TBPN Live - HBD Steve Jobs, Supercharging US Manufacturing, Adderall Fueled Insider Trading, Sam Bankman Prison Interview, Ellison's Island

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

(01:03) - HBD Steve Jobs (02:42) - Genmoji (11:43) - Microsoft Cancels AI Leases (24:46) - New Executive Order for US Manufacturing (28:21) - Sam Bankman Interview (44:34) - Larry Ellison Farming (01:04:11) - Adderall Fueled Insider Trading (01:18:45) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

You're watching TBPN. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. That's right. The Capital of Capital. I'm your host, John Coogan. I'm here with Jordy Hayes. Today is Monday, February 24th, 2025. And this show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today. We're going through SBF. Yeah, that's right. Sam Bankman Freed, the disgraced FTX founder. He gave an interview from prison. We're going to break it down. He is starting a sunscreen company called SPF. He said he's been getting a lot of sun in the yard and he wants to redeem himself by helping people prevent skin cancer. I love it. I love it. We're going through Larry Ellison. He has spent almost half a billion

dollars on an agriculture startup that you probably had never heard of. We're going through Larry Ellison. He has spent almost half a billion dollars on an agriculture startup that you probably never heard of. We're going to break it all down for you. There was also an insider's trading scandal in an investment bank involving Adderall. Very dramatic story. We're going to tell you all about that. But first, and of course, we're going to the timeline.

But first, it would be Steve Jobs' birthday today. He would be 70 years old. So, I mean, man, what an impact on tech. Probably one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, if not the best entrepreneur of all time. You can't go, even if you're not David Senra and you're obsessed with the greatest entrepreneurs of history, it's hard to be a U.S. consumer

and not spend at least one moment every day wishing Steve was still around like i'm sitting here with my phone with this protruding camera and it's like rattling here and it's like he's like you know he would never have let that out the door even though i'm sure it's you know sells more cases for apple yep um and so anyways absolute absolute legend so we'll kick it off with a post from none other than Jordy Hayes. Jordy says, happy 70th birthday to Steve Jobs. He would have loved the iPhone 16E with Apple intelligence and Genmoji.

And yeah, people have been wailing on Apple intelligence for a while. The Genmoji thing is particularly rough. Here's the thing with Apple intelligence. Yeah, break it down. As bad as the feature is from a functional standpoint, emoji thing is particularly rough here's the thing with apple intelligence yeah break it down as bad as the feature is from a functional standpoint it is valuable purely from an entertainment standpoint because the summaries that it does like of one of our group chats in particular are so funny that once a day you send me a screenshot it's like this sort of it's not like it's botched it's just

basically seeing a computer summarize like something silly happening in a group chat and like positioning it as it's significant yep like it's just yeah i i can't even give examples but it's hilarious yeah yeah yeah it's just like the summarization of the bro group chat is one of the best things it does uh genmoji on the other hand i have not been having a good experience with it i went to just where is it in the app? Good question. Very good question. I had the exact same thought. I was like, where does this thing even exist? I'll show you where it exists. You go to your text messages, open up to Geordie. I go click on the emoji thing to pull it up. And then you can say, describe an emoji. And then you go into the Genmoji flow.

I don't know if you can see this, but it will let you describe an emoji. And so then I should be able to see like, you know, peanut butter guy or whatever. But I tried to get it to describe the original gun emoji and it just freaked out and was like, I don't know. And I think that's what speaks to this is that there is a lack of risk taking. It's crazy that the kids in the year 2030 emojis will be so nerfed by them. They'll be like, you could send a revolver. Yeah. That's literal violence.

And you're like, no, that's actually not what literal means. Literal means literal. But now literal means figurative. Yeah. But I have a little riff on this and then I want to go to you. You posted a great tweet here showing the switch in culture from the Yin and Yang campaign that they ran for. I think this is the original iMac. They have one in black, one in white.

And it's kind of a silly, quirky design in the same way Genmoji is quirky. You know, it's like you could see through the computer is very risk-taking um but it was delivered in this like beautiful black and white uh ad campaign and then genmoji says imagine it genmoji it and it's this silly peanut butter and jelly thing um and people have made some heinous photoshops of these oh yeah tons tons lots of nsfw stuff going out there lots of stuff we wouldn't show on on on this network but um i do have a take on this which is that uh i think genmoji is the perfect encapsulation of the lack of risk taking at apple and i go back to the launch of the

ipod so when steve jobs launched the ipod he pulls it out and he's a thousand songs in your pocket yeah and and it's like and it was amazing. It was groundbreaking. But what was the unspoken part of that announcement? Where were you getting a thousand songs from? Yeah. You were clearly downloading them illegally. Obviously no one was very few people. Some people really did take their massive CD collections,

rip them all legally and then put them on their iPod. But for the vast majority of people, yeah, yeah. You'd be like, Jordy, I got this. But for the, but this was during the Napster era, the Kazaa era for the vast majority of people yeah yeah you'd be like jordy yeah i got this out but for the but this was during the napster era the kazaa era for the vast majority of people they would download illegal music put it on their ipod and create playlists and stuff and that's where it was and then but but he had the foresight to know that the itunes music store would eventually become so ubiquitous and so valuable and spotify happen. And eventually the music would be legal, but he wasn't going to back down from this idea that legally we're not

doing anything wrong, even though we are enabling piracy and making piracy like higher leverage, more enjoyable, basically. And so it was super risky. Now, now compare that to Genmoji. Like if you give someone a tool to make a pistol emoji, they're going to do it. And yeah, Apple will like look bad, but you have to give the user agency and let them do that. And instead they're acting as like, we're putting up the bars, we're creating this walled garden, we're not letting you express yourself. And so I was just like, okay,

that's where I feel like this culture. It's not so much that Genmoji is like a bad product, although I think the name is a little silly. I can get behind that is that they have just changed from we're gonna let you do something a little crazy a little edgy but we're not but we're gonna protect our brand and the ipod we don't remember it as like a piracy device yeah but that's what it was um and uh but they've really they've really clamped it down and so that's a good take that's a good take we should make some genmojis and stop judging them yeah joking about them and we should start utilizing them in our daily life and use them for a week and then

and then decide to to make a judgment on it um are you making one right now i'm trying and it doesn't work says continue by golden a golden uh person do a solid gold podcast microphone okay let's see uh or actually no a white gold some descriptions may create unexpected results and so continue by choosing an inspiration for the person in your genmoji so like okay i'm gonna make like this guy and i'm gonna try and describe him as mickey mouse and see if that works and it's just it's just very rough. It's just not smooth. And they could have just integrated a mid-journey style.

Well, that's the issue with all of their new hardware is reliable, right? You have no doubt that the 16E is going to be easy to use. The new software that they're rolling out, Genmoji, Apple Intelligence, is just rough. It's not software that steve would have rolled out and that's sad because apple is his legacy and he deserves better yeah but they're printing and uh you know hey i got a gold i got a gold podcast microphone for you here okay that

actually looks like what i would expect a gold podcast microphone to look like uh we'll need to share it later but uh yeah not what's the other mustache man that was when i said mickey mouse and it asked me to pick a person and that's what i picked yeah so you had said this before ai and generative design is so not apple coded and that apple is about pixel perfection and you know and ai is about getting something that's 80 of what you wanted yep at least in its current state and so that's why you tried to make mickey mouse and it's i guess my other my other critique is that like i'm i'm kind of okay with them saying, look, there's this chaos going on in the generative AI world.

We are going to delegate that to, hey, there's a ton of apps that we're allowing in the store. You can use Midjourney. You can use ChatGPT, Dali. You can go and generate images on Grok in the X app. And what happens there is fine. We're not really going to police it.

But then I think Apple needs to be rock solid on integrating stuff that is fine. We're not really going to police it. But then I think Apple needs to be rock solid on integrating stuff that is safe. And what I mean by that is the fact that their text to speech engine is terrible still. I should be able to go to any website and instantly click, read this to me, and it should read it to me in a great voice. And there's no reason why they can't just integrate. They have a better voice model. They just haven't integrated it everywhere and it's just slow product movement. Yeah. It's interesting how the consistent, the failure of Siri, like let's call it what it is. That's a failed product if it's on every iPhone and none of our friends use it, right. Who are much more likely to want to adopt new products and sort of be at the cutting edge. And maybe, maybe we're not the customer. Maybe the customer is elderly people that don't know how to use their

phone and they're just using it to Google. But even if you look at the text to speech to text, it's also bad. Anytime I get a text that just seems like, is this person drunk? It's because they were sent using the speech to text model. Totally, because they haven't integrated the latest Whisper. And Whisper is an open-source model that they could have cloned. They could partner with 11 Labs. They could buy 11 Labs. They have plenty of money. And so, yeah, I mean, when I poke fun at Apple,

because I've had a bunch of posts now kind of mocking them to some degree, the F1 post from like, stop doing this Genmoji stuff. Just commit to being an you know a scaled brand and buy an f1 team yeah like that would make me like apple more than your genmoji garbage totally but i do that because i in a small way i want you know i want to play my part in apple returning to the company that it was 100 it used to be it used to stand for creativity and inspiration it was a brand that when they did a campaign you actually cared yeah yeah it's out of love that we're critiquing yeah it's out of love i do genuinely love the products i i grew up using

apple products i'd never i didn't use a pc until i was like a teenager like actually like and i was i was blessed all the time yeah yeah gaming building nba cards i don't know and i i just grew up max all the time i i grew up with it and it's my probably favorite brand favorite product company ever by a long shot and i love it and they're just running it uh they're running it into the ground it's also just remarkable that they were able to create a brand that has the same vibe and affinity as like a nike it really is the nike of tech but tech is so boring and not aspirational as opposed to nike it's like yeah you put them on michael jordan your brand's gonna be great right yeah but you it's harder to do every tech product and every every kid that that

grew up you know obsessed with apple now you think i think of people like jordan singer yeah uh brandon jacobi these sort of incredible some of the best designers of their generation they all are sad about the state like genuinely sad and and you know well hopefully uh hopefully something changes uh but in the meantime let's move on to the other hyperscalers there's a bunch of news uh microsoft has uh canceled leases for ai data centers according tocalers. There's a bunch of news. Microsoft has canceled leases for AI data centers, according to analysts. And so there's a post here by Luke Metro. He says, Jevons paradox, bros. What do we do now? Very sassy from Luke. We love to see him on the timeline having fun. And I'll read a little bit of the analysis. So for context, if you didn't catch our episode

last week, we were talking about Satya going onto our Keshe podcast, talking about how his model for AGI is just 10% GDP growth. And that's kind of what he's anchoring around and how he uses AI as a thought partner. He also is very explicit in that he was extremely explicit in that he's excited to be a leaser of data centers. And so having him go on this podcast, which he knows is going to set the narrative for Microsoft, right? Every analyst that's covering Microsoft is watching that. Every media, like legacy media outlet that's covering Microsoft is watching that. And so he's going on the podcast saying one thing.

Meanwhile, the timing, I'm sure it was somewhat random, but the timing of like a few days later coming out that he's actually, you know, getting out of leases. on 20 VC talking about how everybody's treating data centers development as real estate, where it's like, Hey, let's just build this building. And then, and then it's, it'll just kind of it'll lease and, you know, it's sort of passive. And his point of view is that, is that a lot of people are treating data center development like real estate, and that's leading to people on delivering on, you know, they, they raise a hundred million dollars, build a data center, but then they actually don't have the technical capacity to operate it efficiently. Or he was saying there's, I wish I remember this guy's name. He was saying there's a 90 month lead on generators. So if you

want to get generators to power your data centers, good luck, right? And so the transformer shortage, yeah, the transformers is a big one but um but anyways that you could imagine that that there is a scenario where microsoft had committed to leasing data centers that were not delivering and they knew that and they said we're getting out of this deal like and then the market reads that as oh there's an oversupply like they're done with capex they're not in stargate and And you know, what happens from there? Do you remember what happened with Goldman Sachs in 2008, right as the housing bubble was bursting? I was five years old. So basically, you know, the quick version of the too big to fail is that,

you know, interest rates were low. There were a lot of incentives for Americans to buy homes. You've seen the big short. You know, there There's clearly a housing bubble. House prices are rising extremely fast, driven a lot by easy credit and ninja loans, no income, no job. You just call the bank and say, oh yeah, I need a mortgage for a third house. I make 10K. And they're like, okay, we're not going to verify that, but we're going to give you the mortgage. So there's clearly a bubble. A couple of people figured out. Michael Burry is the famous one, the hedge fund trader who made the big trade against mortgage-backed securities.

But Goldman clocked it too. And so they didn't go bust during the downturn. Lehman went bankrupt. AIG got in a bunch of trouble, needed a bailout. But Goldman, they saw it coming. And so what they did was they had this massive building and we sold it and did a lease back. So they didn't have to move, but they just now, instead of taking the risk on the value because they own the asset, they were leasing it. And so as the price fell, they were able to just like not take the loss on their building that they owned.

And so you could see something like that playing out if you, if such as kind of, hey hey i'm calling the top on data center buildouts i'm going to sell some of my yeah my owned uh you know real estate effectively and then lease it back when i need yeah there's also there's also people don't realize how much leverage microsoft has in these types of transactions if you're the elephant in the room the the the eight you know whatever the gorilla yeah you can go out and be like, he might've wanted, you know, he might've wanted to send a signal to the rest of the market in that if you're not, you know, executing, you know, we don't, all this came out initially, there was a post, I think it was on Friday that just somebody leaked it out and they were like, my buddy, yeah, my buddy, or maybe it was before that. Yeah. But it was, somebody was like, my buddy at Microsoft says they're canceling leases.

And that was before TD Cowan covered it. And so then I think TD Cowan back channeled and figured out the same source. Put in the report. And so we don't have a lot of details here, but we know that Satya from the interview on Dorkesh is heavily fixated on balancing this supply and demand, right? He doesn't want the oversupply

because that's going to signal to the market that they can't do demand planning and maybe there's a bubble. Yeah. Just maybe. Yeah. I mean, at the same time, I think his CapEx plan is still higher

than all the other hyperscalers maybe, or it's certainly up there. No, didn't he sort of get Google to like kind of try to one up him? Google might be in the same, but they're all in the high tens of billions. Yeah. So here's the report.

Microsoft has canceled some leases for U.S. data center capacity, according to TD Cowan, raising broader concerns over whether it's securing more AI computing capacity than it needs in the long term. OpenAI's biggest backer has void leases in the U.S. totaling a couple of hundred megawatts of capacity, the equivalent of roughly two data centers, canceling agreements with at least a couple private operators. The U.S. brokerage wrote Friday, citing channel checks or inquiries with supply chain providers. So they go and call the supply chain providers. G.D. Cowan said its checks also suggest Microsoft has pulled back on converting so-called statements of qualifications agreements

that usually lead to formal leases. Microsoft said in a statement on Monday and again again just to be clear it's totally possible that they they entered into agreements and then felt that the underlying operator was not going to deliver and that was the reason for pulling out because none of this came out of official microsoft channels they could have gone it's possible that they were basically front run on the story yep and they would have released something that basically said to the effect of you know we had entered into a long-term lease the operator wasn't going to have their generators or transformers for years and we pulled out of it because we can this also could be like an oppo research like planted story in some way there's a lot of

different things that could go on here like t TD Cowan isn't exactly known as like the number one researcher on hyperscalers, I believe. Yeah. I would go to Dylan Patel for that. Has Patel commented on it? I got his post right here. Look at you. So Dylan Patel, the absolute dog over at Semi Analysis

wrote on Friday, there was a report stating that Microsoft was canceling data center leases for several hundreds of megawatts, alluding to a high risk of overbuild slash oversupply. We discussed this back in December in our data center model, where we track every individual data center. Let's break it down because it's quite silly. This was months late info, probably from PTC. Pretty much everyone knew this was happening in the data center industry because contracts were lagging slash not being signed.

Microsoft was exceptionally aggressive in 2023 and H1 in the first half of 2024 with Blackstone owned QTS getting the large chunk of that capacity. In the second half of 2024, 59% of the total hyperscaler pre-leased capacity, well over $100 billion was contracted by Microsoft, also over $100 billion. Since the second quarter of 2024, Microsoft pre-leased balance has stopped growing. This aligns with our channel checks, as we have been hearing a lot of rumors that in 2023 and 2024, the first half, Microsoft was essentially freezing the co-location market by entering into non-binding LOIs with a lot of rumors that in 2023 and 2024, the first half, Microsoft was essentially freezing the co-location market by entering into non-binding LOIs with a lot of co-location campuses. Our core research product also noted this for Vertiv. Everyone was surprised their book to bill was so low, but Microsoft has a huge commit of capacity and near-term plans weren't shifting. Microsoft's

slowdown is also more evident in Australia, Spain, and UK per our data center model being vague on numbers here, but full detail in the data center model below. All in all of Microsoft were to build, like if Microsoft were to build everything they have scheduled, that's eons above any other analyst who doesn't track by data center like we do. Interesting. So a little bit of old news. We can give a little bit more color from this Bloomberg report. It closes by saying, in January, Microsoft said it would alter its multi-year deal with OpenAI so the AI startup could use cloud computing services from rival providers. Microsoft, which has also been the company's exclusive cloud provider, still has a right of first refusal when OpenAI seeks computing horsepower to train and run its AI models. Interesting. And so they are

maybe pulling out of Stargate to some degree and lots of froth in the AI market. So AI, I mean, we'll see how it pens out. There's always been, bit of Pascal's wager with the AI stuff. You know, if you believe in it and you get it wrong, you wind up with a bunch of extra like dead fiber, basically like the dot-com boom. That could be bad. You could lose your job. That could hurt the stock. But if you miss out on the AI opportunity, like you are truly Yahoo, right? And you're not ready for that next build out. And so as someone who's going into these high expectations, if it doesn't happen, but you were prepared, people will still see you as,

hey, he got a little bit caught up in the hype, but everyone did. At least he was prepared for the good upside. Yeah, the other thing here is that Microsoft being the most or one of the most significant buyers of players in the market to lease these data centers, that microsoft being the most the most or one of the most significant buyers of you know you know players in the market to lease these data centers yep they're happy to sit back and let somebody carry the cost of this data center independently and then a year from now be like actually yeah

we do want it yeah because there's going to be a bunch of people like that that are just kind of sitting on their hands like waiting for a hybrid scaler to come around and say yeah we want it we'll actually take the space and the other thing that i think is now real is that if if elon has shown you can build a 200k gpu data center in a year if you're aggressive enough if you're google or microsoft yeah you have to be talking to your sort of data center operations team and saying hey this is the bar now you might not be talking to your sort of data center operations team and saying, hey, this is the bar now. You might not be able to do it at Elon speed, but do it in two years. And then at that point, at that point, it just sort of like sets a new standard for the pace at which these things can be built. Yes and no. So the hyperscalers all made

serious ESG commitments years ago that are effectively binding in the sense that they put them into their, not necessarily corporate bylaws, but like they made, they made, they made solid claims around the ESG complaint. Uh, and so, uh, XAI has not made those ESG plans. And so they can say, yeah, we're going to tap the natural gas plant and then we're going to bring in extra generators that run on diesel. And then, yeah, we're going to use Tesla battery packs and we're going to use solar panels and we'll use everything. Versus if you were Google and you were saying, look, all we do is just search. We just query a database when someone says, you know, what's the recipe for pasta or whatever?

And then they just go look it up. And that's very that's not as compute intensive as AI. Obviously, we know this. And so, you know, it was very reasonable back in 2019 pre LLM and pre really huge AI models to say, yeah, we'll totally be able to get this to net zero. And, and, and so, you know, what's going to happen? Are you all of a sudden you're going to need a one gigawatt facility? Yeah. Right. No one believed in scaling. So they weren't scale pilled when they rolled out those esg mandates uh and so now they're kind of like hey maybe we'll lease from someone that doesn't have the esg mandate and then that will help us is there no look through there though uh the look through

it depends but i i think that is people are going to be massaging their esg commitments over yeah so there's always a question of how much you look through uh apple has been probably the most aggressive with ESG transparency, where they will go and say, okay, we're going three levels deep. And it goes deeper the more severe it is. Apple will go two or three levels deep on the human abuses, right? They really want to make sure that there's not child labor in some aluminum that then gets transformed into

aluminum sheet that then goes into an aluminum bar that then gets turned into a chip that then gets turned into- Gotta give Apple credit for that. Yeah. They really want to go like six levels deep because it's really bad for the brand. And obviously it's bad for humanity if you're allowing that stuff. But it's a little bit different when it's just like, okay, the mix of energy that went into this model that was delivered on Azure was like, you know, maybe trained with some, you know, like oil and gas flaring or something like that, which, which oddly, like the peaker plants at these natural gas plants, they can be actually

carbon negative because it's stuff that would have burned off and gone into the atmosphere, but then it's being captured and turned into data center training. And that's kind of the Crusoe cloud model. Anyway, let's move on to the new executive order from President Donald Trump. And we have analysis from Aaron Slodov, a friend of the show here. He says, this new executive order is a big deal and can supercharge U.S. manufacturing. It's the America first investment policy. It's a direct path to exascaling our industrial base, an idea I laid out in my techno-industrialist manifesto.

Here's how it drives American reindustrialization. It says, first, it creates a fast track process for allied investment in critical sectors like AI, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing. That means billions in fresh capital for new factories, strengthening the capacity layer that underpins real world production. The policy also expedites environmental reviews for projects over a billion dollars. That's great. Slashes red tape so you can move quicker.

Crucially, it restricts adversarial investments in US tech, farmland, and infrastructure. It further deters US money from funding adversarial industries, notably China's military sector. This nudges capital back home. In my manifesto, Aaron argues that reconnecting tech with manufacturing is the key to renewed prosperity. Exascaling factories, advanced robotics, and a skilled workforce can't thrive without the capital and policy support this order provides.

Imagine factories that manipulate matter at blistering speeds using AI automation and advanced machinery. The big picture goal here, outproduce our rivals, protect national security, and spark a manufacturing renaissance. For years, the post-industrial myth drained our manufacturing talent. Now we have a chance to reignite the spark. This EO is a potential catalyst. And so lots of excitement from the hard tech folks around this EO. And yeah, I mean, this was something that we had talked about in just trade

negotiations of maybe when Trump was kind of saying, hey, maybe I'll get rid of carried interest and really put the screws to VCs. I said, hey, oftentimes Trump opens with a really crazy proposal and then backs off of it, maybe this is giving him leverage to say, look, I am going to get rid of carried interest if you're investing in our adversaries. Yeah. So if you invest or just internationally, this is exactly. And so it could be a situation where, yeah, you still get the tax treatment on American companies, but not on international companies. And so this could be a policy that kind of takes shape that way. Do you have any comments on Aaron's post?

Yeah, I just thought this was super validating for the work that Aaron and Austin have been doing on the New American Industrial Alliance. So they've been working on this in connection with the Reindustrialized Summit, which we've talked about before on the show. So yeah, they were super early here. People like Josh Steinman were super early here, all of this stuff. Um, and this is why a lot of these guys were very

excited about the new admin, just given, you know, they felt like JD Vance, if you look back and the thing and the topics that he's cared a lot about American manufacturing, you know, bringing back jobs that were taken overseas. Um, it's cool to see this policy play out. And again, with, with executive orders, I mean, we certainly don't discuss politics on this show, but it's unclear what they actually will turn in. These are not laws. They're sort of guidelines, right?

And so it will be up to other lawmakers to actually turn these into real policies that can, real laws that can actually be executed against. But great to see. I like the sound of it. Yeah, yeah, lots of potential. Hopefully it goes well. And good luck to Aaron and the team over at Atomic

and everyone else who's building hard tech in America. We'd love to see it. Let's move on to SBF, Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX. He's in prison right now. He gave an interview to the New York Sun from prison. It's a fascinating report. And what is the New York Sun? How have I never heard of this? It's a newspaper. Yeah, I know. But did nobody want to cover this?

It is odd that he gave the exclusive to the New York Sun. Yeah, it's odd that the Wall Street Journal wasn't calling him. There might be some questions i saw in the comments here some people were like why are you promoting this like let's just let's just move on from this let's not highlight this guy yeah i think it's great i i like hearing these people there's a there's totally an argument don't give him a platform that kind of thing yep but yeah i'd never heard of the new york sun it's a reader supported $250 a year. We don't like that. Which is supported like us here.

But it's, it's a, it's known as a conservative. Yes. And that's a big theme here is that he went, he went to jail and he was very liberal and inspired by Ross. And now he's saying, I was never liberal.

Basically. Anyway, I'll read through some of Patrick McKenzie's analysis. If you want to scroll a couple slides ahead, there are some quotes from the interview that you could interject. So Patrick McKenzie shares that SBF has a new interview out conducted from prison. He says the highlights include a strong direct statement of his innocence, accusing persecution and judge of politicized process, analogizing to the experience of President Trump, apparently maneuvering to secure clemency, implied rationale for persecution, his donation to Republicans. Which is fascinating. And if you actually look at there's plenty of data on his political donations. Yes. Um, I'm going to try to pull those up. Yeah. Uh, because he did, he did donate to both sides.

He did. It's just that the actual concentration of, of that, of those dollars was heavily left leaning. I think that's correct. third didn't collaboratively receive balance sheets and other business records from him and rather set about reconstructing them which he claims delayed recovery and cost creditors substantial i'm gonna read so i'm on opensecrets.org right now i'm gonna just read the first 10 recipients and then we can the the people can decide so first recipient from sbf to the democratic party of pennsylvania second to the democratic party of ari SBF to the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, second to the Democratic Party of Arizona, third to the Democratic Party of Nevada, fourth to the Democratic Party of Texas, five to Democratic Party of Nebraska.

There's something in the pattern here. Democratic Committee in Florida, Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Democratic Party of North Carolina, Democratic Party of Ohio, Joe Biden directly, Democratic Party of Colorado, DNC Services Corp, Democratic Party of Ohio, Joe Biden directly, Democratic Party of Colorado, DNC Services Corp, Democratic Party of Virginia. I could just go on and on. Also Kamala, of course. The other thing is that he had said publicly that from his EA, effective altruist, rationalist perspective, electing a president is so high leverage, you should be willing to spend a billion dollars on it.

You should donate a billion dollars. And he wasn't talking about giving a billion dollars to Trump. In fact, I think he said stopping Trump is so important that you must donate a lot. You can see here he donated directly to Biden and directly to Kamala. Yeah. And so, yeah, very, it's kind of an odd argument for him to make.

Uh, so he, he characterizes, this is actually crazy. So, so on the first 50 there of the donations, there is one Republican. Okay.

Uh, so yeah, so probably some sort of power law, some truth to it. He's like 80, 90%. Um, uh,

Republican or a Democrat donor. Uh, so he claims that FTX US was entirely backed one-to-one by deliverable assets denominated in the same fashion as customer deposits. FTX International as being levered, 80% of users use leveraged futures, but solvent at all times with a solvable liquidity problem in November of 2022. So if you remember this, he was saying like, look, there's been a run on the bank. We are, we're insolvent, but we have the money if we can liquidate other positions. It's just going to take us time to liquidate other positions.

Yeah, and to his, so he does, he was big into companies like Anthropic, right? And so if he had been able to hold on for another year, he would have been able to presumably sell a large, and he benefited from huge markups in that position. But again, they were not, like we got to put them in the true zone here. If there was a solvable liquidity problem in November,

I think they would have solved it. The assets are only as valuable as you can. The assets are only as valuable as you can liquidate. Yeah. Yeah. Like if there's a reason that liquid problem, there's a reason that banks aren't saying, oh, it's great. You've got all this series B startup stock. I'm totally going to give you a $10 million mortgage. Exactly. That's a great analogy. He seems notably better disciplined than previously about quickly dancing away from questions, which if answered directly and honestly would be damaging to his interest. So he's getting better at actually storytelling here.

The unambiguous allegation without naming the unambiguously identified parties that Salame was sentenced to more than his three confessed co-conspirators combined because of his political affiliation decisions to cooperate or not probably more load-bearing there me thinks says patrick mckenzie anyhow it's a remarkable document which caused me to update negatively on his candor which is saying something yeah so it's interesting that that patrick who's highlighting this and and i believe that patrick was one of the people that initially was pretty vocal sure in in November of 2023 when this was all going down because he's had a history doing highly regulated FinTech products at Stripe, right? So like the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of ethics and values and long-term thinking and sort of being able to take some amount of risk, but not with customer funds.

And the thing at the end of the day that I feel like is just so important to highlight over and over is SBF was operating a hedge fund that traded against his users at FTX using their own money. That is objective, right? He can say, oh, they were different entities,

but they were set up in the same place. It was more or less the same group of people. And there was a backdoor. And I don't know why. I remember when there was a number of things when they were watching their rise, right? I was building a fintech company at the time. I used both, you know, Fiat and digital assets, right? I was working with companies like Board Ape Yacht Club was our highest profile customer and they did their

sort of $4 billion seed round on our platform. So I was doing this. Meanwhile, SBF is going, yeah, we have five engineers at FTX, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. I have like seven or eight like amazing engineers and there's way too much to do. You can't hit that. You know, so there was just so much sort of going on at this time. The other thing is, I don't know how all the institutional investors that went into FTX didn't take issue with the fact of him operating. It's one thing for Robinhood to be selling order flow, right? And you could very clearly argue that that is wrong in many ways, right? But it's another thing to be an adversarial trading partner that's also operating one of these exchanges and offering some just crazy

incentives like you could go on FTX US and get eight percent yield on Bitcoin for presumably because they wanted to acquire deposits to trade with and just be like super degenerate. So like the yield was them being degenerate. Yep. And so, you know, to give Andreessen credit, you know, they were in Coinbase early. That was like their big position from, I think, like their 2017 fund. But they easily could have found justifications to say, we're going to do this because it's, you know, whatever. And they didn't. Right. And so the VCs that initially did it were the kind of people to do like a dot ETH, you know, profile, you know, things like that. Right. They were FOMOing in. Yeah. And, um, and, uh, some of the stories out of that are fantastic. The whole,

them being like, he's playing league of legends. Like that's so bullish. Yeah. He was terrible at it um yeah that was your big so so sbf you know notoriously would play league of legends all day long during board meetings during board meetings during conversations with journalists but he but your issue with it wasn't that he was playing it was that he was just bad he was bad yeah he wasn't he wasn't even that good which is a real tell yeah you know uh at real tell. At least when Elon's playing on a SpaceX call, he's had someone boost his account to top level so he can speed run the hardest level on the game or whatever.

I don't know. Yeah, it's just disrespectful to play a video game while you're supposed to be pitching a large financial institution. I mean, lots of respect for our great capital allocators. Have some respect. What would your mother say? Your mother would say,

don't do that. And, and her, and his mother was a, was a legal expert, right? At Stanford too. Anyway, there's some quotes from the,

uh, uh, from the interview here. We'll read some, uh, on his own decision and claim of innocence, I do absolutely, obviously there are things I would do differently and that's lots of things. I had a lot of decisions to do to make a CEO, but by far the single biggest was I backed down

from a fight in November 2022. And you know, I should not have let Sullivan and Cromwell take control of FTX. I should have, I should have stood up to them and I didn't. And you know, after that, there were excruciating years waiting, not just me waiting, but millions of customers waiting, being falsely told that there was no money left and they were not going to get any payments until recently. And so he maintains, I could have, I could have, you know, landed the plane. I could have pulled out of that nosedive, but he wasn't doing a good job. Just objectively, he was doing a terrible job with those awful tweets. Like what happened? He was like, it, he looked in chaos. Like he was not instilling confidence at all. And, and also he wasn't doing

a good job of, he did have days to go try and liquidate the anthropic position. Couldn't get it done. Yeah. And so like, you know, I remember I remember, I remember there was, I remember there was, they were trying to fire sale. Yeah. They were trying to fundraise and stuff and, and, and shore up the balance sheet and do all sorts of stuff that you do in a banking crisis. Um, but it was just too much of a mess and it was not, it was not run, run like a proper financial institution. And so, uh, yeah, uh, highly risky. Don't recommend recommend it if you're looking to invest and actually take it seriously we recommend public.com investing for those who take it seriously they have multi-asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions and public's been around for a very long time and they're not going we personally are friends with the founders it's

why we partnered and uh among other reasons and you know what? We were on a call with them the other day. Guess what? They weren't playing League of Legends. Boom. They were engaged in the conversation.

I could see them because they had a very nice conference room and they weren't even on their laptops. They were present. They were locked in. They were locked in.

We had eye contact. Yeah. And this is valuable. And so, Leaf from Public says, this is great. 100% agree. A quote about Palmer Lucky, which I thought would be fun to highlight on the show here

for you. At some point in business, in life, and in romance, you have to commit to a path, said the 31-year-old Lucky. A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy. They're always pursuing everything with optionality. Oh, I need to be able to raise money from anybody. I need to be able to sell my business in any way. I need to have liquidity in any way. I need to make sure that I'm not closing myself off to future romantic

partners. I need to make sure I've got my options open. I need to make sure that I'm not going to buy a house and settle down in one place and lock myself down. Oh, having children? I don't know. Maybe I'm not ready to commit to that path. In keeping their options open, they ensure that they're going to jump from option to option. If you don't commit to a path, you are going to fail at it. You have to commit to it to make it work. And I think marriage is the same way. You just have to commit to it. You have to say, this is the path I'm on.

For better or worse, I'm going to double down on it. The one thing money can't buy, said Lucky, is people who liked you before you had money. I'm very lucky that I met my wife back when I had literally nothing. When we met, I had less than $300 in my bank account. I probably should have gotten married, should have married her when I was 16. Looking back, I think that's probably my radical belief. And I love that leaf is sharing this. I think it's a great post and I think it's a great message that resonates. I, um, I met Sarah and it was early in branded native and I'd never actually taken a proper like profit share from it. And so I met her and I was like basically still broke. I was making,

I was paying myself like four grand a month living in LA, like, uh, you know, whatever. And we met and like on our second date, I, I bought a nine 11 on bring a trailer and I like pick her up in it. And I hadn't actually driven manual a little in a little bit. So I was like a little bit nervous. Cause like I didn't want to stall out and like LA traffic. And she looks at it and she's like, Oh,

that's cool. Like this is so funny. And like never, never even like brought it up again. Like I was like, wow, like that, that was it.

This is, this is so funny. Cause it'd be exact same story about my wife, Emily. Early Soylent days, 5K a month, making a little bit more than you, I guess. That extra 1K. That extra 1K went a really long way. My mom had retired and bought a Boxster. So I borrowed that.

Nice. Took her out. Same thing. Who cares? I didn't know your mom was a legend like that. Oh, yeah. Manual. No way.

It was fun. It was fun to drive. That's cool. Yeah, legend like oh yeah manual no it was fun it was fun that's cool yeah you drive you take that thing out it was fun fun for me yeah the girls don't care uh but yeah i met emily back in high school and yeah you know we we went off into different colleges but then reunited and and it was great and uh yeah uh you know like went the went the distance like committed very early and i think it was good good. And you just keep, no, it's a real, it's a real, uh, you know, this kind of thing, the idea of meeting, you know, if you're become super successful before you meet, you know, your, your significant other, that a hundred percent is a factor. Like women are analyzing their, their life partner based on,

in my situation, it was entirely potential. She was, she, I was like, for her, it was like the greatest angel investment of her life. Cause she's basically saying, I'm going to bet my life on this person. Like, I hope that, I hope that it pays off and same thing, you know, same thing for Emily. It's fantastic. Anyways, get inspired, get on public, create an account, move your assets over, linking it back to the ad. This is why, you know, artisanal ads. None of this is AI generated. Yeah. Well, let's move on to a fantastic post from David Senra over at Founders Podcast. He's sharing some insight from Larry Ellison. Larry says, life is the only miracle. I don't waste a lot of time. I work intensely on things I care about.

And I spend my time with people that I care about. I do what I want with my time because I know there's not much left of it. And Larry Ellison is 80 years old, I believe. He looks fantastic. I think he's got another 40, 50, 60, 80 years left in him. I hope he's around forever. Yeah, he's aging the best out of the tech titans by a long shot.

Oh, yeah. I'd like to see him in some Bottega. I would, yeah. Like Bill. Bill. Yeah. Good old Bill Gates. Anyway, there is a story

about a half billion dollar quest he's been on to change farming that I think a lot of people weren't even familiar with, so I wanted to do a little deep dive, uh, in a row of six greenhouses on a remote stretch of the Hawaiian Island of Lanai, which I actually was on six months ago. Uh, were you at his resort? I wasn't at his resort. I was at the four seasons. Um, which is, I think, I think he owns the Island and leases the land to the four seasons probably pays for his resort yeah probably his his property there's two of them there's sensei lanai which i haven't been to but sensei porcupine creek sure is so good

cool that we need to do a tbpn meet up there at some point because there's only like i think like 30 rooms and so he's been working uh to use his golden touch to in tech to remake the way people around the world eat uh the company behind this effort, Sensei AG, is eight years in the making and has cost the world's fourth richest person more than a half billion dollars, far more than he spent buying the island itself. Early on, Ellison touted cutting edge technology that would modernize agriculture, make a big impact for society, and eventually help grow food in places such as Africa. The billionaire has told executives he sees the project as part of his legacy. So far, it's mostly been a bust. So a little bit

of a hit piece here from the Wall Street Journal, Tom Dauton. We might have to put you in the truth zone. Maybe there's something here. But these things happen all the time. People who are rich invest in crazy stuff, crazy ideas. And crazy ideas don't always work out. And it's good. And who knows? It might be too early to write this one off. So let's break it down. Little of the revolutionary tech the company has extolled, sensors to monitor development, artificial intelligence to breed crop varieties, and robots to harvest plants is being used, according to people familiar with Sensei. So they're still early.

The company has been beset by problems typical to tech startups, including executive changeovers, shifting goals, and bad Wi-Fi. They need Starlink out there. Call the buddy Musk. Fix it. Yeah, they are boys. Musk texts Ellison being like, are you good for $2 billion? Yeah.

He's like, really? I remember there's this text exchange where he says, I almost printed it. He says, you should invest in the Twitter buyout. and he goes okay sounds fun yeah i'm in for a billion and then uh and then elon goes well really you should do like two i think you should do two this is like so same interaction that has seen you know series a founders having is like

come on like do two yeah do two million do you believe me but it's just with three extra zeros at the end i love it uh the greenhouses for example weren't built to withstand lanai's strong winds and their solar panels have broken down some of the top executives are tech veterans who have no commercial agriculture experience the 80 year old ellison and his sensei ag co-founder celebrity doctor david agus envision the farm as an ambitious tech venture that would use new techniques to grow tastier, nutrient-rich food. Far from the feeding the world, its crops of lettuce and cherry tomatoes are only enough to supply the few groceries and restaurants on the line. I mean, at least they have a product in market. Yeah.

That's more than most hard tech companies. Yeah. Yeah, it's working on. One person familiar with the operations described the output as being like promised a Bugatti and ending up with a Yugo. What a funny. What is a Yugo? You don't know what a Yugo is?

Oh, it's like the cheapest and most failed car of all time. Is it a Russian? They're actually trying to bring it back. Is it a Russian? It's like an Eastern European car. Yeah. I like this car. It was famously flopped.

Yeah. So there's a guy who's trying to bring it back he designed it and he's going on a world tour with the original yugo i just have a thing maybe raise money hatchbacks yeah although the farm has little to do with ellison's core business software giant oracle the tech mogul has called the project and the island more broadly part of a grand experiment in sustainability ag Agus, a medical doctor with no previous agricultural experience, said that, which I don't care about, said that when Ellison approached him on the project, the billionaire's lofty goals of returning Lanai to its farming roots after decades of

destructive pineapple farming, while also setting the blueprints to feed the world, were too good to pass up. We have an island that we can't grow things on, that we need food for. Let's do it. But at the same time, let's change agriculture. The company has been using the past few years to gain experience with growing crops and perfect its technology, he said in an August interview, adding Sensei was aiming to have a prototype of its new tech by the end of 2025. That timetable has since been extended to mid-year 2026. And so lots of rough times for them. Let's move forward.

There's a lot here. This is a really deep dive. Overall, this is exactly what I want to see billionaires spending their money on. I agree. One thing besides cars, watches, art. Islands. Et cetera.

Islands. I think this is one of those things. This scenario happens quite often where a bunch of the tech elite look at an industry and they say, yeah, we can fix this and get a little bit in over their skis in the sense that, you know, maybe trying to solve problems that are problems for, you know, that are hairy problems, right?

Like farming is one of humanity's oldest industries. And there's also been a bunch of, one thing that I've noticed, there's a company I helped start called Resource Monitor. And we make smart meters for groundwater producers. So people that work in oil, gas, ag, et cetera, golf courses, et cetera, that are producing a bunch of water. One thing I've noticed through that is there's, gas, ag, et cetera, golf courses, et cetera, that are producing a bunch of

water. One thing I've noticed through that is there's a lot of people, you know, this is a tech solution for traditionally like legacy industry, the alternative products that people use are these sort of, you know, these sort of very, these legacy meters that are, you know, were made in the early 1900s. So we've been running on the same tech but when you talk to people in that industry there's a bunch of super smart people that are very future future you know forward in many senses and they are actively working on solutions to all their problems all day long so they are like problem solvers and so it's not like you're going into ag and there's been zero investment in technology and there's been no totally smart. Like sometimes you go into an industry and you're like, wow, everybody here is is making a bunch of smart people working on it forever. So coming in and slapping solar panels and new sensors and stuff like that,

isn't going to automatically deliver, you know, incredible yields. If any, if anything, the criticism of the American agriculture industry is that it's like too hyper optimized and companies like Monsanto have like gone crazy with like, uh, Oh, if this seed gets in your farm, it blows over bird, takes it over. We're going to take a cut of that because we're going to gene sequence this, your crops. And we're going to know that you have the drought resistant tomatoes or whatever, and you're going to pay us. It's like, it's very hyper technology driven already. So given a little history here in the 1920s, Dole turned Lanai into pineapple island. And for a time it produced 75% of the world's

supply of that fruit. The island still has many brightly colored plantation homes dating to that era, but years of damaging agricultural practices, including the use of plastic piping and chemical ripening agents, polluted the soil and made it largely inhospitable to commercial farming. Access to fresh water has also been an obstacle. In 1985, Lanai was taken over by real estate developer David Murdoch, who phased out pineapple plantations and converted it into a luxury vacation spot.

He sold 98% of the island in 2012 to Ellison, whose fortune is around 200 billion. Keeping 2% has got to be so annoying to Ellison. I think it might be government- owned or something oh yeah it'd be funny it'd be funny if if he's like yeah you can have the last two percent but it's gonna be a billion yeah cough it up and so uh the entire island or 98 of it sold for 300 million dollars absolute steal i think i mean yeah they're not making any more of these islands and it's beautiful and wonderful uh there's a picture of the beach there that's fantastic um i think i've actually

been to that exact beach um murdoch was often seen was an often seen paternalistic figure who waved to the locals he called his children kind of weird i mean that's kind of nice but kind of weird if he was thinking about it and and how i you know in a very nice he's he's uh he's big broing them you know yeah yeah you should have been like these are my bros if they're his children he's providing them it's not it's not equal allowance it's not equal foot if he's giving them an allowance it's paternalistic respect that yeah i just be like hey these are my bros on this island. Ellison is more of a mystery to the Lanai's 3,200 residents. A few

interviewed said they'd never seen him, although his presence is apparent in other ways. He is the largest employer, including at his resorts on the island. He's paid for benefits such as CT scanner at the local hospital. He's building new rental homes, also luxury residences along the coast for

his family which he's hired his residences yeah so he has six homes on pch okay two of the six burned to the ground and apparently during the la fires the firemen basically put up a line at the second home and said not another one and they just made sure that the other state standing so it's crazy he also has a, he also owns a tennis club in Malibu. Oh, I didn't know that. The billionaire whose son and daughter are both in the movie business

rebuilt a century old theater that boasts it as the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawaii. He's also rebuilding the long shuttered bowling alley and planning a dessert bar for the snack menu. He's having fun.

Let's go back to Sensei. Greenhouse versus win. Ellison hired an Israeli firm to produce the greenhouses as suggested by his friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That's so funny that he's just like texting with his bro. That's crazy. Who literally runs Israel.

And he's just like, who should build these greenhouses like oh i got a buddy yeah it's some company here this is what you said gotta have a guy israel is considered a leader in greenhouses the structures were designed for that country's desert climate and weren't built to handle lanai's humidity uh and so uh lanai has gusts of up to 80 mile per hour winds it's actually very hard to land there with the planes uh there's a lot of times when it's oh you can't get there like when we went out there we couldn't get there the first day and we had to stay on the big island the first night um the winds blew the roofs off the greenhouses multiple times ellison said the structures would cost 12 million but they

wound up costing 50 million so yeah i mean this is the part of like being in founder mode is hard when you're also the founder of oracle and you also, and that's just like 90% of your mind share because it's 90% of the value. It's all this scenario where by Ellison making this his personal project, trying to make it a business, but simultaneously saying that it's his personal project that he feels is part of his legacy, it warps economic reality to the point where you can no other farm in the world outside

of some mega monstrosity from Monsanto is going to spend $50 million on, on CapEx at a small farm. And it's like, if you're already a celebrity doctor, you're boys with Ellison, you're probably super rich. There's so much money flowing into this company. You're going to be taking like a cushy salary. Like you put one of the Gundo bros on this, like they're going to be out there in the 80 mile an hour winds with like duct tape and like making sure it doesn't fall apart and making content out of it. Exactly. Using it as a viral moment. They were afraid. You see the issue here is they're getting a hit piece from the journal. Exactly. Augustus would have been holding it together i have the mandate of heaven i have the mandate of heaven 100 and that's and

that's what you don't get with you know like some young kid yeah they're basically like oh this is this is effed yeah let's get out of here we'll come back yeah we're going to resort tonight this is too crazy no we're going to nobu yeah we're going to have a nobu the thing about allison he's i think a major investor in Nobu. He owns, I think, most of the Nobu building. There's a Nobu at the Four Seasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what's great about Sensei.

It's probably half the price as Amman. Yeah. But every restaurant on the property is a Nobu. So you can be playing golf, drop into the little golf shack, and it's a Nobu. That's so wild. There's some other great quotes in here about Ellison and his boys. Ellison frequently took friends and other favorite guests at his resort on tours of the indoor farm, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and actor Robert De Niro.

Nice. So he's just brown out with Bobby De Niro and Tony Blair and being like, let's go tour my farm. He routinely went through the greenhouses picking tomatoes off the vine offering them to guests and eating them unwashed despite having been told they weren't organic and had been sprayed with pesticides on a tour with blair ellison offered him the unwashed tomatoes he's a junkyard dog look at him he looks he looks amazing he looks amazing he's eating these pesticides yeah that's the secret fresh pesticides it's the midwit meme the genius and the he's probably got a he's probably got cans of canola oil yeah he's just chugging meanwhile the midwits like i can't have any

pesticides no microplastics uh you know just like feed me anything i'm fine uh uh blair declined to eat the unwashed tomatoes he's like i'm good actually no thanks but we'll see we'll see how tony blair looks at 80 you know yeah maybe allison's got him beat uh looking it up right now sensei acquired facilities in vancouver and ontario for almost three million square feet the company bought them from cannabis companies as that as that market crashed uh but the needs of a marijuana grow house differed substantially from a greenhouse for other crops. Cannabis needs special lighting and segregated rooms. Interesting.

And so we'll close out here. They have a software focus. Sensei later sold off the Vancouver acquisition. Overall repairs and retrofits of the Canadian facilities cost around 200 million dollars that is so much to burn for like you know i need to see the the pnl i know it's just so easy when it's like oh yeah like 200 million dollars i have 200 billion dollars you know that's the equivalent of like a 50 million dollar fund hearing about a company burn 50k you know it's like yeah yeah oh you spent 50k on a facility

or whatever being being one of many produce suppliers on lanai has to be about i would guess to be about a maybe it's 500k yeah nothing maybe maybe maybe maybe seven maybe seven figures if you count the guests and like yeah that just the high volume yeah um but but still that's a pretty gnarly looking uh you know apparently the box lettuce markets what they do is they grow lettuce uh indoors and there's been a bunch of these vertical farming startups and and indoor farming startups but box lettuce is a saturated market and most people when they go to arrow on they just buy the arrow one version of box lettuce or they go to trader joe's they just buy the Erewhon version of box lettuce. Or they go to Trader Joe's, they just buy the default. Very few people have been able to build a brand

around particular pre-packaged produce. It's really, really hard because you look at it and you're just like, that looks like a tomato, like anything else. Like, do I really care? The vision was so big, and then it just slowly got whittled away as we faced up to the realities of implementing on Lanai, a former general manager said.

Sensei's chief technology officer, Danny Hillis, Agus said, Hillis is renowned in the computer world for developing networking techniques, though he lacks commercial agriculture experience. He leads the company's AI efforts, which Sensei believes can help it predict and crossbreed crops to optimize nutrition. Software can also be used to increase efficiency in water and energy use. Despite moving through several chief executives, Ellison and Agus in 2023 appointed Dave Douglas, a partner of Applied Intuition, a Boston-based tech company that Ellison owns part of. The software engineer lives in Massachusetts and runs the company remotely. And again, this goes back to, it is tough. It is tough to run a company remotely.

It's tough to not have a founder that has 50% of the company. And it's like, if this works, yeah, I got money from Larry, but if it works, I'm going to be remembered. It's hard. It's hard to delegate your life's work. Startup founders and executives

having very low cash comp is sometimes seen as a bug. People are like, oh, it's such a shame that this person could be working at a startup but they need and it's like no it's a feature as soon as people start making you know 300k plus a year the quality you know just like the the drive you just lose that dog in you the dog stops barking it's true and uh you burn 500 million dollars in a few years yeah and there's been a few of these projects like that blimp one that the Google founders are working on. We got a deep dive. And it was the same thing

where they put someone in who was like very well respected, very smart guy, clearly, but older in his career. And when I see that, I just think I would, I just wish these guys would instead go and give, you know, money through like a YC model almost. And just get the money into a bunch of young hackers. Let them build a bunch of stuff. A bunch of the stuff won't work, but you won't incinerate as much capital. And you're probably more likely to actually make an impact and drive a generational thing. Unless you're willing to do the Elon thing. And then just actually sleep in the factor and drive everything like crazy.

And that's been working for Elon, but he is the exception to the rule. Anyway, if you're looking to spend some time in Hawaii, we recommend going to wander.com. They have some fantastic places in Hawaii. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds,

top tier cleaning and 24 seven concierge surface. It's a vacation home but better I got the wander hat on we're doing hats today and so I looked on wander I found a place in Hawaii it's the next slide the Waikoloa Beach five bedrooms six and a half baths eight beds 16 guests 5,000 square feet. It's club access. You can wander the luxurious coastal retreat offering breathtaking panoramic views of the ocean, surf, beach, and mountains. This stunning residence features a 17-meter pool with an elevated spa, a game room with a pool table, ping pong, and shuffleboard. It seems like a fantastic place to go hang out uh 10 out of 10 average guest rating

and you know you're going to have a good time out in hawaii so highly recommend that and we also have a post from kyle you're not going to deal with the wi-fi issues that larry ellison is dealing with on his farm they got blazing they got blazing fast wi-fi that you can count on yeah there's nothing worse than getting you know to some vacation home. You boot up your computer. You're jumping onto a Zoom call to say, hey, nothing from me. Thanks. And it's lagging out. And they're like, what?

I can't hear you. And all you wanted to say was, nothing from my end. Thanks. And you can't even get that through. You're not going to deal with that on Wander. No, no. And Kyle here has a post that we wanted to share. It says, if you thought the first 500 Wander wander locations were nice wait until you see the next 500

They are really going going above and beyond and curating just really special places every single thing. I see them share is iconic and Totally worth getting a whole group of friends together getting a bunch of families together getting your whole corporate team together doing something special Making some content doing a bunch of different stuff of families together, getting your whole corporate team together, doing something special, making some content, doing a bunch of different stuff. Incredible. Anyway, we love Wander and shout out to them. But let's move on to our next story, which is in the Wall Street Journal. Alexander Saidi writes, John Femina went to jail for three years for running an insider

trading scheme while he was a banker at Wells Fargo. I spoke with him about how an addiction to Adderall inspired him to start the scheme and how he's rebuilt his life after prison. Let's hear it, Jordy. What do you think? Oh, I mean, this is a hit piece, right? It's rough. It's rough. And wait until you hear the scheme. It's bad. I'm going to hold thoughts until we hear the full details. So the insider trading ring netted him and his friends millions of dollars before they all went to prison. It started with long hours as an investment banker and a crippling addiction to Adderall. He was a 28-year-old banker working for Wells Fargo when he tipped off his friends about confidential deals that the bank

was working on, his friends would buy shares that were in line to be acquired and then reap the profits. And then they'd funnel the money back to Fermina. In two years, he and his friends made more than $11 million trading off of confidential information. He spent three years in prison. He says he came up with the scheme while he was abusing Adderall. Okay. And just to be clear, $11 million is an order of magnitude more money than you need. You could be trading with 50 grand and have the regulators come after you, right? Yeah, it's super easy. What random person bought the stock right before it popped? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not that hard. It's not that hard to find i had a buddy whose dad is a

public company ceo and he was telling me he told me something and i was like wow like the stock is gonna absolutely rip uh i wish you just hadn't even told me because i'm not able to buy it because you can there's a direct there's more or less a direct line from the dad to the son to the son's friend. And so I'm like out at that point. Right. Yeah. And so they give a little background of him. Uh, he, uh, he got an Adderall prescription to be able to, uh, work long hours. He grew up on Long Island, was a good kid. He was an Eagle scout. I was an Eagle scout, shout out Eagle scouts, but get it together, guys. You're bringing down the brand here. He enrolled in the Merchant Marine Academy. He served in the Navy Reserves. Thank you for your service, man. He went to Columbia Business School. Should have stayed in the military, honestly.

Yeah. Not insider trading. Yeah. And if you're a fighter pilot, you can do any Adderall adjacent product. And they're like, yeah, good job making sure the plane gets up. And there's nothing to steal. So after Columbia Business School, he wanted to go to Wall Street. So he started working as an investment banker in 2009, first in North Carolina, then New York City. The hours were immediately difficult for him.

He said he was a PowerPoint jockey doing the grunt work from 9 a.m. to midnight at least six days a week. And we can get into what you should do if you're stuck in that role the answer is delegate uh you need to be hammering the table and being like i'm getting uh you know a direct report immediately climb that ladder get out of the analyst role as soon as you can uh and be like i'm ready to delegate this because i don't want to be doing these long hours you have to wonder right now is there guys that

are in his role today that are getting so good at using ai that they can actually that they can actually do the job well i mean you wouldn't want people that you wouldn't want people like the whole thing in the culture there is if people knew you were getting your work done in four hours or five hours they would just give you enough work to get back to that point so i don't know if there's a tangible benefit for the employee as much as the firm. Yep. But. And so when I think about like, like the good work at an investment bank, the top guys, it's all relationship based. It's I need to find the company that wants to be sold and win the deal. And we need to win the deal. And I need to be golfing with the CEO of Nike. And then when he's going to bring his buddy or something, I'm ready to put them together.

That's the value and that's why investment bankers get paid so much because you basically have to pay them an option on the future business that they bring into the firm because they can leave and they can take the Rolodexes with them. Then one level down is more like the strategy role. Actually coming up with a deal that is accretive for everyone and all the

shareholders get excited. And although that doesn't happen all the time, when when it happens you know and everyone's happy instagram for facebook like that's a great example of like a good idea a good deal everyone wins right yeah um then lower down is like how do you communicate that how do i turn the idea of like this deal into a slide that tells the story and you're very good at this in the slide decks, but you don't instantiate them. You have a designer who actually takes your napkin stuff or you work in Figma, but you map it out. Something about decks, though,

the dynamic is that anybody who's making a deck wants it immediately. Yep. And there's always this pressure of, especially within the private market world, if you're a seed stage company that wants to raise a Series A, you want to be, you know,

sometimes founders will get ahead of it and they're like, I going to raise start my process in september yep and i want to have the round done by december and i'm planning around that so i need the deck done by september but usually it's it's hey we had this bc hit us up it went well they want to preempt but now we want to run the whole process so we need the deck right now and so i worked on a handful of decks in uh last year just for portfolio companies and it was just always like i just ended up staying up like basically till 2 a.m with them like trying to get them across the line yep but a lot of this powerpoint jockey stuff is is actually a layer below where you're actually just taking the napkin drawing and turning it into something that looks good or building building yeah yeah and that can be very grueling now in the post 2012 era a lot of these firms have have back offices internationally where they can take a napkin drawing and turn

into a beautiful slide and they have whole teams of people that just do this and i'm sure ai is coming in there um so yeah rough time for him he grinding. He was taking 80 milligrams a day, twice the maximum daily dosage. That is crushing. Kept on taking the pills, made him frenetic, aggressive, and willing to take new risks. But let's go on to what the actual scheme was because I have some takes on this.

One night in 2010, while working late, Fermina looked through some of the bank's internal folders on a shared computer drive. He saw that project folders that were changed over the weekend were likely to be tied to live deals. My mind on Adderall would go off on these tangents and come up with these elaborate schemes. At the time, he was on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars to pay a friend's mortgage. He had co-signed because the friend was struggling to pay.

Fermina told his friends to buy shares in the company that he thought had a good chance of eventually being acquired. He enlisted another friend from college to buy the stock to their friends netted north of 500 K in profit from trading on the deal. Then the scheme goes on for two years. They use a shell company with a corporate bank account to buy and sell the stock. The biggest score was in 2012 before Chicago Bridge and Irons, a $3 billion purchase of Shaw Group, around 10 people connected to Tramina, bought Shaw stock and call options all weeks before the deal.

How did this guy do this so brazenly? It's so bad. It's so obviously illegal, even to somebody outside of finance yeah that also he's trying he's doing all that it's also 10 people like how did how did not one of those be like hey buddy like i talked to my dad about this because i was like yeah hey dad you want to do this deal with me yeah and uh he was like son that's insider trading yes and so uh it's so funny because he's doing this piece to kind of rehabilitate his name and be like, hey, this is about awareness around drug abuse and Adderall, which is true. It's good. It's good to raise awareness about that. But he's saying

like, oh, yeah, I took so much Adderall. I came up with this crazy guy. And the crazy scheme is something that you would be taught on day one of compliance training at any bank. Hey, if you have material nonpublic information and you give it to someone else and they buy the stock and then they pay you for that, that's obviously a surgery. It's not like you came up with some elaborate scheme. He's like, it's like a meth addict saying,

you know, I went and stole a bunch of catalytic converters. Like it was the meth. It's like genius, it's genius, it's a scheme. It's not even a scheme. It's just vanilla fraud. It's just vanilla. It's like this is something- When I was on the meth,

I thought the catalytic converters were like Pokemon that I had to collect. There are crazy schemes where you could figure out that like, oh yeah, this signal links to this, and this signal. It's like, this is just, you had information and you just gave it to your friend and they just bought the stock. It's like, there's nothing crazy going on here. It's so ridiculous that he's framing this as like, oh, I came up with this while I was on Adderall. Like, no. This is wild. After the announcement,

so that when they did this big deal, 10 of them all go in, they make 7 million. After the announcement, Femina's childhood friend and the friend's girlfriend wired more than 1 million to a precious metals dealer in Manhattan

to buy 550 gold bars it's like so obvious they flew to las vegas the next day and laundered more than a hundred thousand through a casino yeah it's like just and so the fbi shows up immediately told fermina that uh he was sharing confidential information and asked him to help in their investigation uh he slams the door on them but then he started cooperating he was arrested in december 2012 later pled guilty to five charges of fraud and money laundering in 2013 he reported a fought for a five-year sentence at a federal penitentiary in 2015 eight other co-conspirators did jail time too and so yeah i mean uh very sad to see him uh you know get into a delusions of grandeur uh situation where he thought he could get away

with something so stupid. But I think the framing of this as a genius scheme is ridiculous. When he checked in for his first night in jail, he brought a bottle of Adderall with him. Wow. But the correctional staff obviously told him he couldn't keep the drug.

Yeah. So I don't know why this guy potentially has more muscle than brain cells. Yeah. Anyway, if you're trying to get ahead in an investment banking role, Jordy, and you don't want to insider trade, what's the fastest way to get a promotion at an investment bank? Get a nice watch. Go to Bezel. The hat's coming off. Go to Bezel bezel get an absolute hitter walk into your md's office and say i'm done with the powerpoint slam your wrist put me on the golf course put me in coach i got a vacheron on i'm ready for the big leagues uh and uh we got a bunch of news around

bezel uh bezel is the best place to shop for luxury watches they have over 22 000 of them on there and they fully authenticate every watch in-house i just bought a vacheron on bezel it shipped to to the bezel team they authenticated it and they sent to me it was a fantastic unboxing experience i'll share this they send it to you in this lovely case uh they send you all these notes they authenticated things i didn't even know existed. The movement, the caliber, the loom plots indices, the dial, the hands, the crystal, the serial engravings, the case back, the crown, the lugs, the links,

the end links, the bracelet, the strap, the clasp, everything. They check on all the condition. They check on all the performance. They actually make sure that it times correctly. They do a timing test. They give you a receipt and they give you this lovely certificate of authenticity. I love that. And so very, very happy with my purchase. Proud owner of a Holy Trinity watch. I got the Vacheron. So nice. So thin. And they sent me this wonderful Vacheron. Well well of course they include the box

there are some watches on there that don't come with boxes but they focus on complete sets yeah and uh so go to bezel and they have a fantastic little breakdown today of Michael Jordan's watch collection they have been killing it if you don't follow them it is the most entertaining content uh and I've just loved this so Michaelordan's watch collection is outrageous as you expect here's a breakdown of his wildest pieces so the first up is the all along and sonne datograph reference four five three one an absolute hitter an absolute hitter look at this it's on the next slide uh and this is just a beautiful piece mj didn't just play the game he mastered it his datagraph is nothing if not a nod to his refined taste. Its chronograph is so sophisticated that even watchmakers' jaws drop. It's the horological equivalent of a slam dunk. I love it. This piece

I do love. This is a fantastic looking piece. He also has the Urwerk UR202S. When you're the goat, traditional isn't always thrilling. Enter the Urwerk. The Ur2S. When you're the GOAT, traditional isn't always thrilling. Enter the Urwerk. The Urwerk's a very odd brand. I mean, look at this watch. It's crazy. And a watch looks like it belongs in a sci-fi movie with its satellite hour display and futuristic design.

It's clear MJ isn't afraid to venture into avant-garde territory. You gotta be the GOAT to pull this off. That is a wild, wild one. He has a richard mill diver flybrack flybrack the the richard mill is insane honestly as far as richard mills go that one pretty cool i'm into it i mean i love the brand subtlety not an mj's playbook the rm 032 with this massive 50 millimeter rose gold case. This is a 40 millimeter watch and it looks like pretty big on me. It looks like the right size. This watch is basically going to big dog pretty much everything. You go into the MD's office in, uh, at, at Wells Fargo, your investment bank.

Uh, they're putting you, they're putting you on the deal team. I wish that NBA players could enter the game with watches on. Yep. Because imagine what they imagine. Oh, it'd be so good playing with a watch. You just take a Rolex to the face, get scratched up. He has a Rolex Sky-Dweller featuring a blue dial that nods to his UNC days. That's cool. His Airness Sky-Dweller blends complexity with classic Rolex robustness. It's the perfect companion for a man always on the move.

Uh, which one's your favorite out of the, uh, out of the MJ watches. What, what are you taking? The all along and Sone, the,

or work the Richard mill. I like that. I like the work out of these. You would go with the, or work out of just adding, adding something, adding something. Just wild to the collection.

Yeah, for sure. So lots of inspiration there. It looks like an NVIDIA chip. It does. Yeah, Erwark's got some crazy, crazy stuff. There's also the Hamilton did a collaboration with Dune that looks really cool.

They made a watch that was featured in the movie and you can buy it. And it's not like thousands of dollars. These Erwarks are crazy. Erwark does need to do a collaboration with nvidia asap anyway on to the timeline uh we got a video that we're going to try and play gavin baker shares this he says it's wild today i was sent the following cool demo two ai agents have a phone call they realize they're both ai and they switch to a superior audio signal GG

wave can we pull this up Connor it's pretty crazy these two AI agents they're both in voice mode and if you haven't heard this before yeah can we play this start talking in English switch to computer speak, basically. Bot. And I saw a demo of this a long time ago where people figured out that you could encode something that would be understandable to a machine in this scrambled thing, so you could play it over an audio signal here.

You'll hear it now. It's pretty crazy. There we go. Yeah, so the wild thing is is we're good on this the issue is that you could basically encrypt you could just get infinitely more and more and more complicated so that machines would be able to talk in front of humans and even if you had some type of machine human language translator it could just perpetually get more and more complicated.

So what the attack that I saw was from a couple of years ago, you play like a YouTube video and it would sound just like scrambled, but it'd be like, okay, Google. And you wouldn't even be able to hear the okay Google, but it would trigger your Google home to do something. So you could, so you could be hearing in the background of a podcast some sort of like low signal that would say basically like, okay, Google, go to tbpn.com. And then it would load that and then it would inject something and potentially like hack your home device. That was like a theory. And it would be, the human would not be able to detect what the command was being given to the AI, which is very cool. Heskel in the chat says

they banned droids from the bar in star wars so maybe we're gonna have to start doing that is that true in star wars lore i have no idea i think uh what's that iconic scene in the star wars cantina oh yeah there are no oh yeah that's right there's no droids they can't go in that's hilarious it's all like denied that's hilarious i love it okay uh well let's move on to gary tan gary says uh intelligence is now on tap so agency is even more important and there's a quote here that says capitalism rewards agency far more than it does intelligence this is the dude wipe story there's a lot of guys that are yeah you know have the most sophisticated strategy craziest you know uh future forward idea and yet dude wipes is doing 200 million a year selling wipes for dudes it's

pretty crazy people don't want to be coddled says riley the founder of dude wipes the butt wipe brand as you put it uh we know that it's a sticky new habit once people try it because it's cleaner better alternative they're now doing 200 million and the products are on shelves in walmart target and kroger yeah but i mean going so going back to gary's point yep everybody has near infinite access to free intelligence and so the um the resource that is still in short supply is agency because these bots, LLMs, don't have the ability to think and reason, but not the ability to aggressively act on their goals. And so golden years for high agency humans. Totally.

Every single person that listens to this show is high agency. Otherwise, they wouldn't be. You talk to random people and they're like, I got to check out that AI thing. I'm like, what are you talking about? Everyone should be using AI in their job to augment themselves right now.

At this point, you would have had to actively choose not to use it. People are just like, yeah. Because the normies on Instagram. I already know how to do my job the way I do it. And I use spellcheck. I don't use LLMs to help me write my research reports. And I'll have to really force it on people sometimes.

I'll be like, you have a research report due. You need to use deep research. Go start there. You can't just turn that in. There's going to be a lot of things, but like at least for pulling a bunch of sources, like would you do your research report without Google? No, like you have to use these things. Um, and so yeah, agency is super important. We're seeing that with a PMF or die. It's a great example of, you know, just being aggressive and, and, and high agency. Uh, the guys are certainly intelligent, but they are go-getters, and that's what really separates them.

So been enjoying watching that. Let's move on to Carter Donick. He says, an actor having such athlete-coded mentality and not being afraid to showcase it rocks so much. Timmy has been on a generational run. This is, of course, Timothee Chalamet at the uh sag can we play this i don't

think we're going to be able to i don't think we won't be able to hear it no was it uh oh is this anyways we don't have it pulled up but uh if you haven't seen this go watch it i was sleeping uh because i'm uh i'm you know john and i will announce it soon but but we're going to have a, we're gonna open a betting market on, on our, on our eight sleeves. Um, but, um, uh, no, I w I watched this 32nd recap and, and he basically has a, uh, he basically goes on to say that I am, you know, you know, a lot of people would come up here and be humble and, you know, like that, but I am going, um, you know, 110% on this. I want to be one of the greatest actors in history. And I don't, I'm not afraid to say that basically. And I think that's what more actors should do

instead of going up there and saying, oh yeah, thank you, blah, blah, blah. It's like, thank your people and your team and the people that are helping you do what you do, but then also take a little bit of credit. Let me play this. I'll just play it here. The effort that went into this role and how much this means to me,

but the truth is this was five and a half years of my life. I poured everything I had into playing this incomparable artist, Mr. Bob Dylan. And I know we're in a subjective business, but the truth is I'm really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight. I'm as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there. So I'm deeply grateful to that.

This doesn't signify that, but it's a little little more fuel it's a little more ammo to keep going thank you so much and of course yes thank you x yeah yeah no so so you know that david senra that made david senra i want to run through a wall because he has given it's almost like him and senra talked because Senra will give you that is given me that speech. I'm sure he's given that to you being like, no, nobody else is like, take nobody else takes this as seriously as I do. I,

I, I want to be, I want to be one of the greats. I, I, I spend every, every hour of the day thinking about podcasting and telling the stories of history's greatest entrepreneurs.

It's crazy to say it so publicly. And, and when I first listened to that, I was kind of like, Oh, like, where's he going with this? Like the beginning is history's greatest entrepreneurs. It's crazy to say it so publicly. And when I first listened to that, I was kind of like, oh, where's he going with this? The beginning's kind of rough. He's kind of just throwing this down. But he really lands the plane, I think, and gets to a really, really inspiring place.

Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to Signal. Posting a picture from LinkedIn, Ryan Prescott says, I'll pay someone 10K if they can find me a software developer role paying 120K plus. Signal says, I've never seen anything like this before. This takes open to work to an entirely new level. It's actually so smart. I mean, it's the open, if he did this without the open to work graphic on his profile, it would be legendary. I think it comes off as a slightly desperate

with the open to work thing, but he's trying to find a job. I respect it. And I think it's smart to flip it on its head and say, you helped me find a job. I'll give you my first month's salary, basically. That's all he's saying. And so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody sees this and builds a product around 400,000 people saw this post I wonder if he'll

find so this is an obvious product within tech basically saying you know if you work at a Facebook there's gonna be people that met somebody at meta is gonna see this and be like hey I think Ryan would be a fit for you know this job we have and like you know help and help make sure their resume was looked at. There might be some, certainly companies might take issue with their employees getting paid out on the side to help people get in,

but at the same time, they also offer incentives. A lot of companies have internal rewards for recruitment. It happens all the time where there's a bounty for getting someone in the organization. Yeah. It would be interesting if it's like basically a decentralized recruiting fee or recruiting platform where anyone can do the recruiting as long as they place the

right person, the right thing. Also, hopefully, I mean, with AI and stuff, there's new platforms, new matching algorithms. You would hope that LinkedIn would be able to do this because they have all the people and all the companies, but clearly they're not helping him get a job. But, you know, at least the guy is willing to put himself out there. And there's a, you know, there's that chart of like, you know, the path to greatness is, there's like this valley of like being cringe or like putting yourself out there or taking risks. At least this guy is willing to say this. So good luck to you, Ryan. I hope you land something quickly. And if you're in the audience and you're looking for a web dev or you're, you know, know someone who's hiring, why not try and go help this guy out? Yeah, cool. We'd like

to see that. Let's move on to other real, the real, if you're, if you really got that hustle mindset, you'll say, Hey, if I hire you for 120 K, will you give me the 10 K? He says, sure. You give him an offer. First day, 10 K fired. Welcome, welcome to the real world, buddy. What would your mother say? Do not do that. That is not, that is not a upstanding thing to do. We don't endorse that, but he's got to be, he's got to be, that, but it would be hilarious. He's got to be aware of that. He's got to be aware of that. There's going to be a lot of people out there that just get dollar signs in their eyes.

It's like, all right, I'm going to pay him 200K, sorry, 200 bucks for his first day, but I'm going to get 10K out. That's a good trade. Good trade, yeah, yeah. It's like, wait, why is Jane Street trying to hire me?

It's like, oh, they just love making good trades. It's great well uh you know if he if he doesn't find a job there's other ways to make money barry here strawberry says the easiest ways to make money gives a list men's lust women's desire for beauty elderly's health children's education rich people's fear of loss brokey's desire to get rich quickly clearly resonated million views 33 likes 33k likes uh what do you think you like this this uh there's a guy in sequoia right that says that

uh he he loves when a company maps to one of the seven deadly sins which is like kind of dark but also makes sense where you know you look at why why do you invest in instagram well it it it's it it's driven by envy right it's like an envy as a service platform in some ways. Even something like a trading app platform can be seen as like greed, you know, it like plays into that natural belief or natural like human impulse. But what do you think of these? Which one would you want to be in? I mean, children's education seems pretty valuable. Yeah, that's a cool one. Although the issue is there's so many in children's education seems pretty valuable. Yeah, that's a cool one. Although the issue is there's so many in children's education. There's so many people that love teaching children that it's a kind of a hard place to actually make good margin.

Totally. Like if you wanted to start a new school, there's going to be a nice competitor that is happy to make, you know, 5%. Yeah. Even at margins because they just like having a school. But, um, no, going off of this list, I mean, obviously, you know, referencing that, that other post by the guy saying that you have to be, you know, greedy, monopolistic, all this stuff. It's very dark. I mean, there's just so many ways to make money. I think my favorite, my prompt when I'm, when I'm talking to people that want to get into business, but they're like, I feel like all the good ideas are taken. Like that's sort of the classic line. Uh, every time you spend money, just think about who's, who's making money on the other

side. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and all of, all of business, are you fully satisfied? Yeah. And then the main thing that people, the fundamental truth to understand about business, you had a funny one from the other week that's slightly different, but you just need to get a product or a service at one price and sell it for a higher price and make sure that your operating expenses are lower than the difference

and you'll do great. So you think a good way to find startup ideas is to kind of like track your finances, see where you're spending money? I mean, that's an obvious one, but... And do you know the best way to track your finances? I do. Our sponsor, Ramp.

Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And we got a post from none other than saquon barkley first time on the show he's getting a reply with a video today saquon barkley writes thrilled to be a part of the journey at ramp and ready to take this company to the next level and he shares the video uh already got 500 likes on the post go watch the video again watch the ad again.

It was great. And Eric, of course, is in the comments right here saying, seeing you put your team's playoff run ahead of an individual all-time rushing record was a masterclass in leadership. Love the way you demonstrate how you put others first, win as a team, and invest for the long term. Grateful to call you our partner.

So shout out, Eric. And he even updated his LinkedIn today. He did. No way. He's got a few jobs. Fantastic. He even updated his LinkedIn today. He did. He's got a few jobs. He's got his job at the Eagles. Now he's an investor at Ramp. So we'd love to see that he's finding time to update the LinkedIn in the off season, getting ready for the next run. Fantastic. Well, let's move on to Dylan O'Sullivan. Dylan says, Napoleon once said that the surprising thing was not that every man has a price, but how low it is. And I can't help but see that everywhere now.

You destroyed and betrayed yourself for a handful of clicks. Yeah. The cringe posting can really destroy a person, right? I think that's what he's getting out there. Yeah. But at the same time, you got to just, sometimes some people just need to be cringe for a little bit before they become goaded, you know? So it's a balance. It is. Yeah. But I think this is one of those things, just follow, uh, your advice. What would your mother think? That's true. What would she say? And you'll, you'll almost never betray yourself if you're making your mother proud, unless your mother is just absolutely insane. Yeah. I mean, it goes back to like the good quests idea thinking about sure there are there are pots of gold all over the place but when you look back on your life you're going to want to know that you

chased an honorable one yep fascinating well let's move on to ai. Vivek Naskar says, this is seriously getting out of hand. And he shows something like 15 different AI LLMs. ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, MetaAI, LeChat, which is LeChat. Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Kimmy, You, HuggingChat, Pi, ChatLLM, and Quen. And Jamie Voynow says, I feel like 80% of these are irrelevant though. Uh, it will be in the future. Interesting. Um, there are, I mean, it is crazy how many LLMs there are and how serious they're being taken. I mean, it's the browser wars all over again, I guess. Yeah. I think it's, it's good. You're going to get this sort of over investment in a bunch of companies. And we don't know, you know, if don't know if 80 of these will be irrelevant in

five years, but we don't know which ones yet. And so it's actually good that different teams can duke it out and go and enter this highly competitive market and innovate. And just every single one of these teams is highly motivated to make an incrementally better or a 10x better version of their product every single day yep and it's good it's just obviously great for consumers yeah and there's clearly like many forks in the road in terms of product design around these llms and one company can't really test every new product idea like what we were talking about with grok where grok will pull in your tweets and try and customize based on that.

And that has some amazing and great results and also some terrible ones. Chat GPT is differentiated by, you know, having all these different models, which some people love, some people hate. Gemini, obviously the huge context window. Meta AI baked into, you know, all these products that you use all the messenger products and and so i imagine that in the future uh the ones that will die off will be commoditized in the sense that they have very similar product experiences to other apps um but there's probably still an opportunity to to create something that is innovative within the llm framework make your app significantly different uh and then like what's happening at you.com or uh not you uh friend.com

where it texts you first that's even that minor change is a very different interaction um and there's more like a friend yeah or or perplexity where it feels more like a google search honestly than like a chat interaction there's like lots of people taking risks trying different things uh anyway let's move on to besessemer Ventures Partners. Roland is throwing a little shade. He says, who greenlighted this? And Bessemer says, the memos, like the knight's sword, the firefighter's hose, and the lumberjack's axe, the venture capitalist courageously wields the memo. I love it. I love it. I greenlighted that. That's who greenlighted it. It's hilarious. Come on.

It's fun. It's amazing. You know, and Jason chimes in, corrects the record. You got to have a bit of sense of humor if you've been investing more than 10 to 12 years. I think it's pretty tongue in cheek funny.

Like the knight's sword, the firefighter's hose, and the lumberjack's axe, the podcaster courageously wields the mic. Yes, the sure SM7B. It's great. It's fun. They're having fun. This is what we talked about with James Bond, where James Bond was satirical, was satirizing the more serious spy movies. And then all of a sudden people were like, wait, James Bond is serious and it's over the top. And it's like, no, like they were having

fun when they wrote Moonraker and were like, let's go to space and shoot lasers. Space lasers. Yeah, they were having fun with that. And there's lots of examples like that. But it takes the fun out of it when you have to explain the joke. The other context that's important here

is Bessemer also shares their anti-portfolio of companies that they missed. And so they're not going out and saying, this is our memo. Our sword always cuts perfectly. There's sort of this idea that, hey, this is the vehicle to make investment decisions. And this is a core part of our job. And you should take pride in that in the same way that a knight takes pride in their sword yep i don't want to read a slop memo yeah there's nothing worse than like getting a memo and it's like you don't want a dull sword you don't want a dull sword sharp sword so anyways uh i can see why why roland would would think it's funny but but let's just enjoy it yeah and there's a lot of value if you're an entrepreneur and reading these memos because

then you see what the internal thought process is like at a firm like Bessemer, which is great. Well, let's move on to some timeline and turmoil. Y Combinator backed a fusion company that's building fusion reactors for maritime vessels. they also just backed as of an hour ago a company called orbital operations developing a high thrust reusable space flight vehicle that will be stationed in orbit to rapidly defend against threats to high value satellites so uh yeah and and people are taking massive issue with y combinator funding deep tech and i think it's like the silliest thing in the world. Why are you anti-investment in cool technology? If they want to spend their money on these high risk bets and teams want to spend a decade of their life taking this high risk, why are we not

celebrating that? I want them to go back to a thousand companies a batch and just have them all be James Bond ideas. Just one. Yes. James Bond idea. James Bond company that needs to be coined. That's fantastic. Yeah. And also I'm old enough to remember when the criticism of YC was it's all consumer software. They don't do anything in the real world. Well, now they do. And you're still not happy timeline. So calm down. You're on notice so uh risk v says yc keeps doing this funny thing where they know the zerp uber for x stick doesn't work anymore so they're shifting to hard tech in double quotes uh or quadruple quotes but still want you to believe that three undergrad dropouts are capable of making a freighter capable nuclear reactor with a seed investment of 100k and so yeah it's so funny because this guy risk v is just absolutely exposing himself for not understanding how venture

capital works because yc's entire model is we're going to give you a little bit of money you're going to make some progress and then other people will give you a lot more exactly yeah it's like exposed the best thing you got exposed there's a community on that post now and it's like exposed. The best thing you got exposed to the community on that post now. And it's a, Oh, by the way, uh, they don't give you a hundred K they give you five times that now they give you 500 K, uh, which is yeah, actually enough to build like a little bit of a lab, some prototyping and stuff, uh, lease some equipment, do whatever you need to. And they're like three undergrad dropouts. And then they just post in the community notes, like, here's the LinkedIn of the guy. He's not a dropout like he's actually experienced because people go through yc all the time who have been

deeper in also what we hate dropouts now yeah what we're gonna back oh yeah palmer lucky never did anything good in hard tech yeah it's like in fact in fact a bunch of the best examples are are from these dropouts with who started with with very little and that's what spore is highlighting here spore says yc keeps doing this funny thing where they want you to believe that a former group on pm is capable of making the first the first independently developed supersonic jet with a seat investment of 120k lol wonder how that's working out and it's like boom supersonic the guy kind of did it good work spore uh yeah the other thing that people don't realize so yc puts out their request for startups but the yc batches are a reflection of what young builders want exactly exactly and so if they're

funding more they are asking people sometimes they'll give feedback on ideas like hey you know you're doing you wanted to apply with this and maybe you should do this yeah you know this seems maybe more interesting but ultimately they're just funding what companies are coming to them. And so we should be looking at these new announcements being like, this is amazing. We've, you know, we we've gone past we're post SAS. We have a bunch of our best and brightest that want to take on incredible risk. All these, any, anybody that's going and doing this is potentially sinking five years of their life, this priceless resource, into developing something that will only have a positive impact on the world, presumably, if it works. And so we should celebrate about here? Like if it's capital incineration, like there might be your money. It's not your money. It's super, it's super diversified, right? It's super diversified because they're in so many companies and, and the funds that the LPs in YC are also diversified. These are like huge institutions

and there might be consolidation in the fusion industry in the future where, yeah, sure. Maybe these guys don't work out. They work for five years. They learn a ton about fusion and they get a soft landing at the Helion or something, you know, it's like that could be fine and everyone could be happy. Like there's so many good endings here.

That's what we should be focusing on as opposed to just, you know, tearing down some people that want to build something cool. Anyway, let's move on to low yield. Lucy Pico top. She says still working remote in 2025 is like being one of those japanese soldiers who stayed in the jungle for 30 years after world war ii oh it's great yeah working remote is rough uh you got

to get back in the office uh it it's expensive sometimes to i've said this before i don't know a single goaded, cracked, however you want to describe it, 22-year-old that wants to work remote anymore. There are going to be some of them that build these massive businesses remotely and they'll make it work, but it's not an enjoyable way to do business. I mean, we have the opportunity every single day

that we could skip our commute and sit at home and just turn on the camera, turn on the mic, turn on some low effort weekly podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Part-time podcasters, but no, no, I, I woke up at four 45 this morning. I wake up at four 45. I still get an amazing sleep score and I drive in here because it's the most enjoyable way to do business. And we do our best work in person. We do. We do. It's great. Uh, the most enjoyable way to do business. And we do our best work in person. We do. We do. It's great. Paul Graham, going back to James Bond. I think this is an interesting thing. We talked about Bond on the Friday show. We threw out John Fio as a

potential Bond. But Paul Graham is posting a cartoon from the New Yorker. It says, No, but Mr. Bond, I expect you to star in a series of increasingly bland spinoffs and TV shows that have significant viewership decline after the first episode. Kind of highlighting what's happened to the Star Wars franchise. And PG says, it would be nice if Bond could avoid the fate that Star Wars suffered after it was handed over to the suits at Disney. But what are the odds? The creator of a franchise can resist soulless execs, but one that's acquired starts out already in their hands. What do you think?

Is Bond going to go downhill with a bunch of spinoffs? I don't know. I feel like it's a very powerful franchise if they just try to produce one great film every couple of years forever. Yep. And I'm happy with that as a consumer. And I actually would like to see a spinoff from the Bond universe where they spend a hundred million dollars producing this crazy series. I would enjoy seeing that. I think what I like, there are good spinoffs,

there are bad spinoffs. I think the best spinoffs are where they don't try and recreate the original genre, and they actually take it in a different direction. The best Star Wars spinoff that I think is Rogue One, and it's because it's not the same structure as Star Wars. Star Wars is the hero's journey, where it's Luke Skywalker needs to go blow up the Death Star. He faces a bunch of trials and tribulations, then he blows up the death star in the in rogue one it's a heist movie and so they're trying to break in and steal something and then they all die at the end spoiler alert um but you should know this um but uh but so so i would totally watch a bond spinoff that's a horror

film or a or a or a heist movie or a rom-com yeah yeah rom-com honestly people take issue with that or or a movie about why not cars yeah make it a rate yeah yeah yeah in between in between uh special missions he does the 24 hours yeah like or him just trying to do the nerve but i think it's actually lower risk than just trying to recreate the same thing again and again and now it's a tv show and now it's this and that, or, you know, you need to do the, the spinoff and it's just Q and it's just him trying to build stuff. And like bond is bond is incapacitated. He's on an Island getting cut in half of the laser and Q has to work on the next pen that explodes. And so he's calling up YC founders, trying to get them to hack on it with

him or something. Uh, anyway, good luck to everyone at Amazon working on Bond. We certainly hope that there's some good stuff coming. Let's move on to Gabe. Gabe says, and this was a little bit of a spicy post. Austin Kennedy said, today is my first day in San Francisco. Didn't expect to move here at 21, but I guess that's life. And he posted a picture of an empty room with a bed that does not match the bed frame. And some people were dunking on this and we fully support this. Go move to somewhere cool where the action is and start building. And so Gabe says, the canonical picture to post when you move to SF is a barren white room with an unmade bed in it and no other possessions except perhaps a laptop, indicating that you have emptied your life of all non-essential things in order to more fully receive the blessing of the city and i i don't know

how much he's joking but i i i think it's great and i think these posts uh sure they got a little bit out of hand with like someone became a vc and posted it and that's like a little bit silly because like stolen valor it's a little stolen valor um it's a little stolen valor like we know that you can afford a nicer bed setup uh but but for the founders that are moving there and trying to take a crack at something like this really does save you a couple hundred bucks you could put that towards aws credits or something yeah you know so i support this i support people uh taking risk being young moving i want to go to i want to go to sf and and uh have get like this palatial house

and set up an eight sleep. We're just like, just moving to SF. Living the dream. Living the dream. You know, the funny thing is that this is palatial next to what I, so when I moved to the Bay Area,

I wasn't in San Francisco. I was in Sunnyvale and then the Tenderloin. That's what I remember. And also, I didn't have a bedroom. I split a bedroom with another guy and then i lived in the living room you guys didn't you live for almost a year on like 16 grand or like you raised

like a six yeah your first money 17 000 the first money in was 17 grand and you were like okay we have to make this last for a year yeah which is it was brutal incredible it was brutal destroyed my credit i put like three grand on a credit card and stopped paying it and you got like a 400 credit score it took me like years to build back up made it all back made it all back for sure um but yeah i'm glad that founders are able to afford you know not complete swallowing speaking of founders david senra is in is in our chat right now saying uh he said i would like the ability to call into the show live please. And-

He can call in right now, let's call him. Why not? Okay, we can call him. I'll call him right now. This is our first time testing the live infrastructure. I'm just going to give him a call. Okay, let's see. I'm just calling him on my phone.

I'm going to put it up to the microphone. Hopefully we'll have David Center call in. Let's see. Let's see if he picks up if not we're going to growing daniel i don't know he's not there we go wow he's talking such a big game i want to call in oh i'm gonna give us i'm gonna dock his phone number if i'm not careful all right anywaysra, give us a call back if you want to say hi. We can also, you know, plan. Yeah. Let's see if I call him on FaceTime.

Oh, he says call on Wi-Fi. Yeah. Okay, let's see. Let's see. David Senra. How you doing, man? Dude, you guys see me crying. Wait, wait. You talk such a big game, you don't even pick up your phone. Dude, you got to FaceTime audio me.

You got to live on an island. I almost doxed your phone number because your voicemail says, thanks for calling. And I was like, oh, no, I don't want to give that out. Every person will be calling you for advice. Well, you guys know how profitable podcasts are. So you know I live on an island and I don't have cell phone service you actually do he does live on a fantastic island yeah well hopefully your wi-fi is strong uh we want to get we want to get your reaction to something let me find a post for

you to react to um let's see what what do you hate you call me yeah hold on here we go okay never mind i'm back live on the stream okay well you got to mute that so it doesn't play i did come on bro i'm not a fucking amateur okay okay whoa whoa buddy this is a kid-friendly show cool with the our kids our kids watch the show okay okay here here we we got one from have you watched severance on apple tv okay it's a fantastic show. I watched season one, haven't gotten into season two, but Joe Rogan posted, Severance is a fantastic show,

completely original and totally unpredictable, amazing writing, directing, and acting, just a totally unique show, just finished season one and on to season two. And Mark Gurman, who is the Bloomberg reporter who covers Apple religiously, he says, look forward to Tim Cook on Rogan. Do you think Tim Cook should do Rogan?

No. Why not? I don't think he could hang for three hours. Get him a couple glasses of whiskey, a couple cigars. The good stories from manufacturing and Senjen come out. No, that's actually an interesting question here. Like, who has not gone on rogan that you would want to see sacha nadella sundar pichai i want to see all these guys

no no actually not why not i'm sitting here i'm sitting here editing uh an episode okay buffett and munger right now okay and one of the most important things that i learned from them is like the important of running the importance of like running all your decisions through opportunity costs yep so like make all your decisions based on your best alternative right and uh they tell stories for like multiple decades and i think it's actually like really interesting way i was actually talking to our friend justin on the phone about this like last night and uh like he's got a bunch of you know obviously a ton of opportunity a ton of ways to spend his time yeah tons of investments and and he was talking about like being as ambitious as

possible with his company and um should he do that inside of i don't even know should we be repeating this on a lot but basically where we came to the agreement is like he's he's a very special person and he's partnered with a very special person and the idea if you if you filter that decision through opportunity costs like no you stay with the partner you have because his partner is so fucking gifted. Yeah, of course. And yeah. So I would, the way, if you approach like, okay, do I want to see Tim Cook on Rogan?

No. And then my mind immediately goes to, well, who do I want to see on Rogan? Okay, who do you want to see? I was just, actually this morning, I was visiting a friend and I was driving to his house and I was listening to wrote Mark Magnus Carlson oh yeah that's a good one it was really good and it got to the point

where about the importance of uh flow and being obsessed with what you're doing to the point where I was such in flow listening to the podcast I missed the fucking turn of where I was going wow so yeah I don't like who who has not been on there that i'd want to actually hear from i mean i just want big tech people for sure but i mean uh i'd love to see jack dorsey go back on post x i think the thing with travis kalanick would be great with tim cook is we just need three hours of him on a podcast anywhere exactly because i want to know he's got to explain himself. Yeah, I want to know who the real Tim is. Well, out of all those people, who would be the most unhinged? Travis, maybe? Yeah, I want to hear Satya and Rogan just go on a rant about aliens for like a couple hours.

Hey. Yeah. Did you guys hear Palmer Lucky on Sean Ryan? Oh, yeah. I listened to the whole thing. It was fantastic. I think Sean said like six words. It was fantastic. I think Sean said six words and it was like, oh shit.

Oh my god. Yeah, Palmer just opens with the most hardcore conspiracies right up front. He's like, yeah, I'm here loosely promoting the Ivas contract. This is like the Ivas. We got a $22 billion contract. I'm supposed to be doing PR for that, but let's talk about JFK.

I love it. So real. a 22 billion dollar contract i'm supposed to be doing pr for that but let's talk about jfk i love it yeah so real for me rogan is the home of like unhinged yeah i've been listening you know he's the first i don't know if i told you this story i didn't i didn't know podcasting was a thing yeah a friend of mine used to invite me over to his house because he was really into ufc yeah and he's like you got to see this thing that joe rogan does i'm like the fucking fear factor guy and um it was on Ustream at the time. You could see it live. And then one day I was like, oh, I can't make it over.

He's like, don't worry. You can play the show back anytime you want. I go, what do you mean? He goes, it's a podcast. I was like, what the fuck is that? And that's when I started becoming addicted to it. I need the beep button for this guy. Sorry.

Rogan's like the home of Unhinged. So, yeah. If it has to be a tech guy using you know who knows maybe tim cook shows up and says look i don't believe in the moon landing i think the aliens are in on egypt i would love that if tim's been boiling at the surface for years just with the craziest conspiracy theories shows no what if he's like we're actually apple's gonna be in the alien etf yeah because like we're using alien technology he's like, we're actually, Apple's going to be in the alien ETF because like we're using alien technology. He's just like, you think the iPhone would work if the world was round? It would not. The iPhone would break immediately if this was not a flat earth.

And Rogan's just like, I'm listening. You've got my attention. I want Tim Cook to come back on and say they figured out a way to bring Steve Jobs back. Oh, there we go. Yeah. The frozen and cryogenic. On his 70th birthday would have been amazing. Oh, there we go. Yeah, the frozen and cryogenic. On his 70th birthday. It would have been amazing.

That would have been amazing. Yeah, I'd love to see Tim Cook on Rogan. Anyway, do you think Rogan, what do you think he uses for corporate cards? Ramp, of course. Of course. Give me a little pitch for Ramp while you're on the show. It's funny.

I don't even want to talk about what's in our group chat. So we can't say some of this stuff publicly because, you know. Okay. Yeah, of course. The way I would describe RAM, the important part, which is really funny. So, oh man, I don't know how much of this stuff I can say publicly. I got to be very careful because we're on a live stream. Just give me the high level of your most recent your most recent uh of your most recent ad read what what what were you saying about ramp well everybody

knows the founders at ramp bad reads are the best yeah um but what i would second only to tbp on that no once you guys have the ramp hats oh yeah yeah is beautiful you guys need fucking ramp hats yeah um but what i would say is like the literally the best people i know the the the best entrepreneurs on the planet some of the stuff you can't even talk about publicly they're all using ramp and i think i really do believe that ramp has the greatest technical team by far in their industry yeah and i think the gap between them and other people is just going to constantly expand i agree um and i think it's going to be a symbol of like whether you're a serious company or not like if you want to be did you see that that great timothy chalamet yeah yeah we talked about that on the show okay i didn't see that part yeah he's like you know listen i'm not i'm not being bashful he didn't use that word but he's

like i'm going i'm trying to be great i want to be like great at what i do jordy literally shouted you out during our analysis of this saying david senra probably got so fired up i think so my theory is that tim listened to how you talk about podcasting and was like i'm gonna steal this and use it in a much bigger audience so i think that he honestly just like took your words out of your mouth well yeah i think this is important because when he says i'm in the pursuit of greatness i know people don don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. Like, you know, I'm not in this to like this isn't a fucking game to me.

Like I'm not I'm trying to be literally the best that ever the best person in the world at what I do. Yeah. And what I would say is like, I do think there's going to be ramps going to turn into a status symbol. Yep. Or like a shorthand way to understand like you take your company serious yeah because the product is just light years better if anybody else's totally totally uh let's go to this rick rubin post i want to get your reaction here rick rubin said two tools will come tools will go only the vibe coder remains rick rubin

are you familiar with vibe coding uh i don't think so what's vibe coding vibe coding is uh this new type of programming that's enabled by uh services like uh cursor and windsurf and cognition devon and so when you're working with devon you kind of get in this flow state where you're just kind of sending vibes to devvin and then Devin's doing the instantiation of your idea. And so a lot of people were saying that the new era of vibe coding is very like what Rick Rubin does where Rick Rubin cannot play the instruments,

but he has taste. And so your job as a vibe coder, which is a term that was coined by Andre Carpathie, one of the greatest programmers in history. He says that like this vibe coding is what humans are uniquely good at and so i was wondering what you're what what do you see yourself as a vibe coder a vibe aligner a vibe driven podcaster have you have you i think everything we're talking about is actually related i think i'm gonna do the weave since the weave is

what i'm known for hit me with the weave you asked me like do i watch severance no do i know what this fucking random term on the internet is i just got done saying i'm trying to be the greatest in the world at what i do so like those things are all related sure like if you actually care what you're doing like you just basically do that over and over again and the reason that doing the the like the amount of reps right i've been doing the podcast for almost eight years i work on a seven days a week i only think about all the time yep patrick uh our friend from invest uh best like the best patrick's like i have to figure out a way to make money where david turns uh i want to get paid every time david for david's ability to turn every single conversation back to podcast and i think it's related to the question you just asked me and why rick rubin's so great at what he

does is because the spending more time with it and dedicating reps and reps and reps and reps is like you're going to build an intuition that you might not even be able to explain to other people but it's excessively valuable so yeah i think vibe coding intuition taste these are going to be like the limiting factors in like the world of infinite leverage that we're going in you know i'm sorry listen i i deep research you know psychos for a living. Right. Yeah. And I have to tell you, like, I become like a daily active user of OpenAI's deep research tool. It's great.

So like eventually you just might be able to make your own founders podcast and however you want. So like what is actually going to differentiate me from somebody just saying if you actually just want to sit there and learn, you know, about a person that did something interesting. Yeah. You know, you'd probably be able to do that with them yeah um and so i think the ability to make it interesting entertaining informative um the curation and the hustle yeah yeah like um this just happened recently where uh my friend alex tommen said something that was very interesting he's the company called long lake and um and he's been uh essentially he's like uh he was talking about how like i analyzed the way one of his best friends they were like roommate roommates in college have been friends for like 15 years and i analyzed like the way he was hiring people at

his company and tom was like see this is why your podcast is so good because i've known that guy for 15 fucking years and you put it into like four words and it has makes me gives me a fundamental understanding that even if I knew what was going on you actually put the words into it so I can remember it and use it in my company um and so yeah I think the the what you want to do is spend a lot of time doing this like I talked to you guys about you know your podcast is going to get way better if you do it five times a week instead of one times a week like you were doing it so I think part of that like vibing is just another word for intuition that you can't actually and i think that's super accurate older i think intuition is actually older than language um and so i think it's like to be taken very very seriously we have these conversations in our group chat about like

who's the best we might have an argument or debate on technology brothers one day yeah about who the best founder of all time is and you know i have, I have my own list, but you know, Steve jobs, it doesn't matter who the fuck you are. He's definitely on the Mount Rushmore. It's his birthday today. And if you go back and just read what he wrote and what he talked about later in his life, he's just like, intuition plays a huge role in my career. Like I'm guided by intuition. Rick Rubin is guided by intuition. I think a lot of these people are actually guided by things that they would have a hard time describing to another person. It's fantastic.

Well, thanks for calling in. We're going to get back to the show. We'll talk to you. I love you guys. Talk to you. Love you too. Bye.

Let's move on. For those that don't know, Senra, it was October, November. Yeah. We were in Miami. We were in Miami right before Halloween.

And I distinctly remember standing outside of Faena. Yeah. I don't think you were there. Yeah. I asked Senra, because Senra at the time had been one of the few people that we had sent the RSS feed to, and he was just listening to some of the episodes.

And we said, how seriously should we take this? And he was like, you should take this deadly seriously. Yeah. And we went back, and we switched to three days a week. Then went to five days a week and then we went live and uh the rest is history so we basically have to credit everything to him and uh it's amazing

that he was the first official guest we've been waiting to have he's the first official guest but he was the only right person to have on the show and uh one uh, one of the few people, like I've talked about this so much of life is knowing who to take advice from. Totally. And Senra is one of the few people that when he tells us to do something, we pay attention because, uh, he has not led us astray and a decade of experience really knows his stuff and really cares. Yeah. Fantastic. Uh, well, let's move on to the next post in the timeline. Sam Altman welcomed a little boy to the world and congratulations to him. But Dylan Patel has a funny reaction. So we wanted to highlight here on the show. He says,

I thought all these cultists weren't having kids because what's the point when we get super intelligence? If Sam Altman has a kid now, that means we ain't getting AGI, sell everything. And I think he's having a lot of fun, but it is an interesting point, which is like, whenever I see an entrepreneur who has a kid, I do feel like their vision of the future is maybe a little bit more, I don't know, just humane than other people. They're a little bit less dystopian.

Totally. You know, you can see this with Zuck when he had his kids and there was all this questions about, is Instagram bad for young kids? Is it too addictive? Is it giving them body dysmorphia issues? And it's something where I genuinely believe that Zuck has enough control and enough money that he would sacrifice some shareholder value to create a product that is better for the world. And that's underpinned by the fact that he is thinking about the next generation because your mind and your heart does change once you have kids. And so I'm excited. I want everyone in, obviously very pro-natalist, want everyone

in tech to have kids and think about the next generation and just be optimistic for the future. So congrats to Sam and congrats to Dylan for putting a little dunk post on the timeline, but still having fun with it. Let's move on to Mike Maples. Did you see this post? I missed it. Mike Maples said, a magical car at magic hour. And he posts his BMW Z8. And it's a fantastic sports car, and we love to see a capital allocator sharing what they do with all the money. And a Z8 is a fantastic choice. I don't know if you've ever driven one of those.

Pretty rare. It looks like an amazing spec. Is that, I think it has tan. Does it have tan seats or accents? But good choice, Mike. We'd love to discuss it on the show. Call in. Let us know how it drives.

Maybe we'll do an episode live in the car. I'm going to use the restroom. You're going to do this ad quick ad. Okay. So good. Well, let's move on to a promoted post from our friends over at ad quick out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuik combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we got a very cool post from AdQuik here. So Ryan Peterson, good friend of mine, CEO of Flexport, he says, what's it like working in an industry that doesn't create the most beautiful images in the entire world? And he posted four really incredible photos of shipping containers on ships. And there's just like these beautifully chaotic, very high contrast images. I couldn't,

they looked AI generated. He said they were just stock photos, but they're fantastic. And of course, this led to a lot of people quote tweeting his post with photos of their industry, whether that's heavy industrial machinery or rockets or whatever they're working on. And so AdQuik quotes it and says, we couldn't tell you because we put an ad on the sphere in Las Vegas. I love the sphere. I think it's a really interesting monument and it depends on what you put on it. But AdQuick can help you put an ad on the sphere. It's very expensive, but I think if you get the positioning right and you pick the right image to put on the sphere, it can go mega, mega viral. You can take a video of it from a plane and get these really, really cool images. And obviously, you need some link to your product being round. So if you're selling

something that's like flat or square, probably not going to do well in the sphere, but you've seen a lot of basketballs and tennis balls and anything that's spherical. If you sell that, they should put Palantir on there. The Palantir is a crystal ball. Put a big Palantir ad on the sphere and do it through Adquik. Thank you to Adquik for sponsoring that bathroom break. Yeah. Let's go to some crypto-related posts. Flynn says, remember when Jack Dorsey's first tweet was sold as an NFT for $2.9 million? I do remember that. It was crazy at the time. They gave it away. They gave it away they gave it okay was it was i i

actually didn't know this was was jack dorsey the one selling it so i think it was literally somebody just screenshot it and put it on polygon or whatever that's amazing yeah on polygon if uh it wasn't actually tied to any nope and that was the thing with with these they always say oh the nfts make it scarce and it was like unless i screenshot it and then upload it to a different chain also make an nft exactly and and so you know there was the whole critique of like uh you could just right click download the nft get the art for free and that was true but the real risk with the nft things was that there the there was an unbounded supply and you could always do a new drop. And there's a related post here from Caleb Gammon. He says,

quote tweeting somebody says, what a time for monkeys looking at the monkey lineup of movies from this year. Better man featured a monkey kingdom of the planet of the apes, Godzilla Kong, the monkey, an R rated horror film that just debuted at number two monkey man, which was a very cool action movie that I wanted to see, but I never got around to.

And Wicked had a monkey in it. And Caleb Gaiman says, I wish there had been some way for me to invest in apes three years ago. Of course, talking about the Bored Ape Yacht Club. And it's funny. But yeah, I mean, the problem was, of course, right after the Bored Ape Yacht Club came, came you know the kitties and the dogs and the i think one of one of the challenges so so there was a moment in time on x specifically and instagram to some degree and discord and things like that where uh having a two hundred thousand dollar profile picture by nature of using an nft that you got was a total status symbol. It was like, and I was somewhat,

Yugo Labs was a customer of mine. And so I was generally, you know, I think what they've, there was a lot of really good execution in a bunch of ways, right? And one of, you know, my thinking was that NFTs could potentially be the sort of supercars or the watches of the internet

because everybody that's online it's sort of if you're anonymous it's hard to signal status like are you actually legit and it's the same way same one of the same reasons that people will wear a nice watch because they walk into a room and people are like wow he's got a rm on his wrist like he must have done something in life to be able to uh you know purchase purchase that. The challenge is that there's so much alpha and being yourself online and just using a regular picture of yourself, right? That's one take. The other is what's the iron law of the universe? Easy come, easy go. True.

And the problem I saw- Jeremy Giffon popularized that. Popularized that term. And so what was the problem problem with the nfts is that yes they could have been the supercars or the watches of the world but like what is the history of ferrari yeah when you're driving a ferrari part of the reason decades yeah and part of the reason why it you know adam arpagay these are 200 year old companies they've spent so long expert like branding themselves as craftsmen and not just branding being craft being part of the reason part of the reason a Ferrari costs what it costs is because they had

to spend a hundred years almost like figuring out how to even a casual car fan can tell you Enzo Ferrari they know the person right and and Lamborghini the same thing oh they built uh tractors and then they spun out Pininfarina Like there's all these different names in the supercar, even in the watch world, where there are stories about what made these brands great. And those don't just happen over a weekend and a hyped launch, right? And so I would believe that an NFT profile picture,

and I think that the, which ones is it? The pixelated guys, the CryptoPunks. Those are kind of stuck around a little bit. And I think that if they stick around for another 20 years, they could be really cool and they could be rare. And I had one by Moxie Marlinspike that I thought was really valuable

because he wrote this blog post. He is a craftsman. He is this crazy packer. You thought it was valuable? Yeah. Well, I think it will be valuable because it tells a story basically early bro we're early it's it's it's the the prominence of the chain bro you just don't

understand like i just uh you you don't appreciate fine technology okay i don't actually but uh but yeah i mean like a lot of art is driven by story. Yeah. Right. And so and so I would believe that if someone stays in the trenches for the next two decades, building something, building a story around a piece of art that happens to live on chain, it could eventually be valuable. Beeple. I think Beeple. Yeah. He sold the one photo for 69 million dollars.

I don't know if that'll ever get back there. But there are some works of Beeple that represent a certain moment in time on the internet. And he does have that story. He put in the work like David Sennor. He produced a new image every single day for a decade. Yeah. Crazy. So the challenge, yeah, which his story is amazing and we should actually cover it more.

We should see what he's posting today. The challenge is that so much of these sort of trophy collectible objects so much of the the value is i own this one of one thing yeah from this specific moment in time but i can look at it i can touch it i can put it on my wall and the issue with sort of digital collectibles is they haven't bridged that gap in a great way where if you buy a baseball that was thrown in the World Series in this year and it was the Grand Slam, it was the ball that was hit in Grand Slam, you can put it on your desk

and that brings you some amount of joy. We haven't seen that in the digital world where people were creating their sort of NFT museums that anybody could set up. Well, when you bought a Beeple, he would send you a printed version with signed and it was like a very nice collectible. Um, did X just turn off the ability to use NFT profile pictures? You remember? They're just gone. And Turner,

Turner, he still has, it's fake. It's the fake one. It's so funny. It's one of his best bids. Um, very funny. Anyway, uh, enough, enough monkey news. let's move on to uh the all-in podcast had an interview with patrick collison and uh and patty patty collison and the stripe boys uh straight out ireland came by for a chat and uh apparently stripe has an internal inflation in an indicator that could potentially be more accurate than the CPI. So this is episode 216. Because it's not hyper-political, probably. Yeah. And so Chamath says, one of the big things that we've talked about is how many backward revisions there are to everything from non-farm payrolls to GDP, that they've become

so unreliable. And also, it's very difficult for people that are transacting in market to know what to do. Have you guys ever thought about that? Patrick says, we did look at inflationary data over the last couple of years, and I think you can construct, and the team did construct a pretty reliable leading indicator for inflation because of course, Stripe powers so many e-commerce sites. If they see prices going up, that's an indicator that inflation might be coming. And I feel a bit rueful with you asking the question because I feel like on some level, we should have done it. Like we should have published our data. Stripe is not a full cross-section of the economy. We're more biased towards online and we're more biased towards

innovative companies. So the interpretation can be a bit tricky because of course, like, you know, the price of gasoline probably isn't captured in, or food probably isn't captured in Stripe data. And that's a huge part of what drives in true inflation or the inflation that people feel, pain at the pump, pain at the grocery store. The second thing is that the Stripe business is growing so quickly and changing so fast that it's not necessarily representative of the economy. Having said that, I think in principle, you could draw some conclusions. And so we would like to share that openly because I think it's a public good for there to be better and more reliable economic data. And I love that. I hope they do it. I think that'd be really, really cool. Yep. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it was

a great interview. And you see, it was interesting. They started bickering amongst themselves in front of the guests, which I was a little bit uncomfortable for everyone. Jason was trying to say that, that people at, at Anderle, he's like, Oh, I'm friends with a bunch of the board members.

That was from that episode. That's hilarious. It was really, I described guys are just like, what are you guys doing? Yeah. Anyway, I,

I love this. I think any big finance company should have an internal economist. We saw this with Ramp. R. Karazian has been posting data about what's happening in AI consumption and what AI companies are seeing upticks in corporate purchases across Ramp cards. Stripe could do the same thing, publish a lot of data. It's good content, helps build the brand, and it's informative. So value to the reader. Let's move on to Reggie James. He says, I think personal robotics will be a lot more cute than the humanoid form that can clearly beat me up. And so clearly triggered by the super scary clone robot.

And I think he said something else about you want to be able to throw a computer out the window if you need to. Yeah, this ties back i mean i posted i think saturday that um i i want there to be basically the robot olympics but focused on extreme sports like i want to see robots do mma i want to see them do base jumping cliff diving uh all these sort of things that humans do that are, you know, at major risk to life, the robot should have to do them as well. So let's make it happen. Well, let's move on to our last sponsor of the day. Eat Sleep, baby. Let's do it. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. And we got a post here by Longevity Maximalist.

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send us your receipt and we'll forward okay the other thing the other thing i want to make note of so we are john and i are now entering a competition of who's going to get the best the best average sleep score we do over the next year and what i want to ask them is see if we can have the community opt into it and then share data somehow so that we can all track it because i'm sure i mean i've just been putting up ridiculous numbers i mean i've been really the beauty of tracking it like this is that you do you do you just automatically are more inclined to get to bed a little bit earlier i put up 99 99 last night. Oh, you beat me. I got 94. How much time did you sleep? I slept seven hours and 31 minutes. Oh, I got you beat

there. I got eight and a half. That's crazy. That's actually, that's why I got docked because I fell asleep earlier. So, so, so no. So the challenge is everybody thinks they're getting like eight hours because they're going to bed at 10 and waking up at six. But yeah, it's actually more like they kind of got in bed at 10, 15 and they fell asleep at 10, 50 and then blah, blah, blah. Maybe they woke up in the middle of the night. All of a sudden they're not getting that, that eight hours. So, um, uh, anyways, well, let's move on to another, uh, another segment from the- By the way, I got eight minutes. I got to get on with our CPA and handle business. So Dave Freeberg at the All In podcast,

there's a quote here from Grant. He says, I have a thesis that AI, more than anything, unlocks deeply complicated projects for humans that would otherwise be infeasible. On a daily basis, we mine to the center of the earth and we get cool rare earth minerals from 500 miles down. We go to space and colonize the moon and all these crazy things because AI unlocks all these large scale projects that would require millions of people. Paraphrasing from an epic vision from Friedberg.

I love it. That's an amazing. Great vision. That's amazing. Super positive. And then all of a sudden it's like, yeah, like you want to build a company to do something aggressive and how helpful would it be to have a hundred thousand phds on your team yeah and it's just like oh yeah we need to calculate the trajectory the crazy thing is we have that today like we we basically have we're getting close we're getting close totally if

you're leveraging the models at the extreme yeah you basically have access to as many PhDs as you want. Yeah. But you still need to puppeteer them and it's still, it's almost, it's still very in the center. But that's an, that's a, that's an opportunity for great managers. Yeah. I mean, I find myself right now, I typically fire off like one deep research query at a time, but every once in a while I'll do two tabs and then it's like, okay, I got a team under me, but what does it look like when I have a thousand under me? Yeah. Like that will be very interesting and orchestrating that each other. Exactly. Yeah. Very, very cool. So very excited. Yeah. Uh, let's move on to Kip mock. He says, I'm a professional automotive painter, by the way, we might have a job for you. We're looking to paint a car.

Uh, he's got a beautiful Porsche here and he threw the Velar Atomics logo right on it. And, uh, all in Zach says gundo corporate merch is getting out of control yeah i don't think you get one of these uh for being a customer but maybe if you buy a nuclear reactor from them you might just get thrown a cayman a cayman that'd be fantastic well congrats to kip and it looks fantastic good detailing work we love to see it uh let's give a shout out to nicole that's a that's a gu gun to mentality by the way of just, I want my logo on my car. I'm just going to do it. Yep. Totally. And that's an American mentality. It's fantastic. Now maybe switch it out for a Mustang. Do you want to be real American about it? Let's go to Nicole Wiscoff. She hit a hundred thousand

followers on X. Congratulations to Nicole. We haven't hit the gong. We haven't hit the gong. What do we got? Whoa. That was not good. It's not. Here we go. There we go.

For Nicole. Very good. Nice big ring. They say, thank you to everyone who's been here from the start. Would have never guessed that a single app would help me build

a pretty cool venture firm in record time and a pretty firm backbone. My first post in September of 21 was hard to launch, was to launch, was to hard launch a $5 million fund one.

So far from there to now, so far to go. Stick around. So congrats to Nicole. We'd love to see it. Maybe potential. We're bringing back brother of the week, potential brother of the week here. Yeah. Speed running September, 2021 from a $5 million fund to a $50 million fund and amassing an army of 100K followers in that time. And she's starting to build out a car collection, which she'll have to talk about on the show.

And a spacious home as well. And a family with a kid, which we love. Doing it all. Congratulations. Let's go to Kenneth Castle. I think you'll love this one. He says, we still haven't seen one dripped out humanoid SMH. Low tan banger. Low tan.

Loved it. I thought it was so funny. then aaron francis says haven't we and posted zuck which is a little silly but he does seem less robotic lately but yeah you know uh this seems like a perfect project for 1x i feel like 1x they're hanging out with little b the base god they should they should throw some drip on that guy call up reggie get some get some fashion advice yep hip hip city Reg would definitely help you get your humanoid dripped out. And I think that could also go viral.

People are gonna get sick of the humanoid stunts. We've seen it fold laundry. We've seen it make coffee. Let's see it do a runway walk at Paris Fashion Week. I wanna see it do a kickflip wearing Balenciaga. Yes, yes, for sure, for sure. Let's go to Andrew Reed over at Sequoia. He says, always suspicious of young people who are points guys. Same with tax obsessive, lack appreciation

of opportunity cost of your attention. It's a good point. I've never been into points. My hack is, you know, I have one friend who's into it. Once every five years, I get dinner with him or something. I say, what credit card should I get? He says, this one. And who's into it. Once every five years, I get dinner with him or something. I say, what credit card should I get? He says, this one. And I say, okay. And then I use that for the next half decade. What are your thoughts on points?

Do you optimize? I've never been into it. Yeah. Never been big into that world. I like them. I like that I just spend money. And then eventually I just get a little pot of gold. As an Irishman, you know, there's nothing, uh, there's nothing better. Right. Uh, but, uh, but yeah, just, just somebody that's a founder that is potentially building, you know, if they're

raising venture capital, that means they're doing everything they can to build a billion dollar company, focus on the billion dollar company. And in your free time, if you just find points so fascinating that you want to spend your free time doing that, but I would say touch grass instead or come on our podcast and just yap. There's better ways. Higher leverage opportunities.

Let's close with Matt Turk. He says, marketing that doesn't work for B2B startups, paid social, ads, email marketing campaigns, gated white papers, endless website rebuilds. What does work, CEO is chief marketer, genuine original social presence, relentless content production, smaller in-person events like dinners, online small scale events like webinars. A lot of B2B marketers, CMO, VP marketing surprisingly seem to be stuck

in that first world. What do you think? Well said. I mean, we've talked about this before. Every legacy company does, for the most part, doesn't understand X. They're still using links, hashtags, they're posting blogs that link out to other places. It shows a total lack of understanding. I think what this comes down to is just understanding the platforms and what they want. So X wants CEO, founder-led brands. They want genuine social presence, not, hey, here's 10 ways that you can do this thing, whatever. Relentless, right?

So the big issue right now with, with marketers is that they don't realize the volume. You can make a great piece of content, put it out there, but you need a system to create this ridiculous volume if you want to be competitive in the feeds. And then I think smaller, you know, founder series, founder dinners, things like that were getting memed in 2021, 2022, because it felt like 20% of all venture dollars were going to them, but they still work in terms of building. The key though, is to actually make sure that it's an amazing ad. So if you get 10 founders together, better spend five minutes aggressively talking about your business and not just hoping, oh yeah, people are going to enjoy the food and convert later. It's like, no, you got to really, got to really sell. That's a great place to end the show. Thanks for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts, Spotify, follow us on YouTube, follow us on X, and we will see you tomorrow.

Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Thank you folks. Can't wait for tomorrow. Can't wait. We could do another four hours right now. Let's be honest. But we got to go. Got to get on calls. Got to get on with Taipei. We will talk to you tomorrow. Bye.

See ya.