of France's modern republic led to higher taxes in the nationalization of suez of the French economy. He literally did the meme. If Trump's elected, I'm going to Canada. If Kamala's elected, I'm going to France. And he did that. He was like, there's a socialist here. I'm bouncing. I'm going to New York. And it must have paid off for him because he said he didn't own a single luxury brand at the time. Instead, like Trump, he aspired to become a real estate mogul. He opened offices at Rockefeller Center while Trump Tower was being erected on 56th and 5th. Arnault met Trump for the first time at a charity dinner at the Plaza Hotel in the early 80s, years before

Trump acquired the storied hotel. Trump was the embodiment of a distinctly American form of luxury, one that splashed brand names in bold-based font on everything from buildings to jets. Loud opulence, let's go. Really the creator. Arnaud's most high-profile investments were on the Florida coast. US real estate, however, was difficult terrain

for the Frenchmen who struggled with an unfamiliar market. When Mitterrand's cash strap government made a U-turn toward a more business-friendly policies are no return. That's so dirty. You're only business-friendly when you're cash-strapped. Yeah. You want to- I mean, that's the teal thing is like, is like even the socialists would say you

got to let the capitalist make some money before you can redistribute it. Yeah. So like it doesn't make sense to do socialism in a 2% GDP growth economy. You need to get to 10% GDP growth. And that's like where all the AGI socialists come from is they say, hey, look, yeah, like UBI sounds crazy now. But when we're growing GDP 10%, there's going to be so much money flowing around. It'll be easier to pay for UBI.

Everything will be paid off. Anyway, you know, these guys are futurists. When Arnaud resurfaced in New York in the late 1980s, it was the purveyor of a different kind of luxury. Arnault had purchased Christian Dior and he was fighting for control of LVMH. He had garnered a reputation as France's sharp elbow dealmaker back in France, drawing comparisons to Trump himself. Arnault and Trump shook hands at a party at the Metropolitan Club in 1989. Arnault had helped sponsor a black tie event for the French luxury industry at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan.

They shared a table according to video of the event, and Arnaud is seated next to a bejewed Ivana Trump. As Trump beams as he arrives at the table, to shake hands. Arnaud continued snapping up fashion and luxury brands, including American ones like Mark Jacobs and Donna Caron. Donna Karen. The real front lines of the expansion, however, was the U.S. real estate market. It was like a game of monopoly.

Arnaud's brands needed to occupy prime locations in America's most exclusive shopping corridors. We're talking about Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, just around the corner of Trump Tower, Bulgari, et cetera. And so he goes on an absolute tear. Yeah, and if you haven't already go listen to the acquired episode of LVMH because the story is just, yeah, I honestly have listened to both, so I'm probably have overlapping narratives. But yeah, both of those episodes are fantastic. And they give you just just learning about Arnaud, just an absolute. He certainly didn't lock into being at one point the world's richest man. Well, let's close out with this, like, how the taxes are actually shaping up to see, you know, what the prediction is for how LVMH bears going forward in the Trump 2.0 administration.

In 2019, the Trump administration imposed tariffs of seven on seven point five billion worth of European goods in retaliation for EU subsidies to Airbus. The duties targeted aircraft, cheese and alcohol like wine and scotch. Bad news for the French diet, the French diet paradox. Justin Mares. luxury items like champagne and handbags were spared. Thank God. Dom Perry. Leaving some people scratching their heads.

Yeah, I mean, at $2.50, $350, $350 a bottle, you know, you put tariffs on that. We're going to be making January 6th look like a picnic. A baby shower. A baby shower, yeah. The day before the tariffs were enforced, Arnaud and Alexandra boarded Air Force 1. boarded Air Force One with Trump en route to Johnson County, Texas to inaugurate the new Louis Vuitton Workshop in Texas. Notice how they say workshop.

They don't say factory because a lot of it is actually still done by hand. Interesting. LVMH had invested $50 million in the facility with plans to hire a thousand employees within five years. The bags produced here including the never full, Neu, Niu, and Mettis. familiar with these bags, bear the label made in the USA. When a French reporter asked Trump why he was slapping levies on wine and cheese while ignoring champagne and leather goods, Trump said he had been discussing the issue with Arnau.

I can't tax him because he moved to the United States. He was very smart. He was way ahead, Trump said. That's a good point. I mean, it's the dealmaker guy. It seems like corrupt, but at the same time, it's like the whole point is what does America get out of this trade deal? And there are a number of things.

There are money from tariffs or jobs in domestic manufacturing. And so, you know, Trump says like, hey, I threatened him. He played ball. And so I have to, you know, I have to back down. Yeah. Like, that's the point. It is also tricky because, like, yeah, champagne, how are you going to move that? Like, you can't move that to Texas, I don't think.

Yeah. But Trump's presence at the unveiling caused consternation at Louis Vuitton's offices in Paris. Nicholas Gisguer Louis Vuitton's artistic director for women's collections wrote on Instagram, standing against any political action, I am a fashion designer refusing this association. It's like kind of a reasonable thing to say.

He's not that crazy. But yeah, obviously, there's a lot of people that work at LVMH that are not down with the MAGA bros. And so they're going to have a rough time. Pulling Trump aside are no confided plans to make a major investment in the United States. He didn't say what, but days later, LVMH went public with a bid for Tiffany's.

The roughly $16.2 billion deal was the biggest acquisition of Arnault's career. And with Tiffany's flagship store, LVMH, now controlled three other four corners. And Tiffany is the flagship American luxury brand. Yep. There's not really any, can you think of any that actually- The compass Cartier and it's not an American brand? Yeah. Yep.

And so I don't know who owns Cartier, but, you know. LVMH. Wait, really? Yeah. You're kidding. They own both? Yeah. The most monopolistic thing.

Like, yeah. Where is? Yeah. So, so Cartier is owned by Richmont, but Bernard owns a big steak in Richemont. Okay. Wow. So it's indirect. Yeah.

Where's Lena Khan on this? She's probably buying luxury watches. And she's like, you know what? Let them. Oh, sorry. So actually, I take it back. Okay. Break it down.

I was spreading, I was just spreading misinformation. The size of Arnaud's stake, when he, when he acquired it, was undisclosed. Bernard holds it in his words as an investment. Okay. The thing is, is Arnaud has a history. If you listen to the Founders podcast episode, he will just start, he'll want to buy a company, or he just starts buying the stock. Yeah, of course.

So this is what he does. He's basically on his version of public, just like gripping little checks here. Dollar cost averaging in. Yeah, yeah. He's been dollar cost averaging in. And it's totally possible. Like he just doesn't even want to own all of Richemont. But anyways, he sees it as an investment.

Not, he's never said, oh, I'm going to try to take this over. So he doesn't have a controlling steak, but he does have a stake. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So, yeah. No matter whether you go, Cardier Crash or Tiffany Patack. But it's interesting because Richemont also owns Van Cleef.

Yeah. Which you know that Arnaud, it's such a hot, you know, brand, especially right in this moment. Men and women are wearing it. You know that he wants it. He wants it. But then they also own like IWC, Pige. Yeah. Like maybe he doesn't want those.

Pigege is great. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not a big fan of it. Yeah. I mean, good pilot watches. You can't hate him. So, let's see.

It's such a funny thing being a public company. and just having somebody text you that says, hey, don't want to ruin your day, but Bernard Arnault just bought, you know, bought 6% of the company. And we're hearing he's making other bids. It is very, very funny. Anyway, so now that LVMH was Trump's tenant and Arnaud needed to extend his conglomerate's stay into the brick building, once the Tiffany flagship store reopened, Arnaud wanted to temporarily move Louis Vuitton's flagship into the brick building while its permanent store underwent a sweeping renovation. Arnault dispatched Alexandra to New York to become the number two executive at Tiffany on January 6th, 2021, the same day that Trump supported stormed the Capitol, just coincidence.

By the time he left office, Trump was widely considered a pariah among the business elites. Alexander Arnault was the exception. The young executive and his wife died with Trump in 23 at Mar-Alauga. So for any of our listeners that are under five years old, it's hard to even. Our kids listen to this from time to time. It goes on in the house. People don't, you know, these five-year-olds don't realize that Trump was a pariah. Yeah, it's true.

Just in 2021, he would probably call somebody like Jeff Bezos and Jeff Bezos would just like not pick out. I never need to. I never need to think of you ever again. Like, hey, sorry. You were truly removed from politics. It was just fully removed. And so the inauguration this time was just hilarious in that everybody came to kiss the ring. And all these, yeah, imagine, we talked about this with the, you know, decision to deplatform Trump.

It's like, everyone in that group chat was like, yeah, there's definitely never going to be any negative repercussions from this. And then four years later, they're like, and then even, even a year later. He has infinite leverage. Yeah, yes. And then a year or two later, there's this really viral post. that's continued to go viral with somebody saying, it's crazy that we just de-platform Trump and there was just like literally no consequences.

It's just like, oh, we just lose the election in a landslide. Yeah, I forget who that is, but yeah, it's great. I can't tell if they were joking. I think they might have been joking when they posted that. Who knows? But it is hilarious because obviously they were very serious consequences, but not for the LVMH organization and the RNO family because Alexander is a young man.

on the move, Trump wrote in a social media post at the time, we were celebrating the deal we made. Alexander Arnault, actress Galgadoo and Tiffany's CEO, Anthony Ledrew, cut the ribbon at the reopening of Tiffany's flagship store in 2023. Louis Vuitton's Fifth Avenue store transferred to the brick building, turning it into a department store-sized Temple of Commerce. Temple of Commerce. Giant sculptures of a giraffe and ostrich were added to the facade of the building. thing. Very cool. And so after Trump won the election, our no moved Alexander to Moe Hennessy, LVMH's drinks division, which generates much of its revenue as in the U.S., which generates a lot of its revenue in the U.S. Alexander took over as the unit's number

two official this month, but people familiar with the matter say he's being groomed to eventually take the top job at Moe Hennessey. The drinks business faces more difficult straits than the conglomerates leather goods. And fast, divisions drinks have much thinner profit margins making it harder for them to absorb any additional levies so we got to keep buying Dom that's really important we're gonna save this company here on the consumer side yeah and there's a lot of talk around who's who's Arnault's favorite boy sure child right and so the way that the way that he's sort of moving Alexander around the empire sort of training him up yeah presumably like he seems like the

leading candidate for becoming the top dog, but again, we're not. It's exciting. Don't quite know yet. And so you can't shift, as we mentioned, you can't shift champagne and coniac production to the U.S. I think legally, like France has rules that link appellations of wine and liquor to specific regions of the country. And so it's only champagne if it comes from the champagne region of France. It's like a legal term. For now, LVMH executives have been carefully mapping its exports across every customs code category, tracking their exact locations in the shipping process. So the company can quickly determine its exposure to the moment any tariffs take effect. And they're gearing up for more investments in Tiffany. LVMH is spending 10 times more on Tiffany

stores than its previous owners and more than twice as much on marketing. Wow, that's a huge investment. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, maybe a Tiffany store in every city in America. Whatever people say, the Tiffany CEO Anthony Ledrew says, this is shaping up to be a very pro-business president. So they're coming out, marking their claims. Never hurts to be pro-business. Should we do some jet battling? The airplanes have been crashing.

It's been very devastating, very sad. Fortunately, no one was killed on the last plane crash, but it did flip over entirely, and the wings broke off, which is not good. Seems like pilot air. They came in too fast. Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about, you don't need to name the individual, but a pilot that we know was kind of breaking down. Yeah, I'll just read the texts. This is hilarious.

So we're talking about the crash. And my buddy who flies planes says he thinks it's going to be very stupid for the next five years. have you seen the clear video of the crash? The guy just landed way too hard. Literally nothing wrong with the plane. The weather looks totally fine. Just way too high of a descent rate, which is crazy since you have way higher air pressure

when it's cold, clear day. And Toronto is basically at sea level. Like bro, these are basically the ideal conditions to land a jet other than the snow on the ground, but that seems like that wasn't a factor. Yeah, because as soon as they come in, before they even touch the snow, the wheels just break off the plane.

And so clearly it came in way too hard. And he closes by saying, like, if you told me what, you need to land a jet, what would your favorite conditions be to choose? I'd basically choose these exact weather conditions, cold, clear day at sea level. And so, yeah, what a mess. Very, very silly. But anyway, so this story kind of ties into the last one in some ways because Europe had been subsistive. airbus and so this is just this great battle of commercial you know airplane manufacturers that's playing out uh and it's like it seems like it's worked for them or something something's going right at

airbus because the airbus well is it just that so many things were going wrong at Boeing yeah because it's possible if they were just not even executing that well but just like prioritizing safety yeah yeah durability of the planes yeah and that's it uh pilot training maybe maybe the safest European lines like just works or maybe they're not getting brain drained you know like Airbus might be the hottest ticket in Europe whereas in in America you know a lot of the great Boeing people probably went to work

at SpaceX etc. Anyway the European company started delivering the new aircraft the A321 XLR late last year against a backdrop of manufacturing upheaval and financial strain at its American rival so far the XLR has racked up more than 500 orders, many from airlines, looking to replace older Boeing planes. And can you pull up on public, like, just give me the size of the prize, like market cap

for Boeing, what's happening with the stock over the last couple of years, market cap for airbus, just to give me some ideas. I'm going to send some screenshots to Ben, maybe to share. Okay. I'm going to keep reading and then you kind of do some deep dive in. The jet success is one of the starkest signs yet of the diverging fortunes of the two. companies with Boeing's troubles leading to gaps in its product lineup that are now being exploited by Airbus. It is also a warning of a bigger threat looming. While Boeing is strapped for cash,

Airbus is increasingly investing an entirely new generation of aircraft that could shape the duopoly for decades to come. Very interesting. Yeah, so one one thing right away with Boeing, it's sort of a narrative violation, but they're somehow up 11 percent in the past 12 months, which you just based on all the headlines. You would not expect that. You just wouldn't expect that. Yeah. They've had like a very rocky, you know, they went, they, they, they got, you know, badly, they badly, you know, their stock suffered, obviously with, with, you know, COVID and everything like that.

And then it's basically just like, never actually, never actually fully recovered. So they're still, they're still down from peak. They're down 27% over the last five years. So pretty meaningful. dip on the other hand you have you know airbus which on the you know five years up 30 percent so they're almost inverted in that sense so american airlines and united airlines have chosen the airbus is xLR to replace their Boeing 5757 fleets and again as a consumer if i'm looking at two flights i don't really have that much loyalty to airlines to be honest i just kind of like

try to book yeah the best flight um the but i do kind of pay attention if there's two flights that are exactly, you know, pretty much exactly the same. I just go for the airbus. That's crazy. And so it's totally possible that these airlines are saying consumers don't want to be flying on Boeing. We need to adjust our fleet to fit their concern. It's crazy because like, yeah, I mean, you go one level deeper in the stack and like, you know, no one cares that it's like, oh, this is a Rolls-Royce engine or like this is a trans-dime seat buckle.

but most people don't know who makes what planes when they get on a Delta flight or an American Airlines flight. But it's, you know something going, you know something's going bad when people start caring about who, what the plane manufacturer is. But it has been a mess and there's been a lot of negative press. Even though just on the safety statistics, like Boeing is still like very, very safe. But it's just the, the vibes feel off. Yeah. The new model, the latest in its A320 family of aircraft, has another advantage. It doesn't have much competition.

Boeing discontinued the 757 in 2004 and shelved plans to build a new aircraft that would have competed directly with the XLR in 2020. The U.S. company's main rival aircraft, the 737 max 10, is years behind schedule awaiting sign off from the FAA. If all but a handful of people are let go from the FAA, it's possible that that never. They would just give it, no, they'd give it a rubber stamp because they're like, hey, we really don't have time to deal with this. It hasn't been all gloom for Boeing. The company in December announced a landmark order for up to 200 max 10 jets from Turkey's Pegasus, a carrier that predominantly operates Airbus jets. So they are flipping some people. America Airlines also doubled down its commitment to max 10 with 85 new orders last March.

And Airbus isn't without its own problems. Supply chain issues have limited the company's plans to turbocharge production and meet booming demand in the wake of the pandemic. This month, Airbus said it was delaying a long-touted hydrogen-powered jet. Oh, I had no idea they were even working on that. Anyway, in the five years since 2019, Airbus has spent some $12.9 billion on R&D. Boeing's plane-making business has spent $8 billion. So this is such an example of, like going back, this month, Airbus said it was delaying a long-touted hydrogen jet, hydrogen-powered jet. You didn't even know this was happening. Clearly, you know, the reason that, you know, if you could go back and invest in Tesla years ago, the bull case would be like this is a big company very focused on innovation that's going to continue to try to reinvent itself.

And these airline manufacturers, you know, these aircraft manufacturers, commercial aircraft manufacturers don't seem like the reason they trade it like 2X revenue is because they have no real, like they're not really showing, hey, we're committed to innovation. we want to build the next platform. Yeah. And anyways, it's just interesting to think about. At a large late stage company, people's incentives aren't their lifetimes. They're like, I'm here for a couple years, or I'm here for a decade.

I'm building my career, but I'm later in my career. Maybe I'm going to retire in 10 years. Maybe I'm going to retire in 20 years. Elon's thinking like, I'm going to run SpaceX at 1,000 years, and I'm going to be the president and king of Mars. And so, you know, whether or not it's true,

he's certainly thinking long term. And that leads to a very different style of decision making than the guy who's just like, okay, to really get my retirement package or to get my bonus or to get my promotion, I got to put out a press release about some fake thing and get some McKinsey consultants to say it's real. Yeah, we're delaying it. And then pump the stock a little bit and then pull back from the last second and say, it was actually never really a thing. It was just a, what's the term? It was just an art project. It was just performance art. Performance art.

Yeah. Yeah. What if they, what if they come out and say that in the next press release? Oh, that hydrogen jet, that was just a bit of performance art. Yeah.

It's a side project. This is why Boom Arrow could end up being, you know, their recap could end up being like the best investment ever. Yeah. Is because if they can pull it off, then these big, either Boeing or Airbus will have to come in and buy it

or they'll just sell directly. Yes. To the airline. And for everyone who say, oh, Blake's probably like the CEO of Boom is like, is super diluted now. Like,

you know, it's going to be rough for him. if he really starts crushing and like delivering delivering in a serious, serious way, he can reincorporate in Texas and do the Elon thing and be like, I want 25% of this company and you'll give it to me if I hit, you know, a hundred billion market cap. And all the shareholders would be like, absolutely, because it makes perfect economic sense just like it did with Tesla.

And so, you know, if you're a founder and you're diluted, you're kind of down, but not out. Don't give up because you can always get back in the game. Yeah. This is a new thing. Yeah. Wasn't the case for a long time. Yeah, Paul, you can imagine Paul Graham being a big part of that round, presumably,

and the other investors. I'm sure they were thinking we need to make sure that Blake is incentivized to triple down, you know, when many people would have given up already. Yeah, yeah. But obviously the investors need like financial downside protection and like they need to own what they own. Yeah. But at a certain point, it just becomes about the share price. And, you know, it can be accruitive to issue the CEO or the founder's CEO.

a ton more equity in the sense that like yes you will be diluted as a shareholder but if the price goes up and you make money yeah everyone's happy anyway um airbus has been working on lightweight airframes fuel efficient engines and even folding wings that sounds real that's after that definitely sounds like something that's going to have hey we're going to have folding android phones or we already have them the natural evolution is don't worry the folding wings are definitely coming it's right around the corner 2030 everyone says if you're ever in business and you and you and somebody asks you like, oh, when's that crazy thing? You're going to happen?

Just be like, we're a few thousand days away. Yeah. They're basically saying the same thing. Yeah, 2030, for sure. It's definitely going to happen. Yeah. If it's 2040, it's no big deal. No one's going to be mad at you.

No one's going to remember what you said in 2025 in 2030. Five years later. It's a lifetime. Anyway, folding wings. That'll be, yeah, maybe they should just flap them. Let's make birds. Giant albatross birds. Make the wings flap.

Yeah. Come on, your, Buzz. We spend more time arguing with it. Like an ornithopter, right? Yeah, exactly. From, from Dune. That'd be great. Anyway, Boeing isn't in a financial position yet to launch a new aircraft.

So they're kind of getting stuck and Boeing could get in a situation where their old plane sucks and the new plane they can't afford to launch it. And so lots of risk around Boeing. But the stock is up. It was oversold. Clearly people are optimistic that something will happen here. But let's figure it out. not great when they're saying we've got a little we've got to spend a little bit more time more focus on getting ready getting the business back to generating cash yeah so that we have the cash to support new airplane development

that's just not good like how is the stock trading up on on just that narrative yeah hey we're not making money yeah we're 140 billion dollar company nobody trusts our airplanes anymore going ceos they're falling out of this guy. Yeah, we definitely got to focus on getting ready. Yeah, I think what's going on here is that profit is equal to revenue minus costs and we need revenue to go up while costs go down so we increase profit. Everyone's like, yeah. So just to give everybody context, I have the full public page pulled up here. On 66 billion in TTM revenue, they've lost about $9 billion. So, not looking great. Good luck to them.

Hopefully they can go pick up some startups, do some acquisitions. Let those founders run the company. That's what I want to see. Yeah, at a certain point, you just, you want any great American company. Because Boeing in the fullness of time is a great American company. That said, it clearly needs somebody like Elon. Yeah, I wish. Everyone always says that.

That's the bulk case for Elon just having a bunch of children. Yeah. Is that one of, if we need more Elon's. Now, I think we can get other people. I would say the, the wild card move, they should, Boeing, how much cash are they have on their balance sheet? Like a billion dollars? They should just go buy.

Dude, I hope they have more than that. They're losing almost a billion a month. They're burning a billion a month. Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, people are like, oh, these AI people are raising too much money. We have Boeing's out there burning a billion a month. If Boeing's burning a billion a month and you're only burning 50K a month. Boeing has 26 billion on their balance.

Take five of that. Go by boom. Blake Scholl, get in the CEO seat. You're running Boeing now. Make better planes. You got to make better planes. Make them flap. Make them flap.

No. No, don't make them flap. Make them real. Make them good. Stop with the flapping. I want the ornithopter mode. Ornithopter mode. Ornithopter mode.

Yeah. I like this plan. I think we can turn this around. This is why we should have an activist hedge fund. So we can come in, start putting pressure. Maybe we've got to get Bill Ackman. Send Bill Ackman a post. Hey, we're taking Boeing private.

We're buying, boom. We're putting Blake Scholl in the Boeing CEO seat. Crazier things have happened in the business world. You heard it here first if it happens. What do you look at? I just realized there's that Apple launch event. Oh, is that happening now? Nikiel in the chat says

did we cover it yet we have not covered it yet Ben if you want to print off an article or pull up some slides for us do that but while we're preparing for that next segment Jordy I'd love for you to take me through Nick Carter

and his post on meme coins being unquestionably over yeah here's you know a lot of people over the last week have been saying our meme coin is dead there was a time that felt like NFTs were just inevitable and they were going to take over the whole economy. And I mean, it just feels like meme coins are like the least dead they've ever been in history from my perspective because the president just launched one. And so I feel like we're still like, yes, maybe you can call top if you're really, really sharp like Nick is.

But in general, I think for like normies, they're just like, whoa, like these meme coins are like serious. Yeah. And so he actually gets into this. There's some really good interesting. So the narrative within crypto right now are that meme coins are dead. Yeah. They're seen in these sort of extractive zero-sum games, right? Bology came out and was like PVP.

These are PVP projects. There's no value creation. It's just a value sort of transfer between people that are, you know, early and people that are later, right? And like people that's bought and sold at the right time. Yeah. People that bought and sold at the wrong time. And we've taken this stance. We have said that launching a crypto coin is or meme coin.

is low-class and vulgar, what would your mother say? Yeah. We've said that, you know, we have generally been fairly harsh on the, on the crypto community. And so the last, and it's interesting because, you know, even today, a company that I backed at Precede just announced a huge, their second round. Cool. From Andreessen Crypto called Universal Assets. So like, there's a bunch of good stuff happening in crypto, but it does feel like

meme coins had sort of, the obvious top was the president launching a meme. coin and then kind of where do you go from there and so there's been a bunch of drama with the libra coin from the Javier Malayor who like just kind of promoted it but wasn't necessarily a part of it sort of reflected poorly on him and then now this week it's been interesting Dave portnoy is just like gone heavy into meme coins just launching a bunch of coins and and sort of getting on these sort of live chats on on X and just like him you know looking like classic disheveled you know yelling at sort of cartoon profile picture of people. But let's get into this post and we'll cover some of these other issues. It's so funny that Trump has to pay short-term capital gains on Trump coin. Wow.

That's right because he was just selling into- Because they sold them like two days. It's like it's just ordinary income. Yeah. 50%. Okay. So Nick Carter says meme coins are unquestionably over. Obviously they won't fully disappear, but the trade is gone. Reason being the entire premise of meme coins that was that there were fair launch opportunities where John Retail had just as good of a shot at making money as the funds and VCs. So for a while, it was these sort of ICOs that were sort of public, but they also had some sort of more institutional capital. And then you had these heavily sort of VC-backed projects like Salana, for example,

like raised a bunch of venture capital before they ever were sort of widely available or distributed. And so, you know, after going through this era of like VC coins that are getting, by the time they go public, basically on the chain, they're, you know, trading at these crazy valuation meme coins. You could get in at $10,000 market cap. And then if it goes to a million, like, you know, you've got a, you know, ridiculous return. So anyways, this was the entire substance of the claim made by the meme coin boosters. The coins had no purpose beyond their launch mechanic. They weren't sold as a product in their own. but rather as an alternative to high, fully diluted value VC-back coins. Those have their own problems, of course, but their issues did not make meme coins any more worthwhile, and the meme coin trade was entirely based on a claim that was ultimately exposed as a lie, that the casino was at least fair. It was evident that this wouldn't last, and once meme coins became a big sector, semi-professional entities would emerge to cut pre-launch deals, trade on insider info,

snipe launches, meaning like, just buying something super early that you know is going to be. big. The quoted tweet dives into those details. For all of Hayden's sins, and Hayden is a guy that did the Melania token, and then he did the Libre token. He's done more to expose the corrupt meme coin sector than anyone else, and he should be commended for that at least. So he basically did a bunch of stuff that people are like, what are you doing? This is terrible. And then he went and talked for hours with Dave Portnoy, with Coffeyzilla. And so the Malay coin was the most obvious example of this, opening at a billion and going up to four billion in minutes, clear proof that people were playing a rigged game. So presumably Hayden

basically sold a bunch of the token before launch, basically saying that as soon as we launch this is going to be worth a billion dollars. You're going to be able to sell into that and it'll go up to, you know, a multiple of that. Nick says, but it's just the latest in a series of unfair and botched launches. The casino didn't take a slight edge. It was more like 90-10 in favor of the house, right? So where to now? Like just to make it very clear. if it was 90-10 odds in Vegas, people would stop going because there just wouldn't be the story. It would be way less entertaining. And so Nick's entire thesis is if you're 90-10 in favor of the house, people will just stop playing the game.

Yep. So where to now? Meme coins are cooked. There will still be launches and probably some winners, but the meta is done. Crypto historically has always been about these metas, right? It was defy summer. Then it was like the NFT boom. Then it was the three-three.

And so retail will still be farmed here and there, the little pay pigs. As many are not extremely online and unaware of how extractive the sector is, but the countless coterie of scandals and meme coin land will turn off the smarter investors and eventually the mass market. So his position here is that the people that are on X right now and on Discord and telegram and all these platforms, they know that like meme coins are cooked. Yeah. And they're now becoming way more wary of like some of these bigger projects. In many ways, like Trump, like, if you just bought Trump in the first 20 minutes of when he announced it, you did really,

really, really well. And it's crazy because I feel like, like, in the retail sector, like, in like, in like Wall Street. Like there is a thesis for like, okay, the U.S. government can give you a corporate bond or a government bond, then you get three to five percent or something. And then a large corporation like Apple just makes money, makes money, makes money, and you buy a share of that and they give you a little bit of the money. And so it's very like logical. There's very clear value creation there. And then and then yes, you do get the crazier stuff where it's like day trading very rarely works out because it's so financialized and so professionalized that it's like, yeah, you're going up against fucking Jane Street. Like yeah, yeah, right. Pardon my language,

But then on the flip side, you have people like Warren Buffett, who espoused just like general buy and hold strategies that do tend to work out for retail in for most people. And it does kind of work. And with with the crypto stuff, I guess something like similar does exist with just like stack sats and buy Bitcoin versus like trade meme coins. But when I see the meme coins, like I can write the algorithm in my head, which is like set up a bunch of servers that are scraping. Trump's Twitter and watch for any crypto launches. If there's a crypto launch, immediately go by that. Right. Thank you. Immediately go by that. And you could do that for Malani. You can do that for Barron.

And there's people that actually have set up the snipers that Nick is talking about. It's actually they're looking at the chain itself and seeing. Okay, the person that did Malani is working on a new thing. It's probably big. So let's buy some of that immediate. Or, hey, this thing just got created in $100,000. float into it, buy it with size. Exactly, exactly.

And so all of that seems super easy to make algorithmic. And so I don't know why as a retail investor you would ever want to play in that, unless you truly had inside information. So anyway, so Nick says meme coins are cooked. Second point, conventional L1, L2, defy token launches will continue. But I'm noticing funds and founders shying away

from high pre-launch valuations, mindful that end buyers are wary of these high FDV low float game. And so what high FDV low float means that this is basically the Trump coin, right? So there's like this crazy sort of fully diluted value in that if you released every token onto the market, that would, like if you, if there's a billion tokens, you know, and this is the price, this would be the market cap. But then what they end up doing is there's only, there's only a number of like 20% of that actually circulating. So it helps support the price. But I mean, that happens when a company goes public. And the reason you hire an investment bank is because they're trying to do price discovery in road shows with large investors.

So they go to State Street, they go to Fidelity, and they say, hey, the company is doing, here's the DCF, here's the huge model. We think this is where it should trade. What do you guys think? Okay, let's do an auction. Let's auction off this block and then get it and then unlock more of the shares. Like, this has been a solved problem and somehow crypto reinvented it. But the problem is that like the whole point of an IPO is like typically to rate. is money. So you're raising money. You're offering the public. And then and then the reason why you

want an accurate price is because if the price is the price is too high, yeah, your cost of capital is lower. You raise more money, but then your stock tanks and everyone's like your company sucks. On the flip side, if you price too low, your stock pops, but you're like, hey, we only got $100 million in our IPO and we gave up 10% of the company. Like, what happened? That's why Bill Gurley is always upset about that. But the problem with Bitcoin is that like you don't need the money for anything, right? Like, is there a point to this? Presumably like, you know, this guy Hayden, yeah, with the Libra coin managed to generate $100 million. And what, what Dave Portnoy was pressing him on is like, whose money is it? Like, where did that come from?

Yeah. And so you'd be sort of waffling on that. Like, like, a good example would be like, you know, like Uber goes public. They raise money. Yeah. Now they're public. They can issue debt easier, they get lower cost of capital. And so what is Uber, they're profitable now, but if they need to raise more money, they have access to the public capital markets. And then they can do things like try and build a self-driving car or hire a bunch of engineers to make their app better. Like there's obvious things. But like with a meme coin, like where the money doesn't go towards anything, like the project is done as soon as it's as soon as it's shipped, right? Yeah. There's no, there's no. So the price discovery doesn't even matter. Yeah. It's just, it's just

a wealth transfer. I don't mean, yeah. The price, the price is. The price is. Was there ever a pitch? No, like, I mean, that's, that's Nick's broader point is that the coin's purpose was the launch mechanic. Yeah. And then the product is the price. So when the price is good, people love the product. They're like, I love this product.

And then when the price is not so good, then they start to take some issue with it. And it's interesting. So what Nick is saying is like, these rounds are happening in the private market. So I've done, I've made probably five-ish investments and sort of digital asset related. startups. I was lucky to be in this company that launched today. Yeah, we have an universal asset. We'll cover it in a bit. I was like in the seed round of Farcaster, which is a billion dollar, you know, protocol now. But over the last year, I've been pitched these rounds that are that are, this is our pre-token launch round.

The round is happening at $700 million. Here's the comps. We think we're going to be able to go out at $2 billion. It's like an easy, you know, multiple on your money. Like that's how to these things are being pitched is this sort of pre-IPO round. You only have to hold, you're only a liquid for a year, and then you get this like quick, you know, potentially pop. So Nick says next, he says crowdfunding platforms like Echo will thrive. So Echo is like angelist-esque platform for the crypto world. They do effectively SPVs. They have accreditation, KYC, all this stuff that's important for companies that their narrative is like, let's help these private, Rpto rounds that are pre-token be more community-oriented.

So enable 200 people to invest in something that in a perfect world, Andresen would be like, we're taking that entire round. But people started to think poorly about these VC coins. Another interesting point, this is a really interesting one. So he says flight to quality. Part of the reason meme coins were attractive was because they promised nothing and were thus considered exempt from securities law. Yeah, that's the thing with the Lomnia token, right?

Like it's not like she said, hey, I'm issuing a token and we're going to build a protocol that will allow you to like get exclusive access to me. There's nothing. It's not the financial product. It's just a meme. Yeah. And that's actually what they, they don't even call it a token or a coin. They call it Melania meme.com is now live.

Yeah. It's a meme. Yeah. So Nick says, we have a progressive SEC that is already crafting rules to allow for compliant issuance of tokens and presumably an equity light disclosure regime for issuers. This means that we don't have to bother with fake decentralization, which is these protocols that are like, oh, we're set up in the Maldives and then we have like our, you know, NGO over here in Africa.

That's basically when USAID is getting it on this one. But anyways, so the idea here is that these tokens that couldn't have fees associated with them because that would position them as like blatantly. security, they'll be able to actually return capital the users in an interesting way and actually start to function more like equity. Because a lot of people would say like, oh, this token has to be worth money because it's connected in some way to this company and they're worth a billion dollars. And the reality is, it's like they're totally disconnected. No. The whole point of why you buy stock or preferred stock in a corporation is that it gives you a legal right to the stream of cash flows.

Yeah. That's pretty awesome. It's like if you own, you know, 1% of Berkshire Hathaway, you get 1% of the profits in that they dividend out. And now there's a lot of other structures that can happen. The money can flow around a lot of different ways. The board can vote to reinvest those assets. But in general, you have a claim on the financial assets, both on the balance sheet and in the cash list statement. Yeah.

So Nick ends on a positive note. He says there's no reason to be upset. A sense of gloom and cynicism pervades crypto. right now because meme coins in a sense were considered the last fair terrain where anyone could make money this illusion has been shattered he basically is saying the trade of the next few years is just to be like where is their actual sort of like on-chain cash flows happening and just buy those tokens right because then this fee switch can be turned on yep and you can actually earn you know cash flows based on your ownership of said token so basically like this could be the end of crypto and meme coins are mainstream now

There's going to be less of the, I just bought this token and now I'm worth $10 million type of thing. And more so, it'll bring a level of if you can, you're going to be able to make money on chain. Yep. But you're going to be more like a day trader who's either getting super lucky, taking a lot of risk or being highly methodical and taking the sort of long term value driven approach to investing. Yeah. I mean, it's a good top call. There's going to be, I think like the next meta is going to be crypto, value investing where you're kind of looking at these protocols and saying, okay, where is their income being generated on chain? And how can I, you know, basically own that and compound on it? And I'm sure a lot of people will do very well. But it just looks more like traditional stock or

bond investing. Yep. Or alternative asset investing. Well, let's close out with this growing Daniel post and watch out. There's some bombshells in there. You got a sensor. He's got a little bit of Daniel says, I think crypto permanently damaged tech in weird ways, just a huge influx of very uninteresting, greedy R words. R words. And when crypto went bust, they rolled into AI and now every AI founder I meet except for a handful seems like total dimwits. F crypto, man.

10K likes. 10K now. View hidden replies for insane crypto bought trash. Yep. Absolute S word. technology built by S companies for S community. It is funny that the average, like, if you post a lot on X, you're going to have, even if you have nothing to do with crypto, you're going to have, you know,

hundreds of messages a week from people being like, hey, boss, I've got a meme coin. I have a, I have a bot that replies to every single one of my posts with some sort of like chat GPT spinoff, but it always tries to steer the conversation, boards some salana thing that I haven't seen. And so most of the time it just gets muted. And I don't follow it. So I don't see the notifications. But every time I actually click, I'm like, oh, that's weird.

There's someone like tracking me. Yeah. What would your mother say? Lots of messiness. Go build something real. Do you want to go through Gautier? Do you want to do that? Okay.

Yeah, let's talk about a, a group of a group of, yeah, let's hit the size gong. Goatea is phenomenal post. as well. And anyways. So so anyways, I ended up backing this team

in 2021. So basically had to have been close to maybe 2020 even, but like close to close to four, probably four plus years ago. And they have just

iterated. and made pivots, they were starting and building an on-chain index. And one of the, I think, generalized issues they had was they couldn't really hard launch in the U.S. They had to make it available. And a lot of crypto wealth is still in the U.S. even though our regulatory environment wasn't friendly. So they ended up kind of evolving the business into what it is today, which they're announcing. And so anyways, I'll read it out.

So universal. That XYZ, Universal fundamentally improves how. assets move and trade on chain. You can now trade spot assets like SWI, Doge, and XRP, directly on your preferred chain without bridges or centralized exchanges. The problem is simple. Crypto is fragmented. So many chains, so many assets. If you're trading on base but want exposure to something like sole, Doge, or XRP, you have to bridge or find your way back to a centralized exchange. This creates unnecessary friction for your users and severely limits which assets developers can use. Universal solves this with U assets, wrapped one to one by verifiable reserves held in Coinbase Prime.

Each U asset can be natively minted and redeemed on chain across any supported chain. Since going live, U assets has already seen over $850 million in trading volume. So that's crazy. They seem like very pacing towards a billion dollars, you know, very quickly. Traders, this can mean you can finally trade 80 plus new assets without leaving your preferred chain. No bridges, no centralized exchange. no fragmented liquidity, and you can put your assets to work in defy. This is really cool. A lot of investors have experienced this before. Sometimes you don't really know what your

portfolio company is doing. I certainly didn't fully understand the new development, but they've evolved and clearly iterated and are building something awesome now. So, congratulations to Gautier and the rest of the team. They have just, I commented, incredible showing of grit across a crazy few years because there were so many moments where I'm sure their loved ones were basically saying all right guys hang up the hat like If you're in Web 3 pivot to AI

I sure that was a lot of pressure Like you gave this a good run but like it's over kind of thing Yeah That's great for them. Very cool. That's very exciting. We got more funding news Serronic raised a $600 million series C

from Andresen caffeinated 8V General Catalyst, Allod Gill. A little bit spicy on the timeline since Delian called Alad out for Alad Gil. His whole thing is like the index companies. He wants to buy the one company in the space that's the power law winner. Alad's obviously an investor in Anderl. Andresen's an investor in Anderl as well. And now they're investing in another defense tech company.

But, you know, we'll see. Maybe there's room for two power law. winners in this space but congratulations to everyone over at Serronic and $600 million I mean that's a lot of money you know boom boom boom so congrats to everyone at seronic let's I just love to see solo GPs leading gig around always just it's the best always I love just seeing and it is cool I mean a lot's point was that yeah like shipbuilding capacity is way under way under We need more ship building and that's what Seronics focused on.

Let's move on to the humane AI pin is winding down. Did you see this? HP is acquiring the team IP and software for $116 million. We've been talking about this, make printers great again. We have a brother printer. It's pretty good, but it could be a lot better. Of course we have the printers, the brand is actually called brother. It's not just her nickname for it.

We don't just have one printer. We actually have three printers. We have some very nice printers. We're big into printers. The name is Brother USA, by the way. And so, yeah. And so this, yeah, shout out to Brother and shout out to HP, Hewlett Packard. Let's see.

I think it's funny that HP is known for like printers now because they used to be like the premier maker of computers. I actually know someone who's like a descendant of Bill Packard. And it's. Oh, Bill. Yeah. And. I mean, HP has an incredible founding story. There was a, oh, who was it?

Some guy who fought in World War II or worked at World War II in MIT's radio lab, created a radio system to detect bombing runs to defeat the Germans, goes out to Silicon Valley, teaches at Stanford. And two of his students are Bill Hewlett and David Packard. and he's like, you guys should start a company. And then they start HP. And it's just like, wow,

a massive, massive company. But they have acquired Humane. Humane had raised maybe like $200 million. They launched that AI pin that was kind of a problem in solution in search of a problem. Didn't really get a lot of traction. It was more felt like a experimental, cool art project. It was also weird because it was like, was clearly tacked on at the last possible second.

Yeah. Because originally it was like their Apple folks and they left Apple and they're like, we're making the next Apple device. But every decision that they made with this pin was hyper aware of Apple's monopolies. And that created a very, a very like compromised experience. So it could, it could receive text messages. But they knew that they couldn't integrate with the iPhone. Because so there was a different number.

Yes, you had to get a different phone number. So hey, Jordy, send me a text message. And don't forget to save the other number for my humane AI pin in case you want to text me while I'm wearing the pin. Like it clearly makes no sense from a UX perspective or UI perspective. But it makes sense if you're thinking like 25 steps ahead and you're saying, well, if we do integrate with Apple over Bluetooth, they will have complete control. over us and we will never be able to defeat them. And so clearly they were thinking, let's not make

just like a cool consumer hardware company, uh, because there are plenty of those. Let's try and disrupt Apple. And so we have to rethink everything from first person is just a mess. Yeah. And there was, there was you could look at the human, so clearly very talented builders, designers, like had a big vision. Yeah. I love, I love that in general where the ecosystem is broadly supportive of people taking these big swings on projects that are ambitious and maybe prone to fail, right? We want 10 of these to fail. We don't want them to all to fail, but it's fine if 10 fail and one works, right? But I want more friend.com stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Where it's like you give a kid a couple million bucks and he goes and he tries to launch him in 12 months. Yeah. Not these guys were burning $200 million for like a decade. Yeah. And I care more about the time, honestly, than the money. Yeah. That's just so long.

It wasn't exactly 10 years, but it was just. Yeah, but my main point with Humane is you could objectively analyze the Humane PIN and determine that it was never going to be a hit consumer product. And the issue is that the team had so much time and money invested into it. They had to go put on clown makeup and go out and be like, look, like, this is the next big thing. And you could just, consumers are too smart. They're like, wait, it's a second number and it doesn't fully replace my phone, but it's sort of additive.

so I still need my phone. Yep. But like, how am I going to actually use this? This doesn't really make any sense. It was innovation theater. It was, they were larping as Apple. They were larping as Apple. They literally dressed up like Steve Jobs,

did an Apple style keynote and said all the words that Apple says. Yeah. Except that's not what makes Apple successful. Yeah. What makes Apple successful is that they had first mover advantage to like a revolutionary platform, the iPhone. And then they locked everyone in. It doesn't matter if they've just bumped

the camera specs with two megapixels, you're going to buy it anyway. Yeah. And that's just a different, it's just a different business. It's like a fundamental misunderstanding what makes Apple powerful. It was validating for, for me, because at times you're like, am I crazy? Why are the, we won't name these investors, but you're like, why are these people putting in so much money? And you could say, oh, it's just a team bet. You know, they have some like real innovative technology here and maybe that's worth something. But it's the same thing that my, my reaction to Quibi, which also, you know, the thing about these companies that that have raised a bunch of money are super high profile, they tend to actually fail fairly fast in the sense that Quibi shut down,

was it months after starting? Yep. They were like in Quibi's fundamental flaw was they were like, everybody's watching these short form vertical videos. We should shoot highly produced short form vertical video, cinematic movies and TV shows, not realizing that you're competing with every single person with a cell phone. You can make more entertaining, more topical.

Yep. and you're competing, Quibi's not competing with Netflix, they're competing with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, you know, X. Yeah, and that's what friend.com understands. Anyone can fine-tune an LLM. Anyone can go to Lama and make the LLM sound weird. And so he's been making a bunch of weird decisions that add up to something that seems differentiated

and is not just going to show up in your Siri anytime soon. Speaking of Quibi, Blake Robbins, if we go forward, probably 20 posts. He says, random thoughts. Turns out Quibi could have worked if it had just focused on soap operas. Real Short is doing $40 million per month for vertical video. I don't know anything about Real Short, but people are saying this is a narrative violation. One guy says too bad their output is pure slop, but it's working, which is really, really

interesting. They're doing $40 million a month? $40 million a month. Real short. Never heard of it. but someone figured out and cracked it. And yeah, I mean,

it's the same story with Quibi and Humane. Okay, but, okay, but these stories are like total slop. So their new release, they have, Take Me Hades.

I'm dying. When her sister gets blackmailed by a ruthless sex club owner, Dakota James is desperate, blah, blah, divorced me one last time. Haley Buildner,

a successful NY, CEO engaged to a billionaire politician is shocked to learn. The air this is another one. The heiress and their. Oh, wow. The heiress and her possessive bodyguard. So it's just like, it's basically romance novels turned into these like seemingly like low. Yeah.

But so I mean, this is a weird thing where where they were willing to do the same. What is the counter positioning here against Quibi? Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was the founder of Quibi, would not. touch this for ethical reasons, for aesthetic reasons. And he missed out on a $40 million a month opportunity. This is like basically pornography in the same way that romance novels are. This show is called Pregnant by my Tough Daddy CEO, which I don't even want to say. CLEP all of that. This is not family-friendly content. Is it AI generated or is it actually shot? We don't know what the stories about it. Could be, could be a hard-wereming story. Terrible vibes. Terrible vibes. Terrible

vibes. Blake. So now we know why they're doing $40 million a month. What did it cost them? Well, there's a good question. What do the founders of Real Schwartz's mothers think about them? Because what's, we should reply and say, Blake, where should we start in the catalog? Yeah. But that's interesting. So the thing is, is like, these sort of like low-class and vulgar novels sell really well. It's the same of these character AI. These sort of TikTok,

book clubs and stuff like that. People like the stuff. So slop sells. Anyway, promoted post. We got a promoted post from Porsche, the 9-11 ST. This limited run vehicle is up for auction with the entire winning bid

supporting the Red Cross response to disasters through the United States. Now, that's great because the Red Cross, we've been talking about this, might go through a for-profit transformation, which would be huge. The auction is live now through February 20th in partnership with RM Sotheby's sealed.

So obviously a lot of the viewers of this are going to be at Sotheby's probably this weekend. And so take a look at this 9-11 ST. If you're not familiar, the ST, of course, is a manual analog. Essentially, you know, this is a Carrera GT level performance vehicle with a true driver engagement, beautiful vehicle. Highly recommend picking this up if you're looking for a daily, something to show off, something to have to make your commute a little bit more exciting. Anyway, let's go back to the timeline. Is it a great just sort of commuter, underrated commuter. Yep. And so the Carrara T is out now,

a little bit cheaper, I think 160, 180. No, no, no, no. It's way less. I mean, after, you could probably get it up there with options, but you can get a Carrera T for probably one. They raise the price, though. Like the old one? Yeah, the, the newest one with the hybrid power train is up at like 150 now. The 2025 T is a starting price of 135. So yeah, with options, you could probably get it to like 170. Yeah. But the ST was much more limited, much more expensive.

And I think it's because the S, it has the turbo S power train, or the GTS. It's basically a Turing. Yeah. Like a GD3 Turing. Yeah, yeah. GT3 Turing, power train, but manual and much more engagement. So highly recommend it.

Anyway, big news from Anderrol Industries. They are doing a hiring stunt. They posted, don't work at Anderl. And we have a post here from Chris, Backy. He says, the new social media intern at Anderl is about to single-handedly land them a $500 million defense contract. There's a couple posts here from Anderl. They say, got a tech job, they said. It'll be easy, they said.

I've been soldering for eight hours straight. Oh, sure. I'd love to go help with the dive XL project, flying from L.A. to Sydney. And back in a weekend, sounds great. Matt Grimm just said, I should do the mirf with him in two weeks. And he believes in me. I've never done a pull-up in my life. Whoever was working on IVAS before me was really into sword art online.

And the ultimate banger that got 8K, I think it's going up more, says Palmer. He's the intern, John. Yeah. Whoever ghost rode of these, generational ghostwriter, really. Like, genius, you know, I can't say enough about them. Absolutely, really, really dog. Absolutely dog of ghostwriting on the timeline. It might be in the...

Maybe. Might be in the room with us right now. Palmer just told me he wants a working prototype of the big robot from Pacific Rim by Friday. 8K likes on that. And lots of good responses. Somebody says, is Drill working for Palmer lucky now? Jason Levin says Anderl is posting now. This round is about to be huge.

And they even gave a shout out to our sponsor, Ramp. They say, hey, Ramp, why does my corporate card have unlimited spending on American muscle car rentals? I like that one. And Ramp quote tweets it and says, looking into this for personal reasons. And of course, the Ramp Army comes out. Ju-Wan says, I think we should change it to unlimited muscle car purchase. And Ramp says as long as it increases productivity. Heard a good story.

So I have a family friend who operated a massive. HVAC company in New York for decades. And he's told me just some crazy stories from that. Because imagine you're working basically on the buildings and office and retail space of like all the most powerful firms in the world. And so anyways, wild stories. But he said that he would get his executives. They would all get a company car. And he would advise people, they could get whatever they wanted like within a certain budget range. But he would advise them, you know, generally like get a truck or you know, something that's, and he said the most issues he ever had was an exec that got like a nicer BMW. Sure. Because every customer started going back to him being like, why is your exec like,

I'm clear, like I'm not paying, like, whatever I'm paying you right now, I'm going to pay you like, you know, 20% less because clearly you have way to, so enough margin in here that your executives are like driving sports cars. Yeah, exactly. To meetings. So yeah. Yeah. I think the andrel guys, if you're, if you're working at and you're traveling got to get a Mustang show up in the gt 350r the gt 500 the dark horse maybe yeah who knows uh yeah what else would be there maybe camaro maybe something with a helicat the new corvette yeah zr1 is the new zr1 people are not going to be like this is a muscle car this guy they're gonna ask you to renegotiate the contract at that point yeah but uh but maybe uh maybe something with a helcat in there a demon dot

Demon pulls up yeah zero to 60 and one point seven or something off the factory line totally you love you love a track ready uh american made factory muscle car uh but very cool uh love to see anderall uh doing some fun posting they posted a video uh which i think we can pull up ben is that right you have that let let's throw that on the stream and and and and and and bring it down jordy what do you think about anderl's recruiting video titled Don't Work at Anderl, highlighting all the drawbacks of going to work at a defense tech company. Is that from an icon? We'll watch. Yeah, let's watch. I've been at Andrewl for what, three months now? It's not the typical tech job I was expecting. My last nine to five was more like an 11 to 3. I was working remote. Here, you come into the office every day.

and they have you doing actual work. Where are the nap pots? And everyone's going on about the mission. It's like they're literally obsessed with America. But I'm pretty sure this coffee is Italian. The founder guy, the one who's always in the Hawaiian shirts, he's like always around. Subterraining tunnels are bunkers.

It's about using the entire crust of the earth as a three-dimensional battle stuff. a three-dimensional battle space. A new warfighting industry. It's really hard to make it in the current e-bike industry because dive L-D is the smallest before we make. It dives to a depth about 6,000 meters, totally out honestly.

It's just the bottom of about any part of a Easy shot, you know, easy shot, but very cool. A little touch. Not exactly business class. I thought I'd be on my laptop at the hotel pool. Now, I'm just surrounded by all these robots Product demos. They actually expect us to test our products in the field?

I'm more of an indoor guy myself. Sometimes I wonder, how did I get here? I'd rather just be sitting at my desk. That's a good VFX shot too. This is so well done. It's so well done. I mean, it's like... Is the whole don't, like, blank?

Has that's been done in a campaign? working andrel probably it's just built different it's funny that they mixed in the the zoomer brain rot terms yeah yeah i mean clearly you know targeted at like you know the younger engineers who are i mean the classic anderil pitch was like why are the best software engineers writing add optimization code like come build something important and i think that hits it really well uh pretty fun i love i mean fantastic campaign I was engaged the whole way. It felt like they could have done the same campaign in 30 seconds,

but they just extended it out. They probably cut it in a bunch of different ways. I was talking about that. I think it has like the patina of like Super Bowl ad almost where it's like something you could see almost before a like a movie. It's like a one minute like cinematic like experience. But I think it works because Andrew has so much like credibility. I think that that style of ad probably is a little.

little too much if you're, you know, a seed stage startup that's like just like, also that's a very, that's that's that is I have no idea if they, I, I'm assuming they work with an external agency. No, they have an internal team. Okay. So yeah, the cool thing is like an agency would be like that's like a $300,000 campaign because it's yeah, days and days of shooting and you have like all the product shots in the field and then the stuff with Palmer. So doing it in a house is very cool. I think they can take that don't work at Anderrol campaign and scale it out and do you're talking with the ad quick team, right? Like do do a billboard on the 101 that says don't work in Anderol and it has some crazy submarine. Yep.

And people are going to go. Yep. You know. And it's just about like breaking that expectation of like everyone's saying work at my company. We're saying don't work. And yeah, it's a joke. Obviously you get it. And they are recruiting.

But it's just something that sticks out a little bit in the feed. and even the first just don't work at Anderil post got memed and went viral because it was like, wait, why are they saying that? Like that's weird. Yeah, the counter. People like fell for it. Counter positioning is so key. Yeah.

It's funny. Speaking it. So counter positioning, everybody says, join us on our mission. Anderil taking the opposite approach. Don't work at Andrew. If you don't. Yeah. Like if this doesn't sound exciting to you.

If you care about nap pods, like you're not going to have fun here, just self-select out. Yeah. And then by definition, there's self-selecting. Another good counter positioning example. So, uh, Allen control system, which we've talked about on the show before, everybody was going for these sort of Lord of the Rings names. Yep. And they were like, we're going to go the exact opposite.

We want to sound like we're decades old, like Allen control systems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like just kind of random. It just sounds like an old legacy company. Totally. But then when Steve was on CNBC or some other mainstream media channel, I think like a week ago, it looks very legit because it's like Steve from Allen control systems. Exactly. And people are like, oh, what's this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't sound like a startup. So counter positioning matters a lot. Even with us, like, we love YC. We, like, would love to, you know, figure out some stuff to do with them over time. But with PMF or Dye is like the exact counter positioning against. Totally. Against YC just from the lens of like instead of make something people want, like make something

that makes money. Exactly. And it's not, it's not like taking a shot at YC. It's more just like, like, hey, there's a million like tech stars is just trying to be like exactly copycat YC. and there's a bunch of different companies that are organizations that have just been trying to clone. It's like actually it's more fun. It's more valuable. It's more interesting if you try and differentiate.

And that's what Anderl's doing next to the Googles of the world, which have been pushing for, hey, the nap pods are great. And hey, the work life balance is fantastic. They're saying the opposite. And that is like the spice of basically any great marketing campaign in my opinion. It's just finding the white space and then kind of going and exploiting it. Yeah. Let's move on to ad quick since you mentioned them. This is a little shout out.

Their head of analytics, Ty Tinker, great name. T.T. Head of analytics and he just tinkers with analytics all day. Great nominee of determinism. I love it. Amazing. Why don't you try tinkering with your analytics once you run an ad quick billboard? But he was on the SaaS backwards podcast and you can listen to the full episode here.

And I think that would be a great opportunity if you're trying to think about out of home. You go listen to this podcast and you see. I mean, the big question with out of home is always the analytics. Like, how do I track any of this? It makes no sense. It's like, is it just brand? Do I just have to do it on vibes? Well, Ty Tinker, the head of analytics over at AdQuick, has all the answers.

So go check that out if you're interesting. Yeah. And so I was saying, I asked Chris to see you of AdQuick earlier, how would you approach an Andrewl out of home campaign specifically around recruiting? Sure. There's some of these key areas where they could just like really scale up their recruiting efforts and he said we can layer any first party or third party behavioral data onto the map in ad quick to find the best out-of-home ad placements to hit engineering job seekers.

That's cool. So it's not just about a lot of out of home is like we just want to be out in the world and be big and like, you know, get people's attention. But there's a science behind it and like ad quick integrates all that. So it's not like you're calling up the owner of a billboard just saying like, yeah, I'll take your billboard for 30 days. It's like let's actually figure out the highest R.I. most relevant places to be and then spending in those places.

So they, anyways, very cool. Well, let's move on to VR. Something Andrew was working on. So if you want to work on VR, you could go work on the IVAS program,

which I think is very interesting. I was digging in a little bit more. $22 billion contract for IVAS transferred over. It only went live in 2021. So I think that there might be like $10 billion, dollars left on that contract, but then also it might get rebid and other people might bid for it. But at the same time, it's like, who else would you give it to? The dollar amount wasn't released from what I saw in terms of what Andrew was actually capturing.

Exactly. But Andrews' pitch would have been, even if they were bidding for it cold, we're going to be able to do this for a quarter of the cost. Exactly. And so that means that, hey, if Microsoft was going to make $10 billion dollars, but it was going to cost them $9 billion to deliver that and capture that ACV, then all of a sudden they're like, hey, this, this contract only has a billion dollars of value to us. We will sell it to you. And I have no idea if they paid anything or what they paid. But these contracts can't change hands. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. But I can't imagine a better place just from, I mean, obviously, I'm like not objective at all here. But

just try to be objective. Like, like, you're doing VR for defense. Name a better person than Palmer. Like, I'm super conflicted here. But like, let's be honest. Like, what, company are you giving it to? Like there's no one else. This is our main advice for people is get conflict. Get conflicted. Yeah. Get conflicted. Get on the cap table. Get on the cap table and then start shilling. Pumping your own bags. Let's go to Tim Urban though. Because he is a daily active user of the Apple Vision Pro. He says, I'm possibly the only person on Earth who uses Apple Vision Pro 20 plus hours a week. As a writer, it's just such a massive upgrade to go from a 32-inch monitor to sitting on a mountain top,

totally immersed looking at a 50-foot screen. There's just one problem. The idiotic way Apple designed their headset. All the weight sits on your face. This is uncomfortable and was on the way to making me look 80 years old. So he had a friend who 3D printed a headset that leads the headset to sit millimeters off of his face. It doesn't even touch his face.

And so he says, Apple, please talk to Jonathan and get your stuff together. VR, even with a big heavy headset, does not have to be uncomfortable. It's all in the design. And I love this. I loved the Applevision Pro, but I agree. It was super, it was super heavy. And they needed to fix that. And it seems like Tiburman Scott got a solution.

What they nailed design-wise was what people expected a VR headset to look like. Yeah. But they, but there were just so many. Like, again, that's not something that Steve would have let out the door. And users were like, oh, it's heavy on my head. It was a Pepsi challenge product. Are you familiar with a Pepsi challenge? No.

So Pepsi challenge was this campaign run by Pepsi in, I think the late 90s, early 2000s. And basically what they did was they had blind taste tests with people like man on the street stuff. Yeah. So they'd film a bunch of people come in and say, taste Pepsi, taste Coke. And they'd give you a little like thimbleful, like two ounces of each. People would taste the Pepsi and they wouldn't know which one one. And overwhelmingly they would select Pepsi. And what was going on was that Pepsi was sweeter.

And so over a one-out's taste, you would be like, yeah, I want the Pepsi because that one tasted sweeter. But when you gave people the whole can, they were split much more 50-50. And sometimes even leaned Coke because they were like, I don't really want that much sweetness. And so I call the Applevision Pro like a Pepsi Challenge headset or Pepsi Challenge product because it was an incredible experience for 10 minutes. And that was the experience that most people had. went in, they put it on, and they were like, okay, I'm good. Or you give it to your friend or you blow your grandma's mind with it, that type of thing. But beyond that, it didn't become a daily active product for many people. And Apple isn't the business of daily active use. You've got to be using

your AirPods every day, your phone every day, your laptop every day. Like they can't be hard to build a valuable consumer electronic product if you're not getting daily use. Yeah. Which is why Sona struggles because you can't set it up and then you just put it in a box and, you know. Yeah. Well, speaking of products that. I use every single day. We got to talk about eight sleep. And I want to show this ad that they ran with none of than Charleclair, Charles Leclerc, Charles Leclerc,

the F1 driver. He partnered with Eight Sleep. He says, The Secret is Out. Eight Sleep says we are officially teaming up with Charleclair, who trusts Eighth Sleep to power his performance on and off the track. And this ad is incredible. We are going to recreate this 100%. I love how this was shot.

It's super high energy. Ben, can we pull it up and play the full eight sleep? Charles Leclair ad on R-R-S-R-R-S-R-R-T. Trey in the chat goes, Charles, S-H-A-R-L, Charles. It's good idea. People see the races, the speed, the moments on the podium.

But what they don't see is what truly drives performance. for me is the work of the track, the preparation, the focus, the recovery. Sleep is the foundation. Whether it's long hours of travel or intense back-to-back races, staying sharp and recovered is what makes the difference. It's so sad. Sleeper, or made sleep. So quick.

You can tell the production was like one day, maybe two. Beautiful transition out of the sort of tech online X bubble into one of the, biggest global superstars in the world. 100%. And it also still has that like high-paced, frenetic social media vibe real, like pacing to it, which I love. It's not like, oh, they went to some agency and the agency said, oh, this is how you do an ad

with F1. It's got to be, you know, this really long-winded thing. It's like, no, really fun to watch, a bunch of really cinematic shots. You can imagine, I can see the, I can visualize the lens that they're using, how the camera is moving that's just like handheld really quick, you know, high, high faith, like fast pace editing. And I love it. And I can't wait to recreate that with us because he says champions sleep on eight sleep. And we like to say that podcasters sleep on eight sleep.

And so you should be sleeping on eight sleep. Everyone should be sleeping on eight sleep. So go and get an eight sleep. And we have a fantastic product. We do. TBPN. TBPN. Go check it out.

Oh, we got some hiring news from none other than Josh Ephraim. He says today I'm joining Kooley. LLC LLP as special counsel in San Francisco to support and advise founders that are forging a new tech frontier. Building on the frontier is hard. Think sectors like crypto, AI, hard tech, biotech. This is in part because the legal landscape can be complex and dynamic, making it hard to navigate. He was a paradigm before, an absolute dog. He saw many founders struggle to find the right team of lawyers to help them navigate the challenges their businesses face. Working with crypto founders and investors on these challenges has made me uniquely equipped to help others navigate

legal complexity. Yeah, I mean, crypto deals are next level in terms of legal complexity. It is not just the simple safe note and some Stripe Atlas stuff most of the time. And so Cooley is the leading law firm supporting companies in crypto, AI, biotech and hard tech. This involves a full suite of experts in areas like securities and commodities, regulation, governance, finance, hard and soft intellectual property, money, transmission, commercial transactions, just to name a few. It's a privilege to have the opportunity to join my good friend and former paradigm colleague Rodrigo Sierra. The team at Kooley works seamlessly together to support founders on the frontier of crypto and

beyond, and I'm ready to get to work. I wouldn't have seen this opportunity or been equipped to address it without the support of the team at paradigm. The team at paradigm has set the standard of how to build on the frontier of crypto, and their leadership on the legal and policy front is the best in crypto. So, congrats to Josh. Good luck on your new career. as special counsel at cooley and hey if you're looking for a startup lawyer this guy knows how to post

not many none of the startup lawyers I know are great posters so but this one's love to see it this one's great full breakdown he's on axe you can go reply to this post you can go tweet at him and say hey DM him he's not going to be able to give you legal advice in the DMs but you can sign an engagement letter and I'm sure he'd be able to help you out then yeah let's go to vanta Savraaj Singh says, Trust Vanta, wow, thank you for this generous gift. This is a gift from your friends at Vanta, and it's a couple of Valentine's Day candies.

It does look like drugs, but they are in the compliance business, so I imagine it's not drugs. And people are kind of like, lull, that's so generous of them. And it's kind of the smallest gift. I think it's an idea that it's the world's small X gift, but it's kind of a cute idea to just be like, like, what was the actual, I'm trying to remember

a Valentine's Day thing. What do you expect from your SOC 2 compliance, like, you know, platform? Yeah, you're paying for compliance, not, you know. Yeah, they're not going to take you to F1 on a box at F1 on on Valentine's Day. Yeah, maybe if you're a big client. But yeah, I mean, it's nice of the thing. And I think there's this is underrated that, hey, come up with something cute and fun. and send it to every single customer you have,

especially if you have high LTV. You know, every Vanta customer is probably making them thousands of dollars. So you can afford to send a couple bucks to every single person, send a package, send a t-shirt to every single one of your customers if you're in a B2B organization. Sure, if you're a consumer and you know,

your customer makes you 10 bucks, you can't send them very much free stuff. But better than just an email, better than a, you know, I don't know, just like a discount code. Yeah. I think it's interesting. Kind of, you know, didn't go. viral for the wrong reasons. Didn't go,

it wasn't actually a fiasco for them. I think it's just kind of cute. It's cute. I like it. A cute little gift. Yeah. And it's funny that they have this cute little llama as a mascot. And yeah, I like Vanta. I'm down. I'm into it. Speaking of other good vibes, Rahul, zero interest rates,

posts pictures of evenings at Julius. And he posts this at 10 p.m. And it's just guys being dudes hanging out in the office. I love it. And Raul's really gone on to step back from posting and meming and trolling and just, you know, wind up building a business. EV. EV. Just focused on, focused on grinding.

So we love to see that. Well, every time you post, Rahul, if it's PG, we'll cover it here. Absolutely. And you can always go back into the product manager archive and see some absolute bangers. Product manager. So here's the hack to find that the top bangers. You just go in a go to a new tab in Chrome. that you're not logged in and just put x.com slash their username won't work for him because he's

locked his old account is locked oh his old account is locked yeah all right well he's still got bangers on the new account truly archived uh but some of the greatest posts of that era came from him yep uh he was he was a fantastic poster instead still still got it but you know much more focused on business these days but we love you raoul and good luck on uh the next feature you're pushing or the next hire you're making or whatever you're doing next uh salea underscore who's big on the show before says how the F am I supposed to consistently down 200 grams of protein every single day without structuring my entire life around this I put this in because I feel like you have really good advice for this you're always having some little protein snack we ate burritos right

before this as we typically do yep I mean the easiest way is to look Blake I have the PMF or die stream up here Blake is just housing what looks like raw milk so that's one way just just just just don't drink water and just drink raw milk instead. I can't pull up the old data. But yeah, I mean, you need to eat buckets of chicken. And I mean, one easy way to get this is a single David protein bar has 28 grams of protein. And it's something like 110 calories. It's like uncannily crazy macros.

So yeah, eat 10 of those a day. Boom. Done. But yeah, you got to go, you got to figure out where to get the massive amounts of protein. You know, six eggs in the morning. We talked about this. We're going to start slonking eggs on the show. John's never slonked before.

I'm a slonk enthusiast. We got to get, it's also eggs have become such a status symbol, such a, you know, a safe harbor for wealth recently. Yeah. And I think just having like a 36-pack carton here. that we're just slonking. I mean, Gabe right here, he says, pretty easy. You have 16, we have 16 waking hours. You need to eat 12 and a half grams per hour.

That's only two eggs. Set a recurring reminder on your phone. At the beginning of the hour, eat your two eggs. You can cook the 32 eggs the night before. They'll fit in a regular size cooler, which you can carry with you. Wow, 8,000 likes on that. I didn't realize this was such a bang.

There's 64,000 likes on this post. Wow, Sela, killing it, dude. Good job. Very, very fun post. And yeah, you got to get your protein up. You got to get one gram of protein per pound of body weight at least. And so, yeah, a lot of steak, a lot of chicken, a lot of broccoli. Simple.

A lot of eggs, I guess. Simple. Let's stay with Sala because there's another good post here. Some ideas for huge value add quote tweets in case anyone needs them. You want to read some of these? They're pretty funny. Yeah. So if you've ever had a post go really viral, you're basically going to get people that

are quote tweeting it and adding their own little spin on it. So these are typically some ways that, you know, if you're quote tweeting something, throw these in. Fascinating. Big if true. 100 emoji. Interesting. Wow. Rocket ship. Target. Worrying. Hmm. Question Mart. Exclamation point. Be sure to use these a lot. People will really appreciate the value you add. Kind of an Elon sub-tweet, but I genuinely think this... When Elon does it, it's value ad. Your phone's going to melt down. It's curatorial because Elon knows there's a lot of followers.

Obviously, he has a huge boost in the algorithm. And so what he's doing is saying, I want everyone on X to see this post. And I'm just going to quote tweet it so that it goes in. Because, by the way, retweets don't really work anymore. They just don't go out. So instead, you need to quote tweet with something like this. And so I think this is a great strategy for growing your account. Just become a curator.

Everything you see, quote tweet it, throw it in the timeline. I think you're going to wind up seeing a lot of growth, honestly. And that's just the meta. And you got to play the game on the field, unfortunately, or fortunately, you know. Don't complain it. Don't hate the player. Hate the game or vice versa. What is it?

No, don't hate the game. Hate the player. I don't know. Anyway. We don't know at this point. Speaking of Bezel sponsors, I don't know. There's no transition here. But we love Bezel.

And Bezell has been killing it on Axe. I'm so excited about this. We've been talking to them. They're obviously a partner on TBPN. And we're very happy. I have a watch coming on Bezell. Jordi's watch, he bought on Bezal. And we recommend everyone install the Bezal app and pick something up.

And they do these amazing deep dives here on individual watches that are available for sale on Bezell. And this one today is about the discontinued Patekfilippe Nautilus. It could finance your house or at least a very, very nice vacation. Here's what makes it special. It's complicated. And to be clear, this is like a, this is a $100,000 watch. Yep. So yeah, it's very, you know.

It's a lot of money. A couple weeks at a month is, is, you know, basically equivalent. So they just get an idea of the value here. Beyond the standard timekeeping functions you'd expect from a six-figure watch, the reference number 57121A-001 boasts a date, moon phase, and power reserve. of complications. Will you use them every day? Probably not,

but bragging rights don't come for the asking. Just like the most sought-after executions of the Gerald Jenta designed icon. This outgoing Nautilus features stainless steel construction.

If a standard Nautilus challenges convention in steel, a complicated Nautilus turns the wow factor up to 11. At the heart of this showstopper, Patek Filippe's micro-roiter equipped caliber 240 PS, I-R-M-C-L-U.

Translation for the non-watch-pilled, a comically drool-worthy, self-winding, mechanical movement of the highest quality, the stuff of Swiss dreams. Production of this reference has officially ended, meaning the ante just got upped on its collectibility factor. If you're still waiting by the phone for your AD to call, you might be waiting for a while.

I like it. So go follow Bezell and download the app and start curating a little wish list because, you know, that secondary sale might hit any day now. And or you might hit some sort of thousand bagger and need to upgrade your daily driver. Real quick. Get on Bezell. There's a bunch of options at every price point. And we can't recommend them highly enough.

It's been a wonderful experience. They have a little like Domino's Pizza Tracker when you buy something. Shows the person mailed it into them for authentication. Then they mail it to you. it's all very seamless. You can pay with wires. Which is so key, because normally if you're buying a watch,

you know, from some random dealer, you send all this money. And then you're just like, fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. It's coming. So,

yeah, great solution. It actually goes into escrow properly. And you can even, so they have auctions as well. Right. And those are extremely tempting because you see these watches

and you're like, that's like half off. Of course. So by the way, Justin Mares, former brother, we just, message me and said or messes to us and said talking to a hooded man at Bezell about buying

a $100,000 watch. Thanks for the intro. So he's talking with Ryan right now. So the good thing is like watches are considered purchase. You can go on Bezell browse, buy stuff, but they actually will just let they'll talk to you, which we recommend because it's like you're basically buying potentially something that's car price, you know, as like a car. So having somebody you can talk to is great. That's great. Anyway, so funny that it's happening live. I'm excited to hear what he winds up with.

Yeah. That's fantastic news. That's great news. And then let's do Joe Wisenthall, the stalwart over at Oddlats podcast on Bloomberg. He says, imagining Twitter right before the asteroid hits. Have you been following this asteroid news at all? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb is NASA's like, we are getting doged.

It's coming. How do we protect ourselves against that every single day? Just say there's a 1% greater chance. Eventually it's going to be like 99% chance. We need NASA to save us. Like fund them. So I think this is a survival tactic. I think it's too conveniently timed.

And why are you getting, why are you 100% off week over week on the probability of something hitting, hitting in 2030? Yeah, right? They also just pick 2030 out of the hat. Is it 2030? I think 2025 or something. No, I think it's a little bit up.

Oh, 232, yeah. NASA says there's now a 3.1% chance of an asteroid, an asteroid will hit Earth in 232 up from 2.6% yesterday. This is the highest risk assessment an asteroid has ever received surpassing 2.4% in 2004. And Guju Viper says, can we bet on this polymarket? And polymarket says yes, of course. And Joe Wisenthal says, imagineing Twitter right before the asteroid it hits, a furious debate about whether prediction markets did a better job than the formal

modelers and the degree to which the former could exist without the latter, of course, referencing the election. And so I thought that was just a very, very funny post because of course people would be debating about that and betting on it right up until the end. But I think we're safe. NASA actually has, the bull case, is that they've done asteroid deflection before. And so this model does not take into an account that they might just send a rocket and blow it out, basically. Yeah. Which would be a good outcome. And fortunately, we have, what, seven years to figure it out?

That seems very doable. That seems very doable. We might have, you know, thousands of starships up there by then. Who knows? You could start a new company today for asteroid defense. Big opportunity. And if you want to be a hero, if you want to be a hero, main character every 15 years, start an asteroid defense company.

Yep. We'll back it. Yeah, that'd be great. And so we got another post from Wander. Their designer has been on a tear. And this was interesting because I haven't list. I've never actually listed a property on Wander. But if you have a vacation home that you want to rent onto Wander,

to other people. Their booking website is just the tip of the iceberg. They have a whole management platform, and the management platform is crazy. It's integrated with all sorts of ICAL URLs and smart home things, so you can generate new access codes for the garage door so that when someone comes in, they have a bespoke code that only works for that amount of time.

And so they've done a lot of work to help property managers create a really seamless experience. One of the greatest trades you could do right now say there's a ton of competition for nice homes on Airbnb because there's this huge range. Yep. And if I go and partner with a Wander, I'm going to get a much better guest experience that I don't have to manage at all. Yep.

And less competition because Wander at the moment, they don't have the same amount of density. They might have five homes in a specific market. So you're sort of, and they're working with the technology brothers to drive the demand side, too. So we're here to drive supply and demand. Yeah. And I liked this picture if you're looking for inspiration for where to stay. If you want to be a guest at a Wander, the next photo is just this crazy modern box house with a beautiful pool and a really wide open door. Great for entertaining.

I thought that'd be a fun place to stay. So go surf on Wander. Tell them the technology brother sent you. And that's pretty much our show for today. Our producer, Ben, is a little under the weather. So wish him well. Thanks for being a trooper Ben. We really appreciate you helping run the show today.

Hope you're healing up soon. And leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave us a review with an ad and we'll read it on the show. Send us DMs, tag us, and whatever else is going on. And you can kick on over to the PMF or die stream now. Go lock in. Go lock in. It's time.

It's enough entertainment and news for the day. Yeah. It's time to lock in. Thanks for watching, everyone. Thanks, folks. Have a great day. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.