TBPN Live - Hereticon, Blood Boys, Hypercar Suggestions, What really is ESG?

Episode Date: November 2, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy and I just got back from Hereticon in Miami. We want to do an overview, a deep dive. When did you actually get in to Miami? Got in Monday, got back yesterday. Pretty sure. Apparently the World Series happened. There was 100,000 people on the streets outside of the studio today and not even they could stop us from recording today. Nothing can stop us. There's just too much to talk about. It was like a crazy time

for stuff happening and I was completely disconnected from it. Like I didn't see anything about the World Series. I didn't know the World Series. Did you see what happened in the stock market while we were there?

Like everything ripped. Bitcoin went above 70K. And then as soon as Hereticon was over, everything crashed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Classic. Makes sense. It was like the vibes.

We were just like summoning all the capital allocators together in Miamiami partying yeah uh what does that say when people just get offline like good things no one can sell yeah all the biggest hitters were there and they were all drinking and partying so they couldn't sell yeah so the market just ripped yeah and then they got back and they were hung over and they were like actually i need to hedge worse worse worse uh what was your favorite like moment or did you come away like with any like interesting takes the main thing for me was that at the first reticon that we there was some alien stuff and i didn't really buy it i'm buddies with jesse michaels who's like the the main aliens guy

and he hosted a talk uh with this guy carl nell who i think is going to be like really, really big soon, like Joe Rogan soon. And, uh, it materially updated my, my like expected value of aliens being real. Yeah. Now I probably went from like 3% to 10%, but it was good. Mostly just because the guy that Jesse brought this guy, Carl Nell,

he speaks, he's not like the strung out hippie burner guy being like, Oh yeah, I saw some stuff. And it's like, okay, you were probably on drugs and that happened. He's like straight up.

They test for in, in the government, like in his like, uh, in his like world, they test even for like ibuprofen because it's like, you have the button, you have the,

you have your finger on the button, like the nuclear button. So like they, they need to know everything. So these people aren't on drugs. And then he puts things in terms that I think tech people and skeptics like me can understand and actually open things up. Because the classic tech person defense of aliens aren't real is just like, well, we're listening. We have the SETI project.

And it's quiet. There's no one's broadcasting. And we're broadcasting, right? But his point is that actually the SETI program does not broadcast. We assume that we would broadcast because we broadcast television like I love Lucy I love Lucy once we got to like the 50s I think we started broadcasting with these really high-powered satellites or these dishes they go out and they should be findable in deep space and so you would assume that you know aliens

really far away they got I love Lucy you know yeah a million years ago and we should be able to get this but his point is that we have actually, humans on earth have stopped broadcasting because we switched to using fiber and satellites. That's the perfect show to send up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should broadcast. We should do that. Even though everyone gets it over the internet, which is fiber and Starlink and satellite internet. Yeah, but I want to send it into deep space. Yeah yeah that'd be so traumatizing yeah we have like the aliens are listening they're like what about the timeline yeah yeah yeah so he was good at like bridging from like the dark forest and then providing a bunch of evidence and

so jesse's like very convinced now and i think it's good and he's also like super straight edge now so yeah that makes me believe it more yeah that i feel like we were trying to be cognizant of that with our talk of like dressing nicely yes you know our anybody that wasn't there our talk was on you know the case for performance drug use in silicon valley and so doing any type of talk about drugs we wanted to make sure that we like looked yes presentable yeah uh and i think we did yeah i think we were probably the best dressed people yeah i mean the whole was like, we need to go back to the Mad Men era of the 1950s where there were an intense amount of nootropics consumed. Alcohol was drank at work. Caffeine was drank at work.

They were smoking, using nicotine constantly in the office. And now we've turned, all of technology has turned into like, oh, you need some stack. It's a nootropic. It's like, no, it's just a drug and it's cool to use it at work yeah you basically want to short the companies where the founder is like even thinking about what their stack is versus the founder that's just like

flow state ingesting uh but um but yeah i guess two things that stood out uh that were interesting uh the talk that most stood out to me was um i mean there was a lot i wouldn't say it was the one that stood out the most but it was the one that um that i think would be interesting to listeners so brian johnson gave his like don't die speech uh and talk uh i think it the thing for me was realizing that he puts so much uh content out there about like his you know basically his like penis yeah right because it's like the perfect like viral thing viral thing yeah um but there is an extreme level of debt depth to uh death extreme no extreme level um extreme level of depth to what he's talking about and uh i think it's a lot more interesting than just the surface level,

level, like billionaire spending money on his health. One thing that I think the audience reaction that was interesting, I think like 50% of people were like, this is super cool. I'm going to download the app. 50% of people were, this is a death cult.

Yeah. Like of the 20, you know, of the 21st century yeah like this guy every single person that's ever had a death cult was like this sort of like charismatic figure who's promising we're on the precipice of something very significant which in this case is ai and you need to figure out how to learn live forever and we're all going to live for uh forever together and his example from the talk was that uh he he said something to the tune of of like what i took away is like basically he's creating an algorithm that tells you exactly what to do all day long

and his big pitch to the audience was like would you use the algorithm and some people were like well what if i want to like i'm hanging out with my friends and having fun and the algorithm says go to sleep yeah he's like would you do that and he was really just like sort of trying to find this are you willing to do that yeah cultural ground and then the other thing that was funny is um wearing a make america great again hat was like the most non-contrarian thing you could do i was thinking where i i shouldn't give a blanket statement but it felt like most of the the most normie people there were wearing the make america great again hats and dellian was not yep and dellian's the guy who like three years ago was getting horriciously like that i was like it was like six years six years ago yeah canceled on

twitter horrifically canceled just as like there was probably didn't even endorse trump at the time it was like it like a performance art piece just to see what would happen in San Francisco. And there was a big backlash. Yeah. In fact, the most heretical talk

that I heard on politics was the case for Kamala Harris, which is very interesting. And it was presented in this kind of trollish way. Yeah, yeah. The most, the most.

But there actually was in that talk like very serious criticism and very like, like a deeper level of analysis around the flaws of donald trump and i'd seen elsewhere certainly in like the media which i think was cool and yeah the most triggered i saw anybody was maybe max myers after the decel talk where this guy

was basically saying oh yeah and he was just like like like basically rattled you do have to respect chatham house rules to some degree yeah but um and uh yeah another favorite moment like david senra would show up and then like every two hours he'd be like all right i gotta go home like edit the podcast yeah and i like never knew if he was just like this is getting like too crazy or he actually just had to get home and edit the podcast yeah i think he just likes you know hanging out with a small group of people yeah and when you have like 500 people packed in a place he he's just like, what's the point? Yeah, the real Hereticon was on the 14th floor. Yeah.

I mean, that's how it always is. I mean, last time I met Will, which is the reason I met you, was because of Hereticon. And it was all just because we just sat at a dinner table together. Will is who injured us. Yeah. That's so funny. Will introduced us and I met him at Hereticon. And he was telling me like, oh i quit smoking with lucy and and and afterwards we were just like yeah we were like

got it wrong really well really well and we just had a really good time i got put in a couple like group chats together and stuff and then it just kind of like continued from the rest of history but yeah um there's always uh like that type of connection is like much more valuable in general i mean all the talks it's so odd because of the like the vibe shift There's not that much stuff that it's like Oh If this were to leak like it would be it would be career-ending for them like most people have kind of sorted into Organizations, it's not like they're like middle manager

It's some like tech company that is actually gonna like have HR and compliance be like hey You can't be out there most of the people that are Attending are like either running their own company or aligned with venture capital firms that would support them or like they have a big following. The interesting thing was there wasn't that many people that had to put in like a PTO request to be there.

There was a handful of people that had to put in a PTO request and we're on like a vacation. But then most of the people were just like, that was work. Oh, 100%. That was some of the most productive days ever. Yep. And we were very much working.

100% working. The entire time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, because of the vibe shift, like there aren't that many things that are like, oh, this person like said something that like if it got out, it'd be really bad. It's more just like,

there's somebody putting something out there, and they're laying out a little bit more of a rigorous case for aliens or something like that. And it's on you as the viewer to just kind of say, okay, I'm getting another ball that's being thrown at me. Am I going to swing at this one? Do I believe this a little bit more, a little bit less? And so ideas are like not controversial in like the you can't say them realm as much as controversial in the sense of like 50 of the audience is like i'm not really into this or whatever like you made the case for like brian's thing is like it's somewhat authoritarian like there's a lot of libertarians

like that is a that is kind of a like a debate point for people even if it's like he could talk about it publicly and it's fine because it's not that controversial to talk about it's just like it's an idea that not everyone is down and that's why it was split 50 50 and that's like the ideal scenarios you go into every talk and and people come away like even at our talk people there were multiple people that came up with with after us and we're like no psychedelics are great and our basically our pitch was like, no, psychedelics are terrible. And it's just like, I think that that's kind of like what heretical meant this time around, as opposed to last time,

it was very much just the only place in the world that you could go at that moment and say whatever you wanted because Elon didn't own Twitter yet. And there was still like massive like- Yeah, it's interesting how, I mean, it was the most unique event that I've ever been to.

Yeah. And truly, yeah, an amazing product. Yeah. Thinking of it as like a product of like, and it, you know, but it's one, it's interesting, like would it ever have existed if Twitter wasn't where we all were having conversations, but couldn't say the things that we wanted to say and and covet i mean i know mike was planning it before uh before covet hit but once covet got really bad that really like

amplified it and made it like it was the first conference that 90 of attendees had been to since the lockdown started and it because it was just like, there was, everything was canceled and heretic on still got pushed a few times the first time, but then eventually happened. And it was like this big celebration of like, okay. And the vaccines had actually dropped. So it wasn't that dangerous for people who were down with that.

And so it was a little easier, but still companies weren't like all, all of the big tech conferences were still virtual. Yeah. One of the things that was cool and maybe under discussed to date is that there was this really good combination of intellectuals and people that were focused on theory and people that are technologists, business leaders,

investors that are much more pragmatic. Yep. And so I went to the talk on terraforming and ended up talking with the guy that hosted it afterward. And I was like, cool. You know, his high level point was there's these depressions around Earth which are below sea level. So if you just get water to them, you can make these huge lakes or seas or whatever. And I went to him and I was like, okay, cool. What's the next step? And

he's like, I don't know. Like, I just sort of like talk about this, like terraforming is like my things. I just talk about, I'm not the guy to actually go and do it. So I very quickly like came up with a strategy for one of those depressions, which we can talk about off air, which was basically like to buy up a ton of land around that specific area for nothing because it's worthless right now. And then go spend like 10 times more money lobbying to get water to that place. And there's like a really interesting arbitrage where like you could turn

like a hundred million dollars into billions of dollars just through this like weird mechanic. So we're going to keep talking and like, see if there's cool. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The water rights thing is fascinating. It goes back to like Chinatown, like fascinating movie, like how LA wound up with water rights. But, uh, I remember, um,

there was a politician who was saying like, like we, like all of Nevada, New Mexico and, uh, Arizona could have like way, way more water. If there was actually like a technological solution,

which is nuclear power desalination in California. Yep yeah so you have the ocean unlimited water yeah nuclear unlimited energy you put those two together desalination is really energy intensive so it doesn't make economic sense now but if you can do that then you can reroute the colorado river back to the kind of where it should be basically uh and then and then all of a sudden the the southwest becomes not like a desert anymore it just becomes like lovely because there's just water everywhere um and there's just like so many other little plans like that obviously it took a long time but like with the right combination of like technology lobbying economic incentives and yeah and like yeah you did come away from it feeling like the biggest plays in the world right now from a business standpoint combine technology with lobbying yeah it's interesting the because like the biggest

opportunities in sass yeah like even ai is like lobbying driven right now yeah also just the fact that like a lot of these are like like there's at least one idea there and you kind of got to hunt for it that like will become consensus like this is the whole idea of like contrarianism which is kind of heretic on just like a different synonym um uh is that like the attendees for this one will just be like the entrepreneurs for the next like two decades and and everyone will be like oh like why is that guy here his thing's not contrarian anymore it's like well yeah but you're not just gonna stop working on it like last hereticon i gave a talk on nicotine is good for you right and this and this year like

i was like i'm not just gonna run that back because like everyone knows about that like that's like super normie at this point and same with like the andoril guys like if they were just set up they were like we should build a defense company like it's like okay dude we get it but at the same time you don't want the andoril guys being like oh i'm moving on to the next hot thing because i just care about doing contrarian stuff it's like it's okay that they've gotten that they that they they did the contrarian thing they they took the bet they were correct but now they have to go live that life for basically ever yeah and that's good and that's the way it should be but it lends itself to this like give me a newer hot take and it's like okay like you can i'm sure they have good ideas but it's not always going to be as big as like the

one thing that they becomes the life work right the contrarian thing from this event that will become mainstream is goo goo the feels goo is that uh volta yeah john fio from the fiorentina family yeah fiorentina family they made their money in hospitality right yeah yeah and he i mean we talked about his his like prolific hiking regimen yeah six yeah but basically a lot of people were starting to skip the coffee they were espresso yeah for the goo a lot of people and there would be people running around really wired 3 4 a..m. off the goo and you could just see this crazy look in their...

He needs a new work site. It was almost like a divine spark in their eyes. Yes. Is it the collagen, the colostrum, the caffeine? Yeah, we don't know what it is. It's just like a sacred combination. And he talks about something that is interesting. It's like there's no difference

between invention or discovery. And so it's this thing of like, combination and he talks about something that is interesting is like there's no difference between invention or discovery and so this it's this thing of like did he create goo or did he invent goo did he discover it are they all the same thing but by next reticon well i think we'll have figured that out interesting uh i'm bummed that packy couldn't make it, but did you see his tweet? Was he having a child? How on earth did he not make it? I think so, something like that. But he said, I sadly didn't make it to Hereticon, so here's my talk.

We should flip these lines. And it's the amount of venture capital investment year over year, and then the amount of charitable giving, and the charitable giving line is much higher than the venture capital line. Yeah, so that by itself is like, we probably shouldn't even talk about it,

because it should just be a talk at hereticon yeah it just becomes like a normie like thing that uh you know if it if it ends up being you know world positive yeah i mean that's the fascinating thing about uh all of the uh like climate funds not even even the climate vc funds didn't do that well there was was a big, I think it was Kleiner Perkins had a big push. They had a fund that was, what was the term back in the day? That almost destroyed their brand for a decade. It was tough. I mean, Al Gore became a partner there.

Isn't that crazy? He's hanging out there. But I forget what it was called. There was some term for this, like green investing or something like that, that was like really popular but tesla was not considered in that category yeah but if you bundle tesla and then the returns go great yeah exactly and so it's like there's all this almost like this misclassification of like the thing that solves the problem might not even look like it's in that category just like you know if you were like starting like okay we're we're we're an internet we're an internet infrastructure fund

like do you get into the seed round of spacex yeah yeah no yeah the the um but you should i i do think that vcs that are not there that are feeling fomo should probably feel an order of magnitude more FOMO like I'm not I'm not kidding like they're when the event was very expensive yeah but I guarantee you it will result in a massive return to Founders Fund and the other VCs that were there right it's like there's people there I wish the missed opportunity was getting a photo of the entire group oh yeah because it would just look like the it's the most eclectic group ever like a photo of the entire group. Oh yeah. Because it would have just looked like the, it's the most eclectic group ever. Like a lot of like kind of strange,

you know, a strange mix of people. Yeah. Um, and you could look at that picture 30 years from now and be like, this guy like annexed Cuba. Like this guy, like this guy,

this guy did a hostile takeover of SpaceX. I liked, uh liked Palmer's tweet. What was that? What did Palmer say? He said, Hereticon was so good. Banger after banger, hit after hit,

as if all the best threads on 4chan came to life, but with a level of mutual respect and discourse lifted from the best stereotypes of the Victorian explorers. No, it was one. There was a conversation that was being had and senra kept saying like what does that mean like what does that mean yeah and they were all like 4chan slang yeah and he was just like what like what's going on right now um

so delightfully offline with his like yeah and that's that's why that's why founders is what it is is because he does the reading for you he's not well yeah that's that's why that's why founders is what it is is because he does the reading for you he's not well yeah he's focused on things that were written mostly in the 20th century yeah and that's why there's so much alpha in the podcast if he was extremely online like refreshing the timeline like the podcast would not be he would not be who he is yeah and so i think that that was a cool thing like everybody there is like authentically themselves yeah and i didn't feel like most people weren't there the only time that i got offended was a guy like trying to be heretical not actually being yeah and it was for like a very like political topic that we need to talk about because we don't we

don't talk about politics on this podcast yeah um but yeah everybody was there being them authentically themselves and the combination of all that just made it amazing yeah uh i liked gabby's tweet overheard a heretic on the real nootropic is being on a mission i'm kind of i'm kind of mad she didn't credit me for that did you say this that was my line that was your line yeah yeah wait did you say that in the in our talk or just randomly no during the talk oh really that's yeah it was at it was at the end i think we were honestly uh talking about a uh certain presidential candidate who who clearly does all the wrong things like crazy schedule overworked diet coke mcdonald's like eating terribly and the argument there was that there's no the real the most powerful drug on the

earth is the human spirit and being on a mission makes sense yeah um i liked daniel i don't know how to spell his last pronounce his last name tenry row is he at teal capital uh he worked at teal capital for a while but now he's independent i hold my own private version of hereticon every day on the inside of my brain that's like really that's like really true because i think it is a place where you can say the things yeah like like that's just like schizo energy yeah yeah you're just like saying things that aren't normally said yeah but there was there was like a when i did i didn't really go on twitter during the conference but there was a little bit of like uh pushback like rune tweeted like when people go from sf to hereticon miami the average iq of both cities go up which is this like copy pasta of this like incredible tweet by uh product manager raul yeah um but it's just it's just like oddly

written well it's funny i saw another i saw another tweet that was like, come on, sweetie. It's time for your quarterly beef with Founders Fund. Yeah. He's like, okay. Well, I mean, yeah. Rune's like a prolific hater. But I think you should put your journalist hat on for a minute. Like you're a traditional tech journalist.

And just like follow the money. Think about it. Like Rune works at OpenAI. Yep. Peter co-founded OpenAI. He's invested in OpenAI. Like he needs an enemy. He needs someone to beef. Because you don't want to be at the top. You don-founded OpenAI. He's invested in OpenAI. He needs an enemy. He needs someone to beef. Because you don't want to be at the top.

You don't want to have no enemies. That's the worst. You need someone taking you down. Yeah, if we didn't have the working class, if we weren't fighting against the working class, there would be no podcast. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, a similar thing happened with Sequoia. Sequoia was like the untouchable firm.

No enemies. and then Sean McGuire you know decided to wage a holy war against Islam and so now they have an enemy and and now they're not just this like untouchable brand they need they you know it's again it's David and Goliath all over again which is the ideal scenario you always want to be the underdog and so even if you have to pay someone to talk trash about you, it's totally worth it. That's the summary. Absolutely.

Thanks for the clicks, Rune. Yeah, I do think it's funny because our talk was closer to a comedy sketch than a real talk. And I realized that like midway through where we would say a line and if we didn't get a laugh, it's like, fuck, rework that. Yeah. But you know that somebody came away from that not realizing that it was like a more of a comedic sketch than anything else.

Yeah. And they're just, they were probably like, these guys are fucking crazy. Awesome. This is the craziest talk I've heard. Yeah. But I mean, a lot of it was like, you know, comedy shrouding around, like, a true idea or, like, teasing a true idea. But just, like, amplifying things to, like, help it stick in people's mind and become, like, memes. And then our boy, Theo, got destroyed by some IV or something.

He said the cost of admission to Hereticon was expensive this year, but it was worth it because he became a blood boy, which of course is another joke. There were no real blood boys there, unfortunately, but not in any of the rooms you were in. No, not in the rooms. Anything else to talk about Hereticon? I'm sure it'll come up later. Yeah. What should we move on to next? I think it's time to tell you about today's highlight, Sotheby's. Since 1744, Sotheby's has been the premier destination for art connoisseurs, collectors, and enthusiasts alike, offering an unparalleled platform for buying and selling fine art, jewelry, rare books, and collectibles. From classic masterpieces to contemporary works, Sotheby's brings together world-class expertise and global reach, connecting treasures with those who truly appreciate them. So whether you're looking to acquire a timeless piece or explore

the vibrant world of modern art, Sotheby's is where extraordinary finds a home. Tell a story about a piece of fine art. I really like this Peter Paul Rubens, David and Goliath. Have you seen this? No. It's currently kept at the Norton Simon. Hopefully it'll be at Sotheby's in a few years. Right. You can pick it up.

But it's iconic because Rubens was like, he really explored the human form and musculature. It's this jacked David about to behead Goliath. It's a very, very aggressive piece yeah um but it's interesting because when you first when I first heard the story of David Goliath you think about David as this like tiny little underling and Goliath is this like over this like massive massive like uni but but in but in this in this painting David is actually like very powerful and jacked and like yes he's smaller but he's smaller, but he's still put in the work.

And I think that there's actually a good metaphor there. Where it's like, you can't just be like, oh, I'm some startup and I'm going against the big company. And they're huge and I'm small. Therefore, it's a David and Goliath situation. I'm going to win by throwing the stone. It's like, no, David clearly put in the work, at least in this talent.

Put in the work. And I like that. And that's another thing with Sotheby's. They're not afraid to put in the work at least in this talent work and i like that and that's another thing with sotheby's they're not afraid to put in the work um they you know you know in addition to the art that they have listed and some of the private catalog uh you can go to them and and get their help you know finding specific works that you know uh that you feel something about recently had luck here right yeah so we were looking for basically a lost copy of the wealth of nations we have a copy there just you know for sentimental value um but yeah so the technology

brothers you know collect uh collector division was um looking for a copy that you know a lot of people thought was you know completely lost so the beast was able to help us get it took about three weeks um but basically no lift on our side and it's now safely in the vault yeah it's kind of like the holy grail of capitalism right in some ways yeah which is the primary absorb the energy yeah the primary inspiration for this podcast exactly so anyways thank you to so the beast uh should we move on to some tweets or should we do brother in the week we can just jump into the brother the brother of the week? We can just jump into the brother. The brother of the week. You're going to have to go to the mansion section.

Yeah, yeah. So in the Wall Street Journal today, in the mansion section, there's someone that we have to highlight. So his name, where is his name? Famed LA entrepreneur. George Ruan, R-U-A-N. Is that Ruan? Ruan? So this is the co-founder of Honey, sold the company to PayPal for $4 billion.

And he essentially got a free $44 million house, which has now been profiled. It's 16,000 square feet, nine bedrooms in Los Angeles. The coupon king buys again. So how he got this house for $44 million, effectively for free. This is real. So in 2020, he paid $60 million for a 21,000 square foot house in Bel Air. And then just two years later, when the market was ripping, he top ticks it and puts it on the market for $150 million, almost three times the price. And he actually gets the deal done, sells it for 112. So that's a $52 million gain,

pays a little tax maybe, gets the $44 million house for free. Rolls it in. Yeah, I think this is the real story from this is that if you're a founder out there building something like a Chrome extension, which everybody says, Chrome extension, this is silly.

Like this is not a real business. Um, if he had never, if this guy had never built a Chrome extension that he never would have had gotten a free $44 million house. So don't ever let anybody tell you that your idea is small or not worth doing. Um, that brings up, I saw that Grammarly is at like basically 300 million of ARR. Wow. You see this? No. Like, yeah million of ARR. Wow. Did you see this? No.

It's awesome. Yeah, so Chrome extensions. Yeah. If you're at the Hereticon that didn't happen in 2012, it would have been all about Chrome extensions. Probably. Something weird about that. I mean, there... Yeah, it feels fake.

Yeah, the Honey and the Grammarly, those companies, people love to say, oh, AI is going to destroy this or there's going to be some new thing that's not going to work. But people seriously underrate, this is like a Nikita beer point, but people seriously underrate

just good management and a well-run company being valuable even in a little bit of an odd industry that might feel a little fragile. And so I think the Duolingo stock hasn't fallen at all even though everyone's like oh of course you just learn how to speak a different language by talking to chat gpt and it's like yeah part of it's just a distribution thing like i actually am more

bullish on much more bullish on duolingo than grammarly when grammarly feels like okay you're built on top of this browser that actively wants to roll out features that differentiate it from all these other browsers. Yeah. But who knows? I mean, maybe Google gets it wrong and there's just like, it's never properly, it's never properly rolled out,

but congratulations to this week's brother of the week. Let's move on. We almost should get a, something in here. That's like, yeah. Employee of the month, brother of the week,

the handwritten line image that there almost should get something in here that's like. Yeah. Employee of the month, brother of the week. Handwritten line. Image. There is a good tweet in here that I want to pull up, but we should just go through them in like somewhat reverse order. Yeah. Since we have a whole stack here. So let's start with this one by Andreas Larson. He just posted a meme. I bet he saw it somewhere else.

But oh, wait, this is. I know I follow this account Instagram. QS. I just posted a meme. I bet he saw it somewhere else. But oh, wait, this is, I know, I follow this account on Instagram, QS. I forget what it is. It's like quant strategies or something. Oh, really? It's a meme page. It's good. What people think ESG is,

we must save the planet, invest in my fund, here's my money. What ESG actually is, I have created a synthetic securitization so that BlackRock can buy mezzanine tranches of forests in Zimbabwe nobody planned to cut, and large mining groups can declare themselves carbon neutral while using child labor.

Great, great riff on ESG. If that's what ESG is, what is DEI? Just kidding. Don't talk about politics here. I mean, actually, there's a great economic analysis of the problems with ESG from Aswath Damodaran, this finance professor at NYU. And he kind of laid out the like the bear case for ESG and just how it was like kind of misaligned. It had been abused by capitalists, which,

but the question is like now with this, since it's making everyone so much money, are the capitalists going to come around and like, should we be supporting ESG? Yeah, yeah. We should be like, actually, ESG is amazing. Yeah, ESG is interesting. I feel like it never went its way into startups. But like, I feel like there was never really...

Can you imagine if term sheets were getting issued with like ESG baggage attached to them? Like if somehow... Or vice versa. The funds had gotten... Some sort of ESG kicker where like, oh, if it became a meme, like, you know, everyone knows that you can attach like.ai to your B2B SaaS company and double your valuation.

Right. That never really happened in ESG. Just because I think the money that was actually flowing was mostly in the public markets from these funds that like needed to flow and through the ESG scores and stuff. And it was heavily gamed but you couldn't you imagine if if if big lps had gotten pressure from various groups and were like telling their the vcs that they invest in hey if you can get your companies to follow these principles and track it like that's a very dystopian sort of like thing to imagine but what if they were like well we'll give you 25 carry if you can get on any deals that have ESG attached to it.

Like it's, it's scary that it's not that difficult to imagine actually being the case. And then there would have been this whole dynamic of like, Oh, don't work with this fund because like, they're going to force you to like follow like ESG. At the same time, like how hard is it if you're like doing some B2B SaaS company to be like, yeah, we're carbon neutral.

But like the whole Gundo is like being like, yeah, we were putting up solar panels to spend like at we're carbon neutral but like the whole gundo is like being like yeah we're putting up solar panels like you have to spend like at the office because like baggage like what's his name isaiah from valor is like being like yeah like we're working on this nuclear thing but like we have to put up solar panels in the meantime yeah in the meantime or no even worse just like yeah we have to spend like 10 of our fundraisers on like carbon credits you know the you know the thing that actually going back to her at a con i i didn't i didn't talk to her but you remember that girl like four years ago who's going viral for making nuclear energy cool oh yeah isa dope yeah so yeah no she was she was at this one too um i i didn't get to chance to talk to her but uh it's so funny

that's like a perfect example of something that was contrarian. Totally. She was on stage at the first one. Less than four years ago. Yeah. And now there's like a whole suite of companies. There was a bunch of nuclear energy founders there. Yeah.

So I just thought that was cool. Next week, I'm going to emcee a whole nuclear conference. And it's like the least heretical thing. It's all like government people and companies and DCs. There's whole like nuclear conference and it's like the least heretical thing it's all like government people and like companies and dcs and like there's whole funds around yes and stuff she wasn't giving a talk yeah because they need to she accomplished her mission yeah yeah and she can just kind of like move on and that's why we're oriented around capitalism which is the only so if capitalism stopped being a thing we would have nothing to talk about and we would retire the show and commit um but uh so anyways that's great let's move on to the next one uh

rico's revenge says being broke at the book fair as a kid turned me into a monster yeah why was this personal for you i just remember that like yeah it was one of the first book i just remember the book fairs and like honestly so the topic of halloween this is cool so halloween every single year my entire childhood as early as i can remember my parents i would go regular trick-or-treating and then my parents would say pick your 20 favorite pieces of candy you can keep those and the rest of them were going to take and give away in exchange for you going to be able to buy a new book so my parents were very into the library so we rarely bought books but that would be the moment where i would buy like

a fresh brand new book yeah and it was just like the best thing in the world so thank you to my parents for doing that but i do remember being at like the book fair and to be honest like with our kids now you can imagine a book fair is happening you'd be like yeah like go like just buy everything like buy whatever you want like because like parents are just willing to spend money on like education but it just wasn't a part of my like family and there's also like anytime money yeah money's just so emotional right and so like any you have these sort of like intense blood memories around money and like this tweet brought back that yeah there was also that like meme or like study that like the the like

educational achievement in children is correlated with like the number of books in a house yeah growing up which is clearly just correlated with like wealth and like a million other things um but yeah but but but then but then people kind of took that and kind of flipped the correlation around they were like oh if i just buy a bunch of books then my kid will do well which is also probably true but it's just like it became because you're absorbing just like why would we yeah spend seven figures on the wealth of nations yes and it's because you want to absorb that exactly yeah you want to have that even if you're not going to read it you want to be able to absorb it i actually have read the wealth of nations It's a classic. It's a classic. It's a classic. It's one of those things like if you had to,

if you could only have three books, it would be The Bible, Wealth of Nations, and then the book that Justin Maris will eventually write on health. Okay. Just to support the boys. Yeah, of course. Of course.

So. Yeah. It is a fascinating read in that it's, you're watching someone work through the discovery of capitalism essentially. Yeah. And that's fascinating. Yeah.

But most of the actual takeaways you can get much more concisely from just like an econ 101 textbook. Yeah. But it is very cool. Okay. can get much more concisely from just like an econ 101 textbook. But it is very cool. Okay, so let's talk about the Arc browser situation. There was actually someone from Arc there at the party. There's a company called the Arc Browser Company.

They've raised a fair amount of money, over $100 million. Is that right? I thought it was $150. Yeah, they've raised a lot of money. And they have a very, like, you know, hipster kind of aesthetic. They post these high production value videos updating the community on what they're building. And they've built a new browser. So it's a replacement for Chrome or Safari.

And they've applied a number of different design, you know, elements to that. So pin tabs, vertical sidebar spaces. And they recently announced that they're essentially pivoting launching a new product they're going to leave their existing arc browser in kind of maintenance mode so they're not going to like piss off their existing community and then they're going to launch some new things sound like a lot of stuff is going to be ai based um and they're trying to like get through that transition of being like, okay, we're going to pivot to AI, but let's not make it like too dramatic. And so, uh,

astral wave and Rick writes, uh, I don't fully buy the reason that pin tabs, vertical sidebar and spaces are too complicated for normies. We live in a world where even mainstream browsers, Safari and edge have sidebar tabs, collections, sync to tabs,

pin tabs. Heck Chrome has had pin tabs since a decade ago. I use pin tabs in Chrome. It's fine. I think the reason Arc feels complicated, honestly, is that they're a bit too focused on that circa 2010s hipster aesthetic and gaudy visual design that gets in the way of usability. So do you buy this?

Do you use a good take? Generally, I'm extremely pro-Arc and the browser company because I'm not an investor, but I'm generally like in favor of people taking on these sort of like commoditized products and categories other thing is that it's really difficult to compete with platform companies that are trillion dollar companies that are giving away the product for free. And pre-installing it. Yeah, pre-installing it. So they have the distribution. Google doesn't care if Chrome loses money forever, right?

They'll spend billions of dollars on it. Apple, on the other hand, like needs to have like an installed browser and they don't care how much it costs to run and they're pretty pretty good products i think like them trying to solve they basically were trying to solve like the tabs issue like everybody has too many tabs open and for me i actually this this sounds it's gonna sound bad but i've never i never installed arc because i got fatigue around these sort of like new note taking type things where I'm just like, no, like Chrome's pretty good.

I even think Safari is pretty good. I alternate between the two on my phone. It's just like I don't really think about it. is that they got really interested in AI, as everybody did, realized that there's much more ability to create a viral consumer product with hundreds of millions or hopefully billions of users doing that. And they are really well-suited

to go try to tackle that problem. Now, the hard thing is that they're a really big company now, which most VCs, I would say contrarian VCs would say like companies over 10 people can't innovate or whatever and like do they need this like really massive team but i think the issue that they ran into is they create a product that a small group of people really really love and they're in this position where they cannot they can't just they really should kill the product probably or like spin it out but then it puts them in a position where they say like well why do we why do why are we worth 500 million dollars if we only if we don't have a product yet or we don't have a live product and so i think it

would have been cool if they like spun it out and made it open source and like let the community keep building on it or something like that um but uh but yeah now they're kind of in this weird position but i'm super excited for their like the product coming up devon devon gave me like a little bit of a preview on on what it is it's gonna be awesome uh they they they like clearly build great products now it's finding that like they do there are they they they raise money like with the understanding that they needed to build something with 100 million plus users otherwise they weren't gonna like live up to the expectations that they set yeah it's tough to sell a browser no i'm just not a lot of hyperscalers need one they all have one yeah no i'm just saying give it away to the community like that might be better yeah yeah or

just yeah like spin it out as in like hey we're not because now the thing is like they're going to have this, like, competing thing where their power users that love the brand are going to be, like, why aren't you maintaining this? Or, like, why aren't you adding to it? And, like, there's, like, the, I don't know, some amount of entropy that is going to happen naturally when, like, the whole team is focused on the new thing. And then, like, it's, like, one designer and, like, a few engineers that are running a browser and the tough thing is like they be on that team yeah the tough thing is this is coming off them having like a pretty big security vulnerability from like a month ago that like they got a lot of heat for but i think the heart that what this comes down to is if you do a lot of things really well and you have a lot of attention uh and you're relevant to a lot of people which a browser is everybody has an opinion a lot of people like see like a really well-produced video and are just like i want to like hate on this right um and so anyways i'm rooting for the

browser company uh i'm rooting for arc and uh well i guess i'm not i'm not i'm not rooting for arc anymore because i don't you know this doesn't they don't even want to take it anywhere. It's going to arc. I do wonder about, uh, like what was like a design focus, like the right go to market for this, like the other browser that's done, I think reasonably well as brave. Yeah. But brave is focused on like these crypto micro payments and they have this whole like economic model that you could be very like, Oh's just a crypto ponzi thing but like at least like if it works there will be some

sort of like incentivization there it's kind of like the creator payouts for for x where you're you know ostensibly like paying to use the browser and then when you visit a website if they're on your team they get paid for every time you visit and then and then they have an incentive to actually put up a banner like hey stop reading my website in chrome you should read my website in brave because i'll get paid for that and so you have some sort of distribution um like economy whereas if it's just like really cool yeah it can be cool and people can say oh what's that oh that looks really nice like it can kind of go viral but it's just word of mouth. And that's really, really hard to scale

into like the normie crossing the chasm is going to be really, really difficult. Anyway, let's move on to Nicole Wiscoff, Wiscoff Ventures. Founder shuts down company that never really got off the ground. Emails investors, you are welcome to invest

in whatever I build next on a $100 million post money safe. Sometimes I hate it here. She got almost a thousand likes on that. Uh, I, the biggest problem is a hundred mils too low, right? Yeah. I mean, I know she seems to back really great companies. So knowing the kind of caliber that she looks for, I don't think it would be absurd to pay a hundred million posts for whatever they, whatever they do next. I think what I, I just want more details to be honest. I'd love to see like,

did he send the like filled out safe? Like was it already signed on his side? And he's just like, here's wire instructions, like countersign. I mean, a lot of founders try and mog investors when things are going well.

Yeah. Takes a special breed of founder to try and mog investors when things are going poorly. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. I talked to a founder recently that had like two very high profile failures in like a very specific

category. And he was going back for a third company in the same category. And I wanted to, I didn't ultimately get there on investing, investing uh just from like nothing to do with him or the category just like talked with some people that i knew and they said like you know but just the fact that he was like back to back these sort of like big basically blow ups and was like yeah i'm going back again like just like you want to support that guy right like i mean under under discussed parker conrad uh rippling is his third company not his second company and the first the first one was a little bit adjacent it was a i think it was like a fintech company but it was still like kind of in that same realm there's something for like charts and visualizations for like

financial stuff and that company he left and it actually is still going on like it's it's still alive it's not like a phenomenal company but like yeah and it's just like i talked to a big investor in the firm or in rippling and was just like he can't like i don't know if he could build anything outside of this but he's just like destined to do this that'd be a weird thing like working at the first company watching the third company and you're just like like your your company hasn't your shares haven't been marked up in like three years and you just see rippling with like the 12 billion dollar valuation you're just like yeah well i mean a lot of people moved over and some people didn't and that was like a big well the real hero's journey is that he buys back the first company right yeah and like merges it into rippling because rippling is the last sass you ever need

there's been a couple examples of that i i don't want to like say it because i don't think the deal's done but there's like a big yc founder who had a company that blew up and the early team is like going to go back and buy the ip and like you know use it for something else which i think is really really cool i think there's something about like, like owning your, your owning your child or your baby and like, just like keeping, keeping working at it and having another shot on goal. If it's like an interesting name or an interesting.com or like it'll have some sort of cachet. I mean, we got to talk about getting party around once, uh, once Chamath is head of the SEC, you should just be

able to text anyone in america i i do you want to buy shares in my company we gotta get rid of all the all the uh what is it accredited investor laws we gotta get rid of those i didn't even think about like sax gets a role obviously he's, well, I got to support the boys. The besties. He gets Chamath, SEC. Yeah. And then it's just like a new American renaissance. J-Cal press secretary.

Let's go. Let's go. He's so good. The White House verticalizes podcasts. Yes. Podcasts. You know, we got to break out like. The DOP, the department of podcasting it's

if jcal was running the white house media strategy it'd be heavily monetized yeah that that would be like it's like secretary of state it's kind of like a dream like imagine like yeah white house press secretary is up there and they're doing podcast ad reads between the announcements for like obviously big multinational companies like why not why not just the the bond issuances like the government sells debt so it's like hey did you know the 30 year is that four percent you want to buy some like brought to you by t-bills t-bills i mean they used to do that like during the war there's like posters and essentially advertisements for government bonds now it's all you know distributed through like the war, there's like posters and essentially advertisements for government bonds. Now it's all,

you know, distributed through like the banks and it's very abstract, but it used to be very much like going direct to like the American average American citizen. Exactly. Yeah. Because you just wanted everyone to chip in and buy war bonds. Yeah.

Um, it's great. Uh, but yeah, that's probably the future of party round is specifically those, those political texts. So you know how you get those, those texts from politicians like every two hours on your phone now and you can't opt out of them i don't know why you don't get me i don't get any text

is that just because you've never voted no no i have i i like i i i've been trying to figure it out because you're so extreme politically that they're just like, Oh, we can't turn this guy to waste of money. There's no anarchy candidate. No, I don't. I, I, I haven't got a political text. Wow. But I have made, I have made efforts to like go and like, you can do those like blanket opt out of like, Oh, remove my, remove my info from this. Yeah. But, but that's where we need to get with like, you know, fundraising.

It just needs to be like okay i'm hiring a firm to spam my roll-up vehicle to 10 million americans yeah yeah send out send out the vibe reel that went viral on twitter yeah let everyone know i'm building ai for dogs let's get some money in there general solicitation this is the future there's a couple companies that like figured out how to do that i've seen some instagram ads for like crowdfunding efforts and i'm like yeah yeah okay yeah my friends uh my friends run the biggest agency for advertising crowdfunds in the world um shout out john the jobs Tyler yeah yeah the job yeah and it's like what it's an amazing like thing uh you know sort of like example of capitalism where companies figured

out if you spend a dollar on facebook you can drive ten dollars of investment so why would you not just do that it's like an infinite money glitch basically i mean it's a the the ratio of uh cost to capital raise is probably right in line with like big regular yeah yeah like if you take a company public you're probably paying some massive fee but you're giving an opportunity for everyday americans to you know earn real yield exactly real alpha exactly with uh you know the next great robotics company let's move on to apple uh do you have apple intelligence on your phone yet it's like almost here right you can install it if you go to beta but you don't have but you don't have it. I don't have it yet. I don't have it yet either. Um, I, I used to install the betas and they're always like kind of, kind of sketchy. So I just wait. But, uh,

Schmidt writes, uh, my mom, that hike almost killed me. Apple's AI summary attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in Redlands and palm springs has 14 million views i predicted this was going to happen on a podcast and didn't you also say you think you think a lot of these are i think a lot of these are fake and i think a lot of these are photoshopped i don't know that this one is um but obviously we know llm's hallucinate and they get things wrong and they're rough but that is apple that is not apple's that was a good take that is not Apple's. Yeah, that was a good take. That is not Apple's brand. Like I was talking to a really, really big filmmaker in Hollywood and he was predicting that Apple TV would not be successful. He works with like HBO and Netflix and stuff.

And it is specifically because Apple's brand is. Perfection. Perfection. Everything needs to look perfect. And so that's not Hollywood. Hollywood is almost more like venture capital where there's going to be some dogs even the best and you can't you can't have everything be guaranteed because it's art yeah not engineering and so uh the ai thing has been really really

difficult for apple in my opinion because they're they're two years behind ChatGPT. The day ChatGPT came out, they should have ripped out Siri and had an LLM replace it in terms of just what consumers would want. At one point, I actually had a macro on my phone where instead of saying, hey, Siri, I could say, hey, ChatGPT, and it would take a shortcut and route it into ChatGPT.

It was slow. It didn't really work, but that's essentially what they're doing now but they're still going to have problems and maybe that's why they did the the open ai partnership just because like if they have some really bad hallucinations they and they need to like respond they can be like oh this is a partner we switch partners they're the scapegoat like we can move on to something else hey we revamped it again like i think that i think the right frame of mind when you're interacting with an LLM

is that it is a little sloppy. And as long as everyone goes into it. It's like a human. Yeah, it's a human. It's a human assistant that might get something wrong. Or just like when you're online and you're scrolling a feed, you kind of know that there's going to be slop.

There's going to be jokes. There's going to be fake news. And so you just kind of go into that and you're not rattled. The issue is, unlike an executive assistant, you can't berate. You can't berate Apple intelligence, right? If your EA makes a mistake, you can get on the phone and scream at them for like 20 minutes and then hang up. EA?

What's an EA? Executive assistant. Is that like a secretary? Yeah, it's like a secretary. Okay. You can't call up apple intelligence you know it's going to be a robo call and berating a rope you know an ai like voice bot is not going to feel the same maybe that would be a good like a instead of an ai girlfriend it's just like an ai that you

can practice berating so you get better at just like really give yeah because those moments don't come up that much they don't but when you're ready you need to be able to better at just like really giving some of the business. Yeah, because those moments don't come up that much. They don't. But when you're ready, you need to be able to scream at someone. Like if you're raising for your second company after everything failed, you're going to have to get on the phone with all your VCs and tell them that they don't know anything. Yeah, like look at Jeremy Gaffon, right? He was here. We got to spend some quality time with him over the last few days.

And very, very calm guy. But he's from the world of finance. He goes to tech conferences, but it's like a wolf in sheep's clothing. He's clearly, you know, and the classic behavior in finance is that if something bad happens, you scream and yell. The funny thing is I can't imagine jeremy yelling at somebody like intensely but i know he's gonna have to do it he needs to get practice reps and so he needs to get his reps in so if i was an indie hacker right now i'd be creating like a prosumer yeah like beration as if that's a word practice application yeah yeah it gives you a score at the end like how intimidated

was the ai yeah yeah i don't think you're gonna get a million did you go too far or do where you dialed in perfectly yeah yeah you don't just want to be to get a million users. Did you go too far? Or were you dialed in perfectly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you don't just want to be like, you know, a string of racial epithets. It's like it had a feature where like HR joins a call. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, dial it back. Dial it back. Okay, dial it back.

But, you know, you got your point across. But, yeah, I think it'll be good. I think Apple will eventually dial it in. I mean, the tech is just so good at this point. It's like really easy. And they have a bunch of interesting ways to integrate with all the data in your phone. So you'll just be able to talk to siri more and it's so it's so overdue because siri's been so bad like siri i always ask if the weather maybe this feature is

like this feature is silly like i would turn it off if i had it because like text should be text should be short yeah i shouldn't well i think it's valuable in the sense that like the the real use is that the ai should be able. So right now, if you want to get rid of this political text, you can go into your iMessage and say, but it's all hard coded. So you can say, if I don't have the number saved, put it in a different folder, like a junk folder. But then you miss two factor codes. You miss like things from doctors and stuff. Yeah, well, the issue I'm talking more about.

I could actually go to the AI and say like, if it's a text just thrown in a different sorting is cool yeah summarization is not cool sure if nancy pelosi texts me and and the reddit stocks going up and she says go long soy go long that's all these other things but then if the ai politicians if you're gonna text me every single day, throw a stock tip in. There you go. Throw a stock tip in and then I'll be like, well, yeah, okay. So you told me to go into... Give me your Polymarket coupon code. You told me that you're going to make oil great again and you're going to drill baby drill. And so you told me to buy Exxon. I doubled my money. Sure, I'll give you a 10% cut, politicians.

That should be how politicians raise money. Exactly. You should give a stock tip and then monetize it by saying hey if it works out give me my cut some wheels yeah yeah come on that is this is that is how you drive american everyone would be like i can't wait for the next text yeah the senators and various politicians would be focused on yeah seeking alpha yeah hedge funds would be setting up oh how can we get the text first we don't want to be well no the issue is hedge funds are going and paying off politicians direct they're going direct to the stock tips they're getting their tax over signal yeah and we're we're just stuck with the sms's yeah yeah plebs anyways that's a brutal um you see vivek ramaswamy uh he's now the second

largest holder and shareholder in buzzfeed and he posted a vlog of him in my spec buzzfeed what really yeah cool great guy um uh so he he posted a vlog of him going to buzzfeed headquarters and so uh george here summarized it he said this is so ruthless the vet got on his plane and went in flip-flops and shorts uh flew to california went into the buzzfeed headquarters and handed them a list of conservatives to hire. It's kind of a funny thing to do. They had no choice but to listen because he's one of their new owners. He's now their second largest outside shareholder.

Maybe he'll buy the whole thing and turn it into a non-woke organization. This is how we win the culture war. So I can completely disagree with that. I don't think anti-woke BuzzFeed is very good. I do think the thing that's interesting about that is that Bezos was in the news this last week for saying like one obviously the Washington Post not endorsing a presidential candidate to being like you need to hire some conservatives when I see these things I'm like why like we need to have media companies like sort of we'll never do this but other media companies should have to label are we hyper politicized or

are we a news source right because like when i'm when i'm seeing that that it's just like i don't know it just feels like newspapers have this legacy newspapers have this like sort of you know permanent uh label of being able to be arbiters of truth, right? And so, but if they're hyper-politicized, then, like, the truth is going to get kind of lost in that. I was looking at the New York Times endorsements. Since 1960, they have endorsed every single Democratic presidential nominee. Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton.

It's just like, you know. You got to respect the conviction. I mean, at least you know like where they stand, I guess. Yeah. But it's just odd that like you would never be like, hey, actually, we switched around this time. We're mixing it up. Do we need to put journalists in our enemies bucket or that would be too political? I don't know.

Maybe. I like journalists. Yeah. I like them far away. Depends. Some of them are great. Some of them, I'm sure, are good people. But this Vivek thing is interesting

not because of what he's doing with BuzzFeed. I mean, I hope it works out. I hope he makes a ton of money. But it's because did you actually watch the vlog of him going and doing this? That was interesting because I have this theory that like Andrew Yang was the first presidential nominee to go on Rogan. Bernie Sanders went on, Tulsi Gabbard went on.

and so there were like the fringe candidates that were polling very low had to go on Rogan in 2016 in that cycle and then in this cycle the all the major party candidates are doing these huge uh huge podcasts meanwhile the the more like fringe candidates like i mean that's like not running right now but he's clearly gonna like gear up for more politics stuff in the future and i think having a having a uh a candidate that does does vlogs and direct video and actually owns their own media and puts stuff out, I think that will be the future.

Why is there no... It's actually insane that Trump... Even Trump doesn't vlog. He's putting out... And Kamala puts out these little short videos. I want UFC... Have you ever seen UFC Embedded, which is the week prior to a fight?

They vlog all the fighters, and it's the most engaging content. That will 100% be the future. And you can make it narrative driven, so it's very easy for a political candidate to make it look like, oh, so much momentum building in a campaign.

Politics is more about likability than policy. 100%. With the whole RFK endorsing trump thing is like this paraso this is what senra always talks about the value of podcasting if you're in business is like he's developed like a real friendship it's a one-way friendship with millions of people yeah right yeah and so if i'm shocked that a political high profile political candidate hasn't used the vlog format or even having their own podcast or their own podcast, like with the RFK Trump

endorsement, like they both got on stage at a rally and both, you know, gave their talking points and gave independent speeches. I think that that would honestly do better if it was like the Donald Trump podcast, RFK is the guest and, and they're just having a conversation about health. Yeah. And so you're just watching, you're just in the room with them, watching them have a conversation or it's like JD and someone who,

you know, knows about like, you know, industrialization and JD is like, look, I don't know if this guy's going to be in the cabinet, but he's a buddy and we're going to have a conversation about how we actually like revitalize the Rust Belt.

Like something that he cares about a lot. Instead of him having to go to Joe Rogangan and joe rogan being or you know or com like going to uh yeah and it's and it's a way to it's a way to stay active like over the last couple weeks i think people have been like really hyper fixating on what did this candidate do today and the thing with the podcast is like we can record i, I mean, for us, we, we publish live effectively, like within, you know, a couple hours of recording, but other candidates could save up a bank of content and put it out when they like wake up and they're feeling a little tired and they don't want to hit the campaign trail. Um, exactly. I don't tip politicians or I don't donate to politicians hit the campaign trail

should we do uh this one mike dudas says pump.fund is the fastest company in tech in history to 100 million dollars in revenue i feel like there's a new company that claims this like every day well so the cool thing with this company is you can look on chain and verify that that's happening like actual like dollars in the wallet because it's the reason that i give me the overview like what is pumped out fun it's like solana it's a so basically historically people would make meme coins and they'd have to combine all these different things and they were actually writing code yeah they were always like erc20 like forking projects so this is yeah it was like a sass product everything this This is like Shopify for creating a meme coin.

Okay, got it. That's the way to, it's Shopify for meme. It's Shopify for meme coins. It's basically Shopify for memes because it just allows anything happens. And there's a meme coin, like the Joe Biden trash coin or like, yeah, yeah. So like there's one for like Mudang, the hippo or whatever.

And so the thing that's crazy about this is that one, they made it, they built the perfect product to enable crypto speculation because I think I, I haven't used it, but I think you can actually invest on the platform too. So it's like two sided marketplace like Shopify. So you can create it. People can invest. It actually is good for consumers because it's like easy. they like help uh it's creating more standardized yeah what you know sort of underlying structures well it's like it's you're still likely you could still get rugged very easily if people just decide that this means not hot because the coins not getting hacked as much yeah less less hacked yeah there's like the meme coins were historic historically extremely complicated yeah yeah so if you're on a Shopify site, the product might be bad, but you're not going to get your credit card information stolen.

Yeah. Because the credit card information is with Shopify. Shopify is reliable. Now the product might be white labeled and junk, but at least you know that your credit card information didn't get leaked. So what's interesting about this is what... I think this could be a company where they end up returning billions of dollars to investors without any liquidity event

or through like stock buybacks or something like that or just distributions because I don't know any company that could buy this because it's in such a- Coinbase or something, right? Well, yeah, but it's in such a regulatory like gray area of like you're creating the government like the sec wants to say that these are securities and like every crypto

company has had to like fight back and like make their case like this isn't a security and so i just don't think you're going to see like goldman sachs like buy a company like this like pump dot fun um but they're making so much revenue buy or underwrite like would they would they not even touch it from an underwriting perspective if they want to take the company public i don't know if this company could be public because it's got so much regulatory baggage right maybe in a trump uh administration it could go public yeah because like he's launching like his own meme token but but yeah i think this is one of those things like they might end up returning like billions of dollars to their vcs and i don't think they raise that much money i

don't know how much they raise but like i think it's like under 10 million dollars and they're just doing really well and they could just distribute it out to vcs um like mike and i'm sure it'll be a great return but i think this is you're distributing like tokens that are liquid this is yeah this is such a amazing example of a product with like really good execution but in hindsight it's like why didn't this exist in 2020 or 2021 like it's just like the most obvious thing like shopify for me it just seems like there yeah there weren't that many like actual builders like the ratio of like scammers but even but even yeah even before this product was created like this probably increased the number of tokens by like an order of magnitude yeah totally and even before that there was like hundreds hundred thousand per day yeah something something absurd right

because the cost to create them is low fascinating i like i like how this guy got his little bucky house. I don't even know who this guy is. Yeah, yeah. That was just like a response. Wow. I love it. So Peter Levels, the indie hacker extraordinaire, says, where do I start with robotics?

I want to code and build my own robots at home for fun with the potential for world domination. And Matt bogus, Matt V says the raw volume of software engineers who have asked this exact question in the last 20 days is insane. So all software engineers are pivoting to robotics apparently. Yeah. I think what's interesting here is that there's going to be a bunch of like really,

the thing about indie stuff is that it's oftentimes like could have been fundable but wasn't oftentimes it's just like unfundable like it's just like weird like some like clearly very small tam um the thing that's interesting here is like it it will be dependent on how cheap robotics get which i think everybody thinks like robots are going to continue to like get cheaper and cheaper but like right now it's expensive like the robotics company i'm involved with deterrence like hundreds of thousands of dollars like we're going to need like millions of dollars worth of robots over time so it's not like something you can just kind of like i don't i'm i'm sort of like very for the trend but sort of like i'm not wouldn't go super long on it just because of the part of the nature of like,

I don't know. I think, I think it could be like, you know, it's probably like a decade plus. There were a couple like kind of cheaper open source robotics platforms, like, like Arduino,

Arduino, but you could also like get like a Roomba and like open it, like a, like a hack it. And then you, and then you can just like have a draw. The death Roomba that said Roomba with a Glock attached to it it's like just patrols your house and I know Boston Dynamics does sell the dog for like I think it's under 10k it's like

around there so it's like we should get a dog yeah that brings us you can also rent those but those are much more close but if we had a dog that could go to the fridge and bring you a beer probably with the arm yeah yeah good and then uh george hotz has a has a it's basically like two wheels and like a stick and it's like the comma body and then you can and then so you can like write code for it to like do stuff but it's very limited it's just like it's just two wheels and it balances like it's like a segue basically um uh but yeah i mean it's it's always hard with that it's like these should be at like every single hackathon so like the next generation of like college hackers can like try a bunch of different stuff even if it's like really junky um my um my dad as a teacher ran this thing called

project make which was basically like woodshops, woodshop meets robotics meets like aerospace, aerospace, and just like hacking. Yeah. And so he had at, at his school, he had this like warehouse that was just filled with like robots and Arduinos and raspberry pies.

I think that's kind of like starting to happen in, you know, in high schools, which is very American. Yeah. Right. Innovation is American. Yeah.

It's always hard to tell, like, where the real value will be. Like, even if it's like, okay, you had, if Waymo had an open API, like, what would you do with that? You know, it's like people really just want the one thing. I'm excited to see more, like, I think, like, Nat Freeman tweeted out, like, I want, like, not a leaf blower, but, like, a little robot to, like, go. Somebody built it.

Yeah, yeah, to, like, pick up the leaves. And, like, I'm so for that like leaf blowers we should add it can we add then can we add this enemies lift like leaf blowers because like i've lived in places where like leaf blowers were just like i'm like so constant insane like not only is it loud but like you're blowing particles like everywhere into my yard and, uh, they're hitting my window. Like I'm, I'm going to go postal. Uh, well,

this one's related. Uh, yeah. Xene, uh, rights. We need more. We really need more software engineers to enter fields that are very easy,

like electrical engineering and mechatronics. We can bring so much fresh perspective with our relatively high degree of skill compared to them that's like i love it perfectly intellectual rage bait yeah so good three thousand likes of course three thousand likes that poor person uh probably had like a thousand engineers in their dms just being like you are the world's biggest idiot yeah yeah everyone who's an electrical engineer is like, come on,

dude. But, uh, it's great. Great, great, great. But yeah,

I mean, I, I, I do think though that there should be more, uh, like intellectual flexibility between the disciplines, especially with like, uh,

just how easy LLMs translating between different, uh, languages will be. So it's like, Oh yeah, there's some sort of like little bit trickier, lower level language that you need to learn. But now you can just write Python code and the LLM can like transform it into whatever very quickly.

So there's like there's like a seed of like truth there, even though it's a great bait post. Let's go to this Will tweet. Absolute banger. 4K likes. Less than a day ago. Did he really post this at 6.50 a.m. on Halloween? Was he up that late or up that early? Maybe this is an East Coast, West Coast thing.

That's a good question. I don't know. Ben would have screenshotted it. I think he just posts in the middle of the night. He just wakes up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Divine insight. No, but I think I'm going to guess that it was 952 in miami

okay so will says the real measure of wealth is how many problems you can solve by calling one of your guys yeah it's great it's very real this is this is the phone i think i think like jeremy may have brought this up like at senro's event but um but yeah, but yeah, like it's about, everybody's like, Oh, I have like my car guy. I have like a barber is like a form of a guy, you know, like a hair guy I've got as you get down, it's like, Oh, I have like the stylist or I've got watch guy, or I have this, you know, specific type of lawyer, feng shui. I have a feng shui guy. Um, and you know, at heretic on the conversation is more like, who's your antichrist guy? Right. And who's your aliens guy? Who's your aliens guy? Who's your terraforming guy? If you need to terraform, who's your first call? Like a level of wealth, you have a guy like instead of, and instead of door dash,

you have a personal chef. Instead of Uber, you have a personal driver. Instead of United Airlines app, you have a private plane pilot or two of them since you always have to have to flying. sorry, I had to make a note.

I needed to text back my feng shui guy. Oh, you do. That's great. Uh, feng shui is real. We'll do a deep dive on it soon. Um, so there's news and tech crunch that dropbox is laying off 20 of its staff uh and packy mccormick writes

you're laughing but one out of every 17 americans just lost their job which is hilarious because he's thinking of docu sign yeah not dropbox i'm sure Dropbox has a lot of employees, but it's nowhere near what... Dropbox slander. What? That's the most attention Dropbox has gotten. Yeah. And it's so funny they got 8K likes and a million views because it's wrong, but it's kind of spiritually correct.

And then it's like, okay, no one really knows. But Dropbox is definitely going through a change because Drew Houston is doing videos and going direct. I've actually gotten this from a few people. Or he just working with lulu no no lulu has like straight up created like a zeitgeist shift even in like public company tech ceos i've gotten texts from a few uh yeah so here's here's the thing so lulu was at hereticon we just got to spend some quality time uh it's interesting because like she's she's done the public market stuff right she's currently on shopify's board okay yeah i didn't even know that

um and she and she was like the the you know the comms person on the activision blizzard and microsoft yeah exactly but then she's also like watching like a bunch of yeah she's working with these like really hot seed stage companies helping them do it but like is the real is that a waste of time when she could turn a 20 billion dollar company into a 21 billion dollar company like imagine if she goes turns around boeing yeah like that would be crazy yeah and like probably more value creation than like getting some seed stage company yeah that's like charity work it is yeah that should be her pro bono work it is that should be her pro bono work yeah yeah she should be like yeah she should literally have her charity division yeah

um but yeah it's uh get uh gabby who's also uh gabby gulper whenever they're that's gonna end up being like a crazy i don't know if it's gonna be a mafia or just like a generational firm yeah they keep creating this orbit. Yeah, one of those firms that's like behind the scenes. Yeah, and I guess like to go back to Will's tweet, like a guy is not necessarily a guy. It's spiritually like,

you know, it's a spiritual. There's like a meme like Call Lulu if there's a hit piece that's coming out or you have a comms crisis. Like there's really only one person. And if you have someone that can actually solve your problem, that's really valuable.

Yeah, and if you think about heretic on the highest percentage like any like tech conference the highest percentage of people that have had have been doxxed or had a hit piece against them everyone's like yeah it's like half the people everyone yeah but yeah um yeah it's fascinating seeing like the the like the texts that are getting passed around from like oh this tech ceo who is running a public company uh i'll get a text from someone being like what podcast do you think they should go on like they want they want to they want to do the zuck playbook now yeah and it's like they're running like a 20 billion dollar public company and they're just like they're just getting pilled on this now and it's like it's been like what two years since like

all these people started going on lax and rogan and i'm like okay well like here's the list you gotta little bro them a little bit yeah dude you're two percent of the size of meta like but i think it's doable for some of these people no interesting a lot of them are interesting they've just been beaten down by like the the hr apparatchiks yeah it's actually a way to like you know kind of like pull up the ladder for yeah for these public company ceos being like no no more startup founders on like these big podcasts only like real ballers yeah i mean the the guy that you're not trading the the guy that i'm thinking of runs like a like a massive public tech company um and there was a hit piece on him younger when he was like coming up because i mean he was already like a billionaire and he

was from a very wealthy family but he bought like a m, a McLaren or, like, a Ferrari or something. And they were, like, using that as evidence of, like, him, like, I don't even know, like, being materialist or something or being a capitalist. Like, it didn't make any sense. Stimulating the economy. And you know that his takeaway from, like, his comms team was, like, if you're going to do something nice, like, make sure there's no cameras there. Like, the press cannot know that you went on a boat or like went on a vacation. And, but what's interesting is that like,

if he actually like now Zuck is like, yes, I have a boat that follows, I have one boat that follows me while I'm surfing so it can take videos of me. Like, yeah, I show up to UFC through the back entrance because I'm such a VIP. And Zuck just realized that like, wait, actually like wealth is cool.

And he's just authentic about it and so uh if if the public company ceo that's been like beaten down can actually and that's what lulu does a lot of times just coaching i don't know if you're referencing but the ceo from a wealthy family like it's just okay to own it the only way that you could legitimately get criticism is if he tries to go with a story of like i i like grew up exactly yeah just don't be fake just don't be fake authenticity wins exactly exactly but but you know the the the comms teams of the 2010s their entire mandate was to destroy authenticity yeah and and and hide as much as possible which is just very unsustainable arguably leads to the hit piece exactly because people smell that

like oh there's something off here like this person's being cagey and so like there must be a bigger story here when really it's just like no the person like created a lot of shareholder value created a lot of consumer surplus consumers love the product they're making money and they're enjoying it and that's great wouldn't if they become a car guy that's great company or if they become a hype beast fashion guy like that's great too like it's become a car guy, that's great. Or if they become a hype beast fashion guy, like that's great too. Like it's fine. Uh, yeah, very silly, but I hope he, I hope he breaks through and gets out of his shell and does some cool stuff. Cause, uh, I've been a fan of his for a long time, so be good. Um, uh, this, we, we've had signal. We've reacted to this guy a few times now. Um, I don't even, honestly, is it testament to him crushing

the X algo? Cause I don't know if I follow. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't even honestly is a testament to him crushing the ex-algo because i don't know if i follow i don't know i mean yeah i don't know but uh most great founders are after vengeance in the form of success they have been wronged in some way either by being passed up ignored or overruled by people that they feel are inferior to them the possibility that somewhere the person who fucked you will potentially read a headline where you succeed beyond belief is better than sex. It's kind of like a more aggressive, like cold grudges take. Yeah. The example that pops into mind immediately is Palmer.

Obviously. But like Parker Conrad is the same thing. And like, yeah, if you're Jason, it's funny. It's the all in guys. You know, we don't have anything against all in. We just have things against under-monetized. Well, I mean, we don't like that they don't advertise. No, it's more of like we're against under-monetized.

Let's not pull punches here. Exactly. We're against under-monetized podcasts. Generally. We're not against all-in. Yeah, yeah. But David and Jason having to watch Palmer and Parker Conrad both build these deca-corns. Deca-corns, like the most like important company in sass craft is a

sass focus investor and the most important company potentially in the 21st century in america and or all yeah that's gotta hurt so like yeah like i think this is probably real and i and i think that palmer and Parker, like they're, they know that they're only like 5% through the mission, but they're like, I'm sure they, they appreciate the headlines. Well,

yeah. I mean, to your point about the 5% through the, through the mission, I, I wonder if the motivation dies down once you have like total cultural victory over your, you know,

nemesis, because at this point it's like, it's like the, the, the Palmer viral clip of him at all in like the trashing Jason, like that goes viral like once every six months and gets like millions of views. Like it's like,

it's not like it's, it's widely accepted that like Palmer has won that beef. And so I wonder if he needs a new Jason arguably doesn't accept it. Yeah. Otherwise he wouldn't keep poking the bear. That's good. I mean, maybe he needs to keep doing it doesn't accept it yeah yeah otherwise he wouldn't keep poking the bear that's good I mean maybe he needs to keep doing it because we got to keep Palmer motivated we got we got to keep it's good for him if it's good for Palmer it's good for America exactly yeah Palmer's like I could take off this weekend but you know I could play more uh D&D

I don't think I got I got to get on the grind because I got to keep proving that I'm better. It would be since Parker and Palmer are both P names, strong. Since they're both billionaires, we'll eventually allow them to call in to the Polycom. But yeah, I don't think I would be shocked if they were like, yes, spite was the only reason. It's more like I want to. Parker wanted to revolutionize SAS. Palmer wanted to build the most advanced weapon systems in the world and like there's some like product there has to be some product yeah yeah whenever i hear palmer talk about it it's it seems like a lot of the like the reason he gives that talk is is because he feels like there are dozens of founders who

were destroyed and didn't get the opportunity that he did. And so he wants to like kind of do a cultural reset there, which I think is very valuable. So I think his, his victory lap is less for him and it's more for the community. Yeah. It's good. Let's go to Tariq Mansour,

who says he posts a screenshot from what looks like WhatsApp. It looks like an investor said, you should receive $12.4 million today. 5.4 from Neo and 7 million from me personally. I've already sent in the wire requests. We can figure out the terms later. Go, go, go. And he's posted with a comment. It's in times like these that investors show their true nature. Ali Pertovi and Neo have just redefined the term conviction. Why do you like this? I like it because it's great for Google and meta shareholders because I'm sure a large part of that $12.4 million

was immediately dumped into the ad platforms, right? I actually don't know what he's building. This is CalSheet. This is a competitor to... Oh, really? No way. Okay, yeah. So the reason... They also advertise on podcasts.

The reason for the speed was because it's an election betting marketplace. Makes sense. And the election is coming up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The reason for the speed was because it's an election betting marketplace. Makes sense. And the election is coming up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they probably just wanted to spend a lot of money on ads. Otherwise, why the $12.4 million with no terms? So anyways, honestly, props to the Neo guy. And yeah, I hope they're able to agree on terms,

you know, mutually agreeable terms. Uh, but, but yeah, it's kind of like, it's kind of like crazy because what's, I don't know the guy's full name are upper Toby. I think it's Allie, Allie, Allie upper Toby. Um, Allie part Toby, Allie part Toby. Yeah. But like, that's either going to be like something that each of them like scrub from like their Twitter or it's going to be like framed in his office at the fund about like conviction it's it's long tail it does feel like it does feel like a highly I don't know if people are going to be betting on uh you know sort of like state and like localized elections to the same degree as the presidential election

i would have imagined like the volume dropped significantly yep but it'll either be a legendary investment um it's very binary legendary investment or like that guy is going to be like a month from now being like what was i thinking but i'm sure their metrics are insane right yeah i'm sure everything's ripping it's great yeah one thing I was thinking on that note, on the topic of election betting markets is what happens if the election results are contested by either side? Like, are the funds released when the winner is announced?

Or is like PolyMarket and these other platforms going to have to hold funds until the person is actually like yeah i don't think it's as much of an issue as you think because there's a lot of liquidity in the market so what happens is like i don't i don't know if polymarket had the 2020 election on there but let's say that they did like obviously january 6th happened the transfer of power power happened on January 20th. But the election was like up in the air the night of. A few days later, it was like being called by like CNN

and Fox and all of that. Then there was a lot of chaos and discussion. But through that time, like let's say we just re-ran the 2020 election where it was like in question. Well, throughout the 2020 election where it was like in question well throughout the 2020 process even on january 5th or january 7th it would it would be at 99 percent biden so you could sell your biden shares for 99 cents or or you could be buying trump very cool yeah so so there's still

liquidity and i think the actual like payout mechanism is less relevant or it's not as critical. Maybe this investor is thinking, we're going to make millions and millions of dollars in fees over the next. We just want to be super capitalized so we can outspend. And so even if there's like a battle, like it's like you have two full months before the certification and then the transfer of power. And then it becomes pretty easy for Polymarket to say, okay, well, on January on the inauguration day like everyone watches one person's gonna get inaugurate yeah like we can close it now and it's like yeah maybe you had your money locked up for an extra month or two but you could have gotten out at 99 cents but then you get the full 100 or whatever later so if you're do you want to talk about uh robin hood's betting market oh Oh, yeah. Is that in here? I don't know. We can just talk about how Robinhood launched betting markets as well.

It seems like every firm is launching them. And, I mean, Vegas has had it for a long time. They've been all over the place. I don't think they're in here maybe. Let me see. Going to Vegas on election night and just live betting in the casino sounds like uh I actually don't I only like gambling on private companies I don't enjoy like other forms of gambling yeah but it sounds like it'd be fun yeah I don't think I have it in here but either way um Robinhood also

launched election betting which uh like probably within 24 hours of that investment. Because everyone saw that, like, okay, this is just huge. It's going to be a big thing. But, yeah, I mean, just making it easy for people to bet on it. I wonder if it will increase turnout. I wonder if we'll see turnout material increase. I'm fascinated to see, like, that. That would be awesome.

Because this is really, like, the first. That would be very American. It's the first election with, like, serious, serious liquidity in the prediction markets. There's always been predicted and whatnot, but the liquidity has always been really, really low, like a few million. Now we're in like the billions. But it would be very American if turnouts increased dramatically because people wanted, they're like, I made this bet. I want to win. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or people start betting against themselves because they're just like... Yeah, I mean, that's the thing with the prediction market is like you could want one candidate to win and you could bet on the other one as a hedge, right? Like, oh, I think my business is going to suffer under Trump or under Kamala. So I'm going to I'm going to bet on the other one is like a hedge. So if I lose, at least I have more cash on the balance sheet. So it's like not that irrational. At what point does the Fed start betting on the market imagine if the i mean we went like what four orders of magnitude of liquidity in the in the last election to this one like imagine if next poly market is like oh yeah

there's four trillion dollars being bet on the election yeah pension funds saudi arabia yeah masa gets in on it sovereign wealth funds are just like and it's just like oh don't do the prediction markets it's just whales duking it out yeah yeah you're gonna get smoked like it has no it's completely uncorrelated with with the mark with the actual like yeah now it's just like yeah like raw financial markets i mean it's gonna be fascinating to see like you know how accurate these things are and i'm sure it needs to be We should maybe do, like, a TB markets and turmoil that just analyzes, like, the betting. Yeah.

I mean, if the final polymarket is 51 to 49 and they get it, quote-unquote, wrong, the narrative is going to be, like, it's useless. Yeah. People do not understand probability and statistics at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just going to be such a meme. But if they get it right, even if they're up by 1% or something,

it's going to be like, who's doing genius? But it's partly an entertainment product, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that's why it's in the news category. And that's another thing that's interesting between Kalshi and Polymarket is that I think they're both marketing as like we are the number one app in the app store, but they're in separate categories. I don't think Kalshi says that.

I think they say they're where the legal. Yeah, I mean, that's their main one. But I have seen a screenshot of like, oh, congrats to Kalshi. They're like now number one in the app store. But they're in a different category. Polymark is in like news, which I think is like more competitive maybe.

I'm not exactly sure. But you got to call Nikita Beer to figure out like how to game the app store and get to the top if he just gets his intro numbers up he can call into the polycom he's gonna get there soon um but uh we should we should stay on masa masa yushi sone the head of softbank is here quoted saying that nine trillion dollars of CapEx for artificial superintelligence is very reasonable. In fact, it may be too small. I love this guy.

Amazing. $9 trillion. Numbers get big. Scaling laws. We'll see if they hold. GPT-5 is pretty important. Doing the build-out now. I feel like my only critique of Masa is that he hasn't made the AI boom enough about him.

He's getting there. He's starting. This is the beginning. Yeah. Hopefully this is the start of a trend because SoftBank was every other headline during 2021. And so I just like him.

Didn't they own like 10% of NVIDIA like a couple of years ago and they sold at the bottom or something? Yeah. A lot of, a few people did that. Um, rough.

Uh, but yeah, I think, uh, the guys had some, he's had some big bets that went very right. So you got to give them that. It doesn't have to be right every time.

Like just being a conduit from like, like Asia to these incredibly CapEx intensive businesses, like the money's got to come from somewhere. It's important. Like it's not going to all be, you know, Silicon Valley VC firms as they scale. But nine trillion is a big number. I mean, that's even bigger than what Sam was saying, right? I mean, there was like that kind of jokey report that Sam was like, oh, we're going to need,

you know, trillions of dollars. But it was like, he was kind of like memeing about it and was like, this is kind of fake news. But Moss is just like, no, it's real. I'm more bullish than the founders who are running the companies. That's always good. I mean, that's the story with Adam, right?

Adam Newman, like they get in the limousine and Adam's like, you need 500 million? He's like, we need 500 million. He thinks it's like crazy. And he's like, no, you need 5 billion or something like that. Yeah. It's great.

Highly related. Farzad says, it feels like we're about to enter the golden age of the United States. Well, I mean, we covered this last time with the economist cover. The United States is in a phenomenal position. The dollar is very strong. The economy is ripping ripping there's a lot of chaos and it feels like we're more than divided than ever but i firmly believe that things are not things are more american than ever they're more american than ever and i was thinking about this when people

were like american politics have never been crazier. They're so crazy. But then I was- The craziest experience I had recently was like three hours ago, trying to drive to the studio with LA Dodgers having just won the World Series. The World Series, yeah. Not the American baseball league series. The World Series. They just won the World Series

and there was 100,000 people turned out on a Friday morning. Wild. Yeah. But you think about like, okay like okay yeah there was like this trump assassination attempt there's all like like the the biden kamala hot swap like politics does seem kind of crazy but then i was going back and looking at like the timeline for jfk and it was like there's a massive cuban missile crisis he avoids the apocalypse. Six months later, his Marilyn Monroe is like

singing him like his, what's the word? Like not concubine, like his mistress is openly serenading him on TV. Happy birthday, Mr. President. You know that one? Oh yeah. So she's like public. It was, it was a was sorry it was a maryland no no this is like maryland row but but like it's very clear to everyone in america that the president is like openly having an affair with this like hollywood starlet as opposed to like with trump there's always like weird stuff but it's like very like tangential minor didn't have an issue with it back no they endorse him and then and then six months later he gets shot and killed it's like that is unquestionably a more crazy time in American politics than right now.

Yeah. Like we're not even close. We're at like a six out of ten. Imagine listening to a Technology Brothers episode from that era. Yeah. We wouldn't have talked about any of those things because we don't talk about politics. Exactly. It would have been all about, I don't know, DARPA on the internet or something.

Ben, can we add to the sheet we don't uh not discussing podcasts or sorry politics yeah uh so miranda nover says the market is wide open for a raya-esque linkedin i think this is a good idea i like this there was an adresen back company that just like paired you up with like a relevant connection every single week. Yeah, I joined one of those. There's a couple of VC firms that do that, kind of just like, it's like speed dating for business people.

Senra would absolutely, his head would explode. Senra's worst nightmare. Worst nightmare. Just getting connected with a random person. Yeah. Except what if we created the Founders Podcast app that just connected,

it was only him on one side yeah just connected him to a different founders listener every single week he would he would he'd pay a lot of money for that yeah yeah like organize like you you know yeah yeah um if you're an indie hacker out there go build the founders connect this this is not an indie hacker project this raya ask linkedin like you have to be you have to be super connected because this is something that someone like some like the all-in podcast or someone who's like really connected can start because like the whole the whole thing is like you're gonna you're just gonna be going down market the entire time so but so you have to start with like the absolute top like the cream of the crop and then move the house is basically that clubhouse did a great job

of that but i don't know difficult like scale too fast or something i don't really know i should have gone fully into dating yeah i i think also like they didn't like uh i i hired an engineer who worked at tinder once and he said that one of the tricks that they had was for the for like the bots and the really like toxic users they wouldn't ban them. They would put them in a shadow pool. So they were kind of on their own network within Tinder. Because banning them would hurt the metrics.

No, no. No, it wouldn't. I mean, I'm sure. But no, it's because if you ban them, they'll just create another account. So you don't want to ban them. You want to say like, everything's normal for you, but you're just talking to bots.

And you're just living in this like, you know matrix world And so and so that that's kind of what clubhouse should have done is Has been like the the Marc Andreessen of the tech people are in a bubble just launched They're in a filter bubble but then but then the people that launched like there were there were a lot of people who started joining Clubhouse and they were like Why do I have to follow this Marc guy? I don't like him Like I don't know anything he talks about right because they're just like want to be on there and talk about sports or whatever but clubhouse was still like funneling people into like tech like

alicia horowitz right isn't that ben horowitz yeah yeah felicia like felicia felicia yeah she yeah she held like a whole dinner series on there and stuff and that was cool but it's like but it's like as you they probably need to be a little bit more deliberate about being like okay we have we have dominated the tech community now we're going to go after like the sports community or the wrestling community or some other micro community get designers or get you know uh whatever and and and bring those people on but do it in a really smooth way where it's like okay we're we're going to go after the gardening community. So we got the biggest YouTuber who talks about gardening on here

and he's going to be hosting stuff. And if you're a gardening person that gets acquired through our gardening. I don't think that's credit. And then you're in this bubble and you don't even see the tech stuff that's happening. So instead you just scroll and be like, it'd be tech conversation here

and then just like complete nonsense. It didn't even filter by language. At a certain point I would scroll and it would, it'd be tech conversation here. And then just like complete nonsense. It didn't even filter by language. At a certain point I would scroll and it would just be like completely a different language. And it's like, you should know that I don't speak that language. You should just not show me that. It does feel like the product would have been benefited in a lot of ways from Gen AI.

Yeah. Boy, both like, imagine being able to join a room full of bots and like have a conversation like full, like maybe somebody should build like clubhouse with just bots where you could like join a conversation and just rage about politics. This goes back to just berating people. Yeah.

You get on stage and just be like, you're fucking wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, wow. Yeah.

I don't think it's, it's still under discussed the fact that Twitter spaces just destroyed 4 billion, one new feature because I was just thinking like, wow, I miss Clubhouse. I miss like those, like, you would have at Party Round, we would put our stand-ups on Clubhouse. Oh, really?

Anybody could just join. That's awesome. And yeah, a lot of those conversations are still happening. They're just now on Twitter Spaces. Yeah, I mean, also under-discussed that Twitter was the company a lot of those conversations are still happening. They're just now on Twitter. Yeah. I mean, also under, under discussed that, uh, like the Twitter was the company that did it.

Like a lot of other, a lot of other, uh, you know, social networks did launch. They were like clones, but Twitter, everyone was saying,

Oh, it's so solely poorly mismanaged. But there was this moment where something was happening at Twitter, even before Elon bought it, where everyone was like, we got to make something happen. Yeah. So we've got to, and so they launched like the community notes thing. I don't think that was like we got to make something happen so we got to step it up

they launched like the community notes thing I don't think that was like Elon showing up and being like I have an idea I think it was like in the pipeline and he was like get this out now like what's good just ship it we'll work on it and spaces is the same thing where they actually moved just as fast as Facebook to get that

get that out because they saw it as a risk which it was makes sense yeah and the this is an example that the Andreessen clubhouse X relationship, uh, dynamic is an example of the markets working as they should, which Andreessen ended up losing money on clubhouse, but they'll make it all back on X. Right. Um, which I just, I appreciate it. Fantastic. fantastic do you do you know this account grit cult i've never seen them before but i am familiar with this post is two words live intensely read the intensity manifesto now all caps yeah the intensity doctrine intensity is the universal language of god gifted to humanity all other animals live

according to their nature humans are made to surpass it. And it goes on for like a couple paragraphs. Yeah, so the reason I thought this was relevant is I think we should create the American manifesto. Like this is what it means to be American. This is why you should be American. This is why you can be spiritually American. This is why you should not be un-American.

Even if you're in, you know, even if you're born in Singapore, you can be spiritually American. Sure, sure. And I think we should give out spiritual citizenship to foreigners that feel more at home in America even if they're still getting through the immigration system. That's great.

Hey, chat GPT, please write me the American Manifesto. We were just talking about Mark, but we're back on Mark Andreessen. Uh, he says, Claude knows and, uh, posts like a, a massive screenshot of a huge block of texts.

But basically he asked, uh, Claude, Hey, Claude, noble creation of anthropic. Tell me my good man. If a company in a nascent industry started to gain traction and become a

leader in the space and then began pushing for government regulation instead in siient inches industry what would you call this strategy and It seems like whoever wrote this prompt was kind of like baiting Claude into admitting that they were doing regulatory capture Is that what you found this interesting? Yeah, and it's just such a perfect like example of why LLMs are so magic is because historically you would have needed your a comedian somebody that's as funny as a comedian that understood government regulation and the history the history of government regulation and regulatory capture and you would have needed your guy and you

would have had to pay them like five thousand dollars to do this instead it's free yeah and so this is an example it's the perfect um perfect meme because it's showing how incredible the technology is while absolutely just decimating their decimating anthropics like do you think it's real because you could just write this prompt and then just uh you know a human couldn't write anything that good you don't think so no no no i don't even even think my regulatory capture guy could do that. Yeah, it's interesting. I just remember, like, the thing with LLMs for me is, like, some of my core childhood memories are sitting around a campfire with my dad

and him being like, I'm going to write a song about, like, Jordy's love for soccer, you know? And then he would just like make that song and i would just be like head like exploded but now you can just be like write me a song that talks about geordie's love for soccer and it will do it as good as my dad and right now i just can't play the guitar yet but when indie robots create it's getting close are playing have you played with suno the music generation yeah yeah i haven't played with it but i think it's i actually tried to and and it didn't get very far it seems like it's still in like a pretty early stage but it's really good for like uh

like the stems so you just need like a little drum riff instead of going to a sample website and buying one you can just say like i want it to be a little bit louder a little bit quiet a little bit faster and it'll just generate that. Move on to the next one. We have a tweet from David Sachs of the All In podcast. We talk a lot of trash about how he's failed to monetize his podcast as much as we'd like, but obviously a dear friend. and David writes, it takes effort for a search engine not to be able to find an interview with 34 million views between the biggest podcaster in the world

and the most famous person in the world. He got 60K likes. 60K, can we just talk about how many likes 60K is? That's so many. I think I've maxed out at maybe five. 5K is a good tech banger. I think I've hit 20 or 30 on like something a little bit more generic actually but it's hard but that's why politics this is this is

the this is the thing about all in is like they're going broader for a good reason like there are more people that are interested in politics than tech it's just a more it's just a bigger addressable market it's totally rational and it's also a good service to tech because I'd rather have David than Kara Swisher talking about tech in the politics realm. And this was something that tech people just completely obviated themselves from. They just didn't talk about it at all. We should do a GoFundMe for Kara Swisher

to try to make her a billionaire so that she just has a more positive view on tech. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm pretty sure she's rich. And like, I don't know, Bology's always talking about how she comes from money too. But this is talking about YouTube censorship of the Joe Rogan and Donald Trump episode,

which was weird because when this originally came out, Rogan was like, everyone was like, oh, like why is it not showing up on YouTube? And Rogan was like, we literally just had a problem with the uploader. Like they are not like messing with us. Like it's not a big deal guys. Like there's not conspiracy.

Turns out. I don't think it's shadow banned at all. Like I, where's my tinfoil hat? I think it's, I, I think it's, I think it's widely available.

I don't think you can get 34 million views on a shadow band thing. I think it did. I think it was getting pushed in the algorithm and stuff. I think it i think i think youtube is very seriously pulled back on that um and for good reason there probably wasn't anything as a youtuber yeah well i mean i do have takes on on like the youtube stuff which is that um part of the reason joe rogan blew up so huge on youtube originally was because he chose the three- format. So the algorithm, like the YouTube algorithm is a, is a expected value machine. So it takes the average view duration, which is how long on average someone will spend watching that piece of content. So for a 10 minute video, if it's really engaging, the average view duration might be like five or six minutes.

Mr. Beast is like, he's like the most cracked at, uh, at like retention. So like you have to watch to the end cause you want to see who makes this, the, the, who, who wins the million dollars. And then every few seconds he's reengaging you with a new storyline or a new thing. There's no slow parts where you're like, actually, I'm going to go back to whatever. So Mr. Beast on a 20 minute video might be getting 12 minutes of average view duration. Now Rogan with podcasts, it's slower because it's just conversational. So there's lots of opportunities to be like, Oh, I'll stop listening. But by going longer, even if he has the same average view duration as a one hour show, he'll have three times the amount of like expected value. And so that's more

time to sell ads. And so the algorithm wants to sell more ads and keep you on the platform. And so it gets pushed and then it multiplies all that by the thumbnail click-through rate. So if you see Donald Trump in the thumbnail of a Joe Rogan episode, you're more likely to click that than just someone talking about Trump randomly, right? Yeah. I think a better, would a better test be like

how many people saw that in their recommended, right? Sure, sure. If Joe Rogan, if somebody uses Joe Rog rogan just or uses youtube just to watch joe did it show up in their feed or did they have to click in and yeah exactly i didn't see any reports of that i didn't see any reports of that but those people are not really on tech twitter maybe the guys that are going to youtube.com and but but the big the big the big comparison this this week is about uh the kamala interview that she did with shannon sharp i believe yeah i watched the whole thing and that was only one hour long and the trump rogan was or

they were comparing it to the jd vance episode which has more views but it's three hours long and so it just naturally even if it has the same retention uh percentage it will have more average view duration and so cedars-paribus it should get more views in the youtube algorithm this is why a lot of youtubers are moving to longer and longer form content like it used to be you do like whatever because you could just upload any file yeah five minute episodes then everyone shifted to 10 minutes because you could put two ads in amazing well part of it is longer part of it is youtube viewership is now i think predominantly on the tv yeah tv is huge it's not i don't i don't think it's more than half but it's growing huge and also just people want to throw something on and then just go do

the laundry it's laundry tv right and so a lot of times when you're scrolling through youtube you don't want to just like oh a five minute video and then i gotta find another one do you hear that yeah yeah people are having fun outside we are are hearing gunshots at the Dodgers. Fireworks probably. All right. That's what. Oh, here's the Robin Hood one. I don't know if we need to cover this,

but we already did. Let's skip it. Okay. Let's move on to... People are going hard. Let's move on to Max. I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Says, we are looking at buying some land to eventually build a home.

Wife has Zillow open. I'm like, that's the wrong app. Proceed to pull up Onks Hunt. I don't know what that is. Immediately identify 10 landowners in the area that we want to be in with, either multiple tracks or tracks large enough to subdivide time to start knocking on doors. Do you understand this at all?

Yeah. So, so basically the next tweet is from his family that says, unfortunately, Max was attempting to contact somebody while walking on their land and was shot. No, no,

no, no, no, sorry no but the app is something that you can use to find land that you're available that's available to hunt on oh okay okay so if i have a ton of land it's like airbnb for hunting territory yeah yeah yeah got it okay so i have a huge ranch it's just like understanding like land use and like where you can go and things like that so i just thought this was like the i thought it was funny because it's like mansplaining like like the most complicated way i mean there's a lot of alpha and just like not being like only dependent on zillow for like

trying to find your next piece of property it's going to be more competitive this is more competitive and like that's how you're going to find like actual like deals yeah i mean in my neighborhood like it seems like almost everything transacts like off market and we're always getting like phone calls from real estate agents being like, Hey, you want to sell like that type of thing as opposed to like Zillow where it's kind of a zoo and a mess. Yeah.

Interesting. If you had to buy a competition is for losers. If you had to buy land in some far off place, where would you go in America? Obviously you're not leaving. Yeah. Montana, Idaho, Utah. I think Montana is cool I I think the real play going back to the hereticon piece on terraforming is land around the

Salton Sea yeah that's good and then re getting a new pipeline yeah and that's pretty easy to connect to America yeah to California and LA yeah if you need to I'm also I'm always super bullish on Alaska I got canceled on Alaska Twitter because I was too bullish on Alaska. Really? They were like, don't talk about Alaska. They were like, don't come up here, you tech idiot. Well, it was, my point was that you need to be bullish

on Alaska because if climate change is real, like it'll be the last bastion of like beachfront property. You get a mountain up there, Sea level, sea levels rise. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Los Angeles is 140 degrees. We need to be making big,

big bets. Yeah. Well, this was what inspired me because I had a friend who, uh, I think they're like great grandfather got back from world war one with like a payout of like, I don't know,

like 50 cents or whatever the money was worth back then. But that was like a ton of money. And so they go out to California, go West and they buy something like a hundred thousand acres in what is now napa and so the family just has generational wealth from a guy that just made a good real estate deal like was never really in business oh so that's actually so an interesting one on that growing up in northern california in sonoma county you can still buy like a hundred acres for like $600,000. It's amazing. Yeah. Nothing. And so, yeah, like that's getting harder and harder to do. And I actually think the interesting thing is buying land based on bets that firefighting

technology will get more advanced. Like there's a lot of areas of the Santa Monica mountains near where I am. And there's like really cheap land because to ensure a two bedroom home would be $60,000 a year against fire. So nobody bought, it's not economical to buy there. Yeah. But if drones like totally, you know, revolutionized firefighting and you just have like Los Angeles County fires, just swarms of drones that can like quickly attack and dismantle fires before they start or protect against arson or these different things. A lot of that land suddenly becomes pretty valuable and interesting.

Yeah. My other flip side of related to the technology advancement thing is like if you think that will like solve climate change essentially it means that they'll probably be like on-demand nuclear so you can just go up to what is still tundra because the the climate hasn't warmed and then you can just run ac and heat and oh it's dark artificial light just melt the ice melt that yeah you can just do whatever you want you can terraform it essentially to be localized terraforming exactly and then starlink makes the internet really fast up there you have your power generation like you can live a very modern life in like what is essentially like complete tundra yeah yeah and and you can still go by people that complain about the cost of home ownership it's like yeah you can get a really nice house for 100 grand in alaska in

alaska go do it in fact in there's still homesteading there so you can get paid by the government to go live on land because we want to like defend it from the russians because they'll just like move over and be like, no one's living here. We'll just take it. The border is moved now. It's great. The next stage of capitalism is love.

Love says, Jacob, love your customer and your supplier. Love your investor and your lender and your creditor. Charge fair market price with heartfelt gratitude. Pay fair market price with heartfelt gratitude. Love capitalism. I think if I had to define one, if I had to use a tweet to define this podcast,

it would be this. So I don't know this guy. No. But that is what this show is all about, right? If you start a podcast because another podcast is under-monetized, that's basically an ode to capitalism. It is. So I don't think there's much else that's basically an ode to capitalism it is

so i don't think there's much else that needs to be said except frame it just love capitalism it's fantastic luke ferretor did you meet him this uh this week he was there what's his luke ferretor is a genius hacker kid who uh was either the main winner of the scroll prize that nat friedman did or a winner and he i think he wrote a bunch of machine learning code to help translate the ancient scrolls that were basically impossible to see uh casey i forget what his name is uh hanmer uh he is also like just a genius scientist but um he he uh he just looked at them and realized like everyone was like struggling to decide for the we should do a whole thing on scrolls it's fascinating but the scrolls uh these ancient scrolls that are uh they're in herculaneum is that where it is or athens what was the

it was after the volcano yeah the library of was it no it wasn't it was vesuvius the vesuvius scrolls that's what it is so mount vesuvius explodes ash covers everything and there's this library with ancient writings scrolls that are entombed and they find them but they're so calcified i guess would be the word i don't even remember they're just like petrified. And so if you try and unwrap them, they just disintegrate immediately. So it's impossible to read them.

But Nat Friedman went over there and like put one in like an MRI machine, I think, and scanned them and then put that data on GitHub and put out a reward for a couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollars, if you could decipher these with the raw data. And so there's a bunch of people that worked on this there was like a discord and a bunch of people yeah i think what's cool is like the new tech elite like matt freeman elad gill elad gill yep they're all starting to like do things with their

money yep and elad gill was on um a recently, and they were like, the hosts were pressing him on like, well, how do you like, are you going to monetize this or whatever? And he's just like, no, I just think it's cool. Well, this is the thing. People have been saying like we need better elites because for a long time, the elites would make a ton of money, and then they would just like constantly money launder all their money through like these fake nonprofits that just like made the world worse

instead of actually going and building like just a huge new library that everyone can enjoy yeah it's just like there's so many amazing institutions like going back to like yeah yeah like so many great monuments and like the louvre and like all these like cultural monuments that live on for so long we're just like some rich guy that's that's a lot of thing is like trying to build new monuments yeah yeah or or just like oh someone built like a huge house like hearst castle you go and visit it's like this like kind of crazy guy but now it's like this monument that just lives there forever and that's amazing instead of just like oh cool you have like six different glass boxes that look identical in every major city like who cares like stop spending your money that way go build a castle

and then turn it into an art museum in 50 years when you're when you when your descendants are fighting over the estate and can't sort it out so it just turns over to the to the public or something but anyway luke is the is great and he uh just open sources his ideas i guess and just gives out these great ideas for free he says uh he wants to start or it proposes a space-based pizza delivery in 100 seconds that uses re-entry heat to cook the pizza. It's kind of like a – It's like what happens after Varda, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you can make drugs in space – You can make pizza in space. Yeah, I mean Domino's should act one of the best performing stocks of stocks all time should be calling him up and like giving him like a eight figure contract to figure this out. It's like rods from God. Now there'll be like, uh, you know, garlic bread from God or something. Yeah. No, I, I, I'm excited for the future.

Um, I, yeah, it is interesting to think about like even, you know somebody doing like drone pizza drone delivery right because like doing all your packages like kind of doesn't make sense but like if you could get a pizza yeah like within like two minutes like that'd be so cool yeah so who's doing like you know drone delivery for food because like if you think about it's like the issue with drones is like they can't carry like that much weight so like ordering your like from whole foods your grocery run doesn't make sense but like getting like dominoes like absolutely makes sense yeah and it makes a lot more sense than these sort of like surface-based like autonomous like delivery devices so love it so should we stay on drones with Jason H Lou says we've got an order of magnitude more tweets oh yeah it's gonna be a five-hour show so buckle up get in here you were like when I look in our chat where we post these tweets like jordy was posting

them at like 3 a.m and then again at like 7 a.m so it's the the strongest evidence that money doesn't sleep exactly it's just you're scrolling the timeline and yeah i cut at hereticon i'd feel bad because i'm like john's out there like having like a good time and i'm just like blowing up his phone like it's like four tweets in like three minutes this is more important than any other work yeah um so uh there was a scoop the biggest u.s drone maker skydio which supplies ukraine faces a supply crisis after china bans the company from selling batteries to the group um and jason says one if you're in a u.s if you're in in, if you're a U.S. based drone manufacturer, you really should not be using Chinese made batteries, not only in principle, but also China can ban you from buying two. Two, Jesus Skydio has been using Chinese made batteries.

I mean, this is true in like so many hard tech companies where it's just like, there's no other option. Like for a long time, like small drone motors, I did a survey because I was thinking that somebody should, I don't know if it'd be a good venture company, but somebody should start the American drone motor company and just focus on motor manufacturing. There's one company that makes these small brushless motors that go on the corners of the DJI drones, basically, in the US. And they outsourced to China after a while

because it was like some family owned thing. They needed better margins. It was very rational at the time. They didn't think it was a big deal. And now they do make some motors, but only like larger motors in the US. And I was like, it's almost like it would be like a charity project.

There needs to be some government incentive or something. Like it's very hard or just like a big meme. And then all the VCs can just pile into it. And then we get like this dividend of this company that might not be like a power law winner because it's just manufacturing one part i figured it out what is it tell me i'm not going to say it on the podcast okay okay we'll figure it out yeah yeah yeah but um but yeah i mean it's tough uh a lot i like retooling supply chains takes decades yeah and because it's not just it's like you say

like chinese made batteries but it's like well what are the ingredients to those batteries where those come from who does the packaging what about the machines that package the batteries like this is so critical in defense tech specifically because it's the first thing that somebody's gonna turn off yeah you know when and the average tech person like only understands the supply chain like maybe in chips in the sense that they know that like you know open ai is partnered with is partnered with microsoft who is a hyperscaler who builds a data center that buys nvidia chips and nvidia is built at tsmc and tsmc uses ASML and ASML uses Trump mirrors and lasers from Phillips and stuff. And so people understand a little bit of that just from like the chip war book and a few other books

that have been out there and like Asianometry and, uh, Dylan Patel and whatnot. But beyond that, like that, that same like complexity of like, Oh, there's like seven different companies in the supply chain that are critical. Like that applies to more than just chips. It applies to everything. Chips are just like the hot thing right now, but it's important for motors. It's important for batteries. It's important for so many other pieces of the supply chain.

So it's going to be a lot of upheaval for these companies. A lot of, yeah, the, the even I've tweeted about DGI before, but that, that Americans buying a spy network for China is like the most insane thing. Well, I interviewed a guy at Hereticon who is buying a ton of DJI stuff because he's figured out how to run open source software on it.

Because he says that the Chinese code will call home and talk home. We actually proved this in Sunnyvale back in 2012. We were in this like hacker house and we downloaded from the internet Red Star Linux, which is the Linux fork that North Korea uses. And when we put it on a computer, we installed it on a computer on a private network so we could monitor the traffic. And as soon as you fire it up, it starts calling home. And it's just like all the keys are logged. So if you install this anywhere, even in North Korea, it's like all going back to home. And obviously, DJI probably do the same thing.

But the hardware is the hardware. And so he's like, I don't want to say exactly what he's buying, but he's very bullish on some of their products that are very high quality as long as you run it. Yeah, the hardware is fantastic. And it was probably heavily subsidized because it is a spyware yeah should we move on to brandon says ai is going to take our jobs i'd like to see ai take my job it's three monster energy white ultra zero sugar uh dumbbells, steak, and just a Creed album. The only thing it's missing is XL nicotine pouches.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, what, how is he describing his job? Just, just eating steak, lifting weights, drinking energy drinks and listening to Creed. Like, yeah, I think this is more of like, it's more, it's more of like you, you need to look at the deeper meaning of the tweet, which is that your job is to create and maintain this vessel that allows you to carry out God's will.

It's more about building the vessel that builds the thing. I think that probably went over people's heads, but I think that's all the more reason to cover it somebody needs to build the monster energy for llms something like you know how you can adjust the temperature on llms to like make them a little bit more creative or not like yeah when are they going to create the stimulants for these ml like can you get them drunk and then can they that is like that's an awesome product for somebody to build, which is just like it's a layer. It's a thin layer of LLMs, but you can just like make it drunk.

Yeah, exactly. Give it a monster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Give it a Percocet. Give it some fentanyl. You know, like that... You can kind of do that where in the prompt,

you can just say like, you are drunk. Or you are a McKinsey consultant. You just did some bad cocaine. Yeah. Give me your best ideas yeah let's go uh should we move on to liquidity uh he says harvard business school graduates after starting a search fund and acquiring a kentucky-based trash management company doing two million of last 12 months and it's uh vivek ramaswamy i think getting out of a trash truck or something like that as a politics stunt. But what is he saying here? And what is the trend of Harvard Business School graduates starting search funds and acquiring real businesses? This is like a big meme right now, right? So all of this basically started because of Twitter, which people were like, hey, instead of going and working a soul sucking job at Goldman Sachs, you can buy a business that does three million dollars of EBITDA.

Yep. You can lever it up, use some debt to acquire it, and then you could be, you know, make your investors whole within the first few years. And then from that point on, like, you know, you could work 20 hours a week and be making a few million dollars a year and like living the dream. Right. And you're kind of like an owner operator. Yeah. You're an owner operator.

And it's, it's the entrepreneurial dream without needing to go from zero to one in a very competitive area, all that. And so there were some big, there were some big successes and people that had figured this out like decades ago or a decade plus ago where they were creating these things called search funds, which is like you fund, you create, it's like an SPV almost to buy a company that you haven't identified yet. So it's basically like investors come to you and they say, Jordy, I trust that you'll be able to find something good and manage it well.

So when you find the company, I'm in for a million dollars. Yeah, and I think sometimes there's like some... Some upfront as a management fee. Yeah, yeah. Where, yeah, I'll give you something. Because it's better to spend two years and buy the right company. Flying around and meeting people. So there's going to be some operational expense for their salary upfront,

but most of it is going to come in the purchase, right? And the challenge here is that people, when they are looking at a business, they're like, okay, I found this trash company does two and a half million dollars a year of earnings. Like it's been operating this place for 20 years. It has these contracts. It's basically a localized monopoly. Like it's awesome. Oh. And by the way, they don't use computers, right? Like they, they, um, you know, look at all the like software that we could add and all

this stuff. And the reason that that's the reason that that, like there are great opportunities there. Yeah. They're still using a fax machine. Right. And so that's like what people get fixated on. We'll move them onto DocuSign. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It'll be cheaper. Um, and we'll have five account reps. Yeah, exactly. We'll have a great customer experience. No, but in the trap is that they think that, oh, it's just fundamentally a great business

and we're going to layer in technology and make it an even better business. And the tough truth is that a company is basically as good as its management. And if that person had been, let's look at the trash company in a local, you know, small local market that's doing a few million dollars a year in EBITDA, that person running the company, yes,

he may have like used a really old generation iPhone and like not checked his email that often and used a fax machine or whatever. But if he was like effectively the the mayor of the town and everyone loves him and he can call anyone up at any point and get anything done he has his guys he's got his guys in town and he's got a relationship with the person that decides like which contract like it's like basically um you know if you come in and you're this like search fund mba bro who comes in and you're like yeah I'm just gonna buy this company and like digitize it and you realize like the employees are like

difficult to find and retain and they hate you like the contracts are like much more oriented around uh you know much more oriented around like relationships and you're getting in there and you're realizing like whoa like this company doesn't need to be digitized. Like it needs somebody who's spent their entire life running a trash company in this small town. And the owner sitting there being like, wow, this company was unbelievably time intensive. They just gave me $10 million. And now I'm like one of the wealthiest people in my town. Oh, and by the way, I get to buy back the business and for nothing in like three years when you like run it into the ground and i'm gonna hire back all the old employees i'm gonna get all my old contracts back so like i'm gonna cancel the docusign contract

add add another buy buy a new fax machine for 50 bucks so i think a lot of like people talk about these search funds and they're like oh be careful you're just gonna buy a job if you buy if you buy a company with less than half a million of earnings you're like buying a job a job yeah but like in the real risk is like you lever this thing up and you realize that it was a great business because that founder was a great person they just didn't look like you know they didn't fit the normal mold of like oh they're like a stanford dropout hacker and they know programming so so they're so good. So they can install DocuSign. It's great.

Yeah, interesting. I wonder how it'll shake out. Maybe the Harvard Business School graduates will move on to something else. It is interesting how there's like, you know, these eras of trendy, you know, career paths that come out of HBS, like, you know, is banking. Then it was like YC for a while.

Now it's like the search fund. I wonder what the next thing's going to be. Search funds are just financial innovation, which is very American. And there's always going to be a next one. Maybe the next search fund is just pumped up. I was talking to Sebastian Malabai about this. Do you know him?

He wrote the power law and he wrote more money than God about hedge funds. Kind of historian. And I was asking him like, what do you think the next like big, like know vc tech bubble will be and he was very bullish on biotech he wants to like write and write the next book on like the flagship pioneering model the company that like incubated moderna and all those companies and like as that becomes like more like productized biotech's american yeah and and just biotech becoming like right now it's in this weird, like it's,

it's a very financialized, but not in like the VC realm where you take a company public really early. There's all this like tech transfer between the, between the, uh, the, the universities. It's like very complex,

but if it becomes a little bit more easy, like, Oh, you're just like installing some LLM and there's an AWS for lab. Pumped up on your biotech. Exactly. Well, stay tuned because I think next week we're going to do a deep dive on Ozempic. It should be fun.

Let's move on to this. Spain says every name is like completely ridiculous. The nation of Spain. Yeah. No, S-P-A-N-E, which is Sperry's and Nike something. I cannot believe BlackRock invited a bunch of influencers to their ETF launch party like it's a tequila brand. Truly incredible stuff. So there's a TikTok here that I imagine is someone pumping some ETF.

So why is BlackRock the creators of what's that I imagine is someone pumping some. Yeah. So why is, is black rock the creators of, um, what's that big festival in the desert? Burning man, creative burning man. Why is black rock, uh, you know,

like innovating with like understanding media and like doing like tequila style launch parties when our presidential candidates haven't figured out that they should be blogging yet. Right. So like, this is an example of the private markets at work sure and understanding how to generate and capture and monetize attention yeah i'm the only thing i can say about the street is i'm pissed that we weren't invited seriously blackrock has anybody been is anybody more publicly a fan of blackrock and their

various financial products and services than us yeah i'll wait for sure i wonder what the etf is for exactly i need to dig into it but it doesn't matter what it is as long as people can speculate they need to etf more things like the the the bitcoin etf was a big moment the the uh the ethereum etf as well you need more etfs. I mean, they're essentially, yeah, like shit coins in the public market, so you can just trade. It's great. Back to American exceptionalism. Since I'm in Europe right now, I figure it's time

for another reminder, says Jason Based Man. If we all just consumed less, and then Batman slaps him and says, fucking build something. 10K likes. This resonates with people. I think I put this in because at Hereticon, the thing that triggered the most people was the decelerationist who was saying,

like, we need to stop building and put a bunch of stuff in the atmosphere to like, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah. Well, he's kind of building something too. It's awesome that this is now the dominant the dominant yeah thought on x yeah yeah yeah and there i'm sure will be some negative externalities to that but um but overall yeah europe is struggling with the innovation not much yeah the

the the craziest one uh who we could overlay this is like out of europe's like top 100 firms like all of them or 95 of them were created over 100 years ago yeah it's all like the legacy fashion brands the the car companies yeah really stylish it's interesting that there's no like you know dividend from that like you don't hear about like oh yeah this guy who spent his time at lvmh like has spun out and started some like new hot brand that like grows and like runs the same playbook in the same way that like uh you know Instagram was like it wasn't uh wasn't the founder like an intern at Twitter and so it was clear that like uh like he like you know cut his teeth in social that's the thing with the next thing I do think it happens in fashion but the issue with fashion is you could be fashion such a weird market because you could

have there's like a brand here in la called like cherry which is like seemingly really big like they have partnership they did a partnership at at f1 with like red bull and like they're like they have a ton of attention but like they're a small business it's really hard to break through in this and so a lot of these people go work at lvmh and leave but then they build a business that does 50 million dollars in revenue and you're never going to hear about it and maybe in 100 years it'll be like iconic yeah it's hard to become an iconic brand especially if you take venture capital you gotta you gotta own 100 of that business and making your life's work yeah oh well let's do uh we should do a deep dive on laura piana and brunello yeah yeah i'd like that and we just i don't really know anything about the business

yeah we should only cover the beef though okay and like the drama and stuff no politics but drama drama business drama is good i like business drama there's tons of that. So DD says, I gave AI control of my computer and asked it to solve homework one of Stanford discrete math class, math 61 DM. It found the problem set, downloaded latex, solved every question and compiled it into a PDF in five minutes. Will any college student ever do homework again? Why'd you like this? So I like this because it validated a bet that I'm planning to make in the ed tech space

around generative AI. And the core thesis of the bet is that gen AI and LLMs have completely disrupted all the primary learning modalities that we have, which are tests, essays, and homework. Those are like the core things that you do in education as a middle school, high school, college student. And it's clear that they have massive potential for learning,

like creating learning products and having learning experience where we can go to Notebook LLM and say like, generate me a conversation about the wealth of nations as though I've read it 500 times. Like get into the real meat of it because I already know what it's all about. But yeah, I just think it's like fascinating how a technology has so much potential and is simultaneously like so disruptive where imagine a college student today is taking a test on some like

esoteric book and they're like okay i'm they like hit a point where they're like oh i don't know what to say anymore i don't know this point or and they can go to the bathroom and be like chat gbt like how would you compare like this book to this book and what would you take away from it and it comes up with this like brilliant thought yeah that the college student didn't have themselves and they go back in the classroom and like finish the essay so it's sort of just an extension of everything that happened with like people's fears around google it's like well if people can just google the answer like i remember being in like high school my dad having my dad's math class and being like trying to google the answer to a math problem and you remember there'd be like these like forums and stuff like that and like google was like very much for like

knowledge and llms or for solving intelligence intelligence knowledge and intelligence two very different directions right but like yeah no one needs to like memorize facts anymore or even you know yeah that was in the database era it was, oh, you don't need to memorize facts. Now it's like, you don't need to think. Well, yeah. I mean, I was interviewing Tyler Cowen and talking to him about how AI has changed like his teaching because he's a professor. And he says that now, yeah, to your point, like all of the existing measurement tools are just completely pointless.

So who gets the good grade in his class is the student that teaches him the most, which is a complete inversion of the normal professor student relationship. Normally it's the professor teaches everything and the student who learns the most gets the good grade. Now it's the opposite. The student needs to come in and teach the professor something novel and interesting, and then they get a good grade which i think is awesome and i think that's actually like a bull case for wanting to go to george mason and study under tyler cowan totally

totally very interesting i i think that yeah it might be like you know overrated in the in the short term and underrated in the long term to still go into a highly intellectual sparring zone even if even if a lot of the traditional measurement tools are irrelevant uh just just being on the path of like having those intellectual conversations is still valuable even if you're not even if you don't come away with like a test score but i mean hbs is like being at hereticon miami 2024 at the faena at the pool with Tyler Cowen before our talk. Yeah. Drinking out of a raw coconut will be a core memory. Exactly.

Something that the LLM of me will be telling my long descendants. You know, like Jordy did that. He was there. He drank the coconut. That's great. Let's close on our final tweet out of the stack of 75 tweets. Trunk fan, prolific poster, posts, breaking the new Call of Duty Black Ops 6

has released its first integration with Excel and PowerPoint, an important first step to unlock synergies for Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Obviously, just like a hilarious shit post of like Excel, like poorly screenshotted or Photoshopped on top of some cod gameplay. But very, very funny that you can, these are both like highly addictive products. We talked about this, how like the dudes take,

I knew some baseball players in college at UCLA. I didn't go there, but I knew them. They went there and they would take Adderall when the new Call of Duty came out because they wanted to be able to hit prestige before everyone else. And so they would just stay up for three days straight when the game came out and max it.

And now 10 years later, they're taking Adderall to work in Excel and they're still using Microsoft software the whole time. It's all Microsoft. All the way through. It's all Microsoft. But you heard an ad on Rogan or something for them? I think it's, yeah,

it's an argument that Microsoft is like a 360 degree lifestyle brand. Almost like... 360 degree no scope. Yeah, 360 no scope. No, it's like it's up there with Amon for me because I can go, I can play Call of Duty.

I can get on my ThinkPad. I can do Excel. I could be playing, I could be using Excel and playing Call of duty on my thinkpad at the same time fantastic or even on two thinkpads at the same time right um but yeah it was cool to see uh activision microsoft advertising call of duty on joe rogan it's one of those things like advertising a product to your exact user base it's almost like sending like an email like blast because like every single person on joe rogan plays call of duty actively um but yeah i think this goes back to like talking about

roblox the other week and like being like if you'reision, like looking at Roblox, if that many users not making money, like I've never heard a Roblox ad, would they be making more money if they were advertising me? Like it's possible. I've got money to spend on Roblox if you just talk to me about the right games. I want to play the new Call of Duty so badly, but I have no time. It's just not going to happen. I know. I know that this is one I'm just going to miss.

It's awesome that I still want to play it. Oh yeah. I want to play it so badly, but Oh, well moving on. Uh, let's do a listener Q and a, this is a new segment for the podcast.

We have, uh, our first call in, uh, or email, um, from a friend, um,

of the show. Uh, so, uh, Steven writes in, I'm not gonna say his last name. Hi, John and Jordy. I recently had a nine figure liquidity event and I'm in the market for a new car.

And I'm wondering what you would advise me to buy between the McLaren W1, the Ferrari F80 and the Porsche Mission X. So this is kind of like the new Holy Trinity. Are you familiar with the original Holy Trinity? Of like back in like the 2010s, there was the LaFerrari, the McLaren P1 and the Porsche 918 Spyder. And the three supercars, you know, the 918 was $850,000 at launch. The LaFerrari was 1.4 million the p1 was over a million they all had 900 horsepower uh some controversial features you know 918 was a hybrid and so uh but owning owning three of those

cars like it was a really interesting collection because usually people just collect like in one brand but people started collecting across them and kind of all three of those brands like uh it was like a rising tide situation uh but we're on the cusp of a new one because mclaren i think like a month ago announced the w1 but they've announced like a bunch of other special cars in between so like the senna and some other ones uh and then ferrari launched the f80 and they're back on like the numbered track it was like a 40 a 50 yeah enzo la ferrari which would have been the 60 and 70 70th anniversary and now they're back on the f80 it's a four million dollar car yep b6 hybrid yeah uh controversial but beautiful and then there's the uh porsche mission x which is all electric yeah which is also super controversial because uh i think i

think orders have been a little bit weak because a lot of the Porsche fans, they like the, they like the, the career GT. They like a really manual, really engaging, naturally aspirated V10 or something like that. But what would you go with between the three?

If you'd had to just pick one. Well, to answer Steven's question, you know, nine figure exit. He, the real, the real,

the right answer is by two of each car put one put three you know total into storage yeah keep them wrapped drive the other ones daily them put 30 40 000 miles on them however much you drive yeah um but yeah it's hard to answer that question without more context i think that um uh if he's looking at it as you know the guy clearly likes making money if he wanted to buy a car drive it and basically get paid for owning it you have to look in the last generation la ferrari is an incredible buy in that three to five million dollar range i think that the f80 coming out only makes the la ferrari more valuable yep i think that uh there's a lot of issues with the Ferrari brand right now.

Like if you, you know, they're making some very questionable decisions, which I feel like I can comment on as a, as a, you know, I recently sold my Ferrari, but as a, you know, a real enthusiast and consumer of the brand. But the interesting decision right now is they made their family suv pura sangway pureblood and then they made the f80 the the family car as a naturally aspirated v12 yep uh similar engine to mine and then the f80 sounds like you're when when it's on track running hard yeah sounds like my roomba yeah like it sounds like a roomba going on in the other room yeah and so it's just like

i don't know i don't know if it's european regulatory bodies because these manufacturers are over there like putting this intense pressure on to be like nerf your cars nerf your cars like make them quieter make them you know and they're going to argue like nerf your cars nerf your cars like make them quieter make them you know and they're going to argue like oh it actually has more power and so with la ferrari or sorry the f80 it is an award-winning you know system right they they went and they won le mans with it and like that's awesome but i just think that they're clearly going all the big Ferrari launches that I've seen recently, like the 12-cylinder you got a ton of hate. I thought that was a beautiful car.

Really? I think it's beautiful. I don't like the front-end chip, but I just think the design language is fantastic, and they took a lot of that design language over into the F80. I think it's a little controversial, but I think over time people are going to warm up on it, and it'll be beautiful.

Yeah. Yeah. Like the black front end is so weird, but it's interesting. And I think it'll, I think it'll work. Yeah. I think a lot of these cars too, when they announce them, they're specced in like a very distinct way. And if you spec them differently, they'll just look dramatically different. Like I didn't like the 12 cylindry, like the way the color blocking was.

You did it in like a black. You can do it all do all black yeah i think they won't sell you that actually like or there's something like they won't they won't sell it without the two-tone like they want the two-tone they want to enforce that in their in their design language interestingly but uh my i mean so geordie's pick is get six get two of each i think mine would be a wild card go for ignore the holy trinity and get the amg one oh yeah because the amg one look it's a it's a what turbo hybrid v6 or whatever but it's an f1 derived v6 so it's actually a smaller engine it's 1.6 liter but at least you can say you know it's an f1 car for the road yeah and it's not it's probably the most collectible it could easily be the most collectible out of the i think so i mean they don't do that many supercars whereas mclaren you know they every few years they're coming out with a speed tail that

was a really special one but then it's like the senna is also really special and the porsche one is gonna if it follows the taikon turbo s path it will be worth half the price in literally i mean that's the real flex even if you don't drive it yeah if you can just buy a new taikon every year take 80k in depreciation everyone you know that's part of that's part of that's part of porsche's like effectively like their scam operation yeah is that they they're like oh you want to buy the gt3rs like buy three taikons yeah exactly so um yeah it's like you can pay a hundred dollars over msrp or you can buy three taikons i just love the amg one because it's this i mean it's destroying your nurburgring records like yeah i don't think any of the these

new holy trinity will come close yeah i think the mission x will wind up being too too heavy i would respect ferrari a lot more if it was actually like the fastest car if it's that sort of record yeah if it's that they need to do something um there was a there's a new car the isn't the new c8 corvette the the zr1 setting like a speed record they went like 230 something with it or it's the fastest american-made car and and the sick thing is in the video of them uh doing the speed test the guy driving it is like the ceo of the company or like oh no i think you're talking about the ford the are you talking about the new ford g like gt no no no no this is the this is the this is the corvette zr1 i think we're gonna see an american car renaissance i hope so because

because it seems like the american ceos are locked in driving their actual cars yeah well kind of the ford ceo was caught driving like a chinese car do you see this and he's like this is the most amazing thing oh maybe i saw the like pr response to that i like him getting out of the new ford oh yeah mustang gt car that looks like it's gonna be pretty cool uh all these guys just need to start tweeting and going yeah i'm concerned yeah the beauty of the amg one is that like you can just tell people yeah i just drive a mercedes and they'll be like oh you probably have like a metris or a g wagon yeah and little do they know you're driving like a limited production multi-million dollar car yeah yeah you gotta daily it obviously yeah with the it has active drs so you can like change that's

the thing to respect most about sam altman is that he dailies hypercars full sends hypercars that's the most important reason to get him equity in open ai because we're going to see a renaissance in san francisco and the new car more hypercars more hypercars street parked yeah this is the way the techno elite thanks for listening everyone see you next time