TBPN Live - Arsonist In LA, The Government Files, I'm Rich and Need Help, Why B-Naires Love Diet Coke
Episode Date: January 10, 2025TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - ht...tps://getbezel.comFollow TBPN:Â https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - La Fires Update (03:45) - A Time for Truth and Reconciliation (Deep Dive) (30:45) - I'm Rich and Need Help (From TB) (01:04:45) - DM's (01:13:25) - The Timeline
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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world.
We are still surviving the Los Angeles fires, thankfully.
Both of our homes are still standing, but the story has evolved over the past 24 hours
and it's looking like there's a lot more arson going on than people previously thought.
There's rumors that the whole Palisades fire started via arson.
Didn't Andrew Huberman catch someone clearly doing arson?
Yeah, caught some arsonists very clearly.
And then our vice president, Ben, had to step, riots, I'm just going to rob the houses. And they're on networks with scooters and motorcycles and rented cars.
And so it's just full chaos.
I was seeing in a group chat that multiple neighborhoods in Malibu
have caught people just coming in actively trying to start fires.
So now people are just trying to basically make citizens arrest.
Yep.
Full chaos.
So some recommendations for the listeners,
security systems, ring cameras, ADP,
whatever you can do.
There's not a lot of great stuff there.
Sauron is coming thanks to Kevin Hartz
over at Astar VC.
He's starting a home security firm.
It's not fully live yet, but maybe go get on the wait list
if that's something that you're interested in.
You're trying to defend a home.
Most, the top recommended weapon for defending a home, AR-15.
Don't overcomplicate it.
We joke about a lot of crazy weapons here.
You don't need the meteorite 1911s. And an AR will do the job.
So maybe go pick one of those up.
Also support Andrew Huberman
and citizen journalists
who are doing reporting on X
and buy some Mateina Yerba Mate.
Mateina.
I love this stuff.
And it's Huberman's brand,
if you're not familiar.
He acquired it alongside another Andrew Wilkinson at Tiny.
And so they've been growing that.
And we love.
So if you see something, record it and throw it on the timeline.
We saw just a crazy car crash and police chase outside or bended outside of our studio.
And got some footage of that, threw that on the timeline and just kind of letting people know what's going on and obviously stay on yeah it's a really crazy energy in the city
right now you got ash floating through the air feels like it's snowing air quality's terrible
it's uh it's miserable and chaotic you were actually okay with there being a lot of sort of
pfos microplastics floating around because your t's been so high
lately you're trying to take the edge out and take the edge off yeah uh but anyways not good for kids
i uh i went down to uh south bay with uh or took the family down there yesterday because
uh the air quality was slightly better yeah um not Not good for kids. It's rough. So yeah,
everyone stay safe out there and yeah,
do whatever you can to help other people that are in trouble.
Check in on everyone in LA,
please.
So yeah,
completely unrelated to the fire.
We're moving on.
We're trying to move to the tech stories that we love and think are
interesting.
Today,
there was a op-ed posted by Peter Thiel
in the Financial Times. For those that don't know, who is Peter Thiel? Oh, I thought you were
going to say, what is the Financial Times? What is the Financial Times and who is Peter Thiel?
I'd be interested. I'm sure we have at least one brother in the audience. Well, it says it right
here. It says the writer is a technology entrepreneur and investor. And he's a writer. Yeah, he's a writer. Yeah. He wrote a book,
Zero to One, the power law of business books. The only book you really need to read again and
again and again. Founder of PayPal, founder of Palantir, incubator of a ton of different stuff
through Founders Fund, runs Founders Fund, big venture capital firm,
invests personally,
and is tied to a ton of other venture capital firms.
And any time a reporter, a tech journalist,
wants to make something sound crazy and mysterious,
they always go, oh, Peter Thiel backed this company.
And most of the time he invested in a fund as an LP
or his family office invested in a fund.
So it's like very clear that he didn't necessarily invest in the company,
but they always bring it back and say it's Peter Thiel backed.
He's been a boogeyman of the left for a long time.
Yeah.
Where, yeah, I've gotten to the point where I will sometimes throw it in
like Thiel backed or Thiel sponsored because it's's like it's just such a meme at this point.
And a lot of times they'll try and correct that.
Like the name of the fund is Founders Fund, not Peter Teal's Founders Fund.
He's one of three co-founders and there's multiple GPs.
And of course, he's a huge force in the firm.
But it is its own entity. And everyone,
including him, would like it to be represented as its own thing. But that doesn't fit the narrative.
He also has Teal Capital.
Yeah. And so this is an interesting article. We wanted to cover it on the show. It's called
A Time for Truth and Reconciliation. And it's talking about what's going to happen in the
new Trump 2.0 presidency. And so the lead is, in 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that
Donald Trump's election victory was, quote, not the apocalypse. By any definition, he was correct,
but understood in the original sense of the Greek word apocalypsis, meaning unveiling, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025.
Trump's return to the White House augurs the apocalypsis of the Ansan regime's secrets.
The new administration's revelations need not justify vengeance.
Reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation
to take place, there must first be truth. And this feels very tied to actually Eric Torenberg's
prediction, which he shared with Molly O'Shea and that other analysis that we looked at.
Mikhail Basu-Trivedi wrote those. And Torenberg was saying he's predicting that there will be a Twitter files for
the government yeah that there is now that Elon's more involved and the Trump team is more aware of
what they want to dig into that there will be more documents that are declassified more analysis of
where the bloat is exactly and it could be anodyne just like oh like oh, like, you know, you, you, you see these reports
all the time where it's like, oh, for some reason there's like some bus driver who's making 500 K
and you're like, how did that happen? That's kind of odd. Like, it seems like an aberration of like
the government or, you know, or we talked about it in defense where it's like a toilet will cost
$86,000 or like a screw will cost 20 K. Um all of those should come to light. But he also goes on to talk about some of the,
the,
the,
the bigger kind of conspiracies and secrets within the government that
people are clamoring for.
And how do we grapple with stuff?
It's interesting here because the audience very clearly was not tech X,
right?
He could have just posted this.
Yeah.
It's a long form post.
He could have put it on a blog somewhere. Or done an interview with a tech person. Like he could
have gone on Rogan to talk about it, but he also could have gone on a tech specific show. Yeah.
So it seems, yeah, it's an interesting choice to, to, to say, I'm not going to go direct. I'm
actually going to work with financial times and try to get this in front of a new audience that
isn't necessarily
rabidly consuming every word. Yeah. And so the Financial Times read by capital allocators,
investors, business people all over the world. Very international. Very international audience.
Beautiful. We should get a subscription here. It's pink. Pink sheets. Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
So he says the apocalypsis is the most powerful means of
resolving these old guards or most peaceful means of resolving the old guards war on the internet
a war the internet won and i and i love that because i haven't i haven't actually
internalized that idea that there really was this massive war between go we hear it with going
direct versus traditional pr we hear this versus hear this versus censorship versus free speech.
What does the town square mean?
How do companies operate on the internet?
Bitcoin.
There's so many things that come back to this internet.
And we've heard even Lena Kahn and breaking up Amazon.
It's just been a massive war in a bunch of little microcosms.
And the war on the internet, this is a coogan's law coinage i think the war on the internet is how we should be thinking about what happened from
the dot-com crash when the companies were seen as jokes and toys to now when they are ascendant
they are the most powerful platforms and the people that founded them and invested in them
are the most powerful people in the world full stop yeah yeah and it's the the phrasing is is pretty on point too because the internet is made up of platforms and
individuals and profiles and it really was profiles like individual profiles were attacked
the platforms were attacked the platforms were made to bend the rules of the platforms and
and go against like you know we saw this trump got booted off
of pinterest yeah like wild and spot and uh shopify and shopify so it's like you can't sell
anything you can't even organize pretty pictures and get inspo for your next home yeah like they
didn't want him doing anything it was like full it was so clear that every big tech ceo is in a
group chat together and they were like look, like one of them was like,
we probably got to do this.
And a bunch of them were pressuring each other.
The Pinterest thing is so funny.
It's almost just like, I want to be a big tech company too.
Like, oh, you're banned from.
Can you imagine though, if Trump was like, okay,
I'm banned on X, I'm banned everywhere.
I'm not going to do true social and become,
and create billions of dollars of value.
I'm just going to post on Pinterest.
It's like pretty pictures with him smiling
and then handwritten.
So he goes on to say,
my friend and colleague Eric Weinstein
calls the pre-internet custodians of the secrets
the distributed idea suppression complex, or the DISC.
The media organizations, bureaucracies, universities,
and government-funded NGOs
that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our
liberation from the DISC prison upon the death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein
in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died
by suicide, suggesting that
DISC had lost control of the narrative. That was fascinating. I remember-
It doesn't feel, it feels like he died a few years ago. It doesn't feel like 2019.
I was telling someone like, yeah, it's crazy that Epstein died at the tail end of the last
Trump administration. So there wasn't really time for a reconciliation within that.
And it immediately turned over.
And it was very hard to say,
Oh,
was that before COVID after COVID it was 2019.
But do you remember when you first learned about Epstein?
I remember as an individual.
Yeah.
Like when did the story break?
It had to be the articles where there were,
there were almost like puff pieces back in the day of who is this mysterious financier.
But it was pre, I feel like I started to get an idea of who he was prior to understanding that he was obviously a crew.
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
I found out about him through just straight up like conspiracy theory charts of like of like those pyramids and
it would be like aliens era 51 and like jeffrey epstein's conspiracy because uh when the whole
pizzagate thing boiled up there was a lot of like this is completely fake but if you dig into the
4chan threads on pizzagate it's like 99 epstein focused yeah and pizzagate was like a like an extension of that
where we're like the conspiracy theorists were clearly on to something with epstein but then
they kind of ran with it a ton and then that deranged guy like actually shot up that pizza
parlor that didn't have a basement or whatever and then and then and then everyone was like
clearly the whole thing is fake and that was partly wrong but i remember explaining it to people
you want the hat yeah i mean i needed the hat at the time i remember going to a new year's party
in like 2015 2016 or something and and telling people like oh have you heard about this epstein
thing the black book all these people are flying on these planes like maybe chris tucker's involved
it's like the weirdest story ever uh bill clinton's been out there a bunch and and everyone was just like okay
you're also like 20 or 30 years older than me apparently um uh and everyone was just like okay
dude like that's a crazy conspiracy and now it's like oh yeah i watched the netflix documentary on
on yeah that's like of course it's real that's a hard thing is after you've watched documentaries which shows
specific stories they paint this thing it's like well what is my my memory of like real-time
reactions to what was being shared versus what did i just see after the fact yeah um such such
an odd odd time but yeah i mean it really did become like just normie like it's not a conspiracy there
anymore it's just history that there was an island and there was and it doesn't seem like
it's a conspiracy theory either that there has been a widespread effort within the government
to control the information around that case and prevent it from being widely known yeah well
that's actually where teal goes on to talk about. He says, it may be too early to answer the internet's questions about the late Mr. Epstein,
but one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 65% of Americans still doubt
that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story,
we have waited 61 years for a denouement while the suspects Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi,
and the CIA's Alan Dulles gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on
Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America
some closure. We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about covid 19
in subpoenaed emails from anthony fauci's senior advisor david morins we learned that the national
institutes of health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from freedom of information
act scrutiny nothing wrote baraccio in his medieval plague epic the decameron it is so in
it is so indecent that it cannot be said to another
person if the proper words are used to convey it so do you remember this they were misspelling
words intentionally the same way over and over so that when people would make a freedom of
information act request that emails wouldn't surface because it was just they would always
they were like very consistently had a code like c C-O-V-D-I.
Yeah.
Oh, I just flipped the letter, but I do it every single time.
So when you search C-O-V-I-D, nothing shows up.
Yeah, exactly.
But C-O-V-D-I is like the keyword.
Interesting.
So crazy.
That is crazy.
In that spirit, Morin's and former chief U.S. medical advisor Fauci will have the chance to share some indecent facts about their own recent plague.
Did they suspect COVID spawned from U.S. taxpayer-funded research or an adjacent Chinese military program?
Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses?
Is gain-of-function research a byword for a bioweapons program?
And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?
Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech,
but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war.
Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned acts without American backing
in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine?
We were complicit in Australia's recent legislation
requiring age verification for social media users,
the beginning of the end for internet anonymity.
Did we muster up even two minutes of criticism of the UK,
which has arrested hundreds of people a year
for online speech triggering, among other things,
annoyance, inconvenience, and needless anxiety.
We may expect no
better from orwellian dictatorships in east asia and eurasia but we must support a free internet
in oceania interesting yeah i remember when covid first broke and it was so funny because now
it's become this like cause of the left like you gotta taylor ryan's like you gotta still wear a
mask in 2025 etc
but it came from bolligy who's like firmly on the right and libertarian and at the time before
like there was like a multi-week period where only tech was taking it seriously and some of
the scientific community and so my co-founders are phds in bio at lucy and uh and they didn't see it they're not
super political guys they didn't see it through like a political culture war lens and so immediately
i remember coming in and you know talking about it and we we kind of knew that okay this is going
to be crazy like the the what's the r not the the viral coefficients very high, et cetera. But we just drew out a two by two graph and we were like, okay, is it Chernobyl
or is it Fukushima or Pearl Harbor?
Like, is this an attack or an accident?
Is this intentional or an accident?
And then on the Y-axis you put,
is this bioengineered or is this of zoonotic origin?
Because you could literally go and get a bat or a pangolin
and then just be like, this pangolin is sneezing.
Let's take it, let's release it, right?
And that doesn't require any bio lab, crazy science,
like amazing, but it's still like very deliberate.
Then there's the other one where it's like-
Yeah, if you look at the wet markets in China,
they are extremely foul.
Yeah.
So immediately.
You could easily imagine that something would happen, that it wasn't, that there is a, there is a, could make a case that it was totally natural.
That was and is still somewhat like the default narrative that's being pushed is, is came from an animal, totally accidental.
Yeah. But if you look at the story at the very least, it's like, well,
the Chinese government knew that something was spreading and they didn't raise their hand and
say, Hey guys, we got a thing going on over here. They actually like, I think they killed the doctor
or something. It was like bad. Or they, they definitely were silencing people who were talking
about it on social media, which is bad for us. And it's like, even if, even if they did have
Chernobyl, they did the bad thing of being like no
no no we don't have an accident going on over here and that's annoying and that's expensive and they
and they did we do know that the u.s funded the work of eco health alliance which sent researchers
into remote chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses yeah so we do know that that
was happening and so that takes it into like the it's from the bio lab type of thing yeah this is engineered maybe there's gain of function going on where they're
trying to juice it up and and and then there's the question of okay so maybe there's an argument for
yeah go do the research create the super bug and then create the antidote for the super bug and
then if the real super bug comes out randomly you have the antidote ready to go cool i i can be like okay with that
under the right circumstances if it's clean um but it's like did they have a chernobyl-esque
accident where they were doing this research and then it got out which was like you can't talk
about that at all and then and then the and then the worst of all scenarios is this was engineered
and released deliberately for a bunch of different reasons and you can talk to a bunch of people that think about that but what's weird is this matrix of like four options it was just like
immediately like it's got to be one of these four we should talk about all four of them
this isn't conspiratorial like what's actually going on with there's so little evidence it's
so unclear you can't just immediately be like 100 zoonotic accident. Yeah. And yet that was what you were forced to say. The fog of war really takes quite a long time to dissipate.
In some cases, never, right?
Even with the JFK stuff,
there was all these documentaries that were produced
that each had their own take on the story.
And so the result was that a bunch of information
was put out there,
but everybody was still deeply confused.
And you could make a case.
And even with the fires this week i was hearing yesterday from uh from a
close family friend that that somebody was saying that their friend in the police force was saying
that uh there was arson for the palisades fire yep and and it's like well we know there's arson
for the kenneth fire but is you know it's still unclear other people are saying that fire started in somebody's backyard and just ripped and and i i did this on the solo episode i was like
how do fires start there's a bunch of different ways lightning strikes that's like the
all-natural version there's power lines so it could be on the electrical company it could be
arson it could be someone having a fireworks or a backyard barbecue that went wrong.
There was a video of a kid throwing a bunch of gas on the fire.
Yeah.
So like,
like that can be human and criminal.
It can be a human accident. Like you could just be having a barbecue one day and something goes wrong or,
and it's not even a heater.
Yeah.
It's not even negligent.
It's just,
it's just,
it's just a complete accident,
freak accident,
but it's caused by a human.
But like you should be able to immediately discuss all of these. Yeah, it's not even negligent. It's just a complete accident, freak accident, but it's caused by a human.
But you should be able to immediately discuss all of these.
And that was just not on the table for the first couple of years of COVID.
There was actually an interesting turn of events
when I noticed, do you know Johnny Harris?
Yeah, he's constantly putting out misinformation.
Yeah, I mean, he's very left-wing.
If you look in the comments of his videos oh yeah
it's all this is here's five reasons why you're completely wrong yeah yeah yeah that's great i
mean for a long time he was like i i felt like he was kind of the cultural center of youtube in the
sense that like the average youtube video was very they're very well produced but also just in terms
of politically like he was basically center left.
And for a long time, he couldn't talk about the the lab leak theory.
And then a couple of years in, it was like Rogan had talked about it a bunch.
They put the community notes on it.
And then eventually it got to a point where the New York Times was reporting on the lab leak theory just the fact that johnny could put his just the fact that the disc was so adamant at making sure that nobody thought it was a lab leak almost makes you think that yeah it's
she doth protest too much is the phrase you should keep this yeah yeah we need this here for this for
sure uh we pulled out the tinfoil hat which we put on when we're talking about conspiracy theories
um let's move on darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Mark
Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan's podcast that the Biden administration debanked
crypto entrepreneurs. How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system?
Were an IRS contractor's illegal leaks of Trump's tax records anomalous? Or should Americans assume their right
to privacy, financial privacy hinges on their politics? And can one speak of a right to privacy
at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans' communications?
South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the questions above with piecemeal
declassifications would benefit both Trump's chaotic style and our internet world, which
processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration
shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the right-wing deep state of
an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded. So I think what he's saying there is like,
Trump wasn't going to declassify stuff because the right-wing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie,
does that mean a deep state that is against the right wing? So if they declassify things,
they won't be able to get stuff done because the deep state will be working against them. I think so. I think that's what he's saying.
I'm not exactly sure about that one. I was a little confused when I read that.
He goes on to say our onsen regime, talking about the Biden administration and all the
Democrats in charge, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party
would never end. 2016 shook their historic faith in the arc of the moral universe.
But by 2020, they hope to write off Trump as an aberration.
In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration,
the rear guard action of a struggling regime.
And it's...
Mogged.
Mogged by words.
Mogged by English.
Every now and then we get mogged by the English language.
That's a German word, I'm sure.
Come on. There were there will be no reactionary restoration of the pre Internet past.
And and that is really interesting when you think about 2020 as an aberration of the previous regime in the sense that Biden was like super old and they didn't have a primary to try and install a comma.
And it was like, it was very like, you know,
just like thrown together.
It felt like it was kind of chaotic and thrown together at all times.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think everyone agrees
that like the left will have to like completely retool.
How does Bernie and AOC fit in?
Like completely rethink the strategy
if they want to move forward and be successful
because the foundation has really, really cracked. Yeah. It's interesting too, this week, I can't imagine
that the images coming out of LA will be good for Newsom's political career because they feel like
sort of visual summary of his time running California. And he was a front runner to go for
2028. Yeah. And Polly Market, with the Democrats, he was like 3%, yeah go for for 2028 yeah i'm polymarket he was with the democrats he was
like three percent five percent like hovering around there like maybe i'll throw him in yeah
yeah yeah even you're saying this last election yeah this last election it was like oh maybe
kamala won't do it and newsom will be the one or michelle obama one thing that the one thing uh
the only thing that i uh appreciate about newsom is he oh he knows how to put himself together in a crisis. He always
looks good. We still put on our suits. Yeah. And he has fantastic taste in food. That's true. He
loves a five-star restaurant. Yeah. There was a AI generated image of him at Nobu looking at the
disaster on his phone while Nobu was like burning down. Going to Michelin star restaurants in the middle of the fire.
The future demands fresh and strange ideas.
New ideas might have saved the old regime,
which barely acknowledged, let alone answered our deepest questions.
The causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress
in the United States,
the racket of crescendoing real estate prices,
and the explosion of public debt. So this is going back to
the deepest question to Thiel is what is the cause of technological stagnation?
Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions. But as
Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a
great one. Sad. That hurts. You can admit that
and still love our country. Yeah, for sure. Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient
history. The study of recent history to which the Trump administration is now called is more
treacherous and more important. The apocalypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, referencing the 1619 project, but it can resolve our fights
over COVID-19. It will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who
govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins, but with the truth,
it will not prevent us from forgiving. Very interesting. So I think a little bit of the takeaway here is
that the obsession over the JFK assassination might be a little bit of a distraction from
moving forward. And there needs to be more of a focus on the recent history, as he says.
There was a fascinating, did you see? Yeah, the future demands fresh and strange ideas. To me,
that's Greenland, right? Yeah, that's a very good example.
The Arctic is melting.
We want control over those trade routes.
And so related to this, Mark Zuckerberg just went on Joe Rogan.
The episode just dropped this morning.
And there's a quote here from Autism Capital.
I didn't have a chance to print it out.
But Zuck says,
people in the Biden administration would call up our team and scream and curse at them.
The emails are published.
It's all out there.
They wanted us to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV.
You know that one?
Yeah, yeah.
At some point, Biden gave some statement where they said that Facebook was killing people.
And then all these different agencies and branches of government started coming after our company. It was brutal. And so that's kind of the Zuck vibe shift that we talked about
on Monday, where he appointed Dana White to the board and also announced community notes and moved
the trust and safety team from California to Texas. And then also got rid of, give me the latest.
Completely eliminated DEI.
Yeah.
No more DEI organization or targets.
Yeah.
So,
so you can see that this is like echoing through and it's fascinating because when,
when Zuck came out,
there was a lot of criticism.
Like,
Oh,
he's like late to the party.
Like,
like Brian Armstrong was being brave about this in 2020.
But if you talk to Brian,
he's like,
no,
like it's great that he's here in like four years. It's not that long. Like what we don't want is like
the holdouts who have, who realize, who like haven't realized that the world has changed
and aren't willing to shift. And so like, I think that this is the Palmer lucky thing with everyone's
working on defense now. Like it's fine. If you had a DEI program that was a mess in 2015, like move on and figure out what's actually a good way forward.
You just don't want to be fighting tooth and nail to maintain the,
the previous regime that was obviously very destructive.
But fascinating article,
highly recommend.
I mean,
we reread it all.
So,
but it is free on the
financial times fortunately not paywalled for you bootstrap founders out there who are trying to
keep burn low you even though we recommend uh getting the paper delivered in print every day
you'll be able to read this one for free which is great should we move on beautiful let's talk about a super viral problem super viral post that went
out i believe on monday maybe sunday uh venae higher math says i am rich and i have no idea
what to do with my life here's a blog where i talk about leaving loom giving up 60 million dollars
larping is elon breaking up with my girlfriend, insecurities,
a brief stint at Doge,
and how I'm now in Hawaii self-studying physics.
And for those of you who might not know, Loom is a Chrome plugin that allows you to record your screen,
record your face cam, and match those together.
It's actually very useful if you need an if you need an employee or you're,
you need to send someone a little video of,
Hey,
here's how I want this process done.
A lot of sales guys.
I would use it.
I've used it a bunch for async,
uh,
design feedback.
So if I get some design work done and then I can't talk through it live,
I'll just send a three minute video being like,
change this,
change this.
This could be better. I don't like the way more it's just way more flowing than trying
to write out an email it's just way easier um yeah it's interesting i actually think when i
when most of the time when i get a voice note from from somebody it annoys me because i'm like well
you saved yourself time and and now you're gonna waste my time because you could just summarize
this over text but when you get a Loom,
typically there's actually some like meat in there
and it can be convenient
because it's saving you a phone call.
When somebody sends you a voice note,
they're saving themselves time.
Yeah, it's often saving you a Zoom call
because the whole screen share aspect of it
is really important.
Yeah, Loom is saving you a Zoom call.
Because typically it's hard for me,
if you're giving that type of design feedback,
you need to not only put all of your thoughts
into words perfectly,
and then also share screenshots of,
okay, this is the button I'm talking about.
Draw on it.
It really does save a lot of time.
It's a great product.
And so they raised a lot of money.
They grew the company really big.
I think the biggest venture round
was like over a billion, like 1.5.
And they sold for a billion.
Jason, love that one.
And it was still a great outcome for the founders, very clearly.
The guy made a lot of money.
And so let's look at his blog post.
He says, life has been a haze last year.
After selling my company, I find myself in the totally unrelatable position of never having to work again.
Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way.
I don't have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status.
I have infinite freedom, yet I don't know what to do with it.
And honestly, I'm not the most optimistic about life.
I know this is a completely zeroth world position to be in.
The point of this post isn't to brag or gain sympathy.
To be honest, I don't know what the point of this post is.
I tried to manufacture one.
I have an idea what it's about.
I know the thing that you can chase. Vinay, I got your solution right here. Stay tuned. Then I recognize the
irony of creating purpose out of a blog post when I don't currently have much conviction or purpose
in life. So I'll just go ahead and explain my current situation for my own selfish purposes
to push myself to be completely and awkwardly vulnerable to a blob
of nameless strangers on the internet. Last March, I had no idea what to do with my life.
I found it very hard to give up a $60 million pay package. I had already made more money than I knew
what to do with, but your mind does funny things when you start to consider numbers like this. So
I decided to go to the Redwoods and figure it out. Within five minutes of my first hike, the trees
smiled at me and whispered their simple wisdom. What's the point of money if it not for freedom? What
is your most scarce resource if not time? I would leave to do something, anything to be alive again.
I had no idea, but I was hell bent on making sure everyone knew I had it all figured out.
So he spent two weeks after his tenure, two weeks after leaving an intense
tenure journey. He did what any healthy person does and met with over 70 investors and founders
in robotics. Wait, wait, one, one note. So at Lassie and the company that bought Loom,
they own Jira, right? Yeah. So that that's a little bit of context here so he was like working at the company that makes jira
very miserable software to use was so painful that he couldn't stay for a couple years to make 60
million an nba level contract that just shows honestly one thing he could have done is said
hey millions people use jira i gotta make it my life's work to make this product say,
hey, I don't want to work on Loom anymore.
I'm done screen sharing.
I want to fix Jira,
the cause of so much suffering in the world.
I've always said this,
that you should never sell your company,
but if you do,
you should be sure that you're on the track
to be the CEO of the acquiring company.
And it's a completely different mentality.
If you're a big company.
Like, could you see Dylan Field being the CEO of Adobe if that deal went through?
Absolutely.
Would that be good for Adobe shareholders?
Probably.
Would that be edifying for Dylan Field?
Probably.
Would he be able to bring his team upward?
Or Dylan looking at Adobe being like,
I want to work with Scott Belsky.
And I'm sure the two of them were devastated.
But the big problem is,
of course, if you're in the company struggling,
get an acqui-hire done or your stock
and you just need an exit, do that.
But if it's a deal where you're stuck and you just need an exit, do that. But if it's a deal where you're getting
one to 10% of the company on a market cap basis,
set your sights higher
and actually set yourself up to go in and dominate
because you want to be a leader.
You want to be at the top.
You've been at the top your entire career as a founder
just because they stuff you in an office with an earn out and a boss as like vp of
innovation or whatever yeah if you're a real killer you can get back on the corporate track and
yeah talk to the board and get the ceo fired take over
hostile yeah get hostile interesting technique What's the best way to get
your boss fired? If you want to move up and you know that it's just a corporate ladder and you
just want to move up, best way to get your boss out of the picture, find a bunch of recruiters
to recruit them away to a better job. That's great. So find executive recruiters. Oh yeah.
My boss doesn't work if you're joining a founder
mode i think at last yeah there's a founder mode i think so i don't think they're responding to
hey so and so i heard i saw you work in sass yeah but uh certainly if you're in the middle of the
ladder works every time every time yeah uh great great strategy. And recruiters are always looking for insights.
Yeah, it's not violent. It's not aggressive. It's it's just a little.
And then, oh, I'm getting a lot of job offers. Actually, I'm going to have. Are you going to be OK? I'm going to leave.
You know, I don't want to abandon you on this team. You're going to have a lot more work.
You're like, yes, interesting news yeah that's like a dwight
from the office style move or maybe or maybe uh jim would do that to dwight um yeah it's good so
he breaks up with his girlfriend realizes so i was thinking maybe the purpose of the post was
was it was more of like using it as a dating app kind of of like a call to help for e-girls. Getting close to my theory. Call to help for e-girls, like, hey, any e-girls out there?
Yes.
I'm very lonely and lost, and I have $100 to $200 million.
Yes.
Like, reach out.
I'll be in Hawaii.
So I think the, maybe not the purpose of the post,
but like the missing thing here is essentially fame and
recognition you know like yeah loom is a cool company we know about it but it's not something
that people talk about like tesla you know it's not a consumer product yeah even even smaller uh
even like a kettle and fire has more mental mind share than loom even though it's probably a
smaller company um because they sponsor ufc
and so if you're just running into a random person in a bar and you're like i'm the founder
of kettle and fire they're like oh i saw that at arowan like that's amazing that's sick cool i i
get that all the time with lucy people will be like oh i use those vouchers and we have like
you know tons and tons of customers much harder with a with Rubin loves Lucy. Exactly. It doesn't happen as much. And so,
uh, and, and, and that's a weird ego thing, but it's real. And there's this thing where a lot of
people want money. And then once they have money, they want political power. And once they have
political power, they want fame and they kind of dance between all of these. And, uh, and so first
off, I think, I think like it's fine to want a public
presence, to want to be known, to want to be widely loved and respected. And so, you know,
you're a good writer. I want to hear, I want to read more of these blog posts. So I would say like,
turn this into something, give this a try. Yeah. Maybe this'll work. Uh, and, uh, and, and yeah,
create some content because there's already so many content creators,
but you have the, you have the, the bona fides to put some cool stuff out there. Uh, and then also
just in general, I, I have this philosophy that, uh, it, it, it's very difficult when people
focus on just one metric of success. Uh, and they say, my happiness is tied just to my net worth because if you get to
the top of the mountain you have nowhere to go but down and the real best thing are you familiar
with like the shepherd scale or barber pole i've talked about this theory so basically uh if you
watch a barber he's just making stuff up by the way um, the, like the barber pole theory of happiness is if you look at a
barber pole, it's, it's like striped, like a candy cane. Right. And if you watch it,
it looks like it's going up endlessly. But what's really happening is that it's getting the other
side and then it's kind of restarting the cycle and a shepherd tone does the same thing. I can,
I can play it. Uh, it sounds like really, really crazy when you hear it um because the it's basically a
whole bunch of scales um uh that are playing at the same time and so uh it sounds kind of like
like this you hear how it's like sounding it sounds like it's going up. You can listen to this for hours.
And it just goes up and up and up and up and up.
And it's because some of them...
It kind of sounds like it's summoning a 60 Mesoamerican demon.
It really does sound weird.
But I like this as...
It's like a fractal pattern.
Like you see the fractal pattern?
Fractal pattern just continues...
It's going to make me start juggling.
Yeah, Continue endlessly. Um, and so,
uh, I, I believe that you need kind of that philosophy in your life because things are,
there's certain metrics. Like if you have, you know, your family life, your fitness, your fame,
your wealth, uh, all of those, they're going to reach the top of the mountain. And
eventually some of them are going to decline. But if when you're cresting in your business career,
you're having grandchildren and you're getting more and more joy out of just the size of your
family. Or when you're really young, it might be hard to make a lot of money. But if you're in peak
physical condition, you're like, this is amazing. Eventually you're going to hit 50 and be like, yeah, I can't bench press what I could when I was 25. But, but at that time,
your business career is going to be even better and you're going to be making more and more money.
So you'll be able to focus on like the new thing that's good. And so you're like, you need to be
balancing all of those different sources of wealth, the types of wealth so that you're, you're, you're,
you're raising one while the others are in decline if they happen to be.
So you can always refocus.
It's literally just moving the goalposts on yourself, on what makes you happy.
What were you about to say?
You wrote some stuff down.
I mean, yeah, we can kind of get into, I would say, not, I don't think he's asking for our advice, but, you know.
You're getting it anyway.
You're getting it anyway.
We've never been hesitant to give unsolicited advice.
I mean, a few a few things. I mean, one, it's very normal for somebody who's hyper success and career oriented and mission oriented like entrepreneurs are.
Yep. To feel very lost when that journey ends and landing at Atlassian and then becoming a cog in the
Jira machine. It feels like very much like, okay, I'm no longer make having this forward momentum.
Uh, I went through that on a much smaller, much, much smaller scale after, uh, after we joined row
where I just didn't feel like I was, I was like, I whatever i was 26 28 okay 27 at the time i'm like
okay i feel like i'm at the my my career is picking up felt like it was really ramping up
and then it felt like i slowed way down because i was like okay i have a boss for the first time
in my life i'm working at a company where i i barely i only know like five out of like 250 people.
It just felt very strange.
I felt lost.
And I personally ended up doing the same thing where I left earlier than we had originally structured.
So I think it's totally normal to feel lost.
And it's cool because he's now crowdsourced a ton of ideas and brought all
this you know interest and intrigue into what he's doing yeah you should go read the whole post
i think he went on to work at doge and figured out that he didn't really like that he went into
robotics but felt like he was LARPing as Elon and then he wound up moving to Hawaii and is
teaching himself physics which is yeah and so, and so I think the high-level thing
that I think every entrepreneur,
it's different where for him, he's post-economic now,
doesn't need to start another company,
doesn't need to get a job somewhere,
doesn't need to work in the government.
So I think the strategy overall should just be to do cool stuff.
So that could take a bunch of different forms, right?
That could be Elad of different forms, right? That could be, uh,
Elad Gill, uh, making monuments, right? He's still doing his thing on the investing side
and, uh, incubation side could be doing a grant program like Justin brother mayors,
where Justin gives away money to people to try to change their life on the post economic thing.
I, I love that word. It's a, it phrase for not needing a job. But I feel like I
kind of hate it in the sense that when I look at the people that I look up to and respect,
they are obviously post-economic in the sense that they're like billionaires, but
they are not post-economic in the sense that they're completely players in the game.
And to the point where if they have a down year,
it's emotional.
If they have an up year, it's amazing.
They're really thinking about how to allocate their capital
across every asset class.
And they're thinking about it just as much as...
They're still trying to stimulate the economy.
They're still active participants.
They're still playing the game.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of it happens when it's always hard when you jump multiple orders of magnitude in a very,
very short time, essentially overnight. I've noticed this with like if you ever hire someone
and you're running like, let's say, a hundred person startup, you can usually hire someone
who's been at a 10 person startup or maybe even a thousand person company and they can kind of jump
in but it's hard when you pull someone from a 10 000 person organization into a hundred person
organization because everything about that job is different instead of like if you're in a 10 000
person organization and you're a leader like you don't have a person for everything you have a team
for everything yeah uh and at a hundred person organization just think about like is the wi-fi
down you might have an it person if you go down to a five person startup, it's like, you're doing it yourself.
You're going to get a starling. Yeah. And if you're at a 10,000 person company, it's like,
well, we have an IT team and you jump up three orders magnitude. It's like, yeah. As opposed to,
you know, a little bit more of like what we've experienced in our career where it's a more gradual accumulation of wealth.
And so you're more acclimated to it.
It's not this sudden wealth syndrome that's going on.
Yeah.
The other thing that I've seen, especially in L.A., the kids who got really big on social media as teenagers and then got jaded and didn't convert it into a business or anything like that
those people really struggle because they've had the pinnacle of attention and wealth and not
necessarily wealth like true wealth which is like income like cash flow yeah it's just like so they
got a 100k check from youtube this month so if you're a teenager making 100k a month and then you 10 years later
you stop doing youtube because you didn't care about it and then you have to money doesn't even
feel real in the same way so this happens in crypto people that get ultra wealthy from crypto
they didn't really have to work hard to do it they were smart and they got, had some luck. Those people end up just feeling incredibly
lost because they're chasing that. Yeah. They're subconsciously sort of still chasing that high,
even if they're not playing a game that allows them to get that high. I mean, we've talked about
this with the, in the opposite case of like the PayPal mafia, like why is the PayPal mafia so
special? Obviously like they're all really talented business leaders and technologists but specifically it's like they were kind of forced to sell their company after IPO they got liquidity
but then they all had like these revenge narratives of like I've been wronged like I could have been
running something that I think PayPal's peak market cap is like 100 billion could easily be
a trillion if they were still there uh and and it like, they got that kind of taken away from them
with all this chaos.
And so they all went back in immediately
because they had so much to prove.
Because they were like, we were the dot-com wonder kids
and we didn't get our full bite at the apple.
And so that's very different than the-
And they basically all went back to zero
and all ran it up to public companies again.
Yep, exactly.
Proving that luck counts for something.
That's the goal.
You get a couple hundred million. Yeah, so so i mean there's so many things like yeah imagine if
if mr beast had started his content creation career with 100 million dollars already in the
oh yeah and so imagine so so do something like that uh i think that it's not wouldn't be the
worst idea to do a peter rahal style sure deal where let's say venae buys give
some background on peter so so well yeah so peter rahal started rx bar sells it like raises very
little money sells it for like 600 million dollars yeah proceeds to wait like basically i think like
five plus years after his earn out and all that stuff does like a bunch of growth equity investing
some venture investing and then basically starts the same company again more focused on protein called david and now he's
running it up again like it'll clearly be somewhere probably 500 to a billion dollar outcome again
it's a way better product and it's amazing it's so good peter's sending us some i love it today
i think so we're going to be eating it here with our matina I looked at the I looked at the macros
it's it has like 40 grams of protein like 200 we should see if we can survive on matina's
and easily roar water easily and uh volta goo volta and kettle and fire and david protein bars
you can't survive but you thrive so I would say your strategy was spend all your money and it creates such a crazy lifestyle, you know, bloat and burn that you need to get back in the game just to survive.
I'm happy to run through that, but let's finish up.
So the Peter Hall thing is like rebuild loom.
Rebuild loom, rebuild the same company.
Yeah.
You know, build a loom that just that automatically generates AI generates the video.
So you don't even have to record it. Yep. And it's something that, you know, you can hire all
the best people you already know. And you get back on the treadmill, back on the mission,
run it back again. Yep. So I'd like to see that. I mean, that's also Nikita Beer. That's also a
bunch of people that have done that stuff. Uh, it's not just, uh, it's not just Peter thing with,
um, site. So, so there's a mushroom on his blog which is a is a
bit of a red flag for me because psychedelics are very dangerous uh you know they've been widely
promoted by other podcasters and they're you know people can experience tremendous benefits from
them but doing them while you're very lost and don't know what's going on can give you a bunch
of false signals around what you should actually do and you're hallucinating
yeah so there's it can tell you truths that feel real yeah that aren't necessarily real yeah and so
even um it's like the opposite of grounding yourself you're literally like having an out
of body experience you're like away from the ground you feel like you're flying uh the way
to ground yourself is like go back and spend time with your family and your extended family
because at a certain point it's like you're even if you're running this life of like you know you
never have to work again well like they're going to have real life problems and and vicissitudes
and all different type of uh things that that they need to work through and uh that can just
make you a lot more human if you're actually like engaged with your community and then your friends and, and, and, and, and, you know, whoever's
in your, in your network, uh, really growing that stuff will actually help you stay grounded. Um,
but did you have anything else before I go into my plan? Yeah. Just think, uh, studying physics
in Hawaii. Very cool. Study your own physical form, right?
Get really into bodybuilding.
Get your IFBB pro card.
Pro card, for sure.
Compete with someone like Keith Reboy.
Yep.
Get to the absolute pinnacle of that.
That's an entire mission that's not necessarily economically driven.
Do you know how many workouts Keith did last year?
Like two a day, so like 700.
I think it was over 1,000.
It was the most insane stat.
I looked at it and I was like, this can't be real.
I mean, I understand he works out every single day
and he had a number of days worked out.
It was like 364.
I guess he missed one day.
But it's like, how do you do three workouts a day, dude?
Unreal.
Yeah, mass monster arc is going to be fantastic.
But yeah, good job.
I mean, there's just like yeah there's
a lot that the the get inspired by nat friedman take 500k and create a public good out of it yeah
so there's just so much stuff you can do that's not directly economic that can have tremendous
impact can be very motivating and when I look at this stuff,
these are all things I'm very excited to do
that we're excited to do through the show.
Yep.
And anyways, what do you got there?
Because one thing that we love doing is spending money.
And the timing for Vinay to come into this wealth
also as loud opulence becomes a dominant trend and quiet luxury is sort of fading into the background.
It's great.
The timing is pretty perfect to start spending some cash, especially, you know, on the equestrian side, which I'm sure you'll get into.
Yep.
You know, it's not easy or inexpensive to have a stable of championship of, of championship winning race horses, but he
has the resources to do that. Exactly. So, so yeah, I broke down kind of how I would spend the
first 200 million, um, to really get you back on the hedonic treadmill. Cause it seems like he's
kind of fallen off. Um, and once you move into, uh, you know, a Manhattan penthouse, you're going
to be meeting people in the elevator
saying if i was just one floor higher yep i should get back on the grind yeah maybe i should call up
atlassian or there or you see an elevator and they've got some bags of them and they're like
where are you going there i'm going to my house in aspen exactly and and you say oh what neighborhood
you're in you look it up on zillow and it's 50 million dollar entry price right exactly like
well that's quarter of my yeah assets i i gotta actually get back in the game. I got to get back in the game. So I broke it down
into a couple of different categories. You start with the real estate portfolio. Obviously you're
going to need a lot of properties. I recommend a mansion in Malibu, probably 25 mil, a Miami
ocean front front estate. You might be able to get that for 10 Manhattan penthouses, 30 Aspen
ski chalets, 15 Hampton summer estate 20 Lake Tahoe lakefront home
eight mil Joshua tree contemporary retreat for five and then you're going to need something in
Hawaii that's going to be 12 and that's just in America you might want you might want the bug out
village some property in Montana or Alaska you might want to go to New Zealand that's going to
be expensive but beautiful careful gentrifyingifying Alaska. They will come for you.
And so that's going to,
that's going to take 125 million out of your pocket.
Obviously you can use debt,
but you don't have a lot of cashflow at this point.
So you're, you're trying to burn down that.
Yeah.
But the purpose is real estate rich.
And then that's justification for not to mention at this number of homes,
you need, you basically are running a company again, which is great.
So you're going to get that.
You're going to get daily one-on-one stand-ups.
You're probably going to need a full-time real estate agent.
Just Slack for your, yeah, you might want to put an agent on the payroll and say, give me a little less commission, but I'll give you some cash flow.
I mean, running an efficient family office is in and of itself a status symbol
because so many of them are mismanaged and have tons of hangers on just
collecting checks and doing nothing.
Um,
you're also going to need some cars.
I mean,
you'll need these cars in every single house,
but I would say three for every house.
Yeah.
But if you're just to build one three car garage,
you know,
you're going Bugatti Chiron,
Koenigsegg,
Jesco,
Rolls Royce,
Cullinan, black badge badge that's seven million right there and then you copy paste that a couple times
with different yeah and you get some funky stuff get an old ford bronco drop top you know that's
not going to completely run up the bill on you but it's going to occupy your time oh and the key here
is you know buy it's all life is all about buying the right things right people say oh spend your
money on experiences well you know a one-of-one bronco is an experience you know refurbished
and rebuilt is it's an experience every single time you get in it it's an experience when you
look at it in the garage right yep um and uh anyway so so keep going down the list yep and so for watches you could get a patek
philippe nautilus uh 5990 rolex daytona paul newman richard mill you're in for 100 1.3 mil
right there just with the starter collection and you might want 10 20 different we didn't even get
into dailies beaters dress watches there's so many different options there in terms of far uh
firearms i mean you can't go wrong with the meteorite 1911s we talked about those from cabot guns a singer 1911 could be
150k go down to arley in beverly hills get a get a shotgun a browning 50 cal that's going to be 50k
you're going to need licenses this is all going to take up not just money but time yeah and so
while you're thinking about your next act you're're also... Key to a happy life is a busy life, too. Exactly.
You don't want to be too...
You want to be busy.
So you could easily spend $5 million there.
Then on horses, you're going to want to start breeding racehorses,
ideally from the American Pharoah line.
But then you're also going to want a high-performance quarter horse for cutting,
an Andalusian dressage stallion, an Arabian shoed champion.
It could also be cool to go um uh to go out to omaha nebraska yep and literally
buy every home surrounding warren buffett that would be very cool sort of like a castle wall
type setup where you build it basically yeah for venae he would be able to look down on warren
buffett yep and start picking up through osmosis.
He's got to manage his family office, pick up some investing techniques,
but you'd also be able to mog one of the world's most successful and wealthiest men, which Vinay might like.
He hasn't done that before.
If he sees you walking around the neighborhood, strolling around on top of your quarter horse, he's going to have to stop and say hi.
Absolutely. Or if he hears the...
You're going to pull up in your Camry.
Yeah. If you pull up in a... Yeah. He's in the Camry, you're in the Jesco.
Yeah. Every time he starts his Camry and you hear it kind of start up, you start up the Jesco.
The Jesco.
Yeah, exactly. And then the quarter horse gets a little skittish.
Yeah, yeah.
The Jesco's ripping. Then, you know, obviously build a wine collection.
You're going to want an expansive cellar featuring top Bordeaux first growths, Lafitte, Mouton, Petrus, iconic California cult wines like Screaming Eagle, Scarecrow.
This blends revered old world European traditions with cutting edge American viticulture.
You're going to spend $5 million on that easy.
And get a sommelier. Get a sommelier full time. $5 million on that easy. And get a Sommelier.
Get a Sommelier full time.
$150K a year.
Have them travel with you.
Yeah.
Which we'll get into how you're traveling because for $200 mil,
it's really hard to justify a G650.
So you might have to go fractional private jet ownership.
Talk to Preston.
But there are some good options there.
You've heard us talk about net jets before.
Sort of a touchy subject for our audience.
But if you've spent this much on cars and guns and houses,
it might just be the right mix for you.
Until you get that second, you know, this is the base hit.
We're looking for the home run that gets the BBJ.
And then, of course, art collection.
You're going to want a curated set
of works you could go andy warhol basquiat you could go older and it's just going to get more
expensive but you could easily put up 50 million dollars just decorating your homes so each home
yeah so he's going to really have to stretch and and try to budget i'm assuming a lot of debt comes
in here to really multiply it. A lot of leverage. Maybe
you're actually in control of maybe a billion dollars of assets, kind of a five to one debt
to equity ratio. Yeah, one thing that's priceless too is having an enemy, you know? Yep. If an A
has had enemies, they've basically been forced to listen to the soundtrack of his success for the last few years yep but picking
new bigger enemies yep um you know he could pick somebody like um caruso rick caruso he could he
could try to come in and start competing and outbidding rick caruso i mean the other side of
this is that he's working for atlassian you could go and say you know what dhh you got the aston
martin valkyrie i'm gonna beat you on the track you run base camp it's directly competitive it is i'm gonna crush you on the track i'm gonna get
three valkyries wow actually i'm gonna engine swap a couple of them lower them you know modify
them you know that shot of the dhh has of his like crazy yeah make it even better that's right in the
in the fire oh really yeah really? Oh, no way.
I like to joke around, but that is rough
if that's true. But yeah, I
think DHH,
he puts a lot of time in on the track. He has some
amazing records
and I'm sure he's going to break all of them
with his new Valkyrie.
You know, get your own
Valkyrie. Break his records. Show him
who's boss and then go back to atlassian
and say we're taking we're coming for every single base camp customer and i will be ceo of this
company yeah once i destroy base camp yeah base camp has said they'd never sell but if you take
if you take 100 of their customers they will go out of business yeah and dhh will be forced to
sell his valkyrie to you yeah but. But you'll already have three. Yeah.
I don't think you can have too many Valkyries, though.
No.
You want to corner the market, really.
Because you take them, you race them so fast, you're crashing a bunch of them.
But every time you crash one, it lowers the amount, so it raises the market price.
So there's an efficient point where crashing the Valkyrie, drunk driving, or off-roading it,
taking it on the Dakar, taking it on the Gumball 3000.
This can actually be positive for your net worth.
Yeah.
And that's great.
The other option would be to pick a low status nemesis.
Just I'm sure this post went mega viral.
I'm sure there's some haters, some quote tweeters.
Pick one of them at random.
Go one by one.
Revenge is a dish best served call.
Ripping apart their careers and their...
Oh, you're starting a little lifestyle business?
Wouldn't it be a shame if I raised $500 million
and destroyed you?
I'm competing in your category.
Exactly.
You got a blank check.
Yeah, we didn't have it on here,
but raising a mango seed round
is usually a good way to cheer you up.
I agree.
And he could definitely get that
done in in a day you know in a few hours or we would back we would start a growth fund start a
hedge fund uh i mean the growth fund it depends on who you want to talk to but you know the seed
fund you're talking to a lot of founders some of them are going to be like very low quality just
by nature some of them are going to be amazing and you get in early and that's cool but like
if you really just want to hang out with really interesting entrepreneurs
who are already de-risked, like growth fund, raise a big growth fund and just rip checks into
blue chip companies. And you'll be on the phone with all the best people and hang out with them.
And it's fine if you make one investment a year so you can study physics and then rip checks.
Totally. Totally. It's great.
Anyways, Vinay, proud of you. Proud of you for talking about your feelings.
Good luck on 20 minute VC.
Let us know if you want to join the show.
Call in.
Call in.
We'll come hang in Hawaii.
Yeah.
And we'll go shopping with you.
We'll take you shopping.
Take you shopping.
Bring your checkbook.
Bring your wire instructions.
Because the check is just going to be too be too many zeros to fit in the box.
To fit in the check, yeah.
Bring one of those big checks, actually.
Bring a huge check.
Bring your little, your YubiKey or whatever, so you can just rip stable coins.
We're going to Mercedes.
We're getting you an AMG One.
We're going to Aston Martin.
We're getting you a Valkyrie.
We're going to Bugatti.
We're getting you a Tourbillon.
We're going to Mercedes.
We're getting you an SL300.
Goal win.
We're going to Ferrari. We're getting to F80. We're going to Bugatti. We're getting you a Tourbillon. We're going to Mercedes. We're getting a SL300. Goal win. We're going to Ferrari. We're getting the F80. We're going to McLaren.
We're getting the W1. We're going to Geneva and we're buying the Patek store. Yes. Making them an offer they cannot refuse. Yes. I mean, we talked about, who's the hedge fund guy that
bought a watch company? I love that. He owns the watch. Oh, it's the guy who's always getting
angry. Perfect. Your urban life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why can we not remember his name?
Pershing Square.
Is this fun?
I don't know.
Bill Ackman.
Bill Ackman.
That was going to be hard.
It's hard.
This is not an AI generated show, folks.
We got to sometimes be blank.
Sometimes we get mogged by the English language and other times we just blank on someone that
we see every single day on the timeline.
Yeah.
OK, so we got some Q&As.
Let's go to questions from the fans, from the brothers, from the brotherhood.
Ben Kohler, our vice president, posted some behind the scenes footage of you dancing and
me playing Tetris.
And Chris on the mod retro.
What kind of shoes are on Jordy's feet?
And is this a real word?
Is this the word for what you were wearing?
I don't know.
Category of shoe?
Chris has been deeply within the world of high-end equestrianism.
He's very, he's very, he's very, he's grown up in loud, among loud outfits.
And I mean, his profile photo, he's wearing a tux.
So, love him.
So anyways, I'm wearing...
Those are some Bottega Veneta slides.
Picked them up a couple years ago.
They're some of my favorite shoes.
Yeah.
Kind of wear...
Dress them up, dress them down.
You can wear them to the beach.
You can wear them to a nice dinner.
But we...
I actually love the shoes so much
that we are working with my friend Devin to develop our own TB branded version of those exact slides.
Fantastic.
So, Chris, keep an eye out.
If you don't want to spend $1,500 on the Bottega's, you can get these.
We're going to make them a lot more accessible, but accessible you know but still very fairly priced that's great
so if you head to the bottega vena store tell them the technology brother sent you yeah the
bottega store actually made it in the palisades oh that's where i bought them uh it uh yeah
everything around that development burned down except for the bottega. Wow. Well, emergency supplies. Yeah. We got another DM.
It says,
I'm joining a startup
over a billion dollars in market cap.
Should I focus on a narrow set of skills
or try and work across teams and functions?
What do you think, Jordan?
Wow.
You're joining something
that already has a billion dollar market cap valuation.
This, you know, screams corporate athlete to me.
Somebody that needs to get in there and make stuff happen,
work cross-functionally, you know, own some key product areas,
strategies, whatever you need to do.
But I think go in there as an athlete, outwork everybody, train your mind,
get into the office earlier, be flexible, leave later.
If it's a work from home, flexible work policy, never work from home.
Just don't show up on Saturdays.
Yep.
You know, Slack, you're the CEO on Sunday morning at 5.
AM and say, want to get a workout in door, door to the office is locked.
Could you come open it up for me? And if they say, you know, Oh,
you might be able to get somebody from maintenance over there to say,
if you have a second, it'd be great if you could just get down here.
So like establish that level of, you know,
seriousness with your, not only your ceo but you know everyone
else on your team that you um it's free to outwork everybody it costs a little bit of time but it's
free to outwork yeah your peers and uh if you're in an organization like that you're joining there's
hundreds of people already you need to you need, you know, really put yourself on the map. Yeah. When I first got introduced to the term corporate athlete,
it was from a CFO I was working with who was describing some of the finance folks, uh, like
the strategic finance guys that would come in and as corporate athletes in the sense that they
were good at spreadsheets, but that skillset of analysis, management, strategy could be applied basically anywhere in the organization.
You can drop that person in the marketing team, run some analytics, see what's working, cut things.
But also on the product side, really anywhere.
Yeah, it's like a midfielder.
Yeah, and we've seen this.
I mean, we were just talking to Calvin over at Ramp.
I think he was on the engineering team.
Now he's running marketing. That is a transition that I think
people think is like so crazy, but it's actually a good taste. Yep. Good decision-making. Yep.
Deeply analytical. Yep. Very hard ability to drive outcomes and ability to study the experts.
Like if you want to learn marketing, go listen to Andrew Huberman, go look at Rob Mower's feed yeah right there you go um
so yeah I think the the obvious um yeah obvious answer here is sleep on an eight sleep you're a
corporate athlete sleep on an eight sleep get those sleep scores up wear a whoop band if you
know track your stress throughout the day if you're not getting stressed you're not working
hard enough you're not taking on enough throughout the day. If you're not getting stressed, you're not working hard enough. You're not taking on enough responsibility.
Yep.
So make sure you're stressed.
Chug your Ramonte constantly.
And it's free to outwork your peers.
So go get in there and do it.
Yeah.
I got another question.
I didn't get a chance to print it out, but it's essentially here.
I have it here.
I am a, I'm working at a VC firm and I'm considering joining the Trump administration.
I'll be working for one of the billionaires that's heading up one of the organizations. I am working at a VC firm and I'm considering joining the Trump administration.
I'll be working for one of the billionaires that's heading up one of the organizations.
What can I do to stand out as I join the admin and really make a statement on my first day at work? What do you think, Jordy, when you're coming into a new organization? how can you earn the respect of your boss and how can you set the tone for what might be a
short stint since these political jobs usually it's for your stint at most so going into the
admin in this going to the admin yeah so what i would do for a big shot in a different role how
do you how do you stand out so day one when you are watching a sporting event, who do you notice in the crowd?
Guys with the chest painted with the American flag.
Chest and face painted.
Face painting is key.
Chest requires you to go shirtless.
Not every office environment is that conducive to being shirtless.
But the thing that you can obviously do in this situation is paint the American flag over your face and add stars to it. So like, don't just settle at 50 stars
because that just shows you're not very ambitious.
And you're not tapped into the discourse.
So take the picture that you posted.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're not tapped into the discourse
if you're not putting 54 stars, right?
Yeah.
So moon, Greenland.
Panama Canal, Canada.
Panama.
Yeah.
I actually spent a bunch of time in Panama surfing over the years
and great place. We could add them. Show that ambition. 54 stars plus at least. Full face paint. Hair dyed. Mohawk. of your face to get the flag to fully stretch around your face right and then leave the hair
you know dress that up make make make yourself look like a stallion and and then just do that
every day so it's going to cost you you're going to have to find you know bring in a hollywood
makeup artist bring them out to dc and um you know pay them whatever it takes right you're
and doge they've got these sort of rotating um appointments too where you're
only there for three months so if the makeup artist costs five hundred dollars a day only
there for three months very worth it you're going to be a little bit in the red but you can probably
day trade your way into back into the greens that's good so my advice was uh gift your boss
a gun on day one ar-15 that's wrapped with the american flag because listen
there's a lot of then yeah do you want to make a statement yeah because there's a lot of you know
we're still in the post-pandemic work from home era even if everyone's in the office you know
a lot of what the government's doing is communicating with organizations that aren't in dc
corporations and other arms the government and so you're going to need a nice zoom background
you put an ar-15 on the background just immediately lets everyone know you're 2a
yeah and a good thing is you know even in the government they do work from home quite a bit
so if you know you're going to be on zoom calls go get a starlink post up at the local range
and when you're not talking on the call be drilling the target 100 yards 200 yards 300 yards
mile out and that will just show a level of um you know you're going to relate to your peers better
that that might enjoy guns people don't enjoy guns they're going to say well this guy's could
defend me in a hostile situation so it's a good good way to, to build relationships and establish dominance on zoom.
Yeah.
And so don't,
don't mute either.
Yeah.
You want to,
you want to hear the shots ring out.
There's already so much AI that goes into the voice processing on zoom.
I'm sure it'll handle the loud noises.
But yeah,
you want to make a statement.
You want to come in,
let people know what you're all about.
Get the cadence up.
Well,
speaking of America and international relations, TikTok says it plans to shut down
the site unless the Supreme Court strikes down the law forcing it to sell. So TikTok will not sell.
And AG Hamilton 29 says the fact that China slash the CCP via ByteDance would rather choose to close the platform than give up control of it in exchange for a substantial payday kind of tells you everything you need to know about what they see is the real value of it.
Fascinating.
Yeah, Simon said in poker they call that a tell.
Simon's been right a lot lately.
He has.
Gotta give him credit for that um yeah i i used to be
the owner of bandtalk.com yeah uh sold it for about what i put into it i thought it wasn't
getting banned yeah now somebody's gonna make an absolute killing i talked about this you could
make kind of a vampire app where you clone yeah and sort of recreate the social graph for people and just say, hey, come over here, start posting.
But I hope it gets banned.
It's absolutely insane that we wouldn't want China directly controlling one of the top three largest media companies.
And TikTok is objectively one of the biggest media companies
even though it's a social media platform yeah uh so it's absolutely insane yeah the comp is would
you be okay with the ussr controlling nbc during the cold war yeah no yeah obviously not spent uh
unfortunately i've spent time in china and they do not allow our social media platforms over there
yeah so so there's just a little bit of reciprocity there.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's just keep it even.
It's also just extremely redundant at this point
because every feature has been copied by YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
And so there's a lot of people that are like,
but what about the small businesses that are built on TikTok?
The attention will just shift.
The attention will shift.
They'll be okay.
If you were building your small business on the CCP's platform and not thinking about going elsewhere.
Have you seen those recent deep dives on TikTok shop?
How people are just straight up selling drugs via the TikTok shop.
It's like there's just no moderation.
China has no interest in, you know, there's probably like the number one fentanyl dealer is probably TikTok.
Yeah, it's wild.
Anyway, let's move on to Anne Lee Skates.
She says the consumer founders secret AI master plan.
Give us some context on Anne.
Anne's great.
She was at Andreessen, helped lead our round and now has her own fund.
Cool.
Very, very sharp on all things consumer.
Uh,
she was a part of the group that did whatnot.
She's raised a new round at 5 billion.
So,
um,
yeah,
absolute dog of a company.
Yeah.
No need for tech talk shop.
They're probably gonna be way up after the tech talk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's interesting actually.
Yeah.
I'm going to go scoop up some secondary right now.
Um,
as we know, 2025 is the year of agents.
Much has been said about relationships with AI agents as the new moat,
but the big platforms of tomorrow will be what I call trusted recommenders.
And Signal, she's quote tweeting Signal, says,
the next generation of companies will be full stack,
vertically integrated from content creation to software delivery.
This is the ultimate play for customer loyalty, and retention it aligns something yeah so ann is saying um i just
pulled it up because it's actually a thread doesn't seem like we got it um ai changes the strategic
modes revenue and profit generation of internet companies intimate ai meets human relationships
via trusted ai agents will emerge across many consumer verticals and apps.
I just would say like this is the obviously the most exciting time to be a consumer investor in a really long time because many of the biggest outcomes in venture are consumer.
Like Coinbase, Chime, things like that.
And so, you know, perplexity valued at almost $10 billion.
They're very agentic in many ways, like the browser company.
A lot of their new stuff is more focused on that.
And so her theory here is that AI agents will become effectively like recommenders.
So like recommending actions, recommending products and purchasing decisions, you know, helping you develop habits.
You could have styling apps. We saw this launch last week. There's going to be everything from
agent agentic relationships for consumer fintech. That's like recommending you the right mortgages.
Right. So you're not going and just Googling. You're like in an app being like, hey, I want
to get a mortgage. Everybody was talking about building something that was look at everything in your credit card statement and help you understand which credit cards you should be using for what.
Should you switch to a different credit card?
That type of stuff.
All of that makes a ton of sense.
Yeah, so.
Yeah, and Gary Tan in the comments tagged Happenstance, which is I believe it's yeah, it's a YC company that's basically helping you find connections within your
network and get intros and stuff like that.
So I would say this is probably the most exciting time to be a consumer
investor.
It shouldn't even call yourself a consumer AI investor just because every AI is
going to impact everything. So shout out to Ann. Thank you for the thread.
They make these shows possible.
That's great.
Let's do a promoted post.
Promoted post from Cy Sack.
Cy says, looking for someone who knows the ins and outs of CAD and PLM
while also really enjoys teaching, training,
and enabling other engineers.
The job will help up-level and accelerate the 1,000-plus hardware while also really enjoys teaching, training, and enabling other engineers.
The job will help up-level and accelerate the 1,000-plus hardware engineers here at Anduril Tech.
Roll in the thread.
So Sai is over at Anduril,
and this looks like a really cool opportunity
for somebody who likes teaching other people
and upskilling their peers.
So go send a note to Sai over at Andral and check it out.
That's great.
Let's do a bucket poll.
We got Antonio Garcia Martinez who says,
Trust fund kid in SF LARPing as a VC is such a type.
And Jonathan says, LP equals loving parent.
Loving parent.
I love that.
There are. I do think it's, I do, you know, we are pro nepotism, but we're generally pro
helping people.
So if you have children, family, friends that you want to help, help them, and then also
help a bunch of random strangers.
And I think that's the great part about tech is there's, you know know to use a random example somebody like vene right
yeah he if he has a family member who is uh you know wanting starting a new startup them up with
a fund set him up with a you know you know invest in their company yeah but he's also going to help
somebody who he doesn't know right and that's the beauty of tech um so if you uh want to get
into venture investing and you have some loving parents make them your lps also i mean
a million times better than larping as a philanthropist non-profit person just also way
cooler i mean we could do a whole episode of like how we want to you know how we want to approach
finance with like our kids sure but i do think it's cooler to uh you know invest in your child's
fund like if i invest if my daughter wants to go into venture,
say, cool, here's a $10 million fund and you're going to get management fees, but that's a lot
cooler than just giving them a trust fund that they have to, you know. Also, I mean, like you
got to build a track record at some point. The first investments are probably going to be rough.
They're going to figure all this stuff out and, uh, better to figure out on your parents dollar incinerate your family's capital hopefully
not that bad i mean with if you're in sf a lot of ways to return the return the fund if you get
lucky or in the right group all it takes is one all it takes is one many many solo gps quit right before a hundred bagger yep exactly uh let's go to near cyan friend of the
show uh she says i've never met a self-made billionaire who hasn't drank diet coke i love
this great post and we gotta do a whole deep dive on diet coke maybe do like diet coke episodes
where it's every new thousand listeners we should be drinking diet coke yeah yeah so yeah yeah mix it in so i realized why diet coke is so powerful and why it uniquely
helps billionaires more than just the average person that just goes and gets the diet coke from
you know mcdonald's yeah here's why so diet coke has about i believe 30 to 50 milligrams of caffeine
yeah and so it's a very low dose. It's
not like a Celsius. It's not going to take you to the moon for two hours and then you're going to
crash. But if you're a billionaire, you will have someone bringing you Diet Coke constantly
throughout the day. And you will have a fridge with Diet Coke all the time. And when you get in
your chauffeured car, there will be a Diet Coke waiting for you that's cold. There will be Coke
on board. Whereas if you're just living a normal life, you might be a Diet Coke waiting for you that's cold. There will be Coke on board.
Whereas if you're just living a normal life, you might have a few Cokes throughout the day.
The billionaire's Diet Coke habit, the billionaire's Coke habit is constant stimulation right at that 30 milligram level. Yeah. And it's so good because think about it. So 300 milligrams
of caffeine right at once for a lot of people doesn't feel that great yeah you're jittery 300 spread throughout 10 hours feels fantastic exactly
exactly so it's basically the extended release version of caffeine yeah and so there's been a
little bit of a horse race in the energy drink category to get more and more higher doses of
caffeine yeah but maybe the secret to true outperformance,
that's why I like the Yerba Mate,
because it's 100.
And so you can drink a couple of those.
Could we get a couple?
Yeah, let's get a couple more caffeine beverages on the set.
We're thirsty.
I'm genuinely thirsty.
I need some more caffeine.
I can feel myself dropping.
I wish I had five Diet Cokes in front of me.
But I do think that there is something specifically powerful about...
I was at the shotgun of Diet Coke.
That's probably terrible with the carbonation.
The carbonation is absolutely brutal.
Oh, wow, two is...
Thank you.
Thank you, Ben.
And so...
Oh, so good.
And so there is something very specific about the continuous nature of consuming
diet coke that you see elon and other billionaires do yeah and that's and that's actually everybody
can learn harder to do it's not just a cost thing because you can go to costco and get a whole flat
of diet coke it's like you have to rearrange your entire lifestyle to have cold diet coke available
to you all day long but if you do that you will have the perfect level of caffeinated blood in the brain the whole day.
So I love that.
One more thing on Near.
Oh, okay.
So Near says,
we are very excited to release our LLM wrapper hopefully this month.
I think it will be the most novel and interesting interaction
normal people have had with LLMs so far by a favor of 10.
Remember when the iPhone was new and there were all those
app guys and they just made an app and somehow pulled in millions of dollars with no effort
well guess what the days are back and all it takes is a good rapper that's so sick claude and i call
it the art of the rap that's so sick near has a new app coming out. Go follow. If there's a wait list, get on it.
We want to support Nier.
Yeah, Nier's awesome.
You know they also had the NVIDIA fund that was just a 10-year duration fund that just by NVIDIA.
Okay.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
It's up.
Yeah, 300%.
Crushing it.
Amazing.
But you can't sell for 10 years.
Okay.
You just have to hold it.
That's great it so very cool
but uh looking forward to this um here's a big claude enthusiast so i'm excited to see
uh what the app is oh this is a controversial one we don't normally talk politics but riva's a
friend so we gotta do it uh riva not. I don't think this is politics.
Okay.
This is facts.
Facts.
Okay.
Here's some facts.
And it's centered around policy.
Here's some facts for you.
Which impacts business owners,
capital allocators.
Yeah.
And a lot of tech is in California.
Yeah.
You do not hate California's government enough.
California has the highest poverty rate
at 13.2% of any state,
despite being the fourth largest economy in the world.
This poverty, despite the state having an annual budget of $297 billion, the most significant state budget in the United States.
That poverty, despite the highest spending on public welfare programs in the United States, just under $100 billion annually. All of its failures, despite a progressive income tax system
of up to 13.3% and a state sales tax rate of 7.25%, both the highest rates in the nation.
Despite all those taxes, California ranks 48th for road conditions with 44% of roads rated in
poor condition. Despite all those taxes, California education ranks below average in
national assessments for math and reading proficiency. Despite all those taxes, California's
violent crime rate has risen by 16% since 2019, while most of the nation has seen rates declining.
Despite all that money, upgrades to state grid infrastructure have been slow to scale
and have not hit stated annual targets. California's failures are endless, far beyond the
fires. Do your own research and stop voting for this lunacy. Very sad. So growing up in the Bay
Area and then living in LA as an adult, you don't even have to know those facts specifically to have experienced them
like if you think of the wealth creation and the prosperity in many ways of the last
two decades and the current state of things on the ground when you just drive around la
like i joke that the g-wagon is so popular in la because the roads are so bad yeah that you need
you want a four wheel drive with
like good clearance because you're driving around and it's just constant and it's just, and it's
just pure society, you know, government rot and incompetence, right? It's not a budgetary issue
for any of these things. Um, the, uh, LA spends a billion dollars. The city of LA spends a billion.
It's not even the County. The city of LA spends a billion. It's not even the county.
The city of LA spends a billion dollars a year on the homelessness issue.
And the irony of the budget last year was that $500 million of it didn't even get spent.
They were trying to spend because they just failed to actually put it to work.
So we had the budget.
The homelessness issue is still obviously terrible.
And they just couldn't even put the money to work. So we had the budget. The homelessness issue is still obviously terrible and they just couldn't even put the money to work. Yeah. If you're a VC, your LPs would be like,
sorry, dude, you clearly can't get into any deals. Like you're done. I always think about the,
like the government stuff. I mean, people always say, you know, like, do we need more budget or
less budget? Um, and it always sounds like, Oh yeah, if we just had more money
to solve this problem, it'd be better. And I think about it like the metaphor is imagine like one of
those giant trash cans and you're trying to throw, you know, a crumpled up ball of paper into the
trash can. And, and it's like, yeah, if, if my tax dollar goes in the big bucket, it's in the pool,
but I really need to get it into a solo cup inside
the trash can in order to actually have an impact that's a good way to kind of put this in you know
a way that the brothers will be able to understand and so crushed up yeah yeah yeah and so it's like
you you know you throw your you throw your dollar in the big trash can there's a chance that it can
go in the solo cup and
actually solve the problem and actually repair a road but 90 of the time it's just going to get
stolen yeah and just get burnt or spent on something ridiculous and you see that with the
with the california high speed rail and the fire stuff and just everything it's just like they're
not actually outcome driven unfortunately yeah i saw a whole thread as well that was basically arguing that our inability to
put out these fires in densely populated areas is just a symptom of societal collapse and people
have this idea of collapse as being these sort of apocalyptic scenarios but just the nature of
having fires rip through highly residential areas and have the fire hydrants not work is a there was another
video of a of a helicopter just like dropping a bunch of uh fire retardant or water on just like
on a person yeah it's like you know that's just like a fair mistake yeah um but it's uh but yeah
this this goes back to the to the peter article that we wrote of like let's stop rehashing you
know the past and doing land acknowledgments for stuff that happened we wrote of like let's stop rehashing you know the past and doing
land acknowledgments for stuff that happened 200 years ago and let's focus on you know the next
100 years yeah and how do we make the whole world better for everyone yeah i do have a a bit of like
a insensitive hot take about the fires but it's more of like a thought experiment um so i've always thought that uh one underrated reason to support the second amendment is not like
if you talk to the second amendment people to be like you need the guns to hunt i should be able
to hunt then they say home defense and then the last thing they say is like it's a backstop against
a tyrannical government so if the feds come you can defend your territory if it's truly a tyrannical
government but i've always thought that maybe like there's a better argument around like if america is invaded it would be a complete blood
bath because we'd have the best militias and the insurgency would be insane like yeah just just
taking you know imagine imagine the battle of dallas like if if like russia or china like lands
in texas and is like're going to try and take over
Texas. It's like, they're gonna have to deal with the military of course. But then every single
house that they go to is like filled to the gills with guns. Right. Yeah. And so my, my thought
experiment was like, should like, obviously everyone evacuated and that was what the government
recommended when the fire started. And that's what was rational rational and that's what we did um so i'm not
saying that people shouldn't have evacuated but just in terms of actual firefighting strategy
is there a world where everyone stays or at least all the able-bodied men stay and just turn on all
the hoses at their houses and just hose down every little ember that goes. That's what my neighborhood does. We have our own like.
Everyone, it's like firefight your own house
as long as you possibly can.
Then the firefighters show up and they do what they can
and fight the brush interface.
But everyone's responsible for like staying
as long as possible and get the women and children out
with the priceless valuables and the pictures and stuff.
But the able-bodied men stay and hose everything down. And if they have a fire extinguisher, get the women and children out with the priceless valuables and the pictures and stuff.
But the able-bodied men stay and hose everything down.
And if they have a fire extinguisher, you just try and put it on an ember when it comes down.
There's a tree.
You just do your best.
And if everyone's there just firefighting, would that actually work?
Or is that just a complete fool's errand?
Am I an idiot?
I don't know.
No, I think it's high risk in that there would be a higher loss of human life.
Totally.
Because someone's going to get a tree fall on them or something. Yeah, it gonna yeah it would generally work i mean so but that's like a cultural thing like like we don't think about a society like we think like evacuate you know which is good because like the houses can
be rebuilt and the death toll was fortunately very low it feels like a 9-11 event but yeah
there was so low somebody was telling us in a group chat earlier that a friend of theirs
stayed at their house in sunset
mesa which is like between the palisades and malibu and just fought and fought and fought in
every single house burned around but they saved theirs wow which is almost like what's even the
point like you want to live in the rubble of your neighborhood for three years it's like very toxic
too oh totally yeah and um yeah my neighborhood has a volunteer fire brigade and
they're they train you know like kind of frequently there's a group of i would like to get that going
in my neighborhood just like a little bit of a plan a what can we yeah i walk through with my
neighbor being like he's like this is where the hoses are if i'm not here yeah everyone in the
neighborhood here's how you clear brush in your own backyard then here's how you fireproof your house a little bit more my neighborhood
uses goats to clear brush above in the land above our neighborhood i was saying we bring in
like literally like 500 goats which is super cool for the kids because they get to see like
yeah 500 goats just milling about eating grass i I know there's going to be a ton of regulations about, oh, we can't get rid of the
brush because it's natural and it's hurting the brush species or whatever. And I'm like,
I just want to turn goats loose. We need, yeah, we need to, we need to airdrop millions of airdrop
millions of goats into the Santa Monica monica mountains yeah and i want
to be i would prefer that and the hearing stories of oh a goat shoot through that at my f40 tire
you know yeah i want the fattest mountain lions just just just obese mountain lions from eating
all the goats but they just can't they just get their fill and they just keep eating because
there's just so many goats eating the brush and just turn them loose and just stop,
stop asking for permission.
Just do it.
Release the goats.
Let's go on to this next one.
This is more positive.
We can move on from the depressing California wildfires.
And we go to Nicole Wiscoff who says the at tech bros pod will be one of
the top three podcasts in tech by the end of the year.
Let's go.
Thank you, Nicole.
And I commented to Nicole because I said roughly 5% of our show is just covering Nicole's post.
Yeah.
So if she's correct.
She's almost at 100K followers.
If she's correct, it becomes a huge part of her W Ventures platform.
Totally. Right. Where she can just count on a few times a week.
I'm going to get my my posts in front of, you know, the entire tech community printed, printed is a key thing.
That's great. So anyways, love brother Nicole.
What are your top three? I was thinking about a new segment called gun to your head,
where I ask you a tough question and we pull out.
I heard some squirt guns.
And, uh, and it's like right now,
what's the last founders episode you listened to tell me, uh,
I haven't listened to a few in a couple of weeks.
This is going to be mad at me.
Relisten to Dyson.
Oh,
that's good.
But yeah,
so,
so we also,
I would love to be up there with invest like the best founders podcast
technology brothers.
We'll happily take the dream lineup.
Third,
third spot lineup.
Yeah.
But I mean,
there's some stiff competition out there.
Dworkash is on fire.
Obviously that's about it.
All in is in a crisis, but they'll figure it out.
Anyways, private equity.
Love you, Nicole.
Buys the show and turns it around.
Thank you for the support.
We talked about that.
Did you post this?
Mark Andreessen saying, yes, I read it twice.
His ID says his name is climate change.
I just thought it was a good choice.
Oh, because he's an arsonist?
This is the arsonist that got arrested at the Kenneth Fire,
which sparked up yesterday around Calabasas.
And basically two hours went from zero to thousands of acres.
And everybody was like, how does this make sense?
It was so far away from the Palisades Fire and upwind.
It didn't make any sense.
Turns out arsonist and um
yeah of course bernie sanders is out there saying like this is all about climate change which is
at this point it's i find it uh you know we don't talk about politics on this podcast but i find it
deeply offensive that bernie in vermont wants to to post and say that that this is all about
climate change yeah when it clearly is there's a bunch of policy and political failures
and just a lack of,
Newsom cares more about looking good in a crisis
than preventing the crisis in the first place.
She should go to Greenland.
It's going to be beachfront property.
It's going to be the new Miami
after climate change wreaks havoc.
Miami, we're going to have this whole- Get a mountain in Greenland, mountain in Alaska, water world havoc. Miami. We're going to have this whole.
Get a mountain in Greenland, mountain in Alaska,
water world happens.
Yeah.
We're chilling.
Yeah, we won't.
Greenland will really have been taken once the mega VCs
are setting up offices there.
Yeah.
We got to go to Greenland.
It seems cool.
Let's stay on Greenland.
Go to Bojan.
He says, Greenland is easy.
Time to play on the hard mode.
And posts a screenshot of the world, and it's just Egypt. Now he's highlighting the Middle East.
It's the entire Middle East, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai.
Turkey, I think, is in here.
Yeah, that would be controversial.
I'm surprised this has not gotten some more blowback because...
Did we not already basically attempt that for 20 years?
We did, in fact, attempt that for 20 years unsuccessfully.
Didn't go super well.
Although, wasn't Kushner talking about more of a realignment
between Israel and Saudi Arabia and some of the other countries? We don't talk about politics. super well although uh wasn't kushner talking about more of a realignment between israel and
saudi arabia and some of the other countries i mean we don't talk about politics there's a number
of things that are happening yeah effort of the prior the last admin anyways so it's happening
well let's go to crypto uh literally says i predicted the thor chain collapse in 2023 when
they launched their lending feature,
and it's happening now. The lesson people never seem to learn is any system in crypto that can
fail will fail. When you borrowed on Thor chain, they would sell your BTC collateral for their own
token, RUNE. If you repaid your loan, they would need to sell RUNE for BTC to give you back your
collateral. But this leads to a death spiral opportunity as decrease in RUNE price leads to people wanting to get their BTC back from ThorChain, which leads to more rune being
sold, which leads to a decrease in rune price, and so on. This is exactly what's happening. People
thought ThorChain was a self-custodial secure protocol, whereas it was the exact opposite. In
fact, the founder today tried to shut down the app. There's only one secure option to borrow against your BTC, Lava XYZ.
It's simple and there's no Ponzi-nomics involved.
All we've done is embed the logic for a standard over-secured loan into a smart contract so
you can borrow without bridging or taking on external risks.
Unfortunately, this will be a multi-billion dollar failure comparable to what we saw in
2022.
This was predictable too.
It's basically what happened with Terra Luna happening again.
Kudos to SunnyA97 for jamming with me about this in early 2024.
Rough for anyone in Rune or Thor chain.
I've heard about this chain.
I've never bought it or really dug in, but people are into it.
Yeah, Rune, Thor chain.
Is Rune involved with that?
No, no, no.
It's not R-O-O-N.
It's R-U-N-E.
Very funny, though.
He's moonlighting.
There was some Anon account that was promoting this chain for a long time,
and people really seemed to like that guy.
And so I think it got a decent amount of pump and excitement and investment,
but it seems like it's collapsing pump like our
back workout this morning yeah that was a good one um spamming spamming delts spamming delts
uh let's go to a promoted post let's see what we got here i gotta jump in we haven't talked
about dupont registry enough this episode uh this thing isn't is looks pretty fantastic it's a one
of one custom 1994 porsche 911 oh we're in dangerous territory tj is gonna destroy us
the tj is gonna be pissed about this one but it's just this thing yeah it's a rest no no uh but the
speedster is just so such a such a beautiful concept. And I think Restomods are great for non-car guys
that want to LARP as car guys.
They're like, look at my Restomod.
I'm very much a purist.
I'm not a Brabus guy.
The closest I'll get to an aftermarket is AMG, right?
Which used to be an aftermarket offshoot.
I thought you were going to West Coast Customs.
Yeah, but that's for the minivan.
Yeah, and the engine swap on your F40.
That's for the V12 F40.
Engine swapping my F40 engine into my minivan.
The V12 F40 is grail.
But yeah, this thing, I love the Speedster.
I think it's an underrated car.
And this thing's priced at only 589 thousand
dollars giving it away practically giving it away i mean you could buy a house in in like
someplace like dallas or you could buy this yep you can't drive a house you can't go on the tb500
in a house yeah you can do it in this evo max uh11 spider so uh enjoy thank you to dupont registry uh for uh you
know even sharing this in the first place bucket pull time we got one samuel says they should
rebuild la to look like tokyo remove what remains of the brush chop down these fire-prone forests
and deck the place out in skyscrapers with an
actual working public transit system. It's a joke post, but it's super true, super, super true.
A big part of what's driving these crazy fires is what's called living at the wilderness interface.
So this is where I live. I literally live up against a mountain that if it catches fire,
I'm fucked. But it's amazing because you can just go out your backyard
and go hiking and there's wild animals and you see deer and bears
and possums and cougars and all sorts of cool stuff. And it's like
living in the forest. It's a contrast of like it's very relaxing. It's very relaxing. It's amazing.
I can go out of my backyard, walk up the hill and go straight on to a
trail. But a little bit of the problem, I think, is that we wind up building out not because people necessarily want to live near the wilderness interface.
We do.
Yeah.
But that's a love of bears.
Yeah, for sure.
Which we're working on domesticating.
But it's more that the housing is expensive.
There's nowhere else to build.
And so you just build up until the mountains. But it's more that the housing is expensive. There's nowhere else to build.
And so you just build up until the mountains. And then you're building like gridded out dense houses all out of wood that just go up in one after another.
And that's exactly what's happened.
Whereas if you alleviate the housing pressure by building taller buildings in the core downtown and surrounding area, well, then you don't need to be as dense once you get up into the
mountains and that leads to less fire risk i just don't know i i think that you could put up 40 new
skyscrapers in la and they would still be in 40 i'm talking 4 000 40 000 like i'm talking about
like you you walk around new y, every building is 50 stories tall.
That's like the average building.
You just look up.
And even in, and even in a place like San Francisco.
I know, but even in a place like New York, they're still using every extra square inch of the entire place.
I just think that would still, we'd still have the same issue.
We just have new skyscrapers.
I'm not opposed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe, maybe, but.
Like I would still want to live where I live.
True. Even if there was, you know. True.
But I would like, I really, really do hope that this leads to a relaxing of building regulations and more aggressive permitting.
Because, I mean, the permitting office is a beast.
We talked about it, about my nightmare with getting some stuff permitted, but there's just,
it is crazy that we can all agree
that some permitting rules make sense.
That, yeah, you don't necessarily,
if you're in some residential area,
you don't necessarily want a skyscraper
going up next to you.
Yeah, Warren Buffett would be pissed
if he built a literal castle wall around his entire.
He might respect it, who knows?
Depends on until he hears that engine roar, roar the v12 you know jesco then he's like okay that's w16 i hear the
bugatti firing up the tourbillon's going or you know the shiron's got the w16 yeah the tourbillon
has a v16 that's an insane engine and so you he hears the tourbillon he's going to be like respect yeah
the castle wall i will i will i will deal with the castle wall but um uh it is crazy that that
you know we can all agree that there should be rules around what you can build the problem is
is that there's this crazy paper-based you know analog workflow to actually getting things approved
where you have to send in
a, basically a PDF of your plan. It has to get printed out, reviewed by a human. It takes a
really long time. Like there should be a plugin literally in CAD where as you're designing,
it just tells you you're in violation of this code. And then, and then you can just design it,
design and design it. And once the thing goes green and everything is approved and you're not violating any code, you have no code violations,
you just hit print and just go do it.
And it's just like, okay, it's automatically approved.
But this is a symptom of the bloat.
This is why deregulation makes sense.
It's because you get so many laws that build up and build up and build up
that it becomes illegal to do anything.
Exactly.
And so if the laws hold over the next few years,
I mean, the Palisades is going to be empty for a decade.
It's just going to take forever to rebuild anything.
But hopefully this is the opportunity
to get a new mayor in, new team, doge it,
kick a bunch of people out,
and completely change the rules.
That would be great.
Anyway, should we do this uh power bottom dad post
ahaha update from oregon 1000 year empire and he's uh posting a screenshot a massive new lithium
discovery on the border between oregon and nevada could supercharge the country's white gold rush
uh it is estimated that the newly discovered reserves
under the ancient McDermott Caldera
holds a whopping 40 million metric tons of lithium.
The scale of the deposit is extraordinary,
dwarfing other reserves worldwide.
Just last year, lithium producers were thrilled
to find a reserve of 4 million metric tons of lithium
in the Smackover Formation,
a geologic formation that spans the
the uh the width of arkansas uh next to the mcdermott caldera that that now seems a paltry
sum china alone refines 60 of the world's lithium not for long so yeah he's saying
1000 year empire with a lot of american flags i guess we just found a ton of lithium i didn't
hear the story i completely missed this there's this graphic of you know oh we're using this
natural resource yeah we're running out of it and then america just finds like you know
10 lifetimes worth of yeah yeah yeah it just like continues yeah yeah uh happened with with oil yeah
and uh it's beautiful we're blessed it always was funny how people refuse to admit that there is a resource
bottleneck around solar panels.
Like,
like eventually you're going to dig up all the raw materials or solar panels
too.
And you will run out,
but I think it's just like way more than oil.
So it makes sense.
This is what Peter,
Peter's I hand will often,
uh,
start listening to him.
And you're,
you're like,
this guy's goaded.
Yeah.
It's very nice to listen to.
He can talk about any subject
and then he starts talking about
stuff that you know about and then you're like, wait,
this guy's just spewing.
That's the gel man amnesia we're talking about.
But
his
talks and writing on
the US and how blessed
we are from a natural resource standpoint
is timeless so
uh i gotta uh let's do like one more i gotta get on with my uh chiropractor he's over from the east
coast okay visiting let's do tanay he says simple but neat example of a valuable ai feature that
runs on device tinder's ai photo finder leveraging our vast data set spanning hundreds of millions of
tinder profiles and billions of user interactions we train a proprietary new ai model to sift
through your camera roll in seconds and identify the photos most likely to succeed on the app
importantly we designed this system to run entirely on your device so no images leave
your phone unless you choose this allows us to upload the highest standards of privacy and transparency.
That's cool.
That's good.
Hopefully it helps people meet each other,
solve the fertility crisis a little bit.
But Tinder's kind of lost the plot
on like actually getting people together
for the long term, haven't they?
It seems like it's just like a casual dating app.
But I don't know.
Not a great brand at this point.
But I'm sure some people need their spouses on Twitter.
We don't have a lot of visibility into the apps right now.
No idea.
We have a group chat.
Yeah.
And we had one single person in it.
And then they just got in a relationship.
Yeah.
So it's like, how are we going to end?
And they were anti-app.
Yeah.
There is an arc where even if you're the first person to get married in your friend group,
usually it's like, oh, you got some single people like let me swipe for you let me see who
you're talking to like i'll be the judge for you people like a lot of girls do this at like you
know they're girls nights but um but uh you know that is completely gone why don't you why don't
you mansplain girls nights yeah delegated swiping is what you're talking about yeah that's it
delegated swiping i do think somebody messaged me and they were like i think there's an opportunity to
do a delegated swiping app where you never you can't swipe for yourself it's only your friends
can yeah which is kind of cool it'd be kind of a gamified version a little gimmick you might be
able to get your first million users yeah who knows i mean the the gimmicks were powerful in
the dating app realm because there was the the bumumble had a gimmick, which was the only the woman could message first.
Then Hinge had a gimmick, which was you had it had to be like a second degree connection on Facebook.
So you had like a mutual friend. Then the latter. Remember, was it the league was like you had to verify that you made over 100K.
And then there was Raya, which was like you had to be a celebrity, over 100k and then there was raya which was like you had to be a celebrity basically which is such a funny number which is really funny
it is yeah it is a funny number because because the the girls that are really trying to find
somebody that's like legitimately wealthy yeah like would be so disappointed to get on there
and swipe and then they meet the love of their life and they're like wait you're on the league
but you make like eight grand a month.
Wait, why is this a dentist
in Ohio on here?
A dentist?
A HVAC consultant.
There's so much inflation.
Like 100K is like everyone.
Anyway, promoted post.
We're going to end the show after this.
Okay. Sean Frank, promoted post. We're going to end the show after this. Okay.
Sean Frank, dear friend.
Sean's house was at risk of a fire.
Still reaching out to me, checking in on me.
Great dude.
But he is doing a public service here,
which he says he's giving away the blueprint for 2025,
which he says, my tips for a better life in 2025.
Buy a effing Ridge wallet i'm serious man you have seen our ads for a decade at this point what you don't think you deserve a nice
premium treat you don't like carbon fiber or sick titanium wallets that can expand to fit 1 to 12
cards i think you do i love you and believe in. Make this year your year by giving me $95 to $195.
You can even use code Sean at Ridge.com for a slight discount.
There we go.
And the thing that we love about Ridge more than anything, even more than Sean and more than the design of their products, is just their profitability.
I mean, this company prints prints cash which is fitting for a
wallet company and their dedication to performance ads when you're carrying a wallet it says something
performance marketer of the last decade yeah and these two guys are selling more wallets than
pretty much anyone else on earth so yeah anyways a lot of a lot of buying a specific consumer
item is about aligning yourself with a brand and the team behind that brand.
You don't want to support a company that's underperforming financially.
Yeah, if you see someone in a Model 3 in LA, you know that they bought that car because they support Elon.
They believe everything he believes and they're politically aligned with Elon.
And you can go up to them and say, you know, thank you.
Not everyone. Some of them have a bumper sticker that that say like, I don't like the big man. Yeah. But some of them are doing that sarcastically.
So you should still go up to them and say, I know why you bought this car. You're a big Elon fan.
I get it. Yeah. They love that. I'll see you in the tunnel. Yeah. Tell them that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. They love that. And, but, but it's the same thing with Ridge. You pull out a Ridge
wallet. Everyone knows you take performance ads seriously so go buy a
ridge wallet tell them the technology brother sent you by juggling dm sean use his code but dm him
and say we sent you and i will say i will not stop juggling until everyone listening to this
subscribes subscribes and gives us five stars let's do it and gets their entire group chats
to give us five stars it's great thanks for watching thank you