TBPN - Valentine's Gift Guide, JD Vance AI Summit, Slow Ventures VC Fund, Tesla V12

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Today is Wednesday, February 12th, 2025. This show starts now. Jordi, how are you doing? I'm good, John. I'm back in a suit. The brothers in the chat yesterday were very quick to call me out for just wearing a sweater.

And I'm sorry, try not to let it happen again. But we're back in the capital of capital. And thankfully, we got some breaking news. Yeah, you're looking great. You're looking great. And we got a great show. We got J.D. Vance, giving a banger speech in Paris on artificial intelligence. We got big news from Slow Ventures.

And we got big news from Porsche, one of the makers of the fastest cars in the world. Slow Ventures, fast cars. We're going from one to the next. Then we're giving you a Valentine's Day gift guide, breaking down what you should get for your significant other, your wife, your girlfriend, whatever, we got ideas. We got plenty of picks for you. Then we're moving on to Mark Pinkus. He wrote a banger op-ed in pirate wires all about where entrepreneurs should be thinking about incorporating their companies. This stuff's really important. If we have time, we'll move on to a transformer shortage in the energy market that's driving data centers. We've been trying to

break down the data center market as much as possible for you guys on the show. And then we'll move into some timeline. So let's get straight into it. Jordy, I'm sure you watch the full J.D. Vance What was your initial reaction? How did you process it? It was to me it was a it was a very it was just very narrative breaking in the sense that like it was just extremely rigorous and like it didn't feel like a normal politics speech a lot as much raw raw but how did you process it? So two it was it was it didn't feel normal to listen to a politician talk about technology and feel like they had a good grasp of it right? So right away, that was cool. He had some sort of interesting points that maybe were a bit contrarian in the sense that he was very clearly stating that he feels like AI will drive massive job creation and it's actually positive for labor, which is interesting.

And I think is an important kind of position for the administration to have because nobody's going to sort of broadly support AI development if they think that it's going to take everybody's jobs. And I think there's some real arguments that what they're, you know, what J.D. said is true and that it will have this, you know, sort of effect that other technologies throughout history did as well. Totally. And the other thing, it was, it was very fascinating to hear a U.S. politician speaking to an international audience and speaking to our allies in a way that was basically demanding, right? He was basically like telling everybody what he expects of our allies in the European Union. And that type of rhetoric just didn't seem to happen in the last four years, right? You wouldn't hear Biden. Like Biden would kind of make, I would say, like softer requests.

JD had very clear expectations for our allies and the companies involved with AI development broadly. And so at first I was, you know, at first I wasn't necessarily, I wasn't necessarily taken it back, but to have somebody speak in such a presidential way with like very, very clear expectations was, didn't feel normal, but it felt very refreshing, right? It's like we, you know, the U.S. is the leader in AI innovation and investment. And so we should be able to be very demanding, you know, with our allies and with our partners around what we expect out of them. And in this case, you know, a lot of it was J.D. talking about, you know, the regular regulatory framework in the EU and how that's held companies back, you know, throughout the past decade

around GDPR and trying to avoid a lot of that stuff. So very, very refreshing listen. And yeah, he was just looking very presidential. It, I certainly felt like we might be getting quite a few more years of speeches. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that he's coming at it from this angle. You know, obviously he's a Teal protege. And while he was working with Teal, this is the time that Peter co-founded Open AI, or was one of the initial backers of the nonprofit.

Also, this was the time that Peter wrote that seed check to DeepMinded, Demas Hasibis. So deeply entrenched in AI while JD was with Peter pre-politics. And so obviously he's known a lot of the talking points, a lot of the leaders in AI, for a decade, whereas a lot of politicians are just getting up to speed now. Hey, this thing's happening. We got to figure it out. And so let's read some of his quotes and then I'll get your reaction. He says, I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference

a couple years ago. I'm here to talk about AI opportunity. This administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide. And we are the partner of choice for other foreign countries and certainly businesses as they expand their own use of AI. Number two, we believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off. And we'll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies. And I'd like to see that deregulatory flavor making its way into a lot of the conversations at this conference. Number three, we feel strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship. Number four, the Trump administration will maintain a pro-worker growth path for AI so it can be a potent tool for job creation in the United States.

The U.S. is a leader in AI and our administration plans to keep it that way. And so there were a lot of comments that he made about, hey, you know, we want these things and we don't want you to do this. He was very, very clear about, you know, the problems that American companies have faced abroad, specifically in the EU. and I think it was good for him just to lay the cards on the table and not really dance around this stuff and just make it very clear that some of the GDPR stuff has just been a drag on progress. And that's his view. And so he goes on to say at this moment, we face the extraordinary prospect of a new industrial revolution, but it will never come to pass if overregulation deters innovators from taking risks necessary to advance the ball.

The Trump administration will ensure that AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias. And so a lot of good comments there. I thought it was very interesting. I loved his closer. He says that he was touring and he sees this sword of the, I forget who it was, but it was like the French leader who helped during the American Revolution. And he uses the sword as this metaphor for advanced AI where a weapon can be a weapon of war that's used in a very negative way. or it can be used to create more freedom in the world. And that's what he sees AI as.

And I like that this is the, you know, we talked about this with the You Are Not a lottery ticket. This is the positive and optimistic determinist framing, which is that AI can have a good outcome, but we have to ensure that it does. Technology can go good or bad. And I think that too long there have been people that just say, oh, technology sometimes it's terrible, it's always terrible, sometimes it's always good. I'm just a techno-optimist. Instead, it's not a- It's going to take a ton of work. Yeah, it's too important of a sector and opportunity to have the government be purely reactionary, right? The government was able to be

reactionary to social media, right? They sort of social media exploded. The world became more connected. There's misinformation, other things like that. And the government's tried to sort of react to it and try to make it better, whether or not they did. A lot of people would say that they didn't. And in fact, it just ended up being censorship. But I like this framing that, you know, within the first month of the admin, he's at one of the most important sort of conferences for AI in the world and speaking and saying, hey, we need to be proactive.

We need to be collaborative. And being very opinionated versus just going up. A lot of politicians would have gone up and given a talk about how AI is important and we're excited about its potential, whereas he's not even spending time on that. He's just kind of saying, hey, we need to create this framework. We need to, you know, the positioning around making it so that AI doesn't have ideological influence. Like there was a lot of stuff in here that was sort of light jabs at sort of deep seek and AI coming out of China. He had another line. I'm going to try to remember what it was this morning around.

He was sort of lightly firing shots at Deep Seek when he said, remember the old Silicon Valley adage. If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product. And so I read into that as him saying, yeah, deep seek is free, but this is also a strategy that China has used across telecommunications infrastructure, social media, drones, right? Like we've sort of T-Moo, right? Like we've seen this pattern where Chinese companies will underpriced goods to make it impossible to compete. And yeah, there's a bunch of good arguments for, you know, Deep Seek, you know, fully open sourcing and making it freely available and lowering the cost of, you know, inference and intelligence.

But at the same time, like, I'm glad that he's sort of getting people thinking about, you know, understanding the true costs of something. If something's free, there may be hidden costs. and there's certainly, you know, there's certainly hidden costs in DGI, right? Consumers got, consumers got cheap drones, but then our entire country got dependent on, you know, a technology that's controlled by an adversary. And so, yeah, I just, I thought this was fantastic. It's worth, you know, listening to in full. And, yeah, it's just great.

It's great to have, you know, a vice president who I feel like represents our industry, right? I don't remember any of the narrative. I don't remember seeing Kamala talk ever about AI. You remember she put out those sort of like sort of Ten Commandment style post of like her policy. And there was a mention of like protecting, you know, Americans from cryptocurrency. But I can't recall anything related to do with, you know, AI. Which is odd because she was like buddies with the Andresen folks and like from California. like she should have been very much, you know, embedded in tech.

She certainly had those connections and those doors were open. But yeah, she never really took it as a cause for her campaign. And, you know, maybe that wouldn't have helped, but it certainly would have been cool to see since she is from California and has deep ties to Silicon Valley. Anyway, let's move on to Yoni over at Slow Ventures. He says, today we're launching the Slow Ventures. Creators Creator Fund, a $63 million fund to back ambitious creator entrepreneurs building businesses for their audiences.

Let's ring the Sysgong folks. I love to hear a $63 million fund. This has institutional LPs in a world where paid growth doesn't work and trust distribution and audience or everything. The playbook to build a company completely inverts rather than building a product and then inorganically finding paying for an audience. The next generation of great consumer brands will organically find an audience and then build a product. And I couldn't agree more. We've seen this. Like all the great, so many of these new companies have come out. Mr. Bees with Feastables, Doug Jamiro with Cars and Bids. There's been a whole host of these companies that have been built on the back of a large creator. And, and I think it's a

good strategy. It's a little bit odd. Sometimes you see the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, like the company is built, and then they try and become a creator after the fact, and it doesn't quite work out, but for these folks that are really, you know, generational talents in, uh, in content creation, oftentimes they have businesses that they can launch, but they need a lot of help. They need capital. They need management. They need operators. Doug Jamiro is only CEO of cars and bids for, I think like a couple months or maybe like a year. And then he stepped back and he was like, I'm never doing that again. I love what I do. I just want to review cars. I'm so glad we have a CEO. Uh, but I love that model. And I think that's really interesting. And I've been a fan of cars and

bids and I think it's a great case study here. So I don't know if you have any takes, but I can read more of their post if you'd like. Yeah, so we should read into the post, but I was fortunate to get a kind of a front row seat into them building this fund. Megan light cap over at slow as a woman is that basically the GP, you know, the primary face of the fund of the GP. She had her own post on it, which is great and an own point of view. But I think I met Megan at this point a couple years ago in the early days of this fund. They had made a handful of investments. They were being really selective and trying to prove out this thesis. And so this is a fund one, but they've been making these investments to date and have come at it from a really unique lens. And I really do

think that, you know, we've seen some venture investors, you know, make investments into creators. Doug DeMuro and Cars and Bids was more of like, they're more of like a media focus fund. It's Chernin Group that did that. So like, they're notorious. Yeah, they're notorious. I was like more of a later stage investment. But, you know, there's, there's tons of great. They did go dinky too, right? Yeah. And so they, and I think they were involved with the bar stool at one point.

Like they, they've had like sort of that modern media playbook. But what Slow's trying to do here is, is find these creators early when they're showing signs of potential. And the cool thing is usually like user engagement and love. And, you know, there's a lot of metrics and content creation that, that typically don't exist in startups for some amount of time. And so it is possible to find these people early before they've ever really monetized.

Maybe they're monetizing a little bit with ads or through AdSense, you know, X creator payouts, that kind of thing. But, you know, what I like about this fund is it's, a lot of people would say like, oh, you're going to back a lot of creators that, you know, maybe just end up building small businesses and maybe it's like a $2 to $5 million a year business

and you can't generate a venture return like that. I would argue that they will probably have, like, the way that they structure these is basically like a creator hold co model to my knowledge. So they're like investing in that creator's media business and then everything else that they do. And the cool thing about this is like creator media companies are like sort of default profitable. Typically their costs are low and they actually make money. And so if this is a $60 million fund, you know, a little over, you know, $12 million is basically going to management fees, you can imagine. and so they have like almost $50 million to deploy into deals. If they back 50, 50 creators each with a million dollar check,

they're in a position where if they get a bunch of base hits, creators that turn that $1 million into like a $5 million revenue business, they'll make that money back. But then if you find one truly tier one creator like a Mr. Beast or a Dude Perfect or any of these types of creators that can really break out, and become global brands. Like you'll end up paying back the whole fund by an order of magnitude. And so they're able to bring this sort of risk capital to an asset class,

like this sort of type of business that historically has just had zero access to capital. And so I think this is going to create a bunch of, you know, we're, I've been talking with a creator for the past month or so that is a perfect candidate for this. He has, he's getting hundreds of millions of millions. of views already. He's super talented, but there's quite a lot of equipment that he wants to sort of purchase in order to take his operation to the next level. And so he's actually a good candidate for this because he's like, if I had a million dollars, I'd spend it on this machine, this machine, this facility, things like that and be able to really 10x his operation. And so super excited to

connect, you know, start connecting more creators to slow. And I'm sure we'll end up covering a bunch of them on the show. Yeah. There's been this drumbeat for a while of like, why is there no why combinator for creators? And my take was always, well, you can get started just with your phone uploading to YouTube's free. And if you really have incredible talent, you'll be able to bootstrap that up very quickly with no money. The story of Arak is a good example where he started with basically nothing and went super viral doing all these Logan Paul stunts. He bought Logan Paul's couch and he was able to use, you know, his startup capital was like $60,000 or something. It was like bank loans and credit card debt. There's not really the nature of, okay, I'm going

to start a YouTube channel or a podcast. I need a million dollars. But for a lot of those folks, they start monetizing with ads. And of course, if they're getting paid a fixed fee for to run some ads, they're capturing some of the value. Then now some of the later like the Athletic Greens companies, they've given, you know, a distribution for the entire LTV of the customer you bring in. So a creator converts a customer. They get a check every single month if that customer that converts keeps buying. And so you can build up a really big book of business on this referral business. But ultimately, you're still giving half of the value, even if it's a fair deal, to the company.

And so bringing that organization inside owning the equity is obviously a great way in certain cases if you're truly aligned with that business. And that was certainly the case with Doug Dumiro. He could have partnered with a bring a trailer, but he would never have captured as much value as he did by building the new platform and then seeding it. And it was a unique opportunity because launching a marketplace is really hard to seed. But once you get it up and running, it's pretty self-sustaining. And so he was able to convert his millions of followers, like boom, send him over there and then get the flywheel going. And now it's a going concern. And so that example specifically is everybody that loves cars.

as goes on bring a trailer fairly frequently to whether they're shopping or just, you know, window shopping or just interested in looking at the market and comping the cars that they have. And everybody universally has always said, I should just build another version of bring a trailer because you look on it and you're like the design sucks. Like that just your face sucks. There's so many things you could do better with it. And so Doug was a, Doug is one of the few people on earth that has a large enough audience in cars to actually kickstart a marketplace because it's, it's, it's. finding that supply and demand. And so really unique opportunity for him. And there's a bunch of other people out there. And I think he took the right approach to in this sort of long term thinking of, hey, I'm going to try to focus on getting billions of views first. And then once I have this sort of

established base, then start launching. You know, and you can imagine. If you think about these creators, it's like, yeah, they might have good cash flowing businesses, but they still might not be in a place to say, you know what, I'm going to put a million dollars at risk, hire a CEO and a company. And a couple software developers and actually build a product that may or may not work, that can be a significant cost. And this is perfect for the slow model where someone comes in and they give you the cash to underwrite the initial R&D, which is exactly what venture should be doing. But let's stay on cars move to Porsche soon. Yeah. And the only other thing I mentioned is this position is slow as the ability to get the first look of any businesses that spin out of these

create a hold co. So they can be an investor in the sort of holdco. A new company gets created and they can be the first check into that or participant in that individual company. And that's sometimes where a lot of the value will actually accrue to is the individual versus like the media operation. Totally. Well, let's stay on cars and cars and bids and go over to Porsche. We have a post here from Che Bowes. Porsche will go back to its roots and invest $800 million on combustion engine design. It's basically walking away from the electric car. And obviously, Porsche has been under a lot of pressure. The Taicons have been losing a lot of value.

The Mission E, I believe, is their next hypercar. And it has not been, the allocations have not been tight, not nearly as tight as the Alistin Martin Valkyry, the Bugatti Turbion, the F80 even. I think all of the F80s have been allocated. And I believe that Porsche did, Kind of a stunt almost. They gave everyone that owned a Carrera GT, the 2003 to 2005 supercar.

They gave them all new tires and did like a recall on the tires so that all the Carrera GT owners would come in and they would be able to update their information, give them some real value because they said, hey, look, like we messed up. We're going to give you new tires. You're going to want these new tires because they're expensive. Like you'll come in. Then we'll get your contact information and say, hey, you own a CareerGT, maybe you own a 918 too. why don't you sign up for the mission E

or the mission X I can't even remember which one it is but they're electric hypercar and I don't think it's been going well because the Carrera GT owner has the last truly analog supercar and the last thing they want is some you know car

that's probably going to be undifferentiated from the Remak Navarra or the or the Penn and Verena Batista they all go zero to 60 and 1.8 like they all have like you know cuts like a knife in terms of in terms of steering but they just don't have that driver engagement and really that like high skill skill ceiling that

comes from something like an analog supercar like the Carrera GT. But Jordi, what's your take on Porsche? Good move for them. First off, thank you to Grit Colt, G.C. for tagging us on this because I actually missed it that the news came out a few days ago. But, you know, look, I was surprised to see this news, but obviously excited. I haven't been excited about, you know, what Porsche has. has been, Porsche has been doing in, in the EV market, actually drove a Tycon a few times last week.

And it's a nice drive. It's very zippy. You're getting mostly that sort of Porsche sort of quality and experience. But the big thing is like Porsche has been the manufacturer for sort of enthusiasts. And it's been in many ways a perfect sports car because it's one of the few cars in its price range. just looking at like the 9-11, the base Carrera or Carrera S. One of the few cars on earth that you can buy, drive for a couple years and sell it at like a very, you know, a minimal loss, right? It's a car that has had enduring value due to the quality of the build and the silhouette and the sort of the timelessness of it.

And a lot of, you know, portion enthusiasts myself and owners have been worried about the trajectory that the brand is taking because they've been, you know, the GT what is it the Gt 3 Gt 4 the Gt 4 yeah I was going to say G2 that's a different story so the Gt 4 has already basically the GD 4RS had been discontinued in its current form so they're not making any more of those they plan to make it some type of EV which should be you know should be interesting the you know generally this is just great to see because I think a lot of people and worried, hey, the best car manufacturers in the world for enthusiasts are based in Europe. Europe is putting this intense regulation to sort of force the manufacturers to apply with various sort of environmental regulations. You'll see, you know, Lamborghini cannot post on X without

putting these like crazy environmental disclaimers. And seeing what Europe has done to other innovative companies, the concern was what happens in 15 years is the entire enthusiast. this automotive world is going to just be completely nerfed. And so a couple of things now. One, it's cool to see Porsche realizing that there's still a market for combustion engine cars. I think like the biggest thing for the EV industry, what they need to figure out is around a depreciation. Nobody wants to buy a car for $250 and drive it for six months and have it be worth $150,000.

It's just not, it's the appreciation to date has been too extreme. the same thing with Teslas and Tycons. And the other thing that, you know, other interesting move that Portia made recently is they announced some plans to invest in actual U.S. production. Some people said it was, you know, tariff-related, but I actually think they are sort of seeing the writing on the wall in Germany and realizing that,

hey, a bunch of our customer bases in America, we should probably build cars there. And ultimately, that's, you know, good for America and good for, you know, car enthusiasts here. Yeah. I mean, the other side is like, they didn't fully abandon the manual combustion engine design. You know, the 9-11 ST is a very analog version of the 9-11,

comes with the manual transmission, and has been completely in demand and selling well above MSRP and a phenomenally successful launch. And so I think that they see that, hey, if our new hypercar is selling worse than our, you know, some random limited edition 9-11 ST, and they had another one that was manual before that, there's clearly still demand and how far that will go.

And now there's questions about, you know, will Ferrari or Lamborghini do something in the manual space? You know, obviously Lamborghini has been under the same pressure, but they've been pushing back, stay with the V12, the V8, but everyone's been saying, oh, this will be the last one. This will be the last one.

And Ferrari's certainly been downsizing, but they still have some V12s out there. And there's always been this debate about, oh, how much of the Formula One heritage can you pull in? You know, Formula One, they're running a 1.6 liter V6. A lot of that's due to emission regulations, but the times are remarkable. You look at the Mercedes AMG1.

That is an F1 derived power train. It obviously puts up insane Nurembergering times. There's no question that you can get good results with that combustion hybrid setup. And it does seem to be something people want because it's a special car. But the Mission E, Mission X electric and the Taekons just weren't getting there. And a lot of that was just because of the weight and the driving dynamics and just a demand for a solid engine note. So, you know, we've predicted it before. the next Tesla Roadster naturally aspirated V12 with a gated manual shifter.

I think Elon's done with the electric stuff. Yeah. That period's over. He tried to do the environmentally responsible thing. He was showing for it. Now, you know, it's time to let him rip. Time to give the Tesla an engine note. Two things happened.

Biden didn't invite him to the EV, you know, American EV event. And then simultaneously he saw the success of SpaceX using. you know rocket fuel and he said hey what if we made a naturally aspirated you know v12 with with SpaceX you know a rocket how would that perform why don't we do that yeah exactly I'd love to see that anyway let's move on to some other luxury goods we have a Valentine's Day gift guide for everyone Valentine's Day's coming up in two days you haven't gotten something don't worry we got a bunch of good picks I'll run through some of these and get your take let's start with exquisite jewelry says endless love like an extraordinary piece of jewelry. The world's top jewelers,

Cartier, Harry Winston, Graff, and Bulgari, to name a few, offer masterpieces of diamonds and rare gems that double as works of art. We recommend picking up the 68-carat Taylor-Burton diamond. Actor Richard Burton famously secured this pear-shaped diamond for Elizabeth Taylor in 1969 after initially losing it at auction to Cartier. At $1.1 million then, around $7 million today. It was the priciest gem ever auctioned at the time. Taylor wore it as a necklace to the 1970 Academy Awards, and it remains one of history's most fabled romantic jewels. I don't know, this is all before my time. I don't know that much about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, but this bro was insane. Like, he just got the most insane gifts because you go down two bullet points

and it's Rome's House of Bulgari is renowned for bold romantic designs. Richard Burton's Howard Elizabeth Taylor with Bulgari treasures during their love affair. From a 23.44-carat emerald brooch, he gave her on their engagement day to a magnificent emerald and diamond necklace as a wedding present. He was just giving her 20-carat diamonds every six months. Okay, but there's a whole backstory here, which is that Debears and other sort of diamond, you know, companies in the diamond market would actively work to do like early influencer marketing. And so they would work with celebrities and say, hey, we're going to give you this, you know, stone for free to give to your other, you know, celebrity partner.

And then they need to go to this event where they're going to be photographed and run in all the newspapers. Or they're going to be, you know, wearing it to some big, you know, magazine shoot that they have. So think about this was like influencer marketing to kind of cultivate the image around diamonds. And they did this with engagement rings, engagement rings, you know, have their own sort of history, but the, the, uh, there's a, there's a very well documented sort of case studies around how the diamond industry like forced diamonds on America by using the original, you know, influencers, which were, you know, early, you know, Hollywood talent and things like that to. Yeah.

And artists. So our, our last, uh, pick for jewelry for this Valentine's Day is, of course, the Hope Diamond. It's a 45-carat blue diamond. And I know what you're thinking. I can't buy it. It's in the Smithsonian. Everything is the price. But why is the federal government sitting on this asset? Are they owned by the government?

I don't even know. Maybe the Smithsonian's its own thing. But anyway, call Doge. Let's get it off their balance sheet. Let's run an auction. Let's trim this thing down. Let's get this into the private sector. It is.

Let's fractionalize this. You doubted yourself for a second. So the Smithsonian's, owned by the government. Yes. So, so, so our government, while they're taxing us is, is just sitting on a 45-carat blue diamond that they could offload on the private market. They could fractionalize it. Give me a share. They can make an NFT. Put it on the blockchain. Put it on the blockchain. And then, and then let some size lord pick it up for, you know, probably close to a billion dollars. And, you know, you're thinking, oh, NFTs, that's so degrading to this, you know, historical

artifact, the Hope Diamond. But, uh, look, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, Edward McLean gave it to his wife Evelyn, and Evelyn was a party animal. She would put it on her dog and let the dog wear it on its collar at parties. Imagine you go to a party and it's like, oh yeah, the hostess has this little dog running around. Oh, what's that on the dog's collar? Oh, it's a 45-carat diamond. Build different. You don't see people do that and stuff like now billionaires will be like, oh, I don't even have a dog.

I can't even deal with it. It's, I travel too much. Now, it's just, yeah, no. I'm a little bit. I'm mildly, you know, we take different sides here. I'm mildly against dog ownership until you have at least three kids. You got to get the dogs. You got to get the diamonds on the dogs.

Yeah, people do like putting, putting watches on. You can get kid sized like watches, which I think are great. And it's also funny to just put your watch on like a three-year-old because they get so three-year-olds, like two-year-old, three-year-old love watches. Yeah, totally. It's so human to just to love, you know, Swiss timekeeping machines. Okay, well, maybe you get a small dog and it fits in a purse, and so you want to give your wife or girlfriend a purse this Valentine's Day.

We recommend the Himalaya Birkin Diamond Edition. It was sold for $380,000 at Christie's in 2017. It has 18-kart white gold and diamond hardware. It's a world-record price for a handbag. The model's rarity is no exaggeration. Hermes reportedly produces only one or two Himalayas per year due to the onerous dying process. Owning one is like owning a piece of fashion history

as a Valentine's Day gift, a diamond-encrusted burkin telegraphs that your wife is one in a million, just like the bag. So we recommend that. You could also go... To me, this is just real quick. It's kind of shocking that the most... most expensive handbag is under half a million dollars. That was the most one, the most expensive

auctioned. There is a more expensive handbag. And whenever somebody says, oh, Armes, Berkin bags are so fancy, I always say, hey, you got to step it up. You got to go to the 1,00 nights diamond purse, which is valued around 3.8 million. And so you're right. You're right. Now you're in like real territory. So that's by Mawad. There's 4,500 diamonds on it. That's great. I'm glad to hear that. But still, if you compare the Hermes Birkin to some type of, you know, piece unique, you know, Patech. Yeah. And the tech is selling for $30 million.

And then that Hermes-Burkin equivalent is only half a million, you know, less than half a million dollars. To me, that screams buy, buy, buy on the Birken because I agree. They're not making, they're only making a couple of Himalayas a year. Yeah. And post-A-SI, every, you know, every, you know, every, you know, every, every, woman in America is going to want one of these. I completely agree. At 380K, they're giving it away.

And so you could also go with a custom burkin. You know, this article recommends using rare white alligator skin and putting her initials in diamonds on it. Really subtle. It's the pinnacle of arm candy. It shows that when it comes to her, no luxury is too great. And so then we're going to- You'll appreciate this.

You'll appreciate this story. someone pretty close to me that will go unnamed was telling me the other day that they were going to this this golden goose store, the Italian footwear manufacturer or brand. And he was telling me like, yeah, they keep, every time I go there, like the entire staff like stops what they're doing and they're like pour me champagne and all this stuff. And like, it's so weird, but they invited me to like their fashion show in Milan. on. Like, I was just like, and they give me like, every time I'm there, they just give me stuff for free. And, and I was like, yeah, like, sorry, like that does, that doesn't make sense at all.

Like, like, how much have you spent at the store? And he's like, well, I spent like more than $100,000. And I'm like, how do you know, a hundred six figures on shoes? Yeah, if you go to the shoe store that, that you, you know, spend. somebody's lifetime earnings on in the third world. Yeah, they're going to roll out the red carpet a little bit. But I don't think you can walk in off the street and get a custom burkin no matter how much you're willing to pay. You've got to really work your way up. Run it up. And so yeah, I mean, maybe this is the first big Valentine's Day for you, but start putting in the work now. Makes sense. Let's move to automobiles, cars. What car should you gift to your significant other, your wife, your girlfriend on Valentine's Day.

We got some recommendations here, and then I want to hear some recommendations from off the top of your head, Jordy. First up, the Rolls-Royce dawn, the seductive drophead. It's a gorgeous four-seat convertible, often described as the most romantic Rolls-Royce. In fact, Rolls-Royce said it was created

to deliver the world's most social-soductive open-top motoring experience and to attract a new breed of owners, including dynamic women, drawn to its contemporary glamour, with a whisper quiet V-12 engine and a silk smooth ride, a dawn provides sunset drives in opulent comfort. As a gift, one might commission a bespoke collection dawn in her favorite color

with a personalized coach line, perhaps her name or a loving message, handprinted along the side. The interior could be truly one-off, think ivory leather embroidered with roses, starlight headliner LEDs mimicking the night sky of your wedding date, and even engraved champagne flutes in a hidden console. The Rules Royce ethos is built to order, so no two dons need be alike. Handing her the keys presented in a lacquered box

to a custom Rolls-Royce Dawn tells her that every journey with her will be an occasion. So can't recommend a Rolls-Royce Dawn enough. There's a couple other options here. The Bentley Continental GT, which has a W-12 engine. And you could also go with some exotic sports cars with a feminine twist. The Lamborghini Eventador SVJ Roadster Zago edition,

only 10 made, or the Aston Martin Victor, it's a one-of-one bespoke car. And so if she's a racing enthusiast, she might love those. There's an argument that the Bentley Continental GT is the best touring car of all time. It's simply, it's fast, it's fun, it's elegant, it's versatile. You can drive it, she can drive it.

The interior is insane. They actually age, you know, surprisingly well for being, you know, you can look up some of these cars and find them with fairly high miles. So they do, they do have some staying power. But the build quality is insane. The brand is timeless. You can drive it to date night. You can take it on a road trip. You can go out in the desert on the way to Vegas and do donuts in it.

It's truly you can do it all. You can pile all your boys into it. I, this car is pretty high. towards the top of my list. I can't wait to get one personally. But again, it's a great, it's a great option for your significant other. If you're a high T technology, rather it's giving this to your significant other, you likely will end up driving it quite a bit yourself. And so it's almost like giving a gift back to yourself. The other thing I would do here, if you're, you know, if you're buying a gift and you want to stay under that $100,000,

range. I recommend a two-door vintage G-wagon. I've spent a bunch of, you know, I've owned, you know, a couple of G-wagons. I'm obviously a big fan of the sort of model. Such a timeless car. You can pick one up for like 50 to 60K. They look incredible. They're great to just like pile in and go to the beach. But you can also, they also look good around the city. They're just such a versatile car and I think it's a great car for driving to a wander, parking it at your second home. It works in Miami. It works in LA. And at SF, you're going to stand out a little bit, but, you know, there's, you know, if you need a another two-door option. That might be good. A little bit higher price. You could do what

Travis Scott did for Kylie Jenner. He got a $1.4 million law Ferrari. There you go. Fantastic gift. So always always options for every price. range with this show. And with that one, yeah, that one to be clear, Travis was clearly thinking, I don't want to just get my girlfriend a car or a gift. I want to get her an investment. Kylie's probably held on to that thing. She's way up on it. And just goes to show that, you know, technology brothers, you want to optimize yields, optimize investments. If this is your giving a gift for your wife, it's going to stay on the family balance sheet. So, you know, buy something investable, I think it's a great option.

Let's go to what else do we have here? There's a bunch of good ones here. There's so many good ones. And this is mostly... I like this one. Private Jet, custom private jet. The ultimate Valentine's Day gift. Going to impress your wife.

Going to impress your girlfriend. And it's been done before. Mukesh Ambani, one of Asia's richest men. gifted his wife Nita, an Airbus A319 corporate jet for her birthday, fitted with a plush interior beyond first class. The price tag was around $60 million. This airborne palace featured an office cabin seating areas with game consoles and satellite TV, a master bedroom, and even a sky bar with mood lighting.

All customized to Nita's tastes. For your Valentine, you might imagine a jet outfitted as her ideal home in the sky, perhaps a walking closet for her travel wardrobe, a spa room for mid-flight massages, and her favorite art on the walls. One could even theme the interior, say, model it after the Orient Express train or an 18th century French boudoir. If that wins a light-ser. This all comes down to this one thing. A lot of people like gifting a second or third or tenth home to a significant other. Yes.

But what I always say, you can sleep in a plane. You can't fly a house. and this situation he's giving her the experience of a vacation home in many ways, yet it doubles as this incredible utility of being able to take you anywhere you want in the world without even needing to, you know, if it's an Airbus, you're not even having to stop often. You're just doing directs everywhere. Yeah. And so if you're looking for something in the seven-figure range, you know, LaFara, you can't go wrong.

In the eight-figure range, now we're talking Airbus A319. but what about the nine-figure range? And so that's the real question. I'm sure everyone's been waiting because they got maybe nine figures burning a hole in their pocket. Close to a billion dollars you want to spend on this Valentine's Day gift.

And no better example to look towards than the Taj Mahal, which the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built this ivory-white marble mausoleum in the 17th century as a monument of love for his wife, Mammataz Mahal, who had passed away.

It took 22 years, 20,000 workers, and in today's terms is estimated to have cost $827 million to erect the sublime structure. So, I mean, if you have the money laying around, you don't want to get caught. Hey, why didn't you build me something equivalent to the Taj Mahal? I thought, I thought this was going well. I thought we were in a good relationship. What's going on?

And one of our listeners left to review. He has a luxury home company in Southern California. you might as well, you know, build the most expensive home in California, build a billion dollar home. You know, I think Mark Andreessen still has a record for most expensive home ever purchased. But if you had a billion dollar budget in Southern California, you could do some real damage. You could definitely outdo it. Well, let's move on.

Hopefully that was helpful to the audience. Try to give practical advice for the folks listening. I feel like the best service that we can do is just remind people that it's Valentine's day on Friday, remind them again tomorrow, remind them again Friday, and just, yeah, go above and beyond. Yeah, it's the thought that counts. And so try and build something equivalent to the Taj Mahal. Well said. Because that will be. It's also a good last minute. It's also a good last minute gift. Because like you kind of just need, even if you just had like, you know, you can scratch you could scratch out a card and be like, yeah. Hey, I love you so much. You're the most important, you know,

person in my life. I don't know what my life would be like without you, the way, I'm getting you, I'm giving you a billion dollar budget to conduct, you know, to build your dream home like, right here. It's not a dream home. The Taj Mahal was a mahal was a mausoleum. You will only enjoy this in the afterlife. That's what it was for. I was going to say, I was going to say, you know, pretty dark. Like, um, on that note, I expect that in the future people will say, I want to be buried in space, strap me to rocket and just send me into the atmosphere. And so if you went to Elon and you said, hey, I got a billion dollars. I want to I want to be sent in a coffin deep into outer space.

I bet you you can make that happen, especially as launch costs are dropping, you know, substantially. That's actually one of the options here we didn't touch on. Virgin Galactic for a while was offering a ticket to space for $450,000 per seat. Blue Origin offers a similar experience on its new Shepard rocket. There's zero gravity airplanes that you can rent. So lots of options there. But let's move on to an op-ed in Pirate Wires, one of the greatest journalists out, journalistic outlets in the world run by Mike Solana. Last year's 2024 journalist of the year, Mike Solana.

And he has an op-ed here from Mark Pinkis, the founder of Zinga. He says, founders, leave Delaware while you still can. It's activist courts block founders from controlling their own companies. If you're a founder, run. Don't walk to a friendlier state. We've been seeing this with Tesla and Elon moving his companies to Texas. Zuck's thinking about going to Texas. There's a lot of people that are in Delaware.

And this piece kind of explains, you know, how seriously you should take that. Let's read through some of it. And then I'll get your reaction, Jordi. He says, I experienced this firsthand at Zingat. Now the industry is starting to catch on. For the last century, Delaware has been the default incorporating place for businesses. is with 66% of the Fortune 500 and 80% of 2024 IPOs being Delaware-based. Businesses incorporated in Delaware account for nearly a third of the state's revenue.

Well, we will say it used to be a third. Delaware's primary draw predictability. Its court of chancery is a non-jury trial court, meaning that chancellors, judges, who are experts in corporate law, decide cases unilaterally. The court's lack of juries and century of case law precedent are meant to give business, is a clear and consistent applied legal framework. But Delaware's reputation as the go-to state for incorporation has been eroding for the past few decades, starting with its 1985 Smith v. Van Gorkum decision, when it found that directors can

be held personally liable for their decisions. And since former Legal Aid Society activist attorney Kathleen McCormick took over the court in 2021, after being appointed as chancellor, its rulings have been at times egregiously hostile to founders. It was McCormick who refused who refused Tesla's board-approved attempt to reinstate Elon's $56 billion pay package, even after shareholders voted for it twice. And then that led Musk to reincorporate both Tesla and SpaceX in Texas and Neurrelink moved to Nevada. Chamath redirected incorporation of his last four companies to Nevada. And Ackman reincorporated Pershing Square in Nevada as well.

TripAdvisor, Transperfect, and Dell have all left. Brian Armstrong and Paul Gruel have recently railed against the state's activists, as judges, and now META is planning on reincorporating against in Texas. Why? Because at every turn, Delaware's activist court seems hell bent on kneecapping founders, simply trying to do what they do best, build great companies, and deliver value to shareholders. Jordi, what do you think? That's insane. I didn't know about Dell. I didn't know about TripAdvisor. I didn't know about Perching Square. Brian Armstrong seems like the obvious one. But the tide's already shifting because like one of the issues is it actually matters quite a lot that, you know, the new company

formation moving away from Delaware and like this is very easy right stripe can at any point roll out Nevada incorporation Texas incorporation in fact I need to check but people don't really realize that these online incorporation tools already account for a very meaningful amount of incorporation so obviously go to your lawyer and say I want to incorporate a company in you know Delaware or X you know XYZ state that's still possible that will always be possible but so much of formation activity is happening on legal Zoom, Stripe Atlas, and a number of other platforms. And so it's not hard for them to, you know, they're already running, you know, spending a bunch of money acquiring customers. And if they just start to divert those new companies to Texas, Nevada, that will have a huge impact

over time. But an even bigger impact in the present is these billion dollar companies that are, you know, or asset managers that are saying, yeah, we're just going to move over. And so it doesn't seem like the original moat that Delaware had around case law and, you know, not having sort of jury-based decisions on some of these issues seems to have eroded extremely quickly. And as soon as you have, you know, the world's most famous entrepreneur in the present day, Elon Musk starting to say, like, he was, you know, he's dealt with a ton of activist, you know, judge issues and he has one of the biggest audiences of entrepreneur the biggest audience of entrepreneurs in the whole world and he he you know i see this being something that delaware probably has to

react fairly quickly or their or their state budget is going to be cut but you know by a third or whatever the number actually is yeah yeah it's fascinating because when elon did it it was unclear if it's like, this is only the world's richest man's problem. And it would never be a problem for a smaller company. And it's just an Elon thing. And so he's got to do this thing because he lives this bizarre life and is the CEO of five different companies and all this crazy stuff going on. But it seems like it is translating to the next generation of entrepreneurs, an order

magnitude down in terms of market cap or even higher in terms of Zuck. And, and Mark is saying, hey, this has been going on for a long time. And he shares this incredible anecdote. So if you don't know, Mark, he founded Zinga. They had Farmville, this online gaming company. They were built on the back of Facebook. The company got really big. And he writes, no founder wants to take their company public.

But when they do, while employees and investors are popping champagne, founders face a climb up Mount Everest while carrying a bunch of public investors on their back. And while founders finally succumb to IPO pressure, most realize that the only way their company will survive is by maintaining voting control. That's why Zinga went public in December 2011. we were forced to do so by a now changed SEC rule. That's probably the number of investors on the cap table. If you have too many investors on your cap table, you are forced to go public.

Now there's ways to do roll-ups and all sorts of different things to aggregate those. I think the Jobs Act changed that. But still, there's a lot of pressure. I held on to a separate class of super voting stock, Mark says, knowing that control would be critical to Zingo's long-term success. And if you think about the history of Zingo, a lot of people were like, oh, like it was this flash of the pay. but he's going to break down how it could have gone down differently if he had control, which I think is a very interesting counterfactual. So he says in April 2012, Facebook changed its news feed algorithm,

which caused Zinga to lose a third of our players in a day. And so it used to be these insane growth hacks on Facebook. Like Spotify, when they launched, whenever you were listening to something, it would just share that to Facebook automatically. Imagine the distribution. Stuff would just go viral like crazy. You know, Instagram would automatically share to Twitter and automatically share to Facebook.

Now, no one does that. You can't hack these social networks at all anymore. And so by June, Zenga's stock had dropped 50%. Soon after we were hit with lawsuits, companies almost always get sued after a big stock drop. There is, in fact, an entire industry of securities litigation firms that specialize in suing companies whenever their stock price drops significantly. Of course, because the stock goes down.

This could be securities fraud. Why did it? Was the CEO acting in charge? Not even that. They could just argue that the CEO is negligent. And if there's $100 million on the line, I'm sure sometimes the companies just say, yeah, we're going to settle this because it's not worth a knockout, drag out, you know, multi-year fight and distraction.

And so he says the lawsuits compounded the issues, but they weren't the real problem. The real issue was navigating the whims of the Delaware court. They wanted us to prove that all major decisions of Zingo were driven by our independent directors, board members who weren't affiliated with the company's management, executives, or major shareholders, because the court believed if independent directors approved a decision, it's more likely to align with shareholders. So despite being Zinga's largest shareholder, the lawsuits effectively sidelined me from key committees like compensation and M&A. So he couldn't buy companies anymore, couldn't decide the future of the company. The court also decided that directors I trusted knew well could not be

considered independent because they either owned too much stock or had past business dealings with me. Think about the big investors, the people on the board, the VCs. This led to the greatest missed opportunity of my career in late 2012. I had a handshake deal with the CEO of Supercell, a finished developer, which has created some of the most successful mobile games of all time, clash of clans, to buy the company for $400 million. My board rejected the deal. We want to see you manage what you've got first, they said. And when I asked my lawyer why I couldn't just use my voting control to push the deal through, he explained that to do so, I'd have to fire and replace my board, which would expose me to personal liability.

Supersell went on to make $464 million in pre-tax profit the next year. Eventually, Tencent took a majority stake in the company for $10 billion. In effect, Delaware's Court of Chancery deprived our shareholders of something like a 21x return. At the time, we were also getting inbound acquisition offers, but I wasn't allowed to weigh in on them, even though I was the CEO and the biggest shareholder, our lawyers kept repeating. The Delaware court just doesn't like founder control. Eventually, I converted my voting shares to common since I couldn't exercise my control anyway, and I hoped I could gain more influence over my board.

The Delaware court began turning against founders in the 80s. Since then, a string of rulings have challenged founders and headstrong CEO control, concentrating even more power in the hands of independent directors at their expense. There's the Revlon case, which is very informative, a 1986 case. involving Revlon, found that when a company is for sale, directors must take the highest bid, even if its controller or founder is opposed. In 2005, a judge railed against the CEO of Disney for unilaterally hiring and firing an executive within the span of a year, saying he'd enthroned himself as the omnipotent and infallible monarch of his personal magic kingdom and magic kingdoms and capitals,

which I think is so funny. In 2010, when Craig Newmark tried to defend Craigslist against minority stakeholder eBay, which had just launched a competing classified site. Newmark tried a poison pill and staggered board strategy. The court ruled Newmark had acted against shareholder interest. In 2016, the same judge who presided over the Zinga disaster forced Transperfect, a highly profitable language translation company to sell against its founder's wishes because the two co-founders were caught in a governance dispute. The company hated the decision so much that it reincorporated in Nevada.

And so he goes on to rail against Kathleen. McCormick says Delaware law law enforcement fighting back and I don't know if I I don't know if I've ever heard a story of a attempted attempted MNA that within that short of time proved to just be the biggest missed opportunity imagine having the ability to buy a company for 400 million dollars yeah then the next year put up more than that in that income uh which is what super sell did. I mean, that's just an insane situation and just, you know, you could imagine Zinga being a really big company today still. And so that's a situation where there's just that, that example is very interesting and relevant because people could argue that Elon's pay package like primarily

harms Elon and not the other shareholders. But in this situation, every Zenga shareholder suffered because they couldn't complete this, you know, deal. Yeah. What is interesting is that Zinga eventually sold to Take 2 for $12 billion. It's like a pretty good outcome, I guess, although it did take an extra decade. And what's interesting is that I remember when I was researching Take 2, a lot of the Take 2 shareholders were really upset about the Zinga deal because they didn't, they thought it was kind of a dog of a company and they didn't think it was going to be that additive to take 2 because, of course, Take 2 owns NBA 2K and then they also own GTA. And so if you think about the GTA,

grant theft auto intellectual property, tons of ways to make that go further through mobile gaming and social gaming. But maybe they already owned a few mobile companies. Maybe it didn't make sense to buy, to pay $12 billion just to get a little bit more leverage on that. Anyway, let's move on. We got 30 minutes. Let's skip gridlock transformer shortage. We'll do that tomorrow.

instead let's move on to Alad Gill he says index companies are amazing this is a term he coined he's a Kugin's law respecter he says anderil is an index on defense coinbase is an index on crypto Nvidia indexes AI stripe indexes e-commerce and SpaceX indexes space he wrote about this five years ago I love Amjad Masad chimes in he says Twitter is a mental illness index but let's read about these index companies I just want to hear his thesis here. He says sometimes there are markets that are clearly going to grow massively over time. For example, e-commerce, genomics, crypto are all markets which were clearly going to compound over time. It might have been a tough call, tough to call the winners of each market

early, but it was clear the markets themselves would grow. One lens through which to view companies is to ask what companies are an index of their underlying market. Index companies often take a cut of every transaction in their space or are a piece of infrastructure everyone in the market needs. For example, it's hard to launch something into space in the West without using SpaceX. These companies may be ways to participate in the market broadly without having to worry about who wins. And I think now on the one hand, with the Coinbase example, a lot of people were saying, well, like, you know, the knock on Coinbase was like, why don't you just buy Bitcoin? Bitcoin also did very well and they track very closely with each other.

But I like this because he actually breaks it down and says it needs to be a company that acts as infrastructure and takes a cut on whatever happens. And so you no longer need to think about which e-commerce company will win if you own Stripe. And you don't need to know, you don't really need to care. Is it going to be space tourism or satellite internet or pharma drugs in space or moon landings? Like you own SpaceX, you're getting a cut of that no matter what. And so I like this framing. I initially thought it was a little bit, a little bit weak on just, just the differentiation between just, hey, it's a power law winner.

Hey, it's a monopolistic company or it's a big winner. Yeah, the idea that I think you did a good job. If you attract thousands of talented people and billions of dollars, you earn the right to go into a bunch of different product areas. Yep. I think one thing that, one thing that's interesting is these index companies typically early on have these sort of very asymmetrical risks, right? So with Stripe, that could be the relationship with Shopify, right?

A huge amount of Stripes GMV comes from Shopify. Shopify is a massive company now. And what happens if they, you know, get more into payments and start to want to eat into Stripe's margin there? Coinbase, the risk on that business and why at some point it traded down into the single-digit billions, despite doing billions of dollars in earnings, was that people thought crypto could get broadly banned, right? There was a time that people thought, you know, this was.

Not that long ago, presidents and, you know, first ladies didn't have meme coins, right? So there was a huge risk there. Anderol was always, okay, you can build cool technology, but are you actually going to be able to win contracts? And then you sort of hit these turning points in the business where everybody starts to generally sort of ignore whatever that early risk was because you're able to prove out, you know, prove out these sort of theories and actually get. results. Yeah, it's interesting. Anderil as an index on defense was not listed in the original blog post, but Alad Gill puts it at the top of his new post highlighting this thesis. And it's interesting because I don't think of Anderl as an index on defense in the sense that different companies can win other programs without having to pay Anderl a toll. In fact, I kind of think

Palantir is trying to position themselves more as the index in the sense that they have the AIP program and if you want to integrate with government data you go through the AIP program you're using their APIs and and then and then Palantir potentially takes a cut of your business if that grows but how do you think it'll play out for and I mean it's a good point because andrel is very different than stripe which is like we're going to take three percent of you know a large amount of transactions online right like that's that's more of an index uh model but the thing with the thing with Anderil is, primes historically have had tons of different programs, right? They have a bunch of different products. And the reason that they're able to do that and the reason that they have moats is that

the government wants to have vendor diversification, but it ends up trusting and preferring to use, you know, specific partner like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and these businesses like that. And so the argument that Anderl is an index company is a bunch of other people, you know, start companies in defense, build great technology, and then have to be a lot of, and then have. to sell the Anderol because they can't figure out a way into the government, right? And so the index is basically like we are, it's almost like more of thinking of a toll road style business where Anderol is almost like a toll road between R&D and the government, right? Yeah, that's fair.

That's a good take. You can develop the coolest technology, but but you got to get to this group that we have a great relationship with. Yeah, I like that as a take. And I think there's also another angle where we could look back and say, oh, wow, Andoril really was an index company in the sense that they have the lattice program. And if you think about the future of warfare, where Anderil is providing a number of systems, drones, counter drones, CCA, collaborative combat aircraft, et cetera, but it's all networked through lattice. Even the F-35 program,

that plugs into lattice and Andrewl is taking a cut of that and acting as an index on that so that, hey, yeah, it turns out that the future of warfare is more missiles or more drones. or more, you know, aircraft carriers, but Anderl has a cut of all of that and has an index on all of that through the lattice program if it really takes off, which I'm obviously very bullish on. So I think that's an interesting, interesting frame. And I think Alad might have more information than we do on where things are going. So I love to see him highlight that. And I love a good coinage.

And I'm definitely going to be using index companies in the future. It's great. Anyway, let's move on to Chris. He says, bamboo labs is a prime example of how China continues to deindustrialize the United States. It dumps a well-engineered technology at zero margin in a bid to bankrupt anyone that tries to compete. As long as this is the case, we're not going to get the investment we need in industrial automation. And so Harris, another friend of the show, says, request for startup U.S.-based bamboo labs for industrial automation. and he maps out some examples.

And there's some debate here in the comments. What is the evidence of bamboo dumping? As far as I know, they're quite profitable. Where are you getting the profit data? So people are going back and forth on how much subsidy is going into bamboo labs. But this is something you've been talking about a lot about Jory with TikTok and Timu. TikTok was obviously spending a lot on ads and also spending a lot on creator monetization, paying people to post essentially.

pumping a lot of money to get people on the platform. And then T-Moo's heavily subsidized, DJI is heavily subsidized early on. Now they're profitable. But, you know, we got to watch for these things when they pop up because it can look really small and it can look really good because you're like, hey, I'm getting this amazing stuff for free or cheap. Why would I ever source this from America? Everything has a...

But then a decade later, we don't have the capabilities. Yeah, everything has a hidden cost. Carried no interest, who's been on the show before. and an IRL friend of ours. He has posted a lot about how China hasn't just created an environment that is good for, you know, creating production capacity and industrial sort of might

through access to cheap labor and things like that. But the Chinese government just decided that we are going to heavily subsidize a number of key industries and make a ton of capital available to make us a dominant force in as many, in many of these industries as possible. And so it's not out of the question that an individual Chinese company, the sort of Chinese government can be a kingmaker and say, like, you are our winner in this category.

We want you to go out into the world and get as much market share in this important category so that the world, China is dependent on selling goods internationally, right? Their entire economy and way of life is dependent on that. So they're going to do everything in their power, which is in their right to make sure that the world is stays dependent on Chinese goods. They do not want to lose that. And so the U.S. Good industrial policy. Like, you know, you got to give them credit. Like, they're winning. Yeah, yeah.

Like, it's smart from their perspective. Yeah. And I think it's totally fair that, you know, they're their own country. They're, they have, it's well within their right to do things that, you know, are for their long term sort of national interest and benefits. So overall, what that means, though is the U.S. can't compete purely on the gundo. It can't be simply, oh, we have a bunch of really smart 25-year-olds that are, you know, building cool technology. We do need to get to a point where we have this effect right now where Doge is saying just cut government spending dramatically, but we actually need to increase government spending on specific key industries that are in the national interest. Otherwise, we won't have the U.S. version of Bamboo Labs because it's not in

the consumer or an S&B's interest to buy from a U.S. company if the cost is four times higher, right? And we see that with DGI right now. It's a very difficult sell to go to a consumer and say, hey, you could buy this DGI drone for $1,000 or $500. How would you like to buy an American-made drone that's a worst product that costs $4,000? Nobody's going to do that, right? Like people in the moment act in self-interest. And so I do believe for the national interest, we need.

you know, government, you know, federal and state level investment in some of these key industries to allow new companies to emerge. And I think in the long term, the average American will benefit. So if we can claw back, you know, spending money on, you know, Sesame Street in Iraq and put some of that money towards, you know, the domestic drone industry or something like that, you know, I'd like to see it. Be great. Let's stay on China and go to Beth Jzos. He says, he's sharing a clip from Sam Altman. Sam Almond was interviewed in France and he's getting a ton of questions all over the place. It's a comms nightmare that we can talk about. But Sam said, we would like to work with China.

And Beth Jazeo says, that's a hard no for me, dog. And this interview was so funny to me because Sam is simultaneously, like, getting hit with these questions about, like, you're getting trolled by Elon. He just threw the crying emoji on your last tweet. And then he'll be like, oh, he'll like, try to kind of, like, riff on that and be like, we're not for sale. Like, he's trolling. Like, I'm not dealing with this. Like, this is like a joke thing that's like over here in the circus. But then simultaneously, he'll get another question from another reporter that's like,

it's like, you know, when are you adding PDF upload? Or like, what? A really serious question about AGI safety. And he'll need to kind of like pivot into like, hey, actually, like, I can take this question seriously. But this one I want to react to a joke as. And it's like, just a calms spaghetti. It's just so hard to maintain like, you know, what is the core message here? It's a really tough situation. Yeah. And I- are on. Yeah, I mean, looking at the videos that Sam has been featured in in the last week, typically he's in this mindset of very methodical, slow speaking, highly selective with his words. And you can tell he's starting to get a little flustered on some of these issues, right? He's

clearly deeply annoyed he's you know distracted and you know in this case we would like to work with china there's a very good argument for that right totally the same reason the same reason that china wants us using deep seek is the same reasons that we should want people in china using it's like the same story with google being over there and if if we could bring an uncensored search engine to china that would be very good for american values and america's goals if we could bring you know, uncensored Facebook over there, that would be great. And the same thing with a less censored or uncensored LLM, if we could vend that into China, that would be amazing. But it's just never going to happen. And it's one of these talking points that every tech CEO always has to make

saying like, hey, we're open to it because they don't want to get smacked. And if they are, if they do have some partner over there, they don't want to become a target or get hacked. Like they don't want to really like be too adversarial. So it's total like comms PR, crisis PR speak. But then simultaneously you got to like riff with Elon because he's trolling you. Like it's a wild scenario to be in. Yeah, really, really tough situation. One thing, one thing that's interesting, one thing that's interesting. So China has figured out that they can ban our technology products and we won't ban theirs. It's crazy. I just want, I just want parody, right? If they're, if they're you know if they want to inject deep seek into our economy let us you know let us put

uh deep research into china i want people to be like so so what really did happen at tianaman square and then get like this like you know incredible book report on the tianaman square meme is so funny because it's so overblown at this point i imagine that every single person in china actually knows the truth and it's more just like this like phyric victory for the cc on a censorship front. Yeah, but there's things like that controversial. Like, crazy stuff happens all over the place. Like, I don't know.

I mean, there's, there are things in the U.S. that are known truths that people cannot talk about. And I think that that is a kind of thing that probably happens with Tiananmen Square where sort of common knowledge and, you know,

maybe kids don't understand it, but it's also important. Like part of this is, the CCP wants kids in China. Ideally, they could hit age 20 plus. years old before they ever hear about this because that's 20 years of getting indoctrinated into you know this sort of way of life and and way of thinking so yeah anyway let's stay on AI and go to

arpit arpit says aGI is when nat freeman stops hiring humans for his side quests and then kevin quack who's been on the show before says you have it backwards aGI is when the only thing left for us to do is work on nat's side quests so which side of the argument are you on I think that's, so one thing about this debate that's interesting is, is there's, even if an AI can do something cheaper, like humans are not perfectly rational, right? Sometimes you want to hire somebody to work in your office because that is more enjoyable, even if somebody across the world could have technically the same output, right? And so I think we're going to, we are going to hit a situation where people are going to be able to hire, basically hire AI to do. something or hire a human to do the same thing and a human that's leveraging AI and it'll be really interesting dynamic to see what people choose right yeah there's totally I mean just think about like

like we I mean Packy had a tweet about this saying that like like does everyone have different models like it's good but it's not like anywhere near like world ending to me like it seems fine and I agree with that and I think that just in terms of like AGI like the definitions are so odd but in terms like agentic get something done, none of the systems are capable of like kind of the multimodal work that just a normal person can do. We joke about the PDF upload all the time. But if there's a job that requires making one phone call, going to a store, buying an item, writing a little bit of code, writing a doc, reading a PDF, like no AI can do that right now. There are great deep research tools and then they're great code tools and then they're a great, you know, operator and they're a great

like phone call automation. But there's nothing that's wired it all together in some way that the AI can actually pick the tool for the job and really move between all of these for a really extended period of time. Obviously, we're getting there. We're moving from, you know, the initial GPT4 responses where like it thinks for a few seconds. Now it's thinking for a few minutes. It'll eventually be like, yeah, it worked on it for a day and it installed a bunch of software. it did a bunch of different things and it called people, it did emails, it did all sorts of stuff, it waited for responses from people. But just in terms of tooling, like, we're still pretty far away from that, in my opinion. Yeah, I made a post about the future of employment earlier that

seemed to resonate. Or a farmer is going to be a big one. AI right activist. AI is actually going to pay humans to campaign for AI rights, right? You're going to, you know, it's a better case coming from a human to say, hey, we need to stand up for AI and make sure they're being treated fairly, then the AI is saying that, right? So they need, the AI will want to embody people in that way. DoorDasher that just turns the robot on and off again. So even when we have robots that can go on these side quests or do things in the real world, sometimes they're going to break and you'll probably have an app that basically says, hey, there's a robot near you that needs a little help. Can you please go, you know, get them off the ledge or something like that? And, uh, so

So there's a bunch of exciting futures for, you know, and opportunities for humans. Well, let's keep moving on. Sean over at My First Million says out of 500 million daily tweets, only five deserve your attention. DREC says, who's building this? The five best tweets delivered in a mail designed in a newspaper format. Matt Swanson says TBPN should do it. They love curating tweets and printing things out. I agree.

I actually, Sean used to have a newsletter called five, five days. daily tweets or something like that. And I loved it. It was amazing. Yeah. And he would just email you five tweets and then there would be a sponsored post in the middle. And it was just like five bangers that he enjoyed.

And I loved it. And I think that's a little bit of like the spiritual, this show is a little bit of the spiritual successor to that. If you want to just, you know, either scroll through our feed, Bangor Archive is another instantiation of that. And if you just want us cut to the timeline, you can hear us talk about a couple good tweets from the day. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we're working on a newsletter that will be rolling out that will feature some posts. We got Bangor Archive. Banger Archive is about the greatest posts in history, so not necessarily topical. But it's nice to get some topical coverage as well. But I love finding out ways to consume X content, you know, off of the X app. You know, sometimes I'm in my email, right? Maybe I want to get service posts there. Yeah, everywhere. And curated. Let's go to Michael Mirfleur, a fan of the show. He was replying to us. I looked up his best post and I found one that I liked. He says, leading contender for the worst word of the year and his worst word of the year is orthogonal. And Ian says, useful filter, don't work for or with people who use the word orthogonal with any recurring frequency. And I have a hilarious story about this.

First time I heard the word orthogonal used was in San Francisco probably 2014 at a CTO summit. and the person that dropped orthogonal on me, Greg Brockman, the CTO of Stripe, who went on to co-found Open AI. He was very early and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, okay, I'm in the big leagues. Like, they're dropping words on me. I got to look up in the dictionary. And it actually, you know, the word had its use. It makes sense in a certain thing. It makes sense to kind of say, hey, this is a different angle, you're not orthogonal to the main idea or whatever. But it did become a very trendy word. And maybe it's played out now. What do you think? Well, there's another big O word that hidden the lexicon and the timeline, which is ontology. That's probably the hottest. So

orthogonal stock is dropping like a rock, but ontology is really on the rise. So expect that word to get played out. If I could invest in ontology on public right now, I'd be, you know, I'm a big fan of tautology, a tautological argument. It's self-referential. I got to throw that in some sort of coinage one of these days. But let's move on to ramp. They're still talking about the Super Bowl ad, breaking it down. You can just do things, says Mitchell Bernstein. Seven days. That's how long our team had to produce a Super Bowl ad with Saquan Barclay. This is the story. And so they dropped a four-minute video here. You should go check it out and watch it. Lots of interesting takeaways for entrepreneurs. Obviously, you can apply a lot of these lessons

to much smaller ad campaigns. Even just, hey, we went on ad quick. We have some small out of home buy. But we need to make the most of it and we need to move fast and it needs to make a statement. And what was the secret to Ramp getting the value out of that Super Bowl ad? Well, they picked the sponsor really well. They got the guy to invest. So there was a good narrative. Saquan Barclay wound up winning the game.

So they kind of had some risk or ward upside. Obviously the ad would have less impact if Seekwan Barclay had five fumbles and ruin the game. But he didn't. He delivered. And so Ramp looks great. And then also they figured out how to get the maximum amount of value out of this by getting everyone in their network to post about it. It became a little bit of a meme. There were a bunch of different versions of this thing.

They really amplified it. And now they're doing breakdowns. And I think some of these breakdowns will be really helpful for entrepreneurs. What do you think, Jordy? Yeah, I think it's almost unbelievable how quickly they turned it around given all the timelines. I mean, we heard about it. I think the day that they decided. to do it. And then the team, every, you know, a number of people from the team went heads down. And

ultimately, they got served up the, you know, they executed well in the ad front. But then the fact that Sequin and the team won in such a dominant fashion was just such a, was just icing on the cake, because the ad went over well. But if you're aligning your company in such a public way for the first time with an individual, there would have been a lot of people that would be saying, oh, it's the ramp curse, like, you know, and like, you know how people talk about the Drake curse, like any, any. Or the Madden curse. Like when you're at the top of your game in football, you go on the cover of Madden, the video game, and then you have a terrible season. That was a big thing for a long time. So it's now the ramp blessing. Players are going to be in the ramp ad and

I love it. Let's move on to Brody, a fan of the show. He says, open VC suburb. subsidized.com. He knows not to post links. And he says types in Herman Miller, Aaron. And if you haven't checked it out, Vc subsidized.com is a place to buy assets from companies that are maybe going out of business, maybe raise too much money, maybe bought some nice stuff and want to liquidate it. We love to support brothers in the community that are building cool websites, cool things, helping people out and go check it out. You know, we love domains. I heard that love.com just hit the market sale. I did. I heard that too. Ryan Breslo

had, was building a, um, like a conscious Amazon and somebody wound down or they're not using the domain anymore. I'm not really sure of the details, but, uh, he should get love.com listed on VC subsidized because that is a great, great place to auction it off. Well, we have some bittersweet news, uh, from Gulfstream Arrow. The final G650 has a

officially completed production. Since its inception, the G650 family set the standard that all others followed. Oh, that's a... End of an era. That's the end of an era. Fortunately, the G800 was designed as its successor delivering increased performance, efficiency, comfort, and more. And so, you know, just some interesting news in the private jet world for... And I mean, look, this clearly resonated. They're hitting almost a 5% like rate on... It's not relatively small base, but, you know, this is an iconic plane, the Lone Ranger, one of our listeners, constantly keeping us updated on, you know, his opinions on the product line and what you should be really looking for.

So, yeah, just thank you to Gulfstream. I mean, hard posting a link in this and still putting up a 5% like rate is impressive. And you wouldn't expect anything less from such an iconic company. I agree. Let's move on to Lewis. Lewis builds AI. He says, hand on heart, German customers are the worst. They're broke. They complain too much. They're entitled. They ask her invoices if they spend three euros. Considering geo-blocking. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Absolute banger 1K likes, small account. But, you know, we love some pro-America content. We talk a lot of trash about the Germans. We got a lot of German fans. We like to chop it up with you guys. But get it together. Yeah, we don't talk trash about Germans. We talked a little bit about their crumbling industrial base,

and we hope that they get it back on track. I have some German family history. So anyways, we want them to do well, but don't be annoying to our hardworking SaaS entrepreneurs. Pay full price. Ask to get on the enterprise tier, even if you're on this sort of prosumer plan. If you love the product, tell them 10x the price, inspire me to grind harder.

And let's get Lewis some new contracts. Okay, we got a lightning round coming up. We got five minutes left in the show. We're going to rip through some of these bucket pulls, some of these bangers. I'm going to read it. You're going to give me a quick take less than a minute and then we'll move on. Manal says, chat, is it faux pa to use the term struggle bus in a professional setting? Jordie, what's your take?

I say go for it. Sometimes you want to tell people on a team to just get on the struggle bus and just head out into the desert, just camp out. Go to Burning Man. Get on the struggle bus and go to Burning Man. That's my time. Yeah. Throwing in bizarre lingo, it can go over poorly, but take some risks in a professional setting might pay off massively. Let's go to Sean Yeagerman.

He says, I know posting this is a recipe for getting bombarded by DM, but my website development process has had some hiccups. I need help sort of fast. I'm on a limited budget. any referral you think can help is really appreciated. So we just wanted to put this out to the fans. If you're a web developer, you know a web agency. Get in touch with Sean. We'll put his info up on the screen.

Sean Yeagerman. He's building a new protein bar company. He needs help with web design. No real comments there. But good luck to him. Hope he finds a great web developer soon. Let's go to Patrick Dunlop. He says, real estate is hilarious because nowhere else other than hyperliquid can you get a 5x leverage loan.

Jordy, what's your take? He's referencing Hyperliquid, which is a crypto exchange, and they have a token that is loved by degenerates. But yeah, there's a bunch of DGens in real estate. They like to go gig along. They like to lever up. They like to buy assets, sometimes, you know, sell quick, sometimes hold for a generation. But it's a fun game. And real estate is really about, there's a bunch of really smart people in real estate.

And then there's a bunch of golden retrievers, which we appreciate people that are, you know, know, hot, fun, and dumb, and just doing deals. And if you're, and if you got enough energy and you really hit it hard, you can make a great career in that industry. You just got to buy the right assets and, you know, hang on to them, make them better, maybe sell them at different points. But, uh, anyways, go gold. Good luck out there. Let's go to Nathan. He says, uh, first take care of our community, then rebuild. Seriously considering going back to LA to help rebuild the city that raised me. Only 17 views, no likes. I wanted to highlight this, because I think it's an amazing post. It's an inspirational post. What do you think, Jordi?

Should he come back to L.A.? Help us rebuild? Yeah, I don't know Nathan's situation, but clearly looks like you grew up in the palat. I think that's a shot of the palisades, or maybe it's kind of hard to tell if it could be Altadena as well. But now, I mean, there's a lot of opportunity. I mean, we talked about the sort of industry around disaster recovery. There's opportunities to help while, you know, building a career in that space. And, you know, L.A. certainly needs help right now. I haven't even actually seen a lot of the damage. I've just stayed away from it, just given, you know, the contamination and the sort of, you know, all the stuff that's been off-gassing, been trying to, you know, stay as far away as possible. But, yeah, I think it's a good

Yeah, we'd love to have you, Nathan. I'm sure L.A. will rebuild, but, you know, you seem like a talented builder. We'd love to have you here. Let's close out with this inspirational post from Remy. I look at my code and I feel love. Eventually, it will have thousands, perhaps millions of users. But for now, before it launches next week, I am the only one who sees it and knows its beauty. 33 views, two likes.

Good luck with the launch, Remy. We're wishing you the best here from TBPN. keep us posted. Let us know how the launch goes. And we will talk to you guys tomorrow. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave an ad in your review and we'll read it on the show. And stay tuned for the next one. We'll come to you live tomorrow. Have a great day. Thank you, brothers. Have a great day. Cheers.