TBPN Live - New OpenAI Competitor, Airbus vs Boeing, LVMH and Trump, Meme Coins are Cooked

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. Today is Wednesday, February 19th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We're breaking down Velar Atomics, Isaiah Taylor's company. They raised a banger, $19 million seed round. Then we're moving on to Mira Marotti. Sorry. That's awesome. I knew they were raising a round. I didn't know what they were calling it.

Yeah. So it got me good. You got my authentic reaction. There's just nothing. There's no better humor to me than raising around and then like naming it something that like breaks the sort of generalized narrative like a 19 million dollars is just a typical series a yeah and businesses if you raise 19 million dollars will be evaluated as though you raised a series a yeah to some degree uh but calling it a seed is just so chad isaiah's chad kip is a chad we got to go and actually we should just record a remote pod like from they're doing a demo we should live stream it yeah yeah yeah is that today no no i i don't know if it's today but we'll uh we will um we'll

definitely be covering the company and we'll break that down we're also going through uh miramarati's new company it has a name it's called thinking machines and the website is thinkingmachines.ai don't use a www.thinkingmachines.ai does not resolve you have to drop the ww yeah so if you search thinking machines right now or pull up their website but if you click on the website it will say this site can't be reached so So you then have to go into the URL box and delete the www part. Got it. Return. And then you'll get the website.

So let's hope they're better at... Do they have technology people on the team yet? Yeah, maybe. I mean, I know... Fundraising people. Mir is the CEO now. Okay. So maybe they don't have a CTO and maybe they just...

Yeah. Not some of the greatest programmers in the world work in there. Anyway, IT can be a challenge even for the greatest companies. I mean, OpenAI was struggling with the login page for a while. I remember when ChatGPT launched, it wouldn't keep you logged in, so you had to keep logging in with Google. So, very annoying. Anyway, we're breaking down LVMH and how Bernard Arnault is dealing with the Trump presidency. And then we're going to talk about Airbus and how they're coming for Boeing. It's an international global fight in the race

for an airline that doesn't crash all the time. And then we're going to break down the timeline. So let's go to Isaiah Taylor. We got some breaking news. Congratulations to Valar Atomics. Isaiah says, I'm excited to announce a $19 million seed round led by Riot Ventures, who you know some of those dudes over there. Dear friend. Initialized Alley Corp with participation from amazing new partners such as Steel Atlas, Day One Ventures, Stiffel Bank, Naval, Bology, and Charlie Songhurst. We've also completed two important milestones. Yeah, absolute doggs in there. Great. So Isaiah says,

First, we have completed the construction and pressure certification of our thermal prototype Ward Zero at our Los Angeles facility. The fastest in history a thermal test unit has been developed and built. Ward Zero will be unveiled next week at an exclusive event in LA. So that's next week. Hopefully we can go. If we can't, we'll be live streaming it and covering it here on the show. Second, we're also excited to announce a coordinated research project with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute. The goal of this project is to

develop and deploy Ward 1, our first nuclear reactor, and the world's first operational Gen 4 microreactor. This is just the beginning. The goal of Velar Atomics is to make the world's energy by building nuclear reactors at planetary scale. To do that, we must set a pace. That's such a great tagline, make the world's energy. Yeah. It's very simple. You almost expect it to be like make the world's energy cleaner or make the world's energy more. No, just make the world's energy. Period. Yep. Period. It's in the energy business. To do that, we must set a pace of building an iteration to rapidly scale and commercialize our reactor architecture today we set that pace I can't

overstate my gratitude to the Velar Atomics team in the last 12 months they've proven themselves to be to not to be not only one of the most talented engineering teams in the world but also the most determined I'm inspired to work with them every day and to bring their work to you.

Huge thank you to everyone who participated in the seed. Delian from Founders Fund is in the comments saying congrats, Isaiah. Santiago, good friend of the show. Noted. Yeah, so if you remember, I don't know. This is great stuff, team. Onward.

I don't even remember exactly why, but we owe Kip, who's on the Valor team, a bottle of Dom for something that he did last year. You remember that? It was for Brother of the Week. Brother of the Week. I think we were going to hand deliver it, and then he had to go to the Philippines for a while. Oh, yeah, that's right. So we couldn't do it.

That's right. So congratulations to the whole team, and congratulations to Kip, because we are going to be coming to the Gundo at some point to deliver you a bottle of Dom Perignon. Well deserved. It's fantastic. Yeah. Well, congrats to the whole team over there. Excited to see what they build next and get that stuff rolled out. Lots of exciting stuff going on in nuclear. I think like the big, the big question is always like, like nuclear was, was so contrarian and so like offensive to venture capitalists that even like a few years ago, it was something that was uninvestable.

And so you couldn't really raise any money, even if you were experienced. Isaiah is obviously like on the younger side, more of like the new, like outside the box thinker. He's got a few kids. So that automatically adds a decade. It does.

If you're in your 20s in tech and you have a few kids, people will treat you as though you're a decade older that's true i feel like i've benefited from that for sure degree just because you know having kids it's just yeah you are a different person after you have kids yeah but my point here is that like uh nuclear energy as a category for venture capital investment was extremely difficult to get done cont contrarian, not easy by any means, very hard to finance, very hard to build. Oklo went through like years and years and years

before SPACing. And now it's like the hottest category because everyone's worried about AI and energy generation for data centers. It really is like in an environment that is, in a world where there's maybe less regulations around nuclear 10 years from now, nuclear energy technology companies will be tremendously more valuable. So like that is like the main, that's like the main sort of thesis right now.

And you could have, when Isaiah was starting the company, you have to imagine that in his view, a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now was sort of obvious at the time totally it's like we actually need a lot more energy nuclear energy was demonized if you remember uh somebody told me that's the woman that talks about like that super pro-nuclear on tiktok like she was at one of the isabel bummick so she was apparently at one of the first uh hereticons yeah but then this, like being pro-nuclear wasn't heretical at all. Exactly. It was just like the default tech.

Yeah. So she was just kind of hanging out. She was like, I don't really have any new like things to bring you because like you guys all agree with me now. Yeah. It was great. So now like the problem is, is like we need the energy today. Yeah.

And even fast teams that move really quickly, like Isaiah's, you know, you can't build these things in a weekend. And so now we're in this weird scenario where, you know, everyone in the AI world, all the data center build outs are like, hey, this stuff can't come to market fast enough. And it's like, hey, you know, the VC should have been backing this a decade ago instead of kind of sitting on their hands.

Anyway, quick size gong for Isaiah. Boom. Congratulations. Great connection there, John. Thank you. Well, let's move on to Thinking Machines. So should we do the overview first, and then we'll give a little bit of background on Mira.

Thinking Machines launched their website, thinkingmachines.ai. Reminder, don't use the www. It will not resolve. Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company. AI reminder don't use the www it will not resolve yep thing machines lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company interesting because notably Ilya Setskiver

SSI is not a product company purely focused on on super intelligence directly we're building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools that to make AI work for their unique needs and goals. While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. I agree. The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities.

Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively. And despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values to bridge the gaps we're building thinking machines labs to make AI systems more widely understood customizable and generally capable that was not very gripping copy if I'm being honest uh what do you think jordy yeah you can tell they're not marketers yeah uh but the aura around mira and the business and the team is so strong that it almost doesn't matter yeah like they clearly like didn't even set up their domain properly like they don't want to have like i look at them as like probably being in a similar boat to SSI. Sure.

Where SSI, by being the first to kind of come out and say, like, we're not going to do any marketing or really any launches or we're not going to release any products until we have AGI or safe, you know, super intelligence. Yeah. They kind of like took that opportunity. And I bet you thinking machines is like, I wish we did that. But yeah, again, like this is one of those things if this was if this was the first foundation model company it would be gripping but this is like language you could just copy and paste it onto any yeah i mean or hiring page at this point you know there i want to issue a challenge if you're an OpenAI co-founder, I challenge you to start a company that's not a foundation model. I was corrected.

So Mira was actually not a co-founder of OpenAI. She just served as a CTO in many ways. But is it possible to work at OpenAI and then leave and start a company that's not a supplement company? Exactly. There's a lot of alpha and doing the thing that that doesn't make sense from a narrative standpoint right because if miramarati had a supplement company i'd be like i'm buying all my supplements 100 this because like she would only work on this if it was like the most exactly exactly important work she's

glimpsed the machine god and said we need more creat. It's always been underpriced to be diced. Exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, the question is like, you know, obviously, there are so many companies working on this exact problem right now. Yeah. The only thing that's interesting here is like, where are they contrasting from the others? And it's now established that they will like thinking machines will have a state-of-the-art model in probably a year oh yeah absolutely you would have to imagine that

yeah it's actually so elon had this sort of infrastructure advantage and uh in many ways mira has like the actual hands-on she's a technical ceo who's going to know exactly how to basically you know get back to the point where she was with opening AI, right? So it's not like starting over from zero. So the question is, yeah, do they, do they try and build something, a cluster? Do they try and work with one of the hyperscalers? There's a ton that would be happy to work with her, I'm sure, because it gives them more leverage. Because even if you're, if you're like, oh, we're, yeah, we're Amazon. And we have, I think Amazon does have a custom like tpu style chip

yeah and they are loosely aligned with anthropic but why not work with thinking machines and get more leverage over the anthropic relationship of course and so what does that mean scalers and the model companies are willing to just intermingle and mix of course of course yeah and it's for it's for good reason so it's like yeah if i'm amazon and i say hey you know thinking machines yeah go out and raise 500 million dollars send hundred million over to me and yeah, I'll give you 20 K GPUs and let you train a frontier model. Uh, the more interesting thing is like, where does the product go? Um, because I do think that there is really interesting opportunity for different product functionality and different problem solving there. It's interesting because their website,

AI that works for everyone, emphasis on human AI collaboration. Okay, that's exactly how ChatGPT, more flexible, adaptable, and personalized AI systems. Okay. You're not telling me anything here. Yeah, maybe you're adding, like it does seem that ChatGpt is flexible adaptable and can be very

personalized if that's what you want out of it so yeah i mean honestly this this is like an oil guy it's like this is commoditized and it's like oil like our vision is to like provide energy that will power industry and automobiles for generations yeah it's like just like every other oil company right yeah and it's like that's probably profitable congratulations you're gonna make a lot of money but like you're not doing anything new here necessarily i don't know it's interesting too they say science is better when shared so they're not committing to being open source yeah but they say we plan to frequent frequently published technical blog post papers and code so the whole thing seems extremely fake now yeah by this and

also the whole idea that it's like sam versus a unified block of of anti-sams is also completely debunked because it's like why don't all you guys just go work at anthropic or ssi why why do you all have your own companies oh well like it was probably drama between everyone here like everyone's like yeah but like so look at the current team i'm just going to read some people out because it's absolutely stacked uh alex gartrell yeah former leader of server operating systems at meta expert in linux alexander co-creator of advanced voice mode at open ai yep and the segment anything model at meta previously previously post modal uh multimodal post training lead at open ai yeah andrew this is just an alphabetical order by the way yeah ml systems research uh andrew tullock ml systems and Engineering, previously at OpenAI and Meta. And Meta, yeah.

Barrett Zoff, who's a CTO, formerly VP of Research Post-Training at OpenAI, co-creator of ChatGPT. Yeah. Next guy, Bryden, formerly Post-Training Research at OpenAI. And if you just go down the list, it's basically like the founding,

you know, some of the most important people to work at OpenAI. The question is just, does this actually matter? Because in 2005, you could have gone and said, hey, we're getting people from Bell Labs and Yahoo, and we're getting people from AOL and all the top people, and we're going to have them build a social network that's better than Facebook. And it was like, nah, it didn't really matter. It was actually just like a couple college kids could actually innovate and create something that took off.

And it took off so hard that even when Google threw tons of resources at it for Google Circles or whatever their product was called, that failed. And then whenever somebody else came up, Isaac would just buy it. And I don't know. It's like, how much does the crazy stacked engineering team matter when it seems like there's a ton of crazy stacked engineers that they're over in China building deep seek and they're at XAI and they're at the co-creator of ChatGPT like deep in your team list, not even giving him a picture.

That's when you know the team stacks. It is stacked. In many ways, they should just have their logo and then the current team and like skip all of this jargony stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be more yeah um that would be more meaningful but imagine the pressure right now on on existing open ai employees no matter how long they've they've they've worked there and how how big their their plans are yeah you don't just have like one heavily funded competitor from a former team member that's recruiting you you you could potentially have four or five heavily funded foundation model

companies not even talking about perplexity and sort of like app layer companies that are trying to recruit you at all times yeah so it's just like the craziest uh dynamic and they will make documentaries about uh all of this for sure well she's got the stone cold gaze in the Guardian. Let's move on to the profile of Mira because I think she has an interesting background in history. Let's do how OpenAI interim chief Mira Maradi helped launch AI into the mainstream. Born in Albania, former chief technology officer is charged with calming the waters after ouster of Sam Altman. When Mira Maradi made an appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah last October, OpenAI was just a month away from releasing ChatGPT. Do you want to skip around here? Maradi, as the company's chief technology officer, has been in charge of leading the teams that were pushing out the artificial intelligence chatbot that would throw the AI technology and debate over its usage into the mainstream. On his show, Noah asked Maradi how she grappled with the implications AI has for jobs. I got a cough.

You can keep reading. Implications. She says there were a ton of questions that were wrestling with every day little did anyone know that a year later a person whose job would be affected would be maradi's boss sam malton now maradi has replaced the rising star as ceo oh she was ceo for a while i forgot about that that's crazy yeah so many people have been CEO of Open Am. There was a little... What do you call it? Musical chairs for a bit there. Musical chairs

for sure. In a surprise statement, the company's board of directors said on Friday that Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board and that it lost confidence in his ability to continue leading open ai

that line not consistently candid is just so perfectly general like and they never and they never came out and said what it was yeah that's the crazy thing is that yeah all the all the back channel communications it's also not necessarily you like, wait until you find out. Wait until you find out. You're going to side with us. And then it was like, he launched the best consumer product ever without really telling us. It's like, who cares? Yeah, so questions were made over exactly what happened between Altman and his company's board, which includes respected technology researchers and business leaders.

But the board said that Mirati can provide the company with a smooth transition as it looks for a permanent replacement and then they like immediately added emmet yeah emmet was in for a while in there for a few days which lasted yeah for a few days and then sam so anyways here's some backstory marati joined the company in 2018 as vice president of applied AI and partnerships, positioning herself to play key roles in the company's development of its AI chatbot systems and Dolly, which uses AI to create artwork. She was promoted to senior vice president of research product and partnerships in 2020 and to chief technology officer in 2022.

That makes no sense to me because chat GPpt launched or gpt3 which was barely commercial launched in 2022 so like the first two years vice president of applied ai and partnerships like yeah i don't know that's interesting like they must have known that the products were going to become highly commercializable on track i i don't know it'd be interesting to hear like what she was doing at that time. It totally makes sense that it's a go-to-market role almost. But everyone else was very surprised.

Oh, this research lab has something that they're selling now. This wasn't in the plan. This is so shocking. But it's like, maybe they knew back then that companies would want to generate art for ads or whatever. They'd need to vend dolly into places anyway that's interesting given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company including her experience in ai governance and

policy the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent ceo so this this profile was written like during the turmoil basically in the guardian uh i guess this was uh november of 2023 um we give a little bit of backstory on her that's kind of interesting actually uh born in albania marati moved to canada when she was a teenager to study at an international school on vancouver island she got a mechanical engineering degree from dartmouth and eventually made her way to san francisco where she would lead product and engineering teams at Leap Motion. Do you know the story of this?

Well, I mean, the whole narrative of just being born in Albania and ending up in America raising billions of dollars and being at the frontier of innovation is just – Legit. tier of innovation is just legit is is one of thousands of you know any any sort of like hardcore anti-immigration people is one of you know thousands but a very high profile example of why immigration has made america such a dominant force in technology it's just it's just a very unique thing about america that someone can come in and become we need to we need to reposition the the pro the we need to we need to reposition the the pro the super pro immigration people need to reposition immigration as brain drain oh totally just being like we are draining yeah any competitive potentially competitive economy

I mean that literally is what Elon's position is uh with the h1b stuff um but the reason I want to talk about leap motion is you know who the CEO of Leap Motion was? I don't. David Holes? No way. The founder of Midjourney. No way. And Leap Motion was, I mean, great company. It was a hand tracker for virtual reality.

So it was this little USB stick looking device that then you would put your hand over and it would track your hands. You could put it on the front of a VR headset and very like DIY it into the Oculus back in like the hacker days. And it could do some basic hand tracking. tried to sell a company at apple they get completely rugged apple had uh apple had like re-engineered printed like welcome to apple here's your email here's your corporate badge for everyone at leap motion allegedly uh or like according to the reporting and the deal fell through at the last second because i think david holes went in and was like i don't like this corporate structure like i'm not gonna i'm not i'm not down like i'm out like no way yeah something like that he like turned them down and it was like kind of a mess but then clearly he had just like incredible abilities

to build and be a founder because even though leap motion it wound up being kind of like an acquirer to a different company and kind of sold. But it's just crazy that she, yeah, yeah, that is Leap Motion. It's just crazy that she led product and engineering teams at Leap Motion because David Holes, it's like all the top

technical talent in the valley essentially wound up working on AI eventually. They all moved over there. They didn't move into crypto? essentially wound up working on AI eventually. They all moved over there. And so then she goes to- Wait, they didn't move into crypto? Not many. All the best marketers moved to crypto,

which we'll talk about that. We have a story on that, which is great, from Nick Carter. During a brief stint at Tesla, she played a key role as a senior product manager in the development of the electric car maker's Model X. And so this is another interesting like sliding doors moment. She probably had meetings with Elon at some point. Now she's probably got Elon's phone number.

Again, you're leaving OpenAI. Why don't you go to XAI? You got to start your own thing. It's just interesting. Like there's one narrative where it's like, hey, all of these people are super talented. They're all super entrepreneurial. They all want to run their own companies,

get more equity. It makes more financial sense. But if it was truly like mission driven on like Sam, it was too chaotic. He must be stopped. You would create an alliance, right? You would have to. Yeah. But they're not doing it. Yeah. So the revealed preference is that actually this is commoditized and this is just about money. That's my take doing it. And so the revealed preference is that actually this is commoditized and this is just about money. That's my take on it. Yeah. Or wanting control. The other, the counterpoint to that is wanting control over what will be a super valuable, important commodity. Asset. Yes, exactly. Commodity though. Not, not this like God war. Because if we're really going to war over this and the robot army, it's like, do you really think you want to have the fifth strongest army when Elon and Sam are like warring?

Or should you just create or should you just pick a side now and actually go and win? So the game theory here, I think, suggests that this is more about money than mission in general. That's my take. Anyway, Maradi told Fortune magazine earlier this year that growing up in- The other side of it is all these people are already so post-economic that potentially there is still an angle of once you have more money than you could ever spend in your life do you want to just just do the work that you really want to do without we're dealing with the

sort of bs of of having a crazy yeah boss that you don't necessarily trust yeah you don't like whatever right in some ways this is like uh getting a tenured position at like a Stanford research lab. But you cannot do that because Stanford will never give you a billion dollars to build a 20K GPU cluster. So doing the work of academia now takes the form of a venture-backed commodity researcher. Yeah, there's totally a world

where some of these foundation model spin-outs from OpenAI just kind of twiddle their thumbs and do cool research, but just never reach sort of commercial. I'm not expecting that out of thinking machines. But SSI seems like it could be a good candidate for that. There were a couple of those. I mean, the sort of character, right? Where it's like the guy kind of was like, oh, I got like insane product market fit, but I don't really like the market. So I'm out.

I mean, that was the read for a lot of people that said that, I don't know. Potential one shot. But the guy, I mean, he just did Dorkesh like a gnome. He seems like legitimately like a computer science genius. And so like, yeah, that guy should just be doing like computer science. He doesn't need to be worrying about like,

how can we squeeze more pennies out of these like gooners that are like customers basically? Like it's not important work to him and that's fine. And that's the nature of capitalism in America. And to be clear, I'm not saying, oh, these people are in it for the money and that's a black pill. I'm saying it's a mega, mega white pill. Like it's the best outcome here. It means that AI is going to go extremely well. It's going to generate a lot of economic value. It's not going to be some chaotic apocalypse situation. Because if you think it's the apocalypse,

you don't act like this. That's my take. This is not the behavior of somebody who is like, what did Ilya see? Oh, he saw, he glimpsed into the ASI and realized that we were all going to be killed. It's like, no, that was a marketing stunt. That era is over. And now we are in the oil extraction and commodification perspective. And yeah, go get the money. It's great. I encourage everyone to do this. This is fantastic. Get the bag. I'd already been working in AI applications at Tesla, she told

Fortune, but I was more interested in general intelligence. I wasn't sure it was going to happen at that point, but I knew that even if we just got very close, the things we would build along the way would be incredible. I wanted to be part of that. Murati has often spoken publicly about AI's power as a tool, echoing sentiments expressed by Altman, a key champion of AI technology in a world that has grown skeptical about the company's technology. There are a lot of hard problems to figure out. How do you get the model to find the thing, to do the thing that you want it to do?

100% true. Satya Nadella's in here talking about pumping up Maradi because I think he at that point was saying like, yeah, I'm kind of bullish on her. As a result, he wrote, Mira has helped build some of the most exciting ai technologies we've ever seen obviously true i mean she's like clearly a goaded product and ai manager like there's no question about that um interesting well we will see where

it goes from interesting that microsoft didn't invest in thinking machines i don't actually know at the time at the time it seemed like it seemed like satya had more loyalty to open ai yeah and then more recently you can imagine microsoft would make direct investments in potential competitors given that open open ai is working with uh yeah oracle and and other companies that are now competitive again with microsoft it seems like mira and ilia left around the same time ilia is raising what a billion with 500 from green oaks coming in and mira it says here i don't know how true this is can you look it up uh it says secured significant venture funding over a hundred million dollars to support capital intensive

large-scale model training so which is interesting because that's a... She's behind the ball a little bit compared to Ilya. But who knows? I mean, like a billion-dollar deal can come together in like two seconds in Silicon Valley these days. No, it's possible she's just throwing a bone to a handful of early partners and then she's going to do the one on five billion like, you know, in a month.

Yeah. And like the crazy thing is that like... But... I don't think it might not be a bad deal. I mean, obviously everyone's. And like the crazy thing is that like, but I don't, I don't, I don't think it might not be a bad deal. I mean, obviously everyone's pointing to like the dot-com narrative, being like, oh, there's going to be

one power law winner and all this. But if it's commoditized, you know, maybe, maybe you just got to go drill the wells, get the GPUs, just buy a bunch of GPUs. I don't know. We'll see. Anyway, that's the story of Mira is there anything else we should cover in here it's pretty interesting I mean departed in 2014 and

then founded immediately I I'm just so fascinated by the fact that like it's just model company after model company after model company and like just they all seem to believe the exact same thing which is like these models are highly versatile but yeah but they also don't believe that this will be a power law do you are you a dau of more than one llm no yeah only chat gpt is on my home row yeah uh and then i use i have gemini pro plus like that I can find. When I find it, I can use it sometimes, but it's very hard to access. And I use that if it's like in just a book

because it has a million token context window. So that one feature is something I use. Perplexity every once in a while, grok every once in a while, inX. I do like, grok for image generation is fantastic because there's no guardrails. So it'll just generate like, oh, you want a picture of Tom Cruise,

you know, fighting Mickey Mouse? Like no problem. Yeah. Which is like, I think actually fine because it's very transformative and it's clearly satirical. Yeah.

But all the other LLMs are terrified of IP infringement. Yeah. And I think Disney and all the IP holders are like, yeah, actually, we don't want to get in a legal battle with Elon Musk, the president's first buddy. Yeah, the other thing is that Elon will post through, he will post, like, every lawyer would advise Elon,

please don't call Sam Altman a scam artist during the lawsuit because then Sam can go out and like sue for huge damages he could say you know you prevented this two billion dollar investment whatever there's a million ways there's a million things but but Elon being the world's richest man yeah is willing to just take that risk and so he would do that to a major corporation too right i mean just he he said f you to uh what to like disney and all the major to to bob eiger just for stopping advertising yeah not even like a suit just saying like hey look x is getting a little wild for our brand we're not gonna advertise there and he was like i have a message for you and he flicked them off at that damn time i said f off yeah f off right yeah crazy uh yeah so you know i'm glad because sometimes

you know the the the four-year-old son asks for a picture of uh DreamWorks character interacting with a Disney character. And you know what? I'm happy to abide. And you're going to have to come after me, DreamWorks and Disney, because sometimes Mickey Mouse wants to hang out with Shrek. There you go. I think those two are different IP worlds.

But they shouldn't be. And I should be able to instantiate them. And I think it's very additive. And it's not a replacement for the real thing. It's clearly, clearly additive. Anyway, speaking of intellectual property and luxury goods, kind of, let's go on to the French billionaire working his Trump ties to spare his luxury empire. That's right.

We're talking about LVMH and Bernard Arnault. Let's kick it off. Jordy, what you got? Yep. The day after President Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last summer, he received a call from a familiar French voice. It was Bernard Arnault, owner of the globe-spanning luxury empire. Arnault wanted to check in on the man he had known for decades. Trump was also in the middle of a fierce presidential campaign, as well as several criminal proceedings.

The phone call from Arnaud sent a clear signal. The luxury titan was sticking with Trump through thick and thin. With Trump now in office and warning of steep tariffs on European goods. The tariffs. The question, yeah, of course. The question is whether Arnaud can leverage his connection

to keep his luxury conglomerate out of any trade wars. Trades would be a blow to Arnaud's empire, whose largest market is the U.S., equal in size to all of Europe combined. Trump has called the European Union's trade surplus with the U.S. a quote-unquote atrocity, but he also leans on personal relationships

to guide his policy, as every businessman in the world does. The ties between the families are extensive, dating to when the two patriarchs were up-and-coming property developers in manhattan that's a whole other side of our nose story he was like in the real estate development world in the construction yeah uh industry back in france darno's second eldest son alexander has become friends with trump's son-in-law jared Kushner. Ivanka Trump, also funny story.

I made a, so back in 2021, we launched Helpful VCs, which was that NFT project where we made 400, you know, CryptoPunk style, you know, NFTs. And we put them online and we said, any VC that reposts this in the next four hours gets theirs for free otherwise we're going to auction it off yeah so of course every investor you know nfts were starting to become popular they were like i'm not letting my nft get auctioned off to someone else everybody reposted it super viral alexander saw it and then one of a mutual friend of ours hit me up and he was like, Hey, could you, uh, Alexander wants to make,

uh, uh, a, a crypto punk style NFT for, um, his dad, Bernard, could you make him on? I was like, sure. It costs like 50 bucks. I was like, here you go. So anyways, anyways, because Alexander had, had, was tapped into web three and had done some stuff with Tiffany's and they kind of, think, approached it in the right way where they dipped their toes but didn't go like, you know, they weren't saying like GM, Wagme, and stuff like that. So anyways.

Like Sequoia. You remember that? So Sequoia rebranded as like the Web3 faucet mainnet thing for like a week. And it was like at the actual top and then the SBF FTX thing happened. It was like, okay, back to normal, back to the basics. Amazing.

Ivanka Trump is a friend of Arnaud's daughter, Delphine, and a devotee of Dior. The brand Delphine oversees the CEO. So for those that don't know, Bernard has done a fantastic job of getting all of his children running different brands in the empire. So she runs dior the arno's conglomerate even pays rent to the trump organization which is the landlord for lvmh's louis vuitton store in midtown so does uh lvmh do cosmetics because you were talking on the last show yeah that melania should do a cosmetics line yeah if she doesn't have one already she might she did one there we go yeah that seems obvious yeah okay uh i'll

continue here during trump's first term arno's decision to expand handbag production in the u.s and publicly promote the move with trump helped the luxury industry largely avoid an initial wave of tariffs that hit other european sectors why are you laughing i just think it's the funniest game of checkers where Bernose, like, I just really don't want to get tariffs. Like, okay, open up production in the U.S. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll text it to Trump. Hey, do you see what we did? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, here's why you shouldn't, you know, slap, like, a 15% tariff. Trump left office before a second salvo of tariffs could take effect. Those levies, which some dubbed the LVMH tax, were designed to hit luxury goods in retaliation for a French digital tax affecting U.S. tech giants. Hey, Bernard, you got to get it together over there. Get your house in order. Ban the cookies. Let's cool it with the cookies. Yeah. The cookie banners.

The cookie thing is just, I made a joke about it when I was in France in late December, early January, and it just is so over the top. It's insane. It just is. He should be running. Bernard should actually do this. Because think about it. You walk in the Louis Vuitton store, they're going to be like, hey, just so you know, like you're in a store right now. Hey, there's a store.

You might have an opportunity to buy something. Can you please like sign on this line that like you're looking at merchandise and you're in a store? It's like, yeah, I know I'm in the store. I know I'm on a website. I know the cookies exist. Like, why am I clicking a button for this? Yeah, it's unnecessary. Yeah.

And it's the same thing that you would never see that in a luxury environment. Yeah. And Europe seems hell bent on making their entire internet low class and vulgar. Yeah. You have to imagine that Arnaud is inspired to some degree by and vulgar yeah you have to imagine that arno um uh is inspired to some degree by elon and that if you have millions of dollars you absolutely can influence the outcome of an election and make sure your guy yeah is in so yeah again a lot of like the obvious thing if you're trying to avoid tariffs is to show trump look we're investing in america you know we're

gonna you know develop you know production locally this is an important you know sector but but then the the the sort of more complicated way to do it is to say like i'm gonna fix fix french governance yeah and like i'm gonna get my guy in and i'm gonna make sure we're not like launching these taxes on american you know digital goods and i still wonder like LVMH tax I guess it's still hanging over our nose business empire it says here like of all the things to tariff that seems like the safest yeah not just because like luxury goods aren't important but literally because like they're not price sensitive in the same way like they're not price elastic and so uh you know if you tax cigarettes people consume the exact same amount of cigarettes.

Like, yeah, it's fine to tax cigarettes, basically. Yeah. And it's the same thing for luxury goods. I would imagine that if if they if there's a tax on Louis Vuitton stuff, the price goes up. It becomes even more exclusive. They sell roughly the same. Profits aren't majorly disrupted versus if you're taxing, you know, cheap. No, the main thing is a little bit. It's like all of a sudden the American stuff becomes competitive again. So I was reading an article

in the journal about, about the Chinese, like LVMH's opportunity in China right now. And they have basically, there's already luxury inflation that they set. The thing is that if, if prices have to go up, Bernard wants to be the guy that's raising prices and capturing that additional thing. He doesn't want to be raising prices because you have to account for this tariff or you don't want the consumer to be absorbing more costs because of something that's not your margin. I feel like there's so many places where I would probably be pro tariff just to make the american local industry more competitive yeah um you know we talk about drones we talk about uh you know dji versus gopro we talk about um you know all sorts of hardware stuff unitree versus boston dynamics all these different things that could could or the tesla optimus uh but what like you know like

a lot of these i was looking at like you know swiss watches versus american watches like there's one guy who makes bespoke watches really in america you're on the list you should actually make sure you're on here i really should get on the list because it's going to be like yeah it's rgw or rgm i think rgm uh out in pennsylvania and list because it's going to be like a decade. Yeah, it's RGW or RGM. I think RGM out in Pennsylvania. And then there's Hamilton, which is like a great

and historical organization, but they're not at the same level as the Swiss guys. So it's like, if you tax that, it's like Patek, Vacheron,

and Audemars Piguet are still, like they're only games in town at that level. And I'm wondering like, if all of a sudden Louis Vuitton is more expensive, what is more competitive in America? Like, do we just start rebuilding?

Maybe it'd be an opportunity for an American new luxury line to pop up. The thing about luxury though, is it takes a hundred years to actually build a luxury brand. Whereas if an American entrepreneur came out today and was like like i have a drone that's just as good as a dji not even better just the same same price we're price competitive and and i would buy that one obviously but right now it's like okay if i need a drone like it has to work i have to go with

dji yeah because the opportunity the other the other one is one from America that doesn't work and cost twice as much. Anyway, let's move on. The article mentions China. LVMH is counting on strong U.S. demand to power its growth in the coming years. After sales in China, the second biggest market plunged around 20% last year. And you were telling me something about that. It tracked with iPhonehone sales perfectly right so many luxury product companies had been dependent on china for the vast majority of their growth over the past decade and that just like slammed basically to a halt it's contracting

now um that has to do with like economic issues in china also the chinese consumer kind of like finding their way and there being actual consumer brands in China that are starting to be compelling to people locally. But, um, but yeah, uh, there there's caring group who, whose sales were down like 30% or something like that. So in China, in China. Okay. Uh, that's interesting. Uh, I'd love to know how LVMH is doing over the past year to 10 years. Uh, if you could look that up on public. But there's some interesting information here. LVMH operates 14 factories in the United States already and is planning to pump more money into Tiffany,

the iconic American jeweler it acquired in 2021. Yeah, so in 2024, carrying sales in Asia Pacific, including China, declined 30% due to weakened demand. And so this kind of caught people off guard so there's, there's this kind of caught people off guard to some degree, because there's a bunch of stores that are already like badged, like have the branding of, uh, whatever, you know, sort of luxury brand is going in there and just nobody's moving in or, or they're open and like people just aren't coming through.

So really tough, uh, you know, scenario right there. Apple is having the same issues. Their sales are down almost double digits as of last year in China. And again, part of the reason for that is that the iPhone in China is more of a luxury product than it is a utility. And we talked about this yesterday off the show. But Apple has huge advantages in the U.S. They have their moats, which is like messaging, payments, the developer ecosystem. They don't have that in China because of WeChat and these sort of super apps.

And so somebody can just trade for a cheaper phone and get like 99% of the utility that they would get from an iPhone. Whereas if you go off iPhone right now, it's like you're losing your iPhoto storage. You're using all your group chats. You're losing your calendar.

Bunch of apps. Bunch you're gonna won't work anymore so it is very you're very locked in uh so this is fun he he went to the inauguration ceremony and sat next to bezos and musk who he's been like going up and down with that is the richest man he recently was knocked off and elon is the richest one now um but he was flanked by his wife and two of his five children who would refuse an invitation from the president of the united states to attend their inauguration arnaud told reporters besides i've had a long-standing relationship with him like we're best buds i love him which is probably true um this article is based on interviews uh Arnaud first crossed paths with

Trump when the Frenchman was living in New York in the early 1980s. Arnaud had left France after the election of Francois Mitterrand, the first socialist president of France's modern republic, led to higher taxes and the nationalization of swaths of the French economy. He literally did the meme. If Trump's elected, I'm going to Canada. If Kamala's elected, I'm going to France. And he did that. He was like, there's a socialist here. I'm bouncing.

I'm going to New York. And it must have paid off for him because he said he didn't own a single luxury brand at the time. Instead, like Trump, he aspired to become a real estate mogul. He opened offices at Rockefeller Center while Trump Tower was being erected on 56th and 5th. Arnaud met Trump for the first time at a charity dinner at the Plaza Hotel in the early 80s, years before Trump acquired the storied hotel. Trump was the embodiment of a distinctly American form of luxury, one that splashed brand names in bold-based font on everything from buildings to jets.

Loud opulence. Loud opulence. Loud opulence. Really the creator. Arnaud's most high-profile investments were on the Florida coast. U.S. real estate, however, was difficult terrain for the Frenchman who struggled with an unfamiliar market. When Mitterrand's cash-strapped government made a U-turn toward a more business-friendly policies, Arnaud returned home.

That's so dirty dirty you're only you're only business friendly when you're cash strapped oh yeah you want to i mean that's the teal thing is like is like even the socialists would say you got to let the capitalists make some money before you can redistribute it yeah so like it doesn't make sense to do socialism in a two percent gdp growth economy you need to get to 10% GDP growth. And that's where all the AGI socialists come from. They say, hey, look, yeah, UBI sounds crazy now. But when we're growing GDP 10%, there's going to be so much money flowing around.

It'll be easier to pay for UBI. Everything will be paid off. Anyway, these guys are futurists. When Arnaud resurfaced in new york in the late 1980s it was the purveyor of a different kind of luxury arnaud had purchased christian dior and he was fighting for control of lvmh he had garnered a reputation as france's sharp elbow deal maker back in france drawing comparisons to trump himself arnaud and trump shook hands at a party at the Metropolitan Club in 1989. Arnaud had helped sponsor a black tie event

for the French luxury industry at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan. They shared a table, according to video of the event, and Arnaud is seated next to a bejeweled Ivana Trump as Trump beams as he arrives at the table to shake hands. Arnaud continued snapping up fashion and luxury brands, including American ones like Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan.

The real front lines of the expansion, however, was the U.S. real estate market. It was like a game of Monopoly. Arnaud's brands needed to occupy prime locations in America's most exclusive shopping corridors. We're talking about Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, just around the corner of Trump Tower bulgari etc and so he goes on an absolute tear yeah and if you haven't already go listen to the acquired episode of uh lvmh because the story is just yeah the found i

honestly have listened to both so i'm probably have overlapping narratives but um but yeah both of those episodes are fantastic and and they give you um just just learning about our no just an absolute he didn't certainly didn't lock into uh being at one point the world's richest man well let's close out with this, like how the taxes are actually shaping up to see, you know, what the prediction is for how LVMH bears going forward in the Trump 2.0 administration. In 2019, the Trump administration imposed tariffs of seven on 7.5 billion worth of European goods in retaliation for EU subsidies to Airbus. The duties targeted aircraft, cheese and alcohol like wine and scotch. Bad news for the French diet. The French diet paradox.

Justin Maris. Luxury items like champagne and handbags were spared. Thank God. Dom Perignon. Leaving some people scratching their heads. Yeah. I mean, $2.50, $3.50 a bottle. You know, you put tariffs on that.

We're going to be making January 6th look like a picnic. A baby shower. A baby shower, yeah. The day before the tariffs were enforced, Arnaud and Alexandra boarded Air Force One with Trump en route to Johnson County, Texas to inaugurate the new Louis Vuitton workshop in Texas. Notice how they say workshop.

They don't say factory because a lot of it is actually still done by hand. Interesting. LVMH invested $50 million in the facility with plans to hire 1,000 employees within five years. The bags produced here, including the Neverfull, New, New, and Metis, I'm not familiar with these bags, bear the label made in the USA. When a French reporter asked Trump why he was slapping levies on wine and cheese while ignoring champagne and leather goods, Trump said he had been discussing the issue with Arnaud.

I can't tax him because he moved to the United States. He was very smart. He was way ahead, Trump said. That's a good point. I mean, it's the dealmaker guy. Like, it seems like corrupt, but at the same time, it's like the whole point is what does America get out of this trade deal? And there are a number of things. There are money from tariffs or jobs in domestic manufacturing.

And so, you know, Trump says like, hey, I threatened him. He played ball. and so i have to i can't i have to back down yeah yeah like that's the point uh it is it is also tricky because like yeah champagne uh how are you going to move that like you can't move that to texas i don't think yeah but um trump's presence at the unveiling caused consternation at Louis Vuitton's offices in Paris. Nicolas Guesquere, Louis Vuitton's artistic director for women's collections, wrote on Instagram, standing against any political action, I am a fashion designer refusing this association.

It's kind of a reasonable thing to say. He's not that crazy. But yeah, obviously, there's a lot of people that work at LVMH that are not down with the MAGA bros. And so they're going to have a rough time. Pulling Trump aside, Arnaud confided plans to make a major investment in the United States. He didn't say what, but days later, LVMH went public with a bid for Tiffany's. The roughly $16.2 billion deal was the biggest acquisition of arno's career and with tiffany's flagship store lvmh and tiffany is the flagship american luxury brand yep there's not

really yep any can you think of any that the compass cartier and it's not an american brand yeah yep and so i don't know who owns cartier but uh you know lVMH wait really yeah you're kidding no they own both yeah the most monopolistic thing like yeah like where where is yeah so so Cartier is owned by Richemont but Bernard owns a big stake in Richemont okay wow it's indirect yeah where's lena khan on this she's probably buying luxury watches and she's like you know what let them oh sorry so actually i take it back okay break it down i was spreading i was just spreading uh misinformation the size of our nose stake when he when it when he acquired it was undisclosed ernard holds it in his words as as an investment okay uh the thing is is arno has a history if

you listen to the founders podcast episode he will just start he'll want to buy a company so he just starts buying the stock yeah of course so this is what he does he's basically on his version of public just like whipping little checks here and there. Dollar cost averaging in. Yeah, yeah. He's dollar cost averaging in. And it's totally possible like he just doesn't even want to own all of Richemont. But anyways, he sees it as an investment. He's never said, oh, I'm going to try to take this over.

So he doesn't have a controlling stake, but he does have a stake. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So, yeah. No matter whether you go Cartier crash or Tiffany Patek. rolling stake but he does have a stake yeah interesting yeah so um yeah uh no matter whether you go Cartier crash or Tiffany Patek but it's interesting because all the money winds up in the same place Richemont also owns Van Cleef yeah which you know that are no it's such a hot

you know brand especially right in this moment men and women are wearing it you know that um you know that he he wants he wants he wants it but then they also own like iwc okay piaget yeah like maybe he doesn't want those piaget's great uh yeah i don't know i'm not a big fan of it yeah i mean good pilot watches you know you can't hate them uh so let's see uh it's such a funny thing being a public company and just having somebody text you that says hey uh don't want to ruin your day but bernard arnaud just bought you know bought six percent of the company and we're hearing he's making other bids it is it is very very funny um anyway so now that lvmh was Trump's tenant and Arnaud needed to extend his conglomerate stay into the brick building, once the Tiffany flagship store reopened, Arnaud wanted to temporarily move Louis Vuitton's flagship into the brick building while its permanent store underwent a sweeping renovation. dispatched alexandra to uh new york to become the number two executive at tiffany on january 6th 2021 the same day that trump supported storm the capital just coincidence uh by the time he left

office trump was widely considered a pariah among the business elites uh alexander arnault was the exception the young executive and his wife died with trump in 2023 at Mar-a-Lago. So for any of our listeners that are under five years old, it's hard to even. Our kids listen to this from time to time. It goes on in the house. People don't, you know, these five-year-olds don't realize that Trump was a pariah. Yeah, it's true. Just in 2021, he would probably call somebody like jeff bezos and jeff bezos would just like not pick up i never need to i never need to think about you ever again

like hey sorry and removed from politics yeah it was just fully removed and so the inauguration this time was just hilarious and that everybody came to kiss the ring and all these yeah imagine we talked about this with the uh you know decision to de-platform trump it's like everyone in that group chat was like yeah there's definitely never going to be any negative repercussions from this and then four years later they're like and then even even uh he has infinite leverage yeah yes and then a year or two later there's this really viral post that's continued to go viral with somebody saying, it's crazy that we just deplatformed Trump. And there was just like literally no consequences.

We just lose the election in a landslide. Yeah, I forget who that is. But yeah, it's great. I can't tell if they were joking. I think they might have been joking when they posted that. But who knows but it is hilarious because obviously there were very serious consequences but not for the lvmh organization and the arnaud family because uh alexander is a young man on the move trump wrote in a social media post at the time we were celebrating the deal we made uh alexander arnaud actress gal gadot and tiffany ceo anthony ledrew cut the ribbon at the reopening of tiffany's flagship store in 2023 uh louis vuitton's fifth avenue store transferred to the brick building

turning it into a department store sized temple of commerce temple of commerce temples of commerce uh giant sculptures of a giraffe and ostrich were added to the facade of the building. Very cool. And so after Trump won the election, Arnaud moved Alexander to Moet Hennessy, LVMH's drinks division, which generates much of its revenue in the U.S. It generates a lot of its revenue in the U.S. Alexander took over as the unit's number two official this month. But people familiar with the matter say he's being groomed to eventually take the top job at Moet Hennessy. The drinks business faces more difficult straits

than the conglomerate's leather goods and fashion divisions. Drinks have much thinner profit margins, making it harder for them to absorb any additional levies. So we've got to keep buying Dom. That's really important. We're going to save this company here on the consumer side yeah and there's a lot of talk around who's who's uh arno's favorite boy sure child right and so the way that the way that he's sort of moving alexander around the empire sort of training him up yeah presumably like he seems like the leading candidate for becoming the top

dog but yeah again it's exciting don't quite know yet and so you can't shift as we mentioned you can't shift champagne and cognac cognac production to the u.s uh i think legally like france has rules that link appellations of wine and liquor to specific regions of the country. And so it's only champagne if it comes from the champagne region of France. It's like a legal term. For now, LVMH executives have been carefully mapping its exports across every customs code category, tracking their exact locations in the shipping process so the company can quickly determine its exposure to the moment any tariffs take effect. And they're gearing up for more investments in Tiffany. LVMH is spending 10 times more on Tiffany stores than its previous owners

and more than twice as much on marketing. Wow. That's a huge investment. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. Maybe a Tiffany store in every city in America. Whatever people say, the Tiffany CEO, Anthony Ledru says, this is shaping up to be a very pro-business president. So they're coming out marking their claims. Never hurts to be pro-business. We are pro-business. Should we do some jet battling?

The airplanes have been crashing. It's been very devastating, very sad. Fortunately, no one was killed on the last plane crash, but it did flip over entirely and the wings broke off which is not good Seems like pilot air they came in too fast. Yeah, do you want to talk a little bit about? You don't need to name the individual, but but a pilot that we know was kind of breaking down I'll just read the texts. This, this is hilarious. Uh, so we're talking about the, uh, the, the crash and, uh, my buddy who flies planes says, uh, uh, he thinks

it's going to be very stupid for the next five years. Uh, have you seen the video? Have you seen the clear video of the crash? The guy just way too hard literally nothing wrong with the plane the weather looks totally fine just way too high of a descent rate which is crazy since you have way higher air pressure when it's cold clear day and toronto is basically at sea level like bro these are basically the ideal conditions to land a jet other than the snow on the ground but that seems like that wasn't a factor. Yeah, because as soon as they come in, before they even touch the snow, the wheels just break off the plane. And so clearly they came in way too hard.

And he closes by saying, like, if you told me what, you need to land a jet, what would your favorite conditions be to choose? I'd basically choose these exact weather conditions, cold, clear day at sea level. And so, uh, yeah, what a, what a mess. Uh, very, very silly. But, uh, anyway, so this, this story kind of ties into the, um, to the last one in some ways, because Europe had been subsidizing Airbus.

And so this is just this great battle of commercial airplane manufacturers that's playing out live. And it seems like it's worked for them or something. Something's going right at Airbus because the Airbus... Well, is it just that so many things were going wrong at Boeing? Yeah. Because it's possible if they were just not even executing that well, but just like prioritizing safety. Yeah, yeah. Durability of the planes.

Yeah, and that's it. Pilot training. prioritizing safety yeah yeah durability of the planes yeah and that's it uh pilot training maybe maybe the safest european rigorous hiring just works i guess or maybe they're not getting brain drained you know like airbus might be the hottest ticket in in europe whereas in in in america you know a lot of the great boeing people probably went to work at SpaceX, et cetera. Anyway, the European company started delivering the new aircraft, the A321 XLR late last year against a backdrop of manufacturing upheaval and financial strain at its American rival. So far, the XLR has racked up more than 500 orders, many from airlines looking to replace older Boeing planes. And can you pull up on public, like just give me the size of the prize, like market cap for Boeing, what's happening with the stock over the last

couple of years, market cap for Airbus, just to give me some ideas. I'm going to pull out, I'll send some screenshots to Ben. Okay. I'm going to keep reading and then you kind of do some deep dive in. The jet success is one of the starkest signs yet of the diverging fortunes of the two companies with Boeing's troubles leading to gaps in its product lineup that are now being exploited by Airbus. It is also a warning of a bigger threat looming while Boeing is strapped for cash. Airbus is increasingly investing in entirely new generation of aircraft that could shape the duopoly for decades to come. Very interesting. investing in an entirely new generation of aircraft that could shape the duopoly for decades to come very interesting yeah so one one thing right away with with boeing sort of a narrative violation but they're somehow up 11 they're they're up 11 in the past 12 months which you just based on all the headlines you would not expect that you just wouldn't expect that. They've had a very rocky... They got badly...

Their stock suffered, obviously, with COVID and everything like that. And then it's basically... And then the 737 max. Never actually fully recovered. So they're still down. They're still down from peak. They're down 27% over the last five years. So pretty meaningful dip. On the other hand, you have Airbus, which on the five year is up 30

percent. So they're almost inverted in that sense. So American Airlines and United Airlines have chosen the Airbus XLR to replace their Boeing 757 fleets. And again, as a consumer, if I'm looking at two flights, I don't really have that much loyalty to airlines, to be honest. I just kind of like try to book the best flight. But I do kind of pay attention if there's two flights that are exactly, you know, pretty much exactly the same. I just go for the Airbus. That's crazy. And so it's totally possible that, that these airlines are saying consumers don't want to be flying on Boeing. We need to adjust our fleet to fit their, their concern. It's crazy. Cause like, yeah, I mean, you go

one level deeper in the stack and like, you know, no one cares that it's like, Oh, this is a Rolls Royce engine or like, this is a trans dime seat buckle, but most people don't know who makes what planes when they get on a Delta flight or an American airlines flight, but it's, you know, something going, you know, something's going bad when people start caring about who, what, who, what the plane manufacturer is, but it has been a mess. And there's been a lot of negative press, even though just on the safety statistics, like Boeing is still very, very safe, but it's just the vibes feel off. The new model, the latest in its A320 family of aircraft

has another advantage, it doesn't have much competition. Boeing discontinued the 757 in 2004 and shelved plans to build a new aircraft that would have competed directly with the XLR in 2020. The U.S. company's main rival aircraft, the 737 MAX 10, is years behind schedule awaiting signing from the FAA. If all but a handful of people are let go from the FAA,

it's possible that they would just give it a rubber stamp because they're like, hey, we really don't have time to deal with this. It hasn't been all gloom for Boeing. The company in December announced a landmark order for up to 200 MAX 10 jets from Turkey's Pegasus, a carrier that predominantly operates Airbus jets. So they are flipping some people. America Airlines also doubled down on its commitment to MAX 10 with 85 new orders last March. And Airbus isn't without its own problems.

Supply chain issues have limited the company's plans to turbocharge production and meet booming demand in the wake of the pandemic. This month, Airbus said it was delaying a long-touted hydrogen-powered jet. I had no idea they were even working on that. Anyway, in the five years since 2019, Airbus has spent some $12.9 billion on R&D. Boeing's plane-making business has spent $8 billion. So they're outpacing on R&D. This is such an example of going back.

This month, Airbus said it was delaying a long-touted hydrogen jet, hydrogen-powered jet. You didn't even know this was happening. Clearly, the reason that if you could go back and invest in Tesla years ago, the bull case would be like, this is a big company, very focused on innovation, that's going to continue to try to reinvent itself. And these airline manufacturers, you know, these aircraft manufacturers, commercial aircraft manufacturers, don't seem like the reason they trade it like 2x revenue is because they have no

real like they're not really showing hey we're committed to innovation we want to we want to build the next platform yeah and um anyways it's just it's just interesting to think about at a large late stage company people's incentives aren't their lifetimes they're like i'm here for a couple years or i'm here for a decade. I'm building my career, but I'm later in my career. Maybe I'm going to retire in 10 years. Maybe I'm going to retire in 20 years. Elon's thinking like, I'm going to run SpaceX

in a thousand years and I'm going to be the president and king of Mars. And so, you know, whether or not it's true, he's certainly thinking long-term and that leads to a very different style of decision-making than the guy who's just like okay to really get my retirement package or to get my bonus or to get my promotion i got to put out a press release about some fake thing and get some mckinsey consultants to say

it's real power jet oh we're delaying it but and then pump the stock a little bit and then pull back from the last second and say it was actually never really a thing it was just uh uh what's the term it was just an art, it was actually never really a thing. It was just a, what's the term? It was just an art project. It was just performance art. Performance art. Yeah. Yeah.

What if they come out and say that in the next press release? Oh, that hydrogen jet? That was just a bit of performance art. Yeah. Just a side project. This is why Boom Aero could end up being, you know, their recap could end up being

like the best investment ever is because if they can pull it off, then these big either Boeing or Airbus will have to come in and buy it or they'll just sell directly to the airlines. And for everyone who's like, oh, Blake's probably like the CEO of Boom is like, is super diluted now. Like, you know, it's gonna be rough for him. If he really starts crushing and like delivering, delivering in a serious, serious way, he can reincorporate in Texas and do the Elon thing and be like I want 25% of this company and I'll do and you'll give it to me if I get you know a hundred billion market cap yeah and all the shareholders would be like absolutely

because it makes perfect economic sense just like it did with Tesla yeah and so you know if you're if you're a founder and you're diluted, uh, you're kind of down, but not out, you have, don't give up because you can always get back in the game. Yeah. This is a new thing. Yeah. Wasn't the case for a long time. Yeah. Paul, uh, you can imagine Paul Graham being a big part of that round, presumably in the other investors. I'm sure they were thinking we need to make sure that Blake is incentivized to triple down when many people would have given up already. Yeah. Yeah. But obviously the investors need like financial downside protection and like they need to own what they own. Yeah. But at a certain point,

it just becomes about the share price. And, you know, it can be accretive to issue the CEO or the founder CEO a ton more equity. Yeah. In the sense that like, yes, you will be diluted as a shareholder, but if the price goes up and you make money, everyone's happy. Anyway, Airbus has been working on lightweight airframes, fuel efficient engines, and even folding wings. That sounds real. That definitely sounds like something that's going to happen soon. Hey, we're going to have folding Android phones or we already have them.

The natural evolution is folding wings. The folding wings are definitely coming. It's right around the corner, 2030. Everyone says, if you're ever in business and you and somebody asks you like oh when's that crazy thing you're gonna happen just be like we're a few thousand days away you know they're basically saying the same thing yeah 2030 for sure it's definitely gonna happen yeah if it's 2040 it's no big deal no one's gonna be mad at you one's going to remember what you said in 2025 and 2030. It's five years later. It's a lifetime. Anyway, folding wings.

That'll be, yeah, maybe they should just flap them. Let's make birds. Giant albatross birds. Make the wings flap. Make the wings flap. We spend more time arguing with the- Like an ornithopter, right? Yeah, exactly.

From Dune. From Dune. That'd be great. Anyway, Boeing isn't in a financial position yet to launch a new aircraft. So they're kind of getting stuck and Boeing could get in a situation where their old plane sucks

and the new plane, they can't afford to launch it. And so lots of risk around Boeing, but the stock is up. It was oversold. And clearly people are optimistic that something will happen here. But let's figure it out. It's not great when they're saying we've got to spend a little bit more time,

more focus on getting ready, getting the business back to generating cash so that we have the cash to support new airplane development. That's just not good. How is the stock trading up on on just that narrative yeah hey we're not making money yeah we're 140 billion dollar company nobody trusts our airplanes anymore boeing ceo they're falling out of the sky this is like yeah we we definitely gotta focus on getting ready yeah i think what's going on here is that profit is equal to revenue minus costs. And we need revenue to go up while costs go down.

So we increase profit. Everyone's like. Yeah. So just to give everybody context, I have the full public page pulled up here. On 66 billion in TTM revenue, they've lost about $9 billion. So not looking great. Good luck to them. Hopefully they can go pick up some startups, do some acquisitions.

Let those founders run the company. That's what I want to see. Yeah, at a certain point, you want any great American company. Because Boeing, in the fullness of time, is a great American company. That's what I want to see. Yeah. At a certain point, you just you want any great American company because Boeing in the fullness of time is a great American company. Yeah. That said, it clearly needs somebody like Elon. Yeah. I wish everyone always says that's the case for Elon. Just having a bunch of children. Yeah. Is that one if we need more Elons now? I think we can get other people i would say the the wild card move they should boeing how much how much cash they have on their balance sheet like a billion dollars

they should just go dude i hope they have more than that they're losing almost a billion a month yeah i mean on the other hand people are like oh these ai people are raising too much money we boeing's out there burning a billion a month. If Boeing's burning a billion a month and you're only burning 50K a month. Boeing has 26 billion on their balance sheet. Take five of that. Go buy Boom. Blake Scholl.

Get in the CEO seat. You're running Boeing now. Make better planes. You got to make better planes. Make them flap. Make them flap. No. No.

Don't make them flap. Make them real. Make them good. Make them flap. No. No. Don't make them flap. Make them real. Make them good. Stop with the flapping. I want the like ornithopter mode. Ornithopter mode. Ornithopter mode. Yeah.

I like this plan. I think we can turn this around. This is why we should have an activist hedge fund. So we can come in, start putting pressure. Maybe we got to get Bill Ackman. Send Bill Ackman a post. Hey, we're taking Boeing private. We're buying.

Boom. We're putting Blake Scholl in the Boeing CEO seat. Crazier things have happened in the business world. You heard it here first, if it happens. What are you looking at? I just realized there's that Apple launch event. Oh, is that happening now? Nikhil in the chat says, did we cover it yet?

We have not covered it yet. Ben, if you want to print off an article or pull up some slides for us, do that. But while we're preparing for that next segment, Jordy, I'd love for you to take me through nick carter uh and his uh and his post on meme coins being unquestionably over yeah here's uh you know a lot of people over the last week have been uh saying our meme coins dead uh there was a time that felt like uh nfts were just inevitable and they were going to take over the whole economy and uh yeah i mean it just feels like meme coins are like the least dead they've ever been in history from my perspective because the president just launched one and so i feel like we're still like yes maybe you can call top if you're really really sharp

like nick is but in general i think for like normies they're just like whoa like these meme coins are like serious yeah and so well he gets into this. There's some really good, interesting. So the narrative within crypto right now are that meme coins are dead. They're seen in these sort of extractive, zero-sum games, right? Bology came out and was like- PVP. PVP.

These are PVP projects. There's no value creation. It's just value sort of transfer between people that are early and people that are later, right? And like people that bought and sold at the right time and people that bought and sold at the wrong time. And we've taken this stance. We have said that launching a crypto coin is, or meme coin is low class and vulgar. What would your mother say? We've said that, you know, we, we, we, we have,

we have generally been fairly harsh on, on the, on the crypto community. And so, and so the last, uh, and the last, and it's interesting because, you know, even today, a company that I backed at Preseed just announced a huge, their second round from Andreessen Crypto called Universal Assets. So like, there's a bunch of good stuff happening in crypto, but it does feel like meme coins had sort of the obvious top was the president launching a meme coin. And then kind of where do you go from there? And so there's been a bunch of drama with the Libra coin from the Javier who like just kind of promoted it, but wasn't necessarily a part of it. Sort of reflected

poorly on him. And then now this week, it's been interesting. Dave Portnoy has just like gone heavy into meme coins, just launching a bunch of and and sort of getting on these sort of live uh chats on on x and just like him you know looking like classic disheveled you know yelling at sort of cartoon uh profile picture you know people um but let's get into this post and we'll cover some of these other issues so funny that jim has to pay short-term capital gains on trump coin wow that's right because he was just selling into because they sold in like two days like it's like it's like a short it's just ordinary income yeah yeah okay so nick carter says uh meme coins are unquestionably over obviously they won't fully disappear but the trade is gone reason being the entire premise of meme coins that was that there

were fair launch opportunities where john retail had just as good of a shot at making money as the funds and VCs. So for a while, it was these sort of ICOs that were sort of public, but they also had some sort of more institutional capital. And then you had these heavily sort of VC backed projects like Solana, for example, like raised a bunch of venture capital before they ever were sort of widely available or distributed. Yeah. And so, you know, after going through this era of like VC coins that are getting by the time they go public, basically on the chain, they're trading at these crazy valuation meme coins. You could get in at ten thousand dollar market cap. And then if it goes to a million, like, you know, you've got a ridiculous return. So anyways, this was the entire substance of the claim made by the meme coin boosters. The coins had no purpose beyond their launch mechanic. They weren't sold as a product in their own right, but rather as an alternative to high, fully diluted value VC backed coins. Those have their

own problems, of course, but their issues did not make meme coins any more worthwhile, and the meme coin trade was entirely based on a claim that was ultimately exposed as a lie, that the casino was at least fair. It was evident that this wouldn't last, and once meme coins became a big sector,

semi-professional entities would emerge to cut pre-launch deals, trade on insider info, snipe launches, meaning like just buying something super early that you know is going to be big. The quoted tweet dives into those details. For all of Hayden's sins, and Hayden is the guy that did the Melania token

and then he did the Libra token, he's done more to expose the corrupt meme coin sector than anyone else. And he should be commended for that at least. So he basically did a bunch of stuff that people were like, what are you doing? This is terrible. And then he went and talked for hours. and he should be commended for that at least. So he basically did a bunch of stuff that people were like, what are you doing?

This is terrible. And then he went and talked for hours with Dave Portnoy, with CoffeeZilla. And so the Malay coin was the most obvious example of this. Opening at a billion and going up to 4 billion in minutes, clear proof that people were playing a rigged game. So presumably Hayden sold,

you know, basically sold a bunch of the token before launch basically saying that as soon as we launch this is going to be worth a billion dollars yeah you're going to be able to sell into that and it'll go up to you know a multiple of that um nick says but it's just the latest in a series of unfair and botched launches the casino didn't take a slight edge it was more like 90 10 in favor of the house, right? So where to now? Like, just to make it very clear, if it was 90-10 odds in Vegas, people would stop going

because there just wouldn't be the story. It just would be way less entertaining. And so Nick's entire thesis is if you're 90-10 in favor of the house, people will just stop playing the game. So he goes, so where to now? Meme coins are cooked. There will still be launches and probably some winners, but the meta is done. of the house people will just stop playing the game yep uh so he goes so where to now meme coins are cooked there will still be launches and probably some winners but the meta is done

crypto historically has always been about these metas right it was defy summer then it was like the nft yeah then it was three three points and yeah um and so retail will still be farmed here and there. The little pay pigs. As many are not extremely online and unaware of how extractive the sector is, but the countless coterie of scandals and meme coin land will turn off the smarter investors and eventually the mass market. So his position here is that

the people that are on X right now and on Discord and telegram and all these platforms they know that like meme coins are cooked yeah and they're now becoming way more wary of like some of these bigger projects in many ways like trump like if you just bought trump in the first 20 minutes of when he announced it you did really really really well and it's crazy because i i feel like like in the retail sector like in in like in like wall street like there is a thesis for like uh okay the u.s government can give you a corporate bond or a government bond then you get three three to five percent or something and then a large corporation like apple just makes money makes money makes

money and you buy a share of that and they give you a little bit of the money. And so it's very like logical. There's very clear value creation there. And then, and then yes, you do get the crazier stuff where it's like day trading very rarely works out because it's so financialized and so professionalized that it's like, yeah, you're going up against fucking Jane street. Like, yeah, yeah. Right. Um, pardon my language, but, uh, uh, and then, but then on the flip Like, yeah, right. Pardon my language, but and then, but then on the flip side, you have people like Warren Buffett, who espoused just like general buy and hold strategies that, that do tend to work out for retail in for most people. And it does kind of work. And with, with the crypto stuff, I guess something like similar

does exist with just like stack sats and buy bitcoin versus like trade meme coins but when i see the meme coins like i can write the algorithm in my head which is like set up a bunch of servers that are scraping trump's twitter and watch for any crypto launches if there's a crypto launch immediately go buy that right thank you uh immediately go buy that like that and and you could do that for milani you could do that for baron and there's a crypto launch immediately go buy that right thank you uh immediately go buy that like that and and you could do that for milani you could do that for baron and there's people that actually have set up for all these snipers exactly he's talking about it's actually they're looking at the wallets on shelf and seeing okay the person that did milani is working on a new thing it's probably big so let's buy some of that immediately or hey this thing just got

created in a hundred thousand dollars float into it Buy it with size. Exactly. Exactly. And so all of that seems super easy to make algorithmic. And so I don't know why as a retail investor you would ever want to play in that unless you truly had inside information. So anyway, so Nick says meme coins are cooked. Second point, conventional L1, L2 DeFi token launches will continue, but I'm noticing funds and founders shying away from high pre-launch valuations, mindful that end buyers are wary of these high FDV, low float game. And so what high FDV, low float means that this is basically the Trump coin, right? So there's like this crazy sort of fully diluted value in that if you released every token onto the market, that would

like if you if you if there's a billion tokens, you know, and this is the price, this would be the market cap. But then what they end up doing is they're only there's only a number of like 20% of that actually circulating. So it helps support the price. But I mean, that happens when a company goes public. Sure. And the reason you hire an investment bank is because they're trying to do price discovery in roadshows with large investors. So they go to State Street, they go to Fidelity, and they say, hey, the company is doing, here's the DCF, here's the huge model. We think this is where it should trade.

What do you guys think? OK, let's do an auction. Let's auction off this block and then get it and then unlock more of the shares. Like, this has been a solved problem and somehow crypto reinvented it. But the problem is that the whole point of an IPO is typically to raise money. So you're raising money, you're offering to the public.

And then the reason why you want an accurate price is because if the price is too high, yeah, your cost of capital is lower. You raise more money, but then your stock tanks and everyone's like, your company sucks. On the flip side, if you price too low,

your stock pops, but you're like, hey, we only got $100 million in our IPO and we gave up 10% of the company. Like what happened? And that's why Bill Gurley is always upset about that. But the problem with Bitcoin

is that like, you don't need the money for anything, right? Like, is there a point to this? Presumably, this guy Hayden with LibraCoin managed to generate $100 million. And what Dave Portnoy was pressing him on is like, whose money is it? Where did that come from?

And so you'd be sort of waffling on that. A good example would be like Uber you know, like Uber goes public. They raise money. Yeah. Now they're public. They can issue debt easier. They get lower cost of capital. And so what is Uber?

They're profitable now. But if they need to raise more money, they have access to the public capital markets. And then they can do things like try and build a self-driving car or hire a bunch of engineers to make their app better. Like there's obvious things. But like with a meme coin, like where the money doesn't go towards anything, like the project is done as soon as it's as soon as it's shipped. Right. There's no there's no. So the price discovery doesn't even matter.

Yeah. It's just it's just a wealth transfer. I don't mean the price. The price is almost ever a pitch. No. Like, I mean, that, that's Nick's broader point is that the coin's purpose was the launch mechanic. And then the product is the price.

So when the price is good, people love the product. They're like, I love this product. And then when the price is not so good, then they start to take some issue with it. And it's interesting. So what Nick is saying is like, these rounds are happening in the private market. So I've done, I've made probably five fish investments in sort of digital asset related startups.

I was lucky to be in this company that that launched today. Yeah, we have a universal asset. We'll cover it in a bit. I was like in the seed round of Farcaster, which is a billion dollar protocol now. But over the last year, I've been pitched these rounds that are that are this is our pre token launch round. The round is happening at 700 million dollars. Here's the comps. We think we're going to be able to go out at two billion. It's like an easy, you know, multiple on your money. Like that's how these things are being pitched is a sort of pre IPO round. You only have to hold you're only a liquid for a year and then you get this like quick you know potentially pop um so nick says next he says crowdfunding platforms like echo will thrive so echo is like angelist-esque platform for the crypto world they do um effectively spvs they have accreditation kyc all this stuff that's important for companies that

their narrative is like, let's help these private crypto rounds that are pre-token be more community oriented. So enable, you know, 200 people to invest in something that in a perfect world, Andreessen would be like, we're taking that entire round. But people started to think poorly about these VC coins. another interesting point this is this is a really interesting one so he says flight to quality part of the reason meme coins were attractive was because they promised nothing and were thus considered exempt from securities law yeah that's the thing with money a token right like it's not like she said hey i'm issuing a token and we're going to build a protocol that will allow you to like get exclusive access. You're not going to earn from it.

There's nothing. It's not a financial product. It's just a it's a meme. Yeah. And that's actually what they they don't even call it a token or a coin. They call it Melania meme dot com is now live. It's just a meme. Yeah. it's just a meme yeah uh so nick says we have a progressive sec that is already crafting rules

to allow for compliant issuance of tokens and presumably an equity light disclosure regime regime for issuers this means that we don't have to bother with fake decentralization which is these protocols that are like oh we're set up in the maldives and then we have like our you know ngo over here in Africa. That's basically what USAID is getting in on this one. But anyways, so the idea here is that these tokens that couldn't have fees associated with them because that would position them as like blatantly a security, they would be able to actually return capital to users in an interesting way and actually start to function more like equity. Because a lot of people would say like, oh, this token has to be

worth money because it's connected in some way to this company and they're worth a billion dollars. And the reality is, is like, they're totally disconnected, right? The whole point of why you buy stock or preferred stock in a corporation is that it gives you a legal right to the stream of cash flows. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. It's like if you own, you know, 1% of Berkshire Hathaway, you get 1% of the profits in that they dividend out. And now there's a lot of other structures that can happen and the money can flow around a lot of different ways. The board can vote to reinvest those assets but in general you have a claim on the financial assets uh both on the balance sheet and in the and in the cash flow

statement yeah so nick ends on a positive note he says there's no reason to be upset a sense of gloom and cynicism pervades crypto right now because meme coins in a sense were considered the last fair terrain where anyone could make money. This illusion has been shattered. He basically is saying the trade of the next few years is just to be like, where is there actual sort of like on-chain cash flows happening and just buy those tokens, right? Because then this fee switch can be turned on and you can actually earn cash flows based on your ownership of said token. So basically like this could be the end of crypto and meme coins are mainstream. Now there's going to be less of the, I just bought this token and now I'm worth $10 million type of

thing. And more so it'll bring a level of, if you, you can, you're going to be able to make money on chain, but you're going to be more like a day trader. Who's either getting super lucky, taking a lot of risk or being highly methodical and taking the sort of long-term value-driven approach to investing. So there's going to be the top call. There's going to be, I think like the next meta is going to be crypto value investing, where you're kind of looking at these protocols and saying, okay, where is their income being generated on chain and how can i you know basically own that and compound on it and i'm sure a lot of people do very well but it just looks more like traditional stock or bond investing just or alternative asset investing then well let's close out with this

growing daniel post and watch out there's some bombshells in there you got a sensor he's got a little bit of daniel says i think crypto permanently damaged tech in weird ways just a huge influx of very uninteresting greedy r words r words and when crypto went bust they rolled into ai and now every ai founder i meet except for a handful seems like total dimwits f crypto man 10K likes. 10K now. View hidden replies for insane crypto bot trash. Yep. Absolute S word.

Technology built by S companies for a S community. It is funny that if you post a lot on X, you're going to have, even if you have nothing to do with crypto you're gonna have you know hundreds of messages a week from people being like hey boss i've got a meme coin i have a i have a bot that replies to every single one of my posts with some sort of like chat gpt spinoff but it always tries to steer the conversation towards some solana thing that i haven't seen and so most of the time it just gets muted and I don't follow it. So I don't see the notifications,

but every time I actually like, I'm like, Oh, that's weird. There's someone like tracking me. Uh, yeah. What would your mother say?

Lots of messiness. Uh, go build something real. Uh, do you want to go through go to a, do you want to do that? Okay. Yeah.

Let's talk about a, uh, a, a group of, a group of, yeah yeah let's hit the size gong uh goatee's phenomenal poster um and uh anyways um so um uh so anyways go go TA, I ended up backing this team in 2021. So basically had to have been close to, um, or maybe 2020 even, but like close to close to four, probably four plus years ago. Um, and they have just iterated and made pivots. They were starting and building an on-chain index. And one of the, I think, generalized issues they had was they couldn't really hard launch in the U.S.

They had to make it available. And a lot of crypto wealth is still in the U.S., even though our regulatory environment wasn't friendly. So they ended up kind of evolving the business into what it is today, which they're announcing. And so anyways, I'll read it out. So universal.xyz, universal fundamentally improves how assets move and trade on chain. You can now trade spot assets like SWI, I think it is, SUI, DOGE, and XRP directly on your preferred chain without bridges or centralized exchanges. The problem is simple. Crypto is fragmented. So many chains, so many assets. If you're trading on base but want exposure to something like Sol, Doge, or XRP,

you have to bridge or find your way back to a centralized exchange. This creates unnecessary friction for your users and severely limits which assets developers can use. Universal solves this with U-assets, wrapped tokens that are backed one-to-one by verifiable reserves held in Coinbase So that's crazy. They seem like very pacing towards a billion dollars, you know, very quickly. That's great. Traders, this can mean you can finally trade 80 plus new assets without leaving your preferred chain, no bridges, no centralized exchanges, no fragmented liquidity, and you can put your assets to work in DeFi. This is really cool. A lot of investors have experienced this before. Sometimes you don't really know what your portfolio company is doing. I certainly

didn't fully understand the new development, but they've evolved and clearly iterated and are building something awesome now. So congratulations to GoTA and the rest of the team. They have just, I commented, incredible showing of grit across a crazy few years because there were so many moments where I'm sure their loved ones were basically saying, all right, guys, hang up the hat.

If you're in Web3, pivot to AI. I'm sure that loved ones were basically saying, all right, guys, hang up the hat. If you're in Web3, pivot to AI. I'm sure that was a lot of pressure. You gave this a good run, but it's over kind of thing. That's great for them. Very cool. That's very exciting. We got more funding news. Saronic raised a $600 million Series C

from Andreessen Caffeinated, 8VC, General Catalyst, Allad Gil. A little bit spicy on the timeline since Deleon called Allad out for Allad Gil. His whole thing is like the index companies. He wants to buy the one company in the space that's the power law winner. Allad's obviously an investor in Anduril. Andreessen's an investor in Anduril as well. And now they're investing in another defense tech company. But, you know, we'll see.

Maybe there's room for two Power Law winners in this space. But congratulations to everyone over at Saronic. And $600 million, I mean, that's a lot of money, you know? Got to run the size gun for that. Boom, boom, boom. So congrats to everyone over at Saronic and $600 million. I mean, that's a lot of money, you know, boom, boom, boom. So congrats to everyone at Saronic. Uh, let's, I just love to see solo GPs leading gig around. Always. It's just, it's just the best. Always. I love just seeing, uh, and it is cool. I mean, uh, a lot of his point was that, uh, yeah, like a ship building capacity is way under, way under,

we need more ship building and that's's what Saronix focused on. Let's move on to the humane AI pin is winding down. Did you see this? HP is acquiring the team IP and software for $116 million. We've been talking about this. Make printers great again. We have a brother printer uh it's pretty good but it could be a lot better of course we have the printers the brand is

actually called brother it's not just our nickname we don't just have one printer we actually have three printers uh we have some very nice printers we have we're big into printers the name is brother usa and so yeah you want and so this uh yeah shout out to brother and uh shout out to hp hewlett packard uh let's see i think it's funny that hp is known for like printers now because they used to be like the premier maker of computers i actually know someone who's like uh a descendant of bill packard and uh it's bill yeah. Yeah. And, uh, uh, I mean, HP has an incredible founding story. Uh, there was a, uh, who was it? Some, some guy, uh, who fought in World War II or worked at World War II in MIT's radio lab, created radio systems to detect bombing runs, to defeat the Germans, goes out to Silicon Valley, teaches at Stanford, and two of his students are Bill Hewlett and David Packard, and he's like, you guys should start a company.

And they start HP, and it's just like, a massive, massive company. But they have acquired Humane. Humane had raised maybe like $200 million. They launched that ai pin that was kind of a problem and a solution in search of a problem didn't really get a lot of traction uh it was more it was more felt like a experimental cool art project it was also weird because it was like ai was clearly tacked on at the last possible second. Yeah. Because originally it was like they're Apple folks and they left Apple and they're like, we're making

the next Apple device. But every decision that they made with this pin was hyper aware of Apple's monopolies. And that created a very, a very like compromised experience. So it could receive text messages, but they knew that they couldn't integrate with the iPhone because... So it wasn't a different number? Yes, you had to get a different phone number. So, hey, Jordy, send me a text message and don't forget to save the other number

for my humane AI pin in case you want to text me while I'm wearing the pin. Like it clearly makes no sense from a UX perspective or UI perspective, but it makes sense if you're thinking like 25 steps ahead and you're saying, well, if we do integrate with Apple over Bluetooth, they will have complete control over us and we will never be able to defeat them. And so clearly they were thinking, let's not make just like a cool consumer hardware company

because there are plenty of those. Let's try and disrupt Apple. And so we have to rethink everything from first person. It was just a mess. Yeah. And there was, you could look at the, so clearly very talented builders, designers, like had a big vision. And I love that in general,

the ecosystem is broadly supportive of people taking these big swings on projects that are ambitious and maybe prone to fail, right? We want 10 of these to fail. We don't want them all to fail, but it's fine if 10 fail and one works, right? But I want more friend.com stuff. Where it's like you give a kid a couple million bucks and he goes and he tries to launch it in 12 months.

These guys were burning $200 million for like a decade. And I care more about the time, honestly, than the money. That's just so long. It wasn't exactly 10 years, but it was just a long time my main point with humane is you could objectively analyze the humane pin yeah and determine that it was never going to be a hit consumer product yeah and the issue is that the team had so much time and money invested into it yeah they had to like go put on clown makeup and like go out and be like look like this is the next big thing and you could just consumers are too smart they're like, it's a second number

and it doesn't fully replace my phone, but it's sort of additive. So I still need my phone. But how am I going to actually use this? This doesn't really make any sense. It was innovation theater. It was, they were LARPing as Apple. They were LARPing as Apple.

They literally dressed up like Steve Jobs, did an Apple style keynote and said all the words that Apple says, except that's not what makes Apple successful. What makes Apple successful is that they had first mover advantage to like a revolutionary platform, the iPhone, and then they locked everyone in.

So it doesn't matter if they've just bumped the camera specs two megapixels, you're gonna buy it anyway. And that's just a different, it's just a different business. It's like a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Apple powerful. It's validating for me because at times you're like,

am I crazy? We won't name these investors, but you're like, why are these people putting in so much money? And you could say, oh, it's just a team bet. They have some real innovative technology here and maybe that's worth something. But it's the same thing that my reaction to Quibi, which also, you know, the thing about these companies that that have raised a bunch of money or super high profile, they tend to actually fail fairly fast in the sense that Quibi shut down. Was it months after starting?

Yep. They were like in Quibi's fundamental flaw was they were like everybody's watching these short form vertical videos we should shoot highly produced short form vertical video cinematic movies and tv shows not realizing that you're competing with every single person with a cell phone you can make more entertaining more topical yep and and you're competing quibi is not competing with netflix they're competing with tikt Instagram, YouTube, X. And that's what friend.com understands. Anyone can fine tune an LLM. Anyone can go to Llama and make the LLM sound weird.

And so he's been making a bunch of weird decisions that add up to something that seems differentiated and is not just gonna show up in your Siri anytime soon. Speaking of Quibi, Blake Robbins, if we go forward, probably 20 posts. He says random thoughts. Turns out Quibi could have worked if it had just focused on soap operas. Real Short is doing $40 million per month for vertical video. I don't know anything about Real Short, but people are saying this is a narrative violation.

One guy says too bad their output is pure slop, but it's working, which is really, really interesting. They're doing 40 million a month. 40 million a month. Real short. Never heard of it. But someone figured out and cracked it. And yeah, I mean, it's the same story with Quibi and Humane. Okay, but these stories are like total slop so their new release they have

take me hades i'm dying when her sister gets blackmailed by a ruthless sex club owner dakota james is desperate blah blah divorce me one last time hayleyaley Bildner, a successful NYC CEO engaged to a billionaire politician, is shocked to learn. This is another one. The heiress and her possessive bodyguard. So it's just like it's basically romance novels turned into these like seemingly like low. Yeah. But so, I mean, this is a weird thing where where they were willing to do the same what is the counter positioning here against quibi

jeffrey katzenberg who was the founder of quibi would not touch this for ethical reasons for aesthetic reasons and he missed out on a 40 million dollar a month opportunity this is like basically pornography for in the same way that romance novels are. This show is called Pregnant by My Tough Daddy CEO, which I don't even want to say. Censor it. Bleep all of that. Bleep all of these. This is not family-friendly content.

Is it AI generated or is it actually shot? I mean, it's not technically. We don't know what the story is about. It could be a heartwarming story. I don't like it the vibes are off terrible vibes terrible terrible vibes uh blake so now we know why they're doing 40 million dollars a month what did it cost them well there's a good question what do the founders of real shorts mothers think about them because what we should reply and say blake where should we start in the catalog? Yeah.

But that's interesting. So the thing is, is like these sort of like low class and vulgar novels sell really well. It's the same as character AI. Sort of TikTok, book clubs and stuff like that. People like this stuff. So slop sells. Anyway, promoted post. We got a promoted post from porsche uh the 911 st this limited run vehicle is up for auction with the entire winning bid supporting the red cross response to disasters

through the united states now that's great because the red cross we've been talking about this might go through a for-profit transformation which would be huge uh the auction is live now through february 20th in partnership with RM Sotheby's Sealed. So obviously a lot of the viewers of this are going to be at Sotheby's probably this weekend. And so take a look at this 911 ST. If you're not familiar, the ST, of course, is a manual analog. Essentially, you know, this is a Carrera GT level performance vehicle with true driver engagement. Beautiful vehicle.

Highly recommend picking this up if you're looking for a daily something to show off something to have to make your commute a little bit more exciting anyway let's go back to the timeline great just sort of commuter underrated commuter yep and so the Carrera T is out now a little bit cheaper I think 160 180 no no no it's way less i mean after you could probably get it up there with options but you can get a carrera t for probably one they raise the price though like the old one the new yeah the the newest one with the hybrid powertrain uh is uh is up at like 150 now the 2025 t is a starting price of 135 so yeah yeah, with options, you could probably get it to like 170. Yeah.

But the ST was much more limited, much more expensive. And I think it's because the S, it has the Turbo S powertrain, especially, or the GTS. It's basically a Turing. Yeah. Like a GT3 Turing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. GT3 Turing powertrain, but manual and much more engagement. So highly recommend it. Anyway, big news from Andoril Industries. They are doing a hiring stunt. They posted,, big news from Andoril Industries. They are doing a hiring stunt. They posted, don't work at Andoril. And we have a post here from Chris Backey. He says, the new social media intern at Andoril is about to single-handedly land them a $500 million defense

contract. There's a couple of posts here from Andoril. They say, get a tech job, they said. It'll be easy, they said. I've been soldering for eight hours straight. Oh, sure. I'd love to go help with the Dive XL project. Flying from LA to Sydney and back in a weekend sounds great. Matt Grimm just said I should do the MRF with him in two weeks. And he believes in me.

I've never done a pull-off in my life. Whoever was working on Ivas before me was really into sword art online. And the ultimate banger that got 8K, I think it's going up more, says Palmer. He's the intern, John. Yeah, whoever ghost wrote these, generational ghost writer, really.

Genius, I can't say enough about them. Absolutely dog. Absolutely dog of ghostwriting on the timeline. Might be in there. Maybe. Might be in the room with us right now. Palmer just told me he wants a working prototype of the big robot from Pacific Rim by Friday. 8K likes on that.

And lots of good responses. Somebody says, is Drill working for Palmer Lucky now? Jason Levin says, Anderle is posting now. This round is about to be huge. And they even gave a shout out to our sponsor, Ramp. They say, hey, Ramp, why does my corporate card have unlimited spending on American muscle car rentals? I like that one. And Ramp quote tweets it and says, looking into this for personal reasons.

And of course, the Ramp army comes out. Juwan says, I think we should change it to unlimited muscle car purchase. And Ramp says, as long as it increases productivity. Heard a good story. So I have a family friend who operated a massive HVAC company in New York for decades. And he's told me just some crazy stories from that. Because imagine you're working basically on the buildings and office and retail space of all the most powerful firms in the world. And so, anyways, wild stories. But he said that he would get his executives, they would all get a company car. And he would advise people, they could all get a company car and he would advise

people they could get whatever they wanted like within a certain budget range but he would advise them you know generally like get a truck or you know something that's sure and he said the the most issues he ever had was an exec that got like a a nicer bmw sure because every customer started going back to him being like why is your exec exec like, like I'm clear, like I'm not paying, like whatever I'm paying you right now, I'm going to pay you like, you know, 20% less because clearly you have way too, so enough margin in here that your executives

are like driving sports cars to meetings. So. Yeah, I think the Anduril guys, if you're working at Anduril and you're traveling, gotta get a Mustang. Show up in the GT350R, the GT500, the Dark Horse maybe. Yeah. Who knows?

Yeah. What else would be there? Maybe Camaro. Maybe something with a Hellcat. The new Corvette. Yeah. ZR1. The new ZR1.

People are not going to be like, this is a muscle car. They're going to ask you to renegotiate the contract at that point. But maybe something with a Hellcat in there. A Demon. Dodge Demon pulls up. Yeah. Zero to 60 in 1.7 or something off the factory line. Totally.

You love a track-ready American-made factory muscle car. But very cool. Love to see Anderle doing some fun posting. They posted a video, which I think we can pull up, Ben. Is that right? Do you have that? Let's throw that on the stream and break it down. Jordy, what do you think about Anderle's recruiting video titled Don't Work at Anderle, highlighting all the drawbacks of going to work at a defense tech company. Is that from an icon? We'll watch. Yeah, let's watch.

I've been at Anduril for, what, three months now? It's not the typical tech job I was expecting. My last 9 to 5 was more like an 11 to 3. I was working remote. Here, you come into the office every day. And they have you doing actual work. Where are the nap pods? And everyone's going on about the mission. Where are the nap pods? And everyone's going on about the mission.

It's like they're literally obsessed with America. But I'm pretty sure this coffee is Italian. The founder guy, the one who's always in the Hawaiian shirts, he's like always around. Subterranean tunnels are bunkers. It's about using the entire crust of the earth as a three-dimensional battle space. A new war fighting. It's really hard to make it

in the current e-bike industry because DiveLD is the smallest accessory that we make. It dives to a depth of about 6,000 meters totally autonomously. It suits the bottom of about any part of the island. Easy shot, but very cool. A little touch. It's not exactly business class.

I thought I'd be on my laptop at the hotel pool. Now I'm just surrounded by all these robots. They actually expect us to test our products in the field? I'm more of an indoor guy myself. Sometimes I wonder, how did I get here? I'd rather just be sitting at my desk. That's a good VFX shot, too. It's pretty fun.

This is so well done. It's so well done. I mean, it's like. Is the whole don't like blank, that's been done in a campaign? I don't work in Andoril. Probably. It's just built different.

I like it. It's funny that they mixed in the Zoomer brain rot terms. Yeah, I mean, clearly, you know, targeted at like, you know, the younger engineers who are, I mean, the classic And andrew pitch was like why are the best software engineers writing ad optimization code like come build something important and i think that hits it really well uh pretty fun i love i mean fantastic campaign i was engaged the whole way yeah it felt like they could have done the same campaign in 30 seconds but they just extended it out yeah probably cut it in a bunch of different ways like i think uh like it

has like the the patina of like super bowl ad almost where it's like something you could see almost before a uh like a movie it's like it's like a one minute like cinematic like experience um but uh i think it works because andrew has so much like credibility i think that that style of ad probably is a little too much if you're you know a seed stage startup that's like yeah just like also that's a very that's that stuff that is i i have no idea if they i i i'm assuming they work with an external agency. No, they have an internal team. Okay, so yeah, the cool thing is like an agency would be like that's like a $300,000 campaign because it's days and days of shooting

and you have like all the product shots in the field and then the stuff with Palmer. So doing it in-house is very cool. I think they can take that don't work at Andoril campaign and scale it out and do, you're talking with the AdQuick team, right? Like do a billboard on the 101 that says don't work in andrew and it has some crazy submarine yep and people are gonna go yep you know

and it's just about like breaking that expectation of like everyone's saying work at my company we're saying don't work and yeah it's a joke obviously you get it and in there are and they are recruiting but it's just something that sticks out a little bit in the feed and even the first just don't work at andrewl post got memed and went viral because it was like wait why are they saying that like that's yeah the counter people like fell for it counter positioning is so key um yeah it's funny uh speaking so counter positioning everybody says join us on our mission andrewl taking the opposite approach don't work at andrewl if you don't yeah like if this doesn't sound exciting to you if you care about nap pods like you're not gonna have fun here just self-select out yeah and then by definition another good counter positioning

example so uh allen control system which we've talked about on the show before everybody was going for these sort of lord of the rings names yep and they were like we're gonna go the exact opposite we want to sound like we're decades old like allen control systems yeah yeah it's like just kind of random just sounds like an old legacy company totally but then when steve was on cnbc or some other um mainstream media channel i think like a week ago it looks very legit because it's like steve from allen control systems exactly like oh what's this yeah it doesn't sound like a startup so counter positioning matters a lot even even with us like we love yc we like would love to you know figure out you know some stuff to do with them over time but uh with pmf or dies like the exact counter positioning against totally um against yc just from the lens of like instead of make something people want to

make something that makes money exactly yeah and it's not it's not like taking a shot at YC. It's more just like like, hey, there's there's a million like tech stars is trying to be like exactly copycat YC. And there's a bunch of different companies that are organizations that have just been trying to clone. It's like, actually, it's more fun. It's more valuable. It's more interesting if you try and differentiate. And that's what Anduril is doing next to the Googles of the world, which have been pushing for, hey, the nap pods are great. And hey, the work-life balance is fantastic. They're saying the opposite. And that is like the spice of basically any great marketing campaign, in my opinion, is just finding the white space and then kind of going and exploiting it.

Let's move on to AdQuik since you mentioned them. This is a little shout out. Their head of analytics, Ty Tinker. Great name. Head of analytics and he just tinkers with analytics all day. Great nominate of determinism. I love it. Amazing. Why don't you try tinkering with your analytics once you run an ad quick billboard? But he was on the SAS backwards podcast and you can listen to the full episode here. And I think that'd be a great opportunity. If you're trying to think about out of home, you go listen to this podcast and you see, I mean, the big question with out of home is always the analytics. Like how do I track any of this? It makes no sense. It's like, it's like, is it just brand? Do I just have to do it on vibes? Well, Ty Tinker, the head of analytics

over at ad quick has all the answers. So go check that out if you're interested. Yeah, and so I was saying, I asked Chris, the CEO of Adquik earlier, how would you approach an Android out of home campaign specifically around recruiting? Cause there's some of these key areas where they could just like really scale up their recruiting efforts.

And he said, we can layer any first party or third party behavioral data onto the map in Adquik to find the best out of home ad placements to hit engineering job seekers that's cool so it's not just about a lot of out of home is like we just want to be out in the world and like be big and like you know get people's attention but there's a science behind it and like ad quick integrates all that so it's not like you're calling up the owner of a billboard just saying like yeah i'll take your billboard for 30 days it's like let's actually figure out the highest ry most most relevant places to be, and then spending in those places. So they, um, anyways, uh, very cool. Well, let's move on to VR, uh, something Andrew was working on.

So if you want to work on VR, you could go work on the Ivas program, which, uh, I think is very interesting. I was, I was digging in a little bit more $22 billion, uh, contract for I've asked transferred over. Uh, it only went live in 2021. So I think that there might be like $10 billion left on that contract, but then also it might get rebid and other people might bid for it. But at the same time, it's like, who else would you give amount wasn't the dollar amount wasn't released from what i saw in terms of what was actually capturing exactly but andrews pitch would have been even if they were bidding for it cold yeah we're going to be able to do this for a quarter of the cost exactly and so that means that hey if microsoft was going to make 10 billion dollars but it was

going to cost them 9 billion to deliver that and capture that ACV. Then all of a sudden they're like, Hey, this, this, this contract only has a billion dollars of value to us. We will sell it to you. And I have no idea if they, if they paid anything or what they paid, but these contracts can change hands. So it'll be interesting to see how that, how that plays out. But I can't imagine a better place just from, I mean, obviously I'm like not objective at all here, but just try to be objective. Like, like you're doing VR for defense, name a better person than Palmer. Like, like I I'm super conflicted here, but like, let's be honest, like what other company are you giving it to? Like there's no one else. Uh, so anyway, this is, uh, our main advice for people is get

conflicted, get conflicted. Get on the cap table and then start shilling. Pump in your own bags. Let's go to Tim Urban though because he is a daily active user of the Apple Vision Pro. He says, I'm possibly the only person on earth

who uses Apple Vision Pro 20 plus hours a week. As a writer, it's just such a massive upgrade to go from a 32 inch monitor's just such a massive upgrade to go from a 32 inch monitor to sitting on a mountaintop, totally immersed, looking at a 50 foot screen. There's just one problem. The idiotic way Apple designed their headset, all the weight sits on your face. This is uncomfortable and was on the way to making me look 80 years old. So he had a friend who 3D printed a headset that leads the headset to sit millimeters off of his face.

It doesn't even touch his face. Uh, and so he says, Apple, please talk to Jonathan and get your stuff together. VR, even with a big, heavy headset does not have to be uncomfortable. It's all in the design. And I love this. I, uh, I loved the Apple vision pro, but I agree. It was super, it was super heavy and they needed to fix that. And it seems like Tim and Scott got a solution. What they nailed design-wise was what people expected a VR headset to look like. Yeah. But there were just so many.

Again, that's not something that Steve would have let out the door. Users were like, oh, it's heavy on my head. It was a Pepsi Challenge product. Are you familiar with Pepsi challenge? No. So Pepsi challenge was this campaign run by Pepsi in, I think the late nineties, early two thousands. And basically what they did was they had blind taste tests with people like man on the street stuff. So they'd film a bunch of people come in and say, taste Pepsi, taste Coke. And they'd give you a little like thimble full, like two ounces of each. People would taste the Pepsi and they wouldn't know which one. And overwhelmingly they would

select Pepsi. And what was going on was that Pepsi was sweeter. And so over a one ounce taste, you would be like, yeah, I want the Pepsi because that one tasted sweeter. But when you gave people the whole can, they were split much more 50-50. And sometimes even leaned Coke because they were like, I don't really want that much sweetness. And so I call the Apple Vision Pro like a Pepsi challenge headset or Pepsi challenge product because it was an incredible experience for 10 minutes. And that was the experience that most people had. They went in, they put it on, and they were like, okay, I'm good. Or you give it to your friend or you blow your grandma's mind with it that type of thing but beyond that it didn't became it didn't become a daily active product for many people and apple isn't the business of daily active use you got to be using your airpods every day your phone every day your laptop every day like they're they can't

hard to build a valuable consumer electronic product if you're not getting daily use yeah that's why sona struggles because you can't set it up and then you just put it in a box and you know. Yeah. Well, speaking of products that I use every single day, we got to talk about eight sleep. Uh, and I want to show this ad that they ran with none other than Charles Leclerc, Charles Leclerc, Charles Leclerc, the F1 driver. He partnered with 8 Sleep. He says, the secret is out. 8 Sleep says, we are officially teaming up with Charles Leclerc, who trusts 8 Sleep to power his performance on and off the track.

And this ad is incredible. We are going to recreate this 100%. I love how this was shot. It's super high energy. Ben, can we pull it up and play the full eight sleep? Charles Leclerc, add on our stream. Trey in the chat goes, Charles, S-H-A-R-L, Charles. Charles.

It's good. People see the races, the speed, the moments on the podium. But what they don't see is what truly drives performance. For me, it's the work of the track. The preparation, the focus, the recovery. Sleep is the foundation. Whether it's long hours of travel or intense back-to-back races, staying sharp and recovered is what makes the difference.

It's so skyrocketing. Champions sleep on eight sleep. So quick. You can tell the production was like one day, maybe two. Beautiful transition out of the sort of tech online X bubble into one of the biggest global superstars in the world. Yeah, 100%. And it also still has that like high paced,

frenetic social media vibe real like pacing to it which i love it's not like oh they went to some agency and the agency said oh this is how you do an ad with f1 it's got to be you know this really long-winded thing it's like no really fun to watch bunch of really cinematic shots. You can imagine, I can see, I can visualize the lens that they're using, how the camera is moving. That's just like handheld, really quick, you know, high pace, like fast paced editing.

And I love it. And I can't wait to recreate that with us because he says champions sleep on eight sleep. And we like to say that podcasters sleep on eight sleep. And so you should be sleeping on eight sleep. Everyone should be sleeping on eight sleep. So go and get an eight sleep. We have a code too. We do. TBPN. TBPN. Go check it out. Oh, we got some hiring news from none other than Josh Ephraim. He says, today I'm joining Cooley LLP as special counsel in San Francisco to support and advise founders

that are forging a new tech frontier. Building on the frontier is hard. Think sectors like crypto, AI, hard tech, biotech. This is in part because the legal landscape can be complex and dynamic, making it hard to navigate. He was a paradigm before, an absolute dog. He saw many founders struggle to find the right team of lawyers to help them navigate the challenges their businesses face. Working with crypto founders and investors on these challenges has made me uniquely equipped to help others navigate legal complexity. Yeah, I mean, crypto deals are next level in terms of legal complexity. It is not just the simple safe note and some Stripe Atlas stuff most of the time. And so Cooley is a leading law firm supporting companies in crypto, AI, biotech and hard tech. This involves a full suite of experts in areas like securities and commodities, regulation, governance, finance, hard and soft intellectual property, money transmission and commercial transactions, just to name a few. It's a privilege to have the opportunity to join my good friend and formerigm colleague, Rodrigo Sierra. The team at Cooley works seamlessly

together to support founders on the frontier of crypto and beyond, and I'm ready to get to work. I wouldn't have seen this opportunity or been equipped to address it without the support of the team at Paradigm. The team at Paradigm has set the standard of how to build on the frontier of crypto, and their leadership on the legal and policy front is the best in crypto. So congrats to Josh. Good luck on your new career as special counsel at Cooley. And hey, if you're looking for a startup lawyer, this guy knows how to post. Not many. None of the startup lawyers I know are great posters. So but this one to see it. This was a great full breakdown. He's on X. You can go reply to this post. You can go tweet at him and say, hey, DM him. He's not going to be able to give you legal advice in the DMS, but you can sign an engagement letter and, uh, I'm sure

he'd be able to help you out then. Yeah. Let's go to Vanta. Uh, uh, Savraj Singh says, trust Vanta. Wow. Thank you for this generous gift. This is a gift from your friends at Vanta and it's a couple of Valentine's Day candies. It does look like drugs, but they are in the compliance business. So I imagine it's not drugs. Yeah. And people are kind of like, lol, that's so generous of them.

And it's kind of the smallest gift. I think it's an idea that it's the world's smallest gift, but it's kind of a cute idea to just be like like what what was the actual i'm trying to remember valentine's day valentine's day thing you get these little what do you expect from your sock to compliance like uh you know yeah you're paying for compliance not you know yeah they're not going to take you to f1 on a box at f1 on on i mean they probably will do that too yeah maybe if you're a big client. But yeah, I mean, it's nice that they, and I think this is underrated that, hey, come up with something cute and fun and send it to every single customer you have, especially if you have high LTV.

You know, every Vanta customer is probably making them thousands of dollars. So you can afford to send a couple bucks to every single person, send a package, send a t-shirt to every single one of your customers if you're in a B2B organization. Sure, if you're a consumer and your customer makes you 10 bucks, you can't send them very much free stuff. But better than just an email, better than a, I don't know, just like a discount code. I think it's interesting.

Kind of didn't go viral for the wrong reasons. Didn't go, wasn't actually a fiasco for them. So it's fun. It's cute. i like a little gift yeah and it's funny that they have this cute little llama uh as a mascot and yeah i like vanta i'm down i'm i'm into it uh speaking of other good vibes rahul zero interest rates uh posted pictures of evenings at julius and he posts this at 10 PM and it's just, uh, guys being dudes hanging out in the office.

We love it. And Raul's really gone on to step back from posting and memeing and trolling and just, uh, you know, wind up building a business. Evie, Evie,

just focused on, focused on grinding. So we love to see that. every time you post for a whole, if it's PG, we'll cover it that. Well, every time you post, Rahul, if it's PG, we'll cover it here. Absolutely. And you can always go back into the product manager archive

and see some absolute bangers. Product manager. His old account. So here's the hack to find the top bangers. You just go in a new tab in Chrome that you're not logged in and just put x.com slash their username. Won't work for him because he's locked. His old his old account is locked yeah all right well he's still got bangers on the new account archived uh but some of the greatest posts of that era came from

him yep uh he was he was a fantastic poster and still still got it but you know much more focused on business these days but we love you raul and good luck on the next feature you're pushing or the next higher you're making or whatever you're doing next uh sayla sayla underscore who's been on the show before says how the f am i supposed to consistently down 200 grams of protein every single day without structuring my entire life around this i put this in because i feel like you have really good advice for this you're always having some little protein snack. We ate burritos right before this as we typically do. Yep. I mean, the easiest way is to, uh, look, Blake, I have the PMF or die stream up here. Blake is just housing, uh, what looks like raw milk. So that's one way to just, just, just don't drink water and just drink raw milk instead. I can't,

I can't pull up the old data, but, uh, yeah, I mean, you need to eat, uh, buckets of chicken. And, uh, I mean, one easy way to get this is, uh, a, a single, uh, David protein bar has 28 grams of protein and it's something like 110 calories. It's like uncannily crazy macros. Uh, so yeah, eat 10 of those a day. Boom. Done. Uh, but yeah, you got, you got to go, uh, you got to figure out where to get the, the massive amounts of protein, uh, you know, six eggs in the, in the morning. We, we talked about this. We're going to start slonking eggs on the show. John's never slonked before. I'm a slonk enthusiast. We got to get it's also eggs have become such a status symbol, such a, you know, a safe harbor for wealth recently. Yeah. And I

think just having like a 36 pack carton here that we're just slonking. I mean, Gabe right here, he says pretty easy. You have 16. We have 16 waking hours. You need to eat 12 and a half grams per hour. That's only two eggs. Set a recurring reminder on your phone. At the beginning of the hour, eat your two eggs. You can cook the 32 eggs the night before. They'll fit in a

regular size cooler, which you can carry with you. Wow. 8,000 likes on that. I didn't realize this was such a banger. 64,000 likes on this post. Wow. 8,000 likes on that. I didn't realize this was such a banger. 64,000 likes on this post. Wow. Selah killing it, dude. Good job. Uh, very, very fun post. And yeah, you got to get your protein up. You got to get one gram of protein per pound of body weight at least. And so yeah, a lot of steak, a lot of chicken, a lot of broccoli and a lot of eggs, I guess. Uh. Let's stay with

sale because there's another good post here. Some ideas for huge value add quote tweets in case anyone needs them. You want to read some of these? They're pretty funny. Yeah. So if you are, if you've ever had a post go really viral, you're basically going to get people that that are quote tweeting it and adding their own little spin on it. So these are typically some some ways that, you know, if you're quote tweeting something, throw these in. Fascinating. Big if true. 100 emoji. Interesting. Wow. Rocket ship. Target. Worrying. Hmm. Question mark, exclamation point. Be sure to use these a lot. People will really appreciate the value you add um kind of an elon sub tweet but i genuinely think this this is when elon does it it's value add your phone is

curatorial yeah it's curatorial because elon knows there's a lot of followers obviously he has a huge boost in the algorithm and so what he's doing is saying i want everyone on x to see this post and i'm just going to quote tweet it so that it goes in. Because by the way, retweets don't really work anymore. They just don't go out. So instead you need to quote tweet with something like this. And so I think this is a great strategy for growing your account.

Just become a curator. Everything you see, quote tweet it, throw it in the timeline. I think you're gonna wind up seeing a lot of growth, honestly. And that's just the meta. And you gotta play the game on the field unfortunately or fortunately you know uh don't complain it don't hate the player hate the game or vice versa what is it no don't hate the game

hate the player i don't know anyway you don't know at this point speaking of uh bezel sponsors i don't know there's no transition here but we love bezel andzel and Bezel has been killing it on Axe. I'm so excited about this. We've been talking to them. They're obviously a partner on TBPN and we're very happy. I have a watch coming on Bezel, Jordy's watch, he bought on Bezel and we recommend everyone install the Bezel app and pick something up.

And they do these amazing deep dives here on individual watches that are available for sale on bezel. And this one today is about the discontinued Patek Philippe Nautilus. It could finance your house or at least a very, very nice vacation. Here's what makes it special. It's complicated.

And to be clear, this is like a, this is a $100,000 watch. Yep. So yeah, it's very, you know. It's a lot of money. But it's a lot of watch. A couple of weeks at Amman is, you know,000 watch. Yep. So yeah, it's, it's very, you know, it's a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch. A couple of weeks at Amman is, is, you know, basically equivalent. So they just get, get an idea of the value here. Beyond the standard timekeeping functions you'd expect from a six figure watch, the reference number is 57121A-001 boasts a date, moon phase, and

power reserve complications. Will you use them every day probably not but bragging rights don't come for the asking uh just like the most sought after executions of the gerald genta designed icon uh this outgoing nautilus features stainless steel construction if a standard nautilus challenges convention in steel, a complicated Nautilus turns the wow factor up to 11. At the heart of this showstopper, Patek Philippe's micro rotor equipped caliber 240 PS IRM CLU. Translation for the non-watch pilled, a comically drool worthy self-winding mechanical movement of the highest

quality, the stuff of swiss dreams production of this reference has officially ended meaning the ante just got upped on its collectability factor if you're still waiting by the phone for your ad to call you might be waiting for a while i like it so uh go follow bezel and download the app and start curating a little wish list because that secondary sale might hit any day now. Or you might hit some sort of thousand bagger and need to upgrade your daily driver. Real quick. Get on Bezel. There's a bunch of options at every price point, and we can't recommend them highly enough.

It's been a wonderful experience they have a little like domino's pizza tracker when you buy something shows the person mailed it into them for authentication then they mail it to you it's all very seamless you can pay with wires which is so key because normally if you're buying a watch you know from some random dealer you send all this money and then you're just like fingers crossed fingers crossed it's coming so yeah so it actually goes into escrow properly and uh and you can even uh so they have auctions as well right those are extremely tempting because you see these watches and you're like that's like half off of course so by the way yeah uh justin mares uh former brother that we just messaged me and said or messaged us and said talking to a hooded

man uh at bezel about buying a hundred thousand dollar watch thanks for the intro so he's talking with ryan right now uh so the good thing is like watches are considered purchase you can go on bezel browse buy stuff but they actually will just let they'll talk to you which we recommend because it's like you're basically buying you know potentially something that's car priced you know as like a car so having somebody you can talk to is great and um anyway so funny i'm excited to hear what he winds up with uh that's fantastic news uh that's that's great news and then let's uh let's do joe weisenthal uh the stalwart over at uh odd lots podcast on bluebird he says imagining twitter right before the asteroid hits have you been following this asteroid news at all yeah yeah so i mean i'm gonna go out on a limb is is nasa's like

we are getting doged it's coming yeah how do we protect ourselves against that every single day just say there's a one percent greater chance eventually it's going to be like 99 chance we need nasa to save us like fund them so i think this is a survival tactic i think it's too conveniently timed and why are you getting why are you you why are you a hundred percent off week over week on the probability of something hitting interesting hitting in 2030 yeah right they also just picked 2030 out of the hat is it 2030 i think 2025 or something uh no i think it's nasa's 2032 yeah uh nasa says there's now a 3.1 chance of an asteroid then an asteroid will hit earth in 2032 up from 2.6% yesterday. This is the highest risk assessment an asteroid has ever received, surpassing 2.4% in 2004.

And Guju Viper says, can we bet on this polymarket? And polymarket says, yes, of course. And Joe Wiesenthal says, imagining Twitter right before the asteroid hits, a furious debate about whether prediction markets did a better job than the formal modelers and the degree to which the former could exist without the latter, of course, referencing the election.

And so I thought that was just a very, very funny post because, of course, people would be debating about that and betting on it right up until the end. But I think we're safe. NASA actually has, the bull case is that they've done asteroid deflection before and so uh this this model does not take into account that they might just send a rocket and like blow it out basically yeah uh which would be a good outcome and fortunately we have what seven years to figure it out that seems we got time that seems very doable uh we might we might have you know thousands of starships up there by then who knows um you could you could start a new company today for asteroid defense and big

opportunity and and if you want to be a hero if you want to be a hero main character every 15 years start an asteroid defense company yep we'll back it, it'd be great. And so we got another post from Wander. Their designer has been on a tear. And this was interesting because I haven't list, I've never actually listed a property on Wander. But if you have a vacation home that you want to rent onto Wander

to other people, their booking website is just the tip of the iceberg they have a whole management platform and the management platform is crazy uh it's integrated with all sorts of uh iCal URLs and smart home things so you can generate new access codes for the garage door so that when someone comes in, they have a bespoke code that only works for that amount of time. And so they've done a lot of work to help property managers create a really seamless experience. One of the greatest trades you could do right now is say, there's a ton of competition for nice homes on Airbnb because there's this huge range. And if I go and partner with a Wander, I'm going to get a much better guest experience that I don't have to manage at all.

Yep. And less competition because Wander at the moment, they don't have the same amount of density. They might have five homes in a specific market. So you're sort of. And they're working with the Technology Brothers to drive the demand side too. So we're here to drive supply and demand. Yeah. And I liked this picture.

If you're looking for inspiration for where to stay if you want to be a guest at a wander uh the next photo is just this uh this crazy modern box house with a beautiful pool and a really wide open uh door great for entertaining i thought that'd be a fun place to stay so uh so go surfander. Tell them the technology brother sent you. And that's pretty much our show for today. Our producer Ben is a little under the weather, so wish him well. Thanks for being a trooper, Ben.

We really appreciate you helping run the show today. Hope you're healing up soon. And leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave us a review with an ad and we'll read it on the show. Send us DMs, tag us, and whatever else is going on. And you can kick on over to the PMF or Dice stream now.

Go lock in. Go lock in. It's time. It's enough entertainment and news for the day. Yeah. It's time to lock in. Thanks for watching, everyone. Thanks, folks.

Have a great day. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.