TBPN - Tesla vs SpaceX, Humanoid Robots, Online Dating, Retro Electronics

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. You know the problem with those billionaire resorts that everyone goes to? Ammon. Yeah. It's like we're like the most expensive resorts network basically, like well above the rits in the four seasons. But there's an obvious problem. They're not venture-backed.

Exactly. It's hard to, you wish you could put more capital into them. Exactly. Because they're so profitable on a per door basis. that I actually think that we need 10 more Amman's. We do. And so that gave me an idea. Hit me.

What if we start a venture-backed Amman? That's it. Ammon V-B. Exactly. And so the idea is that this is a place where venture investors could get exposure to something that they already know very intimately. And of course, like when you think about who can run your business better than you. Exactly.

The only person is an investor, VC. And so you, you, you, absolutely. During the fundraising process, you let the investors know, like, this is not your average fundraise. Like, we are going to want you to dig in. You're going to need to spend 30, 45, 60 nights a year at our properties as part of this investment for free.

Yeah, a real operator. Exactly. They like to use that word. Operator gets thrown. Somebody, I think this guy, Michael on 20, was talking about VCs use the word operator to embellish their resumes. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. Because it sounds a lot cooler to say I was, yeah, former operator than, yeah, I was an associate PM. Yeah, I was a sales guy. Yeah, I was one of the first like BDR hires at this company. Operator. Operator. It just sounds like.

I mean, it sounds like special operator. Twisting the knobs. Yeah, yeah, you're twisting the knobs, but also like maybe you're kicking doors in a rack. Yeah, but in this case, it's like, yeah, there's allocation for you. if you commit to acting as a part-time general manager of the property. Giving feedback, bring the whole family. Checking guests in and cleaning bathrooms, cleaning up.

I mean, really get your hands driven. You just need to create the flywheel of like, oh, this is a, this is the stealthy way to justify even more trips to Amman like properties with my LP dollars. Yeah, I feel like sometimes venture capitalists, myself included, can get a little bit. to disconnected from the real asset itself. Yeah. So if you're just lobbing money over, you know, lobbying money over to the founder

and they're taking it, they're putting it to work in their business, there's something about getting into the asset and what's a better asset to immerse yourself in than a physical three-dimensional space, right? This is not software. The hotel is a product, it's an experience, and it's good opportunities because there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done at a hotel, right? VCs aren't necessarily going to add value to

a foundation model, right? They don't have the know-how. But when a guest breaks a glass at a restaurant, they know how to use a broom, right? Exactly. Get in there and clean it up. Do you know history of Amman? So history of Amman. It's fascinating. Yeah, so to my knowledge, it is owned by effectively a Russian oligarch. And when you're staying on an Amman property, you really get that sort of makes sense. I was there, I was at one of their properties last January, or this January, I guess.

And there was a lot of Russian being spoken. And this is like peak Ukraine war. So it was interesting sharing, you know, sharing elevators and hallways and restaurants with, uh, I just love the, like the foundation story, the founding story is in 1988, Amund Resort's first destination was the result of this hotelier, the desire to build a holiday home in Phuket, Thailand. Uh, his plans soon developed into an idea to build a small boutique resort with two friends and they invested their own money in the venture as no

banks would lend, uh, for the project due to the small number of planned rooms. The resort opened in 1988 with nightly rates five times higher than local competitors. They were just like, let's go not 20% higher, but five times higher. And it's actually still pretty much exactly. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Carrleton runs you at $1,000. $300, $500.

Yeah, $500. It depends on the resort, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then the amount can be like $3.5. No, I think, yeah, the desirable. Yeah, desirable properties at desirable times of year, like $5,000 for the entry level. room which is basically as big as our studio you know our studios here is significantly larger than there there is something to that though like the we were talking about this with like

errone like just going like up market up market like actually giving you but going to play yeah and do something you the death zone is probably 20% exactly just thinking slightly premium slightly premium yeah it was because you can't really afford to do anything fancy So you're just like maybe making a little bit margin. It's all this like fake branding. Whereas like if you genuinely have five times higher revenues, like there's a lot of interesting things that you can do with that. Yeah, the interesting thing.

So we stayed there with a couple of friends and another couple. And they had stayed there before. And so they were just like, these are the dates, just book it. We booked it. And I showed up and I didn't realize getting onto the property that two full meals a day. a day on the hotel property or at any of like their 10 partner hotels restaurants were all comped. Oh, okay.

Everything except alcohol. Yeah. So once you were staying there, I was like, if nobody had mentioned this to me, you could have just given me the bill the time because you don't go there expecting. It was the experience of having like being at an all inclusive resort. Sure, sure, sure. And it was sort of funny. We were joking around being like, could we eat 10 grand worth of Wagout right now?

Because it's technically all you can eat. I mean, with that price structure, you can't afford not to go. You can't afford not to. Yeah, so I recommend Amman if you're bulking and you want to do a clean bulk, a Wagyu bulk, as they call it, where you get 90% of your calories. A, 5, Japanese Wagyu. Go to state of Mon. I love it.

Did you watch the Tesla event? Of course. What do you think? It was a fountain of viral. for me. I had two bang or tweets come out of it. There you go. I mean you wish they would hold an event every week. Exactly. I mean it's like it's it's prime for for X content. Everyone just wants to post about it. Unfortunately, the moment that stands out to me the most aside the visuals of the new technology and stuff are when Elon went all right now let's party. Yeah. Yeah. And then it didn't go or whatever. And he was like, okay, now let's party. or let's drink, you know, it was sort of, the timing was a little bit awkward for overall, like, was it, I don't know, it was strange. He seemed, do you think it was all the political stuff?

Like, he didn't seem, he didn't seem locked in. He certainly wasn't on. I heard someone say, like, yeah, his first love is SpaceX. He's like, he's a rocket guy. But Tesla's gotten a lot bigger, and he loves the company. But, like, that was the company that he had to, he had to step into. be the CEO and invest in and like save the company and make it work. Whereas like in in a perfect world like he would just be spending all his time on space stuff because that's what he's like obsessed with. But I found it very odd that he didn't acknowledge. And this is something that pretty much all CEOs do. But you could usually get around this like acknowledge like the state of the market. Like yeah. There is a very clear like bowl thesis for the Tesla strategy of like not doing what Waymo is doing. Like not. doing LIDAR, not starting with limited runs, not having expensive, you know, hardware that they, the company, like Waymo owns these vehicles, they clean them, they have a staff now. They might spin that out at some point, but right now, like, the cost structure is purely internal. Has Google ever spun out a successful product? No, this would be the first one. Yeah, so it almost seems like. I'm not even talking about spinning out Waymo as a whole, which I think a lot of people think they should do because it just has a very different economic structure than, you know,

Google ads. It's just wildly different, even if it's going to be a great business. They should split that at some point. But I'm just talking about like they're buying the cars from Jaguar and then they own and operate them. Like you could easily turn this into like a franchise model, right? Eventually and they might. But not even that.

Just Elon never articulated this idea that like we have more cars on the road than Waymo and we're collecting more data through the cameras. And so even though they're, yeah. In theory, much more capital efficient if you don't have to purchase and finance. Yeah, exactly. So he just kind of like threw out like it was like it was almost like it was pointed to the consumers and then the stock sold off. But it felt like it wasn't doing a lot of. Anybody that's a bear can now easily without any, you know, real objection from Elon go, okay, so Tesla is generally promising what Waymo is already doing today.

not even a tiny scale like they're doing like 100,000 rides a day or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty meaningful and growing exponentially. Yeah. And the Tesla Robotaxi Vision still feels like there was no clarity even around dates. And I think that it's sold off because the market is now very much used to Elon putting out dates and timelines that are unachievable in order to put. push his own team almost. But the market is basically saying,

okay, it's all good if you want to over promise and push your team internally. But if you're not going to meet the deadlines that, you know, they haven't even, I saw this. I don't think they haven't delivered the roadster, obviously. And there's still a bunch of people that have paid like multiple. They don't sell a convertible right now.

They don't sell a convertible, a full-size SUV or a minivan, which are like three of the most popular. These are like really important segments of the market if you want to dominate. I would think I was. I spent all my time in minivans or convertibles. Or convertibles, right? There's no in between. Yeah.

Yeah. And yeah, I wish they'd have a little bit more breadth in there. And also just like different designs and stuff. There's a lot. I did like that they were pulling some of the cyber truck design. Like the event did like look like the future, which I think is good. And I think that he should have stressed that. That it's like these waymos like are ugly.

knows that and so him saying like okay one of our principles and our deep beliefs is that like aesthetics matter to these to the success of these projects and then what else matters well scale of the data like yeah like everyone in AI they constantly repeat scale is all you need scale is all you need right like you just need bigger and bigger transformers bigger and bigger LLMs scrape all the web get all the video get all the audio data compress it down and then you get magical results and that's what the true believers in like this end-to-end machine learning like theory around self-driving and what george hots is doing it comma like all of that

is around this idea that if you just get a ton of data you won't need any of this crazy like like waymo famously like hired a they have a cone guy who like just does the software to like identify cones on the road and and like the end-to-end model it's like it's as if like you know chat gbtt had like you know a special guy just for like commas or periods or exclamation points right it's like that's not how it works at all in fact they just have the one master model that just looks at the huge soup of like trillions of words and then yeah and then it learns all of that from contacts right and you can learn what a cone is and tussler's kind of gotten there almost but yeah they're clearly like they're being like shortcut right now and there and there was this uncanny valley where like for a while like if

you compare GPT 1 to just like grammarly or like some rules based spell check and grammar check, the rules based one would be much better. And you'd be like, I don't want to feed my, my, you know, my English homework through GPT1. It's going to just hallucinate. Like I remember testing. Even GPT3 when it dropped. I told, I said it.

One of my friends was addicted to this video game. And I was like, create a 10 step plan for him to like quit playing this video game. And it's like step one, step two. And by the end, it was like, it was like teaching him to play the game again because it had hallucinated and done the opposite. We're back. Yeah, because everything online was like, if I can get him to play it again, I can get him to quit again.

And quitting twice is better than quitting once. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so when GPT, one, two, three were out, like, they were so bad that the rules-based, like, less, less full-featured strategies weren't. It's funny to think about historically, Let's say a high school student is doing their Spanish assignment. And the teacher, they would use Google Translate and use some sort of exotic string of words that was way more advanced. And the teacher would call it out and be like, we haven't ever taught you how to combine these.

Where did you learn it from? I think you use Google Translate. Whereas now, if they use like an LLM, it'll just hallucinate something completely exotic and also very incorrect. And because it's more complicated, the students even less likely to catch it because they're just like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So on the data thing, it's interesting to me because like Tesla does have more data. They have more cars on the road. They're collecting more data. So they should have more scale eventually. Now Google does have more compute right now to start. And they also have, they also have those crazy, like they're driving all over the world in places where you're Teslas don't even go. So they do have like a more exotic data set, but yeah, going back to your

original, going back to your original point, he had the opportunity to address, address the entire world, shareholders, customers, his team, the press, the media and everything. And he flopped on almost all of them, even though the technology was so like the, like it was almost like a 10 out of 10 visually but then everything else was even even with the the human like optimist the humanoid robots if he had addressed that and been and said something along the lines of like right now there's a human in the loop and here's how you could apply that right you could be 3,000 miles away and using an optimist robot to complete complex tasks and even if you have to step in you know one minute out of every hour to do something

something that's slightly that needs some level of human input it's fine because you get to be at two places at once right and here's the path of how we get these to be fully autonomous yeah but instead it gave ammo to Josh wolf and all these other people online to be like dude you're just like I caught you yeah I caught you and you're tricking people yep and you're no better than Trevor Milton or whatever yeah yeah which which ironically is the exact path that Waymo took to teleoperation critical in the Waymo rollout because I mean they had they had safety drivers in the cars for a long time which is not even teleoperation and then still to this day they have humans over like they're they're operating at a higher level of abstraction they're not physically in front of wheels but yeah they have screens and they're watching all of these and they can and if if one of the Waymo's is in trouble they can just beam into it immediately and take it over yeah I wonder and that's a very different model for Tesla does the driver is the passenger no when somebody in a Waymo has beamed in?

I don't know. I heard some stats. Like one intervention every 17,000 miles or something. So it's pretty rare right now. And obviously that's going to plummet. But I wonder, and that number might be off by one magnitude. Yeah. For every one intervention,

I wonder how many times where somebody's teleoperating in and is like on red alert because, you know, it's just like, well, every time I made a waymo. Some guy and some guy in India is just like falling asleep at his desk in the alert. goes off and he's like, I'm in Louisiana in my Waymo. I mean, every time I get in Waymo, I'm always like, break twice if you're teleoperating this

right now. Like speak to me through the car. But I actually, I have no idea. I don't think that they would want to reveal that. I have always thought that it's, it's Waymo's like ace up their slave. Because if the fever pitch of like, this is too dangerous ever gets really, really high, they can always pull out and be like, actually there are human. watching everything.

So there is a human in the loop, so it's way less scary. And their ability to dial that up or dial that down is great from a regulatory perspective. Tesla could even... You know, if they had a more clear vision of what this ultimately becomes, they could say something along those lines

of, oh, by the way, if you want to drive your Tesla for 10 hours overnight, we can have somebody who's operating, available to join you for your journey or whatever I see see see I I disagree with that in the sense that like I I think Elon does have a very clear vision which is no LIDAR no tele operation he is he's trying to jump straight to the high margin economic model that makes sense in the long-term future and it's just taking him a longer time to ramp no I don't I have no doubt he has a clear vision

but he didn't he didn't articulate it exactly he should have So we're sitting here, you're piecing it together, we're guessing. Yeah, yeah, it comes out and he should have just said, like, look, yeah, this is a concept car. There's no mirrors. There's no rearview mirrors on here. We probably need to put those on legally. But you'll also notice that there are no ugly LIDAR spinning around on here.

And that is a decision that we're sticking by. And that is in some ways why we're behind, but why we will be ahead and more profitable in a few years. And that's why you should be excited as an investor. Yeah. But he didn't really acknowledge any of that. I do think some of the distinctions here are important to tell our operation thing, like the economic model, the fact that he's trying to sell these.

These are all interesting decisions, but you have to put them in the context of what is actually really happening in the market today. You can't just come out there and act like you're the first person to try and launch this company when there's another company that's actively running. Yeah, and also my part of it is he has the biggest direct audience in the world through X. yeah why would you not do standalone events or do like Tesla week and you have like a different the optimus is one and because the hard thing is he just kind of like went through it all yeah this is our vision for the future public transport this is our vision for robotaxe you have a vision for optimist and it was all like you have the resources and the attention in order to you could have done

one event per week for a month and imagine what the stock would have done if he spent the time in you know theoretically spent the time to like lay out an extremely clear vision and treat it as I'm going to give you a masterclass on our thinking and why we're already ahead in these areas. I think it's usually I advise like early stage companies to do this. There's a there's a tendency for companies to try want to announce a lot of big stuff at once and it's usually a waste of all of that those moments to do it all at once when you could spread it out over a month. month or five weeks and be constantly sort of top of mind in building that sort of cadence with the audience. So I think ultimately probably a mistake to just like word vomit.

Yeah. Major, major, major, major announcements. Yeah. And not give each of them. Yeah, it's interesting. I think he, yeah, I mean, I think back to like Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone. Like, I'm pretty sure there was a slide in that deck that had pictures of all the other best in class business phones at the time. they all had keyboards, and he was like, ours will never have a keyboard. And I think that distinction, like, you could clearly tell that he was calling out Blackberry directly. And he didn't get sued for that.

It wasn't defamation. And Elon seems like more of like a wild man when it comes to communication. And yet he didn't actually articulate, like, is he going to war against Waymo? Does he think Waymo's bad? Like, what are they getting wrong? I don't think the average consumer even- Hold my hand a little bit on that. Yeah, does the average consumer shareholder

understand the difference between LIDAR and the technology Tesla's using? Yeah, you sent me this Dustin Curtis analysis. The Tesla event could have told a huge inspiring story about the future, explain the philosophy behind what they're building, and then put everything into the context of how human life is going to change for the better. Instead, Musk randomly and briefly showed off

a couple of world-changing concept vehicles, casually introduced a humanoid robot, Then throughout some dates and prices, as though he was making them up on the spot. He raised 100 questions, ignored them all. And then after complaining about parking lots, he said he wanted to go party. There was no concept of a bigger plan, not even a cohesive theme. Tesla is doing incredible stuff and changing the world. It's insane to me that they are so bad at telling the story of their work.

Yeah, I kind of agree with that. But I wonder, I do think about it in the context of like SpaceX. Imagine Jack Dorsey announcing all those products. Like, he probably wouldn't be the guy to build any of them. his products, but he would have, like, even having, like, slides with a good cadence that he was on and able to just sit up there and, I don't know, getting the whole world's attention and then just being like that. Yeah, it's interesting to compare with SpaceX because, like, a few days later, there's, like,

that amazing, the super heavy came down and they caught it with the chopsticks and the Mechazilla, like, structure. And that was just a video of the thing actually happening. So it was just, like, yeah, they had said. it, but I don't remember, no one remembers like a press conference about that being a plan. Like it was like maybe mentioned on podcasts and stuff and that it just happened. And it was like, okay, this is just a thing now. I guess we're just catching rockets.

It's like amazing. And like, yeah, I think that, I mean, there isn't much storytelling there. But very quickly you can see like, oh, wow, okay, if they catch it and it's already on the pad, well, you're going to be able to refuel it in hours instead of days. and so you can send up. And if you watch the whole video from that launch, the rocket is only gone for like eight minutes. Yeah.

Isn't that crazy? It just goes up and then it comes back down because it doesn't need to get that high up and it's just boosting it and then it comes back down. So it's like eight minutes and so you can see, okay, this is going to get really, really insane when these things are like really pumping. But yeah, like no one's even waiting for like the next like SpaceX,

like, you know, conference. It's just like, okay, he's done some of those. He did the crazy, he did the crazy point to point one where he was saying that you're going to be able to take a rocket across the country and be from New York to Tokyo in like 15 minutes or whatever. And now watching them catch the rocket, I'm like, yeah, that's going to happen. For sure. It might be really expensive, but it seems like it's definitely going to happen. It's interesting because he's deciding how to market both companies. Yeah.

Because the Tesla thing was just marketing. Yeah. To shareholders, to future customers, fanboys, press, it's just marketing. Yeah. The SpaceX thing is actually not marketing. It's just they were just proving that they could do it. That's just one step along their journey. But it's interesting that you wonder how he treats those two different things.

If SpaceX was already public, would he have taken a different approach to that whole event, right? you feel like I don't need to market anything. I'm just doing things. Yeah. I mean, it is so much more visual watching a rocket land, even over a car. Yeah, but if Tesla was private right now, would you have done the Optimist demo? Yeah, maybe not. Probably not.

Probably would have just like teleoperated. Yeah, exactly. Teleoperated humanoid robots are not. Because you could just do an investor day for your private investors. You don't need to publicly signal. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. And then the competition is just wildly different. Like, Google is, I mean, there's a lot of like, you know, problems.

the company, it's a little bit old, but it's not Boeing, right? Like, they have, like, some of the best machine learning engineers in the world. Like, they have a lot of resources. It's still a very young and agile company compared to, you know, ULA, like the Lockheed Martin Prime, you know, joint venture. Should we move on to? Did you read this, the 10 Things That Matter right now in Seed VC by Sam Lesson? Oh, yeah.

Did you read this? I might have shared this. Yeah, I think the, I think the, One of the reasons I shared this is I think that Slow, Sam, Yoni, Will, all those guys have carved out their own style of content marketing that looks so unprofessional, which is just them taking notes in their app, screenshoting it and sharing it. Yeah, yeah. It often has like the red line underneath. Yeah, it still has the red line.

Yeah, it still has the spelling mistake marker. Yeah, and I just think they've figured out. they have created an incredible magnet for the types of people that they want to meet and doing it in their own way, which is honestly smart because they've realized that the blog in the context of Twitter is almost dead. You can't get visibility on links anymore. And so they're like, okay, we're just going to like. Screenshot it. Yeah.

And then I would say that overall, none of them are super savvy around. brand and design and stuff like that and they wouldn't pretend to be but they've carved out their own like very like distinct thing where you see a bare screenshot and it's on a pretty good cadence I feel like always something happening yeah yeah yeah it's like you get a screenshot essay like every every couple weeks or every month and it's always like just near the frontier of the discussion which I think is good it's kind of interesting did anything jump out to you like in the actual piece? You know, I think a lot of this stuff is good marketers tend to get a number of good ideas

and then just keep repeating them over and over and over. So I think this is a summary of like their broader theses that they've had on seed investing for a long time and really trying to brand themselves as seed investors, even though they have, you know, pretty solid AUM. Yeah, I mean, I think going down the list, following the shift in focus to great entrepreneurs, I think people are realizing that it's hard to build iconic companies by just having a good idea and the right timing and even a lot of capital. I think that's one. What about the one about like the next generation of like Gen Z founders being disillusioned?

by the fundraising treadmill, wanting cash flow profitability, these types of things, more like a rebranding of the lifestyle business. And it seems like he's thinking about that more and seeing like, okay, it's possible that the next amazing venture back founder just doesn't really get on the venture treadmill. And that could be rough for my business. And he's kind of like processing that. But that's what I took away from it. Yeah, I think that.

I don't know how real it is though. They've been, and I know this. from hearing it directly from founders that they've recently backed where they are pretty upfront with their founders where they don't care which path their companies try to take. I think it's just about this general encouragement that capital efficiency is cool. Bryce from ADVC is doing something similar, right? Yeah, yeah. It's okay if this is your last round.

He's been on that, yeah, he's been on that forever. And even if you talk to Bryce, he's not against venture capital. No. I think that the. he just doesn't want to wind up with a thing where half the portfolio is like completely faking it just to get to the next round to scale up and then they wind up as zombie corns. Yeah, the thing that I talk, the thing that I feel like comes up a lot when I'm talking to companies is it's the stupidest thing in the world to go start a fundraise or to ever in your business be like, we're never, we're only going to finance our business as one time. Yeah, yeah. That's the last time.

Yeah, yeah. It's like nobody, every business. that is enduring uses financial instruments at different points in their life cycle for different reasons. Apple is issuing bonds. Yeah, yeah, Apple's issuing bonds.

They have $100 billion in cash or something. Why do that? So you coming out, I don't give anyone any points at all for being like, oh yeah, we're never raising again. It's like that honestly is, it shows a kind of general scarcity mindset and fear of

dilution or it honestly makes if when I hear a founder go I never want to raise again all I hear is I want to own 45% of my company forever yeah you know like because well it's not just that it's like the decision to pick a particular financial instrument should be driven by the dynamics of the market and the business and and you know whether you have do you have an insane amount of really valuable R&D expense that's going to get paid back a thousandfold when you have a monopoly on whatever. Like, well, obviously venture capital is perfect? Or is it just OPEX and marketing dollars?

Like maybe that should be financed with debt or is it inventory or CAPEX? Like pick the financial instrument that's correct for your business. When you say, I don't want to raise more money, that's different from saying, oh, I actually understand this industry really well. I understand my business and how we fit into the industry. And because of the way we're operating, we, venture capital, not the right fit for us at this scale. So instead we are financing the business this way or this way or that way.

But coming into it as being like, okay, step one, I'm going to like write off one particular financial instrument and then step two, I'm going to, you know, build whatever and maybe it aligns at that. Or the even worse is I don't like fundraising. Yeah. We're just going to raise it. I'm like, the skill set needed to raise money is the same skill set needed to find. and close customers hire great people and there's a lot of people that benefit will be better

fundraisers if they just have a phenomenal business but but yeah I think I think it's been an interesting you can tell you can learn a lot about a founder by how when a VC goes out and is like it's okay to tell us that you only want to raise one round like how they react to that tells you everything about their ambitions yeah and and and and and what they're optimizing for, right? And how much they understand their business in the market. I think like these, yeah, there's this like

general fear of dilution because there's all these horror stories of companies going public. Google didn't need to raise that much money. They IPOed pretty profitably very early. Yeah, yet they still use the public markets to raise. Yeah, but they did stop raising money pretty early.

Yeah. But it wasn't because they were like, fuck you VCs, I don't like venture capital. it was because it was like, okay, this is actually a profitable business built on top of, and there's a monopoly power here and there's scale and like it's not as essential that we just raise and raise and raise versus like, I don't know, like, you know, you look at like the money pit that has been like the virtual reality saga and meta. Like there's a huge investment, tens of billions of dollars, but like if it pays off,

it's really big. Like that's obviously a good use for like burning cash. And then there's plenty of other examples where, you know, SpaceX has raised a lot of money, burnt a lot of money, but it's paying off now that they have a SpaceX amount. Starlink's doing so well. And so it's like, yeah, it's just like very, very dependent on the particular business. Yeah, I think it's better for founders to say, here's how much money I need to hit these milestones.

And as CEO of the company, my job is to make the price per share go up continuously. And if there's opportunities where I can take on capital and increase the rate of increasing the value of the shares, then I'll repeatedly do that. Yeah, yeah. Because that's the thing about dilution is nobody's clawing back your shares. It's simply that you're increasing the number of shares, but it just make the share price go up more. It's simple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're doing your job, it's all accretage.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so anyways, I think Well, here's another one Another screenshot I think this is from Yoni This is, so Yoni, he's at slow, right? Yeah. He wrote a screenshot essay about the Bull case for OpenAI

And then Eric Newcomer wrote a piece About the Bear case for Open AI I don't know if they were, I don't know who was responding to who here But if they were even Or just two guys shouting into the voice Yeah, maybe, maybe But I thought they were interesting. And I think, you know, we've talked about Open AI and the price a few times,

but I think that there's a lot of other stuff going on in AI that we should talk about, specifically the energy stuff that's going on downstream of all of that, and then a little bit of like, you know, how, like, kind of the knock-on effects from, like, the big deals. Like, there's, like, I think we're going to see a lot of Notebook LM-type startups, and then we're also going to see a lot of the power generation companies. shift into AI-driven narratives already. We're already seeing this, like, this Kairos Power company just did a huge deal with Google to generate seven new nuclear reactors.

It's pretty crazy. The irony of woke Google employees having to realize that our nuclear is actually kind of makes sense. I don't know if they ever had a problem with it. I think it was always, like, oil and gas. Yeah. I think the anti-nuclear stuff, was like it was like the version of woke from like the 70s like post like Cuban

missile crisis but but the in the modern era like most like you know Google employees are probably pretty pro-nuclear it's not as heretical as like people think it's been like pretty mainstream it's certainly mainstream right now but I think the other real like factors like Google and other and the other hyper scalers have all committed to big ESG commitments to be like net zero so they did a lot of work to build out renewable energy sources for their existing data centers, which was fine when they were just serving ads, and it wasn't that intense.

And now they're like, okay, we need to 10x our energy budget as we go into the AI era. And how are we going to do that without burning fossil fuels? A lot of, a lot of, you know, AI folks are worried about that. And we talked about this last time, like, XAI is just like they're pulling from everywhere. They're burning natural gas, but then they're also pulling from the grid and they're doing solar and they're just doing everything they can possibly do. What's Mark? You remember when Mark was sending pro fracking tweets?

Which one? Mark. Mark, is that Mark? Mark Andresen. This was only like two years ago. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was like drill, frack. Yeah, yeah. Something like that.

Well, yeah. I have this interesting theory that like if we had a president in the terms of, of the millennium, like instead of Bush, you had someone who was very in tune with the technology community, we never would have gone to war in the Middle East because... War in the Middle East was never about energy. You don't think so? But that's not a topic for you. But because at least at the time, there was like this big narrative like, oh, we're going there

for oil. Yeah. But what actually wound up happening? Well, like, America didn't really get that much oil from the Middle East. That's not the end conclusion of the wars in the Middle East. And the fracking innovation led to energy independence. So the technology was there the whole time. Yeah.

It just wasn't recognized. And so it's potentially, at least one possible narrative is like an ignorance of technology backed us into a corner that led to more international aggression. Potentially. Anyway, good time to be an energy company because. Because the tech companies are going after you. Yeah, I do think one thing is I had a thesis for a while that a lot of the anti-oil movement was funded by, like, there's a scenario where the GCC, the Gulf, you know, countries, kingdoms, whatever you want to call them. There's a scenario where they're like, hey, what if we spend $100 million a year campaign? against oil to discourage people from investing in oil production, right?

And to discourage young people because like for example, do you know a single person that works in oil and gas? No. And that's insane. Yeah. We know like I know people in pretty much every single industry. I know one guy who who has a small like S&B oil drilling business. Something related to that. Something related to is that. I know one guy. Yeah. And if you go back 30 years ago and you asked how many of your friends work in oil and gas, it would probably be within our networks or the kind of network that we might have had 30 years ago,

there probably would have been 20, 25 percent of people were like, yeah, I work in oil and gas. Because it's just such a massive. Even just a couple of years ago, I didn't know anyone who worked in energy period. And now I know nuclear and solar founders. But for a long time. And yeah. Yeah, we know more nuclear. We know way more nuclear and solar people, but they are not generating a lot of power yet.

They're still in the venture scale. So here's the theory, the very insane tinfoil hat theory of mine is that if you spent $100 million a year campaigning against how bad oil is, you could probably have that, you could probably prevent billions and billions and billions of billions of supply from coming online because it's just discouraging people from going and saying, sure. Oh, I'm going to buy this piece of land and I'm going to start fracking. Right. It's just like part of the sort of it never people didn't even think most people in our generation weren't thinking oh wait, oil's like the most in demand substance

in the entire world. It was massive industry. I should just go do that. You know, um, so anyways. Well, yeah, we mean, we know Isaiah. Valar, he's going into oil and gas, basically, but through a renewable pathway, which is a little different. What else should we do in AI? Tyler Cowan was on a podcast. He says that in the era of AI, everyone needs to up their networking game because relationships, and he even said improve your physical presence, which I think was sick.

Your aura? I don't know if it's aura, but it sounded like, get jacked. Likeability is going to matter. Likeability and connections and personal relationships are going to be. Senra is one of his probably top three learnings from studying history's great entrepreneurs is that relationships run the world. Yep.

So that tracks. Yep. Cohen. I heard an interview with a guy who spent something like a couple hundred million dollars on a mega yacht. And the operating expenses on a mega yacht are something like 10% annually. So it's like a $10 to $20 million like money sink. And he said, but if I do one deal on this boat, it'll pay for the whole thing.

There you go. It's amazing. That's the logic everybody needs to be applying to it. Should I go to Arawon right now? Well, if I meet one person, if I meet one influencer that posts about my CBD toothpaste brand, It'll pay for all my smoothies for the whole year. Yeah. I mean, the sad thing is like there is like the D-Gen version of that,

which is like going to the club and like getting hammered. Like, you know, it's like not good. Or the, yeah, the notebook L.M. We already talked about that. I actually met one of the designers from New Book L.M last night. Oh, really? Yeah. And he was like, imagine having, I think it's like a six or seven person team at Google that created it.

Yeah. And I was talking about it. Another founder that I invested in. Is he going to spin out and raise money? No, I don't think that's how it works. No, no, but like, I mean, he can just quit and build something. Yeah, no, I think it's probably a higher ROI for him to stay with Google and be the creator of a hot new thing. Because apparently, because think about it, when, when I think Google TV started as like a five to ten person project internally.

How is Google TV? I've never heard of that. You mean YouTube? No, Google. Firestick? I think it, no, that's Amazon. Yeah, Amazon Fire Stick. Google had a TV product.

Chromecast. Chromecast, but it was, no, they have some. Oh, yeah, you can like watch baseball on YouTube TV. Yeah, so Google TV started as like a five to ten person project internally, and a founder that I back was on that original team. And it went within two years, it was a 500-person organization. So this guy from NoPocat-Lam is like, he could go. he could go from being, you know, on this tiny team to a hyperscaler.

Sure. Within this tiny. And then choose, and I'm sure there's a lot of comp. But talking about the value of relationships in the AI era, who was it? Brett, what's his last name? He's been at, like, Twitter. He just raised a $4 billion valuation for an AI agent startup. Oh, yeah, that was a good.

Why can't I think of his name? He's on the board of Open AI, wasn't he? I forget. Brett Taylor? Brett Taylor? Yeah, he's been the CTO of a meta and a bunch of companies. He's like, there is no technical moat deep enough to justify a $4 billion valuation for an AI agent startup. It's based on Brett's ability to cross-sell to everyone in his contact list, get to $450 million ARR and sell for $10 billion to Amazon in 36 months.

Very real. That's going to be. Good announcements. That's going to be a quote tweet in 18 months. Yeah. Should we do Brother of the Week? Brother of the Week. Where to start? Technology Brother of the Week.

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You merely look after it for the next generation. Tell a personal story about your family traditions. Yeah, I didn't come from, I actually don't really have that many family traditions. But, you know, tech is one. Well, it will be. And see, that's the thing is that there's this, you know, famous proverb, the best day to plant a tree is, you know, 20 years ago, the second best day is today.

And you can just start family traditions. And as soon as you start them, they can become family traditions. If, in my eyes, family traditions that stimulate the economy naturally, since the economy is good, it's naturally better to choose family traditions that require capital expenditure. Investment. Sure. In order to stimulate the economy so that the economy improves and naturally everybody benefits.

Yeah. So it's family tradition that your own internal family can cherish and sort of carry on throughout generations, but then also hope, like I would hope that you would want your family traditions to benefit the world. Yeah. Stimulating the economy benefits, you know, everybody. Yeah, I really do think that, you know, exercise. for the listener.

If you don't come from a family that has a lot of crazy traditions, like start one today. A handful. Start one. Start one. Yeah. I think that's great.

So on to Technology Brother of the Week. You flagged this guy. I actually don't even have his handle here. Maybe we should do someone else. Oh, well, there's actually two people in the running. So that's number one. This guy, he, you know, made this brave video. He decided, you know,

As Hurricane Milton was approaching, his condo, he decided to stay with all of his supercars and stay at his condo with all of his supercars, not evacuate. And it was all because of sports betting and his success with sports betting that he's willing to risk it all because he can just, even if he loses everything, he can just start sports betting again and make it all back. in 48 hours, something like that, right? You're only three individual parles away from generational wealth. And so I think he's trying to, he might have been using this opportunity to sell a course, but I think there's this broader, there's really a broader story here, which is like if you become the type of person that's worth $100 million, dollars you can make that $100 million

you know in a multitude of ways a multitude of times right and so well the reason that I think he's a technology brother is that this is only possible in the modern era using the latest and greatest technology he has a generator and Starlink so that even when the power goes down the internet goes out from the hurricane he can continue to sports bet yeah the games are not going to stop just exactly you can be you can be getting steamrolled by a hurricane

hurricane in Florida and betting on Chinese tennis futures. Exactly. Yeah, the outcome of a cricket game. Right, right. What's happening in the soccer world? Yeah, and I would hope that if somebody's in India, you know, eventually getting, you know, approached by some storm that they would be making risky, risky bets on, you know, stuff that's happening here, right?

Exactly. Exactly. So he has some. stiff competition. We got Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX, who's reporting to federal prison today to serve seven and a half years on campaign finance fraud charges, posted this on LinkedIn today. I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as inmate at FCI Cumberland.

Who do you give it to between these two? Posting that you're going to jail on LinkedIn is pretty iconic. Does it deserve technology brother of the week, though? I think we got to save Brother of the Week when he comes back and starts a world positive venture. Here we go. It announces that, you know, hopefully, you know, generates billions of dollars and returns for shareholders and uses that to sort of pay back the victims of FTCS. I think Brother of the Week has to go to this guy. Okay.

We'll put his name up. Yeah. He'll link the video. Cole Housen. Cole Housen. You are officially the Brother of the Week. one of the first brothers of the week. Okay.

And hopefully he's still alive. Yeah. Because there's small chance that he didn't make. If he is alive, if he is alive, we know that he's still selling courses. And encouraging other people to fall a suit. Yeah. What do you think of this concept?

There's a company called Back Market that is selling older technology and encouraging you to downgrade. So they're reintroducing the iPhone 6S, SE 11, 12, 13, mini, 14, refurbished. And they're also selling what looks like an old Sony HD handy camcorder. And Tyler here says, fascinating concept and really good name.

Imagine something similar may happen with software. What's your reaction? I mean, this is phenomenally viral. 50,000 likes on this. Like there is serious demand. for nostalgic tech. It was shocking. I mean, like, it's a great ad.

And this goes, this goes into almost every technology consumer tech product has been over engineered. Like, all I want is for Sonos to release a super analog version of their product that doesn't require me to sync four different speakers and spend an hour and a half setting it up. And then right as I'm having people over two of the speakers get disconnected. And I'm just like, could I just like run an extension cord between all of these and just like let them run, right? So I think things have been over engineered. Like you're seeing this in the, in ultra luxury, you know, cars that almost all the most, I think we maybe talked about this going back to analog. Bugatti's or intentionally have these very tactile switches. The utopia.

I think the most interesting thing about this is even after all these years of people trying to unbundle Craigslist and unbundle. eBay, there's still opportunities to unbundle these businesses. So Bezell, as a company at Back, that it's like the stock X of watches. Right now, eBay is still the number one seller of luxury watches online. The issue with eBay is that you could spend $20,000 on a Potech. Actually, not going to get the kind of Potex we like for 20, but let's say you're going to spend $60,000 on a Potech. if there's a 25% chance that it's fake,

that's not really a risk that anybody should take. And so they took what eBay did well already, which was having a lot of inventory, and added authentication. And the same thing is rent the runway to this as well. If you're buying a $2,000 vintage Chanel jacket. Cars and bids is the same thing. I mean, bring a trailer similar, like disaggregate.

Because eBay Motors really was big, but people are peeling the stuff off and adding like specific features. Yep. So yeah, I think I think as long as until something like a backtrack or bezel truly become dominant, there's still these opportunities to like unbundle. So what do you think is more viral about this? I mean, I don't even know if this is their launch,

but it's clearly their introduction to, you know, a million views and 50,000 fans. Yeah. Do you think the concept is more viral or the execution in the sense that it's like, great copy rating on a subway. And then someone wound up just taking a photo of it because of a subway ad. Subway ads are always hard to price and just anything in the IRL. It's probably paid for itself. What's funny is I looked at this ad and I was like, that's so cool.

Like just great campaign. And then I went to the website and it was a bunch of vintage electronics. And I was like, nah, I haven't been back since. Yeah, yeah. But I think this is a good example of just the power of branding and like a really good marketing campaign who knows if it'll make it an enduring business but my worry with this stuff is like a lot of the technology there is they're just appliances and it's it's this the the car world is talking about this how like

you know would you ever want an earlier model three or would you always just want the latest Tesla model three like you would always just want the latest one because it's it's an appliance in the same way that you would always want the latest iPhone there's no real benefit to downgrading as opposed to the old cars where it's like, oh yeah, like a Lamborghini Kuntosh is going to drive in a very specific way that like... Yeah, the issue is you can sell the device, but you still don't really control the software. Yeah.

Apple can be like, we don't support this anymore. Or it just doesn't run that well. Yeah, they'll force you to upgrade, but it runs terribly. Yeah. And so I think what would be an incredible product, and I don't even know if this is possible to deliver at scale, is if you could actually go back and run like iOS 4 on an OG iPhone. and it would just be so fun. I mean, you can get the very first iPhone.

They're getting expensive now, but it doesn't have an app store. No, that's a whole. It just comes with what it has. You get maps. You know, like just buying Apple products when they release and leaving them in the box is like the best performing asset class in the world.

Best performance. Yeah. You know, maybe it's not Amidia, but like it outperforms like the SPP. Yeah, they grow eventually. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, a good example of a good campaign

and how there's not, you know, it's not too. relate to unbundle these behemoths. Yeah. In terms of the other kind of like trad technology, we got to go back. A huge, huge push against online dating recently. Have you been following this? Oh, yeah.

So somebody showed this chart of how couples meet in the United States, and the online is just a rocket ship from 1990, where it's basically zero to 2020. when it's well over 50%. Now, there is a community note on this that's not live, but I clicked on it because I can see what's in there. Yeah, the power. Yeah, and somebody was trying to fight it out in the community notes

claiming that, oh, well, this cuts off right during COVID. Maybe it's gone down. And then they cite some other study that was done by Zola, the wedding registry, so they poll people. And it said that now Zola claims that now the number one place that people meet is in school. And I just don't believe that at all relative to this chart because I think this chart is a much broader selection And I think people doing whether your registries on Zola is

So this is this is a survey of like six thousand five hundred people randomly By some academics and and Zola is like a very specific subset where they're like just pulling their users Yeah, and so I imagine that if you're going on Zola and constructing like this elaborate registry You're probably like higher net worth and then probably more likely to have met in a an IRL setting as opposed to online. And so I disapprove that community note. I think everybody can be bearish on, everybody can hate dating apps the way that people broadly know that

cigarettes are bad. Yeah. But you're not going to, you know. Until there's something better comes along. Well, I don't know that dating apps are basically selling sex, which is the primary human motivation. So you're just not going to, as long as these apps are able to offer what they're offering, they're only going to become, like, it's interesting that it does seem that people are, like,

our society is now very, like, from a dating standpoint, dating apps are driving the majority of connections. like that kind of seems like it's a thing. Yet people are not, people can overcome the addiction. The only thing more powerful than the drive to just like meet whatever for people to meet the opposite sex seemingly is finding your person and like you end up giving, these people end up giving up the app afterwards, right? So thankfully the positive is that it seems like, you know, finding your life partner, wife, husband, whatever,

seems to get people to quit these things. You can't really say that they're addictive, even though they're dominant, right? I did have something funny. So Monday I was catching up with a buddy who started a couple different companies with a certain tech billionaire, and he was telling me that said tech billionaire

is desperately wants to fund a new version of seeking arrangements, which is like the sort of high-end, you know, like Sugar Daddy, like specific dating app. So maybe a contrarian move on his part. Why? Like, wait, is there a problem with seeking arrangements? I'm assuming. I'm assuming.

I'm assuming it's one of those things where somebody looks at the design of a product and they're like, like, he wants to, you know, accelerate sugar baby relationships. I don't even know how the economics work on there. It doesn't seem like they're probably taking a cut because that's the beauty of like the only fans business is that they're taking a cut of the entire economy between the simps and the women. But it's hard if there's potential for disintermediation.

Yeah, but it's still fundamentally. The whole beauty of the OnlyFans model is that they never meet in person. And so it's always intermediated by a platform that can take a fee. And that's why they're so insanely profitable. Yeah. What do you think of the idea of if Elon Musk wants to raise birth rates, he should purchase Match Group, the company that controls Tinder and Hinge,

over half of the online dating market. Make a bunch of changes. So Elon's a capitalist. I don't think he's fundamentally, even X, yeah. X, yeah, he purchased it to defend free speech, but he also bought the most important marketing channel for his trillions of dollars of companies, right?

So it's like, it's hard to argue that, even he can he can he has a great position to take which is oh i didn't buy this to make money i don't care i'm sure he'll take it public again someday he's like he can he could take it public at a loss and say look i did this for free speech or whatever but let's face it he has direct control over the most important audience in the world to him and he could lose 10 billion dollars on X and make it back 10X over with SpaceX or Tesla or whatever. So it's not a, I don't think he's going to, he's not the guy who, honestly, if he bought Match Group and was like, I'm going to re-engineer this to try to increase the birth rate.

And everything that he would do to match and their subset of companies would destroy enterprise value. Yeah. because of course these, of course the incentives are set up in a way, all the way from the CEO to the, of match, to the individual leaders of their different brands, all the way down to the lowly product manager who's just like, fuck, I just want to increase the AU's just 10%. Like that'll get me my next, you know, raise or whatever.

I don't even not. I need to increase the CTR on this one button. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So anyways, match group is, but it's funny because it's, everybody wants to say that match group is all bad, yet there's millions of couples out there that would never have met. Yeah. And their lives are completely, like, better because match group products exist. Of course, yeah. So it's one of those things like nothing is ever as good or as bad.

The other, yeah, the other interesting thing is like, like, you know, even if the match group was in like the, you know, charitable, let's call it like a charitable donation range. Like, let's say it was like $10 million company, but it still had the outsized effect that it has on society. Like Elon could just be like, I'm going to burn $10 million because I feel like changing the world. 10 million. Let's call it 10 million. Like super low, like nothing. Like it's a rounding air for him.

So he buys and he shuts it down. Well, like that's not going to stop someone else coming in and doing. same thing. It doesn't work like that. There's clearly some sort of like market demand here and you can't just go around doing like this this like odd brand of like capitalism philanthropy mix. Yeah. I think the solution here, I do think people are clamoring for a solution to like plummeting marriage rates and plummeting birth rates, but the answer is is probably.

Don't go after the apps. Yeah, yeah. You actually need to build like a better cultural institution. and figure out how that can scale and be profitable. You need to make it, you know, punishable by jail if a guy sees a girl that's cute and doesn't talk to them, you know? In real life. In real life. Yeah. Like if a guy, like if a police officer is on the street and sees a guy walking or this is a cute girl and doesn't say hello, I'd like to take you out to coffee, that can be punishable by up to 10 years.

10 years in prison. And so it's just everybody. I don't know if the government's going to solve this. I think we're looking for free market solutions here. And the free market solutions are probably like someone going and building something that's a really cool. Like I heard one person pitch, this is kind of a wild idea, crossfit for militias. So the idea is like if you want strong militias in America, which maybe you don't, but if you do, and you want the ability of like local groups of Americans to potentially push back against the government in a negative state.

You have some sort of organization. You could do the same thing where it's like, you know, some sort of new CrossFit community, something like that, where it's like it's a scalable organization, but it's about something else where people can meet and bond. No, I want to fund Discord for local militias. Discord for local militias. Okay.

Vertical SaaS for militias. Sure. Everything from. I don't even know if there are that many militias around. No, but we need to stimulate more. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah. So, yeah, if you could manage everything from communication to inventory to recruit,

to dues to training to compliance yeah there's a big business to be built there I mean I do love the idea and my dad group chat in the neighborhood that are all early users and yeah and you even link it into you know scrape active you know police reports warnings you bring in citizen data so it's basically like you know getting you know you get a push notification and then you like rip your suit off you know underneath this is like full you know military I think dudes would sign up for it I do like the idea of you know like okay we're revitalizing like the American military and working with the DOD with all these defense tech companies but like what happens if we get overrun and like you know

some foreign foreign country is like on our shores like we need malicious and we just need to we need our own insurgency and we need to be prepared for that I mean fortunately I have the most guns of any country so shouldn't be going back to that's going back to the fixing fixing uh the reason that i don't think uh i don't think dating i only think it's going to get i don't think it's going to get i don't think it's going to get better really like i think the future that we're seeing today which is hyper financialized dating which is you're on this app and if you pay more money like you can have better odds at success and all this stuff. But then the bigger issue is just that humans historically did not have indefinite optionality. Now people are so used to spending most of their time communicating

online that it's not unreasonable that somebody in Texas would date somebody in Ohio and then form a relationship that way. But the issue is that historically humans had, I think it was there's some data on on until recently or until the last like couple of decades most people that got married were born within like five square miles of each other or something like that yeah and that was actually positive and that people would look around and see and just like be more committal because they're like well this is the best person for me in my neighborhood right or my city or whatever and super easy yeah just like oh like family everything's here. I guess we should get married. So yeah, I think that the era of optionality. Seeing the entire pool across the entire country or whatever. The thing is, is somebody is using dating apps and they meet somebody and then they stop

using dating apps. They're still going to go on Instagram and see the same number of, so eliminating, even if you regulate or try to fold match group or whatever, it's not going to stop. Instagram is the bigger That isn't interesting Like obviously Like I want the free market solution here But it would be interesting

If like like legally you couldn't have a You had to have some geo restriction on On the matching Yeah or you can only get Five matches a month Yeah something like that We're yeah we're limiting matches I don't think that's never gonna happen

No yeah That's why I just I think Whatever you're seeing today is what Exactly what you're going to see for the most part The relentless march of tech and capital Yeah, even the, even the prevalence of, I don't know if this made it in the stack, but there was somebody tweeted, I think it was like on the character AI Reddit. And it was like so long their favorite character that they were chatting to,

I finally met someone. Thanks for teaching me how to talk to a woman. It certainly helped. So that's, I guess, one positive, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. if the sort of in-cell audience is chatting with these AI bots and they're like, damn, I low-key have game, right? Yeah, yeah. I have thought about that where maybe there's a scenario where it's like you, like a boy is talking to an AI girlfriend and a girl out there is talking to an AI boyfriend.

And because they're on the same platform, the two AIs, you can kind of do a match across them and you have a lot of data. to know, because you know every interest about the boy, because you've collected, you know, hours and hours of communication, and you've connected hours and hours of chat blogs with the girl as well, and you can look across the network and say, wow, these two people are actually perfect matches. We should just introduce them and disintermediate. And then the AIs leave, and then the real-life boy and girl meet, and they're like, wow, it feels like I'm talking to the AI boyfriend or AI girlfriend that I've been talking to

for the last year. I'm glad I gave it so much training data. And then they meet up and it's a catfish. I've been leading my, you're talking to the AI girlfriend. You're like, yeah, I'm jacked. Like, I can bench 400. It's like, oh, well, like, we have a girl over here

who wants to date someone who can bench 400. You have to post-proof, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The AI is like, I'm sorry, unfortunately, unfortunately we've had issues on the platform with people embellish their bench, their bench one rep max and we actually will need you to post proof of it make sure you're in a well-lit area that's clearly not using fake weights that's funny i want to talk about this uh this

like you know zombie corn's dead venture companies so uh it started with this tweet by tera or tara very surprised at the number of founder friends who have quietly called in the last few days asking for advice on how to sell their company because they raised it too high evaluations and are now in a state of purgatory. And I think you know this guy, Siva, is that right? Or you just saw him, but he says, he says DM or email me. We've bought a few companies that raged 50 to $100 million from VC and we're stuck behind a large pref stack. I've been a founder and understanding this situation is daunting and running a company with little to know upside as exhausting and demotivating. We can provide a landing spot for your company and a way for you to get a win and move on if you'd

like to do other things. This is my bad signal to founders or investors that see founders stuck in these situations. So, you know, preserve companies that is too much. The irony is that the person he's quote tweeting just sold her company for like a big outcome. Oh, really? Yeah, like she had a really successful exit and then it catalyzed a bunch of people. To be like, oh, how do I? Actually, I actually don't know the details, but I think people did very well. Okay. I saw like employees tweeting that were like, whoa, I'm rich now. Cool stuff like that. So she has a big outcome.

A bunch of people are like, whoa. How do I do that? How do you sell your company? Yeah. Because people still have this perception that, I don't know, a lot of venture back founders think that their company is worth something close to the last valuation that they raised at, even if they're not, or even their seed valuation. Yeah.

Yeah. Whatever. So what I think is funny is you have these people. So Jeremy Gaffaun was probably. over a year ago maybe at this point he goes on invests like the best he starts talking about special situations everybody's like whoa you've been doing like and he's giving examples of deals that they've done at tiny for a really long time where they're buying companies for less than the asset value of the business and he's calling them like log jams and special situations where he's coming in as a somewhat neutral third party saying like how do we

how do we deliver what everybody wants the VC wants oftentimes just just like take a write off or clean it up or stop having to spend any time on it if they're on the board they don't want to deal with it anymore if it's not going to return their fund so he's solving that for the bc's he's usually giving a deal to the founder that allows them and and whatever the core team is that allows them to save face and hopefully see some r oi or walk away entirely if they want to do something else but i think it's funny because now you have jeremy who has his new fund who's fully focused on this. So you have to imagine he's going to be ahead of a lot of these other people that are coming out and now trying to compete here. But Jeremy is competing

with Tiny Capital, Andrew Wilkinson, who's still trying to do the same deal, even though, to my knowledge, Jeremy was the guy, like, really leading the charge of that practice. And so all these guys who are running holding companies are basically now, like, doing, like, distressed finance, you know, where they're just coming in, like, trying to find value and unfuck these situations. So, anyways, I think it's great that these players exist in the space. It's generally positive, I think, for pretty much all the stakeholders. But the nature of everybody realizing that these are good opportunities is going to make, I am at the increased competition.

We'll see if it, if, I don't know. if the venture industry has, could support as many of these types of players as they can, microphones, right? Yeah. I wonder, I wonder what the wheelhouse deal looks like for, like, where, where is their value when there's a log jammed, like, B2B SaaS company? Because I feel like if you raise it some money, you didn't get to product market fit, but you're in the last era.

It's like, okay, well, you probably aren't doing like an AI first approach. You're probably doing something else. maybe you have some customer list. It's like I struggle to think of like why I personally would want to own one of these companies. Yeah. So imagine a company that raised that raised $25 million and gets to $5 million of ARR. Sure. And they're not profitable.

In fact, they're burning a lot of money. Sure. And they stop growing. Suddenly that company is companies that don't make money. and are not growing are worthless. Yeah, they're worth it. Especially if they're losing money. Yeah, of course.

And so you take one of these five millionaires businesses that's not really growing anymore. And if you wipe out the preft stack, massively decreased costs, focus on sustainable growth, you could probably sell that business for $25 million in like three to five years, right? I'm just saying like...

Maybe. Yeah, I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it's easy. Without any more, without like putting up significant more capital that feels hard. Not necessarily, though. I mean, so here's the...

Maybe if you're plugging you into something that has like heavy synergies, like sure, it's like, okay, they have a product that we can cross-sale or something. I'm not saying it's... I'm not saying it's easy. But I'm just saying if you have... If the $5 million are a business

with a $25 million preft stack that's not growing, if you wipe out the press stack, reduce costs, and find a way to grow sustainably, and then you get profitable. And then in five years, you go to a strategic

and you say like, hey, you guys should actually buy this for $50 million because it's accretive to your business. The person that bought the business for five, whatever, you paid $5 million for it, you're going to do great. So that's why all these people are circling being like, hmm. I really want to see the, like the histogram. And it's actually, it's actually good to give VCs love to add value via intros.

And so Siva and Jeremy and Andrew are. all going to be like pretty much buddy buddy with all the VCs yeah getting those getting those calls and intros hey hey this company stalled there might be yeah um I just wonder I just wonder I just wonder I just wonder I just wonder I just wonder I just wonder I just wonder I just yeah the other structure is it just is it just well yeah the other thing here is that these funds can leverage debt yeah so if you're buying a business you know there's totally possible you could buy a business for $5 million with $5 million of cash. Yeah.

$3 million of debt. And if you sell the business for $25 million, it's a pretty good multiple on your cash. It's just, it is kind of high stakes. It's kind of high stakes because like you got to cut costs fast to pay for the debt. And then you're now cut costs and now you have to grow. Yeah. And while maintaining margins in this new era because you're not like this hot company trading it at some premium.

Everyone knows you're like this turnaround. It's tricky. I like it though because it's a simple strategy that you can have real advantages through your network and credibility. Yeah, because Jeremy's done a bunch of these deals. Yeah. I don't know. It doesn't seem like that's simple of a strategy. More seems like something that Jeremy's just really good at uniquely.

It's a simple fun thesis. Sure, sure, sure. Very difficult to execute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's important. It's much worse to have a very complex fun thesis and a very complex execution. Sure, sure, sure. At least have one of them be simple.

Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So, yeah, because I don't know. There's just not that many. Nobody, right now, nobody wants to buy a business that's, for the most part, it's not that strategic to buy. If you have a company that's working, it's not that strategic to buy a cost center, you

know? Yeah. Yeah. But if you can turn it into like a profit center and something that's accretive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder how much of the, I wonder how much of the hack and slash is actually going to go on.

The what? I wonder how much like hack and slash is actually going to go on in those deals. Like, like Twitter is kind of like the famous example of like a really bloated company, 5,000 employees. It's now below 2,000. It's getting closer to 1,000. Like, that is remarkable. But when I'm thinking about a $25 million raise, it's like,

Well, maybe they got to, what, 50 employees so they could go down to 10? Could they go down to 20? Like, maybe. Like, that doesn't seem that crazy to me. Well, the hard thing is if you're going after these SaaS companies or consumer apps or whatever they are, you're still at 5 million of revenue and trying to be super capital efficient. Yeah. You're still threatened by all the next YC batch. Exactly.

We're building SaaS for, you know. With AI. With AI. It's like the next hot thing. They're going to burn money to like acquire those same customers. That is really tough. Yeah. but if you've found some niche and like the revenues are pretty strong yeah sticking around it's just

interesting there's the the startup community generally has this attitude that anything's possible yeah and when they think of private equity they're like oh yeah you just buy companies for one price and sell them for more and like look at this deal like what if you did that with this whatever um but private equity credit to the gentleman that we know in that industry like they are not there's not a lot of efficiencies that you can get in private equity the edge that these guys have is relationships to investors and being able to speak to founders and that's why this like content marketing is like sure I've been in your shoes I understand you know I've been there done that you know it's um they're they're gonna actually so their yeah so their edge is that

There are edges that private act, traditional PE funds are not looking at these, at these companies as much, and they do not give a shit how the founder feels. Yeah. So that is an edge by itself, just caring about the founder. Let's do this one. Do you know this guy? Burn Hobart. I love this guy.

Yeah. He just wrote this book for Strait Press on Bubbles. He's going to be a Hereticon. Good dude. he's pro bubble amazing who he's not yeah he believes just one more bubble

yeah I actually told him about that on a call yeah and he was like yeah and he has an interesting theory that the that in fact it is not the the like main street investor that gets burnt when a bubble collapses

because if you look at wealth inequality during financial collapses and recessions wealth inequality decreases. Interesting. Because on average, the Main Street investor invests on a much more regular cadence. It's the professional investor that's actually winning and losing more dramatically. At scale.

Yeah. It's very fascinating. Because the narrative is typically like, oh, the finance or the rich guys dumped on retail. But that's not really what happens if you just look at the broader, broader picture. It's certainly true in like the micro. Like some people got dumped on. Some people dumped. But more broadly, the economic equality actually goes down during crashes.

But I love this tweet. It didn't get very many views, but I thought it was very interesting. It says, there's a dubious microcap I've looked at that makes a hangover cure that you're supposed to drink at the same time you drink alcohol. The main active ingredient is caffeine. So what they really sell is deconstructed four loco. Can't tell if that's a bull or bear case. When's the last time you had a four logo? College.

damn I'm sorry yeah you haven't had opportunities since then maybe at the reticon we should crack we should crack up on stage yeah Solano was telling me that he was like I showed him I showed him the document and he was like he was like there's one problem like control F for four loco it wasn't in this dock so we definitely have to get some real ones that's so great 100% I mean and we'll do an ad read for four loco yeah it's perfect um yeah I I remember like you know when the four loco ban happened like, you know, everyone was kind of stockpiling, like, a case or two. But the original four-locos is, like, impossible to acquire now. But it's just, the original.

The original formula, I mean, it really is rare. It's rare than your, then your, you know, first-generation iPhone that's still in the box. Can you imagine driving through some forgotten town somewhere in America and you pull up to a gas station and you're thirsty? Thirsty. I don't think thirst has anything to do with it. You're thirsty and you go to look in the fridge and you look back and you're like, what is that? It's like it's not even refrigerated. It's like everything's lukewarm or whatever.

Oh, yeah. There's some dust. Okay. And you like scrape it off and it says like expired in like 2008. Yeah, it was like 2009. And you just immediately like start hitting it against your head. It's like water. It's like a mirage in the desert.

I don't have any negative memories of Four Locke. I certainly wasn't my go-to, but I think it was a great product, and it's a shame that it got regulated out of existence. Yeah. Well, what about Buller Bear case? I will tell you that this company is truly a microcap. I DMed him and asked him, and it's about a $50 million company. Should be smaller.

It should be smaller. Whatever their earnings are, it should be smaller. I mean, the thing with the deconstructed four loco is like that already kind of exists, the Red Bull vodka, and then the gentleman's Red Bull vodka, which of course is the espresso martini. And so the idea of mixing caffeine and alcohol, people do this regularly, they find ways to do it. This is classic. The question is like, yeah, will people really pick up on this? Because they are explicitly triggering people to consume caffeine when they're drinking.

Yeah, there's another one of the. hangover cures that hangover cures or fixes are funny because tough business you're basically saying that I'm irresponsible but I'm responsible enough to buy a hangover cure these are great cups that's really tough yeah thank you yeah it's always hard to to be no the real reason is you're saying you just poisoned yourself here's an antidote yeah antidotes don't promise that you're gonna feel good they promise that you're gonna live you know okay and so uh or that's like theory of an antidote so yeah to me you're just just commit to drinking is going to make you feel worse than you otherwise would temporarily maybe better and then

worse so i think it's i've never i've never invested in any of the companies that have there's clearly demand yeah i have a friend who runs one that's doing pretty well they focus on like weddings too that's like a bit of growth area because everyone's going to be drinking at the wedding so if you can get into the wedding planner network, then the wedding planner can present this as like, oh, this would be a lovely gift for everyone. You put it in a little gift bag when they arrive. They take it before they drink. It's actually like a biotech company. They have like really good science. And so it's this enzyme that breaks down the alcohol. It really does work. Yeah, Zibiotics. Have you tried it? Somebody was telling me that Zibiotics is like, I don't want to misspeak. And I don't want to talk poorly

about anyone's, um, a for-profit enterprise. Yeah. But, um, But yeah, no, you know, I tried zbiotics and I was like this didn't work. Didn't work. And, you know, I don't know, I'm very, I'm very affected by alcohol that I pretty much the next time I drink alcohol and probably the only time in Q4 will be at Hereticon. Sure. On stage before, Loco. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

It is always hard because it's like if you have the forethought to think of taking a pre-alcohol. whole hangover cure, you also might have the forethought to like mix in a glass of water or just drink glass. Or you just, it's a very tough business. It's a very tough business. Yeah. Or drink more water. I mean, any, any business that's predicated.

Or have your blood boy waiting at home. Like any business that's predicated on like you doing less of like the seven deadly sentence is always tricky. Like, you know, the dating app that's not predicated on just more and more casual sex. Yeah. That's going to struggle. To me, to me, if I was going to invest in a hangover cure, it would be somebody recreating John McAfee's protocol, which have you seen. You should pull it up.

You should pull this up or put it on the screen or something. But his protocol is like, you know how he always like, whenever he does a video and he's no longer with us. Yeah. Well, allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Yeah. He's probably listening to this right now.

Um, the, he'll have to go on these rants where he's like, how did I drink four bottles of gin a day for six years in a row and, and, you know, still manage to hold the federal government hostage for 200 days in a row. And he had, he'll outline this like crazy biohacker stack that he's on that like is like helping with his liver and all this other stuff. And so he actually had it dialed. So like the McAfee stack is, if somebody wants to build that all. I'll back that. I'll back that. Because it clearly works. Like, you guys,

like drinking, like, we're gonna do a deep dive on the mat of, he wasn't just partying. He was drinking. Yeah. He, he,

he's like, he's like, putting as much effort as Brian Johnson is into, into surviving, but also like, but just refusing to not drink. Yeah,

yeah. It's great. Yeah. Like the easiest win possible. Yeah. How can I survive well? No, probably like,

yeah, would have, still doing the single worst thing I could possibly do for my body. Yeah. Wow. what do you think of this Dennis says you're busy trying to get into founder mode

while the 18 year old zoomer clipping Kaisenot and Aden Ross on TikTok has a higher ARR than your entire B2B SaaS startup why'd you like this one so much? I mean I just think that I just think it's amazing

if you could go back in time and tell Ben Franklin that some 18 year old you know 18 year old would be making millions. He would be like, yeah, that was what I envisioned for America. Yeah. You know, it is interesting.

You know, to go back to Jeremy Giffon, one of... By the way, Gaffon is... Is it Gifon? No, I think... How do you say? I think that's Gaffon. Giffon. But it's so funny because his favorite business ever is, like, Lazzard.

Yeah. And Gaffon just happens to feel like it's already in the same realm of... Is that the thought of... Is that the thing? Fun name, Giffon, Capon and company. And company? There you go, Lizard. Yeah, that makes sense.

Well, yeah, I mean, he told me this one interesting thing was like he just, like, one of the highest signal, you know, data points that you can get on a founder when they're young and you're thinking about backing them for the first time. They never done a business before is just show me a stripe account with money coming in. and simultaneously a high school report card that happened the same time. All I care about is you made money while in high school. Yeah, let me show you this picture. And that is a great signal.

And I think that it's interesting because this seems ridiculous, the 18-year-old zoomer clipping Kaisenade and Ross clips on TikTok, but that 18-year-old zoomer is probably the next great B2B SaaS founder. Probably. Like not unreasonable to back that person. You evolved from the lowest common denominator. Yeah. And that is going to get retconned from this low status clipping Aiden Ross clips on TikTok to, oh, yeah, I had a social media management company or, oh, yeah, I had an ads company.

No. This is my first company. Okay. Let me see. Jayman Designs. Okay. Literally when I was 12, I figured out that I could get skateboards manufactured in the Midwest for $17. and 50 cents. Wow. And I got my mom's help designing a graphic and I got, I raised the money from my aunt who gave me like 500 bucks for the first round. And I bought a bunch of boards and my number one sales channel was friends birthday parties. So when my friend's birthday was coming up, I'd go to their parent and I would sell them a skateboard at $40 or $36. Whatever I was making like 50% margins. I should have gone higher. A lot of like.

flexibility. Yeah, you got a Zillow the house show up. Actually, this is $200 skateboard. It's a $200 skateboard. No, but that was like the first way that I made money that wasn't mowing lawns or whatever. It was a formative experience. Truly entrepreneurial. The formative experience for an entrepreneur, it's one thing to do a service like copywriting

or any of these other graphic design. Yeah, yeah. Getting, buying a product for one price and all you do is resell it for something else. This is my first job too. first like entrepreneurial thing was buying DJ equipment in America and then selling it on eBay and being willing to ship internationally. And so figuring out that like certain companies with this very niche DJ equipment didn't have the infrastructure set up to distribute internationally. And so I would just be like, yeah, I'll go figure out all the stupid custom stuff. And a lot of people that wanted like the best

audio file gear would be like, dude, if you can buy this for me and I will pay the, extra shipping costs in the premium to do it. And you just go figure all that stuff out. And it was only possible because of like the internet. Yeah. And fundamentally, I still bring that up to founders when they're thinking, they're like trying to over philosophize their businesses.

Yep, yep, yep. Like are you making something for one price that you will be able to sell for more than that price? And if so, how much more? Yeah. And if depending on the market, like that's either going to lead to you creating a big business.

based on the margin profile or not. Yeah, yeah. And so many people forget that. And I've forgotten that at multiple points in my adult life. Fundamentally, it's about making something for one price, selling it for more than that. Yeah, just starting with like a basic widgets business. Somebody's going to clip this and be like, two guys discover business. Basically, like, here's the thing.

So, like, if I have this piece of paper, right, and I can get this paper for a dollar. Yeah. And you're willing to pay $2 for this printout of a tweet. Yeah. What else do we have? We have a couple more things. I wanted to see. Did you actually dig into this story about Mark Andreessen giving 50K and Bitcoin to an AI agent? Yeah, I did. It was over, it was dramatized by an AI doomer. Yeah, dramatized by an AI doomer. Turns out like the money like went into an account and like was never actually touched. It's not like the AI was like, I'm going to use the. this to do that. It was just sort of like Mark sends it. Yep. And then um calling calling Mark Mark this reminds me somebody I was at dinner the other night and and somebody brought up

Epstein and for some reason I was like unrelated and I called him I was like no but Jeffrey would have why are you calling him Jeffrey like what's wrong with you? Is there something that we need to know? Um Yeah, but yeah, I think just, just there's going to be more examples of this where people are like, look, it's sentient. The problem with the truth terminal thing, I mean, it seems really cool. I hope that it's like real and someone's actually doing stuff. It seems like a very avant-garde art project, but you never know, again, teleoperation, is there a human in the loop here? So even with the- And there's an incentive to be like, oh, if people think this is an AI.

They like it more because the bar is lower. It's like what we discussed the other day about the, the, the AI influencers are making 50K on Instagram, only fans or whatever, and it turns out it's just a real woman. But if a real woman says, oh, these are AI generated, people are like, oh, wow, this is incredible.

This is the best AI model I've ever seen. And there's going to be a lot of that, like faking it both in the teleoperation, both in this and just having a filter there. It is interesting. Are you familiar with like Move 37, this whole story? So when Google DeepMind, Demis Hasidus was trying to beat Lisa Dahl in Go, the Goa master.

So computers had beaten chess and they'd become superhumanate chess, but Go was computationally much more complex. So something like, you know, instead of being like trillion possible board positions that you could potentially search with a supercomputer, it's like quadrillion and quadrillion. So it's like impossible to just brute force it. But they applied deep learning, scale, they trained, and they played billions of simulated games,

and eventually the AI became very good. Everyone thought that Lisa Dahl, who was the world champion, was going to wipe the floor, and he wound up losing. They made a whole documentary about it. It was crazy. And in there, there's this moment where they're playing,

and at Move 37, the computer, DeepMind, places this piece, like, way off of the board where, like, no one, not off the board, but, like, it's a legal position. It's just a very weird play. Like no one would ever do this. No human would ever do this. And everyone was very confused.

They were like, oh, there's like a bug in the software. Like something's weird about this. But and Lisa Dahl, like, got up and was like, what the fuck is going on? Like, this is weird. Like, I don't get this. This is not how people play this game. And that move wound up being critical. And they won because of this move.

So it was like true discovery of like a novel strategy. And that is like what we're looking for in intelligence. When you say like an AI. system is intelligent and superhuman, that's where we're getting there. And with LLMs, I don't... Yeah, the thing that would be interesting is if there was this AI, like, agent that was figuring out a way to crack open multi-sigs on Solana. Oh, yeah.

Or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Again, there was a rumor about that too, but very unlikely. But even, even like, so these Move 37 type moments, I've been waiting for something to happen where it's just like a sentence of. poem, a paragraph, something that feels like inspired and like a viral tweet that clearly provably came from an LLM. We won't know that it's that that open AI has reached singularity until an agent

on the opening, like built on the open AI platform buys and McLaren P1 gain the favor of all men. B1 or F1? Well, I think he would. He'd respect both. Yeah. But I don't know. It's interesting.

It's definitely getting a response from the crazy AI doomers. Dumer's going to doom. But I like that Mark, like, you know, Yolode 50K to this project. Like, that's fun. That's what he should be doing. That's awesome. I'm excited. I'm excited.

I'll increase it by an order of magnitude. Probably on the next run. you know, did you read Sequoia's generated AI thing? Their whole paper. Application layer is important. It's a bit too serious for our bones. I think so. No, it is.

It's so long. It's one of those things. Here's the funny thing. The only thing that I'll comment on that is it feels like a year ago, everybody was like the application doesn't matter. Building it the application layer is stupid. Yeah, rappers are stupid. And now it's like all in on wrappers.

But then a year from now, I think it'll be back to, I don't know. It's just funny to think that only like six to 12 months ago people were saying that software is dead or the end of software. So this report is coming within six months of the end of software. So who's right?

Both of them are right. Like that's honestly my opinion is I think that long term both of them are right and that software is going to be massively disruptive. Yeah. But there's still going to be massive value accrual to specific products. Yeah. I mean, the computing hardware companies were valuable, and the software built on top of them was valuable after the dot-com boom. Yeah.

And even the telecom companies were pretty valuable. Yeah. And so the whole stack is valuable. And there's probably value accruing all over the place. It's great. Everywhere you look. I mean, it really is. It makes sense that the value accrual wouldn't live just only one place.

Of course, there's going to be like a winner, but from a venture perspective. Everybody's incentive, anybody that's running a foundation model is incentivized to say, we're going to capture all the value, we're going to do all these things that you say you're going to do, we're just going to do it innately through the core technology. And then everybody that wants to deploy money is saying, you want to, it's much more comforting to be able to say that the value is going to accrue to individual teams and products and apps and things like that. because then you can yolo bets, you know. Yeah, the question is like, and I don't know if they address this that much,

but disruptive innovation versus sustaining, like will the existing, because there's already a crop, there's already a, you know, a multi-billion dollar SaaS company in every major category. And so there's also now a YC company doing AI in that category as well. Is AI disruptive? to those companies that are maybe only five, 10 years old and doing well. Like, I mean, you know, Ramp is like,

they're not being disrupted by AI. They're like the first one to implement it because like they're still on the cutting edge. They still have the agile team, right? And I wonder how much of this is gonna be completely new versus just the existing tech companies are able to just roll in. I don't know.

Keep an eye on it. Anything else? There's always more technology. Always more technology. I think we got through most of the tweets. I have been using those meta glasses more. The Raybans? Yeah, the video ones.

With the kids? With the kids, I went for a walk and had my hands full with dogs and babies, and it was great. We were able to take some photos. The photos are not that great, but the thing that I actually liked was being able to just talk to the AI while you're walking around hands free. You just say, like, hey, meta, like, what's the, you know,

what year was the Declaration of Independence Signed or whatever? You're trying to disrupt Ben. Yeah. It just gives you like little facts and stuff and it's like a little bit easier than pulling out your phone for like the random question. Yeah. I think that's kind of cool.

You become the cell tower that data is being transmitted. Yeah, you're going to have that. I actually watched a heapering clip about that. EMS. Yeah. And he had someone on who was like a brain scientist and who was basically like, it's chill. So, you know.

I think there's like there's like the science. scientists agree. Now the bro scientists agree, but like we got to come up with a new tier for like even more conspiratorial tinfoil hot guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The tinfoil bros. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just the bros. Not bro scientists. Just bros. Don't even pretend to be a scientist. Dude, we should have a tinfoil hat in the background from here. Just like a really really high quality one. Anyway, I think we crushed it. We think we did all this stuff. Let's wrap there. Do you want to talk about it? Oh, ending our potential vice president bragging about not...

Knowing what a VC is? The thing is, here's the funny thing. Politicians used to be able to travel around the country saying whatever they wanted to specific audiences with zero consequences. Oh, yeah. And now almost every single talk that a politician's ever going to have is going to be clipped and almost immediately published. And even, you know, there's always, they're always running the risk of being clipped out

of context. Yep. But Tim Walls can't, it's, you can't go and speak to a bunch of guys that work, you know, he's clearly pandering to a specific audience of being like, well, the funny thing with Tim Wall is the guy says he doesn't own any stocks or any financial instruments. He doesn't have retirement savings. He's just planning to live off of the government forever. Like, he came out and said, yeah, yeah, he has his pension from being in the government

or whatever. He says he has no. he sold his house he doesn't have any he's all in like the guy's all in you got to give him credit for that but he yeah he has zero exposure to stocks the market or whatever so this is the guy this is you know the the um it was it dan lobe who is who is tweeting and saying like is this the guy that we really want you know making decisions around you know the economy sure you know whatever but yeah Tim Wall's going and you know he's probably speaking to some group of like I don't know, agriculture.

Sure, manufacturing. Where the VCs aren't in that state. So apparently the guy I'm running against his venture capitalist. I don't know what he, I don't even know what a venture capital is. And it's like, dude, you can't even if you did, even if that's true.

Yeah. If you want to win this race, like why are you going and bragging about something? There's literally a fairly large constituency of like VCs for your campaign, VCs for Kamala. Yeah. And then also it's like the Obama administration, the, the, the organization, that they met with outside the government more than any other during the administration was Google.

The Democratic Party is like well entrenched with tech and venture capital. This is like well established. And so, you know, playing this like, oh, I don't even know what that is. Yeah, I feel like he's been, the last week has been interesting for him where there was a pick of, or not the picture, the video of him going hunting. I didn't even see that. Where he's trying to show that he's a good old boy that loves guns and stuff like that

to sort of get the mail vote, but back to back of blowing it with them because it was clear he didn't know how to load his shotgun and then straight into saying he doesn't know what a venture capital is, is like you're kind of alienating both crowds of guys that know how to load a gun and then guys that know what venture capital is

and I think that middle group that doesn't know what either is is not going to be that influential in your election. But anyways, that's enough politics. I'm looking forward to the next episode. Yeah, me too. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening.