TBPN Live - Low T Levels at Y Combinator, Founder Burnout, Taylor Lorenz

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Hi there, this is Ben, Vice President at Technology Brothers, with a quick announcement. While filming today, we unfortunately had a small technical error that led to the first 19 minutes of this episode having poor audio quality. I speak on behalf of the organization, John, Jordy, and myself when I say that this will not happen again. We have already found the intern that was responsible and they will be terminated. Thank you for your understanding, and back to the show. I'm here with Jory Hayes, and today we are talking about my ramp card. I got a new ramp card, and my last one was plastic, but they sent me the metal one.

And you know why they sent it? Why? Microplastic avoidance, right? One of the biggest issues with a lot of these fintechs is they're sending millions and millions and millions of plastic cards out of the ether, right? And everyday technology workers are having to use them oftentimes, multiple times, certainly multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. And the amount of microplastic exposure from the average, you know, plastic credit card is really really we think it could be contributing to the testosterone epidemic

I think so too, yeah, everyone always thought that oh you get a black card from Amex it's metal, it's titanium, it's so cool it's a flex, it's never about flex it wasn't about flexing, it was about avoiding plastic, exactly, comes down to health, health is the ultimate status symbol, it is, you know

so if your body is highly estrogenetic and from all the plastic cards that you're handling, that's an easy thing to cut out. And thank you to RAMP. I mean, I was thinking that most of my credit cards have actually moved over to metal now. But my ID hasn't. And why is the government poisoning me?

It's a big issue. But back on the topic of And why is the government poisoning me? It's a big issue. But, you know, back on the topic of ramp and the government, we need to take a little victory lap. Because, what was it, last week you made, you know, kind of threw something out there. Maybe it was a little bit of a joke. Maybe it was half serious. But we got some real traction on your ID up here.

So break down the original thought of ramp for the government and then tell me kind of what the the downstream effects have been yeah look government spends more money the US federal government spends more money than anybody in the world right it's true yeah and and more revenue than I think any other organization in the world yeah uh i'm sure some somebody will point out that i'm incorrect on that but um but look uh anytime you have a lot of spend you're going to have a lot of waste and spend uh you know right now it seems very obvious that the u.s government doesn't have a good handle on their um on their spending just in general and there's a lot of ways to fix that you can

get new leadership in that wants to sort of like drill down budget by budget and kind of start to understand how money's being spent. But another way to kind of attack that problem is through software. So tech enabled financial services. We went through an era where Amex and a lot of the big corporate card players just wanted you to spend as much money as humanly possible because the more money you spend, the more money they make. Ramp you know came out I think only around four or five years ago at this point I decided hey we're going to flip this on its head how do we

help companies save money if our companies can save money they'll become better businesses and through that they'll become better customers. So aligning that sort of incentive structure with the company has proved to be very fruitful. And I think there's a strong case to be made that the federal government needs to get on ramp, not just at the federal level, needs to be mandated state level, county level, city level, you know, all the way down to your kids club soccer team should be on ramp. But we can start and really set an example at the federal government level uh and you know the campaign has kind of exposed uh some of the issues with how our politicians like to spend money right it became apparent uh over the weekend

that the kamala campaign had been using ramp but uh and you would expect them to win if they were on ramp yeah you would expect them to win but they were on ram yeah you would expect them to win but here's the issue so they blew through about a billion dollars in a few months uh almost unprecedented i think like half a million of that went to payroll yeah um but the big issue they were on ram but they were also using a variety of other sort of payment uh and so because that spend wasn't consolidated uh how could they really get a grasp on their spending right they're not able to fully unlock uh the potential of ramps uh you know ramps platform if they're just letting yeah i mean what's crazy is like when when you sign up for ramp

like you get this sdr something to help onboard you and one of the things that they're working towards when they're telling you about the features is like getting you to migrate 100% of your spend. And if you think about it like that ramp SDR like could have changed history. If he or she a lot of people like to credit David Sachs and all in with, you know, Trump's victory, but I think there's a good argument to say that. Yeah, well, I was thinking about how, like, this year, the whole narrative is like, oh, it's the podcast election. And I think in 2028, like, we could seriously see, like, it's the Corbett-Kart election, where one campaign comes out and says, hey, we're

running on ramp, and then the other, you know, when Cobble was on stage, she was like, well, I have a gun, right? And so you could hear, oh, the other candidate, they're on ramp, too. So then, we get into the weeds, and we start talking about, who's using travel who's using bill pay and and then oh someone was lying about it and that's a national you talk really leveraging the ai functionality exactly exactly like oh what's your close how how which campaign is closing faster yeah then this is what the voters care about yeah like the podcast and it's a proxy for

just efficiency exactly efficiency and so yeah i i about. Yeah. Like the podcast. And it's a proxy for just efficiency. Exactly. Efficiency. And so, yeah, I think everyone should pay attention. The podcast story, the whole podcast selection,

you can kind of ignore that from now. That's done. The next thing we're going into the corporate card election. Yeah. Anyway, let's move into our top story of the week. The information featured my talk. Incredible publication. Didn't. Yeah. Incredible copy. I love them. Yeah. No one, no one loves the information featured my talk incredible publication didn't yeah incredible copy i love them yeah no one no one loves the information people literally realize that we're

witnessing the birth of the tmz for technology yeah yeah it's like a special moment yeah there's there's a broader narrative about like new media but people haven't really done the job of understanding mapping the new media to what they were replacing yeah and in this case like uh i mean yeah it's it's clearly kind of the next generation tmz which is fantastic it's like you know it was messy you can't look away from yeah yeah um so in the uh they did some election recapping and recapped a whole bunch of events uh related to politics which we don't really talk about here but uh because they they didn't mention me by name but they mentioned the name of my talk

so uh i'll read from they wanted to march there because there's you've kind of grown a reputation of being a male podcast expert yes not just because you're one of the hosts of technology brothers but you kind of have a firm grip on the industry. Yes. Well, actually, the first time the information interviewed me was, do you know Abe Brown? He writes the Weekend thing. I put out a tweet, which would have made it into the stock

if it was posted today, because it was a banger. It was, you know, we don't need any more Midas lists. We need an Icarus list for VCs that flew too close to the sun. Some of my best work. And it really resonated. Like Alex Conrad, who makes the Midas list, was like, this is actually a good idea. And then we started, like, talking about it.

And so I talked to Abe a bunch, and I was like, dude, like, if someone, I mean, A, if, like, Forbes said, like, dude, like if someone, I mean, A, if like Forbes said like, hey, we're doing the Icarus list this year of like the worst VCs, like you would have an army of like 500 Stanford new grad analysts working day and night just to keep the firm off of that list. Like people try to get on the Midas list. Some people don't really care about it, but most people fight to get on the Midas list. Some people don't really care about it, but most people fight to get on. For the crisis PR industry, it would be the biggest event. It would be the largest wealth transfer industry from

GPs to crisis PR firms. I don't think that's past their expense. Yeah, no, no, no. But yeah, love the information. No yeah love the information no one loves the information more than i do um but uh they were recapping some of the some of the political news and they said last week the most far out faction of tech's burgeoning right wing gathered in miami

beach for hereticon founders funds celebration of radical free thinking between talks like the Trad Wife Returns and the Economics of Doom that one was mine. Teal roamed the crowds accepting preemptive congratulations for the coming election according to several people who attended and I don't know about that last part. I feel like people were not... Let's see the sources. Yeah I don't know. It really wasn't about politics. yeah it wasn't and also there were like tons of like tons of left-wingers there that's like the whole point and there were a lot of fights and that's the part of like the debate club and like all that yeah the most heretical people at hereticon yeah all of the less uh left-leaning attendees who were trying to jam their politics

down the rest of the 10-year road. And it was very triggering, not because of their viewpoint, but because it was not meant to be a place to sort of discuss politics about policy, right? It was about the economy, right? It was about how do we kind of increase global prosperity through non-traditional

i do uh i i do love that like my talk the economics of doom which was great i interviewed tyler cowan i love him it was a lot of fun but we are two of the more normie people there i think in the sense that like we're talking economics. He wasn't particularly doom-pilled. He's a professor. You're a male podcast expert. I'm a businessman. First and foremost. I'm not one of these crazy biohackers who's growing

a third land. Exactly. I'm not doing any of the crazy stuff that I did see there. But I love that I made it. I have no idea why they chose this one i think it's mostly because when uh pirate with the pirate wires team did the write-up they talked about like six different like our our talks was to the one we did on the peds in the valley was too heretical just couldn't really be published anywhere yeah i i gotta figure out how

to get them to issue a correction and say, it was the economics of doom hosted by John Coogan, the host of Technology Brothers, and then link to us. Yeah. Did I tell you I did that? I changed the SEO once. Somebody wrote an article about me being like a toxic male podcaster. It was like some sort of hit piece.

And when they linked to me, they linked to johncougan.com slash about just to be like, this is his about page, right? Yeah. And I wanted the SEO to go to Lucy so he could sell more product. So I rerouted the link. No way.

That's great. Yeah, yeah. And so now we have an extra backlink. I think that journalists would be on to that. Like, don't route to a domain that they control. Exactly. So a little tip out there for the listeners. Journalists would be on to that, like don't route to a domain that they control. That they control, exactly. So a little tip out there for the listeners. I don't think we have a lot of journalists that listen to that. No, but get, I mean, I do have a thesis that a lie can get halfway across the world before the truth can put its shoes on.

Have you heard this phrase? Or if it bleeds, it leads. Yeah. And I think that if you're a startup and you want attention, you want press, you should be courting hit pieces. Yeah. And I think that there's actually an opportunity.

Nobody's done that better than Dryad. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a long way to come back to it. It's not like you just used it to its advantage. Yeah, no. I mean, it's the wrong way to come back to it. Yeah, right. You just use it to his advantage. Yeah. No,

it tells like this heroic journey. Lulu's obviously the, the, the master at getting good press. Yeah. But maybe we need the Lulu for getting negative press. Yeah. Yeah.

Just go and make me like hated by 90% of America. And I will monetize the 10% that loves me for countercultural reasons. I think that's interesting. So to that effect, I had a great call yesterday with none other than Taylor Lorenz. That way?

Yeah. And she's writing a piece for the information. She's writing news. She's writing for the information. She's writing for the information. We're so back. We're at a period of time

where there's this massive power struggle between the information newcomer Bloomberg Forbes for top

technology talent so it's an amazing cosign for the information that they're able to pick up at this moment

in time she's also been on TMZ a bunch so think about that crossing it's amazing if you needed more proof that the information is the TMZ a bunch. So think about that cross-up. It's amazing.

If you needed more proof that the information is the TMZ attack technology. That's it. So I don't think she's not working there full-time, but she's writing a piece about the bro podcast sphere. The male podcast sphere. Which is why she called me

to testify as a male podcast expert yeah and i wasn't sure if she was calling me because i'm a male who is a podcast expert or if i'm a male podcast expert but either way i was totally prepared to comment on the record uh and we had a wonderful conversation and she's really great to talk to she is she's got great yeah yeah and and yeah and yeah i mean like the the the the critique of the of the tech elite that i completely agree with from the caris wishers and the taylor runs is that too many tech billionaires are humorless and they can't take a joke and they get their feathers too ruffled when people come for them. Yeah. And you got to know that we are in the WWE era of tech.

And there's going to be some faces and there's going to be some heels, but you can't shut the game down. You can't have a villain-less, conflict-less society. Full circle moment for me because the first time I ever spoke to the New york times

was through taylor lorenz really give my point of view on the call her daddy podcast that's right wait so we both talked to her about podcasts yeah yeah it's amazing we are top so you're well i'm the male podcast expert i guess you happen to be a female podcast expert yeah yeah it's good no i thought you wrote a great great p this was back in 2020 it was like i remember exactly where i was walking to erwan from my apartment in venice uh and everything the whole world was shut down it was just me and taylor talking about podcasts which was uh really an awesome moment yeah uh a a little checkups got a. A little foretelling of the future. Totally.

Fantastic. She wanted to talk about the bro podcast boom. There really is a boom. There is. There were some things that I disagreed with. One is that

if the Democrats had run a stronger candidate and that stronger candidate had done... I tend to think that right now there's this narrative of there's this very consolidated cohesive, massive right-wing list of podcasts

that lean right. So it's like you start with Rogan, then you go to lex i would say the big ones to be clear are very much center right oh for sure i don't want to be barely right yeah barely right barely right uh and joe rogan and there's tons of clips of rogan yeah lifetime democrat talking about oh he loves bernie all these other things it's just like in this election they have they like the the the goal posts move to the point where like a lot of the big podcasts leaned right um and so you have rogan lex chris williamson jesse michaels

with the alien stuff you have huberman some of those hosted trump you have tim dillon theo von the comedians uh kill tony uh bussusting with the boys aiden ross there's like this huge community and what's interesting is that like if you actually saddle those people down they probably have a pretty wide spectrum of politics but they all kind of just align with like general conservatism this time around and trump was like the candidate of that whereas on the left i think you actually have just as much reach but it's more fragmented so you have uh pod save america comrade didn't do that uh you have smart less with jason bateman and that's a that's a pretty like center left podcast i would call it comrade didn't do it it's more of a comedy show but that's fine like you just need to be a politics

show you have the daily you're the ezra klein show i was just looking at the top podcast and and it's not like yeah tucker's up there rogan's up there but so is the new york times and yeah and as a client well you have a you have a thesis that's clearly turning into a law yeah of coogan's many laws sure which is that the candidate that just simply records more podcasts. Yeah, more hours. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I, I, I read the numbers and it's like 35 million views just on the Rogan episode. Average view duration on that three hour episode was about 45 minutes. I talked to some people that didn't know podcast durations.

And so you multiply that out and it's just billions of minutes or something like that. Or like, uh, it's something like hundreds of millions of minutes. And the value of that is easily $600 million that was made up for the funding gap. And so it's like, if you're a politician, you can either spend $100,000 on an ad that reaches

a million people, or you can go do a podcast that reaches a million people and instead of getting a 30 second ad, you're getting 45 minutes. It's a 45 minute ad. And people just are obsessed. Yeah, this is why for all the businessmen out there, if you get an opportunity to go on a podcast, even if it legitimately only has 100 engaged listeners, it's worth doing because that's an hour of time that you get to spend talking to people that are going to totally digest what you're doing, why it's important and why they should be into your product or service, whatever it is. And I give the example when I'm

talking to founders that ask me, hey, should I go on the show? It's not big, but what do you think? I say 20 years ago when a businessman had an opportunity to fly to St. Louis to get in front of 50 potential customers in a room, they would spend their entire day to go and do that. It's worth you getting on a podcast for an hour from Zoom and just having a conversation. We have only 100 people. Did you see that email? We got our first request to go on as the Technology Brothers. Yeah, we got our first request to go on a podcast as the Technology Brothers. I think we should do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guy has like six episodes. Great. So do we. So do we. On the come up together. Let's give it a try. Yeah. So, yeah.

So, like, we kind of debated on that. I think on the center left, you have those, like, you have those center left shows. But then you also have the far left shows, like Choppo, adam friedland show red scare formerly destiny and it's like you could see a democrat candidate like bernie would go on this yeah he can get in the ring with like the choppo guys and hold his own but he can also hold his own with ezra klein yeah and so so i mean long story short i think the future of the democratic Party is more candidates like Bernie, more candidates like AOC, more candidates like Pete Buttigieg, less candidates that are just straight up media trained to stay on topic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the interesting thing was that Taylor was really asking this one question again and again, which is like, why do podcasts lean right wing? And I was kind of rejecting the premise for a while. But then I was like, okay, let's let's like steel man this a little bit.

And let me work through like, what could have possibly thing. So first thing I, you know, I tried to explain to her, you know, there's this concept called mansplaining. And I told her that that's when a man describes something to a woman, usually condescendingly. And she was very happy to hear that. But then I moved on to kind of a more rigorous analysis, which is that there was a... Fuck. There was a... So on YouTube, like YouTube kind of leans left

because YouTube's algorithmically driven less than RSS. And so, so on YouTube, the, uh, like there was a lot of right-wing de-platforming that happened or deprioritization in like the 2016 to 2020 era. And then in 2020, there was a lot of, there were a lot of right-wing people or just center right that got their stuff deprioritized because they were talking about COVID and they'd get the COVID flag and then they'd get deprioritized in the algorithm shadow band. And then there were a couple high profile right wingers who were straight up deplatform from YouTube. Right. And so on YouTube, you have this,

like you have this subtle pressure from YouTube. They were never like straight up like banning everything, but there was obviously like a big move to rumble, move to other platforms. A lot of like, maybe I'm not safe here. If I talk about certain things, I won't get as much reach, but on RSS in the Apple podcast app, it's way, way harder. Like the bar is much higher, even if Apple and you got to do something really extreme. Exactly. Even if Apple and Google have the same politics and they both think that, oh, like Jordan Peterson shouldn't be on here or whatever.

In on Google, they can just on YouTube, Google can just say, Hey, he said this thing. Let's just not promote him in the algorithm. Whereas for Apple, it's like Alex Jones,

we have to actively take him out of the store. This is a much firmer line. It's not this like, you know, steering thing. And so I think that, I think that him out of the store. This is a much firmer line. It's not this like steering thing. And so I think that a lot of the conservatives kind of kept growing very fast on RSS, whereas they weren't able to grow as fast on YouTube. And so that's kind of the balancing thing. And I think podcasts in general

are much more impactful on opinion. We've talked about this. Oftentimes real sort of yep content and ideas kind of start in these sort of maybe they go from a tweet to a long-form podcast and then they get cut down again into like a 20-minute youtube video to a 60-second tiktok uh you know video so i think one of the things taylor is obviously one of the top technology journalists in the world otherwise she wouldn't be writing for the information yep think one of the things Taylor is obviously one of the top technology journalists in the world. Otherwise she wouldn't be writing for the information. And one of the things about this election cycle and maybe the premise of her article might be a little bit off is that

it became obvious this election cycle that the Republican party was more oriented around technology. Right. And big part of that is because some of the biggest donors to the Republican Party are technologists, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk. And so I think that a lot of tech ended up aligning with that side because it was the party that was pro-technology, right? It was how do we get Elon permits faster so that he can launch more rockets? How do we maintain our edge around, you know, defense in the United States, right? How do we, you know, support our sort of emerging defense industrial base? So the alignment and the sort of maybe shift right in the male podcast sphere, think wasn't even political as much as it was a business orientation right because it was almost a survival mechanism sure sure sure yeah she was also

drilling down on like why is joe rogan popular or why are these like manosphere podcasts popular and i again i didn't that's like asking like why is you know uh vio and the group chat popular yeah like we like him you know he's funny and he's got good takes right yeah i guess she was talking in like kind of a relative sense of like why why are the manosphere podcasts more popular than like female led podcasts but i i kind of rejected that because i think that there are plenty of of female led female hosted podcasts that are successful. And I was actually telling her like, we could be having the exact opposite scenario or the exact opposite

conversation if the Democrats had put up someone. And I was thinking like, okay, so the, the, like Kamala was like a prosecutor. She could have gone on like my first, my favorite murder, you know, that show. That's I think that's women, woman hosted. Very interesting. And she could have told some story about like the criminal gangs that she prosecuted like and it would be like the story of some criminal and she was actually involved and she's like co-hosting there that would've been super cool and super different yeah super weird and like gotten super fans

yeah and and that's where I that's where I won that to go but I think it was just like that campaign was just way too media trained and it was like, stay on message, stay on message, stay on message. When you get off message, you're word salad. But like, I just reject the premise that like, she's word salad when she's like, just having dinner with someone. She's clearly like, you don't wind up in that situation

just being dumb, like that's stupid. One thing I thought was interesting is Sarah told me that she heard hundreds of Kamala ads on podcasts, right? And that they were spending aggressively on podcast advertising, right? And I genuinely did not hear a single Kamala podcast ad because I only listened to one podcast, which is Technology Brothers and Founders. So two podcasts. but i don't even listen to our podcast we just record it live we we let uh our vp ben uh rip it so founders and we don't do political ads we do yeah yeah much more important ads yeah we would do an ad if if a candidate wanted to come on

and talk to us about how they're leveraging uhintech platforms like Ramp to run a more efficient campaign. We would do some type of integration like that, but not a straight political ad. I would also have both candidates on to talk about their watch collections. Yeah. Trump has a fantastic Vacheron Constantine. I'm sure. It's beautiful. Yeah.

He has several solid gold watches. Kamala has a wonderful watch collection as well. She's got some. And Obama. She's got good taste, actually. Obama, through his administration, he wore a Secret Service watch that was gifted to him by the Secret Service. Amazing. I just thought that was so cool.

Yeah. I don't think he's actually become a watch guy. And I think a lot of it was like, you know, the everyman. Like, you don't want to show up. Trump's whole brand is like gold-plated shit. You don't have to be a watch guy to have a watch you love beyond the everyman, like you don't want to show up. Trump's whole brand is like gold plated shit. But you don't have to be a watch guy to have a watch you love beyond measure.

Exactly, that it has significance. And so that's where I would want to take the conversation. Yeah, and I, you know, one of, for me, Kamala has a thing for Hermes, right? And it's sort of under discussed, but she's got, you know, she understands, she's got, you know, uh, she, she understands she's America, you know, she's an American politician, but she appreciates fine European luxury goods. That's what you want out of a politician. Right. I mean, the other angle for us, if we were to interview the candidates

would be to talk about, you know, Donald Trump, the tech founder. and this is why it was so big when the all-in podcast had him on because you know they really stick to the unit there are political there I mean arguably more of a political podcast yeah but it's great that the tech founder yeah like Donald Trump the founder of social truth social well that's great let's move on to some Q&A but first I need to tell you about Steinway & Sons. Founded in 1853 by German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway in a Manhattan loft,

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So everyone knows that you can visit like a Steinway showroom and play pianos, but I bet you didn't know that you can have them ship you a physical template of the piano that you're considering buying to lay out in your living room or in your house to see where it fits. I thought that was really, really cool. I'm sure a lot of companies would just go for like the augmented reality thing, but I like that that physical like you can lay out your whole room and it's like a cut out and you can see okay this is the one that fits so anyway uh we love steinway here but back to the show let's do q a um this comes from uh uh ben uh oh steadfast guides john and geordie hear my lament for near eight long years i have labored as captain bound to a vessel that will neither sink nor sail, a cruel jest played by fate.

The golden dawns of ambition have now given way to Stygian twilight, the gleam of hope tarnished and bound in chains of mediocrity. Every course plotted, every wind sought yields only the same tepid tide, a stagnant pool where once roared an ocean of promise the ledger of my soul bleeds red ink the currency of resolve spent on visions that crumbled like clay under the strain of grasping hands tell me venerable geordie and john is there a course uncharted a horizon unclaimed that might deliver me from this purgatory must i forsake this craft wrought from sinew and sleepless nights to chase an uncertain new voyage?

Or do I persist, a wraith bound to a dream now turned tomb, until the last ember of spirit fades beneath the cold, relentless gaze of stagnation? I seek your counsel for the night deepens as my spirit falters. Guide me before the darkness swallows what remains. Yeah, so if you've been building for, you know, eight years. I know what's going on. Do you stick with it and hope that you'll have a breakout moment, find that product market fit, go exponential, or do you just try and sell

your company, shut it down, get an acquirer and move on to the next thing? What do you think? This screams burnout to me. Yep. Right. Uh, there's a lot of, you know, flowery language and, and, you know, the, uh, Ben, the guy who asked this, clearly an exceptional writer. But look, the guy's burnt out. Yep. He's sort of, I think any time as a founder, if you lose that sort of ultimate vision, right, like he's getting to a point where he doesn't quite know the path forward. And oftentimes as a founder, you have multiple paths forward. But if you're sort of there at this point where you can't make decisions one way or another, and you're sort of

just sort of stumbling along, that doesn't feel good. That's burnout. You know, this guy could go on a vacation. It's not going to really do anything, right? Because he's going to be on vacation thinking about the fact that he's burnt out. Yeah. so i actually know this guy and i was on a call with him and he came to me with a very like so he for just for some context they've raised like a decent amount of money they're like he's paying himself a salary it's not huge but he's like paying the bills right and he's in kind of stasis right and so i he came to me with this idea of like oh i want to make some more money for the company i'm thinking about like it was essentially like lead gen like selling the like the leads that his company generates and isn't

able to monetize and get down the funnel like sell those off and i was just like dude i don't think you're thinking big enough i think this is like not the right path. I think this is like, it'll be very incremental. It's not a path to a venture outcome. Exactly. It's just not a path to anything exciting. It's just going to be mediocre. And so what I was telling him was like, instead of like burnout,

I think you're right. But instead of going on a vacation, I told him he should just clear his whole calendar and figure out who the top 30 players are in his industry. The top three, like public company CEOs, billionaire investors, like the big people. And you should just spend your entire month, the next month, just trying to get meetings with them.

Just fly to where they are. Try and like, we saw this with the Truth Social thing. Go to Mar-a-Lago, figure out like, okay, this guy owns a big company in this town. Go there, meet him, network. And then like half the people I was mentioning, he was like, oh yeah, that guy cold called me like okay this guy owns a big company in this town go there meet him network and then and then like half the people i was mentioning he was like oh yeah that guy cold called me like three years ago when i was starting when i was building this company and like yeah you know we never ran

anywhere i was like call them back call them back and just try and see what how you can be helpful because it could be an acquisition it could be an acqui hire it could be a deal it could be something else here you do that you do that for a month if if that doesn't go anywhere you call up jeremy gaffon gaffon and company yep and this is exactly the kind of opportunity you know we kind of special situation i think you showed me like one of the one of the um he forwarded his investor update or something like that uh not a bad company, right? Nope. Five, six million of ARR growing 30% a year. That is a good business under most evaluations, but it's not a venture scale opportunity anymore.

Yeah, it's tough when you've raised 15 mil. And so go to Jeremy. He'll help figure out all the different sort of stakeholders and find a win-win going forward. Your VCs have different incentives than you do, right? You have, you've been in this business for eight years. You still care about the industry. You're an expert in the industry and with the right capital stack and approach to growth,

you know, this could, this business could eventually sell for 50, $60 million. And it's going to take a little bit of time to get there. But if you kind of, it really is a, kind of a uh uh uh it's not it's no longer a venture product right so you're sort of treading water and not embracing reality um and going with gifan and companies is a much better option than just shutting the company down and people kind of like know this deep down at the later stage where you know if you're doing 100 million arr it's like, okay, private equity exists, everyone knows Bain, KKR, all these companies

that are very obvious and they're probably calling you, or strategic acquisition that could be very valuable, or maybe you try and take the company public, but people don't realize that like this, this like kind of zombie stage where you've done series A, series B, but never really hit escape velocity, those two options still exist. It's probably just something more like an acqui-hire and more like a special situations deal B stage where you've done series A, series B, but never really hit escape velocity. Those two

options still exist. It's probably just something more like an acquihire and more like a special situations deal with somebody like Jeremy. So anyway, good luck to you, Ben. I hope you figure it out. Hard press for a month and then give Jeremy a call. That's what I would do. Yeah. Try and get the acquihire done. Try and get some weird deal done. Try and kind of just break something loose that's truly new and bold and has the upside. Don't focus anymore. Like you've already built the business to the point where it's cashflow neutral. The business works, it's just not there. So you need to either take a really big swing of the fence with like a new partner or do the acqui-hire, go mentor under

somebody who's really successful, then get back into it, or sell the company and restructure the whole cap table with Jeremy or someone. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. So, our first post comes from Guy, who is quote tweeting us. He says, there's two Chad looking guys in a suit discussing Goblin's tweet and my note, I lolled IRL. That's great to hear.

That's great to hear. I mean, as much as we're here to deliver hard-hitting business strategy, we're also here to deliver some laughs. Exactly. Just because we're dead serious about the show doesn't mean you can't get some real enjoyment out of it. And here he says, please, guys in suits, film yourselves earnestly discussing my tweets too well here it is guy here it is first of many i would guess yeah i think you're going to be in the regular rotation uh you have a long a long path in front of you um but yeah goblins tweet i actually don't remember what goblins tweet was but i imagine it being very deranged and having a lot of jargon.

Look, you know, shit posting gets shit posted about a lot, but it's serious, right? It creates trend. It sort of influences the zeitgeist, and it helps us better understand the world. Yeah, has a deeper meaning sometimes. So cheers, guy. Get out there.

Post more. Send us your best posts, and you might be on the show. Let's go to Max Meyer. Max says, the upper Midwest is a 10 out of 10 region. It has everything. Chicago, a proper city, massive metro on an ocean-scale lake. West Michigan, a temperate area warm enough to grow Chardonnay grapes. I didn't know that.

The largest arable land region on Earth and the greatest college towns in the USA. We should do a Technology Brothers meetup to do a wine tasting in the Chicago area. I think we should host a live show in this Iowa stadium that he's hosting at. That'd be amazing. A college tour. Will it fit 100,000 people? Yeah, that's the main problem.

I mean, maybe if we add extra stands, extra seats in like the infield, we could fit 110. But I mean, we'd have to charge a lot. It's lot it's gonna be tight yeah we'd have to charge a lot but i mean you price gate eventually yeah we'll live stream it yeah everybody should be able to go yeah it'd be great um max is max has been i think very vindicated the last few weeks uh the guy's been uh loud and proud about certain viewpoints that he has. And, uh, I think he's going to be on the right side of history on this one. He was wrong about something,

which I completely agreed with him on. And, uh, it was that he, he didn't think Biden was going to drop out and he bought, and he bought like a hundred bucks. Yeah. He put, he put like a hundred bucks on poly market when it was like, you know, Biden to drop out 80%. And he was like, I think it's fake. It's not going to happen. It doesn't make sense. And I was like, dude, like good job putting your money where your mouth works.

Like, I believe that too. And we were both wrong. I'm glad he didn't put the full Arena balance sheet on it because it's a great publication. It is. I think we have a copy here somewhere, but... It's laying around here somewhere. Yeah, Arena is fantastic.

We had it in the first episode um but yeah i'm really excited for more more editions of arena and he should try to he should potentially explore going to a daily uh newspaper right because like the news cycle moves quickly i like i like something that you can just sit there and enjoy on the weekend and have you know a quarterly or monthly um it's a great obviously like ramp up as fast as possible it's the kind of thing that you get in the mail and you and you put it in your briefcase and you say i'm going to bring this on my next vacation yep um you know in a few weeks and i'm going to just really sit down and enjoy this you know well and i mean the design was

fantastic and the sponsors he's monetizing I saw a lot of great companies advertising. A lot of independent publishers say, oh, we're going to do fully reader supported. It's like, no. Max understands that the best content in the world should be monetized. It should be supported by companies that want to support the publication too.

Because companies, you shouldn't ban companies from supporting your publication, right? I was looking at this week's Economist. Ad on the back, Cubitus. Cubitus. Tech Sleep. Yep. Yep.

Yep. It makes sense. We could do a whole deep dive on the Cubitus. And if you read through the Economist, they do a great job balancing the ads. Like it's not overwhelming like a lot of publications, but there's just enough. And it's just nice.

And I look forward to flipping it over to the economists and seeing it. Oh, who do they got this week? The ads are, you know, in the economists, I would say that 80% of the ads

are deeply relevant to me. And so I look at it more like a service. Yeah, it's the same thing for Arena. Every single ad that they ran, I was like, this is cool. And I like this company more

because they're supporting Max. So cheers to Max. Thanks for everything that you do. Let's go to Shane Copeland, the founder of Polymarket. What a great story. So he posts this picture of him in 2020, four years ago. He says, 2020, running out of money, solo founder, HQ in my makeshift bathroom office.

Little did I know Polymarket was going to change the world. And man, what a setup. That is terrible. Yeah, yeah, that's a start. Such a bad setup with an empty water bottle. And the mouse is a crazy mouse. The mouse on the wicker basket is crazy. And the plastic water bottle i mean i think

shane somebody whose testosterone levels are probably so high he needed to take off the edge and have some microplastics yep to bring it down a bit but uh still from the from the bottom to the top the best part about this is that if you look at the image it looks like he like got frustrated punched the wall and like was like yeah yeah yeah yeah he probably did it's a testosterone that's right yeah yeah that's probably he punched the wall and then was like okay i need to have some microplastics yeah yeah exactly but man what a what a run what a run for polymarket and just dominant i think they got like 80 percent 90 percent liquidity on around the election. Just complete. What outcome? Yeah. What do we have any idea how much volume they did in the last month?

I think it was like 3 billion just on the presidential election. Yeah. And then, and I think, I don't know. I think it was like 60, 40 election versus non. And now a bunch of,

um, other stuff, a bunch of sharp, uh, sharp founders are actually creating markets to be able to short their companies. We have a post on that. Yeah, so we'll get...

3.6 billion. 3.6 billion on... Wow, that's massive. Yeah. Am I going to be able to pull it up? It's too hard. There's too many here. We'll get to it.

We'll get to it. We'll come back to that one. But... Oh, here it is. So Avi Schiffman says, never been more bullish on friend please bet against my failure and he's using manifold but i'm sure most founders will wind up on polymarket pretty soon and it says will friend have 10 000 daily active users by november 8th 2025

and it's at 50 50 right now and you can go and effectively short his company because there's been a lot of trash yeah for all the people for all the people that think he spent too much on his domain yep that was a big uh i think he um one word.coms are back during the ai era obviously sam altman saw what avi did with friend and decided i'm gonna get i'm gonna get chat.com i guess a family just launched today some crypto thing do they have chat.com. I think I saw family just launched today, some crypto thing. Do they have their.com? I don't know. I thought they had a.io.

Okay. Maybe they have a.com. They had the axe handle. Yeah, yeah, which is at this point. It's actually funny. The branding of a one-word domain is so strong in AI that I assumed it was an AI company. Like, oh, some app to manage your family,

but I guess it's a crypto thing. Yeah, but Avi. But I love this. I love this. Avi is so convicted. So he's building a wearable for AI. Yeah, so Avi's building an AI wearable that's for his friend.

You went viral with this very controversial video about going and living your life in San Francisco, but also talking to your AI friend and having these kind of Black Mirror-esque interactions. And I think the video was tuned perfectly to be not quite just techno optimistic so it wasn't tone deaf like the people that made it and him yeah he's also he's a technologist but he's also he's not uh he sort of has this understanding that technology is not always good or bad like sometimes it's sort of this neutral thing

where there are going to be people, if he continues to execute, there's going to be people that become madly in love with their friend.com wearable companion. There's going to be people that just use it here and there and like it's a part of their life. Some people might use it as their personal trainer. It's going to be massively positive for some people.

I'm sure it'll be negative for some other people. And that's just the nature of technology. It's impossible to say that any technological product is inherently good or inherently bad. And anytime you get into like binaries, I think it's. But overall, like this guy is putting it all out on the line. He's doing this sort of build in public approach, but basically saying every single week, I'm going to win, I'm going to win, I'm going to win.

Not too dissimilar to Steinman, just sort of a different approach. Yep, totally. Love it. Well, good luck. Let's go to Lee Edwards. He says, there hasn't been a better time to move to SF in 15 years.

AI is here. In-person is back. Tech vibes are off the charts local government no longer run by psychotic clowns legal to build housing again equal marriage and abortion rights are the law and he's quote tweeting someone that says time to move to sf then and i love this i i've always been super bullish on the gary tan like anti doom loop boom loop let's make sf amazing like it needs to be yeah so i was born in oakland children's hospital family you know it's been all around the bay for generations and generations the bay had gotten so bad that when i was graduating college i didn't even consider

moving back and in fact i remember year over year as a kid, my family, we'd go from Berkeley and we'd go over the bridge into the city. I remember just going less and less and less as I got older. And it was because it no, we are sort of like family tradition was to go into San Francisco, park our car and spend the entire day just walking around the city, going to our favorite restaurants. And that just happened less and less and less as it got less safe and just less enjoyable to be there. And I just remember as we started to really needing to dodge certain streets and neighborhoods and it just became like, you know, it just became a little bit dark. Uh, and so I think for all the technology brothers out there, men and women, it's been this, uh, over the last four years, you've had sort of Teal and Elon align and focus on the presidential election. You've had Gary focused deeply on San Francisco and having San Francisco, uh, you know, making a lot of positive progress on, on, uh, on things

simultaneously having new momentum at the federal level, San Francisco is going to benefit massively from both of those trends. So if you are, you know, we're a media business, right? We're media businessmen. We almost have to be in LA. Uh, but if you are a young technologist, it's hard to argue against building your company anywhere other than Silicon Valley. Yeah. There's, uh, the, the SF hate, I feel like was always a little overrated in the sense that most people, by the time they're having problems with San Francisco, they're in a stage of their life where they can move to Marin, Palo Alto, Atherton, Incline Village. It's really not an issue. It only becomes an issue once you have children.

Right. Yeah. It's really not an issue. It only becomes an issue once you have children, right? Yeah, but at that stage and I think that's probably part of why San Francisco got so weird was because I lived in the Tenderloin at age 22. Yeah, I was six foot eight 250 pounds like No one bothered me. You're 250 brother. It was fine. Like it was yeah It was dangerous but most of the people would be like in the middle of like Wrong guy like dealing drugs and they'd be like No, it wouldn't even mess with you

They just be like do you play basketball like they would be so taken aback by my physical size that it was just not an issue Yeah, I remember going to some party in the Tenderloin and there was a girl who was leaving and the girl who lived in the apartment Was like yeah, it was like you have to take my taser like and I was like, whoa That's crazy because I just I would just walk around. But it's like total privilege stuff. But then once you have kids, you're like, okay, I can't live that life anymore. But you can move to Palo Alto or Atherton or Incline Village. So here's what I want to see.

I want to see billion-dollar venture capital asset managers like General Cat and andreessen horowitz and people like adam newman i want them buying up all the housing and sf right if you're really long sf yeah like i want gary i want gary to be a slumlord almost right like the opposite no no i'm saying he starts as a slum slumlord he buys up all these you know studio apartments that are upgrades them bugs them yeah and uses ai to process all that data so that he understands oh this founder hasn't slept in three days get him a term sheet get him a term sheet immediately right yeah that's good no but i think i think one way to go long technology is to go long sf yep that's what gary's. And if you want to benefit from that boom, fund the startups,

but then buy up all the real estate. So you sort of recapture some of that value because a lot of founders paychecks end up just going towards their rent. Yeah, that's great. Let's go to Will Minitis. Will says many remarkable businesses that could exist don't because venture investors refuse to get creative with structure. If you took PE structuring brain and applied it to early stage investing, you'd see dramatically larger outcomes in traditional industries ASAP. And then Rune says, that's exactly how we ended up with the convoluted structure of open AI. And then Will says, does the nonprofit flip have a comp in PE? No, right?

I know the structured capped profit units are classic. Interesting. Yeah. So here's the thing you meet something that's been happening recently is founders are going out and pitching VCs and the VCs will tell them, is this a multi-billion dollar business or is this a something that could get to 20 30 50 million of arr off of like one or two rounds and one of the challenges is a lot of those businesses if the founders don't want to shoot for the multi-billion dollar outcome they could take like two three million dollars and just build a fantastic business but uh the vcs in theory should be able to buy a lot more of the company than they currently are. Right. So they're buying like if you want to go and if you're a YC company and the founders just

want to build like a fantastic business or a wonderful business, as some people would refer to it, they're still getting two on 20. When I think that if you wanted to take a much more sort of PE style approach, you should be like, cool, that's great if you want to do that. But we're going 50-50. We're going 50-50 or we're going to buy, it's going to be two on eight. You shouldn't give the same terms. But the issue is there's so much competition. There's so many seed funds, so many pre-seed funds.

The founders can just go and take two on 20 from some fund that thinks it's going to be a monopoly but it won't yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah and so right now the issue is there's just so much competition that you i don't think you can get these sort of like pe what what will's talking about is quite a bit more structure and he's thinking about bringing in debt earlier bringing in debt earlier you know there Bringing in debt earlier. You know, there's like General Catalyst buying a health system, stuff like that. I think all that stuff is cool. But it's hard to do PE styles early stage because there's just so much, so many different people that will give you that three on 15 or two on 10 or two on 20. And I think that competition just drives up prices and ultimately lowers returns.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I see it a lot in deep tech, hard tech, where there's someone running a machine shop. It's probably going to be a great business, super important, but it might not have monopoly supply. We talked about the drone motor company. Something like that is critical to the supply chain for so many companies, but probably not going to have the margins of- Should be a widget company. Exactly. So it's like, how do you get the next generation of founders

excited and incentivized around that? Right now, the pattern is go lie to VCs. It's basically just tell them that you'll be a trillion dollar company. Yeah, and the issue is if you take money with this venture narrative, you have to do a lot of things that your customers don't give a shit about. If you're making drone motors and your customers are like, you make great drone motors, I'm going to keep buying them. And then you're like, well, actually, we're drone motors as a service

and we're going to go sell our software. And they're like, okay, well, I like you because you make good drone motors and I want more of those. It's funny because the classic business school case study is like XYZ company makes XYZ widget and they do X amount of EBITDA. And like, how would you lever it up to ensure that they can maintain profitability?

And yeah, I think, yeah, what Will's getting at is maybe there's more of these sort of businesses that look, uh, like Gafon and Co that just take a unique lens on venture, which is to say we're focused on returns. We're willing to make investments to generate that we think can generate returns that fit this profile because in pe there's a lot of pe funds that are that are like we don't want a 30x at all we don't care we just want these sort of base hits over and over and over and that's what we've told our lps so i think that what i was talking to you originally about, there's so many different seed funds that will give you two on 12. Yep.

Right. If you come in with a slightly different approach, there's opportunities there. If you're just thinking about it from the lens of we care about returns first and foremost. And I think even Bryce from NDVC is taking this approach. He had created a really structured product historically with NDVC, but now he's just a $50 million fund that's saying we're looking for this unique type of founder that just wants to build a great business.

And worst case scenario, you build a good business. Best case scenario, you sort of build this generational company and we'll make money either way. Yeah, so maybe more permanent capital, maybe more debt financing, less of like a 10 year with a couple of year extension timeline, and then potentially a different, a different target around zeros. Like a lot of early stage VCs are like, yeah, 90% of the portfolio is going to go to zero.

A lot of the great growth funds right now have a no zeros mandate. Like they won't invest in something if there's any risk that it goes to zero. And then they're underwriting against like a 20% IRR. And I wonder what that would look like if you said, I'm an early stage investor, but I do different structured deals, but my hurdle rate for zeros, like less than 50% my companies will go to zero yeah as opposed to 90 because i'm unicorn hunting uh very different the unicorn maybe that looks like leveraging yeah it became so sexy it was like you know if you can be the first investor in uber and the rest of your portfolio is trash like that doesn't matter because you got the stamp of like you got into the yeah that incentivizes yoloing where people are like, eh, this team is like, okay, but it's a good category.

We want exposure to this. Like what's the sort of approach within venture world and angel investing of, I'm only partway convicted in this business. I'm still going to invest, which I've across like 50 angel bets i've done that before where i'm like i see some issues with this business but i like the founder so i'll do it yeah or uh the team is not is maybe like a seven out of ten but like the products at 10 out of 10

let's do it anyways and i think think that, yeah, the venture investors that are like, no, we're gonna be, because the private equity world is just much more serious in the way that they evaluate companies, right? Like they bring a seriousness to the asset class that is for many funds missing, right? It's interesting. Let's go to Bazelord.

Bazelord says says daily reminder that at least one of your needs to, at least one of you needs to start an IQ enhancement company as soon as possible. And my, my take is, uh, already, it's already been done. 10 points, 10 points, 10 points. Yeah. We, we, we know about the performance enhancing drugs for iq caffeine nicotine uh some sleep some exercise high testosterone no it's funny because the original lucy pitch was smart nicotine yeah which intelligent intelligent nicotine right um but yeah i think it can take different forms i think that uh i think there's a big business to be made what bays is talking about selling to technology workers to say like we're going to take a cohesive

look at how to increase your iq yeah yeah i mean brian johnson was talking and measure and measure it he was saying that like people care a little bit about their their health and longevity but it's very abstract but if you can tell them that you get on this diet and you will be performing better at work immediately, that has a much more acute ROI. And so you can kind of underwrite the hassle of doing the diet. And I think there'll probably be more of that. I think, I'm not sure, Brian might be able to pivot into like becoming,

like the Brian Johnson of the mind might just be Brian Johnson, but it also might be someone new who's focused purely on that yeah instead of longevity or instead of health or instead of athletic ability but yeah i would i would i would invest in that business a business that basically says like we're going to test your iq and then we're going to continue to test it quarterly and we're going to do figure out all the different modalities whether it's health supplementation because of the way the the fda regulates these products it's very hard for us like we can't put caffeine in our gum that has nicotine you can't mix actives but if you're more of like a health clinic you could actually prescribe caffeine nicotine differently you

could like move through these things and actually take more of like a holistic view in the same way that a lot of those men's health clinics look at your testosterone markers your biomarkers look at your sleep exactly yeah something like that for for intelligence and performance in the workplace does seem very very valuable if somebody can pull it off but uh but it's a hard business and i don't think it's power law i think it might be more of like you know it's a it's a consultancy it's a clinic there's uh's Andrew Herr does this at Fount Bio. You know him? Oh, yeah. And again, his is a little bit more just general health focused. It'd be interesting to see one of those branded purely as performance in the workplace.

Let's go to Gabriel. Do you know this guy? He's in Australia. He's the man. I don't. I think I follow him. Obsessed with bodybuilding. Yeah.

Great. Just great dude. Never met him in person, but all time poster. Yeah. So he says, I often stumble across an internet phrase i don't understand that has a natural humorous vibe or cadence longhouse many such cases etc an anime avatar just told me to get in the crystal it's a beautiful crystal we'll drop that at the office and see how it goes this was great at uh at hereticon yeah we were in a conversation there was maybe six or seven people and i think that david senra was only

he's like he's like not on he's not online right he's in books in books he's focused he's either recording the podcast he's reading or he's with his family and so going to one of the most online offline events or or like networking it was funny because i'd have to be like i'd have to be like yeah that's that's what um basically like the longhouse means like yeah he's like oh okay okay yeah well that's why we're doing this podcast he'll learn all the brain rot terms through this yeah exactly this is really the bridge in the way that is the bridge every Every time a brain rot term or word breaks through to popular culture, there's already six or seven new brain rot terms that are replacing it on the timeline.

And so we want to surface those. The traditional Gen Z brain rot is like skibbity toilet, Ohio. The Rizzler. The Rizzler. But then tech has its own brain rot terms, like word cell, shape rotator. And it actually can be, if you know those, those are like buttons that you can press

in a pitch with a VC. Whereas if you're saying the right brain rot terms, it signals in group, right? So even if you weren't a PM at Uber or you didn't go to Stanford, you can still signal that you're a part of that. This person's extremely online. I actually don't know know what getting the crystal. It's a beautiful crystal. Do you know what that means? So I think we should, I don't know what that one means yet.

We got to figure that out. Gabriel, I want you to write in, tell us the truth. What does it mean? Break it down for us in the replies to this video. I want an explanation. There's people that, that sort of index YC companies. There's people that, a buddy of mine, Joey, is a Teal Fellow, and he's got like a whole fund that's kind of focused on just backing Teal Fellows, which is super smart. I think we should create the poster index, which is a fund that's just dedicated. If you can post bangers, it is a proxy for your ability to get attention, which can drive customers and capital and all these things. So there is a bit of a meme that it's like, oh, if a CEO is like posting too much, the company must be doing poorly. So here's the thing.

So here's the thing. I think Augustus is every other CEO that wants to be a poster ceo should study him yep because all he's coming he's coming out of the woodwork once every couple days banger back to business back to business right and so there's this like yeah if i see if i see somebody posting like oh there's like this there's this meme that's going viral and everyone has their take on it and so you like transform it into like well what if the trump thing was about docu sign like you're just getting a thousand likes but it has nothing to do with your business. And you're just like trying to get like Twitter clout. Like that's not what we're talking about here. Yeah. I think that if I see

a portfolio company CEO's name four times in the timeline per day, and they're not selling to venture backed startups. Risky. Risky. Risky. It's a big, it's kind of a bit of a red flag. There's a, there's a little bit of a Balmer peak on the post. Exactly. Let's go to John Fio. Oh, this one's rough. So Adam Rankin posts, I promoted my GF and she's showing an engagement ring. And so they're getting married. So congratulations to you, Adam. But Fio chimes in with something not controversial at all and says we gotta pool all the couples that announce their marriage and or child in the form of a startup business joke and study them very closely over the next 50 years and publish the report we all deserve to know how these ended

up i don't think you need 50 years i think think you probably need 10. After somebody's crossed the sort of decade. I think he's underweighting norminess. I think a bigger part of the story here is something about the Warp team attracts. And I love Ayush. But it attracts dunking. Yeah, it does. They get dunked on a lot. The dunk rate is crazy like that's like the dunk the dunk rate is is crazy um they almost it's good for one of their head of growth i think said he was potentially going to go

anon because he's just too much dunking but uh but yeah i don't i don't know i think there's there's uh you know they make they makep, where Adam works, makes payroll software for businesses. If he's trying to sell to more startups, one way to do that would be announcing. Make a startup joke. You want to make people feel connected to you, bring your marriage into the workplace, and make a startup joke. But no, I think. I think Theo might be under-monetizing here. He needs to.

Yeah, no, I think Theo might be under-monetizing here. He needs to... Yeah, no, I think Theo... I would study... I would... If Theo wanted to start a research group that just studied things like this, I would donate to it. That would be interesting.

Kind of a Nat Friedman style. Yeah, exactly. Public good. I agree that there's something interesting there. But again, you know, it's marketing, bro. He's got to pay the bills

one way or the other. Let's go to Enchilada surfboard says 90 of defense tech investors couldn't tell you the difference between cots and gots if their vacation homes depended on it do you know these terms cots and gots no so i dug into this it's commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf and then some like early it's a dual it's a dual yeah I think a big big thing with defense yeah so like yeah exactly like no one knows this stuff yeah but like thankfully I wasn't betting my vacation like an early and oral person and it was like some early and or old joke that like turn here's like here's the i guess to simplify it so um uh a lot of defense tech investors when they're evaluating a business

are they they're kind of deciding if it has sort of dual use applications like i uh invest uh i'm an advisor to a company called aeon which makes tactical missile systems. And I made that bet because Nauid and Joe, the founders are just phenomenal. They've made like 10 years worth of progress in about a year. And so I don't consider myself a defense tech investor. But one thing that was very obvious with their business is there's no dual use, right? It's not like they're going to sell some missiles

to the sort of retail market or commercial market and then it's all in on the USG, right? If they don't get the USG as a customer long-term, the business isn't viable because then they can't even go international, right? Like they need to win that customer first. And so, whereas deterrence, deterrence has like a bunch of commercial

customers where it's a viable business even without like securing an oil field or something right yeah yeah got it yeah i i need to dig into more of this but i think the kotz versus gotts thing is is also related to andrew's early like sensor tower development do you remember this like they they built this sensor tower and they were using literally like off-the-shelf gaming nvidia gpus to run open source like computer vision algorithms like image net and so it was very much like hacked together from literally stuff you could buy it like a best buy yeah but they created a government product from commercial off the shelf as opposed to the way a lot of the previous primes would do it, where it's like, okay, well, like, does it run Windows XP?

Like, we have to use the stuff that's government off the shelf. And that creates a lot. I think that's a component thing. Yeah, yeah. It's more about, like, do you have this attitude of, like, can you just go to Home Depot and get the screw that you need? Or do you need to acquire, like, the $150,000 bag of screws from Boeing? Well, didn't Anduril do this with their latest suicide drone?

Oh, I don't know. Where I think they were using, they had to use. I don't think they call it that. Different branding. FPV drone, whatever you want to call it. Interceptor. Tactical recon surveillance. It's a kamikikaze drone it literally blows up as it gets to the target um but um you know i think they ended up having to use chinese components yeah

some of them because yeah some of them are just not available them here but obviously apparently there's there's only one tin smelting organization in the United States and they are only able to supply like 5% of the tin. And so it's like, if you're in the business of like, okay, we need tin for something, it's like good luck cleaning up your supply chain, just wait 20 years for this one guy

to like grow his business. Because it's not happening. Yeah, but there should be a whole cottage industry of people that are looking at all these deep tech, hard tech, defense tech companies getting funded and being like, I'm going to go build PE style businesses to service these, basically like manufacturing businesses, sourcing businesses. But I think a big part of this is also just like breaking down the problem into something that's more manageable by like a startup engineering team i talked to a guy who worked on the blue origin uh rocket engine versus and was comparing it to the the merlin engine designed by uh tom mueller at spacex and uh the one of the things that allowed spacex to iterate so quickly was that the so when you see uh starship go up you see like the 36 engines i think that's how many are like a bunch of engines it's's a bunch of smaller engines. Every one of those engines, I think

at one point, I don't know if it's true now, but like could fit in a pickup truck in like the back of a pickup truck. Whereas the bigger engines, you need a crane. And so all of a sudden it's like the safety requirements, like just the risk, the level of equipment, like anybody can drive a pickup truck. So if you need to take your piece of equipment. And so there's this question of like, how can you decompose something that is a larger capability, like an F-35 into a bunch of suicide drones? Well, the suicide drones are going to be able to be, okay, the pieces are smaller. You don't need cranes for everything. When you start doing these mega projects, things really, really slow down. And so there's a, it seems like there's a lot of arbitrage right now in just deep tech, hard tech startups

taking something really huge and then decomposing it into something that's more manageable and smaller. This is even Valor's trying to do, just shrink down the size. Yep, the nuclear reactor. Yep, exactly. And yeah, the guy I was talking to

is actually building Fusion Avalanche and it's small enough to fit in a truck. And so he's just like super pilled on that and like really wants to build that. Anyway, let's go to Luke Metro and a role employee. Love this guy. Uh,

we need a, God damn it. Completely unrelated to business. Uh, we need a liberal Joe Roga. He literally interrupted Peter Thiel speech about wokeness to talk about how the pyramids were actually x-ray power plants. What are you people talking about? Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, Joe Rogan, teal speech about wokeness to talk about how the pyramids were actually x-ray power plants what are

you people talking about yeah yeah i uh joe rogan is liberal yeah um and he's talked about that yeah uh he endorsed trump also i think this just speaks to the fact that rogan's like a one-on-one type of person like he's he's he's a he's like a comedian that can pull like a huge group of people uh yeah he's tinfoil hat guy who loves aliens he's very conspiratorial but then also uh you know loves ufc and he he's kind of combined all these different disciplines and uh you can't just like you can't just copy the Joe Rogan experience. Here's a conspiracy. Here's a conspiracy.

Here's a conspiracy. So Rogan is a liberal. Yes. He's voted Democrat like his entire life. Yes. He said this recently. And Trump is a Republican, but Joe Rogan endorsed Trump. Yes.

And what is the link between trump and uh rogan ufc oh okay yeah joe rogan is one of the top commentators yeah one of the top commentators for the ufc okay trump is arguably the biggest fan of the ufc right he'll he'll leave the campaign trail to go yeah be at a fight uh and so maybe that's something there where Joe Rogan said, I'm going to put my politics aside and I'm going to back Trump because it'll, it'll increase the UFC's like notoriety and platform and put it on the map. Cause I think that by the end of the next four years, UFC will be a baseball.

We'll have to have sort of stepped aside. No longer America's pastime. America's pastime is combat and combat sports. Well, then maybe if you want, maybe there's some precursors to building a liberal Joe Rogan. You need a liberal UFC. Yeah. And you need a liberal comedy circuit. Yeah.

So maybe the angle. So the next four years, the Dems go heavy into UFC, AOC sitting in the front row. Or something different. Or maybe she starts. Maybe they become the bare knuckle party. Yeah. Or car jitsu. Have you seen car jitsu?

That's good too. Where they fight in the car. That's good. Or pillow fighting. Yeah. Or any of the slap boxing. Yeah. They could do any of those.

But they need to carve out one of the fighting sports. Yeah. And I think just we need it. And then the liberal Joe Rogan will emerge. We need a liberal. Yes. You know, we need a young Bernie who emerges through bare knuckle boxing. There we go.

Yeah. That is probably the next Bernie. It's not going to come from some small town in Vermont. No. The next Bernie will be a slap boxer. Come rise to the ranks. Yeah. Let's go to Sahil Bloom.

He says, A harsh truth I wish I could tell my younger self. There is no such thing as later. The journey to success is filled with laters. I'll spend more time with my kids later i'll find more time for my health later i have more freedom later i'll enjoy myself later the brutal reality later never comes it's just another word for never most of the things you say you'll do later won't be possible by the time you're able to do them the kids won't be younger later either start designing your life now or live life with regret later okay here's a good example yeah uh yesterday i made my two and a half year old son work the entire day doing

deliveries of aurora systems to high profile celebrities around la uh you, you know, uh, you know, uh, to, to sort of, uh, support the launch. And, you know, this was a Sunday, a lot of people aren't, aren't working on Sundays. And I realized he's never going to be able to be this young again and be able to grind this hard again. Like if I don't, if I don't like allow him to do this, he's never going to forgive me. He's going to be asking me when he's 12, dad, 10 years ago, like, why did you let me chill on the weekends? Right. Like, why wasn't I grinding?

Why wasn't I figuring out, uh, you know, he can't type on a computer yet, but he can lift one of these systems and carry it up a driveway and drop it off and ring the doorbell. Right. He can do that. So I think the lesson here is however old your kids are, you probably need to get them grinding harder and like yesterday, basically. Yeah, I think that's maybe what this post missed. You know, it says I'll spend more time with my kids later.

I'll find more time for my health later. What about levering up? You should be levering up now today the returns you're generating the returns you generating today yeah are because you levered up a month ago you should be taking the most risky bets today not later oh yeah i'll i'll find a 100 xer later yeah right yeah not gonna happen uh let's go to Sean Frank. He's been on the show before. Of course. We love him.

He says, paid advertising doesn't build brand. And then the crazy guy. I love this image. I don't think this is a real emoji, but it's so good. Okay. So Ridge was a company that historically would never spend money on anything that wasn't directly generating revenue right so so they were and so sean has basically been on this yeah for approaching a decade yep and has absolutely

worked for them while all these well you know all birds was doing brand marketing these other d2c brands were doing pop-up stores yeah pop-up stores like big celebrity endorsements so ridge basically had spent probably 250 million dollars on meta ads before they ever did a collaboration with like mk right so that's brand marketing now they do some brand marketing in the form of of sort of these like massive giveaways and they maybe do like some of it more now but they're the the reason that this tweet holds weight and sean is the the perfect uh example of delivering um delivering like real uh business lessons in the form of shit posts but the reason this holds weight is the is the ridge brand is is stronger today than almost

any d2c brand in their in their um in their in their category or cohort of like when they were sort of coming of age so and you know what's interesting is that like they these posts from both shauna and connor yeah build their brand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I now associate Ridge with incredible performance marketing. And now I want to pull out a Ridge wallet just to let everyone know. I care about ads. I care about ads.

I'm not kidding. Like I respect performance and I respect- Marketing efficiency. Yeah, marketing efficiency. Yeah. Because it is a skill. So Ridge was one of the companies to really focus on direct response creator ads on YouTube. And I helped them do this back in the day.

And when Ridge works with an influencer that says like, hey guys, today's sponsor is Ridge. I use the ridge when i'm out fishing but it also is great on date night yep like use my code in the description that obviously builds a brand right they're aligning with a content creator and you see who they're advertising with and who they aren't yeah and so the mkbhd stuff that tells you like mkbhd's whole thing is like super high production value, super cinematic, like really thoughtful analysis of these consumer goods. And so being in that milieu is much more valuable than someone else that they could advertise on. Like it's just,

they've cultivated like, what does your brand stand for? Like you could literally, if you're thinking about building your brand, just put together a mood board of popular influencers and then just go and sponsor them and then that will be your brand yeah and it's like yeah like ridge ridge has probably a million guys out there that love ridge because theo vaughn loves ridge yeah theo vaughn uh is probably you know has for the last like whatever is is since uh Sean initially did the deal with him, he's probably objectively more of a wallet salesman than a comedian, right? Like, he's one of the top wallet salesmen in the world. Yeah, he can go and sell out comedy clubs,

but he's selling wallets at a higher velocity than anyone else. I mean, it's the same thing with Red Bull. Like, you look at, like, Max Verstappen and everything that Max Verstappen stands for with, like, this, like, relentless ambition. verstappen stands for with like this like relentless ambition it's like crazy energy and and i just get like that's what red bull's brand is now because of that and so yeah this this idea yeah very very valuable and and certainly underrated um let's go to raul zero interest rates. He says, the first day in Williamsburg and he sees a spray painted sign on the concrete for an ad for Sonia AI therapy.

Listens better than your ex. At talk to Sonia and a call to action for the app store. What do you think about this IRL advertising? Is this legal? Can you just do this? Why are we not? Is there a company that will just go spray your spray paint everywhere? It's kind of like they don't advertise okay it's very i think it's illegal like it's basically like vandalism yeah it's vandalism uh i don't i don't uh but you could

go viral like this i mean this got 40k views that's probably yeah the play is the play is to probably do that once once in your backyard and have a friend post it and have it be interesting and weird it won't go viral if it's just something boring like whatever yeah i think this is uh in general i'm not a fan of this type of marketing because i think it makes the world more you know nobody likes ads more than me except maybe you yeah so we love ads but in general i'm not a fan of vandalizing property we did a little bit of this at Party Round, but it was more like using an existing graffiti wall and putting an ad on that,

which is designated as a place for graffiti. But yeah, I think there's more. I think that ad space that's underutilized is the plain circling SF. Like I'd like to start a technology brothers advertising division that just, that has planes every single day flying over SF that you can sponsor, which is like for Sonia, it might be like you're, you get no women talk to Sonia. Right. And if that was flying,

if you're like a meta PM and you walk out and you look up from your um what's that app that they that they all use that the um the like blind blind you look up from blind and it's like you get no women talk to sonia that's like probably in your qr code you zoom in and scan uh i'm i'm more yeah a fan of that i do remember what was it back in like 2018 ish maybe uh there was this like when bird the scooters came out and lime and yeah and it seemed like tech just realized like the sidewalk is free real estate i guess and you can just put stuff dude so here's a crazy story so i was working with a um with a startup back then that I just moved to LA and I was basically like, you don't need to pay me.

I just want to help out. I'll do it for equity. And we started doing these sort of like marketing stunt things and it was a skincare company. And so I had the idea to go put hotel like door hangers and I went and put them in Santa Monica. I put them on like 500 bird scooters in a day and within the same day we got a like a note from the the chief uh uh legal counsel or whatever

from bird being it wasn't quite a cease and desist but it was like stop right now the next so funny because like you're doing the bird thing to them. Yeah. It was perfect. That's amazing. Yeah. When that was happening, I was like, wait, so it's just free real estate. If you have wheels, like, can I just set up like a corner store on the sidewalk? If it has wheels under it, can I set up a gym or whatever I want? Like, is there any business that you can't stop? Yeah.

It was a wild, wild time. And I think most cities wound up developing yeah i'm surprised there wasn't like a bird for snack bars yeah like people that are just like here's like a vending machine like i'm just gonna put it right here let's go to aaron slodov he says it's still it's still one thing it's still under discussed that i think birds birds like real downfall started with that social media account that was like death to birds or forget what it was yeah i remember that and that was some of the best entertainment of the era technology brother because you could go see a bird get thrown off like an eight-story

skyscraper and that's just like that speaks to like the the childish teenage boy in everyone it was so entertaining i I remember following that. Yeah, that was really, really bad. They should have sent the season's assist to them. I'm sure they did, but it didn't work. Because it basically just encouraged everybody to like destroy the season. Yeah, go viral, like just do stuff.

And it just like made it feel like, and it was so destructive, like destroyed the environment, so messy. And yeah, they were destroying cars if you run over them. It was a mess. I was really happy when they banned them in my town. But also like weird memetic stuff.

You know that the founder was also named Travis and he was a former Uber guy. So it's one of those things where it's like, well, of course you back Traverse from Uber. Yeah, yeah, Traverse from Uber. Yeah, exactly. It was a wild time. So Aaron Slodov says,

creator economy should be reappropriated for manufacturing TBH. Yeah, I like this. This is good because it's like you're creating actual things instead of just content. But also don't appreciate the anti-content slander, bro. This is a real job.

Yeah. Well, Aaron is a content creator. He probably gets pretty decent expay outs. Yeah. And he's a content creator and he's a manufacturer. And he wrote that big piece for Pirate Wires, the industrialist manifesto,

the techno-industrialist manifesto. I wanted him to punch it up and give it a more controversial name, like B2B Sass is dead or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that will

get people angry, but I couldn't get that across the finish line, but very good piece, very long. Recommend you go read it. We need content creators out there creating courses that say,

here's how to make a million dollars in manufacturing. Like, yeah, buy a CNC. That's what actually, you know, stop the Shopify, drop shipping, your TikTok shop, TikTok shop stuff. Andrew Tate's just teaching you how to use a lathe yeah start a small scale manufacturing business in your hometown yep um that is the way we need to change the culture apprentice under some 75 year old guy who's been making you know hub caps for

the last 50 years yeah all those guys are going to end up shutting their business down because take it over like they do like three hundred thousand dollars a year in profit is not really but that's enough to pay that's enough to pay the monthly fee on a lambo yeah so you could literally be the hustle porn guy go and do that and actually wind up with the lambo yeah grow a little bit yeah just uh just don't bring in docusign just uh just run run it run lean run lean those docusign contracts they can get up into the eight figures real quick yeah uh let's go to patrick blumenthal he says uh my boy loud loud nightclub so what do you do drone targeting mostly oh loan marketing do you like it well it depends on the coverage area why well most guys i know who are in finance don't really like it it's the american psycho scene that's great this guy's just a meme machine he's a machine i don't

know how he puts out so much of this stuff everything's hand photoshopped he has no one on his team he's just like content mastermind he's a venture capitalist like he needs to like he needs to be the media he's supposed but i mean the dude's been to ukraine like a bunch have you talked about this yeah yeah of course i was on pirate wires with him uh a while back and it's pretty we did uh we hit the range together oh yeah it's back oh cool yeah he was telling me about that i think yeah he had to train up before his last his last mission but yeah american psych is just like a an endless pit of memes that just like it really speaks to people yeah one of the most uh i used to not really understand when my parents would be like oh this movie is a cult classic yeah but now you understand like when

we show our kids borat when they turn eight like we're gonna be like it's a cult classic like yeah it is interesting i wonder if there's something deeper here about like the defense tech guys being like the modern Patrick Bateman. It still doesn't feel that... Did you know that Christian Bale in American Psycho was something like 25 years old? Ben, you should look this up. He was 25 when he filmed that? He's definitely in his 20s. And it's crazy because he's playing...

It's almost like he's playing someone older. Totally. He's playing like a late 30s. That right because he's like a he was 25 in the movie so patrick bateman the character has to be over 25 just based on the track unless in the 90s you could make vp at 25 was that possible i know the youngest md at goldman sachs ever made it's not was in his in his 20s the character's 27 wow that's wild so that might have been like a little embellishment by brett east now it's funny because last last night i had this wild moment where i pulled up to the gate in my neighborhood and the security guy goes jordy

like my son just passed the bar and i was like, that's amazing. And my second question was, dude, how old are you? I thought you were my age. I seriously thought he was exactly my age. I never asked. And he's like, dude, I'm 46. Oh, there you go. And he's like, yeah, I just had kids young or whatever. Yeah, that makes sense.

But yeah, I feel like something about that sort of like 90s, early 2000s era movies, all the the actors wall street wall street was definitely this idea that you could go to wall street and finance in new york and in your 20s make it to the top yeah and that's 100 true in silicon valley and tech even today yeah but i don't think it's been true in man finance for decades. No, because over time, you need to create a ladder to keep people in their place. Yeah. I know a few guys that went and started funds pretty early, like hedge funds, and they trade public stocks. But you still want to go work at a fund first.

Yeah, exactly. Get that on your resume. All of them are in their 30s by the time they do that but um man what a wild time it would have been it would have been fun if they if wall street had been able to like keep that culture of like just such a meritocracy that yes a 25 year old can be a vp or an md or whatever yeah like i think it'd be a lot cooler and i think a lot of people would be going into it yeah it would be much much hotter make finance great again yeah just more meritocratic I guess but a lot of these a lot of these firms have like calcified to the point where they're like

they're not yeah because these guys if you're if you're 28 and you want to make 50 million dollars now yeah you raise a 500 million dollar fund with your absolute boy and you take you know that's how that's the only way to do it you can't just go do the right deals because the fees will get eaten away by the the more senior partners yeah yeah yeah tricky oh well we'll bring it back so nate o'brien says why would i pay an American a hundred thousand dollars a year when I can hire someone just as qualified in Argentina for a quarter of the price okay so Nate's smart um but when I and and I think this is generally a good take I think more people need to be looking at say why not both yeah why not both I think the the my the my counterpoint to this is that I like working with Americans,

like both recent immigrants, but also just Americans in person. Working in person is great. I think that there's nothing that beats even what we have right now, right? Which is you, me, and our vice president, Ben, in the same room, in an office, making a wonderful media business, right? You can't- Generational.

Generational, wonderful media business, very profitable. You can't sort of like, there's no amount of like awesome virtual employees that we could have that could recreate this feeling like you can't recreate it in slack so i just think um part of the reason to pay a premium is so that you can all be in the same room together and i think if you're operating a remote structure then you really have to start questioning yeah you know what the cure for male loneliness it's paying a hundred thousand dollars to an american exactly just hang out with you they have to be your friend and then they just have to hey you want to grab lunch you have to be hanging

out you got it yeah it's worth it it's worth it yeah yeah but i do think there's going to be this there there will be this sort of cultural yeah movement over the next 20 years where people are like, you know, at first it was by American. Then now it'll be like higher American, like keep those jobs here. Yeah. But I mean,

yeah, I mean, realistically you need, you need both, but yeah, I like that take. That's good. Cheers to Nate.

Back to Will. Will says work dinner should be illegal. They rob you from your family. you pretend to enjoy drinking with strangers get home late and feel horrible the next day work breakfasts are aristocratic separate lazy boys from from early to rise men feel great when you get to work early easily expensible it's great take great take great take uh i do feel like that about most the only time you should be having a work dinner is if you're closing a deal yep like funds wired everything's yeah it's a closing celebratory yeah right yeah doing a work uh work dinner just to get to know somebody's a waste of time i always suggest lunch yep i don't really like doing coffees that much because i i know the schedule i want to have

caffeine on and i don't want to like plan meetings around that yeah this is my hot take against the 996 thing i'm all for working 100 hours a week but yeah i think you should work 666 almost that's a little demonic but uh i think you should not be working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. You should be working 6 a.m. or 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. Get home, have dinner with the family. Because then if you wake up at 5, you can hit the gym, you can go to work breakfast, you can have a full eight hours in the office. We do.

And then you can get home with the family, have dinner and play, watch movies, do all the things you want to do with your family. Yeah. with a family, have dinner, and play, watch movies, do all the things that you want to do with your family, that early morning right before 9 a.m., it's really hard to have true engagement with the family in the way that you can at dinner. You can go out to dinner, you can cook. There's a lot of more things. We do the Hormozy method, which is 9, 5, 7.

9 to 5, seven days a week. Oh, okay. So you can have the morning moment with your kids. You can have dinner, but you're doing eight hours a day every single day, which is much better than five days a week doing 12 hours a day. You actually get more done doing the nine, five, seven. Yep. I like that.

They should ban work dinners. Easily doable on ramp ramp just ban any no expense after 5 p.m and unlimited before hopefully it gets implemented let's go to ryan i think it's pronounced macintosh is that right it's spelled a little bit different than macintosh uh but ryan says the doc you sign all hands and posts the dune photo which i love it's pretty seemingly pretty accurate how do they what somebody needs to i've literally made this exact same joke about the a16z all hands yeah with a massive festival pitch the full partnership it's huge it barely fit in the boardroom yeah no, but... But man, the DocuSign thing, like 5K likes,

it's just like constant banger. Everyone knows DocuSign has too many points. Every time, yeah. Hey, if you're an up-and-coming poster and you've been struggling to get hits, post a DocuSign joke. Yeah, this is the modern, like you know how people used to post

the two-factor authentication screenshot from Apple? And they're like, this is the best feature Apple's ever made. And it would go viral every single time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's the real alpha so taylor lorenz yeah uh when you listen to this if you want to um you know sort of regain and and sort of like uh sort of an olive branch to the tech community is to go and get hired by docusign and get pictures at their next all hands because that would be an amazing Taylor Lorenz investigative journalism behind

the scenes at a DocuSign. And what if it is like this? I could see it being like that. They're like, Hey guys, we're going over to the giant stadium for the all hands. Like the buses are, you know, and she's on the bus, like project Veritas style. Yeah. We definitely need the information to do project veritas for docusign what's yeah yeah what if it's all just like the most cracked engineers you've ever seen they don't have a single salesperson they're just building the most deep tech they've implemented

they built their own kernel their own operating system is awesome what if they have what if they have uh you know custom silicon for signing i bet they do all the way down it's like google has the tpu docusign i think they need to i think docusign should the docusign processing docusign should add autonomous drones that take off from this sort of centralized places film you signing it yep or they have a little printer that like prints it out yeah well if you need a notary you need a notary in person what if you could have a little printer that like prints it out. Yeah. Well, if you need a notary, you need a notary in person. What if you could have a humanoid robot come to your house when you're signing the mortgage papers? The humanoid robot is acting as the, whatever they call it.

I want a dog. I want a dog robot notary. Yeah, exactly. Notary. That's it. Yeah. Let's go to Bobby Goodlatte. He says, success should be celebrated in tech,

not demonized. I want to see more startup founders looking like this post exit, not apologizing. And it's Elon Musk with his McLaren F1. Okay, two things. One, Bobby is this authentically. Yeah. I was walking up to Faina for for hereticon i see a fantastic blue

ferrari yeah it's sort of really nice metallic blue i don't know the exact color code but um fantastic ferrari pulls up valet yours was red or black mine was gray gray okay subtle a little more subtle yeah um it was a day it was. You got to go red with the Ferrari. Red or white. It was a 458? No, no, no. What was his? His was, yeah, no, his was a 458, I think.

He'll correct us in the comments. But let us know. No, but Bobby's living the brand. He's sort of, you know, being a real leader here. Yep. I think one of the challenges and the reason that supercars haven't become more popular in, you know, Silicon Valley is that it's, you just can't street park a McLaren or a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or a Bentley. And you're going to coffee shops to meet with the next season's founders. In Gary Tan, San Francisco, you're going to be able to street park, you know, an Enzo, street park a LaFerrari, street park your P1. And that's something that, you know an enzo street park a lot ferrari street park your p1 yep um and that's something

that you know sam altman yeah and elon and gary can agree on yep and so they can all kind of like come together because we need safer streets in san francisco i mean they also need to fix the streets and make sure there's no potholes because you're driving a p1 gtr that's why the g wagon is such a popular car in los angeles the streets are actually so bad. You need it. You need something that's four wheel drive. You need good sort of like, um, yeah. Uh, perfect pavement, perfect pavement for the sports cars. But yeah, I mean, there is this interesting thing where, yeah, it became this like status symbol to say, Oh, I drive a Prius or whatever.

But I think people realize that like the flashy cars you know I hope that people can realize that it's not like if you are an engineer and you respect engineering and you made money in technology it's okay to respect the engineering of a car yeah it's okay to appreciate something that's like that's that's like beautifully made yeah like after atomic Murray car it's like it's it's it's incredible it's like it's iconic and that's like beautifully made. Yeah. Like after atomic Murray car, it's like, it's, it's, it's incredible. It's like, it's iconic. And there's so much to love about this. You know, the McLaren, uh, P1 or the F1, they, they wanted to reduce weight so much that

the CD changer in the front trunk, they made special magnets for it crazy spin to just to save like 50 grams from the cd changer yeah they didn't take the six disc cd changer out of the car as a technologist how can you not appreciate that yeah yeah so here's here's the gotcha so everybody would everybody likes to say you know sam altman had this thing of he didn't know equity and open ai and all this stuff uh which i don't think is true now but he they would always post pictures with him in his car collection and say see he does love money look at him driving this p1 or all these other cars he has it wasn't about the it was never about money it was about you know experiencing

beautiful products and that's why people don't realize about buying a supercar. You're buying a, a potentially daily experience with a one of one product. So if we want Sam to build safe AGI, you know, supercars are a perfect example of that. They go through rigorous safety testing to build this incredibly high performing vehicle. And we want anybody building AI to be experiencing a supercar, right? Because it's a good parallel for

sort of AI safety and you can have performance and safety at the same time. Yeah. It's very hard to imagine like living on the power law and driving a power law outcome without enjoying and respecting power law outcomes everywhere. And there's no car that's more of a power law outcome than McLaren. I want to see the average YC founder leaving Uber or Meta, joining YC, and sleeping in their supercar

outside of the YC offices, right? This is what they say. You can sleep in a GT3 RS they say you can't you can sleep in a gt3 rs but you can't raise a house exactly exactly yeah founders get supercars please i'm begging you uh so uh this is a reaction from sophie netcap girl um to a post by uh dakash gupta he says recently i started telling candidates right in the first interview that Greptile offers no work-life balance. Typical work days start at 9 a.m.

and end at 11 p.m. often later. And we work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays. And Sophie says, posting stuff like this is so cringe. It's fine to have a culture that self-selects for people that will put in long hours.

You want people committed to the mission, especially in the early days of a startup. But posting about it is just status signaling grind set hustle thing. What do you think? Yeah. I've never known somebody that posts about how hard they work that actually genuinely works hard. Uh, and so except for us, but yeah, yeah, but, but, uh, but yeah, that's, that's, we feel that's a part of our mission to promote hard work. Um, but, uh, but, but yeah, we feel that's a part of our mission to promote hard work. But yeah, ultimately, the people that work the hardest are not tweeting about it. They're not posting on LinkedIn.

They're not doing that. They're legitimately working really hard. And if you ask them about their schedule, they'll tell you, oh, I do 996, I do 957, whatever their schedule is. But yeah, Elon, when pressed on, tell us about your schedule. You're doing all these things, right? He'll say, Oh yeah, I work 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Uh, but he's not out there like just logged another 20 hours. Like he's a top poster in the world and he's not being like, just log 20 hours.

Uh, here's a link to our SpaceXx job board don't apply if you're not um so i think yeah i think uh sophie's right it's a way to get uh attention maybe that maybe that'll uh maybe that'll work well yeah but i don't think it should be coming from i think that's the kind of thing you want if you do an interview with a candidate and you're like this person's great you pass them to your cto to interview next and that engineer wants to ask the cto what's the work schedule they can be like oh we you know we we work really long hours people are online constantly but it shouldn't be the ceo leading it being like sure just so you know like to somebody who's like they're the the's like, dude,

this is one out of 30 interviews I'm doing and I don't even really wanna join your company and now you're telling me don't join if you're not, it's just gonna like. Yeah, also the timing on this stuff is super important. A few years ago when Google was like, well there's 20% time and family leave and pet leave and bereavement leave

and a million reasons to take time off, it was pretty counter-cultural to be like, hey, actually like our startup works pretty hard. And that was novel. And that got a lot of attention for the right reasons because maybe there was something there. But then pretty quickly it became like, okay, now like it's kind of status quo.

And if you're just jumping on this train right now, it's like coming out and being like, I'm bravely anti-DEI. It's like, okay, you're not Coin on this train right now, it's like, it's like coming out and being like, I'm bravely anti DEI. It's like, okay. Yeah. So good Google,

good Google stories. So my little brother and my fraternity, uh, he did an internship at Google in 2017. And I happened to be in the Valley, uh, working with a startup at that time. Uh, this was like a summer period.

So it was like a four three to four month internship yeah and he by the end his manager was like peter like i really like you but like you objectively have done no work like i don't know how i can sort of write a positive review and peter had in the lead up to that uh in the lead up to that summer he had maxed out a bunch of credit cards to buy Ethereum and Bitcoin. Oh, and it absolutely paid off. Like he just like became like very wealthy because of it. And I'm sure he's if he's listening to this, I'm sure he's like got his like whatever Bitcoin ticker up and he's just like still excited about it but like the guy just basically like went so long

crypto on credit cards that by the time he got to his google internship he was just like yeah i'm like low-key like the wealthiest kid that i know and and and so he would graciously have me over to work out in the gym great salmon dinners fantastic uh and that was the only real like time that i spent at the google offices but it yeah it felt like i felt like a college where people were kind of like doing the bare minimum to actually like get by and just wanted to have fun and and enjoy their their time on campus makes sense let's go to naval he says good vcs should be their own media this is this is a banger because because all's the master of all is the master of taking something that is why how to get rich without getting lucky yeah thread phenomenal got him on joe rogan yeah then eric turned his all of his tweets into a book

yep he's like phenomenal at this yeah but taking this sort of yeah but he's good so he's talking about this but he's also lived it which is great yeah yeah so many other vcs have done this well yeah i think um harry stebbings yeah even the work that eric did on the book i think nival's known for for posting being one of the top posters in the entire world uh in his own way right he's very oriented around brevity and taking big ideas and putting them into whatever i can't see from here but six or seven words yeah um but even the book eric's you know book the almanac over yeah like ravikant he that turned him into a uh he's a one of one of a handful of people that are true tech philosophers yep and um yeah this is this is this is why i like

think about it because i kind of knew nival and the book was you know based on the tweets and so i didn't think the book was going to be that big of a deal but it was it was huge yeah translated into a lot of languages and really opened up the business this is why anybody that's that's an lp out there should go and invest in uh pat's fund right pat blumenthal incredible poster uh you're sitting here like whatever 30 minutes ago saying like how does he keep coming up with this stuff he's just like and pat will get more impressions in the next year than most gps in the world combined and it just completely flips the model from like, okay, I need a horde of analysts, cold calling companies to they come to me.

Ventures all about likability and access, right? And like likability plus attention gets you that access and founders wanna take money from people that they like. So if you're a likable person, you should be doing more media, more posting, more podcasts, et cetera. Yeah.

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Let's go to TJ Parker. Former founder, sold his company for a billion dollars, I believe, to Amazon. Now at Matrix Ventures,

right? Health, health tech investor. Yeah, health tech investor. Phenomenal car guy. Great collector. Fantastic car collector.

Every time I post something stupid about cars, he always replies with some really good insight. I can bait him into telling me about cars. So he's got the coolest car club in America. Oh, yeah, that's right. In Park City. Have you been? I haven't.

Okay, we got to go at some point. He's basically spent a bunch of money, a bunch of his own money, building out this incredible facility in park city have you been uh i haven't okay we gotta go at some point he's you know basically spent a bunch of money a bunch of his own money building out this incredible facility that's becoming the hub of car culture yep in uh in utah and i think what he says he he has he had to take a while back that like really resonated which is that tesla should not be allowed to classify as a black car on uber oh yeah because there's nothing worse than like paying to like get like a black car on Uber. And then this guy pulls up in a model ass and you're like,

dude, like give me a break. Like, um, but, uh, here he says my two cents, don't bring your co-founder slash team to an initial meeting with an

investor. It's great to introduce them later in the process, but early on, it cripples your ability to build a relationship. If they're complaining about not being included, you can show them this tweet. It's so funny because this is clearly a subtweet where he had some argument as an investor with a founder

and he brought the whole team and it was like a very messy conversation. No, but sometimes this can create, totally create, if you have two founders that are both people people and like good at fundraising, it sometimes this can be, this can create, totally create. If you have two founders that are both people, people and like good at fundraising, it creates this dilemma where, oh, it's an important conversation. We should both be on it. And I a hundred percent agree with this.

You can't, two people cannot connect. Like if we had a third person here that was constantly butting in, like our rhythm would be totally thrown off totally and yeah I think that it's much you're much better off take the first call solo take even a second call solo yep as you actually build that relationship in that rapport and interest in in partnering then bring in the rest of the teams that totally throws off the vibe typically like the actually some team are like operating. They have a ton of stuff to do.

They don't need to take a bunch of intro meetings with a bunch of VCs. No, it's a net. It's a totally negative signal. If somebody is, Oh yeah. My, my,

my CTO can totally be on 40 investor calls this week. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No way. Yeah. Um, good post,

uh, back to Aaron Slodoff. He says venture capital. Now I just led a $50 million Series B into my fourth calendar scheduling app this year because their Zoom integration reduces meeting conflicts by 6%. The founder went to Stanford

and worked at Stripe for eight months, so downside risk is basically zero, plus their deck had really clean margins. Venture capital in the 1600s, which is funny. It goes so back. So far back. I just funded an armed fleet

to conquer the only islands in the world that grow nutmeg if we seize their nutmeg trees and eliminate all competition we'll make 60,000% returns and become more powerful than most European kingdoms combined

man this really resonated 14,000 likes yeah venture capital is mainstream venture capital is very mainstream and I think everyone's dissatisfied with the risk that venture capital is mainstream venture capital is very mainstream and i think everyone's dissatisfied with the risk that venture capitalists are taking these days too many yeah i

mean it wasn't the wasn't the first there's there's the remind me of the power law that book yeah especially talk about like whaling with some of the first like yeah whaling you you'd pay literally be like here's the ship here's a captain, here's a captain, here's a team. Most likely it's not coming back, but if it does, you're rich. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the carry model emerged from that.

I think so, yeah. That's amazing. Essentially, yeah. Amazing. And you need a management fee up front to pay for the boat. Every time you get a carry check, think back into the 1600s. Light up your whale oil lamp. Yeah, yeah.

Breathe it in, breathe it in breathe i was at a nuclear conference and i was talking to a guy who does uh like ai data center buildouts and he was talking about the importance of energy and just the fact that these ai like we should make a we should make a whale blubber candle to help vcs manifest carry checks oh that's good i like that yeah yeah uh like a little circle set up where they can just sit in the middle of it and just like kind of breathe in the probably smells a little bit yeah yeah but his his his joke was that uh was that like these these hyperscalers are so dedicated to getting energy right now that they would burn whale oil if they had to

because they just need energy and they'll just take it from wherever they can because it's such a race to get to the next uh the next order of magnitude yeah we were talking about coal you're not a serious ai founder if you're not like thinking about spinning up coal natural gas natural gas all this stuff but whale blubber is the next frontier yeah and uh nvidia is looking into this yeah um that unlocks the next uh scaling tier for sure blubber.ai okay let's go to bryce he uh quote tweets david phillips saying vacation for founders don't fix burnout address what's wrong you'll feel better and bryce says you cannot vacation your way out of burnout we already talked about this a little bit in the Q&A. Yeah, we talked about this. It's true.

Vacations, I don't know. Burnout. Not a fan. Burnout is a symptom that what you're working on is not working. Yeah. Like, it's rare. Or you're having, like, massive people issues. Yeah.

I mean, Josh Kaplan here, you can't even sabbatical your way out of it. Like, you have to be working on something that's more ikigai more life's work more more life's work but also a lot of people are perfectly happy building a sass company even if it's they're not their life's work okay then do they get burned out or not if customers love the product sure they're growing month over month and they have a great team around them yep right because winning feels good it's when you're not winning and you know you're not winning and you're just like getting you're like chewing glass chewing 10 different types of glass yeah and you know it but your burnout usually comes from knowing you're in a bad situation and not doing anything about it yeah i wonder if you looked at like the cases of burnout how many

examples can you find of someone burning out when growth rates are at all times high all time highs yeah i think it seems like it's very rare. I think you get strung out. Sure. But that's very different than burnout. But not burnout. Yeah. Burnouts where I was used to 200% growth. It's now at 30%.

And, and it takes me 10 times as long to get one. Burnout. Yeah. Burnouts like losing conviction in what you're doing or, or again, like if you're, if,

if customers are churning nonstop and you're not doing something to fix that, then you're going to get burnt out. I think the answer is just to change what you're doing. Change your main... If you're a meetings guy, switch to something else. If you're doing email constantly, switch to something else. Jar yourself out of your pattern.

Yeah, but all of those are like more like exhaustion which is different than burnout okay so how do you fix burnout what's the top way burnout comes when you're not delivering for shareholders yeah so the employees your investors yes start delivering no it really is like a fundamental like reframe on that yeah like i'd love uh it's gonna be different for every business yeah okay burnout and again like this is not uh when when a founder that's building a great a wonderful b2b sass company and they go do ayahuasca and then they come back and they're like well i don't want to work on this anymore that's not

burnout that's mental illness yep self-induced mental illness. Yeah. Let's go to Deleon. Deleon says, uh, in January of 2020, I decided to wear a MAGA hat in San Francisco every day for the full month. I remember him wearing it once. I don't, I didn't realize he did it every day. Walking to every meeting. I felt that the country and my tech peers did not appreciate how the MAGA hat was a symbol of hope for the average working American, not a symbol of hate. Five years later, I rest my case. Fascinating. I mean, I remember the backlash to this was intense, intense.

Like a lot of people were really, really upset about this. more controversial than Peter donating to Trump and speaking at the convention because the hat was more visceral of a symbol and it had been so, so controversial, but wow, what an arc to come back from. Fascinating. Yeah. The whole, uh, Deleon should frame this seriously, put it in the founder's phone office purely as being willing to look stupid or silly candidate there brother of the week candidate for sure um he deserves a plaque for that because yeah it was the hate was very real I guarantee you he had thousands of messages

being like you're an idiot and I don't even think he had that many supporters it wasn't as it wasn't as like it was still very contrarian. This year is very consensus where if you came out, if you were just some random VC or founder, which Delian kind of was at the time in 2020, I don't think he was a partner yet. And if you did that this cycle in 2024, you would immediately get like a quote tweet

from like Elon and David Sachs being like, this is incredible. Welcome to the club. Like you're some like, it was a way to actually climb the status ranks in tech, which made it a little bit more memetic, a little bit less contrarian, but it was a lot less risky.

The least heretical people at Hereticon were wearing MAGA hats. Yeah, and Deleon wasn't. He was wearing a red hat, but it was make Founders Fund great again and to play on it, you know. Yeah, yeah. Kind of you grab someone's eye.

A fresh MAGA hat. Exactly. Somebody like packed it up, put it in their bag, brought it to Hereticon, snuck it into Faina, put it on, and then like took it off on the way out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it really is fascinating that that position

became basically consensus in tech. I was talking to somebody who was like, he was saying like, I cannot believe this is somebody at FF who lived through the 2016 Teal stuff, it was saying like, I cannot believe this is somebody at FF who, uh, you know, lived through the, the 2016 teal stuff, which was like,

I mean, there were protesters outside of his house. It was insane. Um, so many hit pieces. Um, and he was just saying like, I cannot believe this was in the summer when everyone was like pro Trump before Biden dropped out.

And Kamala wasn't even like an idea yet. It's like, I cannot believe that Donald Trump is the current thing. And he really was he became the current thing he became like everyone just needs to be like yeah it's wild so speaking of uh contrarians speaking of contrarians uh gotye i know how to pronounce his name right yeah now uh gotye says jar, buy $42 billion more Bitcoin. And it's Michael Saylor in the Iron Man helmet. Just so vindicated. This guy was seen as such a joke for so long. So long.

And went on all, like most of my memories of him are on these major trad media TV shows. Just being like, yes bought 42 more 42 more million dollars over the bitcoin that much but yeah yeah no but i mean he's like along he's gonna he's he's been he was he did something that he wasn't saying publicly because i don't think he could have yeah but it was a way that you could buy exposure to Bitcoin without buying Bitcoin in the public. It's so odd because there's MicroStrategy, his company, which I think essentially trades at the book value of Bitcoin, essentially.

Bitcoin goes up 10%. His stock is up 10%. I don't think they do a lot of other business now. It's mostly just a Bitcoin holding company. But there's also the Bitcoin ETF, Grayscale, and a bunch of others. BlackRock has one. And then there's also you could ETF, Grayscale and a bunch of others. BlackRock has one. And then there's also,

you could go and buy synthetic Bitcoin on Robinhood or you could buy real Bitcoin on Coinbase or you could self-custody. And there's this wild gradient of like ways to get exposure to Bitcoin. And I think all of that has been a big piece of what's driven the bull run is just more and more people can-

Yeah, but a good example of like, he looked like an idiot for a long time and has been vindicated for real hats off for real okay back to back to nate o'brien he says one of the greatest threats to an entrepreneur is when they find themselves in the five to ten million dollar range of liquid assets you lose your hunger you get comfortable it's a dangerous spot to be in. So here's what I would do. And I was getting- Lever up. Yeah, lever up. Lever up. No, I mean, if I was, yeah, risk it all so that you feel like you got it.

Step one is always lever up. Yeah. Start trading options like aggressively. But I think my advice- There is something to levering up where if you have five to 10 million, like you could go and buy a hundred million dollar business. Yeah. You could.

And then you could just be the owner operator of a pretty large business. And maybe that's great. Maybe you take that to a billion. Maybe that's how you get there. Um, as opposed to what he's worried about is like, yeah, you buy a house and you, you wind up with all these costs and you're just like, oh yeah, like my, my life now just costs a million dollars a year. And so I'm not really growing or trying anything bold. Yeah. If I had a founder that, that pitched me for their seed stage company and they, and they were like, yeah, I've got about 10 million liquid. I, I, I would invest, but I'd encourage them to give it away first because they're just not going to have that, you know, like the grind, they're not going to have that grind set. No, the, uh, the, the,

the, another counterpoint. Cause I think that Nate is right, but the other point of view here is that I've seen founders that already have a certain amount of wealth be able to work on something for a long time and stay convicted in it without sort of worrying because they're not operating from fear. They're operating purely from winning yep and the example is i think yc did an analysis on their portfolio and they found that founders that came from money had a higher likelihood of success which you could attribute to oh their parents had connections and provided capital and and resources

and advice but it also is that they just were it's more in the state of when you have 10 ish million liquid, you're kind of in the state of play where the stakes are lower, right? Where you're just like, Oh, I'm just building this to win. I'm not doing it because I need it to, you know, pay my mortgage or I need it so that I can put my kids through college or whatever. So I actually think it can be, he's right that it could be, could decrease somebody's ability to really like grind, but it also could open them up to be like,

all I care about is winning. I'm going to win at all costs. I'm going to be willing to look stupid for some amount of time. So I think it can be a tool. Yep, I like that. Your buddy Dylan says, posts a screenshot. Netflix finally gives up on interactive shows, pivots to gen AI for games and Dylan says Netflix is ending its interactive equipment

interactive experiment but I still believe the future of TV lies in content that you can engage with we've seen it with HQ trivia Bandersnatch and to a certain extent, Crypto the Game. I think that was his company, right? Yep. Someone will do it at scale. My guess, live on-screen betting while watching sports. Yeah. Ooh, I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's good. Anyway, so Dylan helped build HQ trivia into a monster. Yep. Then he, I think he was at, where was he at? He was at not Uber Eats, but he was at the one in LA, Bastion's company. Oh, yeah. Postmates. Postmates. And then he, after we had started doing some party round drops and getting some attention,

he DM'd me and he was like, this looks like as fun as it was at HQ. Ends up joining the team and um and then after uh after party round uh he ended up starting this interactive uh on-chain crypto game that went super super viral and within six he didn't raise any money within six months sold it to uniswaps who's over at uniswap now but super super smart around uh media and and honestly like it's kind of insane that there hasn't been an hq like a a phenomenon like hq that's since hq right you can't really think of clubhouse a little bit clubhouse but that was like not that was social media yep hq is entertainment entertainment game and it was something that even your, you know, your mom or your aunt or your uncle or whatever would be messaging you about and playing.

And it was like really in the zeitgeist. Should we talk about bet on love or is that too much alpha? Yeah, yeah. I think I brought it up to Dylan because I was like, you should do this. Yeah, Jordy and I had an idea. So Dylan's betting on the winner in this interactive entertainment at scale being live on screen betting while watching sports, which is already kind of happening with second screening where you're watching the football game and you're on draft Kings or whatever the other one is to,

you know, bet on the game while you're watching. But we, Jordy and I were talking about how way underrated is maybe betting on something like The Bachelor. Because there's a huge audience there. No one's really modernized that format. Like the classic game show has been kind of revitalized

by Mr. Beast. But if you could have a dating show where you can bet on who's going to win and it's all done via Polymarket or something. Not who's going to win. I want bets, multiple opportunities to bet every single time. Yeah, who's going to get voted off this episode, right? Who's going to get the first kiss

or who's going to get the rose or whatever happens. I think that that'd just be a very interesting, very different format. And maybe there's a money component maybe it's just like long term there probably is like a financial betting but even just more audience participation more interaction that feels like the way things are going if there's one thing it's americans love one thing that's truly american is speculation right even coming to this country hundreds of years ago was speculation in itself so it's core to our culture if you're an entrepreneur that wants to build at the intersection of entertainment and speculation make a reality tv show that you can bet on i love it let's go to sarah hess she says uh startups at the pentagon

i built a quantum ai autonomous drone the pentagon cool can it run on windows xp and fit on a floppy disk yeah this is uh sarah's very sharp around this stuff and um i think uh more plugged into the defense world, like actually plugged in, not just from a venture capital standpoint. Yeah, she worked in the CIA. Yeah, now an investor, classic pipeline, CIA to venture capital.

Many such places. You have to keep climbing the mountain. The question I have about this is like, should we be putting this on the government or should we be putting this on fucking Microsoft? Like Microsoft, like go in and pro bono get the government on the latest and greatest software. Just do whatever that work is

instead of just continuing to charge XP licenses. You have some sort of moral duty. This is your way that you can give back even bigger than your ESG commitments. Just commit to, I mean, we joke about the ramp thing, like the government should run on ramp, but like maybe it actually should. And maybe that should be a lower margin piece

of ramps business, but it's how they actually wind up having a lot of impact. And same thing with Microsoft, like get them off XP. Like just go and do the work. You have the engineers, you have a million engineers. Like go deploy them, forward get them off XP. Like just go and do the work. You have the engineers. You have a million engineers. Like go deploy them, forward deploy them and get the government on the latest and greatest.

Yeah, but Palantir, Anduril have done a ton of heavy lifting for all the startups now building in those categories because they've gotten the government on board with a lot of new technologies and done a lot of that heavy lifting. And the way they get paid back for it is the companies that don't quite make it but build some great technology will eventually get absorbed by palantir and andrewl and then they get the benefit of all that

sort of capex and and uh investment and technology uh yeah i mean palantir is now they have the aip program have you seen this where startups can build on top of the Palantir platform? So you're building SAS and there's gonna be some really cool news about that. I was talking to the team So we'll cover that later this week when it goes live, but Really really bullish on that I love the idea of Palantir being like this this data layer that then other companies can come in and build yeah fun because there's just so many like you talk to people who work for the government during like the palantir story and a lot of them are like oh yeah like i always like loved the idea of palantir but like my unit never got access to it i actually never i actually never interacted

with palantir while i was at nsa or cia or dod or whatever and that shouldn't be the case the case is probably just that palantir doesn't have the bandwidth to build, oh, procurement, oh, all these different things. But if you can create that abstraction layer and be like the Windows XP, essentially, that's really valuable. Yeah, the market is clearly repricing Palantir right now. Oh, yeah, they just flipped. They just flipped Lockheed Martin, which is crazy. But one reason for that is that they are now, they could effectively become,

own the app store for the DOD, right? The Pentagon or the USG, right? Where, hey, if you want to build software and hardware and other products for the government, you need to build on Palantir. And long-term, that's kind of the Andrew O'Thesis as well with the Lattice software. Totally.

It's like everything that's equipment-based will interface with this one thing. And you could see them opening that up at some point yeah to a cruise missile or some other company where maybe they don't maybe they acquire it maybe they partner with it but like there's some interaction i was talking to the andrew guys about the the technology that is used for communication systems and they were just griping about like it it makes like http look like rocket science like it's like insane how look like rocket science like yes like insane how legacy these things are just to like set up a communication line to like yeah everybody everybody like green light on like is the f-35 still in the sky yeah

that interaction is just like the most like outdated system built in 70s and just maintained yeah so yeah Jacob Hellberg writes let that sink in Palantir just flipped Lockheed Martin. And it's funny because just like a week ago, I posted a screenshot that Shams Sankar, the CTO at Palantir, created for his website about AIP and his second breakfast initiative.

And it was the defense tech companies like Palantir relative to Lockheed based on employees and market cap and and Palantir was like kind of middle of the pack but when you looked at market cap to employees Palantir is like a few thousand and the other primes have like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and so it was impressive then but now it's just going to be like Palantir's at the top they have the most market cap and the least employees. And every metric is just the best. It's a total power law winner. And yeah, just a really, really remarkable story.

I mean, long grind. There was a time when Palantir was, I think, kind of hanging out in the single digit to 10, 20 billion range for a decade. Because they grew and they got through the VC thing. Everybody's saying, oh, it's just consulting. Yeah, just consulting. There's no real platform play there. And then the AI stuff happens and they actually have everything in.

And the other companies just can't compete because they did the hard work first. So, yeah, super valuable. Congrats to everyone at Palantir. And the culture there is the culture there from everything I've heard is ridiculous. It's crazy. We saw Eunice talking about no kipping pull-ups. How do you keep that going 20 years in? That's crazy.

You would think they would have evolved just to a normie tech company. Yeah, and all the engineers that historically would have gone to Google and then just decided when Google, with Project Maven, decided to say, you know we don't want this a part of our platform create an opportunity for palantir to hover up all those people that uh clearly care about the country and and our our patriots want to put their skills to use oh this is a rough one this might be the anti-brother of the week, a wag of the finger to Jensen Wong, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA. He says he doesn't wear a watch. And he has a very, you know, this is a 37 second clip from a

interview that he did where he explains that he, you know, the most important time is right now. And so he doesn't need to wear a watch, but he's missing a critical thing, which is that a watch doesn't tell you the time of day. It tells you the time of your life. It tells you where you are not in the day. And it tells other people where you are in your life. Exactly. And so I think we got to, we got to get this guy a hitter. Yeah. I think that's, uh, yeah, you were talking about how Putin, whenever he does an interview, he places his watch on the table as a way to signal to the world what kind of man he is. If you weren't familiar with putin you're gonna see his watch and start to get an idea of who he is just by his time piece i i i want to read more into that because i wonder if it's like

almost like a threatening thing he's like taking you know you take your watch off before you get in a fist fight yeah and so he's taking his watch off to put it down to Wrap it around the hand or whatever. To like, if this interview doesn't go well, like I'm ready to fight almost. There's like a million things to read into that. But it's also a status thing, right? It is, it is. He's probably got one of the better watch collections. I think it might be the kind of thing in Russia

where you want to have a nice watch collection if you're an oligarch, but you don't want to ever have it be nicer than the top dog, right? Sure, sure. Someone who can challenge you. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to challenge Putin's collection.

But you would think that, I mean, I feel like Jensen's like, you know, a hair's breadth away from becoming a watch guy. Yeah. He's a leather jacket guy. Yeah. So much of what NVIDIA does

is precision manufacturing. Yeah. And he should be able to respect the work of a Vacheron, the work of a Patek, the work of a AP. Like, he should be able to get into that we saw zuck did briefly and developed a great uh a wonderful i'd like to see a one collection a one of one uh nvidia gpu watch that you can see the intricate detail of

the gpu humming we gotta get that made and then we'll send it to him and then i'll come on the show yeah um but uh yeah also i mean he's he's famous for doing that jersey swap with zuck do you remember that where uh zuck was wearing some sort of like mountaineering coat almost like very like puffy and jensen was wearing the uh leather the iconic leather jacket and they swapped jackets and took a picture it's a jersey swap fantastic i mean swapping watches that would be very cool too um there's something there but we'll get them soon you can be redeemed jensen it's within your abilities i believe it's never too late so uh david boscovic says i woke up in a cold sweat last night from a nightmare i had spent all of our money on google ads in one day because I had accidentally removed the limit

on my TriRamp card. Someone should figure out how to sell brand placement in dreams like this. It's a new frontier. Yeah, so I would wear one of those. Yeah, there's a couple

lucid dream wear. I'd wear a wearable if it was going to project ads into my brain while I slept. So you can make more educated purchasing decisions. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, as a student, as a businessman, as a student of capitalism, I learn a lot from ads. I learn what's selling, what's not. I learn about my own taste. I learn about what I want to purchase. I learn about products and services I can buy to help grow. Technology brothers, right? products and services I can, I can buy to help grow technology brothers. Right. And so if I could sit down right before bed and put on my little wearable and have it be projecting ads into my dreams, I would, I would pay for that. Right. It's like, um, that's why I pay, I pay for X.

And the only downside of X premium is it actually shows less ads. Right. Um, which is a big bummer, but, um, but yeah, yeah i i can relate to that nightmare um and and the ramp team says our team is working hard to ensure your policy guardrails stay in place in your dreams there you go they hired a good person to run their social media yeah say taylor says you're not online. Couldn't have said it better myself. Simple, simple, simple. Yeah, I mean, part of our work here at Technology Brothers is to be almost like a brain rot shield for our audience.

So if you're worried about spending too much time in the timeline, we basically are a layer over the timeline to help surface the most relevant content and then provide hard hitting analysis on it. But yeah, it doesn't always have to be that way. It can also be you're online for six hours. You have an extra three hours at the end of the day, throw on technology brothers, you get another three hours of content. Well, here's the thing. Sometimes a founder will call me and they say like, Hey, I'm having a rough day. This customer integration isn't going well. I'm having this issue with my head of engineering, whatever it is. And almost always I tell them drink two Celsius,

have some, some Lucy or Excel and go sit outside ideally in the sun. If it's, if it's daytime and just scroll, like give yourself a couple hours to scroll and just don't stop. Right. I think all the fees have gotten to the point where they're not, you're never really going to hit the end. I remember that was like a 2010s era social thing where it'd be like, you've reached all the content. Right. But I haven't hit the end in a decade. Right. And so go outside, get some sun, caffeine, nicotine, and just scroll a little bit. Um, and I promise you like the, that sort of creative juices will start flowing. You're start getting into this sort of problem solving mentality and you'll make your life better so couldn't agree more uh andrew editor says first impression of my daylight

co the hype is justified shockingly responsive distractions non-existent decent chance this becomes my primary work computer oh this is the high refresh rate e-ink screen yep tablet i saw this uh so yeah uh andrew good buddy and uh was on my team uh party round uh phenomenal writer and works with a bunch of other startups now uh so his primary work is meeting with companies that he works with through his agency words uh words ss word sss.com um and uh you know so his he's primary primarily interfacing with clients and writing and so daylight computer is a really good um uh product for that because it it um it's a product that is is trying to uh take all the advancements in computer technology that we have today but sort of like make it more analog so they eliminate uh

color uh they make it uh less basically less engaging overall so that in theory it helps you actually get more work done this is live like you can just go buy one of these now? Yeah, so they've been working. Yeah, I don't have mine yet, but they don't. We should get one in the studio. They're working through, like, pre-order lists, but they are delivering now. I use the product. I mean, it could never replace, like, this experience with paper.

But, I mean, for other stuff. That's what they're trying to do. They're trying to take out big paper. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck. There's a lot of them. But, yeah, take out big paper. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck. But yeah, I use the product. Better chance taking down Apple on the iPad.

But you're never taking this. For my cold dead hands. Yeah. Will you take my stack of print-out tweets? We'll cut down the trees ourselves if we have to. But no, I tried the daylight for the first time. I think it was over like six or seven months ago. Yeah.

And this is one of those things like a lot of the cool trends in technology now are are sort of making stuff more analog more retro mod retro as an example which is more nostalgic who knows if daylight is like going to be as big as apple but i'm so happy that it exists and i want it to be a great company and i think it would probably be a fantastic yeah that was that was fantastic company. Yeah, that was the investment. A bunch of people can make money. That was the investment. Anjan, the founder, when I was talking to him, I kind of almost laughed when he told me the valuation.

Yeah. But then he basically was like, look, if we can become, if we can sell millions of devices, this is gonna be really cheap, right? And I think that with the sort of anti-blue light movement some other stuff like that it has massive potential so yeah yeah that's great shout out to andrew and uh on john that's awesome let's go to uh steven simoni says cheap drones aren't going out of style anytime soon thanks wired for covering allen control systems and wired writes the ai machine

gun of the future is already here and it's a some sort of machine gun mounted on the back of a truck yeah so you know this company pretty well yeah so i i have an advisor to uh acs uh david sacks famous political podcaster actually was i think their first investor because he he backed uh steve's last company i think it was um but uh but yeah steve has been for the last like year and a half two years building um anti-drone anti-drone uh gun turrets so one of the big problems in modern warfare is you have this proliferation of really cheap drones that can just fly across the battlefield and just um and so uh they're very difficult to take out as a human because you're sort of aiming a gun.

Shotguns aren't long enough range. Rifles is just too hard to hit things. And so ACS has built this phenomenal product that can take out drones fully autonomously. So this is Terminator. Terminator's here. It's mounted to the back of a Toyota pickup pickup truck in texas right now on the testing grounds um and they've just made some like really uh incredible progress over the last year uh all the way to there's some cool videos out there they're public now but uh you can see the

acs uh gun turret like taking out drones taking out a bunch of chinese drones which is cool using them as target practice um and uh yeah they did uh they did a demo day recently uh for a number of uh investors and i was joking with steve about it's pretty funny to think about like five vcs seeing the same awesome demo at this at the same time and like looking around being like all right like i'm it's it's mono mono yeah i mean steve is i i think uh i think he's the the the gonna be uh look back is that is the tk of defense like he's like one of one individual and, um, built a ridiculous team and, and on a mission. So thank you to Steve for keeping us safe.

Yeah. Let's go to Zach. So his gamer is up next as a word to describe the obsessed. Notice a lot with runners, athletes who compete hard and smart gamers, gamers. I like that. There's a lot of gamer lingo that people,

the Gen Z is adopting. Yeah. Like one, I'm one shot or one shot it yeah one shot we're one shotting is is that concept taken uh out yeah i think we need to uh so gamer is going to take me a little bit to work it in yeah it's tough i i understanding the definition i identify i'm a bit of a gamer you're a gamer our VP Ben's a gamer but uh but yeah I want to bring the 360 no scope into the lingo yeah what does that mean in a business context so if somebody like posts a banger tweet yeah and then somebody in the comment section replies I'm going to sign up for your product right now and use it that's almost like a 360 no scope because a good post is this sort of like elegant thing that's hard to do you're youscope. Because a good post is this sort of elegant thing

that's hard to do, you're doing a lot at once. Are you familiar with the term pre-made? No. So if you go on Counter-Strike or Call of Duty and you're playing the competitive modes, like 5v5, 6v6, normally you just get matched with random people, so it's very hard to coordinate because who's the sniper, who's the machine gunner,

medic, or whatever? But the way to really win is to make a quote unquote pre-made where you and your boys all are in the lobby beforehand. And so you show up, it's you and everyone knows like, okay, I'm going to go left. You're going to go right. And we're really good on the comms. And we know not to fight and talk over each other and you're going up against randoms. So if you have a pre-made you're locked in. And when i think about the teams that show up with startups like and raise 50 million yeah like like anderle very much a pre-made in the sense that you have palmer but then you also have like three palantir executives it's like how is that not going to be successful they really stack the deck in their favor right so i'd like to see as a pre-made that's like to see uh company x accounts like start to use gg

so like when ramp launch launches a bunch of new functionality i want to see brex just reply to it and say gg gg well played yeah gg well played and then they just delete their account good luck have fun glhf yeah i mean there's so much gamer lingo we can bring over. And again, it's like a way to signal in group. So very valuable. Sam Gerstenzang says, wow, A16Z is hiring a full-time person just to keep track of carry. And it's a job for their internal HR team.

So this is awesome because it shows the evolution of venture capital, right? It's becoming mainstream. It's learning everything that traditional private equity learned in the 90s. We're just relearning it, just like cryptos, like speed running, like financial regulation.

So anyways, bullish for Andreessen. I can't wait for them to go public so that everybody can own a piece of that. Monster. And to me, the signal is like, we're getting ready to go public so that everybody can own a piece of that monster. And to me, the signal is like we're getting ready to go public, right? Like it's one thing when it's just the GPs and they're sort of managing carry internally. They have a CFO. They must, right? Yeah, sure they do.

They must have a huge finance team. Any multi-billion dollar AUM fund without a CFO would be concerning. Yeah, but it's interesting that we don't know their their cfo like we know some of their comms people yeah yeah like mark because that's why i'm ready for i'm ready for andreessen uh earnings calls with the cfo that's gonna be we're gonna have to do a live stream for that fantastic i guess the question is will the other funds uh go short you know sequoia they're set up to take long and short positions in the public markets. What if they're like, you know what? We're opening a big short position. We're shorting Anderson. Just to try to

attack the brand. Exactly. Hindenburg research from a Sequoia on Anderson would be devastating. Yeah, Sean would do that. Dark Sean would do that. Dark Sequoia. Love Sean. I think he's in the stack somewhere. Kate Clark tweetsia. Love Sean. I think he's in the stack somewhere.

Kate Clark tweets, some personal news. Bloomberg hires Clark to cover VC and startups. So she was at the information. She was at the information. So this is why right now, the technology publications, you've got TMZ, the information,

you've got newcomer, next generation. They should have like a fantasy sports for tech journalism where you could like build your team and see who's getting the most views where's the poly market yeah poly market on the trades and then there should definitely be like a draft day where you get the best posters and the information bloomberg forbes they all have to yeah you know they they get rankings based on you know oh they didn't get that many views last year that the top of the ranking they get to pick the best posters. Yeah. Right.

So there should be a draft day. There should be a fantasy. You should be able to build a team and ultimately bet on this. You should be able to gamble on it. Yeah. And you see like, you know, Kara Swisher has had a very antagonistic relationship with the technology industry. And I think one of the reasons is she watched all of her peers at the time become wealthy. And so this competition within different, you know,

media companies for tech journalists is actually good. They're all going to make more money. I think I saw newcomers paying like 300, 350 K to hire journalists. You know, I would expect Kate Clark is, is, you know, this, I would expect this is like a seven, seven figure contract over four years. You know, it's not nba money yeah but i mean pretty soon we're going to start seeing the 360 deals the sponsorships like you know what kind of jersey are they wearing if they go to a conference you know yeah um if they're going

to be on emily chang's the circuit throw some logos on that shirt or that blouse but yeah i think i think uh journalists have, we think of these media companies as these sort of big brands that carry a lot of weight. But like it's Bloomberg. Yeah, Bloomberg got her. Bloomberg is going to become much more relevant because Kate actually gets scoops. She does.

She's very good. She like is not just like, you know, using Chad GPT to summarize what someone else talked about online. No, she trades information. Yeah, I'm excited for the shoe deals. is not just like using Chad GPT to summarize what someone else talked about online. No, trades information. Yeah, I'm excited for the shoe deals. I want to see like, you know, Laurel Piana or something.

Be like, oh yeah, we got an exclusive deal with this person. When you see them on CNBC, giving some squawk box, like, oh yeah, they're reffing our gear. Yeah. Be great. Ayush writes, new founder KPI dropped testosterone level. The average YC founder seed stage is 344 nanograms per deciliter. Yours truly 727 nanograms per deciliter. And did you see this underlying study? I know the guy who did it. Yeah. I think his name is Michael. And yeah, not good.'s that's really low yeah i think so

here's what we got to look into one not surprised that i use uh has such high t it's probably why he's had some some a little bit of controversy but like the guy's online constantly he's grinding his entire team is grinding he's like extremely smart and um uh very just like hard working and that's probably because where his t levels are at but um we gotta go to y combinator do some investigative journalism ourselves because i would guess that they're handing out a little bit too much uh plastic yeah bottle of water because how else can you explain explain it's got a 30 average that's um the positive thing though is that those ycd should just be t-bone steaks yeah no no water no water even though water's lindy yeah uh but yeah i the

positive thing from from that study though is that it seemed like the the more venture capital the founders raised the higher their t levels were yes yes and so i think that's a positive trend which tells me and uh why a combinator should just invest more money in. Because it actually could be that more venture capital is actually just pulling up their testosterone levels. So they have so many unicorns in a batch, they should probably just start investing real size. Make the entry check $10 million.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a million ways to upregulate tea. And they got to make a new trend. It's not the Allbirds, I'll tell you that. Justine Moore at Venture Twins says, new A16Z investment thesis, AI x parenting. Raising kids is one of our most challenging and important jobs. Every parent needs support sometimes, but many can't access it because it's too expensive or inaccessible. AI changes this, what we're seeing and then there's a uh market map okay so two

reasons that i i think this is smart one audio is a fantastic interface for kids yeah uh because parents don't want their kids on screens yep i got this thing for my son called a yoto i have one i set one up honestly it honestly my son locks in yeah like he puts on something and then he goes and reads books and stuff and just plays lego as well and he has all these custom cards you can download any music and put it on a custom card it's so good it's so great uh so anyways for parents like even 20 minutes of time where their kid is doing something solo is like massively valuable. So parents will spend a lot of money for something like this.

In general, parents will pay for anything educational pretty quickly for their kids. And then the other thing is like audio to date has not been the best interface for adults because we're ADHD, we have like, we need things that are kind of like moving faster than audio typically provides. But for kids, it's just absolutely fantastic.

And so what I've wanted to see is somebody, something like what Avi is doing for Friend, but for kids, because if you give kids this digital companion that has certain guardrails that can talk with them, that can teach them things, that they can ask questions to, I would love to back a company

that's doing that specifically. I think there's been some toy companies that are integrating LLMs, which is cool. But yeah, like a little pendant type thing that has a speaker on it that they can talk to. Or even just a robot dog that follows you around, but you can also ask it, what's that squirrel over there?

Unitree Robotics or Boston Dynamics. I want a robot dog that I can strap an AR to that has a speaker, a Polycom attached to it that I can strap an AR to that has a, like, uh, you know, speaker, a polycom attached to it. So I can talk to my kid and the dog just protects the kid and hangs out. It's their best friend, man's best friend. It's great. It's got an AR on it. Um, and, uh, anyway, so let's go to Andrea D Huber woman, PhD PhD. She says, YC should add some cute ladies to the workplace, purely for the sake of their founders' low T levels, of course. We're back on T levels at YC.

Back on T levels at YC. This is funny because Y Combinator has been criticized a lot for not having enough women in the cohorts. But yeah, maybe this is now a right-wing critique of the lack of of feminine energy at yc yeah i i genuinely from a different angle so that the issue is yc is fully remote now oh no i think they went back in person really yeah back in person okay that was just during the covet years oh but but do they actually have like an uh you can't work from there every day, but you can go in for dinners and office hours. Yeah. I think this is probably, uh, they're, what they're dealing with is, is not just like a small issue.

Like it's an epidemic, right? I would, I would imagine that some founders are going to start not applying for YC because they have high T and they, one, don't want to be around men with low t because it's just a drag right and two they're worried if they join their t is going to drop dramatically sure or that and so they need they need to not it's not like oh adding secretaries is is one approach removing plastic bottle water is another but they need to they need to try like 20 things at once and see see what sticks because it's gonna that is yc is one of the greatest institutions to to be created within silicon valley in the last whatever is it it's almost 20 or 20 ish years now uh they got to save

and i think gary will i think gary will get on it. Uh, do you know this Congressman Waltz? Do you know this guy? I feel like we had him in here previously. Uh, this is funny because it's like a very Twitter native format, but it's from an official Congressman's press Twitter. And so, uh, it says, Waltz, how much do you think the air force pays for this bag of bushings usaf secretary kendall i don't know congressman waltz says ninety thousand dollars so we've run into these again and again there's just so many things first there was soap dispensers yeah exits called out yep now it's bushings yep but it's also the seat belts on the planes the the urinals all these different things they're all way, way repressed. And this is why Kimia's company is going to rip, is because we're going to introduce competition into the bushings market.

Yeah. But look at this. I mean, he has one clip essentially from C-SPAN. It's a one-minute clip, and it has two million views. This is just the poster native congressman or politician, just going direct and using the correct format and not just saying, hey, I put out a press release. Go to this link.

It's like I'm articulating the problem and I'm showing you evidence that I'm trying to do something about it. He just mogged the Air Force Secretary. Secretary, yeah. It's wild. Hopefully it comes down. Need commercial off the shelf.

Cots versus gots, baby. Cots versus gots. Let's go. Oh oh here's sean this is a great one so sean so elon musk uh you know on the election uh night i believe says all-time high usage of this platform and it looks like global user seconds was over 400 billion on the election night. And Sean says, we at Sequoia invested $800 million into the X, take private. We were ridiculed for two years for it, but I'm confident we'll get the last laugh.

Never bet against Elon. Yep. And he was getting dunked on a little bit about this because like, I guess the stock is down in like private markets, but I think he's right. I think never bet against elon i think the i think elon inc yeah and they're investing on a 10 valuable they're a venture

capital firm yeah they're they care about yeah sean cares about what the position is going to look like in 10 years and it's and right now there's so much company yeah and right now there's so much momentum yeah that that i would i would be willing to bet my house that they'll make money on this investment in 10 years. It's almost like there's a re-founding of the company over there, because I remember when this happened. Totally, and that was why we talked about the rebrand. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The rebrand was re-founding. And it's actually like, they're going through the whole cycle that Twitter went through again, but with just like a completely new open book for monetization. Because when Elon bought it, I was like, you know, like there's a lot of people that are like leaving,

but this makes me more bullish than ever on this is the best place to be if you're in tech. Yeah, let's go check in with all the journalists that posted their blue skylinks. Yeah, it's fine. They might be doing well over there. I know that the numbers on threads are fine, but it's not the most important place to be if you're in tech.

And tech is always ahead of everything else. And so over time, we'll go through the same cycle. Dan Loeb is not on threads ratioing people twice a day. No. And so as long as like the most high signal, most valuable alpha is there, they can kind of climb up the ranking again of like everyone has to be on there because that's where the conversation is happening. Yeah, and the ads platform will get...

The ads will be all sorts of different things, but they're getting more money for sure. And especially Mark was tweeting out, basically calling out all the advertisers that sort of worked collectively to boycott X and basically saying that I think a lot of those advertisers will start to come back because they realize that what they're doing is not only sort of short-sighted, but potentially even illegal. Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting because the cost base for X has gotten so low that if they can get the revenue side anywhere near back to what it was, it is a $45 billion company. They could be doing $5 billion in EBITDA and trade at 20X or something, 10X.

That's not that crazy to imagine yeah um one of my one of my uh one of my former employees uh close friend just had a bunch of different offers from every sort of like mag seven type company and he chose i know a lot of people like that um and so the reason the reason to be bullish yeah besides the fact that sean is bullish is that uh and the whole election and everything like that is the talent. The talent magnet is real. The smartest people that aspire, that want to work under a leader like Elon are going there.

Let's go to Sheil Monat says, a lot of fintech shit codes that went public in the Zerp era and were completely left for dead are quietly having monster years, many up 600%. And he cites Dave Inc., which is up 600%. Neobank. Root Inc.,

Clover Health Investments Corp., and Blend Labs. I actually know the founder of Dave. And yeah, rough go of it when they SPAC'd and it went way down. And SoFi is ripping as well. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm really happy for these folks

that SPAC'd at the wrong time and just had like a rough go but stuck with it. That's great. It'll be interesting to see if SoFi ends up finding its way and then Chamath will be able to say like, look, if you just invested in all my SPACs, you did well, right? I talked to somebody who's SPACed and said that like, he did it post-Zerp, but what he did was he, on day one, he immediately unlocked all the investors and the founders had like a three-year lockup. And so that created like a ton of downward pressure on the stock immediately. But got it out of the way. But yeah, got it out of the way.

And there was never this like, you know, weight hanging over the company. And they were able to essentially tell their VCs, hey, we got your return, you can distribute, and your LPs can sell today if they want. You are, we're clean of this, and we're into the next phase. And it's like, now we gotta build up as a public company. And a lot of these companies, it's like,

yeah, they're public, they're building, they have the money, they're growing. And I remember looking companies, it's like, yeah, they're public. They're building. They have the money. They're growing. And I mean, I remember looking at Dave and being like, this is trading at like a third of book value or something. I'm pretty sure they were trading for like $50 million and they had like $150 million in cash. And I was just like, this is insane. Like it was like the whole like SPAC meme became so negative for a while that things

really were clearly undervalued. So I fully anticipate SPACs will be back for certain companies pretty soon. Let's go to Jason Lemkin. He says, no downturn or recession at Samsara at 1.3 billion ARR, Klaviyo at 1 billion, GitLab at 730 million, Palantir at 2.9 billion, Toast at 1.6, Datadog at 2.8, Confluent at 1 billion, just a couple of examples. So there's just all these companies that are ripping, ripping, ripping,

and growing ARRs 30%. Fantastic. It's so interesting. I mean, this is really a good tour of the fact that this B2B SaaS. Turns out it's a good business. Yeah, and that there's not, even though there are power

law winners like the salesforce um or i guess microsoft really um it was such a huge market that there's multiple hundred million hundred billion dollar companies to build there so really really cool to see um and yeah i mean i think we could see the same thing play out in defense i think we could see the same thing play out in ai. I think we can see the same thing play out in AI. And I think that like, yeah, if your fund is set up to, you have to get a trillion dollar company. Yeah, go for that. That's great. That's awesome.

But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be, you know, the seventh biggest, you know, B2B SaaS company that has a billion dollars in AR growing 25%. Like I would happily be that company that's great yeah fantastic let's go to zane he says one of the best times in the history of humanity it just it's one of the best times in the history of humanity to start a manufacturing company is likely right now so yeah so this this guy's been uh sharing the gospel around manufacturing broadly, but also the fact that a lot of our onshore manufacturing is dependent on leaders that are at retirement age. Sure. There's that factor.

There's also the tariffs thing. Tariffs are real. There's also just a new boom in a whole bunch of things that require manufactured parts. Like if we really do go into the humanoid robotics era, that's like a million different motors, a million different batteries and control systems. And like who's going to manufacture the tibia for this thing? It's going to be some aluminum rod. a company like andrel over time having thousands and thousands of employees are that those thousands of employees experience all these small little pain points throughout different product cycles and then they go out and say like okay i made my money in tech but the next thing i'm doing is setting up this like small manufacturing shop outside of st louis and we're going to make

this widget and we're going to sell a lot of them and that's going to be really good for the country it's going to be good for them financially it's going to be good for the companies that depend on these sort of smaller scale manufacturers yeah i was at andrew lhq last friday and uh i was overhearing some like engineers have a little like a little meeting and they're like you know somebody's like i'm willing to bet on it like we need to make it 26 millimeters or something i have no idea what they were talking about but like you know yeah they're like making these engineering trade-offs widgets. And yeah, I mean,

they're not going to be able to insource all of that. And then there's also just going to be the dividend of, you know, manufacturing and hard tech outside of defense. I mean, I think we talked about the impulse stove. It's like a hardware company. It's never going to be acquired by Anderle, but you know, we're going to get a new fridge company.

We're going to get a new washing machine company. There was a guy making wheelchairs. Yeah, wheelchairs. Yeah, exactly. We're going to get all these different engineering, hard tech manufacturing things. It's going to be great. I'm really excited. Let's go to Clint Fiore. He says, no income tax for the rest of your life if you have birthed four or more children. Cop copying Hungary in America. And then he follows up, upon further review and discussion with the commenters here, I'm editing this to be for the household income,

not just the mom's. Rewards homes where one spouse stays home with kids while other spouse works as well as one's returning to workforce. What do you think? I would take it further, just no income tax, period. Yeah.

No, I think it's a good incentive. I know a lot of people where kids are very expensive, right? Yeah. For every, we, we look at everything in supercars, right? So if I see a guy with 10 supercars, I'm like, okay, you could probably comfortably have five kids. Right. So with every, at least from like a carrying cost standpoint. And so I know a lot of people that have two kids, right? So with every, at least from like a carrying cost standpoint. And so I know a lot of people that have two kids right now. And if you said have two more and you can not pay income tax again, they're going to run the numbers.

I'll make a financial model and they'll see very quickly. We should have those extra kids. One kids bring joy. So that's like just value add, but two, if you can, if you can take that incremental um income that's not being wasted through wasteful government spending on expensive bushings or 150 000 soap dispensers uh and invest that capital it'll benefit them as well as the entire country so yeah it's great super pro uh paul bohm says can hollywood stop making slop now and then mopar says no you're gonna watch

fast and the furious 45 and you're gonna love it what do you think uh this was an election so uh paul's had some some great ideas lately uh this was post-election response maybe in response to wokeism being having peaked um but uh but i don't know i think like the problems in the movie entertainment industry are just so much bigger than than politics there's just this massive lag on productions because you need someone to start writing now and then that movie will get released in four years the good good thing is I hit up a copywriter that I'd worked with in the past. I actually, I think we got some of her help on Excel. Sure.

And I hit her up recently because somebody was looking for some copywriting support and she's like, I'm staffed on shows indefinitely. I don't have time. Interesting. And I was like, that's good. That's great. We need more content.

Yeah. Yeah, I think the power loss stuff I don't have time. Interesting. And I was like, that's good. That's good. We need more content. Yeah. Yeah. I think the Powerloss stuff will still stay around. The Denis Villeneuve's. Yeah. The Chris Nolan's. Yeah. I would argue that there's small groups that are making cool, impactful films.

Yeah. It's just rare. Civil War by A24 was a big idea. I think it flopped. Yeah. But that wasn't slopped. Right. It was a big idea i think it flopped yeah but that wasn't slopped right it was a big effort and if you think about like blade 2040 dune is a good counter example of like i actually don't oppenheimer like like there's usually like one or two a year there just aren't one every month and yeah you know barbie yeah what's barbie oh barbie yeah barbie. That was a big moment. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, gladiator. Yeah. It's coming out. Good reviews so far. We got to take the boys out.

This is a, a note for all the listeners. Get your boys together and go to a movie. It's the best thing we've done in LA a few times. Dress up, dress up, have some drinks before, have some dinner after.

It's just a fantastic time. It's a good excuse to get out of the, uh, out of the house. A lot of what I realized was that a lot of our friends are married and their wives are more into sports than the husbands because sports have just become really popular and so if you say hey we're gonna go watch the Dodger game well like everyone's gonna want to come but you know very few wives want to go see the latest Jason Statham movie so yeah yeah it's an excuse to get a boys night basically and it's not as hard of a sell as being like, we're going to go get hammered and smoke cigars all night. And boys nights are a good way to counter

burnout, right? Because burnout is usually a symptom of something not working in your business. But if you hang out with your boys, they can help give you that clarity, gas you up, give you that extra conviction to keep pushing through it. So one movie night could save your company. That's great. Let's go to Typed Female. Sam Altman, we are a few thousand days away from building God.

We will build suns on earth, unify physics, and resurrect the worthy dead. Also, we just bought chat.com. Yeah. Gary Tan, sounds like this will be really impactful for startups. Sam Altman, definitely. No better time to be a startup.

I love this. Sam replied. It was like, this is funny. Because it does seem like there's a little bit of tension there where it's like, okay, if we're going to get this crazy future, how can we predict anything? OpenAI is developer tooling at its core. So if they do build God, you're they built an api yeah into also it's just like startups are creation and so if the tools get better and better like

you would want to create even if there is abundance you would want to make something creative and and creating a company is like a expression yeah i do feel like it's it's now that we have intelligence as a service it is difficult to predict the future yeah right especially with software and consumer products i mean whatever seven years ago you were like hey i think smokeless tobacco you know nicotine is going to be big we should do this And you turned out to be very correct. But it's harder to do that with software. I think it's becoming obvious. Like you probably want network effects. You want some type of lock-in.

You don't want to build, trying to rebuild Salesforce right now could be an amazing business for five years and then you get completely disrupted. Who knows, right? Let's go to Keith Reboy. He says, should I post, this is post-election,

reflecting on his posting strategy. And he runs a poll. Should I post more about health, fitness, music, venture capital, or politics? And venture capital won handily with 62%. Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

I disagree. I think that posting about politics is actually great for VCs because you want to know what you're getting yourself into at the board dinner. Because it's all going to come out and the last thing you want is someone who has some crazy political ideology that you don't align with. Yeah, but I feel like if Keith met somebody right now that had completely different political views than him and was like truly on the opposite end of the spectrum he might be like you know what you crazy kid like give it a shot i'll give

you a few million give it a shot um i i do appreciate that he's he's been he's become like my de facto personal trainer because whenever i post on x about whatever workout i'm doing he just immediately chimes in with feedback on how I could be doing better. I was like, you know, going for a one rep max today. And he was like, you should try three rep maxes instead. I was like, oh, like, you know, clean and jerk is the best movement. And he was like, it's too hard on your tendons. You know, he has a lot of.

Whatever, whatever. I don't know. I don't know, i don't know though with keith is it is it his uh incredible spirit and and sort of uh energy that that allows him to do these things or is it his health protocol right which one is which one is yeah exactly right because i think a lot of people if they followed his schedule yeah would collapse in like the fourth day right and so who knows who knows yeah um well we know step one is lever up yeah so always uh Phil says working with a new client a 17 year old founder 10 million dollar d2c brand no zoom calls

no in-person meetings only meets over black ops six calls if it can't be discussed over cod it's too complicated the workforce is changing 2k likes what do you think this is something that's like amazing and could be the future or also could be like a harbinger of doom and this kid could be like i do think yeah do you think there's potential to be like, hey, let's move the water cooler talk to COD or whatever the Invogue video game is? There's a place in the gaming room you can go play Smash with your colleagues. Yeah, maybe Call of Duty is a new ping pong table, right?

Yeah, that makes sense for the modern, for the gamers. I do, I have had some breakthrough conversations. Actually, so this is crazy. So Soylent, when they moved to downtown LA, they opened up some desks for startups. And I was at, I don't know if we ever talked about this, but you had left the company, but I had a desk there and they had fantastic ping pong tables that I would use at least once a day. At first I was kind of thinking that COD thing was silly, but how different is it to play ping pong versus Cod? You know, one of my favorite pitches with a VC that I ever did was with Blake Robbins when he was at Benchmark. And we played PUBG together, which is a Battle Royale game.

And it was fascinating because it felt like the modern version of going golfing. So we talk about business, talk about the business, talk about building companies, but then we're also on the same team in this fight for survival. So Battle Royale, I think we were playing duos, 150 people on the map, so there's 75 teams. And if you get shot, you go down, but you can be revived.

And so there's always a question of, are you going to be greedy or thirsty? Another good gamer word to adopt. Being thirsty is when you get too hungry for the kill and you prioritize offense over defense. And so I noticed, and what I really liked about him was that when I got downed, he would prioritize reviving me

over like getting the extra kill. That's the VC you want. And I noticed myself thirsting all the time and being like, fuck, we lost because I'm an idiot and I didn't play it right. Well, that's why golf is actually a genuinely really great way to get to know somebody, especially in a business context. Because if you play 18 holes and you see like, oh, like every fourth hole, he like undercounts his like undercounts, you know. Or throwing his club, raging out. Yeah, or getting pissed. Yeah.

Or yeah, doing anything. Or if they're too chill about it. Like getting drunk on the golf course. Or in the back nine. Hollering at the catty girl or whatever. Yeah, back nine. Yeah, there's a lot of ways to expose the truth about someone through that.

And it's much better than just a coffee meeting, which is just vanilla. Yeah, and you get to walk the whole time. through that. And it's much better than just a coffee meeting, which is just vanilla. Yeah, and you get to walk the whole time. Yeah, I love it. So yeah, maybe COD is the future. Let's skip that. Man, Jarvis says, man, Trump really lucked out

having an autistic billionaire randomly choose his election as his next object of fixation. Ha ha ha. And Elon responds. 50K likes and Elon responds with a crying emoji and Jarvis just says, love you, King. So good.

Amazing. So funny. That Elon just got obsessed with the show. I can't believe this app is only $10 a month. It's incredible. These are interactions. This has always been the case. I remember when I first got to Silicon Valley,

getting online and just tweeting with like Sean Parker and and Jim Breyer from Excel they were they were on stage and like they were posting about their you know investing initiatives I was able to just be like a reply guy and like chat with them There's a crazy like huge alpha and being a reply guy basically. Yeah, and it was super inspiring at the time I was like, okay, like at least these guys give me the time of day. Like, they're not like big dogging me, which is awesome. Yeah. So, so here's the thing. It wasn't, it certainly was not random, right? Yeah.

Elon was absolutely snubbed by Biden who completely disrespected the biggest American manufacturer of EVs by not inviting Elon to meet with him and the government on the issue. thing in california california like basically made fun of him and told him to leave um and so received yeah message received he everything we just saw over the past however many months was just a reaction to being disrespected as a person, as a businessman. And it was almost a, with his level of ambition, it was something that he needed to do to reach his full potential because he's at a scale where what the government thinks about him

and his businesses is probably more important than anything else. Yep, that makes sense. Let's go to Jan Pellig. He says, heard a leak from one of the frontier labs, not open AI, to be honest. They reached an unexpected huge wall of diminishing returns, trying to brute force better results by training longer and using more and more data, more severe than what is published previously. So the question is like, are we hitting a wall or are scaling laws going to hold? Here's what I would say.

90% of frontier AI labs quit right before they're about to make it big. Same thing in gambling, right? 90% of sports bettors quit right before they're about to hit that crazy parlay. And so my advice to this frontier lab is double down. More data. Lever up. More energy. Get whale blubber as an energy source if you need it.

Yes. Nuclear. Yes. Coal. Coal. Wind. Do it all. Tidal.

Yeah. Solar. Tidal. Everything. Tidal. Fusion. Sam is linking up guys. Here's what AI labs have not partnered with SoulCycle yet to try to capture that energy.

Yeah. I mean, we've seen the matrix, like put the people in the pod, use their energy source, they become batteries. The interesting thing here is like, it's really hard to evaluate this because OpenAI is the most well-funded. And so they're the ones, other than the hyperscalers, they're the ones that can actually go and build like the gigawatt data center which is like a new thing that needs to be built it like physically needs to exist before you can do that training run xai is pretty far along they're building like the largest cluster so it's like you can't i i feel like it's really really hard to evaluate is scaling holding without actually running the experiment of like we built the thing and this was the result and the fear is that you you you yeah you 10x the power you 10x the training and the

gpus but then iq of these models goes from like 105 to 107 and it's like that might be economically viable honestly it might be better at whatever it does and it might be really really valuable to do that but it might just be like okay we're hitting really diminishing marginal returns and we're not going to get this super intelligence where it's like oh yeah just a couple orders magnitude and then we'll be at 200 iq and and and that's something that like no one i've never really seen anyone make a really great argument for like clearly scaling is all you need and scale is really valuable and and scale improves the model but what is the ratio between orders of magnitude in energy and and data center size and actual real world applicability

and iq like what will it take how many orders magnitude to get to 150 no one really knows i think but we'll see let's go to edmund he says does anyone ever think about how aesthetic it is that humans drink water to survive like this clear zero calorie smooth liquid pure minimal sleek it's water it's giving lemare it's giving modernity it's good design water's lindy water we have a lot of other alternatives. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you to Aurora. We have a lot of other alternatives, but we humans, we keep coming back to water. If only they could put caffeine in it.

There's that company, Orca, right? Oh, yeah. We got to get some of that. Yeah, we got to try that. Demo that on the pod. It's great. Let's go to Cody Sanchez. She says, I don't want passive income. I want a fucking empire. Let's go,'s great let's go to cody sanchez she says i don't want passive income

i want a fucking empire let's go let's go cody cody one of us one of us one of us uh passive income isn't real yeah fake if you're getting you're buying you're getting income, there's some level of management that comes with it. And even if you hire somebody to manage said income, like a CEO or an asset manager, things like that, you still have to manage that person. And even if you have $100 million and you put it in government bonds and you're getting $3 million a year,

it's like you will forever wonder, could I be getting 10%? Yeah, active income. Nothing 10 yeah active income active and nothing nothing hits like active and active income working and getting paid active we are pro active active income no nothing hits like working hard and then making a lot of money from it it's like the greatest drug on earth so this is a great question adam draper writes where's the punk rock of the startup world right now 12 12 years ago, it was Bitcoin. And Matt.Crypto says, it's just funny.

He doesn't say crypto. He says longevity, which I somewhat buy. I would say that it's been the Gundo. The Gundo really was like very punk rock and very countercultural and very independent and very not an industry plant. It's crazy that the internet made it go mainstream. Very quickly. Very quickly.

It was one year of punk rock and now it's like... They were getting a hit piece in like four months. Yeah. No, not a hit piece, just like puff pieces. No, I know, I know. Like puff piece after puff piece. And now it's like everyone knows it and it's like, okay, the game's over.

No, but they were... At one point when there was some coverage happening, they were worried it was going to be pretty negative. I do think longevity and bio could be next. I was talking to Sebastian Malabai, the author of Power Law, and he was saying that the next big book he wants to write is about bio-investors

because it's a very, very different model, very different world, but maybe it could change with AI. Maybe it can change with more financialization, but it is a very untapped world that totally is kind of early but clearly very promising um let's go to rajveer he says on election day kalshi outspent the trump and harris campaigns on meta ads yeah so this is one crazy i totally respect kalshi taking capturing the moment because their whole thing is much,

it's much more about politics and polymarket. Polymarket is markets for everything. Kalshi is much more focused on being the legal, quote unquote, legal way to bet on the election. So they should have spent millions and millions and they did. The funny thing though, is they kept like congratulating themselves on hitting number one and all this stuff and it reminded me of that meme where like it's like the guy like spraying champagne like in his own mouth and he's like third on the podium or whatever i think retweeted that so yeah i think uh yeah we'll see what what happens uh every company needs to continue to kind of reinvent themselves

i'm sure kalshi will come back and and kind of try to create like new markets and momentum. And maybe there's an argument that the way to do it is to build a ton of momentum around specific markets, whereas PolyMarket's more like platform style approach. Yeah, this is a great one. Bill Gurley says, stop using revenue multiples and you will have more clarity on valuations. And it's a reply to Jason Lemkin. for the math to pencil out in venture capital we

probably need a rebound in public multiples vc probably can't make money at 5x arr public comps with harry stebbings it's so funny because bill girley's just coming in like the boss yeah he's he's kind of he's he's basically has the wisdom of y now. He's the only VC from that era that's still extremely online, right? Yeah, that's true. And he's able to just pop in and be like, you've been a multiple, my friend. Oh, you think that's what he's saying? That was the way I read it.

I thought it would just be like a more nuanced analysis of team, market structure yeah like monopoly characteristics but over over focus on any one metric is going to lead you astray yeah I mean revenue multiple is really silly

when you think about like all the other levers in a model yeah it's kind of crazy to lean on that but yeah

let's go to this quote tweet of Chamath in glorious capital says thanks Washington Post but I only trust autism capital with my news. It's a serious tweet a billionaire just wrote. So the crazy thing is how much impact this has. This is insane.

Wasn't that one account you said? Yeah, Cremieux. So he went from 70K followers to 200K followers off of this one tweet by Chamath. It was a very well-written tweet. I canceled my New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions and just reallocated the money to subscribe and follow the following folks on x who i believe help get me accurate news and it was autism capital and then uh cremeux and then a bunch of other people but what what a rise of the poster yeah and it's it's

true it's true like you'll just get better. That's why we cover the timeline instead of we don't, we don't cover the news. Yeah, we don't. Let's go to Joe Lonsdale. Roaring twenties redux begin shortly. Jeff Lonsdale says, okay,

but the PE ratio of the S and P 500 was around nine to 11 in 1924 to 1925. Boo. I'm on Joe's team here. Yeah. Yeah. Run it back. Run it back. Are they both Lonsdales?

Are they literally brothers or something? They must be related. Okay. If they're not, they should, they should, they should partner up in some way. But yeah,

Joe, I, I, I, I'm very bullish on the twenties. I think it's great. I think we're getting there. Yeah.

Yeah. Beginning Troy. I think the optimism that there's, there's obviously a massive amount of the animal spirits are back. There's a ton of optimism in the last week in the tech world. That's great. But it actually began, I swear it began like early in the,

in the 2020s, right? Like there was some, obviously a lot of froth and bullshit around COVID and markets and stuff like that. But there was also the beginning of this whole movement of like, we're going to make the world a better place, not just with software and apps, but with real world products. Yeah, that's when a lot of that stuff started.

It's interesting. Yeah. There's also, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because like during the post-Zerp crash and the recession, like the fundamental economic drivers of the American economy were very strong. But if you asked people that consumer sentiment, they would all say, it's not working for me. It's not doing well. And so this was termed by Kylo Scanlan, like the vibe session. Yeah. And there was this idea that like the vibes feel off, even though we're not seeing

like the American consumer collapse. And the American economy kept growing and we had a very brief recession. We never went into a depression. All the Doomer stuff didn't come to bear. So there's something about the fact that like, we have a very solid foundation to build on right now. Yeah.

Yeah. That's great. Okay. Let's pass that let's do uh uc berkeley's law school apparently had a course called elon fought the law the law won on offer alas it has since been canceled that's so crazy that someone was going to teach a whole course on this and they're just like it doesn't make sense anymore because he actually won yeah wow yeah i wish we could see what date it was actually sent and it would be amazing if it was canceled last week i think it was this looks recent this yeah recent screenshot spring 2025 yes yeah they're planning it for spring and just canceled it

crazy yeah i think the lesson here is he didn't try to fight the law directly he fought it indirectly yeah right also a lot of things he won like in the micro like that tesla shareholder lawsuit where the judge tried to take away his comp package which all the shareholders had approved where if he got the stock price to like an insane number he would get a ton of shares he did it everyone was happy but then yeah like one shareholder fought and like the judge ruled with them but then he went back to the shareholders and got it done yeah and so yeah i don't know what they were thinking with this because there aren't many examples shout out to the shareholders air l's it's very very rare yeah shout out to the

shareholders seriously uh let's go to trend griffin uh i think he's like a public markets analyst. He writes, Alad Gil, I see five layers of AI value. One, NVIDIA and chips. Two, data centers. Three, models. Four, tools for deploying AI. And five, workflow services. And I think he misses six, which is energy. Energy is like clearly the next thing.

And it's been a little bit of a champagne or a cocktail position in the sense that people talk about it at cocktail parties oh energy is going to be really important sam alton's investing in it but the market hasn't really moved on it but they're starting to right now it's just starting seven posters right without people like rune and and other top ai posters almost none of this works, right? Posters are moving the market. I mean, in terms of AI value, there are legitimately dozens of people

that are going to build million dollar businesses off of AI related content. Yeah. Whether it's YouTube videos or how tos or courses or podcasts. Like there are a number of AI podcasts that have gotten really big. Elad Gil has a great AI podcast. I mean, he's monetizing it differently through a fund, There are a number of AI podcasts that have gotten really big. Elad Gil has a great AI podcast.

I mean, he's monetizing it differently through a fund, but nevertheless, he is part of the AI value chain, even as a capital allocator. It is interesting. But of course, you've got to boil it down to five. The AI media industrial complex. You don't want to go too crazy. But that's a fascinating tweet. Let's go to Scotty Pippin.

I didn't even realize he was still using X. That's amazing. Scotty. So Scotty Pippin writes,'t even realize he was using x that's amazing scotty so uh scotty pippen writes just woke up from a wild dream satoshi nakamoto visited me and he laughed at the price of bitcoin too low he said i'm taking it higher you haven't seen anything yet get ready 2025 is going to be crazy i love this trend of athletes yeah like retiring and then coming back to post because you can have a whole he still

has his jersey in the picture yeah it's amazing you can have this whole cultural resurgence right because when people see scotty pippen in the feed they're going to pay attention right it's great um ab has done this i think really well throughout the last um whatever year as well so yeah bullish on scotty and Bitcoin. Very bullish. Let's go to Nikita Beer. I can't help but feel like we're about to enter one of the most insane times to own risk assets.

And Amit replies, is a Lambo a risk asset? And I hate to break it to you, bro. It's not. It's a hard asset. Very stable, hard asset. You want to get into the equity. As long as you don't put too much mileage on it. Yeah, but most Lambos are depreciating. Very few. Maybe get a hard asset. Very stable, hard asset. You want to get into the equity. As long as you don't put too much mileage on it. Yeah, but most Lambos are depreciating.

Very few. Maybe get a Countach if you're looking for something. But even that's not a risk asset. Yeah, I think Paki was saying something earlier as well. He's like, I feel very under-allocated to tech and crypto, even though his media business is like probably 95% tech and crypto. So yeah, the FOMO is starting. Great time to own risk assets.

Nikita also knows he can risk it all. And worst case, he'll just build another app and flip it. Did you see his other tweet about millionaires in the post-Zerp era are pointless? Yeah. It's all about centi-millionaires. And we're going to call them centis, which is very funny because like, I mean, we know. are pointless. Yeah. It's all about being a centi-millionaire is what, and we're going to call them centies,

which is very funny because like, I mean, we know, we know a lot of centi-millionaires and that's not the word they use.

Like, we all know the word that they use. It's not centies. So he's kind of telling on himself that he doesn't know like the real word.

Exactly. Yeah. But hopefully he gets there. Hopefully, hopefully he learns the real word. He's kind of acting like one of those guys that moves to san francisco san fran you know you don't really sound like yeah real a real senti millionaire but uh someone will clue you in i would

mike i would caution you if you're in lake como don't drop senti because you know george clinton is gonna spit out his screaming eagle if he hears you. I think Nikita should get on to really capture the long tail of his fans that can't afford intro. Create a copy trading subscription. Oh, there you go. Charge $10,000 a month. There you go. And some carry on it too. Because I think he would have like probably like 10,000 people that would be like, yeah, I'm going to YOLO with Nikita.

Hell yeah. I'm riding. I'm riding into the risk assets uh and this is the one we gotta close on jay alto says some creators do it for the clout some creators do it for the money but this is why the real ones do it and it's a clip of the founder of patreon giving some long speech about yeah we don't need it who cares we do it for the money. We just want to be ultra clear about this. If you're listening you're going to hear a lot of ads and you're going to hear a lot of monetization. So get

ready. Buckle up. Lock in. Lever up. Welcome to Technology Brothers. Thanks for listening. I think we got to get on with Taipei. I actually have to get to Las Vegas to meet with the new administration. as one does it's been a pleasure

thanks everyone good doing business with you