TBPN - Trump's Tech Career, Power Tools, Say His Name, G650 vs BBJ

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are telling the story of Donald Trump, not because it's the day before the election, not because this is a political show. This is a tech show. We never discuss politics. I don't actually think a single political subject. I don't think we've yet to cover a single political topic. I'm blissfully unaware.

And we're not going to start today. Yeah, not going to start today. But we are covering Donald Trump today, not because he's the former president, not because he's running for president again. We are covering him because he is a tech founder and we need to talk about the technology angle of the tech company he started, Truth Social. I've had a running joke for a while with a bunch of friends that, you know, Donald Trump might be the best tech entrepreneur of the last two or three years. And, you know, obviously it's kind of a silly thing because people don't think about Trump as a tech founder, but if you actually look at the numbers,

I couldn't name another company that got to a $10 billion valuation in tech in less than two years in this recent cycle. Yeah, it's one of those things you can, you know, saying, is somebody good or bad, is usually very objective. But in this case, there's metrics that we can discuss and going from zero to two billion in two years. 10 billion? Sorry, zero to 10 billion in two years. The stock's at 6 billion now. Yeah.

And it's been three years, I guess. It's a little bit volatile, which we'll get into. But it's crazy because everyone did expect it just to completely rug and be worthless. And I don't know, maybe that'll still happen. Nothing here is financial advice. But it's just a fascinating story of like how one of these major celebrity deals gets done, how people as big and large. larger than life than Trump work.

And there was a big deep dive in the economists that we're gonna kind of use as the backbone of research. Truth Social, called it a hit piece. I think it's actually pretty neutral. You come away from it, just kind of learning some things. There's some good, there's some bad, and we'll kind of go into what that hit piece means. But let's start, you know, back in 2016,

Trump was kind of this outsider candidate. He was the first, I think, was the first president to never hold elected office of any kind before winning. And he ran this very unorthodox campaign, tons of just posting on Twitter. Only the best. Yeah, I think, I think, I think, I think, at one point, he was posting something like 40 times a day. And I think during his presidency, he posted something like 50,000 times or something like that. He puts us to shame. I know, legendary poster. And he had been on the record on, there's like a very specific interview. I think it's back in the 90s, maybe early, I think 90s, maybe 80s, where he like explicitly says,

like, I wouldn't want to be a part of, you know, public office. Really? Oh, I don't know that. Interesting. I know that, I mean, he's had like an obsession with the media and kind of understood the, like the asymptotic returns that come from being a media personality for a long time. He had this rule early on that was like he would never turn down an opportunity. to be on TV no matter what it was.

Even if it was going to be bad, he was like, I just want the exposure. Because exposure is just so important. Yeah, he's the original, like, he's the poster child of like, no attention is bad attention. Yeah. Yeah.

And there's that story about how he like fought tooth and nail to get on the billionaires list, on the Forbes list. And it was like. Everybody else, all the other billionaires are like, like, paying to get taken off of it. Like, dude. I don't want to be a hostage. You know, I don't want to be a.

extorted and Trump's like please. But yeah, I mean, during the during the Trump administration or during like one of these sagas, there's always a question about like, what is Trump actually worth? And there was always, and his argument was like, well, I'm a billionaire because I have like brand equity.

Yeah. And it's very funny because now he's kind of converted that brand equity in some way to this like meme stock and it's like, well, it's kind of liquid and he kind of does have a lot of money now. So it's much harder to make the argument that he's not a billionaire now. Yeah, and I think he had gone through, you know, he had seen how owning a business is a great way to convert influence into EBITA, right?

Where, like, there was like a huge amount of the pressure over the years and sort of naysayers were saying, oh, he uses Mar-a-Lago as a way for people to buy favor with the Trump family in a similar way that, you know, Hunter Biden has had an esteemed. art career as well. Which is, you know, one could argue that that's another way. Yeah. But I think that could get a little political. Yeah. So I think the whole story starts essentially right after January 6th. Massive riot at the Capitol, a lot of pressure on Trump, and the tech community kind

of comes together and de-platforms him all simultaneously. He gets his Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and his. his beloved Twitter account, he gets kicked off of all of those. And he got D-platform from, like, Shopify and a bunch of other things. I think there was a rumor at the time that all the CEOs were just in a group chat together. And so there was a little bit of a moment where it was like, okay, shutting down the, he's still the sitting president because the inauguration was on the 20th. Kicking the sitting president off of social media is a crazy move.

So they had to all be in like unison and be like, yeah, we're all going to do this. And a lot of, a lot of pushback at the time, though January 6 was really crazy. But what's interesting is that within just a few days, like there was a plan in place for Truth Social. So this all started when a pair of former contestants on Trump's reality TV show, The Apprentice, Wesley Moss, who's a financial advisor,

and actually has a YouTube channel with like 20K subs. This guy, Wes Moss, he talks about like how to retire early. How to retire early? SPAC accompanied to 10 billion. Wait until you hear the end of the story. I'm not kidding. And then Andrew Dean Littinsky, who is a Harvard grad.

He now goes by Andy Dean, I think. It has a radio show. But these two guys, these two former apprentice contestants, show up to Mara Lago, and over, they meet with Trump on January 26th. So just six days after, January 6th. Like the dust is very much not setting. Not wasting any time. And they and they meet with them. They share cheeseburgers and they describe their vision for like Trump's new media empire,

which is crazy. I mean, my, my takeaway is like obviously like, you know, working with Trump is like, you know, like extremely volatile. There's a lot of things that could go wrong. But the takeaway for me is just like if you have the opportunity to go to like a billionaire's mansion who has like an insane amount of some sort of cornered asset in Trump's, in Trump's case, it's like social capital. It's like social capital. But even if it's like somebody who's like, oh, yeah, they're sitting on like massive forest reserves or like water rights and like you have a chance to go there and sell them on a vision

for like what they should do next. Yeah. That's going to be extremely, extremely valuable. Yeah. Yeah, it's an example of, you know, the market is efficient in some ways, but deeply inefficient in other ways. I have a friend who is a health and wellness influencer and basically the first person that came and pitched him on doing a supplement company.

he was just like, sure, that sounds great. The business does like, you know, millions of dollars a year in revenue now. So you can just do things. You can just pitch things, right? And these guys, like, you know, had they waited even another few weeks, maybe the opportunity never would have happened. Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's not like these guys were like ex-Facebook, X Twitter,

like really established in social media. They just had the connection to Trump through the show. Clearly, like, a lot of energy. And you'll see that throughout this story. Like the dates will go over the dates. and it's like major milestone every like three months. Like the speed of execution here is very remarkable, faster than what I would think would be possible

given the scale of the operation. So they go to Mar-a-Lago, they pitch it, and they kind of break down this idea of this truth-social, new media offering. They're talking about a streaming service, online payments network, a social media platform. And can you guess what the deal terms were? This is fascinating to me because we know a lot of companies

that have done deals with celebrities. And it ranges all the way from like, oh, we just paid them a CPM deal and they posted on their Instagram to, oh, we gave them a couple points of equity to like these 50-50 deals that happened every once in a while. I know some people that just did one of those. In this case, Trump got 90% of the new company. Which in hindsight was very fair. Considering that the real enterprise value is you can, there's almost a direct line between

the company's enterprise value and Trump's social capital. And you can see the. fluctuations there. It's interesting. I would love to, I don't know if this will ever be shared, but I wonder if there were other competing bids and people were like, there's no way we can give him 90% of the cap table. Like that would never make sense. And those people left like a billion dollars on the table, basically. Yeah. For when it was trading at 10 billion, it's literally a billion. And so these guys got, I mean, they split the rest. So I think, I think Wes and Andy got maybe 5% each. And then, of course, there were dilution and, you know, equity grants after that.

Still, like, when you think about what, where they were going and they clearly had a vision of like a billion dollar, multi-billion dollar exit essentially, like pretty good terms for not, you know, for like a couple of years of work, basically. And so they are trying to set up financing, but instead of going, I think they actually did pitch this in the valley. And I think some VC firms passed on like a traditional deal. But very quickly, they go straight to. Because the VCs would look at it and be like, all right, you have a non-operating. partner with 90%? It just violates every rule. Yeah.

You would have to be very contrarian to do it. Yes. Yes. Extremely. And then there's also all this volatility about like, okay, well, if Trump runs again, maybe he'll deprioritize true social or if he wins, then that could invite a whole bunch of other scrutiny. It's like there's so many failure modes. It totally makes sense not to do it if you're a traditional VC. Even if you're hunting for like, oh, something that's edgy.

It's still really risky. And so they decide to go the SPAC route. this was uh 2021 spaks were like super super hot there and i i actually haven't been involved in the spack i know you know some guys who have done them um but i think most people think about a spack as like going public in the sense that like the company drives the process and says like we are going public okay like now we have done that but with spaks it's much more like the spaks exist there were like 326 different SPACs, which are these special purpose acquisition companies. They're holding companies, blank checks. So they IPO the company with like basically no financials. So it's a very simple

process of the SEC. It gets approved. It has a stock ticker, but it's just trading at the value of the cash. And then they go and acquire a business that exists. And then once they do that acquisition, they can rebrand or rename the ticker and then the company's public. So the company doesn't need to go through all the traditional process and all the oversight. So it happened a ton. A lot of the people went down. Beautiful financial innovation. Incredible.

And I'm sure it'll be back. And it actually, like, SPACs are not entirely new. It was something that was like revitalized in 2020, 2021. They've existed for a while, these like reverse mergers. But Moss and Littinsky, Andy and West, these guys start calling all the different SPACs that are out there to try and get them to bite on the true social deal. And so they call 326 K. candidates, which is hilarious because you know Chumath got a call.

Yeah. Because he had like seven different, he had like IPOA, IPOB, IPOC, IPOD at the time. And they were definitely like, you would have so many of these. Oh yeah. Like you have so many of these. Like let's do it. But everyone passed essentially for reasonable reasons. Liberals wouldn't touch it.

Even those who agreed to meet were wary. Many said no right away. At least one person yelled. Like get out of my office. I don't want anything to do with you. There's this funny quote. Yeah, you have to think about how toxic the Trump brand was then, right? It was post-Jan 6th.

Couldn't have been more. Now there's been this like contrary revival. Anybody that was passing, like had like infinite reasons to pass, even if they thought it could do well. Yeah. It just almost wasn't worth the career risk for anybody to go and do that. Even the people who liked Trump and maybe they supported them in 2016 or 2020, it's like, it was very clear that Trump's like star was waning at that moment.

This whole 2024 cycle has just been like. a surprising revival of the Trump brand. And a case study on the human spirit. Yes, yes. But there's this interesting quote from Merida Merger, which was one of the SPACs that talked on the record about it. I was like, I don't want to be on half the country's radar. I don't want anyone looking at my name.

I have kids. And he said once he started to dig in, he was like it looked like a quick cash grab rather than the long-lasting business venture. We don't do the cult of personality thing. And so, you know, Adam and Wes start, they keep calling it. Eventually they find this guy, this swaggering Miami-based investor named Patrick Orlando. What a great name for a guy based in Florida.

Patrick Orlando. Dominative determinism. Essentially. It's great. And so. It'd be great at, we should do a deep dive. He might be brother of the week at some point. Maybe, yeah.

And so Patrick Orlando had already taken one of these blank check companies, public. He was sitting on a SPAC. It's a search fund. It's just like the Harvard MBA that raises 10 mill to go buy some HVAC company, but on a much bigger scale, raising maybe 100 million and then going and finding the business. And during this time, this time, there was so people that all those hundreds of SPACs out there were going and hitting up every possible, like they were, there was way more SPACs than there were qualified companies, right? And so I was golfing with an investment banker around this time. And he was like, oh, like your company, Lucy

might be a target for a SPAC, right? And I was like, no, like, we're like pretty small still. Like this wouldn't make sense. Like we wouldn't want to be a public company. He's like that. And he was like, well, what's wrong? Like, is your cost structure not big enough? That was the problem.

It wasn't the revenue. It was like, but if we could have justified, like, oh yeah, we're burning $100 million a year, so it totally makes sense. That would have been justification to SPAC, not the revenue, because the revenue is in material. Yeah, and there was, There was so much capital available at that time.

It basically was a last resort for most companies where if you couldn't really go public and you couldn't access private capital, that was the best route. Yeah. And then also like... Which had a huge adverse selection problem. Yeah. And also I feel like there had just been this massive drought in liquidity for VC funds for a long time where the companies were all marked really high and they were great,

but there was just no actual payouts to any LPs. And so if you had like, maybe you were holding on to some power law winners that would like IPO properly. But if you could get some early liquidity and just kind of clean up your portfolio by spacking a bunch of things, that felt pretty good because you could distribute the shares. Now, of course, what happened was that a lot of these companies got locked up and then the stocks tanked. And so the LPs got dumped on and didn't really wind up with anything good. But, but yeah, I mean, around this time, like Trump was really, really anxious to rejoin social media and just kind of get his content game back up. He's a poster. He's a poster.

He's both just like the founding fathers. I didn't know he did this, but he started a blog called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump. And he was thinking about like going direct and kind of doing his own thing. And there was a lot of tension about this deal. But eventually they got it done. And so on June 4th, 2021, Trump and Orlando signed a preliminary agreement to work together. As far as Moss and Littinsky were concerned, the money was coming. Now all they had to do was build the company.

So think about this. Jan 6th, insane riot, like the worst press for anyone in the entire world. Really dark time. Getting impeached, I think, around that time too, like very quickly, like just miserable. The Jan 26th, they meet, have cheeseburgers at Mar-a-Lago and are like, let's do this thing. And then June 4th, less than six months later, they're like, okay, we have the money lined up. We're going public with this company. Insane.

You can just do this. It's crazy. Cheeseburgers, he could have been having cheeseburgers at the Rosewood. Instead he was on the... in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. And so they bring on this guy, Josh Adams, who doesn't exist online, and he brings on Billy Boozer as technology officers. Great names.

Billy, I know, Josh Adams and Billy Boozer. So Billy Boozer's a tech guy. And they start building this group of software developers, because they're actually going to go build this thing now that they have the funding lined up. And so they're doing a lot of interesting things. They're working out this we work in Atlanta. And, and, like, it's basically all, like, tech developers, like, engineers who have, like, kind of dropped out of society or, like, hardcore libertarians or, like, living off the grid.

And then, and then the entire management team is just former apprenticed, like, former apprentice stars. It says, at one point, there were three or four, three or four of the people there were contestants on the apprentice. So they're just like, okay, we need somebody in a suit to, like, do bizdev, like, get, get a charismatic person who's been on TV. TV. It's kind of genius. I really think we need a new apprentice. It is funny though that because that's kind of how hiring generally works. It's like oh yeah, I work with this guy like six or seven years ago. Like he's good. I trust him. He's just like the best guy for the job that you're aware of at that time. And all it takes is like one text message and a call and he's like, cool, let's do it. Yeah. We really need a new, we really need a new apprentice. Maybe we should do it.

Something that's like Mr. Beastified for the next generation. Hit us up in the comments if you want to be on our apprentice show. So, and then they bring on this, like, remote software engineer from Macedonia, and they're basically forking Mastodon. Are you familiar with this open source project? And so they're using a lot of that as, like, the, the base code to build the network. And it's, like, pretty janky in the early stage, like, very much, like a fork of this thing, doesn't really look really good.

But they all have faith that, you know, Adams and Boozer and the... these other guys will like, you know, fix it up before they launch. Move fast and break things. Work for meta. It'll work for truth. Yeah. And so a lot of people at the company are basically just blackpilled on social media generally because of the de-platforming.

And so they're all there kind of on a mission just saying like, okay, you know, it seems like they all support Trump generally, but they're more there about like free speech and like the importance of like an open platform. And that's kind of how all these things get started. Like even Mastodon, I think, got started in the same way. Blue Sky had the same thing. And there's been a couple other, there's so many of these clones at this point. I think Jack Dorsey's working on a new one.

There's that crypto one. Farcaster. Farcaster, yeah. And the whole plan is always like, we're going to be more open, more consistent, less mercurial about the policies and whatnot. And so these, the developers, they're, they're, it here saying they found it outrageous that Twitter had suspended Trump's account. The problem as they saw it was pressure from corporate advertisers whose play at safe attitudes Adam summed up as you can't

put our brand right next to the guy that's saying all the mean words. And I kind of get that. Like, you know, if you're at Twitter and every advertiser is calling you, like, I don't want my, I don't want my ads appearing next to Trump. But what I always found weird was like the advertisers never had a problem advertising in the middle of like a Trump rally that was being. advertised or that was being broadcast on NBC or at CNN. It was only later when it was like, okay, Trump's like this really good guy. Yeah, it's kind of a cop out of being like, oh, we're getting all this pressure from this other group and just like putting the, putting the blame on them versus taking responsibility as a platform. Because it's a lot, you know, having like a programmatic

ad is just dramatically different than a podcast ad, right? Where there actually is like an endorsement happening. Yeah. And you and you think that like, yeah, people would be able to segment out like okay this ad clearly is not related to this in this incendiary tweet and usually like if you're an anti-trump guy like the algorithm will serve you like the quote tweet that's dunking on him so like you're it's not it's very rare that you're seeing just like pure trump tweets that are like yeah and the platforms you have to imagine there's millions and tens of millions of people who would only use the platforms to consume Trump content yeah and so the platform it wasn't the platform's incentive to boot him, right?

Because they're just in the business of capturing attention and monetizing it. And that was the story of all of the Trump rallies that got broadcast on CNN and NBC prior to the 2016 election. Those were phenomenal for ratings. So everyone had these incentives aligned to promote Trump. And he got so much earned media and so much free press just because he was like the clown who was polling at like 3%. But then he won. And everyone was like, oh, shit, we should probably not do that if we care about blocking him. from being the president.

Yeah. And so now he's been much more like, you know, constrained, although he's made obviously a comeback in the 2024 cycle and he's been much more platformed this time around, mostly due to X and other like podcasts. Obviously he did like a million podcasts and hasn't had any problem with those. Like, yeah, it is weird because, you know, technically like when, when Andrew Tate got de-platformed, it wasn't just that they banned the Andrew Tate accounts.

They actually would ban like Tate fan club number six, five. And that account. Because that was his whole acquisition strategy was this like affiliate model where anybody could monetize the Tate brand. Yep. Yep. And so he would go on a live stream, talk for like three hours. His little minions would like clip it and then go viral with those and then be selling. A lot of those people that were clipping had more ARR than average YC batch. Yeah. But but but but that was like a that was another like unique like moment in like. platform censorship or deplatforming because it wasn't just Andrew Tate's account that got banned. It was people that were posting Andrew Tate content. And so there was a worry at the time that the same thing would apply to Trump.

And if Rogan had Trump on, Rogan would lose his YouTube account. But that didn't happen because I think there was just like too much pressure, too much pushback, which I think is good because Rogan should be able to talk to your own. It's also very different that the Tate minion accounts were purely trying to sell Andrew Tate courses, whereas if Joe Rogan is covering something in the news, it's just news. Yeah, exactly. And so the first decision that they really have to make at Truth Social is kind of the monetization model, like the business model. And so they have this, they don't want pressure from advertisers because that was the whole thing that started this problem with Trump getting kicked off of all the major social media platforms.

And so they were thinking about either charging for the service itself, like, you know, $10 a month just to go on it, like Spotify. or do something else. They had this idea and they landed on this business model similar to the one used by Twitch, the video streaming site where most of the content is free, but fans can tip or subscribe to creators and the site takes a cut of that. And this is an interesting question that I think I keep coming back to as I dig into the truth social story, is like how much, like whether you think it went right or wrong, that's kind of an exercise for the listener.

But the question is, are the problems or benefits due to strategy or execution? Because I think that if you went to like, you know, Ben Thompson, who studies, you know, these platforms at Stratereckery and asked him, you know, what the best business model is for a social network, he would almost, he would want you to push to like the extreme ends. And that's what he was advocating for on Twitter. He was saying, like, you either need to be completely free and tons of ads. that are really well targeted and kind of be the aggregator like meta and that's why meta has done really well even post ATT and when Apple pulled back on all the targeted ads Apple's meta's been doing

really really well or you need to be completely closed pay only pay walled only like what ben does at Stratory where you know you only pay for everything yeah and Trump could have thrown up a substack and gotten to nine figures of ARR very very quickly oh yeah but he was wouldn't it would have taken much longer to become a billionaire that way. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And in many ways, like truth social fits into the theme of Trump's life, which is he is an entertainment

brand. Yeah. Right. And truth social is an entertainment experience and that you can go on there and see funny things and laugh and retweet things and things like that. But now it's become an entertainment product in the form of a ticker symbol. where it just provides, you know, daily entertainment in the form of watching the number go up or down, usually very dramatically.

Yeah, it's a meme stock. And so it's interesting because it seems like at the time there was a debate between the executives, like the apprentice business guys and the developers and the software engineers who are more on like a, they're more like missionary versus mercenary. And so the missionaries who are very all about like openness and durability, and censorship resistance, they don't want to do an advertising model. And they actually say here that, you know, for many users, ads and other profit-boosting ploys had ruined the experience of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

And I think that's an incredibly incorrect take. Yeah. I think that. Yeah, this is, we've talked about Jordy's Law, right? Which is the higher quality of the content, the more ads you can jam in it. And if you have a media product and you can't put a lot of ads in it, it usually is just not that great of a product. Yeah.

And also, I mean, there's the revealed preference, which is that every Facebook and Instagram and Twitter user says, oh, the ads are so bad. And yet they keep logging on way more than they would if they paid. And then also... With X, I want the ads to get better. I want more targeted ads. The only reason I'm annoyed by ads on X is I'm like,

this isn't relevant to me. Yeah. It's very clear that the whole iOS privacy, app tracking transparency thing was just political infighting between the big tech companies. I don't want to see bad ads. I want to see good ads for things that I'm shopping for. I like when I'm talking with my friends about something and then something pops out. An hour later I get an ad for it.

It's like a bookmark that I never had to. It's like automated bookmark. I actually know people that if they're shopping for something, they're like, okay, I need to make a decision about like which printer to buy. They'll go just like visit all the printer websites. And then it's like they hold court on Instagram. And they just like come to me. You know, oh, like, I've been doing some research on, you know, which, which jitter-free coffee company I should buy.

Let me visit all the websites and then they'll all advertise to me. And whichever has the greatest ads, I'll buy. But I don't need to make decisions based on your website. I'm going to make the decision based on your ads. Yeah. It's very interesting. But then, I mean, the other thing is that ads are just much better at price discrimination. And so if you have, if you have a billionaire in your audience and you also have a college kid in your audience and you're charging.

$10 a month, they both pay $10 a month. But if you're doing an ad-based model, you'll get $1 in ads from the college kid, and you could get $1,000 or $10,000 from the billionaire because it's targeted, you're gonna be able to target more premium ads. And so that price discrimination really, really maximizes value capture for these digital platforms,

and that's why ads really are like the end-all, be-all of monetization strategies for these companies. And it's interesting, do you know Dalton Caldwell? at Y Combinator. He's a YC partner. He started a company called App.net. Do you remember this? No.

Back in, I want to say like 2012 or something. Still in high school. Yeah. He started a paid Twitter. It was, you know, you had to pay to use it. And the whole idea was that the money would go to developers, who'd be able to develop things on top, kind of like Farcaster, where it's like open.

And he had a really tough time with it because it was hard to get that viral growth. Whereas with Twitter, it's like, you can always hear a new story and be like, oh, I should get on there and then you're on. And then the more you use it, the more money they make. And the money that they make is directly proportional to the amount of time that you spend on the site and your wealth, essentially.

So if you're buying Rolexes and Lamborghinis, they're gonna make a lot more money from you than somebody who's just shopping for candy crush or whatever. But yeah, it's fascinating. They also had this crazy struggle with their tech stack because they didn't wanna get de-platformed and rugged by one of the other, the tech companies. Do you remember the parlor situation where parlor was on Amazon web services

and because the bunch of the January Sixers were on parlor organizing? Parlor just got booted. And if you just lose your hosting provider, you're not going to be able to move over just instantly. This is what Matt from Antimetal was originally working on, which like a decentralized crypto native cloud. At that moment, that's what the original anti-metal was, which made a lot of sense. And it turns out they ended up evolving the company into what it is today because there was only a tiny, tiny, tiny group of companies that actually needed decentralized cloud. And they weren't necessarily the customers that you actually wanted.

But in that moment in time, it felt like, oh, yeah, cloud should be decentralized and accessible regardless of like your, the political leanings of the platform. Yeah, yeah. It's very niche. I've seen it work in there's this, there's this rendering network for CGI where every every CGI artist has a really beefy computer, but they're not always rendering out their projects. So they can share render time between the computers.

So the computer is basically always rendering. And they're rendering your project while you're rendering their project. And there's like render tokens in between. They have like a crypto thing. And I think it's, I think it's been like one of the more successful like use cases, even though it's kind of a small market. So then they, you know, they're hiring more people to scale up the company and like actually build this thing.

They hire this interesting guy, this Baptist of South Asian descent named Justice Eepin, who was canceled for tweeting, God smites unbelievers. Isn't that crazy? He was an engineer at some company, and another engineer posted on Reddit complaining about him, and he was disowned by his friends and called a bigot and a fascist by strangers. And what's weird is that, like, based on that response, I feel like he must have tweeted something crazy. crazier. Like, tweeting, I feel like you could go tweet God smites unbelievers right now and people would be like, so true.

Yeah, yeah. Or like, isn't that just like a straight up quote from God, from Bible? Like, that's not like that controversial, I think, but. I guess the intention matters. Yeah, but he had a very, he had a very bad go of it. And so he was one of those people that was like really driven by the mission, right? And then it says also among the other recruits was Ryan Lackey, a libertarian programmer who had been working since

1990s to stop what he thought of as excessive corporate and governmental interference on the internet. And do you recognize this guy, Ryan Lackey? Looks like a boss. I know. That guy could I interviewed him. Really? I interviewed him in Miami, yeah. This, not this year. Yeah, this year. Really? Yeah. I interviewed about prepping. Yeah. Oh, that's him. This is him. Yeah. And I mean, he has a wild, wild story. He was a civilian who went to Iraq during the war just to build a business. Like he wasn't in the military. He just went there to install satellite communications and take like really small like DOD contracts here and there. So like the the army would be like, oh, we have some forward deployed base. That's a guy. If he opened up a safe at 100, you'd enter at any

price. And you know, you know sealand that like offshore and offshore concrete platform located in North Sea, seven miles off the English coast. He went there and installed a server farm there. And he was like doing their like IT. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So he was there. I think he was doing like security and stuff. They had a man who worked at Apple. They had a bunch of other people. Basically just like the outcasts of tech like all come together in this we work in Atlanta. The black sheep. The black sheep, exactly. And it's very funny because they start like colliding with each other in very interesting ways because they're all like, they're all similar in how fringy they are, but they're all different fringes. So there's one guy who just-

Strong opinion strongly held. Yeah. Yeah. So there's one guy who described. describes himself as a literal communist. Yeah. And a vegan. And a vegan. And he gets it. And then like Eepen, the guy who tweeted God smites unbelievers, was observed proselytizing to his colleagues, particularly Gleason, the vegan communist, which is so funny.

Because it's just like you have all these like black sheep and they're all just like fighting in this chaos pit. Yeah. It's not just like a group of people with differing views that are all like happy to be around people with differing views. It's a bunch of people that are like, no, I am right. I'm right. And you're wrong.

We need no government at all. Or we need a complete government. We're going to argue until we figured this out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But probably some interesting conversations. But then there's this like anecdote about how like, so it's all like just like chaos as we work like trying to build this thing like forking open cities projects like working so fast.

And then like when Patrick Orlando like the big like investor, the SPAC owner comes by, they have to like bring all the remote workers in to like make them look bigger and like put up big displays and like play trump clips on the TVs to be like this is a real office like this is this is like a real deal and and and like the former why is there no Hollywood documentary on this yet by the way well I mean that's the whole reason I want to do the story was because you know as much of a joke as it is like like this does deserve a a profile in Bloomberg like the information should be telling this story because it's one of the most interesting stories in tech in the last few years.

Yeah, and I don't need the fifth mockumentary of WeWork. I want the first of Trump Social. Yeah, Trump Social. Truth Social. Freudian Slim. Totally, totally. And I mean, these interactions are so funny.

It probably should be like a mockumentary or some sort of movie because it's... No, it should be a very serious documentary about a very serious technology entrepreneur named Donald J. Trump. I think Trump should go on the circuit with us. Emily Chang. Yeah.

We need an Alex Conrad piece. Yeah. Alex, if you're listening. Yeah, yeah, do it. Your move. And so, and so they're, like, the tech people keep bringing, like, the Trump organization, like, ideas for, like, how to, you know, juice engagement on the site. And one of them is so funny.

So they told Trump about the possibility of giving early adopters of the site a digital badge, something similar to Twitter's blue tick. Trump thought he was talking about making physical badges, like a, like a sheriff's five-point star and mailing them out to users, which is like actually what they should have done. Yeah, they should have done that. It would have been so good. Like, it would be such a collectible to get like the original true social. Have you ever used true social?

I actually signed up. I created an account just to see like what's going on there. It's chaos. I feel like I get the core content in the form of screenshots that are then posted. Not even. There's very little that like actually makes it way over because it's all so boring. Yeah. It's all just like, and the ads are particularly funny because they're all like ads for like third party un, like unpaid for are, what's it called when you don't like register a trademark?

You're not paying. The money doesn't go to Trump, but it's like a Trump t-shirt basically. Yeah. And he's just like cool with it because like whatever. But they're all, they're all framed like the ad strategy there is basically to put up a poll, like a fake poll. And the poll will be like, do you support Donald, Donald, Jay Trump? and it'll be like, hell yes, or like, no. And no matter what you click, it's just an image.

So no matter what you click, it takes you to the next thing. It'll be like, do you want to take back the country from the corrupt Democrats? And it'll be like yes or no. You can click no, it'll still take you to the next thing. And it just takes you to a checkout for like a $60 t-shirt or like a coin or something. Well, maybe that's a good segue into their monetization and kind of the numbers they're putting up. Tell me. You have some?

No, no. I mean, you'd pulled up their chart earlier talking about how they've done. about a million dollars of ad revenue in the last 12 months. Yeah. Yeah, last 12 months. They're not, they're post monetization. It's a story of orders of money. I'm clear if they're focusing on monetization or if it's just sort of happening by nature

being a big technology platform. Yeah. But it's, uh, I'll let you get. I think the numbers are, uh, in the last 12 months, they're a little over a million dollars in revenue. They, uh, EBITDA was negative 100 million net income was negative 400 million. net income was negative 400 million roughly 380 and it's almost a 10 billion dollar company so you can think of it as like it's a gross story it's a gross story um it's wild um and so yeah i mean they wind

up building the site and it's actually like a very simple front end it's like a direct clone of like every twitter clone ever but the back end's like extremely complex because they need to have like two providers for everything like two databases two you know front end or two like uh I forget what they call it, like CDNs, because like, they get deep platform. Trump's the uncancellable man. Yeah. And he had to have the equivalent. Back end.

Basically. Distribution engine. Yeah. So they're building all this. And like, I think at a certain point, I think this happens a lot with like the Trump projects where it's just like, he's at Mar-a-Lago. Somebody says, hey, I'll give you 90% of this business. And he's like, yeah, go for it.

Like, we'll see what happens. And then they came back with like the SPAC offer. And he's like, oh, okay, this is getting interesting. And we come back with like a site that's like kind of working. And I'm like, oh, okay. Like maybe I should go deeper. I can imagine him like hammering out a tweet you know not a tweet a post a truth and hitting send for the first time and seeing it lag for like 20 seconds and then post and being like not bad because he grew up in the era like he came like he became relevant in the era that it was really hard to build software products so he had probably had other attempts and been like this is really hard and so just having a working product he's. he was probably pretty excited about it.

Well, you know, he's a printed email guy. Yeah. He doesn't do email on the computer. It's all printed out for him. And then he just says, okay, yeah, respond to this this way. That's great. And so, you know, I think as, yes, for sure. I think as things start to get a little bit more real,

the rest of the Trump org kind of descends. So Eric Trump shows up and wants a piece. And Don Jr. wants a piece as well. Melania. And Melania wants some shares. And they kind of go back and forth. They're fighting with Litinsky and... Yeah, they try to go back on the deal, right?

Yeah, they try and go back on the deal and they try and say, like, you know, oh, that thing we signed, that term sheet for 90 percent. Like, that wasn't accurate. Like, we don't want you to run this thing. Which is funny because it was already so aggressive. How do you get more aggressive than that when it's... Yes, it would have still made sense for them to do it, even if they had a point of the company but going trying to take them from 10 down to I don't know and so they so they issue another

3% of the company to the Trump org they didn't give any to Melania I assume it's just like dilution on top of the existing structure but what's really interesting is that like latinsky and west moss like the original guys even though they only own 10% of the company they must have had some block right or something or like the board must have been structured in a way that they could because otherwise you would just be hearing about like and then they were gone and like then they were gone and like then They lost all their equity and like that didn't happen. Maybe it was just like legal threat, but they knew what they were doing on that faithful cheeseburger meeting.

They were like, we will give you 90% of the economics, but we want to gain. They were on the apprentice. They learned from the best Donald himself. How do you? So Donald's probably sitting there being like they're using my moves against me. Yeah. And so like as, so they sort all that out. And as they, as they're starting to build, they do wind up partnering with Rumble,

which is like the, the, the YouTube. competitor that's actually like fairly big I know some people that have worked also public right yeah I think it's a public company I think it was another SPAC and they acquired yep our peers over it all in yep I think Rumble acquired Colin yep which is cool yeah yeah and a little cameo from Sacks yeah yeah and so they they they do have like a more robust tech stack than some of the other partners and so the idea was okay maybe we get on Rumble they can host our data but at the time Rumble still rumble hadn't been struggling with like

deplatforming as much because most of the stuff they host I mean they host like Barstool they host who's that guy from get him to the Greek you know that guy oh yeah yeah yeah he's like some sort of like former comedian now like a podcaster Russell Brand that's so they host Russell Brand these people aren't like completely agitating and being like take to the streets they're not the most aggressive so I think they I think Rumble has not had that many is kicking themselves for not doing, you know, trying to make a billion dollar bid for a truth at that moment in time. Well, a lot of the other companies were like GAB or Parlor and Getter at this time.

We're both talking to Trump about like, hey, why don't you come and make this one your home? Because we already built it and we'll give you, you know, some sort of percentage. They didn't realize it's not about the tech. It's about the distribution. Yep. That and they, and you know that parlor and getter, we're not going to be like, yeah, take 90. percent of our company. Yeah.

There's just no way. They're probably like, oh, we'll give you 5 percent and we'll pay you a bunch and you'll get all this stuff. But like, there's just no way. That even, you know, once they built it, there's just too many people around the table, too many people on the cap table. So it's just impossible. But then on October 20th, so we're still less than a year out, the day the world was

meant to learn about the merger and the existence of true social. Trump summoned Latinsky to Mar-a-Lago in a twist worthy of the apprentice itself. The former president said he was once. again considering a deal with getter and asked latinsky to convince him that truth social was better somehow latinsky got trump to sign the merger agreement wow legend like legend you get called and it's just like actually I'm bailing on this thing like get out of my office and he's just like wait wait wait he was summoned yeah yeah that was a long that was a long flight so it worked Orlando you know or land Patrick Orlando goes to the Atlanta we work with a

magnum of Vuvclico and they pop out of the champagne and the Press release goes out that evening. And the rest is history. They call it Trump Media and Technology Group. And the plan is to give a voice to all. The tech team were excited to be able to tell friends and family what they'd been working on. The press release claimed that Trump's new media offering would be worth $1.7 billion. But within 24 hours, the stock market valued the SPAC at 10 times that amount, 17 billion.

So total meme stock for a minute. Obviously, it goes down. But, yeah, for not much. I think it's still that. But even at that 1.7 billion, you know, that makes Trump a billionaire just on that one deal. Because he owns, and now he owns 60%, but at that point it was still more, but it was enough to be. Yeah, it was kind of interesting timing for this election because that was a lot of what people would try to pin him on and say like, oh, you're not a real billionaire, right? But now it's just like, check the market cap.

You can run the numbers yourself. Yep. Yeah. And even though like a lot of it's locked up, I'm sure he can borrow against it. I'm sure there's some sort of collateral. He's probably gotten some out and we'll get more out and stuff. So yeah, it's fascinating. And so they launch and there's a bunch of like, you know, negative press and they get attacked. And at one point they, one of the companies that's providing their back-end technology actually does close truth socials account. But because the tech team had built these backups, they were only down. It affected 8.5% of their traffic for three minutes. minutes. That's it. Pretty crazy. These guys are better than cracked.

It's like insane. And so, of course, they're not done yet because, you know, dear friend of Donald Trump, Gary Gensler pops up to hit them with a lawsuit, saying that the SPAC was illegal because his view was that Orlando had spacked with the idea of, acquiring truth social and you can't do that you have to truly set up a blank check and not know and so if there's evidence that it's like oh you're gonna spec IPO G to acquire this company then that would mean that you should just spack you should just go through your regular IPO yeah but if you truly

spec the blank check and then you get the calling out okay this is what I'm searching for I'm going with it is that lawsuit still it's settled settled we'll get there but it did settle and now everything's above board hilariously enough. And so, of course, like, there's a bunch more problems that happen. People figure out that the company's working out of this. We work in Atlanta. And so, you know, tons of Trump haters are, like, doxing people and taking photos outside,

and they're really worried about, you know, threats to their lives, which should have been predictable if you go to work for this. Yeah, why were they not in Trump Tower? Seriously. They should have been somewhere, like, secure, I would think. something, I don't know, work out of Myrolago, I guess, or something. But now that like the SPAC is going through, it's the parent company was now the most valuable SPAC in history. And all the tech workers basically, you know, consider the apprentice guys, like they're de facto bosses, even though

it seems like all the titles are pretty vague. The employees learn that there's going to be this new guy running the company, essentially a CEO, and it's Congressman Devin Nunes. Of course. Yes. And of course, there's as much of pushback. Once you, once you've gone public, you usually go try to find a great congressman to run your company. Yeah, yeah. What a dream.

But Nunes had an interesting background. So he spent two decades representing a rural area in California and was best known for his time as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee during the investigation into Trump's alleged collusion with Russian meddling in the. 2016 campaign and at that time Nunes had accused the entire intelligence community of a conspiracy to take down Trump so like he was the one congressman or like the main congressman who was like pushing back against the Russiagate stuff and so that probably won him like a ton of favor with Trump because he's like you went to bat for me on this one committee like thank you all work with you in the future and so you know true social employees like respected him for that but they were kind of

of like what is this non-tech guy doing running our company one person said this is like going and hiring a high school baseball coach to be the CEO of Microsoft and I love that love that quote because they're like we are Microsoft yeah you run like a website that Britt pulls in a million dollars a year there are like indie hackers that are doing better than you and you're comparing yourself to a business that's worth a trillion dollars but respect respect and so it's like maybe he's actually qualified to run this way? Who knows? It's such a small operation, you know, whatever. So he doesn't comment in this economist article, but there's a bunch of interesting stories about him kind of going back and forth. And interestingly, like while he was there, he pushes for advertising as soon as

possible. Yeah. So again, it's like this guy's completely unqualified and like all the employees, all the disgruntled employees who spoke to the economist for this article are like, oh, he's so unqualified. He was the worst boss. He was terrible. But like, I keep seeing like some of the decisions he'd make. And I'm like, these seem reasonable. Like advertising is the correct business model. And you should run fast. And so there's a lot of, like, the new CEO told the team they needed to work harder because a lot of money had been spent.

Like that's true. Like they were burning a lot of money. Like he said that they needed to do advertising as soon as possible. That's also true. Like it's like kind of odd to say because, yeah, he doesn't have the traditional background, but it seems like he kind of made the right decisions. A lot of business is common sense. Yeah.

And so the tech guys are like Adams and Boozer are like really pissed because they really don't want to do advertising. They're like, let's get, let's get like, like, and they're comping themselves to Facebook and Twitter. They're like, Facebook and Twitter didn't have ads and they launched. But, you know, just like they need, they need a growth story. It's that balance between, yeah, revenue and just traction, right? Yeah, there is something to be said for that where it's like, would the stock be trading even higher if people weren't like, they only have a million dollars. It's like, well, they haven't even started monetizing yet. Yeah, yeah. Who knows? Maybe the first month would have a hundred million dollars. I actually think it would be trading higher.

Yeah, because if somebody told you, I was shocked when you told me that they had a million dollars of revenue, right? Like it seems like you would intentionally have to be trying not to monetize to only have that much revenue on that much attention. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's a terrible conversion of attention to. I mean, as a political candidate, Trump has raised like almost a billion dollars, right? Just by asking for donations. So you would assume that if we went on there and was like, I'm going to give you at least some sort of product.

maybe it's like a badge or something. Like he would be able to get like the tens of millions, hundreds of millions something. Yeah, or the physical pin. Yeah, something. You know, you would think if he's just selling stuff, you'd be able to get more because you're monetizing the same attention.

But it's just very different when it's this like ad platform. But yeah, very interesting. So at long last, the app was released to the public on February 21st, 2022. So it's just over a year from that like dinner at Mar-a-Lago over cheeseburgers. It really is fast execution. Like you have to.

to admit it. And it's interesting comparing it to like Quibi. Do you remember that company? Yeah. Like they spent like what six years in like stealth raised all this money. Toiling away. And it just like went nowhere. It's like at least they're down to fail fast. Like respect that. Yeah. But of course the launch is like a mess and like hundreds of thousands of people spent days in the waiting list trying to sign up. Once in they encountered glitches galore, error messages, broken links. One page on the website misspelled truth as T-R-U-H, just like general like chaos, which is normal. It's all normal stuff.

But by the end of the week, Truth Social was number one on the app store. I'm sure they got a call from Nikita Beer. Yeah. I'm sure Nikita was actually, I'm sure they were spending eight figures on intro just for Nikita just to get his advice. Yeah.

But again, like, just remind people, the app store is a measure of like, of acceleration, not absolute numbers. Pure volume. So if you launch and grow very fast, then you'll rank higher. It's much harder for a product. Established app. Yeah, an established app like Facebook to be number one because they're not necessarily growing as much.

But more than 866,000 people installed it in the first week. Instagram by comparison only signed up about 100,000 users in its launch week. It's such a bad comparison. This is such a bad comparison because Kevin's sister was like, an awesome guy in tech, but he was like an intern at Twitter. And they knew if you actually want to create a super engaged social platform. Start small. Start small. Get the right users.

Don't, don't, don't just sign up as many as long. I like that this journalist is writing it like it's a dunk. Like, oh, like, you know. Got him. Got him. It's like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. But so at this point, like, it is a pretty good launch that number one in the app store.

Maybe Trump's popularity in widespread frustrations with big tech really could fuel a major new platform. And so two weeks later on March 11th, the terms of Nunes' contract were finalized. He would make 750K in his first year plus bonuses and shares in the company. And then some other people came into the company as well. But they're working 20 hours a day for six straight months. They said they didn't see their families. They're really grinding to make this work.

But there's just total chaos. They really took all the core lessons from Silicon Valley history in the prior decade and just implemented them perfectly. Yeah. But obviously things are chaotic. There's, you know, disgruntled employees who are like literally destroying code, like erasing servers and stuff on their way out. That's like wild thing to do.

Also like super illegal. And like you could face like a bunch of like civil penalties if you do this. Interestingly, a bunch of a bunch of ex employees like wouldn't talk on the record for this because apparently in the NDA that you sign with truth, social, there's a $5 million penalty. I'm going to start putting that in the NDAs. I send a VCs. If you want to see my pitch deck,

it's a $5 million fine. If you screenshot the docs in, yeah, get out of here. And so some of the tech people start leaving, the general counsel, Adams and Boozer, and a lot of people are like, oh, this is like the beginning of the end. The stock went down by 10%. Yeah, the stock went down by 10%.

And then another 10% the next day when the tech people quit. But obviously it's like gone back up. And there's this like discussion now about like the pre-devin-Nunes era and the post-devin-Nunes era. Because Nunes relocated the truth social offices to Florida, moved all of Truth Social's data

over to Rumble's nascent cloud service, sign the company up for Rumble's new ad platform. And again, this seems like, you know, maybe it's controversial and the employees didn't like it, but those all seem like really, really smart moves. Like building a new ad platform, is genuinely very hard. And I remember when Netflix announced

that they were gonna be doing ads, they wanted to do everything like in-house and very bespoke. Yeah, there's apps on the app store with tens of millions of users that use other ad networks to monetize because it's just- There's more liquidity. Yeah, exactly.

And so like if it's something that people, I don't know if Netflix wound up actually partnering with Microsoft to do the ad network. I think they were gonna do like the Bing ad network, which obviously is very robust, has great matching algorithms. and lots of liquidity. But if it's potentially good enough for Netflix,

where Netflix would at least consider it, and analysts like Ben Thompson would recommend it, like obviously it's right for this tiny company that has just a few employees, like, and is only a year old to, like, not try and build everything in-house, especially if they have a friendly company with Rumble that's down to partner with them.

So again, very, very interesting where, like, I think the execution was good. I think the strategy might have been a little lacking just in the, And this is something we should discuss more about, like, you know, is building a new social network the right strategy for Trump generally? Or should he have just done the substack? I think it was a, it was just a timing thing.

When they decided to do this, it was absolutely the best possible product to build. And he didn't know that Elon was going to buy X. Yeah. And so he didn't know that he was going to get his account back. He didn't know that he was going to be able to go on Rogan on his shoe. Has he gotten his, he's gotten his other accounts back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he has, I think he has pretty much all of his accounts back. Yeah. And he's been able to kind of do everything, which has somewhat taken the air out of the two social balloon because it's not as existential to him. Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people thought that it would already be a zero, like full on zero. Yeah. And certainly not. Yeah.

So they kind of changed their, they changed their startup culture. It used to be agile teams and horizontal management. management, Nunes imposed a top-down structure in which workers were siloed in small groups under different managers. Again, like reasonable. Like sometimes that's the right thing. Sometimes you want something that's very flat and horizontal. Sometimes you want something that's a little bit more vertical. You have to wonder, was there, was Nunes in group chats with highly competent tech CEOs being like, hey, what would you do in this situation?

And they're like, yeah, I would silo things out, move from being a horizontal structure to like, you know, kind of verticalizing the management teams. like have build out these different functions. Like you're really going to want to have a trust and safety department. That's important for any social media platform. Totally possible. Yeah, I guess from here, where does going into tomorrow, we don't talk about politics on this show, but what happens to truth, you know,

if Trump is elected is the most natural next step for the U.S. government to acquire the platform and use it as sort of a digital town square. for citizens or where does truth social go from here? I have no idea. Is it purely an entertainment product? It feels like it's like bare cases on both sides. Yeah.

If he wins. Stuck between a bear case and a bear case. I mean, if he wins, he doesn't need this like liquidity injection as much anymore. So, I mean, this is, I think Peter Thiel had a quote in, who's that Axios guy, I forget, but he was doing some interview. Dan? Yeah, Dan Primack. And he was doing some interview, and the question was like,

what's going on with true social. And Peter was basically, I think it's some sort of like, you know, sneaky way to transfer wealth to, uh, to get around like campaign finance rules. Um, and so,

and so that, that becomes less of an incentive. Like if you want Trump to win and you want him to have wealth so that he can borrow against that and finance his campaign or something like, something along those lines, even though he's locked up and hasn't sold the shares yet. It's like clearly having a four billion dollar asset is valuable when you're running for when you're running for president.

But after if he wins, then, okay, you don't need to pump the stock anymore. And if he loses, it's like maybe he becomes less relevant. He's not deplatformed anymore. And it's not like if he loses, he'd be deplatformed again unless he tries some January 6th stuff again, which would be crazy. Yeah. So I don't know. It is, it is tough.

Yeah. It's certainly a much easier long if he wins tomorrow because it's just another half a decade. Yeah. A lot of a lot of attention. a lot of attention and relevancy. Yep. And, and, and, and, and I guess the historical ways that presidents would monetize their attention would, I'm going to be president and then I'm going to, I'm going to write a book.

And then my wife's going to write a book. And our, you know, son is going to write a book in every sort of member. And that, that's like very like 20th century way to monetize attention and still works generally well. Yeah. But it could be, you could imagine a future where every president. you know, just ends up creating a social media platform because that's, that becomes like the right way.

Like, would you, I think Kamala could probably drive, if she created a social media app after losing, if she were to lose, I think she could get, you know, 50 million downloads, right? Probably. I would sign up for that. Well, you know, this isn't the first celebrity social media company. Jeremy Renner cloned at Instagram

and had the Jeremy Renner app that you could install and it was just his Instagram feed. Isn't that insane? And you had to subscribe to just see Jeremy Renner posts and then he would post like extra photos but it was just like his feed. So it was just like I'm surfing today. I went to the gym and like the Jeremy Renner fan club

was just like on his app and then he eventually shuttered it. But I mean you could imagine like in the same way that substack, like a lot of people are completely, they follow some writer and they're completely unaware that like substack is the underlying technology. They're just like, oh, I love not boring.co, right? And I just, and this guy, Pachy is great. He must have built this website, but he's using the substack infrastructure. You can see, you can see that, you could see that happening in almost every vertical where it's like, oh, you're using Vimeo to power a website.

It's like a YouTube. Or substack allows you to just generate your own app at some point. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that would be interesting. So it's like you're on substack. I'm not worrying out. I mean, I talked to the substack guys about other media formats, and they allow you to upload podcasts, and they actually do allow you to upload videos.

So it is possible to run, like, basically your own private video feed, like your own YouTube on substack, and you could have someone just like have that, you know, okay, they're subscribed to your YouTube feed. The technology brothers app. Yeah, exactly. We'd like to own that real estate on your home screen. Yeah.

But let's close out before with the ending of the SEC fight. So even though the SPAC was trading and successful, because of the SEC lawsuit, the acquisition wasn't approved. And so you weren't technically investing in truth social. You were investing in a SPAC that had like a contract in place to acquire. this company but didn't actually own any of the assets yet because the acquisition hadn't been approved by the SEC. And so there's this lawsuit that says, you know, hey, it was illegal for you to do this SPAC and this acquisition. We're going to block the acquisition. But on March 24th,

more than three years after Litinsky and Moss got Trump to agree to their plan, Trump, media, and technology group stock debuted on NASDAQ, they settled the case of the SEC for an $18 million fine in July of 2023. It's very... That's a big fine for... Yeah. It's a big fine for... feels like a big fine, but yeah, yeah. Not in the context of the market cap now, but that's like a significant fine. Yeah, I, I guess they were just like, yeah, negotiating and figured out that was like a number that they were paying. Gary's bonus got big that year. Yeah, yeah. And so they get it approved and at that point like the the stock actually becomes like the DJT ticker or something like that. I think it was DWAC before like digital world

acquisition company or something. DWAC was the. was the SPAC name before. Yeah, that's a very funny name. So they get through. Matt Levine has a good quote in here. You know Matt from Bloomberg. He says that the regulatory body might be sort of worried that this thing will be a big bust

and he's using the early merger talks as an excuse to prevent Donald Trump from dumping it on retail investors. So it's kind of like they're like maybe the SEC didn't actually have that strong of evidence that Orlando and Trump were talking before IPOing And we don't know how much that there's a huge incentive for all the Trump insiders to keep the party going. Yep.

Through the election. Yep. Because if the stock had there was a couple moments where it looked like it was going to zero. Yep. And if it had how that would have actually created that would have been potentially the biggest risk factor for the campaign is a bunch of Americans being like I lost a bunch of money because of Trump. And he's maybe he is the scammer that the media like says. Yeah. Yeah. And so they celebrate the NASDAQ listing with a, it's funny, it's on the NASDAQ.

It feels so serious for what this is. Back in Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, back in Mar-A-Lago. They have the actor John Voight and Truth Social branded cookies. That first day, the share price touched $78, making the company worth about $15 billion, more than doubling the former president's personal wealth. Moss and Latinsky, the two guys who started this whole thing, were unable to profit from the moment. however is they were locked up they were locked in multiple lawsuits with trump media and technology group The company argued that their initial deal with Trump was void and they had forfeited their shares

Because they had run the company so ineptly and that was interesting because it's like it was so it's a short thing I wonder if there was like a vesting cliff that they were trying to like you know push them towards or something like that if they had like some some one-year vest and they barely made it over that could be like a point of contention I don't know but it all worked out because they they settled those lawsuits and And Moss and Littinsky won their litigation with the company and cashed in nearly all their shares together pocketing around $100 million. Wow. It's not going to have to do YouTube anymore. Yeah, that explains why he retired early. Retire early, seriously.

And so. I wonder if you got a, as part of the settlement, he got a complimentary lifetime Mar-a-Lago membership? He either got a lifetime membership or a band. Yeah. One or the other. Yeah. It was a high standard deviation outcome. Yeah.

I feel like Trump would be fine with them still going and spending money on the property because it would just be his way to be like, I still, like, I'm your daddy. Yeah. One current employee message to group chat, a current and former truth social staff saying that Nunes had claimed that Moss and Littinsky had stolen shares leaving nothing for anyone else. His colleagues responded with crying with laughter emojis, suggesting that they didn't take this idea seriously. as if they were all all the shares were sitting in the office and on the way out they just grabbed

yeah exactly a bunch of i feel like i feel like if any organization was still running on physical paper stock certificates it would be it would be true so yeah it is funny because it's like everyone is saying like oh this is like a mess and like you know like it's poorly managed and it's like fake but then they're like but also the money's real and i really want a piece like you screwed me out of this like very legitimate thing like they can't you can't have it both ways guys You can be like talking trash in the media or you can have your payout, lesson learned there. But Trump has insisted he won't sell his shares, which now amount to about 60% of the company, which is very uncommon for a tech founder who starts a tech company.

IPOs it in two years. Very, very rare. But then... It just shows that he's mission-oriented. Yeah. Right. And they could, yeah, all of these ex-employees are really trashing it. They could probably have 100 million people on the platform if they had any intelligence whatsoever.

But again, it's like, is this a question of intelligence? Like, is this a question of strategy or execution? Are they running it as a company or a financial product? Is the product the stock or is the product the website? Yeah. And I think we know the answer. Yes. And so, yeah.

It's basically fintech, right? It's a technology that enables a new way to. trade on Trump's social capital. There's this very interesting quote from Billy Boozer here. He says, I had to step away from a role that I felt God made for me due to ethical and moral concerns. It shook me to my core. Sometimes those who share your beliefs might exploit you for financial gain.

And I think that there's a lesson here about like, like, we hear about these venture capital firms that are very difficult to work with and they're notorious for like firing founders. And yet when I talk to very, very aggressive founders, oftentimes they're fine getting in the ring with a VC with a bad rap. They trust themselves. They trust themselves and they're okay. They're like, I'm willing to get into the gladiator arena. I'm the lion.

They need to be worried. I think that there's something here where like the, where like you know, it is clearly public knowledge that these are some of the most hard negotiating people in the world. But if you go in and you play your cards right, you can wind up with a $100 million payout like those guys did. And so maybe they will wind up hanging out at Mara Lago in a little bit. Yeah, I think it's one of those things like five, ten years from now, if they were to see Trump, they would shake hands and wink.

It would just be like, it would be like that first. We had one hell of a boxing match. Yeah, it was like, yeah, going back to that fateful bite of the first burger. Yep, exactly. And then the article closes with an epilogue about now Trump has moved on a cryptocurrency project called World Liberty Financial. I had somebody bring up

would any of this have been possible without Diet Coke? Like if you took, if Diet Coke didn't exist, could this entire story have existed? And I think you could make an argument that... Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That's a good place to end.

Well, that's the story of Truth Social. The Truth About Truth Social. Hope you enjoyed it. Let's move on to some tweet reactions, but first, I need to tell you about Citadel Securities. Citadel Securities is the leading global market maker committed to creating the most efficient and transparent markets. They provide liquidity across a diverse range of financial instruments, including equities, options, and fixed income, ensuring traders and investors can execute orders seamlessly at the

best possible prices. Leveraging cutting-edge technology and quantitative strategies, they optimize trade executions for tighter spreads and improved market efficiency. Whether you're an institutional investor or a startup building a retail brokerage, Citadel Securities consistently delivers unmatched performance in an industry where speed and accuracy are paramount. Discover how they're shaping the future of finance by making markets more accessible and efficient at Citadel Securities.com. That's Citadelsecurities.com. Now back to the show. Did you see that, is it Bowery farming failed? Yeah. Yoni writes, it really sucks that Bowery farming failed. I always was rooting for Bowery because it felt like it could actually make a difference

on nutrition and climate change. Here's why, from my outsider's perspective, that it was so hard. Growing a single crop that's both undifferentiated to consumers and low margin, lettuce is cheap, sold through wholesale, wall of lettuce at whole foods, means it's even worse for margins. They scaled super quickly, building and flying the plane at once doesn't work in the physical world like it does in software, while owning the local operations and needing to be good at lots of complex things simultaneously. Tons of cap-ex. that they paid for themselves. If you inverted each of those factors,

you'd wind up with a multi-crop, full basket, sold directly to consumers, basically a CSA, operate as a franchise. Hmm, interesting. I hope this won't dissuade others from trying to innovate and transform our food system. It's a worthy effort.

Yeah, I remember seeing vertical farming stuff and never dug in too much, but... Good take from Yoni as usual. I think the real question that comes away from it is what was the actual strategy, right? Because I've had the product. It's a good product. I remember buying Bowery lettuce and being like, this is good lettuce. But I never, you know, I don't shop for groceries.

So it was Bowery branded? Yeah. So they were like fully verticalized. You could go into Whole Foods and like buy their lettuce that they had cultivated using their technology and eventually sold. But you have to wonder like yeah, what's the strategy? It's like the lowest possible margin product. It's deeply, deeply competitive. It's really difficult to sort of like differentiate because if I wanted to start competing with Bowery, I could go get a small plot of land and just obsess over making lettuce and create like the same quality of product which with a much

different cost structure. And so yeah, it's one of those things like how. would you have that you know you obviously couldn't value a farm that was producing at bowery's scale at two billion dollars yeah right i don't know a lot of um uh sort of mid-level mid-market farms farm operations that are so it's like i you have to wonder they were last valued at two billion dollars what was were they pitching at the time hey we're creating this technology stack that other farms can use and uh yoni and slows like have a big thesis around verticalization, which is like if you have this technology, like don't just sell the technology or the software. Yep.

Like sell the end product. Sure. But that's interesting. You know, they were involved with the company that they were involved with a company that made software for parking garages. Yep. And the software company just ended up buying one of the largest parking garage management companies so that they could own more of the value chain, basically. And so I would have loved to see Bowery's last pitch deck of being like, why are we worth $2 billion selling lettuce, right? Because you have to imagine the actual net revenue on selling that lettuce. Like if somebody was running like a farm,

yeah, let's say somebody's running a vineyard and they're like, yeah, like we spent like $3 billion or we spent like $3 million last year to do $1 million of revenue. You'd be like, okay. Yeah, bad. Cool, like pet project. Do you think they should have gone upmarket? Have you seen that Omicasse strawberry company? It's like $50 a strawberry or something.

Yeah, so I'm excited to see. Starting with that seems very interesting because it's so high end. It's going to be only consumed by celebrities and like it's going to be very Instagrammed, but you're also going to have so much breadth to like tell your story. Whereas if you're just, if like, yeah, there's this cool story where the lettuce was vertically farmed, but then it just comes in a standard lettuce pack. Still tastes like lettuce. Still tastes like lettuce.

Whereas the Omacase strawberry, you open it up, it's like a, it feels like sugarfish, right? Yeah. I think that that is what they absolutely should have done. I think there's a bunch of interesting angles to do like exotic fruits that are almost like desserts. Yep. And so if they were the key thing though for Bowery would be like how do you justify charging four to five to ten times as much for the same product, which is what this. I got a box of Asian pears once from someone and they were so juicy that I kept choking on them. I would take a bite and it would just explode with like, like, parents.

You call your parents. And I'd be like coughing. Like, oh my God. You guys got to try it. It was amazing. They were so good. And it's something where I'm sure they were like, you know, 10 times the price. Yeah, but you have to like to make something like this work where Bowery's investing what I'm sure amounted to do hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D and facilities, all this capax.

You have to be able to tell a story of, oh, we're going to be able to. to, we're going to be able to expand, you know, our core product from a 20% gross margin product to a 90% gross margin food product. And, yeah, I just, I, I, it's also interesting because there's, there's like some other competitors that don't feel like they should be competitors, but they are. I'm thinking of like rainmaker flooding different areas, like terraforming. It's like, yeah, maybe we're running out of farmland, so we need to go vertical in cities. or we need to turn the desert into farmland. And if we do that, it's like, okay, well, all of a sudden,

the price of farming lettuce is going to go way down. If we can just figure out how to get water there. There's another plan to reroute the Colorado River if we switched California to nuclear power desalination. So California gets the water from the ocean, desalinates it, uses that for Californian farmland, and then the Colorado River goes through Nevada to New Mexico and Arizona. And all of a sudden, Nevada and Arizona.

That was one of my favorite talks at Horticon. Yeah, I think what's interesting where I'd end with Bowery is that this was one of the last, maybe is one of the last super high profile failures from the D to C era because Bowery was a company that the big branding agency is like the Red Antlers. Oh, really? I don't remember if it was Gin Lain or Red Antler that did it. But I think it was at a time where you could take any sort of product, slap a, you know, get. Emmett from Jen Lane or Antler to like give you this like half a million dollar brand treatment.

And then people are like, oh, this is investable now. Right. Like people investing in all birds because it had a cool story. And narrative and visuals. But then, oh, at the end of the day, you're selling shoes. Yeah. Yep. Do you see this Martin Screlli tweet?

Defend capitalism everywhere, every time. Be willing to die for it. Civilization collapses without it. And then someone chimes in. frame put on the wall and then it says like Thomas Jefferson and then Martin Trekelly. I love this because the first reply is civilization actually collapses well when it lacks strong sovereign institutions social cohesion and resilience to external threats and Martin just says no Mogged strong opinion strongly out yeah yeah no I I just think uh not enough people are saying this

and I think it's now becoming a normal view within our hyper online technology world, but outside of, you know, my little brother, I've had to talk with him in the last year being like, no, capitalism is actually good. It's like if you look at all these different categories, whether it be education or health care or housing, capitalism, life expectancy, capitalism is the driving force that, enables improvement in those areas. So ultimately you have to imagine that it's fairly good. So it's one of those things that feels obvious,

but like I actually think is worth talking about because there, there we were, our generation was the generation that grew up where it was okay to be in the classroom and a kid, you know, I remember in college would be like consumption is bad all, you know, and it's sort of this like decelerationist like view. that leads to Western Europe, which I like to vacation in, but I certainly don't want to live there. Don't want to invest there. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting. Capitalism, for a long time, faced, like, assaults on both sides. There was, like, the communism, like, we need to go back to, you know, like, real communism has never been tried. We need to go back to, like, you know, Soviet era communism or something like that. But then there was also, like, the accelerationist, like, techno version of anti-capitalism, which was, like, we're going to get AI and robots and UBI. And are you familiar with Falk fully automated luxury communism? This idea that, yeah, there's like a bunch of sci-fi stories about this. And also like political philosophers about it.

And that one actually makes kind of a decent amount of sense, although there's all these questions about like how incentives would work in that case. But that did take hold in a lot of Bay Area people where they were like, well, yeah, maybe if we can just have the robots do everything, we'll live in the time of abundance. And so there won't need to be, you know, we won't need to allocate resources because we'll have unlimited of everything. and you can just snap your fingers.

Although there's always a question about like, okay, well, what about? Luxury communism. Luxury communism. It is a good take. Communism needs a rebrand. Yeah, it is a good take. And it's certainly preferable to, you know, terrible communism or something. But then there's still a question about like, okay, well, there's only so much beachfront property.

Even if you create like the metaverse or you've got other worlds. Certain things are always be scared. Yeah, it's very hard to imagine a world where it's like, oh, yeah, I can just like get an island in the middle of the ocean on demand. Like, okay, maybe you have. some sort of crazy, like micro robots that can just do that, but it's like, it's very odd. So the, uh, Sean Frank, good friend of the pod says, uh, Virgin Run Club versus Chad Walk Enjoyer. And, uh, the Virgin Run Club says, uh, you got to give some credit to Wilmonitis for being an early major proponent of the Chad Walk enjoyer where he would, the Lindy Walk, yeah, he would,

you know, frequently tweet that he was going on a 30-mile walk around Manhattan. And, you know, shortly after that had a nine-figure exit. He actually sawed me into that. The last time I was in Manhattan, I walked the entire island, like, from like, I don't know, 91st Street down to the Wall Street and back. And it was amazing. Like, you spend like two or three hours walking, I mean, particularly in Manhattan because the entire city, like, turns over and you watch people leave work.

then start settling in, getting dinner, and the nightclub scene. It's insane. It's like one of the most fantastic cities in the world. Also, are you aware of how a lot of like the best bodybuilders are doing cardio these days? The hybrid athlete. It's all walking. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

I forget Chris Williamson was doing a video with somebody. He's called like Seabom, Chris Bumstead, you know this guy? So he is a fantastic bodybuilder. his cardio is 45 minutes of walking on an inclined treadmill. Yeah. And it's amazing. I've been doing it because there's never an excuse where you're like, oh, I don't really want to sprint right now.

But everyone can get on a treadmill and just start walking. And then 45 minutes in you're like, okay, I actually burn a lot of calories. I'm actually exhausted. There's a lot to this because it's inclined. But it's very hard to stop. We bought our house specifically because it's the best walking in Malibu. Really? Right.

There's like this amazing walk path. It's fantastic. Saagar, good friend. says 12 days until clocks, this is actually an old tweet, but it's relevant because we just went through daylight savings time. 12 days until clock shift forward, dooming the productive class to dark mornings for months, all so people can drink outside one hour later. Team Standard Time. So I guess we're actually in Standard Time now. We went back, so he's excited now that we're back on Standard Time. Contrarian to be excited about the, yeah.

Yeah, but he hates going to Daylight Savings Time because then if you wake up up early, it's dark. Yeah. But I, and I agree with this. Like, I think the switch is always like super disruptive, especially you have kids and a family, like it just throws everything off. Like, yeah, you do so much to train the kid to go to sleep at a certain time. Their circadian rhythms off. Yeah, our four month old is now deciding he went from, she went from waking up at seven, 10 a.m. to now six 10 on the dot. And it's like, okay. But I will say like last week when we were at the tail end of daylight savings time, I got into the office at like five or six. and it was perfectly dark outside.

And I could watch all the buildings in downtown, like, light up. And, like, oh, it's just beautiful. Watching the sunrise. Like, there's nothing like watching the sunrise from the top of, like, from the office. From the top of, like, when I worked at Bain Capital, I would get in before everyone. And I would go around, like, set up conference rooms.

I was, like, an intern. And I would always be on, like, the top floor of this building right as the sun rose. And it was, like, so inspiring. Seeing the sunrise over your think pad is an out-of-body experience. Literally over your polycom. This was like 2012 or 2010. Every single office at a polycom. It was great.

Other stuff too, I've got to dig in. Okay, so Goblin says, wait, what the hell? I asked Claude if he noticed any patterns in my aura data versus the health data I've been logging, and he's like, my summary. Oh, sure, your HRV heart rate? drops greater than 20% from baseline a day or two before the migraine starts.

If it gets below 40, you can be pretty sure one's coming. And then there's a community note that says, this seems to have been a hallucination as per the author. But it's like some sort of deeper truth. I think that I think what's interesting here is like, greater health comes from greater understanding of yourself and the various inputs that drive your health whether that's, oh, I feel a lot better at 5 p.m.

And I have more energy at 5 p.m. Because I walked in the morning. Yeah. And so this sort of quantified self movement has been allowing people to understand themselves better, whether that's getting your biomarkers tested with function or you're using your aura ring or things like that. And I just think, like, incredible, incredible things are going to come from having more quantifiable data. Yeah. And then having effectively a team of brilliant longevity and performance doctors that can analyze that data for free.

The thing that we keep coming back to about what's actually interesting about AI today is intelligence as a service. And so if you want to work with the leading longevity specialists in the world, a lot of them charge like 150K per year just to be. in their sort of program. And it's gonna be really incredible when the average person with their $10 a month or a ring can get even better care from this team of digital specialists than some public company CEO

that's using David Sinclair's like longevity program or whatever. Yeah, yeah, it does seem valuable. I think for certain people, they need an algorithm or a doctor to tell them something or they need the quantified self data to tell them something. But I always worry that there is a loss of value in not just being in tune with yourself. Like the sleep tracking is fine.

It's good. Sleep's really important. If tracking it helps you get more sleep, that's great. But you should be able to just ask yourself, are you sleeping? Yeah. And there's a company that's building smart AI toilets to analyze your urine and your feces. Yeah. Called Throne.

Okay. And they're bringing the quantified self to your toilet, basically. So it's like understanding yourself through your waist. I could see some of that being valuable because that's a little bit harder to tell than just like, did I get a good night's rest? We'll get it. We'll get it set up in the studio. Okay, perfect. You can be like, every time I have a really good bowel movement, the next pod, I have some absolutely bangers.

Yeah, bang. That's great. So Alexander says, Bachelors in the 1950s. And he posts a what's a screenshot from a book or a picture from a book. Men were also pressured into acceptable family roles since the lack of a suitable wife could mean the loss of a job or promotion for a middle class man. Bachelors were categorized as immature infantile, narcissistic, deviant, or even pathological. Family advice expert Paul Landis argued, except for the sixth, sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped, and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry. I thought this was relevant.

I was going to ask you, does... It certainly resonated 11K likes. Yeah, do you think that people started treating you differently once you had kids because there's just a certain sense of... Responsibility. Yeah, just responsibility when somebody is working for more than just themselves and has more on the line that comes from a family. Like, I do think there's this sense of...

There is a sense of, like, serious. like you bring a new sense of seriousness to your work. Yeah. That I don't think you can have. I think I looked at this and somebody, it's fairly easy to have a pretty good life. If you are just a bachelor and you're living in your luxury apartment in New York and you have a job and whatever and you can do your run club and all this other stuff. And life gets infinitely more challenging once you have children in the men. and other sort of people that you're responsible for.

So I think that I wanted to cover this because I think we'll actually come. We're going to see a shift back where, you know, Keith Rabeau was in the news recently for saying you shouldn't hire anybody over 30. But I could imagine they're getting to a point where the tech world starts looking at people that are, you know, that are 40 without children and being like, oh, like, I don't know. Like, you know. Well, I mean, when I got to Silicon Valley in 2012, there was a blog post by PG. And he said that it would be hard for a founder to be married with kids.

Yeah. And it was somewhat controversial, but it felt pretty consensus at the time. Like a lot of people agreed. Yeah. And I think that's, that's may be true for first companies. But if you're already like, I've never had a job that wasn't. entrepreneur so yeah it's like it's kind of just like the career of the entrepreneur is is a little bit more there's less of like a leap like I don't feel like oh if I'm going to start

a new company I'm going to like lose this stable corporate job because that's not a thing that exists what's interesting about this is that it I feel like it's resonating it got so many likes because it's part of this like very trad revival like let's go back to the way things were right but but I other than that example with PG it's hard for me to remember like when I was 20, what were the 35-year-olds or the 40-year-olds saying about starting families? Yeah. Because I think that it was out of vogue and now it's kind of back-in vogue. Yeah, and I just think there's always this oscillation between two extremes.

And it almost feels like right now we're in a healthy middle ground where everybody's like, yeah, kids are a ton of work. Having a family is a ton of work. It is a distraction from finding product market fit. Yeah. But there's this more of like a middle ground where you have a good example of as like Asiah from Valor has like a bunch of kids, right? And like you could argue that he will be more successful because he has like a small army that's depending on him to perform.

Yeah, yeah, it's certainly motivating. Yeah. And I do think there's probably something. I mean, I remember when I like first made like a significant amount of money talking to my father-in-law about this and I was like well I made like so much money I could like retire now and he's like no you can't he's like you don't understand how expensive kids are you don't you don't understand like how much money you actually as a car guy I think of it in the I think every time I see like a buddy with like I have a friend who's like 31 and he's got like six cars that could be considered supercars

and I just look at that and as I'm like for every one child you could basically support two supercars So I'm like, I would probably be doing the same thing. Yeah, it's great. Let's go to Vitorio. Vitorio says, who even uses Teams and posts a screenshot of Microsoft Teams versus Slack daily active users? And Teams is like absolutely ripping. And Slack is more or less flatlining. And I mean, I think the answer is like Normie.

He's like everyone who uses Outlook and just a normal job, they show up and the computer is just there. And they're not on some slick MacBook working from a coffee shop. They just go to work. They have a badge. They sit at a cubicle and their boss says, this is your tech stack. Here you go. Yeah, this is a very startup tweet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is a warning to all the technology brothers that are thinking about their product in the context of, oh, we're going to build a Slack integration. Oh, yeah. Right? Because so much of enterprise software just ties back to communication, Slack, email, email being like the bedrock of all software. software products. I think that, yeah, I remember I once built an internal tool to track how much time people were spending online on Slack because it's a really good proxy for how much time somebody is spending at their laptop. And so never got to building teams because it wasn't relevant

to me. But I think that is, it's the building for the teams market that's going to justify your unicorn valuation, not purely the... Slack. There is something interesting about Teams versus Slack, which is that with the recent defense tech boom, being a company that has to use teams because of ITAR is like a little bit of a status symbol. And people, founders flex about it because they're like, oh, I know that I'm a product guy. I know that Slack is a better product. I hate using teams so I can like complain about this publicly. And everyone will know that like my work is so important. I can't use Slack because It's not I-tar compliant.

I was on a team's call for deterrence this morning. Yep. You probably felt great. Yeah, the other, yeah, I felt like a patriot. Yeah. Exactly. No, the other thing with this chart is what would it have looked like if Salesforce hadn't? Oh, yeah.

I mean, that's the other thing is that it's just bundled into the distribution. So every, every, every, but also Stewart was running Slack. You have to imagine he would, that chart would still be going. Founder mode. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Daniel says, we need to double the fluoride in the water and add ozumpic and adderalt too. This is insane. 72,000 likes. What a banger. This guy is just like a god tier poster. Yeah.

It's just like, we were talking about this. 72,000 has so many likes. Almost inconceivable. Most people have a tweet that gets 72,000 impressions. And they're like, oh, I'm going to retire. Yeah, exactly. This guy, he doesn't need to raise money anymore for his company. He can just fund it off the creator payout.

Yeah, he's good. Generational wealth coming to him. Yeah, for him, the balance is making sure that his, his MRR grows faster than his Twitter payouts. No, no, no, no, no. Just grow the creator payouts. We'll see you at Amman. Subsidized. Yeah, subsidized.

Let's see it, Christy's. AI for COPS product. No, I think. But you're, so you're anti-fluoride. Anti-fluoride. But in general, I think there's a much bigger debate to be had around fluoride. And fluoride usually gets, talked about this at Hereticom, but usually gets, all of this shade when in reality it's the fact that a lot of the pipes in the U.S. water infrastructure are lead-based

and so that's just channeling lead into every household and fluoride makes lead more bio available. So when you're having fluoride alongside lead, you're just absorbing more of it, which could could account for the, you know, what are, you know, IQ downsides of fluoride consumption. But yeah, I think if the United States was really a serious country, we would be thinking about more proactively about medicating the population through the drinking water. For free, yeah. Yeah, it's like the world's perfect delivery mechanism. Everybody drinks water. Yeah.

So if you want somebody to be on a certain substance, then put it in the water. This is genius because, like, this tweet could have just said, like, oh, Zempic is so amazing. We should put it in the water. Like, that's just a phrase that people say when something like a miracle cure. But he wound up, like, having the most. Most incendiary thing possible, double the fluoride, but then also adding a Zemphic and Adderals. There's a ton to latch on to.

There's a lot of countries that have stopped fluoridating the water. In the United States, it's regulated effectively, but every single year we're effectively deciding to continue medicating the population through the fluoride in the water. Wow. Look at this. 17 likes. This is an undiscovered gem. Walid says tons of young girls are using chat GPT to manifest.

looks like OpenAI is acknowledging it on their official TikTok. So I guess chat GPT is reposting. The chat GPT TikTok account is reposting this. And people are using, I don't actually know that much about manifesting. This is the secret, right? Where you just, I will be wealthy. I will be at Amon. I will be at Amon.

No, you don't say, I will be at Christi. You don't say I will be. You say, I am at Amon. Oh, okay. I am wealthy. I am. I am. Present tense.

Present tense. No, but this is, this is relevant because this is the bull case for open AI, right? They're not saying, you know, people on TikTok are using Claw to manifest, right? They're using chat GPT. It's the new brand. It is the clean X for AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the clean X it is. It is. It's just like, ask someone on the street, how do you do, how do you use AI to do your homework, chat GPT.com? Yeah. Yeah, it's almost like, it's a consumer company. Google for search, where like if that plays out within AI, it's just like when I want AI, I go to openAI.com slash chat GBT.

I mean, Sundar was correct when he said, competition is only a click away, and yet Google has a massive monopoly. Why? It's just the place that you go. Yeah. It's the default. I do think that there's something very interesting about AI

for these kind of squishier use cases, like astrology, manifesting, personality test, that type of stuff, because the hallucinations are fine. Like with code, there's like a right answer, so it can test itself, so it's very good at that.

But then it's always tough in the middle, but when you get out into just like are you familiar with the PT Barnum effect this whole thing? So the Barnum effect is this series of like statements that I can make about you that feel very personalized but actually apply to everyone. So I can say

you have a complicated history with your family and who doesn't but you're like oh my God you know me or like you believe you deserve more in life something like that and you'll be like oh my God I do and so a lot of like tarot card readers palm readers, psychics. They use that, PT Barnum effect.

But AI can use that very effectively, and it can feel like, wow, the AI really knows me, even though it's maybe just hallucinating or applying heuristics that are basically applied to everyone. But everyone just wants to hear a pump-up speech, and that's valuable. Yeah, and if that trend is real, there's a really big business,

there's a hundred million dollar business to be built on just being like AI for manifestation, thin wrappers. Rapper, for sure. Although it might get baked into one of the existing companies like CoStar could could integrate something totally but I think These products are so engaging Yep They can stand on their own you can stand you can spin it up and it can stand on its own Probably not super venture backable probably not a total billion dollar company

Yeah but phenomenal business if you get it right I firmly agree this was one of the pitches when I went on my first million I was like exploit the barrenome effect to create an AI app rapper yep I don't even know how to pronounce this, TOR taxes. TOR taxes says, an incredible thread on Musk. Very rarely I see something like this from someone who is not a blind fanboy. TLDR. Some people are larger than life.

Then the self-reinforcing ugly pettiness of it, you wrongly assume this is a triviality to brush aside, they can do it for real. And it's a quote tweet of somebody from Olivia that says, if you can't model Leviathons walking through the world, you're going to make some pretty bad mistakes. and it's just a deep analysis of musk. It's interesting. I like the, I've always liked the take that Elon is both, you know, P.T. Barnum, the circusman, the showman,

and he's also Thomas Edison, the inventor. And he's solid on both. So, and that really breaks people's brains because they want to latch on to just one. It's like, yeah, he does announce products before they're ready, and he is wrong on those, but then he's also a great engineer, great manager, and can build real stuff.

Like the cars drive, the rockets land. And so even if he's saying some wild stuff that might be wrong in the short term, it's like both are true. What was your take from this, though? It's hard because I actually think. There's like a million tweets in there. Yeah, a million takes. But yeah, I think what you take away from this is that he's incredibly complicated

and the people that just want to pin him as doing like the cringe stuff where he's like jumping on like the stage and oh he's not just an engineer he's not just a poster there's so much there's so much depth to it all and yet the thing that we had we had a listener comment on one of our posts this morning saying that basically like very bearish about acts and your take which i think is the right take is Elon has a history of just making stuff work and making money. So at this point in his career, betting against him is just like generally stupid, stupid idea. Yeah, it's interesting. Allie Taylor says, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit it, but I genuinely find chat GPT to be helpful and supportive when I'm anxious. This is back to the

environment. Another thin wrapper opportunity. Yeah. I would be, there's probably already $50 million of ARR worth of these sort of like chat GPT therapy products that are just out. their printing and they're not in they're not even being talked about because it's just like two engineers like just shipping I mean the first version of this was like all the RIS apps did you see these yeah yeah so I talked to a kid yeah I think I met that guy too DM me and was like hey I'm building this like chat GPT rapper for you know how to talk to girls on dating apps so you'll copy what they said and it'll recommend what you should say and and I was like that sounds great kid like good job building something that people want.

Clearly, like, you have some users, like, just go monetize it right now because the whole chat GPT wrapper thing is going to be a bad meme. Don't bother with status symbols in Silicon Valley and trying to raise money. And he comes back to me like a month later. He's like, we're doing a million a month. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he ended up joining, if we're talking about the same people, he ended up joining

HF0. Yeah, there you go. And now he's building a self-improvement sort of community platform product. But that initial, that initial experience of being young and making money is so valuable. And then taking someone who can, a, build a product, get it to market, figure out the marketing, like do the, I think he does the growth hack on TikTok, like the motion of like getting the stripe account growing, even if it rugs and like, oh, you got killed by Chachapit, if you're a 20 year old and you're making a million dollars, even for just one month and then you make nothing,

it's like, it's going to be so much easier to stay back. Yeah, go read zero to one, figure out what actually a monopoly business is, but you have the experience of launching, building, coding, hiring, firing, all these different things. And then you can go build the real generational company, but you actually have something under your belt instead of just being like,

oh, I went to school. And VCs pattern match. So when you go into your, when you have the right idea and you can go in and you can be like, yeah, when I was 21, I built a million dollar AR chat GPT. Show me a high school diploma

and a striped cat with money in. For a period of time, it was like, oh, he traded sneakers. Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah. On eBay. And then it was like, oh, he created like a Shopify store. And now it's,

he created, or she created a thin wrapper on GPT. And if you didn't do that, like, it's kind of bearish. Yeah, yeah. So word of advice to the younger technology brothers, both male and female in the audience, go make a million dollars with a thin chat GPT wrapper. Don't fall for the sciop that VCs are putting upon young founders that, you have to build a generational company that has a monopoly thesis, like immediately.

Like, if you're young, just go build something cool. Yeah. Air Katakana says Actually insane how Steve Jobs was The singular successful ideas guy In the entire history of tech companies Until 7.3

Yeah 7.3K likes clearly resonated I don't know how true this is It's such a weird thing like who's an idea guy Why is he an idea guy? Ideas guy is such a funny way to slander somebody because among certain groups being able to generate great ideas is like the highest, like it's like the highest status thing. Especially in the AI era.

And in many ways, like you there's, you could totally make a case that Elon is an ideas guy, right? He thinks of really big ideas. And then he brings together smart groups of people to go and do that. And yeah, he's adding fuel to the fire and pushing people and questioning everything and all that stuff. But at its core, he's an idea guy. Yeah. For sure. And I mean, it's like, where is the line? Like, is Zuck an ideas guy? It seems like he has, like, the most value he creates there is ideas, right? And it's more like will almost. Like he's in founder mode. So, like, he didn't have the idea for the metaverse or the idea for VR, but he had the will to be like, we're actually going to go do 10 billion of capax on this or AI or something.

Anybody that's using, calling saying idea guy as a way to slander. Somebody is usually the kind of person that is mad because they see an idea and they're like, oh, that's a good idea. Like, I thought of that. Yeah, but I didn't do anything with it. Yeah, so it's not just having the ideas is actually being able to like believe in them early. Like there's plenty of ideas that I've had that I've seen the incarnation of a few years later and been like, wow, that's like a really, that was a good idea. But there's a massive difference between having the idea and actually taking action on it and going and going.

Even just betting on the market. There's been so many times where I've been like, oh yeah, like I do feel like. NVIDIA is like way under price right now and bought like a thousand dollars like that and I'm like let's go I should size that like way different one year one year one year of college tuition yeah exactly I should have size that way differently like having conviction in your ideas is is is just as important and I think that's what that's why Steve jobs is successful because he he has the idea that you know you don't need a keyboard on a phone but then he screams at anyone who says we have to have a keyboard and demands that it doesn't have a keyboard to a thousand employees that all have like little subtle soft power realms.

And there's a designer over here who has a bunch of friends and you can't fire them and they're going to push back. And there's going to be all these things. So it's like actually bringing the will of like the founder mode to make your ideas actually happen. And getting and being lucky with the timing, there's a there's a, Justin Merrer's brother, Nick, one of the other co-founder of Kettle and Fire. he has a new company that is disrupting the legacy CPG testing companies. And when I saw the deck, I was like, this is like super obvious, like wanted to invest, would invest in anything he does. But saw it, I was like, yeah, this is super obvious.

I'm surprised nobody had really taken this on. But I'm sure a lot of other people had the idea. But Nick and his co-founders came together at a very specific moment in time when there was a bunch of new regulations happening in the baby product market and new testing requirements. And so it created this sort of perfect moment to build light labs, which will now probably end up being a really massive company. And a bunch of other people will look at it five years from now and be like, oh, I've got a thought of that.

Let's go to the squirrel story. I know we don't talk about politics, but this is animals. It seems to have broken through. So the Associated Press writes, An orphaned squirrel who became a social media star Was euthanized after being seized from home And Mike Salana quote tweets it with say his name This wasn't even the biggest Mike Solana banger about this.

Yeah, he quote tweeted another video of like, yeah, this one. He quoted a video breaking down the squirrel. It was like all the best clips of the squirrel And it just says this is what they took from you. The Elon quote, got 150 million views. That's like everyone on X right now. Like every single person saw this.

This meme was just a good way for posters to cash in. Yeah. Because like Pat, Pat Blumenthal was like sent me one and he sent two and one of them got like 11,000 likes or something like something ridiculous. But I think I think the real story is that the squirrel was a content to commerce play. for this guy's only fans. And so having the squirrel become a hero of the conservative movement

is a bit shaky ground to build on. Because if you look, if you dig below the surface at all, it's only fans. Odd funnel. Yeah, funnel. Many content plays are, many Instagrams are just fronts for only fans.

Are you familiar with Gelman Amnesia? I think we've talked about this. So Gellman Amnesia is this idea that like, let's say you're like, you know, the world expert in like structured credit and you pick up like the Wall Street Journal and they write an article about what you're a world expert in and they get some facts wrong. Then all of a sudden when you read an article in the same newspaper that that isn't about your expertise, you're like, well, if they got my thing wrong, maybe they're getting the thing that I don't know about wrong. It's kind of like the glass shattering and you realize like, oh, there's all this like, like things aren't just broken in my world. They're broken everywhere. Yeah, it was like my dad reading an article about me in the New York Times. Yeah, yeah.

Like, oh, wait, maybe this isn't like the bastion of truth. Exactly, exactly. And so I feel like this was a huge gelman amnesia moment for a lot of normies who just like animals. Because they're like, if the government could mess this up, like aside from all the laws, aside from whatever happened, just the idea of like euthanizing an internet famous furry animal is like Com's Nightmare 101. one, right? Like, you should never do that ever because they have virality and cuteness. And that's like all you need. So you know that there's going to be a backlash. You should know. And so if the government can mess up that, then maybe they can mess up the war in the Middle East or the Vietnam War. And so it's very easy to look at this and then realize, be like, oh, the government can do people. And that's

Elon's point. Government overreach and action. And it's like, it's such a minor thing. And it's like, yeah, I don't want a squirrel. This is never going to happen to me. But it's like, if, if, if, If they can get this that wrong, like maybe they can get something else bigger wrong that does affect you. And I've talked to a lot of people in defense. I've seen this at the FDA where it's like a lot of the defense people are like, well, I went really deep dealing with the DOD and I saw how broken that was. And I wound up starting the company, but that led me to believe that it's not just the DOD that's broken in their procurement. It's also the State Department of the Department of Agriculture and all of these different agencies that all have like similar levels of rot. Yeah, like Boeing, Boeing, you know, has their issues with their planes, but they were also

selling like 150K like soap dispensers. Yep, yep, yeah. To the government. Yeah, it's very hard to be like, oh, yeah, we are excellent everything, but just the one problem you're hearing about. Usually like where there's smoke, there's fire. It was funny because I was watching this video of this cute squirrel videos. I was watching with my three-year-old.

And he was just dying, laughing, just like so cute, just like, oh, my God, look at the squirrel. and I'm, like, crying because I know how it ends. And it was just like, I was like, oh, my God, this poor squirrel. I'm, like, tearing up, and he's just, like, dying laughing because he just thinks it's, like, a cute squirrel. And I was like, damn, like, yeah. It's a dark girl. When you find out, you're going to be, like, the most hardcore libertarian ever.

But I'm not going to tell you. You can listen to a podcast in 10 years, and you can figure out what happened to the squirrel. But wild. Oh, yeah, here's the soap dispenser story. So praying for exits, good buddy, says, posts a screenshot of an article about Boeing says Boeing cleaned up on air force parts, including soap dispensers, marked up 8,000 percent. Wow. Oh, yes.

Good old government accountability. 150K for soap dispensers certainly seems correct to me. So this is why I'm excited about, do you know Kimia? The AI thing. Yeah. So our friend Kimia is building a company that allows anybody to find and bid on government contracts. Yep. And what's going to be really interesting about that is by introducing,

there's a lot of contracts out there that the government gives out that basically don't have much competition. If Boeing goes to them and they're like, we have these soap dispensers and we're Boeing and you buy a lot of stuff from us. So why not spend? These are great soap dispensers. They're only $100,000 per dispenser. It might seem like fine. Nobody gets fired for buying Boeing. But then if there was another bidder in the mix being like, I will sell you a soap dispenser for $500.

Exactly. And so Kimia is like arming. the all the people all the drop shippers all the yeah basically like basically i i i i i yeah so i and this is we talked to him about it's like his company will be very successful if he can inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs that want to go and be government contractors because it's very tangible right it's actually easier to go and make money selling to the government than it is to buy something on allie express get it sent to you mark it up get the facebook ad when you could just like product or service and customer product service and customer right so it's great uh i think

predicting out the next couple years camea is going to start a similar to what shopify did yeah a new movement amount around government contract are you fill you with the story of trans dime no oh man it's it's fantastic so uh it was profiled in this four episode limited podcast from patrick o'shaughnessy host of Invest Like the Best, a separate podcast called 50X. And it's a fantastic deep dive into this company. It was like the least Silicon Valley company, private equity, buy up, roll up. And then it goes from like 500 million to 5 billion to 50. There's like 50x of gain and that's why it was profiled in the show.

But the four episodes are like the CEO who like was running the company. then the lead investor in the private markets, then back to the CEO for a second interview about taking it public and what they did next, and then the lead investor in the public markets. So you get this very back and forth. It's just fascinating. And the first time I listened to it, I was like, this is like the craziest jargon because you think you're like taking crazy pills because they're like, so what's your secret? He's like, well, we raise prices and we cut costs. And it's like, and he says it.

And they talk about this for like 20 minutes and you're like, okay, get to like the crazy one trick that everyone hates that's so secretive. And really it's just like super operational efficiency, go in, play books, good people. You can learn while getting a Harvard MBA, which is raise prices and cut costs. But Charlie Munger was asked about this on an invest like the best episode. Like what do you think of Transdime? Like would you ever invest in this company? And he was like, no, I think it's unethical. And the reason is because a lot of the way that Transdime makes money is they go, like they make like all of the seatbelts on planes.

So you know if you go on a Boeing or an Airbus when you buckle. your seat belt, it's all the same clock, right? They're doing the toilets, all the toilets are the same, all the seats are the same, and all of that stuff, they make, like, you know, some sort of fan blade that goes in, like, every motor. And so what they'll do is they'll get intellectual property around that, get a small monopoly on one single part. And then once they have a contract with the government, they'll raise the price, so their margins

are really good. And I don't think they ever get this egregious, but what they'll do is they'll say, like, okay, yeah, like, we sent you this part for, like, a dollar. It costs us 50 cents to make, but the next batch is going to be, like, $100. bucks and the government's just like a hundred bucks like whatever like that's so little it doesn't matter but they're buying a lot and then all of a sudden transzym starts making a lot of money and so it's seen as the issue is the government the government has budgets but no profit incentive nobody working in the government really has this sort of profit incentive yeah exactly but it's fascinating it's a very very

contentious company like some people love it some people hate it it it's a fantastic financial story but it's just like under disgust in my opinion meanwhile they're running seas candy and they're like we raise prices 7% every single year, no matter the market conditions or anything else. Yeah. Brand monopolies are okay, I guess. Yeah, brand monopolies are fine. Everyone, everyone has the preferred monopoly that they're like, this one's natural. And the other ones aren't. And all the other ones should be broken up. But my monopolies are good. Monopoly is for me, but not for the. Let's go to Jack Prescott. He says, whatever happens after the earning call, the mission and focus will remain the same. Execute and deliver,

protect the West, Palantir. Should we do a live reaction to the earnings? Oh, did the earnings just happen today? I think they were today, yeah. I love Palantir. Fantastic company, very interesting business. Earnings for CEO. 10%.

There we go. No, no, I don't think that, I don't think it's actually. They're trading really well. They're trading like a tech stock now, which is fantastic. I think they broke $100 billion. I saw this insane chart that Shamsankar sent me. the it was like every company in defense all the primes their market cap and then their employees and Palantir is like fourth by market cap and they have 3,000 employees and every other company

has like over 100,000 employees crazy it's remarkable like do more with less the um it's good stuff it's interesting Google is not up to date it should be probably on perplexity let's actually compare this just open the Bloomberg app yeah just just why we need to get a terminal on the Yeah, terminal right here. But, yeah, it's interesting that Yahoo is up to date. Interesting. And yet, perplexity is quite up to date. So congratulations to all Palantir shareholders.

Palantir sales beat, stock up 13%. 13%. Wow, so it must be over $100 billion now. Yeah. That's fantastic. I was at a defense tech event in D.C. and Shams Sankar, the CFO, who's been there since day one, he might be a co-founder or first employee.

He gave this great talk about Palantir and what they're building and how they want to work with startups and whatnot. And somebody asked this question, like, oh, well, you've raised, like, $4 billion in the private markets and your revenue's only like $4 billion. So, like, isn't this like a failure financially? And he was just like, oh, my God, like you don't understand, like, the first thing about finance. The guy was from out of the country.

is from like France, something like backwater like that. And so the next question I asked, I raised my hand, I was like, so you've raised only, you've raised only $4 billion and yet your company's worth like more than 10 times that. Like, how do you make it look so easy? Yeah. Their PE ratio is 243. I mean, software.

And they have an amazing AI story, right? Because they have like all this private data that no one can get into. And so it's like they're going to be able to sell like very differentiated products. Yeah, I think there's. I think there's, that's potentially a trillion dollar company. I mean, carp is just founder mode. Like he's the embodiment of it. And it's like, don't bet, don't bet against that.

Yeah, seriously. Steve Weissner says, email marketing is dying. Google ads are dying. Cold calls, well, are dead. Not sure people fully realize we're at a huge inflection point for marketing. Got to think differently about how to reach your customers. So. So what's interesting, so what's interesting about this is that it feels like a lot of sales is all going to go back to relationships.

Sure. And so the truly gifted salesperson that's just good at making people like them and wanting to do business with them is actually going to excel. Even in a world where as a small company, you can have an army of like online digital clones that are just selling constantly. And it feels like people. may only start responding to like a personal message of being like, hey, like the CEO, this company wants to meet you. Like let me know if you're down for a conversation. And it's like, sure. Yeah. So it's like going back to Senra's point and like core learning from studying the history's greatest entrepreneurs like relationships around the world. Yep. And in an era of

AI that will become even more the case. Yep. Yeah. You can't disrupt the Chad that just like people like to do business with. I think there's an interesting thing that this tweet misses, which is like a lot of these things companies have moved on to. Like this doesn't even acknowledge like owned media going viral on TikTok, doing stunts, being really good at press. Like there are areas of marketing that still are like they might die off in the next few years, but he didn't even really capture like the tail end of this marketing.

But I agree with your point. And it's interesting because he's direct response marketing seems to be working better than Like meta is getting so optimized that I buy products on a weekly basis from companies I've never heard of because they serve me an ad for a highly relevant product. And that still seems to work. And meta's figuring out a way that even though CPMs have gone up dramatically, like the ads still work. Like you can't brute force his stupid product into being really big like you could like a decade ago. But the ad platform is like getting better and better. But yeah, I think what this misses is like you are going to need to figure out how to get high quality attention for your product or your business.

And you're not going to be reliant on this like tool set that everybody has access to. Yeah, I think people miss this with like the AI spam or like AI sales agents is like there's going to be an arms race. And just as fast as the AI spam increases, like so will the AI filtering. It's that classic, like, there's this web comic that's like, oh, this is amazing. This AI, I just type one bullet point and it turns into this really long email. And then on the other side, it's like, this AI is amazing. It turns this long email into just one bullet point. And it's like, the relationships are built on just like text messages between two people that are just like, do you want to do this deal?

Yes or no? It's like thumbs up. And that's the end. So I'm very skeptical about like the spam being of good path. Unless there's something, like, you really found some weird edge and you're just like, but it's going to be short-lived. Yeah, the other thing that's cool is now that anybody can, anybody can be like a pretty competent developer. Yep. I, a founder of my portfolio, who's not the CTO of his company, like almost won a hackathon this last weekend just by using all the publicly available tools.

And so what's interesting to that is it's the really talented marketers of today going forward are going to be, like, looking more like engineers where historically the really sophisticated marketing organizations like ramp as an example they have like a lot of engineering involvement in the marketing activity that they're doing and so you have to imagine that the new marketers are not the the best marketers are not going to be like the affiliate marketers or like I'm really good at ad sense because that's all just like automated now it's like I'm actually writing code to better find and attract and do all you know customers. Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting. I like that. Boring business says, good times create high EBITDA multiples, high EBITDA multiples, high EBITDA multiples, low EBITDA multiples,

create good times. So I think this is a funny tweet, but I have to say that I feel like it is great, good CEOs, create high EBITDA multiples. Yeah, high EBITA multiples, create sloppy CEOs, bad CEOs create low EBITA multiples and low EBITA multiples create opportunities for good CEOs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like the wartime versus peacetime CEO thing a little bit. I think that there's, I think what, I mean, what needs to be like unpacked about the wartime CEO is just that there's like

a million different wars that you can fight. There's like, there's like the war of like my company is dying and I need to like fire people, cut costs, and just like keep this thing going to like make it to the next fight. And that's what that, that, that, you need a wartime CEO to get through that hard, hard time. But then you also need a wartime CEO to go back on the offensive. Yep. So there's like defensive wartime CEO, offensive wartime CEOs. Yeah.

And they're both wartime CEOs. Yeah. The good example right now is Sundar at Google spending the last 10 years. Everyone says he's like the classic peacetime CEO. Yeah, he's making so much money. Every employee is making a lot of money. The shareholders are doing well. Everybody's just kind of coasting.

And then it's like, boom, Sam Altman comes in and laps you on AI. All your AI products internally suck. Everybody loves Sam Altman's products. Boom, you make room for the perplexity guy, which is becoming a legendary ship poster himself and has a very extreme, even a multiple for his business today. and so yeah it's the relaxed CEOs creating opportunities for cracked CEOs. Yep, I think that's right.

Atlas says, amazing. Now we have LinkedIn thread guide goontrepreneur influencers depicting an AIGF in front of the giant goon tower in Dubai, the goon capital of the world. We are still so early And it's another one of these We talked about this before I created this AI influencer in two minutes It's making me $3,000 a month

And I only worked 60 minutes a day Let me show you how to get started And of course it's selling a course There's like an entire economy Of people selling courses On how to make your like army of Well you know that And I just want to see

If somebody's watching And they can send me their striped dashboard Just showing that they're gooning influencer is actually making money like I'll shut up but until then I'm just going to keep calling this stuff out because well the dashboard shows that the courses are selling you know I love how this guy too his username is at creatine underscore cycle and I wonder with this quality of posting I'm guessing he's stopped cycling and he just always always on it yeah always on it um well you know that uh like when you join Andrew Tate's like you know club to

become like an entrepreneur or whatever he had like most most of like the fake guru entrepreneur hustle core core seller guys have like one thing they're like I'm the real estate guy I get you in my funnel I talk about how I became rich through real estate and then you will eventually pay for my course or like my in-person thing to learn how to do real estate or there's a different person that does it for crypto there's a different person that does it for you know Shopify sites or whatever Andrew Tate does all of them yeah He doesn't do just one. You go in and there's like eight modules and it's like learn crypto.

One of them is Forex trading. Four X. And then as soon as AI got big, he has an AI module. So you can become like an AI influencer. Like this guy might be like downstream of Tate in some ways. That's crazy. Fascinating. Yeah, it's smart going multi-product.

Tate has so much attention and such a crazy funnel. I'm sure that he understands the product shifts. But people are just buying the attitude and like the brand. And it doesn't matter what the product is. You know, he can sell anything. It's wild. Yeah. Let's look at Cody Norquist.

He said he traded in his Tesla. Zero regrets. He bought a extremely depreciating range rover that will probably be worth have as much in six months. Yeah, I just, I don't know if this guy's in tech, but I do think that this is the beginning of a trend where tech people discover luxury products. And they're like, wow, these are actually pretty nice. I never, well, I never even thought of going to a non-Tesla dealership.

sure sure sure you know my I tried my friend's range rover and wow this actually feels like pretty good you know it's like you know those tests that they do in cars where they like touch all the buttons plastic and stuff like that and the SMR yeah like you can't like I my driver the guy that I used to get to and from the airport he I had to tell him like don't pick me up into Tesla because he has a Tesla and he has like a just like a regular black car or whatever and being in the Tesla

one everything feels like cheap and kind of wonky and I just don't like it the acceleration is the other thing but yeah I just don't it's just not a luxury product and I don't want to be in them and so now that not only

are there other like electric products out there but this like sort of prevailing narrative that maybe gas cars aren't that bad and I just think that if this trend continues to play out, it'll be good for San Francisco because people aren't going to want to get, it's really expensive to replace a Range Rover window that's been shattered by somebody that's breaking into your car. Tesla, you know, you can just eat it.

It's like, I do think that one of the most like underrated near-term bull cases for Tesla is just actually filling out the product portfolio. Totally. There's no reason why they can't do like a Mercedes S class, a supercar, which like they've been talking about, but even just taking a Model S and being like, everything has like wood and like real metals and stuff. Like, yeah, it costs twice as much.

Yeah, in your case, they know it's the luxurious. They don't have a minivan. They don't have a minivan. They don't have a station wagon. They don't have a convertible currently. They don't have a full size SUV. Like they're just like missing a bunch of pieces.

But then also within the range, you know, like Mercedes has done a great job having like the S class, the E class. Yeah. And the whole. And the S class, like it feels different when you're inside. Like even the leather. stitching is different than an A class. And that's not that hard to do.

It just hasn't been a priority because the whole thing has been economies of scale. Economies of scale around the batteries, around the acceleration, the self-driving. But if you get to a point where you can buy something and it's like, okay, yeah, I'm getting the model, the model X, but with the upgraded package that takes it to range rover level of luxury, like it's game over because it's going to be so much safer than a range rover when you're driving with the self-driving and stuff. But you're just not going to, unless you have a driver. was better than my subject-eming, but I don't know.

Yeah, I think that will be good for the whole Tesla brand if there are products that genuinely feel like luxury products. Everyone's been talking about, oh, they need to go down market to like the $25,000 car, but maybe they actually need to. They're already basically there because you can buy a depreciated model three for around 25. But what you can't buy is a Tesla that has the luxury features of like Rolls-Royce. And Lucid Air kind of came in as like the top upper market, but they could just crush lucid with like a slight tweak to the interior.

And if Tesla built a $400,000 car, it would be amazing. People would buy it. It would be, yeah, it would, it would start displacing. I'm sure that has a much bigger market than the Pursangwe, right? Totally, totally. And I think the, I think the design language is evolving. Like the 3S, X, Y, like those all have like very neutral, unoffensive looks. The cyber trucks in the exact opposite direction.

But the cyber truck showed me that they could build something that's like, as iconic as a Huracan design or something like that. And so if they can bring some of that to like, what does, what does, you know, Tesla's edgy next generation design language look in a luxury sedan or a full size SUV?

Like, like, escalade, I think they had a timeless design and they've ridden it so long now that even with the electric, the new electric escalate is, I think, 180K,

Tesla should get in there and be right at 180K. But see, okay, when you run the company, like Elon does, you can probably put even more crazy stuff in there, right? Because you can get into like, you know, operational efficiency around how he's acquiring like the wood and tell a story there. There's probably something really interesting that could happen.

Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to David Holes, founder of Mid Journey. Love this guy. Played a Starcraft with six friends last night. It was a free for all. We added two AIs to fill out the eight-player map. We spent the whole game fighting each other while the AI slowly took over and suddenly were too powerful.

and beat us all. A lesson in AI safety. I think this is a great example. It also, I used to play StarCraft quite a bit. I didn't really play it. And I was diamond ranked and pretty good. So I would usually smoke the bots, but I have some distinct memories where you're just like, oh my God, I just got steamrolled.

You think that you're like winning basically and you're just on one side of the map and then just like this like... The wall comes towards you. And that could be like what we're doing right now, which we're like, oh, look at like the cute LLM. And like, oh, I just generated this funny picture of like a squirrel meme. Yeah. And then you just get steamrolled by the AI.

Yeah. I wonder what AIs he was using just like in-game AIs or something third party. Well, every video game has their. Of course. They've had like their AI. But those AIs, I believe, have never, maybe they cheat or something. But there was the story with Open AI. They had the Dota team.

And then they did a StarCraft thing as well where they were able to be. the like the world champions and for that I think they had a specific restriction where they they interacted with the game via an API but they still limited the actions per minute so they couldn't just get like inhuman reactions and then also the API lets you see like beyond the fog and they wouldn't they obviously wouldn't do that because it's cheating so they like they nerf the AI they make it like they kind of level the playing field but the AI still still wins and so like you kind of should expect the AI to win if you're going like

No chess master expects to beat an AI at chess. But yeah, it's kind of makes it is the, it's like kind of, it's great because it's a meme, but at the same time, it makes the case for these AI Dumeers that are like, guys, we need to stop fighting among ourselves. And it needs to be more of like the humans versus AI. Like, we need to take this seriously. And that was more convincing than any like essay that I've seen from them, which are really easy to be like, that like cool story, bro.

Yeah, I mean, David just has great takes on all this stuff. Like, he is pretty, like, AGI-Pilled, but he has, like, very nuanced takes. He's not just, like, out there, like, saber-rattling and, like, having a connoption fit every two seconds. Why did you, how did you select Joshua Steinman? Okay. Good morning we are going to win. Okay, simple. This is not a new tweet.

Tweets this every single day. Tweet. It's a mantra. Not even a particular banger. Yeah. Some of them ended up since. Some of them, it's funny watching, like, the Algo just pick some up more than others. but the reason I included it is that I see these like every three, four days and every time I see it, I'm like, nice.

So anyways, I just included it because it's American. Thank you for your service. And I do think it's a public service. And it's kind of, it's an example of like marketers that think like, oh, like we're being too repetitive with this messaging where now I just associate Steinman with winning and being committed to winning. and it makes me want to back whatever he does. And being optimistic. Right. And it's, yeah.

He worked in the Trump administration. He's very pro-Trump and never faltered when the polls weren't going as way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a big fan. Also, I mean, it's his version of like the Jocko Willing thing. He posted this at 6.16 a.m. And as we know, the most important thing is not waking up early. It's getting on Twitter early.

And posting. First thing, get on X. Post. This is key. Wilmanitis. says having a full-time Bible instructor is the new private jet. Yeah, and pressed, no, I think, was it, no, Preston-quot tweeted Fio about something else, but no, I think this is relevant because we know some people with full-time Bible instructors. We know some billionaires with full-time Bible instructors, and it just shows that even a product like the Bible that is.

is available to everybody and been analyzed, you know, over and over and over and over for generations, it's still worth hiring, you know, a tutor and learning, even if you have the time to study it intensely. So, yeah. There's also an interesting thing where, like, even if you're the most, like, atheist, skeptic about the Bible, it's a valuable text just because it's so old that it's been copied again and again and again in so many different stories, like the Lion King or whatever. So the first thing a child learns, the first story that a lot, that a child learns is like a hero's journey that's derived from the Bible. And so if you can go to the source text, text, understand like the, the way the story and the narrative is structured, that gives

you power in storytelling and also understanding like what resonates. Oh, and our mutual friend who is a Bible instructor to the global elite, his main point is that if you don't understand the Bible, you're going to miss so many other things when you're reading some random story like the Lion King. It's like, oh, well, like, yeah, it does just improve like, you know, your edification and your enjoyment of other literature. So yeah, get the full-time Bible instructor, although, I don't know, maybe with AI, it'll be on demand soon. Some of those Bible apps like print money. Yeah. Like, it's a good business. There's a few. And then there's that company, Angel Studios, one of the most underrated media companies that does really well.

Really? Yeah. Christian, like they did an adaptation of the Bible that was like HBO level cinematography and did really well. And they produced a number of films that are all like related to Christian themes. But more interestingly, like the business has just become very, very good. Yeah. And they've done they've done very well.

It's an interesting business to try. to monetize. There's a podcast called the Bible Project that I listen to that's totally free. They don't do ads, but it's donation based, which is like, at what point should they just become a church? Sure. Right?

An online church effectively. That's cool. Just pay what you want. Power tools are making a comeback. Julian Friede says the power tool Renaissance is underappreciated. It's a great time to be alive if you are someone who likes making things and quote tweets this is this is I shared this because it's funny because tech guys whose only

tools has been a phone and a laptop are now discovering that there's the democratization of super high quality power tools that has been happening like in the background and there's like entire religions oriented around the different brands of power tools and whether you're like a Makita guy or Milwaukee guy or whatever. I've seen those memes that are like choose. And the guys that have their drills like fight each other where they like attach two of them and they just like go. So I haven't gone down the power tool like, you know,

rabbit hole and watched a thousand hours of some YouTube. I feel like I got to like Tim Ferriss Pilled where Tim's like mindset was like if something, if you can hire, if you make $500 an hour and you can hire somebody to do do the job for $100 an hour. Nick Huber's. Now when I'm doing stuff, yeah, Nick Huber's like,

why would you stand on a ladder? It's like, it's a good point. Now when I'm doing, like if I do something around the house. And I do like, yeah, glory. Household glory.

I find that I think women are attracted. You know, when I can like use a hammer, Sarah's like, nice. I remember one of my first days with my now wife, like went over to her sister's place,

changed a life. light bulb, everyone was like, this guy's God. Yeah. It was amazing. Marry this man. Yeah. Fantastic. I got my power tool game. I need to build up. We're going to get some. I think we should. Yeah.

On the rack there. On the rack there. On the wall. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine posts 25 years ago today, the Battle of Los Angeles, the cover art for that album that has Bulls on Parade and a couple of really hit songs. And Orrin McIntyre quote tweets and says, you have the same political. beliefs is Black Rock and City Bank. I think he was trying to dunk on him, but your point of view is that...

I love rage against the machine, and I love Black Rock and City Bank. There you go. So what a match made in heaven. I'm glad. Welcome to the club, Tom. If you have the same political beliefs as Black Rock, you're a friend of mine. It's great. Yeah, it is kind of odd that people try and dunk on this.

Like, I... I do think it's a good way to get people to question their beliefs. Yeah. Because if somebody thinks that organizations like Black Rock and Citibank are inherently bad, and then you tell them they have the same set of beliefs as that group, then it is a good at least thought starter in their mind to be like, hmm, maybe I should have a more open mind around certain things. This is also one of those interesting tweets where like,

I can't quite tell if this is a leftist or rightest critique. Like it could be like you believe you like Citibank and they like, ESG and DEI so you suck and I and like you should be more right wing or it should be like you like the capitalist black rock and city bank you should be more left wing yeah and it's like I don't really know but all I know is black rock basically it kind of makes sense like raging against like black rock is the machine yeah so it's saying like if you're raging against the machine yet you shouldn't be aligned with the machine yet you're aligned with the you're stimulating the machine yeah but who knows maybe Black Rock and Citibank are raging against the machine, the machine of stagnation.

Yeah. The machine of under-financialization. Black Rock created Burning Man, which is, it is the foundation on which Burning Man was built. Yeah. The machine of a lack of financial products. I wouldn't want to live in that world. It would be a disaster. How long until we go viral for being the podcast bros that say, no, no, that say that Black Rock created Black Rock City.

Eventually, we'll get that. It's gonna happen. There's like a cottage industry of, of YouTubers that just put out endless hit pieces on Black Rock being like, did you know that they own everything? And they don't understand how like fund of funds or ETFs work.

It's so hilarious. And you watch someone fall into that trap and you're just like, oh my God, take one economics class please. It's really bad. Anyway, Colin Mickles says, I hope I'm pronouncing that correct, Michaels maybe, Colin Michaels.

If you learn that SpaceX prices, their launches way higher than it costs them to launch. They're essentially reaping $30 to $60 million in profit each launch. Blue Origin existing is extremely good for the commercial space market. Bezos is notorious for downward price pressure. And then he has to follow it up with an apology kind of. I underestimated how many people would misinterpret this tweet, Lull. I don't know what they were misinterpreting. It seems pretty basic, but I mean, everyone knows that SpaceX is way ahead of Blue Origin, but, you know, competition is good. And if you like going to space. I mean, it is for losers, so

wouldn't want to be a as a as a SpaceX bowl. We'll get to that later in the pod. As a SpaceX Bowl, you know, maybe you don't want to encourage things. I do love when these, the Musk-Bezos rivalry in some ways is just so entertaining because they have warring

properties like everywhere, right? They both have car companies because Bezos was like one of the biggest backers of Rivian and then they have rival space companies. Obviously everyone knows about that one, SpaceX and Blue Origin. They also have rival media efforts because Bezos owns the Washington Post and Elon ends acts. Wait, but the way that you just said all of this and it kind of makes it seem that Elon is maugging Bezos at literally every single one of these Washington Post Tesla.

Except in, you know. Commerce. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's, I don't care about, I don't, I mean, I care about, I care about what Bezos is doing with his money now. Yeah. And if you're repeatedly getting mugged. Yeah. Wow, you have to imagine, though, that his performance across all those things is going to improve as his testosterone levels have climbed month over month for the past five years.

It seems like it's happening in the Washington Post. A lot of changes there. Seems like he's improving that. Maybe Blue Origin, you know, becomes a big space launch provider. Yeah, but it's, yeah, I think it would be amazing for humanity. I think Rivian's holding up okay. Yeah, Olivia Rodriguez or whatever the name is. There's another one, too.

But, yeah, I mean, I think Bezos is a little bit more of like an old school, like, mega billionaire where he sees the side projects very much as like side projects where it's like get somebody to do something, go and show up. He's not on the factory floor at Rivian. Yeah. Elon feels like when he does something, it's like he's putting his life on the line for it. And it's like almost you a lot of people, this is a critique, we'll say like, I actually just care about the space thing. I would be fine with him not spending time on media. But Elon's like, I'm going to personally make this change the way this company works significantly. I'm going to go and rename it.

I'm going to do all this crazy stuff. And for Elon, it's like, he only has one mode. Elon doesn't like angel invest. Renaming. Renaming Twitter has the decision has grown on me quite a bit. When it happened, it was like one of my favorite brands, even though it was flawed. Yep. And it was very painful.

Like for years, I would just input, I guess not that long, but I'd still put Twitter.com. And more and more it's feeling like, yeah, coming in and making it, just making it your thing actually makes sense in the context of Elon. Yeah, there's that saying like when there's a change of leadership, the company needs to be refounded. Yeah. And that's certainly what Elon did. Yeah. Even changing the name, change all the people, change everything. Yeah.

So that it's like, but he had to do it because as we talked about with the truth social thing, like having a network is very, is, is, is. very important and it's very resilient. And even if the servers did go down, which was like a big fud thing for a while, like people would have opened up that app. That's where they go. Yeah. And it's very hard to get people to move,

even though people tried to move to Blue Sky or Maps. We should do a deep dive on threads and how that's actually working. Yeah, it is, but it's very different. Yeah, it's a totally different market. Completely separate product. Yeah. But yeah, cheers to, cheers to both Elon and Bezos.

I love you guys. Another Steinman tweet, got to love it, 100K views. It's a quote tweet from ARMA who posts a picture of the reception desk at General Motors Technical Center in 1965, Interior by architect Eroseranen. It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. It looks like a 90s sci-fi movie that's like super ahead of its time. And they were probably the 90s sci-fi movie was just referencing General Motors.

Because they had the technologists, they had the money, so they'd, just went and sent it. And I'm sure it was like the most delightful place to work. If you were an engineer, you were like, this is beautiful. This inspires me. I want to go build great stuff there. Yeah. It's fantastic. So Steinman says Detroit was fire back in the day. Then politicians decided shipping jobs to China was more important than the American industrial base. Making it political, bro, we don't talk about politics on this show. Not on this podcast, but we'll highlight some good aesthetics. We will love some great aesthetics. Fantastic. Yeah, I'm really excited for this new generation of hard tech and defense tech companies. They're going to do stuff like this for sure.

They're going to do stuff like for sure. We're going to do this at deterrence. Right now it's messy like you know sleeping on the floor of the warehouse but it will be beautiful and there are some companies. I forget if it's Airbnb like when when Lockhe grooms robotics company. Oh yeah. It will have like a robot playing a symphony in the entryway. Yep. Like they're welcome to use this idea just throw some shares to technology brothers. Yes, yes, yes. There is there is a company that made I feel like I and a hit piece is like, oh, they spent too much money on this.

But they built a full replica of the Dr. Strange Love, how I learned to love the atom bomb. There's this Stanley Kubrick film, and there's this iconic, huge boardroom where all of the military leaders are meeting and it's this massive, massive boardroom. That's huge, like, 50 people. Is the closest?

They, like, built a replica of it. Is the closest example to this, like the scale AI office? I haven't been, but isn't it pretty iconic? I've been, it's, I don't know if I've been to the newest one.

It was beautiful, but it didn't, like the thing of it stands, like, this stands out. This stands out. No, it's just like,

it's just like, it's hard to differentiate because, like, there is some practicality. Like, this, this, this, like, entryway desk is,

like, the most impractical thing. There's so much, like, wasted space here, but that's exactly the point. I love how the woman is sitting, like, on an island,

basically, in a bowl. It's fantastic. And it's like, you can't get, within five feet or whatever. Yeah, it's great. So, yeah, making like bold design decisions like that that are,

they go against the obvious optimization of like square footage. Like, it is going to cost you more to do this, but it's going to make a statement and it's going to be more important to the business long term. Maximilism. Yeah. Red Bull futurist writes, I want a dozen kids. This guy's awesome. He's a rocket scientist.

Oh, really? Or an emerging rocket scientist. Cool. He's involved with SpaceX. Also caffeine connoisseur. Caffeine connoisseur, Excel, enthusiast. Fantastic. Yeah, I think this is hilarious.

Like I pulled this out because 10 years ago, he would have been ostracized for saying something like this. It would have just been so random. But the pro-natalist movement is like now becoming like the new norm, at least within the tech community. And I think it's great because I hope Red Bull Futurist goes and has 12 children because they're all going to be a bunch of smart

little rocket scientists and we'll probably create the companies that topple SpaceX and Blue Origin Monopoly on space. I mean the trick is just like breaking free of the memetics around like what it takes to have a dozen kids like yeah you probably need to live on a ranch outside of a major city.

Probably not raising a dozen kids in Manhattan unless you're a trillionaire. But if you're willing to go live in some interesting place and, you know, set your life up to be, oh, there's a couple other families there with lots of kids and we homeschool or something or we do something interesting. And like, you know, we've designed our life with that being the KPI. That's the priority. Well, then it becomes very easy.

Everything flows from that. Yeah. So shout out Red Bull Futurist. High yield Harry, great fintech influencer, writes, oh, you just ran the NYC Marathon. That's sick, dude. I just spent all day building an investment memorandum that no one is going to read. So I feel like high yield Harry and some of the other folks from his generation of posters, like basically it almost, it's like they,

it seems like there's infinite competition now from these sort of new posters. Sure. And yet these guys are like pretty stable. Like they've got like they're like posting, you know, regimen and, you know, it seems like they've kind of broken above the noise where you see a post from a high yield Harry now and you know that it means something. Yep. You know, it's not just a shit post anymore. It's a little black pill, though.

I feel like if you write an investment memo, someone should read it. Come on, man. Yeah, but I think it's more, I think he's more saying, you know, look, when I write a memorandum, people put in size. They're not worried about what it says. They know I wouldn't write it if it wasn't worth putting. They just see the attachment and they wind. They don't need to open it. Yeah, they go straight for the wire.

Okay, I like this. This is a little bit more optimistic than what I was. Yeah, yeah. It was very, like, low-level analyst coded where it's like I'm doing kind of, make work and this sucks. That's how I read it at first, but I like your interpretation more. I got to go long, hairy. I love it.

Early, really thin to it. Mostly just anything to avoid watching the New York City Marathon. I was on the phone with somebody yesterday. They were like, oh, call me after I got to watch the marathon. And I picked up the phone and I was like, I'm going to keep it real with you. Watching a marathon sounds like the most boring thing I could possibly imagine. I'm already not that into sports.

The only way that you should be watching a marathon is if you're betting on it. If you're betting on it, you're betting on it. you're betting on it or you're running in it. Yeah, exactly. The best way to watch a marathon is by running in. To be fair to my buddy, I did, he did have a friend in it. And he was like cheering a friend on and stuff. Yeah.

Well, even, even, no, watching your friend, it's like, if you're watching a friend run a marathon, like, it better be like some like blood, like relative connection. And even then it's cringe. But even look at the Spanish, when they go to a bull run, they're not just watching. They're running. They're running with the bulls. That's great. Yeah.

So let's bring bull runs back. Bull run. Yeah, replace the New York City Marathon with Bull Run. Or just put a bull into the marathon. For sure, for sure. Yeah, New York City talks this big game. Oh, we have Wall Street Bull. We're all into Bulls.

Prove it. Bull on the street. Turn it loose. Turn it loose today. Turn it loose now. I want a New York City bull run. Let the marathon go. Give them a one minute head start.

One minute. Release the bowls. Yeah, no slackers. Yeah, not just one bowl, like 10, 10, 20. You better be running. Make every person running the marathon wear red. Yes, yes, that's great. Yeah, no slack.

We need to step up the expectations of the NYC marathon. Let's do it. Increase the state. Another Palantir tweet, a little bit more of a shit post. I like this one, though. But you know it's good because the other one didn't have the badge. So it was just a fan, like a stock, a guy who owns the stock. This says the employee badge.

So Eliano Yunus says, with a lot of Palantir merch now out in the wild, here are some ground rules to follow when sporting the logo. No drugs, no fighting, no theft, no more than two beverages, no elliptical, no kipping pull-ups. Why is he singling out kipping?

Oh, because it's a cross-bit thing. Sorry, I was thinking, I was fake, it's right, yeah, yeah, that's really good. I thought, I was thinking muscle-ups because I never want a kipping, I only do muscle-ups. Yeah, of course. Strict, strict muscle-ups. no no you know sort of like yeah yeah um yeah thank you for doing your part the reason that this is relevant

is like when a company crosses a hundred billion dollars in market cap does it become a religion because like yeah he's kind of acting as like a priest of saying like this is good and right and this is wrong um it is i think it's a good yeah i mean it is legitimately valuable to be like you know this merch is out in the world we want to like set a tone for like what it means to have this. And, you know, some of this is a joke, but some of this is very real. And so I like that he's like enforcing a brand standard, like a little bit more broadly. And hopefully people got the message. If I see someone doing kipping pull-ups and a Palantir shirt, it's over. I'm going to show him this tweet. I printed it out. Let's keep it. Let's each keep a copy in our wall.

Yeah, exactly, for when we run into somebody from Palantir. I mean, Palantir, fantastic team. I, from some random content thing, I got a DM from a kid who just, like, graduated from some school and went to Palantir and it was like still a cut above it's a 20 year old company like you just don't see that anywhere else it's wild um simp for Satoshi i am ginger trash says by the way polymarket will become a way to short startups post election the financial primitive is finally here yeah and i think what's um what's interesting about this is that you know having the news around Bowery today is like, okay, it's just $2 billion company that's was that's now as of whatever this last week worth zero. The thing that that so I really hope this becomes true.

Yep. Because it'll provide a lot of content for us and then we'll be putting some size on the platform. For sure. The interesting thing, though, is that the private markets effectively have legalized insider trading. Yep. already right all the private markets are is like using inside knowledge on companies teams founders and placing bets accordingly and so we'll be extremely chaotic about this is that bring short pressure like if this actually happens companies will have to be like employees you are legally not allowed

to trade the company's uh poly market because like it'll be like that you'll see so much activity of like right leading up to a big product announcement like oh 20 million dollars just got placed on polymarket right and so hopefully this doesn't lead to more like if this actually plays out it'll be it'll lead to a lot of pressure around the private yeah yeah we've just reinvented yeah we just reinvented stocks from first principles LMFA yes um well you know how they do this for like so death pools are like illegal you can't bet on someone dying because then you have this really perverse incentive to like go kill them obviously um but on polymarket there are a number of contracts that are like, this person will still be the leader of, you know, Hamas by this date.

And so it's like, well, they could step down, but really what you're betting on is like, are they going to get taken out? And so there's a bunch of like, you know, proxy stats that you could probably build to get there where you say like this company's domain will still be live or like this company, where you're not like truly betting on just the stock going down, but it's like some proxy for the Yeah, the cool thing would be the real meta stuff around Polymarket, where like, will Polymarket do 100 million in volume on this month in 2025, right? Interesting. Because like you're able to bet about the platform on the platform.

And if it's on chain, then it's all like verifiable. But then there's also the incentive of like, okay, if I put a bunch of size into this event, into this bet, then I could just artificially create the volume. What's interesting is that there are already polymarket markets that are direct representations of liquid financial markets. One of the most popular categories that I see is like, will Bitcoin hit 80K in December? Or will Bitcoin hit 100K by the end of the year? And it's like you could just buy Bitcoin. Why are you betting on this in this weird way? But that's kind of an effective way to short Bitcoin, I guess.

It's some sort of like proxy. It's not perfect. And so I could imagine this, but for a lot of startups, like, the liquidity is just not going to be there. Because there just aren't going to be that many people that care about some Series A company that, like, has got some VC platform teams have entire teams. It would be funny if there was like a VC. Dropping up their portfolios, like, polymarket accounts. Yeah. Yeah, the insider sharing will be crazy.

It would be interesting to see a VC be like, yep, we're pivoting to like long short. Yeah. Like, we are a long short fund. And like, we will be going long. one company and we will be going short the other companies because we think our founders are going to win. And so we're investing a $20 million series A and we're putting $10 million on polymarket on shorting all the other companies. Crazy. We already did Bowery.

Let's do. Bayes Lord says, how do we get a new elite in America? I think this one is broken. Seems like we're in the midst of power shift. No, technology trends to disrupt, establish hierarchies way more than it cements them, I think. we are I don't aimless post yeah the new elite thing I was talking to somebody about this how this is this is the story of Elon makes a bunch of money in tech yep starts owning everything yeah all the like these super important robotaxies but doesn't just wind up laundering it through a bunch of

nonprofits yeah and then buys the biggest one of the biggest media companies in the world yeah a social media company yeah that is the story yeah he's doing impact investing even though like some people might not like the impact that he's having like his he's putting his wealth to work in like very specific targeted ways he's just an impact investor essentially much more than like you know oh diffusing a billion dollars through a bunch of nonprofits that are kind of like moving yeah I saw someone else plastic straws yeah I saw someone else say like because Elon I guess was like helping bus people into Pennsylvania or whatever and somebody was like we have our George Soros yeah yeah yeah and it's like yeah but I mean the other thing that's

underrated about like elites is is is I think when people go back to like this idea of like, we need better elites, we need the older elites. It's like back in the 17th century, 18th century, early 19th century, the elites were the ones who would go and build Hearst Castle, Versailles. They built these like massive houses and then they would, and then they weren't just like perfect boxes of glass

that were memetic with everyone else and they just wound up looking like track homes. They were like these very unique expressions of wealth. And then when they turned over, it didn't make sense for anyone else to maintain them, even the descendants. And so they became museums and libraries. And yeah, and like there's so many stories of this where. Yeah, the Getty is that.

Yep, exactly. Like the Getty, the, what's the other one in Pasadena? I forget. The Huntington, it was a house. The guy was so rich. He was a railroad baron, oil baron. He built train tracks that went to his house because he wanted to just be able to, Oh, I want to take the train to New York.

And this is, this is Elod Gill in his new monument company. New monument company. This is Nat Friedman with his, with his like one-off projects, the scrolls. These are dividends that get paid to society and pay back in probably better ways than most of the other things because they build the brand and founders want to work with them. And so they get better deal flow. So it actually is rational. This guy, go and message your favorite elite, which you can DM them on Twitter and just pat them on the back.

say thank you for doing something good with the money good yeah something interesting yeah something interesting that will live on beyond you i mean bezos is doing that with the long now thing the i think that's what's called he's building this clock in this mountain that will allow it'll keep time for like a million years and it's just like this really heroic you know engineering project yeah it's just like this heroic engineering project and it's something that like everyone right now is like oh the project's not going well oh it's not working you know it's like this mass of mega project, but then it'll probably work, but in the next 20 years, you know, it just takes time. And then it'll just be this thing that people go visit.

If you want eternal time, if you want eternal time, have a little patience. Have a little patience. Skip that one. Men only want, let's see, Dylan Morris says, men only want one thing and it's disgusting. Who wants to split this with me? And it's on biz by sell, award winning sailboat manufacturing business in San Luis Obispo County. and it's going for 495K and it cash flow is 75K and they build sailboats. That's a tough.

Would you split that with him? I'm not going halves on that. We talked about this last time. Buying a company with less than half a million of cash flow is buying a job. And this one, if you split it with a buddy, it's buying the minimum wage jobs. You could just work at Chipotle and then go and build a job. I think businesses like this, like we need a movement around entrepreneurs and retiring boomer operators to be like, I'm hiring an apprentice to learn my trade and take over my business and I will give it to you on a seller note over the next 15 years if you come in and operate it. Because like the only way that I could see this business even maybe being sellable is if a smart enterprising search funder out of Stanford.

goes and decides I'm going to roll up all the mom and pop sailboat manufacturers and create a monopoly. Or put a gun on it and raise some defense tech money. Let's go. Put a gun on it. No, I think. Slap a 50 cal on the front. I actually know a guy who sailed sailboats all around like the, he would sail like all

the way from California to Australia. And he actually did have a 50 cal on the front because he was worried about pirates. Smart. And he would be able to like fire off warding shots if something happened. Because when you're out there alone, like anyone could just come up to you. And what are you going to do? Call the cops. They'll be there in two days.

Like that doesn't work. Two days? The SOS? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. John Palmer says, I feel like joining the World Coin team is kind of like the crypto dev equivalent of joining the Marines. People join there and then you never hear from them again because they're just grinding. Strong men create good times, et cetera. What do you think about WorldCoin?

The eyeball scanner. The eyeball scanner. Very dystopian, but I'm always, like, I'm just bullish on Sam projects, and I'm, I'm, I'm interested to see, like, kind of, like, the manifestation of that idea. Yeah, you haven't, I feel like you don't hear it. The other thing about it is, like, I feel like a lot of WorldCoin activity is just happening overseas. Sure. So, like, these devs are, like, being deployed to Africa, just, like, scanning eyeballs and, like,

doing it more efficiently. Yeah. But yeah, I think I'm excited to like hear more about like it's so it's so dystopian in a way you would only do it if it was like you thought it was really important work. I mean it does feel like in line with Sam's idea of like, okay, in the future we need UBI, we need it to be a global UBI. It is truly the fully automated luxury communism concept.

How do you distribute wealth to every single human individually. Like, well, you need something that's, you know, identifiable on a human basis and then has its own internal currency that can then be distributed and redistributed endlessly. We should get a Worldcoin orb. I'm down. World coin can sponsor the orb. I'm down. Antibiology says whenever something is P-FAS-free, non-toxic as a non-stick pan, it usually just means they replace the thing that we studied and we know is bad with some, something that is unstudied so we don't know it's bad yet. I love this guy.

I, uh, he's got a really cool company in the cancer research space, like reviving, uh, a bunch of lost sort of like esoteric knowledge around cancer and like bringing it back. So anyways, this guy's like brilliant, building something really cool. Um, I've gotten, personally gotten some like great health tips from him, uh, via DMs. He gives this example. stainless steel lowest aluminum possible Corning glass cookware Copper are all better if untreated

Cast iron kind of sketches me out because of the seasoning process You just parma burned fat onto an oxidizable surface And even if the fat is non-toxic excess iron So he goes on and yeah It's an interesting thing There's always this like rat race

Of like let's get rid of one thing Oh oh we introduced a new bad thing Like we got rid of lead And then we wound up with microplastics It's hard because so many things that are so many products of modern manufacturing processes and things that we expect out of products

end up being just deeply toxic by their very nature and so it's really hard to shop for modern any sort of consumer good now like you have to be hyper you have to be hyper aware of it and even look like glass is superior

to plastic um in pretty much i don't know in pretty much uh every single way except for its weight and it's shattered and all the health concerns and all you know it's sort of like safety concerns i mean um so yeah i think uh i think that there should be a deep tech company that tries to create uh like the issue is the consumer package goods entrepreneur that's like i want to make a microplastic free version of blank or i want to make a non-toxic pan they don't have time to do a 10-year science experiment on creating a new material. We need more teams that are trying to create totally new materials that are non-toxic

that can be used for everyday consumer goods. So somebody out there wants to spend a decade developing new materials for consumer goods that are non-toxic, we will back you. Moulson Hart says, if you get rich when you're young in America, you will live in a neighborhood that is 90% old people. you cannot relate to at all. 8% young people with family money that you can't relate to and 2% with a fellow Uber Mench that you can break bread with.

Same goes for country clubs. It's pretty funny. It's pretty accurate. It's very true. I think what's interesting is you have this, at least in my neighborhood, you have this balance of people that have moved into the neighborhood in the last five years.

And then people that are multi-millionaires because they bought their house like 20 to 30 years ago. And the tension between those groups is crazy, right? Because like they just want very different things. And so, yeah, but I think, I don't know, there's a lot of alpha and just going and being in a place where you're the younger person with energy that's still in the trenches, basically,

because all those other people just want to back what you do, basically. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, when I moved into my neighborhood, I was like, we met our neighbors and I was like, oh, they're about the same age as us. And my wife was like, they're 15 years older than us. No, this happens like, I don't know, with Sarah and like her mom groups, like the other moms in her group will be like 15, yeah, 10 to 15 years older. And they're just like, there's like a pretty, yeah, well, same lifestyle.

totally different era. Yeah. I mean, I think the lesson is like, is like, that is not a criticism. That, like, the nice thing is still the nice thing. Yeah, it's sort of like. You shouldn't be like, oh, okay, because everyone else who's like in my world, like, lives in like a high rise, like that's what I should do. Yeah.

It's like, no, it's okay to go be like the odd one out at the country club or the odd one out in your neighborhood. Like, that's fine. Just do it and meet the old people and it's fine. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that are in environments where they're the young person and they build their entire identity around that. And then they wake up one day and they're like, wait, like, I'm the older person in the room. And you actually always want to perpetually be the youngest person in the room.

But then you go from the workplace to the neighborhood to, you know, and you want to like stay on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very American trajectory. That's great. Number runner, run the numbs says ambition is just rage channeled. And Dan says real a F. you think that's accurate I don't

rage I don't I feel like I've never gotten the feeling that Donald J. Trump is has internal rage

I think he more just like likes being likes attention and likes winning and those are like the core motivation that's funny because there's like a book about him that's literally called like fire and fury

and it's like it makes the case that he's driven entirely by rage. It's an odd, odd pick. If you wanted to pick someone who's, like, peaceful but extremely ambitious, I think you'd go for, like, a Zuck or, like, a Steve Jobs who, like, don't seem very, like, rageful. But I guess you hear stories.

But I feel like you hear more stories about, like, I can think of that, that exchange that Zuckerberg had in the early Facebook days where somebody's like, where he's like, yeah, these people just, like, give me the person's, like, they just give you all their data. and he's like, yeah, these fucking idiots like trust me for some reason. Is that rage? Is that rage?

I don't know. But you don't hear stories of like Trump on like raging out at people, right? Like he sort of gets, I don't see it as rage. It's certainly like one one path to ambition. Obviously. We hear a lot of stories that people are like they've been wronged. They've been heard. But I think people really like boiling this down to just like a single

precursor. It's like you have to have a chip on your shoulder to do anything. Yeah, yeah. You have to have to have to have to be wronged. You have to come from a broken home or something like that. Chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. It's like it's certainly true that there's some, but there are a bunch of exceptions there. Yeah. I don't know. That's a good one. If you if you have rage inside, at least use it to create value for shareholders. Oh, this is a great one. I love this. Trivian says a friend was at a cafe in San Francisco and said cursor crashed on his laptop. I like that he's just like saying this out loud, I guess, and says a cursor co-founder was walking by at that very moment and offered to debug this company is sticking around.

This is this an ad? Because this seems a little bit imprower. Curser crashed out loud and just happens to be a cursor co-founder. I mean, talk about a great marketing stunt if this was like planned. I don't think it was. It seems ridiculous. It seems this is the type of thing that happens in cafes in San Francisco. Yeah, you saw the other. There was something last week with a guy who was like in an SF like a cafe with just like a thing on the other side of his laptop that's like marketplace startup have revenue raising precede say hi or whatever and it's like wait really so if you looked at his if you looked at his laptop yeah people were taking pictures of there was like only an SF but yeah I just think there's a reason that like half of the super

important companies in the world come out of that area and it's because the density of like-minded people and the overlap that you can have with customers on a day-to-day basis. I remember when I lived in San Francisco, I went to a cafe. I didn't work from cafes very often, but I went to a cafe maybe just to get a coffee. And I ran into David Holes co-founder, Elite Motion. And I remember him just talking to me. And I was like, oh, I love what you're working on. Like, this is super interesting.

And he was, like, breaking it down. And, yeah, it was like way back in the day when he was working on this, like, it was hand tracking for VR. That was David's first company. Fascinating. That's just like the type of thing that happens. Serendipity. San Francisco is a serendipity magnet.

David Zaganov says, realizing the reason they call it hard tech is because this is really hard. Makes for a nice moat though. And then Dylan just says, no, bro, that's not why. And then he says, this is why. And the tweet got cut off. I like this. I like this because it reminds me of like two cattle ranchers being like, makes for a nice moat though

yeah this cat raising cattle ain't easy but pays the bills it's a life it's a life love it so yeah

I uh maybe we do a deep dive on why hard tech's called hard tech but um but yeah it's definitely is real it's sort of nominative

nominative determinism shit's hard you know yeah yeah that makes sense me everything's just slower right like you need a part that could delay you a week there's just like a million things

that could go wrong interact with the physical world and then heavily heavy regulation yeah so it's just like you have two really tough factors that you can't move at the speed of of bits you have to move at the speed of atoms and yeah when things break they physically break yeah rough rough but I think the the hard tech and hard is hard meme I think it I was around when I was in YC and I think it was probably true initially and then a sci-op after a little bit not like an intentional one but like a negative meme where there was a time when it ceased being hard because just the capital markets were ripping so much and technology had gotten better

and there were a bunch of ways to like do hard tech adjacent things whether it's white labeling or partnering or doing a bunch of different things and that's when the first boom of hard tech started and now we're all talking about it but all the big companies are like 10 years old so like clearly hard tech wasn't hard eight years ago when some of the big companies were getting started but everyone was repeating mantra hard techs hard the interesting thing is like this new generation of hard tech companies so i have portfolio company called shinkay which uses robots to kill fish using the traditional uh methodology that japanese fishermen would do and it's done in a way where they um they basically insert like a needle into the back of the fish's brain and it and when you kill a fish that way it doesn't the fish doesn't

release all this cortisol and other stress hormones that make the fish age more rapidly. And the interesting thing about that is they're going to a market with like very little innovation, not a lot of competition, but then they're going to build this system that other people are going to realize, oh, that's a really good business. But then if you want to go compete with Shinkai in five years, you're going to be going up against a company that can spend way that's still very young that can spend way more money on R&D and sales and marketing and distribution and has better cost structure and all this stuff and the real hard tech is going after like a five to 10 year old hard tech company that's competing in the same exact category as you

that has more resources that has more learnings that has more customer relationships and like so that's the real that's the hard hard tech yeah yeah that makes sense let's go to ivan zao Chow? Ivan says, why do Americans always vote on Tuesdays? Because 1800s citizens needed a full day's

horseback ride to reach polling sites after Sunday church. Pretty amazing that this democracy runs on horse and buggy software in the age of the internet and AI.

That's a very interesting I didn't know that. Super Tuesday, yeah, every Tuesday, right? Because you need a full day. Wow.

Full day. But you can't match to church. I feel like if you wrote a horse. He's the founder of Notion, Yeah, yeah. I feel like if you wrote a horse to a polling site today, you would end up in a very viral video. For sure. With the police, like, it would just be very dark. But no, I thought this was interesting because I hope that the Ivins of the world end up building software, like, you know, more, like out of the last week, it seems like there's been a lot of failures on the software side. in regards to, you know, polling and voting specifically. And so if the voting and polling software, the future looks and feels more like notion,

I think that'll be a win for democracy. Is the digital polling ever coming? Like, we're so far. We're just so deep in this. I feel like we never, I'm so black-filled out and I feel like it'll never happen. It should be so simple. But then again, I was reflecting on the fact that maybe like 10 or 15 years ago, there was all these stories about, oh, well, in Japan, they're like this cashless society.

They have this great NFC technology. You just take your phone. You can tap to pay. You can tap for your ID. You can tap to get on the subway or whatever. It's just all digital. And it's like, why can't we have that in America? Things are so backwards.

But then, like, for the last month, I haven't carried anything. other than my phone, and it's been fine, because the DMV finally moved over. There's an app for it. You can just pull up your driver's license there. Every single place takes Apple Pay now. And so we finally have caught up, so maybe it'll happen with the digital voting.

Probably not in the next election, though. Not the next election. And then also all the skepticism about the integrity of elections. Like, one party is going to fight it tooth and nail. Yeah. Whoever's, you know, more pissed about the election. I really think it's boomers. You think so?

Boomers aren't into it? I think boomers don't get enough hate in general. Yeah. Like we need to be slandering boomers more. Add it to the list, enemies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Add it's the list, Ben. So Eliza says, people shit on the YC ecosystem shilling to each other,

but the underlying concept is actually beautiful. 20 to 30 somethings a year, 20 to 30 somethings founders buying SaaS from other 20 to 30 something year olds. We speak the same language. We run at the same speed, and it's really nice. This is for sure true. Love it. Yeah, I think I pulled this out because I invested in Eliza's company.

Oh, cool. And we promote, we end up. We shall for the portfolio. We do promote companies that we hold securities in. Yes. But yeah, I think that's a beautiful, it's a beautiful thing, an entire economy that is dependent on itself. Also, I mean, like, people always say this about like, oh, the YC hack is like, you get into

YC, you start some SaaS company, sell to all the other YC companies, your revenue spikes. And it's like, is it a good company or not? But I haven't heard about that many stories of like, oh yeah, that company, like their revenue totally collapsed because it was all fake like YC revenue. Like if you if you're in YC and you can sell to, yeah, if you can sell to Airbnb and Stripe and Coinbase, like that's pretty durable revenue. And even if it's just a bunch of startups, like there's enough that you could cobble together. Like it's not like YC has ever had a situation where it's like, oh, all of the companies went out of business all of a sudden. Most of them are fine.

Because they're in such random industries. It's so diverse. Yeah. It's actually like a fairly diversified revenue stream if you're selling to like all the YC companies. It's almost better than being like. It's actually more like one of YC's like moats is that if you could be in YC and you don't go in YC and then somebody that's competing for your same category does,

the loyalty is like very real. Like they are going to use your competitor. out of, at least in the early days until like it's very clear who the best product is. Yeah, yeah. We were talking about some company. Like if there was, if somebody, like the real, the only threat that we have with technology brothers is two other guys

that look like us that are NYC that take the 700K. And then they just have all this alpha from being NYC. Maybe we should go through YC. We talked about some company that was like highly, highly volatile. It might have been like a real estate company or something, but it's like all of their revenue came from something that was like super cyclical. This happens with hiring companies a lot. They're like doing great in a bull market. And then as soon as the riffs start and all the companies are laying off, their revenue just goes to zero because no one's hiring.

So no one's paying for hiring platforms because there's just plenty of applications coming in when it's not a tight job market. And so, you know, like that's an example of like if you can be if you can have a diversified revenue stream about it's like, oh yeah. Well, like the market overall is selling off and it's a little bit tighter, but there's still this one company that we sold to that's growing because they're in some interesting industry and they've kept us on as a client. You can actually be pretty good. Yeah. Let's stay on YC. Let's go to Jared Friedman. Partner at YC says, today I learned Saudi Aramco was started at 2.25 Bush Street in San Francisco because Ryan Peterson says every company in the world worth more than $1 trillion was founded on the West Coast, including Saudi Aramco, which was started in the same building as Flexport here in San Francisco. That is crazy stat, West Coast. All the innovation in California. Yeah. All the innovation in the world. Maybe it flips at some point, but I can say something else.

I think Nikita elsewhere on X was making the point that it's because on the East Coast a lot of power and resources go towards like prestige and people that have, you know, degrees where SF and California are more egalitarian, where if you're talented and hard working, you can get resources and opportunity. Who knows, but I love it. And I think that we should California should be more proud of founding Saudi Aramco. Yeah. It's very American. It is. I wish the state did a little like, you know, one on 10 into the Saudi Aramco pre-seat. I would solve our budgetary issues right now. Fantastic. Nice cash flow. Well, I mean, we should do a deep-dive on the Saudi Ramco story because I'm pretty sure that was like the ownership of that company was

like fought with wars. Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty sure like it was a big deal when it got like nationalized. It was not like a, it was not just like a, oh, they decided to move over to a different country. It was like we, this oil is in our ground and it's ours. Eric Raymond says, you can just make things. This is my massive white pill about the revolution and small scale manufacturing that's going on right now.

The immediate trigger is a story I read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair and the designs were all crappy and hideously expensive and made in China. So he booted up a small factory that now builds custom wheelchairs delivering them for about $1,000 a pop, undercutting the Chinese by a factor of five. Amazing. This guy's going to do one of the DOD contracts you mentioned. Really? No, I just imagine.

Yeah. Oh, just government contracts in general. Yeah, if he can spin up a small factory that builds custom wheelchairs for $1,000 a pop, like he could go and get the Boeing contract that's selling a soap dispenser for $150,000 and very he clearly has the skill set to deliver a high quality product at value. So get this guy on that platform ASAP. The original promise of 3D printing where people were like, oh, you're going to just be able to buy something online and 3D printed in your office or whatever.

And like I think that will basically come true, but it won't necessarily look like people imagined it. It'll just be localized manufacturing, talented, small companies. etc. Yeah. Let's go to Austin. Is it Reef? Austin Reef?

Founder of Morning Brew? Yep. He says, The New York Times Tech Guild went on strike today. As a reminder, here are their demands. A ban on scented products,

unlimited break time, pet bereavement, mandatory trigger warnings when discussing events in the news. It's funny because they were way ahead of, does it have to be your pet, or could it be a pet squirrel? owned by someone else.

I need some time off for sure. This is such bait. Clearly their demands were more than just this. Come on. Like they're obviously out. He didn't, he knows content. He knows content. He knows content.

But yeah, it's very silly. But also half of these things are like, you know, the read here is like, oh, they're all like left wing demands. Like they're like special snowflakes that need trigger warnings. But then also half of these are like, I could see the right wing adopting these because like, oh, the scented products have microplastics, so we can't have scented products anymore. Or like, yeah, we need to bereave our squirrels,

so like I need time off. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, it's like a little bit of like a horseshoe theory. The real, I guess the perplexity CEO did a PR push today saying that he would happily replace all of their writers with AI like he did a, he did a piece today. He's just becoming a shit poster. Oh, wait, oh, the New York Times.

Oh, yeah, because they're in a battle. They're in a legal battle, New York Times and perplexity. I'm pretty sure, or maybe Wired or one of the big publications for the scraping and whatnot. But it is kind of funny that the New York Times, they purposely chose to go on strike the day before the election as a way to like... Oh, yeah, because the Tech Guild is, so they do the software development, and they do like the New York Times needle, which will be getting like the most traffic tomorrow. Ever.

It's going to be like the highest demand. They do cool, like, visualizations. Some of the tech people are actually really awesome. They know when they have some leverage and they're willing to twist the night. But, yeah, I mean, I imagine they'd be able to give on that if they got a pay bump, maybe. This is a good one. Let's do Linus. So the creator of Linux, Kakashi says, the creator of Linux has publicly voiced what I've been saying for the past two years.

The Linux creator, Linus Torvald, quote, AI is useless. It's 90% marketing while he ignores AI for now. It's all hype. So the reason that this is easily refutable is that we've only ever recorded one podcast together in person. The very first one in every other episode of this podcast has been AI generated powered by Delta. It's funny because it's like the classic like, you know, programmer mistake of like marketing doesn't matter. Yeah. In my opinion.

So it's like 90% is marketing. Also, let's talk about Nike. Is that a valuable company? Does that bring people joy? Is it valuable? 90% marketing. It's 90% marketing, of course. And that's okay.

Some things are marketing driven and that's okay. It creates value and everyone is happy. The shareholders, the employees, the customers, everyone's happy. The athletes. It's like, this is the myth of consensual capitalism. Like, oh, like I didn't consent. It's like no one cares. No one cares that it's just marketing.

Like, it's fine. But I get that we're saying to deeper level like, you know, we want more AI innovation. Like it should be good. A lot of the products are kind of bad. But still, you have to fundamentally believe this, you have to have, you have to believe that all the AI products that we're using are not AI products. Sure. Because the products, many of them are magic, right? Like they really feel like magic.

Let's go to the last one with AI. Sajit Indop says, nobody blank, Wall Street slash Silicon Valley. What if a private credit bubble was combined with an AI bubble and then Nvidia related party transactions were thrown in just for fun? And he's talking about how I believe Nvidia is now doing deals. Yeah, there's huge amounts of credit being extended that is backed by GPUs. Sure. His core, I think, complaint from what I can tell is that GPUs are very rapidly depreciating assets. So it's one thing to extend credit against the house, which is relatively stable or an appreciating asset.

But extending huge amounts of credit against GPUs is like, you know, would be like really levering up a car and then driving it a ton while the cars were sort of like improving very rapidly so much so that a car would be almost worthless after three years. Yeah. Whereas a car is going to have some value for 20 years. granted as long as it doesn't sort of. Well, the other flip side here that I see people criticizing is this idea that like a startup will go and raise a $10 million series A and go and get $90 million of Nvidia credits. And then they'll announce $100 million fundraise. That looks like, you know, an in-kind related party transaction from Nvidia.

They get $90 million more revenue because the startup will use it. But it's kind of like, you know, where do the money. was kind of created out of thin air. Yeah, I feel like, but the thing is, is that this, this also happened in the dot com bubble, where a lot of the,

uh, telecom providers were, we're funding a lot of dot com startups and giving them like preferential access to bandwidth early on. But the thing is, is that, uh, like,

so it's like, oh, AI is overrated in the short term and underrated in the long term. This could lead to a bubble that pops, but it still could be amazing that all this stuff gets built out. and there's all this infrastructure. And that's exactly what happened in the dot-com boom. There was a lot of dark fiber,

and that's what enabled Google to grow so fast because even though the internet bubble had collapsed, the infrastructure was there, so when the right product came along, it was able to go super wide and super fast. So I feel like Bill Gurley has a nose for bubbles, like he just can smell bubbles, and he's been harping on the,

he's been harping on the Nvidia-related party transaction thing for quite a while. Yeah. Interesting. Let's move to audience Q&A. We have one question, then we'll wrap. Hey, John and Jordy, I've been running a Fortune 500 tech company for about a decade now and wanted to get your take on the next jet I should purchase. I currently own a Gulfstream G650 ER, extended range, but I've been thinking about upgrading to a Boeing business jet. What do you think I should go for? What do you think? Look, I think it's less about the shell and more about what do with the interior, right? And so I think whether it's a Boeing business jet and you want to be

able to bring your potentially entire polycule or family, or you're going, you're going to stay with the Gulfstream, I would just think about even if you keep your same Gulfstream, redoing the interior on like a fairly frequent basis, right? Because it's kind of like redoing the inside of your house. Like you walk in, it feels like this new, it feels like a new house, sure, even though it's the same, same kind of core or shell or whatever. But really, I would feel bad advising any one direction and would put, you know, tell him to go talk to Preston, Holland expert on private aviation. And he's our private jet guy.

I have a little bit more of a point in take. So I think I know who wrote this in. And it's really about like what your lifestyle. So for those who don't know, the Gulfstream is probably the most popular private jet. Elon, Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, they all have Gulf Streams. The Boeing business jet is essentially a white-labeled Boeing plane. So you can get a 737 max. Like the thing that you fly on United, you can just have that privately.

You can have a seven, you can have a dreamliner. And a lot of heads of state have these, you know, Saudi princes. you can think of Air Force One as kind of a Boeing business jet, although it's owned by the military. Trump flies on a BBJ, a Boeing business jet. But if you think about what's the difference between a CEO of a large company and a head of state. Well, the head of state is bringing an entire delegation to another country, a lot of international travel, and always landing at a major airport.

So you're going from D.C. to London. Those are huge, huge airports. When you're just a CEO, A, you don't need to. to bring your entire company with you when you go to do a deal. A lot of the biggest deals, it's just, you know, Zuckerberg and Kevin's sister, I'm going for a hike. And so if they have to be meeting in Sun Valley, they can just fly in very easily. You don't need to worry about is the landing strip too small or too big. So you can get to much more remote locations. You can still bring your whole family. And but for if you're thinking about, you know, running a political campaign now,

then you need to be thinking about, okay, I'm going to be in every major airport because I'm going to be campaigning in swing states. And they're all. going to have huge airports so I can land and I can bring my entire staff, my entire team with me. And when I get off the plane, we're going to hop in a bunch of black SUVs and I'm going to bring my writer, my speech person, my makeup artist, my comms person, my finance, you're going to bring the, my lawyer is going to be with me all the time. And so you really need to think about like what your lifestyle is like and what's going to be like over time before you make that decision. But I would probably, based on what I know, I'd stick with the Gulf Stream. But that's our

show. I got to hop on with Taipei. soon I think we're going to wrap so thanks for watching