TBPN Live - Holiday Party Recap, Christianity is So Back, Stop the Clock, Vitalik Needs to do a Cycle

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

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I didn't know that you backed Elizabeth Holmes' new company. Oh, we're live? Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are putting the information in the truth zone. Truth zone. They're back. A lot of people are calling them the misinformation. We don't encourage you to say that.

Just call it the information. It's classy. You don't need to call it the misinformation. But there's a new article in the information about the antichrist and the new apostles and it's talking about christianity being so back in silicon valley it's a great piece breaks down a lot of people we know basically everyone mentioned in here it's funny uh a bloomberg reporter actually reached out to me about this exact story like six months ago and the pitch was basically like i think christian Christianity is having a moment in tech right now.

Oh, so this was a different writer. A different reporter. Ellen Hewitt at Bloomberg, completely different reporter, but was smelling the vibe and could tell that this would be a good trend piece to write. And this happens a lot. They write a trend piece about Gundo

and everyone writes that piece. Similar thing happened with this Antichrist and Christianity in tech story. And she was texting me about it. I was like, I just, I don't think it's that much of a trend. Like, yeah, Peter, Trey, but they've been, you know, prominent Christians for a long time. No one's really talking about Pat Gelsinger. And then, yeah, you got Augustus.

But beyond that, it's not that big of a deal. But the information hunted it down and put together a very compelling narrative. It's funny because it's somewhat of an old... I brought Augustus to a buddy of mine's house who has a venture fund, and it was early days of Rainmaker. And Augustus, this is over a year ago at this point, was wearing a huge shirt with Jesus on on it like bench pressing nice with a gold piece hanging out and so this all this story almost feels like old news right yeah yeah

like in one way it could have gone just like oh wow another puff piece for augustus yeah which you love to see you love to see it they try to see it. Everybody tries to write a hit piece on the guy, and it comes out as this glowing profile. Riz Master. Yeah, I had it all written up as a hit piece, then I hung out with him, and he's the real deal. Maybe he gave him a horse. Maybe.

I love Augustus. It was good seeing him. Did you get to talk to him on Saturday? We saw him at some of the BC holiday parties. We've got to give you the update on the BC holiday parties. It was such a bummer. I saw him and his mullet from across the room and then i couldn't get to him there were just too many people there were too many there was legitimately too many people i said hello to like half the people i wanted to it was really tough but i do have some tips for vcs throwing their holiday parties now that we're out of holiday party

season the main one is you don't want to gild the lily it's a good phrase you know lily beautiful flower you don't want to dip it in gold you don't want to add a bunch of jewels you know if you're in a beautiful house just be tasteful with the decorations just a couple christmas trees a couple carolers a little fake snow not too much actors acting like they're from the matrix yeah but just the basics just the basics you don't want to go over the top. Yep. And you want to keep it tasteful. Uh, did you have any tips takeaways? The one thing that I noticed from our, from our, uh, our, our guide on how to get the most out of attending a venture capitalist Christmas party that I didn't anticipate was that you not only need to bring a swimsuit to

go in the pool, you might also need to bring a chainsaw because sometimes they cover the pool with plywood to put a dance floor this was super unfortunate so john and i showed up to the party obviously wearing suits uh but we did bring bathing suits of course um because we fully intended on doing the uh the whirlpool in the center and and you know becoming the main character like we advised in the guide. But lo and behold, they had built this pretty complex, durable wood structure over the pool to turn it into a dance floor. It was a wild card. That was a wild card.

It was like somebody had listened to the guide. They said, hey. I think they knew. They knew what was coming. They knew what was coming. They knew what was coming. And so we made every effort to try to figure out how to get yeah sort of dismantle it but we didn't have power tools yeah i did that was another mistake maybe next year is

yeah carry to the party but then bring power tools in case they cover the pool up there is one trick you know imagine you're at you know mark andreason's party you just go up do you find the party planner you just grab them real quick like it's an emergency hey mark changes mind we got to get that dance floor out of there we're opening up the pool you just shake it put the fear of god in him like it was delivered directly he's going to be too nervous to go and fact check it mark's busy yeah yeah you got to just do this now mark's pissed off he's pissed off and he's busy you don't want to double check with him hey of course i want the pool open of course i want the pool open you don't want to get uh unfortunately that didn't work didn't get to go in the pool it was uh it was tragic but you know we made it out of there and it was good

so yeah and it was it was uh you know there was a lot a lot of venture capitalists had election parties right yeah uh everybody you know given silicon valley's somewhat um conservative leaning as of late we expected those parties to be very celebratory but uh saturday night felt like the top right like the vibes were incredible everybody was was everybody was just on top of the world great night uh clear you know potentially a top signal yeah um but you got to like live in the moment and just embrace it right just because you know you know we might be staring over the precipice doesn't mean you should yeah you know not have a good time didn't see any journalists didn't see any escorts it's pretty clean clean pretty clean yeah it was well but there was other parties in the

general area that seemed like they had that kind of they might have more of a journalist yeah journalistic attendee list yeah it's tricky well there's always next year folks yep uh so let's go to the misinformation or the information as they like to call themselves uh they opened this article saying worship at epic church in downtown san francisco last sunday began in a darkened room on the second floor of a former factory building the shades were drawn across the tall windows while colored lights cast a theatrical glow on a band that sounded a bit like Arcade Fire if Arcade Fire made worship music. A mostly millennial congregation swayed to the harmony, a sea of Apple Watch clad arms raised to the heavens. Oof. Rough. Gotta upgrade those Apple Watches. She had to drag them like that. She did. It's a little bit of a hit piece.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a little bit of a dig. A little bit of a dig. This is a special moment for Epic Church and its congregants. With the opening of a $12 million space just down the street from the headquarters of Pinterest and Airbnb, acquired two years ago to accommodate a flock that has ballooned to nearly 1,000 people every Sunday. Epic's pastor, Ben Pilgrim, couldn't have been more pleased. We really feel called to this particular place and its people,

he said a few days later, reflecting on the opening day turnout. I attended the services as a guest of two of the more prominent people within Epic, Trey Stevens, the Founders Fund partner and Anderle co-founder, and his wife, Michelle Stevens, chief revenue officer at Felt, a healthcare software startup. People think church is just for the poor, the marginalized, the visibly in need, but the highly rich and famous are just as much in need, Michelle told me. Then she paraphrased a bit of scripture. It's harder for a rich man to pass through the eye of the needle than for the poor man to see God. It's interesting. Pat Gelsinger has this amazing quote where he says he breaks down silicon valley and he calls them a bunch of like rich miserly pagans because san francisco historically has been one of the most unchurched cities in the world yeah and also

uh has one of the lowest giving rates for charitable donations and so he i just like the miserly pagans phrase it was very people from san francisco donate so much to companies that end up going under that they feel like that is yeah that's terrible it ends up being a write-off too yeah um they feel like you need to count that in a little bit right yeah but it is good they go on to say epic church is one of the epicenters of a societal shift among the tech elite. More and more Christianity has become a growing constant part of many of their lives. Some of these people are longtime Christians who feel newly emboldened to embrace their faith publicly. Others are brand new adherents. Together, they formed a movement

with real breadth that does not have roots in any one Christian denomination. It spans the country, fueled by a swirling mix of different proponents. Traces of the sea change. It really is wild that even 10 years ago, you just wouldn't have seen a high-profile GP be involved with religion. Yep. And if you did, everybody would be like, whoa, cool of them to make such a public statement about something like that. Even though it's just totally normal. People are welcome to.

For a long time, religion was coded as anti-science. And science was essential to the development of transistors and technology and so the idea of and pat gelsinger was clearly like a narrative violation there in the sense that he's like running like the most hard tech the most science physics driven yeah company and yet a devout christian um yeah but he was never in the spotlight because he wasn't the founder of that company and so now that you see folks like peter and augustus and trey who are founders and have profiles written about them in the same way and people want more of a 360 view of their life it cuts through um much differently than Pat I think yeah um even though he was you know fairly prominent in Silicon

Valley I feel like 10 years ago I don't know he's been the ceo of intel for a while but um then describing describing the el segundo uh brothers as as having developed a form of muscular christianity is like an attempted dig it seems but it doesn't really linking patriotism patriotism masculinity and athletic discipline with religious moral character. Wow, what a dig. Got him. Got him. They can't find the words to make this negative.

Yeah, yeah. And that's why it turns out good. They would all, like one of them would post that, I have adopted a form of muscular Christianity that links patriotism, masculinity, and athletic discipline to form a strong religious moral character. Like they would just post that themselves. Yeah. It's actually like a good post. Yeah. Uh, they, they highlight Peter's tour of, uh, of the antichrist and, uh, Peter's obviously's obviously warning about the risk of a one world government and what

you know ai might lead to that he's long said that you know ai is centralizing and therefore communist and uh crypto is decentralizing and therefore libertarian and i really liked his take on rogan where he said that if there if aliens exist they they must be either angels or demons because at a certain point if you develop the technology to propel something near the speed of light you can just destroy any planet by just accelerating an asteroid and just wiping them off the face of the earth so how do you how how have we not been destroyed if there are statistically probably aliens out there? Well, either they are angels in the sense that they have a moral virtue

that stops them from just destroying everything, or they are demons in the sense that they are controlled by a one world government and they have eliminated terrorism through complete control, which is a fascinating concept. That it must be like your society must move to the extremes as you develop more and more technology because the technology becomes so asymptotically powerful. I really enjoyed that.

Even it's interesting. Do you remember? I mean, it feels like Sam Harris fell off dramatically. I don't know if that's actually true from a viewership basis, but it feels like. He turned inward and he went full paywall. So he'll only post half of his shows on YouTube. So he has an incredibly rabid audience that pays a monthly fee to be part of the community, but he never escapes that little echo chamber um i saw a hot take about him today

that uh lopez was saying that he like you should never forget that one of his like critical turning points was doing a lot of psychedelics yeah and that was like canonical to his development and i and i just thought it was relevant because like five, six years ago when I just graduated college, I worked with somebody that was just very into the Sam Harris meditation app, which is an alternative to just going to church, basically. Because it's like, hey, sit and be quiet and just sort of like think about these ideas. It's like almost a one-to-one. It's like church in your pocket, but it sam harris's like church of atheism yeah well wasn't it willmanitis who posted about this today that or a few days ago that uh like the folks that get one-shotted by ayahuasca are also getting like they'd be so much less resilient or they get one-shotted by the idea of ai doomerism

uh and you can get one-shotted by anything yeah yeah but it's a good it's a good phrase it's a good turn of phrase um and and the reason is that is that because i've always had this interesting thought that a lot of the ai doomers are fearful of a return of god have we talked about this basically this idea that um they live degenerate lives that are highly incongruent with any sort of moral framework. And so, but they also believe God is dead. And so that's fine. They won't be punished because they don't believe in traditional God. But if AI becomes a God, AI will judge them and then AI will kill them or punish them or send them to like an AI hell essentially because they haven't been living a morally virtuous life. Yeah.

And so a lot of it is like an anxiety about the return of God. Whereas if you at least believe that you're living some sort of morally virtuous life, it's like, yes, there might be an AI that's super powerful, but it will think I'm cool and good and it'll be down to hang. It'll be great. Give me guidance in my life. Yeah, I mean, there are plenty of people that are powerful that you run into and they don't just immediately want to kill you

because you haven't done anything bad. Otherwise, we wouldn't have made it out of Saturday night. No way. But there is something about when you dig into a lot of the most prominent doomers and you read how they live their lives, you're like, wow, this is pretty dark and crazy. It is interesting. There's one guy who describes himself as a sadist. Yeah, it is interesting that on – I mean, there's so much talk right now about how impact or sorry how ai

will impact every facet of society yeah and a lot of people depending on your industry like you're going to talk it up as it's going to have this greater impact right now it's popular in crypto to be like oh ai is going to adopt crypto rails and use tokens and wallets and it's you know it's less regulated so they can just do this all programmatically. But, but there's such a crazy case to be made of how AI is going to transform how we think of religion. Right. Yeah. Kind of what you're getting at, which is. Yeah. There was a guy, Anthony, was it, was it Anthony Levandowski?

I believe he was the, the, the guy who left Google went to Uber and then went to jail and got pardoned for stealing code from Waymo oh it's crazy yeah pardoned and and I believe he said that he was starting a church of AI like yeah like we will worship the AI god and and then I don't know what happened and I think maybe he just started building another like normal company um but but there was there was this big like trend for a while it was like well it's interesting like replacing even so the reason this article coming out now is kind of funny is because i do think you could have written you could have written the exact same article a year ago

like it's not like breaking news there's this wave of christianity even two years ago it had become counter-cultural on tiktok if you were a young man to make these vibe reels that were like religiously oriented and like oriented around Christian ideals. On the feminine side, there was like the trad wife content, ballerina farms, that type of stuff that got really popular recently, which is like adjacent. It's Mormon, but it's adjacent. Yeah, and eveneremy had a good

post i'm trying to find it sure that was over the summer well let me read this while you're looking that up um they say the interest in christianity among some of the technorati comes at a moment when religion has been declining in america for decades we're just a few decades removed from what from when the new atheism the new atheism movement, partly led by philosopher Sam Harris, sat at the center of our cultural zeitgeist. Just 68% of Americans described themselves as Christians in 2023, according to Gallup research from that year, a dramatic drop from nearly 90% of Americans in the 1990s. That is so high, 90% in 1990s. I had no idea it was that high. And I'm wondering, are they counting Catholics as Christians there, do you think? I would guess. They have to be, right?

And moreover, 80% of Americans think religion is losing influence in the country, according to Pew Research, a high watermark since the organization began asking that question in 2001. Still, about half the Pew respondents who said religion is losing influence thought it was a bad thing. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy's post was on July 3rd of this year. He says, if you can't see that we're on the brink of a religious tidal wave in young people, you have your head in the sand. Yep. So. Yeah.

Yep. So, Bible sales are up 22% this year. Halo, a prayer app raised $105 million from investors, including general catalyst, as well as Peter Thiel. Let's really we'd love to celebrate large funding rounds. Um, and, uh, it became the first religious app to reach number one in the Apple App Store. And also there's that Christian film studio, Angel Studios, and they are producing like HBO level

interpretations of the Bible. And they're also very, very good at just online marketing. The movies go into theaters, but then they have this great mechanism for buying tickets for your friends. So they have this kind of like social viral engine a little bit to amp things up a little bit more.

And the team behind it, I'm like loosely connected them, are like absolute killers, like really, really sharp. And it's completely under discussed that they're like probably one of the greatest new media companies, because they're just like in the religious category. But if you put them against a free press or something, you'd be like, oh, wow, this is a fantastic business.

They're A24 level, very, very successful. We should do a whole deep dive on them. It's very fascinating. If there's one person at the center of tech's shift toward Christianity, it's billionaire Peter Thiel, a devout Christian who, like many other techno-Christians, doesn't publicly align with any one denomination. Several of the young tech founders and investors I spoke to, from Los Angeles to Austin to New York,

told me they had been influenced by direct conversations with Thiel, as well as his frequent talks on religion and his work spreading the ideas of theological philosopher René Girard. For me, the logic was simple. It was, well, Thiel is really smart and interesting, and he's pulling from René Gir well teal is really smart and interesting and he's pulling from renee gerard who's really smart and interesting and both of them are pointing back to the figure of christ shouldn't i look into that said david perel founder of right of passage a tech focused online writing school who has met teal a few times yeah very very david yeah it was i was talking to trey about this like it's always one of the most it's one of the most like you know countercultural things about trey's like kind of personal brand and and i'm

glad to see it get more attention just because it is very interesting you don't want to go too far with it i think but yeah uh but i think this like really really nails it down as like this is just who he is and yeah it's not it's not like some there's not a deck about like let's like let's pick something that's edgy or something it's like no this is very natural so i reached out to our our friend the lone ranger oh yeah to get kind of his take on this he is a incredibly intelligent uh young man who and uh has found himself um one of the only um he is a sort of religious advisor to to many uh different people within the tech elite so i was interested to get his opinion he said his first thought was one um he'd never seen the author before which he thought

was relevant because historically, major papers would actually have somebody that was just full time on the religion beat, right? That they would just write articles like this, and that would allow them to just engage in like a higher level analysis of what was happening. Versus like, this is a thorough article, right? She talks to a bunch of people as i a taylor david perel yep new founding guys um but uh but she doesn't have the like um literary chops and expertise to like write something like truly groundbreaking yeah right that makes sense um and the new york times uh the original uh original the New York Times misinformation actually still has like religious beat writers. Interesting. I didn't know that. Anyway, so.

Yeah, so another thing that he kind of went into is he basically says as of right now, he believes that this is entirely organic. Like there's not one specific organization or public figure that's leading this. Yeah. But he says what comes next is that as this trend becomes more and more obvious, there's going to be people that are going to try to gatekeep it, claim it, like grift off of it in different ways. Totally. Right? Yeah. Already it's something that a young founder can put on as a costume

and to feel more edgy or more aligned with like the Tealverse. But the people that were covered here, Sia, Augustus, Perel, they're not doing this to be clear. They're like non-threatening. Yeah. So like, I mean, everyone saw that they were doing this like years clear they're like non they're non-threatening yeah so like i mean everyone saw that they were doing this like years before this article yeah but you can and they're like they're pretty take this pretty clearly like not being political about it yeah just sort of saying these

are these are um generally you know my beliefs and and why i was uh got involved in the first place. Yeah. I like this question here. When Thiel proselytizes, he likes to dispense little rhetorical riddles. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about one in particular because of what it seems to suggest about the scope of the mindset he and other tech Christians hold.

He posed it to the economist Tyler Cowen when he appeared on Cowen's podcast in April. The millionaire and the general and the priest, what do they all have in common? In referencing those three archetypes, Thiel was describing the coalition of free market libertarians, defense hawks, and religious social conservatives that coalesced in the Reagan years, drawn together partly through a common dislike of communism. And it's hard not to look at the tech elite piling into Donald Trump's new administration as a second coming of those forces.

Tealism can be a mind-stretching form of Christianity. And I think that's part of its allure, especially in a world in which lengthy, digressive, right-leaning podcasts have become cultural cornerstones. Seeing a guy as smart and rational as Peter Teal be like, the resurrection literally happened. It's real. There is a taboo that's being broken,

said one person in tech whose newfound interest in Christianity largely ties into listening to Thiel. It shows that faith is valid and real. Yeah, there is a little bit of just breaking the glass and jumping over the threshold

in order to make this acceptable like no one uh no no vc can write you off as a founder because you're christian because there are now enough people who are serious yeah that you won't be you you can wear on your sleeve whereas before people used to hide it clearly um yeah it's wild. I know a guy who is a brilliant, brilliant, uh, electrical engineer and grew up in a deeply religious city in Georgia, I believe. And in high school he had a, like a, every, literally everyone in his community was religious, Christian. And he had this breakthrough and wrote his thesis about atheism and decided that he was an atheist because he was so rational and so, so like quantitative and science based essentially. And he was essentially cast out of his society and like exercised like literally

they got they brought in an exorcist which i didn't even know was the thing that existed in like the 90s i guess wild um wild and then and then eventually he came back to it which was very interesting while he was like in this hyper rational phase for a long time very very interesting like how how difficult that is and then um and then when he when he started you know going back into religion he uh it was still like very countercultural in silicon valley and it was very odd and he was always like seen as like an outsider he's like been an outsider his entire life it's great it's wild anyway should we go into isaiah taylor one of one of the elsa goodman who founded velar atom, a nuclear energy startup,

sees his and his peers turn towards Christianity as a way to reject the tech status quo and to shoo atheism, which has essentially been tech's de facto spiritual guiding principle. Yeah, you got to get out of the spreadsheets when you're deciding what to do. It is tricky.

You can see it with SBF, just like like the whole like oh well you know this is like mathematically efficient to like steal all this money so i can give it back like he might have been a true believer in his ultra utilitarian philosophy but it clearly led to like a terrible bad outcome yeah he's going to take user funds to invest in Anthropic, which he knew was going to be a $50 billion company. And he was going to make it all back. He was, he was. SBF was on the Tyler Cowen podcast and Tyler was like, how much of a utilitarian are you really? Like if there was a 51% odds coin, like the coin is 51% heads, 49% tails.

And if it comes up 51%, if it comes up heads, the population of humanity doubles. And if it comes up tails, everyone dies. Would you flip that coin? Like it's positive EV. The expected value is that the population increases. That means more happiness and utility.

So the utilitarian should flip it. And he was like, yes, I would flip it. I would flip it endlessly. the expected value is that the population increases. That means more happiness and utility. So, you know, the, the utilitarian should flip it. And he was like, yes, I would flip it. I would flip it endlessly. I would flip it forever because he just operates off of a positive.

Yeah. And it's like, he doubles it, doubles it once. He's like, let's go again. Practice. Obviously that's not,

that's not how it works out. But like, if you're just short-sighted thinking about expected value, well, yes, then it is positive ev but like clearly you need some broader guiding principle than that find god yeah very odd um yeah where else should we go i mean in terms of the driving force i mean michelle stevens really

can't be under counted like she's she's put together like a really strong speaking tour and has been a driving force they highlight here uh the Act 17 Collective, a nonprofit that aims to evangelize tech leaders that Michelle Stevens leads. And she's hosted events with Teal as well as Y Combinator President Gary Tan. The name references a Bible passage about Apostle Paul's missionary journey through various cities. She and her husband Trey originally planned to bring the group to 17 cities including Austin, Miami, and New York, but their ambition is growing. Just last month, she and Trey ran two ACT 17 events in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the theology of AI and defense and choosing good quests. Yeah, we got to do a deep dive on choosing good quests. That is a fantastic essay. Really great. And Trey had another recent post that i think was really great

about uh ai girlfriends and in there there was a there was a little bit of this at the end kind of saying like there's this natural force that wants to just you know juice reward find the path of least resistance let's just make everyone date and ai um and and we were i was kind of struggling with him thinking about the uh that the conclusion because i didn't he like the original conclusion was something like you know oh like you know go to church like rebuild the institutions like meet people in person um but that's very hard and it's very it doesn't fully align with like the the war machine that is like vc's funding like the only fans business is just so powerful like it's very hard

to overwhelm that culturally and same thing with the ai girlfriends thing like if the business is just printing money it's just going to have so much more energy behind it than like a couple people being like hey we should like go to that church and patronize it and like build our community up like it's really hard to start those things um but but i do think that there's like the angel studios thing the uh uh the the the uh hallow app there are a few ways that um you can align community building real world relationships some religion stuff you can you can you can make that align with like the traditional venture capital model i talked to one vc was who was thinking about incubating a uh b2b sass company for churches basically like you know like i need to get in

on the action what do i know i know yeah and i'm pro-christian so vertical sass vertical sass for payments for donate payment rails for donations exactly all this stuff but then also I mean if you if you go like uh we do a lot of like content creation video you know recording and stuff um if you want to learn this stuff you don't go on YouTube and search for like what do podcasters do you go to the mega churches because those guys have the best gear. It's incredible. They have all these like behind the scenes things because they're all doing like live streams and switching and stuff. It's like NFL level, but they all talk about it because it's their community and they're

giving back to each other and stuff. It's really, really cool. I've watched like a million of these videos and I'm always like, oh my God, they got that gear? Like sick. I want that. But yeah, I mean, I think that like bringing some of that top tier stuff down and making it more accessible for these organizations to run really, really smoothly probably is genuinely extremely beneficial. Anyway, you got anything else on the information article you want to talk about? Yeah, I thought it was interesting. Julia Black, the writer, positions this. I don't know if this is authentic, but

Michelle had said she doesn't mind if people use their Act 17 events to pitch their startup to her husband. Go ahead and network, she said. God used everything, anything and everything to get people to turn that way, so I'm totally okay with that and actually welcome it. And Julia positioned that as mixing religion and work, which I guess is like one way to do that. I would just call that mixing community and work. Yeah. Like, yeah, churches have always been a place for community

and conversations that are not, you know, entirely oriented, um, around, uh, pure religion. So, um, I like the, uh, like the call out to new founding a Dallas based anti-diversity equity and inclusion venture firm anchored by a Christian ethic and worldview. Okay. Um, so there wasn't much, wasn't much more on that, but, um, yeah. Echoing that Pilgrim is continuing to fundraise for future projects like his planned Center for Sacred Vocation. He hopes to create a space where people can come network, find people who are like-minded to start a company.

He told me it won't be just for Christians, but obviously as a church, it will be, hey, we believe God created work to be a good thing. We want to help you think about how to do that ethically. I read a great book about, it was from this like capital allocator, some big hedge fund guy, about Christianity and it was a fantastic embrace of Christianity, of capitalism, because obviously capitalism didn't really exist when the Bible was written. So there's this question of like can you

derive Christian... It existed, it just wasn't defined. Yeah. Yeah. Can you, can you derive capitalist principles from the Bible to know, like, are we in the good timeline or not? Like, are we doing the right thing? Is there, is there a Christian defense of capitalism? And, uh, he had a bunch of really interesting things to say about that, but one was that, you know, God is a creator and created us in their image. And it's our job to create. And the role of creation is business and is capitalism and is entrepreneurship. I keep finding, like, you read all these great books and the conclusion is always, like, start a company.

Become a founder. Like, it doesn't matter what their, like, what their stated angle is. Maybe it's just me, but, like, the Straussian reading is always, like, become a founder. Like it doesn't matter who, what they're like, what their stated angle is. Maybe it's just me, but like the Straussian reading is always like become a founder. Become a founder. Yeah. The last thing I would say, I think it, uh, you know, we, we, we generally only, uh, are on this podcast to talk about technology and business and the technology industry. So that's why we covered this. but generally i think it's a very positive trend that people within the tech community are feel like they can fully express their personal life themselves right so the same thing of trey and michelle you know having their uh events and church and being able to talk about that that's great there's also prominent uh examples of investors and founders from Jewish backgrounds and like wrapped Teflon. And they post that on X, right? So like, that's another expression of it. Neither of them,

like it's, it should be totally, everybody should be fine with people expressing their own personal belief systems and values and cultures. So, so anyways, glad, glad to see it all. That concludes our deep dive for this episode. Uh, do you have some DMS over there? I wanted to go through some Q and a DMS come. We got some DMS. Let's hit some DMS. I got it. I got a good one for you here. Let me see if I can find this. Um, okay. Yeah, this is a, this is a fun one. Hey, Jordy, as someone with a soul male heir, are you doing anything special to prepare young master Roman for inheriting the Haze estate

and continuing your dynastic traditions? Great question. We could do an entire deep dive on this, and we should. I am, along with my wife, where he's turning three next year in Q1, and we're going to be gifting him a C-Corp for his third birthday and start him building his own enterprise because as much as I think that all parents should generally embrace nepotism

and try to give their children and their communities, you know, the advantages in life. I do want him to learn how to do it on his own. And so, yeah, I think one of the best gifts for a third birthday is a C-Corp, right? A C-Corp's malleable, right? They can bootstrap out of it. They could raise capital, could kind of work across any industry it's a great gift to be like hey it's not a not a totally inexpensive gift right stripe atlas like 500 bucks it's like i got you this is the equivalent of 30 dino puzzles this is a ps5

yeah and uh and now you it's up to you to make it worth something but instead of playing you know some ps5 game you're playing the game of capitalism. The game of capitalism, which is the ultimate game. Ultimate game. It's much like the dino puzzle. You need to puzzle together the capital. Yeah, exactly. To create value.

So yeah, that's a big, big gift coming up. Fantastic. I have an idea for you. I think that there's a natural inclination for children to rebel. And so you might want to use some reverse psychology. Tell them, hey, look, I expect you to become a tech journalist. I expect you to become a DJ in Bushwick.

And then 23 rolls around. He sits you down. Dad, I know you wanted me to become a dj and be the first member of our family to play a boiler room set but i want to start hedge fund yes that's actually so smart and you're just like okay son if that's what you want to do with your life i will support it i will back your first fund yeah but uh keep listening to the edm the journalism side too every every saturday morning the routine is if we sit down, we open the information app on the family iPad.

We deify that, and then he gets exhausted by it and has to rebel. And then he's like, but through the process of reading the information articles, he learns about these countercultural bad boy entrepreneurs.

Exactly. That are like, wow, these guys, Zaya Taylor, this guy kind of sounds cool. Yep. Augustus Dorico, this guy sounds cool. Yeah. Strong moral character. Yep.

Fitness oriented. Yep. So, yeah, I think that reverse psychology. Don't undercount it. And a C-Corp. And a C-Corp. It's a great. So he has the entity set up.

Yeah, yeah. If he wants to rebel. Yeah. Give your children entities. Yes, for sure. I can't stress this enough. For sure. Well, we got a question and a suggestion from Sean. He says, Tech Bros Pod, have you heard you guys need a tie recommendation? Check out this Burberry. What do you think?

Should we do some Burberry ties? We should get on there and shop. Sean submitted this last night. We just got to the studio this morning. Didn't have time to get in there but it's a great thank you for pointing that out Sean it's really going to be dependent on who writes us a bigger check to sponsor them from the high fashion world in terms of ties

but we're open if you run a tie company contact us it's kind of a winner take all it's a winner take all market this neck and that neck. Well, we can do rival sponsorships potentially. Hermes over here, Burberry over there. We'll see.

Thank you for the submission, Sean. Oh, this is good. I work for a billionaire as a chief of staff. What art should I put on my wall to make a statement? What do you think about art for your office? You want, when the billionaire walks in and says, hey, I need you to book a flight for me, you got to make a statement. My recommendation was you go with Peter Paul Rubens, David, and Goliath. We'll have to put this up on the screen, but it's one of the most aggressive.

It's a painting. It's in Pasadena at the Norton Simon. You, it's a, it's a, it's a painting. It's, it's in Pasadena at the Norton Simon. You can go see the real thing if you're in LA. And, uh, it's a, it's an amazing, uh, painting of this super jacked David just about to be head Goliath. Yeah. It's like one of the most aggressive, like fire and brimstone types type paintings, uh, really sets the tone. Yeah hey, billionaire, you might be bigger than me. I might be the chief of staff. You're the boss here. But at any moment, one rock to the head, I'm slicing your head off.

Yeah, I'm going to take a different approach. So if you're chief of staff for a billionaire, you have big ambitions. You don't want to be the right-hand man or woman forever. And so what I would do, billionaire circuit, you're going to end up at various art fairs. Art Basel might be one of them. So I think the right approach here is actually to silently and anonymously

build an entire career as a sort of provocative modern artist, right? We've seen pieces like the banana that was duct taped to the walls, selling for significant amounts of money. And so I would take that approach, figure out a way, if you're hungry and a hustler,

you'll be able to do this, figure out a way to get your own art shown at Art Basel, get it auctioned by Sotheby's and really get those numbers up and take your boss and say, hey, we should stop by. This artist is blowing up.

And then ask, once you're there, the billionaire might say, is the artist here? What do they even look like? Pull off the mask. Pull off the mask and say say it was me all along. The call's coming from inside the house. Exactly.

But only do that after they've bought a piece and say you're my customer now. I would take it a step further. Maybe you don't have the artistic inclination to pull it off yourself. You've got to get on the art circuit, figure out what artists want to sell to your boss, rent your wall space to display billionaire walks in sees oh that's nice yeah it's my friend yeah it's only this much then you become an art dealer yeah start selling yeah i mean you could even take

this a step further is find an artist you love buy up all their available works work with sotheby's to get these works listed you buy them back from sotheby's to mark them up to higher prices yep and then just build a little you know build the market market build the market and then have your boss be the bag holder and have him buy the piece and be like i i own this entire market and then flood the market running it to your recommendation there we go it's uh peter Paul Rubens. What a piece. It's beautiful. It's going to look great on your wall. Good luck. Here's a serious one I got from somebody. Do you think there's room in the market for a robo-advisor with a modern all-weather

portfolio such that it entails inflation hedging via crypto and black Swan hedging via far OTM near expiry options. It's interesting. The robo advisor market. I haven't followed too much. I know that isn't wealth front the main big. So, so I think what's been interesting is the,

for a long time, there was a lot of robo advisors. It was unclear if any of them are working and then wealth front came out and they were like, we have 200 million of revenue and we're profitable. And this is actually a great business, right? Because people park their funds and they don't really think about it. And the number goes up and presumably retention is pretty high until maybe... I think there's a certain point where people are like, well, I have 5 million in Wealthfront. Maybe I should give this to a traditional money manager type person,

but it turns out they're pretty good businesses. You know, we know like the autopilot team, he's built a great business already. Um, having a more opinionated robo advisor that has like a set strategy. So I think there's a lot, this,

I have no way to like analyze on the, on the, on the show, whether or not this is a good strategy, but I think like highly opinionated robo advisors are a great way to like analyze on the show whether or not this is a good strategy, but I think like highly opinionated robo-advisors are a great way to get your first 20 million of AUM and then from there, maybe you can build. Yeah, I think you kind of need to abstract it.

Like there's one which is like the actual, you know, backtesting and risk modeling and just making sure that what you're proposing here is a good strategy. And then number two is like, how are you wrapping that and distilling that into marketing language so yeah I remember there's one robo advisor that was like every time you make a transaction it will round it up yeah it will just take 15 cents and you'll never really notice but then you'll save a bunch of money

along the way yeah and then there's like the the other one which is like copy trading oh this one. There was another one that went through YC a couple of years ago that was like, we just look at the hedge fund, the best performing hedge fund disclosures, and we trade based on that. So you're copying a hedge fund. Yeah. And that's very easy to understand.

Okay. Hedge funds do well. My portfolio is copying those. I'm happy about that. I'm willing to give it a try. Right. copying those, I'm happy about that. I'm willing to give it a try, right? And so this like modern all weather portfolio, like that could be great, but it's not jumping out to me

as like a fantastic elevator pitch that you could put in like an Instagram ad or like a post around Twitter. I want to copy that. Whereas the autopilot guys, it's like you're copying Nancy Pelosi's portfolio. That is a meme. People understand that.

And so they're in with that. It's very distilled. Yeah. The last thing I would say, so wealth front, if you've ever used it is very risk off, no matter how much, how, uh, risk on you basically tell it to be, it's still like going to be a very pretty stable portfolio. And that's part of their strategy. If I was going to make a robo advisor and I just wanted to optimize for users and like attention and potentially volume, I would just say we are the degenerate robo advisor, which is like, this is ultra high risk. You might lose almost everything, but the potential content that would come out of that is like, you can, if, if wealth front wants to be the stable place

where people can earn 6% a year and you're like, hey, you might go down 70% one year and go up 4,000% the next year and we're going to do it. There's hedge funds that basically do that. I mean, yeah, there's a crypto trader that our buddy knows who you can essentially give him $1,000 and he'll just try and run it up to a million. And then he'll be bankrupt after. And so you got to pull out at the right time, kind of push him. But he'll just try and run it up to a million and then he'll be bankrupt after and so you got to pull out at the right time kind of push him but he's just a gambler like he's not

even a hedge fund it's just like a guy yeah and uh yeah the the d-gen because that's going to create a lot of content a lot of wild long tail stuff uh people people want the risk yeah so instead of wealth front you'd say maybe call it the incinerator. The capital incinerator. How much did you put in the incinerator? I threw a 10 right in. I threw a 10 in. Let's throw a 10 in the incinerator and see what happens.

See what happens. That's great. Should we move on to the timeline? Do we have any other news? No, I got to jump in. So last week we talked about this. that's great uh should we move on to the timeline do we have no i gotta jump in we got a uh so last week we talked about this we have had so many incredible brothers in the comments uh replying uh and so we decided to make reply guy of the month a weekly award okay weekly award and this

one was honestly crushing it was so high stakes for us. I was up all night thinking about this, debating between the choices. We barely slept. It's one of the hardest decisions I've ever made in my life. Barely slept. And let's see. Let's talk about some of the people that almost made the cut. I mean, Baldo is absolute on the path to goat

hood brody brody's an animal he had a great comment today response to our driving gloves so brody's been in the running but the guy that is this week's reply guy of the week is uh somebody who has to have post notifications on it's the first comment pretty much every time. He's a true technology brother. He's building, he builds rockets down in Texas. Nice. He is friends and I think, you know, partners with Red Bull Futurist.

And he is none other than Stefan Salis. Salis. Salis. Stefan Salis. Salis, you are this week's reply guy of the week. And, it can't go to somebody better. I'll drop some of the,

the highlights here. We posted yesterday founders. The next time a journalist is writing a hit piece on your company, buy them a dressage horse. Most tech journalists grew up writing weekly, a gift like this will let them know that you respect their culture and you shouldn't be unambiguously demonized and returned. He says this, that equestrian opulence I thought was very relevant. We posted about VCs.

If you want to count on a VC for a growth check, you should hope that they go skiing places that don't have chairlifts. He says, if you can't drop in on a double black diamond equivalent run with fresh powder, how are you supposed to generate wealth? Fact check. It's a good point. Later, he says, America isn't fucking around. So that's a deeply American post by itself. He just threw that in there and he just i love yeah yeah just a little bit a little bit of fuel on the fire he was weighing

in on on y combinator's success y combinator is a great yeah i mean that's the thing about being a great reply guy you don't need to drop a whole essay every single time you can just kind of just kind of remix what we're saying amp it up a little bit just give us some juice we love it this one was good too he said me uh we posted vcs with no followers love to yap about how much they value anonymity which which uh you know if you've talked to a vc with no followers they will tell you that yeah uh he said i think it's funny that i see vcs with zero followers isn't it heavily in your favor to be able to reach an audience and get your product in front of people and i thought that was just a good way to position um uh position that and then lastly we posted and just like that venture capital holiday party season is over thank you

to the lps that make these events possible and our security for keeping us safe from anti-capitalists the parties may be done for now but the back of the napkin deals will echo for eternity and stefan said communists wouldn't even have napkins to do deals on they have much to learn and that's true that's good anyways so shout out to stefan a great american a great reply guy and we are lucky uh to have you in our community of brothers. Fantastic. You love to see it. On to the timeline. Let's do it. Let's go to Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp. He has been on the show before. He is, quote, posting Lenny Richitsky, who says, companies minting the most founders out of their product managers. And Ramp is number four with 14.3%.

And he says, we're the youngest company on this list, already top five in the ranking of new companies formed. Sad to see exceptional people leave. Only thing we fear more is no longer attracting exceptional founders in the first place. Just shy of 10% of Ramp's team today have started a company. Yeah, wow, fantastic. You were joking about the pipeline of like ramp, ramp to company founder. And I didn't realize how real it is. No, the

pipeline is the pipeline is extremely real. The thing that I would say that a lot of people that become founders want to be founders from very early on in their lives. Like maybe they had a small business while they were in middle school or delivering papers or flipping sneakers, these kind of things. And so there's this tendency to once you're an adult to be like, oh, I want to be a founder. I should become a founder immediately. And there's so much value in going and working for a company like Ramp, learning best practices, learning what excellence looks like, learning about the needs of customers. You're not just learning how to work and how to approach business, but you're learning about the problems that businesses have and the, and you know,

ramp probably benefits from the fact that they serve companies in a bunch of, in a bunch of different industries. And so you're getting exposure to a bunch of industries and the problems that are there. So I give this advice all the time to people that are like, I want to be a founder. And it's like, well, you don't need to have started a company before obviously to be a founder. And it's like, well, you don't need to have started a company before, obviously to be a founder, anybody can just become a founder. But a lot of people

would be better off going and working two, three years at an, at an iconic company and then taking a crack. And most importantly, a fast paced company that executes on product very quickly, like Ram. This is why, you know, Google, former Google person was really great during the, during the, like the growth years of Google, because they would just go and Paul Buchheit would just go build Gmail in a weekend. And now it's kind of been like, oh, okay, Google is a place where you just settle in. Maybe you leave and start a company if you're in the AI group. But like for the most part, like the Google PM is not as hot anymore. Yeah, the pattern matching.

But Ramp is still super fast paced. Yeah. And it's not just about what you learn on the job, but it's the pattern matching that capital allocators will do after you leave where they're like, this person's never started a company before, but they were a PM at Ramp and they built this feature. And I talked to Eric about it and he said, they're great. And that just can be an extreme catalyst. Yep. Let's go to Gabriel. He says, this is how Vitalik built Ethereum.

And it's a screenshot of a kid in a very awkward pose saying, look at this kid. And everyone was laughing out loud at this. It is funny. Vitalik has been, I think he's been on tech bro drip, but he hasn't done enough. I mean, A, got to go through a bulking cycle, got to hit the gym, get jacked. It'd be a great turnaround everyone would be singing his praises i'm sure that i'm on a little test get him get him a get him a sports car get his testosterone up but also he did that photo shoot i believe for time magazine or forbes or something and they did him really dirty they shot him really flat they didn't give them a lot of contrast the camera was kind of looking down on him and the whole it was very clear that the whole thrust of the article and the and the brief for the uh for the photographer was make him look like a nerdy

kid because that was the story they wanted to tell they didn't want to tell him like a like a hero and i was looking at the the trump is on trump is on the cover of time magazine and i saw that they made him look really heroic and everyone was like this is crazy because the last five Time Magazine covers about Trump have been like it's a disaster, it's terrible but then they finally shot him and if you look at the BTS you can see that it's a really low angle

the photographer's basically on the floor, he's looking up at Trump which is heroic, angle matters a lot and there's a big soft light and you'll see we have a big soft light and you'll see you know we have a big soft light in the studio it it it creates more intrigue for your features more contrast and it just makes you look better and that those details get lost a lot um but hopefully we can spread the word that founders should be aware of the way that they're photographed ryan peterson

when he was on the cover of for. It was a fantastic lighting setup. I was obsessed with it. I know. Founders need to build into the shoot that this is the camera angle. I won't take photos in any other angles. I will be smiling because sometimes if you want it to be a celebratory piece, I had the New York Times come to my house once, and they told me they were covering my launch, and they were excited about what we were doing. And we did this interview

and then they told me during the shoot, don't smile. And I was like, that's pretty weird. I'm being featured in the Sunday business section. I'm kind of think that's decently cool. At least my parents will think it'll, it's cool. And then, uh, of course it wasn't, it wasn't like overly negative, but it wasn't like the celebratory piece that they had and the main thing is that there's still a lot of people out there that put like pr firms on retainer but the pr people aren't sharp enough to actually execute that if you look at the way uh tim cook is shot at apple it is so detailed and clearly it's like he's always wearing an apple watch he's always wearing nikes like he everything is thought out perfectly the angle the the set design of his office is perfect and if you

have someone good on your team you don't necessarily need to know how to do that as a founder but you should have someone on your team that's that's overlooking that and making that happen yeah um let's go to uh arvind srinivas over at Perplexity. He says, you post about Robinhood. I post about Ramp. We aren't the same. And this post got a lot of likes. He's subtweeting Sam Altman, who was talking about the Robinhood gold card, which is a very cool product. But he's saying, you know, you're flexing with your gold uh you know card tied to your trading account

i'm using the ramp card to optimize my business and this is just a crazy ad for ramp i mean yeah we've done some good um promote promoted posts of ramp but uh it's hard to compete with a guy running one of the hottest uh ai companies in the world to just post his personal ramp card and brag about it. It's great. And I think once ramp launches the meteorite card or the tungsten card. Yeah, yeah. We're working with them to try to get some heavier,

more exotic metals. The meteorite card is a good one. That's going to be big when they do that. But Robinhood will have to respond. going to be big when they do that. But Robin, who will have to respond? It'll be the card wars. Yeah. Much like the merch wars and going on in defense tech.

And we're all in Palantir. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to Delian. He says, thank God, please end this nightmare. And it's an announcement that Donald Trump will use its best efforts to

eliminate daylight saving time. Yeah. There's been a huge, strong constituency, but shouldn't. It's inconvenient. Yeah. there's been a huge. Strong constituency, but shouldn't. Daylight saving time is inconvenient. Yeah, there's been a big movement here. Huberman had something.

I think he's branding it. He coined it. Yeah, he did. Hugen's Law. He understands the value of coinage. I think he stopped the clock or something like that. Stopped the clock, yeah. Yeah, Sagar and Jetty is big on this.

He's been on this for years, talking about how it's a tax on early risers. No, it's a tax on parents yeah sun goes down at five you're like great i've got to entertain yeah children for another 90 can't just let them play outside anymore yeah it's it's it's i didn't really care about it until having kids yep and mine go down around seven yep but but seriously like sun goes down and you're like okay we have to keep them indoors yeah like try to get their energy out yeah yeah it just it's not not great it would be exciting it would just be the type of change where it would feel like monumental for

like a day and you'd be like wow i didn't even know they could do that that's crazy like because they used to just like create these things like at some point it didn't exist and then it did and they just did things. And then the thought of the government changing something like that or moving us onto metric. We could just do that, but it's been unthinkable. That would be, frankly, un-American. Yeah.

And then if we did a hostile takeover of the metric system and then kind of recreated the history of it and said, look, we've actually been using this in many ways for much longer yep native americans actually use created the metric system i love it uh let's go to ryan peterson he's been on the show before he says inside a flexport 747 loading this thing to within nine kilograms of max weight today. Nice job by our sales team. This is amazing. This is founder mode.

So that's, I think I sent this into the stack because this is the, he's been on a founder mode tear recently. Totally, totally. And it's so cool because you see this and anybody who is a customer is like, wow, the CEO is deep in the trenches of his company, like improving it daily, making sure it's running well. If you work for the company, you're like,

Ryan's working harder than I am. Like that's unexcusable. I should be like, you want to be working at least as hard as your boss. And then if you don't work for Flexport and you're, you want to work somewhere founder led, it's like, okay, this is a company that, um, that, that, uh, has the right culture coming straight from the top. So a couple of years ago I made a whole video on my YouTube channel about Flexport and kind of broke down his whole history and it was great. I didn't even interview him for it. Um, but I was always kind of wondering like, Oh, what would be a good followup? And when he got the seven 47, I was like, can we go do an interview on the seven 47? Like that would be so good follow-up and when he got the 747 i was like can we go do an interview on the 747 like that would be so sick like and the interview and the the the bay drops in the back it'd be so cool right uh and and we never could figure out the scheduling it was always really

hard this makes so much more sense for him just to hop on and you know i don't know if i want to spend like three days in hong kong right now but, uh, but we should definitely do a vlog with him on the seven 47, something like that. Yeah. And CEOs it's costs $0 to go founder mode. You just have to find it within you. That is very, very capital efficient thing. You just got to become, you just got to embody the lifestyle. Yeah. It's interesting. The founder mode stuff is it's like you go back to Brian Armstrong. It's like this crazy bravery thing. This is not edgy or brave in that way. It's really just being authentic. It's the best possible marketing for Flexport to the entire market, capital markets, new hires, customers. And it doesn't require some expensive New York agency.

You don't have to spend $300,000 on a branding package like we did just to launch a podcast right you literally just have to have a cell phone and just like talk about what you're doing and show that you're deeply engaged and I'm sure there's been discussions on the Flexport marketing team of like should we do some sort of owned content should we start a podcast about shipping yeah and we'll have someone like you know non-related to Ryan run it. And it's like, that's going nowhere. This is already viral. And this took him a couple minutes to go and do. And he was already going to go anyway.

So why not? Go for a ride. We got a promoted post. Speaking of founder mode, we got a promoted post from a friend of ours, a friend of mine and friend of the show, Nate Bosshard. Nate says, brand marketing within traditional orgs has been siloed, gatekept, and opaque. 40% of an average marketing budget is allocated to brand, yet no one really understands what it truly is. It's a services-heavy practice without software to scale it. Brand AI finally solves this.

So Nate has incubated or helped start a company called Brand.AI. And what they're doing is like building this entire suite of tools. I know that the guy who did the, the Rora brand uses brand AI and Nate generated an analysis of technology brothers. And so they've built software that, that helps you understand your brand from what you're already putting out there yep and so nate ran tb through brand ai and it gave us ideas about what our brand actually is yeah it was really good at like distilling what we've already been talking about

so just like it was really psychoanalyzed us and the podcast like perfectly yeah we didn't even have to be involved um and so we're we're getting onboarded right now. And, uh, anyways, it's kind of beautiful because like, if you put your company through there and it gives you like kind of milquetoast analysis, you can't write it off as just like, Oh, it got it wrong. It's almost like, no, you haven't created enough. You haven't been living the brand. You haven't created a brand. You're not opinionated. Um, you should almost, you know, pull in like, okay, your CEO went on invest like the best. Let's pull that into the brand AI thing as well. And then understand, you know what that is. And then once you, once you dial it down, like that's kind of your brand

book, have everyone run with that. And and to the founder mode point, it's like the Flexport brand needs to be, you know, the guy who goes on the 747, the guy who goes to the dock. And so what does that mean in all their marketing language, all their sales collateral, like anything that they do needs to reflect this because this is the brand now. And it's not whatever's in some pitch deck. Let's go to Ben Heilack.

He's been on the show before. He says, smartphones as we know them will be around the next 20 years at least in the future people will be using them more not less interesting i i do i do think that there's something about like we've gone smaller with the watches the apple watch that hasn't really taken off and we've gone bigger with the ipads and that's still not what people carry. There's something about the pocket that is just the platonic ideal. And even Apple, Steve Jobs didn't want to go bigger than like four inches. Now we're up to like five, like small changes, but it does seem pretty dialed. And it also feels

like as they get more powerful, it's going to be something that drives other experiences. Like you can clearly tell that like the Apple vision pro has this power brick. Your phone has a battery. That's basically the same size. You should really just be plugging a headset into here. If you're using that, like the phone can kind of always be around a power as like the central core of your personal computer. Uh, Ben Thompson, Mr. Techery always says like, we messed up the terminology. The phone should be called the personal computer because it's actually the personal computer. Whereas the computer whereas the the laptop is like a workstation yeah um but what do you like about this post i people have developed such negative relationships with their phones and negative

feelings towards their phone and like oh what's your screen time oh my screen time's so high i always joke around about this i'm like i spend like 90% of the time on my phone working either messaging people that I'm working with, um, workshopping memes, uh, sourcing posts from the timeline, whatever, talking to founders. And so I'm actually like, I was actually pleasantly surprised to see my screen time go up. Uh, last, uh, when I got the notification yesterday, was like good i've been working harder yep but i think people have have developed this thing where yeah you're if you're doing if you're doom scrolling on your phone if you're just like doing the anti-meditation where you're just injecting new ideas in your brain just like constantly which is like what an algo feed does that's bad but the way that you use it matters a lot. And I don't think that more screen time is always worse for you. It's just like what screen time. Even within the apps, like you can be scrolling X and getting all slop,

but if you do click the mute, mute, mute on those, like you can get a pretty high quality. We were with somebody Saturday night and they pulled up LinkedIn and it was like time gated. And we were like, what are you doing?

What are you doing? But it was funny. Cause this founder is like a very hard worker. Yeah. And he was like, what are you doing? What are you doing? But it was funny because this founder is like a very hard worker and he was like, like in it, in it, in it, it was like the app notification

was like, you have used all your LinkedIn time today. And I was like, I mean, I think if he doesn't do that, he wouldn't be able to turn off and like enjoy the party.

Yeah. Yeah. He'd be on it. Yeah. Because he's grinding. It's great though. Classic like stated preference versus revealed preference uh i want

to use my phone less what do people do yeah scroll the algo feeds watch our content um shiel says a few folks have asked me why is 3x why is the 3x multiple good for a lender like bridget here's an answer question for you so wealth front trades at 10x arr and bridget at 3 to 4x is that just due to net dollar retention being much shorter at Bridget? Here's one way to think about quality revenue. If Bridget lays everyone off tomorrow, people run off with the money. And without customer acquisition, there's no ongoing revenue. If Wealthfront lays off everyone tomorrow, the majority of people won't notice.

And Wealthfront continues to make money off those customers for many years to come. So Wealthfront's revenue is worth a lot more in enterprise value than Bridget's. Pretty self-explanatory. Honestly, great analysis. I don't really have that much. I don't know that much about Bridget and I don't know why if they lay people off.

Bridget, to my understanding, was effectively a fintech as a payday lender, right? So they give you these like short-term loans. So there's like a ton of demand for it, but not the highest quality customers to have, not a lot of recurring revenue. But either way, it was like good. It's just exits are good, right?

Like they're necessary. And it wasn't the outcome that everybody, I think it was quite under what their last valuation was. But ultimately, they created a half a billion dollar company. So congratulations to the team and hope everybody made some money. Boom. Little size gong moment. And great analysis by Shiel.

Let's go to Gary Tan. He says, vision for 2040. Every person should have a robot, universal basic robot. And Elon Musk chimes in and says they will. They will. That's exciting. 2040, not too far away. So I think it's under discussed.

So there's a lot of humanoid robot hate right now. And a lot of people are saying like, oh, it's like the iPad form factor. Like it's not really going to be like what you think is going to be the thing is not really going to be the thing. But Elon's been pretty intentional guy. Like I think he had like the fact that he's doing it says a lot. So it is interesting to see. You know, we've talked about we've had a request for robots that goes and uses computer vision to analyze a tree, figure out which leaves are going to fall and just quietly picks them out

before they hit the ground. So we're looking forward to robots like that, but I expect like everybody will have a drone, right? That like goes and picks up like, Oh, I want this drink from the grocery store. Like go grab it for me. Right. Everybody has like their little leaf picker. Everybody has, like, a humanoid robot around the house,

or maybe it's not that form factor. Yeah, it's kind of like how, you know, the first CPU in your house or chip in your house is probably, like, your personal computer. Very expensive. You use it a lot. And then over the last 20, 30 years, like, the chips have just gone into everything,

such that you're like, your toaster has one. And it can be very annoying when it's implemented by a non-tech company poorly but in general like having tech in things is probably good and inevitable and the same thing will probably happen with robots right now everyone does have a personal robot in the sense that like most people have a Roomba or something like that but then there's a question of like is the leaf picker next is the you know is the car after that and then then what else can become robot? You get the laundry one,

you get the dishwashing one, and eventually everyone winds up having, or the average person has one on average. I'm excited. I'm excited for the age of personal robots. I don't think they're going to rise up, and if they do, I'll be shooting them with an AK-47.

Let's go to Kip Mock. He says says we really have to bring family crests back i love this you should be paying a firm half a million dollars to design the crest that your sons will wear on fat gold rings for the coming millennia i do love that i have some friends that have the crest rings that they pass down the best day to start a family tradition is today. Go and design this. I don't think you need to spend a half a million dollars if you don't have it. Obviously, if you do, if you're any sort of venture capitalist,

that's kind of the bare minimum that you should be spending. But for the folks in the audience who are maybe a little bit scrappier, a little bit more bootstrapped, just get in Bigma and start designing. Ask your calligrapher to make something. Exactly, yeah. You already have him on staff

yes yes exactly but definitely get it in a gold ring and pass that down start wearing it today gift it to your the oldest patriarch in your family give it to your dad give it to your grandpa if he's still alive and then when they pass away they'll pass it down to you and then you can say

to your son this was your grandfather's. It doesn't matter that you got it to him when your grandfather was 85. It will still be technically his and passed down. And you should do the same thing with Patek Philippe. You should go and buy one and then gift it to the oldest patriarch in the family.

And then it will pass down fairly quickly. It's the start, hopefully not, but hopefully they live forever. But you will expect to have this at some point but then it will be a fourth generation or third generation patak or ring almost immediately which is great um so get creative yeah it was funny because i commented on that and i was like this is technology brothers bait yes and it works clearly but he then he said no is the technology brothers brothers inspired. So the positive thing right now is we have this virtuous cycle of brothers in the community, both men and women,

taking stuff from the show, creating new things. We then recycle it back. Now we're promoting family crests. And so, yeah, it's a great cycle that we have going here. Yep, it's great. Oh, this is – should we do this one? Quantian? Quantian says, this was the exchange that Beth said

was one of the worst days of his life, Lamau. And it's a big, long fight between growing Daniel and based Beth Jesus. Daniel says, so is Beth's company going to ship anytime soon? Beth says, hardware takes time. Not building a GPT wrapper like many out there, wink. And then Daniel says, it's a crypto mining thing, right? That's exciting. And then Beth says, it's not. And then Daniel says, oh, okay. Blockchain something

though? And then Beth says, no, there's literally no crypto. It's just hardware for AI. And then Daniel says, oh, right right everything is ai now that's gonna be big just like dude you're so online beth like how did you get trolled like this like come on but uh yeah but i mean just masterful posting by your posters collide this is a war this is a war verse but you gotta you gotta just post through it the main thing to beth is just don't hold a grudge. Like, you know, he won this round. You know, you got to get him back.

The best way to mog somebody is by building a massive... You can't really mog Daniel by having a big audience on X. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of the greatest posters of a generation. Yep, yep. But you can mog by making Xtropic. Yeah. A great company. Yeah. Yeah. Xtropic, you know, uh, an NVIDIA, you know, um, close competitor even. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is, I'm pretty sure Beth announced Xtropic like a couple of weeks before this post. And so

Daniel's just like jumping. It's a hardware company. a hardware company. So he's like, is he going to ship anytime soon? It's like even like, you know, like hardware companies that people are not skeptical of. Yeah. It takes them a long time to ship things. Like, you know, like the companies that have gone on to become massively successful in hardware. Like Anderle took a long time to ship because that's just the nature of these things. Yeah. And soiel's like

really ribbing him like hey hey have you shipped that brand new chip immediately it's like okay probably not but uh don't let him get to you beth you gotta just uh move on but oh well one of the greatest interactions very funny on both sides and honestly you know nice guys like there needs to be there needs to be something so that was a screenshot screenshot, I guess, because maybe part of it got deleted. But there needs to be a museum called the Screenshot Museum. I love it. It's just a museum that you get to walk around and see the great moments of history that happened online that were screenshotted and then deleted. And I'd pay to go to that.

So if you make it in San Francisco or New York, I think you'll have an audience. Yeah. We need a new segment for like wars. Conflict. Like timeline wars. Timeline and turmoil. Yeah, timeline and turmoil. Because there's been a number of these

where it's been like, okay, we're breaking down J. Cal and Palmer and we're going back on like six different posts. There was the Robert Scoble thing. And it doesn't really work to just react to one post. You need to really understand the full context. So let's build out a segment for that. And this is related to our next post from Creatine Cycle, Atlas.

He's quoting Simfer Satoshi. Simfer Satoshi, I am ginger trash, says, this is becoming a universal slop indicator. Seeing this on your website plus contact us for pricing means you know you're about to talk to two of the most obnoxious 23-year-old Stanford grads ever. And it's a screenshot of Backed by Y Combinator. Simp for Satoshi, among other people, have been talking a lot of trash about YC lately.

Very negative. We don't like that. Let's have some positivity. Let's keep all this negativity towards the real villains of our industry. The tech journalists, please. And the communists. And the communists. YC is clearly on our side.

China would kill to have Y Combinator. They would. They would literally kill us and take, they would leave, they would decimate everything and they'd just take YC. Yes. And who knows,

maybe they're funding all the tech journalists to write hit pieces and take us down. That's possible. That would be a great sign-off for them for them um but we'll have to break they won't be able to break that scoop for themselves yeah if we can get scoop that shows yeah the information people are worried about foreign money on cap tables through like seven layers of roll-up vehicle and spv uh maybe the real thing you should be worried about is foreign money in the tech journalists yeah yeah yeah that's the real risk we'll be breaking that is foreign money in the tech journalist. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's the real risk. We'll be breaking that news. It happened in politics. There was a bunch of Russian money going out to YouTubers. It was very dramatic. But Atlas says, this dude is carrying on like that weird guy at the club who approaches women, asks for their number, gets politely declined, and then calls them ugly to their face. Interesting. A little anon on warfare.

Timeline and turmoil. Timeline and turmoil. So I'm a torn here. I think YC is great, even though I was rejected by it. I think Simph for Satoshi is a great thinker and has good ideas. Atlas is right, though. I think Simph for Satoshi was rejected from YC and they told him his idea wasn't going to work

and then they put out some request for startups or one of the YC partners was kind of... And so he has a personal vendetta against YC and he has an audience so he's able to use that. And there's a lot of people that want to commiserate over not being a part of YC and want it not to be that cool. So they're kind of rooting against it. So it's good bait,

but it's just kind of boring and played out. Just go build. There are plenty of companies that are great that didn't go through YC. YC has yet to put a gun to someone's head and tell them, join YC. Yeah, or stop building because we're not funding you. Yeah.

They never say that. Yeah, they re-invite companies back all the time that get rejected. I know a guy who applied eight times in a row and got in and now his company's worth like $500 million.

Insane. Let's go. Like insane. And this guy was like 4.0 Harvard, like super high status at every single moment and it still took him eight times to get in and I was running an AI company and they're ripping it's it's amazing

it's great um Steve Jurvetson says first time on the show but you know very famous metric capitalist we love him he says uh the Starlink manufacturing line is the closest thing to a fully automated alien dreadnought that I have ever seen it makes 4.7 million terminals per year and growing. One subsection is the largest printed circuit board factory in America. This is great because we were talking about Aaron Slodov saying, I don't know if there's a single company in America that builds defense technology that could produce one million of anything in a given year if asked to. Well, guess what

starlink is 10 000 oh 10 000 i thought he said a million oh anyway he said a big number and starlink's clearly beyond that and starlink is critical to national security very clearly we've seen it have an impact in all sorts of different uh you know war fronts um and elon's pulling it off obviously we need this in drones we need this dji we need this Obviously, we need this in drones. We need this in DJI. We need this in robots. We need this in cars, all sorts of things. But it's great to see that high volume manufacturing is working in America.

Well, yeah, now there's, think about how many engineers are working in that facility that can then go work at other companies and run that same playbook back. We're doing this in many ways with the Turrents. We, the two engineering leads on the team were at tesla and rivian doing like scale battery cell manufacturing and now they're working in a totally different sector but running back the same manufacturing playbook that they learned at

tesla and there's always been this question about um oh how do we bring back manufacturing do we just need to like retrain a ton of you know cnc operators or you know like be very custom and very manual but clearly you know this went from zero to 60 very fast and it's an entirely new system it's probably built completely differently and i wouldn't be surprised if you know you look in like 30 years and there's like oh there's something in there some process that's maybe protected IP maybe Elon's not talking about it maybe we just don't really understand or have a word for it but there's probably something in there that's like the the Henry Ford uh what was it called like the line the the assembly line like the assembly line is just something that is like so standard now but it was created at some point and there's probably something in here that's,

that's a new way of thinking about how to mass manufacture that will eventually be canonized and used everywhere and copy pasted. And that, that will be like the future of manufacturing and it will all be new. And that's why we need new companies to build things that even seem like, Oh, well, yeah,

there are primers, right? Why do we need deterrence? Well, it's because like, there's probably a, when, there are primers, right? Why do we need deterrents? Well, it's because like there's probably a, when you start fresh green field, you can build much faster in a completely different way.

That's less, maybe more capital intensive, maybe less bound by a human capital instead. Okay. Let's go to Neil Kosla. This is a good one. He says, son of Vinod Kosla, he's a VC himself. He says,

reminder that as you see these VC transitions, that most of the time, it's someone getting pushed out or artificially capped in power, not leaving by choice. And Wilmanitis chimes in and says, the only generalized solution to the succession problem is murder. Taking it back to the, I don't know, like the 1600s,

probably Machiavelli like that. Yeah. Well, so, so we, we posted something a lot. I, I, I, I don't want to guess and say this was a response to something that we posted, but, um, but yeah, oftentimes when a GP leaves a fund, it's very happy on the surface and everybody's like, congrats, really excited for you. Like, can't wait to see what you do next.

But then behind the scenes, like they were forced out or like there was a lot of hatred between the partners or somebody's like the founders of the firm were just like like you're never gonna like truly see your potential here you should leave so there's always a lot going on behind the scenes and a lot of it just depends on like what do they do next like if they're retiring

well that makes sense but if they're immediately i was dming with uh logan logan and he was like my favorite line is I'm going to return to my operator roots. Yeah. Did we say that on the last thing? No, we didn't. We didn't. But he says

that's a common line if you're leaving it for which is another way of saying my returns were terrible and I'm no longer going to be invested. Yeah, I mean

GP at a major fund is just like the best gig ever. It's so hard to turn that down under any circumstances. Yeah. You don't just leave that. But we'll leave it to you to read between the lines on this show.

We'll spell it out as much as we can without getting murdered. Matt Marlinski, good friend of the show, works with Mike Solano over at Pirate Wires. He is screenshotting a great interaction between Mike Solano and the All In podcast. He says the so-called number one podcast can't think of an original idea. And All In launched eight weeks of All In Idol. And Mike says, Jason, this is shameless even by your standards and shares a screenshot of Pirate Idol which Solana has been

running for like two months and so it's a format. We like to have a lot of different formats here. We got some personnel news. We got the size gong. If you see a gong on all in, call us immediately because we're going over to Jason Calacanis' house

and we're going to have to have a sit down conversation. we're going to have to have a sit-down conversation. We're going to have to have a sit-down conversation. And it'll probably be like the average board meeting at Lucy. A lot of, you know, basically an all-out brawl. I'm wearing a vest. Yeah, bulletproof vest. I'll tell you which one. It's not going to be Patagonia vest.

But, yeah, this is ridiculous. I mean, you know, obviously the Pirate Idol is a riff on American Idol, but just to decide a new co-host, it's very, very similar to what Pirate Wires is doing. And he could have switched it up and just used a different word because there are so many. He could have said, we're doing The Voice, or we're doing anything else.

We're doing Survivor. Musical Chairs. Yeah, or just take it from a different – we're doing The Bachelor. We're doing any sort of like who wants to be a millionaire and just adapt it. But don't just literally take the exact same concept. Ugh, rough. Anyway, Jason, you have a writer's room. Get him to do some more workshopping before you rip Solana again.

It's not happy to see it. John, I got to stop you right there. We have a promoted post from my friend IllScience. IllScience is actually a GP over at Andreessen. He's on the consumer AI front. But today I'm calling him Ill Science because he's also a recording artist and DJ

and put out a song. He says, very excited to share my new record and first collaboration with the maestro and molten music label boss Homero Espinosa

streaming on Spotify and everywhere else. You get your music. I downloaded the track. It's fantastic. It makes me wish that I downloaded the track. It's fantastic. It makes me wish that it was summer already. That's great. And anyways, go check it out.

I love when people are excellent at one thing and then they pursue excellence in another thing. And we've talked about this before, but for Ill Science, a break from investing to do music, even though making music is hard and intense, it's still a break. We have to make a playlist because you know who else has released tracks?

Elon Musk. Didn't know that. He released a track called R.I.P. Harambe with someone else. Zuck released a cover of From the Window to the wall get low remember this this happened a couple weeks ago yeah brian armstrong i believe released an entire edm album during the nft craze and you could like get the rights to it on an nft it was just like a promotional thing but

he loves music i'm pretty sure it was him and And then Justin Kahn, after he sold Twitch, him and his brother, who his brother went on to co-found Cruise, produced an entire DJ set called, they were the Kahn Bros. And it was an incredible DJ set. It was on SoundCloud for a while. And when I got to YC,

he had already sold his company. So he was like God in yc world he was one of the first ones to really get serious liquidity and they put out this uh dj set and we would just listen to it all the time when we were grinding coding it would just be con bros ben con bros we need an official technology brothers playlist yes ill science track yeah throw that on there and there's got to be more i just listed off like four off the top of my head i'm sure there's like 10 others, uh, folks who are, who are in tech and DJs.

Cause it's very adjacent. I, one of my first businesses was buying and selling DJ equipment. I'd buy it in the States and sell it internationally. Cause I couldn't do it. You're an international business, international businessman at age 10 or something. Uh,

but it's very like nerdy. I actually produced an entire EDM album in fruity loops, which is like the software that you could kind of like piece things together i sold one copy to a friend i found the copy recently it's terrible but you know it was impressive for you know i think it was in middle school and uh and something about edm it's very very technical like dead mouse is like a program or two and there's a lot of overlap there so i think there's a lot of a lot of music people in tech that you know need to just be surfaced.

And I think they'll play- We need a new music festival in tech that's not Burning Man. Yeah. Like we need to, we should maybe, I don't go to live music events much. And Justin Kahn put a song of him. I think it was actually at Burning Man

on his YouTube channel. Let me see if I can find this. And it was a banger song. It was him. He's just been putting up like live sets recently. It's so sick. He did like some interviews. He did some other stuff. Where was this? Playing our first EDC, Orso at EDC. Introducing Orso, which I guess is like his new band or something. But he put together this whole like vibe reel and this song like really went hard.

Isn't this good? I listen to this a lot. This is my playlist for a while. Justin Kahn, this guy's fucking sick. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Justin Kahn. This guy is fucking sick. It's so good. Finding PMS to this song. At EDC. How tight is that?

That's awesome. You know all the words. I know all the words. I've listened to this so many times it's really good and it's just like he's playing like a massive stage like yeah goals like i i love that you gotta if you're if you're super liquid in in tech do some side quests just you can just do things like yeah go win the boxing match or whatever go climb that like yeah you hit those 14ers yeah do the gumball 3000 do the gumball 3000 do a parry to car you know get in the car drive 3 000 miles do a cannonball go to the moon go to space

you can just do things you can just do things there's no excuse don't just be sitting around your mansion uh scrolling or whatever uh let's move on to j Way. He says, y'all heard it from the man himself, and it's Ilya Sutskovor talking about how pre-training as we know it will end. Compute is growing, better hardware, better algorithms, larger clusters, but data is not growing. We have but one internet.

It is the fossil fuel of AI. Lots of people talking about the data wall. Lots of people talking about how scaling will... Scale AI is just somewhere... So excited. Somewhere. Yeah. I think the stock is like way out too.

It's wild. Well, it's not public, but you mean... No, I think like secondary demand and stuff is like doing really well. And it's such a midwit take to be like, did you know that scale AI uses third-party contractors it's like yeah that's the whole point of the business like have you heard of uh comparative advantage like this is like econ 101 people like you're not like blowing the doors off this thing by talking about it's so it's so embarrassing when i see this take i'm just like yes like obviously like

you need to write a bunch of answers and generate a bunch of data. Did you know that Uber doesn't own cars or hire drivers on W2s? It's not a bear case for the company. But yeah, it's interesting. I was wondering like, okay, so what could drive the next era of exponential data growth? Because it has to come from humans. And I was kind of thinking about what that could be. And I think something along the lines of like a friend AI thing that you're wearing and it's recording 24 hours a day,

7 billion people, I think that actually might generate one or two more orders of magnitude of data yeah and maybe that's useful data i think some of it would be very useful but it requires a lot of trust because you know it needs to be anonymized and yeah but that could be like a ubi type thing like if you wear the pendant you get like five dollars a day yeah the world coin pendant or something like because yeah i think it was who's the super base guy at xai oh yeah greg i think yeah he was just like it's not that

hard to get more data you just like take pictures that was basically or like put up cameras everywhere cameras video feeds uh i mean i was talking to nat friedman about this and he was like oh people are worried about like you know will the AI be able to access the New York Times or something and he was like based on the data budgets of these AI companies they could just buy all of the New York Times and then just or they could just

pay you know way more journalists they could hire every single journalist double their salaries and they wouldn't even be scratching the surface of their data they could give every journalist a billion dollars and still have $200 billion left. Basically UBI for journalists.

That so much heartache could have been avoided with the, uh, New York times lawsuits. If they, if opening, I had just sent over some dressage horses and they would have avoided a death potentially. Oh my God.

Oh, rough, rough, rough, rough. Uh andrew huberman is saying lock the clock we discussed this we love it i like that he's coining a phrase 4k likes people know it you gotta have the clock yeah i said stop the i thought yeah lock the clock lock the clock is better and he cites uh stanford med laura weed says uh s time is one uh is the one to lock in. Standard time year-round gives people greater opportunity to get morning sunlight, necessary to shorten the period of their central circadian clock from 24.2 hours to 24 hours

to maintain synchrony with the, I presume, the sun. Because it says show more here, but he breaks it down. Yeah, this is great i really hope this does happen it'd be so cool i mean like i'd probably enjoy it like practically but i think i would more i would much more enjoy just the fact that we did something and the fact that something has changed made something uh even like the pluto thing like the pluto demotion it's like you get to tell your kids oh yeah well back when i was a kid like there were more planets and then we learned more and we decided that there's less petition you wanted to keep pluto no no no you wanted to

remove pluto i was in favor of removing it don't give them the franchise don't give them the franchise like we've talked about you know yeah there's people that want to take over canada yeah they don't want to give them a state yeah yeah it's real regulatory capture for the rest of the planet it's just reducing the oligopoly on planethood. It's good. It's power law. This is the way. Next step is get the gaseous giants out of here.

You're not landing on those. What are you doing? Get them out of there. Unless it's a rock. Just push them out. Third rock from the sun, not third cloud from the sun. Yeah, shouldn't count. Get some landmass.

Get some mass. Neptune. Yeah. I think Neptune's a gas one. I actually don't remember. Okay. Word grammar. He's been on the show before.

Emerging poster of the year, potentially. Yep, yep, yep. Potential rookie of the year. I think I have done a complete 180 on Y Combinator's business model in the past 24 hours. All of the economic gains from AI startups will be made by pre-seed investors. Any good AI product will be extremely hard to build,

but easy to scale. Interesting. Distributions, the bottleneck and moat. Put a little asterisk here behind the frontier labs, but they are a special case and not representative of the average startup. The funniest thing is that, of course, the number one frontier lab

came literally out of Y Combinator. But I like that. So the reason that this is a good take, the reason that I think this is a generally good take is that there's, we've seen this a lot with AI companies that raise pre-product and then generate so much revenue. Yep. And are making so much money so quickly with such a small team that by the time a next financing happens the company's raising 20 on 200 yep and it's just really hard to make like truly great returns doing that yep and so because these companies oftentimes are not needing to do that intermediary oh we're going to do four on 16 or something like that they literally get the one yc round maybe another two on 20 and

then they're just making all this money. And so if you can buy a basket of those companies super early for pennies, it's like, yeah, but I don't think the critique of YC, everybody, like the primary way that people try to critique it is by saying, what's an important YC company that launched in the last like three years? Yeah. And it's like, but the critique has never been, this is not a good business model. Yeah. Oh yeah. Totally. Some people try to critique it of like, Oh, well you're just having, it's a Ponzi scheme

because you're just trying to have this company buy from this company. And it's like, that's just like fundamentally like, yeah, of course they sell to each other early to get feedback. If you're enterprise, you should, or B2B, you should sell internally. Let's do one more promoted post. We'll close with this, and then we'll get out of here and hop on. I can't think of a better ending promoted post of the day than from our friends at DuPont Registry. Fantastic.

They have a 2024 Ferrari Purusangue presented in blue Corsa. This has an asking price of only $679,000. $978,000. Yeah, $679,000. And I got to say, these have been floating into the 700s frequently. Yep. This is a fantastic spec. It is powered by a naturally aspirated V12. Yep.

Delivers over 700 horsepower, ensuring thrilling performance and a 0-60 time of around 3.3 seconds. Not as fast as my turbo, but pretty good to be able to fit a family in it. And it's just a great-looking car. I've started seeing these around LA. The thing about the Pure Songway is it is an expensive car, but think about what you get. It's a performance car, it's a luxury car, and it's also potentially a family car, but it about what you get. It's a performance car. It's a luxury car.

And it's also potentially a family car. But it's something you can do business in. If you're a VC, you can take the whole founding team. It's not just you and the CEO. Throw the CTO in the back. Throw the chief operating officer in the back. Chief of staff, even. Go out to Nobu, get some sushi.

Hiroshima-se. Hiroshima-se. Don't say it, though. Don't say it. Don't say Hiroshima-se. But bring the whole team. uh, Hiroshima say, Hiroshima say, don't say it though. Don't say it. Don't say it. Hiroshima say. But, uh, but you know, bring the whole team and fundamentally it is a lot of money,

but it's a lot of car. Yep. And so, you know, you get what you pay for in this life. Yeah. You got to have money to make money. Yeah.

So if you're buying, if you're buying Ferrari, if you bought an SF 90 aftermarket and over the last couple of years, you lost, lost like 500 K, something like that. Make it all back. Yeah. I don't know if you're going to make it all back if you daily drive it, but you'll make it all back spiritually by being in a, in a truly great, well, you will show the Ferrari dealer.

You'll show your dealer that you're committed to the brand. Yeah. You took the bath on the SF 90 year. Maybe you're prepared to take another bath, but when the, when the F 80 comes up, you're getting that tailor made program. You're getting an allocation. And that's what it's about in this life. That's where you'll make it back. That's great. Let's close with Rat Limit. Rat Limit has a fantastic bait post.

Thank God for posters with great usernames. It's fantastic. Because it would make the show would be much less interesting. Yeah, if it was just Steve. Steve. Rat Limit says, that Polly impulse to hack relationships with tech. I printed QR codes on my GF's panties.

Her playmates get instant access to an info sheet on my and our boundaries. A bit nerdy? Yup. But what won her over? I 100% trust you. I want to trust your sweeties too. And it's a picture of some underwear with a QR code on it.

And I mean, this is one of those things that I'm like, I'm 90% sure this is a bait post, but it's like so real that it could be real. Yeah, so I don't, I'm fortunate that whatever side of tech X that we're on, this stuff doesn't pop up for me, except if somebody's dunking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this was a dunk. dunk yeah this was a screenshot i think it's probably deleted but i think it was i think it was designed

to bait and i think if you look at the rest of the posts and some of the replies were like crying laughing like okay people get it uh obviously uh you know polyamory is very popular in the bay area this is kind of a play on that but why why I want to highlight this is not for the culture war debate over poly, but instead the beauty of the virality here that there's a picture of an item with a QR code on it. And when you scan the QR code, you actually get taken to this info sheet, this website that this person built that has more content about this post. And again, I think it's very funny. I don't know if it's real, but it creates this cycle where you have to scan the image, but the image is on your phone. So it's kind of tricky. You need like a second

phone or something to scan the QR code, but then you're taken to this website. And I think that there's something here from a format perspective that could be very viral marketing for a company. And so like if we did a drop and we were like, we're dropping these coffee mugs and the coffee mugs have our logo on one side and a QR code on the other side. But then when you scan the QR code, they take you to some video or some website that we design. It becomes this like online to offline to online experience. And then people are going down this rabbit hole and then they will screenshot where the QR code takes you and share that. And it becomes this like rabbit hole for these people. And I think that's a big part of why this went so viral was that it wasn't just, there's a QR code and I've

blurred out the QR code. No, it's like the QR code's there. You can see. And if you went on there, there were all these other jokes and stuff baked in. It was very high effort. And I thought it was a very good marketing stunt if it's a marketing stunt. Even if it's real and it's cringe, there's clearly a lesson in there for- I respect the innovation.

I respect the innovation. Exactly. Do your thing, Rat Limit. So let's wrap up there. I got to hop on with the Vatican. So I will talk innovation. Exactly. Do your thing, Rat Limit. So let's wrap up there. I got to hop on with the Vatican. So I will talk to you later. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.