TBPN - The Switzerland of AI, Roblox Short Sale, Google's AI Podcast

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjVWe covered a lot:Google’s NotebookLM PodcastHindenburg Research Roblox Deep DiveBastion Free Rides in a CybertruckAI Models making $5,000 per monthZuck’s Porsche MinivanBillionaires and regular people live the same lives nowAI Reshapes Sleepy Malaysian State

We're good. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are talking about a number of news stories. The big one, did you see the Switzerland of AI? Now Switzerland's like the neutral party in the financial sector, like they don't really take sides. Well, Malaysia has emerged as this neutral place where every company... Every inch. Yeah, all the AI companies are building data centers there. Because it's right next to Singapore, which is a massive trading hub. But then it's also independent between like China and America. They haven't picked aside. But because they're connected to Singapore, it's like very easy to get to.

But then they also have the like some of the largest concentration of undersea fiber cables. Beautiful. So it's just like a huge, huge rush. I want to go to scuba. I want to go to scuba dive. in Malaysia and dive to alongside the underground cable

and just like sort of like you know like you know those shots of scuba divers where they're like touching a whale like imagine like touching the underground cable that would be information superhigh yeah and just like downloading all of that

like the power um look at how close it is to Singapore Jehor that's the spot Jehor

and so they know where we're going in holidays They're like a couple years away from having the same amount of energy capacity as Northern Virginia, where like all the major AWS hubs are. And it's interesting because a lot of the reason why the data centers are being pushed overseas is because of the ESG things. Like a lot of the big tech companies, they made ESG commitments. Have you heard this, that XAI just didn't make any ESG commitments? So they're just burning coal to just pump energy into this. latest training run.

Yeah. It's been fascinating. Whatever it takes. It's a war between good and evil. I've talked to some AI founders who are like kind of worried about like the climate stuff. Just the demand for coal. Yeah. Just because like there's just no way that we can ramp up everything else even though.

That's that's the irony of Elon like being the dominant player in clean tech. Yeah. And then also burning. Potentially. Potentially. Yeah. People like looked at like. like the satellite images of like what he's building and like there's just not enough power from

the grid there to do what he says he's going to do so it's just like very clearly they're just going to set up as many generators as possible and then also pull from the grid and then also build solar and nuclear like just throw everything out it because it's like so important it's like total land ground somebody's got to do it yeah what else do a did you read in the journal today oh in the journal where to start where to start uh i thought this article on on the American guns that the Mexican cartels covet was interesting. Did you see this? Yeah.

I don't actually know when this printed. I think this ran over the weekend. But apparently Mexico is engulfed in a wave of criminal violence and disputes between rival drug gangs and U.S. weapons are fueling the budbath. So there's just apparently a group of U.S. dudes who buy American weapons and then sell them overseas.

Well, you've seen the videos where it's a car. and there's like they do this sort of like show of force for the bosses who are usually nowhere near like the private armies but I've seen videos where they're just like walking and there's just like a line of like paramilitary guys with the trucks that are like branded with the cartel and it's just like literally like you can walk and and pass like 500 trucks like and it's all like it's like it's like a North Korean or Chinese show of force yeah it's like Ford Raptors that have like turrets on the top. It really does seem like the cartel is like

almost equal in power to the actual military at this point. That's the biggest. That's the biggest. I don't actually think I end up watching, I end up putting on like YouTube to fall asleep.

And I always have to put on something that's interesting but not really that relevant to my life. And so what I'll do is I'll put on this there's this podcast that only goes like super, It's like a two-hour podcast every time with like some journalists that's just been covering the cartels for 20 years. Interesting.

And they just talk. It's basically like reality TV for cartel life. Yeah. And so that's how I, that's some reason it puts me to sleep. And it's sort of like a calming, like, you know, hearing about the rise and fall of these sort of drug lords is like relaxing to me. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, the biggest headline is that I think in the last presidential election, there was. 37 candidates that were murdered, assassinated in the lead up to the new president.

That's so insane. And that's just, that's a little concerning. I think it's totally, I don't think it gets enough attention just how out of control Mexico is. Yeah. And their stone's throw away. Yeah. I mean, I have an employee who lives in Mexico and, you know, he lives in like a safe

neighborhood and it's fine. Oh, yeah. But it definitely seems like there's, like, you know, a lot of conflict going on. The thing that blew me away about this article is that, like, I was expecting, like, okay, maybe AK-47. Like, you hear, you think, like, American guns that are fueling the Mexican cartel, and you think, like, AR-15, right? Yeah. Maybe AK-47.

They start off with the mini-gun. The six-barreled machine-fed weapon can destroy a small car in minutes. It's reserved for high-profile. I don't think. I remember the editor? Yeah, I don't think it's going to take minutes for a mini gun. It's like not everyone has the ability to use these sophisticated weapons. The Mexican military seized the first mini gun from a crime scene in 2018,

according to the military documents released by the nonprofit. Oh, it's a status thing, just like a Patec is a status. Well, they go into that. The Zapata El Hefe and El Grito pistols are Colt 38 supers. and it's like having a sceptor or a crown for a king. And so they actually have different weapons for specific tiers. So if you're the lowest ranking cartel member, you get the Beretta 22 pistol. If you're a little bit higher up, you get the AK-47, the Goatshorn, as they call it.

Rocket launchers, the M-72 Law, anti-tank rocket. It's like, I don't understand how they get these. And they're saying that the whole point of this article is like, these are, American-made weapons that are in the hands of Mexican cartels. But I can't get, I'm an American citizen, I can't get my hands on a, on a belt-fed M-249 saw. Or rocket launcher. Or a rocket launcher. I mean, maybe the Barrett, you can buy a Barrett, which is the, you know, armor piercing, sniper rifle. You know, my neighbor's truck was recently stolen out of his driveway. It had the keys in the truck. Maybe he needs a rocket launcher. No, no, but the thing that was interesting is it was

immediately driven to a harbor in northern California, and it was hours away from being shipped allegedly to Mexico. And so there's this whole, and it was like a blacked-out cord pickup truck. And it's just so easy to imagine that truck taking a relatively short trip down the coast, like pulling into a port in Mexico and being rebranded to, what is it, the CJ? NG cartel. Were you the one that was telling me about the, there was some guy who had like a window company

and he had his like logo and brand on his truck and then eventually he sold it and it wound up like in an ISIS video with like his brand and phone number on it. Because it just got sold or stolen or something. Not all attention is good. People probably know

that he's not involved but still very, very wild. And then they have something else. here too yeah the belt fed saw is the prize weapon for top drug lords in Mexico the weapon denotes status with the security details of Mexico's biggest drug lords wielding you know it does feel like it's like a Gucci bag it's it's more of a way to recognize who's in charge of the cartel teams who's the boss who's the closest to leadership the new Armes Kelly is yeah is a yeah

bolt-fed. I mean, this was, the Barrett sniper rifle, I mean, just the fact that they're like actually considering like how do we take out

vehicles is like so next level compared to the crime that we see in America. Barrett's are only assigned to mid-level gang members, some trained in special combat. It's like they have their own

swap teams. They have their own special forces in the cartel. Yeah. It's just so crazy. Well, you know about, what is, the, it's not El Muncho, who's the guy?

So there's this guy, this guy, Ismail Zambata, otherwise known as El Mio, and he allegedly was like a ghost for decades, but the theory is that he was the guy behind El Chapo. Like El Chapo was sort of like the front man and got all the attention and all the like, all the drama was always seemingly around El Chapo. Yep, yep, yep.

But Elmayo was allegedly calling the shots the whole time. He was like, I believe he was an accountant prior to becoming, you know, a drug lord. And or had some type of, you know, he was like the finance, he was like the CFO, basically, but the one that was actually calling the shots. The drama is that very recently over the summer, he was flown over into, I believe it was El Paso. with, and it was basically initiated by one of El Chapo's sons and basically like abducted him, like in Mexico, flown him over to El Paso. And the theory is that El Chapo's son was coordinating with American like drug enforcement groups.

And so it's been sort of interesting like for me as a spectator to go from watching Netflix and watching Narco. which is probably the last show that I watched to completion on Netflix. And YouTube has just sort of picked up all of that. So instead of watching, you know, this thing unfold, you know, that happened 20 years ago, you can now go on YouTube and like basically in real time cover the drama that's unfolding within the cartels. And there's this whole cottage industry of people that are basically small business owners, like media operators that are just like,

have an entire career built around covering the cartels in real time. Reporting on them. And basically like reality TV. Interesting. And because of the emergence of the iPhone and cell phones in general, there's now like real time relatively high quality video footage. Somebody sent me a very dark video of a cartel like ambush in like basically high definition where these five guys are.

are sitting on a, like, ridge line, and they're just, like, watching their ops, like, approach. And they just straight up just kill them all. And they're all just filming it. Like, they're all, like, looking, like, full members in the military. I mean, it's propaganda war as well. Like, they want to appear strong in addition to being strong.

Yeah, and it's just wild the state of... Have you picked up on any riffs within the creator community? Like, is there someone who's, like, clearly more pro-cartel or, like, maybe on the dole? Yeah, like, the information warfare. Yeah. Because that happens in, like, I mean, if you look at, if you do, like, China research on YouTube, you will see occasionally, like, there's an American who, like, goes over there and is, like, very pro-China all of a sudden.

It's like, okay, like, you're probably being paid. Yeah, and there's the, the whole emergence of faceless YouTube channels has created this environment where it's a perfect battleground for information warfare because you can create this clickbaity video that's like here's why the United States should stay out of the South China Sea. And it's like 20 minutes of like pretty highly produced content. It's fairly convincing. And then you look in the comment section and it's like nice try CCP, you know, and it's like

300 likes. It's like the top comment. But then like half the people watching it are just like going off there. You know, the people that realize that most, I think it's like 50% of YouTube viewership is on TVs. and it's not as comment-oriented. Yeah, not comment-oriented. Or just auto-play next thing. It's autoplay, so they're just like watching this

and it's basically like television. I mean, Netflix can be like that too. Like, wasn't there, there was some, like, 9-11 conspiracy documentary that was on Netflix that was, like, pretty debunked. And they will, Netflix will put stuff out that's about, like, super volcano. And it's like, there's this weird, like, blend between, like, the, like, you know, UFO hunters, ghost hunters. Like, it's fun.

And then it gets into like, okay, is this like propaganda? Is this like, does this have an agenda behind it? Totally. I mean, there's a long history of, like, people think about information warfare playing out it through traditional, like print media, online media, you know, New York Times, et cetera. And there's decades and decades of evidence that various groups have go the length to get highly produced films made, including the same group producing six different films just with, that all have different takes and angles and like objectives just to make it

super confused. Different target audiences. And also to just make it super confusing. And so that's certainly is happening on, you know, legacy media with like films and documentaries, but is obviously happening on YouTube now. Yeah. Anyways, back to not to get too far into the politics. Conspiracy land.

Emerging cartel politics. But should we talk about some technology? Yeah, let's do it. Our favorite topic on this show. What's the first? Yeah, where to start? Roblox or Google. We could start with Roblox.

You were playing. What were you playing last night? Forget the game. you're playing run from Ditty simulator. Run from Dutty the Roblox mini game. Right after you were playing Escape from Epsine Island. I have never actually played Roblox. Yeah, it's always any time.

I tried Fortnite once and I tried Minecraft just to kind of know like, okay, what is this thing? Didn't find them like deeply entertaining or anything, but... It's almost, if you're very online and there's this thing that allegedly is just so dominant, like massive. You got to like learn about it. Like, I read the Matthew Ball piece on... Yeah, so you learn about it, but when somebody's saying, like, 10% of the world plays this two hours a day, you know, it's not actually that extreme with Roblox.

But then you don't know anybody, you know, Roblox target audience is younger. But that was the case. There was also this calendar app that SoftBank backed, if you remember, that, like, was claiming to have, like... They were claiming, I think it was called IRL. Yeah, I remember this. And they were claiming to have, like, an egregious amount of... Yeah, and they were basically just cooking the box. Yeah, never once had knew of anybody using it.

There was the same thing for this. I think Nakeda Beer called them out pretty early too. Yeah, there was some app that I think benchmark back that was like a college finance app that was again the same thing. Turns out it was like they had some incentive where if you signed up for an account you got $5, but you could just sign up like infinitely. Yeah, sends a frog where like maybe yes there is technically an email address in the database but it's fake. There was a ton of that. There was also the company that sold to J.P. Morgan or something. You remember this?

Yeah, yeah. She was on 30 under 30. Yeah. Yeah, I mean. But this isn't, is this, is this an allegation of fraud or just that, like, that stock is mispriced? Like, Hindenburg is just a short seller, right? So Hindenberg did something similar.

Like, I think that they, like, my opinion on Hindenberg is they could almost write their reports on any company. because there's always like, like I'd love to see a Hindenberg research report on Apple, like intentionally degrading iPhones in order to drive sales velocity, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, we all know that for some reason or another,

your phone starts getting materially worse after about 18 months. Like, every company has a most aggressive tactic. Yeah, yeah. Like, whatever their most aggressive tactic is, you want to see that detailed? And in the case of Roblox, they're repeatedly claiming that 50 million people are playing Roblox every single day.

And they specifically were wording it as people instead of daily active users. And they were almost using those interchangeably, but it sounds a lot better to say people. Because it's like, those are real people that might have purchasing power. And it turns out that they were well aware that many people had alts, meeting one person with 10, 20 accounts that were used for different purposes. And they had internal tooling in order to determine who the actual person was behind those 20 accounts were. Yet they were still willing to call those 20 accounts people when it came to reporting. So ultimately, I mean, I think all the issues that they call out are all the issues that happen on any video game with user-generated comments.

content, right? The concerning thing is that it's a game, it's a video game for kids and maybe creating like a sandbox. Like you remember people like there was, even Minecraft is like pretty like, you're in this world, you can build blocks and it's pretty contained, but then you could build like a statue of a huge penis. Yeah, sure. And like there's almost nothing you can do to stop that, I feel like as a game.

I think with Roblox, when you give people the ability to effectively build games within the games, they're creating games like Palestine and Israel Hangout. LGBTQ plus vibes. Guns work at a hospital. You know, I think it's... There's been some backlashes to Roblox. Like on YouTube, I've seen people kind of say that there's like kids that get hooked into like the developer ecosystem don't get compensated fairly.

Like there's been a lot of like, there's been various waves of like, you know, oh, like criticism. But it seems like the. stock is doing well and that's why Hindenberg is like chiming in because they're primarily like a short seller right like are they publishing this after taking a short position is that we're always supposed to assume that's that's okay do you have any idea like how big this fund is Hindenberg research it has such like a meamy name and they're so like big on Twitter that I feel like it's what if it's like a 10 million dollar fund yeah yeah it almost feels like it could just be in a non-account but I think it is actually a research firm because it was in the Wall Street Journal like in in this

it says, I think this is two games, right? I think the real, one thing that you can focus in on is, what is the, is part of the engagement because the games are so extreme?

Because looking at these games, beat up people outside of 7-Eleven has 900,000 visits. Yeah. Beat up the pregnant is another game. Guns work as a hospital, guns work at a hospital has been played 1.6 million.

What's interesting is like, is like, I understand that if you, like, I mean, Hindenberg is not saying that they don't have millions of users. Like, they clearly do have millions of people. I guess, yeah. But even if you have millions of people, like, years ago, it was a reasonable thing to say, like, well, you would have to hire tens of thousands of people to just sit there and watch everything to, like, monitor this for trust and safety.

But now we have LOMs. Like, you can just take every string of text. Yeah. There's so many. Right? Like, look through it. It's funny because there's a lot of ways you could make a bear case for the best. for the business, which is that

user turnover is going to be high. People certainly age out of this. You have 50 million DAUs and you're not making money. Call a Duty does not put out a game and have 50 million people playing it and not make money. You have to imagine

that other gaming companies look at Roblox and they're like, ha, ha, you have 50 million people and you don't make any, like, you have zero earnings. And so I think that there's a lot of ways to critique this business. I mean, the big thing to me is if you make it, it seems like you could make it

pretty easy to eliminate games that were explicitly political and just wrong. Guns work at a hospital. Like, is that a game that we should be encouraging kids to play? And that's something that's so easy to catch with an LLM.

You just throw it through and like the most basic like Lama model. Yeah, and like should you be able to should you be able to name a game Palestine and Israel hangout. Like it's not the town, this is a video game, right?

It's not the town square. Nobody's arguing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I don't think that... Yeah, no parents of kids who play Roblox are like, freeze, but it's almost like when we should play the game

one episode. But like, should you be able to create a game and publish it under something called survive Diddy? And would those games get any users at all if they didn't have the word diddy in it? Probably not, right? No.

So, like, it's part of, like, children, children are innately drawn to offensive things. Yeah. Because it just makes them, like, giggle and it makes them whatever. I do wonder how much of this is driven by adults being creepy versus kids being edgy. Because it's totally possible that a 13-year-old is being edgy because they're edgy on Instagram. Yeah, and I think these games are just less malleable when we were kids, right? Like, kid, you might, like, whatever, in Call of Duty, for example, like, people would try to make it to write a swastika, you know, in the game. But it would eventually, like, they would figure out how to, like, stop people, they would patch it.

And so, but when you create these open sandboxes, it's sort of, if you're creating a metaverse, the same slime and sort of offensive things that happen in the real world, they're going to be recreated within the metaverse. I wonder if there's like an opportunity for something that, like an app, like a child safety app that you could put on like your kids' computer, kids iPad. Shrap it to their Orion. Just like blacks. That's, that's, that's, Orion, Orion. Yeah, yeah. But it just takes a picture of the screen like every 10 seconds and just says like, is this offensive? Yeah.

Is this offensive? And it's just asking the model, like, is this offensive or is this is this inappropriate for age? and it can capture, like, text or images or, you know, a penis in Minecraft, like anything like that can all be processed. There's been, there's some company called a Rewind that does that, but just for, like, your second brain. Yeah, right.

You know, it, like, takes a picture of your screen, and then you can, and I think Microsoft might have a feature for this, too, where you can say, like, okay, I think, like two weeks ago, I was on a website of a short-selling firm, but I can't remember the name. And it'll just be like, oh, Hindenburg Research, right? Yeah. But there was even a, there was a, I feel like there was,

a Black Mirror episode years ago that had something where kids, it was like a software update you could give to your kids where anything's scary or wrong, they wouldn't blurt. So the dog would be like barking, like trying to like kill you and the kid would just be like...

Yeah, it's kind of creepy. And we're probably headed, we're probably headed towards that. I mean, the steel man here, I mean, the journal has the Roblox revenue versus net losses and revenues accelerating in net losses over the last three quarters are declining. So they went from almost 400 million in net losses to just over 200.

So share price is stable at 40. Yeah, should we luck? Should we look? Should we, let's see what impact this actually had. Oh, yeah, did it move the market? Or it moved the market for Roblox stock? So on September 24th, it was trading at $47 a share. and when was this

this came out yesterday it's October 7th or October 8th so the stock is actually up the stock okay over the last three days it's down 2.9% but

but today it's up 3% so that's the thing I don't it was priced in it was priced in yeah everyone who owns the stock is like yeah I know that I know that half the people are fake

and it's a cesspool but I don't care. Because I'm still optimistic that we'll print cash flow in five years. Yeah, the question is like, does this become, I guess the question is,

does Snapchat not make money because of its user base or because of the way that it's run? Because you could argue that Roblox user base is even worse in many ways in terms of willingness to pay just from an age standpoint.

Yeah, yeah. But it does seem like they're trending towards probably making a lot of money. My concern is how ephemeral are video games, especially as they just get easier and easier to create. Well, I wonder how much video game revenue is essentially gambling driven in the sense that Call of Duty has this monetization arc where the first game comes out, it's 60 bucks, 70 bucks, maybe there's $100 for like, you get a little bonus skin for the day one edition and then over time they introduce loot crates that are effectively

gambling where i mean you're not winning money but you're winning like good skins for your guns or like rare items right yeah what's the word it's sort of uh there's the official word for it is variable reward right sure sure so it's like you just might get something or yeah oh you're doing it live and the headset so that clearly has more of a docket yeah rush, they just, okay, I bought this, I bought this skin for $5 or the one that's $100 I paid $100 for. It's like, for $10, you could win either. And I wonder if you look at, you know, the revenues of the gaming companies, like how much is driven by those day one sales, people just paying 60 bucks versus the whales that wind up.

Because for the mobile games, like, they're free up front. They make no money from non-gambling. And it's all basically. The only apps making money day one are wallpaper apps. but that presents a really tough challenge for Roblox right because if Roblox wants to every time they introduce something that feels like gambling they're going to feel the pain 10 times worse because it's their target market's kids whereas Call of Duty it's like 40 year old hardos it's like yeah of course you know dad's

gonna gamble on some skins because like he's having fun and whatever dad's dad's gambling again dad's gonna find a way to gamble one way or another if it's on Call of Duty, you know, outfits for his character. Like, that's not as big of, like, a national news story as, like, 13-year-olds are gambling on Roblox skins. So, like, how can they, I mean, they can, you know, pay wallet and age gate it and stuff, but, like, I mean, they're making a ton of money. Like, they're making, like, I think it was $800 million last quarter.

It's pretty good. But I wonder if they're going to run into problems, like, really ramping it up. Yeah, the question is, is Roblox digital Legos? and does it have enduring brand value that they continue to monetize? Because it certainly looks like digital Legos. Like, I don't know if you... Basically, like, they took Legos.

I've seen videos where people have recreated other games in Roblox, and it doesn't look like Roblox at all. It's crazy. Right, but the core entry point, the cover art, is like, hey, we're online Lego. And it was a very similar strategy

for Epic Games and Fortnite where Epic Games created Unreal Engine, where you can design any game from Gears of War to the new Halo is going to be in Unreal Engine, but then Fortnite is also more accessible. You can kind of design like a little custom game if you want, if you're non-technical or whatever.

Yeah, I think the issue with Hindenberg is this seems like a business that's way more impactful if you're doing one report every two years and just taking these massive, very concentrated position. Whereas like this almost, feels like a stretch, right? Because you're trying to pin them, you're trying to pin them, you're trying to pin them on,

yeah, like they had, they honestly did damage to square. Oh yeah. Was that what it is? Yeah, they were basically, hearing about them for the first time and thinking like, oh, the name, I mean the name implies like the Hindenberg. Like, it's a disaster. It's like world historic, like we have discovered something

that's going to absolutely blow up. And so their name is, like, this is a five alarm fire. Right? And if they are talking about something that's mispriced by 20% or the DAUs are off by 50%, but the revenues are still okay, it's not quite as hard hitting as like, is this the Hindenberg or just like a blimp that needs like a refuel of gas or something. Yeah, so they're putting out usually a couple of these a month, which I didn't know. Okay. But it's like maybe like six a quarter, five a quarter, something like that. at least if you look back historically.

Yeah. And so I think it's actually just they're constantly doing this. And most of the time they're going after companies that are like, like you don't know about and they're genuinely doing bad stuff. But then for them, from a marketing standpoint, it's like it's this battle with for attention, right? They're like everybody's addicted to attention. And so we should try to invest in Hindenburg and see what they're,

see what their process looks like. I wonder, the only thing that would genuinely be cool is if it was like it was all their own money. Oh yeah. You know? And they were just like, yeah, like we just do this for ourselves. We just share what we find, basically.

But it's interesting to see, like, they're basically a media company that happens to monetize through shorting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there were many media companies that monetized through longing. Longing, right?

Through going along. they're just merely on the dump side. Yeah. They're not on the pump side. Yeah, I always, I think it must be such a nightmare to get all of that through legal and figure out what they can and can't say. Because you're putting out this,

you're kind of front-running this information, you're somewhat manipulating a stock, even if everything you say is true, like you're moving the market. Yeah, you have to assume that every single company, like they must get sued like 80% of the time. I would imagine. Because unless a company is such a dumpster fire,

they're like, we have bigger battles to fight. If the CEO that's at the target gets attacked, if he wants to. They're going to find something to pick in there. Like, oh, this is actually wrong. That person that talked to you is wrong. Yeah. It's tricky.

Very tricky. Really, really wild. Should we move on to Google? Okay. thing if people did Hindenburg for venture funds that would be so gnarly like just just no way to monetize it just purely for like if you had like spite Hindenberg you know like somebody wants to take down a certain fund so they publish like 15 reports to make it look legitimate and then just drop like a bombshell and they're like this fund fund

for is it's gonna do like negative you know it's doing going to do like a 0.1x, right? And they just go company by company. So bad. I was thinking about that during the last cycle, like, do you think there's anyone who raised, like, some, like, $50 million fund and will return zero? Not, like, zero percent gain, like,

won't return a dime. Like, like, the liquidation value of all the companies was zero. It must happen. It must, it must happen. I mean, I don't know. Because most companies, like, you return, like, 10 cents on the dollar or something, you know. There must be a 1 that shuts down.

Yeah, yeah. But the point 1 would be astronomically bad. It's possible. Yeah. Sometimes we should cover some of the actual data on, because like Venture as an asset class gets just, you know, constantly attacked because, like, the bottom quartile is just genuinely so bad. But, like, from what I've seen across, like, a few different reports,

it's actually, like, the median is, like, not that, bad. It's like maybe not as good as a median private equity fund. There's tons of venture folks who have been in the business for 20 years and they have never had like a bang or breakout deal, but every deal is structured at a good price and they run their business very well. They haven't overscaled their funds and they make a decent, you know. Decent living. Decent living. Enough to have the house in Aspen, the house in Montana. Oh man. Speaking of the house in Aspen. I couldn't print this one, and I was hoping it would be in the journal today, but this is like one of my favorite articles I've read. So apparently people in like high mountain

towns are pumping in oxygen into their houses. Have you seen this? It's the coolest thing. So I have this saved. The wealthy are paying big money to pump oxygen into their mountain homes. So there's like these home oxygenation startups now that, um, I'll just read you some of this. That brings it down to sea level, basically. Exactly, exactly. So this guy, Kevin Ross, built a new mountain home on a ridge at 10,500 feet in Telluride, so high that in the winter it's only accessible by gondola.

And it's so high that some of his guests struggle to acclimate. For those guests, Ross installed his home. It's really high. Really high. Like athletes go and they fight in Utah and they're out of breath and fight. Not just one mile. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he has a home oxygenation system in every bedroom of the 12,000 square foot house.

This guy is a badass. I was thinking we should do a segment of like the tech bro of the week, like the person we give a shout out to. And this is definitely my pick this week. The only critique is that it's coal powered. It's just you see the smoke drifting off. Yeah. For those guests, Ross installed a home oxygenation system in every bedroom, the 12,000 square foot house. Now 10 oxygen enrichment machines located in the storage area,

pull oxygen from the air outside and pump it into four bedrooms and a bunk room through blue tubing built into the walls. It makes the rooms feel like at 3,000 to 5,000 feet above sea level, not two miles. We need that, but for galaxy gas. This dude is a boss. He's 59. He retired as the owner of a pipe fitting company. Like some business that you've never heard of, but clearly just crushed it. He and his wife, who's 58, moved there last December, and he wants to have his friends come visit, but he doesn't want them to spend, like, three days, like, acclimating, so they can come and hang out. So he spent 18 million on this house, took two years planning and six years of construction, and now he's just completely ready to go. You guess he's got to take the gondola

to get there. Yeah. And then they profile a bunch of other people who have done the same thing, and apparently it's just, like, really, really popular right now. That's proof that you don't need to work in tech to be a technology brother. Exactly. It's about how you leverage the tech. Exactly. He's putting the tech to work. So each enrichment machine costs 15K.

It would have cost 75, but today's price it's 150. And a single unit can enrich about 2,000 cubic feet. There's these funny ones where it's like, this dude's bedroom was so big he needed six of them or something like that. but man all these other people this whole article is just like a world tour of like sick dudes basically I need the

I need the video of him on his like helipad just like you know punching and stuff you know shadow boxing he's like this is why I laid all that pipe throughout my life I've been to some like high elevation like ski towns for like ski trips

and I've never had problems acclimating but I wonder if that'll get worse with age. They're describing it in the article. Like you get headaches and stuff, and I've never had a problem with that. I remember as a kid backpacking trip with the family getting going up to a high elevation in whatever, five, six hours, and being in the tent throwing up. Oh, really?

Yeah. I've gotten that before. I just personally would never oxygenate my house because the low oxygen concentration would just inspire me to grind harder. I was thinking... I need to be harder to kill. There was somebody else who,

I think Nat Friedman just posted that he has a hyperbaric chamber. And I was wondering, do you know if Brian Johnson sleeps in any crazy, like, hyperbaric chamber thing? I feel like when you go full-tilt biohacker, you're doing something to the air mix while you're sleeping.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're an air filtration guy, right? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I have these things in my house. I think it's called, let me get the name right. Yeah, IQ Air, it's a Swiss company. And they look like old school, like Vax machines. It's like the ugliest thing in the world.

But, yeah, they're like hospital equipment. It's certainly not cool looking. But yeah, I think you want to be filtering your air. People don't know this, but your errors. the air quality is almost always worse in your house than outdoors, which is somewhat counterintuitive, but there's... I mean, the air quality is much better in Malibu than, like, Core L.A., too, right? Yeah, yeah, in general.

Just getting, just being on the coast, but it's still, you're still, the air quality is still much worse inside. And I think, yeah. And the only way to really make it better is, like, through filtration, but also diluting the air with outside air. Oh, sure. Right? But, yeah, hyperbaric chambers, I haven't,

I've spent a little bit of time in them, but it's one of those things, like it feels like a pretty marginal benefit unless you're going to sleep in one. Yeah, I think, I think Nat Friedman said he had psoriasis or something that he was fighting, and the hyperbric chamber made his symptoms good out by, like, 90%. It was, like, very intractable.

Like, he tried a bunch of things, and this was, like, the one thing that worked. So, like, if you have a problem, like... Going to sleep in the chamber would be cool. I don't know if he's actually safe. But, like, I've heard that people do that. Like, the next step for eight sleep is, like, the dome, like, bed chamber.

I thought they were building something like that. Damn, putting their roadmap on blast. No, I like that. I think it be cool. Yeah, it's awesome. I think we should probably record in a chamber. A chamber. Well, there's a, on the 11th floor, there's some sort of a cryo chamber.

Here? Yeah. Classic Jonathan Club. There's some, like, um, who's some, like, um, some company that does like regenerative medicine in the building. Have you seen Notebook L.M? It's going to put us out of business, bro. Oh, the Google AI generating podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's two people talking about whatever you want them to talk about. Yeah. It sounds pretty good. Yeah. But it sounds like the most generic, like Wikipedia article ever right now. Yeah. And it's just trained on Reddit. So it's sore.

It's like the most. I think you can put in whatever you want. The AI The AI goes, so my wife's boyfriend was telling me the other day and you're like,

wait, what? It's just the most Redditor podcast. Now, have you listened to,

have you spent, like, what's the longest amount of time you spent like consuming AI content? So I think it's

on YouTube on some of these videos that a topic seems really appealing. Sure. And it's like the video is

clearly set up in a way to draw you in to get the click. and then you get through like a minute and you're just like, ugh, like this is like AI slop. Yeah. And I think that there's like a very real thing happening on YouTube

where there's the sort of like people are drawn to like the artisanal videos, right? It's like I like, I love that you keep doing like real voiceovers. I love your edit, you know, like and so there's this, there's like this, their content is going from being like all handmade artisanal, content to now this sort of like mass produce mass manufactured it's the same thing that happens with like clothing right like you know it you know you can go and get the the Cuccinelli of content right this like handmade craft led content and but yet there's going to be like probably like 90% of content

consumption will eventually become this sort of like slop just like mass produced just curated you know it's it's like fashion nova putting out seeing one seeing a luxury brand drop something the next day shipping the carbon copy of it and why would that not happen with content because I'm sure there's already channels

that when I don't know like the needle drop Anthony Fantano on YouTube so Anthony Fano Pantano puts out a music review somebody just clones that content repost it immediately and like

makes a better clickbaity title and gets like more views right and so a lot of consumers will just keep watch you know they're just like so in the the being like you know just navigated through that the alga and you're going to have to be like the way to fight back is to be like no I'm getting that good artisanal yeah well I mean there could be like taste but then there's also like a price gate on the clothing, right? Like the artisanal clothing is more expensive. Yeah. So the monetization works out.

Like the fast fashion and the LVMH stuff is like similar market cap probably, but wildly different profit per unit. Peter Zahehan, do you know Peter Zahun? He just went full paywall on YouTube. He put out a video and he's like, this is my last video doing. and that's kind of interesting because the guys got incredible insights and takes

and I'm sure some of them have conflicts and are influenced by various parties and he has certain narratives he likes to push but... You probably still do some stuff as a lead gen

for the paywall but yeah every comment when he announced it was basically like okay see you never bro yeah it is tricky yeah there was this one

YouTuber called Jake Tran Have you heard of this guy? He's like business video essays and he tried to pull himself. So he pulled himself out of like the editing and had a team writing and editing everything but he was still doing the voiceover and he would just record the voiceover

and he wanted to pull himself out of that. So he started just recording the intro and then handing it off to another voiceover artist to do it and everyone was like why aren't you even voicing your own things anymore like this is so fake? And it's and it was like he was just two years too early

because the AI, voice clones are good enough now that no one would notice if he used an AI voice clone. He might be now, I don't know, but there's just going to be a whole cottage industry of people on YouTube that just like watch the video first, like run some analysis on it to determine if it's like artisan and then just be the first comment to be like. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like there's maybe like, I don't know if there's an analogy with the clothing thing, but there is some sort of like barbell where. Yes, you might want, like, the artisanal content for something that's, like, really entertaining and novel and interesting and unique.

But then if I'm like, if I just want to know about a topic that I don't know anything about and I can just, like, search it and get a, you know, Wikipedia article or listen to that as a podcast, like, why not? Yeah. I'm a big fan of, like, the consumer gets to choose the format that they consume the content in. Yeah. So I can say, I want this, there's a podcast here. I want you to, AI, I want you to transcribe it because I feel like reading. Or there's a book here. I want to consume this in the form of a video.

Like, make that for me and just translate it. Because that's where the AI models are really, really good when they're just swapping things over from one thing to the next. It's hard for them to do, like, truly novel new things, but they're pretty good at just like translation, transformation, right? Yeah. But yeah. I mean, glowing endorsement from Andre Carpathie.

He said he loves it. I listen to the one Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it was kind of like, it was a little not that great. I think the thing that's interesting about that is the applications in education are wild. So imagine this. I'm a college student and I'm going into an exam in five hours. And I know nothing about a topic, right? And it's going to be like you're going to sit down and have to write an essay.

There's three topics. You remember in college they'd be like there's these three topics you're going to have to write an essay about one of them. Right. So imagine I'm a college, you know, like gym bro. I'm going into this essay in five hours. I'm like, okay, I got five hours. And I tell my notebook, LM, I'm like, you know, make me a podcast about the signing, the events that led up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

40-minute podcast, I just listened to it. And the recall on that is crazy, even if you're just like, you know, benching in the gym. And so I think that's good. I think the applications in these sort of like, you know, I don't want to listen to Notebook, L.M, talk about antitrust, you know, situations within tech, right? Because the part of listening to takes about that kind of thing is you want the host to have some insider information that's not publicly available.

But if you're just talking about like history and trying to learn about like, why is, you know, why, who would benefit more from keto versus an intervention? fasting and then having those two people talk about that. You can learn a lot. It does seem like there's a lot of alpha in the content around like edgy niche or comedy or anything that's like

would be censored by most LLLAS so they can't produce it well. Or just comedy in general is novel. I even tested like tell me a joke on like the latest and greatest like GPT-01 and it was terrible. It's not even close.

Not even a zinger. It's just not getting anywhere near. It's not making any progress there. But it's incredible at math and a whole bunch of other things that it's supposed to be good at. But there is something else to be said for content where the AI seems to be really, really bad about surfacing new facts. And a lot of reporters will say this where like, oh yeah, like LLMs can like write articles now. But like that's not really what reporters are doing. Like when a reporter writes up an article, that's like the last 5% of the work that they've been doing.

Like 95% of the work is like collecting new facts that don't exist on the internet and don't exist anywhere because they talk to someone and they got a fact out of them. They got information and they corroborated it. And so there's still value in like surfacing that fact. But there is a question about like how do you monetize that? Like you need to set up a really like tough paywall because like if you're, as soon as that fact gets surfaced in your article, boom, you're going to be cloned in a million places immediately. and other people are going to try and monetize that. Like, that's going to be really, really tricky.

Already people do that all the time where it's like someone gets the scoop and then it's reposted immediately, just like changed up a little bit for some other like rag. Yeah. But I don't know. It's interesting. Oh, well, what else should we talk about? Should we talk about venture funds?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, CROD giving back money. Yeah, so my, I mean, I actually don't know a single person at CRV. I have some portfolio companies that have, you know, spoken to them. over the years and, you know, more recently. But ultimately what this comes down to is I haven't seen, I cannot recall CRV being in a headline,

like within the last 12 months about anything. And they effectively chose to make their biggest media moment. They chose to make their biggest media moment giving back money, which I feel like as a venture fund, all of your marketing should be towards founders, which is one customer and then, you know, LPs, which is your other customer. And going out and making the only thing I can recall about CRV now, aside from interactions portfolio companies have had with them,

is that they decided that they didn't have places to invest money and like the whole strategy that they had raised around. And so one, it almost feels like they're traders to go to the New York Times and feed them. You know, because... Well, are you sure that's what happened? Because it's totally possible that they announced this to their LPs and their LPs leaked it immediately. Like, that's where most of the venture fund use come from.

Okay, but if you pull up the article... Oh, it's like they're commenting. It's their four partners in the picture. They decide, they made the decision to have the New York Times come and photograph that. It's not just their default, like they pulled it off the website. Okay, we should... Because that could be... No, so here's...

Here's why I think it's a New York Times picture. is because it looks like a New York Times picture. One, it's in their style. Yeah, yeah. And two, they look sad. They knew you were going to say that. Which is normally what the New York, they're like, hey, like, act like your dog just died.

Let's do one series. It's sad. Okay, that's the one we're using. Class of. Yeah, so, yeah, it's Ryan Young for the New York Times. Oh, wow. It's written by Aaron Griffith. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Who we know has a history of saying that she's going to position a story one way and then putting it that way. But the idea to go to Aaron Griffith and their comms agency, whoever they're working with for PR, because I would assume they are, it would be kind of weird to affirm that size not. I mean, they probably knew that it was going to leak for the LPs. Yeah, but it's just like why, I don't,

nobody, did they want a pat on the back? Like, do they want to be acknowledged for, like, to me... It's a little late. I mean... Yeah, it's a little late one. It's two years after similar... decisions were made. And I just don't know.

I mean, and the other thing is that, I don't know, I don't know, I have no idea the mechanics of it, but it's not like they had the money in their bank account and they were like giving it back. It's that they didn't make the capital call. So you basically, the same article as CRV resizes their growth fund. Okay. Is that a story? And is that what you want to be covered about it?

Could you not think of anything else? It kind of presumes that the reader doesn't understand the concept of a capital call. Well, and that's the New York Times audience. The New York Times reader definitely thinks that if a venture fund raises a billion dollars, they have a billion dollars in an account somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that the VCs, like, took 50% of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or that it's 90% their money. Or it's all their money. Yeah, that's the average. So, yeah, I think giving Aaron Griffith ammo to make, to paint tech in a bad light as though tech is just like this disaster which is like her entire venture's not working anymore funds are giving it back you think that's the goal here that's always the angle I don't know but I mean for every one of these articles there's 10 that are like oh soft banks back in the game baby like let's go yeah yeah yeah but I don't think yeah it is but Aaron

Aaron would cover that same story in the line of so back stories right now than it's so yeah for sure New York Times is not doing Werso back stories, though. No, like, it's always like Adam Newman is back. Yeah, in a bad way. Adam Newman is going to make a bunch of ugly buildings beautiful again. Here's 10 reasons why we hate that. Yeah, yeah.

No, so anyways, I just, like, I respect them making this a business decision. If I were CRV, though, I'd be like, how can we get a story that's going to be big that actually makes us seem like Alpha Chads? And, you know, saying that we have no places to deploy is not, you know, I don't know, why don't you, why don't you, you know, do a hostile takeover of a Caribbean nation, you know? Or what, like, how much, what could they have done with $275 million in Haiti, right? Could they have returned? Well, General Catalyst is buying a hospital network.

You saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy. Like, that is, like, the kind of type of bold move that gets you, like, crazy. Yeah, so, but here's the thing. Yeah. They are still investing out of their core $1 billion early stage fund. Yeah.

And so, I don't know. What was the select fund? It was just like their growth fund? Yeah. It's interesting that their growth fund was like so much smaller than their early stage fund. Well, that's why it's like I think you guys might have bigger problems than just having too much money. Yeah, I mean, maybe they just hire some growth people and the growth people don't want to do it anymore or didn't work out or something. Yeah.

Anyways. I hope they generate massive returns for their LPs and have, you know, massive carry checks. Exactly. I would never root against any firm, even if I think there comes, any allocator, even if, and I hope we see these guys on the Midas list

for this decision, right? Like maybe like they have such a banger in the first like half of the fun that they're just like, nah, like let's just let this ride. You know, maybe that's the whole thing. That might be smart, yeah. You got something good.

They got something good. What could they have in there? You'd have some, You'd hold some cash back to do the next. You'd do the series. The series Z. You got to wait for the series Z. Yeah, anyways.

That's where the money is. Reed, Marat, Tsar, and Max. He's back, baby. He's so back. I thought he was doing something else. Like the real estate roll up. Is this a new new thing or is this just a new ring? This is a new working thing.

I think he was doing multifamily. Was that flow? Flow is multiple. And now this is called Workflow. Yeah. Avoid the specific business model that got his original co-working company into trouble. is it just a management company I didn't actually read the article

I was just like this guy's sick dude this is this is the reason technology brothers is just Twitter and podcast is because no one's reading the article and we're just like all I know is that one of my friends ran into him in a party

and he wasn't wearing shoes and I was like yep some things don't change it wasn't actually a zero interest rate phenomena it wasn't I mean he he captured so much of the mouth with their secondaries

Like to write him off, like, he's not in jail. I don't think he got sued or anything. He wound up with a billion liquid or something like that. And so he's going to make a play at some point. He's going to try and do something. I just wonder what this will be. Somebody told me his jet was on the market. Oh, really?

Maybe he just... Well, they're coming out with a new one, so, you know, got to sell the old one. Right. I think the G650 is like, you know, no longer the hot commodity. Pasing out. Yeah. You've got to go to the 750 or something like that.

didn't know this, but apparently, I think his jet was black. Yeah. And apparently that hurts the performance quite a bit from like a weight. A huge amount. Because you're just attracting so much that you have to like run the AC constantly, I think. Yeah, but it's also just so cool. Like it's much cooler. Yeah.

Michael Jordan's jet is also black. Yeah. It's like a crazy paint job. They spend a ton of money on. Yeah. And it adds like an egregious amount of weight. Yeah. From the density of the paint or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Silly. Should we go through some of these more tweets? I got a whole stack here. I printed them all off. Do we, is this the same stack? No, no, no. Oh, sorry, I don't have the same stack.

We'll just pull them up one at a time. Okay. So the first one is from Signal. I never say these Anon names out loud, and then I do. I realize, like, I have no idea. But he says, the gap between the very rich and everyone else

is actually shrinking drastically over time due to hypercapitalism and tech. You drink the same thing. Coke as a billionaire. You use the same iPhone as a billionaire on the same network. You use the exact same tools as a billionaire, e.g. ChatGPT. There is no special ultra-rich person versions

of software or apps. You read the same garbage online as a billionaire. Definitely true. You ship those in the same fashion as a billionaire on the same networks. A billionaire ships in the same type of toilet as you do. You're afforded roughly the same health care as a billionaire assuming you have insurance with marginal differences. You can roughly

go travel to any place like a billionaire can, private versus not. And then PG actually had the top reply and mentioned that he'd written about this in 2004, which is kind of funny. Got him. Yeah, I don't think things have changed that much. I mean, I'm going to do like a very short of like shaky analysis of this, but if you went back hundreds of years ago and you had like a king and peasants, like they're both, you could argue you use the same stone, you know, for your wall. And it's like your bread was milled with similar grain. And it's like, and your wine also gets you drunk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, well, the things that were truly luxuries were like, oh, the king has like this little meager supply of like this certain spice. Sure. And it's like that stuff still exists, right? Like I can go, you can go and get like blueberries that were handpicked. Sure. You know, in Japan.

The omacasse strawberries. Yeah, yeah. And I would argue that, you know, the, you know, early, you know, first job out of college product manager that's going to sugarfish is not eating the same fish that we do when we go how to get sushi. I'm kidding. No, they're not eating the same fish. They're not eating the same fish that somebody who's having, you know, hosting a dinner party at their house and like having like some sushi chef from Japan, like who flew over. It's just not. And so I don't know if you could argue like, you know, the peasant is says to the king, but sir, my wool, I, I, I, I, I,

Sure, you know, the wool in my sweater is the same as yours. Are we not so different? You know, I do think that this actually goes back to Warren Buffett eating C's, you know, candy and being like, like, he's the original one of this. Obviously, he's known for sort of like eating down in some ways. But yeah, I think it's just like, capital. I think the takeaway from this is that capitalism rips. And we should encourage it and support it. It is an interesting thing here where, like, if you are a billionaire and you want an iPhone or you want chat GPT, like you at some level need some sort of competition or you need some other people in the economy. It's like you can't just have one person with all of the assets. Like there's some sort of wealth equality that needs to happen in the economy. Yeah. Such that, like, you know, like the richest man can't make the best film happen and the

best album and all of these things like there needs to be a lot of other people building and doing other stuff like it really is like a society that bounces off of each other which is like important to get like the innovation that then becomes like evenly distributed over time right yeah it's interesting I don't know well should we go to China yeah I think the cool thing the last thing I would say on that I was talking to a founder on Monday who has a candy company yeah And the thing that's genuinely cool about all this stuff is, like, the thing about the accessibility of all these things is being a billionaire doesn't make the iPhone more enjoyable somehow. Like there's not even really apps that you can get, right? Whoa, not yet, but once we watch a wallpaper's app, the I'm rich wallpapers app that there's a $10,000 subscription.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. I think it's $1,000 a month is the cap. thousand a month. But it's good 12K ARR per Well, you just know you have the

mostly curious wallpaper as we go coming soon. Yeah, it's like it's just that is all the evidence that you imagine how much people would be an uproar

if you could go down that list and be like billionaires have this and I don't. Billionaires have this and I don't. Billionaires have this and even given that situation

the dominant sort of like political view that gets votes seemingly is let's tax the 1% more even though, or let's tax the 10% more even though they already pay like 80% of federal income taxes. Interesting. I have a friend who is a sugarfish hater and he once referred to it as like the McDonald's of sushi.

And I was like, now you're speaking my language. I love that. I love that. That's amazing. Standardization. Yeah. Delicious. Like, you didn't have to convince me.

quality but presented well. Repeatable. It's good. You saw this, that Huawei in China built a European city. Right. Yeah, I mean, we're going. That's where our Asian studio has to be.

It's amazing. Yeah, why can't we do that? I mean, I think it would be probably cultural appropriation or something. But it's effectively our culture. Well, no, no, no. If we did the opposite. No, no, no. Yeah, I'm not saying build a great wall. I'm saying like...

Well, we kind of do that in the sense that there's like Chinatown and Japan town and Korea town, but, you know, we don't take it to this level. Like, it'd be so sick if, like, Chinatown and New York City just looked like the forbidden city in Beijing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Imagine in Manhattan. Yeah, I mean, amazing. Yeah, you go to, like, little Tokyo.

And it looks exactly like Tokyo. Yeah, the bus looks like a dragon, you know, like. Be amazing. See Winnie the Pooh walking around. But this architecture is just, it's just so iconic. Like, you see it and you're just like, that looks like Europe. Inspired. Yeah.

It's just beautiful. But what a crazy choice by Huawei to just like send it. 25,000 people work here. It's like acres and acres and acres. You can just walk around this city for like, you know, hours and just only see Italian, French, and German architecture. More residents than the entire town. Double the residents of the entire town that I live in. I don't really know why I pulled this up other than just it's like crazy.

Yeah. honestly we'd like to see more of it i think the excel campus will look similar should we talk about the all-in podcast yeah how how do you warm up for your all-in podcast lessons um sunning uh my perinium oh yeah you know both legs back yeah sunlight just to kind of like get the chi going sure you know um to make sure that when jason starts you know talking are you listening are you listening are you listening on like AirPods Macs, AirPod Pros, or are you listening on more

of a wired headphones? Or do you do like a full stereo system? Is All-N's toxic enough? I don't also want the toxic EMS, right? Like, the relationship dynamics of the show are already so you know. You don't print it on vinyl and just play it at home.

That's a good. I think that's the right way to listen to it. That's, that's our next drop. Yeah. Is last week's All-in episode on vinyl. On vinyl. That's good. You should definitely do that.

The greatest things. Let's cut this out. We don't want to do it. We don't want to leak this. Actually, no, we can leak it. Our five listeners, they can get a little preview. I like it. Let us know in the comments if you want the online podcast.

I'm pressed vinyl. This is going to be like a great journey for us because we're going to find some guy in Brooklyn who's like the last guy just making like handmade vinyl records. Yeah. artisanal vinyl. I think having like the Trump episode or like the Elon episode on vinyl is just, it's so high status for a tech bro. And there's this big problem.

Especially with the like like there's something so like a record, the packaging and everything. It's like it was the epitome of like album art. Yeah. And you could just like hold it. Yep. And just like, you know, seeing the zoom screen of like Jason and all the guys. The all-in, like the podcast logos, they're square because they show up in your podcast feed square, and that fits just perfectly on the line of, you know, cover.

But, I mean, I think everyone is kind of circling around the same conclusion around the all-in podcast that, you know, it hasn't lived up to the expectations of what people thought it could be, unfortunately. In terms of profit, mostly. I mean, I love what they've done politically, genuinely. I think it's very good. I talked to a literal congressperson who was like, I get my takes from the all-in podcast, which... That's good. It's very good because previously they were getting it from Caraswisher and Rico.

It's a huge step forward. These are, like, people joke about all the different all-in guys or whatever, but seriously, like, they're all on the same team, which is the most important thing. And even though they have a little infighting about politics, that doesn't actually matter. What matters is that they're all capitalists and they're all capital allocators. and they all care about founders and business and, like, good things. They're not insane. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, it is a huge thing, but it just sucks that they don't have ads.

Yeah. I think everyone expected when the show got big. Right. This would be a place where the best ads and the ad rates would be super high, and they'd be making a lot of money. Six-figure CPMs. Exactly. But they just haven't lived up to it.

And I think that's why it's more important than ever that a show like Technology Brothers exists, a show that focuses on profit over. for listener satisfaction or audience size or any, in-person community, community. Exactly. All of that stuff, you can put that all to the side. Yeah, they're posting about while they post pictures from their conference, we'll be posting our P&L.

Exactly, exactly. We'll be posting our Stripe dashboard screenshot it. Everyone loves, oh, my podcast is this in the rankings or has this many stars and reviews. No, what's the eBay doc? How much do you do it? What do you cash for you? These are the important metrics for a podcast. And per listener, right?

It's not just gross. It's on a per listener basis, what are you taking out? Exactly, exactly. And are you levering up? That's the other thing with podcasts, not using leverage. Oh, yeah, it's insane that they're not. It's insane that they're not, right? So, yeah, I mean, I see us kind of as a spiritual successor to the All-In podcast,

kind of finishing the job. What matters. Exactly, like doing what they couldn't figure out. And honoring it through, you know, paying homage to some of their most iconic episodes through vinyl releases. Yeah. Exactly. That's great. Should we talk about the ZuckMobile?

Yeah, this was amazing. There's a lot of words that you could describe Zuck's era that I won't say. So give the overview. It looks, so Zuck posted pictures on Instagram of him. He is purchased and customized his and hers Porsche's. One is a sports car, looks like a 9-11, and the other is a Cayenne, SUV. Don't disrespect Zuck's choice.

That's a GT3 touring. Oh, it's a GT3 touring? But it's not, is it manual? Is it the ST? I think he said it's a manual. Okay. No, it's not an, I mean, the touring's are all manual, to my knowledge.

Or maybe you can get it in. I thought the ST was the GT3 manual. I thought that was the whole point. of like the ST, that's why it exists. But maybe it's like, it's more just like analog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway. Yeah, so right away, it's cool.

I saw somebody else saying, I don't know if it was this tweet, but like he's sort of realizing that him doing this is not cool to other billionaires, but it's cool to the average Instagram user. Yeah, that's what this tweet is. I think what Zuck realized is that the norm of avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth is entirely about intra-elite elite social. social status and common people actually love stuff like this. This is 100% accurate.

Yeah, so the, so the plus there was this whole like fake thing for a long time like SBF drove a civic and was like I'm not doing it for the money and it's like he was the most in it for the money and completely fraudulent and so it's okay. And Zach was doing like I'm smoking meat. Yeah, I'm just in my backyard and it's like to make it look like everyone knows your backyard is sick like it's fine like just let us enjoy vicariously how sick your backyard is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We want to see you surfing and stuff. My whole thing is like the, you've gone and told the entire world that your wife drives a turbo GT minivan and it's a one-of-one. And so what is the actual usability of it? Like I don't understand is she pulling out of the Zaka estate to pick the kids up from school and there's like this military convoy and an helicopter? And she's just like, I love living my regular minivan mom life. Well, you know, like, the standard billionaire, like, setup? It's, like, two black SUVs outside of everywhere that you go. Yeah.

And so you walk outside, there's always two. So if one breaks down, you can get in the other one. But then also, like, you don't know where they are, essentially. That's just kind of the standard equipment. Yeah. If I was a billionaire, two Ford Rafters. You want two Raptors. Two trucks, for sure.

For sure. Except the Raptor, as a former Raptor owner is, like, really not that practical. Like, it's just not that big. It's not like you can like, unless you want to be in the front street. Some new West Coast Customs to stretch it. It's a truck bed. Yeah. I'm very pro minivan.

I've told you this. I recently purchased a minivan, a Mercedes metris. Very popular in Europe, less popular here. Mostly used as an airport transport vehicle. I've been loving it, like just walking up to your car, pulling the door and having the door go out. It's very, very practical. My only critique is the color choice.

I think chalk is the worst modern. Yeah. Porsche, you know, color option. The putty color. I love how we have to tweet in black and white. But yeah, it's a rough, it's a rough color. Like, if you're going to do that, why not do like the, like, Python color? I've been looking at the new VW bus.

Have you seen this thing? No, is it the electric one? It's electric. It's called the ID Buzz. But it's coal power. It's coal power. Well, the electricity that uses is from coal. Right.

So it has the sliding doors like a minivan, but it's a bus. So it doesn't read as a minivan fully. It reads as like something weird and different. And then it comes in like these crazy color ways. And I was even thinking, again, wrapped in like something more fun. So that... I think that the optimization when you're a parent is just like, get the car that will be fun for the kids.

My optimization was extreme practicality. And when they have the Airwant smoothie and they're throwing it around the car, that I'm not worried about it getting on the leather. Yeah. You know? I just don't care. I just like throw it on the ceiling, throw it on there, throw up,

you know, like do whatever you want to. I mean, I've been testing the waters with like, what car should I get based on my three-year-old's opinions? That's great. That's great. So I'll do like an AB test. Like which one do you like more? I'll show them two images.

And the car that beats everything else, can you guess? Red cyber truck. Yeah, I was about to say cyber truck. It was designed by a three-year-old, and it gets a three-year-old going. And one of my friends was, like, the cyber truck is the most, like, it's the most perfect example of a car that matters to only, it matters only to people who don't matter, right?

It's like, it's cool to people who aren't guilty or serious, right? And I'm like, but it matters to three-year-old boys. Which is arguably for us. He's the only guy that I care about. I don't care what some, you know, random person thinks about my, car. I care what my son thinks about my car. He's pumped to get in and go on an adventure. No, most of my car purchasing

has been driven by my inner child. Yeah, right? That's why I got the waggings. It has the reverse three seats, like rear view seat. I was always a hit when I was a kid. It'll be a hit for these. And when I got a raptor, I, so I got

this murdered out raptor that had been lifted and tinted. And it was like what is the truck that like the year old me wanted and I didn't have because my parents drove two Priuses. I was like, what do you want to, what should we take to school today? My parents drove two civics. Yeah, I was like, do you want to take this, the white Prius or the gold Prius?

And I'm like, no. You get a white and a gray or silver Honda Civic or a white Honda Civic. And so as an adult, I have some purchasing power and I'm like, what, what am I going to get? And I started, I basically like had to train Sarah on it for a year. Every time I would see a Raptor, I'd be like, that is a good looking truck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it would basically, like, she was like the first, like, 10 to 20 times.

She goes, absolutely not. I hate that. And then I kept saying it, and I started to break through. I did the same thing. My wife knows, like, nothing about you, but she knows that you owned a Raptor. And I've told her that Raptors don't depreciate, like, as much as other cars. And so whenever she sees a Raptor now, she's like, I know that that car doesn't depreciate. It's a practical decision.

And she's like, I hate that you've, like, taught me all these stupid car things because now I'm, like, noticing red brakes or, like, when a car has four, has four tail, four exhaust pipes. She was like, yeah, yesterday I saw a BMW that didn't have any, like, decals on it. It had been debadged. And I was like, oh, like, there's something under the hood there. Nice. A muscle car. Like, it's clearly modded. Yeah.

And she was like, I don't need to know this. Like, why is this in my brain? Yeah, I could be using this for other things. No, but unfortunately with the RAPTER, the ultimate challenge and the reason that I got rid of it was one because parking in the average L.A. parking lot with a RAPTER. One, can't fit in any parking garages, which is also just a general issue in L.A. But two, any time you're meeting with somebody that doesn't know you already, their first assumption is that if you pull up any lifted, murdered out Raptor is that you are a total dickhead. And so like trying to, I just realized there was this period of like I had to like overcome that. And I was like this is kind of a waste of time.

Like I'd rather somebody pull up and sort of like people, you know, people. It is tough because there's no American car right now that sends just like a neutral signal. Like if you're in like a Mustang or a Mustang owner, a Corvette owner, etc. That's so true. Raptor, same thing. If you're in a Tesla, people have all these weird mixed things. Like it was either like your total like green like tree hugger or now it's like you're trying. supporter. We bought this before we knew what a bad guy he was. I mean my hot take is like Elon is

getting so right wing-pilled that he's going to make a V12 Model S. Yeah yeah with a gated manual and a stray pipe exhaust. I think that'd be incredible. He's just like yeah you know what like you know like I didn't get any credit for I didn't get any credit for the whole EV transition anyway. You guys don't like these EVs, so now I'm doing ice cars. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is pretty wild that this cyber truck is seemingly selling very well. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it would sell even better if it was just like full.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, if it was more controversial. So, yeah, we have this one. S&P Global Mobility says Tesla delivered 5,175 cyber trucks in July. This is a 61% month-over-month increase. They also estimate the rest of the electric pickup truck market. sold only a combined 5,500. So Tesla's 50% of the market. So there's a founder, the classic thing,

if you're a founder and you either raised a bunch of venture capital, I guess, in the case of this other tweet, or there's a founder of a no, a company that's actually doing really well. And he bought a foundation series Cybertruck thinking that, okay, there's just going to be a limited release, like if anything's going to hold value, it's this one. Tesla has completely ignored that that was ever supposed to be limited

and sort of like foundational like first number of orders and they're continuing to produce them at full clip. What's the difference between a foundation model and just a regular one? I don't know the design differences but I think it was sold through as a limited edition like you got the first

you know like one of the first one. Yeah. It'll be the one that like it's at a significant let's like it. Yeah, that's interesting. I still love them. I think they're just beautiful. And I smile every time I see them around

and my son smiles every time I see them around and I think they're just funny looking. And I want more aggressive cars like this. I really like that Hyundai that's coming out. That one is crazy. Well, yeah, so they put the electric power train in the Hyundai Ionic 5N. And it's the guy who did the BMW M series.

And what letter comes after M, it's N. So he went over there, put out the N division. and he created like digital control basically like a dual clutch transmission and it has engine noise and all the car guys that have driven it are like it's incredible like you you forget

that you're not driving like a manual or like an actual engaging car and now they're going to put that in this Hyundai Vision 74 thing yeah like it looks amazing it looks like something out of back to the future have you seen this thing it looks really good I didn't know that I thought that was just a concept car

so it was a concept car and they were going to do it with some crazy power train that was like hydrogen. Have you seen this thing? Hydrogen cars? And they yank that. They're doing the electric. I think they're going to do an N model.

So it'll have like 700 horsepower, but it'll be like 50K or something. It'll just be able to track on it. And it'll just be like so funny and look so cool. And I think it's going into production. They're trying to get it live by 2029, which I think is like believable based on Hyundai. Like I think that they're like pretty serious.

It's out of concept car territory now. There's nothing better than when a car manufacturer wakes up out of their stupor. Because, like, every car manufacturer is pretty much a legacy company, except for Tesla and whatever, Rivian. Yeah. And when these companies wake up, I would give the example of, like, Toyota with their land cruiser. It's like, hey, let's take, like, one of our most loves cars ever, and let's just, like, run it back. And, like, make it modern and make it cool. And people love them, and you know that it's going to be, like, a Toyota.

It's great. thing with the Lexus, effectively the same version of the car that has, I guess it's like slightly, I don't know, slightly bigger. Yeah. And then the VW that you mentioned the band. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bring back the bus. There's nothing like, because when you take the legacy of these, yeah, you take the legacy of these amazing iconic products and you just somebody like wakes up one day at these manufacturers

and they're like, hey, we should actually like do something cool or novel. I think VW got like the marketing right, but I think the car is actually. pretty trash. I think the range is really bad and the price is way too high. So I think, objectively, it's not a good of a car. But it's a cool idea. And I'm glad that they're like going in that direction, at least being fun. Speaking of cyber trucks, did you see this startup promotion? This guy was announcing the latest version of a company called Bastion. And instead of spending a bunch of money on a video, we decided to do something more impactful, giving out free rides across New York City in our branded cyber trucks.

Details on the launch or how to grab a ride below. low. Yeah, so I never want to hate on anybody trying to create value in the world that this is just like so whack. It's like I now know that you were giving rides in a company cyber truck, which why do you have a company as a crypto infrastructure company? Is that what they are? And I don't know what they are. So yeah, I had to go deep. I don't know what you do. I don't know what they do. It would have been much more impactful to do. Do something related to that. Like yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, like, you know, like what are the themes of your business?

Security, regulation, money, infrastructure, like crypto. Like, it's got a tie to that somehow. Whatever the stunt you do needs to be something like around that. Yeah, if you're building, like there's so many things like back in the party round days, we did something where we were like, hey, reply with your like address and we're doing an air drop. And then we air dropped NFT ads for party round into everybody's wallets, which you would then have to pay money to get out of all. So we just sent them to, like, the CEO of Figma and, like, all these other crypto people.

So it's like, cool. Now, like, there's a... And it just said, this is an ad for party around. And it was, like, in, like, comic. And so it's like, there's so many things you could do. But I'm like, okay, like, I could take the subway or I could, like, text the Bastion hotline. I mean, even if they were just, like, okay, text them and we'll send... Like, I don't know.

If this is, like, security company, it's like, okay, text. them and they'll bring like a like 25 security guards will like follow you around or something like something that's a little bit more like tied to like security it feels like this should be about like a transportation company like are you launching like a lift competitor or something yeah or you do something like this during a conference yeah so that at least there's like more like but i'm just thinking like you're driving around soho and you see this like cyber truck yeah and you're like okay cool and they probably got like 10 rides in throughout the day yeah and I do like the idea of, like, if you're a founder and you're picking a car and you just happen to buy a cyber truck, like, throw your logo on it.

Yeah. Like, I think that's really positive. Yeah, it's a good way to get cheap attention if that's a car that you personally want to own and drive. But you can put it on whatever car you own. If you have a Ford Raptor, throw some, throw a wrap for your company on there. Like, that's funny and cool. And then when you pull up, people are, yeah, you stand out. It's funny. It's funny that when you think about wraps as like an unutilized ad inventory.

Yeah. the issue is that the people that would wrap their car with something for like a nominal amount of money are going to have like not so great cars that you want to associate with. But like it would be a funny thing for like like like only wrapped the Porsche with like, you know, oh like buy my meta ray bands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be cooler. Like a G2RS with it like Orion.

It was just like all of his different products. Like download Instagram here, QR code. Like just really tacky. No, I did that. I did that with our old CTO is like into like racing. I was like, let me sponsor you. Do you have any sponsors? Let me sponsor your car.

I got put five of my companies up there. It's great. Yeah, that's cool. It looks awesome. It also just looks cool. Yeah, it just makes the car look cooler. Yeah. That's an example of capitalism in action is putting a bunch of stickers on a car makes it look

cooler. Yeah. That's amazing. That's the power of advertising. Yeah. I like that. You saw this tweet. Yeah.

So this is, this is so, this is so, this is just like so funny in so many ways because for some reason, like all the AI slop red accounts have all decided that like this is the new scam. Okay. Break it down. Tell me what the tweet says. Tell me. There was like 30 of these tweets that are basically saying AI models.

are earning over, AI influencers are earning over $5,000 per month. Meet Emily, a 21-year-old model who was brought to life by AI. Now you can create your own AI influencer in minutes. Here's how. And I think it's cool technology, but to me, this just makes me go long,

like actual influencers, because, one, people don't really realize, but, like, you can have 100,000 followers on Instagram being like an Instagram model and like make like below minimum wage because like unless you're genuinely influential and cool and brands like actually think that by working with you they're going to elevate their brand the best that you're getting is like free product so I'm imagining like all the guys that were doing like drop shipping stores 10 years ago and like didn't it didn't really work and they're looking for their next thing are now like I'm going to

make an army of AI influencers. And they're just like going to be like slaving over like creating like the perfect like all this content because it's obviously like these people are competing against other influencers who are have a real connection with their audience, have years and years and years of sort of like a relationship and genuinely are creating like artisanal content. And anybody that's going out and saying you're going to make $60,000 a year. year with your AI Slop influencer that's like has no opinion and all these courses are for sure going to say like if you can just get one AI influencer that's making 5,000 a month and then you

scale to a hundred or a thousand you can be making five million dollars a month from your AI like influencer business well that's where the money is so that guy's promoting a course or something or like a product something yeah he's selling the product that allows you to do this but you know what's really interesting is that that video there is an actual human. It's not AI generated. He's just saying that it's AI generated. Because obviously if you use a real person, it looks even more real. And there's no, there's no risk of like sloppification. Because everyone's like, oh wow, like he was able to make a girl where the hands are perfect and everything. There's no, like the hair isn't transforming or anything. There's no like, there's no artifacts. So he must have

the best tech in the game. I got to go with this. guy. That's what I think. At least that's what the community notes said when I dig in. Really? Yeah, I'm like a community notes. Did I tell you this? I'm like I'm like community notes admin now. Let's go. Let's go. So, so I can go in and like rate all the community notes. I can do all that stuff. That's great. You should communicate community note all our posts. Just say, technology brothers is not not the most profitable podcast. Yeah. Because if you get community note that it'll be more viral because they got dunked on yeah exactly yeah so i mean Trevor McFedries like already tried to do this with Brad back in the day oh i don't know this

like he made an AI influencer called Will Michaela oh yeah yeah yeah had genuine like million followers like really cool collaborations like really good execution over a long period of time yeah he sold the company to dapper in like 22 um and i would just like but they were approaching it from like world building and actual storytelling. It's not like, give me a TikTok girl like that's between the ages of 22 and 25 and make them dance to the most viral songs. It's like, okay, like, I'm very bearish.

But happy that the course bros have a new, have a new product to sell. Yeah. One of my, one of the guys I was hanging out with at, buddy of mine, this guy, Kimia, who sold his last company to Ramp, he's building, he's building software to, like, basically an AI agent to, like, find and win government contracts, which is cool. So we've been talking about, like, how do you create this sort of, like,

cottage industry around people, basically showing other people how to find and win government contracts. And then, you know, in the same way that Shopify benefit. I think shop, maybe it was you that said, I don't know if Hindenberg ever covered Shopify. Oh, I don't know. But, you know, basically, his business will be massively successful if you get all these bros being like millionaires are being made by government through government contracting, which I'm actually very, think is very positive.

Yeah. Because if you get a bunch of, like, smart young hustlers that are going to compete for contracts to do, like, toilet paper for, like, the penitentiary. It's kind of like the old war dogs. Yeah, it's like, well, it actually increases competition and lowers the, the, the, the costs for the taxpayer. Sure. And the government.

So anyways, I hope that that becomes. Yeah, it's kind of really did like the rise of the rest thing that you've been talking about. Did you see that announcement from Valinor? Julie Bush put this out. Have you seen this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Is it an incubator?

Yeah. I mean, everyone's kind of like confused about what it is. But it's like, you know, maybe incubator, maybe holding company eventually. Maybe some of the companies live inside. I think it's still pretty early. But. Did they raise money? Yeah.

Is she a part of the Bush family? Oh, I don't know. Maybe. That's some lore. If Ben was here, he could quickly get from it. Because that would be like the ultimate, like, if Jeb Bush is the lead investor. I was thinking about how there's like so few neocons anymore. They're kind of a dying breed.

Everyone's like, you know, you're either like a right wing nationalist or like you're like left wing pro war, but there's no like right wing pro war. Dick Cheney's still around. Yeah, but he's like crossing the aisle now, right? Yeah, he endorsed Kamala. Yeah. But he's just pro-war. He's just pro-war.

But, yeah, I think the main value prop for Valinor is like if you're just a talented founder, but you don't know anything about distribution, you don't know anything about government contracting, like they will, in exchange for equity and cash, like standard YC deal type thing, they give you the tools to get your first contract. That's super cool. Yeah. Which I think is, yeah. Because I just think it's about the reason I heard about a guy who is a basically makes like millions of dollars per year as the guy that California contracts to when they need to move like protected bird eggs from like one location that's getting developed to another.

And so like that should not be a million dollars contract. Yeah, yeah. There should be three companies bidding over that like aggressively to get the price down. Because think about it. Think about it if you went to like some environmental study student. Yeah, yeah. It was like, hey, do you want to take a six-month course on how to transport, like, you know, endangered bird eggs? They're like, cool.

Okay, now you can do this. And it pays $150 per day. Yeah. And it's contract base. And like you've gone from a multi-million dollar contract to like, okay, now we're paying like entry-level like people to do this. And so I think more competition is good and it's so opaque. and inefficient that can't possibly be very competitive. Yeah.

I mean, we were talking about this with like the, you know, the SpaceX narrative is like, is like, you know, it's the power law winner. I think it's like $150 billion company. And it's great. And the, and Anderle has kind of like carved their brand out as like the power law winner in defense tech broadly. But there still remains the question.

of like they can be the power law winner and defense tech can not look like the phone market. It can look like the SaaS market in the sense that like, yes, they are the power law winner in the sense that like they're the sales force. They're the biggest company and maybe they're the prime. Yeah, but look at the CRM market. You still have Salesforce and HubSpot. Exactly. There are still a lot of other companies that like do fantastically.

And I also think like there's this. There's this very broader element of like, Anderil is like a prime and does like, you know, DOD contracting. But when people think about like defense tech and hard tech, it gets so broad that people wind up like Augustus with weather modification is like kind of in that milieu and yet like not. He just called me from the Caribbean. Really? The winds were howling. He said, don't tell anybody where I am right now. You're not going to believe this.

He's just in the high of the storm, just like. He's fighting for his life right now. No, so I think the reason that defense tech is not going to be, or I would hope that it doesn't become the monopoly that Anderol is sort of implies is that... Oh, that's perfect, yeah. The reason that I don't think it'll be the monopoly that they, like, sort of, like, philosophize...

We can be monopoly over, like, what they do. One of the stated goals of the DOD and the government in general is vendor diversity. Yeah, I mean, Palmer told me that directly. He said, like, the government will not allow us to be a complete monopoly. Exactly. But they can still be the greatest, like, value creation event in defense technology over the past 60 years, right? Which is, like, a huge win for everyone. And I think the even cooler thing is, like, I think about that guy who's doing that stove, the impulse stove.

and have you seen this? It's basically like a stove that has a ton of batteries in it so it's an electric stove but it can heat up like a pan very quickly be very precise and he's always like cooking steaks on Twitter and being like, I cook the perfect steak using my stove. It's very cool and it's something where it's like, I don't know if that would get funded without Anderrol. Even though it's like not in defense tech at all,

and rule just kind of like shook the tree to be like, hey, it's okay to take risks on hardware because for so long the meme was like hardware is hard. Like Pebble had such a bad go out of YC. There were so many companies that tried and never really got to escape velocity. Now people are like, okay, we're gonna take a shot on it again, just with whatever.

And that means like new fridge companies, new camera companies, new phones, new devices, and I just think more of those. I have one that's relevant to the show. Maybe we should fund it. I want somebody to make me the world's most beautiful office printer. I just bought this printer and it's blocking why. So when you think about a printer, it's like basically the perfect business model.

It's like this sort of like- Raisin-blade. Up front, yeah, razor and blade. But I was driving over here and I got an email that was like, can you like print this out and scan it and like return it or whatever? And I'm just like, oh, that's like super annoying. I don't have a printer. I'd use like the like postal place.

And so I was like, oh, now I need to buy a printer. And I'm like, well, like, I needed to fit, like, the aesthetic of my office. And, like, I'm like, okay, now I'm going to be, like, on HP's website being, like, what's the least ugly printer? But then it's like, okay, like, some things just don't die. And in the same way that, like, vinyl records are probably, like, you know, they're not as big as they were at the peak, but, like, stabilized. And, like, there's just, like, people with, you know, various.

And it's like, I would love to be able to buy, like, a beautiful printer. Yeah. And, like, I'll sign up for the, like, you know, yearly subscription. You need to do it with somebody who's really cool and who the board of directors of Apple actually just wants to hang out with so you can sell the company like D. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it should live, that clearly should live within Apple. They will never do it. Probably for ESG reasons because it's printing paper and it's cutting out of reasons. But that would be like an MKBHD, like make a printer. Yeah, that would be great. The tech guy makes the beautiful like,

I'm really bullish on hardware that is like just extremely analog right? Like I want, like it's in the same way that the highest, like the most luxury stuff, yeah, but like the most like Bentley when they're making new cars or like we know that our customers like switches and like stuff like that. And so

and it's the same reason that like my least favorite technology company of my life is Sonos because you made this like beautiful looking speaker that is like, you know, very ugly to use an experience as a user from the setup to like it's not sinking anymore to, why are these three speakers playing, but like that one's not. And like, oh, one of them's not connected to the internet. And it's like, I'm going to like take, I donated some sono speakers, but I'm now wishing that I brought them to the gun range. It's like, because it would bring me joy to just like blow up like my sono speakers. It is crazy how they're a pretty big company and they deserve to get mauled by Apple. They need a Hindenberg research.

We tried the product and actually is confusing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they said that people were playing music every day, but it disconnects all the time. It disconnects all the time. But it really is a testament that like in order to do the absolute like top tier software engineering where stuff just works, like you actually have to be a trillion dollar company like Apple. a $10 billion company just can't do it. Especially if it's an older company. So do it slightly analog.

I think some companies, like Ramp obviously has built something that's like they're punching way above their size in terms of like the quality of the software. But it is extremely hard. It's craftsmanship to build like great software that actually works all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because anytime you break those expectations. Well, it's the firmware. Anytime you're getting into like. Yeah, the cross-circ is really hard. Yeah. Between the hardware and software. Did you read this one, Mark Andreessen? This is so real.

What he said? He said, overheard in Silicon Valley, every company should add this question to their interview loop. It's fine if you have gone to Burning Man, but are you currently going to Burning Man? I think he means like on an annual cadence, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Burning Man, I mean, I know why he hates it, extremely high NPS, but can't invest in it. That's it.

Because if you ever talk to somebody who goes to Burning Man, dude, you got to go. It's so amazing. Extremely high NPS. Yeah. But they haven't stoned. Yeah. I didn't. So two things, you've effectively had, you know, almost going on a decade of having the

ability to do it without the desire to do it. And I would say ayahuasca and Burning Man. and ultimately both of them were sort of intuitively demonic. Ayahuasca is like, hey, I'm going to go take a plane 12 hours into the jungle to get one-shotted by some jungle demon and then hope that it cures me, right? And then come back with like, okay, now I'm dealing with whatever trauma I was trying to deal with and the trauma of my jungle demon, you know, who's calling me. You know what's under-discussed in the ayahuasca debate?

Lex Friedman didn't get one-shotted. I just listened to a recent podcast of him with the cursor team. You know, these like AI, it's like a coding IDE. It was just classic Lex. There was nothing changed. It was fine. What do you mean? You're saying he did it and then came back.

Yeah, yeah. There was a whole arc where he like went into the jungle. He like took a bunch of time off. He like, I think he grew a beard. And I think he, in a conversation with Elon said he took like a mega heroic dose. Maybe it wasn't ayahuasca, but I think it was. He did some sort of like shamanic retreat. And he came back completely fine, has done a bunch of interviews.

No, but I think here's the thing with, he's just normal. Here's the thing with psychedelics. If you're going into a psychedelic experience and you're highly stable and you're in a good place, then you come out of it being like, cool. I'm good. I don't need a change. Yeah, yeah. If you go in an unstable place trying to make it fix you, it's different to go into it being like,

I'm going to have this cool, unique experience. And maybe I'd like come out with a different perspective, but going in being like, please, jungle demon fix me yeah well this was the the Daniel thing was like it's a sorting function and it's dangerous for Mark to invest in in pre-sorted founders and then and that he should actually only invest in founders that have done the ayahuasca and not been one shot and still are doing enterprise sass exactly those are the those are the generational families yeah so anyways I think that if you think about things that are sort of like sort of intuitively demonic going and taking a poison and throwing up for for you know 12 hours in a hut in Peru and like being visited by a spirit

that is like making you you know face like your greatest you know fears you know that sort of seems like maybe not the thing that the average person should do it'd be like you you wouldn't be like, oh, I'm going to go get an exorcism in Louisiana in the swamp. You know, it's like how different is that than like going to Peru? Yeah. So if a founder calls you up and says, hey, I'm going to be offline for the next couple weeks, I'm going to Louisiana to get an exorcism. And it's like kind of in this hut swamp.

It's going to be really dark. It's with somebody I don't know. I'm paying them a lot of money. I'm not really sure what I'm getting in return. There's going to be other strangers there that I don't know that are also dealing with their own traumas, you'd be like, hey, hey, bud, I feel like it's my duty to tell you to not do that. And then also, if somebody was describing, hey, I'm going to go into the desert, this place called Black Rocks, is it, it's Black Rock City? Yeah, no, is it? Black Rock is it? Black Rock is it

investment front? Black Rock. I'm going to go to. I think it is Black Rock City. Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to go to Black. Is it affiliated with Black Rock? Oh my God. We just put it together. That's our all in conference, Black Rock City. Black Rock shorting tech massively, and they're funding the thing that's one-chotting all the right technology. Is it actually called Black Rock City? That is ridiculous if that's what it's called. Black Rock City. Yeah, it's the Playa.

Burning Man Black Rock City. Oh, my God. Well, now I got to go with Black Rock's involved. I love Black Rock. Yeah, Black Rock is a phenomenal institution. No, but if somebody said, I'm going to Black Rock City. You think Larry Fink's ever been? And he's like, this is my city.

He's the CEO of Black Rock. I bet he's dropped in. He's flown in the PJ and, like, landed. He's like, I run this place. I run this place. He harvest the energy. Like, what's the, like, the Harkinen mode where he's, like, in, like, a bathtub in Black Rock City, and he's just, like, fully locked into the energy of the playa,

and he's just taking it. and he goes back to New York. He's like, I have what I need. And he has his gloomerate terminal. But if somebody told you, hey, I'm going to go to the desert with a bunch of people I don't know. All sort of Western norms are thrown out the window. People are going to be dressed up in, you know, lingerie or just naked. And then everybody's going to do a bunch of drugs and have sex, you know, with strangers.

You would say, hey, I don't know. Is that the best use of your time? Have you done hard drugs like that before? like should you combine hard drugs and sex with random strangers? You'd be like, so. I don't think everyone does everything there. Right, but like the people. There are some people that just go and DJ and stuff.

Yeah, but let's be honest. Like the people that are coming back being like, dude, you got it. Those are the ones that have been, you know, occupied by the demons and are now trying to spread that, right? Yeah. So anyways, I think like if you just say it out loud, it all makes sense why maybe the average person shouldn't do it and they should just like go to church or something you know yeah try try it's like the Fork in the Road meme there's Black Rock City and then

there's Black Rock HQ yeah and you just want to show up to Black Rock H. It's almost like grinding up the ladder yeah yeah it's almost like you could go to the jungle and do hard drugs with the sketchy shaman or you could just put on a suit right and like would putting on the suit give you the real effect that you wanted which is just like feeling good and just like looking good and just like doing good yeah probably right like you could go to burning man or you could just put on a suit yeah and just like hit the spreadsheets you know the spreadsheets it's like it's people that are like I don't tip male waiters like hit the oil rig hit the oil rig I've never heard that that's really funny or it's like dude don't go to

don't it's like don't go to don't go to black rock city like put on a suit and go to Black Rock. Go to Black Rock, yeah. I can't believe we just realized that. I've heard about Burning Man for so many years, never put it together. Black Rock's behind everything. Oh, my God. They own the entire economy, including the burners, apparently.

Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of getting on the grind set, do you use a set of apps to build a second brain? Yeah, yeah. This is so... It's the midway. Right? Yeah, yeah. Everyone has this at the midway.

So I will say I can't completely roast this because I use the bear app, which is just like a notes app that I think is slightly better than notes. But I do have just like a bunch of notes and a lot of them get lost and it's fine. It is easy to like roast this because it's like kind of like this over-optimized thing.

But like it's totally reasonable to like have some organization in your life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like don't go crazy with it. It'd be like somebody, like it'd be like a guy in Mad Men being like check it out all my filing cabinets you know yeah and he's like I use this one for like important you know documents and I use this one for like pictures of my family yeah it's like I mean there's something where it's like I the problem is is that just like from the context here

just seeing this in the form of a tweet like I know that this person is like selling a course and like their like second brain is like their life and this is all they do is like organized And it's like this self-referential thing where like they're in the business of organization as opposed to what I really want to know is I want to know like what is Elon's version of this? What's Zuck's version of this? I just want to know like what are the actual BlackRock? Like what is on his phone? The high powered version of this is just like having really talented people around you that you delegate

important things to, right? It's like the executive assistant. It's the driver. It's the CEO. It's really just one app. It's the phone book and you just call. call the person and they pick up because they know it's important. It's the COO that you've worked with for 20 years.

That's like you're like, I'm not going to do this deal if this person's not involved. Yeah. I mean, yeah, at the high level, I've always noticed that like the really big guys, they always just like, oh, I'm like, oh, I have an app for that. They have a person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, I have DoorDash, they have a chef. Yeah.

Right? It's like, oh, I have Zillow. They have a person that buys real estate for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A full-time person that just goes around hunting for real estate. deals. Oh, like, you have, you know, the United app, they have a private jet with a pilot

that they just call. And so it's just their phone book. It's like they want to do something. Okay, call the driver. Yeah, instead of Uber. I got good advice from... Maybe the billionaires aren't so similar. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You have apps, we have people. They still have access to like the same things. It's just like at a different level. Yeah. I got really good advice from, like one of the GPs at Andreessen after they invested because I was like, oh, we raise a lot of money now. We should be like, we're like a real company. And I was concerned because I'd never worked at a company the size of my company.

So I had no like real like, well, how should the meetings flow? When should we do meetings like this? And so I was asking him, I was like trying to figure out like what the, ideal like meeting structure throughout a week was and he was just like dude just like build just build the product like just build yeah like sell the customers build the product like none of that stuff really matters until like you know and that's sort of like like common Silicon Valley advice but sometimes you need to hear it at the right time and I would just ask like I would just like ask this guy like cool like like how much money

did you make in the last 60 days not from selling courses on your second brain you know And if the answer is like zero, then it's like, okay, this is just like you're a course bro. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The course bro definition is always quantitative. It's, did you make more money from content? I remember watching somebody who was doing real estate content.

Like, I had to invest in real estate. And he was like, I made $3 million. And I'm a real estate guy in LA. I made $3 million last year. And his breakdown was he made $50K as a real estate broker and $2,950,000 as a YouTuber. Isn't that crazy? That's amazing. And he like put this, this was in like a CNBC like published, like they broke down all of how he makes it.

And I was like, this is hilarious and ridiculous. Seems like the only person that would ever like make content like that. Yeah. That actually makes money from business is like Alex Formose. Oh yeah. Where he's like, here's how I like run my day. But then he's actually like owns a bunch of like profitable businesses. What else should we talk about?

Lightbulbs. Probably got to wrap up soon. I wanted to do this investment memos versus decks. I thought this would be a good Q&A. You're a big deck guy. Investment memos are trending. This tweet from Mercedes-Bent says, I'm seeing more founders put together investment memos

as fundraising material. It's a good idea. But too many of them read like book report summaries. Founders, if you're going to write a memo, make sure it reads like a thesis, how you develop your thesis, your unique vision for the future, assumptions you make that could be tested,

risk to your thesis, etc. So what's your take? on investing memos versus death. Huge mistake to go into a round with no deck because the visuals are so important to the storytelling that if you just have this text and like 20 paragraphs in a row, it's just like so boring because if you have one image where people's eyes gonna go to,

and I think people don't realize, like, I'm not reading your memo, I'm not reading your master's thesis on your business before I've even met you. Because it doesn't matter if it's a good thesis, if I have a five, ten minute conversation with this person and the person sucks, I'm not going to, nothing's going to happen, right? Like that happens all the time with investors where it's like the right idea and the wrong team and you can't invest.

And so I think that the reason to write a memo, and this is the core reason to write a memo, is to give the investor something that they can copy and paste to make their own memo. Sure. So write it as though they're writing it to their investment committee, their partner meeting, whatever the thing that they're going to share around. This is the same thing for press releases. If you do the journalist's job by giving them an interesting story, giving them interesting quotes, give them the angles, give them the photos, give them the stuff, like make it easy for them,

then they will be more likely to write that. Yeah, but I think like I really think people are doing it on hard mode if they're just doing it. IRL thing. Huge visual component and it doesn't give the visuals enough credit. There are also some VCs

that just like demand a deck every time. And so it's like why would you just pitch a subset of VCs by being hard on like oh, I only do you know.

Yeah. Well, I don't think any legitimate VC is saying I won't talk. I want Keith. Keith Roy. Demands deck. I'm pretty sure he,

I'm pretty sure he, like generally he won't take a meeting. He will also. He will also invest. He will also invest 20 million into some he knows really well without any materials. Yeah.

So yeah, I just think like that debate always comes up and one is not, they just have like very different use cases. I also, on average. In fact, building the memo can often like does lead to the deck being stronger when you build it, right? Totally, totally. But yeah, it's just like not one or the other. I think the right combination that feels a little bit less like try hard almost.

Yeah. Because sometimes when somebody's like writing, with some super extensive memo, you're like, you should be like doing something else, like your seed stage, your pre-seed company, like you don't know any of this. But like FAQs, I think, work really well where it's like you basically create like, what are the 10 most common questions that somebody asks, how are you different than XYZ competitor? And you just answer all those.

And then as you get more questions than you're raised, you just add them to the list. Sure. And then by the end, you have this like document that you can just share with everybody. And then that, like, again, is helping them do their job. so they're at their investment, their partner, like, meeting, talking about it. And somebody's like, well, we looked at this company and they're doing great. How is it different? And they're like, well, here's how it's different.

So you're just, like, making the job easier for your potential investor who, if they invest, will become your partner. So you already, like, should be acting like you're on the team. Yep. So that's how I would advise people to your direction. I like that. That's a good place to close it out.