TBPN - The Truth Zone, Bear Domestication, Daily Driving Supercars, Lever up

Episode Date: November 14, 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=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

Yeah, yeah, I got it. Okay, cool. Yeah, Peter, I'll talk you later. Thanks. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we're saying thanks to a small brand called Enchalada Surfboards. They sent us some stickers, some merch, go give them a follow. We've reacted to their tweets before.

A lot of cool inside jokes for the defense tech crew. I still don't understand basically any of them. But I do believe I know the story behind this picture. this was someone who was on, I think on an Anderil test site or something. It was just kind of like a friendly dude and just had a great vibe. And so they got a picture of him and they put it on a t-shirt and it's become part of their brand. Yeah, the Anderil to surf apparel brand pipeline is sort of beginning clearly. Yeah, and we're excited about it.

I just like the, yeah, I mean, we'll talk about the merch, I'm sure, but it's great that there that there's like you know more stuff going on and like the creative southern california has two two histories aerospace and defense and merch and surfing surfing yeah and so if you can figure out a way to combine those there's a lot of alpha in that yeah yeah yeah speaking of defense tech did you read we got to enter the truth zone uh we're doing some fact checking we're keeping the information accountable a lot of people online call it the misinformation I think that goes too far. I think we got to be nice to the information.

It's a great outlet. As we discussed earlier, they just brought on Taylor Lorenz to write an article. I talked to her about that. I'm excited for that to drop. And I got a lot of news from the information. I have the app on the phone. I read it all the time. It's great.

I get the push notifications. They're a fantastic publication. And somebody needs to stand up for the journalist besides journalists, right? They get a, they're doing super important work. They get a lot of hate online. They're in the arena. They're in the arena just like all of us. And so this new segment is really meant to help cultivate journalistic integrity

of the information, but more broadly. And yeah, we're excited to dive in. Today we got an article from Corey Weinberg talking about Trump's win and the impact on the defense tech space. Bulls. Yeah. Despite talk of a bubble. So obviously a lot of people are focused on, you know, what does the Trump administration mean for defense tech?

It's, and it is, it is genuinely confusing because defense tech is very right wing coded, right? It's like American flags and like lifting and very like masculine and very Joe Rogan. But there's been this big wave where it's like, well, actually they're all talking about how they're no longer neocons. They actually want to pull out of all the wars.

The funny thing is Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala. Yeah. How does that, how do you sort of make sense of that? Yeah, yeah. odd. I mean, my hope is that the new administration is obsessed with deterrence over conflict. And so this is the Joe Lonsdale take where he said, you have to build defense technology that is so asymmetric in its impact that the thought of conflict is unfathomable. And so you just don't go to war. And Palmer said this too, where Palmer said, war start when people miscalculating.

their abilities to attack. And they think that's a weak, that's a weak target, I can go after it. And so in general, it's this odd, it's this odd kind of contra, it's a little,

it's a little bit of a paradox. Like you might see more defense spending with less war, which would be great. Well, defense spending has been at historical lows over the last five, ten years. And so, So yeah, it actually dipped down substantially.

And so the renewed investment in the space is positive for a lot of reasons. Yeah. I mean, right away, I think we got to start at the headline. Here's what I highlighted. Trump's win Stokes, Defense Tech Bulls despite talk of a bubble. So right away, you know, there is talks of there being a bubble in defense tech. But our point of view is, I think the information, you know, obviously they're going to put their own spin on it.

If I was writing this article, I would say, bubbles are awesome, right? They're great. And so Trump's win, Stokes, Defense, Tech, Bulls, bubbles are awesome would be how I would write that. But again, that's, but I'm not a journalist, right? I just got a copy of the new book by Stripe Press by Bern Hobart and Tobias called Bubbles. Yeah.

And I haven't read it yet, but I've heard his talk and I've been on calls with him. And it's very interesting. He has a bunch of really good points about how bubbles are what allow people to start really ambitious companies and there's a lot of dividends from those. and that in fact, like the average Joe doesn't usually get hurt by a bubble because they invest more regularly and the people that get the most hurt when bubbles pop. Right. Yeah, exactly.

They're the risk on folks. So you don't need to be like the argument of like what about Main Street doesn't actually apply like bubbles popping. But let's go through some of this article. So they talk about Serronic startup that is trying to build and sell a fleet of autonomous military boats to the US Navy. There is $175 million at a $1 billion valuation. despite having secured only $17 million in government contracts, according to investor materials. Yeah.

Right away, I had to highlight trying to. This implies that they're not already selling to the U.S. government, or at least that's kind of the angle that they're taking. They have a contract. So they are successfully doing that. So they're selling.

So, yeah, when you're in the truth zone, we're not going to let that fly. Yep. They expect to generate 12.5 million in revenue. But next year, they're hoping to hit 150. So yeah, I mean, if you're growing 10x revenue.

And it makes sense with anything. I mean, this is a young company. It makes sense that if you're going to, you know, be building something as complicated as a boat for the military, like there's going to be some lead up to actually getting a large contract. I think Andreson stole those shares at a billion. If they can land this, if they can land this $150 million with the Navy.

Yep. They're getting that. They're getting in at less than a 10x revenue multiple for a company that, you know, if they stay on this trajectory, you should be doing billions. Yeah, the whole tone here. Still, the Serronic fundraising was the kind of deal that has set off alarm bells that the money flowing into young firms building rockets, drones, and autonomous warships

has far outpaced the government contracts. The only alarm bells, you know, within our networks that it was setting off is that other defense tech CEOs were like, wow, I'm getting, I got to get in on this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the size gong. Yeah, the size gong. That was the real, it wasn't actually an alarm bell. This is the size gong.

Boom. Yeah, exactly. We got to get a gong on here. So there's quotes from a bunch of different investors. Matt at Crosson Capital says the sector has become a little hype, which I think everyone agrees with. This is true. There are a lot of companies that need to grow into their evaluations, probably also true. But again, it's a good time to need to grow into a valuation.

Yeah. So here's. You have, like, you have low interest rates. You have more money flowing in. Like, this is the time when you have, like, the worst time to try and grow into a valuation. was 2022, when everything was down. Now it's like,

it's okay, you can breathe. You can raise some more money. The bubble narrative here is dependent on this idea that government, investment is outpacing government contracts, right, which is the entire nature of venture, which is like,

let's deploy a lot of money into big ideas that don't have a lot of revenue now, but might have a ton of revenue in 2034, right? And so I think the whole premise of this, entire paragraph here is sort of incorrect and just sort of a little bit disingenuous, given that that's the entire venture model. Yeah. I mean, the thing with the defense tech bubble is like you could say that it's the same bubble as, you know, like compared to the crypto bubble or the NFT bubble that happened.

Like I just think about the sure that it's like a, what, it's going to be a 10x forward revenue multiple in that company. That's not that crazy compared to what we were seeing in some of the crypto companies. where it was like 100 or 1,000 X, even in just B2B software. But what I really... Or even truth social, obviously, is commanded pretty meaningful multiples.

Like 1,000X. Yeah. Actually, more like 10,000 X. Yeah. But the thing that I genuinely believe is a reason to not fear a defense tech bubble is that a... It's good for our team.

Well, it's good for our team. It's good for our country. And the skills that you learn working at a defense tech company, are super valuable. Like you're learning how to build things and work on machines and stuff. And it's like, A, there's a million jobs,

like all the primes, not just like the big companies, like Anderol and stuff, but like even the primes, they, like the defense industry supports like hundreds of thousands of jobs. So if you learn some new skills, you can go into that and then have an impact there, even if your company doesn't work. And, but no one was saying,

oh yeah, like an NFT guy is going to go. and work on Wall Street. Or if this, if this NFT bubble pops, we're definitely going to be hiring the NFT traders at Jane Street. Like, no, that wasn't going to happen. And so there was definitely like a, like a, okay, what do you do with those skills of just like hyping shit coins? Yeah, the only thing I'd push back on that is that I have,

you know, there's a buddy of mine in Malibu who, you know, has been operating like a smaller crypto fund for the last few years. And he's got opportunities within the Trump administration now to help, you know, potentially shepherd the new administration in terms of how do we even think about this new industry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Overall, I look at this is, I think one, bubbles are awesome. Two, this bubble, you know, it's obvious that some really big important companies have already been built in the space, Palantir, and Roll, the big breakouts. But if all these billions of dollars of investment end up, you know, creating another one or two Palantiers or Anderals.

And that's all that happens. That's good for America. That's good for our team. That's good for Corey who wrote this article. And I think everybody, everybody's going to win. And the overall return profile should be similar to that of, could be, could be very similar to climate tech, right? Where if you looked at the core climate tech investments, they actually did do that well. But if you included Tesla in that group, it actually ended up being a really good place to invest overall. So there's a whole section on bearish signs, very doom-pilled here, the information. I would position this if I was going to rewrite this, and maybe we could start getting early versions of this for Corey, but I would position this as just potential challenges, right?

None of these, every defense tech founder I know knows that what they're doing is not easy. right it's not like we built this cute app and we shipped it and we got our first 10 users and now it's you know we're going to try to get to 10,000 by next month and a million by the end of the year or whatever yeah it's obviously very hard and not easy to navigate the you know federal government but it's certainly worth doing it's worth taking on that challenge yeah and so he writes underpinning the optimism is the push from executives at defense tech firms like palatier Anderol and SpaceX for reforms and how federal agencies buy weapons and technology. They argue that instead of buying from a small handful of large firms such as Raytheon and

Lockheed Martin, government buyers should reward younger firms the executives say can build rockets, missiles, and tanks more cheaply. This argument so far hasn't helped many startups. Among more than 125 venture-backed startups focused on defense, aerospace, and robotics, analyzed by Howie Wang, a deep tech analyst, just 10 firms accounted for 70% of the government contracts awarded for this year. Yeah, that's a power law, baby. Yeah, I mean, of course there's going to be some power law here, but the power law here is so much weaker than in like, you know, online advertising or something where, or search, you know, Google, one firm, Google owns like 90% of the search market. Yeah, and yeah, to me, to me 125. Yeah.

It actually doesn't sound like that much at all. Like historically, like over the past few decades, there's been massive consolidation in, uh, in government contracting broadly, but especially in defense tech. Yep. And I don't think that's generally good for competition. I think that, you know, if historically there were thousands of independent firms that were helping sort of like deliver the products that are federal government and the DOD needs, that's actually better.

And I think one of the things about defense tech that people don't really realize is the government wants vendor diversity, right? They don't want to be reliant on just Lockheed and Raytheon for ground-based tactical missile systems, which is why Aeon is doing what they're doing, right? They want multiple providers for a lot of these products. So I don't think it's the winner-take-all market because the government actually, there ends up being natural sort of monopolies, but the government's goal is not to have certain products effectively be monopolies.

Yeah. And it hurts taxpayers. Yeah, it's interesting. I was in Vegas on Monday night at the Rockbridge Conference, Rockbridge Network Conference, which was started by J.D. Vance and brought together a bunch of technologists. Palmer Lucky spoke and Mark Andresen spoke. And a lot of the focus was on this like bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Washington, like the Hill and the Valley.

There's a couple of those organizations. But Mark was talking a lot about, I mean, he's really good at telling the story of how, you we need to go beyond just the products into the supply chain, who's making the drone motors, who's making the batteries. He actually called out Skydeo, which is one of his portfolio companies who got their batteries embargoed by China. Now they're hunting around for new batteries. But it's interesting because a lot of what he was saying, a lot of what Mark was saying on stage, I was just kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all this, I've listened to your podcast, I've seen your tweets, like I'm very familiar with all this. Like, this is kind of old news.

But you look around and like the political people in the, are like, yeah, mind blown. And they're like, that was like one of the greatest presentations of all time. And it was if you hadn't heard those. And so it's really good that he's like he's playing the hits essentially. And he's and he understands the importance of like repeating the message in new territories and in new audiences. So yeah. So I really appreciated hearing that. It was good.

Yeah. Another note here, average 12 month employee head count expansion slowed 37 to 22% between May and November according to Wang. So to me. that implies you know to the average reader that's maybe skimming it and spending a split second on this paragraph they might think that hiring is like contracting but they're just maybe not hiring as aggressively but they're still growing headcount right yep I think that's important for readers to know so maybe maybe they could add some type of annotation there that says like to be clear these companies are still growing

rapidly and you should go work for them yep yep they write it's not certain that the republicans election will wins will make much of a difference to defense startups as it will to other sectors like cryptocurrency which face tougher rules from democrats definitely true defense spending is generally bipartisan and defense tech firms like SpaceX Palantir shield AI and Anderl have made inroads with government contracts during the Biden administration yeah I mean it's been a good time for for defense tech generally and it seems to continue. This is less like, like, there's a mega bull case or bear case. It's more just like everyone is kind of on board, which I think is good. And they call out this Silicon Valley

Defense Group. Have you heard of this nonprofit? They run that like defense tech, sec-def 100, like the top 100 companies, kind of like a networking organization. Musk posted on X in response to Andrewl co-founder Palmer. Lucky last week after Trump's win that it was very important to open the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to companies like yours. Pay for outcomes, not requirements documents. That is true. I was learning a lot about this at that nuclear summit where apparently there are all these rules. First off, when you apply for a new nuclear reactor design, which is probably like the most complicated piece of, you know, essentially defense tech or like government technology that you can get approved.

the NRC, the National Regulatory Commission, is paid per page that you submit or something like that. So this massive incentive. I don't know if it's like literally per page. It might be just like if there's more work, there's more jobs and more people get paid. But there's this massive incentive to increase the requirements and have more and more and more like, you know, laborious documentation. Well, you know the cost plus model of a lot of products at the DoD buys, which is basically that these, Contractors like Lockheed when they sell a missile they're getting their revenue is a percentage of the final cost Yeah, and so the incentive structure is so flawed and that the more the product costs the more money they actually make so

If it's a $500,000 missile system and it's like a 10% you know cost plus contract They're they're making 50 grand a missile right? Yeah, yeah, and so a lot of these defense tech companies are going to be really impactful because they're sort of changing their approach and they're saying like, no, we're just going to sell you the missile itself. And because of that, we're incentivized to make sure that our margins are healthy, but ultimately can start to get really competitive on price. One of their line in here, you know, they call out and they actually highlight that profits are likely years away. I saw this. For Anderol. And at $14 million, investors have valued Anderol between 18 and 19 times this year's expected sales, even though profits are likely years away. It's like, how can you write for the information and write that line?

Like, this is the story of every startup you write about. Yeah, that's painful. I think everyone sort of understands that Anderol is focused on building a bunch of really critical, important product lines and profitability is maybe like number 12 on their list of priorities. So if Palmer cared about profits right now and the team more broadly cared, then I'm sure they would be able to produce those. But it's just not at all the priority. And it's not in America's best interest for them to pursue. you know, actually driving profitability for a very long time. So I'm glad that Christian Garrett got a shout out,

a partner at 137 Ventures, which invests in SpaceX and Anderol said he was hopeful that the Trump administration would change procurement processes to help more upstarts, but he believes most of the spoils would go to top firms. I think there will be opportunities for more, but this won't look like enterprise software with a large number of winners, he said.

It's a cap market in the number of opportunities, but definitely not in the scope. Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's like hard tech could look like enterprise software or a deep tech broadly. And then it's like, you know, like Palmer said he was a consumer of nuclear. He's not necessarily building a nuclear power. Yeah. So here's what Anderil has really built and why I think they're valued in the way that they are among a number of reasons.

Besides of talent density and traction and growth and all that stuff is they have built the best possible distribution engine into the DOD. So if you're any of these 125 new defense tech companies, you can build a really great product and not necessarily like crack distribution or crack these contracts. And so a lot of those companies are effectively like off balance sheet R&D for Anderol. Yeah. Anderle can then say, hey, we're going to sort of, you know, buy up this company and kind of put them through our distribution engine. So I think that Anderol in one way could be seen as a distributor for a lot of these products. Yeah. And there's a few different models.

So Palantir has their AIP program, which is going on this week that hopefully we can talk more about soon, where if you're a software defense startup, you can build on top of Anderol's API or Palantir's APIs. And then Palantir acts as the distribution arm for you, kind of like the app store for the government. And Palantir hasn't done many acquisitions. But Anderle is starting to do more acquisitions. And it's kind of a similar model. I talked to one founder who sold his company to Anderol and he said, like, the number one reason was their DC office. and Chris Brose out there.

And so they just have phenomenal distribution. A number of their new products have been acquisitions. I know the submarine, Autonomous Submarine that did. Ghost was an Australian company. It was called Dive Technologies before. Yeah, yeah. And that's why.

And that's actually the fact that Anderol can be a soft landing for these companies that don't crack the contracts. Pretty soon it's not going to be a soft landing. Pretty soon it's going to be a banger outcome. Yeah, yeah. Not necessarily soft, but like the thing is like, yeah, shoot for the moon, shoot to be the next anderil, even if you miss, you'll land among Palmer stars.

Exactly. And the conversation on the information seems to be pretty lively. Muhammad here is chiming in. He thinks spending will reduce significantly. I just don't think that's true primarily because defense spending has already been at historical lows. And I think that with increased global instability and proof that we do, need deterrence. I think it will actually continue to go up no matter who the administration is. And I mean, the first Trump administration was so noisy and chaotic that people miss.

Like, you could hate everything about the Trump administration, the 2016 one. But if you just believe that China, like, reorienting around China was important, that was like a groundbreaking moment for the United States. It's very, very important. It comes from the 100-year marathon, that book that was kind of popularized. And then there was like an almost an instant pivot to like, okay, let's renegotiate the tariffs. Let's do the Chips Act. Let's do all these different initiatives.

And you know that it's even though like most of, you know, we never talk about politics and most people are, you know, pretty firmly in one camp or another, that the reorientation on China was really bipartisan. Because when Biden came in, he didn't change anything there. Yeah. He actually kind of doubled down, did the Chipsack and stuff. And so I think that, like, no matter what happens, we're going to be in a new era of, like, great power competitions back on the menu. And it's not the end of history. And we need to do something about Russia and Iran and China and, like, kind of the new axis of evil. Anyways, overall, solid article from Corey, clearly did his research.

And we're here, Corey, if you ever kind of want a more positive view on all things. venture. Yeah. Let's move to Beth Jaisos. He writes, folks, Ycombinator has gone fully based and EAC pilled with their recent request for startups. And we have their, the YC request for startups in 2024. At the top of the list, government software, highly related to what we were just talking about. So AI software to automate government administrative tasks, target large-scale operations like form processing, application reviews, building solutions for citizen-facing services, DMV permits, licenses. Oh man, DMV, that'd be fantastic. I want, I want iOS level software to interact with the DMV, right? I want a digital ID that, that like, you know, looks like a ramp card when it's

in your Apple wallet, right? That's what we need. Fantastic. We need to make America more beautiful in every way, including our software products. And then public safety technology. This is like, you know, in the flock safety world, but, and also growing Daniel is working on this, law enforcement efficiency tools, U.S. manufacturing, stable coins 2.0, LLMs for chip design. Do you think, do you think Daniel's like a little bit, uh, he went through YC, right? No, I know, he went through YC. He's got to be a little bit frustrated with them doing a, uh, a RFP or a request for startup for basically exactly what he's, uh, what he's doing with his product, reducing paperwork for, uh, law enforcement. But, um, uh, no, I think, I think, uh, the, this is,

something I talk to with founders quite a bit when they're building something is and just something I think about is how is this founder and this company going to perform when YC puts out a request for startups to thousands of super talented people. And suddenly you have three or four other people building in your product category. And with Daniel, like he's going to continue to thrive, right? He's a phenomenal poster. He clearly knows how to get attention. Good, good sort of product guy. and but a lot of you know a lot of times I talk to founders and when I'm kind of like analyzing in my head do I think this person is going to be able to compete with three or four YC companies in the same category usually I'm like okay like this guy's going to get smoked right just because I think YC's like high level methodology is the most battle tested approach to company building sure and I I've never been through YC I interviewed there for party round back in the day with Michael Siebel and got a quick rejection. I don't think I fit, even with like,

we were already backed by Gradient, when at Google's funds. I just didn't fit the YC mold, being non-technical myself. But their high level advice of like launch now, build something people want, do things that don't scale, talk to users, all startups are badly broken at some point,

find 10 customers who love your product avoid long negotiated deals with big customers oh that's hard in the government yeah yeah that's gonna that's gonna change a little bit uh founder relationships matter more than you think all of this stuff is just the closest that you can get to the truth yeah yeah in terms of company building yeah and i think it's why it is part of why uh the average VC fund has partners and associates and principals and platform teams that all have different opinions. Yeah. And oftentimes even GPs at the same fund will disagree on, you know, the right approach for a company.

Yeah. YC gives the most like generalized advice, but it ultimately clearly undeniably works. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you go down this list, it's like government software, that's Palantir, public safety technology, that's flock, U.S. manufacturing, that's Hadrian, Atomic, right? And so there are like kind of leading companies in these categories already, but I think there's still something really valuable about going and a finding like a smaller niche and building something unique or just putting yourself in a really interesting and fast moving environment. And then maybe you wind up pivoting doing something else or discovering like an entirely new category that we didn't really know and couldn't be put down into or request for startups.

But it's like it's a signal. And I think that's what Beth is getting at is that like, you know, they are signaling that they are. are on board with like the next generation of builders and the stuff that's interesting and and cutting edge right now. Yeah to me a lot of these categories have really really talented teams that are already building and pursuing many of these opportunities. I think honestly category nine one million jobs 2.0 like they've always had this idea of like kind of trying to create get people start thinking about ideas of like how are you going to build a company that creates a million jobs right like something like door dash Uber things of that nature um in the AI uh,

era. I don't know what that looks like, right? Like there's so much, uh, so much uncertainty. Um, we've joked and people have joked online that like the last two jobs are, uh, like, HVAC and capital allocation. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're basically going to be like like, like, deploying money or just like doing, uh, manual labor. Yeah. Um, there's also something about this where it's like the, the, like, when you look at like the power law at YC winners like Coinbase or Airbnb. Like those would never have fit into requests for startups at the time. They were two frontier, but they still chose to go to YC because YC was a place where

cool stuff was happening. And so I wouldn't be surprised if putting out this message and waving the flag of like government software, public safety technology, U.S. manufacturing, like, you know, brings in someone like bio isn't on here, but you could see some like crazy bio company coming. And you can see them wanting to jump in here just. because like, oh, this is where like interesting people will be, yeah, I'm building in something that's really contrarian and really like undervalued right now.

But I'm still going to go to YC because there's going to be cool stuff there. And they're not just fighting the last war. And I think the, a lot of, like, when I look down this list, the founders that I know that are building in this space, like somebody like when you look at U.S. manufacturing and Aaron with Atomic, he's not like going to be at any point. Like he's been pounding the table being like, we need more manufacturing startups.

So I think that these categories and opportunities are so massive that it, I think YC is doing a massive. YC has been getting memed and getting a lot of hate because their founders have really low testosterone, which is an issue. But they're doing a, they're doing a huge public good by saying, hey, we want to invite 50 teams into each of these categories. I know they've reduced their batch sizes. So maybe it's less than that now. but we want to invite 30 teams into each of these categories and capitalize them and allow them to take like a meaningful shot on goal to do something important. And it's funny that the funny thing people in crypto love to track like YC like two batches ago. YC did not have a single crypto company in the batch.

And everybody was like, wow, this is super bullish for crypto. Because usually like you want to be like building when there's zero hype. And it's interesting that. It didn't make, crypto didn't make the list. Well, it did, stablecoins 2.0. Yeah, yeah, okay. But that's almost more like traditional finance, lending.

Almost. But, yeah, again, stable coins 2.0, bridge acquisition was a really meaningful win for the crypto world. And I've got a really exciting company, Menteo in Latin America. It's doing basically what Bridge is doing for the Latin market.

Yeah, stable coin infrastructure. That's great. But anyways, God bless YC. Godspeed to all the founders. All the builders. And I'm sure some of them will post and we will cover them. Fantastic. Welcome back.

We're doing some Q&A. We got a DM from a founder and I'll read it. They say, hey, John and Jordy, I run a unicorn tech company and I'm looking to buy a new car. I've done quite well for myself, but I hate the idea of looking flashy or flexing on my employees. I was looking at a McCahn from Porsche or a G-Wagon. from Mercedes. But what do you think? For extra context, I live in Manhattan and I don't have kids yet. So what would you, what would you recommend to the unicorn founder? Probably pretty wealthy, but, you know, is it, how do you not look flashy? How do you not flex too hard? And then

what's practical in Manhattan? Give me your analysis. I mean, I have strong opinions. You have strong opinions. This has been, if we've ever had a rift in our relationship, it's due to arguments over automotive manufacturers, luxury cars, yeah, sports cars. You lean one way, I lean the other, and at the end of the day, as long as there are combustion engines, we're both, but we would never drive in the same car together. I think Lindy Mann talks about this. It's just kind of, it's a bit strange to guys driving in a car together, just avoid at all costs. But look, I can think of five or six or seven or eight cars that would fit the bill here. I think he mentioned a G-Wagon.

I don't think that's super low profile, except you're in Los Angeles when it's every other car. So the issue with G-Wagons in Manhattan and L.A. is that there are still like 20% of parking garages you actually can't get under them. Oh, really? They're too tall. Because the benefit of the G-Wagons is kind of short. even though it's an SUV. It's short.

You can parallel park it. Yeah, yeah. I recently pulled into one of the many equinoxes around L.A. And I was driving into the tunnel and I hit the little. Scraint it? I didn't scrape like a concrete, but it was like the hanging bars. The bars that like tell you. And I was like, whoa.

I had to like do like a 20 point turn to get out. So I don't recommend that for the city. You can make it work in L.A. I think that if you want something performant, but low profile. The Kyan Turbo GT is a phenomenal car. It's basically Porsche's version of the Uruz. It's fast.

It's loud, but not in like a... Overpowering way. Not in an overpowering, like, kind of douchy way. Like, it's sort of got this low rumble. It's nice. It's fun in a canyon. And the McCahn's going EV now. Yeah, the McCann, I would...

And I've been in a Macon. I mean, it's not the most comfortable. It's pretty tight. Yeah, McCann is a great car when your daughter turned 16. Yep. Get her a Macon, right? It allows her to feel maybe use to other luxuries she has in her life, but it's not, you know, flashy or, you know, it's not over the top.

It's not a bent take, right? But, yeah, if you want to go sort of under the radar, fast, fun, performant, I'm going Cayenne Turbo GT. Kian TurboG. Sleeper, Sleper, SUV, supercar. If you want something, my opinion on, if you want something that's like G-Wagon-esque, but a little bit more unique, Ineos Grenadier. Have you seen the Enios Grenadier? Very cool.

Very cool. Very small company. So there's a little bit of risk that they like go out of business. No, it's like it's like aerospace, right? That's a billionaire funder of Enos. He's got a $25 billion chemical company that he's just plowing the profits into building like a vintage land rover. And yeah, it looks like a vintage land rover. You can kid it out with all this off-road gear. It looks really cool.

Good for Manhattan roads, which are often broken. Truck Gladiator. Oh, they do? Okay, cool. That's cool. Yeah, something like that would be good. But the only other thing, something a little bit more low-key, but luxurious, still driving a very nice car, is the Bentley Bentega.

Okay. Those are great. If you buy, the thing about Bentley's is they lose about half of their value in the first two years. So if you want to buy, you can buy a 22, basically a new car, 5,000 miles, and you're paying less than you'd pay for. a new Rangerover, but you're getting to drive a Bentley. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the Ranger Rover depreciation's brutal.

The defender's pretty cool, though. That might be a good option. The new Octa, the new Octa. Oh, no, that one. No, that one's now. New top-of-line defender. Okay, yeah. Very cool looking car.

They made it slightly more wide body. Okay, cool. Yeah, that'd be a good one. But really, I mean, you don't have kids, I think sports car. I would say if you're worried about the roads in Manhattan, Lamborghini, Hurricanes, Storado. That's a safe bet. That's a safe bet.

a safe bet. But then, you know, you might be flexing on your employees, but at least they'll know you have taste. You bought a limited edition. It's the last V12 or V10 hurricane. If you don't, you're around Manhattan. You're not going to put a lot of miles on it. It's actually somewhat practical. You're going to be able to sell that car in a few years somewhere near what you paid for it. Yep. Do you think the Dakar is also a good option? The Dakar is great option. If you lean more German, it's phenomenal, you know, phenomenal car. He's got the bigger sort of of like lifts. Yeah. Dealing with snow. If you need to throw anything on the roof. Yep.

It's great too. Yeah. It's so good at grocery shopping. If you have like a new Apple Pro monitor, like it's not going to fit in the trunk in the hood, but it will fit on the roof. Yeah. The car is like functional,

Serato, functional, Bentega, you're sort of cruising. But I think those are some good recommendations. Like a ZR1 or something like that. Yeah, I mean, Corvett ZR1, fastest American-made car, 240 miles an hour, faster than

the Penn and Farina Batista electric car. Wow. Yeah. Wild. 1200 horsepower or something like that. Yeah. Huge. Because you got being more of like a track toy. Exactly. Yeah. Daily, that's going to be rough. Yeah. In Manhattan. A little loud, little high profile. Yeah. Kind of looks

Yeah. Looks closer to a Lamborghini. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of a lot of looks. You want that in Connecticut or upstate where you can kind of take it on the roads, back roads. Yeah. And you're just, you're not going to get respect You know, it sounds like this company probably wants to go public soon. CEO is driving a ZR1 to a meeting with a major capital allocator. You're going to throw off some huge red flags, in my opinion.

I disagree. I think that the ZR1 and the American-made cars are coming back. I think it's big in the American dynamism. I think it's just countercultural, but it signals something special. It signals that you appreciate American manufacturing and you're willing to forego some of the Nurebergring time to stick with an American-made company. and the only way Yeah, straight line speed.

Yeah, straight line speed and the only way that the American manufacturers are going to get better is if we actually support them. You have to put your money where your mouth is. If you say, oh yeah,

American needs better innovation and manufacturing, like go buy something that's made in America. Yeah. And great culture. You know the 9-11 is actually what it is because the cayenne

sold so well. Porsche was in kind of a bad spot in the early 2000s and they released the cayenne became one of the best selling luxury SUVs in the world. they were able to take all of that R&D that they were spending on the Kaya and not only benefit the 9-11, but also have the kind of balance sheet that allowed them to, you know, continuously innovate on the 9-11 platform and make it,

undeniably the greatest sports car of all time. But that's going to start another argument. Yeah, probably get on the rest of the show. I'm sure we'll come back to sports cars at some point. We always do. Let's go to some posts. We got Ryan Peterson. He says, someone should domesticate grizzas.

bears to replace canines in the military. North America would never have to worry about invasion again. It's hilarious because, like, are we worried about invasion? Like, not at all. Yeah, that's the benefit of being American is being able to grow up, never worried about invasion. Yeah, because we won the geographic lottery. Yeah, but I think we need to see more people combining American dynamism with biotech, right?

Like, we need to be, we need to, like, bring Wuhan here. Yeah, right? Yeah. Accelerated Accelerated genetic engineering. Because I think domestication takes like a thousand years and a lot of generations. But if you shorten that up in vitro. Kind of accelerate some of that.

Sure. Sure. You know, run thousands and thousands of simulations every minute. Yeah. To understand. Yeah. So anyways, if you're building in at the intersection of biotech, American dynamism and, you know, large language models.

Yeah. Let us now. But you got to. I got to call Ryan out. I mean, he's a good friend. But domesticating bears is my thing. I got a tweet here from 2023. Domesticate Bears.

I'm no longer asking. I got another one from 2022. It's time to domesticate bears. I have another one here from 2021. Yes, and we should also domesticate bears. Totally doable with enough time in genetic engineering. I got another one here from 2020. This is pre-COVID.

It might take decades, but we need to domesticate bears. It could easily be our generation's moon landing. And so you've actually done a poor job branding yourself as a bear guy. I know, I know. I should have written like the long post or, you know, there could be a team out there that's already domesticating bears. And you only posted four times. Yeah.

If you had posted the fifth time, I would have gotten the deal. I would have gotten allocation. So Ryan, give me some credit. I got to the domestication of bears thing earlier. But it's a big tent. Everyone's welcome in the bear domestication movement. Happy to have you on board.

Let's go to Sophie, net cap girl. She says, Bro got sent to the minor leagues of posting And it's a screenshot of Mark Cuban On blue sky dot social saying Hello, less hateful world And unfortunately, I didn't think we were gonna have to do this But on a previous episode, we gave Mark Cuban

The Brother of the Week And we have to rescind that award. He left X and went to the minor leagues of posting And so you will not be getting your brother of the week award mailed to you. I'm sorry, Mark. Yeah, we had it all packed up, the plaque and everything. a little bit of mistake by us.

We will do better. I don't think he'll be in the running unless he gets back on and has a redemption arc. As a podcast, we're not afraid to kind of admit when we made a mistake. We talked about net jets on an early episode. We got a lot of pushback from our audience. He said, this isn't relevant to me. My family has multiple jets. Like, we do not use net jets.

Like, please do not talk about them or promote them. It's just a waste of all of our time. So we admitted to that mistake. we shouldn't have given Cuban Brother of the Week, and fortunately, the plaque wasn't in the mail yet. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we're deeply sorry to the audience for that mistake, but this week's Brother of the Week will be much better, trust me.

Let's stay on apologies and go to Marquez Brownlee, MKBHD. He was apologizing for driving too fast. Let's read it. Last video, I did something pretty stupid. You might have already seen it, but maybe not, so I'll dress it here. there was a clip with the action cam of me test driving a car and going way too fast, absolutely inexcusable and dangerous.

I've since cut it out of the video. There's no reason to leave that clip in. All I can do is apologize and promise never to do anything close to that stupid again. That's a terrible example to set, and I'm sorry. What's your take? Great. Good apology. And getting out very quickly, like, there was a tweet calling him out that was kind of going viral, and he just jumped on it really quick and with a long post.

And I think that there's something about if you had, If he had just, quote, tweeted and been like, I'm sorry, like, that's not enough. But he actually, like, broke down everything that he did, everything that he would do next. Like, I'm well aware of the stricand effect. And I know everything on the internet lives for other. But I think this is the best decision for now. And, like, it was very, he, he, like, broke down his whole thought process. And I thought this was very, very good.

But I don't think he should have apologized because I think, and I'm on record saying that we need to ban speed limits in America. I think we need an American auto bond. The entire economy down. Yeah. I mean, there's so many times when, you know, you're going to a meeting. and if you could just drive twice as fast, you'd be there twice as fast.

You could do more meetings. You could do more meetings. You could increase the volume of shareholder value. Exactly. I was actually thinking about this because my friend has a house in Mammoth, and I was driving there, and the speed limits like 65, 75. It's like a three-hour drive.

It's like a four-hour drive. I'm saying if you're driving. But it could be too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And cars are getting safer. This was posted as like kind of a joke, but it is serious. Like the self-driving technology is getting a lot better.

The cars are getting way safer. Seat belts and airbags are in every car now. And so like the, possibility of just driving fast. Like that might be the solution. Like do we need high speed rail or do we just need an auto bond? That needs to be a core tenant of American dynamism is just, yeah, removing speed limits. Yeah.

Because think about some of these deep tech founders that have, you know, a facility out here, office over here, and they're spending a lot of time on the road. Yes, you can use it for phone calls. But if they could spend more time in front of their, whether, you know, their engineer that's needing to code or a capital allocator that's behind a blue Bloomberg terminal, the more time they can spend in front of those desks, the better for the country. It's also just like a lot of things with the government, it's hard to do new things and create new projects, but it is a lot easier to just stop doing something. So if you, if you're the

government, you just say, hey, we're just going to take down the speed limit signs. That's a pretty easy job as opposed to we're going to build a new high speed rail. But it also could be a community grown effort, right? Like there could be kind of a grassroots movement of, hey, we're going to take down speed limits. Yeah. We're going to just do this, uh, all, you know, an axe. Yeah. Right.

Just chop like a tree. Yeah. Um, and, uh, yeah, even even one less speed limit in your local economy could actually provide some pretty tremendous. So even though, you know, uh, I, I do disagree with, uh, MP, BHD on respecting speed limits. Um, you know, we got to support him because he's a fellow turbo S owner. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. Really. Yeah. He was driving a plaid and switched to the, TurboS, and he loves it. He's a big fan. He's a big fan. He watched every single possible video about it and made the decision that that's the best

possible car. Sports car. And for someone who's reviewed so many products, like, I think you made a good decision. I'd love to see him in a GT350R Mustang. But let's stay on the topic of, you know, government efficiency and government deregulation. Delian, my colleague at Founders Fund says, hell yeah, Doge is real. Elon and Vivek are running it. What a time to be alive.

And there's a statement from President Donald Trump saying that Elon Musk and in conjunction with American patriot Vivek Ramoswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency together. What do you think? I mean, very cool. Very cool. I mean, it feels like we're in, somebody said this, but it feels like we actually are in the best possible timeline where it's the most entertaining and actually seems to be the most

America positive timeline. Yeah. Since 1776. There's been this, yeah, there's been this question of like, you know okay even if someone gets in that people like like is there energy to like actually go and work in the government and as silly as the doge meme is it's something where you could see a smart hardworking person say yeah I want to go work with Elon on government stuff sure I'll go to the the doge that sounds great that's the big that's a big change here right is totally is smart young people

are going to want to work in the government for the first time just so that they can work under that sort of Elon religion, right? Yep, yeah. Yeah, that's great. And somebody else is saying, like, you know, the U.S. economy is basically just like steady state growing a couple points a year. And if we can double that growth, it kind of fixes so many of the core issues in our society, right? So it can't be understated that this is, while it's immediately being politicized,

I don't think it's political at all. We want our government to run the country, like they'd run a business, right? Bring in more revenue. Yep. Then you spend. It's pretty simple math. It's napkin math. We need to run the federal government.

Federal government should be able to run on a napkin, right? Yep. Social security, defense, health care, et cetera. Like you should not need more than a small napkin to run this country. Except if you want to drill down into the details, you can get on ramp. Yeah. That sounds good. And then Andre relatedly says, in America, the Department of Efficiency has two bosses,

pouring a little bit of cold water on this idea that, okay, you know, hey, is it really efficient if you have two people there? But I think it makes sense because Elon's running so many different companies. He can come in. No, isn't he running it exactly how he runs all of his company? Spacex. He is Gwen Chilwell. He's setting the pace and energy and, like, the focus.

Yeah. But then he needs his lieutenant to actually get a job. Yeah. So if that can come in as like the operator alongside him, like that, that seems really good. But it is a funny meme. And, you know. Yeah, I like that they're treating it like a product launch. Sure.

Like the Trump admin over the last like week has been almost having a major, major story every single day. That at least within the tech community is like getting the right attention. Yeah. Generally getting positive attention. Yeah. And this is the advice I give to startups. It's like even if you have something that feels relatively minor that you already announced previously, announce it again. Make it a big moment, right?

I heard this thing. I don't know if I haven't checked it, but I heard that if you've seen these like Trump videos, there's all these policy videos that are going out, him talking about like his ideas and they've all been like going viral. Apparently those are from like a few years ago. They're from Rumble. Is this true? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So they're from Rumble. And he put them out and they just didn't get any lift because Rumble's really small. But now that they're like, you know, he's unblocked on X. They can go viral. And so everyone's like, wait, where was this guy all along? It's kind of funny. Yeah. And to his credit, I think he still believes 80% of the same things.

Yeah. Like they're still part of his platform, which, you know, historically, the critique of Trump has been, he's constantly sort of like changing his mind and going back on things that he said before. So I'm happy to see that what he thought in 2022 is also what he wants to get done. Yeah. Visicon Versami, who I found out about through Patrick O'Shaughnessy, saying he has some really good frameworks and posts and long posts and writing, writes, TechBropod, please discuss this. And it's one of the most indecipherable posts, but we'll try and get through it. He writes, culture wars are partially downstream of the media tech nation dropping paratrooper brainworms inside the udaloupes of those with fragile self-sense and people sense.

and recruiting them as cannon fodder mooks into profitable but destructive psychophonah titan battles. So I think I think I kind of understand what he's saying here. And it's a little bit of a twist on, have you heard the term or the phrase like politics is downstream from culture? You heard of this? Andrew Breitbart said it. And it's this idea that like the government is just a reflection of the culture. in a country and that it's not that you can like you don't necessarily need like pro natalist regulation

to create a pro natalist movement it's like culture is pro natalist and then it just happens exactly and i've always been fascinated with that in conjunction with um the medium is the message that yeah that quote by uh marshal mccluen and i've always thought about the interaction of those two terms so if you believe both of them are well argued and i and i do um well if the medium is the message, then the design of our communications platforms informs our culture. Yeah. And so the medium is the message means that when you design, what is a TV show? What is a movie?

What is even on, even on formerly Twitter now X, like the idea of a retweet or a quote tweet, that became more adversarial because it invented the dunk. And so our culture got more aggressive, which you could say is good or bad. Yeah, it's like it created a mechanism to bring a ton of negative energy from your community to one person who's not necessarily in your community, which creates the cycle of fear. Exactly. But yeah, the other quote that stands out, I'll butcher it, but we create our tools and from there our tools, like shape us. We shape our tools and our tools to shape us. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And so this is something I've always pushed back on. There's this debate. Like the media would always say like, oh, like tech is like an. inherently political and then the technologists would say like no like our tech is like politically agnostic but I don't buy that at all I think that if you're a product designer at a big tech company and you're designing a communication tool the decision that you make to include quote

tweets or to make likes private for example that shapes the culture and culture shapes politics and so if you are designing a product that's used by hundreds of millions of Americans you do have an impact on politics yeah and yeah and you do have a responsibility. And so I think that's somewhat of what he's saying here, but you could probably dive into this whole thread and spend another hour deciphering every single word there. But thanks for writing in and let us know how we did. Let us know if we nailed it. I think we did. Let's go to Will Minaitis. He says building in public is over. The future is a cult companies of unknowable size and influence hidden beneath a sea of LLCs so deep, divine

light can't even get through. Cap tables so arcane. It's impossible. to know if truth exists at all. No one knowing what really is going on here. So imagine explaining the build and public movement to the Koch brothers, Coke Industries. They're like, wait, you tell everyone daily what your revenue is. You screenshot your internal metrics and share them with the world. You invite massive competition.

You allow others to get an understanding of your profits so that they can eat away at them slowly. I think the build and public movement, is very, you know, it's good to share what you're working on. It's good to talk about what you're working on. It's good to make people feel like a part that they're a part of your movement and kind of along for the ride. But the entire, and I think Will did a good job of this with his last company, right? He, you know, would share the right things that positioned him as the,

the thought leader within AI and healthcare, right? He did that very well. Never once had to share a strike. dashboard right or or yeah um and i think that there's the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it and you've talked about this a lot the you know what we're seeing with the build and public movement now is a lot of founders that are talking about what they're doing but not sharing metrics publicly but making sure that their competitors can can clock their their revenue and earnings by their car and watch collection exactly people should still know that you're successful it's just got to be

a little bit more subtle right so instead of a stripe dashboard showing a you know 200k day we want to see like a you know one of one Patek right exactly so it's just evolving yeah and yeah thanks will let's go to off scaler says hmm and it's a screenshot of what looks like a TikTok saying you can tell if he makes money whether he says Q4 or winter dude I think we're like one of us yeah no I think but I think we're in it but I think we're in a We're having a banger Q4. Yeah, I think we're, I mean, obviously we're having a phenomenal Q4. Yeah.

That said, I think we're at maybe the intersection of people that are saying I'm starting my winter arc because we're halfway through Q4 and I need to lock in even harder, right? So we're, there is this intersection and the kind of founders that I want to invest in are starting their winter arc, but very well aware that we're almost halfway through Q4 and they need to make stuff happen. Yeah. But in the same way that we advocated for adopting gamer lingo into everyday life, also you got to adopt the finance bro lingo. Yeah, we don't need to read. We don't need a speed run reinventing finance. There's a lot that venture can learn from our predecessors.

Exactly. But yeah, one thing for everybody to remember, your Q4 metrics are forever, right? When this quarter ends, you will have to live with those results. Yep. you know, January, February, March, and then 2030, 2040, people are going to be looking back at this quarter saying, what the fuck were you doing? Yeah. Or giving you, still patting you on the back from the work that you do now.

So lock in, whether you're having a winter arc, whether you're in the tropics, it's still winter. Yeah, those metrics will be immortalized in your 10K forever. So good luck. Get out there. Augustus says, have you ever had nine Coors Banquet beers with your customer? I love this because he at's Coors Banquet. Yeah. Hopefully they gave him a retweet.

That's really good marketing for them. Yeah, because that's kind of the whole point. That's like the idea of Coors Banquet, right? It's a celebratory beer that's an everyday product. It's accessible. I can imagine that this is not unusual for Augustus, right? He's somebody that his his edge is being able to speak the language of Silicon Valley and be immersed in this amazing subculture and Bayes and Saudis princes and then

simultaneously going and hanging at the farmers for 48 hours yeah rainfall he's serving he's serving customers in places that Starlink has never touched right I don't actually think that's true but but yeah fantastic I mean meeting your customer where you he's going to he's going to correct this seriously there are a lot of companies that they you know wind up in YC and they're like, well, we're building SaaS for farms and then they like can't relate to the customer at all. It's really hard. Yeah, I told the story. People want to buy products from other people like them. Yeah. And so if you're not like your customer, you better have a head of sales who is or, you know, learn from finance. Yeah. I mean, I told you that story about doing a deal with

like a tobacco distributor and I walk in and everyone's smoking inside. It was like really crazy. Indoor heaters. And yeah, it's like, it's like, how did you handle that situation? Oh, of Of course, rip one. Rip one. Yeah. But, you know, you're bridging the gap between big tobacco. But then I force them to use the strongest product I make and see if they can really handle it. There's actually a good story from last night.

I was at a dinner hosted by a venture capitalist. And the guy next to me who, he actually asked him what he'd want to be referred to on the pod. he said the Jewish cowboy. Okay. He was taking a four milligram loosey pouch in between every course of the meal and then taking it out because he didn't like to reuse them. And so in a 90 minutes of sitting next to him,

he plowed through like seven or eight pouches. I was like, dude, you're an absolute animal. And he's like, I don't actually feel the buzz anymore. I just avoid the withdrawals. So anyway, shout out to the Jewish Cowboys. Boy. Yeah, friend of the show. Let's go to Vittorio. He says, what's the book that changed your life the most? And this is just a good question. What's your answer? Do you have something in mind? Art of the deal. Art of the deal. I like zero to one. I mean, that's classic. I mean, honestly, it's kind of crazy to say, but I remember in high school, a friend who was really, really smart guy, just kind of clocked that I was going to be an entrepreneur, I think. and on that track and he got me four-hour work week. And like now in Silicon Valley,

that's not part of the canon in the way that zero to one is, but it was a phenomenal book just in terms of exposing like what does it mean to be an entrepreneur at any scale. And it's a very you can just do things book. Like there's a story about him. Tools of Titans was also a really great book. Yeah, that was my first. So I would say the media product that's been most impactful on me

over the last two years as Founders podcast. Sure. And part of that is, is David digesting all the best biographies and autobiographies ever in entrepreneurship and just like tying them all together. But Tools of Titans was very impactful for me during college because that was my first exposure to,

not my first exposure, but like the first kind of Senra-esque attempt at kind of capturing what made these people who they were and how they ticked. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. It's a good prompt. Let's go to Jesse.

Jesse says, as a young CEO, the worst advice I ever took seriously was that each manager should have standing one-on-ones with each direct report. Utter stranglehold on calendars throughout an organization. Direct reports should have something to report or decide to call a meeting, especially with the CEO. And it's a quote tweet of Brian Chesky talking about how he doesn't believe in one-on-ones and almost no great CEOs in history I've ever done one-on-ones. And there's a lot of this stuff

that's happening right now where big public company CEOs are coming out and saying, like, I actually do things very differently. Jensen Wong, noted watch Disrespector, claims that he doesn't have any, like, meetings or direct reports.

What is it? He has something to the same effect. But it is true. Like your calendar should be like as default empty as possible and you should have a few standing. I think the big issue is one-on-ones is if you have a standing Wednesday one-on-one and you have a direct report that's having an issue Monday, if they're waiting to talk about it until Wednesday, that's 48 hours of wasted time. And that could have been the most important thing of the week that you just needed to handle and fix.

And so I think that, yeah, this trend towards CEOs being like, Jensen's big thing is like we have no long-term plan. He's like we don't plan. like we think about what do we need to do today to make the company, you know, win today and for the long run. And eliminating meetings, eliminating long-term planning. Shopify has been big, eliminating OKRs, things like that. So anyways, I think it's, I think what's the old joke that, like, Google invented OKRs to just like stifle, like, innovation. In competition. Yeah, there's a lot of that.

I mean, all of the work-like balance stuff is 100% game theoretic. Yeah, it's like, hey, by the way, if you're the best business in history, you can have amazing work-life balance and offer all these perks to your employees. Yeah, yeah, and then create that as the competitive playing field that everyone has to compete with on. Brilliant, brilliant. But yeah, I mean, it gets to the idea of like the phone CEO, which we've talked about before, but just this idea that like you can be much more effective if you're just constantly on eye message with people that are important in your organization and then just picking up the phone and calling randomly and just playing phone tag with people. Yeah, the only time that I genuinely. Very little email, very little calendar. Yeah, the only time I need my computer, video meetings.

Yep. And if I'm doing anything. Many of which could be phone calls. Yeah. Just happening randomly, usually. But, and then doing design. Anything design related, I want to monitor. But other than that, I can run everything off my phone.

Yeah. Let's go to Cryptox Zero. I think that's how you say that. Crypto ZX or Zero X. Oh, one more thing. B.C. I was talking to you last night was like, I've been, I was golfing a ton while I was raising my fund. And now I'm doing it like once every couple weeks.

But before he was golfing four days a week while raising the fund because he's like, it's the best way to get to know people, have four hours to talk about what you're doing, how the other person ticks, things like that. So that's another example of the capital allocator phone only. Yeah, phone and in person, honestly. So the best way is to get to know someone if you're seriously going to do a deal is go and spend a full day. I've done that with a few people.

not just golfing like I I went and met with somebody very powerful and spent got to his house in the morning we go for a big long hike we have lunch we sit down and like you know talk about some books on his shelf we have dinner together drinks and it's just like we spent like this the full day together and like even though it was like a million times more impactful than like a weekly call for like three months yeah it was it was so much better just to actually get to know and to this day I'm like that's a solid person that I would do business with yeah uh Let's go to Cryptox, zero. Bro, it's crazy how one follower here is worth 100 followers on Instagram. This is a good way to get a lot of engagement because everybody on X tends to have more followers here than Instagram. Yeah, of course. But it's true. It's true. Like, like, you're not going to accrue the same caliber of founders on Instagram than X.

Yeah. Like, the, like, it. There's no, there's almost no more negative signal to me than a founder that more frequently posts about their company. on Instagram, then X or even LinkedIn, unless it's a consumer product company. Yep. And even then, they need to be like the celebrity face of it, essentially. And that's the only case it works. LinkedIn makes sense if you're selling B2B software and you need to be like an influencer

there to like pull in companies. That makes total sense. But you should still have a presence on X. People have been begging us to move some of our posting over to LinkedIn. Yeah, we'll make it happen. It'll be a seven-figure deal with LinkedIn if it's going to happen at all. Let's go to Daniel. he says they should have Uber Eats Black.

What if I want my burrito delivered in a Cadillac Escalade? And I, when I heard Uber Eats Black, I thought it was just going to be like caviar, champagne, like the top tier foods that you guarantee you're good, but it's more just the vehicle. Energetically, the idea of having, knowing that your burrito is being placed. Like I wanted to be, I'd almost like the Brinks version. Sure. Or like, you know, it has like armed guards that like carry the burrito from the restaurant. Yeah.

Well, that's what Turner says. Turner says, I want a SWAT team to deliver my, McDonald's in a Black Hawk helicopter. There you go. There's a bunch of different, you know, modalities that people would happily pay for. And anyways, that's like Uber's a dominant player. They now have the ability to, like, layer on these sort of value add, sort of niche products that make their power users happy, right?

I honestly would pay for an Uber Eats Black that guaranteed that the food was going to be like properly stored because I swear sometimes they just, sometimes they just throw it in the trunk and then they're drifting. around and you get somewhere and everything's just totally destroyed. And it's just like such a mess. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think also if you could get a Black Hawk from JFK to Manhattan, that would be cool.

That would be big. And have like armed. Like Blade, but yeah, Blade but Black Hawk version of Blade. I love it. Hopefully coming soon. Brian Halligan says, get ready for the IPO market to roar in 2025. I think it's legit. I think it's happening.

Yeah, I do think that there's a little bit of a countervailing force where a lot of the, a lot of the really big companies are still seeing what's possible in the private markets and just don't want the overhead of IPOing. Yeah. But there's this huge pressure, even, even Databricks announced this last week that they're raising $2 billion just to provide liquidity for early employees. That's a company that, like, I don't see why they don't go public at this point. But again, again, like the overhead is real.

I think that we've talked about SPACs coming back in a big way. I think. Especially for companies and categories where VCs aren't necessarily paying attention right now or aren't set up for that. Like there are enough funds now. It is not a bad financial innovation. It was just used improperly. Yeah, I agree.

I agree. There are a lot of companies where, like, if you're an AI company right now, you don't necessarily need to go public because there are multiple, multi-billion dollar funds. that are ready to write a $4 billion round for you in the private markets. But if you're in something a little bit more niche, where maybe public market investors might be interested in it, but private markets aren't really stuff for it.

Yeah, and retail. There's a ton of products that retail is generally excited about. Yep. But you've got to be a going concern. That's the main thing. I just hope it doesn't end up being, yeah, you should be raising money anymore. You need to be profitable.

Yeah, I just hope it doesn't end up being, again, what happened last time, which is the companies that didn't have any. additional, you know, private capital sources. But guys, girls out there, if you don't have four to five friends that are spinning up new special purpose acquisition vehicles, like, it's time to elevate your circle. I mean, I was looking at the list. There's a website where you can go and look at all the SPACs.

There's like, yeah, 350 that are actively searching right now in all sorts of different fields. Good for competition. And so, I mean, I honestly think, like, yeah, if you're raising a $50 million around, like, why not talk to at least a few of the SPACs and just see what they're pitching? is see how it would work out and see if you can see if you can pull it off let's go to jack reins he writes folks love their fast casual mediterranean cuisine and kava is up 440% in the past year wow i wish that we actually could see their market cap because they have to be trading

at like two because they're way down they have to be trading it like 300 times earnings oh yeah i need to actually look it up right now people love fast casual i mean it was always Holy story was so solid that it makes sense that people would kind of ape into the next thing. I always, actually never eaten in Kava. Have you? Is it good? Okay.

Yeah, their P.E ratio is 300. Okay. Let's go. Yeah, so yeah, great, great for Kava. They're going to be able to get a low cost of capital. Sure. Expand sell more, more Mediterranean grain bowls. But it's funny.

I remember like seeing pitches for people being like, we're the Mediterranean Kava. Why doesn't this exist? Meanwhile, Kava was just building a behemoth. And they did it, they did something. pretty interesting, which I forget the name of the Kava actually acquired a restaurant group or a restaurant brand. I'm blanking on the name that had like 200 locations. And they were able to like really quickly rebrand all the locations and turn. And so they were able to like double their

footprint. Yep. Smart. You know, super, super fast. It would have taken them. But yeah, one thing, you know, I think we, there's a lot of optimism right now, but one or two years ago there was a lot of year in the market and I always tell entrepreneurs go look at Starbucks like if you think the world's bad and it's going to be like a worst place in five years go look at Starbucks and Chipotle and all these big fast casual and just like retail concepts they're like we want to add 300 stores a year like every single year and it's like they these are like really smart teams that are smart capital allocators and yes the world's sort of unforgiving unpredictable place, but just look at how many locations these businesses want to add.

And I guarantee you, your business is going to be able to thrive in a world where they can add 200 new Starbucks every single year, right? That's great. It's great. We go to Jacob Andrew. He says, Jacob Andreiu, he says, the hardest part of building AGI is naming the models. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like this is an industry where we went kind of like weird quickly, right? So it's like we have llama.

And so now you have like defense llama. It's like, how do you, how do you get, like, get more attention than defense llama? Yeah, it's great. Strawberry, I thought that was a cool name. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like, open AI, great name. Even though, like, the openness is kind of pivoted. But, I mean, it's just like, it's just a nice name.

And it's, it's very, like, welcoming. And it speaks to, like, what they do. Chat.com, phenomenal. Like, one word domain. Great. But then, but then, like, GPT 401 preview mini. is like so bad. And I mean,

but I feel like that's part of them. You don't have to select anymore. I do think that part of that is somewhat intentional of being what matters right now as being loved by developers. Sure. Because developers are the bottleneck to actually get your product

to tens of millions of users. Yep. Not the bottleneck. They have their own consumer products. But I think it's kind of like almost an inside joke of let's release a product with the worst name ever that developers are going to meme and talk about. Yeah.

And being like, wait, are you using this? version or this version but yeah and i bet most of the chat gpte consumers that just go to chat dot com like are blissfully unaware of the fact that there's a difference between four four oh one preview oh one mini they just type their question and they get an answer yeah but very quickly they're going to be able to put a router in front of that and and dynamically decide oh this is a this is a question that needs to go to oh one this is a question that needs to go to four four or whatever and uh and all of that will become abstracted. The real question is where we have with the iPhone.

Nobody knows which iPhone they have anymore. If you ask them what iPhone do you have, they go, I don't know. I was like, I got it like a year ago. 19, I think. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. But Zach says, money doesn't excite me. My ideas excite me.

And it's a quote from Walt Disney. I think money should excite you. Walt Disney. He was lying when he said this. Yeah, yeah. That was pure marketing. Yeah. No, I think that there.

is a very common addiction, which is the addiction of wanting to see your ideas in the real world manifested. And I think that there's an equal amount of, from those people, there's an equal amount of excitement around the market potential of that idea, right? Because if one of the best ways to make it big in America is to build credit to YC, a product that people just really love and sell a lot of them, right? And so this goes back to You know, people talk about don't think about how to get rich. Think about how to help a million people. And you can do that with a product.

You can do that with an idea. And yeah, I've seen a lot of people get very wealthy off of ideas that they don't really aren't that excited about. Just we're, you know, fine. Like Walt Disney's famous for that, like, circular graph. Have you seen that? It's like a napkin drawing of like how all the different Disney enterprises interface with each other. Whether it's consumer products, films, parks, all these different things.

And it's like, that is an idea, but it's a very financial idea. Totally. But you could see that being like a beautiful interaction, and it would allow you to do more ideas, and that's the nature of the virtuous cycle of capitalism. To me, a good idea is the greatest drug on earth. Yeah.

Like, can you remember like multiple times where you just like had a phenomenal idea and you know it's a hit? Like when we first, when we talked about Excel, yeah, we knew from the very first conversation, which was not even a planned conversation. We just started riffing on it. And we were like, yeah, this is like so obvious.

Like this is going to be a hit. And you launch it and it's a hit. Yep. Yeah, that was great. And that feeling is the best feeling in the world. No amount of ayahuasca can get you that. Impossible. Impossible.

Let's go to High Yield Harry. He posts a screenshot of a text interaction that says, do you want to join my religion? And then the question is, what's your religion? And it's just a picture of a dude on a Bloomberg terminal with a bunch of TVs in the back. background and then the the other person says I'm interested I love this I sent this to a dude who works at the hedge fund and this is his entire life and he was like yes this speaks to me

yeah I mean if you think about I think the venture community spent all of 20 late 2022 and early 2023 praying for the next bubble right like I remember calling friends they wouldn't pick up and they said like hey I'm at church right now I'm praying for the next bubble right So it is a it is absolutely a religion returns are just kind of a nice. I mean there is there is something to the fact like when you when you pray at the altar of Bloomberg and C&BC, you ideally discover alpha that can allow you to uncover the next bubble. And I genuinely do find that like a lot of the best really, really amazing VCs are on Bloomberg regularly, actually understanding what's happening in the public markets.

and they're tracking that almost as much as what's happening in the venture portfolio. It's all down downstream. Exactly. And seeing those interactions is really, really important. Like what are the Fang companies or the hyperscalers doing does have an impact on your venture strategy? No, every GP at big venture funds right now is looking at their portfolio now that the markets are ripping being like, let's actually capture some of this returns. Time to print. So now the real edge is going buying Montana and Aspen real estate now.

Now things are going to get pretty hot. And installing those amazing like air pressure systems. Of course. You can effectively live at sea level. Yeah. That's great. Ryan Peterson apparently was on a flight and was trying to get Starlink working on his Delta flight.

He says, my first attempt to get Starlink working on this Delta flight a failure thus far. Okay. This is amazing marketing because he's clearly sitting in economy. and while he's trying to show his company, like this is how we're going to run lean. We're all running lean. And if you have a guy running the biggest freight brokerage in the world, they're one of the biggest startups.

He's flying economy. I think everybody should be a flying economy. Yeah, that's awesome. Because you're wearing a suit. But yeah, yeah. If you're in a suit, you can sit in first class. Business class. Business class.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I mean, the Starlink rollout should happen soonish. doing deals but it's taking forever. Isn't it something that like Boingo Wi-Fi or whatever the plane Wi-Fi service blocking? Are they blocking it? No, they have these like multi-year contracts with airlines that the airlines would have to buy it like it works.

It has to pay it out massively. Yeah, that's bad. And so I think we're all, we're just kind of like. You're in like the press release cycle for all this where like you now and we'll be like, we're proudly partnering with Starlink in 2029. Yeah, yeah. When we can retrofit all our planes. Yeah, that's good.

It's amazing. Maybe I should fly just. JSX more. It's not that much more expensive than just a normal thing. It's really not. And just for the Starlink, probably worth it. Let's go to Ryan's brother. There we go. David Peterson types faster, writes, I'm told a vigilante is roaming San Francisco. Oh, wow. I actually had them confused. Yeah. I was singing that was Ryan. No, no, yeah. That was Ryan. This is David. Yeah, yeah. And so David says, I'm told a vigilante is roaming San Francisco offering homeless people a thousand dollars cash and a plane ticket to Dallas.

Someone I know recently sat beside one of these homeless guys on a flight and he confirmed the story. Has anyone heard about this? Is this why SF has gotten so much cleaner? Also, why would any homeless person leave SF and give up the $600 a month cash benefit that no SF politician public figure dares to say anything about? Interesting. I haven't heard anything about this. This is the first I'm reading of this. I think we need here's the solution.

We need Taylor Lorenz to go undercover as a homeless person in San Francisco. Let's see if somebody tries to buy her out. And let's see if somebody tries to buy her out. tries to buy her first class flight to Dallas. Yeah, yeah. That's the kind of hard-hitting journalism we need from our tech journalists. There's, I mean, there's stories about this, right? Didn't New York do this?

Is it like Giuliani famous? There was like a South Park episode about how they like paid. But it wasn't quite just like go to Dallas. It was like, we will pay for your flight to your family. This has been a thing forever. Yeah. Just shuffling around people. homeless people like a Greyhound ticket and just send them out.

Yeah. I think that one of the solutions talked about this is just creating like a permanent Burning Man style encampment in the desert. That's the George Hots plan, the Wirehead City. You get a phone, you can chill out. You can do whatever you want, but then there's like a two-mile walkout, so you have to be kind of sober to leave.

Yeah. Essentially, but you can leave at any time. Yeah. You get like UBI essentially. Yeah. Somewhat dystopian, but I appreciate George for, you're not outside the box. In the city.

Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah. That's a good point. Nicole Wiscoff says, just to use Grinola AI. for the first time to take notes for me. Totally insane product. Highly recommend not an investor, sadly.

Have you used Grinol AIA? I haven't, but from what I understand, it's basically like an AI agent for secretaries where it's, you know, really good memory, good at taking notes, kind of knows what's going on in your life, kind of proactively sort of expecting your needs, things like that. So I'm interested to see how this space plays out.

There's been a, I think, that there's more venture-backed meeting note-taking apps than I've had meetings this year. I've had a lot of meetings. So I'm interested to see who. Yeah, yeah. I have seen some weird like fallout from some of the AI note-taking stuff

where it's kind of awkward if you get on a call and someone has their, like I was on a call with a bunch of people once and someone sent their AI note-taker and they couldn't make the call. And so then they just read the AI notes afterwards. I never let, I never, if somebody's joining a call And they try and add their AI. I'm like,

block it. Yeah. But yeah, I did, it was granola or one of these other, one of their competitors that was, uh, uh, portfolio founder of mine, like had an important meeting with a big customer. He, he recorded it like it was, you know, with permission. And he sent me a summary afterward. And it was like perfectly done.

Yeah. It's bullet points sections next steps. And I was able to get the full benefit of being on the meeting. Yeah. without actually attending. 20 seconds. Yeah, yeah, it's probably good. Like, you don't want to be like completely zoned out during the meeting.

But if it's taking notes for something, you can't make it. That makes sense. The, the funny thing is like these apps can actually turn what would have been a 20-person meeting into a meeting of two people where even if you don't know exactly what the next steps are with a project, two people can just talk it out. They come to a conclusion. The note-taking app doesn't just write exactly what was talked about. It takes like the entire meeting, break it.

it down into next steps and the reasons why and then lets anybody benefit from that. So I think it's actually fantastic. I think it's going to save a lot of time. I don't know how investable those businesses are really going to be, but we'll see. I do know that there's been one like fiasco where some, like I think a VC firm had an AI no taker on the call. And then after the founder dropped off the call, the firm stayed on the same call was talking, talking, talking about all sorts of stuff.

And then the AI notetaker sent a transcript of that to the founder to see kind of like what they're talking about behind their back. Very, very awkward. I doubt a deal got done. Very, very awkward. So, yeah, we've still got iron out the best practices there. The founders are a six. Let's go back there. They're in their competitor.

Rough. Rough. Rough. Let's go to Trace Stevens, another one of my colleagues at Founders Fund. He says, doing some email deal flow triage during a long plane ride and just opened three consecutive decks for companies. building group one to three ISR drones for defense with dual use in industrials. My brothers and sisters in Christ, why are you all starting the same company? Please stop.

So the reason that this is not so bad is these founders are going to build for about six months, see how hard it is, and then pivot to crypto. Oh, crypto. So. Pivoting to annual job applications. The cycle will continue. Okay, okay. It's this perpetual cycle of pivot.

Pivot to crypto, pivot to AI, pivot to defense, pivot to the new hot thing. But who knows, who knows? Yeah, I think I think this, you know, starting a drone company now when there's five or six super talented teams. With contracts. Yeah. While Anderil is also. Like, Andrewl does a lot of business there. Even Shield AI has a lot of business in Ukraine and stuff.

Like, yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. Oh, well. We should still bet on it. on polymarket though yeah uh yeah exactly uh mica isagawa says i'm i must start calling them male founders and this is a throwback from 2022 i think this is like i think it's a female founder who's uh responding to this idea of like if you're a woman founder people call you a female founder but if you're a male founder no one calls you a male founder they just call you a founder i mean people

call you a male podcast expert yeah exactly i'm actually i'm happy to be called a male founder but yeah yeah I mean where are the men in tech conferences we have the women in tech conferences but maybe men in tech conferences are next women angel groups you get some men's angels well there's a there's a there's a founders fund and there's a female founders fund but there's no male founders fund they did they did but there's no there's no there's no male founders fund like a spin-off I think that could be really popular yeah but until until and dramatic and dramatic there's also a a block chain founders fund and an Italian founders fund.

There you go. It's just hilarious. The most racist version of them. Yeah. We only back Italian. Liquidity says VCs who pivoted from Web 3 to AI to Defense Tech are now pivoting back to Web 3. This is exactly what we were talking about.

Yep. Yep. Yep. It is a snake eating its tail, the orobores of memetic energy and venture. You just got to move from one thing together. Yeah, I think you basically get one, you get one pivot like that. before and a lot of and and uh seriously it's founders and vc's i i can name multiple funds of course um the the typical cycle i feel like of a crypto fund is we're just focused on crypto this is our

edge is our focus and then as the the bear market like really gets into full effect they start branching out and they're like oh we're going to do the SaaS company because like they could have some use some leverage some blockchain at a certain point we'll just slap a token warrant on it call it a day it's a crypto deal and then they're like oh yeah like we're going to do this like sell service company because like they can slap a token on it at some point and then it comes roaring it comes roaring back around and then they're back to being fully uh just literally on monday uh one of my port coes got hit up by a strictly crypto fund uh it was a defense tech company trying to make the case and this uh so anyways uh i mean i just think this is the argument

I think that you're it's okay as a VC to position yourself as an expert in a certain sector, but branding your venture fund as a specific industry is almost like committing Sapuku. Yep. Because they're just simple, almost always is not quite enough opportunities unless you're keeping your fund size small. Like I know there's a friend of mine, Nick Milanovic has a, has a $10 million dollar fintech fund. Yeah, yeah. It's going to perform super well. he's the guy you go to if you want to raise a precede in FinTech.

He's going to do well. It's when you have a $100 million fund and you're saying we're the XYZ fund, then you get in a bad spot. Yeah, it's just so much better to just be a generalist and just move around. Chase returns. Yeah, it's just money. Ride the high cycles. The IRAs.

Well, thanks liquidity. Good post. Oh, this is a great one. So we got tagged by Eric Jorgensen, good friend of the pod. He says, I need the tech bros pod. take and it's a Vittorio tweet that says the fastest way to make fuck you money is to learn to say fuck you without any money I think that's right I felt I felt like I had fuck you money when I was making like four grand a month for my first company absolutely because I was enough to pay for my rent

I had a car with 200,000 miles and I could go to Trader Joe's without fearing that my card was going to decline and that was like the ultimate luxury for me I could do I could live to whatever I wanted at that point yeah there's that there's that meme of like there's levels to this shit, you know? Yeah, you get the sports car and then you find out somebody has the hypercar. You get the net jets description. You find out somebody has a Gulfstream. But if you don't let any of that, if you just completely ignore the hedonic treadmill,

there's nothing stopping you from acting like you have fucking money. The fuck you mentality is simply not depending on anyone else for your survival. Yeah, yeah. Everybody depends on somebody for survival. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's the difference between being wealthy and rich. Yeah. Like being wealthy is being independent.

and not having a boss, essentially. And being able to say no. It's great. Let's go to Mark Andreessen. He's been on the pod before. The primary mission of technology and economy policy should be to put everything on the TV price curve. And it's a picture of the price changes

from January 2000 to December of 2023. So 24 years, 23 years of progress. And hospital services are through the roof, college tuition through the roof, medical services are through the roof, but of course, cell phones, toys, computer software, and TVs are all down 90%. And now, you know, I paid one Bitcoin for a TV that wasn't even, it wasn't even 1080P, it wasn't even 4K. And I wound up just giving it away a couple of years later. But then I bought a new one. It's a $90,000 TV. Yeah, I know. And it was a, and now you can go and buy like a fantastic,

85 inch 4K, like everything TV for like a thousand bucks. It's great. The classic Black Friday, Black Friday is like much less of a thing now. Sure. Everything's online. But the classic sort of scenario in a Best Buy on Black Friday, seeing people fighting, like getting into real altercations,

was always over the TVs and the TVs are like the rotissory chicken of a Black Friday sale, right? They're like, this is our loss leader. You're going to get them in the door, get them a new TV, and then we'll sell them a bunch of other stuff to get some more margin on. But I always thought that was funny because the TV is already the cheapest thing that you can get, like almost year round. They've been so cheap. And they just get cheaper and cheaper. And it's no longer that like statement.

It used to be a status symbol. Because like everybody has them. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to Dr. Ben Braddock. He says, there are people laying in a hospital bed begging God for the opportunities that you have right now.

What an inspiring post? Simple post, inspiring. not even just the opportunities, but the feeling you have right now. Yeah, just if you're young, the last time you were sick. It's miserable to just have like a powerlessness. And there's no better feeling

than having fantastic opportunities. And I think those opportunities are available to everybody in this country. You simply need to listen to Founders podcast by David Senra and start to understand that opportunities are everywhere. Exactly. Let's go to the civilization enjoyer.

they say dance like nobody's watching, post on Twitter or acts like it will be printed out and read by men in suits. If it's a banger, it's a banger. Men in suits. So yeah, we got a deep dive this guy's account. Find some of the banger gems. I'm sure there's some good stuff on there.

He's an emerging poster. Next generation? Next gen. So we're investing precede in this guy? Yeah, covering this guy's tweets is like covering if we were around for Daniel. to be comparable to that. Yeah, that makes sense.

Daniel at sub a thousand followers is like some real alpha there. So first of many, if he keeps on this trajectory and shout out to the civilization enjoyer, Lucas. I enjoy civilization as well, so shouts out. Great, great invention. Signal, who's been on the show before, says, my portfolio relies on Trump and Elon never having a falling out. How can I hedge against this?

I mean, a lot of people are predicting this. I'm I'm I I certainly hope it doesn't happen but I mean they're interesting to figure out if there's a way to create a market for this on polymarket yeah I wonder how you would actually express that's a really yeah because like the falling out could be just happened behind the scenes it could be always like you know less involved in the doge in year three or something so this is a unique thing where it will in my view I think it will be beneficial for Trump and Elon to be cordial yeah and have a working relationship In the same way that you're not gonna burn the bridge having a direct line to Putin is not necessarily bad Like it was always positioned as oh Trump's has Trump's friends with Putin. It's like no keep your enemies close Sure sure so I think that I think both Trump and Elon have a lot Writing on each other right Elon has one of the most influential media businesses in the history of the world Trump runs is about to run the country and Elon's businesses are pretty dependent on government contracts.

So I hope they continue to bro down forever. I'm not sure how you'd head against it. And they're also technology others, right? Trump created the hottest best performing social media app for the last five years. Elon bought the best performing. The best social media app. And so they have that mutual respect from both being social app founders. Let's go to Jeremy Giffon.

He says, Everything good you want in life is on the other side of a single phone call that you're absolutely terrified to make. You know exactly who it is and you know exactly what you need to say, but instead you let it haunt you for years. You know, I saw this tweet. First thing that popped in my head was that call that I needed to make to my Porsche dealer.

And a lot of guys play this game with Porsche where they say, hey, if you want to buy a GD3 or Gt3RS or a touring or an ST, You know, you got to buy the EV Macon. You got to buy a Tycon. You got to buy two Taikon. You got to buy another, another Cayenne that you don't want. And those are obviously cars that the buyer doesn't actually want. So they end up buying them, owning them, selling them back to the dealership at a loss.

And you end up racking up like six figures of losses to buy the car that you actually want. Yep. So a lot of guys are afraid to just spend the $100K over sticker to go buy the car. But I'm just going to put it out there. Like a lot of people are afraid to make that call. and I don't think that you should be. You're going to spend that money one way or another. Just do it.

Even if you're buying on the secondary market, on bring a trailer or whatever, just do it. Yeah. So everybody's going to apply a different meaning to that, but that was the idea that popped in my head first. And as they say, you know, you can sleep in a GT3RS, but you can't race a house.

Can't race a house. So better to be car rich than house rich. Let's go to Tyler Cosgrove. He says, you guys can do your tour at U. Michigan Stadium. It comfortably seats 110K. so long as we get a couple thousand more folding chairs it should work fine this is our new campus wrap our new campus

wrap we love tyler congratulations yeah uh yeah i could call with him i really like this guy young hungry studying physics yeah really really thoughtful i'm kind of worried to i'm bullish him up too much i know i know he's saying it's so other other other uh people are going to try to post him but uh that's a free market it is it is uh thank you for representing technology brothers yeah and thanks for thanks for flagging this uh we'll do that tour soon let's go to the world the world we're going to do the Technology Brothers World Tour, is only going to be in the United States. Yes, exactly.

All the most important destinations in the world. Yes. Las Vegas, Miami, New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, Austin. Michigan. Exactly. Drewva says, nothing is more expensive than cheap goods. The price of cheap goods from China are factories never built in the United States.

Industrial technology is never discovered. Younger generations that look down on factories, deep process knowledge that dies out and dependence on an adversary. Interesting. Yeah, it's true. Well said. Well said, Drouva. I think this is the time.

is CEO of a company called deterrence, which is part of getting off the ground. Deterrence is doing high volume. Energetics manufacturing, so manufacturing like the super boring components that go into different types of munitions. He's probably struggling with supply chain right now. Yeah, supply change is the biggest thing.

Like basically a lot of the U.S. military's like arsenal is dependent on overseas sources. Yep. And that puts us a position of like potentially like a catastrophic the supply chain crunch depending on how the world shapes out over the next 10 to 20 years. So the real, yeah, and then looking at these sort of externalities of offshoring our manufacturing throughout the last century, the job loss, the cratering of certain towns and communities. in America, which is all the stuff that J.D. Vance is like talked about over and over.

There's a real cost to getting stuff cheap. Yep. Let's go to the next one. But first, we have a promoted post from Mont Blanc. We want to put them on the show and we're excited to bring them to our audience. Montblanc writes, a nature-inspired color palette refreshes Montblanc's timeless leather goods in the Mason's spring, summer, 24 leather collections filled with pieces the combined aesthetics and functionality. You might know Montblanc for their fantastic pens, but we encourage you to go to Montblanc.com and check out some of their fine leather goods.

So we're excited to welcome them to the Technology Brothers podcast and look forward to partnering with them more in the future. Let's do Montblanc. Thank you, Montblanc. Let's stay on the topic of luxury goods. The luxury watch guy says, Sotheby's just sent four world records

at its Geneva watch sales, the highlights. In total, the two auctions combined for an impressive $22.9 billion in sales. Patac Philippe reference number 1563 sold for $3.8 million and referenced 2499 for $2.6 million. I love how that's probably more revenue in a week than the entire last 10 YC batches will generate in this calendar year, 2024. Yeah. Young collectors under 50 drove 60% of sales. Future is bright. Yeah, I just love to see that young, you know, younger people are getting in the mix, supporting fantastic institutions like Sotheby's. And it's great to see the watch market coming back. It's been a rough couple years. It's no probably accident that it correlated with an increase in the price of Bitcoin. Most of the watches that our audience wants costs about one Bitcoin. So, I Anyways, easy, easy trade there. Let's go to Emily Troy at Coinbase. She says slowly and then all at once.

And it's a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal saying Gary Gensler's ambitious SEC agenda could be near its end. Emily's, from my understanding, I've been a fantastic leader at Coinbase through tons of ups and downs and regulatory uncertainty and scrutiny and all this stuff. I just don't think it can be stressed enough that like every company, whether public, or private goes through periods of euphoria and periods of darkness. Yep. But nothing is more intense than within the crypto world. And like as much as crypto founders and Web3 people that are pivoting into Web3 as it gets hot, as much as those people get made fun of, it can't be stressed enough how much the people,

companies like Coinbase go through on a year-to-year basis and how much they just have to like put the blinders on and these people are working at a company where they're like embarrassed to say what they do at Thanksgiving right and now they're going to go into Thanksgiving is going to be a jolly jolly holiday season so shout out to Emily and Coinbase for pushing through it fantastic let's stay on the stock's up like literally I added like 30 billion a market cap it's amazing I love Brian great team let's go to Martin Screlly he says the future of finance and it's a USDC transfer of 100 USDC. It's happening on Ethereum.

And it's happening on Ethereum. And I actually don't really understand what's going on. So he's sending $100. It's costing him $10. No, no. It's a 10% payment processing fee. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Okay. So anyways, one of the reasons why Solana's just absolutely cleaned up. Yep. And like a lot of the developer activities moved over to Solana. Yep. It's just, you know, blockchains were invented to be able to process like really high volumes of transactions globally instantly. Sure.

And the fact that if you want to send 100 bucks, it's like a 10% payment processing fee. Yep. And it's not even going to the Collison Brothers. It's going to Vitalik, what's the thing? Yeah. Not directly, obviously. The Ethereum shareholders. Let's do another promoted post, this time from Steinway and Sons, who you've heard from before on the podcast.

Steinway writes, during World War II, Steinway victory verticals were shipped to every theater of war. And it's this amazing picture of these. upright pianos that the Steinway company was building, just lining this factory during World War II. And it really speaks to the heritage of this company and why we're so proud to support them and we love them so much. But it's great to see, I mean, this was posted on Veterans Day. It's great to see a company that, you know, they're not, their CEO isn't like shit posting on Twitter all day. But they still get it. They're still pro-America.

They're still, you know, pro- The classic images you see around World War II industry is these massive. hangars and facilities spinning out planes and tanks and guns and cars. But it's important that we understand that when America rallied around World War II, it wasn't just aerospace and defense and automotive manufacturers. It was some of the greatest companies in the history of America of Steinway being one of them that rallied around the cause. So thank you to Steinway.

And if you think about, you know, you're in the theater of war in World War II. Like they didn't have iPhones at the time. like literally having a friend who could play piano and entertain you was probably what got you through. So we love Steinway here. Please visit steinway.com to learn more. Let's go to Sheel Monot. He says, Don Jr. is a VC. 1789 capital invests in the Republican slash parallel economy, de-globalization, anti-ESG,

and cutting-edge technologists that disrupt industries weighed down by excessive bureaucracy. And so he's, Don Jr. is joining a venture capital firm. Interesting. what do you think uh de globalization anti so so it's funny these are all framed they're all like negative yeah but like they really could just be like you flip this around and it's just like uh american manufacturing like energy independence yeah mission driven companies right like yeah you know uh founders that move fast and ignore bureaucracy like well that's always founder mode it's really just a reframing of the same pitch we've heard from playing of uc's

yeah that's that's always been the one of the critiques of trump broadly is the negative view on things. American carnage as opposed to optimism. He obviously, yeah. Yeah, there's a little bit of America. I mean, even make America great again. It's like, are we not great right now? What's going on?

Yeah, yeah. But that, but anyways, these trends, I think they're generally, you know, sounds like they're going to be a pretty generalist fun, but not bad themes overall at a high level. Fantastic. Let's go to Nikita Beer. He calls the top on 1111, 2024 at 6th. 6.54 p.m. And I think he was wrong. I think he was calling like the Bitcoin top more or less at like

84 or something like that. I'm not exactly sure what inspired this. So here's the funny thing. Usually the top correlates with Coinbase going number one in the app store. Sure. Coinbase as of this morning was number one in the app store. Okay. Okay. So that's what he's saying. No, I know. I think that this this post predated that number one. But by a couple days. But but but yeah, I just think it's funny. I think what Nikita should do is tweet top once a day for... Delete all the ones that are wrong. Yeah, and just go back and delete them. And be like, I called it.

And then he can say he called the top and then he can sell more. But we would have the evidence here that he did that because we'd be printing them out. We're the only people in the world that are printing out tweets. You're in the truth zone, Nikita. Good luck. Yeah. Can't pull that on us. Anyways, I think right after this, he tweeted we're back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know. He's optimistic. We have one more promoted post today. This time from Gulfstream Aerospace. Gulfstream is proud to announce that Starlink has arrived. Gulfstream has officially received FAA supplemental type certification to install the high-speed internet service on the G650 ER.

STCs are also going in progress for the G-800, G-700, G-S-600, G-500, G-500, G-F-G-F-G-FU-F G-G-V-G-V-X, GV, and GVSP. And you can learn more at gLF.org. So shout out to Gulfstream. Big, big fan of the pool pod. our favorite companies. Exactly, yeah. We love SpaceX and we love Gulfstream here. So, happy to support them. I mean, this tweet did very well. They got 1.7K likes, 100K views. Hopefully we'll get them some more attention because we love Gulfstream here and

encourage all of our employees and listeners. Go buy a Gulfstream. To go buy golf streams. Takes a little bit of time, but it's worth it. It is. Let's go to Roon. Roon writes, when you're good at something, it doesn't feel special or high agency or brave. You're like, what else would I be doing? It's a good post. Podcasting. podcasting yeah no no it makes sense it's it's the Ica guy thing it's like figuring out what what your life's work is what you're meant to be doing this is important I like this yeah a big thing that ends up happening is people have like all these incredible insights and learning so they don't end up sharing with the world because they just seem so innately

obvious to them that they're like why would I ever talk about that idea or thought yep exactly because it's just so so obvious and then turns out like thousands tens of thousands of other people would like be like mind blown i can't believe it was like in grace it was like mark talking about all this stuff totally the rock bridge event right where the politicians minds were like blown yeah to him it's it's it's it's second nature yeah yeah so find the thing that's second nature to you avoid avoid memetics and and just do whatever the best in the world at it exactly like ruin is runes the best in the world at posting and language models yep like undoubtedly right yeah there's a lot of alpha sitting in that. Yeah. Well, we got to wrap up because I think Jordy has to hop on with Manila,

but we will see you later. Subscribe. Thank you. Goodbye.