TBPN Live - JD's Venture Portfolio, Lessons from Mark Cuban, Angel Investing Addiction

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. It is, what, November 7th today? Correct. And every technology podcast is clearly going to be obsessed with one topic and one topic only. You're going to hear about it on All In. You're going to hear about it on 20VC. You're going to hear about it on Newcomers writing about it, the information stuff with it. It's undeniable. you can't get away from it

uh openai bought chat.com very very strong brandable four-letter domain.com huge absolutely massive yeah in the eight-figure range there was a lot of million yeah a lot of speculation i don't think the actual number was released it was cash dar and stock. Dharmesh released it. Oh, really? I think so. I thought it was some mix of cash and stock. Oh, maybe. And he was positioning it as like, look, I'm a savvy investor. Interesting. I never lose money, but I don't like to make money on my friends.

Yeah, okay. He said, now I'm an investor in OpenAI. Really? Oh, okay. I think he may have invested the domain. Yeah. So, I mean, the context here is Dharmesh, I think it's Dharmesh Shah. Yeah.

He's the founder of HubSpot. Yeah. So, so I mean the context here is Dharmesh, I think it's Dharmesh Shah. He's the founder of HubSpot. Correct. And he, a couple months ago, uh, acquired chat.com and I think he said he paid 10 million for it. Yep. And he was like, I'm going to do something with it, but I'm not sure yet, but I know this chat bot chat interface is going to be big for AI. Yep. And so there's going to be an opportunity here. And that opportunity came along in the form of a call from Sam Altman. And so Sam just tweets chat.com and that's it. I love it. I think OpenAI stole it, honestly.

Oh, you think it's a steal? Like I think it's a steal. That could be a $100 million redemption. There's another big language model company that doesn't have their.com. their dot com and all the variations of it are owned by domain investors and they're all asking for yeah like tens of millions tens of millions yeah mid-eight figures yeah uh and they're kind of at a standstill because wow they're just like they don't really want to take you know know, 40, $50 million of equity and put it into.

But yeah, for a hundred. I want to debate this a little bit because on the one hand, like chat.com, it's an iconic domain, single word, four letters. It's like one of the best assets you could own on the internet. On the flip side, Google has trillions of dollars. They've never bought search.com. They didn't need to. Google became that. And so the thing with ChatGPT

is that it was always like a bad brand name in the sense that people would mess it up. They'd say ChatGBD, ChatGP, like they couldn't remember it. But once it got stuck in the mind, it was iconic, like Airbnb, like Google. Yeah. And they're still, all they're doing is redirecting it to chatgpt.com. Yeah, so it's like, where will the brand live? I think the domain was, they kind of stole it in the sense that if a savvy domain investor would have extracted a lot more value out of it,

they'd have been like, give me $30 million and $20 million of stock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, but yeah, I think from a branding standpoint, when you scroll on TikTok, it's people talking about chat GPT, chat GPT, chat GPT,

and that is AI to the normies. But I wonder if they'll be able to actually build a brand or if they'll even try to build a brand around chat.com. Yeah, it's also very unclear. It's a.com era throwback, like pets.com.

And for a while, it became difficult to actually get uh intellectual property protection around these single words like yeah the famous example yeah the way to get real protection usually is to make the dot com your name yeah pets.com was yeah they didn't own pets they own pets.com exactly and so yeah i mean the escalator was originally made by the escalator company do you know this no so uh escalators we just think of like you know any escalator you see in like a mall yeah but that was originally the the brand name for the machine company that produced the first escalator and they became so popular that the

name became like normalized and they lost intellectual property protection and then kleenex went through a similar thing where like just facial tissues i think is like the technical term uh like kleenex became so popular that everyone would just say like oh yeah just grab a kleenex doesn't matter what brand yeah it's just kleenex um but kleenex actually fought back and won And so now you can't use that term. But if we were to start a new escalator company, and it was like, oh, which we might, because yeah, we might want to roll up a couple of the small operators.

It's probably one of those things like there's only three or four manufacturers of escalators in all the US now. And so if we buy all of them, we can jack up prices like massively. I looked into stoplight manufacturing for a while and there's only a few manufacturers in the same dynamic.

And there's no technology in the stoplights. I wanted to do something where the stoplight would have a camera on it. And if there was no one waiting for the red light, it would just switch the signal, right? And so it's like- Is that not how it works right now? No, no, no. It It's just a timer. You can pull up and just be sitting there and there can be no cross traffic and you can just have to wait. So there's just all this like

deadweight loss in the system when you're just driving around, which hurts the economy. It does. Yeah. Opportunity costs. You could be working. You get to work faster. Um, so it'd be a very simple like product, but the distribution is really hard because you have to sell to each individual city. It becomes like a flock safety type thing it's really really tricky but yeah uh so you're so you're bullish on uh on this at 15 mil right i i uh i think it's a good buy in the context of who the owner was who the company is uh the quality of the domain. I just don't see them using this domain in 10 years. Yeah, so in 10 years you think people will be saying like, oh yeah, I'm using ChatGPT.

The model has completely changed. It's now GPT-601F2. I don't care about that. I just know I use ChatGPT and I go to chat.com to access it. I would just be pretty sad if AGI was at chat.com. I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's something retro about that.

It's not, it's kind of a cool throwback to be like, yeah, we're going back to the.com era. Like, do you know the story of mp3.com? No. mp3.com was like a.com boom company that was,

I thought I liked domains. I know. mp3.com was a bunch of guys in the in the dot-com boom basically the business plan was Spotify like music on the internet but they hadn't really built out any infrastructure they IPO the company and we're worth like four billion on like you know 300k of revenue or something like that like the revenue multiples during the dot-com boom make the Zerp era look like-

One of the greatest bubbles of all time. It's incredible. It was incredible. I did some digging on mp3.com. It's a fascinating story. Everybody's always trying to poke fun at bubbles, and I think they should be celebrated, right? Because they're drawing that capex forward

and accelerating. Yeah, and clearly with all these things things it's always just a matter of timing like spotify was the right solution at the right time napster was too early mp3.com was too early kalanick had his spin on file sharing oh yeah he did right what was that called like red arrow or something yeah something like that yeah ovitz was involved oh really had a whole war oh no way i had like this crazy uh ovitz took old hollywood style negotiating into silicon valley which was a big no no basically long story short he had committed to committed to funding the business they signed docs and then he withheld wiring until the company was out of cash and then tried to renegotiate

And Travis did not like that and they got in this huge hardcore huge war Now now Ovitz is is an awesome super helpful angel investor. That's great. I've been to his house Yeah, all all's well that ends well. Yeah He's like, oh I have to play nice and not abuse uh people generational talent yeah yeah exactly um okay well let's move on to the the top story we're talking about jd vance's portfolio and career as a venture capitalist um why did you think it was important to educate the world about jd Vance's private sector career? Look, I think, again, same thing with Trump this week.

People really focused on his political career, less focused on his career as a technology entrepreneur and his success, you know, building social apps. You know, with JD, it's one of those things. We didn't follow the campaign much at all we were focused on the podcast and driving returns across the portfolio but we did notice at one point that Tim Walls uh was talking to somebody at a rally and said he didn't even know what a VC was yep and it made me think that you know VCs have this aura this this mystique, they're so cool, they're powerful. Right. Um, and that,

that makes it so that a lot of people that maybe aren't in our industry are tend to be a little bit afraid of them. Right. If a VC walks in the room, you might, they might flinch. Um, and, uh, so I think it's worth kind of breaking down that, that private sector career and just helping people understand venture capital and why JD would give millions of dollars to a company with no revenue and just a cool idea. The other thing is giving people an understanding of how venture capital works. A lot of people think JD Capital is a venture capitalist.

He's putting... JD Capital. JD Vance. That's a portian slip. works right a lot of people think jd capital is a venture capitalist he's putting jd capital jd capital yeah what was that's what maria should be called jd capital jd cap when he when he gets out of the government he goes back into the yeah he'll be back he'll be back jd capital yeah but i think people have this thinking that venture capitalists always deploy their own money. Yep. But oftentimes, it's only partly their money. So his fund is Naria.

He's since stepped back. But Peter Thiel's Cornerstone LP. Yep. And then, do you know Fallon Donahue? I think that's how you pronounce her name. She's really cool. She runs the firm now with, I think, one other person. But they've done a bunch of deals.

We should go through some of them. Acre Trader facilitates farmland investments, allowing individuals to invest in agricultural real estate. Amplify Bio provides advanced preclinical services to accelerate the development of medical therapies. Atomic Industries, who we actually know know develops innovative manufacturing technologies to enhance production efficiency and quality their whole thing is like reshoring domestic manufacturing um i think they're out in detroit with a bunch of like huge machines aaron's always texting me photos of these like

giant million dollar machines that he buys from like you know, some Korean conglomerate or something. It's really, really, really sick. Yeah, I think Aaron and JD were really early to trends that are now considered American dynamism. I was thinking about that. Like in many ways, his portfolio was. People often say like American dynamism is just shorthand for defense tech, but that's not it. It's this whole like American heartland revitalization thing.

And it's not- It was really about manufacturing. Yeah. Only more recently has it been about defense tech oriented. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And like founders fund has a bunch of that's there and has been like bouncing around that generally. And then Andreessen obviously like came up with the coinage for the word, but Naria is really the fun on the brand. Yeah, of course. But Naria is like really the fun that like designed the entire strategy around that from day one, which is fascinating.

Yeah, and I think if you go back to JD's book, a lot of his investment strategy was oriented around revitalizing economies in America that were historically dependent on manufacturing, but that manufacturing got taken overseas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a cool, it's a cool portfolio. Uh, chapter assists in individuals in navigating Medicare options. Hello is a Catholic prayer and meditation app. You can just see really all this surprisingly large business. Oh yeah. Yeah.

This is all, uh, it's all very like in theme with like his his uh political platform uh another therapeutics company kiro therapeutics focuses on developing gene therapies for various diseases rumble the video sharing platform that competes with true social and actually got started free speech yeah like i think the naria uh rumble deal happened like three months before truth social yeah and you could imagine how that would have played out differently if yeah one thing that stands

out to me is that it's not a really big volume of bets right no no no I mean the entire portfolio on their website is 10 11 companies true anomaly is a phenomenal company yeah I wonder where they got in on true anomaly because that's a multi

billion dollar business last I checked. And my buddy Will is one of their biggest investors now, but he's personally put in nine figures. And then it says they're in Strive, manages investment funds. I think that's Vivek Ramaswamy's company, right? I don't know.

Unless there's a different Strive. I know that Vivek runs a firm called Strive and it would make sense that they're aligned. And then Value Base offers valuation services and financial insights to support business growth and investment. And so, yeah, they kind of have like a few different like areas of focus, a lot of bio,

a lot of manufacturing and a lot of kind of like, just like, you know, like the Catholic prayer app. It's more like traditional American values. It's interesting because no one, they're the only VC firm that's really like sent it on a thesis like this seriously. And like years ago, because it takes time to actually deploy.

You can set up like an American dynamism ripoff fund tomorrow, but you wouldn't have a portfolio of companies like this. Yeah, it's interesting that, you know, venture capitalists talk about, and founders talk about, I'm building and investing in the future that I want, right? And a lot of people are in VC or strictly chasing returns, right?

If you're strictly chasing returns, the actual best place you could probably focus is crypto. Like the median crypto fund has like much better returns than the median venture capital fund. I mean, for a lot of times it was just B2B SaaS. You know, it was like, there was this massive software boom and the number of unicorns and decacorns

that came out of B2B SaaS is just like undeniable. It's undeniable. There's just so many opportunities to hit her. As opposed to you look at aerospace, there's like one company. You look at defense, there's like one company right now. Yeah, and i think that uh we don't discuss politics on this podcast but a lot of people could

do a political analysis of this portfolio and try to poke holes in it and say that what he's doing is a bad thing but i think if you go line by line on this every pretty much every single product has potential to benefit every american right like even if you're not catholic if a hollow app has a million people that are using the product to help become you know better people and and practice their faith like that actually can have a positive ripple effect right true anomaly is something that's helping uh america um they build hunter seeker satellites which is cool so they send up satellites and then use those satellites to take out other satellites because you can imagine in a major global conflict one of the top priorities for all nation states would be

taking out enemy satellites controlling space right yeah um so all these things are, you could, you could make them political, but I would argue that, uh, many of those bets are generally like they've, they're all like America first in their own way. The other thing that I like about this is that there's like a pretty significant representation of like advanced biology. And there's this, there's a big meme. We saw it with that Eric newcomer post that it's like, yeah, Trump might be pro-deregulation, but the right wing is super skeptical of science generally. And that's true about some things. Obviously, RFK is out there talking about tallow fries and seed oils and stuff. stuff but i i think that there's a that there's like a silver lining there where you see that um like there is some significant bio innovation that is that's being embraced by the conservatives and it's not just a a party of uh like neo-ledites when it comes to biology even though the biology

stuff just build build build frack frack exactly exactly like there is some element of like okay yeah the like bio when done right is like amazing it's just that it can't be done like Build, build, build, frack, frack, frack. Exactly, exactly. Like there is some element of like, okay, yeah, like bio when done right is like amazing. It's just that it can't be done like carelessly or only for profit or only for- Or only for pharma. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So cheers to JD. The one thing that I think a lot of people are maybe a little shook by is just the hierarchy in the White House right now feels a little bit out is just the, the, uh, the hierarchy in the white house right now feels a little bit out of balance because normally you'd see, uh, you know, the real estate guy being a little bit less prestigious than the VC. The VC should be on, on top there. Um, so it's a little bit of a narrative, narrative violation that the,

the real estate, the social media guy, really, it's like, you could think of Trump as like the investor with a podcast, you know, he was on The Apprentice. I would argue that. And J.D. hasn't yet done as much podcasting, so he's still in the second rung. But hopefully that flips. I would argue that the highest status occupation in the world is being the founder of a multi-billion dollar social media product, right? Yeah. Because if you think about.

Zuck, Elon. Zuck, Spiegel right these are people jack dorsey right there they end up gaining the most amount of cloud and influence and power because they control uh what is effectively the the printing press right yep so valuable so anyways um yeah if you want to put say that trump's just a real estate guy, like some people like to say, it's like, no, he's a technology founder first, at least when you look at his personal balance sheet. Yeah. Also, reality TV star. Valuable.

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to start your bespoke creation today and tell them John and Jordy sent you. So on to brother of the week, Mark Cuban, before we dive in. Oh yeah. Uh, we did get some pushback from a few of our listeners. Uh,

we, we recently, uh, promoted net jets and, um, we just realized that that didn't many of our listeners you know it's not super relevant just because they have you know multiple private jets already so we just wanted to acknowledge that and and if you do go to NetJets just don't mention the podcast or anything like

that just don't tell them we sent you yeah mea culpa won't happen again sorry about that so let's move on to Mark Cuban so brother of the, why do you want to give him brother of the week? Uh, so Mark Cuban has done a lot of winning in his life. He's a technology brother, but this week was rough and what I rough for him. And, you know, I don't know how he's handling it we've seen his name popping around group chats you know getting out his sort of frustration in different ways but ultimately i just think this is an opportunity to say to mark and to every one of our listeners it's okay to get knocked down it's okay to fail if you look at our next president this is a guy that has been knocked down many times has come up short many

times. So, you know, there's been conversations of Mark talking about a presidential run. And I just don't, you know, whatever happened this last week, it's in the past. Mark has created a tremendous amount of enterprise value through smart investments in his own companies. And I just even though his Shark Tank portfolio is underwater as well, I just want to say to Mark, you're the brother of the week. Get back up. Get back on the horse. Keep going. Lever up. Lever up is a good way to kind of make it all back.

It's never too late to make it all back in one trade. So 2028 is around the corner. Feels far away right now. Start planning now. Start planning now. Make it all back in one trade. Yeah. And good luck.

You know, the interesting thing about Mark Cuban is there's this very, like, there's clearly a rivalry between him and Trump. There's all those clips from, like, the old talk shows where they were kind of beefing with each other and talking trash. And they were kind of in the similar milieu in the sense that Cuban was on Shark Tank, like the number two business show, essentially. And then The Apprentice was like the number one business show. And so they were both like these billionaire entrepreneurs with big, big media presences yeah but i think what's what's interesting and i don't know how accurate this is but um cuban made his first big win on broadcast.com which was radio on the internet this dot com boom sold it to yahoo for i think eight billion dollars amazing and it and the product never went anywhere like yahoo obviously declined and

broadcast.com i think either shut down or just the product never really like realized that valuation um but it's interesting because like you could he you could almost say he's a godfather of podcasting yeah in many in many ways is honestly maybe what he should do to rebrand himself now yeah big loss is to say like all you people talking about me on podcasts like i created you yeah right basically grandfather and but the really interesting thing is that like throughout the uh the the 2000s and 2010s he was almost too early to internet content like because he started this company in like i think 97 and sold it and maybe like 99 or 2000. But it was too early. Meanwhile, during that era the last laugh with Cuban and won this mimetic competition. But only because Cuban – not because Cuban was too late to a trend.

It's because he was almost too early. Totally. It's very, very interesting. Did you know that Jason Calacanis, his first company was with Mark Cuban? That's amazing. Either Mark was the investor like a co-founder or something. And then they sold that like blog company. And so they like go like way, way back. It's fascinating. Did Mark ever go on all in? I think he did. Yeah. Yeah. And there was, and there

was a big like kerfuffle over it because, um, uh, I think like Jason was like teeing him up for stuff and he was beefing with sacks and there was like some sort of like debate over it uh but jason was framing it as like you know we're being more balanced here because we had trump on we'll have the we'll have the comma surrogate on uh which makes sense but um yeah just mark's gonna get back to winning soon i think so i feel it i think so and i do think that the uh the shark tank format is underrated and i And I've talked to a lot of people who are in business content. Maybe they have like a podcast, like a business interview show.

And they've said like, oh, I want to do YouTube and I want to be like the Mr. Beast of like business on YouTube. And I've always told them, like the format is Shark Tank. Like you need to do an episode where you're giving away money at the end of the episode every single time.

It's very expensive because you actually have to be giving money away, but that's the way the Mr. Beast model works. Like you have to watch to the end because you want to see who wins. Like, like so many of Mr. Beast formats are just, it's just American Ninja Warrior.

Yeah. Adapted for YouTube. Well, now we've been told enough people that they should do that and they haven't. So maybe we have to do it. Well, yeah, but no, no. So we're not going to do the shark tank. We're going to do

the apprentice. Yeah. Did you see the comment? Someone commented on the show. How do I be on the apprentice? Uh, well you got to show some more hustle than just commenting. You got to get my DMS. You got to fly to LA and figure out where we record bang on the door. Exactly. There's security downstairs, but if you're cut out to be on our show you'll you'll find a way through yeah you'll talk your way through hot tip wear a suit where there is a dress code in this building yeah um but yeah i i think i think bring back the apprentice for the youtube generation bring back or revitalize the shark tank for the for the uh for the youtube generation uh the morning brew guy was doing a version of that was more like man on the street there's man on the

street tell me about your business 60 second pitch um but i don't think he was giving away money the only problem with that format is i love business so much 60 seconds is not enough no right like i want it's's gotta be the 20 minute, like the, the Mr. Beast format. Yeah. The funny thing that people don't realize about shark tank too, is that they,

they record, I think with every company for like two, three hours, you know, the trick, right? Yeah. They record for two hours.

If you take the deal, they edit, they use the good clips to make you look good. And if you don't take it, they make you look bad. Yeah. And so you really, so the real thing, you have to take the deal take the deal drag

back and forth back and forth back and forth and then after it airs be like you know hopefully you know they can work it out yep make the deal happen but uh because there's such an adverse selection problem like you know the the the power law companies are not showing up to shark tank it's also weird products that do well for shark tank consumer stuff right it's all consumer but then it's it's honestly a lot of if you come out it really is a reflection of the shark tank audience is more traditional america than any other sort of like business media like oriented audience and so if you come out there with like some new CBD drink, that's like replacing alcohol, like you're not going to see a single like sale from it because the audience

just does not care. But I had a friend of mine years ago started a company that was during the, the sustainability boom. He made a collapsible metal straw that could fit into something that would be on your keychain okay and for months after after their shark tank airing they would just see the sales uptick when when it would go live because people yeah i guess like mid with midwest moms would just were like oh i'll take a straw that i can just like keep on my keychain it was great to save the planet save the planet in the process so yeah um anyways we we should definitely take a company on shark tank yeah ideally your gun store yeah i i know i'm like i'm like trolling

you i know it's like a real business but i'm'm like, I'm like, we need to take, we need to take Arlie through YC and we need to get it on, on shark tank. Yeah. I know it's a real company and it's very disrespectful to joke about that, but no, I think real, I think real companies, if,

if the audience is relevant to that company, they should imagine yeah. Customizing a firearm on the, on mid show, you know it's fantastic yeah um so cheers to mark hubin you are one of the few brothers of the week so far but soon to be joined by a legion of other technology brothers um should we move on to some some some posts the timeline the timeline the timeline so uh trung fan says if you need a doom scroll break check out my new podcast caffeinated deep dives one drink three coffees

maybe a scoop of c4 to read a book three press record for an hour the first two episodes are here iphone and calvin and hobbes oh so this is like a real thing this is not like a joke post he like that's actually a shit poster but no this is this is real it's something that senra has been pushing to do for a while which is a long-form podcast and while you have senra focused on founders you have business breakdown focused on businesses businesses you have invest like the best focus on capital allocators and now you have trung you have technology brothers focused on the timeline you have trung focused on individual products which i think is interesting yep because everybody knows apple the company and the founding story and all that stuff but

i actually don't know the details of the iphone right i know some high level stuff yeah um i actually you know i know quite a lot of details but there's like a whole layer deeper that you can go on all these products um and the stories behind them and the individuals right because like it's not just fat like it wasn't steve jobs that built the iphone right there was hundreds of people that played a critical role here we go in building that so uh trunk trunk's amazing i'm gonna follow this right now this looks good trung's amazing long time uh quality poster uh and writer and generally uh i think it's easy for posters to get caught up into like toxic timeline drama but trung has always he's done

a good job stayed above it yeah um you his empire. I like his first review on here. Smart threads, dumb memes, and an entertaining podcast. That sums Trunk up perfectly. Well, I'm looking forward to listening to that. Let's go to Sean Frank. Sean. Friend of the pod. Friend of the pod.

Quote, yeah, just go ahead and 40X budget starting 11.6. Me to my media buyer. Yeah. just go ahead and 40X budget starting 11.6, me to my media buyer. Yeah, so Q4 is always challenging for consumer brands because CPMs go through the roof. Because of Christmas. The cost of getting in front of each incremental potential customer goes way high. And then when you combine that with the election cycle,

which increases spending, it has like a whole new group of people that are coming on and spending super super super aggressively yeah they spend a super tight literally a billion dollars yeah yeah so now you're not just competing with other brands in your category and other brands on the platform but you're competing with this new elephant in the room um which is various political groups competing to drive voters to make certain decisions. And so it's very much the second that the election ends. I think Facebook actually has a policy that says you can't create new political ads now, so you can keep running old ads. But they wanted to prevent people from using, if the election were to have gone differently

and there was more drama and controversy oh you they wanted raise they well they yeah they didn't want people to basically use it to manipulate public opinion like sure hey like kamala stole the election or trump stole the election and then it's sort of like yeah facebook doesn't want anything um and so if you're a brand like sean uh sean's company the ridge and you're seeing good performance during the election uh connor runs their all their um is their cmo and is the best performance marketer that i've ever known or work with um he was probably seeing solid results even during the election. But then when CPMs drop, they could drop like 50%. And so you just want to just absolutely send it

because you have from now until Christmas or December. Typically, it's like December 20th is when sales start to fall off a cliff. I mean, I remember talking to the Pebble guys. Do you remember this watch, the smartwatch, the precursor to the Apple Watch? And it was a pretty big business. I feel like were doing like 50 million dollars in a year in sales maybe more com of smart watches yeah it's rough uh but yeah i mean they would do like 90 of their revenue in december yeah because it was just like a gift and that's the and that's the nature for a lot of these electronics companies and so like you it's just like you build up your inventory

you build up your inventory, you build up your ad budget and you got to be able to make a decision like this. So 400, this isn't a joke. Like this is actually what he's going to do. Yeah. Something like that. Uh, we're launching Rora on November 21st and, uh, we've been, uh, running campaigns to acquire, uh, you know, people that are submitting, um, using our our our rora.com to do a water report and we've been seeing fantastic results um even during the election cycle and now we're doing the same thing budgets went up dramatically um uh basically yesterday so that's great amazing let's go to wyatt cavalier oh what a name. You know, Wyatt is a cowboy name.

Cavalier literally means like crazy. Wyatt Cavalier's posting again. He says, I'm a single issue newsletter voter. Whichever of Beehive and Kit lets me upload and attach WebP files first gets all my money. And I think, are these the two founders of the two companies? I love this. Saying CC to an email. CC to the CEO of one company.

Okay, so the reason this is interesting is Kit was originally called ConvertKit. This was original build in public. Build in public. Like story. Literally, I remember years ago, they had a dashboard with all of their metrics. And I think that there's this thing that happens

where build in public is cool because you get a lot of attention yep and and sort of people are patting you on the back like you're legend but um the the problem is that everybody was looking at that business being like this business rate zero dollars it does really well pretty much a commodity product right it's not easy to build but like anybody can kind of like spin up the ability to send a SaaS product to send emails. And what happened is Tyler, who was at, yeah, he was at Morning Brew.

Yeah, so he was at Morning Brew working on products, like literally building. And so he realized there was this white space around a more enterprise, Creator ConvertKit was more focused on creators literally building. And so he realized there was this white space around a more enterprise creator. ConvertKit was more focused on creators and people like Tim Ferriss and things like that. He realized there was a white space of building like much more enterprise tooling for people that were, I'm running a newsletter, but I'm running a business. And he's taking the exact opposite

approach. I remember meeting, I met Tyler in Miami in 2021 and credit to him. I didn't under, I didn't see that white space at the time. I should have just backed him because he was like much more knowledgeable in the space. And he's taken the exact opposite approach as ConvertKit just raised like pre-seed, seed, series A. I think they maybe have already done their B, tier one investors all the way through, Like just like absolutely the business is crushing. They're doing over a million a month. They will. I'm,

I would imagine there'll be bigger than kit or convert kit within the next, uh, 24 months, maybe even. And there's probably so much energy in the employees. They're seeing their stock get marked up. They're, they're a talent magnet.

Like the challenge is there. Dank is really good at Twitter. Nathan, the other founder is really good at Twitter. Oh really? They're a talent magnet. And the challenge is Dank is really good at Twitter. Nathan, the other founder, is really good at Twitter. Oh, really? They're both good? Yeah, I think that Nathan was doing it his own way, like the sort of build in public, like in the hacker way. Dank is much more like full speed ahead. I'm going to publish my investor updates.

He's doing it in his, his own, um, sort of lane. But the challenge when you, uh, have two companies that are both good at one marketing channel is it really does. Uh, I'm sure it sucked, um, the, the sort of wind out of kits sales where they're like, uh, this was our biggest acquisition channel now there's another person in the room with us yelling to all the same customers and you see it in tweets like this where people are literally just saying like all right founders like fight for my business and then they have to fight it out on the timeline yeah yeah yeah i mean dank even says like i think we may be able to get this live today but how much money is all like haha because it's like

if this guy's like i'm willing to pay 50 bucks a month, it's like, well, I'm not going to do it. Yeah. Interesting. Let's go to Mike Solana. Um,

quote tweeting, Adam, Adam Rubenstein things, tech time. Uh, so the New York times tech employees demanded unlimited break time, pet bereavement. It was a big meme and it was seen as like kind of ridiculous going into

this election they were they were uh demanding other things but the the the timeline really focused on the most ridiculous things and so solana says uh new york times writers dark days a fascist dictator on the rise at home and we will surely be imprisoned if we can't stop him the fate of the world hangs in the balance and then the NYT tech union says my goldfish died I'm going on strike so here's why this is funny so uh the tech world has had beef with the New York Times forever yeah uh I wish I could go read the New York Times the day that I was born because they were probably like bashing some like dot-com era founder. And so that's been forever. The irony of it is New York Times is so anti-tech

that even their own tech union is rebelling within the company on the most important day, week, of the New York Times' entire, like, whatever, this decade, arguably. So the infighting uh shout out to those to the tech workers in the new york times uh you know besides the sort of more memeable things that they're asking for yeah um what's interesting is like the website stayed up like even though they were maybe on strike like the needle was too good at their job we didn't hear yeah we didn't hear anything about like, Oh, like the, the, the New York times sites like unreliable or breaking.

It's because they were just, they have the polymarket API feeding it in just like polymarket minus 10. Yeah. Yeah. Just like hard coded. Yeah. Let's go to Elon Musk says I'm doing a digital town hall on X tonight at eight 30 Eastern time.

And this is on the 4th, which is election day or was the election day? I think it was the night before. So it was the night before. And the top comment is, can you buy Canada? Oh, I guess this guy's probably in Canada and it's like, oh, I joined the team. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I think. How do you get the X emoji? I need to figure out how to do that. I really like the way that looks. You just have to copy and paste it. It's just icon i thought it was something where you know it was like hard coded in where if you like did some sort of i'm sure there's a character combination yeah you can get that i gotta get a shortcut for that on my keyboard yeah uh yeah i mean 47 million views 191 000 likes like just so it's phenomenal the reason that i included this even though you could somebody might so it's phenomenal. So the reason that I included this, even though you could,

somebody might say it's political and we don't discuss politics is that what Elon is doing and trying to do with America is not political at all. It's, it's actually applying the same methodology that he uses for company building, which is progress, uh uh being capital efficient all these other things yep um you know uh accelerating timelines all all these things so uh i i do imagine after we make the moon a state canada would be another good target um for the united states i think it's a long time yeah antarctica, low hanging fruit. A friend of the pod, this guy, Sam Poirier,

was, was when we were at Senator's event, was talking about just wanting, basically that like Canadians are getting so, at least people in Quebec are getting so sick of how things are being run that even they're thinking about, you know, separating. There's been like a separatist movement, I think, within Quebec for a while. But anyways, long Canada, if we can, maybe the play is the long Canada now, if Elon's going to turn. There's a lot of land in Canada. You can do a lot of rocket launches. Yeah, sure. um yeah i didn't listen to any of the live streams i used to listen to clubhouse

all the time but um i haven't listened to a lot on x but maybe we should host some i think it'd be fun if if only they're they weren't prioritizing xai so aggressively oh is that what the top live stream is usually no i think it's more like uh oh oh you just get thrown into a grok flow instead of like yeah i don't want to be in grok i'd rather i'd rather like there's too many yeah it has some cool features where like if if me and you were doing the show on an x space like a live stream we could highlight a tweet and then everyone who's looking could see this the tweet that we're the post that we're like talking about at the time and i think that's like it's probably kind of cool i know there's some people that have growth hacked it like crazy that guy mario newfall i think is like

everything's like breaking news every two seconds um but uh there's a lot of people that have like mario walks so we could run yes yes yes um well the p god says I'm hitting this at the next closing dinner. And it's three football players doing some sort of handstand or headstand. Yeah, so this is something that looks really good in slow-mo or pictures. But if you actually see them do it live, it's sort of like a little bit silly looking because they're doing like a headstand

without their hands. But this was more, I think we need to bring back showboating to the workplace. Yeah, well, you know what? Elon hits some pretty crazy poses. Yeah, he does that. And he's good with the iconic sync day, bringing the sync in, creating these viral moments, dancing on stage.

You need to be creating viral moments in the workplace. Yes, yes. Well, maybe we just need to return. I was getting coffee with the head of investment banking at one of the big tech investment banking firms. And his office did not have a square inch of bare table because he had so many deal toys. It was insane.

Every single surface was just covered. I've always thought that- We need deal toys for venture. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, people do it, but then it gets really embarrassing

because you have to throw 90% of them away. But it's like, oh, this one's really embarrassing. But with investment banking, it's like even if you take a company public and it didn't do that well after... It's like you still made $100 million on that deal. So like, go off.

My 2021 holiday gift from an unnamed venture fund was a bottle of wine that just said liquidity event on it, which was, which was great. I kept the bottle. Yeah.

Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Yeah. We've had a bunch of VC firms reach out about doing custom branded nicotine pouches as gifts,

but that's very like temporary. Like you're probably not going to perform it. That's just more like performance. Yeah. It's something you want in the office. You want to give that portfolio company an extra little push. But for this, I mean, we have the framed $100 bill. We should definitely frame our first ad deal,

which was at a $3,000 CPM. Yeah. Although we should stop building in public. We should just insist that we're the most profitable podcast. If people figure out that we're charging $3,000 CPMs, we're going to invite a lot of competition. Exactly. Exactly.

Uh, there's going to be a bunch of knockoffs. I can already feel it. Um, but, uh, but we should do more deal toys. I mean,

I love the YouTube thing. Like when you pass a hundred thousand subscribers, they send you a plaque. That's cool. That's probably the best thing YouTube's ever done. They send you. Yeah. Yeah.

That was really, really smart. It's like kind of like a deal toy. And I was thinking proof of work. Yeah. Like, but like more companies should do this. Like, uh, that was really, really smart. It's like kind of like a deal toy. And I was thinking- It's proof of work. Yeah, but like more companies should do this. Like even just for Lucy, like I was looking through some of our top customers

who have been with us for like eight years, no stop. And it's like, I haven't even thought to like send them a t-shirt. Like I absolutely should do that. It's like, it costs nothing. And it's like just a thank you. But you could get so much more creative with it than just a t-shirt.

You could give them a deal toy or something or something really interesting. Yeah. With the DocSend, like you send every potential investor VC a deal. So I'd be like, I got to glance upon the series B DAC in DocSend. Yeah. Regardless.

And then they just have to deal with this like. Physical object. Physical object. And do they throw it out? What if they didn't do the deal? What if they got beaten out? But it's going to stay in their mind. It's going to stay top of mind. Because they close that DocSend tab, they forget about your company. But if there's a deal toy sitting there.

Shows up at the office. Shows up at the office. And it's this glass monument. Mischief did the reverse deal toy where they made, they did a drop once that had miniaturized versions of products that failed yeah i saw that there knows i always think that's juicero i love i love mischief but i thought that would win that like the whole like you need celebratory stuff yeah not dunking yeah being obsessed with like the failure it is it is very funny but uh it's it's a little uh it's not as exciting as as as the as the good stuff.

I mean, a lot of VCs do get artifacts from, like a lot of SpaceX investors have like cool model rockets and stuff that have been given out at various times. Next time. And they're all has like swords and stuff. Pre-IPO rounds, VCs should give their founders like miniature feed chips. Oh yeah, there you feed chips that kind of lean into their, just like a little model

one, which is like, you're so close to them. I feel like Nikita should give a model G-Wagon to everyone that hits number one on the App Store. Everybody that spends a year with him on intro. Thank you for the G-Wagon. Gets the toy G-Wagon. Let's go to

Swen, I think. I don't know how to pronounce that. Jess Swen Lee says discipline is for those who lack obsession. And it's a beautiful skyline photo with a screenshot of a, or a photo of a Mac book with some text on it. What does it say? The original something of trading. I don't know. Did you, did you, so this is a little bit of a hustle porn post,

but the reason that I included it is that I think that the, if you're somebody that gets, when somebody is posting about, here's my knowledge stack, here's my second brain, all this stuff. And you're starting to obsess over note taking apps. There's probably something

that's probably um the reason for that is that you don't actually care about what you're working on sure right it's it's um to do you have to because if you truly power yeah if you if you're thinking about oh i need to have more discipline you just don't care about what you're working on like i don't it's not hard for me to roll out of bed and come here and record the podcast right like I don't last week I had to drive through a hundred thousand people to get here right I even I even destroyed my tire oh yeah I had to replace it well and so so yeah it's it's about obsession brings discipline but not because you're disciplined but because you're obsessed So yeah, it's about obsession brings discipline,

but not because you're disciplined, but because you're obsessed, right? Yeah, so you should just be obsessed first. Just find something that you're obsessed with first, and then the discipline will come naturally because the energy will come. Warren Buffett would use iPhone notes app stock. Yeah.

Right, pen and paper. Yeah, he's not getting crazy. No, fourth brain. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Pen and paper. Yeah. He's not good. No, no. Fourth brain. Fourth brain. Second brain. Third brain. Fourth brain. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I've, I've spent very little time in the, in the productivity world. The one thing that I did get, I did adopt and I like is inbox zero. I do inbox zero where everything gets archived or replied to or delay send or remind me later and then and then like i just i just know that if it's in my inbox i need to get to it at some point that becomes like the task i'm obsessed that works i have 2500 unread texts yeah and i always reply to the ones that matter to me so interesting so i don't i don't worry about by trying to get to inbox zero with

my text at least yeah i would be dealing with a lot of things i don't care about yeah really um so uh yeah just yeah i mean at a certain point it just becomes completely unmanageable i was i've talked to i was talking to a billionaire a week ago that uh uh lost his email because he basically lost his email because there's just too... A beaner? Yes. Because he basically lost his email because there's just too much. So he just can't do it at all. And then lost his texts because he just got too many. Well, Trump, you said, prints out,

gets his email printed out for him. Exactly. And at the very least, the printer is a little bit slow. So people can email you faster than you can print them. So the printer is a rate limiting factor. You can only see so much stuff. Maybe it runs out of ink.

Maybe it runs out of paper. Eventually, you're going to see that. You're going to have your vice president print them out for you. Yeah, there's going to be some natural prioritization. But yeah, now the only thing that gets through is Twitter DMs because you have to be a mutual follower. So in order to contact this guy, you basically have to say something interesting

so that he follows you and not do something stupid where you get unfollowed. And then you can, and then you can contact him and that's the only way. And that's the, that's the real cue of like how you get to him. Um, so, uh, let's go to Nicole Wiscoff. She says, uh, the founder of Wiscoff ventures. She says launching a podcast feels 10 X harder than launching a VC firm. Humbled after incorporating and filming the first episode, mildly concerning. And then Alex Conrad says,

now you are finally a VC firm. And she says, don't jinx it, Alex. What do you think about this? Which one's harder? Depends on who you are. I think for you and our vice president, Ben, who produces the show, this is like riding, like the production value of Technology Brothers is intense, right? There's lighting, there's heavy, heavy audio optimization, post work on.

This is not something that you're going to do on. This is not your guys's first rodeo right and so um for you starting up a podcast is like riding a bike um but to anybody out there that thinks oh podcasting's easy uh i would just say you know grab a mic yeah grab a mic give it a shot right yeah i do think that what makes it hard is that people don't think about the format enough yeah and or what the show is and so they wind up just doing kind of like oh i'll just interview my friends or like it's like an interview show is just one possibility like there are within the within the podcast world if you actually look at the podcast there are structured interview shows like tyler cowan where he asks he has every

single question written out he asks the question lets them talk lex friedman's very similar asks a question lets them talk lex famously let elon sit for like 15 seconds you remember this he's he asks elon a question and elon just sits there and think and there's just 15 seconds. You remember this? He asks Elon a question and Elon just sits there and think, and there's just 15 seconds of silence on the mic. And everyone's like, wow, like he like really didn't jump in. Rogan, very different. It's a conversation. Rogan doesn't have a whole bunch of questions. He's just talking the whole time. So conversational versus like planned interview one-on-one. Then there's group shows where it's a bunch of people hanging out. The pod save guys guys that smart list

podcast is like for comedians they still have guests on every once in a while there's shows that don't have any guests like art like ours there's shows that are scripted like uh you know serial on npr senra shows are solo solo and like objectively it's more of like an audiobook by the end exactly yeah and then there's also the acquired show where it's similar to senra's thing but two people and lightly scripted like lightly planned but not scripted word by word but but a lot of like the but a ton of research yeah but a lot of those like true crime shows are like literally scripted like every single word and it's an audio it's not yeah it's an audio book and then and then how much production are you going to do are you going to use sound mixing and bring in you know atmospheric atmospheric sounds?

A lot of horror shows and true crime shows will have like moody music to set the tone. Just all these different formats and figuring out like what is the right format for your goal? What are you good at? Like actually thinking that through and then sticking to that instead of just being like,

I have a podcast, it's a zoom interview show with just random people that I meet that doesn't really work. So until you do that work, you can just be like stagnating. And I've seen a lot of people launch podcasts and just struggle for years to get, you know, any sort of product market fit because they don't feel it should feel more like same thing with companies where I give this example to founders where if you're uh if if you're working on a product that is not good or the market doesn't care about it or doesn't want it it's going to feel like pushing a rock like a really heavy rock uphill right which is like almost impossible like for a small team uh if you're working on something that is getting real

pull from the market that's a good product at the right time all the stuff it's still really hard but you're like pushing this heavy rock down like a small slope yeah um yeah slight decline and so yeah you have this momentum kind of like working with you um yeah so yeah i think that's um i guess the question for me is like if you flip it around like what do you need to get right to have like immediate product market fit for a VC firm? Is it just like a banger thesis or like a lot of it feels like you have some preferential access to proprietary deal flow and so it's very natural for you to raise the fund

because you are already seeing great deals and either angel investing or raising SPVs like very consistently. Yeah, Nicole's on her, like so people were trying to dunk on this tweet, which people want a reason to dunk on anything, but she's on her third fund, right? It's not her first rodeo.

It legitimately is probably much easier for her to set up a venture fund and raise money, raise tens of millions of dollars from LPs. So for her going and doing podcasting for the first time, I think a lot of people as adults stop doing new things. So everything they do is pretty easy. Like I make my coffee in the morning, I drive to work, I do my job that I've done for decades

and it's all like very easy. And so it can be, and if you're naturally a talented person, it's usually a weird feeling when you're doing something and it's like hard. And didn't she also like publish like the exact funnel that she used to raise the latest fund and it was like hundreds of pitches yeah and that's the equivalent of doing hundreds of episodes right yeah and so she's been very transparent she's building in public yeah yeah she's building in public but doing it doing it the right way yeah that's great let's move on to Tane says market caps of a few consumer

companies that were all multi-billion dollar companies when they IPO'd in the 20 to 21 period. Sonder at $32 million now. Rent the Runway at $36 million. Bain Capital Company. I remember seeing them at Bain. Allbirds $88 million. BuzzFeed, 96 million. And Wish at 167 million. And then Brennan says, market cap of Sonder is lower than the cash we raised for our Series B in 2017. Is this like the founder of Sonder or something? Like we raised?

He must at least have been there. I don't think that's the founder. But yeah, I think there's some type of opportunity here. A lot of these companies are, like you have to imagine that Sonder, I don't know if the board and everyone would be able to approve like a take private, but last I checked,

they had like hundreds of these corporate style like apartments that were basically like somewhere between a hotel room and an Airbnb. Yeah. And there must be like some value in there greater than, than that number. And so I think a lot of these are, um,

I think like wish and stuff like that, these e-commerce things, e-commerce seems like it's a really bad business if, unless you're online, unless you have, uh, unless you're Amazon, uh,

or you, um, you have a real brand. It seems like the middle is really, really bad. Even if you have a real brand, the e-commerce effort is merely a go-to-market strategy. And that's what we're seeing with Lucy, where we were 99% e-commerce for years. Now it's less than a third of the business. Yeah, and then Rent the Runway is one of those things.

When it launched, I think that in theory for um in theory i don't know if they have a men's product i'm sure they have men's products well there's the black tux which is a competitor for tuxedo rental online and then i think they got kind of eaten up by those uh like buy and sell resale websites like the realReal, where it's like the economics, it sounds way more expensive, but it's actually pretty similar. If you just go to the RealReal, buy a dress for a hundred bucks,

wear it, take it back, sell it for 50. It's like you've taken a 50% loss, but that might be the same price as renting the runway. So the big issue with Rent the Runway is that it is a lot even though they've really dialed in like the receiving and dropping it off the more money you pay for rent the runway as a consumer the more work it is it's like oh great i have these like three or four things that i have to like take and put pack up and put to ups and eventually they're looking at

it as like okay i'm spending two thousand dollars a month i could just like strategically build out my wardrobe and sell the stuff that i don't like like you're saying so i think it's one of those things like that is something that is probably great localized small business in new york for example where if you could subscribe to a closet yes new york where a woman could walk in buy something you're not buy something, rent three pieces that she likes, wear them, drop them back off, and it's, like, right in their neighborhood. That probably is, like, a pretty good business.

But, you know, online, very logistics intensive. It just doesn't really make money. I remember my mom always saying that, like, maybe it was, like, the Italian way is to just have, like, one incredible suit instead of, like, ten 10 cheap suits and there you go this is a special occasion and uh and and and and just always essentially building a power law closet where you don't where you have very few things but they're all extremely nice and you

take very good care of them and you repair them and they're repairable because they're made out of nice materials instead of just buying fast casual fast fashion or whatever i remember the moment the distinct moment i was probably like 22 ish where i realized i'd stopped growing yeah and i was like wait i can buy stuff that's gonna yeah and effectively mentally depreciate it for a decade as opposed to a couple months. Yeah. Let's go to Sar. He says, nice, because he's tweeting a picture of an interaction between Jason Calacanis

and David Freeberg. RFK is talking about how the Trump White House will advise all water systems to remove fluoride from public water. And Jason says, um, dot, dot, dot, science boy, can you vet this for me? Question mark, parentheses, Friedberg. And what I love, so Friedberg responds, insecure boy, why don't you use the internet to do some primary research yourself instead of outsourcing your thinking? And it's this massive ratio of,

you know, 9,000 likes to 900 likes. and it's funny because it's like infighting but what i love is that david friedberg matched jason's formatting to like it's pixel perfect um m dot dot dot three dots insecure boy science boy comma and then even when they tag the person jason did open parentheses space at friedberg space close parentheses and friedberg does the exact same thing with jason the the attention to detail here is just fantastic and i just like was like the the mirroring of the of the meme it's like yeah it's it's beautiful um yeah so here they've been i don't i don't want to celebrate i don't think it's worth dunking on them or celebrating.

Clearly, they're going through a lot as a group right now. Sachs is probably going to, you know, it's possible he'll have to divest and become Secretary of State. You know, who knows? There's a lot going on. But I think why I thought this was relevant is one of the biggest reasons that we started this podcast is frustration that All In wasn't monetizing and frustration from our friends that said, hey, we want to advertise to this group of smart pro business individuals and we can't get in front of them. Can you guys build a bigger podcast than All In that monetizes and we can sponsor? And I think the big thing is if All In had sponsors and they were generating

tens of millions of dollars of revenue, which they can and should, uh, they would not be fighting on the timeline. I mean, that could pay for a private research assistant for Jason to ask these dumb questions too. Exactly. And they can have a vice president.

Yeah. I don't think they do. I think they have like a producer. I think they have a couple of producers, but I don't think they have a VP yet. So if, yeah, just thinking if if

i'm feed ship yeah feed ship is sponsoring all in yep and i see two of their hosts fighting it out i'm like hey we're here to sell boats right yeah we're not here to argue and poke fun at each other yeah yeah i think there's more to this story and i'm sure it'll come out yeah yeah yeah yeah it's tough i mean the the sotheby's clientele like you don't want bidders. You want, you want them to be fighting with over individual with, with the paddles, with the paddles, not, not, not making a scene in the lobby. So yeah, it's tough. It's, they almost waited too long and you wonder like, could they monetize now or has the ship sailed? Yeah. Has the feed ship sailed? Yeah. Oh oh well let's move on to kyle harrison he's a contrary right yeah uh kyle says uh vc quote we don't invest in chat gpt wrappers founder

our chat gpt wrapper has gone from 150k to to 15 million of arr in 12 months vc will a valuation of 1 billion suffice you know what i'll just leave the valuation line blank for you to fill in. And then Matt Turk says, ha ha, that's ridiculous. And also, is there still room in the round? So that was a perplexity subtweet, right? Oh, really? Chachi P rapper, 50 million AR, one billion. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I would say VCs love to invest in founders and products that are genuinely loved. And people fucking love Perplexity, right? Like it is a product that has replaced Search in a small way with very, very, I don't think really anything has done that in my history in tech yep so if if something has the potential something like perplexity has the potential to disrupt the greatest business model of all time being search maybe they should buy

search.com yeah search.com it's not resolving right now yeah no one's using it. And so anyways, I think perplexity is a fair bet at any price in the range of what he just described. Yeah, I mean, bullish on chat GPT wrappers generally. Not sure if they're always a good fit for VC, but the UI layer is important. And perplexity just gives a different UI. But yeah, a year ago, everyone was saying there's no value in the app layer. You're all getting commoditized now.

I think this tweet was in response to OpenAI rolling out web search. Sure, sure. But people are still using perplexity. I remember at the election party that we were at, everybody was either, they had Polymarket open or they had perplexity. And it was just

like much better sources of information and it's interesting because i mean perplexity is 100 making more money than mp3.com yeah ever did and and and and a lot of that's just the cultural shift of like yeah when you launch a product charge 20 actually the founder of perplexity was on i think lex and was saying like i wishPT had done $40 a month because we just copied their business model. My only critique of Perplexity is I haven't, I've never gotten an upsell. Oh, sure. I've never gotten pushed to give them money. Yeah.

I use the product pretty frequently. I used it a little bit. I kind of switched out of it. I had a problem with their voice dictation product where basically sometimes you could use, and ChatGPT has this too, where you can use Whisper to transcribe something into text and then it becomes a text interaction or you can open up their voice assistant and then you're talking to the AI and it's not printing it out in text for you. I like the text interactions

because I want to see tables and data, but I want to talk to it. And so if that flow is confusing, it like really breaks my experience, but that's probably a little bit niche. Let's go to Lindyman. Actually, we should probably skip this guy. He hates me.

He hates you? Yeah, he blocked me. How'd it go? I don't know. He hates me. He hates you? Yeah, he blocked me. How did it go? I don't know. I mean, what's the tweet? It says, gambling is so normalized now. People are casually betting on the election. It just took a few years after they made it legal.

American society is perfect for betting. Lots of money. Lots of people sitting at work wanting some action. The only thing is this might be how your Lindy man redemption because he would appreciate that we're sitting here in what looks like a newsroom. I hope so. I hope so. Um, Paul, if you're listening, unblock me, man. I really like your posts. Uh, so yeah, American society is perfect for betting lots of money, lots of people sitting at work wanting some action. Right. And that was all leading up to, yeah, I think people need to see any type of betting as, as much as it is a financial activity, it's entertainment. Right. So when I angel invest,

that's an entertainment product for me. I'm like, I'm giving you a lot of money without the ability to get it back, except if you do super, super well, and I'm going to get it back except if you do super super well and i'm gonna get updates every single month until something happens it's like the most expensive premium newsletter exactly the investor the investor update is like the best the most expensive sub stack exactly it's a one-time 50k fee yeah but i just like that we're now getting betting products for everybody right if you're if you're a technology brother you can angel invest yep If you're a D-gen, you can do sports betting. If you're an intellectual, you can bet on markets. You can do pump.fun.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you're a real D-gen. I mean, the D-gen levels are just 25 deep. Yeah, yeah. You can be betting on Candy Crush. No, the really degenerate is a coin going is like having like your 10 screens and going long corn futures while you're betting on like a chinese tennis yeah yeah exactly yeah that's great um so uh uh creme you uh says elon starts his surprise joe rogan

appearance by mentioning that he's one of the top 20 Diablo 4 players in the world and there are only two Americans in the top 20 and David Ulovich quote tweets it and says I'm pretty sure Travis Kalanick was the number one Wii tennis player in the world for a period of time when people played Wii tennis. There's a whole story of him playing left-handed

with some VC. Yeah, faking it. Faking it and smoking him still and just being like... Oh, he wasn't even playing with my correct hand. That's just so... It's just so funny

because like Diablo, I get it. It's like kind of like a hardcore game. So Wii Tennis is like just like... It's like a silly game, you know? Yeah, but that's the thing. You think that when I play Wii,

it feels like a joke because everything feels like you're in a big cartoon. Yep. But Travis had figured out that there was actually deep skill in the game and i think that sbf when he would be playing league of legends while pitching smogging your vc by playing left-handed and we tennis and just smoking them over and over that's cool just going and playing some random and he was bad yeah yeah that was bad yeah it wasn't one of the best.

If Sequoia had figured out that he actually wasn't even good at the game, they probably wouldn't have invested. But anyways, I think so. The reason the quote tweet there brings up the fact, like somebody analyzing the fact that Elon is just spending a lot, probably using an army of people to play for him so he just gets to play with all the other top players and apparently if you're playing with other top players you just rank up a lot more quickly i think that this is a risk um uh factor for elon's reputation because

he the number one way that um uh elon haters try to discredit him is by saying he didn't build rockets, he didn't build X, he didn't do all these things. And so to now be publicly being like, I'm the top 20 Diablo player in the world, when in reality it's probably a team of people, is just like, what's the point? I don't know.

I mean, I would honestly flip it around and be like you know there's there's all this skepticism about like does he have the ability to perform at the highest level and he's like demonstrating that in a public place where like if you think that you're better than elon it's everything and he just gets lucky or he just has some sort of thing that's a good point okay well then show up and beat him you know you could do that um and then palmer says it's very interesting phenomenon. I was briefly one of the top 10 players in Sword Art online memory defrag

back when it was still online and my score in Pokemon pinball for Game Boy Color was several times higher than the Guinness World Record. Wow, that's amazing. I don't think I've ever been like top 10 in anything. See, that's cool. Now he has Mod Retro. I was.

I played a lot of Counter-Strike and I got to, there's like a league called the Cyber Athlete Amateur League and the Cyber Athlete Professional League, but the CPL was in person. So, and it was too expensive. So I couldn't go because it was like Texas and you had to bring your own computer. And it was just like really tricky. But I played online and I was always like, there was Open, which anyone could get into main which was like once you were doing well then there was invite only and i couldn't get into invite i was

in main but then i switched games to day of defeat which was a world war ii like version of it essentially slightly different and that i actually got to invite in yeah i was never like really one of the top players but i was really into that game and it was fun but again like it's hard when you don't have uh time i don't know how you I don't know how he makes the time for it. It was always tough. There was some Olympian that talked about this. And she was saying like she does Olympic skiing and modeling and she's still going to school. And the reporter was asking her like, how do you do all of this?

And the thing is, is context switching usually ends up being a break, even if it's very active. So Elon going from working on SpaceX to working on X to working on playing Diablo is actually like, it feels like it's refreshing him. It's like refreshing it versus just doing SpaceX for 14 hours is actually harder to stay at a high level. Interesting. Yeah, I like that. Let's go to Nick, dollars and data. He says,

friendly reminder that Jane Street built a system to get the 2016 election results minutes ahead of the mainstream media and still ended up losing 300 million on the trade. And apparently Sam Bankman Freed involves his time at Jane street capital where he built a system to get the election results earlier which is wild that he was there doing that and i guess it was reported in michael lewis's going infinite what had what had been a 300 million dollar profit for jane street was now a 300 million dollar loss it went from the single most profitable to single worst trade in jane street history so it basically popped off of the news and then they held and didn't sell?

That's what I'm taking it for going from profitable. Yeah, I just think that guy pretty... They bet against the US market. So they predicted that Trump would win early, but they didn't predict that the market would like the Trump win, which is interesting. You would think that you could interview a hundred capital allocators that control a large company.

Maybe there was a preference. Or maybe people didn't want to say at the time that they were pro-Trump and they thought it was going to be good. I know Citadel, their global macro team, they do thousands of CEO interviews every year. I wonder if Jane Street has a similar function. Well, you know the French quant. Yeah.

He did his own polling. He did his own polling. And what he was, he claims, I mean, who knows if he was just degenerate. And now he's sort of like making. Retconning. Oh, yeah. Real data. But he said that there was a difference in polling between who are you voting for and who are your neighbors voting for?

And that gap was his edge. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was what felt different this time around than 2020. I was seeing like MAGA hats in Venice or in like Santa Monica. And it's like, it used to be like, like if you saw that like that person be getting yelled at Yeah, I saw and none of the none of the ultra legs I saw like a mini Trump rally of like 20 people with like a big Trump flag like in Pasadena even California apparently was

For 40% of the popular vote in California went to Trump Wow, which is yeah Your years was a plus 27. Yeah, which is like more like everybody for years. It's supposed to be a D plus 27, right? Which is like more like 70, 30, I think maybe even more than that. Yeah. Wow. It's wild.

Anyway, uh, let's go to Austin Peter Smith. No matter who wins this election, I'm going to build some B2B sass. So underappreciated tweet, just 74 likes. This is a good one.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, he, yeah, so underappreciated tweet just 74 likes this is a good one yeah yeah uh he yeah he's been building this uh tool called howie for the last year oh yeah howie's a product that acts as like uh your secretary basically so the same thing that your secretary does versus he says hey john you know uh this person would like to meet with you uh or can i schedule it for this howie's like a digital version of that does that make sense yeah yeah okay so uh you can cc howie in on email and it just says like suggest times they can coordinate back and forth the person you're

booking with can say hey uh that actually my day changed around can you do this day and how he'll just handle the whole thing so um it's basically making uh the coogan secretary experience maybe they should buy secretary.com yeah yeah it's fascinating because secretary has become like it was it was branded as like low status to be a secretary and so that got rebranded as an executive assistant but if you think about the most high status roles in the world the secretary of state the treasury secretary secretary it literally means keep the secrets secretary yeah it's the keeper of the secrets apparently yeah and uh like literally secret to terry like the person in charge of that so it's actually like a very high status word and it is non-gendered and so maybe we should bring it back yeah let's go to Rasset.

Says, my post is the top post of all time in the R slash cursor. In R slash cursor. Bro, what the fuck? Zero coding skills. My web app ranked number three on product hunt. Hi, guys. I was laid off from my job. I don't know how to code.

I decided just to build things with cursor. Still learning. Didn't really know what to build. So I just decided to build the most something, something, something. And they don't even know about the viral tweet thing, LMAO, huh. Yeah, this trend is awesome, right? Ideas, guys. Which is that it's being easier and easier

and easier and easier and easier to build software and just things in general. And so it matters more of your raw ability to execute and pace and even marketing edge, this guy's doing marketing through posting. And I think the really interesting thing is that, like I guarantee if this idea has legs, it ranks on Product Hunt, he gets some early adopters,

like there's gonna be real programmers. Like it's going to be a tech company, there's gonna be a lot of programmers. They're gonna be using Cursor, there's gonna be a lot of leverage there, but gonna be using Cursor, there's gonna be a lot of leverage there, but it's going to turn into a real software company, but you've just disconnected this need for the ideas guy to go convince a programmer

to take a risk and build something for equity and something that they're not sure about. And so it just gets so much easier to iterate and test new ideas. So very bullish. Crazy example here, have a portfolio company that recently went to a hackathon. And instead of going as a group,

they had the CEO enter and the CTO enter, and they both built individual products that both did well in the hackathon, which, and the CEO didn't have any any prior real he had never been a software engineer at a company ever yeah um and now he's like competing against other like regular engineers and winning yeah uh which is because of the hackathon in the early stages you're not solving really really hard engineering problems you're not coming in with like oh i need a new sorting algorithm or something you're just like i need to pull some code over here, some boilerplate over here, deploy this,

just get something live that does the basic bones of the thing that I want to demonstrate. Is this valuable? Is this a product that people want? So side note, Cursor is the most painful miss of mine that I never took a pitch from. But I realized about a year ago that the Cursor CEO had followed me since 2021,

before the company started. And I hadn't followed him back. And I just was like, oh. So stupid. Yeah. Oh, wow. Great product. Great product.

Glad they're winning. I mean, another example of a UI wrapper, essentially. And it's actually model independent. I think you can choose whatever model you want. People like Claude 3. The fact that these apps are going model independent too just shows that value will accrue to the app layer and not the sort of commoditizable language model.

Yeah, the language model could be like the underlying technology in the same way that I think Netflix was built on GCP or AWS and Snapchat was built on GoogleCP or AWS and Snapchat was built on Google cloud, but then they eventually built their own servers. The consumer doesn't know. Yeah. They don't care. Um, James Stuber says VC the other day told me we've lost several really good founders to factorio. They came back and just wanted to work in manufacturing, not SAS. Do you think this is real? Do you think this is a joke? I think this is a joke. It's funny though.

It's like ayahuasca adjacent. Yeah. Like you either lose yourself to ayahuasca and you go off to be a hippie. Yeah, I could see a SaaS founder playing Factorio and they're like, wait, I can like do the same, use my same skill set of company building to like just play this game in real life. Yeah. Like that's what Aaron's doing. Yeah.

He's just like playing a real life game in Factorio's what we're doing at deterrence yeah i wonder if there's a like a dividing line between like the type of game that someone played as a kid and then the type of career path they follow like is there a difference between like the shooter who's maybe more of like the aggressive that was, that was always the risk. That was the RTS games. My parents were freaked out that I would, I like call of duty as a kid because I, uh, now you own a gun store. Um, no,

but that, that was because, uh, and they were just worried that I'd just like get, uh, like want to go into the military and all that stuff. But little do they know, I actually played way more Starcraft,

which is much more entrepreneurial, balancing, building, resource management, conflict. So anyway, long Starcraft players. Yeah, long Diablo players now. I wonder if there's gonna be a boom in Diablo. We had a hackathon, or a LAN party at Founders Fund, and it was a lot of Halo, a of a lot of counter-strike a little bit of smash brothers and i think there was maybe two people playing starcraft but starcraft's a

little bit harder to set up for his longer game i think super long but i could see the next one i played a little bit of diablo 4 because shout out lulu misservy she gave me a free coupon code for it when she worked at activision i was like thank you uh but i played a little bit and i was like this is like too much i played diablo 3 i never really played diablo 2 that was like the one everyone loved loved loved but it was like i'm waiting for another world of warcraft scale game where it felt like world of warcraft was the most deeply addicting well that's supposed to be fortnite and then Roblox, right? Or Minecraft.

Like Minecraft is very much the new version. But World of Warcraft, I feel like had a lot of adults that were deeply addicted. Totally. I guess maybe that's the case for Fortnite too. I just am not, I don't know. It's maybe true for Fortnite.

I think it's probably less true for Minecraft. With adults that are addicted to video games. But yeah, like, I mean, I guess they're making a Minecraft movie. They made World of Warcraft movies, so maybe it is pretty adjacent if they build it up. But yeah,

I understand what you're saying. Grit Cult, who's been on the show before, dumps a whole list of problems and solutions. The fertility crisis, the solutions have 10 kids. Environmental crisis, buy a classic car.

Ownership crisis, become a landlord. You laugh, but it's real. It's usually more sustainable objectively to buy a car. Because it's not being produced by anything, right? Yeah, that's right. And they last a long time. More sustainable than buying a Tesla. Interesting.

Well, not when Tesla starts launching V12s with gated manual shifters uh which is coming um it's it's the end of the arc for elon very clearly uh education crisis homeschool we know many people that do that uh health crisis gym obsessively unemployment crisis go in go all in on crypto love it uh everyone's scared over leverage lack of nutrition steak and eggs and then jack butcher says 100 year bull run uh any of these you disagree i just like this because it's all about taking personal responsibility for the problems that you see in the world so a lot of people think that there's a lot of problems in the world like we should just do less but the key is to do more but do more of the right things yeah and all of these are things that you just do independently mostly i mean yeah landlords a little no one's no one's stopping you like

elon talks about the fertility crisis and actively works to fix it right like takes personal responsibility he's not just saying you have 10 kids he's having he's having and this is something we've seen with like the health crisis stuff there's a lot of like kind of like trad influencers that um you know complain about like the fluoride or seed oils or all this stuff but then like you meet them and they don't go to the gym and it's like something's mismatched here like you should start with yourself and like yeah and like at least solve the problem there's the one guy and then your and then your family and then your community and then the city the state the nation yeah but if you're just jumping straight to the nation like you at least need to lead by

example right yeah uh one guy at heretic one guy at hereticon that was like giving a panel on like health and like the like alternative health movement he like was 37 i guess and straight up look like my age like he like i was like proof of work oh there you go respect it yeah so anyways be be like that guy is it brian johnson or justin mares no no just justin mares justin looks fantastic yeah yeah yeah um proof of body very important proof of work yeah proof of body for for any health claims like yeah you have to be able to say like okay this person's recommending steak and eggs do i want to to look like them? If yes, then I will listen to them. This is the Andrew Huberman effect.

Chamath Palihapitiya says, these should return the exact same form of results, but they don't. So if you searched where to vote for Trump, it would give you stories about the election. And if you asked for where to vote for Harris, it would give you like a like an info form of where to vote and you could just type in your address and it would immediately

take you there so people were saying like google is biasing uh towards harris they're being more helpful to harris voters than trump obviously it didn't matter in the election but uh the the the community note says the search results were different for harris and vance because harris is a county in texas and and Vance is a county in North Carolina. And it appears Google has corrected this issue. I do want to give Google the benefit of the doubt here. I think there was so much scrutiny that they really, okay, okay, here comes the tinfoil hat. Here comes the tinfoil hat. I think there's so much scrutiny that they know that. I just think that there was quite a lot of examples like this

over the last two weeks, so much so that it's hard not to wonder if the woke mind virus within Google is still not acting up a little bit, even though the spotlight is on them. Maybe. That's all. It just seems like if there's a whistleblower, there's so much scrutiny, they're trying to curry favor. Yeah, you can make the same argument that X is deeply political and upranks certain ideas.

So I think ultimately it's happening on both sides. Sure, sure. Let's go to Sean Puri. He says, host of My First Million, says, the new bachelor party, trip to Turkey with the boys for hair transplants. Where'd you get your hair transplants, Jordy? Uh, locally, locally. Yeah. I actually get, I get weekly micro transplants where they're, uh, they just take like a, you know, one centimeter by one centimeter and just transplant a little bit. It's more sustainable. You know, I never have to like go through the whole week now i haven't haven't had to do this yet although i either

uh function health tells me that i've like really my hormone profile will is conducive to hair loss okay but my spirit is conducive to having great hair interesting so it's kind of like this this balance between my hormones and spirit and whatever. Um, but yeah, I haven't seen this yet. I do think that medical tourism is, is like a underrated trend.

I think it's like pretty investable trend. Uh, I knew some guys that were working on, on sort of Airbnb for medical tourism, which is kind of a cool concept where yeah if you want to go down to mexico to like get some dental procedure done there's some dentists down there that are probably fantastic and there's a lot that are going to jack you up yeah but knowing which one's good knowing what you're good having that user generated i was talking to justin mayors

about this with uh the like gl-1s were like widely available for like five years before they came to America. And a lot of rich people were going abroad to get them. And they're still really cheap on the black market. Yeah. The gray market. Yeah, very interesting. I have yet to lose my hair

and I don't think it's genetic in my family. So I'm not super worried about it. But I did start getting a bald spot back here a while ago. And I was like, this is so weird. Like, I don't understand why I'm losing my hair back here. And what I figured out was that I was so interested in efficiency and shareholder value and just being on the grind and not wasting any time that when I got out of the shower, I would take the towel and vigorously rub my head as fast as possible to dry my hair in like two seconds

and it was ripping out my hair no babies get that yeah my three-month-old my three-month-old crib cradle crib yeah my three-month-old little bald spot yeah yeah same thing yeah it's basically giving myself that here's here's here's i should put the tinfoil hat back okay here's here's what the hair a lot of the hair loss epidemic is driven by uh lack of sunlight to the head sure sunlight makes life grow yep but everyone's inside all the time no one's working outside overuse of artificial fluorescent lights sure um that you can offset cinema lights they're very high quality yeah yeah sure they're good uh wearing a lot of hats cuts off blood flow and then a lack of physical touch so if you're a guy go like this

through your hair yeah i will just like massage my head multiple times a day okay um to stimulate blood flow because or if you're like down 100 excellent trade you're just like yeah you don't want to be pulling out your hair you don't want to be pulling out your hair yeah anyways if you're a brother um physically uh or spiritually give yourself a little i mean it is it does feel like the hair transplant thing is becoming more normalized more democratized cheaper more reliable and so i think we'll see james yeah and i think we will see more people start to do it earlier so you don't have those like billionaire transformations where it's like before money after money, it's so obvious that they went and got their hair done.

Instead. It's like the person just doesn't lose their hair because they made enough money at 30 to like pay for the cheaper hair transplant. That was like pretty reliable. Yeah. But yeah, the hair transplant stuff, I mean,

it feels pretty brutal. I know some people that have done it and it's like, your head's like bleeding for like days. It's like rough. Yeah. I people that have done it, and it's like your head's, like, bleeding for, like, days. It's, like, rough. Yeah, yeah. I had a buddy do it, and he kept leaving the house. And I was like, dude, for all of us, just, like, stay indoors for, like, a few days. Yeah, just chill.

Just chill. Just relax. Like, you're going to be back on the road. Yeah. Nobody wants to see that. It's rough. Anyway. Boys trip. Sounds fun fun i don't know uh i mean any excuse for a boys

trip but hopefully not like surgery and just sitting around like you know being miserable i'd want to do something fun there's so many other things you could do yeah go visit feed ship and start designing your custom yacht uh eighth century wood chipper says forget polymarket here's the real indicator palantir technologies jumped uh 14 the stock's over 50 um and was this this was like right on election day i guess yeah to me what was amazing about this election as somebody who appreciates uh finance was just how many different ways there were to bet on the market dogecoin about this election as somebody who appreciates finance, was just how many different ways there were to bet on the market.

Dogecoin. Dogecoin was one, Bitcoin, Solana, defense tech stocks. Even Google went up 4%. Even a big one was obviously all the companies that are potentially impacted by tariffs, like Lululemon and things like that. Truth Social, the stock got halted right before the election you saw that yeah um well i think there was a big it seemed like the truth there was a big sell into the election which somebody was like

let's sell the before you know that basically yeah it's gonna get less attention now that trump's elected and oh really you think that's what it was it wasn't that they thought trump was gonna lose i think you could argue that that was the moment where people were pouring on investments because people thought he was going to win. Yep. And it will actually could just trade down now that he's going to be president again and nobody's taking away his other accounts. Yeah.

I mean, he's like live on every podcast and on X now. Yeah. Yeah. it's interesting. Also, the fact that all the defense stocks pumped is interesting because there's this narrative that like the – Yeah, Dick Cheney endorsed – Yeah, yeah, like Dick Cheney and the Democrats were going to be more pro-war. And in fact, the right wing would be less pro-war. So you would assume the defense budgets would get cut but i think there's probably just like a return to the traditional uh balance with uh the the conservatives still continuing to promote defense and i think it's good because i love palantir and i think it's important um let's go to mark sisson is that how

you pronounce it yep uh he says the best thing to do right now is lift some heavy ass weight okay so mark don't know him personally, but total legend early to a lot of these sort of alternative health trends. And he has proof of body. Oh yeah. Like the guy is jacked. Fantastic.

Six pack. I think he's in his 60s. He had started a company called Primal Kitchen. Oh really? Which he sold. No way. So he sold for hundreds,

millions of dollars. Great products. Like he basically took a of millions of dollars, great products. Like he basically took a lot of the sauces and other things like that that were unhealthy, took out the seed oils, put avocado oil in, stuff like that. But I've seen him. He works out at the gym next to my house. I think he splits time between the West and East Coast. But the guy is just like a living example.

Yeah, you'll say hi. Living his values. Well, no, when he is in the gym, last time I saw him, the west and east coast but um the guy is just like a living example yeah you're saying hi living his values and um well no when he is in the gym last time i saw him he's like the mayor like everybody in the gym is like saying hi that's awesome and uh so anyways like he's proof of work the guy uh yeah the guy's also just a good message i mean i think this was the fifth so this was like election night essentially or i think it was noon before the election and so a lot of people are stressed they're just going to be checking polymarket doom scrolling and he's just like just go get in the gym yeah which is true it's good um just just

get those endorphins flowing yeah it's important morgan housel what firm is he with again collab collab fund is that right he right? He's like, done very well. Yeah. Oh yeah, he's a writer. Yeah. He's written a bunch of books.

He has a quote, the polls don't tell us much. Let's turn now to the degenerate gamblers to see if we can learn anything. 7,000 likes. Yeah, so here's the thing about evaluating whether prediction markets worked.

Yeah. They were right this time. Yeah. but even a day before they were projecting that there was a 40 basically projecting there's a 40 chance that common win and that was not like yeah i don't i i think this was a huge win for prediction markets from a liquidity standpoint and how much attention they had most importantly they were more accurate than the polls because you could just be one point over correct but at least it was the most correct source of information there was no perfect that it was and i was saying this okay i i i i thought that trump was going to win but i also knew all my most degenerate friends were going real that are very generally conservative and were betting heavy on polymarket.

And I just figured that that would slant it more. But the election was such a landslide that maybe it was perfectly accurate. Yeah. I don't know. What'll be really interesting is if in the future there's a prediction markets are split 55-45 and they get it wrong.

Yeah. Because I think everyone will be like, oh, it's worthless now when really it's like a 45% chance should come up every once in a while, especially across like, you know, you test 10 elections, like it shouldn't always be right. Yeah. But I mean, what a win and, and just like incredible accuracy. And also just the fact that they, I think almost more of the value is this thing Shane was saying on, I think it was on CNBC today or some sort of TV spot. The founder of Polymarket was saying that like, because Polymarket was continuing to reprice the odds, they were able to effectively call the election like three hours before the news media has this, it's like, you could say all these different things about like conflicts of interest and who's doing what

and biases and who likes who or whatever, but it's just a fundamentally different economic incentive. Like if you're CNN, you are incentivized to sell ads and get watch time and keep people watching. And if you're Polymarket, you're incentivized for liquidity and providing correct prices yeah and so it's just a very different like incentive structure and so the the cnn coverage and the mainstream media coverage was constantly like well you know could still be a toss-up like don't turn

this off like let's go to this one district let's look at this we were at it was i was standing between two tv screens one had called it yeah 30 40 minutes before which was fox news and msnbc was just still just going going saying but at the same time before you even got to the party like three hours before any of them called it polymarket was at like 85 for trump it was like okay yeah like unless something crazy i remember will was like will was getting nervous because polymarket dipped like three percent yeah oh it went from 95 to 92 and he was like i'm panicking or whatever but like yeah it's ridiculous uh it just just having that having that early signal even if it's just like three hours and then i did see something where uh they had a screenshot of the polymarket map like a month earlier and it was dead on

yeah so i don't know if um i don't know if this made it into the stack, but somebody did an analysis of Polymarket and turns out like 90% of users had a negative balance. What does that mean? Like 90% of people that bet on Polymarket in the last, this election cycle lost money. Really? Yeah. Just at various times? Hopefully it made into.

Yeah. Like maybe they were trading up. It's probably more like people were just trading in and out oh sure sure i don't know um yeah who who knows but it's just again when the liquidity is like the stock market if one person's winning someone else is losing interesting winning big yeah a lot of other people are yeah interesting let's go to b Chesky, founder of Airbnb. He says, Airbnb just reached 2 billion guests. It took 14 years to get our first billion and only three more years to reach the second.

Thank you to everyone for giving us a chance. It's amazing. I like this. Best first comment. The first comment, Charlie Light says, congrats, Brian. The first 2 billion customers is the hardest in my experience. Smooth sailing from here on out.

Charlie's actually a legendary poster. Really? He had this account that probably had a few hundred thousand. So he's joking. But no, I think it'd be good to rank YC companies based on customers because there's like,

I don't know if any other YC, is there another YC companies based on customers because there's like I don't know if any other wise is there another YC company that has more customers then Airbnb can't imagine it's not really big but not didn't know didn't do I see or anything there might be some company out there that's just like such a such a general app yeah it's like tiny other ones do you know So I guess the other thing that is interesting about this is the real number of people that have been a customer of Airbnb is actually probably significantly higher because how many times have you stayed in an Airbnb and like you didn't book it or you booked it

and you had like four or five people come with you. So it's probably more like they have like three and a half billion or 4 billion users. Yeah, pretty insane. Yeah, and what a journey. I mean, during the COVID cycle, just completely losing everything. There's a possibility that at some point in history, Airbnb will have more users than Meta or Coca-Cola

because Airbnb is actually very geographically dispersed so like there's countries that run on airbnb and a lot of like tourism runs on it that will be using airbnb but they use some local social media and they have some like off-brand coca-cola yeah so um so yeah getting to a tough spot where there's the TAM they've got they've almost gotten 50 you know they're approaching 50% of penetration. I wonder if any of the other Airbnb stuff

will pan out they did experiences for a while did you ever see those so you'd show up to a place and then you could have like kind of a tour guide recommend restaurants kind of a like a an Airbnb native version of like when you stay in a nice Airbnb recommend restaurants kind of a uh like a an airbnb native version of like when you stay in a nice airbnb there's usually like a book that you open up and it inside it has uh like recommendations of like what restaurants you should go to but yeah um have you used turo

turo is pretty cool before i could afford 911s i would i would i so turo is hilarious because you're taking highly depreciating assets that are high risk assets in that a sports car and putting them on a website where the primary users are going to come joyride it and i just don't understand people that take a car like a porsche and put it up there because the clientele that's actually renting were like 22 year olds like me that are i was very respectful with the cars but still like they're driving them to like drive them and put miles on them it doesn't make sense whereas a house you could have yeah a house a house you could have you could have a million people come through a house and it would still appreciate

right i don't know i mean people rent airbnbs and throw parties it's the same problem as like true but like there's something to be something to be said of like if a house is appreciating five percent a year sure sure sure and even if you need to put another yeah 50 grand into the house every year yeah i mean i think like kind of i guess like maybe the bull case for turo is that a lot of the real serious Turo managers basically run a business on Turo, similar to the way people run businesses on Airbnb. They know the sweet spots. The Porsche Macan is a phenomenal value because I think you can get one for $45,000

and it releases a premium Porsche, but it's cheap. Same thing with the Corvette. Yeah, the question is why hasn't... The C8, because it's like a mid-engine sports car, but you can get it for 70K or something like that. Why hasn't Airbnb moved into car rentals? Maybe it's just too different of a business, but it would be cool to just like fly in, do, okay, I got a car, go to this Airbnb.

That's an example of Airbnb should get air.com and then do everything. That'd be cool to just like fly in do okay i get a car go to this airbnb i do that's an example of airbnb should get air.com and then and then do everything that'd be cool um that's cooler than chat gpt rebranding is chat yeah my opinion i do love that i mean i don't know if we talked about this but uh chesky wrote this post about how like everyone should do a demo day every year at a big company uh you and and when it was first proposed to him he was like we're airbnb like what are we like everyone should do a demo day every year at a big company. And when it was first proposed to him, he was like, we're Airbnb. Like, what are we going to announce? Like, it's not like we release a new iPhone every year. Why am I getting on stage like Steve Jobs and being like,

this year we're doing something different? Because it's like kind of the same business every year. But it forced him to like think of ideas and get in the habit of driving towards, it aligns the entire organization around like some sort of milestone some sort of deadline even if it's just shipping like their new you know fraud prevention service it's like okay well then you can announce to the public like if you're an Airbnb you know host you're gonna deal with a lot less fraud because we just announced this new program but then also they could do a bunch of cool stunty things like they built the house from up

they built like a like a Barbie Oppenheimer house I think or like that yeah uh and all that stuff is like very gimmicky but like actually makes for good marketing and so i like this i think it could be probably be misused by startups where they wind up leaning into just like oh we're like we just are constantly standing on state there was like a whole batch of ai companies that were like larping as steve jobs with like no products and and and it was kind of like okay like you guys got a ship but like once you're once you're in that middle phase where like you have product market fit you're growing but you want to keep the pace of play up you want to keep we should do a yeah we should do it it's good you know anderle does this very well they're they're always launching like these like hype videos

for their new products and it just feels like there's a sense of motion that would be very different than them just being like hey we sold more sensor towers we sold more of the same thing like instead it's like okay you're hearing about this thing you're seeing this video and basically any company companies need to think about every major moment as a launch yep not just when they launch their company that's the number one advice i give for companies in my portfolio that are how do we generate attention? And you have a major you have a major hire. Yeah, read it like a launch. Yep. Hype it up. Yeah Yep yeah and also like bundling those things together because like even even if you raise like a

decent series a or series be like 20 million dollars from like a Decent firm like that alone might not be enough to get like a profile on your company It might be enough to get like a tech crunch article but that's not going to do anything instead it's like if you're if you're launching a new product and you're raising money and you got some interesting hire and there's also some interesting like personal angle with one of your customers and your founder has an interesting story and you're an expert in this industry now and there's some mega trend going on that you're playing into it's like okay now you're going to get the deep dive like alex conrad's going to show up and like talk to you because like there's more there than just okay

yeah they raise money cool like one line like you need to give facts you need to give like a sense of motion and progress in the story yeah let's go to keith he says rest assured guys i have checked the ballots and they do not contain pfas or bf bpa go vote so this is so underrated 45 likes yeah yeah microplastics disrespect yeah so this is a riff on uh receipts which use this like thermo paper and receipts are genuinely terrible like there's zero roi to touch them you should avoid them i huberman recently did a deep dive and he said one of his three things was no plastic bottles, but then also don't touch the receipts. People don't realize even the transfer from take, put your, putting your finger on a hot receipt. That's hot off the fresh, fresh,

uh, like a real transfer and with hormones, like really, really, really small amount of volume of, uh, you know, hormone disrupting chemicals or hormones themselves can have a dramatic impact on how you feel. So if you're a, I don't think we have any, um, uh, I don't have any, think we have many cashiers in the audience. If you are a cashier, wear gloves and refuse receipts. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I guess the ballots don't matter because it's all printed like way ahead of time and maybe uses a good ink. Yeah, there's that. And you just hold the pencil far away.

Yeah. But very on trend comment. Let's go to DR22. Dejaru22 says, a lot of entrepreneurs are not business people because they enjoy the idea of business, but rather because they are repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else. I think there's a lot to be said about that on a soul level. It really clearly resonated a thousand likes.

Yeah. I think people, there's a lot of benefits for working for someone else. Cause if you're working for somebody else, you're effectively outsourcing all of the gnarliness that comes from running a business, which is, yeah, you're outsourcing. all of the gnarliness that comes from running a business, which is, yeah, you're outsourcing. There's a lot of benefits, right? Like your salary arrives right on time. You don't have to be thinking about making payroll. You don't have to be thinking about some customer issue or HR issue. There's, you don't have to be with the, if the website goes down and you're not the web developer, it's not your problem. Right. So I think the benefits of, of, and I think for a lot of people like going and working,

there's such a tried and true path now of like going to work at a good company and spending four years learning from the best, like ramp has spun off like Devon AI, right? Early ramp cognition, early ramp team um and there's so many benefits but yeah i think for me and i don't know i don't i don't even hate uh for me like i think this is one of those things rage is one of them if you're if you have a lot of rage in your heart and you want uh to win and you want power and prestige building a company can be one way to do that if you just want to

create things some people love creating things and companies are the best way to do that sustainably um and yeah this definitely resonates with me the desire like yeah after you you interned at bain and you're just like i i can't do this again i need to be the md yeah i could never do it i i used to tell people like if you want to just be a successful entrepreneur just never take a job Yeah, because like eventually you'll figure it out and like but as soon as you say like I'm taking a couple years off to go Work at Google or something. It's like okay. This is the beginning of the end like you're gonna get comfortable They're gonna do everything they can to keep you from going back in the in the gladiator pit Yeah, so you're gonna get complacent and tired usually the exception of

course is going to work for like an extremely hot startup for a very short time because it's super entrepreneurial no i i have a former employee who could have just stayed in fang and decided to start a company and join a couple startups and um he would have done uh he would be retired by now even though he worked at like good companies yeah if he had simply just never left i've never left google if he was a fang pm he'd probably be pulling in what a couple hundred k a month right yeah yeah but uh it's bad for the soul yeah hurts the spirit hurts the spirit um yeah enjoy the idea of business yeah i mean i i did not fully understand the idea of business really i was truly repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else and i mean it also helped like

after doing yc like you miss the standard recruiting cycle so totally like all the yeah target no not at all and you're just in this weird space and i actually had a friend who was like the first employee at facebook and uh was just i emailed him to just be like generally like i want to work in tech and he was like i don't think you want to work at facebook even though like it's a great company like it's too late stage like they just want to hire people like out of the pipeline i've never i never, I shouldn't say never now, but in the first three years out of school, even though I was talented, hardworking,

working in relevant spaces to startups, but just the fact that I had my business on my LinkedIn, you just don't ever, you know, recruiters know, I'm not gonna go hit up the founder of like this business because it's just like non, you know, the odds of them'm not going to go hit up the founder of like this business because it's just like non, they're not, you know, odds of them leaving and they don't pattern matches like your next great

engineering hire. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Liquidity, uh, liquidity says we need Blackstone to take America private, right size,

our cost structure, clean up the capital structure and get us ready for an IPO before the next election. This does feel really real. Like I do feel like if, uh, if, if Elon and,

and can, can like bring in this like sort of efficiency that he brought to X the whole country. Well, it's the first time that I've felt not political at all, but it's the first time that we could sort of America's debt has been just running a rip but running away like last week it added like a hundred billion dollars in a day yeah and it's very very concerning

and this feels like an opportunity to right-size the government right-size our cost structure because nobody nobody's in favor of increasing taxation generally it feels like you have to be an anarchist to to want to say like yeah we just need to raise taxes raise taxes that's that's the solution because then you get europe um and so yeah i think this is an awesome uh moment and this is a meme but i think it's like legitimately real i think the uh the interesting kind of hot take is that the way to uh right size the the what is it like the government uh what's the what's the income statement essentially yeah for for the government it's like the the uh government expenditure is like is like way higher than the tax receipts,

is not necessarily to like cut a bunch of spending and like fire a bunch of employees, although that's like one way to get there. The real way is to extend the retirement age because that's where all the Medicare and retirement benefits kick in. And I think it happened before and it dramatically changed the financials of the country.

Everybody's healthier now. Everybody should be retiring. You need Brian Johnson to come in, make everyone healthier. And then if you push the retirement, if you can push the retirement age out because everyone's living longer, well, then it's justified.

But for the last, you know, what, 20 years, life expectancy has been declining. And so moving the retirement age up is really like taking away like prime years of retirement And yeah, it's like really gonna put the squeeze but if everyone's like well, yeah I'm gonna like I don't I don't mind that the government wants me to work or like the government is Incentivizing me to work you can still retire whenever you want

But the government's incentivizing me to work till 70 instead of 65 because I'm gonna live to 120 Here's here's how America like really gets its you know house in order is getting on ramp, right? Because if America ran on ramp, you'd be able to look through and be like, why are we paying Boeing $150,000 per soap dispenser? This is insane. That's a real thing. And right now, the president doesn't have the visibility into that. And Elon's not going to be able to look at every single line item.

He needs software that helps him reduce spending. Software, AI agents to go through these line items. And imagine if America was getting 1.5% cash back on all government expenditures. That's a whole new revenue source. It is, yeah. So Kareem, Eric, let's get America running on a ramp. We should.

That's a good campaign slogan. Someone needs to do it. Let's go to SPOR. SPOR says, yeah, I'm a full stack dev. The stack is Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. 29,000 likes. Wow. That's crazy.

29,000 likes means something's mainstream. Super mainstream. People understand that likes means something's mainstream. Super mainstream. People understand that this is the modern stack. Or maybe that's because the number of people that consider themselves developers is... Like a niche AI coding joke would not get 29,000 likes like a year ago, right? So maybe the market's just expanding that quickly.

And then Peyton Casper says, MFs are going to be arguing one day about whether they should ask Claude or ChatGPT. It's going to be the new reactor view in some of my circles. It already is. Yeah. I don't see a problem with it.

I think it's good. I mean, the full stack was blended years ago with putting JavaScript on the server. We're going towards a future where there's art artisanal developers that are handwriting code and they're going to be like uh they're just going to be like in their off like small sub section of the internet where they're talking about artisanal code and that's like the nat friedman website or like gordon's website yeah yeah like those like no it's not even that like building technological digital masterpieces but all just by hand just

one key at a time yeah you know um yeah no ai slop no ai slop i don't know it's a good stack it's a good stack it's a good stack let have fun. I think people are pumped up about it. They're like, yeah, go off. It's great. Let's go to Alex Wang at Scale.ai, founder of Scale.ai. It says, Scale.ai is proud to announce Defense Llama, American flag, the LLM purpose-built for American national security. This is the product collaboration between Meta, Scale, and Defense Experts

and is available now for integration into U.S. defense systems. Read more. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, very cool. I think it is a wild turn of events because if you could go back and tell journalists five years ago that Meta was going to be getting into defense tech yep they would be like what this is so bad oh yeah you know like because meta went through the worst pr cycle of almost any company in history around the election around the election and all that stuff yeah um and so yeah now honestly bull case for meta that that zuck is getting into uh defense tech yeah i mean it

seems great i remember the original, are you familiar with the Project Maven story? This whole kerfuffle at Google. So the Pentagon had an initiative to modernize technology using artificial intelligence and they called it Project Maven. There were walkouts. And Google was one of the contractors on the on the project

um but there were a lot of others like i think palantir was in there i think scale might have been it's kind of unclear um but you can go and read the actual like subcontractors and everyone got a little piece of it google was one of them and then there was this massive walkout this open letter uh there were a whole bunch of like new york times articles around it and it was very interesting because it was all framed just like google is helping the government build like killer robots because like ai for defense means like like you know automated drones like killing people but what it actually was was like very very basic machine learning just to take the load off of like they're literally like you know like you know how when these ais get trained as like hordes of people in third world countries like tagging images and stuff um we were because

it's a critical national system we were having like united states airmen do it do this like you'd go and work for the air force and your job would just be like clicking on a box being like that's a car that's a house that's a person just to like label the data. Cause it was all coming from satellites and drones. Cause once the drones were flying around the middle East, you needed to tag all that data and understand what was going on in it. And so we couldn't outsource it. And so it was just like very, very messy. So Google came in and was just like, okay, we'll allow, we're not building anything for you. We're just allowing you to use our TensorFlow API, which is for their machine learning system,

and we'll just host you. We're just providing hosting. And the actual development was done by other companies. But that was like too much for the Google employees. And so there's this massive walkout. And then eventually- And that's why Palantir is a $100 billion company now. For sure, for sure.

And I think it's smart to do a custom LLM for this. Like you obviously need more security and more controllability and just more insight. So building something on open source that can be auditable, but still deployed. I just wonder like where the first use cases of LLMs will actually be in the DoD. Because like what we're seeing in,

what we're seeing in tech or like consumer is mostly like you know ai girlfriends and and coding assistants no it's really dark it's basically like you go to the llm and you're like what's the next what's the most relevant like potential assassination that we can do globally yeah that that most fits the narrative right now i think it's much more banal what i think it'll be is like you'll have like a ton of spreadsheets and word documents sitting there to like inventory, like the meal kits in some base.

And you'll be able to just like type into the LLM, like when will I run out of Gatorade? And it'll just say like, you'll run out of Gatorade in June of 2025. Like, okay, order more please. And it'll just go order more and it'll save some, you know, poor soldier,

like, you know, like an hour of work basically. I think that'll probably be the, the, the real impact, but everyone always wants to jump to like, it's going to be a killer robot.

Defense llama. It's good. It's a good brand. I like it. I'm excited for that. I wonder how, how we'll see that roll out. Let's go to Ben South.

He says, I love SF. And he takes a picture from inside a coffee shop. And the guy has on the back of his laptop a sign that says, Marketplace raising pre-seed. Have revenue. Say hi. Amazing. I think we talked about this guy but didn't have him pulled up and

what people need to understand is if you get this guy probably is getting his round done faster than some tier one founder who's like already has a bunch of relationships because just based on the volume of angel investors that are probably coming up to him and talking to him and people within tech love to bet on underdogs they love to bet on people that put themselves out there it's bold it's so anybody can do this it's free you just have to work be working in your startup put a sign up go to get moved to sf and you have to i mean you also have to be confident because you know that you're going to get mocked like i'm sure that this has like you know hundreds of quote tweets being like this is the dumbest thing ever. And then a lot of people being like,

this is cool, I like this. Yeah, but it's all about... Elon is... You have to know who you want to like you, right? It's not about having everybody like you. If a bunch of pro-technology, pro-startup people on SF think what you're doing is cool and you want to raise money from them...

You can have 100 VC funds that hate you if one likes you, it's go time. It's go time. Adam Newman. We already did this. So you pronounce this Gautier. I always pronounced it Gaut. I don't know which one it is. His full names. But Gautier says everyone watching the poly market odds, silence model, a gambler is talking and it was 100 accurate we already talked about this but poly market was correct so cheers to the market team uh goatee is amazing i uh do i he has uh some handle a crypto index fund and then they also have like a protocol built on top of base for liquidity i guess that makes sense the zero x um but anyways yeah he's somebody who's for entire time i've known him since i invested in 2021 head down just focused on product no token just grinding um and it's been uh there was

yeah there was about um uh so anyways this was this Polymarket was a win for him because he's French. Yep. But also the, they've had a ton of like regulatory, lack of regulatory clarity because of this last administration. Sure, sure. Making everything that they're doing way harder. All they're trying to build is like, you know, their first product was an index product of like a bunch of different digital assets. Yep. That was way harder than it needed to be security um and i still think you're maybe not allowed to even buy the the the index uh in the u.s you have to be international so hopefully that uh hopefully that changes with the new admin yeah i mean this is brian armstrong's point always is

like is like we just want regulatory clarity we just want to know what we can and can't do yeah like the the lack of clarity is so hard and that and that's hard for the financial markets because how do you price this weird risk yeah um it's hard for builders because are you really going to go spend all this time building something that might get outlawed or might not it's like this weird high volatility bed yeah so and the um, there's a reason Gautier is building in New York is because after the Frenchman won this massive bet on Polymarket, France is now trying to ban Polymarket. So like if people are winning, if people are, you know, you know, if something's innovative and fun, let's ban it. I do think that Polymarket, the result here is going to be very good for crypto. Like we were talking about how crypto needed to win a big acquisition with Bridge. But Polymarket was accurate, bipartisan.

I think everyone was using it regardless. Yeah, if you think about it, we're only about a decade into crypto. You've had Coinbase IPO. And it's a real use case. Real use case. Yeah, Coinbase IPO. The Bridge acquisition. Billion dollar acquisition by Bridge.

Polymarket being the center of this election cycle. And just Bitcoin actually sticking around. All the crypto haters were like, Bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme, it's going to zero. It's clearly not going to zero. And so you now have stacked up a few of the core pitches, which have always been, look, it's this decentralized currency that can't be hacked.

True. It's maybe digital gold. True. There's actually use cases built on top of it. Polymarket. True. There's just a lot of different wins that are stuck. Financial innovation.

Very slowly. And GoTA's first product is a token that is basically a collection of other tokens right yeah so there's like real innovation happening there's real consumer use cases yep stable coins are here to stay Bitcoin all-time high yeah hard to not be long crypto yeah yeah and it's just like and all the so many all the people will never be a use case there are no use cases and it's like well at least we have one now yeah very clearly. Very hard to deny that. Lit News Network.

Is this Liquidity's affiliate? Oh, cool. Lit News Network. I just thought this was awesome. Hold on. So Lit News Network says, breaking Florida votes against legalizing recreational marijuana. 55 to 44.

Yeah. I just thought this was so uh so based i think that um i think that marijuana has some medicinal benefits but in general should not be publicly available or promoted in the way that it is yep um and this is all about this is our talk about this is our talk at hereticon was all about there are drugs that are general, you know, every drug has positives and negatives, but there are drugs that can have a very negative societal impact. And I think that marijuana is one of those.

When it's taken in extremely high doses, extremely regularly in extreme concentrations, which is exactly what's happened. And the New York Times has been reporting on this, where psychosis and medical episodes are increasing dramatically. And a lot of it's just because there's been this pressure. You talk to some hippie Grateful Dead fan, and they cannot smoke modern weed.

They're like, what is this stuff? This is a different drug. And that's true with pretty much everything. I mean, think about the difference between having a beer and drinking Everclear. The only thing is nicotine, you're getting a similar dosage today that you would have from a cigarette 50 years ago and that's part of why it's lindy yeah yeah and it's part of yeah it's there like nicotine has this weird curve where like if you take too much you just like you get like sleepy you don't have like a it's not it's not like an increasing yeah it's not increasing uh

like result yeah so um there's been like a natural forcing function for there's less of a race to harder like more and more concentrated dosages which is good um but that certainly has been hasn't been the case in psychedelics so good news for florida hopefully more to come there uh let's talk about uh ross mckay he says he's obsessed and he posts a picture of a company I think called Cadence and it's just him like packaging stuff. So what's going on here? So this is a, they make like a hydration product. What I think is interesting about this post is historically Twitter and X were a place

to share words and Instagram was a place to share pictures. And so if you look at your Instagram feed, there's thousands of people like Ross that are posting like cool lifestyle imagery around their brand and things like that. And if you simply take the exact same content and just post it on Twitter, you get like comparably like much better engagement and way less competition. Yep. So, uh, there's a bunch of people building hydration brands on Instagram and just by going to X and sharing the same style of content, you can really like stand out and build this sort of like cult following of people. Um, and so Ross has done that. Uh, there's another brand in the fashion space that's done that really well represent. Um, and so I just think if you're building a lifestyle brand, there's a ton of alpha and going over to X and, um, uh, like the comments where they're like, there's really, really high status people on there and you can slide into people's DMS and

stuff. It just feels a little bit easier than Instagram where, because there's like the quote tweet functionality, there's just a lot more vectors of like engagement and you can just find a conversation going on. That's a little bit harder in on Instagram because the comments are a little bit more buried. Yeah.

But yeah, it's cool. It's a nice photo. I got to buried. Um, but yeah, it's cool. It's a nice photo. I got to try the product. Is it, it's just hydration or is there caffeine as well? They have a ready to drink and then they have, um, I don't think they're onto stimulants yet. That's cool. Well, I got some nice tattoos. I gotta go see that photo in color. It looks, looks good. Let's go to Naval. Naval says upcoming deregulation wave will create an economic sonic boom. This is post-election. Hopefully. Hopefully.

I think that there's a lot of, you can just look at all the charts around introduction of new regulation. And then you look at Europe. And Europe is an example of what happens when you hyper regulate every single industry it just hurts innovation it hurts everyday individuals hurts the economy um i don't want america in 50 years to be the vacation purely a vacation destination for wealthy people in the middle east China, where there's been this sort of renaissance of innovation. And so in the same way that Europe, by nature of hyper-regulation, has propped up, when you look at all of their public companies

and their 1,100 largest companies, I think all of them were started around 100 to 200 years ago. And if the United States were to continue at the rate it has been from a regulatory standpoint, that same thing would happen here without a doubt. And as much as I love that Europe has become sort of Cancun for people like you and me, I don't want that to happen to us.

I agree. Yeah, what's interesting about this is like, I don't want that to happen to us yeah what's interesting about this is like i don't even really know what the top deregulation efforts on the agenda are it's make it easier for elon to launch rockets yeah but honestly like the zeitgeist and the and the feeling for the support felt more driven by just stopping more regulation yep and not And not actually, I mean, this is the same thing with the illegal immigration thing. You go back to the 2016 to 2020 era. There was not, it wasn't, we weren't in a negative net immigration era.

Trump was, during the Trump era, there were still 400,000 border incidents or like interactions, which is how they measure it. And that increased under Biden, but the, but the idea that, you know, you're going back to like, okay, we're going to see negative like outflow of, of migration is probably not the truth. And, and, and, but I mean, it's still potentially bullish, even if there's just less new regulation because we just have so much already.

Here's an example though. People don't realize that a lot of the gasoline and oil used in California is actually produced in California. Sure. And California recently rolled out regulations to make it much harder to produce oil in the state, which is motivated by this sort of like sustainability movement, ESG. And I know a guy who's in the oil industry in California and he's like his business is basically like getting destroyed. California is still going to have to buy gas. We still have to buy oil. We still need it for pretty much every facet of our life.

And so it's that kind of regulation that's just like effectively motivated around religion, which is the religion of ESG and sustainability. That doesn't make sense because the same people that are regulating the oil industry in california are going to drive their car to work yeah using oil yeah and it's like make it make sense you know yeah yeah it's just it does feel like we're very we're in the early innings of actually understanding what like a deregulatory policy would look like yeah like we've heard like drill baby drill but what does that actually mean is there a specific law that's going to be rolled back or across really every single possible facet of the administration um but but i do agree and i mean the market is certainly pricing in an economic sonic sonic boom like everyone's very excited and very bullish uh the thing that i'm really excited about is that is the housing stuff

i hope that um and i think ben thompson was writing about this today, just this idea that if the administration is empowered to go in and deregulate at local levels, like that's really powerful. And that actually happened in California to some degree where California passed the ADU laws that allow, and they override local laws. So it's the state of california saying los angeles i don't care what you say we need housing in this state and so here you can build an adu if it's this size and it applies to this and that and so um it'd be very cool to see something like that at the federal level where the federal level says you know what like we're not going to have any more restrictions on height and you can just build 10 story buildings

wherever you can build a one story building. You can build a 10 story building, like go nuts. Good luck to the good luck blocking this state government, federal, like local government, whatever. Um, and, uh, and, and then, uh, you know, I think the housing ladder, like getting, I think that's a major, major issue. I think the millennial generation and Gen Z as well, getting to a place where you own a house is so important and has been so important through the American experience. Emotionally. It's the American dream.

Our vice president was talking about how a lot of his friends who are in their 20s, just none of them own homes yet. Our vice president? Yeah, our vice president. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, just none of them own homes yet. Our vice president? Yeah, our vice president. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, not J.D. Vance. Our vice president at Technology Brothers was saying that it's just unheard of.

And a little bit of this, I hope, can be swung by a number of factors. I mean, one is just build more housing. Two is what J.D. Vance was kind of teasing on one of these podcasts, saying that he might want to make it harder for foreign investors to come in and buy property. Which is interesting because it's true supply and demand, right? Like what drives housing prices up? Restricting supply with a bunch of regulations and making it really hard to build, but also increasing demand. And this is what everyone always gets frustrated by. And Europe has done this, right?

It's much harder generally in Europe to buy a home as a foreigner yes and the and now you can still look on the european zillow equivalent and you can be like whoa this house is two hundred thousand dollars it looks nice it's in a nice town yep um but it would be hard to go buy it if you're in part of not a citizen and and and so just and that's kind of the opposite of the process where people say oh we're going to give you a housing credit oh we're going to make it we're going to give everyone the same amount of money to buy house so much that's just going to raise the price so much about it we know this a lot of the issues yeah and a lot of issues with regulation is it just slows things down dramatically so there's entire if you could take a town in Georgia that is just decrepit right yeah totally like

just falling apart there's no industry and you could say hey you can build your new factory here and we're gonna fast track the frastron a fast track it and it's like a it's a capital thing right because if if you need to fund some new initiative and it's gonna take six years. And this even locally in Malibu, there's people that want to build a house. They have a plot of land. And it just doesn't quite make sense to get some construction loan when it's going to take four years. And you're going to be carrying this big cost and not being able to live there. So there's all this land that just doesn't get used. So I think the other, the other kind of like set aside the politics issue, the cultural issue that

might solve the housing crisis to some degree is there's been this massive shift. I think the Instagram generation and just the FOMO of seeing everything online has really driven this phenomenon where someone grows up in a suburb or, you know, Ohio or some kind of like, you know, third tier city, mid tier state, but then they go to a college, they get a communication degree, and then they go get a job in Manhattan, and they can pay their rent, but then they're not on the economic ladder to the degree that they'll be able to afford a house in New York. And they're like, why can't I afford a house? And it's like, well, you're in the most expensive city in the entire world and houses start at 2 million bucks. But if you just went back to your, your community and built there,

like you'd be fine. Or even if you were just okay with like an hour long commute, when you did need to come into the city, you'd be fine. Yeah. The Nick, Nick Huber guy always talks about this. He's constantly getting canceled every other day, but his, one of of his really good points is that you can afford housing, just not in the places that you want to live. So I think there's kind of two angles with what could drive a cultural shift towards that. One is just the trad memes of being pastoral and wanting to live in a safer, chiller community, kind of less on the grid, a little bit farther away. That's why we're looking at opening up the montana office there you go and and so so so just making not being in the most

expensive city cool anymore and seeing more instagrams from people that have set up little houses in small towns throughout america that will create like mimetic pressure for people not to just be clawing tooth and nail over the man the Manhattan townhouses that are out there for two mil. Um, but then the other one is just technology like Starlink makes it so that you can guarantee super fast internet anywhere in the United States, even if there's not great fiber coming into a town. Um, obviously with like new power generation, like the utilities are going to get better. Self-driving cars mean that, okay, yeah, you could have an hour long commute, but if you're in something without a steering wheel and you're just on your laptop and just doing work, sleeping even, like all of a sudden that kind of stretches things out because

like real estate is priced as a function of the economic opportunity around it. Like the reason Manhattan real estate is expensive is the great jobs there. I wonder if robo taxis will change sleep schedules where more people will start to do that like four hours on yeah yeah oh yeah i wake up at 4 a.m i hop in my robo taxi i sleep for an hour and then i'm in the city and and all of it's like scheduled out so like like the car is actually traveling 60 miles an hour the whole time i'm not stuck in traffic offset and then even like vr and teleconferencing stuff like that will also reduce the barrier so you can keep like it's easier to keep in touch with someone on the other side of the country with you know group chats and vr and

video games and stuff and some of that stuff has you know deleterious effects at the extreme but in general it feels more possible than ever to go to montana and be and we know a lot of vcs we know a lot of rich people that spend most of their time not in the major cities, but there's no reason why a young professional who wants to buy a home at 25 couldn't move there and then still compete

in the global workforce. Totally. Let's move to Augustus. Augustus Dorico, founder of Rainmaker, says, you should all know that we have a four-year window

to go as hard as fucking imaginable, deadly serious, leave it all on the court. It's a miracle. We have another shot at all. Press me to go harder. I will do the same with all of you.

I'll hum a doula. I'd never know how to pronounce that. How do you, I'll hum duly law. I'll hum duly. Uh, uh, I'll hum duly law.

Uh, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how how can augustus go any harder he's going he's already at pedal to the metal i would think but uh but i like it it's a good it's a good reminder like this is a window of opportunity like like regulation's not going to get worse there's lots of opportunities like you know go hard like try a lot of stuff and it's just a reminder that you can you can do crazy stuff yeah i don't there there's a lot of stuff and it's just a reminder that you can you can do crazy stuff yeah i don't there there's a lot of talk in tech about taking advantage of technological

cycles and moments yep there hasn't been over the last 20 years as much emphasis around taking advantage of political cycles to the same degree right it's it's clear that uh admins impact the economy i think right uh you would you would hope that um they're not just on on autopilot um but uh but yeah i would say that there is a moment here across pretty much if you're building in heavily regulated industries there's probably going to be a lot of opportunity there if you're building in heavily regulated industries there's probably going to be a lot of opportunity there if you're building um you know crypto is like a good example where um now there's polymarket winning is actually amazing for all these all the all the type of like crypt the og crypto people that got disillusioned with the industry because they were over they just realized that it was only speculative and so now there's more opportunities even some of the sharpest people were like

everything's just regulatory arbitrage right now i just take something i put it offshore it's like very zero sum it's like not fun but now people see that there's an opportunity to actually like just go back to the basics of like improving the speed of the financial system yeah yeah yeah and with augustus there could be ridiculous opportunities right they might decide hey weather modification capabilities is super super important we need to emphasize this and yeah he's like i mean this is to my knowledge close with like steinman and like there's gonna be opportunities that come through that so yeah a lot of the he early on he was talking about how china is like reclaiming the gobi desert is that yeah Is that the right desert?

Yeah, they're terraforming it by just planting a ton of trees and just watering them and rerouting rivers and stuff, and they're just reclaiming all that land. And so when you think about the current administration, I would be surprised if there wasn't energy around, like, yeah, let's make nevada a bread bowl let's make new mexico beautiful yeah and and uh no longer a desert yeah i'm sure yeah but i'm sure there'll be a bunch of like regulatory things like oh well like you're going to displace the

lizards and the snakes or whatever but rare bees oh yeah the rare bees which we can talk about um but hopefully you know uh there's enough energy to get through this and actually bring about. And we've we've talked recently about how because because the regulatory environment has been so bad, there's just not there's been a lot of entrepreneurs on the sidelines that are like, I'm not going to do this because even if I get the product to work, like it's going to be impossible from from a regulatory standpoint to get it through. So hopefully that changes and a bunch of people that were on the sidelines come in. And yeah, anyways. Jake Chapman pours a little bit of cold water on it faster, 18 months after the transition, but before the government stops process midterms,

stops to process midterms, nothing is promised after that. That's a little bit of a bummer, Jake. Come on, man. We're trying to get pumped up. We're trying to leave it all on the court, but I understand what he's saying. It's a little bit of a bummer, Jake. Come on, man. We're trying to get pumped up. We're trying to leave it all on the court. But I understand what he's saying. It's a good point.

Anyway, always an inspirational poster, Augustus. Phenomenal what he's done to like the next generation of entrepreneurs. Yeah. It's really, it's really impressive. He's like created like his own little like YC cult. Yeah. Fantastic.

Rob Keel says, well, at least my boss will be in a good mood tomorrow. And he has the XAI badge because he clearly works at XAI. And I love this because there are so many companies where there's a rule like, oh, the compliance officer says I can't tweet. I hate it. And clearly Elon lives and dies by the post yeah and he lets his he lets his employees post and it's great yeah post just post post through it post through uh yeah i read this i don't know i don't know rob but i i i almost read it as like maybe he was like disappointed and now he's like well at least my boss will be happy oh yeah like maybe he wasn't

happy he voted for kamala yeah but he's like at least who knows that's great that's great i do think xai is a huge beneficiary of like everything that's happened in the last week totally um but either way it's good uh i'm sure that x is an environment where people are allowed to share their views yeah uh but because it's just not about that it's about building exactly xai yeah and i mean that's the thing that people miss with like the whole mission-driven company leave the politics at the door it's like no it's actually okay whoever you vote for like we actually don't care yeah yeah but there was a lot of there was a lot of hr teams that wednesday were sending out notes

that were basically to the effect of whether you're celebrating or devastated we're here for you you know well we sent one out to our team but it was like whether you're celebrating or devastated like the shareholders come first get back to work yeah yeah yeah uh no no fucking slack yeah we we have a policy where if we, employees need to send us a screenshot of their screen time on their iPhone and if there's

more screen time than there are, you know, we don't consider screen time working hours, right? Working is when you're at your terminal editing content, making trades. Breaking the keys on your keyboard. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we're a little bit hardcore about it.

Okay, let's go to Fisher King. He says, Kamala skipped Rogan but did Saturday Night Live. She generally only did scripted, controlled events. She avoided long-form conversations that could reveal her as a person. Trump and Vance did the opposite. They took chances, showed themselves. Victory for transparency and new media. And so I've dug into this like very, very seriously. I went on, uh, I went on, uh, on pirate wires podcast, like back in March when Biden was still

in. And I said that the person who does the longer Joe Rogan interview will win the election. And, and then later I went on and coined the, the Coogan parlay, which was, you go on polymarket and you bet that Trump will do over two hours on Rogan. Kamala will do under two hours on Rogan and that Trump will win based on that. And whoever does more will win. And we should make a polymarket parlay now for next election around Joe Rogan airtime. Yeah. So I've dug into this. And not only did Trump do more interviews, I think he did something like 18 major podcasts. And Kamala did about six or eight, maybe. I think Barron was leading the strategy.

But his podcasts were much longer. So when Trump went on Rogan, Rogan is a three-hour show. And everyone was like, Trump's old. He's not going to rogan is a three-hour show and everyone was like trump's old he's you know he's not going to want to do a three-hour thing he's going to cut it short and this is something that happens with all the big uh political folks like when bernie went on rogan he cut that short he didn't do three hours he did like an hour and a half uh even when uh benjamin netanyahu went on lex he cut that short too and a lot of these guys they're like media trained they want to stay on the talking points

and they don't want to get caught in hour two and a half being a little bit tired and just like freestyling, right? And that's the whole point of the Rogan interview is that you can't stay on talking points for three hours. People trust people more that freestyle. Yeah, well, there's a phenomenon about this. When police interview like pyromaniacs, or suspected pyromaniacs,

they'll just interview them and get them talking for like eight hours straight. And they'll just come in and talk and talk and talk. Because the people who are obsessed with fire, even though intellectually they know they shouldn't say like, I like fire, eventually they'll break character and just be like, yeah, you know what?

It would be cool if we just lit lit this table on fire it's crazy um and so and so there's something about like the long interview that just like you you you can't stay in character like me and me and angel investing i'm like yeah somebody has a good idea i'm like let's bet on this exactly um and and but so so what's interesting is that the the ratio of like podcast appearances um between kamala and trump was something like three to one for trump but the ratio of hours Spent podcasting was more like ten to one Yeah, and then because the youtube algorithm weighs longer content as better for keeping for selling ads and keeping people on the site Longer content does better for keeping for selling ads and keeping people on the site longer content does

better in the algorithm so the rogan three-hour trump interview got 35 million views something like that and the call her daddy they just posted a clip that was like 20 minutes and so that one even if even if a bunch of people watched it youtube's just saying well should i should i promote the three-hour thing that i can sell 50 ads on? Or should I promote the 12 minute thing that I can promote five ads on? And so it's like Google, YouTube, like the algorithm is just expected value maximizing. And so the Trump one goes mega viral and gets tons of views. And so if you add up, I was trying to run the math on this. I might do like a piece on this and actually run all the numbers but So the the Harris campaign spent a billion dollars the Trump campaign spent like 300 million

but if you think about it like Like how much does it cost to run a 30-second ad on Rogan? It's like a hundred thousand dollars I think so if you multiply that out for three hours of essentially an advertisement for Trump, right? Yeah well now you're at a single- The inefficiency is insane. A single, like if you were to go to Rogan and say, I want you to do a three-hour episode on Aurora,

on just my product. He'd be like, okay, well, a 30-second ad is $100,000. So a one minute would be 200,000. A 60 minute, you know, you could multiply it out and get to like $50 million. And then it also did 10 times as good as a normal episode. So that's like a $200 million value asset, just in terms of like impressions.

And there's a massive, massive availability bias where things that you're familiar with and you spend a lot of time with, you like that person more. And so just the fact that people were spending time listening to Trump and his surrogates, I think it made them like him more. And this is very different. In 2016, CNN, NBC, they were all promoting Trump rallies because they got good ratings.

They could sell a lot of ads. But then in 2020, Trump got COVID. There were lockdowns. There weren't as many rallies. And all the mainstream media were like, maybe we shouldn't be promoting this guy. Maybe we shouldn't be publicizing his rallies. So he got way less earned media. And as as a result the average american just spent less time listening to trump even if you're trump skeptical you probably still listened to 10 minutes across

all the different things in clips and little bits maybe you turn on the rogan for a little bit you're like oh this sucks it's boring but you listen to a little bit and yeah and so i think it's really just attention is all you need going forward. The candidate that gets the more attention, the more views. And that's what the political spending is a proxy for. It's literally just ads that they're buying. And those ads are just 30-second ads. And there's something.

I feel like 2016 and 2020 were dominated by performance marketing. At least from that was what was being analyzed who had better performance marketing and people felt like performance marketing was the future of political campaigning where you could just create an ad for effectively two people in one county to turn them against yep and podcasts are so good at building narrative and likability and these things that really matter. So that for every one person that watched the Joe Rogan appearance, they're telling there they've then consumed so much content and so many talking points that they now become effectively a surrogate for the campaign. Right. They're just out spreading the message. So, um, yeah,

I think there's something about the internet where long form content, uh, a textbook gets digested into a tweet, a podcast gets that gets turned into an Instagram post or an Instagram story. Right. And so the internet is all about just cutting down long form content into the smallest, most digestible piece of content. Yeah. I think it's the future. I don't think that either major party will ever put up a candidate that isn't going to do it. It isn't going to do a three hour Rogan. Yeah. And so my bet that I would put on polymarket right now is that the 2028 election is between J.D. Vance and AOC or J.D. Vance and Buttigieg. Because AOC and Buttigieg both can actually sit and be real people for several hours. And AOC's done it with the Twitch streams and stuff.

She gets it. She's definitely part of the new guard. Let's go to Aaron Slodov. He says time to re-industrialize. And I like this because we talked about Josh Steinman tweeting, good morning. We're going to win every single day. And this feels like the seed of a mantra.

Yeah. You know, Aaron ran the re-industrialized conference. Yeah. Him and Austin Bishop. Yeah. He's done a lot of stuff, a lot of work around re-industrialization.

It's a very interesting coinage and buzzword. I actually got in a fight with somebody about this on X because I said re-industrialize and they were like, well, there's no such thing as re-industrialization. The opposite of de-industrialization is industrialization. And I was like, I don't, A, I can just Google it and there is a dictionary definition for re-industrialization.

So like, you're kind of just wrong if you're being like literal, but also like everyone knows what we mean by reindustrialize. It's just branding. It's just branding. And so it's a great coin. And everybody can attach slightly different meaning to it. Exactly. And,

uh, yeah, it was, it was, we, we were at, we spent election night with Aaron, uh,

and he just, he, he, the work he's doing is so difficult it wasn't like he was fist pumping or anything like that but it was a good moment for him and rewarding to start to get to have somebody like jd vance you know in office who actually cares about this topic legitimately and it's not just voicing it over yeah exactly so i hope to see this post on my timeline every single day yeah uh let's go to uh shiel monat says this is an incredible ad by calm during election night calm bought a 30 second spot on cnn where they just turned off the sound and just played like we're giving you 30 seconds of peace and quiet this is the calm app we know that you're stressed out really in the zeitgeist really uh

really capitalizing on uh the moment that you know psychologically everyone who is watching kind of understands this is like a stressful moment it's great for the cnn audience too because i think the fox news audience was probably starting to pop champagne. And then the CNN audience was having a tougher night on average. But I like stuff like this. I like when these companies are agile and think about, yeah, just taking a little twist.

Like I think at the Super Bowl, there was a company that ran, I think they sold like hammers or something and they did like a one second ad and it was just a hammer smashing something for like one second or Coinbase did just that QR code that was bouncing around like the DVD symbol and they kind of broke the format and it sticks out and I still remember it to this day whereas am I really going to memorize like the fifth Budweiser ad like that's kind of undifferentiated Lucy we need to be

planning the 2028 election yeah but it needs to be something that's like, you know, in the zeitgeist cutting against it. Like you can either be, I'm sure most of the ads that ran that night were like, you know, America's at war. Like this is why you need to buy this thing. It's like in, it's in with like the normal narrative. And this one just cut completely against it.

So good, good job and good spot by shield to like find this and clip this because i wouldn't have seen this otherwise so great curator sean mcguire says the turning point was elon buying twitter do you agree feels that way it felt like another turning point was uh making likes private because sure yeah revealed preferences yeah a lot of people were even afraid to like anything that was yeah against the narrative so yeah i think it would but yeah uh the acquisition or the take private was down um was upstream of of likes and other changes that have happened on the platform there was a good uh article in stratechery today about the election and Ben Thompson was basically just saying, as a business, individually, it's very hard to say that X is this massive win

because he paid pre-Zerp prices for it and the stock probably would have crashed. He probably could have bought it for cheaper and then there was this advertiser exodus and the whole business is going through a business transformation. But if you view it as the Musk company's portfolio, like it's very accretive.

And I think that's what pretty much everyone in the deal was aligned on. Like a lot of people invested because they wanted access to other Musk companies or, or they wanted investment banking contracts. They want to be the one to take a SpaceX public or something. And, and whether or not X is a win for Elon, you could argue that it is, even from a regulatory standpoint right now, he's effectively purchased control of, not directly, but sort of indirectly. But yeah, right now, I think X has marked it around $20 billion.

So on paper, they've lost $24 billion dollars something along those lines but uh but elon's personal net worth went up 100 billion dollars in the 24 hours so um and many of the people that are big investors in x have exposure to the other companies so yeah are you familiar with the japanese kiretsu no so the kiretsu kiretsu are this uh a bunch of japanese conglomerates that all own pieces of each other. And so they're like deeply, deeply intertwined. And Musk is like kind of building a little bit of that.

He was deeply criticized for like the solar city acquisition. And there's always a question about like, Oh, if one of his companies doesn't do well, maybe one of the other companies will just buy it. But maybe that's actually like a good strategy. And we certainly saw it play out here where, you know,

buying one thing can have synergies with another, even though you wouldn't assume that a social network would have any impact on a space launch company. It was always obvious that when Tesla would brag about not needing to do ads, that their ad platform was Elon's own personal Twitter account.

And so, yeah, if you're getting billions of impressions a year for free, you don't need to run as many ads. And so, yeah, if you're getting billions of impressions a year for free, you don't need to run as many ads. And again, just run the numbers on the impressions of Tesla, like how many cyber truck videos and like funny raps and funny hype videos and reels have you seen on X and really anywhere add all that up. It's probably more than Hyundai spent on the Superbowl or like all the

advertisements for sure. Just in terms of attention. Yeah, exactly. But they terms of attention. Yeah, exactly. But they're not paying for it, but they are getting the economic value of those impressions. So it's the future. I can't believe I have to read this again.

A creatine cycle, Atlas, a friend of the pod writes on election night, hopped up on Addy and a Zin while gooning to polymarket and manifold one second charts and widescreen on my Apple vision pro while talking to three Hopped up on Addy and a Zyn while gooning to Polymarket and Manifold one-second charts and widescreen on my Apple Vision Pro while talking to three different LLMs and streaming those results directly to eight different group chats of terminally online schizophrenics monitoring the situation.

And Glark says, work harder. And then Atlas says, I have Fox News and MSNBC at both at full volume in my AirPods Pros. It feels like the real argument for having six monitors is the election. The election. Right. Because there's so many different things to bet on. You've got traditional media. You've got defense stocks, Bitcoin.

Yeah. Polymarket. You've got your boys. You've got your discords. You've got your signal chats. Yeah. I was talking to Sagar and Jetty, who runs Breaking Points, about this. And the most perfect stack was the Breaking Points livestream.

Have you ever watched this? It's phenomenal. They all came from more or less traditional media backgrounds, but have gone very YouTube native. They're viewer funded, so they have subscriptions and stuff. And so they're just completely authentic, just making jokes, posting. They have this funny thing where,

it's kind of a left-right show, where Crystal Ball, one of the hosts, she had to wear a MAGA hat because she bet on Harris, and Sagar was going to have to wear a Harris t-shirt if he lost the bet. And so they just have this really fun rapport. They have a bunch of other people around the desk,

and they have enough of the technology where they have multicam. It looks really nice. It looks like a CNN production, but it's clearly not as high budget. But it's just really, really fast-paced, really great. And while they're doing the show, they're doing lead-ins to YouTube clips. So they'll set something up. So they'll be like, oh, now we're going to – so so he kept during the live stream he'd always he'd stop and be like oh the producer's telling me to do a lead-in so he's like donald trump has been elected the next

president we go live to like his speech and they cut to the clip and then they react to it and it was just a live show but it was really really well done so it's like breaking points live stream x scrolling the timeline polymarket and that's all you. So it's like breaking points live stream, X, scrolling the timeline, polymarket. And that's all you needed. And it's all independent, alternative stuff. And that was by far the most entertaining, truest source of alpha, the most accurate information. The mainstream just turned on the TV is truly gone.

So I'm excited. Let's go to Hype. Sarah and the kids are getting kicked out of the hotel. You gotta go? Do we wanna prioritize one or two more? Yeah. Let's, I really wanted to do Max. We can do him next time.

Shane. Let's do Rune. Let's do Rune and then Q&A. Yep. Okay. Rune writes, the age of the technology brother is at hand. And what a perfect post to end on. The timeline.

The timeline. I couldn't agree more. Perfect time. Perfect name for the podcast. The technology brother. Subscribe if you haven't already. Follow us on X. We're also on YouTube and Spotify.

And you can get all of your takes and timeline analysis on there. So shout out Rune for the accurate analysis. Accurate. But the technology brothers are good. We're going to go to Q&A. Yeah, sure. Hey, John and Jordy.

I recently started angel investing and I'm worried it's starting to impact my marriage. I've been spending less time with my wife and kids and more time wandering coffee shops and SF looking for founders building the next big thing not to mention i've sold two of our vacation homes to pursue this how do you balance chasing unicorns and having a balanced life where to start i think we would need i think that there is an angel investing epidemic yeah on the

west coast okay right now i think that it's widely understood that sports betting is highly addictive yep it's under discussed that angel investing uh is also addictive it has longer timelines right so when you when you ape 50k into some kid with a deck in a dream uh it might take five to ten years, but I know people that wake up on the first of the month that are refreshing their email like a rat waiting for that next hit, hoping to see an update, hoping to get markups. And I think it's important for the innovation economy, but it's tearing families apart. I do think that the first mistake that that listener made is selling the vacation homes

because some of the greatest angel investments ever made were made in vacation homes. There's the famous example of Travis Kalanick. What's his name? The cowboy guy. You know him? He would bring people out to his ranch and they would hang out in the hot tub in Tahoe.

Yeah. And so if you get the vacation homes and you start inviting people to come hang out and relax, it's going to be much easier. Let the entrepreneurs come to you. My advice would, would be, I mean, the first mistake was selling the vacation homes. You're right. Should have taken out debt against the vacation homes and use that. Especially in this market, you can refinance. Yeah. So that was probably a big mistake because even if you're paying 6% annually, you generate 30, 40% IRR angel investing. So it's hard not to think of that as a poor decision, but ultimately I'd say bring your wife and get her angel investing too, right? Have her put some money to work.

Yeah, essentially lever up. Lever up against the vacation homes instead of divesting. And bring your family into it. A lot of sports bettors are out there. They're telling their wife, who do you want to win? She's like, I don't know, honey. Make a bet for me, right? And it's about kind of involving the whole family.

My son's two and a half. He has five or so companies that he's deployed into. It's great. They're kind of silly ones. He's like, I like this snack. Like, let's ape in. But there's something to be said about just investing in products that you love. I have never really been misguided by investing in products that I love.

So that's great. Involve the whole family, lever up and you know, don't take yourself so serious. Maybe get a third vacation home. Yeah. Well, that's our show. I got to hop on with New York. I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.