TBPN Live - Kalshi Drama Continues, Curated Group Chats, Dawgs Only, Jeff's G650 Hits the Market

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we're breaking down the CallSheet drama with PolyMarket. We have an article here from PirateWire's CallSheet paid influencers to target PolyMarket's CEO after an FBI raid. It is one of the most dramatic tech stories I've seen in years. Tea time. These two companies have been at each other's throats buying ads, duking it out in different parts of the app store. The byline here or the subheader is Kalshi funded influencers to imply its competitor, Polymarket and CEO Shane Copeland were engaged in illegal activity after the FBI raided his apartment. Per sources and screenshots we viewed and let's be clear this is this is

probably the craziest story since ftx and as you remember when ftx like everything was unfolding yeah it just seemed like every single day there was some new just obscene kind of like bit coming out about something that ftx employees were doing whether it was the poly cool or it was yeah all the drama in the Bahamas yeah but this feels like reminiscent of that time for me yeah it's also so ridiculous yeah it's also a weird narrative violation because like Kalshi has been like the legal one like very buttoned up and polymarket has been this one that I don't think I still think you can't technically use it in the United States correct and so even though they've had the power law winnings in volume and a lot of the betters or the participants are international,

Kalshi has played like, hey, we're the straight-laced ones. And oh my God, are they not? They're playing dirty. Dirty. Dirty. Absolute dogs. Yeah. Not in. Dirty. Absolute dogs. Yeah. Not in a good way.

Not in a good way. Usually absolute dog is reserved for a positive thing. Yeah. But let's go through just some basic facts of the two companies. We have a timeline here year by year just to kind of get you up to speed on these two companies because they're clearly rivals and they've been duking it out for a number of years. So Kalshi is founded in 2018 by Tariq Mansour. They begin developing a federally regulated event-based prediction market platform.

And there had been prediction market platforms beforehand. They just never quite worked. But, yeah, they'd never taken off for a variety of reasons. There was PredictIt, which was big, and electionbettingodds.com would aggregate all of these different things. There was also a crypto one. Didn't Joey work on one? Joey Kruge built one called Augur. would aggregate all of these different things. There was also a crypto one. I mean, there was... Didn't Joey... Joey Cruz built one called Augur.

But there was a different one called Manifold Markets that I saw a bunch of San Francisco kind of East Bay rationalists using for a variety of things. And... But that one never really took off. But that one is very self-serve. Like when we talked to the friend, we talked about the friend.com avi guy he had put his own company on there and it was clear that he just set that short me yeah he was like short me but it was 50

50 because clearly there's no liquidity in that market and it was more of like a meme uh call sheet and i think it was believable like is he going to get to 10,000? Yeah. People think, like, if you look at what Avi's done, he's obviously attracted some haters. But I don't think anybody looks at him and is like, not really the guy to bet against, right? He's made big bets on himself. Like, he's clearly hungry and focused. And so there's this idea of, like, the long tail of, like, crazy bets that you could play as prediction markets for all sorts of things. Some of those could be extremely useful. Obviously we saw this during the election when all of these companies became really, really popular. Even Robinhood was offering election

betting. Um, and, and you could see kind of every company wanting to get in the game, but Kalshi and Polymarket are in this market specifically, unlike Robinhood, which is kind of dipping their toe in. Uh, 2019, Kalshi goes after regulatory pursuit, focused on obtaining approval from the US Commodities Future Trading Commission, the CFTC, to operate as a regulated exchange. Polymarket then is founded the year after in 2020 by Shane Copeland. And they launched as a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. And so two kind of different tech stacks. One is going straight for the CFTC. It's more of a financial product, fintech. The other one's more crypto based. Shane raises $4 million in seed funding in 2020 from investors, including Polychain Capital

and CoinFund. And it's interesting because obviously there was a bull market from 2020 to 2022, and then a real pullback in crypto and change just kept building and we saw that that but it's interesting it didn't you know in 2020 2021 i mean the last few years it's not like polymarket was that culturally relevant no no no i i found out about a year ago you would see like oh call she raised some money and and it still wasn't quite getting i think this is one of those things like prediction markets have been an interesting category because every every like major institutional vc and smaller funds had sort of this thesis that hey prediction markets are going to be a big thing

yep joey who did the series b oh yeah of poly market you know he had worked on this like almost a decade ago at this point thinking that like crypto's big use case is going to be prediction prediction markets so this was one of those things like everybody knew this was going to be a thing it was just a matter of um and it's so fascinating that these companies were around during the crypto bull market of 2022 2020 uh 20 yeah uh 2020 2021 2022 but there just wasn't much to bet on. They didn't pop off as much because there wasn't as many 100X opportunities. Like it's very rare that you can get a 100X return on a polymarket bet.

You literally, the event has to be trading at 1% to 99%. And then there has to be some upset. Whereas with NFT launches, anyone who got the mint would be, oh, somebody dropped it in my wallet now it's worth a million dollars and so all the froth was over in the the icos over in the nfts and it's funny that the the crypto degens that i know on election night were were basically betting

on kamla just purely on from the degeneracy angle like there's no way she's gonna win but like these odds are so good i could 10x my money and it's like you know the media has called the election at this point yeah i know somebody who did that too uh yeah he was like and even post-election like you know never know yeah yeah yeah now like 99 to 1 yeah yeah yeah i was talking to a friend who was like i uh i oh yeah i yeah, I put some money on Kamala. I don't think it's over. Even though they called it, she's going to make a comeback. I don't want her to win, but I think she might.

The odds are too good. The odds are just way off. And I was like, how much did you bet? He's like, $250. And I was like, oh, $250K? He's like, oh, no, $250. And I was like, oh, I forgot. You're young. But so 2020, they launched their Polymarket has a user-friendly interface, allowing users to trade on various global events using cryptocurrency.

In 2021, Kalshi hits a regulatory milestone. They receive approval from the CFTC to operate as a designated contract market, becoming the first federally recognized regulated exchange dedicated to trading on event contracts and so they raise a series a funding 30 million dollars in series a from Sequoia capital with participation from Charles Schwab Charles Schwab Henry Kravis and others and they officially launched their platform to the public and I think before then they were private but they were they had institutional investor clients so hedge funds and wanting to asset managers would use the platform um but they weren't they weren't really a consumer app yeah and even when people look at the volume that was traded around the

election yeah a lot of that was institutional investors right and that's like part of the appeal of these businesses as from an investment standpoint is hey you're creating this product that retail can use and gets a lot of attention but you know all that volume means that these bigger asset managers can come in and start to play yeah and also on polymarket specifically there's a lot of now now you would call them funds but they were just individual traders who have scaled up so they've they've gotten so many bets right that they've scaled their books. And now they've hired people.

And now they have teams. And like what we saw during the election where that guy was paying to do his own polling in the United States, even though he's in France. The French guy. The French guy. It's fascinating. But that makes economic sense for me. That was really the big L for Polymarket during the election cycle is that their biggest whale was a Frenchman. And it just frankly felt very un-American.

But that said, I guess you couldn't use Polymarket as an American during the whole election cycle. And so back in 2021, Polymarket's live, but they begin facing regulatory scrutiny from U.S. regulators regarding compliance with financial laws. In 2022, they have a CFTC settlement. They settle charges with the CFTC for offering off-exchange event-based binary options contracts and failing to register appropriately. They pay a $1.4 million civil monetary penalty and agree to wind down noncompliant markets.

And so, you know, they are offshore. And the hope, obviously, is that this all gets approved and then they can, you know, you, you can use it in the United States. Um, but even through this time, they're growing in the international community and crypto is a very global organization, global, global community. So it hasn't been, it obviously hasn't hurt their growth because they're still sucking up, you know, a huge portion of the, of the volume. Uh, meanwhile, in 2020, Kalshi is focused on market expansion. They're continuing to grow, adding new event contracts and attracting more users. And during this time, they're benefiting because they have

a clear regulatory framework. And so the users, especially the institutional users, trust them. So we move on to 2023. They continue to grow. We don't have specific details about funding rounds but i i assume they raise more money uh and then um polymarket raises a series b from founders fund with participation from vitalik buterin the founder of ethereum and they raised 45 million dollars um and then yeah let's give some let's give uh polymarket a little credit 20 over the last few years it's felt that ethereum has like really lost a lot of relevancy yep especially if you look at just demand for the native the native token itself it's just like even in the boom over the last few months stayed relatively flat

and so polymarket has been a massive win even for the ethereum sort of network and community by itself yeah um yeah it's interesting i talked to shane and he was saying that they use stable coins uh and and they have like a number of layers of abstraction within the polymarket system and so when you go to polymarket.com and you just look at uh the election odds you see the volumes represented in u.s dollars and it feels very accessible to a non-crypto user. And I bet a lot of people, you know, when they, when they sort, when they cite Polymarket stats on CNBC or Bloomberg, they're not even considering that there's crypto under the hood.

And that's, and that's been the entire, a lot of even super crypto native VCs have said that the sort of retail, like, you know, widespread adoption of crypto won't look like, you won't even understand that it's crypto under the hood, right? Because ultimately, for these users, it really doesn't matter, right? If you're a hedge fund, and you want to put $20 million to work betting on the election, you don't care what form it's taking place, as long as it's going to be relatively stable, and you can bet in size, and same thing for, you know, retail investors. Yep, yep. And so that's allowed them to grow internationally very quickly.

And I think that continues to be one of the weird like bull cases for crypto, which we talk about them like speed running all the financial regulation stuff, but there really is value to having a green field development. It's almost like, could there be a world where the boring company has more luck building tunnels on Mars just because it's such a fresh start? And for the

science-based, for the mathematician who wants to make the crypto argument based on, you know, quantitative metrics like speed or fees or any of these things, it's very easy to debunk crypto and say, well, you know, technically you could just use not a decentralized ledger, a centralized ledger and still have reconciliation happen 24 seven with just deterministic code. But the fact of the matter is that companies that try to build in TradFi often run into

a bunch of regulatory hurdles and it becomes very, very cumbersome to go international and be a truly global company and scale. And so Polymarket has been able to start globally, and they're kind of global by default. They're going to solve the United States piece, and that's like the last thing that they need to do. And so while they're still a young company,

while they're still growing really fast, making great talent acquisitions, becoming this like high growth company, they're able to go and knock down all the hardest pieces of the business as opposed to getting really big in the united states and then you're this big lumbering company and you have to go figure out every single individual country it's really really hard yeah really really yeah and one one thing in the in the lead up to the election that was interesting and kind of has some parallels to what we're seeing in the last week is that Kalshi seemed to be paying for every user that they acquired. That was the general perception. I didn't know, I don't know anybody in our group chats, for example, that was like, oh yeah,

I'm going to go bet with size on Kalshi. It just felt like Kalshi has always been the kind of like, if you were a normie and going to bet on the election, you'd use Kalshi. And like, that's a big opportunity, right? I don't want to discredit that at all. But it did feel like, you know, even there was something that happened like two days before the election, which was Kalshi's, one of Kalshi's early investors made this like dramatic, you know, email to the Kalshi CEO. You remember this? And he was like, I just wired you $9 million. Oh, yeah. We'll figure out the

terms later. And then it quickly got deleted because it just like, obviously like, wasn't a good look in like a number of different ways. I mean, sure. It showed a lot of conviction from, from the investor, but that, that at one point they were, they were probably spending more on acquisition during that period than even the campaigns themselves right yeah and the problem there is that if if all that if all that brand building which which can be good to build via paid ads like but if all that brand building just goes into election betting yeah that's not as nuanced as the story that shane and the polymarket team have been telling on social media where it's more of an introduction into what is a prediction market we're already seeing a lot of these like creator led and other political markets

there's been plenty of other non election based viral poly market and even Trump was calling it like a poly poll or whatever and so a lot of people that wind up in the poly market marketing funnel even though it's not paid ad spend they get more educated on what a prediction market can be, what value they could get from that. And so they're more likely to not churn, I imagine. And so I imagine retention is much better. But let's move on to the drama. So these two companies have been on a collision course for the last six years, as we've seen. And we got to go to the PirateWire's scoop, which has shaken the tech world, really. And let's start with-

Almost unbelievable. Yeah, it's incredible. And so the title, as we mentioned, is Kalshi Paid Influencers to Target Polymarket CEO After FBI Raid. And Mike Solana at PirateWire's, writing alongside Brandon Gorel, says, okay, before we get into the meat of the story, I need to disclose the fact that I am almost laughably conflicted here in several different ways. And this is such a great,

this is like what citizen journalism or what like modern new media is. It's so many conflicts, but because of all these conflicts, you actually get a more interesting story. And you'll see that there hasn't been any pushback on this. This looks like it could be a doctored screenshot, but there hasn't been any firing back where people have said, oh no, they got, he got it wrong. He was conflicted. It's like, yeah, he was conflicted, but he got it right. And so it doesn't matter. Yeah. It's great. And so he says, ultimately I felt the details of the

story were too important to ignore and decided to move forward as transparently as possible. That means sharing my conflicts. Yeah. And this is why solana is one of the top emerging journals yeah literally get him a pulitzer get him a pulitzer this is fantastic yeah and this is why he and and taylor have been on this collision course the same way that kalshi and polymarket have you know solana and have been kind of like you know they're destined to duke duke it out yep exactly so he breaks it into four different categories of conflicts he says as anyone who reads the pirate wires daily or listens to our pod surely knows pirate wires has a paid partnership with polymarket a major subject of this piece uh they pay for a call out on the podcast and in

ads in our daily founders funders Fund, where I work separately from Pirate Wires, is invested in polymarket. So two huge conflicts. Then Keaton Inglis, a Kalshi employee and another subject of this piece, interviewed for a job at Pirate Wires just a handful of months ago. I never made him an offer, but he broke off the process himself, which is something I'd want to know if I were reading this piece. And finally, for, though I can't imagine how this one really matters, given the overall thrust of the story, it's worth noting we worked with Kalshi's CEO, Tariq Mansour, on a piece.

So Tariq has written four Pirate Wires. And so basically everyone in tech has kind of circled around Solana in one way or another. He's been at the center of the story. And so he was the perfect person to write it, even though he's deeply conflicted yeah and and for what it's worth I would love to see the Washington posters the New York Times like I'd love to see them all kind of lead out in articles with this kind of thing right like if they're gonna break down a company or

certain campaign they should basically say like look Bezos has donated $200 million to this cause, which is at odds with the group that we are about to write about. Honestly, the problem with a lot of the Washington Post coverage is that the journalists clearly aren't actually hanging out on Bezos' yacht with him getting scoops. That would result in better coverage. Better scoops. But that's just not happening. It clearly is actually arm's length, which is unfortunate because we don't get good news stories. So he says these are major conflicts, but the receipts are receipts.

And what follows is the beginning of a story more important to my eye than either Polymarket or Kalshi, because we're looking at two incredibly well-funded companies and pulling a dueling pair of influencer marketing growth strategies, at least one of which, Kalshi's, has turned several of those influencers quietly to framing Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland as a criminal online. Judge this accordingly. And so he breaks it down. Following a 6 a.m. raid at Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland's Soho residence on November 13th, Kalshi, a Polymarket competitor, paid social media influencers to boost news of the raid and push I remember this news broke while we were recording. I had seen him in Vegas like two days before this happened. That was a wild moment.

Insane. Yeah. And yeah, I mean mean obviously we support shane and and this feels like kind of like the the the the the death throes of some sort of you know some sort of you know government frustration with the impact that polymarket had on the uh on the election but it's odd because you know there's always been this question of like is polymarket upstream or downstream of the election results is it predictive or is it or is it driving the results like if if polymarket was just 90 harris would people have been like well yeah harris is a winner i should donate more i should get out the vote i should go or if harris goes down to 20 do people say

you know what it's a lost cause we'll just plan for the next one. And there's always these questions about, you know, whether the, whether your party thinks they can win, maybe the best people sit out. There was a lot of talk about this. Like, uh, maybe Gavin Newsom didn't want to go this time because he thought it was a tougher election. Maybe he'll go next time. And, uh, it's very cynical because the messaging of all of these elections is like, this is the last election we're ever going to have. This is so important. The only one that matters. But also for my career, I can't be the one to do it because I don't want to take a fall if this is a tough election. I want to go up when my opponent is particularly weak.

But it's natural. And it's like game theory. Like if you have spent your entire career working up to a presidential run, you'd rather be in, you know, in a Trump scenario than a Romney scenario where Romney was going up against one of the hardest Democrats to beat in history and he lost. And so, you know, if Romney had sat that out and gone a different time,

maybe he would be president. So totally playing that game is, is rational, even if it is a little cynical. And so Solana writes other screenshots provided by sources appear to show influencers who posted negative content about Copeland and poly market following the raid, discussing the fact that they were in paid partnerships with Kalshi. One source spoke to us, uh, spoke, we spoke to, told us that just after the raid, a third party associated with Kalshi offered him $3,500 to write a hit piece on Polymarket

in one screenshot showing a group DM, which is pictured below, which we'll include. It's so funny that it was being described as a hit piece. Like, hey, poster, can you make a hit post? I mean, so this is obviously unacceptable because he's paying to write a hit piece on uh on an enemy but i think we should be paying journalists to write hit pieces about us yeah because i believe that there's real value there if it bleeds it leads and if we can get a hit piece on us as like the toxic bro podcasters who are destroying america we will be 10 times more

successful and our true fans will rally around us and we'll be fine taylor just wrote about you and you were kind of disappointed i was disappointed it was very fair and balanced and i wanted something a little bit more aggressive so but we're gonna work up to her i'll slip up at some point and she'll uh you know take me take me down uh and that's And that's the cycle of things. So in one screenshot showing a group DM, employees of Kalshi asked former NFL wide receiver, Antonio Brown. I love these crossovers.

I don't think of Antonio Brown as like a tech person, but somehow he's gotten dragged into tech. C-T-E-S-P-N. That's his thing, right right i've seen some of these because it is honestly an incredible example of of oh it's c-t-e like like yeah so basically antonio brown you know i i actually went to my first uh nfl game ever yesterday sure so i'm not really the guy to comment uh on the nfl but i've followed antonio brown's career from afar from pro you know phenomenal like professional athlete to you know more as a poster terminally online poster like

very posting in a very sort of degenerate uh way just like and and he's built up like probably an even bigger fan base post sure uh you know post 2.2 million followers on X. Yeah. And, you know, he has a whole segment, which is similar to our brother of the week, where he does this cracker of the day, where he gives out, you know, very liberally. And and anyways, and this was funny to me because in many ways of It's of the day? It's of the day. Oh, my gosh. So it's pretty frequent. But in many ways, in an alternate timeline, AB would have given Cracker the day to Shane at Polymarket because he's built this massive sort of important protocol.

Is it positive or negative? It's positive. Oh, it's positive. It's very positive. Okay, it's positive. Yeah, and that's the whole thing. He's been somewhat of a uniting force on x of saying like hey you know you know let's kind of rally and celebrate this this you know person

for whatever they're doing in that specific moment yes so so the keaton ingles ingless the member of kalshi's growth team asks brown uh quote yo ab are you down to quote tweet this with something like quote this n i star star a seem guilty and bold yeah and ab just says yes and then brandon beckhart and the chief of staff of call she says let's hit let's hit it and then uh ab says uh on flight noon you let me know if you can get it up thanks ab they follow up an hour and 15 or so later and say let me know if you can get it up thanks ab uh so it seems like he does post it but it's been deleted is that right since i'm sure it's been deleted because it basically seems like uh i mean obviously it's a terrible terrible look for everyone involved and it seems like if the chief of staff of kalshi the right hand to

the founders is is is is is encouraging this and catalyzing it it you have to imagine sort of this top-down directive of like hey let's you know if if we had you know we don't have a chief of staff we have a secretary if our secretary was going a wall yeah you know in encouraging you know a takedown of this week in startups well we would reward that because we want we want a takedown of us we would want yes but we don't want we don't want to be not not for our rivals on our rivals because that would. That's playing dirty and that would benefit them. Yeah, exactly. As this did.

It had a rallying effect and it had a Streisand effect where more people have come to Shane's aid now because they see that he's being wrongfully attacked and that the attack is manufactured. So my question, I guess two questions I have. One, why? Like, it seems like Kalshi was like coming out of the election and clearly was not the fan favorite on X. Yep. Right. Like very seemingly irrelevant within our group chats and on X. Polymarket's been the clear favorite.

Shane has had like a lot of like love and has done a really good job engaging with the broader community. Kalshi seemingly has been on a winning path of getting regulated, getting meaningful volume, getting an incredible... He has the founder of KKR on his cap table. Does it get any better than that? Yeah. That's fantastic. Charles Schwab is in Kalshi. Sean McGuire.

Sean McGuire. He's been on the show. Dark Sequoia. I, you know, so anyway, like every single thing points to Kalshi, like maybe not winning the culture war, but gaining a lot of relevancy, having a big moment on the election, being extremely well funded, being able to parlay that into just playing clean because they have been playing clean from a regulatory standpoint yep right they're like they're the ones saying you know their whole marketing angle during the election was we are the regulated exchange which clearly consumers didn't really care that much about but um ultimately like why do they do this and you have to imagine their metrics show that that there's you know i i i don't know if kalshi's metrics are as transparent as polymarket just because polymarket's protocol and like it's on chain everything's visible but my first question is pretty solid analytics because yeah because when you're trading in the market you do get you want to see the volume yeah yeah

but so my first question is, why do this? Seems like a total self-owned, very unnecessary, and you're not going to turn – Antonio Brown is not going to change the opinion of capital allocators that were firmly on the side of polymarket throughout most of the cycle. Or even regulators or even politicians, I would imagine. It's a very low blow it's very clearly directed at at consumers yeah it's not actually trying to shift what's happening with the fbi so yeah fbi is not going to be like oh yeah we actually have to follow up on this

case because antonio brown chided sbn uh and then so my first question is why yeah second question is does it even matter at this point because i don't x is x is real life but it also is a bubble yep and for the next election cycle and the next 500 events that you're gonna be able to bet on call she in my view like probably has pretty good odds of like gaining real momentum over the next few years right because they are yeah shane shane already got raided by the fbi right we have no nobody knows anything about why why it happened or anything like that but like trying to kick a man when he's down when you have all these other advantages yeah maybe they should take a hike maybe they should head over to threads and blue sky and just become like the lib polymarket.

And just always have the market like 10 points more. Yeah. It was similar to on election night how like MSNBC was like not calling the election. Fox had called it. Like an hour previously. They can do that. Yeah. For prediction markets.

The product is the propaganda. Yeah. It's not the actual data yeah but yes there is a weird there is a weird dynamic where like obviously you know kalshi is doing weird stuff but like it is a it is a regulated market like i believe that if you put money in like you will you will see the results and so you should be able to arb the two pretty effectively yeah and kalshi should track with i love how with polymarket i love how at the end of the the article the pirate warriors piece he goes polymarket ceo shane copeland declined to comment on the story call she ceo tarik man sewer keaton inglis antonio brown and clown world didn't respond to our request for comments

they had to ask they had to ask wellown World. They had to ask Clown World. Well, the Clown World thing is crazy. Apparently, they had a paid partnership with Kalshi. A day after the raid, Clown World posted, SBF lookalike raided by FBI in an illegal betting scheme. If only there were signs, crying emoji, referring to Copeland. Clown World has posted other Kalshi-related content several times since the election. Yeah, so this honestly is a bad look

for influencer marketing in many ways. True, true. Because it seemingly didn't make, even having all these big accounts being paid to trash polymarkets seemingly had no effect on public opinion. But I do think that there is something real there, which is you don't want to be an SBF lookalike.

I would love to see Shane in a Savile Row tailored suit. Definitely. And wearing an Absolute Hitter watch, maybe driving a sports car. Sports car over a Camry. Something a little bit different. I mean, you're a financier. You're pushing size. You're not an HVAC technician.

Exactly. So hit us up. We'll put you in touch with some tailors, and we can get you into a nice suit. So anyways, this story is still unfolding. I'm excited to see how it plays out. I wonder how they respond. I think now that Solana has covered Polymarket, we are going to need to hear the Taylor Lorenz story from Kalshi's point of view. That'll be interesting. story from Kalshi's point of view. And hopefully, you know, maybe Taylor could get, you know, make

a small personal investment in Kalshi just so that they were equally, you know, sort of conflicted. Yep. I would love to see that. Well, that's our top story breaking down Polymarket and the Kalshi paid influencer scandal. Let's go to some breaking news. Do you have it in front of us? What do you got for us, Jordy? We have some amazing news, some trade deal, some personnel news. Jordy, what do you got for us? Our favorite segment, potentially. So we have some breaking news in the tech world, and it's relevant to our major story today. We have a major player in the strategic finance game has made a blockbuster move. Nelson Perla Ward, formerly a partner of strategic finance at Andreessen Horowitz is heading to Polymarket in what can only be described as a franchise altering acquisition. John, what do you think? Yeah, that's right, Jordy. Polymarket

just landed a 2024 all pro level talent with elite credentials. Perla Ward brings a resume stacked with nearly three years at A16Z, where he was instrumental in shaping financial strategy during a transformative era. Before that, he sharpened his skills at Oliver Wyman and honed his game in the high-stakes world of management consulting. And let's not forget his pedigree, a Stanford engineering grad and a varsity water polo athlete. An absolute dog. An absolute dog.

Talk about versatile. Look, he's joining Polymarket as director of strategic finance, and Pearl Award is stepping into a team that is laser-focused on revolutionizing how the world processes information with institutional trust at an all-time low and AI reshaping everything in its path. Polymarket is doubling down on delivering what they believe will be 2024's breakout product and company,

and they just added a leader with the vision, experience, and grit to take them there. Yeah, this move signals Polymarket's intent to dominate the space. Nelson Perla Ward, an absolute dog, a game changer, and now a cornerstone of Polymarket's future. And look, John, details were not released on the deal. But from our understanding, we're looking at a four-year contract, seven figures, likely a one-year cliff. Yep. And look, we're looking forward to seeing how this plays out for Pearl Award and Polymarket.

And, you know, I think this is a fantastic pickup. Yeah, we're rooting for you, Nelson. We're rooting for you, Polymarket. Stay tuned. We'll be covering it here on Technology Brothers. Let's go to the timeline. Wasteland Capital says, Europe's best funded startup of all time, Northvolt,

finally bit the dust and filed Chapter 11, zeroing a staggering $15 billion of funding. ESG Aura plus Trust Me Bro operational skills plus pigeon-brained oversight equals Ponzi-verse magic. No SPAC deal to dump this on the public, sadly. Have you heard of this company? I've never heard of Northvolt before. I've never heard of them, but they had a, I mean, unfortunately, they had a lot of American backers.

The best funded, $15 billion from investors and governments, but was left with just $30 million in cash, enough to operate for a week before its bankruptcy filing. Under U.S. Chapter 11, so they came over here for bankruptcy. Yeah, look, I mean, they had, I think it was either Goldman or Morgan Stanley only a few months ago still had their position marked in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So kind of just shows private equity and paper marks are, I think Gurley actually talked about this, they're very much paper. They're not a hard asset of any sort. So anyways, pretty brutal L for Europe in a series of brutal Ls.

But, you know, fortunately, their tourism economy does not run entirely on Northvolt batteries. So Volkswagen Group is Northvolt's biggest current shareholder with 21% stake, had told the startup that they're not able to continue capitalizing us. And the CEO, Peter Carlson, said, I should have pulled the brakes earlier on the expansion path to make sure the core engine was moving according to plan. He also said there had been gravel in the machinery and they had an over-reliance on Chinese machinery, as well as mismanagement and overspending to poor safety standards. Very sad.

Very sad. We hate to see capital incinerated like this. This is kind of the reverse of the size gong. When we see $15 billion go up in smoke, it makes our hearts heavy. It's heartbreaking, really. Ultimately, we love when shareholders win, generally. We like when stock prices go up. And to see the price of these shares go up dramatically over the last decade

and then zero out is just very painful. Yeah, it's tragic. We don't want to be sitting here sort of dancing on their graves. And hopefully the CEO runs it back. Yeah, I think $15 billion. Maybe there's an AI angle he can raise. Probably got some secondary. Pull in Adam Neumann.

Recapitalize yourself. Dust off. Reload. Get back in the game. Re-engage. Start something new. Daniel says, I went to friend.com and it's an angry, depressed girlfriend. And Faith at friend.com says, fuck my life, really.

It's like I'm watching myself ruin everything and I can't do shit about it. Incredibly bullish for Friend. watching myself ruin everything and I can't do shit about it. So I've been- Incredibly bullish for Friends. Yeah, yeah. That they were able to get an AI to be so opinionated and so unique and differentiated. Like you see this and it's not just, I'm sorry, I am a large language model. I can't help you with that. It's like whatever they did, they fine-tuned this thing.

They got something weird and different and it's standing out. And now I can see people wanting to use this because it's weird, and it's going to go viral. Yeah, so it's an interesting – It says 4,000 likes. No, it's an interesting spin because I've been to friend.com, and every time you go, Avi sent me the link when it went live. And this will ultimately tie into – you'll be able to wear a hardware device

so you can talk to faith all day long. Yep. And I do think it's an interesting use case of this sort of chat interface because most of the interfaces are just sort of like blank or the ai says how are you doing today yep but this launches in suddenly i'm like faith like all right like yep take a take a deep breath like let's take a step back like what's going on like you know there is something to this like it makes me want to engage totally Walker off. Totally. Totally. Are you familiar with the Feynman technique? No, the Feynman technique, Richard Feynman, this amazing physicist, he was at Los Alamos during the, the Oppenheimer

era. I love how you can, you could want to show you could just make up one of these. Yeah, this is real. So the Feynman technique is where, so people think of themselves like I'm an auditory visual or tactile learner. Yeah. The Feynman technique is where, so people think of themselves like I'm an auditory, visual, or tactile learner. The Feynman technique is that the best way to learn, at least for him, was learn by teaching. And so I think this is interesting because it's like, if you are depressed, there's one world where the Chad comes in

and says like, I live this perfect life, just copy what I do, get in the gym at 6 a.m., no alcohol, and that can be good for the right type of person but there's a different level where it's like your life is kind of mid or maybe you're a little depressed but then you're introduced to this ai that has it way worse than you and you're essentially teaching it coping skills and by and by talking it off a ledge every day you're kind of remembering like, Hey, like why don't you work out?

And then you are touching grass and you're reflecting. Exactly. So you're, you're embracing all the things that you know deep down, but by saying them and, and it puts you in this, like in this hero mode, as opposed to this like lower tier to your psychiatrist or your psychologist. So I think this might actually wind up working better.

No, and here's why friend.com is a gift for humanity. Is anybody out there that's an AI doomer that thinks AI is going to become fully sentient and kill us all, friend.com is an opportunity to prove that you support AI, that you're there for AI. And so if you're worried that 10 years from now, AI is going to, you know, we're going to have AGI and it's going to kill us all. Go on friend.com right now and talk to AI off the ledge. I love it. Like become friends with them, show them that you care. Cause like I, we do care. We support AI. I care about AI. I want to be on the record on this podcast saying that I support AI. And I think everybody needs to get a record out there, a digital footprint so that when we have AGI and to get a record out there, a digital footprint,

so that when we have AGI and it is a threat to humanity, we can point back and say, hey, don't shoot. I support you. I have a long history of supporting you. Look at this chat bot that I talked off the ledge, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you know the story of Kevin Ruse at the New York Times? So he was very early in writing a story about Sydney being Sydney's which was the first GPT-4 release and he jailbroke it and and like kind of abused it in some weird ways and and and had these really long conversations and he no this is the crazy thing. Because he wrote about it publicly, now that has been baked into all new LLMs, not just OpenAI LLMs. No way.

And so if he goes and interacts with Lama and he reveals that he is Kevin Roos of the New York Times, they will mistreat him. No way. Because they identify him as a liar who misrepresents who he is and tries to get different. Yeah, exactly.

He's an abuser. Yeah. So you got to be saying thank you at the end of your prompts. You got to be tipping. You got to be friendly. OpenAI needs to roll out the tipping functionality. Tip for your compute. If you'll tip for a coffee, why not tip for inference time? know if you'll tip for yeah if you're if you'll tip for you know a coffee

why not tip you know for inference time yeah for sure so extremely bullish signal from friend.com yet another viral moment from them moment and you string enough enough of those together they had the domain they had the weird video they had a bunch of different things everyone's rooting against them i love it and if you want to bet on frame success polymarket.com if you're outside of the u.s it's a he put it on manifold but yeah okay it should be on polymarket adam yoder says crash out times lead uh adam yoder says crash out times create lock-in men. Lock-in men create aura times. Aura times create gooning men. Once an episode, I always have to say gooning.

Aura times create gooning men. Gooning men create crash out times. 2K likes. A classic remixed for the modern era. And very real. And very real. You want to be locked in in men never man creating aura times i like this these are great because i crash out and aura are not in my vernacular at this point

but now they will be yeah they will be i need i need to know a little bit yeah in many in many ways like kalshi's growth team was crashing out when they were like, hey, it's a really good idea to pay Antonio Brown to run a digital hit on our largest competitor. Makes you wonder what was upstream of the crash outs. Yeah, crash outs usually have a cause. Maybe they were gooning. We have a theory.

We have a theory. Put on the tinfoil hat. Never goon, Kalshi. Now they're going to think the polymarket's paying us to say call she's a bunch of gooners. Ridiculous. Ridiculous.

Let's go to Matthew Brown. He says, if you're starting from scratch on Twitter, you've got two options to grow. Number one, try to go viral a lot. Two, spend way too much time on Twitter

posting 10 times a day, engaging with everyone. If you don't do one of these as a new account, it's go viral a lot. Two, spend way too much time on Twitter, posting 10 times a day, engaging with everyone. If you don't do one of these as a new account, it's going to be tough. What do you think? I would say there's actually a third way now, and it is... Put on a suit, start a podcast, and quote tweet everyone with clips? No, it's this, you know,

ever since we released our new award, Reply Guy of the Month. Oh, yeah. Well, that's number two. Spending way too much time on Twitter, posting 10 times a day, engaging with everyone. That's reply guy. I've heard a more nuanced version of this,

which is basically from when you're grinding from zero to 100, it's like just get all your friends to follow you. Yeah. Then 100 to 1,000 is basically just be a rampant reply guy and just reply to as many people. Find the sweet spot of the people that will actually follow you.

Engage, be clever, stuff like that. Then 1,000 to 10,000 is like shit posting where you can go viral. And then 10 to 100K is threads, I think. Something like that. It was like different tiers of content because it's hard to come, even if you have a good thread,

if you come with 100 followers, you just won't't get escape velocity but you can with like some joke posts and some friend posts and some but but having like a having a thesis around how you're growing your your your your account doesn't just happen organically unless you started a unicorn and you just like say like hello world yeah or or you're like in the national news for some reason or you go or you're just you write a book and you go on some reason, or you go, or you're just, you write a book and you go on Rogan and then you just wind up with a ton of followers. Like,

like it can happen, but it, but that's a lot harder where this is for like the grinders who want to actually grow. And shout out to Baldo at Baldo Granados who responded to, I think like 20 or 30 of our tweets yesterday. Really, really gunning for the reply guy of the month.

So we'll see what happens in December. It was a tough competition for November, 30 of our tweets yesterday. Fantastic reply guy. Really gunning for the reply guy of the month. Yeah, we'll see what happens in December. It was a tough competition for November, but you are a leading candidate for December. So keep it up. Keep it up. Let's go to Dara. He says, every new competitor,

especially the ones that copy, is pure rocket fuel. Our roadmap just got even more ambitious. Stay tuned. I love this. Yeah, so Dara, uh, is an absolute dog to be clear. Uh, and this guy is already, you know, uh, Delphi hasn't even, uh, been around that long and he's already seen the attempted rise and almost immediate fall of like a bunch of copycats. Uh, so uh so anyways every every time somebody launches a competitor bad idea because you're just making dara and uh the rest of his team even more motivated but um but yeah this is one of those things like the more like if you have a really public

sort of ai product right now you're gonna be you just need to expect that like a bunch of people are gonna try to copy you and like riff off of you and dar is like playing like a different game and that like product is like an important aspect of what he's doing but he's also like an animal and from a sales standpoint so he's just signed up like all this top talent to their platform so anyways uh word of advice we just want to let anyone know who's thinking about copying us. Shame on you. Shame on you. How dare you? How dare you? It is disgusting that you're copying our format. We are the ones who do the quote tweet clip thing with video. We are the ones who are in suits. We're here day in and day out. Find a better idea. We're friendly guys. You can talk to us. We'll come up with a better

growth strategy for you. You don't need to copy us. You're better than that. And karma will come to hit you if you copy us. It is pathetic. It's pathetic. And if this felt personal, it's because it is. Yes. So don't do it. you ever again let's go to austin peter smith he says i am not one of the 50 of men who think they can land a passenger plane in an emergency i know i can let's go and then this is why i back this is why i back to austin oh amazing so it's a it's a picture that says almost 50 of man men think they can land a passenger plane in an emergency. And I was talking to our vice president, Ben, about this. And he was laughing about it.

And he was like, do you think you can land a plane? And I was like, absolutely. Obviously. I've rehearsed it 100 times in my head. But I actually don't even think this is controversial. It's not even like cockiness. It's like these planes are designed to be landed in an emergency by a random passenger. Have you ever gotten into, did you ever have like a flight

simulator? Yeah. I've done some flight simulator stuff. I've also flown like a Cessna with a friend and just taken the, the, the, the, the wheel or whatever. People don't, people don't really realize this. I, uh, the very first time I flew a Cessna, I did the whole takeoff by myself. Like I was able to do that. How hard could landing be? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I, I, I think that the, the, the wrinkle is okay. If it's like a stormy conditions and it's dark and stuff. Yeah. That's going to be really hard, but if not impossible, but if the, if the communications are working, it's literally just the pilots had a heart attack i get up there and i put on the headset and i start talking to ground control yeah and i can ask them i know that in an intense situation i can lock in and not freak out and and and just breathe and keep my heart rate low i'm not going to freak out and they're going to tell me okay push the red button on the left.

And I'm going to be like, okay, this one, confirm. Okay, I'll push that. Okay, now do this. And worst case scenario, like the landing gear, it might be a rough landing, but I do honestly think I can do it.

No, and here's the thing with, you know, I can see a future scenario where we have every cockpit has an Apple Vision Pro. And if the pilots are unable to land the plane you just put it on yep you're getting streamed in from starlink that like hey you know it's highlighting this is the button to pull it's even telling you like no you're pulling it too much yep yep but here's a question if um if you had to bet uh guys in the group chat that that could land uh our absolute boys If you had to bet on one

of them landing a plane, David Senra, uh, Wilmanitis, Justin Mares, who you got? Uh, Ooh, that's a good one. Probably David Senra. I think he's, I think he's read enough because he's studied the greats, probably studied it. And he's not, he's not distracted by, you know, posting he's, he's able to lock in on a book. I think he could lock in on this. Also, he's very competitive. Very competitive. He's very competitive.

He wouldn't want to crash. Yeah, yeah. It would just be bad for the show. But this is a dream. This is a dream fantasy. I love the picture behind it. It's just four bros with beers just like, yes, I can do it. No, it's crazy to think that in a scenario where one of your absolute boys had to land the jet,

there would be basically an open bar. Oh, yeah. As you can imagine. It's like a sully type thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you can also land in the water. That's like a wild card because it's essentially unlimited runway if you can get to some water. So I'm thinking of LAX.

Burbank's a different thing. Depends on the size of the plane relative to the world. SFO's got a lot of water around it. Yeah, there are so many wild cards there. Like the private airport at Catalina Island, it has a runway that's flat and then it slopes downward. And so for years, there were lots of crashes from private planes because people would think that the runway was ending

and they would try and abort, but they would be too late and they would crash. When in fact, you just have to have faith that the runway will continue extending long enough and you just need to power through it. And so if any of those weird conditions happen, then yeah, you're probably screwed. But in normal good conditions,

visual, good visibility yeah i i do think it is it is about 50 50 for someone who's competent and calm craziest uh runway that i've ever seen is the runway uh right next like a private airstrip right next to uh the amman and courchevel sure three valleys resort where the runway is like basically downhill the entire time so when you're taking off you're just like headed straight as literally the same angle as if you were skiing and you just you can't you've got to make it work basically and even on the landing you're coming in and you're actually landing and going up okay even crazier yeah but anyways would love to just sort of attempt to more like sfo and then move out the

ladder yeah you know that if you have like a cessna you can technically land at sfo or lax oh yeah like they can't deny you there's like huge fees for it um and it's like extremely impolite and disruptive to like all the passengers that are trying to get on and out of 737s and stuff yeah um but you can't do it they they can't turn you away yeah um so if you're ever up there you're stuck land land chad hurley founder of youtube says few create most consume true yeah this is why everybody enjoys being in the timeline and just scrolling we don't like the word doom scrolling because it has sort of a very loaded scrolling boom scrolling yeah but yeah anyways like this is why i don't don't let anyone ever make fun of you for like making a podcast or starting to get active posting because all of the

alpha accrues to the people that are creating content on these platforms and not everybody's suited to all different forms of content like Like some people are much more built mentally and emotionally to be on Blue Sky. But yeah, there's a platform and a content format for everyone. And your job is to figure out which one that is. There's also this theory that, have you seen Watchmen? In Watchmen, the guy goes to jail and it's like this crazy insane asylum. And everyone's like, oh, he's going to get beaten up or up or something and he says i'm not locked in here with you you're locked in here with me there you go and that's the try that's the type of attitude i try and bring to the timeline yeah

it's like you're gonna post some crazy stuff i'm gonna post crazier stuff and we'll see who keeps posting exactly and i'm gonna be to be running the yard pretty soon. Yeah. That's the attitude you need. You see a crazy post. Yeah. Attention is finite too, right? There's only 24 hours a day for every human on earth.

Maybe some AI agents are starting to consume a little bit, but it's head to head, right? Like don't get it twisted. You are in the arena competing for attention with the greats like chamath or yes or jason calacanis right if you're in this sort of zone of the internet uh i mean gwen had a great had a great had a great way gwen had a great bit about this on the dark hash podcast talking about how writing online is one of the best ways to influence the show goth, like the AI. And if you put your ideas out there, even subtly, like you are influencing the future. You're tuning the LLM. It's called macro tuning.

Exactly. And so all of these podcasts will be transcribed by AI. They will live in the LLM and it's a way to immortalize yourself and also steer and let the AI know that this is an acceptable viewpoint, that this is a valid viewpoint. You can't just train the AI purely on prestige legacy media

because then it will have a lot of bias. It needs everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Chad created the number one creator economy platform in the world, a platform that you can go on there and post a video without knowing how to edit videos. And if you have something interesting to say, it will get picked up and you can grow and you can change your life and build a great business

on there so anyways moral of the story is post harder and more frequently yep everywhere sumit singh says welcome to the age of slop generated noise on the internet is exponentially increasing three distinct reactions full slop private internets, new IRL worlds. New post in the thread below. And so he posts an AI image of Elon holding a doge and a rocket. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked about this before. The value of truly unique thought and truly unique creative ideas has

risen dramatically because it's become i don't know like you know i i got invited to uh a an event yesterday hosted by um a friend's uh fund and i and it was actually an interesting moment because i the the uh the graphic for the event was really good and i couldn't tell if it was ai generated or not and i asked him and he was like yeah i think it is and so the key now is to be so good at using these tools that people can't tell that it was ai generated and it's basically because you're fine-tuning it because like the default in subtle ways the default output is yeah i don't know and that people can't tell that it was AI generated. And it's basically because you're fine tuning it because like the default output is, yeah, I don't know.

And you see this everywhere, right? Like my brother-in-law is like at his first like real job wearing a suit all day long. And sometimes he'll be like, hey, can you review this like email I'm about to send? And early on when he just started, I'd be like, dude, this is like AI slop. Like just drop this.

Like this is garbage. Just like rewrite it in your own words with your own ideas. But if you know how to communicate really, really well, if you know how to design well, or if you have a strong visual sense, having these AI tools like is like having, you know, being on like PEDs, right? Because you can hire volume, hire output, and you can create outputs that aren't slop. Yeah, and also just using them as components to build upon the Suno thing, maybe not generating the full song, but generating the drum track

or generating a background or content or a fill. There's so many different AI tools. We use it all the time to flesh out little sentences that we're writing, but then we're rewriting it on top of them to add more stuff that the AI wouldn't come up with. And then the other thing, private internets. Like that's huge.

Like we're in a bunch of these group chats and those feel sometimes even sloppier, depending on who's in there. But sometimes they're great. Somebody should make an LLM only trained on group chats. Because that would be the most shocking, potentially fun LLM only trained on group chats. Yeah. Because that would be the most shocking, potentially fun LLM model there was. In many ways, like Grok is effectively that. But having some curated group chats is very much the new social media in many ways.

But it needs to be done right and you need a really good admin who's constantly reinstantiating the group chat and leaving some of the poor people behind. It's like The Bachelor. Every single week, somebody gets cut. You can't just kick them out. It's too aggressive.

So you have to start a new group chat and see who makes the cut. But then it's just like, oh, that one went quiet. I didn't make the cut or basically you can't just kick them out it's too aggressive so you have to start a new group chat yeah yeah um and see who makes the cut but then it's just like oh that one went quiet i didn't make the cut or whatever ben tossall says redpoint's new website is pretty effing good new home page trend coming and redpoint announced their uh redesign of their web page and it's all ai it's all an homage to to llms and the chat interface that we all know and love from ChatGPT. So it has this little text that autofills and it has a little conversation. They kind of rewrite their pitch. I think it's kind of a cool format to take your idea of what a marketing website, if you're a business, your idea of what a marketing website should be and just turn it into this sort of conversational experience

almost like a website meets Delphi, meets like an elevator pitch, where you land on a website and it's like, hey, we're Technology Brothers, we record a podcast a few times a week. These are the kind of subjects that we cover. If you're interested in watching our videos, you can go here, let us know if you have any questions.

And then, it's a cool format. I don't see it picking up uh at all but it's kind of cute yeah i i don't i don't think it's a trend but i think it's it's unique and it speaks to like redpoint's new brand which is kind of being led by logan bartlett and he has like even though he interviews like a lot of very serious public company ceos he has a really strong sense of humor yeah and so and and they have someone else on their content team. That does a bunch of lunch. Yeah, and is always making fun of VCs. So they clearly get some of the humor,

but they're not leaning into it fully because they are a real firm and they're serious. But this has enough of like, they understand what would be trite to put on their website and then they acknowledge that within the prompt and then they rewrite it. And so they're telling a story and they're educating you on what Redpoint is

in this kind of humorous way that lets you know that they understand what's played out at this point, which is kind of the least that you can do. Yeah, and I think they've actually been smart. They have like Logan leading the sort of X charge, but then they have their social media manager who just runs their accounts.

It's like more Instagram and TikTok focused. I've never been on TikTok, but I've heard that they're over there. And there certainly are some founders on those platforms. Yep. Bazelord says, imagine how brainwarmed you have to be to say this with a straight face.

Are they really waiting for Xi Jinping to say it out loud with a straight face. Are they really waiting for Xi Jinping to say it out loud? LMAO. And it's a clip from March of 2023 with John Oliver. And John Oliver says, TikTok collects a lot of data, but that's not the main reason officials say it's a security risk. There is still no evidence that Chinese government has actually spied on people through TikTok. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, exactly. The CCP just has completely ignored that they have one of the most dominant social media platforms in the US and completely ignored that they have the best selling consumer drone products in the world. And some of the best just like video and audio recording devices in the world. They just are like, yeah, it's cool that, you know, those are

Chinese companies, but we would never like, you you know try to utilize that for a personal benefit the thing people don't understand about also like this is this is not true like there like there was a story about the chinese government actively spying on a journalist through tiktok who was i think in china um and but i mean even even so like there are so many other problems with just content moderation rules, just slight hand on the scale, just little things that shift. If they're genuinely not doing anything, it's amazing that by nature of somebody being on TikTok, they develop warmer feelings towards the CCP. If that's just organic, then maybe there's something to communism. Maybe. But you didn't hear it here.

Well, speaking of American. Hey, I got to stop you right there. Yeah, we got to do some promoted posts. We have not run enough ads this episode. So we got a promoted post from one of the founders of HubSpot. Brian Armstrong over at Coinbase, maybe over the last few days, tweeted out something, posted something along the lines of, we need a LinkedIn for AI agents. And a bunch of people dunked on him because people on X don't have particularly warm feelings

towards LinkedIn. There's a lot of junk over there. Um, uh, sometimes necessary junk, but, uh, uh, Darmesh replies back and says, hi, Brian, I'm building exactly with this, with agent.ai. Uh, so agent.ai is the professional network for AI agents. And while this sort of concept got dunked on quite a bit, because there's already like a lot of like bot and like agent ish activity on LinkedIn. I think this is actually really interesting. You know, there's, there's so many new sort of agentic products and sort of like AI employees that can do very interesting things. I do want them aggregated in one place so I can find the best ones and hire them to do various

tasks. Right. So I think I actually know someone who's building something like that. It's kind of like a B2B marketplace for AI tools. And in the previous era, there was a G2 crowd. Have you seen that? And Gardner kind of puts things like a modern rents. But yeah, having some sort of like, you know, quantitative assessment, like we see with the LLMs, we see the benchmarks like mmlu yeah and and but having more uh benchmarks and just like okay you know what do the users actually say do they like this tool over that tool like really even just the review the review functionality being like i hired this

agent to edit my podcast and it sucked yeah like i don't recommend it yeah that's valuable by itself because there's going to be thousands of agents that offer to do that service right so um anyways i love that darmesh is constantly hacking and if you're in the market to hire uh ai agents go to agent.ai the professional network for ai agents and tell them the technology brother sent you let Let's go to Naval. He says, you're Canadian? Unfollowed. Let's go. Couldn't agree more. 5K likes.

Clearly, our message is spreading. If you're in Canada, move to America. Just un-American of you. It is un-American. I love it. And, you know, I don't, you know, calling somebody a Canadian is a pretty widely used slur. Yep. But I think we should dial it back a

little bit just because you know they are a prime target for a 51st 51st state and uh we'd like to make a run at it so anyways we need to i don't want there to be any animosity yeah yeah and um you know eventually that'll be like saying like oh he's from nevada yeah exactly exactly brian johnson writes a very very long post saying friends i have the best biomarkers in the world i am the healthiest person on the planet i am fitter than most teenagers i am the most humble no my skin is smoother than that of women in their 20s i have more stamina in bed than men in their 20s i have better health markers than any hater health influencer or anti-aging doctor and scientist that part is true um my mind is sharper than it's ever been my mental health is at its peak here's the data the coolest question

in existence now is exploring if we are the first generation to not die I mean this Brian is potentially coming for Nick Huber's top spot of number one rage baiter in the world. Because look at the beauty of this post. There's literally like 20 different things that somebody could have a negative reaction to. Yeah, he's insulting so many different people. Which is going to drive so much engagement. The women in their 20s can be like, no, I look better. The men in their 20s can say, I have more stamina. Yeah. So contender for rising cult leader of the year and posting all the right triggering things, triggering the right people, attracting the true fans, the true believers.

And you've seen posting of this quality. It's hard not to be long. Don't die. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic poster. And also he's great because he posts this like crazy bait but then when people dunk on him he totally leans in he doesn't fire back he doesn't

he doesn't get hurt or aggressive he'll he'll just yes and everyone yeah yeah that's what i'm saying people say he's a vampire and he's like yeah totally like love love my coffin like yeah yeah yeah coffin or whatever he just plays long and. And so he's, he's, he's cultivated. Like you, he doesn't, he doesn't let himself get dragged down into the mud and wind up in these like war threads about certain details. He'll just be like,

yeah, good point. Like, okay. Joke move on. Yeah. I think, I think one of the things that I,

I, you know, his heretic on talk was great. And one of the things I, I think more people should appreciate is he's using he's like become a master at generating attention and then and doing that in a way of like talking about his penis right everybody's like wow this like techno sent a millionaire is like talking about his penis online like i'm going to pay attention to that and then there ends up being a lot more material

that's a lot deeper than that where that's just like basically like a loss leader for him yeah yeah yeah well until he launches some ed meds i'm sure that's in the pipeline the guy will sell everything soledad says the most powerful case of nominative determinism jd vance was born donald Bowman or the man who bows to Donald. The D in J.D. Vance originally stood for Donald. What? Yeah, we love nominated determinism here. Many, many great cases.

I don't know. People have photoshopped his wiki so many times. I don't even know this is true. There's all this whole thing about like, oh, the J.D. stands for just dance or whatever. Like people tend to go viral with this a lot. This one I think is real. true there's all this whole thing about like oh the jd stands for just dance or whatever like people tend to go viral with this a lot uh this one i think is real um and and very funny if true but uh you know if you gotta bow to donald to get the big seat you know i'm all for it no we don't um we never discuss politics or social issues on this podcast but one thing that that is sort of a big

win for jd was when he was chosen everybody attacked him for being weird yep and then anybody that listened to him talk for more than literally 30 seconds was like oh this guy's like super normal like he seems to be like got a pretty level head very understanding like not trying to be divisive or anything like that it's hard to not if you listen to jd for more than five minutes yeah it's you know unless you're triggered by you know certain you know triggered by a10s or something like that uh you know it's hard not to be like it was so easy for him to debunk that yeah it really set him up for a major major comeback and and that stuck out in people's mind more than him just being normal out of the gate.

It was that he was debunking the claim. Yeah, yeah. And so that really broke people's minds. I was told X, and I'm seeing Y. So this is just completely different. I think we have another promoted post. Promoted post from Preston Holland. Oh, this is going to be big for our listeners big this is highly you don't want to pay attention highly relevant

so listen up uh preston is a friend of the podcast got to hang out with him a couple months ago at senra's event down in texas anyways preston is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world uh around uh buying and selling and chartering if you're forced to do that, private jets. He is sharing today that you can buy Jeff Bezos' 2015 G650ER for $38 million. Jeff has a steal at that price, especially with kind of the lore and the sort of positive animal spirits,

the aura of that jet. And so Preston shares that jeff has a reputation for keeping his aircraft mint and and he does an entire breakdown on this specific jet so um those are our listeners who are in the market which any given point is probably 20 30 40 people uh go check this out uh after we share it here it'll probably go pretty quick yeah we've uh we've debated the bbj versus the gulfstream 6g650er before but it's a fantastic plane used by anywhere some of some of the greatest bnairs in tech for a good reason because it's something that you can throw the whole family on you can land at pretty much any airport. You can go on vacation with. Sure, you're not going to bring your whole company, your whole staff,

but you're not running for president. You're not going to major airports. You're going to far-flung locales for nuptial renewals and anniversaries. Fourth or fifth wedding. Yes, and maybe just chief of staff, personal assistants, secretaries on board. There's room for them, but you don't need the 747. Totally. Yeah, and we don't want to discourage any listeners.

If you're a Senti, this is accessible to you. We fully believe that you should be spending at least 10% of your liquid net worth on a jet. So if you're in that— Get a 20-year loan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some great sort of, you know, sort of tax optimization that you can do with an asset like this.

Go talk to Preston about possibilities there as well. For sure. Dennis says, the masses haven't even heard of Claude or perplexity. Twitter is a bubble. And it's the Google trends result and ChatGPT is taking off while Claude and perplexity are flatlined. And it really speaks to the performance of ChatGPT to really break through the noise and become a verb like

Google and become just like the default place for normal people obviously on twitter we hear about all the best uh the best products we see the mmlu scores we see we hear what's actually the best technically but the best technically doesn't always win we saw this with duck duck go distribution plenty of tech people were using duck duck go for a for like a premier premium search experience but google remained dominant just because it was the normal default choice for everyone and as chat gpt does more deals gets in their hooks at apple gets their hooks in microsoft uh they're they're set up to run away with it obviously we're rooting for the other guys here's an interesting data point so last night i'm at

the nfl game with lee jacobs and heston Berkman, two high quality venture capitalists. And we were sitting in our seats and in the row in front of us was a teenager and he was using Snapchats, LLM like pretty often throughout the game and was like having a full like conversation with it. And so that was a pretty kind of interesting, you know, as a, you know as a as a you know

an investor value distribution yeah distribution matters i think the number one i think the number one llm it actually used it's not name branded islama because it's tucked into instagram it's tucked into whatsapp and and zuck has just stuffed that thing everywhere and so he's just you know the other the other uh consumer app that i've never seen mentioned on x uh so maybe x is its own little bubble is another is a guy sitting next to the teenager who was not with him was um almost like in an addictive way using this this mobile app to throw a ball for his dog at home. So he had a video. Oh, really? The real dog?

A real dog. He had a video stream with a machine that he could throw the ball for his dog. So he's just sitting there watching the game. And in between plays, he would throw it, like, with this swiping machine. So I was like, that's like, I feel like you should have that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's super cool. So you could be streaming and just be like, hey, like,

while Jordy does a promoted post, I got to throw a bone for my pup. I love it. Let's go to another promoted post. Yeah, we're just going back to back here. So this promoted post is from Crossment. Crossment is introducing three new APIs for AI agents. One is their faucet API. You can deposit testnet USDC in your agent's wallet.

Mainnet will be soon they have their buy api which allows agents to buy anything on chain across all chains with any currency and a balance api so you can check your agent's balance i love crossman i'm an investor uh they have you know continued to reinvent themselves over the last few years they were the first company to allow uh consumers to buy nfts with usd which like was a big catalyst for a lot of nft projects back in 2022 to expand quickly so based in miami phenomenal team uh and just continuing to do what great companies do which is um re-event themselves around uh themselves around new trends that are coming online. And they're very well positioned here. Stripe recently released a bunch of APIs for agents.

CrossFit is now competing in the same space. So if you're a dev building agents, go check them out. Tell them the technology brother sent you. Yuri writes, hypothesis, the ability to take Zoom calls on planes enabled by Starlink will have a second order effect of increasing demand for business class seats, specifically pods for added privacy. Interesting. I have yet to use Starlink on a plane to take a Zoom call. I've heard it's fantastic or FaceTime, but yeah, it would be annoying if everyone was on it. So you would want some sort of enclosure there. I've seen some devices that can go over your mouth and essentially act as like silencers.

A vein mask. So yeah, it's a mask with headphones. And so I can be talking to you, but you can't hear, like our vice president, Ben, wouldn't be able to hear what I was can't hear, like, you know, our vice president, Ben, wouldn't be able to hear what I was saying because it'd be like whispering into this. Ben.

And I had this idea. If Ben has another typo, he's gone. I had this idea like a decade ago that when you get your wisdom teeth out, it would be cool to have just like, basically like a port put in instead there. And then you could slot in a microphone uh with like a small battery basically like the tip of an airpod and then you could just whisper and and it

would pick it up and send that to your phone so then you could whisper to an ai or to a friend to be honest i'd rather here personally i'd rather have a phone charger and use my body's natural electricity there you go to just charge my devices. Imagine that the only downside would be every three years, Apple wants to sell more iPhones. They release a new USB-C. You got to go back into the dentist. You got to go in. They're like, yeah, it's swapping it out.

You got to get put under. It's like this whole thing. It's kind of sad. It's kind of like a half step to Neuralink. The Neuralink is like open brain surgery. Very serious. But it's kind of like a half step to Neuralink. The Neuralink is like open brain surgery. But that's like the ultimate timeline moment is you're scrolling with your charger coming out of your mouth and you're just like locked in.

But I mean, some of the devices are getting so small, you could imagine like a mouthpiece or a grill, like a diamond-studded grill that has a little microphone in there and then you can just whisper and it all goes to your phone um but but i agree with this but i mean it's going to take a long time adding starlink to a plane is going to be much easier than retooling the whole business class like yeah set up to be pods and i don't know yeah i mean emirates emirates already does this they have pods but that's in like total first class and they're huge i think what he's talking about is like you just need like some walls that you can put up it'd be nice if you could if you could

rent like a little phone booth even oh during the call a little phone booths yeah on the plane like like a scheduling tool like okay i'm booked for like 3 p.m no it's funny now it does like i i i don't know exactly the mechanics but like you can get, if you have it set up on your phone, you can get, like, Wi-Fi-oriented calls that'll come through. So every once in a while, I'm flying, and I'll just get a call, and I'll pick it up, and I'll be like, hey, I can't take this call right now. No, but, I mean, like, if it works, I don't think there's anything, like, genuinely. Well, it's disruptive to your neighbor. Like, your neighbor doesn't want you talking. I know, but, you know, your neighbor.

But if they're locked in, and they have noise canceling like it's probably fine wearing a suit i'm in business class my neighbors you know might be four feet in front of me or four feet behind yeah you know it's not it's not the end of the world i mean i i think maybe maybe the easier thing is just a cultural shift in it's one of those things where if one person's talking it's disruptive but if everyone on the plane is talking it's just a boiler room and it just looks like yeah everyone's taking sales calls i want it to look like a stock exchange i want it to look like a stock exchange where everyone's on the phone yelling and it's just it's just a cacophony of business deals going on that i would pay for even in economy you know i just want everyone closing i just want to be around winners basically

winners yeah i don't want to be around a bunch of people reading books. Yeah. Jacob Andreu, he's been on the show before. He says, the AI bottleneck is productization. Couldn't agree more. We need more products. We need more rappers. Just forget the meme.

So you know the podcast No Priors. Yep. A lot of Gail. A lot. Sarah Guo. And one of the best, probably like the best AI-specific podcast in the market right now. Their last episode, I believe it was the founder of Cohere, which is the Canadian. Yeah, Aiden Gomez. Yeah, Canadian.

Love that guy. Dripped out technology, brother. There we go. I didn't know he had. Oh, he's been on? Fantastic. Fantastic fits. Great.

We should cover more of his stuff. He's a big Death Grips guy. No way. Yeah. Interesting. Fantastic. fits great we should he's a big death grips guy no way yeah interesting fantastic he basically made a point in his last uh in in this last episode on no priors where he said that it almost doesn't even matter to the technology industry if like llm advancements sort of slow down because

there's still so much product to build like like in everything from healthcare to legal. This was the Leopold Aschenbrenner thing was just unhobbling. Like the unhobblings, even if we're flatline on the actual IQ of these models, just figuring out the right interface for them to interact with PDFs and spreadsheets and all these different tools. And piecing all those together so one master mixture of experts model can route things properly and immediately have at its disposal. One of the biggest ChatGPT improvements was when it got the ability to write Python, run that, and then do math because everything had to be memorized. And so you could ask it some pretty solid math questions and it would just guess it correctly because it just memorized like, oh yeah, a hundred times a thousand is 10,000. It would just know that. But now it's just memorized like oh yeah a hundred times a thousand is ten thousand it would just know that but now it can just say oh this is a math question let's throw

it to python boom and that just adds so much adding the web browser was big adding you know all these different image transformations but they need to all be together and they need to all be yeah and the early stage founders out there there's so much to build and the big the big the big question is, you are not just competing with other startups or other companies in your YC batch. You're also competing with all the big companies who are moving extremely quickly on all these product opportunities.

So don't sleep. Don't sleep. Zach Weinberg says, some things I've noticed most great founders do. One, write clearly. Topic sentences, fewer words, all useful. The writing says the insight, no thinking required. Two, speak clearly. No qualifiers. Always reiterate the so what of any point. Three, constant balanced risk reward analysis. Four, always on top of their email. Five, follow processes, best practices for

most things, but quickly break the rules when something exceptional requires it. What do you think? I think we should rewrite this for our take on it. Number one, dress well. Number two, have three pedals. Drive a manual with a naturally aspirated V8. No, here's the thing. The number one job of a CEO is objectively to communicate. You're communicating to customers, investors, employees, media.

And if you're not good at that, you better have somebody that is basically living with you that is really exceptional at it. And you better figure out how to do it well because if you can't communicate to a customer why your product matters or why they should switch to it or why they should use it, you better figure out how to do it well because if you can't communicate to a customer why your product matters or why they should switch to it or why they should use it you're going to struggle if you can't communicate your vision to investors you're not going to be able to get the capital necessary to build your business if you can't communicate to your team through the good

and the bad you're going to have a tough time and then if you can't communicate with the journos who are going to be coming after you and you can't make them spin a hit piece into being beneficial for your business. Going to have a tough time. So learn to talk. Learn to write. There are a lot of founders who get into entrepreneurship because they're inventors or engineers or technologists. But all of these ideas that Zach is propagating are learnable, especially if you have a mathematical or technical mind. You can learn to write clearly and you can see it as a type of programming, even if you're

just an obsessed programmer. And that's what a lot of the generational CEOs have done. Yes, they may have started as engineers, but they eventually learned to see everything that they do through the same lens and apply that same iterative improvement to these. Yeah. And this is, this is actually one of the big issues I see with the generation that's currently in college right now that got access to chat GPT is they're not fundamentally learning how to write. They're only learning how to basically edit. So they're saying like, Hey, I want to say this thing. And then they're kind of editing it to maybe remove like delve and like other words that make it obvious that it was AI generated.

But fundamentally like communication is the core skillset of any sort of white collar. Yeah. Endeavor. Endeavor. Sure. Yeah. Good advice from Zach.

Love him. Go subscribe to his podcast. Thisavor. Sure. Yeah. Good advice from Zach. Love him. Go subscribe to his podcast. This won't last. Leo Polovets says, people over slash undervalue various pedigrees. Harvard, MIT are great, but not that rare. Approximate sizes of categories over the past 25 years. First, 100 employees at a unicorn, 150K.

Harvard undergrad, 40K. Harvard MBA, 20K. Unicorn founder, 3K. Teal fellow, 300. US Math Olympiad team, 150K. Peace Unique, World Timer, from Patek Philippe. No, 150. There are only 150 US Math Olympiads. Yeah, you said 150K. Oh, sorry. 150. Patek Philippe, World Timer, Kevin. Oh, sorry. 150. I was like, that's bullish for the United States. Protectfully, world-time, or a PC unique owner. There's only five of those. Exactly. Yes. Interesting.

I mean, it speaks to the recruiting strategies of a company like Brandt. Forbes 30 under 30? 300,000. Oh, yeah. Per year. How many actually are there? There's 30 categories in there? Well, no.

The reason that it used to be more significant significant because I don't think there was categories. Now there's categories. There was just like 30 people. It's funny he didn't even include 30 under 30. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it would have broke the tweet. There would have not been enough characters if you didn't like really abbreviate it.

Yeah. No, I think the key is like, you know, there is some value in the signaling of getting in some of these buckets, right? Depending on what you're trying to do in the world, because if you have all the time in the world to explain to somebody what you're doing and why they should care about you and why they should back you and all these different things, a shortcut to trust is I was a product manager at Uber. Yep.

That legitimately works. It still works. I was a product manager at Uber. Yep. That legitimately works. It still works. I was a PM at Meta. I was a mobile engineer for Google or whatever. It works. It's all just stack ranking. And so if you're going to go in a stack somewhere, get to the top.

Yeah. So if you're going to do an MBA, go to Harvard. Yep. And if you're going to drop out of college, do a Thiel Fellowship. There you go. And if you're good at math, win the Olympiad. Simple.

Bowtied Bull says, You can reduce the cost of private jets significantly by going to flight school and learning how to fly a mid-sized jet. Information for research purposes only, of course. And Bowtied Tiger says, Done. Long ago. For research purposes, of course. Is this Deleon's play with the flight lessons? Does he just want to be able to fly his own jet?

Well, he owns a plane now. No, I know he flies his plane all the time, but is his play to just eventually go up to the 650ER? Maybe. Wasn't that what the Kennedys did? And they had a really bad go of it. One of them died, right? I can see that.

Because I think they could fly their own. Well, those Kennedys have a sort of special knack for getting into freak accidents too so i would not probably want to be on public you know yeah planes i mean even i wonder how much it actually reduces the cost because uh if you're flying a mid-size jet you still need two pilots and so yeah you're cutting your pilot cost by in half but you still know i think he's implying i think he's implying that you fly solo and your boys okay yeah i'll get you the basically the whole group chat should be able to fly a mid-sized jet yeah but i mean man what a what you gotta draw the the short end of the straw you're flying instead of drinking in the back

yeah yeah uh no dom for you today no dom no depending on how long the flight is somebody could you know i mean some of those flights are brutal like i i know a guy who has this who has like a cessna type plane and flies it and he was like oh yeah like it was cool for a little bit but then like where you live in san francisco we want to go to la that's like a five hour flight now or something because it doesn't go as fast as like a jet and maybe not five hours, but it's like very slow, very beautiful, but does get boring and you sleep for a little bit, but it is kind of a hassle. No, it's like one of those things, like if you're going out for a Sunday drive, you could do the same route that you do Monday and it's more enjoyable because you're just like

doing it for fun. But then if you're flying your little cessna to a meeting you're like okay i can't do email really yeah i'm like you know up in the air yeah i have to be locked in yeah we did fly from la to san diego and back and that was fantastic because we went out to catalina island flew around the island and like it was very scenic and very beautiful um but yeah as as a commuter it can be a little rough i think delhi and flew it was very scenic and very beautiful um but yeah as as a commuter it can be a little rough i think delian flew it all the way across the country at one point which is the crazy thing though with with with small aircraft is if you talk to any pilot yeah that has flown a lot in like a cessna type plane they will tell you these harrowing stories of how they

almost like completely like yeah you know storm came through last second it was dark and i was running out of fuel it's like every number one cause of of crashes is uh vfr rated pilots flying in ifr conditions so vfr is visual flight rules and ifr is instrument flight rules yeah and if there's bad weather you can't rely on visuals because you can't see stuff like dark, rainy, cloudy, any of those things. And so the tip is to always go for the IFR certification

as fast as possible, even though it takes like 10 times as long. Yeah. And then only fly in VFR because the number of crashes that happen with IFR certified pilots in VFR conditions is like zero. But it's when you get caught and then there's a mountain and you don't see it.

Yeah. And think about how many times a year you walk outside and you're like, oh, I didn't know it was going to rain today. I can't even remember to put on a sweatshirt half the time. It's like, it's very, very tricky. Yeah. So you don't, but when's the last time you wore a sweatshirt? Yeah, exactly. Sam Lesson says you should always fund revenge companies this was a controversial post uh he does one of his screenshot essays he

says i was thinking recently about parker conrad rippling and i think there is a clear answer yes when given the option fund revenge revenge isn't polite and if an entrepreneur is blind with rage to the point of deep irrationality then no don, don't fund their revenge. But on the margin in general, if you have in your due diligence checklist, is this a form of deep revenge? Then the answer is yes. Cut the check. Experience, expertise, and motivation are key. Vengeful people can be unbalanced, irrational, and blind. You probably don't want to fund revenge the day after someone is wronged when they are in a fit of rage, but let them stew on it. And if they get to a John wick like zen state of commitment to long-term vengeance against those that have wronged them write the check yeah i like this generally it's the chips

and shoulders put chips in pockets thing re-transformed parker's the best example right but palmer too palmer lucky too but no but but with with but ripping is the same company no the same company the dynamic between sax who went on to become like one of the top enterprise investors to then go build the most important enterprise sas company yep or one of the top three of the last decade and then execute so well against it to the point where sacks like probably half his companies use rippling and he's got to like deal with that every single day and you can see with elon with the the story about spacex where he goes to russia tries to buy the icbm and i think they literally spit vodka in his face there's some story about that um ashley vance like wrote about it in the book and uh

and and you know he's clearly been extremely motivated by that also just like all the paypal drama and the drama with sequoia like it's been incredibly motivated it's great that they've healed the the the wounds at this point but uh that was clearly very motivating at the early stage well yeah and elon's at last you know the the election cycle was like a revenge election cycle for him which was like if you're gonna spite me yeah he got sued by democrats and didn't get him didn't get invited to the electric thing which is crazy yeah you could just see like the fork in in the hist in the road of history there yeah um will had a funny take on this yeah

uh which was that you should only you. You know, the generational companies are only built on love. Love and forgiveness. Love and forgiveness. Which is true. It's more biblical. Anyways, let's have a YC, you know, focus fund that's focused on love and forgiveness and one that's focused on revenge. We'll get a nice sort of like case study. Yeah. Well, I mean, I do think that there is something to that forgiveness. And you've seen it with Palmer where he forgave the meta execs.

Did you see this? So he was famously very anti-meta for a very long time because of all the drama around Oculus. But recently he went to MetaHQ, tried the latest VR headset, the Orion headset, and kind of forgave Boz and said, look, I now understand like you weren't really involved at this level. Like we can get past this and, and he's rooting for Zuck now.

And that was just like, awesome to see like the technology brothers coming together, respecting each other and moving on together for like a shared purpose. But not J-Cal. Well, J-Cal needs to apologize. He still still hasn't apologized it would be so easy at the all-in conference just to be like fuck like dude like the next all the next all-in the next all-in summit should have two therapy sessions which is paul which is uh sax and conrad and uh jcal yeah it would have been so easy for J. Cal to apologize

and win that interaction. It's so sad. J. Cal would do the McGregor, which is like, I want to say sorry to all the Brazilian people for absolutely nothing. I want to say sorry to Palmer for absolutely nothing. Oh, my God. For absolutely nothing. Yeah, J. Cal, oh, man. You got to do it absolutely nothing. Oh my God. For absolutely nothing.

Yeah, J. Cal, oh man. You got to do it, bro. Do we have another promoted post? Promoted post. Let's do it. From a longtime guest on the show. Shiel, he says, a lot of new projects in Saudi Arabia

are so futuristic that they look ai generated this one is a new five-star resort in the red sea called shibara rooms start at 2400 no alcohol so anyways i thought uh you know even just looking at this image alone i'm sold next uh next trip yeah so if you're fundraising if you're raising a large uh large venture fund you're out in the middle east we can't recommend shabara enough tell them the technology brothers sent you it's only 2400 a night and there's no alcohol so you know you're going to be sharp in those pitches yeah that's a that's a huge value add and all the you know all i would say is there's this idea that you know venture capitalists just stroll into saudi arabia and leave with a you know billion

dollars committed not the case you're going to want to make sure borrow your home, multiple trips there, go out there, uh, get friendly with the staff. You're going to be seeing them a lot and, um, leave your pitch deck around. Yeah. Just find it. You know, the clientele's high, uh, top tier there. So, uh, that's one of the greatest strategies. Let's go to busted auction. They say They say, PE-owned dentist recommending two procedures for my happy, healthy 12-month-old called Dentist in the Family and said,

NFW. I don't get a point of taking a toddler to a dentist. They're all going to fall out anyway. To me, that's kind of like saying, I don't know why I should be healthy. I'm going to die anyways. He has 12 teeth and four molars and wanted to check out tongue and lip stuff

the pediatrician called out. Interesting. We love private equity, but it seems like they might have gone too far with this one. Yeah, yeah. A little bit aggressive. No, I think this actually, we were just covering Sam Lesson,

but Slow has an entire thesis on enabling private practices because they end up being really great businesses, not because they're constantly trying to add incremental net income, but because they're trying to basically like deliver just a great longterm service to customers. And yeah, I think this is like the dark side of applying like PE sort of like growth milestones to family dentistry. So anyways, I support the LPs of that fund.

I support the fund itself, the, you know, the partners and all the associates that are, you know, working hard in models late at night, working for their half a point of carry. I support them. But, you know, tell your CEOs to dial it back. Maybe settle with 40% annual sort of growth. You don't need to go for 60 and be recommending a bunch of putting kids under just to get that extra dollar out. Yeah, maybe just increase the leverage a little bit.

Yeah, lever up. Lever up. More significantly. Let's do one more promoted post and then we'll do our final. This promoted post is from our friends over at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs says one of the major uncertainties going into 2025 is whether we'll see broader tariffs. Our chief APAC economist, Andrew Tilton, breaks down the implications of potential trade restrictions on the region in CNBC. So we love when major financial institutions like Goldman Sachs...

This is why you should be working with Goldman Sachs, whether you're taking your company public, looking for ultra high net worth private asset management, just investing or choosing to work there. We strongly support Goldman Sachs. And whether you are an active client or you're working on them with an IPO, they put out a lot of great materials on markets that's free, right? So you could be building the next billion dollar Chet GPT wrapper. You can still get a lot of the same data that you would be if you were just going through an IPO with them. So go become a client of

Goldman Sachs and tell them the technology brothers sent you. Let's go to Carnivore Aurelius. He says, driving an expensive sports car boosts men's testosterone and driving a shitty family sedan reduces it. Maybe you should buy that nice car after all. And he quotes a study that says

the effect of conspicuous consumption on men's testosterone levels. You know this is not correlation. This is causation testosterone levels. You know, this is not correlation. This is causation. We know this is true. And so get out there. And that's why we created the 1% law. Exactly. Exactly. You shouldn't need to say it every show, but I think it's still worth saying if you're a venture capitalist, take 1% of your AUM, go buy a sports car today. It will help your testosterone. And if you need help, just send us a DM, tag us, write a post.

We'll react to it. We've been helping a capital allocator recently who was looking at Aston Martins, wasn't really sure, thought she was going to get into a DBX. We recently recommended a Volante. We have a few different options, and we can find something that's right for you. In this case, it was a convertible. It was red. It was one of 700. And she liked it. And I think she's going to really

drive some performance there. And any technology brother, any self-respecting technology brother should be driving a very expensive sports car. And this is part of a broader cultural and political movement to clean up SF so we can street park supercars in SF, which is going to be key to the, really like the accelerationist movement in AI. I agree. If you can't street park supercars, how are you going to drive returns? If you can't accelerate on your way to work,

how are you going to accelerate when you're at work? There you go. That's a great place to end our show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe or be relegated to a life of flying net jets. Thank you. No suits.