TBPN Live - Ms. Information Herself, Acquiring Mountains, Jonathan Moneymaker, Start A Tradition Today

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we have some breaking news in the media-free agency, brothers. We got a blockbuster trade coming out of the journalistic trenches. Taylor Lorenz, yes, misinformation herself, is officially making the move from the Washington posters to the San Francisco information. This is a huge pickup for them, absolutely game-changing. Jordy, what you got for me? Let's talk about Lorenzo's game. This is a multimedia star who has posted and reported across

every single platform you can think of. Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, podcasting, Twitter, X, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Threads, you name it. She's dominated dominated it she's not just covering culture people she is shaping it of course her her career hit a bit of turbulence after some head-to-head contact with none other than the nut with none other than mark andreessen let me do that again of course her career hit a bit of turbulence after some head-to-head contact with none other than mark andreessen that little dust up in the clubhouse caused her career trajectory to be slowed, hindered, impeded, delayed. There are other words for it, but you get the idea.

She hits free agency after parting ways with the New York Times, but instead of hanging up her cleats, she deletes all her tweets and goes back to the grind and gets immediately signed with none other than the Washington posters. And let's not forget, she thrived there, continuing her gumshoe reporting,

taking on billionaires, and making life miserable for anyone daring to build a network state. And talk about a dream gig, working for one of the greatest technology brothers in history. An absolute dog. Jeff Bezos. She worked hard to make the richest man in the world even richer.

One of the most noble things a technology journalist can do. And yes, people call her a champagne socialist. They call her a limousine liberal. But look, as someone who loves drinking champagne in the back of limousines, I feel like we're kindred spirits. Look, this is a reporter who doesn't just show up. She gets in people's heads. She understands the game like no one else, whether it's hard-hitting investigations or defining internet culture for the masses. Her articles have been must-reads for years. If you're building a network state, a new social app,

or just trying to live your life in Silicon Valley, Taylor is coming for you, and you better watch out. Phenomenal pickup by the San Francisco Misinformation. They just landed an absolute franchise player. Can't wait to see the headline. She's about to write. John, do you have any details on the contract? We don't at this time.

I think it is just a contract. I don't think she's full time yet. Still testing out the water settling in through the team. But very interesting. She hit me up a couple of weeks ago. We chatted about the rise of the brocaster and I chimed in as a male podcast expert on the record. Talked to her for about 30 minutes. It was a fantastic conversation, and she's still got it. She's in the arena. She's making plays, and this article is fantastic. We're going to break it down. But first, we're going to go to a profile of Taylor Lorenz in none other than the information they wrote about her. Now they're writing with her. It's almost like you can't write this storyline at home, folks. So let's go to Annie Goldsmith at the information

who writes all rippers, no skippers, how Taylor Lorenz became part of the story. On May 18th, the Washington Post published a breaking news story about the Biden administration's newly created and promptly attacked disinformation government's board. The board was able to be led by researcher and author Nina Jankiewicz, who the Post reported has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral. The Post revealed that Jankiewicz was resigning from her barely three-week-old post, and the board, which had been charged with countering misinformation related to Homeland Security, was being disbanded. And this was a different arc in Taylor's career. She'd been on the tech beat, and she always got a lot of a lot of criticism because she was a technology

journalist but she wrote a lot about social media she wrote a lot about culture and people oh she should be in the style section i completely disagree with that characteristic i think that what she wrote about was extremely important to the technology world now and what i i mean discussed in many ways she was the center of the entire creator economy trend, which was huge, but in many ways, she implanted so many ideas in venture capital's head that it led to a sort of capital incineration where VCs invested billions of dollars into the creator economy, and we haven't had much to show for it and she was so pissed about bc's coining the the whole creator economy thing and really running with it with as their own because she'd been reporting on it for years and was like this is not well that was that was that was actually the book well and that was somewhat of the the the thing i always found you know having my first you know real company um is a youtube ad network that I started while in college.

And when I saw the creator economy trend happening in tech, I was like, this is kind of interesting because the entire movement was basically kicked off because somebody did an analysis. Somebody did an analysis of the fastest growing small business categories in the US and influencers were the fastest growing category. And so people were like, we need to give them SaaS. And so they just dumped literally billions into, and the information, the San Francisco information was at the forefront of kind of covering that. They've had probably hundreds of articles at this point that have referenced the creator economy and tracking like deal volume and velocity

which has slowed down dramatically and i think one of the issues where why that trend didn't necessarily play out is the trends that were driving the creator economy had really started at the creation of youtube and some of these sort of foundational social media platforms yep that had already been in the like very like scaled, like, scaled for a while. That said, I do think Taylor did a good job of making the creator economy about herself. Yep. And she's built a, you know, fantastic career on it. Yeah, there was an interesting dynamic where the thesis of her book was that, look, you might see Mr. Beast or Logan Paul,

like, kind of the shining stars of the creator economy now, or Kai Sanat, or I Show Speed, all these bros, Rogan. But really, if you go back in her telling of the history, it was the mommy bloggers who really were on the forefront of the creator economy, which I think is right. And that's accurate. But it doesn't go back far enough, in my opinion, because if you go back even further, there's a group of bros that start the platforms and that's guys like Chad Hurley at YouTube. And so there's this question of like, her whole point was like, VCs are just jumping onto this creator economy bandwagon right now. They're not authentic. And like, while that was true, if you go back to Sequoia writing the investment memo for YouTube in 2003 or something like that, like clearly they saw what the creator economy was going to become.

And they actually made a very strong bet. If you're a venture capitalist and you're looking for outsized returns, you don't necessarily want to rip a check into someone with a Canon 5D who's going to go make vlogs and who knows if it's going to hit. And if it does, it's going to look like a lifestyle business, most likely. You want to be in the platforms. And that's why the VCs were correct to put money into Twitter. Yeah, it's funny that in many ways, the creator economy investment trend was like the trend of capital incineration. But if you go back and you combine Shopify and YouTube into that. And Instagram and Facebook. It was an amazing category to invest in. Exactly, exactly. So you need to really understand the definition of like, does creator economy include the platforms?

Like it should, right? And so obviously there's a lot of beneficiaries there. And there's been, you know, for platforms like Substack that have gotten, you know, that have been at the center of controversy, they've continued to be a place where you can build a great creator business on. Yeah. And so she gets a lot of love for breaking this story. It was a huge story at the time. The scoop was for a news cycle, at least the talk of the town, just the latest in a series of stories

that has made Lorenz the most scrutinized, recognized, and controversial journalist in the tech beat. She just keeps putting out bangers, says NBC News reporter Ben Collins, who I believe runs The Onion now. Did you see this? I think I'm thinking of the right person. Her former editor at The Daily Beast. She's all rippers and no skippers. And that is true. She's on the power law. She is a phenomenal player. And everything that she touches turns to gold. She's a scoop machine because she lives and breathes

the heavily online lifestyle that her subjects... Her book, Extremely Online. She is extremely online. She's living the same experience as many of the people that she covers. So obviously she's going to have better scoops and, um, you know,

have a very unique lens on it. Yeah. And it goes back to her early career in the three months since she left the New York times to join the post. Lorenz has been breaking, has broken high impact stories about Facebook smear campaign against Tik Tok. The woman behind the right wing libs of Tik Tok social media account, and the White House's Ukraine war briefings for TikTok stars.

She's a scoop machine, said her post editor, David Mallitz. It's so true. Her beat was initially dubbed internet culture, though Lorenz now rejects that moniker. I hate that phrase. She said, attention stemming from her belief that all culture is internet culture this is so true she's dead on like the internet online is real life twitter is real life and that's why she is she's she's really good and she runs this like she runs her own instagram account but then she also runs in a non-instagram account that's been banned so many times it's now on like taylor lorenz alt number 717 oh yeah i don't even know about oh. Oh, it's really, really good. I'm missing out. Uh, I forget what it's called, but it's really funny. Um, and she posts great stuff. She like

is very, very in tune with the culture and she doesn't get enough credit from the tech elite. In my opinion, um, a number of Lorenz's friends and colleagues use the same phrase to describe her extremely online. And that's the title of her forthcoming book. There is no distinction between online life and offline life. Couldn't agree more, Taylor. Truth. You are dead on there. Now, for the first time, Lorenz has found herself at the subject of media attention

in February when she announced she was leaving her job at the Times to become a columnist at the rival Post, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and The Hill all covered her departure with Lorenz lobbying some lightweight grenades of the gray lady on her way out the door. She told Vanity Fair that she kind of hit a ceiling at the times and hoped the paper would hopefully, you know, evolve in their ways. Completely agree. I mean, she left shortly after the dust up with Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. They were in this clubhouse chat. Ben Horowitz used the R word, but he used it.

He was quoting members of the Wall Street Bets community who used the R word to refer to themselves in endearing ways. And he was being positive and they were being positive. So it was kind of a hall monitor situation. She took to Twitter immediately, posted about it. But most importantly, she got the name wrong. She attributed the quote to Marc Andreessen instead of Ben Horowitz.

And shortly after, she was out at the New York Times. And I think, huge mistake by the New York Times. Clearly, they just don't get the modern way. Lost a lot of cultural relevancy for the Times. Yep, exactly. Which is why it's such a big pickup. Jeff Bezos understood, hey, if you're going to be talking trash about, you know, Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen,

get on my team. I love, I love riffing with these guys. Yep. And so she goes over to the times. Um, and she says, uh, a few weeks ago, she found herself in mid in the midst of another journalism brouhaha after she referenced her personal brand in an insider interview. I will not make that mistake again, she told me. Pulitzer Prize winning Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted, is there something going on in the world other than the desire of some folks to get more attention? Ridiculous. Maggie, no one's going to be talking about you in a couple of years. You need to be building a brand. Like you're going to be irrelevant. Taylor is clearly a glimpse into the future here.

And the old guard just doesn't get it. And so it must be extremely frustrating for her, for Taylor, because in any other community of tech people, everyone would be like, yes, like you are doing everything perfectly. And you can tell because the tech folks are like, fuck, this is the one thing that competitor for the technology industry and a sparring partner, right? Somebody that you can bounce ideas off of and have sort of this sort of somewhat charged, but very meaningful debates on the most important topics of our time, like how much time you should spend scrolling. Yes. Yes. But it's kind of like getting in the

gladiatorial pit with like a wild bear or tiger like totally it's gonna lead to a lot of glory but you could get malt yep and so you talk to her on the record could come out fine as we saw with this next piece that we're gonna cover uh but you could get you could get destroyed and your whole life could be uh up in up in flames um and so there was a big controversy after she doxed the libs of tiktok the daily Wire leased a Times Square billboard, which blared in all caps, Taylor Lorenz doxed libs of TikTok. I wish I could get my rivals to buy Times Square billboards about me. Man, what an impact. You know you got under someone's skin when they're buying billboards about you. That's fantastic. In Lorenz's view, it's not just the politically flammable stories that elicit such incendiary

reactions, but the tenacity with which she reports them. I think you have to really nail them, she said. And when you really twist the knife in a good way, in an accountability story, people are going to freak out. Taylor Lorenz joined the Washington Post at a delicate moment for the newsroom. Like the Times, the Post was working to formalize a policy surrounding its reporter's use of social media. The paper had been rocked by a discrimination lawsuit filed last July by reporter Felicia Sonmez, a sexual assault survivor who was suspended in January 2020 by former Post editor Marty Barron. The suspension came after Sonmez tweeted about rape allegations

against Kobe Bryant shortly after his death. Though the paper is now under the leadership of its first female executive editor, Sally Busby, the episode was still fresh in the minds of some staffers when Taylor Lorenz joined in March. Enter Taylor Lorenz into this powder keg situation. Here is somebody who is employed to use their voice on Twitter in a way that no one else has been empowered to do. And so the feeling from the top brass is mutual. There's a lot of excitement in the room about working with her. Part of what it means to practice journalism today is there are going to be staffers that have really large followings. And this is true. This is the modern era. And so you have to be

online. In many ways, in our corner of the internet, Lorenz is going to be bigger than any publication that she works with. She actually genuinely has more reach than the post within our section of the internet. She is the one technology journalist who truly lives rent-free in the minds of the tech elite. In a very meaningful way. And that, you can't put a price on that. It can't be quantified in distribution numbers or circulation numbers. Though Taylor Lorenz is now the poster child for being very online, growing up in old Greenwich, Connecticut, she remained fairly unplugged. In the late 90s,

I felt like the internet was for nerds and I wanted to be cool, so I didn't really spend a lot of time online. Aside from AIM, she told me. In 1998, I just didn't get the hype at all. She declined to answer additional questions about her family life, upbringing, or even her exact age. Itself the subject of wild speculation on the right. Yeah, people are obsessed with her age. It's very funny. On her Wikipedia page, it says that she was born between 1984 and 1988 or something like that. Well, that's, that's, that's, that's her gift

is being able to swing through. Is she Gen Z one story? Is she millennial? Another, is she a boomer? Another, she really can sort of bend with whatever the subject that she's writing about and really feel as though it's coming from the source. Yeah. Right. But that bit, it just keeps on giving like just, just this week, it went viral again because, uh, someone was talking about her age and she replied like, look, I'm 50. And it's like, obviously she's not 50, but no one gets the joke. And so everyone's like, she, she's actually 50. And they like, you know, start dunking on that. And like, it just, she's got a real, she's got a real sense of humor, right? She's got a real sense of humor. She knows how to get the people riled up. Exactly. She does it intentionally, strategically. She did this. You remember when, when she went out and said, you know, I need to have my, you know, apartment. She heats her apartment to like 80 degrees, sort of like her baseline temperature. And that sparked a lot of speculation that maybe she was, you know, a lizard person or something like that.

She needed to be in sort of a warm environment because of that. The war on air conditioning. She's been waging it for years. But yeah, I mean, what a career. In 2017, Lorenz came face to face with the dangers of her new job when she was assaulted at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, getting punched in the face while delivering a live stream report. I peer pressured the Daily Beast into hiring me for literally nothing. I took a 70% pay cut. I sold every belonging I had and moved in with a bunch of roommates in Crown Heights.

Conviction. Conviction. Grinding. And yeah, what a crazy thing. I remember she was at that live stream. That was so crazy. What a crazy time. She was an instant hit at the Daily Beast. She was like a rocket ship. She was a pioneer in what was then a criminally undercovered industry. Lorenz stayed at the Daily Beast for a few months

before getting recruited away. Within six months, I had four job offers from all these other outlets. I took the Atlantic, where I was there for a year and a half. And then the New York Times was aggressively recruiting me. Yeah. I mean, this is what happens to star players. They get recruited.

And now she's fully in the free agency. She's writing. She has a fantastic sub stack. I subscribe to her newsletter. She's always unearthing stories that I would not have found otherwise. She's not writing about like the mainstream tech news, but it's very important if you're a tech person. She's done this perfect creator dance,

which is benefiting from these legacy media brands in order to establish herself while still sort of building up her own audience so that she can maintain this sort of, you know, this sort of like, fuck you attitude of, I don't need you, you need me, right? Given that she could, in theory, be completely independent at any point and probably make just as much money doing that than she could at any one of these publications. Yep, yep. But it's obviously come with major setbacks. She's been doxxed multiple

times. She's been swatted multiple times with police forces wrongly called to her home and that of her parents. She's philosophical about what her parents faced. She calls them generic suburban white people who can comfortably reason with law enforcement when 15 police show up at the door. But she worries about other reporters who are victims of such harassment. Think if they're in a different neighborhood or of a different background or of a different race. Those are the stakes other journalists are trying to cover. The abuse has been so constant, it's become almost routine. It's the same. Docs on Kiwi Farms and 4chan,

Reddit thread about your family and friends and get swatted. You get swatted, they leak your phone number. I feel like I'm on the merry-go-round for the 20th time. I feel like there's got to be some way to harden her her security because um she's got to keep posting um but uh swatting people's just playing dirty folks don't do it it's it that that's not the point the whole thing is like you have to understand what's going on in the tech press versus the tech community is like it's it's wwe it's wrestling like what happens on the court is left yeah is left in the ring and and and you know you can't

be the fan that thinks it's real yeah that's just embarrassing yeah but here's here's the thing the the pressure on her and the scrutiny has made her a better journalist right and she admits that she says she's keenly aware of any mistakes that she makes no matter how trivial will be trotted out in front of a national audience i can't get a correction ever like i would be dead i can't fuck up ever any tiny thing is going to be blown out of proportion so the margin for error because of that attention is just very high that's that mamba mentality right where she's she understands in the spotlight she's going to perform right and it's pushing her to be a better journalist yep and and this came back to uh to mamba mentality, right? Where she understands in the spotlight, she's going to perform, right? And it's pushing her to be a better journalist. Yep. And this came back to hurt her recently when she

was at a press briefing for Joe Biden. I believe she called him a war criminal on her close friends feed on Instagram. One of her close friends, turns out not that much of a close friends, leaked it, screenshot it, leaked it. And there was massive blowback but you know what free speech I thought we were the party of free speech we're supposed to be supporting people saying unhinged things about our enemies that said so but recently she's sort of come around to feeling like deep platforming is actually wrong oh yeah ways she said on a recent podcast that you know while she historically was in favor of silencing the manosphere. So if you had male opinions, she wanted to generally sort of shut you up, deplatform you. What she's sort of found in

her research is that that tends to have blowback that comes with it, where if you end up in this game of whack-a-mole, where you-platform somebody they pop up on another platform and she's been very critical of the right-leaning uh platforms that have been in favor of free speech um has spoken out very strongly against many of those platforms but at the same time recognizing that the there there are so many potential platforms to post on today that deplatforming is potentially very ineffective. You gave us the birth of Parler and Gab and Truth Social and all these different platforms. I think that the natural next move for her is potentially a board-level role at Truth Social. Where does she really go from here? She's been at The atlantic the times

the washington post the san francisco information she's been around you know she's been at every top newsroom in the country the only the natural next step is to join the board of something like true social and help you know true social while they have a fantastic valuation they only did about a million in revenue last year so if taylor went on there and said she was rolling out a private feed and subscription she could probably two three x their revenue overnight yeah i mean it goes back to the concept of like the horseshoe theory right like she's been clocked as like left wing but as we've seen with her calling biden a war criminal she's not riding with Biden. She's not in the democratic establishment. She's further left that. She's very skeptical of government because of how

they handled COVID. A lot of people on the right are skeptical of the government because of how they handled COVID. And so you could see her following around, going to national Bolshevism or far right extremism and just kind of coming to the other side at a certain point we've seen this a lot i like to i i like it when she runs into the fire right so with with her going to the information it's it's literally saying hey all my you know all her top enemies are avid you know readers of the information these sort of texts she's in the mouth of the wolf she's going and running at them yep and you know screaming screaming at them, chasing them around the internet. But the next move could be to the Daily Wire. The Daily Wire or Truth Social, right?

Yep, or Truth Social. Going into the fire, she's not afraid to do that. But there's one journalist who will not be working with her in the future, and that's Nate Silver. They got a little spat on X. Taylor wrote, hi, Nate. I don't disclose any personal details like my birth date home address family info etc because my family members are harassed and

swatted at their homes thanks to reactionary people like you misrepresenting my work and inciting outrage why are you so obsessed with my age it's a good point good point who cares if she's writing bangers I don't care if it's a 13 year old in Czechoslovakia

I will retweet it. But Nate replies and says, Taylor, normal people publish their date of birth. Mine is one 1378. I know you're probably older than the image you want to cultivate online, but you just own it. Not much you can really do to make yourself younger. And Nate had to delete it. He said, deleting this because it's mean. I don't think highly of this person, but I also don't know this person. I was a little unclear what he meant by deleting it, by screenshotting it.

Screenshotting it and getting 5,000 likes. So I was a bit confused on that, but I think it's important. So we don't talk about social. This is a growth hack. We need to post some really incendiary stuff, then delete it, and then post the screenshot. I'm deleting, just so you know,

I'm deleting this picture of my watch collection and my rare car collection because it's gauche. It's in bad taste. I apologize, and please don't repost it like this. Yeah, and I think it's important to say, so we don't talk about politics or social issues on this podcast. I feel like I have to remind people of that. But I do think it's important for us as a technology and a business podcast to stand up against this journalist on journalist violence.

Exactly, exactly. Technology brothers, we have our differences at times. But overall, we have this sort of shared common mission to advance the world through enterprise SaaS and rockets and everything in between. Journalists have the same sort of desire to find and share the truth. And I don't want to see Nate Silver and Taylor Lorenz fighting. I want to see them uniting. I want to see them going over to True Social, going over to Blue Sky together, being everywhere at once, posting more and, uh, you know, constantly in pursuit of the truth and not letting personal differences or getting into arguments about

birthdays. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this goes back to when, when Elon bought ask X, uh, Taylor was, uh, banned for a little bit for some reason. Uh, it was a very dark time. I want her on the platform. I want her in the ring i want the surprise she's still she posts with comments off now yeah she's back on but we need to get her her account fully back up and supported we need all of her crew on to really create some tension on the timeline this was like the beauty of twitter was like if you were posting about capitalism or technology it could go either way you could get a bunch of you could get dunked on now when you go out and now there's no there's no capitalism good you're not oh yeah cool old old news there's no stakes and so stakes and drama that's what makes for entertainment and so we

need more of that so we need to support taylor lorenz on the timeline and and honestly if if taylor was taking x seriously i'm i'm assuming she'd be pulling in at least 50, 60 K a month. I would hope so. Um, just off of the, the ad sharing revenue. I would hope so.

So go and, uh, go and subscribe to the information, subscribe to her podcast, power user pod on AWS is a sponsor. So we'd want to just say, do we, we like to do sponsor.

She's still, she's still working with Bezos. That's great. I was worried that they had a rift after leaving the post, but it's good to see that Bezos is still supporting her. I think it's good to do sponsor acknowledgments. Thank you to AWS for sponsoring Taylor. I think it's an amazing way to get in front of the next generation of engineers

and entrepreneurs that are going to be building on top of AWS. I agree. I agree. So let's go to the rise of the brocasters. This is the article that Taylor called me about, and I spoke to her on the record. going to be building on top of AWS. I agree. I agree. So let's go to the rise of the brocasters. This is the article that Taylor called me about, and I spoke to her on the record. She writes, about a year ago, Sean Kelly, then 26, decided to launch yet another business. Previously, he'd fooled around running a small dropshipping company as a Rutgers University undergrad. Later, he sold face masks and other personal protective equipment during the pandemic's

early days. Clearly, very hustle, very entrepreneurial-oriented guy. Neither enterprise had really gone anywhere, so after years of binging the Joe Rogan experience, he settled on his next venture, his own podcast. He built his show, Digital Social Hour, as in-depth conversations with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and high achievers, attracting guests like Brian Johnson, Tulsi Gabbard. He uploaded episodes relentlessly, both audio and YouTube videos, and amassed a dedicated male following. In swift order, he shot to number one on Apple Podcasts self-improvement category. Congrats.

Probably lots of Dom pairing on along the way. And he's accumulated 11 million Instagram followers and more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube. He's leaned hard into video and employs up to eight freelance video editors at a time, six for his longer stuff and two for short social media friendly clips. What's interesting is that she then later clocks his revenue

or his profit. Why wouldn't she not? So she went and she said she talked to industry experts about it. Why would she just not ask for a picture of his watch or car collection? That would be good. It'd be a much easier way to clock his revenue. He won't comment on his annual revenue, but based on conversations with industry experts,

it could plausibly be around a half million dollars. I feel like that's really low. Super low. Really low. Kelly, if that's really low. Super low. Really low. Kelly, if that's what you're doing, talk to us. Yeah, we'll get you set up with some real profit. Maybe he's not doing enough ads. But I mean, 11 million Instagram followers, 1 million subscribers.

You got to be able to pull in a lot more than half a million. I mean, the rule of thumb generally, I mean, this isn't even for business content or long form, but the rule of thumb is usually a dollar per subscriber on YouTube is like reasonable monetization. So you look at Mr. Beast, over 100 million subscribers. His business does over $100 million. You look at a lot of the finance channels that have a couple million views, a couple million subscribers, a couple million bucks in revenue. And then, of course, there's costs below the line. But Taylor is opining on the end of an era. The era of journalistic podcasts like Serial and Slow Burn is fading away. And even the schlocky true crime and horror standbys like

My Favorite Murder and Last Podcast on the left no longer hold as much cultural sway and brand power as they did a few years ago. Instead, the new podcast stars are young men like Kelly. They're part of the manosphere that's been talked about a lot in politics lately. Ever since Donald Trump made their shows, he campaign stops. Yeah. And Taylor's last podcast episode was with your friend, a researcher. Joshua Cittarella. Joshua, who is an expert on the manosphere. Yep.

And it was a great episode where Joshua basically mansplained the manosphere to Taylor and the audience. So it was very insightful for me, considering I've listened to some of these podcasts before, but I'd never heard the Manosphere described so perfectly. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's all this question. There's been a big question in the media about should the Democrats build a Democrat version of Joe Rogan? And there's a bunch of reasons why that may or may not work. If you look at the top technology or the top podcasts, there are already plenty of left-wing shows with huge reaches. The Harris campaign just didn't do them. Like there's The Daily Show. There's The Ezra Klein Show.

The NYT Daily. There's Last Podcast on the left. And there's that one with those comedians called – I'm blanking on it, but it's also really – Smartless is really big. And then there's the one with the obama writer uh called uh pod save america so there's just like so many like the views are clearly there it's not like you know oh there's 100 million americans who just aren't listening to podcasts they're just listening to different podcasts but they just weren't prioritized so i kind of rejected the whole premise when i was talking to her. But there is an interesting question about why male podcasts have become so big, how this happened. My thesis

for her was that a big part of it is that Apple has less algorithmic control over what people look at and listen to in the podcast player. So they are much less likely to de-platform people. They did de-platform InfoWars, but they never de-platformed The Daily Wire in the same way that YouTube can just adjust the algorithm to promote a little bit less. Because Kevin Ruse did this whole deep dive on, I think it was called Rabbit Hole.

He did a whole podcast and series about young men who go on YouTube and look for self- know, self-improvement content, essentially. And then they wind up in a conservative rabbit hole of content that gets more and more right wing as they go down it. And the recommendation algorithm was, it wasn't tuned to deal with politics at all. It was completely neutral about it. It was like, if you search for a video about a, you know, 911 Turbo S, well, you're going to see a video about a more niche Porsche. And you're going to see an ST video and then a GT3 RS and then some retro Porsche because it knows – You might end up on Cars and Bids buying a GT3 RS.

Exactly. So it's kind of like a funnel for anything. And, of course, it works the same way for conservative content and liberal content too yeah and she and this this piece calls it out but youtube is i i do think it's starting to change but it forever because youtube originated with a lot of gaming content that was like over i think it was like over 50 of all content uploaded to youtube for a while i think it may still be that way was just gaming content that There was a lot of men. That attracted a lot of men.

And then that has still snowballed where I see this, running a YouTube ad network. I haven't run it in years, but starting one in college, it used to be a real challenge to help a female-oriented consumer brand actually scale up on YouTube because there just wasn't that

many channels that's changed a lot as youtube has become but i think i think one of the that i don't think this is like specifically called out but some something that people miss with youtube is there is um it has complete so much of youtube content today is watched on TVs, right? And so what that means is that the influence that TV used to hold is now held by the male podcast experts, right? The Hubermans, Alex Freedmans, etc. And a lot of them have deals where they can still post the full show on YouTube. This is the thing with the Harris going on Call Her Daddy and Trump going on Rogan. Rogan is now a couple years out from his Spotify deal. He's allowed to post the full episode on YouTube as well as on Spotify.

Call Her Daddy is still in that tweener phase where they have to gate it. And so what went out on YouTube from Call Her Daddy was just a clip. It wasn't the full thing. And it was a lot shorter. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that goes into the dynamics there. They had a good quote from Samir Chowdhury. Do you know this guy? of the colonists oh yeah yeah it's a great it's a great show they break down uh the they break down everything in the youtube world and they really break down like the business of youtube yeah really great interviews with mr beast and a lot of other folks uh samir says youtube is a largely

male audience and male loneliness is a factor you have a lot of young men looking for community and friendship and they've been able to find that through podcasting yeah we've talked about the cure cure to male loneliness being just calling up your ramp you know sales rep yeah you're right you're sdr over at ramp they'll talk to you for hours or going on tigas yeah going on. Going on TGS network calls. Exactly. But I, I resonate with this when I discovered podcasts while I was a young man, I was 18 and it felt like having a mentor in my pocket where I could listen to hundreds of hours of people that had gone and done the things that I wanted to do. And I learned

the language of the industries that I was interested. I learned different health practices that, you know, many of which I still do today. So it podcasts have served as basically an older brother to me that I didn't have in terms of teaching me about the world. And it's influenced many of my beliefs, right. Yeah. My question here is he says, YouTube is a largely male audience. And so I wonder how, what the actual gender breakdown is. Is it 60, 40? Is it 70, 30? And then, and then if you zoom out, can you look that up? And then if you zoom out, I wonder if, if, is it that women are just listening to less content or consuming less content? Or are they on, is Instagram more female?

Is TikTok more female? Or is YouTube and podcasting really just, excuse me, like are AirPods sold more to men than women? I wonder about that. Or just like headphones, like listening to things, like the thing that is upstream of the individual platform because I would believe that there are some platforms

that lean male, some platforms that lean female, but I would be very surprised if we learned that just content consumption is a male phenomenon. Yeah, it's interesting. So as of now,

this site is reporting that only 54% of YouTube users 18 and above are male. That sounds right to me. That sounds right to me. But it is in different niches, obviously. If you look at like the business niche or the manosphere, obviously that's going to skew male. But there are going to be plenty of sub-niches that skew female. 50-50, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And so I kind of disagree with that characterization of YouTube. And I don't think the data backs that up. But it is interesting that that just the the accessible product on on social media in on new media was accessible to the conservatives this time around, where next year or in 2024, I guess 2028, we could be looking at, oh, it's the TikTok election or the Instagram Reels election and the Democrats are crushing because they have much more viral potential on there

and it's a little bit of a more, like for JD, he seems to do really well in a three-hour show, same with Trump. But maybe the Democrats, whoever they put up next, whether it's Buttigieg or AOC, they'll do better on a streaming platform or they'll do better on a short form platform. And so I'm wondering if this holds forever or if this will be disrupted. And so let's go to my quote in here. The other commonality, many of these podcasters eventually fill the pull towards political coverage, which is something I've talked about, which has been an even wider appeal than

topics like artificial intelligence and crypto. John Coogan, an entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund and host of the podcast Technology Brothers, said he experienced this pressure firsthand when trying to grow his YouTube channel, which now has nearly half a million subscribers. You want your business to grow. You have employees, he said. But as you grow, you need the numbers to go up. The algorithm is addictive. You realize that there are only 100,000 people interested in tech or AI. At a certain point, you max out the technology or business market size. And so this is very natural. We've seen this with all in going political and everyone getting really up in a tizzy about that.

But it makes sense. They're growing their business. And what they're doing is impactful to the tech community. I was just talking to somebody at the gym about this. Let's not take away their desire to go political. They enjoy the culture war, right? Like those guys like duking it out on the timeline with the taylor lorenzes of the world and they just enjoy it

it's like a sport to them and it helps them get bigger and bigger and bigger like when jcal's posting like we're the number one podcast he's not even talking about like the number one podcast in technology anymore yeah like he will have episodes like the all-in show will have episodes that are like the number one podcast in all the categories yeah and it's because it appeals to everyone yeah if they were just sticking to deep dives on oh what ai agent is the best or what startup got funded like they're not gonna they're not gonna go broad and and they want to go bigger and bigger and bigger and this is very natural and it creates an opening for new shows to come in this is what happened with lex fried. He used to be

the artificial intelligence podcast. It was all AI researchers. Then eventually he broadened out, started having political people on, started having, you know, Jocko Willink on and Rogan and all sorts of different people on health stuff. And that created the opportunity for Dworkesh who's doing fantastically. And now Dworkesh is doing Tony Blair and eventually Dworkesh will broaden out to all sorts of different topics that he's interested in. He won't just be the AI researcher show and then there'll be a new Dworkash and that's great. And it's this virtuous cycle that should not be, it shouldn't be criticized. It's just, it's a positive thing.

The only thing I want to see out of Taylor is if she wants to really fight back against the manosphere, she's got to get bigger. She's got to monetize more. I want her, you know, there's this talk within the tech world of what's going to be the first $1 billion one-person company. Yep. Could easily be Taylor Lorenz. The Taylor Lorenz Media Supercorp Inc.

Yep. That could be the world's first. Yeah. And that would be, I would love to see her as a BNR. I'd love to see her, you know, potentially gunning for that first you know podcast to ipo right you're gonna have to go up against newcomer for that yeah total spat candidate if she would really start to focus on monetization so my biggest

criticism of taylor is focus on monetization if you really want to yeah if you want to understand the creator economy more more promoted posts i like that she's working with AWS and encouraging young technologists to build on AWS through that partnership, but ramp it up, right? Like ramp it up. Yep, I like it. More ads. And I feel like we're lucky to have her

as a sparring partner. The pressure makes her a better journalist. And so if you're listening to this, you're a founder, you're in technology, give it on the record interview to Taylor. Most of the time it'll come out great like this, but every once in a while you'll slip up, admit that you read one unqualified reservations post

and she'll destroy your entire life. But that's the way it goes, folks. That's the game. That's the game. And it's a good game. Yeah, so she's actually retooling her podcast right now. We saw this. She's shifting from an interview show to a dual host conversational show.

And so hopefully that leads to breakout success. Whenever I see somebody with an interview show, I'm always cautiously optimistic that they'll play the game correctly. If she wants to be this technology political show, she should have gotten Kamala harris on the show yeah and it's like what was her plan to get to that size to that that scale and you can't i mean i love josh but uh he is very much a micro internet celebrity he's small and so he's not going to bring a huge audience but it's and it's also a question of taylor lorenz is such an alpha could she and and kamala who's also an alpha even exist in the same room together you gotta figure out a way i mean rogan rogan figured it out with trump yeah like they they they got some great

content together and so i i think that's that's the big problem with with the the the democrat version of rogan is that no one is really grinding out like, okay, how do I make sure that I have to be the stop? It almost felt like Caller Daddy was like lucked into it and was like, okay, I guess we'll do this, but this wasn't our plan. Whereas if you're really trying to build the Rogan of the left, like you gotta be getting all these people on. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. Thanks for listening to that deep dive.

Didn't even have to put her in the truth zone because it was a truthful article the information everyone is calling it the misinformation is misinformed it's not the misinformation stop calling it the misinformation it's the information it's not the misinformation the san francisco information it's the san francisco information so go easy on them they're great and they just they just picked up an all-time player so we love them. Yeah. Oh, before?

Okay. Yeah, we got to do that. We have a fantastic promoted post by Tyler. He says that inspired by Friday's episode of Technology Brothers, I created a marketplace for sales reps to rent.edu email addresses from female college students to increase their response rate to cold emails. If you're a sales rep or sales leader looking to crush your Q4 goals, try leveraging a.edu email today. Check it out at edumart.io or at the edumart. And he's created this fantastic marketplace where you can go on.

If you are selling enterprise SaaS, go on there, get a.edu email address from a female college student. And if you're in college, go on there and rent out your.edu address. It's probably massively against the terms, but so is Airbnb in many ways in the early days. Move fast and break things. This was all inspired by Morgan, right? Inspired by Morgan Barrett, who said, with a girl's name and a.edu email address, I have almost 100% response rate to cold emails. True banger here, one and a half million views, almost 4,000 likes, oh, sorry, 40,000 likes. 40K likes. Almost 4,000 bookmarks. And people really resonated with this.

And this is why we got to call out Tyler, because 40,000 people like this, only one guy actually went and built it. And so the next time you see some crazy banger and you think, oh, somebody already built it. There's probably 10 YC companies that are doing this already. They aren't. Just go and build it. And send it to us. Morgan covered it on the 19th.

We talked about it at the end of last week. Fantastic execution, Tyler. Tyler built it over the weekend and shipped it this morning. Does he deserve brother of the week? I think this has to be the brother of the week. This built it over the weekend and shipped it this morning. Does he deserve Brother of the Week? I think this has to be the Brother of the Week. This is Brother of the Week. This is Brother of the Week. Congratulations to Tyler.

Congratulations, Tyler. You are the technology brother of the week. This is exactly what we look for in the technology brothers. Building. Shipping. Shipping. Shit posting. And even running after controversy.

There's going to be a lot of people. There's going to be a lot of pushback's going to be a lot of pushback that are against this there's going to be a lot of people in general that say this is you know misleading or whatever but as long as you're selling a product that people need and want i i think that it's fair game yep uh you know and he's good at promoting it he got it'll be good for the next stage it'll be good for the shareholders call up business insider you got to get them to write about it. Call up Taylor Lorenz. Tell her what you're doing. Maybe she hates it. Maybe she writes a hit piece. It's going to be good for you. Thank you to Tyler. Thank you to Tyler. Congratulations on your brother of the week.

Andrew D'Souza says, the startup industrial complex created by Paul Graham and Y Combinator is rotting the creativity and ambition of a generation of founders with a paint-by-numbers approach to entrepreneurship. Founders, go off script, have an original idea, stop building for a niche, build for humanity. And this is so funny because I saw someone subtweeting this and it was just like someone complaining about YC

and then it was just Paul Graham, Coinbase, Airbnb, Stripe, Zapier. It's a good rebuttal. It's like, well, yeah, of course we're not focused on the off script companies in this batch. The ones that people are focused on right now are the AI rappers that are like running the right playbook. Yeah, but Coinbase was contrarian. Coinbase was not hot in summer 12. When you were in the batch, you could get a Bitcoin just for signingbook. Yeah, but Coinbase was contrarian. Coinbase was not hot in summer 12. You got, when you were in the batch, you could get a Bitcoin just for signing up. Yes, one Bitcoin was the signup reward for Coinbase. And then for years, no, everyone was like, oh yeah, Coinbase, like that weird company. Like, oh, okay, I guess they raised some money. Like they were slow to

raise money. It took them a while. There were much hotter companies coming out of YC. And also they were not flagged as like a top startup. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say, uh, the YC framework and basically religion around company building that they've created objectively for most entrepreneurs is like a fantastic set of guardrails to just like run it, you know, build, have the best possible chances at building a business. When I look back at the companies that I've built you know if i if i'm taking sort of a rear view look i'm like i wish i was sort of following more of yc's dogma around certain things and the other thing is yes yc is a great place to go if you're if you don't have some super inspiring idea or vision and you just want to build some software yep and have like a good framework to do that maybe join another but you can still they're still happy to take these weird

outlier ideas there's just not they found in a nicotine pouch they funded a nicotine pouch company in 2018 yeah and they're not gonna zen didn't even exist yeah and you're not gonna have a hundred visionary companies in every batch yeah that's okay because there's gonna be some you only non visionary you know plays that end up yeah pivoting into also like like there is a massive piece dividend of this startup industrial complex like you look at the ramp guys they took their first company through YC Paribus wound up selling it and then they wound up doing an even bigger company ramp after and when I think of their creativity and ambition, like it's not rot, it's not rotten, not, not by any stretch of the imagination and,

and them setting them up with the YC framework to build, execute, sell that business. Like it made them who they are today. And so, uh, you know, it's like there, there are so many ways to be successful and we're, you know, very thankful to YC. So a big wag of the finger to Andrew D'Souza. We disagree. But let us know what you think in the comments. Christina Farhat says, Your Honor, it was my AI agent. And Veronica says, This will be a real argument.

And I think that's real. Yeah. Where does the liability fall? We're already seeing this a little bit with some stuff. If you go on agent.ai, the professional network for AI agents, and you hire some digital employee that just goes absolutely rogue. Well, this is already happening with those customer support agents where you can basically get the customer support agent to give you a full refund or something for if you like game it out properly yeah and then the company has somebody oh that was not our policy like it hallucinated like yeah who who's responsible for that the llm the company

that created the customer on that side yeah the customer they're smart enough to convince your yeah but what happens when it's a hundred million dollar deal yeah or something that's going to court and yeah someone is going to say it's my agent and so that liability should fall not on the company but on the the the company that made the ai agent or the llm it's going to be a mess yeah but fortunately full of lawyers the lawyers will win in the end everybody's using ai agents and to fight the cases we We hallucinated. We pled guilty. We didn't mean to. No, there's going to be value in being a human at the end that says like, you know, just

taking responsibility for the bot. Yeah. I mean, human for a very long time, obviously, is the responsibility. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friends over at Fiorentina Label. Fiorentina Label, bespoke suiting designed in America and handcrafted in Italy. So Fiorentino Label is run by John Fiorentino. His family made their money in hospitality.

John has been running Fiorentino Label. Fantastic suits and tuxedos. And there's many heads of states and, you know, very the tech elite that wear these suits. We can't, you know, discuss specifics because it's very private. But anyways, fantastic suits. I wore one at Hereticon. I got a lot of compliments

on it. And we've had a number of our listeners actually go to Ferentino label after hearing about them here on the show and get suited up. So we ask everybody, anybody that's recording a podcast, especially if you're a capital allocator, would it kill you to put on a suit? Yep. Answer is usually no. So you should put one on.

You are a capital allocator or an executive, not an HVAC repairman. So dress like it. Dress accordingly. Alexa Z says, wow, I'm definitely bullish on this app at gethypehq. And in the settings slash account, it says call the founder. I think this is great.

I think this is amazing. Yeah. I think this is actually like the kind of thing that YC basically recommends. Yeah, do things that don't scale. Yeah, just think, I think this is actually like the kind of thing that YC basically recommends, which is like, yeah, just make yourself extremely available to users. And once your phone is breaking,

then get the second line of defense, but don't be like, Oh, I'm starting this brand new company. We don't have product market fit. We have three customers and I need some sort of like, you know, like a bunch of people and a bunch of stuff.

It's like, no, just let people help you uh some of the greatest uh tech support i get from early stage companies always from the founder yeah and the best the best founder mode ceos they see somebody post on x like hey i'm having this issue and they're just there right there boom yep stripe ceos tomorrow still does this yeah it's great um let's go to guillermo roche over at Vercel. He says the American dream for real. And it's McDonald's is hiring a web developer to use Next.js.

So I think historically, this would have been a great opportunity for crypto investors after the bull cycle ends. You know, maybe you're not going to just put the fries in the bag, but you could get it, you know, next JS development role. This was such a banger 12 K, but this is, yeah, this is a fantastic job. I can't, what's more American than working for the golden arches. Yeah. It's remote and it pays 130 to 180 K. Not going to be a, not going to be an angel investor with that salary, but you know, get this job, ask for a raise. Hey, with your bonus, you might be able to get up into that 200k range and get accredited and see you go super long on all your absolute boys exactly employees can work remotely so yeah and mcdonald's is back it's having a moment it's very popular

so you know go work at mcdonald's if you are a next js developer josh wolf says the new lux quarterly letter to lps our theme tech venture global markets told in four parables of four brothers i like this one prometheus two meno issues three prometheus and four atlas and they have these like giga chad uh cartoons of these bros i like somebody else like quote tweeted this or just tweeted yeah and they were like what every time the lux they put out their quarterly letter i just put it into claude and say like rewrite this in a way that i can understand and then it just pops it out just take out the parables and no but i this is this is one of those like the fact that they're taking

this information like think about how much like great, how many great takes were locked up in like LP updates for the last, like literally decades. And now this is, you know, we're very against building in public on this. Are they leaking their alpha though? Uh,

I think they're leaking last quarter's alpha. Yeah. I guess it's, uh, it's marketing at the end of the day, but I do like that, that there's a, there's a the end of the day but i i do like that that there's a there's a twist here in the writing language to use these parables i think that that's that makes it way more interesting it's just more interesting more stimulating than i

mean it's very anti paul graham who wants to just write plainly directly but i think there's something about creating a little bit of a barrier to get into the the the lp letter and enjoy it and then you're also learning something about atlas or prometheus and maybe you don't know that much about them so you're also getting educated maybe you wind up pulling up the wiki reading a book learning a little bit more it's a good one i and i anytime i'm talking with a friend with a fund who's saying like oh i know i need to do content but i don't know what to do. It's like, find your brand of content. For Josh, it is, hey, I'm going to write this sort of esoteric, broad ideas

about markets and technology and put it out there. There's a lot of big ideas and it's up to you to kind of sort through it. For Slow, it's the screenshot essays. Slow, screenshot essay. Clearly, those start as Slack conversations or something like that.

And Dreesen, the big idea that they're branding something that's already happening and just owning. Yeah, graded coinages. Yeah. Coogan's Law. Yeah. And Founders Fund is shitposting.

Viral videos and vibe reels, I guess. And shitposting. And apparently breaking stories about Polymarket and their competitors. Bennett Siegel says, Flavor of the month, technical teams raising seed capital to buy business and transform it with AI. Sounds like a nightmare scenario for the founders, the company being bought,

and the VCs funding it. Yeah, so this is referencing all the new teams that have come out and doing these AI-oriented roll-ups saying, hey, I'm going to buy a bunch of accounting firms and automate everything. And it's hard enough to just buy a business and make it grow. It's comparably, if you're trying to buy a business, make it grow

and completely change how the service is delivered and not lose all of your customers and alienate like the existing teams and clients and everything like that. Like it just sounds like one of those things. Like I think people, when think about um what attracts silicon valley got very obsessed with roll-ups and just general m&a because they're like wait i could go work at meta and like you know have to work 10 years to eventually get to the point where i'm making a million dollars a year i could just buy a business that does a million dollars of ebita and like you, use some conservative amount of leverage. And, you know, eventually I just own this great asset, but everything is just much, much, much harder than it, than it seems. And roll-ups are obviously that it's like, not only are you competing with other groups that are participating in roll-ups so that the price

of assets end up going up and spiking and being very competitive. You're competing against other owner operators that are just coming onto the scene and they're like, I don't need a tent that. Yeah, we saw that with Thrasio. Yeah, I don't need. The attempt to roll up all the Amazon brands. Yeah, and then in their situation, they're beholden to the platform.

And as Amazon fees went up, they just didn't really have a business anymore. But yeah, in general. Think about examples where buying a business at seed stage made sense i know didn't warby parker buy no it was uh harry's they bought a razor factory i don't know if that was fantastic but um it was certainly differentiated at the time i know some there's been some companies that have bought banking licenses yeah where it's been some sort of asset that they needed and they couldn't get

any other way. Yeah, the Plaid founder did that. But it's rare to go and buy an existing business and transform it because usually you could just start from scratch, Greenfield. Yeah. Interesting. But yeah, there's a bunch of people attacking the whole services economy, which is trillions and trillions of dollars of saying like, hey, if we can go just provide the service with AI, we can turn this from like a relatively low margin services business to a high margin software business. And I just think it's going to be much harder. There's a company I invested in Nick Abouzid, who is at a main product on main street and then ramp.

He's now building rivet, which is like a ground up attempt to leverage basically AI for accounting. Is he buying CPA firms? He's taking the opposite approach. He's just building from scratch. He's saying like, you know, I don't know what you're buying if potentially all the customers leave in the first year. Yeah. Be tricky.

I don't know. Not easy. There usually needs to be some sort of – there was another generation of companies. Wilmanitis was really obsessed with this. There were companies that would buy like dental practices and then flip the CapEx to OpEx by essentially like renting the medical equipment to the – And that was like really, really alluring to like the CFOs of these like hospital, of these like, you know, hospital networks or something because they don't have this big CapEx expense anymore. Um, and I think they grew pretty quickly, but then I don't think it really panned out in the way that people hoped. Um, there'll be dragons

for sure. Dangerous. Let's go to Connor McDonald. He's been on the show before. Here's my take on app loving and he stars out LO so that they can't search for it. Um, so it's reaching an older audience with disposable income with high quality ad space for the very first time is often good. That's not rocket science and worth trying, especially with ad credit, but long-term sustainable results are still very much TBD. What do you think about this? Have you used that? Yeah. So app Lovin is an ad network that's focused on mobile games. And so their audience of people. They're very big. They're public, right? Yeah, yeah. Tons of, you know, very scaled ad network.

And anytime you're a consumer brand that you're able to get in front of a totally new audience, you can usually drive some pretty interesting results. One, because CPMs just are going to be a lot less than Meta, because Meta is like the premier place to advertise, right? It can be the most hyper-targeted targeted and so CPMs are just higher but but yeah there's been a lot of talk about Applovin I think Applovin like it was able to create this mania within like the X like marketing community of saying hey if you're spending like 20k a day on Meta we'll bring you over to Applovin and people have been seeing some great results but um yeah i was able to get you know

just by being friends with with connor and doing some work with with ridge and sean in the past i was able to get a front row seat into like viewing of like how they test into new ad networks and they've always meta has always been the backbone of their business and they've they've focused on meta excellency i think it what connor's alluding to is it's a trap to think, oh, I'm just going to find this new ad network and suddenly my business is going to be fantastic. No, it's going to be very temporary. It's like, no, if you're not making meta work well,

you're not, Applovin's not just going to solve all your issues. Totally. It's a marketing excellence. It's a skill issue, basically. So you're not just going to suddenly transform your business by going over to a new network. That makes sense. Let's go to the P God.

He says, anyone have $105 million for me to borrow? And he screenshots the buyout LBO opportunity for the Arapahoe Basin ski area. The company, a subsidiary of Dream Unlimited, was acquired by Altera Mountain via its financial sponsors, Triton Funds and KSL Capital Partners through an estimated $105 million LBO on November 19th, 2024. So this is not available. He's like joking clearly because the deal already happened. But I do know a Binaire who bought a mountain, like a ski resort. And I think he enjoys it. Was that the Summit Series crew?

No, no, no. That was different. They also bought it. Yeah, I just like to encourage more listeners to just go buy ski resorts you know all of the great mountains for the most part i've been getting acquired by these big conglomerates and i'd like to see more independently operated ski resorts uh we're working on an event with with bryce over at indie to do a technology brothers uh gathering uh in park city stay tuned for that stay tuned for that but um but yeah just if if working on an event with, with Bryce over at Indy to do a technology brothers, uh, gathering, uh,

in park city. Stay tuned for that. Stay tuned for that. But, um, but yeah, just if, if you're thinking about it, the answer is yes. Just go buy a ski resort. Yeah. Um, yeah, it is tricky. It depends on the CapEx that's, that's already gone into the ski resort. Like the one that I know, uh, doesn't actually have chairlifts, but it it's, so it's for like a more prestigious type of skier they do cat skiing are you familiar yeah it was like heli skiing cat skiing you ride on a big like caterpillar on a truck basically on a cat you bring all your ski gear they just drive you up to the top of the mountain and then you ski down and completely fresh powder yeah it's just pure powder amazing and for the real real ski heads uh pow, where it's at? My great-grandfather ran the gondola at Mammoth for like 40 years.

Basically like post-World War II. He happened to be best friends with Dave McCoy, the founder. And because of that, my uncle used to massively take advantage of the relationship to the mountain. So he would just go off off terrain oh yeah of course and like duck under the rope and then he'd have this was like pre-cell phone but he'd be like radioing like hey like i ended up going over the other side could you send the cat and they had some crazy that's hilarious crazy stories uh but i it's the fact that like anybody who is building these ski resorts in the 60s yeah is insane. Thinking about the machinery and the amount of risk

and the amount of human life that's at risk on a mountain at any given point if the machinery malfunctions or you're not smart about avalanche control. It's one of the craziest environments to build a business. We could probably do a whole deep dive on it. Some of the ski resorts have howitzers where avalanche control there's a few versions one is just you have the ski patrol go up there with sticks of dynamite and they just throw the dynamite and it just shocks all of the avalanche potential down

and it just creates an avalanche but then uh at some ski resorts they have they have howitzers where they just literally fire a cannon into the mountain and it just causes all the avalanche to come down i love nothing like being at a at a ski resort with your absolute boys firing no and you're in the hot tub after skiing after a long day and you get to hear the cannon going off you know showing that you know there's gonna the next day is gonna be it's like signaling that the next day is gonna be fantastic yeah bluebird uh do we have a promoted post? We certainly do. We always do. This one is from Amman Resorts. The architecture of Amman Kila is a celebration of Bali's natural beauty. Cascading down the hillside to the sea, stone buildings, walkways, and pools

are woven among the palms, framing views of the ocean and the resplendent greenery. So this property is fantastic i haven't been yet i've been to bali a couple times on surf trips but was before my aman arc i want to go here aman is kind of where uh sorry bali is where man really got started yeah uh you know their first property i don't even believe they they were able to get a uh loan to do it. They had to just like personally acquire this property turned into the, you know, what, what is today the greatest hotel brand in the world, in my opinion, at this specific moment in time, if you're, you know, evaluating it for reach and quality of experience. So go check out the Amonkila. I highly recommend booking a trip to Amon and book it far in the future.

Book it, get online, look a year out, book something that you can look forward to for a full year. So then you're just kind of planning and thinking, oh, this is almost going to, I'm almost going to forget about this. And then it's just going to sneak up on me. And I'm not even going to think about the expense

because I paid for it a year ago. That's the way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Plan next summer. That's my headspace right now. Yeah. In about a month, I'll be at an Amman property.

But you've got to book the next one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have something to look forward to. Always. Exactly. Always. So you're never like, oh, when am I going to get around to getting back there? No.

Yeah, yeah. It's like you already have it booked. Exactly. You always want to have one or two bookings, like just rolling. Perpetual. Let's go to Jim Sailbike Wright. He quote tweets us and says, Technology Brothers is the best personification of the vibe shift.

Their aesthetic and approach to discussion are the antithesis of Brooks' bourgeois bohemian archetype that so accurately described elite culture for the past 20 or so years. Very insightful. Very insightful. Very insightful post. That is exactly what we were going for with this. And I do think we want to push back against the bourgeois bohemian trend that's been really popular in tech, unfortunately, and celebrate the capitalist bourgeoisie.

Not the limousine liberals and not the champagne socialists, but the capitalists who enjoy drinking champagne in the back of a limousine. Yep. And sparring with Taylor Lorenz. Exactly. And so thanks for writing in, Jim. I'm glad you really hit the nail on the head with this. And good to have you first time on the show, but I'm sure you'll be back soon. Absolutely. Thank you, Jim. Thank you. Let's go to Dirtman. Dirtman says,

Dirtman B-Sack says, Elon should buy MSNBC and just have Tech Bros pod reading bangers from the timeline 24-7 streaming into boomers' living rooms across the country. We got to put the CNBC banner on this one. For sure. Elon says, the most entertaining outcome, especially if ironic, is the most likely.

And everyone's joking about Elon buying MSNBC. And I think we could crush on MSNBC. I agree. And honestly, we should stop right there because there's stuff in the works that we can't necessarily talk about. But I think we have the production value. We have the banter. We have the content.

Give us a slot, Elon. And I think we have the production value. We have the banter. We have the content. Give us a slot, Elon. Pick it up. And I love sparring with boomers. Normally I spar with boomers in my HOA board meetings, but I'd like to do it on the airways, right? I'd like it to be more like a megaphone approach. Like sort of they can't talk back, but you're just sort of... I mean, if Twitter is real life, imagine how much more it will be real life if we're broadcasting it into the MSNBC. And I mean, talk about making your family proud. All of your distant relatives will be, oh, I saw you on MSNBC. I love your new show. And think about what we could do for the broader economy if we were able to encourage all the boomers to lever up, go long, risk assets. A lot of them at this point are sort of they talk down to gen z and the millennials saying you're you're too risk on you know you're all you care about is is uh you know

the next crypto coin yeah also you watch you watch msnbc and they do a little segment and then they take an ad break the ads aren't integrated properly and there aren't nearly as many of them and on that note let's go to a promoted post promoted post from tiffany and co celebrate meaningful beginnings this holiday with tea by tiffany an homage to an iconic motif from 1975 these designs feature handset paved diamonds for extraordinary shine discover more at tiffany.com slash gifts slash shop slash holiday. Hashtag Tiffany and Co. Hashtag a Tiffany holiday. Anyways, this looks like an absolutely fantastic gift. Fantastic.

Highly recommend everyone in the audience. Our audience is very oriented around. Put your AirPods in. Go to Tiffany right now. Now, our audience is very oriented around crushing their Q4 revenue goals, but Christmas is, as of today, a month away. Get those gifts in now. Go to your local Tiffany's and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Thank you.

Let's go to Beth Jesus. He says, real, and posts a photo of his phone and Vittorio's phone next to themselves, next to each other. They met up in real life and he was very blackpilled because Vittorio uses light mode on X instead of dark mode. And I like this. I think this is so funny, like showing someone your X account profile thing is very much like, it's you know in old uh you know how knights you know where we got the salute from so we got the salute um you you would salute someone with your hand because you were raising your uh your knight's helmet like the the shield here you would raise this to show my eyes and show that i'm i'm yeah i'm not i'm not a threat brother and me sees the

brother is the same thing as why do we shake hands we shake hands to show that i don not a threat. The brother in me sees the brother in you. It's the same thing as why do we shake hands? We shake hands to show that I don't have a weapon in my hand, in my right hand. And so this is like showing a little bit of vulnerability. I'm showing you inside my life, inside my ex account. And it's almost like two of the greatest posters meeting. Proof of post. And showing each other a little bit how the sausage is made. And it's fascinating seeing the difference in numbers.

I mean, they follow almost exactly the same amount of people, almost 2000. Uh, Beth has 140 K followers. Fantastic. Vittorio, a little bit smaller, 40 K, but Vittorio is on an incredible trajectory right now. I mean, he's really ascended, ascended, but what's interesting here, Beth has 136 subscribers. It's like a decent amount. I think they're all on five bucks6 subscribers. That's like a decent amount. I think they're all on five bucks a month. That's like not bad, making almost a thousand bucks there. Vittorio, only seven subscriptions. But this is what I found funny.

Beth is subscribed to four people. Vittorio is subscribed to 47 people. Wow. So Vittorio is shelling out like, what, almost $300 a month towards his absolute boys yeah respect that's amazing respect amazing it really is a sign of respect this is the creator economy yeah he gets the check from x the the creator payout i'm sure it's i'm sure it's uh heavy as a stone recycling it and then he puts it right in with his other boys and so i'm gonna go check out who he subscribes to if that's public but uh great to see two posters meeting IRL. Love to see it.

Recreating the timeline in real life. Yeah. That conversation, you could probably just steal tons and tons of bangers from that. Totally. Let's go to Din. He says, the Harry Stebbings effect, I believe he just went on the show. It says 200 plus applicants, every tier one investor in my DMs, 4 million euros of potential revenue in my DMs. Okay. That's a little weird. 3,000 LinkedIn requests. Wow. And 300 Twitter followers. That's actual tangible value added. So the crazy thing is, I don't know. Harry has a $400 million fund, baby. There you go. Size gong.

Size gong. Boom. I don't know if he was on the show or Harry just tweeted. Harry tweeted. First time. Oh, oh, oh. You think he just tweeted? He just tweeted and he said that Buena, this guy's company, is adding a million of ARR every 12 days.

Really? And he just was like, just threw it out there. That's it? He didn't even have him on the show? I don't know. Wow. I only listen to Founders Podcast and this podcast. Well, congrats to Dan.

Fantastic growth. Good luck with the next phase. Convert all of that. Good luck. You're going to need to go to agent.ai to get an agent to help you process his LinkedIn request. Find the alpha. That's a lot. Good luck out there. Good luck. Do we have a promoted post?

Promoted post from Blackstone. Think investing equals the stock market. Think again. There's an ocean of opportunity in hashtag private equity. If you're a hashtag financial advisor, curious about tapping PE for your clients, check out hashtag Blackstone University. And then they throw a Bitly link up here. So they've dropped a whole course for financial advisors to learn about private equity. If you're a financial advisor and you don't know about private equity, it's an awesome asset class, some fantastic returns. You can go really risk class, some fantastic returns. You can, you can go really risk on with some great managers and, uh, you know, Blackstone hidden card. We're better to learn it

than Blackstone. Yeah. Yeah. We love Blackstone here. They created, um, a popular, uh, festival. No, that's BlackRock. Oh, Blackstone. Different organization. Right. right, right. BlackRock created the BlackRock City. Blackstone is just a fantastic asset manager. Yes. And love their use of hashtags. And private equity firm. Aggressive use of hashtags here. They clearly know their way around this platform.

Yes. Leveraging all the features. Yes. So thank you to Blackstone. So thank you to Blackstone. Let's go to the Wall Street Journal. And we got to put this in the truth zone. This is a rough article.

I read it over the weekend. And I was pounding my fist on the table. I was so mad. They said, the ultimate trading for Flex, a Snoopy Swatch, or a Casio Calculator. Why lots of money men still favor novelty watches. The anti-status watch why men in finance love cheap cheesy watches terrible trend i hope it ends immediately yeah uh they do give a shout out to some strongholds in the finance community that have stuck with the classics the automobiles the

uh the richard mills the pateks but they yeah if, but they call out these joke watches. Yeah, if you want to go fun and funky, go RM. Yeah, and this is the Bobo. This is the bohemian bourgeoisie that we are fighting against here. So if you see someone with a Casio calculator or Snoopy swatch on the trading floor, tell them, put that watch down.

Pick a new career. Pick a new career, buddy. Take a hike. Yeah. I was very upset about this. Enough. Shout out to the journos at Wall Street Journal. This is the ultimate hit piece on finance.

This is trying to collapse our global economy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if enough people find out about this, then the- How will they trust their- Their asset manager, I agree. And this is what could really make the common person hate wall street if they find out that they're wearing just trash ironic ironic watches um but if you see someone with a with a uh with a gold cartier santos you have to respect

that totally so um this is this is just a very depressing trend. So it starts here, folks. If you see someone with some ironic watch, tell them clean up their act, put on something classic, put on something timeless, head to bezel. You are a capital allocator and asset manager, not an HVAC technician. I couldn't have said it better myself. So thanks, everyone, for helping fight the good fight. Let's go to guy he's been on the show before he says by the way just fyi this emoji prayer hands is not praying it's high-fiving lol did did you know that i saw that and i was because it's yeah it's it's it's the prayer hands emoji. It's the two hands together.

It can be praying or high-fiving, but I guess you went into the Unicode. I don't use it on the. On the high-five? Well, I'm going to start using it now, but I just use that a lot because I, you know, pray for bubbles and other things. I think it's whatever you want it to be. I mean, people have long changed the definition or the connotation of emojis, the peach emoji, the butt, and the gun emoji has been through multiple cycles. I think that it all depends on the context. And if you see someone

using this in a context where it clearly means prayer hands, it's prayer hands. And yeah, and emojis are clearly high-fiving emojis are tools for communication and you know we shape our tools and from there our tools shape us so we need to constantly be re-evaluating our use of emojis and rethinking them redesigning them um you know stick to the classics when you can but don't be afraid to mix some new hitters in. Do we have another promoted post or should we do this first? Air Environment says, AV has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Blue Halo. Together we'll create a more diversified global leader in all domain defense technologies

capable of addressing the full spectrum of modern defense. Huge deal in the public markets. Air Environment has acquired Blue Halo. And we wanted to cover it on the show because it's one of the most fascinating examples we've seen in recent history of nominative determinism. The CEO of Blue Halo, his name, Jonathan Moneymaker. And of course, he made the money.

He made the money, baby. Don't bet against Jonathan Moneymaker. That's all I would say. Never, never. And so fantastic outcome for all the investors. I think this was a private equity roll-up. They put together a bunch of small companies and wound up selling it to Air Environment.

And congrats to them. We don't know the full terms of the deal here, but it feels like a size gong moment to me. Congrats to Jonathan Moneymaker. And we would like to back whatever he does next. Yes, 100% Quick promoted post from Zegna

We are only a month out from Christmas and there are many other holidays coming up but we wanted to celebrate a Zegna holiday from our home to yours Wrap your loved ones in timeless Oasi cashmere Yeah, Oasi cashmere scarves that will be cherished

for years to come we're committed to certifying our cashmere fibers as 100 traceable from 2024 i don't know if this is a as is an esg thing i'm i i prefer their commitment to quality over traceability but i certainly appreciate the traceability as well. Thank you to Zegna for making... I think it just speaks to this idea that, like, you know, you're going to be in fancy holiday parties. Maybe you're going on some ski trips. Ski season's coming up, and you want to look good.

You don't want to be stumbling around in athleisure or looking like you just got off a bus in Sand Hill. You want to be dressed to the nines, and so Zegna is a great way to go get a nice jacket or a nice coat. And why not make a cashmere? You don't see enough Technology Brothers wearing scarves broadly. It's a great accent piece. It's a great way to kind of communicate what you stand for.

It's clearly a step up from Patagonia. Yeah. And so we highly recommend you go check them out and tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to April Zucci. She says, I can't stop thinking about this Nietzsche quote, the most intelligent men like the strongest find their happiness where others would find only disaster in the labyrinth in being hard with themselves and with others in effort. Their delight is in self-mastery. In them, asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct.

They regard a difficult task as a privilege. It is to them a recreation to play with the burdens that would crush all others. Couldn't agree more. Yeah, when you're in that zone, you have to find what your why is. And that why can be anything for us. It's, you know, doing it for the money, being willing to push through. When, you know, when you're in this case, we're an hour four of podcasting. And, you know, you have that weakness inside of you that Jocko would kind of reference saying, quit, turn off the mics, walk out of reference saying quit turn off turn off the

mics walk out of the room take the suit off and being willing to just like push through and continuing to create content is is you know you have to have that so raison d'etre yeah yeah exactly dylan field he's been on the show before he says if this were where if this is where we're starting i'm worried what the actual top signals will be this cycle. How it started versus how it's going. How it started is Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper. And how it's going is dollar sign dog cage. And there's a live streamer doing some extremely depressing things

that we're not even really going to talk about. Yeah, we don't want to talk about it. But hopefully Pumped Up Fun gets their act together and ends this uh live streaming feature sometimes moderation is good content moderation uh that's good good to hear it's over hopefully no more and uh yeah i think that there's a lot of alpha right now just tweeting top every single day because eventually you're going to be right yep and you'll be able to go delete all the other ones and go back and quote tweet the top and say like, look,

I called it, called the local top. Yeah. And there's a, you could raise, you know, a billion dollar fund off of calling the top. So there is something about like,

like the good meme coins and the ones that last are fun. Like Doge is about this dog. It's very funny. And Elon's run with it and it's become, and it's like even popular today because it was always filled with like some sort of comedy or funness and the dark stuff never even solana with like the gm culture yeah yeah exactly it was always like inspiring to some degree even even when it was frothy yeah so stay positive out there folks

no revenge hate hate meme coins. Bruno says, regarding the hot topic of stable coins, if you strip out USDT, which is primarily used for trading and laundering, transaction volume since 2022 is flat and supply is meaningfully down with no merchant adoption. Not really getting the hype, but let's see how this plays out. Interesting. Yeah, the merchant adoption stuff's interesting i mean i i do think you have to imagine that you know strong like infrastructure platforms like uh bridge and especially the amount of investment that i imagine stripe will put behind bridge going forward like merchant adoption will go up yeah coinbase you know recently you know last week ran that ad you know showing a guy selling a car, a truck with stable coins.

And I think that that stuff is going to really meaningfully catch on. Also, big assumption here that 99% of USDT is trading and laundering. That just might not be true. Well, certainly a lot of it is trading. The laundering stuff, who knows? It seems much harder to prove. But even trading is valuable in the sense that

you could say a lot of the US dollar is tied up in trading activity, right? Like how much is on Citadel's balance sheet right now? A lot. Does that make it less real? I don't know. I don't think so. I don't know. I'm still positive on

Yeah, at the end of the day, the technology is very meaningful, being able to I don't know. I don't think so. So I don't know. I'm still positive on... Yeah, at the end of the day, the technology is very meaningful. Being able to send money 24-7 in a trustless way. Yeah. It's awesome. Exactly. Let's go to Prang for Exits.

He's been on the show before. He says, Designers, Dolly 2, I stole your pictures and used them to generate art. And the designers say, No, this is illegal. And the programmers are talking to ChatGPT and ChatGPT says,

I scanned your GitHub account and stole your code. And the chat programmers say, cool, did you get it to work? This is an interesting reaction. It does seem like... It wasn't really designers. It was more like the art community. Yeah, I haven't...

Yeah, it was the designers, the creatives that weren't monetizing. Yeah. The non-monetizing creators that are struggling artists, like having them figure it out in a commercial application. Yep. Open AI monetizing their work sort of indirectly really piss them off. The designers that I know that have built great careers are all excited about ai or even the artists like people you know he uses cinema 4d i'm sure he's able to use

generative ai either in the post-processing or in the texture generation but he's coined this own style that even if it could be copied he has the proof of work. Yeah, but I do feel like the Gen AI stuff did take a little bit of wind out of his sails because Beeple was going through the painstaking effort to make these absurd images, and now anybody can make the same absurd image. But I haven't seen anyone replace him. No, I'm not saying he's been replaced.

I'm just saying more like it's less jarring. It doesn't have the same effect for me to see a Beeple image now. To see like Elon riding a bull or whatever. Yeah, because anybody can – Yeah, yeah. Because you can just generate that now. I guess. I guess.

I think he still has some sort of like interesting carve. He still has a – It's going to be the same thing where Beeple's artwork – people always said this about like the Mark Rothko. Oh, my kid could make that. Or some artist where it's just like paint splatter and and you'd say yeah my kid could make that but the point was that you didn't yeah and then the point was well if even if your kid did everyone would just be like well that's

Mark Rothko ripoff yeah and now it's like yeah your kid could prompt that but it would just feel like a people rip yeah in my opinion my opinion. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, he's already made generational wealth, so I don't even know if he needs to make any more anymore. Yeah. Post-economic. Let's go to Delian. He's been on the show before. He says, uh, so Waymo is changing to a Chinese auto manufacturer. Yeah. F that. My autonomous ride bout to accidentally drive off a cliff. Okay. So Waymo's been running on- Too many Winnie the Pooh jokes. Hard pass jokes hard pass so so so i really don't get it so this is funny timing because waymo is like the only time you see a jaguar today yeah they

could just buy jaguar and jaguar is just like floundering floundering uh the the ray dong yeah whatever the president over there is just like floundering totally nobody cares about but like clearly they have manufacturing lines that can produce reasonable cars yeah jaguar had stopped making cars probably presumably except for waymo yeah and why did that deal not happen it's crazy it's honestly it makes me even shorter jaguar feeling that's rough waymo was already running on their basically infrastructure and decided not to move forward with that. Um, but very, uh, very bad.

I don't want, I don't want, uh, I don't want, I don't want the CCP to control, uh, our drones are, you know,

one of our biggest social media platforms and now our autonomous cars. Very rough. Don't want that to happen. So, uh, Deleon, why don't you, you buy jaguar put a billion dollars into a jaguar buyout and you know reshore it something i mean we already have the answer it's tesla right like tesla is the american competitor to everything that uh waymo will be

doing and uh it will become a culture issue i i tweeted this post of like look at the way the waymo car looks and then look at the aesthetics of the tesla self-driving car and like both political sides like hate the opposite one yeah and and it's weird to think that something is utilitarian as as just getting a ride from one place to another to become like a political statement but it it has people like like many democrats would say like i will not buy a cyber truck because of the statement that it makes yeah and the same thing for a republican driving a prius which is the same thing i'm going to be rolling coal in a raptor r let's go to luke metro he's been on the show before he says how do you not own a suit for the office christmas party you're an l6 and it's a photo of wife Jack have you been

following the wife Jack thing I think these are great yeah I see him I'm like at first I thought it was like kind of negative but I realized that it was actually very positive and very pro-natalist campaign and there's been a little self policing within the wife Jack community around like don't make it negative don't make it overbearing it's it's like the wife is saying these things because she loves you not because she's actually upset with you positive spin and so yes also if you're an l6 get a suit if you're an intern get a suit yeah everyone needs a suit it's ridiculous it's ridiculous get a suit call your tailor call fiorentino label call fiorentino

uh daniel he's been on the show earlier uh and he's been on the show many times former brother of the week he says the walls close in as you age the path of for responsible change to oneself grows more narrow you have commitments in your work a career that makes sense given your current mental arrangements you have a spouse and a child who won't count on you to exist in a certain way who count on you to exist in a certain way very doomer on you to exist in a certain way. Very Doomer-ish post. This is kind of the opposite of that other post that we said that was like, you can just change your career at 45, remember?

Yeah, you can. But the thing is, is your life very quickly adapts to your identity. True, true. And so if you want to change who you are and what you do, once you have a wife and children. And I even noticed this of like uh i've

i've appreciated like having a kid in school now and being like okay i can't just move across the country of course that makes me like more oriented around yeah investing in my local podcasting podcasting locally yeah um but yeah i just thought that that was relevant because I think if you're, if you, you know, aren't married or don't have kids yet, like you need to be taking on like at least five times as much risk as you are right now, because the more that other people are dependent on you in many ways, the less risk you can take on. Yeah, that's great. This is a great one by Zane. He's a little skeptical, but we're going to debate this. He says, some idiot took regular old sour candy and put it in a bag with some generic branding and sold it for $100 million.

And you're still waiting for someone at HR to approve your PTO on Thursday so you can spend a couple days with your family. Denied. And he's quote tweeting a CPG Wire article that says the Hershey company is acquiring sour strips, a fast growing sour candy brand for an undisclosed sum. So I don't know where he got the a hundred million, but maybe he dug into it. Sour strips was founded by internet personality, Max tuning in 2019. And Max tuning was like a huge YouTuber, uh, all in the fitness space. I mean, great nominative determinism there, like chewing to the max. He's chewing the sour candy.

He always likes sour candy. And so he started this brand. But the fascinating thing is that, yeah, the name is just Sour Strips. That's the name of the category. That's a descriptor. I don't think you can trademark that. And so someone else could start a Sour Strips company.

Maybe you couldn't use the exact same logo and stuff, but you could make it pretty close because Sour Strips company, maybe you couldn't use the exact same logo and stuff, but you could make it pretty close because Sour Strips is not trademarkable, but he still grew it really well. And he started advertising it on his podcast, advertising it on his YouTube channel, and then use that to get into retail, I'm sure. And eventually grew it to,

I think $100 million of revenue, something like that. And fantastic outcome for max love his podcast love him yeah it is so funny because if you if i think back to being a child and going to a candy store or a place that sold candy there was always a like sour strips kind of bucket or dispenser type thing that were just called sour strips yeah right yeah yeah and so um if if there was truly no other brands in that category and he's just like, I'm going to take this and brand it and really focus on selling it well and marketing it and growing it,

then yeah, he deserves the nine-figure. There's also a big piece here where if you go through, if you're starting a CPG company and you walk through the aisles, you can see that some are incredibly competitive. Some sections of the grocery store are like, it's half Unilever, half Hershey, and you're just screwed because they both have major competitors there. They're going to outspend you and they'll never acquire you. And then some categories are completely run by, you know, 200 year old companies. I know a guy

who started a, uh, a popcorn spray company that he got to like a million dollars in revenue very quickly and like you make popcorn and then you spray it you see how you season it on top of it graffiti and and it and it gives it like the movie theater popcorn smell and there's a bunch of different scents the pfos the extra pfos and i i asked him about that and he and he had a bunch of claims that it like wasn't bad but it does feel weird. But what he realized was that the main competitor in that entire section of the store was just Orville Redenbacher. And it's a very old company.

They're not really innovating. They're not going to fast follow. And so it was very easy to get in there. And it might've been the same thing with Sour Strips where Hershey didn't have any play in that category. And so he basically built the perfect company. Yeah, because everybody, oftentimes the best ideas are just like obvious but overlooked yeah let's go to Greg Yang at XAI first time on the show he says if you haven't had

more than one career have you truly lived I like that yeah you had your career and Wall Street Wall Street short career Street. Short career. Yeah. I like this. I think this is a very millennial post, like jumping from job to job, being a founder, being an investor, being a content creator, moving back and forth between things.

But I feel like it's widely accepted now. The millennials are the first generation where it almost, yeah, it was just normal to be like, I'm going to do this one thing. It might get decent at it. And then I'm going to jump over here and do this other thing. I'm going to do this, that kind of like snake your way through life. I think it's generally good. I, I have a lot of, you know, people that I went to college with that have only done one thing out of school,

like real estate like investing and then they get to like you know 28 29 30 and they're like well i guess i could still do other stuff but then they feel still kind of trapped and i try to talk to them and be like no you can literally do whatever you want like you can completely reinvent your career jump into a different industry or category, or go from an investing role into an operating role or vice versa. There is an interesting thing that PG often says that like the best founders have like their experts, like two or three different disciplines,

or maybe if there's a co-founding team, they have like five or six disciplines mastered between them. And maybe you get that from working in different careers and then you can put them together like you've worked in finance but then you've also worked in consumer packaged goods and so you're able to operate your business very effectively uh it's yeah yeah maybe maybe i don't know what greg did before this but maybe he was you know at a uh woke language model and now he's like i'm reinventing myself by being at a base language model. Yeah, at XAI. But yeah, reinvent yourself. Yeah, I like it.

Inspector Clouseau, Investments, says, Average U.S. bank, we regret overcharging customers. We are hiring additional staff to investigate, and we should have it settled by 2027. Average Japanese bank. Pledge. Anyone employed by this bank who has stolen money or caused others to steal from the bank will pay for it with his or her own property and then commit suicide.

Very on brand for Japan. I can't believe they're still doing seppuku over there. That's so crazy. It's a samurai approach. I was watching a show called Sam like samurai or something on netflix and uh and like the show got boring because it was like every episode someone's committing seppuku it was just constant it was like oh okay like oh guy stubbed his toe gonna commit seppuku but i guess that's really what they do well i think the the the meaning for the takeaway from this is that

financiers are the modern samurais, right? And you need to act with honor. You do. And if you betray your own honor, then there's only one route. Yep. You know? Yeah. I mean, if you as a listener ever catch us doing an episode without any ads,

hold us accountable. Yeah. Demand that we commit seppuku. Yeah. Because that would be a violation of our sacred bond with the listener. Yeah. Demand that we commit seppuku. Yeah. Because that would be a violation of our sacred bond with the listener. Yep. To advertise.

And people are going turbo long, that company. Oh, here's a good one. People are saying that Ben Heilig is the next Ligma, zero interest rates. And it's Ben Heilak. I think we mispronounced his name.

That's a thing that we do yes at least yeah we give it a shot we do a good crack so so he he printed out a transcript of our of our podcast and uh we say i don't know the guy but i think he's got a cool startup great designer great taste fantastic this is a future rahul ligma bit this is fantastic he really is the next ligma he really is the next ligma so stay tuned for the next league i mean he had some uh he had another post that was great i don't think we covered it but but as the bit was going on he posted he was like hi everyone in our defense when we did the jaguar rebrand, we really thought Kamala was going to be elected. And that got picked up, too.

And it got a bunch of. I told a friend that, like, jokingly. And he, like, didn't get the joke and was like, wait, really? Like, they thought she was going to win. I was like, no, dude. They went Jaguar, went turbo long. Turbo long Harris. Legitimately, they did go turbo long, like the rise of wokeness, which probably was steadily, literally happening from, what, 2010 to 2020? Even beyond.

2022 was probably the peak. Then Elon buys X, and then the culture starts shifting. And if you were long wokeness, your company did very well throughout that entire phase. You got ESG customers. You got DEI investors. You got all sorts of benefits. And that only stopped, that gravy train only stopped like last year. And so if you kicked off a rebrand for your company, like Jaguar didn't make cars this year. They like took the entire year off. And so the whole plan for like the rebrand, the reset, going full electric, this is like years in the making. And like, I'm sure they did like

some multi-year McKinsey project and like had all these different things. Like it was a big deal for them. They didn't just like do this overnight. It stinks of McKinsey. We love management consulting. We love McKinsey. But it kind of reeks of McKinsey.

Well, you get in what you put out. VP gone rogue. It's garbage in, garbage out with McKinsey. If you show up with a good plan, they're going to deliver some good plans for you. But the inspiration has to come from the founder. Take some responsibility. Siri says, VC went from being a relationships business

to a sales job. When did the dynamic shift? I have an idea of exactly when the dynamic shift, but what do you think? So I think the dynamic shifted after post.com around 2010 when the industry realized that B2B SaaS was not going to be a winner-take-all market. And you could underwrite 2 and 20 against $10 billion outcomes reliably. And so if the market had... Well, the $10 billion outcome thing was was new that

was more of exactly that was the decacorn thing was yes it wasn't it wasn't real in 20 in in in the dot-com boom yeah all those vcs got rugged uh and they didn't do that well and a lot of them went out of business but in in 2008 2009 coming out of the financial crisis, it started to be clear that while there were major, major power law winners in social media, and you couldn't just build a whole fund around social media investing, because if you missed Facebook, you were done. But you could build a fund around B2B SaaS, like base hits that were essentially decacorns. And if you can build a business to $10 billion in under 10 years, you can easily charge two and 20 and beat the market. And as long as you can beat the market,

you can charge those high fees. And as long as you can charge those high fees, you look like a venture capital firm, as opposed to if you're underwriting to 10 years and it's $100 million outcome, you just won't look like a VC. You just won't have the management fees. You won't have the returns. Like it just, it'll look like a bank. And, and, and if you're building a business where your target is a hundred million dollars, you know, high CapEx, less R and D, you just go to the bank or you fund it off your credit card or cashflow. There's a bunch of different ways to build these businesses. And there are different pockets of financial capital out there for different business strategies. Kind of everything became, looked like VC, including like consumer and D2C and all these things.

And a lot of those didn't pan out. Creator economy is a good example. But it was when it was clear that it wasn't going to be Salesforce or Oracle building every vertical SaaS tool that at that point it became, okay, any fund could hit the next databricks or the next rippling or the next gusto or deal like there's so much opportunity to to exit with a billion dollars return a fund and as soon as you can say hey we're going to own 10 of this deck of corn and we're going to return a billion dollar fund yeah it's game on and that's when it became and that's when it became a sales job because you scale up and you need to be in every firm that's going to be a deck of corn and you need to write checks in.

And also the IPO window shifted out during the dot-com boom. Companies were going public at 300 mil and then mooning. So it was a sales job, but it became the sales that was being done with the stuff you saw in Wolf of Wall Street. It was the Wall Street guys cold calling, hey, I got a stock for you. This company just went public. The ticker is whatever, mp3.com. You should get in right now. And it mooned in retail. That shifted when companies started staying private longer.

Yeah, well said. I mean, I think any VC that doesn't understand, I'm like short any VC that doesn't understand that they're in the likability game. Because if you're not one of the Holy Trinity or a top five firm, you have this sort of adverse selection problem where all the but they want to work with Founders Fund. They want to work with Sequoia. And so if you're not one of those funds, then you need to realize like you better, the founder must genuinely feel something about the partner who wants to do that deal. Otherwise, why are you going to have any right to win that deal, even get a slice of it, right? And so it is still a relationships business for the power law VCs. The next generation of power law winners in venture capital are doing the relationship business. And that's the Lockheed Grooms, the Nat Friedmans, these new generation of capital allocators that are doing very well versus the droves of Stanford grads who are just associates at large firms

that are just churning through cold calls. They're in the sales role because they are not out on the extreme end of performance and they're deriving their growth from fees, not carry. Totally. So it's all a rational move because the funds have gotten so large that you can sit in what is essentially a sales role collect management fees and not need to play the

relationship game to get some unfair advantage into an early deal that would never happen if it was a free market um but uh you can still make a ton of money just on fees. Yeah, I just think at the end of the day, the reason that the asset class is so addicting as an investor and why you still get firms that trade in public equities that end up trying to come down and play in the private markets is that every single company is a one-of-one asset. There's no other, you know, shares like it. It's literally like there's a sort of a finite number of shares and,

and, uh, you can, you know, you have to earn the right to buy into the company. You can't just market by Stripe, right? You have to get the Collison brothers to sign off and say, we'll take your money. Right. And that's a, that's, that that's that creates a lot of good behavior overall right because you need to be a good actor otherwise founders are eventually going to be like no we don't want our cfos at a certain point we'll be like no we just don't want your money yep let's go to ussr pictures we don't usually agree with communists on this show but this might be the one exception uh it's a picture from 1947 and it shows a committee to approve fashionable clothing suitable for sale to Soviet women in Moscow. Now, I'm against this for women,

but I would love something like this for capital allocators. We've seen this time and time again of VCs going on podcasts in t-shirts. Dress like HVAC technicians. It's just sloppy, and it would be great if we, the Technology Brothers, could be approved as a committee to review all fashion choices by capital allocators. We could say, hey, look, you have a billion dollars under management. What are you doing in that t-shirt on 20th of May, D.C.? What are you driving? What's on your wrist? We need to hold our capital allocators to a higher standard. And so we got to agree with the communists on this.

They were doing one thing right. Totally. They were approving fashion. Top-down management of fashion decisions. His next frontier. Throw on some suits. The tailors are awaiting your phone call. Fiorentino suits.

It's easy uh let's go to ryan peterson he's been on the show before founder flexport he says robo taxis that pick you up at your house and then take you to the nearest boring company tunnel so they can zip you at 100 plus miles an hour straight to your destination with no stops will be on par with rockets that land themselves let's go go. I want it so badly. And people are sleeping on the boring company. They hate it. They don't think it's possible,

but wait until it happens. It's free real estate. At the Vegas tunnel opening. We'll be there. We'll be in the first, we'll be in the first pod, the first pod. Yeah.

Put me in the pod. I will eat the bugs if I can get to my destination. If I can cut LA traffic, I will do anything. We're going to have the guys in tuxedos. We need one from Malibu to Pasadena. That'd be fantastic. Yeah. Now the boring company, I think we'll, we'll, you know, every Musk company goes through oscillates in terms of attention, but the boring company will be at the forefront of the conversation. It's even harder because it's all local regulation, whereas with the rockets, it's like he doesn't need to get every single jurisdiction that he flies over to approve it.

It's like if Florida says it's cool, it's cool. Or if the FAA says it's cool, it's cool. And same thing for the Starlink satellites. How crazy would it be if he had to get everyone to agree that those were okay? It's like, no, there's one organization. I mean, I'd like to see a boring company tunnel to to hawaii imagine if you could imagine if you could drive a gt3rs to hawaii that would take so long i know but in the gt3rs you're not exactly wishing the time away you don't need the gt3rs you need the thrust ssc you know that car no the thrust s Thrust SSC hit the world record, land speed record, out on the salt flats.

It's basically a jet engine on wheels. There we go. And I think it can go like 600 miles an hour. There we go. And so at that rate, you are going as fast as a passenger plane. And in a tunnel, if you suck all the air out, it might be more efficient, and you might be able to get there. But yeah, I don't know.

You'd have to go pretty deep. The ocean's really, really deep. It's deep down there. Yeah. I mean, they put the undersea cables down there for the internet. So maybe. But man, the pressure and everything. The pressure might get to you.

You're going to wind up in that Titanic thing. Yeah, yeah. That's rough. Anyway, fantastic show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe or be relegated to a life of flying net jets what do you guys want to say yeah it's thanksgiving this week happy thanksgiving whatever you're doing get together with family friends start a family start a family tradition this is something that

i've advocated for before start a family or start a family tradition or both yeah i have a family tradition that i'd like to share i i i don't come from a family with lots of traditions, but I decided that's not a reason to not start a family tradition. And so my family now has a tradition where every time we get together for one of these events or a birthday party or a holiday, all the men of the family go outside and we smoke cigars together. Incredible. And it's fantastic.

And it's something that everyone in the family immediately adopted. And it would have been a much harder pitch if I hadn't said it was a family tradition. Yep. And as soon as it was, now it's actually been a tradition because we've done it a couple times. It's on the schedule. It is well on its path to becoming Lindy. Very Lindy. So I would encourage everyone to start a tradition.

And don't be afraid to just adopt this. If you do, send us a DM. Send us a picture of you and your hopefully wearing suits founders yes smoking cigars smoking cigars or a nice turkey dinner there's a lot of different things nice toasts are a fantastic tradition yeah uh my mom likes writing uh rhyming limerick toasts there we go and and with chat gpt you can really take it to the next level um i i would read one but it wouldn't make any sense because it's all about my family. But, uh, I've been to a few, uh, you know, dinners with colleagues where someone has stood up and given a roast or a toast and called out

everyone in rhyming fashion for various things. And it's hilarious and memorable and it just stands out and it's just going a little bit, a little bit extra, making the trip to the cigar store before the event, writing out the toast beforehand. And it takes a lot of confidence to just stand up at your family event and give a toast. But if it's good, it's good. In the same way we recommend booking your Amman trips, you know, at least a year out, you know, plan ahead with your traditions too.

Don't do it on the fly. These are serious things. And you're not going to want to Uber Eats. Maybe start planning out the Christmas one now, if you're listening to this on Thanksgiving or, or after, uh, plan out the Christmas tradition now. There you go. That's a great place to end. Happy holidays, everyone.