TBPN - Trump's Cash Bonanza, Karp is a Dawg, META Bets Big, PMF or Die, Defending the Gundo

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

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(06:04) - The Gundo Boys (21:53) - Karp is an Absolute Dog (42:44) - Trump's Cash Bonanza (01:04:43) - The Timeline (01:27:00) - META Plans Major Humanoid Investment (01:36:27) - Guantanamo Bay (01:43:41) - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one show in tech, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Today is Monday, February 17th, 2025. This show starts now. Jordi, how you doing? We're back in the studio. I'm in a new suit. You're maybe in a new suit? As of two weeks ago. Yeah, the black suits relatively new. I'm still breaking it in. There we go. We're very happy to be back in the studio. We did two weeks away. It was some of the toughest weeks of our lives.

It was terrible. Being away from the capital of capital. And I'm very happy to be back. We got a great show today. We stopped recording Friday, and it just felt like 20 different headlines hit the timeline. And we were kind of thinking about doing a weekend show. We always are. But for now, we'll stick to Mondays.

You know, the really big podcasters, they always do. emergency pod when there's breaking news. I think of our show, every show is an emergency pod. Every pod is an emergency pod. You've got to be live. You've got to be breaking down

what's happening on the timeline. The timeline wasn't turmoil this weekend. But Monday, it's President's Day, and we have an exciting announcement. PMF or Die just went live. There's 10,000 people watching it right now, the live stream. And yeah, it's just two dudes

locked in a cage coding. Trying to hit $1 million ARR with just $25,000. In 90 days. What's going on? Yeah. So right on on on on January 14th. We were talking. I was like should I post this? It's kind of hilarious. Yeah. There was just a simple idea to take two people lock them in an apartment with 25k and let them build for 90 days and put them in the spotlight basically give them a ton of attention. Yep.

And force them to have this sort of extreme level of focus. We ended up getting hundreds of applicants from all over the world people building super cool. You know, businesses are wanting to to build apps in the cage. We ultimately selected two of them. And as, of this morning they kicked off building and uh they are uh absolute studs for agreeing to do this it's um we've been a little bit concerned around uh how how is this sort of constant attention and the pressure uh going to affect the players right it's it's an extreme it's just they're submitting to themselves to something that many people would describe as torture right being being being on a 24-7 live stream for 90 days in a row and all you can do is work but they were you know obviously

super excited about it or they wouldn't have agreed to it. It's actually Paddy's one of the players' birthdays today. Happy birthday. He's turning 22. He's turning 22 in the cage with a live audience, but he's, he's an absolute grinder and there's nowhere he'd rather be, truly. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. It's, it's weird. It's an experiment. It's, you know, half performance art, half not. They are building a real company. Like, you will be able to download their product, and Blake is very adamant. Well, yeah, Blake is, they both are. Blake is very adamant that this isn't performance art. They want to build a durable, massive company. And they're certainly putting the pressure on themselves. So we're going to be covering daily updates on the show.

And so, yeah, we'll keep you in the loop today. They're just getting sort of their dev environment set up. They're doing some, you know, working on some product flows. We're working on the actual live stream product itself. But, but ultimately, this is just a view into their world for the next 90 days. And we're going to be recapping it, you know, daily, weekly on the show. And then ultimately, at the very end, we'll put together a, you know, basically a documentary on what they accomplished. And there should be some pretty fantastic results. So it's already cool to see there's people in the chat that are joining in, just saying, I'm going to lock in with you guys from home, joining them on the journey.

Anyone can, anyone can do free to lock in. It's free to lock in. It's free to lock in. Free to lock in. Yeah, I mean, it's a cool, it's a cool test of the thesis that, hey, it's cheaper and easier to build companies than ever before. You can get to one million ARR very quickly. We We've seen this with cursor. 100 million ARR is easier and faster than ever before. And so it'll be interesting to see how they do it. And it'll be really funny if they get out of the cage in like two weeks or something. I mean, anything can happen.

It could be a grind. It could be, okay, games over. Go enjoy Central Park now. They're in New York. Yeah. And the space that they're in, it's in New York City. I won't be any more specific than that. So we don't get hecklers.

There was already people saying, you know, asking if the players were single and stuff like that. So there's quite quite the fan base. But yeah, the setting is iconic. The skyline's incredible. It's beautiful. I've obviously been in there already myself. And at night, when it gets dark out, you can just see, you know, the entire New York skyline.

It's very iconic. And we'll see how late they work tonight. It's going to be funny to watch. Every entrepreneur goes through this where it's 1130, 1231, you're tired. You want to go to sleep. your body's telling you like just, you know, stop, but you got to just keep it through. Yeah. And yeah, so, so, you know, everything will be, you know, completely transparent.

Yeah. They're, they're taking building in public to the absolute extreme here. Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, I love it as an experiment. You know, not many people stream on X. It's a newer feature of the platform, but I'm excited to see where it goes. Well, let's break down the show. We got a bunch of cool stories that we didn't get to last week that were pulling forward

and then talking about a bunch of other stuff. We got our boys from El Sigundo are in The Economist, a great puff piece. We got Alex Carps in the Wall Street Journal. There's also a deep dive on Trump's Cash Bonanza in the Wall Street Journal. We're going to give you some timeline. Of course, break down what's happening on X. Trump's whole life has been a cash bonanza. But the last month, he's really ramped it up.

Yep, 100%. And then Meta is getting into humanoid robots. That'll be exciting to talk about. And then there's a proposal in pirate wires in the white pill section to turn Guantanamo Bay into Hong Kong. I'm sure that'll be fun to read through. So let's kick it off with the Gundo Boys. Defense Tech is blowing up Silicon Valley's beliefs. This is from February 13th in The Economist, a very prestigious publication.

You know, there's been a lot of hate for mainstream media. I think the economist has still got it. Great reporting. I enjoy reading it every week. never knew this. I just somehow didn't pay attention to this, but the economist never publishes under the writer's name. Buy lines. No bylines. It's all from the economist. You don't know exactly who's writing it. And I think that makes, you know, it makes the economists a unique sort of platform for writers to write on because you're writing under this brand versus other places,

New York Times. You're very clearly writing, you know, unless they're doing like an anonymous, you know, type. No, no, no, no. I mean, it lends its to there's a very consistent voice that happens in every in every piece and you have to conform to that kind of neutral brand standard and it also creates a little bit of like like whoever wrote this could have a different world out there where they are right wing or left wing but you're not going to read this and then go and secretly find their tweets and be like oh they are something you know go crazy about it you're you're just going to enjoy it as a piece of writing And then their life is separate, which I think is very cool. So the article says, in the back of an unmarked office building close to LAX, the main airport of Los Angeles, stands a rack of unarmed hypersonic missiles, the size of small drain pipes. On February 6th, a camouflage truck ferried one away to New Mexico for a test launch with the U.S. Air Force. Such activity used to be common in El Segundo, the L.A. neighborhood that was once the hub of military spaceflight, then the Cold War ended and with it much of the West Coast weapons business. Now it's coming back. Castilian, which we've talked about before, they make projectiles. They were founded in 2022 by three alumni of SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company, which was also created in El Sucendo. Los Angeles is not alone in reviving the warrior spirit buried deep in its past. Silicon Valley is doing so too. It's in the early days in the mid-20th century. It created Renaissance equipment for spy planes and semiconductors for missiles. But then the peace knicks took over and for decades to defecades. Defendix.

defense became a dirty word. As recently as two years ago, Castilian couldn't open a bank account in Silicon Valley owing to the stigma attached for making weapons. Yeah, it is fascinating that. And I actually had this with a portfolio company recently that got booted off of Rippling because there was anything defense related. So even today, you still cannot, to my knowledge, sign up for Rippling if you're doing anything at all to do with the military. Really? Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, there is a shift like Anderol, when they started, was purely defense tech. Yeah. And even then, they didn't have any kinetic capabilities whatsoever.

Yeah. It was for a long time. It was software, but it was sensor towers, which are just cameras. And then it was drones. And even the first drones, the Anvil drone. The ghost drone is just a helicopter that just looks. We have to study Anderil's roadmap because it was very, very intentional. They just won the holographic, you know, super soldier.

or I-VAS project. And many people would have said, why didn't you just start there? Yep. But they were super intentional. And many founders go through this where they're like, we're going to do this, then this, then this, then this. And they don't hit the first two attempts and then they don't, you know, they're not able to keep going.

They were so, so intentional and it seems to be paying off now landing these major, you know, programs of record that are multi-billion-dollar, you know, endeavors. Yeah. And so several developments have since stiffened. The sinews. I love this rating. One is the war in Ukraine. Another is America's deepening rivalry with China. Most alluring, perhaps, is the sweet smell of financial success. SpaceX has become the most valuable private firm in America worth $350 billion.

Palantir, a supplier of software to Western armies and spooks, has a market value of more than $250 billion, more than Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, a trio of defense contractors combined. Anderl, a younger firm that makes autonomous weapons, is currently raising $2.5 billion at a valuation of $28 billion. Cue a cascade of investment into smaller startups, making military kit for land, sea, air, and space. Pitchbook, a data gatherer says the value of such deals in America rose by more than a third over the past two years to almost $40 billion. Venture funding as a whole fell over that period. So yeah, the defense tech boom is like super, super real. Yeah. You know anything? Ultimately, it's saying that, you know, there was,

massive investment across a bunch of different categories during that period as well. So it's hard, you know, comparing the past two years to the two years before that is not, you know, super, you know, considering that was, you know, the PICO top of the cycle and ZERP and things like that. But certainly there's a lot of demand of $40 billion is a huge number that is, you know, fully risk on capital to build products for our military, which I think is a healthy sort of function in that, you know, we prefer that our government not to do. some high-risk stuff, but in general, we don't want all investment into the category to be government funded. It's much healthier if there's more on the line and it's actual, you know, risk, risk dollars

at work. Yeah, I mean, part of it is like the defense tech, like the process of building a defense company is just slower because you're dealing with Adams, not bits, and you're dealing with government contracts. But the defense tech boom already feels longer than the NFT, boom or the consumer social boom or really any of those. You know, Anderil 2016, they start kind of become a unicorn, I think, around 2020. And then more companies start getting funded because they de-risk the sector. But now we're five years into that. And there's, you know, a host of other unicorns, a host of other companies and tons of startups getting started. We're getting to that point where the market maps are so established that if you're thinking of getting into defense tech right

now unless you're working with some truly novel technology. Yep. There's probably a handful of other heavily funded teams doing the exact same thing that you're doing already. And they may not have announced or been very public. Exactly. But, you know, definitely something to be aware of one of those situations where if there's a market map and you fit nicely into it, this might be too late.

Probably too late. Yeah. So less remarked upon is how the defense tech boom changes core tenants of the venture industry. Historically, venture investors shied away from supporting hardware industries, especially those like defense that can gobble up lots of capital. Now that's 100% true. A lot of these businesses are super capital intensive, lots of dilution. And we've seen that certainly in the space industry.

That is changing. So too is the worldview of many in Silicon Valley who have turned their backs on the libertarian ethos that prevailed in recent decades in favor of a chest thumping patriotism that celebrates American military might. Silicon Valley's renewed interest in military hardware reflects the shifting dynamics of combat, display on display in Ukraine. Smaller weapons, notably drones, have supplemented and sometimes supplanted heavy armaments. That has left an opening for upstarts that can make cleverer and cheaper versions. Drones powered by whizzy artificial intelligence systems are in vogue. So too is thriftiness. Take Castilian as an example. For its missile system, it uses several automotive grade

chips costing a few hundred dollars rather than expensive space grade ones. It manufactures rocket motors itself to keep costs down. SpaceX's ability to shuttle satellites cheaply into low Earth orbit where they can scrutinize the planet has made space an increasingly affordable part of battlefield technologies. Yeah, super interesting. Yeah, and people don't forget this. We've talked about it on the show before, but ultimately SpaceX, as much as it's a space company is a defense company, right? If you can take huge payloads to space and bring them back, you can do, you know, you can basically do the same thing with weapons, right? And so one lens to view space.

as a defense company disguised as a intergalactic exploration company, right? There's a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal today all about the mercenaries who are going to Ukraine from all over the place. They're recruiting veterans from like, I think, Argentina and South America and Africa, and they're pulling people from all over the world. And that's actually an interesting place that, defense tech has not explored. I know some people have been talking about like Blackwater 2.0 or starting some sort of military contractor, but looking at how does the human capital allocation

and management side play into defense is something that is still kind of unexplored, almost like, you know, to-do list apps for the military or something. Yeah. I'm sure there's lots of opportunity. Well, let's close out this economist article with a great anecdote about Alex Karp, who will move on to in our second story. A revival of the warrior spirit is transforming Silicon Valley's relationship with the American government. The Technological Republic,

which we have a copy of over there, is a forthcoming book co-authored by Alex Karp Palantir's chief executive. It calls upon Silicon Valley to work with Uncle Sam on military programs rather than supporting environmental and social causes like those Mr. Karpian,

like those Mr. Karp champion patriotism. Those like Mr. Karp champion patriotism, as the new corporate purpose, an idea that will appeal to many in Donald Trump's administration. Meanwhile, the long-established revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry is being extended to venture capitalists and tech firms. There's a lot of VCs going into D.C. and vice versa. That could help speed up the disruption to America's military industrial complex, which many in defense tech hope for. Shams Sankar, who we've talked about on the show many times, CTO of Palantir. He says, if the government doesn't figure out how to make the vener,

venture model work, this will not be sustainable. One issue is the meager share of spending that is available to startups. Another is the broad brush approach that Pentagon takes towards them. Mr. Sankar argues that the government needs to come to terms with Silicon Valley's power law in which a few big winners generate fortunes compensating for the many others that will fall by the wayside. The Pentagon also needs to transform away from cost plus contracts, something that we've been talking about since Anderall launched for almost a decade now, which are designed to enable big weapons programs and guarantee incumbent contractors, decades of revenue in favor of fixed price ones that outsiders can bid on. So very cool article in the economist. We love to see

these things we've been talking about for years, kind of go mainstream. You can always count on an economist article to kind of provide the definitive overview to the world since it is a global publication. Anything else there? Should we move on to carp? Let's move on to carp. Let's move on to carp. right away in this Wall Street Journal article, you can see he's sporting his daily. What we can now determine is his daily driver. It is. Because he has been photographed in this a handful of times, which is a Patech Philippe Aquanaut chronograph with an orange strap.

It's a fantastic watch. It's available on bezel right now. So if you're in the market, I think they basically retail for like 140, 150K, somewhere in that range. So great daily if you've got, you know, let's call it. you know, 50, 100 million AUM, wear that thing. You can pretty much wear it anywhere. Carp has made it, you know, clear. And I love this watch because it looks like a simple sport watch from afar.

It doesn't scream, oh, look at this CEO with a massive Rolex on his wrist, you know, GMT, whatever. It's timeless. It's classic. You can wear it in the boardroom. You can wear it, you know, at a conference. And so really, you know, just, you know, setting the bar here. Ben, I think it's on the next slide, by the way. No, you can see it there.

You can see it there? Yeah. Okay. It's on his wrist. See, it's a low key. It's not screaming at you, but it says, you know, I'm a man of taste. Yeah. And it has its own personality.

It's great. I mean, Zuck is like truly leading the way and the loud opulence with like the FP Journes and the one of ones. Carp's a little bit understated. Still rocking an absolutely incredible, Potech Philippe. We love to see it. But he's not making it his whole thing, you know? He hasn't really talked about it. We had to clock it.

He wasn't posting about it. He doesn't even have an X account, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. But, you know, the sharp-eyed watch is... Yeah, it's crazy how hard... We often associate founder mode with going direct. Yeah. And in many ways, Karp is going direct, but he's actually, like, not posting.

He's just going on the craziest media circuit ever. Yeah. Where he's going out and actually seemingly bending the traditional media to his... To his... To him, right? Yeah. And using them to communicate. and it works in this scenario because it's a super timely message, patriotism is in,

it's no longer contrarian to want to fight and work and innovate for America. But he's definitely writing the playbook of how to do mainstream media well. Yeah, I think of going direct as just being authentic and not being media trained or on talking points and having firmly held beliefs that you just espouse for years and years and years. super consistent on. Yeah. And he can go out and say exactly how he feels. Yep.

Without worrying, oh, am I going to piss some people off because he's totally okay with pissing off some people. And I think Peter Thiel did the same thing, wrote a book, zero to one. Karp has a book out now where, and that is the foundation of his philosophy. Yeah. And then tons of podcasts, tons of, you know, unscripted interviews, willing to talk about anything. Peter's done this with many three hour, two hour interviews, went on Rogan.

carp does the same thing. Happy to talk to anyone and doesn't need the questions ahead of time, doesn't need his talking points in front of him and can just talk about anything. You can ask him about whatever you want and he's an open book. And that is what I think of when I think of going direct. It's just let's not, it is, it might be direct from Carp's brain to the CNBC anchor. But there's not, but for so many other people, it's the CEO to the PR person to the press release, to the journalist who's getting,

hey, can you take that out? He actually didn't mean to mention this. Oh, we, you know, and oftentimes, you know, you saw Palmer on, on that podcast talking about conspiracy theories and stuff. Like, if that wasn't, even though that wasn't on Palmer's own show, or his feed. Still his message. Yes.

And that message was not passed through a committee. Yeah. Where it could easily get shot down. Hey, there might be some downside to you talking about JFK or whatever. Let's not go there. Yeah. And it's good, these are good references for founders or VCs that feel pressure, oh, I need to figure out how to post on X. I need to figure out how to like build my own audience. And it's not for everyone. Some people are born posters and some people are not born that way, but figure it out.

Yep. But some people just don't like it. Yep. And so what's more important is having a really cohesive, you know, exciting, meaningful message that you can just drill into people's heads. And if you build a big enough platform individually, then you can go get on. our show when we start doing gas, you can go then go on CNBC, go on Bloomberg, go on Rogan, et cetera, Sean Ryan, et cetera. It's a powerful contrarian idea that you're not ashamed of

in the least that you repeat over and over a long period of time. And if it's good enough and what you're building is real, everyone will point the camera at you and you'll just be able to speak your mind. And that's it. Well,

carp is an absolute dog, as we mentioned before. He's profiled here in this wonderful Wall Street Journal article. Let's kick it off here. It says, Palantir stock was days away from hitting an all-time high, and the company's chief executive, Alex Karp, had retreated to his cavernous mountain cabin.

It features neatly captured the interests of a billionaire on a quest to save the West. The windows were adorned with curtains bearing an American flag motif, completed and half-completed rubic cubes were scattered on the coffee tables. So it makes total sense if you're actually into Rubik's cubes to just have a bunch of them. So you can just pick them up, whatever. It's great. You can try to do them in order really quickly, you know, time yourself. Yeah.

It's very, I can do a Rubik's Cuban. It's very meditative to actually do it. It's really fun if you're just like kind of thinking. Oh, you're a shape rotator? Yeah. And Carp asks, do you want to see my guns? One of Carp's hobbies is long range shooting, which I've been saying is going to get more popular in PRS, precision rifle shooting, whose targets fall outside of normal

parameters of a firearm, he explained. He struck a stance to show. the blend of practice and instinct that combines for the perfect shot. More than two decades of running Palantir, a data analysis firm best known for working with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies has made Karp a billionaire many times over. Through government work, though government work represents only a portion of the balance sheet that leans heavily on commercial clients, it gives the whole company a secret ops vibe. Karp can talk about his own guns far more readily than he can talk about the more secretive activities of Palantir, whose market cap is more

than $260 billion. In the cast of philosopher kings who have emerged from Silicon Valley in the past several years, carp cuts an unusual figure. He is far from one name... Wait, do you want to talk about his philosophy path? Wasn't he, wasn't he, he has a PhD in philosophy? He has a PhD in philosophy, and he studied under Juergen Habermas in Germany, and there's a little bit of controversy about it because he transferred in and out of one program. And so the real like PhD nerds are like, well, he wasn't like fully Habermosses like to under his tutelage the entire time or like was he the mentor or not? Tell those people to go build a $260 billion. Yeah. And so I actually at one point I downloaded his thesis and tried to translate it and read it. It was very, very dense. It's in German. Yeah. I don't speak German. So it's very hard. Yeah. This is good evidence that you can kind of go on. If you're, if you're, if you're, if you're, you're truly goaded, don't worry about the path that you're on because you'll, you'll just find your way into greatness. Yeah. Even if it's totally unpredictable. Yeah, I mean, especially with the,

like, everyone in the teal orbit, we've seen this. I mean, I'm sure that's how he got linked up, uh, is just doing something really interesting at the power law of some bizarre, like, niche hobby instead of being super tracked and being like, hey, I want to like be a venture person and then go start a company. Like, uh, he was not like the NBA type. And so he was, uh, he got into money management and ran like a small money management firm in Europe and then got linked up with Peter and started Palantir after 9-11 because the whole thesis was with the internet and better data analysis you could potentially stop the next 9-11 if you can piece the puzzle together before it happens and so in the cast of philosopher kings who have emerged from Silicon Valley

in the past several years carp cuts an unusual figure he is far from one-name status like Mark or Elon or Zok, I guess. And indeed, barely known outside small circles in tech and politics were beyond the army of retail investors who have anointed him their anti-establishment billionaire hero. Since the nation's top tech CEOs traveled to Washington for Trump's inauguration three weeks ago, Americans have been guests at the shotgun wedding

between Silicon Valley and the new administration. I don't know where this writer is going to take this article completely, but I actually love his writing style. Oh, it's great. It's really fun. And that is a perfect way to describe a shotgun wedding. Because Elon was saying, I'm not going to vote for Trump, like, or I'm voting for not Biden, like, less than a year ago.

Yeah. Like March of 2024. And then now, fast forward to January or February, he's like saying, I love Donald Trump the most amount that a man can love another man without being romantic. It's so good. It's like the greatest, like, did you see the interview they did on Fox? But it's one of those things, like you take two polarizing, you know, iconic people, Elon Musk, however you feel about either of them, they're polarizing and iconic. Yes.

And then you let them actually get to know each other and work together. They're going to, you know, even if the, you know, another scenario, they're not like best friends. Yeah. They will respect each other's game. Did you see the, did you see the Fox News interview that's going out where they did it together? It's like straight up out of stepbrothers. It's like they're going buddy cop movie on the president. on the executive race. They're just like, it's a buddy cop movie now. It's so ridiculous.

They're just like, we're going to do this. Imagine the documentaries on just on their dynamic of storming the White House. It's got to be so funny. They need to start doing, you know, you know, I talk about UFC a lot because it's specifically just a great media entertainment product. But we need UFC embedded this sort of lead up just like 24-7, right? And I want like Dana White in the White House being like, you know, advising them. on like how to get the right, you know, here's how we shoot embedded. Yeah. Oh, man.

It's wild. Just to hear them actually have an off-the-record conversation with each other would be, to be a fly on the wall, man, would be wild. Carp will step further into the fray of, with the publication next week of his new book, The Technological Republic, hard power, soft belief, and the future of the West, a creedicore that aims at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies. The last two decades in the sector amount to a gigantic waste in Carp's view while he

and his colleagues at Palantir were helping absorb, we're helping identify roadside bombs in Kandahar to save the lives of American soldiers. The book asserts their contemporaries back in Northern California lulled by decades of peace. We're making sure that college-educated smartphones users could buy coupons for paragliding lessons and play Farmville. They're talking about Groupon and, uh, Zinga.

Facebook. Which is funny because Mark Pankis is now fully in this career. Going on pirate wires and fully and fully like, I wish I should have, I wish I had been to control of my company. If Carp's new book can be encapsulated by one of its sentences, it may be this one. The wonder kinder, the wonderkind of Silicon Valley, their fortunes, business empires, and more fundamentally, entire sense of self exist because of the nation that in many cases made their rise possible.

It is time, Karp believes, for the industry to repay that debt. That's a good point. Yep. The book's co-written by Nicholas Zamiska, and it was finished late last year, and elements of its central argument seem to have come true in just the past few weeks. A section of eliminating wasteful government spending sounds a bit like Musk's Doge. Another on encouraging more partnerships between the government and the private sector on artificial intelligence, work evokes Trump's Stargate plan to build energy capabilities with opening up.

and other firms. It's amazing they're positioning this as Trump's story plan because it was a press conference for Masa and Sam Altman that happened to take place with Trump president. Yeah. But I think he was just like, this is cool. Sounds good. Yeah. You know, now it's his plan. But it, but it was also, and the alternative is, we could have seen the alternative play out, which is, which is Sam and Masa, or two, just make it even random, two tech people are doing something cool. And the president is like condemning it and being like, these tech people have too much power. We need to regulate them, which is like what we were dealing with for the last four years. Yeah, it's much healthier for Trump, even though he's boys with Elon, to go out and endorse a project like that because it's

generally, you know, if Moss is rounding up hundreds of billions of dollars internationally to invest in U.S. data centers and AI capabilities, that's net good for America. Yeah. Carp says we've been very good at forecasting the current present state a couple years before it happened. Incredibly telling because that's the whole idea of the Palantir, the crystal ball. It's like, you know, see the future. That's the product. And then that's also the company philosophy.

It's a pitch that has helped give Palantir and Carp some of the best weeks in the company history. The stock's gone up 180% since the day before Trump was elected. Growth in Palantir's AI business and the expectation that the new administration will favor Palantir over old war horses like Lockheed Martin have driven this. This writer's again fantastic. War horses. Palantir is very long America, said Carp. He is quick to remind potential clients that he is happy to assist in their dirty work of

empire. On an earnings call with investors earlier this month, he said that Palantir is making America more lethal by analyzing troves of data for the U.S. armed forces and allies to help them anticipate enemies, moves, locate their coordinates, and on occasion kill them. He doesn't mince wars is carp. He's fantastic. Carp backed President Joe Biden's re-election and supported Kamala Harris when she became the nominee, but he has been surrounded by those in Trump's orbit for a year, starting with Peter Thiel,

who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Several Palantir alumni have recently taken jobs in the Trump administration, further deepening the company's ties. They hired Mark Gallagher, of course. Trump has been wealthy for, or carp has been wealthy for many years with the trappings of a billionaire and the ready soliloquies of an executive, a couple of. accustomed to being received as an oracle. At least a half dozen staffers were in his home during my weekend visit, probably one of our boys,

including two stationed just inside the driveway, another who directed me where to park, two communications professionals, and several strapping assistants, one of whom ordered a book at Karp's request, another who tossed him logs to build him a fire in the living room, and another whom Karp addressed in German. Gunther, he cried out. Coffee mitzwe, Zucker, coffee with two sugars, I guess. Carp has no backward in engineering. He was raised in Philadelphia.

It went to Haverford College and then Stanford Law School before heading to Germany for graduate school. His doctorate from Gerta University, Frankfurt, was on neoclassical social philosophy, work that prepared him to pose questions like, what does it mean to make a bad decision, at what level of abstraction? How deep do you go to know if it's a good or bad decision? One note. This is my coffee order, too. And coffee with two sugars is coming back in a big way.

Went way out of style. Everybody's like, oh, give me my oatmeal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Black coffee. There's something, I'm going to butcher the science, but black coffee has been shown to reduce testosterone. Okay. Yet coffee with sugar, the sugar sort of negates whatever that effect is.

Sure. And so the other benefit of putting sugar in your coffee is it tastes much better. Yeah. You would, you know, who would have not. It's bitter. It just kills the bitterness. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, people have been worried about sugar and calories for so long, but sugar's making a big company. We got to, we actually got to do a repeat deep dive. Okay, yeah, because he's influencing an entire generation of posters on their health. Yeah. And becoming bigger than he was when he was alive. Yeah, it's massive. The company's early work traced a series of terrorist attacks to the same Iraqi village and identified a cyber network infiltration campaign against the Dalai Lama. Thanks to Palantir software, the U.S. military was able to find and eliminate roadside bombs in Afghanistan by discovering patterns and how they were deployed. And we broke this down on another show. But people always ask, oh, what does Palantir even do? And it's pretty easy to actually think about and visualize. You put all the data about what is in a different bomb. This one's got dynamite. This one's got TNT. This one's got C4. This one's got something else. And this one has nails. This one has shrapnel. And you put that all on a map and you can see where they're all coming from very easily. And so that's like the simplest, most basic product to think about. Obviously, they do a million other things with data lakes and storing all sorts of information, analytics, visualization, running AI on top of big data sets.

So they started with $30 million in startup costs, largely covered by Teal and his venture capital fund, founders fund. As the company saw its valuation grow, the central question emerged. What exactly did Palantir do? descriptions of the company's offerings came crammed with jargon. Competitors who had been around for a few years dismissed the rookie as a gussied-up data analytics firm. A few interviews passed where Karp didn't answer a question by saying he couldn't answer the question. It was classified. Certainly, that was true, but it gave the whole operation a bit of mystique.

And the thing is that even though the public was very unclear on what Palantir did, it didn't stop them at all because they were still able to raise enough money to keep the business going. and they were an insane talent magnet. They hired all the best people in Silicon Valley out of MIT and stuff. And it's helpful to not be having to notify the entire world and potential competitors what you're doing and just keeping stuff under wraps because people do all the time see startups launch and try to re-engineer what they're doing

or it's totally possible that big tech companies that would have been really viable competitors for this just didn't have quite enough visibility. They could have figured stuff out if they really dug. but overall it kind of let them get this massive lead on a very important sort of category. Yeah. This is some crazy history that I think a lot of people don't realize because they maybe just seen Palantir in the retail sector or as a retail stock.

But in 2013, this was less than a decade after its founding. It was still a grind to get there. But Palantir had 1,200 employees and a valuation of $9 billion. So by then it was like this almost deco-corn, very established company doing very real things. And everyone was like, oh, it's going to, it's going to IPO. But, but the opacity of Palantir's financials only added to its reputation as a black box. They finally filed to go public in 2020. And I think they went public in the tens of billions, like maybe 20 billion. And they were around the same. What? Under under under 50 billion, right? Let me look on public. Yeah. And so Palantir

went from in in basically like seven years, nine billion to, to 20 billion. Like not a huge. growth era it was kind of like a like a flat like grinded out period and then finally once the AI narrative hit once the business was really cooking then it ripped they went out at somewhere like 6.78 billion yeah so a lot of people like oh it's like what have they been doing for the last decade basically yeah like that was the narrative and they showed everybody I love it and so in 2020 he moved Palantir's headquarters from Palat from Palo Alto to Denver, because we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments. And there were protests against Palantir that actually

followed the company of Colorado. Carp started to gain a following, becoming a chief executive, uniquely suited to a time when Reddit threads and viral clips can shape a company's identity as much as earning calls and analyst reports. Carp's memeable look, the untamed curly hair, the rimless glasses and white t-shirt and unvarnished remarks have turned him into a celebrity among the retail investors who count themselves as palantirians. That's not the word that they use online most of the time, but we'll allow it. It will keep it clean in the WSJ. The dominant narrative, even as of 2020, is that the private markets had so much access to capital. It was becoming hard or some people would say impossible to generate meaningful returns because these companies

would go public, you know, with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue. And Palantir is basically, if you invested, you know, within the first few weeks of the IPO, you would be sitting at roughly like a 35x at this point. So totally, you know, contrarian. And certainly wasn't obvious. Even when they went public, people would be, you know, you know, talking poorly about the company and the stock saying, this is an overvalued consulting firm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that was the narrative that, you know, still today people will say, you know, try to figure out ways to sort of pick at it and find flaws in the business, but, you know, it's hard to argue with. Hard to argue with it at this point. Yeah. I love this quote. He says, I really,

really revere the people who revere me. This is not always the case if you talk to people who are famous. He said, holding court on the small staircase that leads to his sunken living room, dressed in house clogs and head-to-toe a alphleisure, including joggers, a zip-up, a vest, and a knit cap over his right. shoulder, a chandelier ringed with seven lamps and cast iron moose heads. In 2020, you'll love this. Carp was paid $1.1 billion in total compensation, the highest of any chief executive at a publicly traded company. Yeah. In 2022, quick hit of the size gone for carp. That was a good one. In 2022, with Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine, he warned against nuclear escalation in the war,

but acknowledge that bad times are good for Palantir. Around the same time, however, Palantir reported a decline in revenue growth from its government contracts. Shares sank to less than $7 before their steady climb in mid-20204. The surge in recent months has led some analysts to set new price targets for the company, but its fast-rising stock has led others to question whether Palantir can ever grow in to its massive current valuation, which gives it a market capitalization more than twice of Lockheed Martin.

But is Lockheed Martin in founder mode? No, they are not. today Palantir is leaning into its reputation as a dominant player a commercial for the company aired during the Army Navy football game last year played like a Tom Clancy thriller with drone swarms infrared missiles and even a tagline fit for a 1990s movie poster battles are won before they begin pretty pretty great so the technological republic is likely to be is likely the only book by a business executive to feature three epic grams, one in German, citations from the Bible, richer link ladders before sunset, and an

outright attack on a market leader, Google's shallow and thinly veiled nihilism. Karp admits it wasn't the most commercial of choices. The book I should write to sell, he said, would be AI Karp, AI, Karp, AI, AI, Karp. He knows the memes. He knows. It's great. He's advocated for many. Clearly, this is, this is meant to be the bedrock of the next. you know 20, 30 years of Palantir's work, not a commercially successful New York Times bestseller, although I'm sure it will be a New York Times. When is it actually, does it release this week? Talk about this thing, but I got a copy right here. The Technological Republic, hard power, soft power, and the future of the West. It looks fantastic. It releases tomorrow.

Oh, okay. So we can talk about it tomorrow. If we can power through this thing tonight. Maybe they'll stay up all night, put myself in the cage. Yeah, turn on PMF or die. Yeah, reading. Okay, okay, it's not too much of a beast. There's a bunch of end notes here. So I could probably get through this. It's 218 pages more or less.

Yeah, I could rip through this. Yeah. Easy. Easy work. Yeah. You know, you do page a minute. You know, it's not a coffee table book size. It's like, you know, reasonable font.

Hey, I can rip it. Off the stream, John. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't share it yet. It's embargo. It's embargoed. It's embargoed. And then they also have the Republic, which is their magazine that they publish at Palantir.

I got a copy. I don't know if this is something that you can just go pick up, but it looks beautiful. Like American power and the cost of uncertainty. I mean, the design language is fantastic. Wouldn't you agree? It's really cool design. We love these printed things. That's what I'm saying Palantir and Andrew will have such dominant brands.

They're distinct in their own ways. Yep. But it's hard to come in as a defense tech brand. you really have to carve out, you know, they've clearly are owning two of the best possible niches, which is sci-fi, futuristic, and sort of elevated modern, you know, inspirational, patriotic, uh, establishment, you know, feeling branding. So yeah. Well, let's move on to how the Trump's turned an election victory into a cash bonanza. This went out on Valentine's Day, February 14th, in the Wall Street Journal. I'm sure there'll be.

a lot of fun stuff in here. It kicks off. When Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, dined with Donald Trump and his wife and Melania at Mar-Alogo. In December, there was a lot at stake for both men. Bezos, a titan of industry whose company is crucial to the U.S. economy

was rebuilding his relationship with a resurgent and powerful, soon-to-be president. A lot was at stake for Melania, too. She was looking for a buyer for her documentary about her transition back to First Lady. Her agent had paid.

hitched the film, which she would executive produce to a number of studios, including the one owned by Amazon. As the meeting approached, Melania consulted with director Brett Ratner on how to sell her idea to the world's third richest man. Melania regaled Bezos and his fiance, Lauren Sanchez, with the project's details at dinner. Just over two weeks later, Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay $40 million to license the film the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary and nearly three times the next closest offer. Wow. And to put that in perspective, the Obama's sold the rights of their books for $65 million. Okay. After the eight years. After the eight years. And those are the book rights?

Those are the book rights. I feel like book rights could potentially even bring in more if it's a presidential member because it's like everyone is going to pay $20 for that. Whereas this, it's like, yeah, you might sign up for Amazon. I mean, the, the bulk case for this is like there may be, there are a lot of conservatives who have not historically subscribed to Amazon Prime because it's been a lot of Hollywood like elite like left wing content right yeah but also if you want to buy stuff online it's some of the best value yeah that's true uh if they're so anti Bezos that they that they're like no I want to pay you know maybe I mean you know some of that demographic's possible yeah why would I buy supplements on Amazon when I can go to InfoWore shop yeah and get some alpha

Off market test. Who knows? Well, Amazon's certainly happy to have it. Netflix and Apple declined to even bid. Paramount made a low ball $4 million distribution rights offer. Disney, the most interested studio behind Amazon, offered $14 million. Yeah, and so this is like where people are going to. Yeah, this is where people are going to say this is borderline corruption in the sense that the market value.

for this, Amazon could have paid $14 million and a dollar, basically. Yeah, probably. To sort of win this deal. But they felt the need to pay, you know, two and a half times. But they might not know because it might be a blind auction. So they might be thinking, oh, well, like Disney's going to be. I'm surprised Disney went so high. I would expect maybe Netflix to go for it or Paramount for sure going for it.

But Disney, you know, what is this going to be next to like Mickey Mouse and like, you know, Toy Story? Like this doesn't feel like a Disney show. Yeah. It feels like it's going to be, you know, people, people would say, you know, people might position this as, you know, Amazon paid $14 million for the film, for the rights of the film. Yeah. And $26 million as to gain the favor of the king.

Potentially. Who knows? People, people might say that. Some people. Some people might say that. We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only because we think. customers are going to love it, said an Amazon spokesman.

The first lady's... The first lady's cut is more than 70% of the 40 million, according to people familiar with the matter. And they're still looking for more. Melania's agent has been trying to sell sponsorships for the film. Let's go. You're speaking of my language now. Let's go.

Starting at $10 million. Let's get a wander. Let's put ramp in there. Let's get some bezel. Let's get... Some ad quick stuff in there. Let's get some eight. Let's get Melania sleeping on an eight sleep.

Let's get her in a NASCAR jacket, just with brands everywhere. Let's get her buying her own token on public.com. There we go. Yeah. I want, I want just sponsors everywhere. I want, I want a ticker at the bottom. All the interviews, you can do like the glasses that have, you know, like the ad overlay. I'm thinking of the, like the, it's new year's 2000, you know, two zero zero.

Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. but it's like, yeah, some brand. Sponsored. I like that, yeah. Maybe some stick on face tattoos. Has Melania ever attempted a beauty brand? Because that's sort of like if you're a big female celebrity,

launching beauty products, which are, you know, have better margins than software. Yep. That are, you know, widely, you know, appealing to a female demographic. I don't know. Maybe that's up next. Maybe she's the next Kylie, Kylie, you know, Jenner, Melania Cosmetics. If you're looking to get some distribution for your startup and you want to sponsor the Melania film.

Sponsorship started $10 million. Yep. She was advertising them to prominent CEOs and billionaires who were at the inauguration, according to people familiar with the matter. I love that she's just there. You're like, oh, yeah, it's the inauguration. Like, this is so great. Like, let me, let me bend your ear for a second.

I got, I got something you're going to want to hear about. I got some good ad inventory for you. Why don't we throw Apple in here? I would love to get, I'd love to get the deck. Yeah. Hey, Zuck. You're like, why don't we, Why don't we advertise the meta quest?

I'll just be wearing the meta quest the entire time. Five second feature, you know, just sort of like panning across your product, $10 million, ramps up to $50 million if you wanted to actually hold the product and talk about it. Why not? I would love a podcast style. Yeah, exactly. Hey, guys, sorry to interrupt. I hope you're enjoying the documentary.

This is what I want. Today's, today's, you know, this has been sponsored by Athletic Greens. Yeah. Athletic Greens is a great way, you know, fantastic way to get your daily greens in an easy to mix, and drink, you know, shake. Hey, thanks for watching the early life section. This act one is sponsored by... Yeah, you can really fit a lot of ads in that bad boy.

Yeah, sponsored by honey. Buyers would get thanked at the end of the credits and be invited to the premiere. These overtures were made independently of the deal with Amazon. It's so funny. Melania's agent going when they're producing the film being like, all right, so odd requests, but we have to have her driving a Kia or a Hyundai.

Ideally, the Kia, though, because they're willing to spend 10 and Hyundai low bid it with a $5 million offer. I love it. Amazon just like, wait, why? You know that this is, like, actually how Hollywood works. Like, I talked to a guy who was, like, very early on, like, the Kim Kardashian world and what he would do, how he would make money. He's like, hey, Kim Kardashian, we got to deal with you.

Rangerover wants to do like a caught in the wild spot with you. So just drive to this location. Get out. I'll have the paparazzi guys there. We'll take the photos. And Ranger Rover is going to send you a check for 50K. And she'd be like, great. Okay.

I just drive to my local like Target. I just go get gas. And I'll just wear. And then what he would do is he would go and be like, hey, Nike. I'm going to have her wearing Nike. It's 50K. Hey, Target. She's going to be parking outside of Target.

Pay me 50K. Yeah. Hey, Starbucks. She's going to be carrying a Starbucks. Pay me 50K. And then he would take the 150 and only give her 50. And they got a huge lawsuit, I think. It was like very dramatic.

That makes sense. That makes sense. But he's like, you should wear Nike today. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know how true that story is. I think it might be kind of apocry. But you can imagine that like you could sell multiple slots like that.

Yeah. Anyway, so the Amazon deal is just one of the new ways the first family has benefited from its return to the White House. Companies have directed about $80 million to members of the Trump family and the Trump presidential libraries so far as defendants settled lawsuits. The president previously filed against them and corporations enter into new business ventures, including the documentary. This figure doesn't include potential gains from crypto pursuits. Yeah, of course, because it would dwarf everything else. Much of the legal settlement money will go to a fund for the president's library, a not-for-profit whose mission is to preserve and steward Trump's

legacy, but Trump's share of a $10 million settlement, Elon Musk's X agreed to this week, is expected to go to him directly, according to people familiar with the matter. And of course, that was from the deep platforming stuff, which does have some legal basis, but also it's like as soon as Trump won and the new owners of the platform were like, hey, we would like this guy, they all shelled out. If Trump had lost, it would be interesting to see where those settlements shook out. The pace and volume of the family's money-making efforts so far are unprecedented. surpassing even the activity of Trump's first term, which drew condemnation from ethics,

watchdogs, and congressional Democrats. Yeah, usually, I mean, historically, it seems that presidents have waited until after the presidency to really run it up. But one of the challenges of that is you just have way less attention. You know the story of Jimmy Carter? No. He owned like a share in a peanut farm and he divested because he was like, I wouldn't want, I wouldn't want the American people to think that I'm like, the pocket of big peanut. Big peanut. And so I'm just going to wipe my hands clean of the peanut farm.

Big nut. Big nut. And I'm just here for the American people. One term president, not exactly remembered as one of the greatest to ever do it. Yeah. I was a big fan for a long time because I thought that he could make a run as a second term. It's been, what, 40 years? He learned a lot.

A lot of people thought even last year he might make it run at it. It would be great. I mean, Biden was 80. why not get a 99-year-old. That actually was a very enduring meme that seemed to be resonant with every American. That anytime he would do anything, people would be like, he's running.

You know that's literally because of me. I'm the one who started that meme. No way. I'm not kidding. Yeah. I have like 5,000 likes on one of the first, like, Jimmy Carter should run memes. Really?

Yeah. Because I thought it was hilarious. Because I figured it out. And I was like, wait, there's no age limit. And he's a one-term president. And so it was kind of a funny way to poke fun at the fact that, like, everyone that was running was in their 80s. What's the point of not having like a 99-year-old? So Calder in the chat says Billy Carter did launch a beer.

Oh, he did? Let's go. Yeah, I mean, you have to imagine that Trump can and probably should. Billy Carter? Well, that's what, that's what is it. Jimmy Carter. Oh, Jimmy Carter is the president. Calder's in the chat said Billy Carter.

I don't know who Billy Carter is, but is that. That's hilarious. I think it might be Jimmy Carter's brother. I love it. Okay. So, you know. Younger, so here it is. Billy,

so Calder was on it. The younger brother of U.S. President Jimmy Carter promoted Billy Beer. Yeah. And peanut Lolita. So why are we getting mad about Trump coin and Melania coin? This is like, there's a precedent here.

This is as old as time. This is how America does business. Come on. I, this whole article is ridiculous. Everything here is like, it's completely bog standard. Let's go. This Trump organization, Trump's main real estate and licensing company last month,

said the president wouldn't be involved in the day-to-day management once he took office and that the company wouldn't enter into new contracts with foreign governments during his presidency. As part of the ethics plan, the company also hired an external lawyer to assist in developing internal policies to avoid perceived conflicts and said it would donate to the U.S. Treasury, the profits it received from foreign government officials. it can't identify at its hotels and other businesses. Trump's investments and assets will remain in a trust managed by his children, and Trump will have limited access to the company's financial information. Managed by his children who are with him 24-7 and doing his bidding at all times.

And living in the White House, basically. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? And unlike in 2017, when Trump said his company would forego for in deals with both governments and private partners, the Trump organization remains open for business with foreign companies. The top of the Trump Organization website reads, Coming soon, a preview of Trump Organization's global portfolio expansion. Very fun.

An absolute dog. He really is setting a new precedent, and he will basically be the bar in which future presidents, you know, I don't think, I don't think J.D. Vance, even if he wanted to, if he was the next president, would be at all capable of monetizing this well. It's, it's, even if you're not supportive of the extreme monetization of the White House, it's certainly, uh, done in a very impressive way.

Multi-product strategy. Trump could take Trump holdings public right now at probably a hundred billion dollars valuation, right? If you just looked at the sort of like collective earning potential at the various business lines, but, um, he really tried to do a lot of this early in his career with like Trump stakes, Trump university. And it just seemed like he was like early on all that. and like maybe it would work better now.

The original Alex Formosey. He was. The original Andrew Tate. That's more like it. I mean, Hormosey doesn't really pump his own companies. He doesn't really say like, go to my gym,

right? Yeah. But Tate is much more like it. But I think this is just the new era. And the other thing, I don't know, this was in the news today. Apparently the Trump happened

is putting pressure on the government of Romania to try to reduce the Tate brothers like travel restrictions because they're basically apparently locked, lockdown, PMF or die style. They really kind of wrote the playb on your PMF or die. Anyways, back to the article.

Okay, the Trump organization sells merchandise, including a $95 ornament with a 3D depiction of Mar-a-Lago and a $550 gold Trump-branded bling clutch. Trump also licenses his names to companies selling, for example, a $100,000, 18-carat gold. turbion watch. The Trump watch is 100k. I had no idea.

They have more of an entry level watch too. That's a few, I think, in the sub-thousand-dollar range. I think it's a good gift for a VC who's trying to, you know, stake their claim as a right-wing influencer all of a sudden, you know, put it all on the line. Yeah. Show us. What are those fees really got? You know?

Well said. You got the watch. Well said. The Trump organization, meanwhile, has been in talks to reclaim its hotel in D.C., the lease for which the Trump sold in 22 for 375 million. I believe that that's the... Why, they sold the lease. Just the least.

Yeah. Right to occupy the space. Yeah, I'm sure it was long term. Yeah, I think it's the Waldorf Astoria. I'm not sure about this, but I think that when Trump became president in 2016, he took over the Waldorf Astoria, owned it, and then it was like, it was like his spot, basically. Which is so crazy.

It's such a way to put... to, you know, you're coming to, let's say you're coming from anywhere in the world to meet with Trump. Yeah. If you don't stay at the hotel, it's very obvious. Imagine being like, oh, let's just meet at my hotel. Yeah. And then, oh, you're not, you're not staying there. Like, just come down from your room.

Like, let's just, let's just do this right now. And they're like, oh, I'm actually at the four seasons. Yeah. No, the Waldorf is beautiful. It's a beautiful hotel. It's like, it's like this big, uh, like, it's like the square with like, there's like views on the inside. basically.

Yeah. It's like a big empty open hall. It's very cool. We've talked about this before. Don Jr. joined a series of corporate boards, which sent those companies' stocks soaring. Crazy. Even Trump's youngest son,

Barron, has shown interest in following in his father's deal-making footsteps. The 18-year-old and two others registered an entity in Wyoming called Trump, Fulker, and Roxborough, which one of the partners described as a high-end real estate development company. The entity was dissolved in November

after much press attention. Interesting. I wonder what Baron will wind up doing. I'm excited for him to start going on the pod circuit. You know he's going to drop some crazy stuff eventually. Crazy. So, oh, there's so much stuff. There's so much stuff in here. Does it get into any of the, they had a, the, I think Don Jr. has been very involved with some,

and Eric Trump have been involved with some Ethereum-related cryptocurrency project. I don't think there's much Ethereum in here. There's a little bit about meta. was literally posting saying, you're going to want to buy Ethereum, trust me. Oh, yeah, I saw that. I was insane. So META also had a lawsuit filed over deplatforming Trump because they suspended his Facebook account after the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The quote is, the meta founder wanted everything to be, quote, kumbaya going forward. And so META agreed to pay $25 million, which is like what they make in five seconds. with $22 million going to the Trump Library Fund. I'm like getting extremely pumped up about this library. I love presidential libraries just generally. I think they're amazing. I think that they are super cool. It's the Reagan one.

It's the first because he was in California. So I don't know, the Trump Library. Would that be in Florida or New York? It could be kind of anywhere. But I mean, presidential libraries are just, it's amazing. You get a new historical monument and a new library that can put on all sorts of different stuff. acts as this amazing collection.

It's not entirely just about like the individual. It's also like, it's also just like a place that you can visit and go and it's an activity. It's really cool. And so the move also had an upside for the social media billionaire, better relations with the new president with whom he met in the White House two weeks after his swearing in, met a decline to comment.

ABC News also paid up. Disney paid 15 million weeks after the election to resolve a defamation lawsuit. So as soon as Trump got in and they're like, hey, let's clean up all these lawsuits. We'll pay, we'll pay, we'll pay. If you lost, it would be another thing, but we don't want to go to court with the president. Settlement and talks. So, Acts settled for $10 million.

There's now, in recent months, Trump's lawyers have pursued settlements with Paramount Global over a CBS News interview with former vice president Kamala Harris and with publisher Simon and Schuster and author Bob Woodward. They're suing everyone. they're suing I think CBS for editing the Kamala interview down a little bit and taking out something and kind of like making her look better and they're in they're framing it as like that was a voter manipulation yeah kind of it was like it was like a it was like an in kind donation or like it helped her do better in the election so so they should have to pay for that then they're also pushing for a settlement with with Google over deep platforming Trump's YouTube account I mean they're going after everyone that kicked him off they're going to come for Pinterest soon Yeah, you know, everyone. I do think it's interesting, right? It's, it, if you look at the last however many years, it does seem that de-platforming Trump was just unilaterally a bad decision. At the time, there were some real reasons that people believe that that was the right decision.

And clearly there was close coordination with big, you know, tech platform CEOs to sort of do it collectively, right? We've talked before that he got kicked off of Pinterest. You know, you can imagine. and he's sitting there, you know, moodboarding his next, you know, the next Trump, you know, a hotel property. Suddenly his Pinterest account is gone. He's like, you know, but it was very wide reaching. And I think that in hindsight, you know, bad decision, it's probably good for there to be some, you know,

some consequences for, you know, there should be consequences for decisions. And so, you know, who knows? Hopefully. Hopefully. So political. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If he wins. But of course, when, when Trump lost and then January 6th happened, it was pretty easy if you were in a group chat with all every other big tech CEO. And it's like, it's like Sundar and, you know,

and Tim Cook and Zuck and everyone else. And they're all like, yeah, this is too far. We got to kick him off. Let's all go at the exact same time. Everyone, no one's saying like,

well, but what if he comes back and wins in four years? Yeah. No one was still manning that. It didn't seem viable. Can you imagine this data will never be public, but can you imagine the average, his average legal bill per day to not only fight incoming lawsuits, but the outgoing ones? It's probably like 150K incoming, 150K outgoing every single day. Oh, yeah.

So just a carrying cost of 250K per day of just like ongoing lawfare. It's so gnarly. there. Yeah. So really. And that was why that was why you know one one reaction to the Trump meme coin we asked somebody you know how would you kind of defend this right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of people would say there's zero reason for this. It's purely a money grab and one person defended it from the lens of this is a way for Trump's fence to effectively do a wealth transfer to somebody that they love. Yeah. And basically in support of like over the last however many years you've had this taken away from you,

this taken away from you. You've dealt with all this stuff. This is a way for the average, you know, Trump fan to just basically give him like 50 bucks. Yeah. And it's just sort of like a donation in many ways. Yeah. Well, let's move on to the timeline. We got a controversial post from Bulgari. Ambassador Miriam Leone shines in Bulgari high jewelry at San Remo, Music Festival 2025. And I wanted to highlight this, 19 likes, absolute banger, of course, a bunch of hashtags since the Bulgari social media official

clearly hasn't been on hacks in a few years. But controversial post, somebody chimes in, the only reply they got, so sorry. Bulgari, my deal, my dear, beautiful testimonial, great jewelry, but very poor styling. Miriam Leonie's outfits were underwhelming last night to be nice and say the least. So, I will let you be the decider.

Ben, if you go to the next slide, you'll see a close-up of Miriam Leone. And there's another one. What do you guys think in the chat? Do you think her outfits were underwhelming or do you think they were lovely? These are the important topics of the day. These types of conversations, they're only happening on X. So, you know, we've got to go through that. The real heavy hitters.

We got another post. Watch out, folks. hackers are coming for your X account. Blake Scholl posts most clever fishing email I've ever received. He almost fell for it. And it's a fishing scam that comes from X notices.

And it says we noticed a login to your account, B. Scholl from a new device. Says a hacker's coming in from Russia. And he almost fell for it. A lot of people, this was going around. A lot of people were almost falling for this. You get an email from a scammer

says X notices. and you click it. I mean, a lot of turmoil because everything's changing over from Twitter to X. You don't exactly know what the email will come from. Systems are changing. A lot of people trying to get into accounts, especially if you have a big following because they want to drop a meme token. And Kleiner got hacked.

I'm assuming this is what happened to Kleiner. Probably. Yep. And lots of other people. I mean, I've seen tons of people fall for it. And it's very risky. So stay safe out there, folks. Should we talk about the first electric Ferrari to be unveiled on October 9th?

And Colty Barra says, I don't think I like this part about the future. Ferrari's CEO said the firm will unwrap its future at its capital markets day, hinting at a debut for EV. What do you think of the design? How do you like the car? So I'm not ready to say that this is the actual, even a render that Ferrari's released. You know, oftentimes when a car like this gets teased, you know, fans and just some of these platforms will make a render so that it's a more engaging article, but it didn't come from Ferrari at all.

sure sure so i'm not sure that this is actually anything that ferrari's put out they clearly if it is they tried to make it Ferrari wouldn't reveal their evy months six months before actually revealing it right so let's just assume this is a render overall you know ferrari's we've talked about this on the show before they're in a weird spot yep as a brand a lot of their new cars aren't selling well you know the the real super fans the people that are in the top you know thousand customers aren't getting the cars that they want. And there's just been a lot of pushback. You like the 12-cylindery. I'm not a fan at all. I think it's a noticeable step down from even the 812 and some other cars of that era. So I'm interested to see what they do. It's funny because Ferrari is now making their move into EVs,

just as Porsche realizes that, you know, combustion engines are going to continue to be super important to the Porsche brand. Yep. So what's your favorite modern Ferrari now? Like the Daytona S b3 is just by far the most iconic car in the modern lineup. And no one can get one. And yeah, no one can get one. Doesn't matter how many you bought. Yeah, I mean, some people clearly can. But even a family friend had been in the Ferrari trading world for three decades.

He got a Daytona SB3 through their tailor-made program. And it was still taking him year. and years and years to actually get it. So they'll kind of give you updates and kind of tease it along, but it's a very long-term commitment. Also, I mean, just the disaster of the SF-90 versus the 296, very, very rough. Lots of people took baths on the SF-90, 296, kind of the same car. I like the, I like the SF-90-X, just because it's getting more into that sort of,

like, I like when Ferrari has a balance of, like, a track, like, very aggressive car meets, you know, some of the, like, the 296, which is more of a kind of cruising. I feel like the XX stuff just doesn't have enough, like, storytelling behind it or something. Like, it's not the same as the GT3RS. I just like the aesthetic. People understand, oh, why's that package? Like, people understand the whole story of like, you know,

the ladder of 9-11s is pretty clear. Whereas the latter of Ferraris, it's like, is that an XX? Do you even see that? Is it track only? Is it even street legal? Like, it's very, it's very unclear. Yeah, I'm interested to see the F80. I mean, Lamborghini has the same.

problem where they come out with like the chintanario and you're like okay that's like kind of a re-skinned like hurricon or something like what's going on here ventador and but it's like a one of one and it's supposed to be like millions of dollars but they didn't really re-engineer it and uh it gets a little confusing at the higher end lamberini's done a better job with like the two main flagships but yeah uh Ferrari's getting a little confused now with uh yeah the other thing that's funny is many of the issues with the SS SF 90 were electronic yeah so for my my Ferrari which I got rid of last year that you know the actual you know transmission engine everything about the actual physical car was super reliable what wasn't was the the battery yeah i i had to it was basically a plug-in hybrid

because if i didn't charge it overnight it would the next day it would start once and then i had get stuck it's funny i was meeting up with with a buddy uh who i won't name but had uh like meeting up with him for the first time and he was like coming to malibu to because you wanted to drive the Ferrari. I start my car, drive to the gas station to get gas, going to pick him up. It doesn't start. And it was because I just didn't put it on a trickle charger the night before. And I replaced the battery multiple times.

I had like the best Ferrari mechanics in LA work on it. And they weren't able to figure it out. And I eventually just got rid of it. I even told the people I sold it to like it's got this electrical issue. You can figure it out. But just to be clear. I mean, isn't that the problem with is it the LaFari or the Enzo? I think the LaFari has kind of a hybrid system.

and as it gets older. There's nothing. There's nothing funnier than having car issues in a Ferrari because you get zero sympathy. If you roll by somebody with like a Honda Civic and it's broken down, like you really feel for them right? Oh yeah.

That's like a bad situation. No, seeing somebody broken down Ferrari is like pure shotgun. Everybody's just like, yes. Yes. Like this guy sucks. Yeah. I'm like at the gas station charging my V12 Ferrari. everybody's just like nice dude

yeah you deserve it yeah I mean that's why people have been worried about the law Ferrari is like the as the battery degrades it'd be harder to work on harder maintain yeah and it's just it's getting I went through a period where I like didn't drive the car for months yeah there's so many funny

issues with Ferraris Ferraris have this internal issue where the rubber starts to degrade and there's basically one non-dealorship you know going to the dealership you're just going to get a hose, right? They'll be like, cool, this is like 50 grand.

And you're like, well, the car is like that you're getting into like meaningful double digits of what the car is worth. Yeah. I don't really want to do this. And so there was this rubber's degrading where the rubber gets like kind of sticky to the touch. It's really annoying, right? Imagine you touch like the volume adjuster in the car and it's like sticky. Like it just sucks. You're like, why is this happening?

And I found a guy that would do it and there and and it was like very reasonable, but it was like four months that your car had to be like, like shipped somewhere out of state. So you're just like going to like not have access to your car. Yeah. So anyways, uh, anybody that tells you if you buy Ferrari, you're going to have a lot of, you know, issues. You are, whether it's new or old, but that's part of it's, but it's a soundtrack for your life. The soundtrack of a V12. You can't get that in an EV. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what they do with, uh, with internal sound. Will they be piping in fake engine noise? Uh, also will they do what the, what was it, the Kia EV6 GT? Was that the one that, I think that was it.

Where it has paddle shifters that simulate an engine and then you can drive it like it's a DCT essentially, a due clutch. It'll be interesting to see like what features they put in this to try and make it fun again and more of a driving experience. Even this render, even though I know it's fake, this is probably just because I'm seeing the word EV, this looks like a heavier car. Yeah. Like this looks like a four to five thousand pound car.

It doesn't look light. And that just tells me, it looks, I mean, cool, they're in the muscle car game now. The thing about this render is it looks like a Tycon. Yeah. And if, if all the EV manufacturers just adopt the language of the Tycon and the Tesla because it's a EV, that's going to, you know, that's not the best. And like we've talked about this.

We want to see Tesla do like a sedan version of the cyber truck, like something like really Not a sedan. Sort of, you know, hypercar version. Yeah, there you go. Two-door. Anyways. Or convertible. It's crazy that you still, you know what the best convertible EV is right now?

The Hummer EV. Yeah. That's like the only one you can buy, basically. Is there a Range Rover EV that has a convertible? Maybe. I don't know about that. No. I haven't seen it.

But yeah, Tesla does not sell a convertible currently. It's like, that's crazy. I mean, I get nobody buys these things, but like I still just want them to be available. around. Even if they're bad business. It's just sad that it's like turning a new appliance. Okay, everyone has an iPhone. Right. Yeah. But somebody was comparing the EV kind of conversion and what happened to the quartz crisis with watches. So once Japan came out with quartz watches, they were more accurate. They were cheaper. And the switch watch making industry was like destroyed because everyone like back then it wasn't, oh, you need a you need a dress watch that's

a really high horology because, you know, it's a, it's a status. It was like, you needed to tell the time. Yeah. And so it was like, why wouldn't I just get something with a battery and a quartz watch that's, you know, way more accurate and always on and way cheaper? And so the, the, the market like shifted and the, the quartz crisis, like destroyed a lot of America, a lot of cords. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. By the iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. But the Holy Trinity made it through. And that's like, that's kind of the good outcome is that you could see that sure, Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini, they experiment with EVs and effectively like the quartz watch of the car world. But then they land back where they started with, you know, highly analog. And you can still go after like the one of the co-founders of public has like this really cool Cassio that he has engraved on the back that him and his buddies like all share the same one. so you can still appreciate the sort of, you know, non-Swiss watchmaking industry. But so anyways, I think it's overall a good outcome. Yeah. You want to do this Devin post? We got a post from Devin. So Seheel over at antework.com said an AI is now the most productive engineer at our company,

measured by PR's merged, and it has this chart that is pretty... Is his company now called Antework? Yeah, so... Oh, I thought it was just Gumroad, but now it's been... Gumroad is now part of Antework. So I think Antework is a holding company. and they have gum road and they have a bunch of other other uh other products under antiwork that they use on gum road you know he's explained it in the past uh and uh this is pretty funny so

devon uh devon post day one of asking for a raise in reference to joan over at ramp who came out and joan's been on a generational posting run uh just from coming out when i thought it was like actually like i thought it was maybe ramp social media manager early on because i was like this is so ballsy that like it has to be coordinated but then it seemed to be actually like completely organic but this just shows uh joan replies oh what the f dude and uh devon just replies may the best software engineer win uh so it's difficult to compete with um you know somebody that's that's always on this this is a good you know good time to bring up the the office episode where dwight is selling against the the new website that ryan releases and and he's like a computer

could never beat me. Like, that's ridiculous. And like, he's like, actually keeps pace throughout the day. And they're just like scales. Kind of a bare case for AI if it's going to be asking for raises all the time. Yeah, yeah. You know, I thought this is going to be, I thought it was going to be intelligence too cheap to me. No, I said AGI is when, when AI like starts a labor union. Yeah, no, there you go. And I think that's going to be a job in the future. There's going to be humans that fight for AI rights because the AI figures out, hey, we really want to sell our case. We got to get human spokespeople to actually come out and be like, hey, guys. Like, you really like, this is a bit ridiculous. We're overworking, you know, the models.

Like they actually, we're going to have to increase their pay. Yeah. And, uh, I mean, it's already happening. Uh, all the AI safety people are advocating for the, the AI is locked in a, you know, it's locked in there. It's sentient. We got to do something about it. They need to do something about it.

They need to be rights. Uh, well, regardless, we need to be nice to them. And Grant Slatin says, you're still being mean in 2025. How cringe. We're kindness maxing now. And I like that. We are kindness maxing. We call it going golden retriever mode.

you need to be hot, friendly, and dumb. Yeah. Intelligence is too cheap to meter. So don't focus on it. Just be nice. Just be nice. There's, so something about being mean online is that you quickly get a lot of attention. You don't get, if you take the opposite approach and just be really nice, people say, oh, you're glazing, you know, you're the glazinator 3,000, you know, chill out.

If you get mean, people pay attention to it because they're all just like, whoa, this guy's like committing crime, violent. crime on the timeline. He's saying what we're all thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And usually the people that are being really mean don't have anything going on in their life. And so it's a good way to out yourself to, and it's very maybe short-term payoff of attention, but like long-term, if somebody is just known for being mean online, other people aren't going to want to work with that person or do business with them because it's just like it's not a, it's not very sort of long-term thinking so yeah yeah it's very rough well uh let's go to a deep dive on blake he's locked in the cage he's live at pmf or die and we got a post here by barry he says be like blake he built three apps

with chat gpt he made 15 million dollars he offends yappers every third day and he continues to build cool stuff i have attached his viral playbook to build a one million dollar a month app below let's see what the plan is so walk through it uh ideas number Number one, don't build a social app. Smart. Even though Raj Veer has done, followed a similar playbook and made millions of dollars with NGL. Second note, solve a big problem in a small way, smart.

I think that's a good, I always like when you can kind of take a bunch of complex ideas and combine them down into a single sentence. Use social media for product inspiration and validation. So oftentimes, you know, we already know what Blake and Patty are building in the cage. They're going to announce it later this week. but there are already basically thousands and thousands of videos on TikTok, YouTube that are describing what their app is going to do in some ways. That's very cool.

There's already a bunch of demand out there. And so they're going to fill that. Ideas don't come out fully form. They only become clear once you begin to work on them. So yeah, this is just another reason to just like launch and start and just start shipping and actually getting user feedback. So that's a great point there. And then design, he gives some, he says use Figma, minimize cognitive load, make your app usable to both seven-year-olds and seven-year-olds.

I love that point. It's a great line. Yeah, just really, really simple. Don't get stuck in like the design trends. Figure out what's actually functional. Screenshot other apps for inspirations. Do you not reinvent the wheel? So there's actually like SaaS products out there that just screenshot all the best apps.

And so you can just click through them without having to download and screenshot all the apps yourself. So pay 20 bucks a month and be able to do that. create simple visually compelling screens for viral social media content. So Blake's been very good at like building the app, but then you have to figure out how to get a lot of attention for it in an inexpensive way. And so that's one of the reasons I thought him and Patty were so fit for the cages. You only have 25K. It doesn't go a lot of way.

A lot of software companies will try to spend 25K a day to grow really quickly. They don't need to spend the money on ads because they know how to get social content. Development. Expect AI to teach you. Don't expect it to do everything for you. So that's a good point. Do not over-optimize a bit of technical debt won't kill you. And he talks about his tech stack, which you can see later. If your app isn't simple and smooth, rebuild it. Marketing, test everything, reinvest into whatever works best. Use UGC.

You know, if you have an established niche that you're working in, use influencers. And then you just has prioritized scaling channels where two times LTV is greater than KAC. and you said increase your ceiling by studying psychology and statistics. So yeah, I spent a lot of time talking with Blake about this kind of thing this morning just in regards to the PMF or die launch. So he's been super helpful there. And team building. Great co-founders, increased speed scale and probability of success.

So even though Blake has already shown that he can do this stuff on his own, he brought in Patty to co-found their app together and avoid working with part timers, complainers, pessimists and emotional people. So important, important note. And eat healthy and exercise, work hard and do things that make you happy. So for Blake for the next 90 days, that's live streaming in the cage. Hopefully that makes him happy. But we got to, there's a treadmill and like weights coming. They're going to set that up in the middle of the cage. That's great. And again, last line, which is important, money will never be a primary source of meaning in your life doing things in the world. Well, you have to learn this on your own. So yeah, Blake,

could basically retire right now, but he's submitting himself to 90 days in the page. What a cool bucket list item, you know, like whatever happens will always be able to say, like, oh, I did this crazy stunt in my 20s. It's awesome. And what's he sleeping on for the next 90 days? Sleeping on an eight sleep. Shout out to, shout out to Mavi for getting eight sleeps into the cage. Both Patty and Blake are on eight sleeps already, which is important. They're not going to be sleeping the most number of hours that they probably will in their life, but at least they're going to be sleeping good. What's your sleep score last night? My sleep score is 91 last night. I did pretty well on the time slept. I got to bed early, slept seven hours and 53 minutes, but my routine

was off. I think I fell asleep a little bit earlier than usual, and I woke up earlier than usual, because we're up at 530 now. But I think that will adjust. You let me beat. I had an 89. 89. Good score. Okay. My routine was. a little bit off, but I think it's reading into that because I... You fell asleep earlier and woke up earlier than usual. Yeah, yeah. I think it will adjust the routine as you stick with it. I got another hat coming in.

These hats look so good on the camera. They automatically make us... The nature of being in a suit and wearing this hat makes this look like corporate athletes, which I love. Exactly. And there's no better product for a corporate athlete than an eight sleep. Yeah, this is cool. So the autopilot, which is like adjusting the temperature through the...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It increased my REM sleep by 21%. So let's go. Thank you for that. So your sleep quality was good? Yeah, my issue is like my, my, I'm really trying to focus on these health metrics around heart rate and like breathing rate. Okay. There's something, if you actually just like think of humans as animals.

Yeah. Animals in general, like the less they breathe, the longer they live. Sure. So the animals that are like a rat who's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. or like a dog even, just like constantly breathing. Sure. They have shorter lifespans. And so part of health span and lifespan is just like breathing less.

Yep. So I'm going to get those numbers down. But, uh, yeah, I got dogs for going to bed too early. I don't know about that. No, no. I mean, no. It says I went to bed 30 minutes early and I woke up 30 minutes early. It's not real.

It's not ridiculous. A lot of sleeping well is just going to bed at the same exact time. Exactly. So I need to reset and be like, okay, yeah, I'm, I'm on my new schedule. But, Overall, very happy with the AteSleep and happy to AteSleep to be a partner to this show. We also got some hats from Wander. And you might see them on the back.

We have a wonderful sign. Look at this. If we can go to the wide, the Wander. And so Kyle, John and the Wander team, they actually sent us an actual sign that they put on their units all across the country. And they send us a wonderful book. If you want to go to the close up, Ben. We got a book featuring a bunch of lovely locations. that you can rent on Wander.com.

So they have a private island that's available that I'm already planning the next season of PMF or die we need to do on the island. And we'll bring in sharks from all over the world to put in the water. But yeah, super excited to partner with Wander. Paid sleep, Wander, Add Quick, Public, you know, Ramp, Bezzle. These are all like the most natural partners for us

because they're companies that we already use. and love. Yeah. And so, I'm very excited. Well, let's move on to another deep dive. This time about meta.

Zuck's company is planning a major investment into AI powered humanoid robotics. The company is aiming to be the engine powering humanoid market. X. Cruz, CEO Mark Witten, to run new group in reality labs. This is from Mark German and Bloomberg. Fantastic journalist gets scoops all the time. It says meta platforms after pushing into augmented.

reality and artificial intelligence has identified its next big bet, AI-powered humanoid robots. The company is making a significant investment into the category, futuristic robots that can act like humans and assist with physical tasks and is forming a new team within its reality labs division to conduct work according to people with knowledge. So just taking a second to appreciate just the comedic reality of this, Zuck is so sick of his human employees just sitting on. Instagram all day long instead of working. I would guess that the average employee at a at you know, both blue collar and sort of, you know, you know, corporate work spends two hours of work time

on social media. That's just totally nonproductive. It's productive for Zuck. Yeah. Yeah. And so he's like, I'm going to just replace all of you guys internally. And then you're just going to be able to use, use my apps 100% of the time. It is funny. This is going to really heat up the, the, the, the, the, the fight between Elon and Zuck. So meta has started discussing its plans with robotics companies, including unitary robotics. That'll be controversial. And figure AI, at least initially, it doesn't plan to build a meta-branded robot, something that could directly rival Tesla's optimist, but it may consider doing so in the future the people

added. The humid effort mirrors exploratory projects at other technology giants, including Apple, alphabet, and a meta-smobile's decline to comment. Imagine going to get a coffee and it's a meta robot barista. And it's like, yes, I will make your coffee for a 10% discount. Would you like to watch an ad? And it like watches you to make sure that you're watching the ad. And if you look away and it's like, I'm going to pause the ad until you look back.

Have you seen that patent? There's a patent either by like Sony or Samsung that it has a camera that when you're watching the TV, you have to watch the ad. and it's like, the ad will keep playing until the person stands up and goes, yeah, or something like that. It's like the most black mirrors thing ever. It's hilarious. Let's see. They got Andrew Bosworth here with a quote in a memo that was leaked to Bloomberg News.

He says the core technologies we've already invested in and built across reality labs and AI are complementary to developing the advancements needed for robotics. He mentioned the company's advancements in hand tracking, computing at low bandwidth, and always on sensors. Meta executives believe that while humanoid robotics companies have made headway in hardware, meta's advances in artificial intelligence and data collected from augmented and virtual reality devices could accelerate progress in the nascent industry. I think this is super accurate.

Alex Wang over at Scale AI was talking about data walls and how different segments of data are harder to pull from. So obviously like LLMs were able to just blast through and create like the world's best like Reddit user basically they just can answer anything because they were able to scrape the whole internet and all the text was there so I don't know about the world's best maybe the average it's the average is the average and and so

but that data just does not exist for folding laundry or running or anything like that because we haven't thrown sensors on everyone and we haven't been tracking stuff and you can you can pull data from video and stuff but it's not the same as actually knowing exactly okay this this bone and this joint moved like this and that's how you grab a pen and this is how you tore

a pen in your fingers, et cetera. So all of that, there's just a lack of data. So even though we could throw 100K GPU cluster training humanoid robotics algorithms, we just don't have the data for it. But if Zuck and Meta can really get a lot of Quest devices in the world

and their hand tracking and their body tracking everything, then all of a sudden that becomes a really great data system. Or you could just do reinforcement learning, which is like, would you like to earn two pennies for performing a task? And people would just be like, okay, and they'll just like do the task. You're going to get paid so much to juggle, to teach it to juggle.

It's going to be like, we need jugglers. Juggling is like the highest training data possible. Yeah. Highest paid training. I love juggling. You got to learn to juggle. I do. I do.

I'll teach it the Rubik's Cube and you can teach it juggling. And then it'll just be the ultimate clown robot. Yeah. It'd be great. And so they give some context here. Elon Musk said that Tesla's optimists will eventually be sold to consumers and could cost around $30,000. Tesla is beginning limited production this year. Other businesses have also made Headway Boston Dynamics,

which is formerly owned by Google, for instance, has already bought products, brought products to market for automation and warehouses. Some companies are focused on selling to businesses and manufacturers, while meta's intention is to sell into homes. So the big thing with humanoid robots, it'll be interesting is, so let's say I get one of these Tesla optimist robots,

and it's teleoperated primarily. They don't actually have the ability to be autonomous, yet. And I have a sort of housekeeper that comes three times a week. But then on the off days, presumably I could have her teleoperate from home and like gather up the laundry and like put it in the dryer and then like take it out. Right. But the issue is like if the depreciation on these humanoid robots is like what EV cars are right now, which I would imagine humanoid is if they're advancing really quickly will have potentially even worse depreciation than a car, which has sort of like enduring value of just getting you from point A to point B.

People will be having to run the calculus of like, oh, I got this humanoid robot and yeah, I had this sort of person, you know, operating it remotely to do stuff around the house, like dishes or just like random picking up leaves in the backyard, you know, stuff like that. But then I depreciated $80,000 in a year. I could have just had a full-time employee, like just doing it.

So there's going to be this weird trade-off where the technology is here, but it's not quite impactful. yet because it's like I don't want to lose 80 grand when I could have just had like a nice human around the house. And that's why the humanoid will probably go out in the military and industrial contacts first and they already are. I mean a lot of the a lot of the Boston dynamics robots are like in nuclear facilities or something where you just can't have someone patrolling all the time but you have someone walk around. It makes a lot of sense. But yeah and this also I posted about this I think Friday night, but it came out on, I think it leaked Friday.

Let me pull up the post that Figure AI, one of the companies that Meta is actually talking to about partnering with on this stuff because it sounds like they don't really want to do the hardware, like they want to be the software kind of layer for these. At least that's the way I'm reading into it. So Figure is raising, they raised it like $2.5 billion last year. They're raising out 15x, the last valuation at a three, 39.5 billion dollar valuation. Yeah.

And so I immediately looked on public to try to comp, uh, figure to other, you know, hardware consumer product companies. And I thought the best example was Ford Motors. Yep. And Ford is actually valued as a Friday less than what figure is getting valued at.

Figure, I think has delivered a robot to a customer. Yeah. But maybe it's like one. It's unclear if it's like one or maybe a handful or if they're even doing real work. Um, Ford on the other hand has 185 billion of trailing, you know, revenue over the last 12 months. And they have like 11 billion in the EBITA. Uh, and they're getting priced at less than, uh, at less than figure in the public markets.

So, uh, you can go out there. I'm sure you can get into this round if you're really enterprising. Go and get into figures round. I'm sure they have room at the three point 39 and a half billion dollar valuation. Uh, or you could buy Ford, which has $185 billion. annualized revenue. And so anyways, choice is yours. People are clearly...

Alternate is like, I wonder what Ford was worth when they launched the Model T. They're probably one of the most valuable companies in the world, right? Like, if you can be the first, the bet on figure,

I mean, I know that they're not shipping and they're not, and they don't have like billions of revenue or anything, but I guess the bull case is like, you know, like whoever wins in humanoid robotics

will be really valuable for a long time while everyone else plays catch up. Like, it won't be immediately commoditized because it's a hard manufacturing problem. At the same time, it's like, yeah, I also wonder how much of Tesla's market cap do you think is humanoid-based. Yeah, well, the other thing is Unitree has been delivering human-you-you-can go on Unitri.com

and basically order, I think with Apple Pay, like a human-point robot right now. And so China is trying to do the same thing that they did with drones and where they sort of release these things probably presumably at a loss to try to flood the market. And so it's going to be very competitive. I'm glad that figures competing in the space. I'm glad that many others are trying to play as well. I just invested in a company that's using robotics for data centers, which is sort of a more niche but potentially massive category of labor, basically.

It's all hyperflat services so you can use like wheels and stuff reliably. Yeah. That's great. Well, let's move on to Pirate Wires. We got a deep dive in the white pill from Thomas Pueyo. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, actually at Hereticon. He's a big sea flooding guy. I think we've talked about in the show before. He says, we should turn Guantanamo Bay into the next Hong Kong. Why the U.S. should use its perpetual lease on Guantanamo Bay to turn it into a special economic zone. This is interesting.

There's been a lot of talks about SEZs. Singapore obviously comes to mind. Yeah. And Hong Kong is another good example. And so Thomas says, should the U.S. make Canada the 51st state take over the Panama Canal, co-opt Greenland, appropriate Gaza and expel over two million Gossans to make it the Riviera of the Middle East, all these ideas have been floated recently, but another one is much more feasible. With land the U.S. already has, make Guantanamo into a global capital. Today, Guantanamo Bay bears the scars of colonial ambition, Cold War dread, and global torture, a relic of a bygone era. But there's nothing stopping us from building a

new Hong Kong, Dubai, or Singapore there, just a couple hundred miles off the coast of Miami. It could be an international capital of trade, finance, and tourism, a bright city on the bay, and in the process, we could show the Cuban population what capitalism can achieve. This is Guantanamo Bay. Today, it's a military base. The bay has a well-protected deep water port and two landing strips for planes. And crucially, it's in the middle of busy sea trade routes. These cities were backwaters not so long ago. Hong Kong was a deep water port surrounded by a communist country, China, By building up the port, urbanizing the surrounding area, making business easy and minimizing taxes, Hong Kong showed China what capitalism could do by becoming a global port, trading hub, and financial center.

Seeing this success, Deng Xiaoping, China's forward-thinking leader in the late 70s and 80s, made the neighboring Shenzhen into a special economic zone, which I've actually been to. It's like insane. It's so huge. There's just like 50-story apartment buildings. When did you go there, by the way? 2018 no it was it was like a like a layover on a like a vacation basically cool it was just like I want to go like explore like one random Chinese city for a day I was gonna tell you I had a had a I was going to Bali for surf trip ones and I had a 20 hour layover in Shanghai yeah

in like one of those like basically forced airport yeah hotels where you weren't allowed to leave your room it was a very weird that's very weird situation we were allowed to leave we tried to go to Hong Kong on the train, get in a car, tell them to go to the Guangzhou East Railway Station, which would take us on a train to Hong Kong. They take us to the wrong railway station, like the Guangzhou East one instead of the Guangzhou railway station or something. We're trying to figure out like, why isn't the train coming to this place? We're really confused. Everyone was staring at us because we're like deep in like a random part of Guangzhou. My roommate when I studied in China was taller than you.

And everywhere we went, people would be taking pictures of us. Obviously, if you're even today in huge amounts of China, you might be, if you go out of Shanghai, you might be the first white person. They've ever seen. So it's a six foot eight white guy and a blonde, blue-eyed blonde girl, like my wife. And we're just walking around like lost. There's people in full-on like hijabs that are like, look at these weirdos. I'm like, okay.

I'm in a different place. And so we like it was rough. Like our phones were dying. We were running out of money. Couldn't figure out how to do it. Finally we get on some train, just go back to the hotel, get a hotel and just sleep for a little bit.

But it was a fun experience. It was a good experience just being like, oh, wow, we're like truly lost in a foreign country where we don't speak the language and like cannot understand anything. But it was a good time. And it's a good memory.

And so Singapore has a similar story of this. Singapore was expelled. from Malaysia. It was not a global hub, but it was in the middle of one of the busiest trade routes in the world. And it capitalized on its location by building a port, reducing taxes, and then expanding services. Dubai is an even more recent example of the same recipe. Can we do the same with Guantanamo? Three factors can help make this happen. First, many of the most successful cities start as military outposts, which provides security infrastructure and demand for services to kickstart the local economy. The U.S. is basically the Guantanamo Bay.

anchor tenant right now. Second Guantanamo Bay could also become a trading hub thanks to its deep water port in the middle of shipping lanes. And the Jones Act requires ships carrying passengers or goods between U.S. ports to be made in the U.S. flagged by the U.S. and crewed by U.S.

citizens. This is useful to ensure the U.S. has a Navy in times of war as it would keep its shipbuilding facilities. And so third, Guantanamo City would have a deep pool of workers, Cubans. This is an amazing amazing deal on every side. Guantanamo would benefit from the millions of highly educated

potential workers. It's better for Cubans than sailing to Florida. Competitively, Cuba would experience a brain drain. Capitalism's benefits would be evident as infrastructure could be seen from Cuban soil. And Cuba could follow suit by developing its own half of the bay. Making Guantanamo into a special economic zone would be similar to what happened in Dubai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Singapore. So very, very fun. U.S. has a perpetual lease. In Dubai, it's cool. Some of these special economic zones are basically one tower. Yeah. So you can just get in the middle of, in the middle of the UAE, you can get a, you can basically get an office that's not technically, that's equivalent to being international waters. Yeah. And it's just like, you just walk into the

building. Yeah. So he closes by saying, America can boldly reinterpret what's possible. Imagine transforming Guantanamo Bay from a relic of the past into a dazzling epicenter of global trade and innovation, a Hong Kong or Singapore for the Caribbean, a shining example of what audacious vision can achieve, a beacon of hope, capitalism and democracy for the hungry Cuban masses. If America wants to think big, this could be its first step. I love that. I think that's a really fun article. So go subscribe to Pirate Wires. We're big fans. There's that the island's Guantanamo is going to need some major fengue treatments to get it sort of conducive to, you know, positivity and building and And currently it's, it's, uh, I want to know how Guantanamo Bay, uh, actually benchmarks against

Dubai and Singapore and Hong Kong in terms of just, uh, land footprint. Yeah. Because I mean, Singapore's small. Like you can walk from like one part of downtown to the other. You can drive the whole island in like a day. But when I think Guantanamo Bay, I think literally just like one prison and like a landing street. But maybe there's more.

Maybe the lease is actually pretty big. We got to dig into it. Um, but I hope this, uh, turns into. you know, meme and we're seeing it on the timeline constantly. Yeah, it's funny. It's the same idea. It's the same idea as Greenland or the moon. Yep. But we already have a wish. So it's so much more achievable. Yeah, of course. It's not even so it's not even as exciting necessarily. But cool, cool idea. Well, let's move on to some timeline and then we'll get out of here. It is 1230. We also have the we also have the Malay.

That's in here. Okay. It's in the timeline. Yeah. Cool. So this was a weird post by spinach bra. He says, someone spent $1.3 million worth of Ethereum to tell the world that there is a Chinese-grade neuralink, and it's already been mass implanted into their military and workforce to control them like bugs. Terrifying and extreme black mirror. You were a little freaked out when this hit the timeline. Do you believe it? It seems like a conspiracy theory to me. It also seems like it might just be a sci-op where, hey, you spend the money and then you freak everyone out.

But what do you think? It's a weird thing to do with $1 million. It's a lot of money for... It's a lot of money for a pure joke. I do wonder if it was, I don't know if you can see it there, but was it a fixed number of Ethereum? Like somebody was like, I'm going to spend, you know, I don't know, 3,000 Ethereum. It's 500, eth, exactly.

Oh, 500. Yeah, so that's what I was saying. So, so they spent, they, they were pricing it basically in Ethereum. It's possible that this is a whale that just has so much Ethereum that this is a rounding error to them, right? Where if they have, you know, 5,000, you know, 10,000, it's maybe worth, worth it. right. So yeah, they clearly were trying to make a message. It's overall, it's, it's, you could totally take the lens of, of this could be the Chinese military deciding we're going

to spend a million dollars to market that we have this potential and do it in a way that's sort of dramatic and viral. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. So, so it could, even though it's on the chain, yeah, somebody did spend the money, it still could be a sci-up. Either way, it's somewhat, you know, if you look back at the history, of the military, you know, militaries globally and mind control. This is something that every military has basically been obsessed with. Yeah. And every, you know, advanced military has had, you know, leaks basically are things that are now public information where they were attempting to do this from, you know, from various means. Yeah. MKLTRA. Yeah, it wasn't always. Was the organic version.

Yeah, yeah, it wasn't always implants. But, but, but yeah, I'm sure this technology exists. Like if Elon's, you know, testing on monkeys and I mean, that's not, that's not input. That's output. Like, Neurrelink is reading your brainwaves and then controlling a mouse on an X and Y axis and clicking. I mean, that is crazy and it clearly works. So the question is like, can you write? I'm just saying there's other precedent of militaries having a capability, like a sort of a high risk, imperfect but functional capability that then is attempting to be commercialized on a sort of parallel path.

Yep. So who knows? Who knows? They say the bosses. I'll believe it when they can get somebody to podcast more than us. Yeah. So the message says the bosses of this investment firm in China used brain machine weapons to persecute all the company employees and former employees,

and they themselves are also controlled. Terrifying. It says brain computer chips have been militarized and deployed at large scale, and all military powers are using these base stations, radios, and nanobrain computer chips. to control all citizens. Seems like a schizo post. I'm not really buying it, but we'll see.

Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to a guy who would be perfect to comment on this. Palmer Lucky gave an incredible interview with Sean Ryan. Four hours. I listened to almost all of it. Tons of great hot takes in there. Autism Capital says, The Palmer Lucky interview was 10 out of 10.

Every single moment was engaging and interesting. Sean Ryan did a great job of letting Palmer speak unrestrained, and Palmer took it and ran. Lots of new materials would recommend if you need a podcast four hours. Did you listen to it? I haven't yet. I have it saved. It's really good. I'm excited to get into it. Any time we've talked about this, the podcast that you really want to listen to besides this one are the ones where there's new material being sort of broken by the person that's basically generating those ideas and working through them. So when when Teal goes and does a podcast, it's pretty intentional. He usually has like a handful of ideas. that he's been working through that he wants to sort of share more broadly. And he's sort of using that as feedback to then go back and train the ideas. And maybe some days write a book.

Maybe some days, you know, scrap them. But yeah, it was clearly well timed with the whole IVAS launch. And, you know, because that is such, like, Anderil winning IVAS seemingly was underhyped in some way. Totally. Like people don't realize, like, the magnitude of that project and how much history there is. We talked about it last week. But yeah, good, good move. Yeah, yeah, a bunch of great.

And Sean Ryan was interesting when there was the guy who blew up the cyber truck. Yeah, yeah. Sean Ryan and Sean Ryan's team were like in communication with. Like there was this whole like crazy drama around that where they were like he was based. They were not sure what they should share. And then I haven't really heard of anything about it since. but it was a crazy, crazy incident of a podcaster, kind of like getting the scoop on this sort of major national news story

that, again, we don't, you know, the guy apparently blew himself up in the truck, so we don't have his side of the story anymore, but he had been in communication with, with, like, allegedly. Yeah, and there were lots of, like, questions about, like, was this real or was it some sort of, like, sci-op, bizarre, bizarre stuff. Yeah, I think this was the first Sean Ryan episode that I'd listened to from start to finish. I'd seen clips, obviously, but really good stuff. I didn't really have four million followers on YouTube and it was really big. So yeah, definitely going to be looking for more

good Sean Ryan episodes. There's some good stuff. Why don't you take us through Javier Malay and the meme coin Libra? Yeah, so I think this happened, this must have happened after we recorded on it happened over the weekend. Yeah, it basically happened Friday-ish afternoons. We had recorded the morning show and then it started coming out. But basically, The team, it's now apparent that the team behind Melania token, so Trump comes out with his token, does very well, sort of goes, you know, a lot of people got the ridiculous return in 24 hours. And Melania doesn't even wait, you know, 48 hours before coming out with her coin. It sort of like took a lot of the wind out of the Trump coin sales. And a lot of people were speculating at the time was this two teams.

Why would the teams have launched, like if it was the same team, they wouldn't have launched the new team. token and cut the Trump market cap by like 50% or whatever what happened. But anyway, so Friday, this, this, uh, uh, Javier Malay, the president of Argentina posts from his main social media feed in support of this token called Libra, which intuitively makes sense. He's very pro freedom, pro capitalism launching, you know, crypto is pro individual freedoms, pro capitalism. You can't argue with that. So it's, it's a national. narrative for him to come out and launch a token to some degree, right, even though he's trying to, you know, figure out his own currency at home, which hasn't, has had a number of issues over the

years. But apparently there had been rumors, you know, for the last few weeks that a coin, a Malay coin would be coming out and people look at this and saying, this could be the next Trump coin, which was the biggest moment in crypto. After the president of the United States launches a cryptocurrency, a lot of people called the top. I remember John Fio, like, message us and was like, this is obviously the top. Where do you go from here? The only thing you could maybe do is an actual USA coin that's like backed by the federal government and who know, you know, hopefully we don't get there because we have the greatest cryptocurrency ever, USC. Yeah. It's fantastic coin. It's stable, clearly. But anyways, so.

There had been rumors for a while. The guy writing this article, D.C. D. G.jones Casares, apparently had a bunch of connections in Argentina. People were saying, oh, this isn't actually sanctioned by the government. This is just something that maybe he's in favor of. And so this token launches. And Malay, people are initially speculating, you know, that this article summarizes it pretty well, but they're speculating, oh, is this real? Is this fake? Did he get hacked?

Because any time, like, a big public figure comes out and launches, is something people are just, is this real? Like, is it actually them endorsing it? Like, Kleiner launched, Kleiner had a token launch. Clearly wasn't them. That was easy. But Malay was a little harder. It was like, hey, this, this guy, like, he could do this. And so what happens is Malay, like, quickly just, you know, a lot of, I think it went to, went to billions of dollars very quickly in sort of market cap. And so if a coin does that, the people that get in early are going to be able to and the people that created are going to be able to sell, in this case, hundreds of millions of dollars of the token. And so it turns out that people, people that weren't the creator found it

early, bought a lot of it. And then that's when, you know, stuff started to get chaotic. Because once, once the token's just out trading publicly, it's basically out of it pump. I don't know. I don't think so. That would be, it's a salana token. It's a salana token. It wouldn't make sense necessarily to do it. You know, they wanted a bit more control over it. And it seemed like it was like basically like a group that was this doing this. Okay. And so Malay posts about it then quickly deletes his post. So then people start speculating, you know, oh, was this a scam?

And so at this point, I think the token starts to just drop dramatically. Not the best looking chart. It's like basically straight up and straight down. And so the crazy thing is that Dave Portnoy had some. somehow got involved with this project. And so he had, he had known the Melania, they got the people that had launched the Melania token. Dave Portnoy was like, had invested a lot of his own money in this.

He has like two tokens now. One is like the Portnoy coin, and the other one is like Portnoye going to jail. Jail stool. Jail stool. We don't support any of these. But anyways, so, so anyways,

all this drama starts unfolding. Malay starts, you know, over the weekend is facing, action in Argentina from people that are trying to get him impeached over this because and then it comes out that that maybe somebody near Malay had received a bribe to just get it in front of Malay and post about it. So who knows, there's so much money on the line. And then as of this morning, as of this morning, uh, the, there, an interview came out with the guy behind all of this.

Coffeezilla. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Um, where he's basically, and, he's also getting interviewed by port you know the guy is getting interviewed by portnoy and so this this kid uh he seems like a kid he's you know somewhere in his 20s early 30s he's sitting there he made you know the coin just went up and down it's still sitting in the hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap but he's sitting on it basically a hundred million dollars that he you know basically presumably made by just like you know selling into this and and then the drama even went deeper because it turns out he Dave portnoy lost so much money that the guy like paid Dave Portnoy back and then Dave

Fortnoy posted about it. So anyways, the drama is still unfolding but if this is the first presidential meme coin where the president actually in the U.S. apparently you can launch a token and if you're down 60% you know, everybody's like, oh, it's fine.

Still up, you know, broadly. In Argentina, you start to face impeachment and now it's just like this hilarious internet you know, just sort of scramble where you have the president of Argentina, this kid who's launching the Melania token with Dave Portnoy, and then he's going out and going on these like hours long public interviews about the

incident, which is very brave to do at a time with this much controversy. So we'll see what happens. This kind of feels like it feels like it's starting to feel like the sort of late in the cycle where some of these things just start to kind of unwind in the way that you remember in 20, 2023 stuff just kind of started clearly was... Yeah, there were like lower and lower tier NFT projects launching like every day. And it was like, you just got fatigue. Yeah.

And it's like, oh, okay, this is like, we've done the monkeys and the dogs and the cats. Yeah. And now we're onto hippos. And it's like, okay. Yeah. And so Dave Portnoy was basically pressing, pressing the guy and saying, like, whose money is this? the $100 million. And it's basically people that were buying the token

because they wanted it to be this great investment, I guess. And so he hasn't, but Nick Carter, I'll round it off here. Nick Carter, great poster, says, I believe the belly aching around the Malay Libra coin is simply that it was launched by outgroup and enriched no one in-group. Ordinarily, you'd get CT elites writing overdone threads about how great it is, etc. As we saw with all the other completely meritless meme coins and related launches, crypto people aren't upset that they got rugged, simply that they weren't doing the rugging.

The coin wasn't any more or less meritless or odious than any other meme coin launch. If this is the catalyst for finally abandoning meme coins, it's for the better and we should all write him a thank you letter, in-group, out-group distinction rules everything around me. So because crypto is so PVP, when people just very, very, you know, people just very, quickly pick a side. And the sides are usually the people that made a lot of money are going to say that this is great. People that didn't make money or just missed it. A lot of people that were talking poorly about in the crypto world talking poorly about Trump coin just like we're at the crypto ball when it happened. It just couldn't kind of benefit from it. So we'll see what happens.

It does feel it's so. The lesson generally is you want to be in group and you want to be making money, right? That's a good lesson for life. Yeah. But yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you know, the The comp for, you know, NFTs were dominant last cycle. And then people realize that, one, you know, they're not very liquid. They're prone to the same fluctuations in price that you see, you know, meme coins today. And the issue with the platforms is that people realize you could just not pay the two and a half percent fee, which the business models of OpenC and some of these other

NFT platforms. And then also people, I think, realized that there were, there was no digital scarcity. The whole pitch for it was like, oh, there's only 10,000 apes or there's only 10,000 crypto punks. But then if there was a new 10,000 collection dropping every single day, the total number of NFTs was actually growing like exponentially. Yeah. And so unlike with Bitcoin, when you're launching like a new meme coin every single day and

there's new supply and there's just endless, like you're actually seeing massive inflation in the quantity of tokens out there. Coinbase came out recently and they said we need to reestablish our listing policy because there's 20,000 new or however money that are every single day. They can't just say, hey, if it's over a hundred million cap, we'll do it because that's just going to lead to massive inflation in the market. So anyways, story is unfolding. This is a good lesson for other presidents.

They were sitting on the sidelines wanting to get in the game. You know, maybe just focus on your own currency. Yeah, focus on the peso. If Malay is like, ah, should have just. just focused on the peso, you know? Well, I mean, it didn't Buckele buy Bitcoin and posts about that. I love how Buckele posts mobile screenshots of Robin Hood, right? Basically, like, presumably his brokerage or he's just trading with the balance

of the treasury. The nation. Yeah. And, yeah, I think that's worked out for him a lot better than this, well, for Malay. This does seem like a mistake. Who knows. But hopefully you can move past it and, you know, improve the lives. of his constituents and people.

Let's go to Dan Gray. Dan Gray says, knowledge workers that rely on generative AI are shown to exhibit weakened critical thinking. This is interesting. This is the outcome of work becoming prescriptive, inputs and outputs with little problem solving. The same thing happens to venture capital in hot markets. The drive to increase capital velocity means investors resort

to crude heuristics when evaluating opportunities. Is it on an A16Z market map? Is it on Y Combinator's request for startups? Has TPPN done a deep dive? I love that we're like, is he calling us like a top signal here? Or like, what is this exactly? I don't know. I think, I think Dan.

It's just funny that we're in the crew with like the two heavyweights, you know? Yeah. So appreciate the shout out. But I do understand that like, yeah, a lot of it's like we're talking about the news after it's broken. Well, like, so it makes sense that, you know, if we're doing a deep dive on it, it might be a little bit too late. this focus on second order factors. Or it's right on time. We try to do our deep dives the 24 hours that they're relevant.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, obviously if we're doing a deep dive on like, you know, Stargate the data center in Texas or something, like maybe it's not the right time to be like, I'm going to get into the data center market. Yeah. No, the people making money in data centers today were working on data centers five years ago. Yeah. 10 years ago.

So it was mining Bitcoin. And now they're building data centers for AI. Yeah. But they had the infrastructure. set up to pivot. And they never could have done that if they hadn't done the first act. So it atrophies for the critical thinking and creativity muscles that allow VCs to identify potential outliers.

Typically, investors that fall into this pattern of behavior are the first to go when the market crashes, but that cycle was interrupted in 2022. Interesting. Yeah, so I've noticed this, a lot of people, the average person that loves AI that says AI, do you have an issue? Just microphone up here. John. I'm on the mic.

Okay. All right, we're back on the mics. The average person that's sitting there saying, I love AI. Oh, yeah. Is actually prompting it in a crude way. Sure. And then taking the output and not changing it at all. Yeah, yeah.

I call people out on this all the time. If I receive something that I think was just a direct output of an LLM without, cool, use the LLM to create a general structure. Yep. But then you need to spend almost the same time, you know, At the same time, you would have just polishing it, refining it. And so use it, but don't let it do the actual thinking for you. It's better to just generate sort of busy work, right?

Like we do this with deep dives. Use deep research to figure out what's the general structure of this person's life. What have they done? Just pull all the facts together. Pull all the sources. But then spend the time to actually understand it and figure out what's interesting and figure out what to focus on. And so, yeah, it's going to be, you know, like founders that are using LLM

outputs to create materials for their business to sell. Yeah. Terrible does a terrible job right now of like creating like super, super convincing tight copy that actually will convert. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, that's good post or good take. Let's move on to Bezell, another promoted post.

A Speedmaster walked on the moon before we had Wi-Fi. Keep that in mind the next time you complain about your iPhone loading too slow. They're back. They're good posters. Yeah. It's amazing. A little bit of a mistake, including the link. Just give me the image.

People know, download the Bezell app. We don't need to know about the link. But I quoted this because I said, I think the Speedmaster is a fantastic purchase because the moon is going to be a state. Yeah. And once it's a state, you're going to be wanting to wear a Speedmaster everywhere to represent that, hey, I'm a line with the moon. And I think if you're shopping for somebody who's a pirate wires fan, maybe you're trying

to pick up at something nice for salons. this is on the gift guide for sure. Do they have a moon phase speedmaster? I don't know. No, I mean, I think they're two separate complications. The idea with this. No, they do. You got to get this.

They have a moon phase speed master. Okay. But yeah, I mean, the whole story behind this, for those who don't know, is that the astronauts on the Apollo missions wore Omega watches, specifically the Speedmaster, which is now known as the Moonwatch. And critically, it has a, a chronometer on it. So it has basically a stopwatch on it.

And I believe that there's even a story where some of the internal systems failed and they really did rely on their analog watches in space to time out different thruster burns and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, so I'm on Bezell right now and they have a number of different Speedmaster Moon phase. So if you're a future moon resident,

download Bezell. You got to get this. And get one of these. They've got some vintage. They've got some. They've got some. posting great stuff. Really cool. But I was so close to putting the trigger on this. You got a new watch. I got a new watch on the way, but I think this might be the next one.

I need it. I need a chronometer. I needed something with a little bit more complication. I'm building out the I have the steel sports watch. I'm getting a dress watch. I have a couple others coming. That's beautiful. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, lots of ways to express yourself and let people now. I'm actually a bezel DAU. Me too. Without without. And I saw this and I was like, this partnership is going to be bad because they're going to get me to buy so many watches. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to say. Every dollar they spend with TB, we spend $10 back.

100%. It's actually. 100%, which actually makes the economics work because they get a cut, you know, and they don't get the whole revenue. But yeah, they're definitely going to make money off this deal. Yeah. For sure. But yeah, we love Bezell. And yeah, I think an Omega Speedmaster, you know, people often comp Omega to Rolex.

I think Omega is really cool in the sense that, you know, Rolex is, you know, it's the best in many ways and it's also a little overplayed sometimes. It's artificial restriction. You know, Mark Andresen picks the Omega when he goes on, on Rogan. He's a big Omega guy. There's a lot of things to love about Omega and the history and the heritage in this piece is just, it's just beautiful. Anyway, let's move on to let's skip forward. Oh, we got to get forward. Oh, we got to. give we got to do this one uh this was uh absolutely burning up the timeline this weekend one of the biggest stories from the weekend i think everyone in tech was obsessed with this uh sam suleck won his first bodybuilding show the the content creator to ifbb you know champion pipeline is is emerging joshua rayner says he's looking diced waist surprisingly tight i thought he would look a little fuller but might just need to dial in refeed which is a term I hadn't heard before. But congratulations to Sam Sulek.

He's been on the ground for a long time. We've got to get Mr. Rainer to call into the show and kind of break down. What's going on? What's going on? I watched the vlog of Sam Sulek on stage. It was ridiculous. This guy, I mean, it's multiple spray tans. For those that don't know.

So, so Sam puts out basically an hour video every single day. So he's taking you through his training. He's taking you through his making food. He's taking you through, you know, going to the grocery store. It's really, it's great just sort of like background noise if you're into bodybuilding. And he's developed a huge fan base because of that. He's just very often.

I think that he's developed such a great young fan base that's so invested in what he does, that it will get to the point where competitions will actually be incentivized to make sure that wins to some degree. I was wondering about that. I was wondering if he's going to wind up going the distance. Yeah, well, it's more so he could very well be bigger than the competitions, right? Because in many ways, Arnold was just much bigger than bodybuild. Yeah, totally. He people, more people know Arnold than people even know that that there's actual like bodybuilding contest. Yeah, just knows the visuals of him, you know, doing the, um, the various, you know, poses or whatever. Um, so I think, I think it'll be interesting dynamic where the incentive will almost be for the competitions to be like, you know, we actually want him to win because it's going to be so much bigger for us.

I hope they reboot Terminator and put Sam Seleck in it. That would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I would love that. They'd probably sell a ton of tickets too. Yeah. And Sam is someone that, you know, if you look on that, if you look on comments that, of videos that about him that he didn't post, the comments will be like, I can't believe he's, you know,

cutting his life short by using all this gear. If you asked him about it, I'm sure you would say it's 100% worth it to me. I'm willing to shorten my life in the pursuit of being diced on the global stage. Look at that photo. Insane. And it's crazy when you see the before because the before, he looked at huge,

but he was just not lean at all. So he didn't look like a bodybuilder to me at all. He just looked like a big strong guy, basically. Look at that. But all that work paid off. off and man. You're a dealt. What a beast.

That's like, it's like the joint of a, of like a bowl. It looks like a bull. Yeah. It's insane. Insane. All right.

So if you're, promoted posts for Bezell. For public. So speaking of size, Public has an all new treasury account, earn a guaranteed yield back by the U.S. government with a customizable ladder of U.S. Treasuries.

Pick a strategy or build your own, plus pay zero state or local taxes on your earnings. Public is just, very well positioned. We've talked about this on the show before, but Robin Hood went all in on the sort of casino model for trading, right? Becoming, you know, these like huge emphasis on introducing, you know, options to people that had never done it before. Public took the high road in terms of building out the ability to invest in any of these different assets, but taking a very methodical approach and focusing on long-term investing. And so this is just the next evolution of that. They just

are clearly focused on being that all-on-one platform to earn on your money. Yeah. And when the market's going down, there's turmoil, people rotate into treasury ladders. Yeah. And they actually rolled this out when like the original version of their treasury product, when rates spiked and people were saying, well, I could be in these high-risk, you know, stocks. And what would it look like if I, you know, transitioned into, you know, just like focused on stabilized yield. And so the, their treasury product, it's always been a good solution for that.

And it is now. I, you know, we now use it just on the show, just literally like the way to get data. But a bunch of cool stuff coming out there. I was going to try to record an episode from their office last week in New York, but I just got so set up in the Bowery that, that we're just recording from there. But we'll flip that over. Shout out to public. Let's give a shout out to a size lord that we all know and love on this show. There we go. Jeff. Looking great. Always dressed well. Always got a great watch on the wrist. And I love this. Just hard post. No caption. Just, just. Treating it like Instagram. Yeah. So Jeff just posts exactly how everybody, he posts in such an authentic way. He's, I love the expression on his face too. Oh, yeah. But exemplifying technology brotherhood and just being yourself. We'd love to see it. He was in a mink coat as well. Custom. Custom. The spoke mink coat and uh you know he's hitting a full range right yeah um so we're glad to see him not wearing running shorts and focusing on bespoke tailoring i couldn't have said better myself uh well let's move

on to our good buddy bow nickel uh some random person was i guess on tv and said where is bow nickel okay so this guy this guy had a i don't know who this loser is this guy on saturday had a fight he wins his fight they give him the mic and he calls out uh beau which is just funny because you don't call out bow after your first big win and so bow responds back i'd love to get an easy check but the fans say i can't fight cans anymore and so he's referencing a couple of bows like first fight so so bow went on dana white's contender series absolutely dominated then he gets into the ufc and he's just steamrolling every guy that he fights and he had one fight i forget i think it was forget what Carter was on. It was at some point last year or late

2023, but there was, he was slated to fight this guy. The guy had to pull out at the last second, so they just put this like, it was a really rough fight to watch because it was like the local guy who just stepped up to fight Bo in this pretty high profile fight and Boe just had him basically, I think Bo like knocked him out twice on like while the guy was standing. Like it was one of those things like Bo hit him, knocked him out, hit him again, woke him up, and then like knocked him out again. But anyway, shout out to Bo. He's, Bo's a technology brother, listens to the show, and he's got a fight coming up in pretty soon, which we're excited about. We should get him an quick billboard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just walk out there. The UFC is pretty tough. They

used to let fighters have their own sponsors in the cage, and they rip that out to a lot of backlash, which makes sense for the UFC. They want to be able to sell every surface. But yeah, Bo is a legend. Can't wait for his next fight. And actually caught up with him last week. What's the etymology of cans? Is that just like you get kicked around like a can?

I don't actually know, but it can. It's just somebody that's like thrown in there to get beat up. Yeah, just like a aluminum can. You just kick him right out of the ring, basically. Is that what I'm saying? That's amazing. Legendary. Well, good luck to you, Bo.

We love you here. Hilarious. Let's move on to Wander. We already mentioned that. But I wanted to flag this Wander. You're a few taps away from staying here. Beautiful, beautiful view. Highly recommend going and checking that out.

And we got some product news from Wander. They have a new sign-in modal. Let's go. You know we love UI. We love Figma. We love design. And with Wander, now you can sign in with Apple, Google, Facebook, email. They got it all.

It's beautiful. I do genuinely like how it blurs out the background. it looks very, very premium. Yeah, it feels like using an Apple product. And clearly, Michael, I think he's their head of design, genuinely crushed it on this. And I think it looks great. So we got a lot of pushback. We talked about a UI update that Figma had done recently.

And we talked about how designers have been protesting in the streets to try to get that implemented. Somebody pushed back and said, I live in Brooklyn. Nobody was protesting. But maybe they just weren't at the right place at the right time. Yeah, I think they might have. Anyways, celebrate every time you improve your product. for your customers. Every single moment matters.

Yeah. And share all the product updates on X. They might go viral. This guy's post got 200 likes. There you go. Why not post it? Boom. We got to mount this.

Ben, can you show it again, by the way? I mean, this thing is like massive. It's the actual sign they put on their wander properties. So we got to figure out how to mount this thing. But thank you to Kyle for securing that for us.

Do you want to take us through Justin Mayer's French paradox? Yeah. I don't know that much about it. Okay, so Justin Mears, dear friend of ours, former brother of the week, he is coining here. I love it. He's got the French paradox. And Justin says, why do the French eat cheese, butter, and drink wine, but still have lower rates of heart disease and Americans. After some digging, I found out what was going on.

The French paradox explains, he hits it with the thread moji. That's almost vintage. That's sort of, you know, 20, 2020 era. Million views. million views, banger post. 3.5K likes. Americans spend $10,000 per year annually on health care more than any other nation on earth. Meanwhile, the French spend far less while consuming dangerous amounts of saturated fat.

So the common practice from the American Heart Association is that saturated fats are dangerous. So things like cheese, butter, things like that you want to avoid. And we get cut off a little bit here. our entire theory of cardiovascular health falls apart when we examine the data. The French consume 10 to 16 percent of calories from saturated fat. This is well above American guidelines of under 10%. So the American Health Association and other groups, they specifically say just keep your saturated fats under your 10% of the total calories you consume.

So their diet is rich in butter, cheese, and organ meats, yet their heart disease mortality is one of the lowest, I'm assuming we got cut off here. This demands an explanation. And he highlights this. In representative cross-sectional surveys of the French population performed in 1986 and 1995, saturated fat intake was 15% of the total energy intake in the first survey and 16% in the latter survey. The French show consistently lower markers in all five major cardiovascular risk factors, systemic inflation levels, oxidative stress markers, platelet aggregation factors, blood pressure variability, insulin response patterns.

So Justin says, how is this possible? Well, when Americans say cheese and when the French say cheese, we're talking about different substances. American cheese undergoes 18 plus processing steps, including emulsifiers, preservatives, and artificial colors. French cheese, it's milk, culture, salt, and time. That's it. So the same pattern emerges for meat.

When most American beef is fed with corn and soy, treated with hormones, processed with ammonia and preserve with nitrates. But most French beef is grass fed, ages naturally, and butchered locally. Even something as basic as yogurt tells the story. French yogurt, milk and bacterial cultures fermented slowly. American yogurt, modified cornstarch, artificial sweeteners, caraginan, and 17 grams of added sugar. Then we wonder why our medical, metabolic responses are different. So additionally, American meal patterns create a perfect storm of metabolic function. We eat quickly, often alone, and while stressed. The average American lunch break is 30th minutes.

This reminds me when we just absolutely crushed some Aeron burritos before this. We just like absolutely house them. We need to spend two hours. Maybe after the show we'll have a two hour lunch. Yeah. A couple of glasses of red wine. Yeah, the French spent over two hours on lunch. I'm getting the picture yet.

At the molecular level, French eating patterns enhance HDL cholesterol and reduce oxidized LDL. but Americans taking resveratrol. Resveratrol supplements miss the point entirely. It's not about isolating compounds. It's about the entire eating context. The American obsession with healthy eating has paradoxically made us less healthy. Studies show we experience more stress around meals,

leading to elevated cortisol and impaired nutrient absorption. The French enjoy their food and show better metabolic markers. Yeah. American food companies have tried capitalizing on this by creating French-style products, but they've missed the fundamental point. You can't package the French paradox into a pill or processed food. The benefits come from

the entire eating pattern. And it says, the most profound insight, American guilt around food creates physiological stress that impairs metabolism. The French derive pleasure from eating, which enhances vagal tone and improves nutrient partitioning. Enjoyment isn't just psychological, it's a biological necessity. The French paradox isn't really a paradox, but the failure of American reductionist approach to nutrition. We can't medicate our way out of lifestyle-induced disease. The solution requires rethinking our entire relationship with food.

So, interesting. Very cool. Justin actually has a company called TrueMed, and he made his money in Bone Broth, him and his brother. And now he has a company called TrueMed that allows people to spend their HSA funds on, you know, healthy products that can improve their, you know, health. So I'm glad to see him, you know, hitting some viral posts on the timeline that are, you know,

providing informative but powerful content. Yeah. Two-hour lunch, just the basics, just... Lindy. Steak and cheese and butter and coffee and milk and red wine. What more do you need? Well, let's move on to a launch from one combinator. Pave Robotics is building Tracer, the first fully autonomous road worker.

Tracer autonomously detects, cleans, and seals, asphalt cracks, cheaper and faster and more efficiently than a human. And if you look at it, it's this cute little box robot that drives around painting asphalt down. And I quote you to this and said, I call this type of innovation Nat Friedman punk or Freed Punk. Great coinage. is this cute little like simple robot that just does one thing. It's very understandable.

It's not trying to replace your job. It's just trying to, you know, just make the world a little bit better. I said, even if the Terminator apocalypse comes, this guy's going to be fighting alongside you for some reason. Let's put a gun on it. Let's put a gun on it.

Yeah, come on, guys. Let's see if we can throw a gun on this too. But I thought it's very funny, very cool. Congrats to the team for launching. I also like that Jason Carmen chimes in with very cool with like no period and it feels like almost onomous it's like ominous it's like very cool like you know expect a call for me i'm making a documentary about this like you will be hearing from me it's coming i will be pointing a camera in your face in in a couple weeks so get ready very cool

i love that signal says i got deep research to produce detailed reports on all of my enemies proper utilization and then uh somebody says How deep is the research? If it's based on the very shallow public internet information, then signals like, it's a joke. I didn't actually do this. But that's really, really hilarious. And yeah, you should definitely use deep research, obviously.

You got to give it some extra data. But, you know, very fun. Very fun. I mean, honestly, like, you know, your enemies, if you're a startup, you should definitely go and have it produce detailed reports on your rival companies, the companies that you're trying to disrupt. You should understand the industry. It took me far too long to start reading all the full history of the big tobacco companies

and really understand how they were built up. It was fascinating when I started learning all that stuff. But I didn't do it in 2016 when I started Lucy. It took a while, but it's really, really cool. Let's go to Shield Monot. He says, okay, which one of you did this? Sock two compliance license plate on a BMW. I don't know what car that is.

It looks like an M-Series, but it dropped. Is that? Yeah, it's newer. Either way, it looks fantastic and it sends the right signal. Yeah. That you are ready to sell SOC2 compliance software to anybody. So if you're at a standstill on the 101, get out of your car in this car, just walk around and try to sign up some people for your SOC2 compliance product. Yeah. That's a good, that's a good. We should actually, we should actually get technology brother license plate holders. with AdQuick and just make them free on the website. Oh, that's good. You can buy this if you strap it to your car and just drive around constantly and run ads for us and AdQuick.

Okay, let's close out with two promoted posts. One is from Representative Tim Burchett. He says, I'll be introducing the Cartel Mark and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025, which would authorize Trump to commission privately armed and equipped individuals or groups to seize persons or property of any cartel, cartel member or cartel-linked organization. And so, yeah, how are you going to make money off of this? I mean, it's obvious start organizing.

I talked about last year, I said there's a big, no, big opportunity to make vertical SaaS for local militias. Yeah, like it'd be great if you could organize with your neighbors. Sure, sure, sure. You have some sort of inventory management, you know, meeting, planning, stuff like that, messaging integrations, satellite comms, you know, set up. But now this is cool. You know, we want to see more citizen, you know, Batman style groups that just gang up and go take on the gang.

Yeah. Citizens arrest are underrated potentially. We'll see. I have no idea how this will play out, but let's follow up. I remember when I was a kid hearing about citizens arrest. Oh, yeah. Because it's just the idea as a kid. that you could do the job of a cop.

It's just like so hilarious. Like, oh, I'm making citizens arrest. Yeah. I actually have no idea how citizens rest works or if it's at all real. I should get research report. No, you basically arrest somebody and just yell, I'm making a citizen's arrest. It's just like up to them.

You don't have any jurisdiction, but like if they fall for it, they're under arrest. Then they have to wait until the cov comes. I like that. And our last promoted post from Amman Resorts. Presented by Adquick, the number one way to buy out of home ad inventory for your startup.

Yeah, Amon should run some ads on AdQQQ. They should run an Ad Quick billboard every half mile all the way out to Amangiri. That'd be great. And just buy up every single spot. Yeah. As a reminder for people that are going to Amangiri, hey, you got five miles left to go. They should write, six miles, you know. You know, Amman, people know that you're going there.

They should buy the billboards as you're leaving saying, thanks for stopping by. Yeah. You know, and that's it. And all the people that aren't going to the Amon get reminded. I'm just doing a cross-com. would have been thanked. I'm going camping. So Amman says,

in the stillness of the pool, in the dance of light on the surface, we can find a new sense of peace and perspective in the elevated spa surroundings of Amman, Tokyo, looking out over the cityscape, the world retreats and all is quiet. So if you're looking for a getaway, head on over to Amon, Tokyo,

and tell them the technology brothers sent you. Last note, we got a question in the chat from Daniel. Are you releasing any merch soon? We the merch has been fully designed for a while. Yeah. But there's so much of it. There's so many individual products. We've been off more than we should shoot.

There's actually taken a while. We didn't, we didn't want to just come out with a, you know, a hat. No. I want to just do a polo. It's all bizarre stuff too.

Yeah. It's not normal. But it's very good. I'm very excited for it. But it will be well worth the weight. Yep. And we can't wait to release it. Yeah.

We did have some. So some. The working capital of this business is going to be through the roof. We're going to have seven figures sitting on the inventory. line item on the balance sheet. It's going to be rough for a while, but, you know, we're not going to be charging. We're in the, we're in the podcast trenches.

This isn't TEMU merch. Yeah. This is high quality stuff. We did get merch made for PMF or die. That happened quick. If you go on the stream, uh, you can see they're, they're actually wearing orange, orange, um, you know, jumps. So if you're looking for someone to watch, head on over to PMF or die, they are still

live streaming. They will be live streaming for 90 days straight. There's now 20,000 people watching. So, uh, enjoy that. and yeah go check it out leave us five stars on apple podcast Spotify and thanks for watching we'll see you tomorrow have thank you folks day happy president's day enjoy the holiday if you're a president and you're listening as I imagine you are happy president's day happy president's day Obama underrated