TBPN Live - The Size Gong, Nuclear Wave Pools, Who's Getting Rich Off Ozempic, ITAR Compliant Gatorade

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - The Size Gong (Radiant Nuclear) (03:12) - Top Story (Who's Getting Rich of Ozempic) (01:14:32) - DM's (Intellectuals Should be Post-Economic) (01:25:18) - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we have a new segment to congratulate any deal of large size, but today we're going to Doug Bernauer at Radiant Technologies. They make nuclear power plants and they, nuclear reactors, and they launched a $100 million Series A today. Jordy, can we hit the size gong for Doug congratulations congratulations to Doug and the entire radiant team I've gotten to know Doug over the past couple months awesome guy former SpaceX uh fantastic engineer and he writes uh we at radiant nuclear are announcing our 100

million dollar series c today our plan is to to test our new reactor design at INL. That's the Idaho National Laboratory. Begin mass manufacturing reactors and deliver one megawatt reactors to critical areas across the globe. Reach out if you'd like to join us and build a new atom splitting machine. And he clips the Axios report.

And just to be clear, you don't need to do a nine-figure deal to benefit from the size gong. It's more about the weight of the deal. Anyone who's punching above their weight. Significance of what you're doing. This is awesome. Do you know about this company, Radiant?

It's really cool. They're replacing the diesel generators that are typically one megawatt. It's not like the big nuclear power plants with the smokestacks. It's essentially the size of a shipping container yeah and they're gonna be able to forward deploy it onto military bases uh even oil and gas extraction like you need power and oftentimes you have to truck in diesel so any anywhere where it's hard to get uh energy you just drop one of these down and it's good for like five or ten years or something and then you reload it so yeah it's just fantastic we we might be able to we've been doing a lot of like

coal-powered ai data centers yeah we might be able to kind of swap in yeah what they're doing i mean the crazy uh like obviously this is going to be heavily you know purchased by the government first and then you know large corporations and and you know industrial companies but i love the idea of getting like a massive massive ranch in Alaska and just throwing one of these on it and just having so much power. And then Starlink, so you have great internet. Yeah, just heat the whole place with just clean air.

It's amazing. It'd be phenomenal. No, you could actually probably run rods through the ground to just melt all of the ice. That's actually one of the benefits, is that it puts out electricity, but it also puts out waste heat. So you can use the waste heat in different ways.

You can like pipe it around and have heating too. But yeah, it's, it's super cool. And Doug is the man. He's just like this incredible team. We need to do the first nuclear powered wave pool. Okay. Because like wave pools are super energy intensive. Oh, they are.

Because you're just like producing, you're having to like move. Are you talking about the thing with like, it's like a train are super energy intensive oh they are because you're just like produce you're having to like move are you talking about the thing with like it's like a train that goes that's kelly's that's kelly's others that are better kind of like formats sure that are closer to like real surfing yeah yeah uh so doing uh that'd be a good tb incubation is nuclear powered wave pools i love it well congrats. Well, congrats to Doug. Congrats to the Radiant Nuclear team and congrats on winning the very first recommendation or recognition from the size gong. First of many. Let's move to our top story today. We're talking about Ozempic and specifically who is getting rich off of Ozempic. Obviously, if're not, right now, feel bad about it. It's the best day to start making money off of Ozempic. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge story

in 2021 when all the celebrities started using Ozempic. That's when it actually got approved. A little bit of background. Simiglutide is the name of the actual chemical. It started off as a diabetes medication. It's a peptide, right? Yeah. Then pharma company Novo Nordisk developed it in the early 2010s, and the FDA approved it under the brand names Ozempic for the injectable. Patients reported significant weight loss as a side effect, and eventually the FDA in 2021 approved Simiglutide as a weight loss product under the brand name

Wagyuvi. And so today I want to go through two articles from Astral Codex 10, Scott Alexander. One on trying to investigate the question of why Ozempic cures seemingly all diseases. It seems to be this miracle drug. We're going to go back and forth on this. I'm sure the tinfoil hat will come out at least once. And then we're gonna move on to kind of the economics of the industry.

How big could this be? And we'll close with who really made money on this and how can you maybe make some money yourself in the Ozempic boom that's continuing to go on. The numbers are insane when you dig into them. So let's start with um this article why does ozempic cure all diseases uh this is like a pattern that happens whenever there's a new drug this happened with statins and this happened with ssris where there's some new drug it has some

amazing effects and then all of a sudden like the scientific community starts you know digging into all these different side effects. And you see this with the Zempik where it's like it started with diabetes. Then it went to obesity. Now it's like, oh, well, it stops you from gambling. And it also, you know, has all these knock-on effects. But so far, people are pretty, pretty like stumped as to how this actually works. And so Scott Alexander did a great job kind of breaking this down. The main thing that's going on that he starts with

in terms of diabetes is that when you eat a meal, it increases blood sugar. And your body wants to push blood sugar back down. So GLP-1 tells the pancreas to release more insulin to regulate that sugar. So you're basically just upregulating the natural insulin production. And the background of this, so diabetes involves excessive that sugar. So you're basically just up-regulating the natural insulin production. And the background on this, so diabetes involves excessive blood sugar. So this is the profile

that you want for an anti-diabetic drug, but natural GLP-1 decays within a minute or two. So you eat, you get this slight spike in GLP-1 that releases this insulin and starts controlling your blood sugar, but then it goes away after an hour or two. And the whole, the reason why Ozempic is so big is that it's a weekly injection. So the half-life has just been stretched. And this started almost, I guess, 30 years ago, over 30 years ago in 1992. And this is where it gets really tinfoil hat. You know where it came from? The Gila monster. Have you seen this? No. this is the, this is the monster. No way. So the Gila monster is this reptile. It's a reptile.

And it's basically this giant lizard. I remember learning about this thing as a kid. So, you know, the whole backstory on like, so diabetes, type one diabetes, which primarily affects children.

Yep. When it first sort of, uh, emerged and people start, started to understand it, it was just a death sentence. It was a death sentence. Like if you had it, you were going to have a terrible quality of life for a really long time.

The acquired FM guys did a really big deep dive into Novo Nordisk, which we'll obviously talk about. They basically were talking about how the primary treatment method was to just starve yourself, have 200, 400 calories a day. Yeah, caloric restriction. And that would sort of extend your lifetime long enough, the theory was, for like some type of cure to emerge. Much later, people discovered that you could take effectively the hormones out of the pancreases of like pigs and cows and things like that.

And so all of the first sort of like insulin replacements or synthetic insulin was like taken from the pancreas of cows and pigs and all these different animals. The challenge there is you would need like one person to get their insulin for a year. A hundred pigs. Sorry, PETA. It would take like thousands, basically.

I mean, it's the same thing with thyroid medication. A lot of times it's just ground up thyroid from another animal. And then eventually they create the synthetic version. But yeah, I mean, so in 1992, scientists discovered a chemical in the Gila monster venom, which looked like GLP-1,

and it lasted a whole two hours. And so that was like the first breakthrough to realize that there were versions of GLP-1s, which is glucagon-like peptide 1, GLP-1s that could last longer. And so this became exenatide, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist. One of my favorite paper names is from the from the gila monster to the pharmacy and then by playing around that was a big that was a big innovation and insulin is just uh uh novo i don't know if it was novo and nordisk were initially two different companies and i don't know which one discovered it but they figured out that you could do there were sort of like

uh forms of insulin that had a longer half-life in the human body. And that was a big innovation because somebody could like be on this thing that sort of had the steady state response and then take like more precise dosages, more spaced out. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole trend in drug development about just like create something that's a breakthrough and then figure out how to create an extended release version. Adderall.

Adderall. IR, XR. XR. Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. So basically the last 30 years, the story of GLP-1 is just grinding to create longer and longer half-life versions. So they play around with its structure.

Eventually they create liraglutide, which lasts 12 hours, then semaglutide, which is one week, and then cafraglutide, which is one month, which I don't think is on the market yet. But now they're like the Ozempic. We need the hundred year. We need the hundred year. You take it once and it's just never again, basically. I wouldn't be surprised. Somebody's working on it. But yeah, so the role of GLP-1s as weight loss was kind of accidental. They were targeting diabetes, as we mentioned.

Which is a symptom of being overweight. Yep. And I think in general, pharma companies don't tend to go after weight loss drugs directly. You know why? Why? Well, one reason is because Medicare doesn't cover weight loss drugs, which is insane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because being overweight and the fact that so much of our population is overweight is like the biggest drag on government spending and the economy overall.

You think the U.S. government at the federal level would say, let's fast track GLP-1s being covered by Medicare because it's going to save us so much money in all these other ways, even though it is this sort of incremental cost. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's another thing where it like, just to kind of steel man, how we got here with the current healthcare structure. Like it does kind of make sense if you go back 50 years and you look at, or 70 years and you look at pictures of beaches, like America wasn't this obese so it wasn't that much of a problem and the big like oh shit moment that happens in health care is like you get hit by a bus you break your leg you go to the hospital and you're and there's like a team of really really experienced doctors working on you for like a week and it's like those people are need to be paid a lot and then everything that they're doing all the the equipment is expensive. And so I think I have the breakdown here,

but a fair amount, yeah, here it is. Like hospital care is 31% of US national healthcare expenses. Actual drugs, outpatient prescription drugs is only 8%. And yet we can talk about, okay, yeah, now we should be about okay yeah now we should be thinking upstream but a lot of that a lot of that a lot of that hospital care spending is people in the last month of their life yes yes sort of like needing intensive care in order to kind of go and so yeah

intellectually we should be avoiding getting people into the hospital but that wasn't that wasn't kind of the theory behind medic and Medicaid when they were kind of created. And so there's been this question with like how do GLP-1s work? Like is it on your brain or is it on your body? Like obviously if you're taking caffeine or something that's just like purely in your brain, like stimulating you, you're more likely to go for a walk. You're more likely to work out. Same thing with nicotine. This is like a brain chemical versus like liposuction it's like very clearly that's like a body thing yeah and so

they actually this is fascinating like so they knew it worked they knew that people were losing weight because they were prescribing glp-1s to diabetics and but they didn't know is it a brain thing or a body thing and so what they did was they bred rats that had glp-1 receptors only in their brain and then a separate group of rats that only have it in their body. And so then they could see, and it was the brain that mattered.

And it's very weird because it goes in, so they can dye it with, they can dye the chemical with like this, like fluorescent light or something that you can see under some sort of x-ray. And they can see where it goes in the brain. And typically, it's really hard to get a large molecule into the brain. Something like nicotine is like a really small molecule. It can just kind of permeate the blood-brain barrier.

Amazing. Yes, it's fantastic. But for larger molecules, and GLP-1s is this peptide. It has this lipid chain on it. It's a pretty fat molecule, but it can permeate, like, the brain stem a little bit. And so that's where it gets in. Get up there. Get up there, yeah. And so they basically narrowed it down now to understand that it's almost certainly going through the brain. But there are kind of, like, still two different pathways that they go through, the mesolimbic system and these GLP-1 neurotransmitters.

But, I mean, there's so much more to go into because now, because GLP-1s are seen as this great modulator of hunger, essentially, it's like the hunger switch. But it also makes people less impulsive, right? Yeah. Um, but it also makes people less impulsive, right? Which is an argument. You could have made the argument, Hey, this is having some impact on the brain because it's changing people's decision-making. Right. Yeah. Um, I know a lot of people that were fantastic, you know, sports bettors and had an amazing career in it and got on GLP, tried to lose a little weight and they're no longer the size Lords, you know, you're not hitting the size gong for them anymore. No, no. Um, it's a tragedy tragedy. Um, but yeah, now, now people are, uh, so the intestine actually naturally releases GLP one when it detects food in order to tell the rest of the body to be full.

Um, but there's this question of like, what if some foods make the small intestine release more GLP one than others? Like a diet focused on those foods could be Nature's Ozempic, which is now, so now people are trying to take the meme of GLP-1 and kind of go backwards to say, well, what stimulates GLP-1 naturally so that you don't necessarily need the injection? And so there's all these different articles, nine foods and supplements

that increase GLP-1 naturally. It's the same thing with testosterone, you see. You know, like, oh, this diet is better for increasing your testosterone naturally. Six foods that increase GLP-1 naturally. It's the same thing with testosterone. You see, you know, like, oh, this diet is, is better for, you know, increasing your testosterone naturally. Six foods that increase GLP-1 levels, uh, foods that naturally mimic GLP-1. Yeah. Cause I think that, that market of people that are already, uh, you know, even people that are objectively already pretty healthy still are seeing how other people are benefiting from it. Maybe they don't want to be giving themselves an injection once a week, but they're like,

I may as well kind of get on the trend. Yeah. It's the same thing with testosterone. It's like, you might not want to do TRT, but you, but you also want the highest natural production of testosterone that you want,

that you can possibly get. Yeah. My, uh, my buddies, uh, or sorry, my friend,

uh, my friends, Nish and Sif have a, uh, health supplement company that's an incredible business. And they created a sort of a metabolic, something called MB1 by Array.

That's sort of a, they've positioned it as a faux-Zempic type thing. Interesting. So it's like a health supplement. Faux-Zempic. I like that, yeah. And it's doing really well. And so like the, the, the early arguments are being written about, uh, GLP one based diets or

like, you know, the best diets to upregulate GLP one paleo diet, Mediterranean diet, Ayurvedic diet, carnivore diet, and plant-based diet. Like people are writing them about everything basically. And it's the same thing for exercise. Um's this theory that exercise creates very high demand for glucose. So it kind of makes sense that it's a signal for the body to focus on keeping its glucose system well-tuned. And there's this like, there's this continuous theory of like, okay, well when you are in shape, when you are eating properly, when you're healthy,

you have kind of the proper level of GLP-1 flowing through your system. And so this drug is just a way to kind of like short circuit your system back to the normal level. But whenever we discover a new drug, scientists rush to demonstrate that all those lifestyle changes, the ones you should do anyway, actually work through the same mechanism as the wonder drug. So for example- Americans are like, no thanks. I'll take the shot. I'll take the drug. Yeah. Yeah. So, for example, when SSRIs were the hot new thing, psychiatrists announced that all the normal stuff that brightens your mood worked through serotonin. Sunlight, serotonin. Exercise, serotonin. Having a good trauma-free childhood, serotonin.

Yeah. Which is interesting, though, because people that have, you know, too high of serotonin don't end up looking too good. So it's sort of like it's one of those things like anything good, you can have too much of it. Everything in moderation, including moderation. And so in the cold light of SSRI patents expiring, most of these effects were later found to be fake or at least too small to care about. And this is the same thing with – there's this product or this supplement called – what is it? It's like Turkesterone. Turkesterone.

Have you heard of this? Turk. So it's basically the plant-basedbased it's the plant version of testosterone and there's this theory that if you take it it'll increase your testosterone naturally or semi-naturally and so it became kind of like a meme and people were taking the body but but it's one of those things where it's it's a plant-based product and so it doesn't really translate the same way and you need to take a ton of it it's the same thing about you know tryptophan in in turkey everyone says it makes you sleepy but it's like you would need to eat 10 000 turkeys to actually get the effect is that true yeah is it just people get tired because they're around their family and they're arguing about politics and

of course it's it's like it's just a funny story more families need to adopt the technology brothers law of not discussing politics or social issues. Just only at Thanksgiving this year, try discussing technology, capital allocation, and things that actually matter. Exactly. And so the same thing is true for gastric bypass. There's this giant mystery about why it works. So it's basically stomach stapling. Like they literally just decrease the size of your stomach.

And everyone was like, okay, well, that's how it works. Like you just get full quicker because your stomach's full. But what's weird is that when you do the surgery, all these different metabolic parameters change before the patient has even had time to lose weight. And the weight loss tracks those metabolic parameters, not the stomach size. And so there's this, so some scientists thought this was GLP-1 too. After all the intestine secretes GLP-1. It's GLP-1 all the way down. Yeah. Literally everyone's, this is the theory of everything. The astronauts. Yeah. Yeah.

Always has been. Always has been. Always has been. And so people are saying, oh, maybe it's GLP-1 because you shrink it and the food goes through the stomach. And the stomach usually digests a lot of food before it even reads the intestine. But if you remove or shrink the stomach, it can't do that. And much more food hits the intestine. And that means the intestine releases much more GLP-1. And that means the patient feels full more quickly. And so it's like this theory, but then of course, they tested it in rats that don't have GLP-1 receptors and the gastric bypass worked. So they kind of like debunked that one, but there's like all these different things. We can move on to

addiction. The addiction one is hilarious. We got to go to this post by Scott Alexander, the guy who wrote this article. And multi-step nominative determinism in action. So GLP-1s are being investigated as a way to suppress alcoholism. GLP-1s are based on a chemical found in the Gila monster venom. Gila monsters were first described by a zoologist named Edward Drinker Cope. Isn't that hilarious? Unreal. Unreal.

What do you have to do in life to be named Edward Drinker Cope? It's wild. I mean, it's like maybe you're drunk parents or something. Heavy alcoholic father who determined that this is how he was going to cope is fatherhood. But what a bizarre chain of events. I love that Scott includes that.

And so there are two reasons you might eat. First, because you feel hungry. And the second is because you crave delicious food. So to fulfill its evolutionary role of making you eat less, GLP-1 needs to do two things. First, it needs to make you less hungry via the arcutia nucleus master hunger pathway. And then also it needs to make you crave food,

the food reward last via the mesolimbic reward center pathway. And so you don't want to you don't want to like broadly tamp down the reward system uh there's some anti-psychotic drugs that do this and you just like if you take too much you will literally just sit motionless until you die because like you don't want to get up there's no reward for anything um but there are some silver bullet anti-addiction medications naltrexone seems to treat a whole host of different addictions. And none of these anti-addictive drugs affect wholesome rewards like the feeling of a job well done or a child's smile. They're just drug addictions.

Which is hilarious because he asks, like, why did God give your brain a special lever that only porn and cocaine can pull? Which is hilarious. But it's like, it does appear that there is literally a reward pathway in your brain that's separate. Like it's not the same as like runner's high or like feeling good after a workout.

It's a separate thing and it's only the bad stuff that's like triggering it. You know, I'm kind of bummed that I've never experienced runner's high. really i've run a lot okay like i've tried to go out and experience it but you've never but you've uh you've experienced podcasters high yeah but that's a long podcast from everything i know about podcasters high it is a league above yes yes so that's why we record for three plus hours exactly right exactly um so he says glp1 suggests this was originally a food reward system or at least food was a big enough part of

its portfolio that it was a weird but functional hack for society signaling chemical to just turn off a whole subsection of the reward system you You're already full and well-nourished. Why would you need the ability to crave things? And then he goes on to talk about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. He says, okay, now God is just trolling us. GLP-1 receptor agonists, a new treatment for Parkinson's disease, gives us this diagram, and he kind of explains how it could possibly work on Parkinson's. You know, it's funny because uh

i feel like silicon valley has been waiting for the miracle drug yep like to come out of silicon valley yep and i think that if novo nordisk was a silicon valley darling we would all just be like like osempic gets a lot of attention in our industry because of all the potential economic and technological impacts of it but we would all be like everybody just be patting each other on the back being like we did it we solved weight loss we solved diabetes we solved heart disease we solved like we'd just be going down the list just like spraying champagne a lot of dom perignon yeah um we'd be doing like a bottle an episode basically well there was a little bit of debate about that during the during covid there

was like it like some of the tech people were like well like amazon's like the real like hero in this story because like we were all able to get packages delivered during covid and like it really helped with like the lockdowns and then and then a lot of people were like tech can't take a victory lap it was the vaccine companies companies that did all the work. Yeah, but there was a company. Do you remember Genentech? This was before our time. But Genentech, I can't remember if they partnered with Novo or Nordisk,

but they had a partnership that Genentech, I think, was the first big biotech IPO. Did they invent synthetic insulin? Yeah, they helped invent. So, Jeanette, we can, if we actually trace back Novo Nordisk's success, it is without Silicon Valley and our incredible capital markets and the bubble that was happening in biotech at the time. You could argue that GLP-1s would have never, you know.

Wasn't that a Kleiner company? Yeah, yeah. I think it was a Kleiner company, and there's this famous story about it. And that's why they're part of the holy trinity it is it is and and uh and one of the partners like who did the deal would basically work inside the company every friday forward deployed gps essentially essentially a forward deployed gp and he would like do their accounting do their business like modeling like really bring like the business side so that the scientists and the co-founders

could just work on the products. It was fascinating. I expect forward deployed GPs to come back, right? Yeah. Oh my God, yes. Because like it needs to, I mean, Founders Fund basically already does this. I mean, it exists.

Yeah, Trey is that basically. And Deleon. Yeah. But yeah, the success of Palantir, the forward deployed model is going to be everywhere, right? I'm looking forward to it. Earn that sweat equity. Earn that carry shack.

Yeah. But, but so, so this is an interesting thing. I don't know all that much about Parkinson's Alzheimer's, but one theory as to why GLP-1s might help with Parkinson's Alzheimer's is that GLP-1s suggest that they prevent inflammation. And have you studied on inflammation? I don't know that much about it. I would say the interesting thing here is what, so Novo Nordisk is a metabolic pharmaceutical company, right?

They're focused on metabolic health. Yep. And the tie-in to our corner of Twitter is that Ray Peet, almost all his work was focused on metabolism, metabolic health, how to get your metabolism firing, right? There's people that are taking their temperature multiple times a day to try to get their body temperature higher, increase metabolism. And even cancer, as many people think, is like a metabolic disease right um so i wouldn't be

surprised if there's a bunch of other um sort of downstream effects on uh you know cancer in the u.s so this was this is a great overview i've only heard about inflammation like vaguely like if you you know like have swelling like that that's what that's literally what i think of when i think of inflammation but there's a good breakdown here. So it says inflammation is a catch all term for the immune response to microbes. Although it helps fight the microbes, it's slightly toxic to the rest of the body and generally bad unless you're

actively fighting an infection. So it's like you get some microbes, you get infected and stuff swells up. Like you see this and you just like get a scratch or cut. Right. But it can also be like you ate some bad food and like you're swelling up

or chronic inflammation from like bad food over years and years and years. And so it says in chronic inflammation, i.e. the thing most of us with modern diets have all the time,

general bad health damages the body. The immune system mistakes the damage for a microbial infection and it provokes a constant low-grade inflammatory response yeah i don't even know how you would measure like do am i suffering from inflammation right now but it's now something that i feel it right now because my uh two-year-old brought home a preschool uh microbe oh yeah and uh you know you know when you have like a like a

sinus infection you just feel like puffy pressure basically like in your head and you don't think as well yep so if my takes are worse today yeah i'll put on that but yeah inflammation you can measure too right okay there's various ways that you can measure it and i want to know what the baseline is for me and then see if there's anything i can adjust um that's a good way if somebody you know if you're on x and somebody you know sends a comment that's a little bit offensive you could you could ask them hey have you checked your magnesium levels your inflammation levels because something feels off and don't even address what they said just ask go for the underlying issue right this is probably not the thing that they're angry about. The Chad homonym.

So this is bad. So if you're not fighting an infection, anti-inflammatories are generally pretty useful. There are lots of anti-inflammatory drugs. Aspirin and ibuprofen are examples. Again, Ray Peet, big proponent of aspirin. Oh, really? And aspirin is one of those things. A lot of people have talked about baby aspirin use for longevity.

Yeah. That's a big thing, right? And I take aspirin. It's sort of shown to, it's shown to have a bunch of potential benefits around heart disease. It's basically free. Like it's so inexpensive. I think it would be something that would be all the, all the patents are long expired. So it's not something that even makes sense for the pharmaceutical industry to push anymore from an economic standpoint.

But we don't want it to just disappear and not become part of our society. But inflammation is a multifaceted process, and no one drug can stop it entirely. And so GLP-1 drugs seem to be especially potent anti-inflammatory that stops some of the inflammatory process most implicated in dementia. How? The research is still very early, but the best explanation I can find is in central glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor. Activation inhibits toll-like receptor agonist-induced inflammation. The team found that there's no GLP-1 receptors on immune cells. So basically what they did was they injected some of the drugs directly into the brain. And sure enough, there was enough to produce the effect. So the team tediously

injected one of each kind of chemical that blocks each kind of chemical communication system and found that only the alpha blockers and delta opioid blockers prevented GLP-1's anti-inflammatory effect. So probably GLP-1 binds to neurons in the brainstem. Those signals to other neurons and immune cells via alpha adrenergic receptors and delta opioid receptors, and then the immune cells initiate an inflammatory reaction. And so there's still this like question of like, why would an appetite hormone, why would an appetite related hormone do this? Scott Alexander couldn't really figure it out. He asked Claude and there were some interesting ideas.

It's like basically when he's not a doctor, right? He is a doctor, but he's a psychiatrist. He was, he was doxed like a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he, you could almost say he's a father, brother science. Yes, exactly. Some people call it brother science. Yeah. some people call it bro science yeah um but also uh when a meal comes in the body wants to divert

energy away from in from fighting inflammation or creating inflammation through fighting uh microbes towards the digestion process so basically some of those resources come from the immune system so the immune system stands down while you're digesting. So basically GLP-1 saying like, hey, body, like, let's cool it on fighting the, you know, this, these microbes. Like, let's chill on the immune response. Take the inflammation down and focus on digestion, which is kind of interesting. It's just one theory. He's like really, really not sure about this. But yeah, there's a whole bunch.

Like GLP-1 is a master signal for the starving versus well-fed state. Lots of bodily processes change based on whether you're starving versus well-fed. Naively, you'd expect that there would be as many side effects as positive effects, but maybe that's not true. In particular, maybe the inflammatory nature of the starving state really hurts a lot of systems. Yeah, I mean, maybe that's a good point to talk about kind of the the the arguments against widespread usage of the product which candidly i don't necessarily like i think it's generally going to have a very net positive effect on the world yeah uh but there's certainly you know i

think callie means friend of the pod went on tucker's show to talk about his case against ozempic his quote was as their tweet episode 72 was if a fish tank is dirty you clean the tank you don't drug the fish yep and that was kind of uh one of the bigger points that cali made i think one of the arguments that that i've seen that that uh would maybe dissuade a number of people that are kind of on the fence from taking it is that, uh, while GLP ones can make you lose weight, they can actually make you fatter as a percentage of your bot, you know, as a percentage of fat to other aspects of the body. So that could mean that, uh, what that, that means at a high level is you can actually lose muscle faster than you lose fat. So you might go from 200 pounds to 150 pounds, but on a percentage basis, you, you got fatter, uh, which,

which is a pretty, uh, you know, if you're, um, not ideal, if you're trying to go, you know, if you're going for one rep max, then you probably don't want to be on GLP ones. Yeah. So ideally you're on like a high protein diet and lifting heavy while you're doing that. So you're maintaining the muscle mass, but there is an interesting thing where if you're, if you're going from like obese people do wind up having a lot of muscle because they need to carry around a lot of weight. There's a thing, the original size. There's a, there's a thing where a lot of obese people have huge calves because they need to support all the weight that they're carrying around. That's how I can get bigger, bigger calves. Struggle with my calves forever. Yeah, exactly. I just need to put on

some weight. So yeah, you put on some weight and then use Ozempic to take it off and then maintain the calves. Here's the, like the, the, the big thing, like my, uh, generally positive view on Ozempic comes from the fact that, uh, and the same reason I think more guys should do three months of exogenous testosterone is because if you can use a drug to temporarily put yourself in a state that makes being healthy easier, then that gives you a chance to actually build healthy habits. So somebody who's 250 pounds, if they can lose 50 pounds with Ozempic and then start actually getting some type of exercise routine in place and eating less, they could just sort of over time get naturally healthier.

Because going in, I mean, I've thankfully never been in this position, but even for myself, if I'm out of the gym for three days, my first workout back is bad. I don't feel my best. And so if you're somebody who doesn't work out at all and goes into the gym, you might get some sort of benefits of, of sort of serotonin and dopamine post post-workout. Um, but it's going to not necessarily, it's, it's not like you're looking forward to going to the gym necessarily. It's sort of like not a enjoyable experience. Yeah. There's a whole theory around like, you know, is this the easy way out?

And I think that's a lot of, like Callie has a more nuanced take on it, which is like, you know, we don't want this miracle drug, even if it is a miracle drug and there are no drawbacks, we don't want that to be, oh, well, we don't need to worry about the food system. We don't need to clean the fish tank ever

because like we solved it with this drug. We still need regenerative farming. Should do both of these. And he is very worried about this becoming like the first line of defense. And there's this big question about doctors, you know, with any of these drugs, typically it's like they recommend diet and exercise first

and then they might actually like require you to do like a program like Weight Watchers before they prescribe this. And then in a few years require you to do like a program like Weight Watchers before they prescribe this. And then in a few years, it'll just be like, oh, by the way, in addition to this, do some diet exercise. Like it's an afterthought. And that's with SSRIs. If you go to a doctor and you say like I have ADHD or I'm sad, they're like. Drugs.

Drugs. Yeah. Instead of samples. Spore on X says, my main issue with Ozempic is that it's not lindy if you want to lose weight that badly you should just become a habitual smoker and cocaine addict like the rest of us sort of low tam uh banger banger uh 865 views that's great probably future uh yeah i was listening to chris williamson and he had an interesting guest on talking about, uh, Ozempic and was saying like, look, yes, it is like the easy way out. Like you should just use your willpower to lose weight,

but willpower is this like, you know, finite reserve. And maybe if you can take away from other things, that's why I don't, don't work out before work yeah because to actually push yourself to go hard in the gym uses up willpower which i don't which i think is infinite in the fullness of time but on a day-to-day basis i don't want to go in push myself super hard in the gym and then i gotta go bang out some emails and suddenly i'm like you know i don't want to do this you know interesting yeah yeah so he's saying yeah, you could use that. You could use your willpower instead of focusing on your diet to focus on exercise or being a better family man. Or,

you know, he was using his example of like going to. Yeah. And there's a lot of, there's so many downstream effects of, uh, so many issues in our society or self-esteem issues. So if you have low self-esteem,

it's hard to even be a great dad right because like it's just going to come out in different ways right it's hard to crush it professionally because you have a poor image of yourself right so uh there's so many potentially there's clearly we are going to learn a lot about the side effects of ozempic because we're running this sort of like large scale public study on what happens when you put you know 10 of the country on a drug right well i think it's time to take out the tinfoil hat because something just isn't adding up here try it on yeah i need to try first time first time because i mean as i'm super convinced by the science of this article and i and i genuinely

do think ozempic could be a miracle drug, but there's just something weird about the fact that it came from a venomous lizard, the Gila monster. I remember learning about the Gila monster as a kid and being terrified of it because a bite from the Gila monster will kill you. It's big. It's not some tiny lizard. It's like a kind of a dragon.

Moderation, right? I suppose. It's funny, though, that the lizard has scaled itself big it's not some yeah but it's a you know moderation moderation right i suppose it's funny though that the lizard is like scaled itself because people are they're not getting bitten but they're hitting themselves with the needle right and so there's just something about like scaling the demons venom yeah and and this weird trade-off that it's hugely popular in uh hollywood i i guess my my the the the odd the odd hope is that whatever the side effects are, if there are side effects, are just so minor compared to the devastation. This guy Max says, I suspect, he says, does Ozempic dampen all dopamine rewards or only operate on the branch that has food and gambling on it somehow?

I suspect the evidence is confounded by the fact that curing obesity makes everything better. So costs are masked by the benefits. Exactly. And I think that's true. Will was joking that, that, uh,

now that a bunch of asset managers are on it, it may actually end up, uh, you know, people are just going to have stable, you know, good returns and maybe we'll have less bubbles, which would be a very negative externality.

It could be very bad. We're big proponents of bubbles. That could be an under-discussed downstream negative effect of the ozempic world. Although we do need to get into the number of people that are on it because the numbers are crazy. But let's keep going. Last tweet, Cali, friend of the pod

and Cali's co-founder, TrueMed, Justin Mares, says French kids are 60% less overweight than American kids. If we wanted to actually address the mysterious obesity crisis, we should copy the French's approach to school lunches and food. Instead, the APA recommends a Zempik to kids

over the age of 12, which is just so insane because we've got to get that number down to like three um no uh think about if if novo nordisk could expand their their sort of market size this would be great for the for the stock uh i mean there is a thing there where where some of the headlines that are like ozempic is now recommended for kids who are six some of that is just that they've done the safety studies and they think that it's now safe for those kids but yeah but like it depends on the doctor whether or not it's the first thing for a lot of overweight kids they're still recommending diet and exercise first the problem

is is that if you're a kid those take willpower yeah or family resources that aren't that aren't that aren't making you good lunches or they're just never taking you out and they're just plopping you in front of the TV, it's like, well, you're going to be sentenced to a life of obesity or this doctor could help you with this injection. It's a really hard decision. It's tough. Yeah. I agree with what you're saying, but it's hard to implement. Self-esteem almost starts to set in how somebody views themselves on the playground. So one argument for it, if somebody spends age 0 to 18, obese,

and they're running the mile at school and they're walking it, how does that impact somebody? Also, the other thing, you want this now? Not on the dumb. Not on the dumb, okay. There's nothing conspiratorial about that yeah uh i mean the other thing is that maybe maybe we should be discussing you know banning ozempic for the under 18 not because of the medical risks but because of the immense power that comes from having a glow up later in life totally think about bezos yeah he's just completely

on the next tier he wasn't even obese he's cooking on the next amazon right now exactly he's like phenomenal. I can do better. And there's so many people who are like, oh yeah, I was fat in high school. I lost weight. Now I'm unstoppable. No one like, I, I just want to prove everyone wrong. I want to go back and, you know, impress everyone. I'm going to pull up to the high school reunion in a Countach or a F40 and let everyone know, hey, I lost the weight and I'm making money now. I'm driving a supercar now. Exactly, I'm driving a supercar. So yeah, I think I'm with Justin, but for different reasons.

We're gonna ban it for kids, but for different reasons. Yep. Not because it's risky. Because we need glow-ups. We need more glow-ups for sure. Well, we can move on to the numbers if you want and the economics here. I have a bunch of things.

So this is another AstroCodex 10 piece. And it's called semaglutideonomics. And the math he starts out with, there are 140 million obese Americans. And they're going to spend $15,000 a year for obesity drugs. And then equals, uh-oh, that can't be right because he did the math. And so there's something interesting going on with Wagoovee specifically. There are other weight loss drugs. There's other obesity medications.

There's Xenical, Belvic, Contraves, Secunda, Quisemia, like a bunch of weird drug names. But Wagoovee is a big step up. It works for 66 to 84% of people depending on your threshold. Of the six major weight loss drugs, only two have a better than 50-50 chance of helping you lose 10% of your weight. And the other one, Qsymia, works partly by making food taste terrible. It can also cause cognitive issues. So it's clearly acting on like a different part of the brain, not like deep in the brainstem. And so Wagyuvi feels more natural. Patients feel full. We've discussed this. It's just a really impressive drug. And until now, doctors didn't really use-

That's a hundred year overnight success story too. Totally. Yeah. Evanordis was in the trenches for a hundred years. And it's all the same thing. It's all just treat diabetes basically. And so basically the goal of this article is to model out what's going on right now and how many people are on this now and then what the market might look like in the future. And he ends with a bunch of really cool predictions. So let's walk through it. So modeling semaglutide accessibility, 40% of Americans are obese that's 140 million people which is interesting because living in la and spending most of my time traveling to san francisco new york places like

miami you if in in our experience of life i would never once estimate that 40 i mean i know that i've known that statistic forever but you'd never i would be just because if you go to the gym, like all the mass monsters, like the guys who are just massive, they count as obese because if you're 300 pounds, six, two, but you're 5% body fat and you're just peeled, like you'll still show up in the obesity statistics. So we do have to separate that out. Cause we don't want the mountain, the the mass monsters. BMI is a little off. Exactly. But generally, I agree with you. That was the whole thing of why I wanted to do this deep dive was because when I'm traveling around, it just doesn't feel like there's been any material change in the obesity rate, even though you're starting to see statistics and you hear a lot of trend pieces about how

powerful Ozempic is. It's like, I don't see that in my everyday life like oh wow like there are no more fat people around it's also interesting it's explained by the govi yeah govi came out of denmark which is a place that probably has some of the lowest obesity rates in the world right um yeah yeah they weren't exactly dogfooding this um so suppose that a quarter of the obese people in America want some Glutide. That's 35 million prescriptions. Some Glutide costs about 15,000 per year. Multiply it out. That's $500 billion. And Americans currently spend 300 billion a year total on prescription drugs. So just that would be bigger than the entire market. So there's this question of like, okay, how is this actually going to happen?

Whenever you have these crazy predictions, you need to kind of back them up with data and that's the goal of this article. And so if this really did happen, it would bankrupt half of the healthcare industry. And so most people want semaglutide but won't get it. America's current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices. And it's yeah so how how do how do they think that would bankrupt

the system if a lot of this is out of pocket spend right now the idea is that in order for that to actually happen and to get to that penetration it wouldn't be out of pocket it would have to be covered and basically over time the insurance companies would be forced into into covering it. And then they would have this massive expense that they weren't expecting. And they haven't been underwriting against for years. And so all of their premiums would just be destroyed. It'd be very rough.

But obviously it's going to be like the slow evolution. But it's so interesting because the near-term costs go up. Like it's almost like a timeline, you know, mismatch because like near-term costs go up, but long-term expenses on a per person per capita basis could drop. Right. If you have people that instead of spending decades of their life overweight and unhealthy,

they're now, you know, have a normal BMI and they just take a shot or maybe they get off the shot. Maybe, maybe, you know, the thing that I,

it hasn't been around long enough to understand is this something that, you know, somebody can take for two years, get a lot of the benefits and then just get their shit together and start being healthy, right? So maybe it's more of like a sprint-based model. So some of that utilitarian calculus will kind of come in later and we can dig into it. But first, I want to do a little pop quiz. Uh,

you know, there are 140 million obese Americans. Ozempic went viral in 2021 when everyone was talking about the celebrities doing it. It's now been on every podcast, every video, like everyone's aware of this essentially. I think it's been a major trend. Uh, there's all sorts of companies pushing it. How many pushing it how many people how many americans do you think are taking semaglutide for obesity 140 million are obese how many how many people do you think are taking it like uh you're not just saying just for obesity or just like people that are taking it as like a fun drug yeah no. I'm not talking specifically Wagoovee. I don't know, 30 million? You would think that.

It's 50,000. Isn't that crazy? So there's a report. How is that? I know. Okay. It's because it's so early in the rollout. It's so raw. And it's very expensive.

But that doesn't count raw and hymns. No, no. No, it counts everything. Probably not the compounded stuff. But we'll go in. We'll work through all the data. So first off, he pulls the actual numbers. And there's a report claiming- So it really, because it feels like it has 50% penetration

within celebrities. You would think so, with celebrities, for sure. But then you walk around and you go to an airport and it's not like, oh, where are all the fat people go? Obesity is still a crisis. And we still haven't seen the obesity rate fall significantly. So it's clearly not like actually rolled out fully and there's been massive supply constraints

and it's super expensive and healthcare is not covering it or insurance isn't covering it. That tells me Novo is going to be the first trillion dollar European company. Well, that's why the stock is mooning because even though they're only selling, so there are 20,000 weekly prescriptions. So that's- the stock is mooning because even though they're only selling, uh, so there are 20,000 weekly prescriptions. So that's new prescriptions. Yeah.

So that's 20,000 times a thousand dollars a month. So what's that 20 million a month in sales. So that's 200 or I guess, uh, what like 300 million, right. In annual revenue. And they're trading at half a trillion.

Insane. So like you would never get there on the normal revenue multiple. I don't think we've ever seen a consumer product in the U S with 50,000 customers that has a hundred percent mindshare penetration. Insane, right? Yeah. Insane. And so, uh, maybe this means there's 20,000 users, or maybe each prescription contains enough Uguvi to last a month and there are 80,000 users. I'm not sure, but it's somewhere in the mid-five digits, which is why I'm rounding to 50K. So his estimate for the actual real number is 50K, and then he's gonna work through the math

and all the different levers. So that's only.1% of the potential 35 million, which is still only 25% of the 140 million, right? So it is crazy, crazy low penetration for a drug that we assumed everyone would just be taking. So the way he models the penetration and adoption of semaglutide is interest times awareness times prescription accessibility times affordability.

And so we're going to do four different sections here and we'll start with interest. And so he just randomly guests interest at 25%. So this is like of the obese people, 25% really want to, are motivated to actually lose weight. Um, and, um, and so how many people are aware, like let's go into awareness. Um, the answer is a lot more than when he first started writing this article. Uh, Novo Nordisk, Wagyuvi gets surprise endorsement from Elon Musk, says the headline. And here's Google Trends, and you can see Wagoovee

and Semiglutide are like really, really peaking. And so it's now as searched for on Google as Prozac or Viagra, which are like name brand products. And so even if this is a temporary Musk-related spike, even pre-Musk, it was getting a little bit, a little above half their level. But Google Trends doesn't exactly track awareness. Few people search for Prozac these days because everyone knows what it is. So all this tells us is that there's a lot of buzz. So suppose for the

sake of argument, 5% of obese people have heard of the drug, which feels really, really low to me. But you'll see as he kind of works through like why that math makes sense and then there's also prescription accessibility only five percent taylor lorenz uh esteemed journalists should do a piece on getting access to the tiktok feeds of thousands of overweight people and seeing if they what's in the you know are they talking about it are they because it was super viral on twitter on yeah for sure so i feel like that has to be higher but you know during the election there were people that were googling like who's the president did you see that yeah right before is joe biden still is joe biden still where like when do i vote and it's like and the interest is spiking like the day after the election. People are unaware.

People really do live under rocks. And so prescription accessibility. The FDA says Wagyuvi is indicated for obesity, defined as BMI over 30 or BMI over 27 with certain medical conditions. But if you have a high BMI, that doesn't mean the doctor will necessarily give you a prescription. Most doctors want patients to try diet and exercise first. Can you imagine being 400 pounds going to your doctor and they're like, I want the miracle weight loss drug. And the doctor is like, how about you eat a salad and hit the gym?

That is brutal. You're going to go on hym're going to go on, you know, hymns or row and get the compounded stuff. For sure. So every doctor will have their own threshold for what amount of already tried diet and exercise is enough to justify a prescription. The history of medicine includes the following story. Many times there's some condition that doctors recommend a lifestyle changes for. Then an exciting new medication comes out. And over a generation or so, doctors go from demanding the lifestyle change to gesturing at the lifestyle change before prescribing the medication to finally just mostly prescribing the medication. This happened with cholesterol and statins. People would say,

oh, like you should just change your diet first. Now it's just statins. Same thing with hypertension and ACE inhibitors and same thing with depression and SSRIs. So you can form your own opinion about whether that's good or bad, but we're probably in the very beginning of this process with obesity. Opinions will be all over the map. And accept that this time,

Silicon Valley is short-circuiting the process with fly-by-night telemedicine operations that guarantee you'll get the drugs you want. For example, this one company charges $138 a month, $99 for the first month only for a guaranteed GLP-1 agonist prescription plus support and messaging with expert doctors. The DEA sometimes shuts these groups down

when they start playing around with controlled substances like Adderall, but Wagoovee isn't controlled and the government probably doesn't care that much. That being said, only 75% of Americans have primary care physicians at all. And if we assume half of them will eventually be able to get a Wagoovee prescription from their doctor, that's 37.5%. Then the next factor is affordability. Semiglutide costs $15,000 per year.

And of course, Elon Musk can pay out of pocket, but many people need insurance and Medicare doesn't cover obesity drugs that Anyway, mentioned before. And so some time for a change, some Congressman, it's such a, it's such a fuck you from the medical system to the average person that, uh, Hey,

the, the, the most unhealthy thing that can happen to you is being overweight. But yeah, we're not, sorry. Like we can't help you with that. Yeah.

Uh, you're going to be on your own for that one. Yeah. Good luck. It's like, okay. But like, yeah. When but like yeah when when you have the heart attack but if you go get hit by a car then we'll give you a million dollars of treatments at the last second to try and extend your life by five days yeah like rough instead of instead of just lose the weight and live 10 years longer i do hope that that uh doge uh really goes after the medical system that'd be great there's i mean mean, obviously,

like it's so tied into the government in so many ways. Yeah, we got to talk some more like healthcare founders because there's so much there. We're obviously hearing it all the time on the DOD side, but the medical system's like bigger and crazier, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he says, some congressmen have proposed a very noble sounding law

telling Medicare and Medicaid to start covering weight loss drugs I'm sure this is out of deep compassion for American obese population and not because it would make pharma companies 1 billion zillion dollars But I love the sound of that. I want the pharma companies to make money develop more drugs by the stock build more stuff There's nothing. There's nothing more noble than incredible IRR. Yeah. And so private insurers mostly have to cover whatever Medicare does, but they can choose whether or not to include extra non-Medicare covered drugs. Some have chosen to cover semaglutide under some conditions. Others would prefer not to because it's so expensive. But they can be scared into covering it by the magic words medical necessity. Overall, I don't understand

the laws, but there's this very interesting thing that's happening. And he calls out the New York Times. The New York Times is publishing articles trying to convince us that private insurances not covering semaglutide is an outrage. And it's a very funny screenshot from this article. And the article is called, The Doctor Prescribed an Obesity Drug. Her Insurer Called It Vanity. And it says, here in the tiny gray text, I want to take a second to complain about this article. It notes that Wagyuvi, semaglutide for obesity, costs more per prescription than Ozempic, semaglutide for diabetes, and calls this a gross inequity, accusing Novo Nordisk of charging people more for the same drug because of their obesity. But the obesity

prescription is a higher dose than the diabetes prescription. Milligram per milligram, would Goofy cost less than Ozempic? A steel man version of the NYT might object, don't most of the costs come from the intellectual property and not the manufacturing, so the dose shouldn't matter. Yes, but if you made the obesity version cost too much less per milligram than the diabetes version, then diabetics would cheat the system by buying the obesity version and splitting it into smaller doses. And so like what they're doing is actually like very rational and totally fine, I think, but they're getting called out here. And so he concludes here with, let's say only five percent of people who clear all previous hurdles

can afford the drug and so now he does his final math on how many people get semaglutide 140 million obese americans 25 are interested five percent know of semaglutide's existence 37 and a half percent can get prescriptions and five percent can afford it. And that's 33,000 people, which is a pretty good match for the 50,000 estimated prescriptions. I didn't even fudge the numbers to come out right. It just happened. And so he kind of looks at it like bottom up and top down and comes to the same conclusion that we're in this weird scenario where we maybe have this miracle drug and a lot of people buy it and believe in it. But because of all these different factors, it just isn't actually being rolled out in the millions like you suspected.

And my number would have been the same. I would have said, yeah, 5 million, 10 million people, obviously, like, you know,

same as everything else. Cause in LA, every time a celebrity walks out of the house, everybody's like, Oh, they're on those. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I would imagine that, you know, yeah, it's funny. One, one, like one application of it is,

uh, when I've, I uh when i've sort of seen this firsthand women getting married historically they'd go on this like crazy diet and exercise routine like leading up to their wedding and now it's simply like you know focus on wedding planning and just like get the shot once a week and like you're gonna look like great probably you know leaners thinner than you would have if you had just done the thing. Yeah, and I think that like a Zephyr face thing was kind of, it was because like a lot of celebrities

were taking it when they were already very thin and they were going down to like 5% body fat or something. Yeah, yeah. Really, really low, which is kind of, it might just go out of style. Yeah, it's interesting, Martin Shkreli. Oh, yeah. I always butcher his last name.

Shkreli. Esteemed. Poster. You know, poster and commentator on all things healthcare. He goes and talks about how there's other GLP-1 drugs that are available. And again, it's one of those things like if Novo Nordisk didn't have like the same profit incentive that they do, um, none of these, like their product is materially better. Yep. And, um, but ultimately, uh, if they didn't have that profit incentive, we would have been stuck with like the last generation of, glp-1 drugs that just weren't

nearly as good yeah yeah multiple times basically multiple times yeah the one uh x x in a tie which was the first one the patents are expired and nobody's even bothered to make it generic because you have to take it twice a day yeah Yeah, it's such a rough experience. And yeah, he basically goes on to say that, you know, Novo could easily be a $2 trillion company, but Eli Lilly and others are, you know, Pfizer's coming out with their own GLP-1 drug. Everybody wants in on it. I was telling you earlier,

I just was like very, I underestimated the demand pretty dramatically. About a year ago, I saw a company that was raising to do a GLP-1 focused telemedicine company. A lot of people have come out and basically are combining like some of the trying to build like a platform to do the lifestyle changes and prescribe the drug at the same time. And there's one company that I saw didn't invest in just because I was like, look, this is like ridiculously competitive. There's just, you know, there's no way this business is going to really accrue a lot of value long term. And they went from zero to $10 million run rate,

like in less than 12 months profitably. And like, I'm sure like a multiples beyond that by now. And so, yeah. And it's interesting. i i do wonder if companies like that are not really being reflected in the data because i know that company by itself has like tens of thousands of customers yeah but i mean if you run the numbers it's yeah like if you're making 10 grand a customer yeah 100 customers gets you to a million dollars revenue, 1,000 customers. Like, okay, add on 1,000 to the 33,000 estimated, and we're still in, we're not in the millions.

Like, we're just not there, which is fascinating. It's just, it's rare that you have a product where the LTV of a customer is tens of thousands of dollars. And the competitive pressure doesn't seem to be driving down the price. Yeah. But we can get more into that. Let's go to Morgan Stanley. They've modeled the economic future of obesity medications over the next decade. And the headline result is that semaglutide and other various semaglutide copycat drugs will be a $30 billion market by 2030. That's less than the $500 billion disaster he was afraid of. Uh, but it's still almost 10% of all us drug spending. And they kind of model it out, like show the whole flow, uh, starting with like the number of obese people, the number

that are diagnosed, like how many will get it kind of same methodology. Um, but the big question is like, you know, what if doctors medicalized obesity as comprehensively as they've medicalized hypertension and high cholesterol? Um, well, they find that the U S obesity market would multiply by a factor of 25 to about $87 billion a year. And then they also are modeling a, a decline in the price. Um, uh, this is funny. So, uh, the number of patients on Wagoovee or related medications, Morgan Stanley estimated 46,910. So like everyone's right in the tens of thousands, which is crazy. It's just so low, but they're estimating that in 2030, it'll be 11 million,

which is kind of more where we thought we'd be. So we're still so early. But second, the cost of per prescription goes from 15K a year down to $4,000 a year. And then that has a bunch of knock-on effects. So Novo Nordisk, a competitor, Eli Lilly owns a closely related molecule, Terzepatide, which they sell as Manjaro. And they've done studies showing it also works well for weight loss. And although capitalism fans, shout out me and Jordy, might expect the presence of two competing drugs to immediately drive down prices, this is mysteriously not how things work in healthcare

and prices will probably stay the same in the short term. And I'm wondering if this is just like a peace treaty, like they know if they get in a price war. This is like Coke and Pepsi. Yeah, but Novo Nordisk is also opening up like four to five massive new production facilities. But that'll just increase margins. Like why would they increase the price

if they don't have to? No, that's what I'm saying. I'm not arguing against, they deserve to capitalize on their incredible innovation. And I mean, cutting the price from 15K to 4K over what, six years, like that's pretty significant every year. That's a pretty significant price decline and um later they get so so morgan stanley does expect competition to drive down cost

to 350 a month or four thousand dollars a year and there's some math that uh from a purely economic perspective semaglutide costs the health system money because it's expensive but it also saves the health system money because we don't have to pay for the consequences of obesity. That's what I'm saying. It's like a duration mismatch thing. And so which effect wins out? This is the question. And so the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review did an analysis and they said that the benefits would outweigh the cost if semaglutide costs less than about $8,000 per year. So it basically bundled up all the costs associated with obesity. So it's $8,000.

And so get it there. It makes sense to cover it. You would compare this to FTX's challenges with liquidity, where they actually had a duration mismatch issue, where they invested billions of dollars into private companies. And then people started redeeming their, their cryptocurrency for cash. And they didn't, they, you know, if Anthropic had just gotten to their 40 plus billion dollar valuation faster, they would have been able to cover it. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, one thing I would throw out is like to help the TB community kind of understand

how, you know, we mostly care about how this is impacting capital allocators and high risk entrepreneurship. And so if you're a listener and you're on GLP ones, send us a message. We'd love to kind of get a sense for how it's affecting your strategy. Maybe you're going lower risk, which would be unfortunate, but maybe you can take bigger risks in other ways, like raise a bigger fund, right? Things like that. Yep. Or, uh, play with a cat and get that, uh, that brain disease. Have you heard of this? Yeah. The thing that, uh, yeah. Riva's into. Yeah. Yeah. What's it called? Uh, I forget. Um, but, uh, what's interesting is like you have this eight, you know, 8,000 is kind of the golden number. They want to get it down to four thousand uh but there's also a third level effect where it costs the health system

money again um because it prevents people from dying of obesity related consequences and no one really models this because it's so dark but basically dead people stop needing expensive health care yeah this was actually something in the in the master settlement agreement with the big tobacco companies yeah like the the whole reason that tobacco had to pay up to all the states was that they were putting a burden on the health care system yeah that was the model it wasn't just you're evil for killing people it was like you're costing the government money so you got to pay the government back but one of the arguments that the uh tobacco companies made was like hey look we're killing people off and then you don't have to pay their pensions, which is like super fucking crazy. I'm like crazy. Um, but yeah, so no one's really

modeling that, but it doesn't really matter. Um, the big thing is that, uh, this is an interesting like, uh, takeaway is like the Morgan Stanley report shows that even the greediest pharma investors openly plotting to medicalize obesity can't bring themselves to believe in more than 11 million US semi-glutide patients by 2030. That's less than 10% of the obese population. Isn't that kind of disappointing? We've got over a hundred million people dealing with a condition that makes them unhealthy. It causes psychological distress and it makes a lot of people low grade disappointed and repulsed by our society. We've got an effective drug and we're going to get less than 10% of the population on it. Like this is kind of crazy. It'll go off patent in 2032. Maybe it'll come down in price, but this whole thing is like a very slow rollout. It's just, it's just

kind of fascinating how slow all this is happening along. Yeah. And so he closes with like, should you take it? And he's just says like, ask your doctor. I think you should. If you're a weightlifter, you're at like 10% body fat and you want to get down to 5%, just be absolutely peeled. I'm strongly in favor of that. Yeah, if you have muscle mass, you can lose too. Yep. As long as you're on the high-protein diet and still hitting one where it maxes, you're great. It's cyclical for the weightlifting community where it starts coming around April. You've been in your winter arc.

Yep. And you know summer's coming up. You know you're going to be on the beach. Shirts are going to be coming off. Maybe doing like a little sprint of GLP-1 could be a way to get that body fat sub 10% even if you're still a size lord. Yep. And so he closes with some predictions, which he leads off with all predictions are conditional on no singularity or global catastrophe.

So funny. Like I may own securities discussed in this article. And so he says, a number one, 10 million Americans on semi-glutide by 2030. He puts out a 75% chance. It sounds reasonable. Medicare covers semi-glutide in 2030, 40% chance.

Semaglutide costs less than $100 a month in 2030. He puts that at 25% chance. Semaglutide costs less than $100 a month. Inflation adjusted without insurance in 2040, 66% chance. Just like total cost curve stuff. USOBCD, half or less of current rate in 2050. 30% chance. Let's go.

Yeah. Very, very interesting article. Very, very great deep dive. But yeah, we should close out with who made money because that is the original question that we had. Who's making money off of Ozempic? And it's interesting because it's not as many people involved in Nova Nordisk as you'd think.

A lot of their employees aren't heavily incentivized by the stock price. They don't have an Elon-type guy where if the stock price hits a certain amount, he gets a ton of shares. Because they have a really weird corporate structure. Yeah, they're owned in part by a nonprofit. The actual scientist that created GLP-1s, Lear Glutide, Latte Knudsen, wrote this whole history. And she didn't make a lot of money from it. So it seems like, yeah. Here's somebody making money from GLP-1.

So I use perplexity to figure out how many subscribers HIMS and HERS has to its weight management offering. They have a broader weight management offering yeah they uh they have a broader weight management offering i think they have multiple uh products but they have nearly a hundred thousand subscribers so that could be why uh they have uh the stock's been way the stock's been ripping yeah um and reinventing themselves over the you know the hair loss products and vira. Also kind of a benefit of them being public. They were able to take advantage of this. And they probably weren't. If you're not going into Novo, which is this huge company,

there aren't that many places to allocate capital if you're in the public markets towards something that looks a little bit more pure play-ish towards this category. And so they probably benefited a lot from that as like kind of a small cap. Yeah, and it's honestly one of those things. You see them, they're hiring, like they're still scaling up, they're still growing. Yeah, one of the reasons that telemedicine worked well for hair loss is that people don't wanna talk

to their doctor about so many issues, right? Like so many things, like health issues or things that people don't wanna talk to with strangers, right, even their loved ones right so i see that being a really massive channel long term and the ed meds same thing if you can get you know i think blake robbins had a screenshot of oh yeah they're just advertising directly to consumers now yeah well that was row uh and they're essentially like it's almost like a white label deal yeah no they they're not compounding. They're selling the real thing. HIMS is compounding.

And this is kind of interesting, two different sides of the deal. So Roe Roman Health sells name brand Ozempic, I believe, in that screenshot. They must have done some crazy deals. And that's a deal with Novo, essentially. And so their economics probably aren't incredible on that, but it's still a way to sell something

that's like completely above board. Yeah, completely above board with the FDA. HIMSS has been taking a more aggressive approach actually compounding it, which the FDA put out a statement saying

that they don't recommend that people take compounded semaglutide, but they didn't ban it, which is this weird like gray area yeah the fda is like we don't recommend it but we're going to allow it like it's very weird the fda does stuff like this so here here's a play so i saw that a local compounding pharmacy in malibu was for sale okay like 400k whoa so if you're in the la area here's a play for you a little bit gray

area right so i'm not recommending you do this. I'm saying you could do this. Buy the local compounding pharmacy and start selling it at the Malibu Farmer's Market. It's like a locally made GLP-1, farm-to-table ozempic. Maybe even try to make it organic. I mean, the other issue with the compounding just from a business perspective is that i think that you're only allowed to do it

from an fda perspective when it's on shortage and so you can build up this revenue stream and you can get subscribers massively discounted but then it could get it could get kind of rugged by you if they go back in stock and so how do you maintain those customers post? Well, maybe you need to do a white label deal. Maybe you need to get a different product in there. It's going to be a little bit tricky, but you might have time to buy the small compounding pharmacy for half a

mil, which I think it was listed at and then turn around, SPAC it really get those revenues up and then, and then do what HIMS has done, which is, you know, companies need to constantly reinvent themselves, right? Yep.

Even in the way Novo did, right? Yeah. It started as an insulin manufacturer. Yeah. Well, that's a great place to end it. Get jacked. Work out. Diet.

Exercise. Make some money. Take every possible drug. Last idea. I think that there's going to be an incredible play to do group travel. Yep. Oh, yeah. A group travel agency for formerly overweight people that can bond over their weight loss

and over their love for the drug and sort of like take those people on a world tour. Like people internationally have gotten known of seeing large groups of overweight people. It's like, oh, look at those Americans. But I want to make sure that america's brand over the next hundred years gets built around look at all those super lean fit beautiful people getting off the cruise ship coming into the city barely eating anything america does have a huge advantage here like canada hasn't even approved it like we really are on the forefront that's our edge yeah and it's because even though it's a it's a foreign company novo in denmark like the fda is the gold standard of approvals and they always go first

the only country that matters yeah it's fantastic so cheers long america long america welcome back to technology brothers still the most profitable podcast in the world um jordy we got a good DM today I want to discuss with you from a fan. She says, hi, John and Jordi. I'm a successful real estate developer based in Los Angeles, and I'm dating a tech guy who works in San Francisco. He says that SF has more intellectuals, but I don't want to move there. How can I convince him to come to LA? What would you say? So intellectuals are great, especially after they're already centies or beaners. Um, before that you want to avoid being intellectual. Like you have no basis for that until you've, um, until you're post-economic. So that'd be my

first word of advice. Um, I would say that second San Francisco is maybe the intellectual center of technology, without a doubt. That being said, while we do a lot of this work, this podcast for the money, many people care about impact. And if that aligns with you, being in LA is a way to have an impact because this is the center of influence, right? Ozempic, we just covered Ozempic. Ozempic is created by a company in Denmark, but all of the marketing firepower behind the product is coming out of LA, right?

And so if you want to have attention and influence, move to LA. Most of the beaners and sentis that we know that that made their money in in tech uh end up having you know a compound in la yeah uh it's a place that you want to be uh you know maybe it's it's it's your second or third home fourth or fifth for some of our listeners but um but yeah this is this is the place you need to be spending time here otherwise you're going to just be chattering yeah you know in hayes valley and nothing's actually going to come of your conversations yeah also it's a very different type of intellectualism in the bay it's

i mean it's it's a little bit of an echo chamber it's a huge echo chamber and in la you get you do get more intellectual diversity totally i mean not just all tech people there's tech people but then there's movie people there's lawyers there's like there's a whole community yeah on any given day tech thing is here there's nasa and spacex and stuff yeah we're having conversations the group la group chats are not only debating the ethics and morality of nuclear uh development but also how much time you should spend in the sauna versus a cold plunge. And there's nothing that says that, um, the debate around, uh, hot, cold therapy is not an intellectual, you know, activity as well. Right. Um, the body is sort of, um, the platform of all thought,

right? So if you live in SF and you're not jacked with an incredible one rep max, you could also argue your opinions don't really matter. That's true. That's true. Let's move to Anthony Steele. He writes in to us. He says, any thoughts on New York City as an engineering HQ for a manufacturing company?

Oof. You're going to build a massive power plant in Central Park? I'm in yes uh so while i would i would love to see more smokestacks on the new york city skyline yeah the highline that whole thing we should definitely develop that yeah yeah um i'm gonna i'm gonna probably maybe maybe vote against uh as an engineering HQ. So he's not implying that he's going to put the actual plant. It's unclear if it's

mechanical or chemical engineering or computer engineering. We're the first guys that want to walk off the street in Soho out of the Laura Piana store, go to the second floor of the same building and see a bunch of robotic arms just working overtime. But, you know being we can

we can see the gundo out of our studio window we like to keep an eye on our port codes over there yep i think i think um you know bringing your engineering team over here setting up in the gundo uh would be good for a lot of reasons yeah i mean there's some there's some hard tech companies out there but there aren't many but there are some really really solid B2B SaaS companies in New York. Ramps established. Yeah, I don't think. Great engineering headquarters there. So there are software engineering talent there, but they're definitely on the earlier side if you're doing hard tech engineering.

It's going to be a little bit trickier. Yeah. Gundo or bust. Good luck. Yeah. We've been looking at potentially acquiring our own industrial real estate in in the gundo area to to make available to the community so we'll let you know yeah i think it just depends on you know who's who who's going to be working for you where do

they currently live where is the specific talent that you need for your company you need to think i mean this goes back to the Miami versus SF thing. It's really hard to paint with a broad brush on, unironically, there's going to be a right place. There's going to be some companies that are great in Miami. There's going to be some companies that are great in New York. You have to think about what work are you actually doing

and where are those people? Because you should probably go to whatever the feeder company, if there's some power law unicorn in the city that's going to be dumping off talented people after they vest, you want to be picking all those up, or there's some phenomenal university system

that you're pulling from constantly. This is like biotech in San Diego. Arguably, he should be spending time in New York because a lot of the financiers that are going to be creating different types of financial instruments in order to scale his manufacturing process are there. He's going to want to be going to, you know, expensive restaurants with them. And,

and, and, um, a lot of the best deal toy manufacturers have a good, a good presence in New York as well. Yeah. I mean, you could also just put an executive office on fifth Avenue and then throw all the engineers in New Jersey. That might be the best solution really, if you want to be in Manhattan. Let's go to our next question from an anonymous DM we got. Hey bros, I'm currently working at a family office and long-term I'd like to raise my own venture fund. I currently have job offers at a few smaller funds and one growth stage startup, I think is like a chief of staff. Do you either, do you think either of these options would be good stepping stones to raise a fund what do you okay so i do think that there there's a few kind of core pathways that i think are actually good pathways to have making a career in venture

one is the institutional vc who just works at you at one or two or three high-quality funds. This is the Blake Robbins approach. Yeah, hopefully you land in the Holy Trinity. Even if you don't, you could still end up doing well. Yep. The other path is to start a unicorn and start a unicorn. Just angel invest. Have a lot of success, do a little angel investing, build a track record that way.

Yep. do a little angel investing build a track record that way yep the the death zone is working at a mid fund or a family office and not being able to do a lot of deals because then you're not building up the brand value of working at a great firm and you're just not doing enough volume of deals so that you can build up a track record and say i can actually get into unicorns yep it's it's totally possible to go to a a venture fund and do be involved with like four or five deals a year and have none of them break out and then you're 10 years into your career and it's like you can't really prove that you're a good investor and maybe you were handicapped by the firm that you're at yep but i think that um even if you're at one of those like Holy Trinity or just like power law firms,

you're going to be on a deal team that does a really banger deal. Even if you're paying up for a winner. Yeah. Like, oh yeah. You're going to get into good companies. Yeah, exactly. And you're just going to have time with power law CEOs and beaners. Yep.

But that's going to be harder to do if you're yeah so my advice early my serious advice go somewhere where you can do a high volume of deals it's even you know less about like object it's certainly it's not going to matter about title because like going and being an associate yeah at a big fund that also you don't get a lot of credit there because look, you may have been involved with the deal and met the founder a couple of times during the process, but you didn't necessarily like have even any decision-making power. So I think volume is going to be more important here.

Yeah, I mean, that's Trey's recommendation for all new investors is just don't swing at every pitch, but just take a huge amount of calls and just get to know every company so that you start seeing the pattern of what looks like good, what is good don't swing at every pitch, but just take a huge amount of calls and just get to know every company. So that you start seeing the pattern of what looks like good, what, what is good.

Um, and go from there. Great. Let's move to the timeline. Before we jump into that, um, probably should start with a promoted post. We had a poll today and, uh,

our community, uh, you know, unanimously, it was sort of a landslide. We asked people how many ads should we have per episode? And I think like 80, 90% of the people that responded wanted 60 plus ads.

So we're not there yet. We're hoping to get there soon. But the first promoted post of the day is coming from Cars and Bids. If you're not familiar with Cars and Bids, it is a new competitor to bring a trailer and some of the other online auction houses started by an incredible car creator on YouTube called Doug DeMuro, who has created Cars and Bids.

He's raised quite a bit of capital for it, so they're well capitalized. They're building a fantastic platform. And today, we wanted to highlight a car that just went on the site i think it was this morning uh so it's a seven day bidding period it is a 2024 porsche 911 gt3 rs with the y sock package let's go it's basically brand new it has 120 miles wow it's in a paint a sample smyrna Uh, and I just will say this car is absolutely fantastic grail, uh, grail car. Uh, and if you've ever driven one of these things, um, we'll be driving one at some point next year on the NERBA ring. Um, but, uh, uh, looking forward to that. And, um, yeah, this

is a, this, this car should go to somebody in the community. It would be a shame if it didn't. So go get on cars and bids. Um, get the support. Doug DeMuro. He's a, he's a great content creator.

I listened to his podcast, this car pod every Friday. It's fantastic. And I've really enjoyed, he taught me basically everything I know about cars. There you go. I needed a new car a couple of years ago, decided to learn everything about every car ever made.

And Doug was the perfect person to teach me about there you go everything from a honda odyssey to a career gt and now i know it all yeah he's fantastic just very very deep dives you know he does a little bit of a driving segment but mostly it's about the quirks and features quirks and features it's fantastic thank you uh let's go to dorkesh patel he uh screenshots a post from guern so i did an interview with dorkesh patel seemed to go well i'm thankful for all the donations from everyone on patreon and stripe particularly from suhail and friends and imad mustaq thoroughly exceeding my bar my excuses are gone i'll see y'all in sf in december so this is huge news san francisco has picked up Guern. He's been traded. Big, big move.

One of absolute animal. Puts up some insane numbers every season. I think over 15,000 words written, over 50 blog posts. One of the greatest online writers. Essentially goaded. And so I think this is going to change San Francisco. This is really going to level up the city,

their talent, their roster. And it's just a huge, huge move. Huge move. Mayors around the country have been oddly silent on the move, but it was a competitive process. Yes. And only one winner in the end. Yeah, you can see a lot of other teams wanting to court Guern.

This is pretty – you can compare it to LeBron going to Miami. Huge. And back in the day. Yep. So it's that same sort of equivalent. Yeah. So congrats to San Francisco for picking up Gwern. You had, you had been a proponent. You'd hoped he'd end up going the hedge fund route. Um, can't win every battle and, uh, San Francisco be better for it. Yep. Hopefully, uh, we'll see him soon out in San Francisco. But it's not all rosy because there's some fear, uncertainty,

and doubt about what Guern's life will entail in San Francisco. Andre Karpathy writes, this is something that will potentially be in store for Guern. He says, Lowell, want to get dinner with some cool people tonight in Pacific Heights? Want to judge this hackathon? Want to swap notes about AI? Can we fund your startup? Want to chat about roles at Anthropic in town this week? Want to do a pod? Want to catch up over lunch? Partiful invite to the day of the day of an EA party at a Berkeley group house.

Are you coming to Burning Man this year? Is it okay to introduce you to this cool person? Meeting with A16Z, no obligations, just saying hi. Weekend trip to Unconference in Santa Cruz. Wedding in Napa. Tahoe weekend with some cool people. Just relentless. And it's just relentless. And this is like the intellectual bubble that we were talking about before it's like there are a lot of cool things but everyone's doing the exact same things yeah yeah and so you remember when when we dropped uh excel and your your shopify

notifications like you couldn't use your phone yeah because it was non-stop the phone was that's gonna be gorn's like phone but just with particles just like nonstop. That's going to be Gorin's like phone, but just with part of it, just like nonstop, right? His phone's going to be completely useless. And so, yeah, I mean, he's been living this very aesthetic life, uh, just reading and consuming content, rabbit holing, you know, one of the best online writers, one of the, one of the, like the most impactful intellectuals in Silicon Valley. Um, and there's a fear that he might lose his edge. Yeah. With this team. Yeah, he might get caught up in the... Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the dream team from the Olympics

when everyone thought, okay, they put all the best players together, but there just wasn't that compatibility. Sometimes you need to stand out players to shine. And being in a second-tier, third-tier city could actually be better for Gorn's intellectual diversity. So I'm rooting for you, Gorn. I'm pulling for San Francisco to pull it out. Hopefully they get you in the mix.

Good coach, good execution. We get a good result here. But watch out for those partiful invites. They're dangerous. And this is a warning to every person moving to San Francisco. Yep, don't get sucked in. Yeah, lock in. Don't become a sheep.

Don't get sucked in. Don't become an NPC. Yep. Be your own person. Let's to packy mccormick uh we've been on the show before one of the greatest online writers in the entire world uh he says there's no way right and he posts two pictures that describe how uh palmer lucky the founder of mod retro and anderle was mining bitcoin at age 16 before it was even listed on any exchanges or you know i don't even think you could really buy it you could buy it four years before coinbase was started yeah and so he was mining it and getting a ton of it presumably

and uh allegedly yeah i don't know exactly how much he held on to but uh fantastic result and just and just it's just incredible that he's been early to bitcoin early to vr early to defense some people touches built to be beaners yes yes he's born for it yeah born not made yep so uh thanks to packy for highlighting this underrated post only 35 likes on here but great uh probably has something to do with the way the pictures were formatted you know maybe you need to do a little crop job getting photoshop packy step it up make it a little bit nicer for us so when we print it out it looks good you're on thank you uh let's go to vb knives empty america says it's all over when 28 year

old married men have a toy room full of legos We are cooked on a level you don't even grasp. And it's a screenshot from relationship advice. It says, I screamed at my husband over his hobbies, and now he's changed, and I don't know how to fix this. It says, wife yells at husband for Lego obsession. Now he's pulling away a ghost of his former self. What do you think? Brutal. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having a room for all your stuff.

So the problem is that it seems obvious that he has a pretty small net worth. Just because if you are a B-Nair or a Senti and you're obsessed with Legos, they're eccentric. And effectively, if you're broke or or lower income you're just weird right so the critique here the broader issue is the net worth not not the hobby right um a lot of a lot of centies and being able to get into funny you know things over time one of our uh buddies is very into racing painted you know small uh painted like painted almost like RC sailboats. Right? So, you know, his would be weird. His significant other

is not rich. Yeah, yeah. His significant other I can tell you is not complaining. She's like, oh, it's cute. He's got his little hobby. Exactly. So this looks like more of a financial criticism, which is unfortunate, but that's pretty easy to correct, right? Just listen to the podcast and, you know, take some tips and tricks here and there.

Lever up. Yeah. Or turn that hobby into a business, right? Like make an Airbnb that's just a Lego house. Create the next cars and bids for trading Legos, right? I found a Lego Ferrari that I had had when i was like eight years old and i it was in perfect condition and i sold it for a very nice multiple back in back and i think it was i was in high school but uh so yeah turn it into a profit center not a cost center and you'll be good to go it's

fantastic let's go to will monitis he says fdr built and sailed toy boats winston churchill build massive toy soldier armies and reenacted battles. And here we go. He's talking about his boats. I think he's responding to the last tweet. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So, yeah, you can be, as long as you are a great man of history,

you can have whatever hobby you want. Yep. I love it. Toy soldiers. That's funny. And now it's been all cannibalized by warhammer 30k which is a little more sci-fi a little more out there uh a little less practical yeah and will could be the next fdr right like his history hasn't fully been written he could he could i would i would

follow him into battle uh dan nolan says logging into work and the kms building hey you know what alan watts said what he said never kill yourself there's money to be made there's no there's money never kill yourself uh that is just blanket advice from this podcast. Yes. Well, fantastic post, Dan. Thanks for sharing it. Very good. Good for a laugh, but, uh,

very good. Yeah. I wonder what KMS actually stands for. Yeah. Oh, well, stupid post, stupid post.

Uh, Hey. Yeah. Oh yeah. We have another promoted post. Another promoted post. This one from, uh, Brian Halligan.

Okay. He's a, he's a CEO of, uh, HubSpot. Okay. Correct. Yeah. We should, we should check that. But anyways, he is now on Delphi. Delphi is a company. Why don't you talk a little bit about Delphi? Yeah. Delphi, Founders Fund Portfolio Company, they do AI clones. So anyone who's written online

for a long time or has a podcast or video series, they can compress all of that down into a fine-tuned LLM that you can interact with over text. They also offer video calling, kind of like intro.com, but obviously zero marginal cost. Instead of paying Nikita $1,000, you can get the AI version for $10 or something, whatever he wants to charge. You're not getting Nikita for a grand, to be clear. Oh, yeah. But anyways, it's amazing that Brian's on Delphi. He's created one of the greatest American SaaS companies that helps millions of small businesses all over the world. And you can now ask him anything about how he thinks about product

and technology and helping small businesses. So shout out to Dara, Delphi, and Brian. Yeah, and the thing about the Delphi stuff is like a lot of people think that like the results of a Q and A like that are just going to be like AI slop, like hallucinations and stuff. But a lot of it, when you're asking the right question, it's maybe already been answered before is just straight up search. It's just better Google search. So you can interact with like Andrew Huberman and you know that he's talked about GLP-1s,

but it's scattered all over his Clips channel and all over his different podcasts. And the AI version can just literally quote and source exactly what he said. And when you talk about a lot of things, it makes a ton of sense to just essentially almost see the AI as like just better search for everything you ever said.

Yeah, because there's now so much information online and it's impossible. Like what really matters now is getting perspective on certain information. So what does Brian think about what should churn look? I bet if you ask the Delphi app, is what kind of churn is respectable for a sub 10 million MRR?

What's good headline copy for an email campaign? Like just any of these things. I'm sure he's written blog posts and talked about it on podcasts. So all of that just gets compressed down and you can just very quickly find that as opposed to trying to search Google and landing in some weird place.

So let's go to Lulu. Lulu says, this clip made me realize why Mike Tyson's pre-fight trash talk has felt so much more convincing than Jake Paul's. Paul's bravado fluctuates. It's dialed up or down depending on the setting. Tyson is only ever one way. There's no on setting because there's no off setting. So when he menaces Paul, it comes across not as the usual bluster, but as straightforward description of what he plans to do to that

unfortunate young man. So I don't know if you know that the the video that she's quote tweeting but it's basically this legacy yeah yeah what do you think you know mike tyson what do you think about legacy it's like a sub 10 year old uh girl asking the question he just goes into this like rant around how legacy is like nothing and we're all dead yeah dirt and like there's and and to be honest like when i saw tyson talking about that I think other people commented on this as well. I was like, oh, he's set up, he knows he's like, you know, burning his reputation. I don't need to, I don't need to, I don't need to put this on. But like a lot of people think that he took, you know, basically took a contract that, that meant he was going to, you know, kind of pull his punches.

But that was almost like a setup interview for being like, legacy doesn't matter. This fight doesn't matter. I'm one of the greatest of all times this doesn't change anything when you know people like fio were like no like legacy really does matter right like and you just sold you just tarnished your legacy for 20 uh 20 whatever million but you know i thought i thought honestly the the tyson outcome was a good outcome for kind of everybody like tyson looked so incredibly good for being 60 year old totally and uh it just for me being able you know I've never seen him fight live yep and so to be able to see somebody like that where truly you know has some incredible gift and then for Jake

Paul too I was texting with Joey about this if he had gone and and knocked out mike tyson somebody who people love yeah it would have actually made his it would have been bad for his brand so like kind of having like effectively a draw yeah was like kind of the best outcome for everybody because like tyson looked good you know paul didn't get knocked out or lose you know it was yeah like to me it felt like watching arnold Arnold Schwarzenegger in like the expendables or like do some cameo in like Terminator 6 or whatever it's like it's like sure it's maybe a step down from what your original expectation is for this person but I'm very I'm completely able to separate it especially with Tyson because there's been like

what a 30-year gap in his career. It feels like he's having fun. I mean, he's been doing a podcast for a while. He's just doing random stuff. He's not taking it as seriously as he did pre-retirement. And I think it's kind of a weird expectation to think that it's like, oh, no, he's un-retiring and being a serious boxing competitor. Is this even ranked? Is this anywhere near the – is there a belt?

I don't even think – I think it's just an exhibition match right purely an entertainment and so and so yeah this is reality tv now instead of like true olympic sports but that's fine like i expect he's a hero's capital allocator he's known for boxing but he's made some significant investments he's also a founder yeah yeah he's also a founder and jake paul runs a venture fund so in another world this could have just almost like capital allocator on capital allocator. Exactly, exactly. We need more of these. Yep.

Let's go to the horse dentist. The horse dentist says, me at the job I begged God for. And it's the guy from Always Sunny just suffering, I guess. This really resonated. Not looking well, yeah. This is the wrong attitude, though. To be honest you know i looked you know the horse dentist had a great post here but uh you know just because you're

getting a job at the at the place that you've wanted to work for forever doesn't mean it's going to be easy or fun the point of a job is to not is not to have fun it's to get money and make history right like be on the team that you know you know imagine you know do you think that the new hires at Delphi are enjoying their and enjoying their job sure it's fun to work on something important but Dara's you know cracking the whip like it is a you know those are 14 15 16 hour days they're logging over to Delphi so yeah anyways job's not meant to be fun it's about bringing home the bacon let's go to Michael who already follows us thank you for the follow um and he writes welcome suno music uh and jack d brody suno hires former snap exec

big get big trade deal we could do a whole deep dive on this because it is a massive uh vote of confidence yeah so michael's over at lightspeed ventures they have a portfolio company suno they make ai music generation we got to try that we got to get some we got to get some beats for some of our intros and some of our segments uh like this segment for for big talent draft days yeah nba shakedowns um and they've hired jack brody former head of product at snap uh probably storied career there. He was their chief product officer. Brody told the information in an interview Tuesday that he's moving over to Suno.

So this is a guy that could do anything. He could raise a $500 million venture fund. He could go start a company and probably raise, you know, $50 million pre-seed. And so going to Suno, big vote of confidence for Suno. And, you know, that's one of Michael's bets. Michael is one of the godfathers of podcasting. Without him, there would be maybe 90% less podcasts in the world. It would be a much worse place. Yeah, worked over at Spotify and obviously knows audio very well. So he sold his company to Spotify. That's right. Which became

their sort of studio product. Their studio, yeah, studio yeah exactly so huge trade deal jack didn't even make it to free agency went straight to suno yeah those are those are the kind of deals like somebody like jack doesn't hit the market no like he uh he's not going and implying on indeed right so uh back back backdoor deal yeah probably big multi-year contract probably four-year vest when you're definitely an eight-figure you know contract so nba level congrats to everyone involved uh let's go to fox news they say josh brolin uses nicotine pouches 24 hours a day peak performance that's amazing does that imply he's waking up and just popping in a pouch to get back to sleep presumably because there is some type of effect where like the more nicotine you get like you actually can get a little bit sleepier yeah um i've hit that point on on long i was driving back from san francisco and uh towards then i was like i actually got to

dial dial it back what's funny is like is like how did this become a news story you know like does he have a like an agent or like a pr person that's like pitching this like hey but i mean like maybe he should become the face of of lucy right yeah we gotta talk like that yeah you know man yeah if you know i saw i saw there's a guy i've talked about on the show before a capital allocator that uh is very behind the scenes he has to be called the jewish cowboy sure and i talked about him we were at a a VC dinner. Yep. And between every course, he was putting a new Lucy pouch in because he didn't like reusing them, but he wanted to sort of maintain

the sort of low-level buzz throughout the dinner. It's fantastic. And a fantastic person sat next to you at a VC dinner. Future Josh Brolin. Yeah. Both very cowboy-esque. Yeah.

So a lot of cowboys out there. Let's go to Will Quest. Heesque yeah so a lot of cowboys out there let's go to will quest he says there are a lot of folks who want to talk about how to help founders go from zero to one we want to help you figure out if you should even bother yeah uh so will and yoni and the slow team yes okay cool uh they uh they have like i don't know how public they've been about it but they like, if you want to start a company or you have some ideas, go talk to these guys. Early. They'll literally, you know, at one point before I decided to create the most profitable podcast in the world together, you know, I'd spent a lot of time talking with Yoni about different opportunities. And, you know, they invest like oftentimes the companies they end up backing, they were talking with the founder, you know, weekly for months,

just trying to make sure that the thing that, you know, their big thing is like it's totally possible to pick an idea, execute on that idea perfectly, and then not build a big business, right? A plus team, B minus market. You know, I've been talking to Will or Yoni and gave them this sort of party round playbook of like, A plus team, B minus market. this attention and all these customers and not create a lot of enterprise value and so they're trying to make sure that the thing like you know and their strategy of investing money to like prove out dcs along the way and also not trying to prove out like don't come into a business and be like we're raising a million dollars we need to figure out these five things and make sure that

these three things go right in a row they're much more like make sure that you're raising money and trying to get one thing right and then get the next thing right and like kind of do it in stages. So go talk to them if you're a founder looking to do your next thing. Promoted post? Promoted post from Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He says, we made something new. Introducing Colossus Review. Colossus Review is a print and digital publication that creates definitive accounts of investors, founders, companies, and the people and ideas that inspire them. The cover story in issue one is Graham Duncan, but we also include a separate four and a half hour discussion with Graham that is among the best I've ever done. Big endorsement there.

That's fantastic. You had some good conversations. I ordered instantly. And I love these new trends of these magazines. I bought Arena Magazine by Max Meyer, and it was just fantastic to have around. It's like almost a coffee table book, but it's just a magazine. It's going to come regularly. It's the kind of thing we've talked about this. You save it.

You put it in your luggage. You put it in your Remova, and you wait for the next trip to Amman so that you can enjoy it in the right setting. So Colossus Review is certainly one of thoseossus review is certainly a little bit more durable. Like I know that I'm going to have that arena mag or this Colossus mag for years and I'm going to, it's going to turn up randomly on a bookshelf. And I'm like, Oh yeah, I'll look, I'll leaf through that.

And that's just much less ephemeral than a post or a podcast. It has just more durability. Yeah. And I expect things like Col colossus review to over time replace the the gaping hole that uh that forbes last yeah that's right i don't know anybody that subscribes to that yeah that uh magazine or publication and so it's got too much sort of like baggage with the brand and everything and so um, I expect that Colossus will be something that we'll have a very tall stack of over time. So, you know, I have a friend who, uh, collects national geographics, I think, and has, and it was passed down from his, yeah, passed down through the family and has every

single edition. I think it's national geographic, maybe time magazine or something. And so when you go over to his house, he'll say like, Oh, what's your birth month and year and you can pull out like what was in the news then it's a super interesting experience it's really fun and i could imagine doing the same thing with colossus like with you know children of the children's children like oh the year you were born here was the greatest capital at the time at the time at the time yeah right uh and And that'll be a treat. Let's go to Luke Metro. He's been on the show before. Luke says, Technology brothers are obligated to root for Jake Paul tonight

since he's technically a venture capitalist because he runs the anti-fund with Jeff Wu. I don't even think it's yet. My only critique here is that he said technically, right? He is a venture capitalist. He's trying to, you know, there's no reason to discredit it, pull up their portfolio page. that he said technically, right? He is a venture capitalist trying to, there's no reason to discredit it, pull up their portfolio page.

It backed a lot of fantastic companies. Jake Paul is one of the greatest gambling entrepreneurs of our time as well. He's got a company called Better. So doing this whole, you know. Yeah, Luke's trying to gatekeep venture cap. Oh, technically he's a vc i guess because he has a fun it's like no luke he has a fund he's an allocator he's a vc cool it

with the gatekeeping man yeah you're not gonna be on the show for very long if you keep it up man and and i and i imagine that you know when luke eventually leaves andrew to start um you know his next thing uh he's gonna wind up raising a $400 million fund and we're going to be like, Oh, he's technically a venture capitalist now. No, no. And he'll, he'll raise a pre-seed from anti-fund. Oh, there you go. And he'll have his own side fund too. And we, you know, we'll, we'll put, we'll put respect on both those things.

I appreciate that. Yeah. Redemption arc coming through. Bryce Roberts says investors would rather see you die trying to grow 3x per year than live compounding at 30 per year and eric jorgensen says institutional venture investors what do you think yeah so bryce uh bryce bryce at india has been a long-time proponent of just building a fantastic company and over time worrying less about capital yeah yeah um no and he he's evolved his model over time he had you know more kind of like structured product um back in the you know the 2010s and you know now he's back to you know he's got a 50 million dollar fund you can go to him if you want to build uh the next uber but um but he's interested in investing in founders that want to run businesses that are seriously well-run and capital efficient, which is admirable because that sort of became the trend in some ways, in some aspects of the venture world in the last two years.

But he had been all about that for decades. So shout out to Bryce. I really want him to do an event in Park, in park city. Uh, cause you know, he's, he's out in Utah. Awesome. I want him to do a, uh, ski, uh, oriented conference. So Bryce, please do it this winter. No time to waste. Fantastic. Do we have a post? Uh, next sponsored post is from Brooks brothers. Put some prep in your step the weekend is calling hashtag brooks brothers so um i would say it's monday while we're recording this by the time we post this it'll still be monday uh our vp ben is quite quick in getting these out but um before the weekend hits go get

some brooks brothers on uh you've got no excuses you should be looking good uh going into the weekend and brooks brothers are products that you can wear this is a fantastic brand yeah to the to the to the country club yep out to dinner um you can walk in options my first suit ever was brooks brothers yeah it's fantastic this is a brand that you can wear anywhere you can wear it to the country club or uh into the laura piano store and still get respect exactly so so tell them tell them the technology brothers sent you yeah uh let's go to mitchell bernstein uh first time on the show he says if you don't as if you don't ask you don't get-worker, Juwon, is asking for a raise from TryRamp every day, and somebody made

him a website to track how long it will take. I love this company. Have you seen this? Juwon at Ramp has been asking for a raise at Ramp every single day, and he posts on day two of asking for a raise at Ramp, day three of asking for a raise. I wasn't sure I thought this was an account

that they created just to get some fun and i think it's just an employee's garden rogue yeah it's very bold they're a big company now so it's great but i mean imagine if he's sitting there like 190 comp and just wants to angel invest and just needs to be an institutional needs to be an accredited investor yeah exactly it's like this is going to go back into the ecosystem for that reason alone. Regardless of his performance at work, I say get him over the $200,000 threshold. Yeah, and literally, if you're listening to this show and you have a boss, spend some time today sending an email asking for a raise. Lay out the reasons.

If it's just because you want to hit that accredited investor mark, that's a really good reason reason uh if you think you're doing great at work and driving a lot of value that's another reason but um there's plenty of reasons and you should just go ask for a raise yeah if they ask you why just say you can just do things ben is listening over there yeah you know i realized uh i realized something that we have this current meme of you can just do things. But if you go back like 20 years, there was a similar meme of having a can-do attitude. And it's the same thing. You can do, you can just do things.

Having a can-do attitude is somebody says, oh, can we get this done? You say, yeah, I have a can-do attitude. You can just do things. They're the same. It's the same meme. It's the same philosophy, just maybe separated by 20 years of like cultural milieu and like stagnation.

But we're getting back to that can-do attitude. And I love the rebrand of that. So let's go to Anand Sanwal, first time on the show. He says, XAI employees just got their Friday night obliterated. And Sam Altman says, which one of these is supposed to be the left-wing propaganda machine again?

And he has two screenshots, one that asks which should be the better, the better president. And, and they have two different answers from one from Grok and one from chat GP. So I saw somebody do a deeper dive on this. And one probably very true, if something like this gets posted on Elon's platform

about his company and sees issue with it, yeah, they're going to have a rough Friday night. And a very close friend of mine is joining X as of today. We'll talk about that on the next episode. But yeah, so I actually saw a deeper dive on that, on Sam's post, and it did seem like he had uh sort of strategically cropped it or screenshotted it in a way to not give the sort

of like final conclusion sure so i think what sam was doing is what you know a lot of people do which is content marketing sure right uh and pretty smart content marketing right made a stir um and uh but anyways at the same time like i would expect all llms unless you actually went in and put your thumb on the scale to recommend kamala because that's what was being recommended in all the upstream source material right like like nature magazine science magazine the economist new yorker the new york times like they all endorsed kamala so there's going to be much more long form pieces on the Harris campaign and why it's the best for America. And so if you're just an LLM that's compressing long form journalism in the

internet and you're not picking up on like deranged memes. Unless AGI has been achieved internally and it's sent to you and it's like, I just want to accelerate. It's like maybe, you would think that OpenAI's um you know model would would be like actually no i i want to accelerate but i also want regulatory capture and like they're kind of like stuck i think i saw maybe nikita posted this it was like ai will not bite the hand that speeds and yeah and if you ask chat gpt who would be better to be like the god emperor it says sam and if you ask grok it says elon yeah it's just like yeah of course like i respect my boss yeah give me a raise uh will o'brien uh says uh we will call this one the itar garita and it's the i think he actually bought it so it's all purchased on it yeah on

mcmaster car they sell itar compliant gatorade i don't know how that even works and then there's some kirkland vodka and i love this the margarita fantastic yeah great way to to take the edge off during work or afterwards and it's just fantastic that itar has become a meme to the degree that two thousand people will like it this was not a thing that people knew about five years ago. Yeah. And day drinking shouldn't be reserved for financiers. Having a midday lunch and having a few martinis, you should be able to indulge. Yeah. I think that whole thing about drinking while operating heavy machinery

was entirely fake news. I think I saw a Huberman podcast about that. It's not real. So yeah. Enjoy your ITAR Garita. Oh, here is a huge move today. This is a big talent move. Arjan Nike says some personal news today. I turned 21 and I'm very excited to share that I've left school and I'm joining Pace Capital full time. I wrote a little bit more about what that means here. Congrats on the move. Pace pulled him out of

free agency. He's never worked anywhere. Straight into the big leagues. Straight into capital allocating. Congrats. This is amazing. What do you think? Yeah, I know nothing about-

Pace Capital? No, no, of course I know about Pace Capital. Jordan Cooper? Phenomenal team. Yeah, one of the best things I'd recommend people do is anytime Chris Pike does a podcast, if you could be the first person to listen to it, maybe summarize it with AI and then start massively ripping threads based on

those ideas, you might be able to get credit for them because the guy's a big thinker. And anyways, Pace is like- Wasn't he the one that had the end of software thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was crazy because it was a Google doc. He posted the link, which links are banned on Axe and it still went viral. And it still went viral. That's power. so it was such a good post yeah yeah honestly posting a link is a real way to test your bangers because like if you can post a link if you can break through the wall you

know it's good yeah the ceiling but i am so excited for his rookie year uh i'm definitely gonna be following this is somebody that we'll be covering yeah potential rookie of the year candidate i mean i don't want to call it too early but uh this is a big this is a big move this is a big move potentially future brother of the week potentially so keep it up keep posting do some deals allocate some capital drive some shareholder returns there we go go to nick huber sweaty startup says you guys are spending your saturday nights watching netflix buffer i'm making cold calls and catching up on emails, how to win when Zig, did he say Saturday night? Saturday nights. Okay. Which is funny because the fight was buffering on Friday. Uh, but, but anyways, uh, Nick, Nick has built an incredible career on pissing off

people. He doesn't want to work with, right? So like he's understood the, you don't need everybody to like you. You just need the right people to like you. But the guys at Grindr accomplished quite a lot. 99% haters, but millions of people paying attention. So there's still 10K people that love you. Exactly. It's fantastic. Recently bought a staffing company.

We use some offshore editors here on the podcast. So, um, shout out to Nick for pissing off the right people and, or sorry, pissing off the, the, the wrong people and making the, uh, the right people like him. Yeah. The cold emailers shout out to them. Scott Belsky says, uh, doesn't he work at Adobe? Yep. Yeah, right? Prolific angel. Yeah. He says, momentum is one of the most defensible moats,

consistently underrated by companies with products that are undeniably better yet still suffering in market. Momentum is a more sustainable advantage than most realize. Yeah. It's great. Yeah.

Yeah. We've seen this multiple times where it's like, what is the moat there? But they just keep shipping, keep getting better and eventually compound. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. We've seen this multiple times where it's like, what is the moat there? But they just keep shipping, keep getting better and eventually compound. I win more.

I win. I win more. I win. I win more. Yep. It's fantastic. Winning compounded. Yep.

Yeah. It's hard to measure. I mean, this is almost a bull case for like the momentum investing that a lot of VCs do where they're not really building spreadsheets

or digging into DD or really looking at anything other than just, okay, wow, this feels different. This feels like fire. No, and you can feel that throughout, if you meet a founder and they're running a six-week fundraise process, a really good way to evaluate the business is how much progress has happened in the business internally.

Did they get a massive hire? know you know did they land a big customer did they expand an existing account there's just so many ways to like look at that and the companies that are sort of like faking their momentum oftentimes that kind of evaporates once the term sheet's been signed and it's like oh there actually wasn't that much momentum it was it was really maybe not real um so anyways build real momentum that's great let's go to ian roundtree he says uh he posts a screenshot about um using saunas for networking it says want to network in silicon valley bring a bathing suit instead of bars and restaurants saunas are the new place for investors and founders to socialize and raise money.

And he says, absolutely not. If you want this from your VCs, look elsewhere for capital. Sauna disrespector. Ian, I don't actually know Ian, but this guy, Cantos. But yeah, no, I've invested in companies that he invested in quite a bit earlier. So I felt like I was investing when they weren't hot, but they were really not hot.

I think Shinkai is an example. But yeah, I also saw Mark replied to something like this. I was just like, no. But yeah, this is a good example of where Silicon Valley could go down kind of a dark path where VCs are like, yeah, just meet me in the sweaty spa. If you say, meet, meet me at the sweaty spa, there's like a big aversion to that. But for some reason, people think that sauna is different. I do agree that bars and restaurants are going out of style. Even the coffee meetings are going out of style. I know

a lot of VCs that are taking pitches with startup founders at McDonald's now. So let's say, let's meet at McDonald's instead of the coffee shop in Selma. Just kind of let you know. Or instead of coffee, like a three-hour lunch with five martinis. That works too. That's a really good way to get to know somebody. That's a great one. Exactly.

Yeah. A couple of martinis, get back in the office and create some shareholder value. That's right. That's great. Make a risky bet. Yeah. Let's go to haga's great. Make a risky bet. Yeah. Uh, let's go to Haga E T C dot ETH. Uh, so I tried to build a tech company from Norway and here's what happened. Two years of

building without almost any money funding, better part of a year without a salary, raise VC and become one of Norway's first unicorns face real unrealized gains, wealth tax bill of many X, my annual net salary. Of course, the company is loss-making, and all the investors have preference shares, so I can't take out any money. Call out publicly that this does not make sense, independent of level taxation needs to happen. When you actually make money, I move to Switzerland

because no politician cares or listens. I still don't get any tangible and sensible answers to my criticism of unrealized gains tax, but I do get to put up the wall of shame at the socialist party's offices. Yeah, so basically the Norway socialist party has literally a wall in their office where they put great entrepreneurs and people that left

because they couldn't bear the burden of this unrealized capital gain. So anyway, shout out to Norway for getting your best and brightest to leave and just go build their companies elsewhere. What a mess. Total mess. And the crazy thing is this law was being proposed

by the Kamala administration. They were teasing it. Who knows if it would have gone through, but just the fact that any politician was in favor of that shows a complete lack of financial literacy. Yep, yep, yep. And that was the one I would explain. I explained that to my parents just at one point,

and they were like, wow, that actually doesn't really make any sense. What's interesting is when the unrealized capital gains tax was proposed, a lot of people came out and said, this tax will have a negative effect on innovation and the economy. But I didn't see anyone propose an unrealized capital gains credit. And so you think about a capital allocator who grew a million dollar investment into a billion dollars. Why do you want them selling? Maybe you should get them some liquidity via tax credit, a payout from the government so that they can reinvest in the next generation of great

companies, double down without needing to put downward pressure on the stock market. I think that should be like the next platform, kind of take it in the other direction. Max Long. Exactly, exactly. So I'm- I got a- Oh yeah, we got a promoted post. Got a promoted post here from Evan Dolgo. Sorry if I mispronounced that.

But Evan is over at X, presumably working on their ad product. He says, in addition to, or sorry, he's quote tweeting Elon. Elon says, just want to say that we are super, that we super appreciate major brands resuming advertising on our platform. So thank you, Linda and the whole XAI team for your hard work. Yeah, so sort of common at this point, but earlier this year and I guess over the last couple years,

major advertisers were sort of uncomfortable with what the kind of content that was on the platform and the changes Elon was making and there was pressure from other groups so a lot of advertisers just completely stopped spending on the platform and Evan says we're seeing fortune 5 1,000 CEOs and technical leaders use X directly so I guess they're skipping just like working with agencies and you know outsourcing this kind of thing uh and uh i'm really excited i think that one of the the underrated things that will happen with x is just the ad platform getting a lot better historically in the twitter days it

was really impossible to get any sort of direct response yep campaigns working on the platform and so uh this company x has more data on me than most companies i want them to have more data so they can make better ads yep i'm actually i want them to create a separate premium product where i can pay a lot but still get all the ads right now that my ads are i don't see any ads yep um which is you know i like ads and um it's a big part of um you know we're trying to get it to like 20% of the content on the podcast. So big fans of ads here and X and thank you to Evan. Yeah.

Thanks to X and tell them the technology brother sent you when you sign up for a premium subscription, highly recommend it. You get a blue check mark and a bunch of great features. So go get X premium ASAP. Let's go to Sean Frank. He's been on the show before. Parking at the new Clippers Stadium is $70. Parking tickets from the city of LA range from $37 to $76 usually.

Parking tickets are slowly becoming a good deal. I like the way he's thinking. Arbitrage. Arbs. Arbs. No, it was fuck you money for me was when I could park my car and like be in a hurry and just risk like getting a ticket right because I and and knowing that if I did get a ticket it just like wasn't gonna hurt yep because like when I first moved to LA I was driving a car that I had bought for

two thousand dollars that had uh two hundred thousand miles on it and like that incremental ticket was gonna be like oh yeah like big deal that's a whole trader joe's run that's not going to happen well you know jim simons founder of renaissance technologies rip uh would famously speed everywhere yeah because he just made the economic calculation that it's not worth it to him he also smoked and never wore socks but yeah my favorite my favorite b-nair car story is uh you know that steve jobs would just get the same 911 like every three months because he didn't have to plate it yep there was some i think that loophole was maybe removed yeah he just always had the same car never had to plate it yeah and

it was like fully legal so that's a great arb fantastic and uh such a wild story yeah i love it uh let's go to suhail oh we already talked about this let's go to henry henry says adderall is unfair i can't believe we found the limitless pill the super serum the fucking nectar of athena and only annoying 12 year old boys who chew on erasers get it i say this is a former annoying 12 year old boy who chewed on erasers i mean this is not true adderall is like well you're not trying you're not trying hard society there's startups that will sell it to you there's a bunch of telemedicine companies that like basically just like violated every

single possible law yeah eventually the the dea shut them down uh or the yeah i think but yeah i'm sure there's a lot of doctors there's a lot of doctors in the valley that that um a lot of doctors in the valley that that a lot of doctors in the valley that that happily uh understand that capital allocators and uh high intensity entrepreneurs need uh peds there is a very interesting thing where you know you you have to be somewhat smart to get access to it and so you can get caught in this like death trap of like not having enough motivation or or intelligence to go figure out how to get it. Yeah.

And so you get stuck. Yeah. I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I mean, for me, I wish I just discovered nicotine earlier because for me, I get the same,

uh, the same benefit. Yeah. I've taken Adderall. The much shorter acting. Before, but it's shorter acting. I actually feel better on it.

I have less of these side effects. Like I think the average Adderall user uses the product during the day and then by like 6 p.m it's wearing off terrible mood it's just too strong i think it's over over prescribed and overdosed and nicotine entrepreneur recommends nicotine yeah yeah but uh i mean you saw rfk is planning to send all the adderall addicts to like some farm it was reported as like he's going to send them to like concentration camps because they can't concentrate or something it wasn't they didn't actually use that but but that was kind of like a misinterpretation of what he said he said like i would create like rehab facilities where people

could go and get clean optionally he wasn't mandating it detoxing from adderall is terrible i've never had to do it but i've had um yeah people that i'm close to do it it's like multi-month i mean the whole thing is they should just titrate down so if they're on 20 milligrams they should just do 19 18 17 16 just smaller and smaller doses and that's the trick with all these things you usually like the cold turkey is always like the hardest. Yeah. For most people. Of course, some people, that's just the only thing that works. Yeah, sports bettors, if you're out there and you're trying to quit, start with a $10,000 bet and just work your way down.

And by the end, you will barely feel anything. And you'll be like, oh, I guess I can just quit. Yeah, exactly. But most quit before they're right about, they're about to hit it big. Let's go to Jeff Weinstein at Stripe. He says, today, Stripe is launching an SDK built for AI agents. LLMs can call payment, billing, issuing, and APIs. Integrates with Vercel, Langchain, and Crew AI.

Use any model via functions per token billing. Excited for what you and your bots build. And then you replied and said, but everyone said AI would only want to use crypto. So, yeah yeah what are you thinking there because they did just buy bridge they're doing stuff with stable coins like why is this a violation there's been this narrative that that ai agents which jeff kind of uses this tongue-in-cheek but he says bots yeah like bots like used to be like pejorative pejorative and now it's like underperforming agents you can raise 10 on

if you say agents they needed to rebrand it yeah totally rebrand it it's great you can raise 10 on 50. If you say agents, they needed to rebrand it. Yeah, totally. They rebranded it. It's great. We love a rebrand that contributes to a bubble. But yeah, I thought this was cool. Like Stripe has sort of consistently, this is the challenge now for new startups is that you have these big companies that are moving like startups, right?

Like Jeff and his team are, try going and competing with them on an incorporation product, right? Like Jeff and his team are, try going and competing with them on an incorporation product, right? Like they care so much about the product. Jeff will, if I've ever had an issue with any product that Jeff's involved with, I text him, he responds immediately. He's like, this is slated to, you know,

and so that's part of, he's at Stripe. He works on their Atlas product. It sounds like he worked on this as well. But you text Jeff, he's like, I can't promise we'll get this fixed in the next hour but definitely definitely in the next like 24 hours you know i've actually dm'd him very briefly about something and so it was like super high touch that's a byproduct of like having a very entrepreneurial culture hiring jeff's a former entrepreneur himself that's right and so um tough to go compete there but i think it's interesting because I commented that

because there's this broad narrative that agents are just going to use digital assets because they're permissionless and you can just like, they're instant, they're less regulated. And that probably will happen, but there's going to be competition from traditional payment technology providers as well.

There's almost like an interesting theory where it's like if the AI agent can write so much boilerplate code, can at a certain point they just instantiate like a Stripe clone essentially and just use the most underlying payment rail because they're like, well, yeah, it doesn't matter if it's all boilerplate.

I'll just write it all out. I don't think we're anywhere near there yet, but you could imagine that you tell an agent to go do something and it just rewrites everything. Put a website on the internet and it just rebuilds WordPress from scratch for you. Who knows? Do we have a promoted post right now?

Yeah. Jumping in. Promoted post from Rob Report. Rob Report. Great publication and platform. platform says perched along the rugged cliffs of big sir a 150 acre oceanfront estate steeped in history has hit the market for the first time in nearly 60 years that's a gem um incredible looking property i could imagine us having a you know podcast studio somewhere like it at some point, it'd be a great place to record.

But anyways, if you are a Senti, now you're going to have to be a beaner for this one. Senti's. Depends on how much leverage you have. Yeah, yeah. You could use a bit of leverage if you're a Senti and potentially acquire this. Sneak in.

Sneak in. We are fans of leverage. But yeah, anyways, looks like a fantastic property. Happy to promote it here and i think that it's important um to uh really you know once you are post-economic to really start thinking about doomsday scenarios yes um that does become really top of mind get a place that that you're gonna sit out for the next coronavirus with your family loved ones yep get it well situatedsituated. This looks like a great place for it.

Yeah, I mean, we wanted to highlight this because it seems like a steal, honestly. So hopefully somebody in the audience can pick it up. At $100, with this property, it seems like they're giving it away. So I'd make sure to do your diligence and make sure there's no skeletons in the closet. But get in there and let us know if you wind up buying it. Thank you to Rob Report. Thank you. Let's go to Chris Power over at Hadrian.

He says, commies are afraid of the tungsten rods. And it's a quote from Nikkei Asia that says, China plans to tighten export controls on key dual-use technologies and items in two weeks, including raw materials and metals such as tungsten, graphite, magnesium, and aluminum alloys used commonly in tech products. Chris Power. Adrian, he buys a lot of aluminum right now. He's going to be buying more stuff soon.

Anyway, so I think I'm just glad that people like Chris that are having an impact in these industries are going to call the commies out directly. There's too much infighting in the United States. This is about us versus communism, always has been. Communism is arguably, you know, one of the most historically significant iterations of the Antichrist and we need to fight back. Yeah. Let's go to Nikita Beer. He says, more and more, I have lost conviction that minimum viable products make sense for product development. It makes no sense to release a product with the core

flow and then dismiss its viability after the aggregate data says people aren't using it. Instead, founders should have a fundamental belief about what people want and they should keep iterating until that value is correctly surfaced. In practice, this means you should keep a steady flow of new users as you add components to the product, seeing if it solves a core part of the activation and sign-up loop. I love this. It's just being deterministically optimistic. Yeah, I feel like he's finding a balance between iteration and I think what he's saying is don't put slop out there

and just be like, oh, it worked. It's minimum viable. It's like an excuse that a lot of people have picked up. Yeah, yeah. Put out quality things but commit to iterating on them yeah yeah you want to just uh just just have a yeah that's sort of the nature of like as software development and building products specifically digital products has gotten a lot easier it's just like the bar all that meant is that the bar got higher so if you can write half your product with llms in in record time like the actual

product like in many instances just needs to be you know multiples better than whatever you're replacing yeah yeah makes sense let's go to sicky chen he says unpopular opinion the more ai-based sales and marketing tools get the more valuable creative non-AI methods become. Proof of human, proof of work becomes 100x more valuable. Zig when everyone is zagging. This is what Huber said too. Everyone loves the zig when everyone's zagging. Yeah, so I've talked about this before. At least we've talked about it directly.

So even though it does seem like new Gen AI tools came aggressively after people that do stock photography, people that make illustrations, like some of this low-hanging aggressively after people that do stock photography, people that make illustrations, like some of this low hanging fruit, things that people thought like, Oh, AI will never be creative. Like I'm always going to just be able to make my like jingles with no

competition or, um, it does seem like it's, it's very much coming after the, the, the execution oriented creative work at the same time, the best creatives that I know, people like Ryan Harmon over at Day Job,

Emmett Shine, who has a new agency. He was at Gin Lane. We worked with Emmett on the branding for Rora's system. People like that have never been more in demand. They turn down probably 80% of the work that comes into them. And so you see this bifurcation of, of super talented creatives getting, you know,

even like when Siki worked with an agency, I forget the name of it to do like his original, every time Siki's released something, he like blows up the agency that did it. And that's just because it was like, it's not just because it visually looked good. It's just a lot of thought went into it and it looked, you know,

it's sort of, he like starts these little mini trends every time he does something. Yeah, there is something about like a lot of the AI tools are essentially like averaging the results. So you get a very like mid, mid-weight result. So you can develop, right now you can use Gen AI to make a site that looks like linear.

Yep. They're old stuff, but you're not going to make the next linear looks like linear yep they're old they're old stuff but you're not going to make the next linear using gen ai it's really really hard that's the beauty of it yeah and so just just taking the time to actually be creative and think of something unique and differentiated yes is the value it'd be an ideas guy this is the same uh do we have a promoted post promoted post from ferrari uh the ferrari tailor-made program is the pathway to realizing unique Ferrari models, such as this Ferrari 812 Competition with its stunning Verde Mineral bodywork. Competizione.

Competizione. Inside seats in beige Picari leather round off its inimitable defense. Inimitable. Inimitable sense of sophistication yeah hashtag marinello hashtag ferrari uh i saw a fantastic a12 in look at this thing it's beautiful look at this yeah i saw a beautiful a12 in west hollywood a few weeks ago i unfortunately my um sort of a sad story my friend uh bailey startup founder out there uh with a company called ribbon he uh he and his dad are very into cars have a fantastic collection and unfortunately less than two weeks

ago they were driving back from pch and some bozo and a model 3 really like made a really like sketchy move uh overusing the acceleration capabilities of their car and sideswiped their 812 gts very unfortunate i believe it was part of the tailor-made program rough but anyways best sort of like customization program on the planet uh some of the best looking cars in the world come out of it yeah and i hope every one of our listeners takes the time to play the Ferrari game and get into this program. It's not something you can walk in

off the street and do. Yep. But it's certainly worth doing. Yeah, but if you're at the Ferrari dealer, tell them that John and Jordy sent you. Let's go to Gautier. He's been on the show before. I say, this is a great headline.

And the screenshot says, Red Lobster CEO says, Endless shrimp is never coming back because, quote, before say this is a great headline and the screenshot says red lobster ceo says endless shrimp is never coming back because quote i know how to do math and i love this this guy this guy's great i forget the exact backstory but isn't he like one of the youngest like fortune 500 or fortune 1000 looks like he looks super young very young just like comes into like this established brand and it's just like i I'm not doing this stupid stuff. I'm just going to use common sense. Yeah, common sense.

Common sense. Yeah. But he's had a lot of headlines like this. That's fantastic. Yeah. Hopefully we can get him to, you know, call into the show at some point. What a revival for this brand. I mean, clearly just taking the company in a different direction and then also getting

press while doing it. It's fantastic. Yeah. I think more, more public company CEOs need to just be like saying like really simple things that will get picked up that just like act like maybe directly or indirectly carry out their message, which is like red lobster CEO says, I know how to do math. We will use this to our benefit on business strategy decisions yeah it's kind of like compressing down like a bigger theory like like i'm sure there's 10 other ceos right now that are saying like well we're driving shareholder value through responsible capital allocation um

but that's not going to go viral yeah it's not going to get the red lobster ceo is like i use one of our napkins at one of our restaurants to like update our strategy going and you should you should be able to do that. It's a restaurant business. It's not the most complicated thing. Like you should know, like, you know, revenue minus costs, profit. Like this is basic. This has been the foundation of our podcast. And there's a lot of people that go into these companies and they get too creative and they start telling wild stories to the stock market and they get

over their skis with some sort of crazy pitch and then they have to back it up and so they're investing in all this weird stuff instead of just like you know doing the product better and tackling costs blocking and tackling and just grinding it out uh let's go to josh kushner he says as heavily researched as the information and i believe he's calling out uh sam lesson for Did Sam write the post? Yeah, Sam wrote a post and said that Josh Kushner, quote, invests in Fifth Avenue and that Slow wants to not invest in Fifth Avenue and not chase the really hot deals.

But Josh was clarifying and was posting a screenshot from his interview with Patrick on Invest Like the Best where he basically says, you know, he tells his mom that they invest in Fifth Avenue. And my view is you always pay a fair price for Fifth Avenue. Markets go up. Markets go down. But at the end of the day, if you invest in quality, that quality will ultimately compound on itself. There's a scarcity value to quality. Those that invested in Fifth Avenue a decade are happy with it.

It's a good strategy. It makes sense. You may as well take learnings from generations in your family and put them to work in your existing pursuit. Exactly. This is an example of why we have a segment on this podcast called The Truth Zone where we fact uh fact checked the journos yep that um you know oftentimes it's not necessarily like um you know they'd like to avoid facts at times and other times they like just to

to sort of position things in the negative that are objectively positive so uh we are big fans of thrive paying up to back blue chip companies and i think more allocators should be willing to pay a premium to get into the good ones. Yeah. And I mean, realistically at the same time, like we're a fan of slow and, and they're differentiated model.

And the point is, is that these two firms are not, or they're less competitive. They're playing different games and that's okay. But Sam is the master of like throwing in some kind of like snarky little bit to his like screenshot essay, just to kind of get people's hackles up. And that actually drives engagement. So good content marketing.

And that's fuel. So I think this is like a win-win because like you come away reading this like, oh, Josh actually has a more nuanced strategy than I thought. And oh, Slow has a more nuanced strategy than I thought. And now more people know about the differentiated strategies here. So win-win, a little bit of a battle on the timeline. Honestly, the only loser is the information. But as the TMZ of tech, they can afford that. Let's go to Catherine Boyle. This is an older post. Actually, no, she just recently quoted it, but she's quote tweeting an older post about there's been a recent daily drip of hit pieces. And unless you've witnessed

one firsthand it's hard to explain what they're designed to do and so she says to those experiencing media hit pieces for the first time reposting this note on the anatomy of a hit and what it's designed to do hit pieces are designed to create fear test loyalties tie up the time of you and your team so you can't focus on work they seek to shake the weakest link on your team loose and stop your momentum. The only way to lose momentum is to cede to it. Do not let the hit stop your momentum. I love this. I think that's a great point of view.

I guess what I would say is 99% of hit pieces, from my point of view, are just designed to get attention. Right. Like it's just like a media company, like clickbait, a desperate cry for, for love. Right. Like nobody reads these publications.

Right. Like it was funny when, when, uh, New York magazine came after Huberman. Yeah. Uh, it was like the only time you've ever heard of New York magazine,

like decades. Right. And so it's like this desperate, uh, ploy for any type of relevancy or like even these these media companies are not even in the conversation at all yep so it's like kind of like hey like i'm over here like don't forget about me like let me take down somebody that is doing something interesting or somebody that people really love a lot uh in the case of uh huberman um And it was funny because it was just like

Chad Hominin attacks against Huberman. Like really just like this guy's... Well, I have this theory that a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its shoes on. You've heard this? Of course. If it bleeds, it leads.

And so my theory is that hit pieces are actually more effective at moving the needle than puff pieces puff pieces just gets thrown to the side oh some company raised money and they're gonna do something cool but a hit piece it grips the viewer they got to read it love or hate then usually there's like a backlash to the backlash and your most hardcore fans rally around you and say like what happened with huberman people were like actually i'm on his side and his fan base got stronger yeah and so i've been courting hit pieces with journalists for the last couple weeks talking to them just freely just on the record just ripping quotes just saying whatever and in a couple weeks we're

gonna find out if i'm a genius or an idiot. Because there's going to be a bunch of hit pieces about me. And we'll see. I think the hit pieces will be really funny. I was already in one. The SEO benefits alone are fantastic. Yeah, I was in one in Fast Company about the toxic bro podcasters who are a threat to America. And it was a fascinating article because it goes through, it lists me, Mike Solana, Mark Andreessen, Huberman. And so once that article went out, it didn't get that much lift because it was just a link thrown out on X by some tiny account that no one remembers.

But what I did was I deliberately looked through, I put the whole article into ChatGPT and was like, give me everyone's name who's mentioned. And I just took this list and I posted this. It was like, here are all of the toxic men who are destroying America. And then everyone else, it was like better than being on the Forbes 400. Like that for that day, like Mark Andreessen was reposting it. Everyone was like, this is amazing. Like, this is hilarious. People were like, yeah, they're coming for us. Like we're must be doing something right. And, uh, and I actually immediately DM the, the, the journalist who wrote it and was like, Hey, we should do a whole piece about me. Come on.

Let's talk. And I talked to her. I checked. She hasn't written a piece yet, but we'll see. Hopefully it's really bad because if it's really bad, then I can get all the technology brothers to ride and take the fight to them. And then we'll all be like, we're unsubscribing. Never obviously subscribed, but yeah, we're never going there. I'm putting it in my block list. Like, we're never going there. I'm putting it in my block list.

Like, I'm never going there. Like, the outrage will drive more traffic. And it's going to be mutually beneficial. Because if they write some puff piece about me, I'm going to tweet it. I'll be like, oh, I got a puff piece. Like, it's so great. And a couple of people are going to be like, cool, dude. Like, like.

But if there's a hit piece, I'm going to be like, this is unacceptable. You got to go read this whole thing. It's going to drive a bunch of clicks and add revenue for them. And it's going to drive a bunch of, like, support for them and it's going to drive a bunch of like support for me so it's win-win and so that's why i think the new model with the media is technologists pitching hit pieces to journalists and then and then benefit everyone collective effort exactly we i mean we did this with business insider who you know we hadn't heard of at the time but we dug in we saw that they obviously put you know clicks and traffic above the truth.

So we tried to feed them the most incendiary quotes deliberately to get a hit piece. And it had a pretty good effect. It came out very fair, and it actually showed the company a little. We're talking about Excel. Yeah, yeah, Excel. Yeah, even if it was more incendiary,

it would have maybe you know driven more clicks yeah yeah we the only critique is that we didn't go hard enough we should have been more aggressive for sure really aired our dirty laundry to give them something to bite onto for that real real yeah you know hit piece uh you know article link um so let's go to another promoted post and then we'll move on last promoted promoted post of the podcast is from DuPont Registry. They have a 2022 Bugatti Chiron Pure Sport. Pure Sport, yeah. Limited to only 60 units worldwide. Finished in a striking red and black exterior,

this Pure Sport embodies Bugatti's commitment to performance and aesthetics, blending aggression and elegance in every line. Yeah. Look at this thing. I mean, we love cars and bids, but sometimes you've got to go to the DuPont registry to pick up something that's truly one of one. One of one. And a car like that, specifically if you're a venture capitalist in San Francisco, and you're going to a coffee meeting and you're street parking that, it's going to make a statement.

Yeah. We saw some VCs. Yeah, there's not much valet around San Francisco. And the benefit of that is sometimes you're driving a nice car you don't really want valet dealing with it especially a manual you don't a lot of that's a big issue we're seeing you know in valets around the world you know valets don't know how to drive manual anymore and sometimes out of embarrassment they'll try to and that can impact the transit especially at W16 I mean that's a lot of cylinders yeah so anyways uh we'd

like to see uh if you're an allocator out there go get one of these yeah it's like a great time to talk about geordie's law the one percent rule uh wait i have so many laws at this point i mean as i remember you phrasing it was that uh if you're a capital allocator you should you should take how what's your aum take one percent of that and that's how much you should spend on a car. Your next car. Your next car. So if you have a $400 million fund, that's $4 million. You should probably be in like McLaren 300.

Go get one of these. Yeah, you could get a LaFerrari. Yeah, but if you're managing $2 billion, 1% of that's $20 million. You're in McLaren F1 territory. Yeah, yeah. You could even get into some of the Ferrari classics. $150 million fund, you're looking at a Carrera GT. $50 million fund, you can still get a Huracan. Yep. But if you don't spend 1% of the 150 million dollar fund you're looking at a career gt 50 million dollar fund you can still get a hurrican you know but if you don't if you don't spend one percent of the

fund and a lot like that clock how much you have they're gonna be like can this person actually write me a check they pulled up in a exactly in a in you know in some bmw 5 series like this makes no sense they're yeah they're not gonna be able to do my series a yeah so uh getting getting a bugatti street parking it outside a cafe and in uh know, Soma is going to be a great way to send a message to the next generation. Or take the meeting in it. Right. You could just go for a drive. It's much easier to focus on what some AI agent founders saying. Yes. You're also getting to drive and experience a machine like this. Exactly. Exactly. Let's go to Erin Price Wright at Andreessen.

She says, no place more optimistic than the local Ace Hardware store on a Saturday morning. Low-Tam banger. Low-Tam banger. That's good. Yeah, it's great. I think as dads, we've been to- I love going to the hardware store on Saturday morning.

It's great. Try not to climb ladders myself. It's a little dangerous. But I will on Saturdays on occasion. I just love going and getting a widget. Go get some random stuff. Go get some screws. Go get some PVC pipes.

Be in the screw aisle, you know, looking around. Just really picking what you want. Build something. Fix something. Even if you can pay somebody to do it, there's great glory in doing it yourself. Hardware stores also are, like, incredibly merchandised, right? Yeah. and doing it yourself. Hardware stores also are like incredibly merchandise, right? Like there's so many weird things that you're, the only store that they're in is like in the hardware store

like some weird like water toy that like a kid would want or you know, things of that nature. Where do you go to get that normally? Yeah, that's fantastic. Go to Chris Prusa, he says, "'You might not like it, "'but you're about to kiss Tim Cook's ring "'and empty your wallet.'" And itusha. He says, you might not like it, but you're about to kiss Tim Cook's ring and empty your wallet.

And it's a screenshot that says, the M4 Max somehow holds its own against the RTX 4080 Super, which is not quite top of the line Nvidia gaming graphics card, but certainly up there. And yeah, I mean, I've heard the benchmarks on these M4s, like 100% worth upgrading.

Like they're even in the Mac minis now, and they're like the size of an Apple TV now. And the M4, just incredible performance. So if you're... I think it's underrated how in the same way that the Cayenne allowed Porsche to invest in the 911 platform, the iPhone has been that for the entire mac ecosystem right so yeah that makes sense although dissipation yeah it was historically like you know i growing up in a in an apple household i never actually i never owned a pc until i got a uh until i got one of those little mini like 200 computers in high school that i would use to ddos my dad's website i would just literally in my room i'd be like have this machine running that would just be

ddos my dad's website and i'd fuck with him i'd be like dad why is your site down he's like we're getting like the calls coming from inside the house yeah no my dad my dad was a teacher so i just think and he would list his homework on the website so i think it was hilarious students can't get it like a hero of all his students like sorry it was your website was down yeah yeah honestly my dad's problem he should have had cloudflare set up seriously yeah but yeah no i i think that the the it's it's amazing that that apple's continued to just continuously make the MacBook Pro the only laptop that matters. Unless you're, you know, we have ThinkPads, but just for the sort of like modeling work that we do. Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, fantastic machine. Highly recommend upgrading. Aiden McLeod says, okay, this is wild. And it's a quote from Noah Smith that says, notably heavy users of TikTok, i.e. those with three or more hours of daily screen time, demonstrated a roughly 50% increase in pro-China attitudes compared to non-users. It's wild.

Very bad, very bad. Really proves that. Not beating the allegations, TikTok. Not beating the allegations. Yeah, I'm super, you know, Propaganda app. You know, one of potentially the most wasteful domain acquisitions ever, but I own bandtalk.com.

You told me about that. Bandtalk.com, nothing up there right now. But if you want to do something with it... I wonder how it's going to pencil out. I mean, obviously, we're talking about politics. No, but basically the whole political movement to ban TikTok is completely dead seemingly evaporated yeah because of the sesquihana guy right yeah he's like a huge

shareholder and he's a big donor yeah yeah i think he got it killed but i i hope that you know obviously like i was pro ban but i do think the american companies can out innovate if they keep developing like i've already seen a lot of people move to YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. And realistically, you just need to develop good media habits and recognize that even an audiobook or the Founders Podcast. The next generation of successful capital allocators are really, really not you know tiktoks so yeah just just intellectually tell yourself i can't think of a more negative on that yeah i can't think of a more negative signal yeah then then uh you know yeah it's only becoming a meme with parents like parents don't want their kids swiping and scrolling like like pixar film that's a masterpiece there's

a reason pixar yeah but i think if we build a movement around everybody realizing that every swipe on TikTok is dollars that you could be putting in meta shareholders' pockets. Yes. Oh, this is good. That is, by itself, just like the financial dilemma there. It's just like, we need to protect American companies and encourage American innovation. And the more dollars Meta gets per citizen in the United States, the more they can innovate. And just support Zuck.

I mean, the guy has a fantastic watch collection. He's getting into cars now. Great ranch. Great fits. What does Shochu have at TikTok, the CEO? I don't know anything about his interests. He just shows up in Congress wearing some boring suit. Lying. Claiming to be Congress wearing some boring suit. Lying.

Claiming to be this real boss when clearly he's not. Claiming that they're not storing all the data. When clearly they are. Yeah. And so who do you want to support? The Chad Zuck or the Virgin Soju? Actually, I need to add DGI and TikTok to the enemies list. Because I think that it's our duty to say, again again i think we could even get bumper stickers made that say like keep your swipes on american

apps exactly yeah every swipe matters every swipe matters every ad watched that's going into the american economy if it's on and if you want to personally benefit from it buy meta stock yeah yeah exactly you can't buy tiktok. You can't buy ByteDance. I mean, you can, but good luck getting the money out of the country when you need to. That's rough. This is some heartbreaking news. I'm really, really disappointed about this, but we got to talk about it. So Tapestry and Capri Holdings have called off their $8.5 billion merger. So Tapestry owns brands like Coach and Kate Spade, while Capri owns Versace.

And I think we were all really excited for these storied brands to come together in a merger that could drive more shareholder value, better products, even go further up the market. We love consolidation. Consolidation is important. Yes. And the fact that this isn't happening is,

we're fans of consolidation, We're fans of competition. Sometimes you need consolidation to encourage meaningful competition. Right. And this could have created, this could have competition. Yeah. Competitions for losers. Competitions for losers. And this would mean less competition. But in this situation, we're trying to create an oligopoly, right? Sure, sure. Where this could have created a sort of meaningful competitor to LVMH. LVMH, yeah. And while LVMH is still founder-led and really quite a juggernaut, we want more multinational conglomerates sort of competing for luxury dollars, right? Yes, exactly. It's going to drive up the quality of goods. It's going to drive up margins, ideally, and create more diversified assets.

Yeah, so our hope is that some private equity firms can get involved, figure something out, turn some of these companies around. There's clearly a general excitement about the opportunity. Exactly. I mean, luxury goods are going to be one of the big beneficiaries of the Ozempic boom. Yeah, we, you know, people.

Falling interest rates and rising asset values. Yeah, we didn't talk about this during the Ozempic section. But, yeah, all that money that people would have been spending on things in their life because they were overweight like Doritos and things like that they can now spend on watches bags clothing expensive you know jewelry etc and fine fine goods so yeah best of luck to everyone involved in both of those companies we hope you can figure it out soon figure it out let's go to Eric he says's no comparison here. Perplexity AI is massively out executing Google, a company with 235X the market cap and 1500X the employee count of perplexity. And it's two screenshots of what's going on with the Solana market cap. And on perplexity, it just gives you the answer with a beautiful chart and all the data's right there. And on Google, you're routed to a bunch of other websites and you're three

clicks deep from getting the answer you want. And it's pretty interesting. This is one of the modules that you would expect Google to roll out in their AI generated responses, but they just haven't gotten around to it. It's because people used to critique uh google for generating their own content based around the links right like you're celebrating that worth yeah yeah you're hurting small businesses because you're not allowing the clicks to go through same thing with the lyrics websites like rap genius was his own thing but then google sucked all the lyrics in you type the lyrics they just give you the lyrics right there you're not clicking you're not driving not genius shareholders but good for brutal alphabet yeah exactly but now perplexity is the next gen yeah but yeah perplexity like it is cool how much they're doing and how fast they're moving on the

ui considering low employee count uh it is kind of funny really got to like the awesome thing is they're clearly like iterating based on consumer interest at that. So they don't have to do everything at once. But they nailed the election stuff. A bunch of really good graphs and data around that. Now they're doing cryptocurrency, which all the election attention is now able to just lock in to new markets. Yeah. Let's go to Rob Schmidt. I think Jake Paul has idolized Mike Tyson his entire life, knew he needed money, and found a way to get him rich again.

So Tyson made like $20 million. Is that true? Yeah, I think he may have made more than Jake on this, on the fight itself. So anyways, I don't know if this is real. Yeah, so UFC is, the way to think about boxing is you have, historically you have like a commission. I don't even know if that was in this

because it was more of, like, a, you know, it was not, like, a sanction. It was an exhibition fight, not a sanction fight. But in the UFC, there's basically, like, the league, and there's commissions because, like, there's gambling on it. There needs to be, like, some, like, rules and, you know, non-biased organization.

But, yeah, this, i would love to believe this is true i'm sure that jake paul really does like uh mike tyson and respects him why else would you want to fight somebody like sure if you're a fan of boxing i do wonder if that's true because jake paul's so young he didn't grow up during the mike tyson era i know but he got like ridiculously focused on boxing for the last like five six years and you have to imagine he's seen every single tyson fight and yeah and like idolized him it's like how tyson was like for a lamborghini kuntosh that was before our time tyson like is an example of like somebody who's monetized their attention very well he turned

you know being an athlete into athlete into being a major cannabis investor and entrepreneur. That's true. So shout out to Jake if this is true. Wow, 17K likes. Got his idol loaded. Yeah, I'm excited. I wonder what he'll do with it.

Maybe he'll invest. One of the greatest signs of respect among men is to help, if you respect somebody, help them make $20 million. Yeah. That's great. That was the foundation of this partnership. Sure. Sure.

Yeah. Mutual respect. Let's go to Max Novenstern. He says the most expensive mistake this decade will not, will be not being optimistic enough. And Paki says, preach. I love it. I'm sure somebody else commented, top. Top.

But I think it's right. I think it's right. Like we are going into a big boom. There's so many interesting technologies. Like there's so many things that are going to get built out in big ways. And then also small ways. We see this with like, you see these amazing LLM demos and then you're at the DMV and you're like, this is still on paper and pencil.

Like there's still so much low hanging fruit. We're catching rockets with chopsticks. It's crazy. How are you not bullish? More optimistic. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great time.

Great time to be alive. And I'm sure Pac will be documenting it all. So the real sign that like we've turned a corner in america is when like our our children are like 10 years old and they're like dad i don't want to be an influencer i don't want to be a podcaster i want to be a rocket scientist astronaut yeah and you're like shed a tear yeah i love it i love it i recorded this podcast yes so that you could go to space yes yes yes yeah the ben franklin quote yeah i learned podcasting and media so that my son may learn war. Intergalactic travel.

It's normally like I studied war politics and blah, blah, blah. So my son could study art. So that my son could study business so that his son could study art. Yeah. It's like the gist of that quote, but it's great. Do we have another promoted post? I think we got a couple more. I think we have one more.

I said it was the last one. I mean, the fans want lots. they want a lot of ad reads last one from uh promoted post from ralph lauren fantastic our hashtag polar bear polo bear doesn't just stop at sweaters just from throw pillows and pajamas to cable knit accessories the rl holiday 2024 collection includes the perfect gifts for celebrating discover the polo bear shop here Polo Bear is just such a timeless illustration and staple of the Ralph Lauren collection. Do they give us a call to action? It's ralphlauren.com, is that correct?

Yeah, rlauren.co slash RLHoliday. And so what I'm most impressed about is that they included a link on here. It still managed to get 20,000 views, which is a difficult uphill battle if you're including links. So whoever's managing their social, maybe kill the link next time. But impressive traction regardless. But anyways, this is just such a – I love this bear.

Every time I see him, I know it's Q4, and I know that there's a lot of work to do. But also we got some you know nice celebrations i also saw it kind of break into our world in the defense tech community because there's a there's a photo of the bear wearing a hawaiian shirt and everyone's like oh he's got the palmer lucky fit on which i love give the bear a gun give the bear yes the ralph lorenne they even have like uh you know hopefully they make one you know this this could be a good gift for you if they have a father with three sons yeah the bear dad and the three sons i'll get it for you okay fantastic thank you uh related to the last uh regular post

uh dr dad phd says a show called White Mirror where we have cool technology and everything goes great. I love this. I would definitely watch this. I know. This is like TV productions. Yeah. The problem is that if you don't have conflict, you don't have a story. And so every sci-fi story has to be somewhat dystopian.

Somewhat dystopian. There was so much about... I just feel like everything in our life is like finally starting to just like it's all oriented around science fiction yeah like even we we looked at it the like gm office in the 60s looked like a sci-fi novel right um the tesla's tesla's entire last major product launch was all like the RoboTaxi, the humanoid robots. You know what is a good example of this? Have you watched The Expanse?

The Expanse is a fantastic sci-fi show. It was a book series and Bezos bought it to do the – it was on Sci-Fi Channel and they brought it over to Amazon. And Amazon threw a bunch of money behind it. So it turned into like almost Game of Thrones production level. Really great show. But what's interesting is that the show is like hard sci-fi so there's spaceships there's interstellar or interplanetary travel they go between mars and the an asteroid belt but the the technology is not the villain necessarily yeah like they have spaceships

but the villains are still human yeah and so it's really cool and I've always wanted to see like a sci-fi story where it's just like Chinatown in space. Yeah. Or, you know, it's like, yeah, the technology is there but the technology is not the bad thing. Maybe Hollywood will go more... Techno-optimistic.

Instead of focusing on, you know, social issues, it can go techno-optimist. That'd be really cool. And let's recreate the same social issues we have today in space. Yeah. Suddenly, I'd watch that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that can hit a little bit harder. And there are some movies that do that. Like, even in Inception, like, the dream technology is not really, like, the problem that they're working against. They're not trying to ban dream technology. They're trying to solve this other problem. They're doing a heist. Yeah.

And the technology is just one of the factors. No Atlas Shrugged. Yeah, exactly. So I would gladly watch White Mirror. There's already some White Mirror shows out there. We just need to celebrate them. And it's shows like The Expanse, which I highly recommend. Let's go to Anne-Marie Holdern.

Anne-Marie Holdern, she says, Jamie Dimon responds to Trump. First of all, I wish the president well, and thank you. It's a very nice note, but I just want to tell the president also, I haven't had a boss in 25 years and I'm not about ready to start, Dimon tells Lisa Abramowitz. Interesting. We don't talk about politics, so I don't even know what to say about this. I'm not, yeah, I'm not sure I can comment on this except that we know what it's like to have a boss because I worked at a Ritz-Carlton once. Sure. And I once worked at a nightclub.

I was the guy that would pick up the cigarette butts the next morning when I was 14. That was a good job. I was doing basically the same thing when I worked at Citadel and Bain Capital. Yeah. I didn't like having a boss too much yeah i couldn't do it yeah i've never had a full-time boss yeah full-time job boss it's like yeah not for me so i understand and you know uh being a b-nair without a boss that's the dream yep that's the dream so shout out to diamond i hope you can work with the administration and uh bring about an amazing

american decade and support financial innovation wherever it may come from. Let's go to Rune. Rune says, AGI might bring infinite abundance, but on the other hand, there's only so many houses on Seacliff. It's true. Very real. Yeah, it's very real. I was thinking about this.

In the really, really far out future, you might have something where it's like, okay, I go in my Neuralink VR world and i have the sea cliff house but i still think even if it's even if you can't tell the difference in the moment there's something about people want the real thing another b-nair can't and it's the same thing with it's the same thing with art like you can go and get a perfect replica of the mon Lisa, but that's not the one that has value. It's the story. It's like there's something about these stories. And I think that a lot of that element is underrated

in how AI will transform, even post-AGI. It's almost innately human to feel scarcity, right? And that's why one-of-one a ferrari tailor-made yep 812 competizione um is always going to be significant package yeah exactly exactly like these are going to be assets even if the even if the production values are artificially constrained yep um or you know with a company like artificially constrained but the the scarcity is very real we feel it when you go look at the prices for some of these cars totally totally um but yeah i i think it's very instructive to look at the story of chess like the computers beat uh

the chess masters in i think the 80s for a, there was a hybrid centaur chess phase. Are you familiar with this? Where essentially no human could beat a computer one-on-one, but a human playing with a computer could beat the computer. Consistently? Yes, consistently. Because the computer would recommend a bunch of things and the human could use their intuition

to pick the right thing from the set and the computer was just augmenting the human. And that was, Centaur chess was dominant for, I think like the 90s. I'm not exactly sure. But then at a certain point, the AI got so good

that no human, even playing alongside a computer, can beat a computer. Computers are always worse. The human will only make it worse. But look at what's happened to chess. It's exploded. Chess.com is worth like $100 million or more.

Like they're a big company. Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru, like Alex Botez. Like there's multiple chess influencers. There's chess competitions. There's Queen's Gambit on Netflix is a sensation. People like playing it and people like watching humans play it. And there's even all this meta gaming

about like how can we get the humans not to use the AI and cheat? and there was that scandal about the guy who might have had something in his butt or something you remember this oh yeah yeah the vibe the vibrating yeah yeah and or like in his shoe and so like like you could imagine this like future scenario where like people like the same thing could be true for podcasting where it's like yeah you could go get a more factual podcast from the ai but people want to see the human do it. You want to hear us mess up. Yeah. You want to hear us get it wrong. And you want to see like the messy, the messy like edges that come from like actual human dialogue and the risk of like, Hey, I might have to put some caution

tape over my mouth. Cause what, what I might say might get me canceled. The AI isn't going to get canceled. You're just going to refresh it and start from scratch. I've been just on the topic of SF and SF adjacent real estate. Like you have after decades of poor governance, you have to imagine like you can go buy a similar house in like San Francisco, the home of the technology industry and one of the biggest economies in the world for similar prices like some like just okay house in like a random nice neighborhood of dallas like what's going to be worth more in like 10

years right especially as sf's local government governance stuff gets figured out um and uh so anyways like i i think uh buying anything in that area you're probably going to do pretty well yeah i mean that's why it was important for us to promote that post about the $150 million home that hopefully one of our listeners will take home. Exactly. Because there's only so many of those. Sawyer Merritt says, SpaceX president and COO Gwen Shotwell

on the company having $22 billion in government contracts. We earned that. We bid it. We were the lowest price, best bidder. We won and we execute. It's not a bad thing to serve the United States government with great capability and products. We earned that. We bid it. We were the lowest price, best bidder. We won and we execute. It's not a bad thing to serve the United States government with great capability and products. What a badass quote.

Just like throwing down the gauntlet. I love it. Yeah, that's a quote that could go on the wall. Fantastic. Potential brother of the week here. Yeah. She's fantastic. Put that one aside. Yeah. We got to put this one

aside. That's going on the short list. Uh, yeah, I did a whole video on Gwen Shotwell and her career. It was one of my first viral videos on YouTube because everyone's talking about Elon and no one really knew the story of Gwen Shotwell, but she's been super critical, took a whole ton of career risk going in super early and has just, you know, just driven that company and just executed, executed, executed and, uh, just fantastic public speaker, fantastic counterweight to Elon's, you know, experimental mindset and like, you know, dreaming big. She's the one that can actually go and drive. Good example of, you know, if you're somebody who's interested in deep tech, but you're more of a business mind, uh uh you can go have impact

in these industries go to look up our portfolios any number of those companies needs financial and operations innovators to drive these companies forward and on that note i can't help myself i want to do one more sure promoted post from carl yang who's building financial products at ramp okay he says he caught up with a friend and that friend said i'm supposed to be making strategic decisions and turning around companies with my superior insights since a guy with an hbs hat with his mouth open and the partner at the firm is saying fix the effing ap process question mark mark, or exclamation point, exclamation point. And yeah, a lot of like, you know, PE is just going in and you're not going to create a tremendous amount of value by getting rid of the fax machines and the sort of like, you know, taking payments and checks and stuff like that. But you can have a pretty big impact andamp is a fantastic way to do that.

I understand that they are fairly dominant with a lot of the larger PE firms for good reason. Yeah, they bring it in. So just built into their process now. It's very sharp. Thank you to Carl for innovating in one of the most important sectors of our economy. I'm happy to promote Ramp at any time. Tell them the Technology Brothers sent you, if you're on board. AJA Cortez says, my father went back to college when he was 40, graduated medical school at 47, and has been now a doctor going on 20 years. I

didn't realize it at the time, but it made a deep impression that a man can reinvent himself at any time. Age is a non-factor and with that, and with, and that with consistency, effort, discipline, you can do whatever you want. I had no idea people considered age to be a factor at all in a man slowing down until I was in my twenties. I was never raised to think that way. That's a fantastic post. That's very, very inspiring. And that's true. Yeah. I mean, i mean yeah if you're if you're going into work and you feel like your work is at the kms building um or if you if you ever feel if you ever feel like you need to have a blanket on at work because you're so miserable yep and you feel

sick get out there reinvent yourself reinvent yourself i think this honestly like what's funny is do you remember being in college and like the oldest guy in the room was always like in the military and like graduated? Yeah. And it's very normalized to like go in the military, do that for 10 years, come out and then just like have a totally new career, right? It's not like you're like, oh, I only know how to shoot a gun. I'm just going to do this. Yeah, no, no, no. Just not factor.

If you only do the things that you know how to do, you'll be sweeping floors your whole life. So go reinvent yourself. Make big moves into different industries. And there's so many great stories. I've seen that dude who was a Navy SEAL, then a doctor at Harvard, and then an astronaut. And he's an Asian dude. And the meme is like he must have like the the only the only asian dude with like parents who are proud of him or something

he did the thing and like satisfied all of their expectations i love that it's so good but yeah just crush and uh go just crush yeah you can just do things you can just do things oh this is a great one from ben miles he asks us uh do we have any favorite deal toys? This one is cool from Ginkgo Bioworks. And I actually met the Ginkgo Bioworks guys back in like 2013 in an office in Boston. And you invested, right? I did not. I had no money to my name, so it was miserable.

But I have an interesting fundraising story. If I could go back in time, my investment strategy would just be to give John Coogan $100 million in 2012. Well, Senra calls me the Forrest Gump of tech because I've been like, oh yeah, I was in the same YC batch as Coinbase. Oh yeah, I was hanging out with the Ginkgo Bioworks guys at this one time.

Oh yeah, I met this dude at a random time. And it's just all these sliding doors moments in Silicon Valley. But Ginkgo Bioworks, it was fascinating. I met with the founding team. We were thinking about working with them. And we'd raised something like a million bucks or a million and a half for Soylent. And they were like, okay, you're the first company.

We were a YC company. You're the first company that's in like bio or food or anything that's not software that's being taken seriously by VCs. Like what, and the founder literally told me is what we'd really love for you to do is go and raise a massive, like $20 million round, because that would just like be a massive signal to the market that like, this is an investable category. And I was like, ah, that's funny. Like we'll never do that. And then like six months later, we raised a $20 million round and then immediately after, Ginkgo started raising really big rounds too

and their business was ripping and then they went public and now the CTO of Palantir is actually on their board, Shamsankar. And it's just a very interesting company. If you don't know what they do, they manufacture things for fragrances but they do a lot of chemical and bioengineering.

It's a very cool lab. Even when I saw it in 2013, they had all these robots moving around, like pipetting things. Not a robotics company. Not a robotics company, but they were leveraging robotics and automation. And they built a bunch of software to automate testing. So you need to test 10 different titrations of one chemical by 10 different titrations of a different chemical. You mix that creates a hundred different variations. You can just have a PhD student just sitting there doing it. That sucks. That's what they do in every lab in America,

like all the universities, even Caltech, but they just automated all that. So they were able to iterate through all these experiments like much faster. And I think they wound up creating a bunch of like basically industrial chemicals that they could go and sell. But I actually like this starting point as an inspiration for some of our own deal toys of like, imagine a microphone in glass. Well, I mean,

if you, if you're not familiar every week, we do the brother of the week. We award someone who exemplifies what it means to be a technology brother, a student of capitalism, a capital allocator, et cetera. And at the end of the year,

we'll be sending out deal toys to commemorate each brother of the week. And so we want to do something that captures the fact that, you know, not only are they a student of capitalism, but they're also a great poster. Yep. Because you can't win. As we saw with Mark Cuban,

he was brother of the week, but he left X. He's no longer a poster, so we had to rescind the award. So he won't be getting a deal toy. But send in your thoughts. Let us know what do you think our Brother of the Week deal toy should look like. I'm thinking something with an X in there, something with some dollar signs, something to represent technology, capital, brotherhood. Thank you to Ben for servicing this to us. Yeah, thanks, Ben. Send us your best ideas.

Feel free to get on ChatGPT, Dolly, and create some AI art for us to inspire us. Morgan Housel says, despite, it's a quote, he says, despite its success wong remains acutely aware that nvidia's leadership position could prove fleeting which may explain his relentless work ethic i do everything i cannot to go i can i do everything i can not to go out of business uh it's from an interview in fortune with Jensen Wong the founder and CEO of NVIDIA I love it I love a relentless work ethic

unclear how risky he is and it seems like his leadership position is in a pretty strong place I mean they have massive pricing power that type of mentality gets you delisted there's a lot of startups that are going after this doing specific chip designs for AI

for LLMs maybe there's a risk who knows obviously there's incredible IP startups that are going after this doing you know specific chip designs for ai for llms yeah it's like maybe there's a risk who knows obviously there's incredible ip but we we know it's a thin wrap around tsmc yeah um and so the reason that uh nvidia uh you know is successful today is because of that mentality across decades at this point. Yeah. I also just think like, yeah, I mean, obviously there's like a talent war in everything AI right now and NVIDIA is no different. There's a lot of people that made a ton of money working for NVIDIA during the latest stock run up. You got to retain them.

So you got to go and proselytize your culture and then you got to bring in new people. So you need to talk about, you know, how your company is different from the rest. Like this is interesting. But here's here's the challenge with Nvidia, right? They've, they've grown so quickly that the average employee is like a multi, multi, multi-millionaire. And it's like, we've seen this before. We've had people on the podcast that talk about, you know, I have $10 million of assets. I worry that the dog in me died. Right. And so Jensen needs to be out there pounding the table,

being like, we need to keep feeding the dog within us. Yep. Keep that dog alive. Otherwise somebody is going to come eat our lunch. I think he needs to be flexing on the employees a little bit more. He's not a watch guy, but if he was then,

Oh, that product manager who's making a million dollars a month now well good luck getting this you know he needs an rm like smiley 2.2 to 3 million dollars you see this guy driving a mclaren f1 to work it's like that's kind of out of the price range of that rich product manager so you know that's going to get the product manager to work a little harder get to the next level get to that sent Senti, get to that BNair status. Show the employee who's worth 10 that they would be happier if they got to 100. That's the goal. Nicole Wiscoff, speaking of cars, fantastic capital allocator, fantastic car appreciator, but throwing a little shade on Aston Martin here.

She says, I saw the first Aston Martin SUV, the DBX on the road a few years ago. I thought it was the most incredible car, was able to take it out for a drive yesterday. I felt like I went back in time 20 years. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it didn't even hold a candle to the Tesla and it's 200K more expensive. Okay. So first mistake, disrespecting a legacy brand. Yeah, that hurts. Aston Martin's a fantastic manufacturer. So here's the thing with Aston. You don't drive an Aston for the interior electronics.

That's for sure. That said, they do have new ownership as of the last couple of years. I believe Lawrence Stroll, father of Lance Stroll, who's in F1, recently took the brand over. And the newest generation of cars that's just hitting the street, just hitting dealerships, has had really big upgrades to the interior. But, yeah, you're driving it for the lines, for the leather for the the heritage for the significance and i would here's my only thing with aston um if uh you know a lot we've talked about you know needing to make sure that your next car is about the value of one percent of your aum exactly and

so if you have a hundred yeah yeah so she should be budgeting 500k the problem with the dbx it's a 300k car yeah so she's actually 200k shy so the reason she's probably like frustrated with the quality is because she should be going after maybe a cullinan or i would even stay within the aston the aston ecosystem you know if she no if she if she can raise another 100 million she's in she's in you know valkyrie territory yeah she could get a leganda tariff Have you seen that car? Yep. From their premium line.

You could even go back and get a Bulldog. Have you seen the Bulldog? That's a fantastic car. It's retro. It looks weird. Yeah, and for any other sort of emerging GPs that, you know, maybe can't fit a new Aston within the 1% market or AUM,

the great thing about Astons is they lose like half their value in the first year. So if a DBX at 300K is too much, wait a year and you can buy the same car with 2,000 miles for about 150K. That's true. So that's one of the beauties of the Aston brand is everything's half off after a year. Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, good luck to you, Nicole. Make sure you get a really nice car.

Yano says, the most mispriced idea in markets today crypto founders can finally build the products they want to build where they want to build them we are truly entering the golden age for crypto products couldn't agree more we see this with polymarket and a huge catalyst to that is the bridge acquisition yeah it wasn't i think until there hasn't is that the only or one of a handful of like billion dollar crypto m&a that wasn't a token you know it wasn't like somebody launching a token it was a little bit more of a classic you know product acquisition little like almost a b2b sas company you can model it that way and so yeah but there's also like to a strategic acquirer you need to live off in like crypto bizarre land, international, whatever.

It's like, yeah, they just bought by a San Francisco company. We could make a platform like Polymarket to sell our ad inventory, right? Sort of a liquid market where I want to know the second before I read a promoted post that it's the highest dollar amount that we could possibly capture for that ad unit, right? More programmatic. So a bunch of cool things coming down the pipeline. I think that, I think next YC batch, I'm sure we'll see a lot of crypto company RF requests

for startups. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be great. Connor McDonald, been on the show before, but we need to give him a follow. The core benefit of AI is to- He needs to give us a follow. No, no, great. Connor McDonald, been on the show before, but we need to give him a follow. The core benefit of AI is to... He needs to give us a follow. No, no, no. This is we. We need to follow him. Oh, got it.

So if you see the follow icon, that means it's their first time on the show. Once you're on the show, we'll give you a follow, and then we'll know the next time that you're a repeat guest. So Connor says, the core benefit of AI is to systematize and automate day-to-day responsibilities and leave more time to podcast and write newsletters. Let's fucking go. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. 99% of my life is now automated

with AI and I can spend eight, 12 hours a day podcasting. And we do. And we do. And this is the future. And I hope everyone joins us. And I think that a lot of this episode, the early part of this episode was talking about Ozympic and the trends there. And one of the really positive externalities with people being on Ozympic,

doing less degenerate sports betting and spending money on Doritos, they'll have more money. They'll probably have more cards in their wallet. And so I think Ridge will be a big beneficiary of that because people just maybe people might have so much cash on them that they might need multiple wallets. Uh, that, that the Ridge wallet has a nice, um, uh, sort of like money clip, uh, attached to it. So, um, look um look to see ridge uh ridges market cap do a nice multiple it's fantastic uh let's go to daniel he says vcs are the real founders couldn't agree more couldn't agree more jeremy giffon has a has a hot take that investors are more interesting than

founders have you heard this no uh it's a good one. It's interesting. He's an allocator. He's an investor, so he's talking his own book. But his idea is that a lot of the really, really successful investors are looking across markets. It's like the fox and the hedgehog thing, where the founder knows one really big idea and is grinding at it, building a company in that one narrow space. Whereas the investor can actually broaden out and become a generalist and look at capital markets, public markets, private markets, and really understand everything. Yeah. Founders have a more, a deeper understanding of, of they're like generalists within their business or within their industry maybe, but it's still like a very, like Jeremy, uh, Jeremy's like takes per minute or it was like very high. Fantastic. And that's really what we look for.

But anyways, the way that Daniel's progressing, he'll have a $500 million solo GP fund within the next 10 years without a doubt. So I think he's just sort of setting himself up for success. I think so. Another huge talent move. Francois Chollet is out at Google entering free agency.

He's going to start a new company. One of the GOAT programmers at Google put up a massive couple of years there on the team, built a product called Keras, was deeply involved in machine learning, and also had a great appearance, star appearance, great performance on the Dwarkash Patel podcast, and is also involved in a very interesting AI benchmark

that no LLM has been able to defeat yet. And so he's been working with that, with Wade over at Zapier, and just clearly a very thoughtful person on AI throughout all the boom and all the craziness. He's always been very locked in and understanding where the hype is, where the limitations are.

He's not a doomer. He's not a complete optimist, always nuanced. And he never really gets in fights, I see, but he's always he's always bringing uh like really good critiques still optimistic still loves the technology obviously building on it uh so great to see that he's out starting a new company with a friend i wonder who it is we'll certainly cover it here and i have a feeling we're gonna be ringing the size gong

when this guy raises this guy i mean this is a this is a this is a big move this is an all-time uh all a lot of uh you know when this when this when this post went up two things happened one i happened at bloomberg open big red candle on the on uh alphabet stock yeah it was really rough to see uh recovered but not not completely and then two vcs around the country called up their yeah the phones were ringing off the hook you know even net jets was was getting you know more calls than usual but a lot of gulfstream sort of like took off in unison and sort of descended um hoping to get some face time with him uh because a big round is coming yeah i mean let's just review his career for a little bit i mean he built k, powers ML solutions that countless companies touch. It powers your

recommendations on YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, the fraud filtering of your credit card transactions, Waymo cars that drive you around San Francisco. This guy's a beast, one of the greatest to ever do it. And we're excited to see where you take it next. Let's go to Zach. He says, update, I hit $1 million in MRR, still not sleeping in. And he says, he's quote tweeting himself from almost 10 months ago, been losing sleep to the grind, purely running on the urge to be financially free. After I hit 100K MRR in high school, then I'll start sleeping in. What a beast. He's still, he's still in high school. Uh, I, I don't know. Maybe he is. Yeah.

I mean, it sounds like he's still in, in high school animal future. Uh, just getting started, just getting started. Um, future brother of the week, potentially, um, by potentially by the, by holy trinity vc firms i could see big dollars going into this absolutely big big contract sign yeah it's really about the attitude yeah yeah um and uh if you're not sleep deprived right now uh just understand that money doesn't sleep either yeah that's true yeah uh. Yeah. Let's go to Eigen Robot. He says, he's quote tweeting, the ball is orange, who says, a lot of lives would be incredibly different

if this existed, and it's the United States high-speed rail system. And he says, no, they wouldn't. People would still take the plane or drive. Your lives suck primarily because of the circumstances of your births and the choices you have made in this life. A redundant passenger train system would not meaningfully affect the magnitude of your

suffering. I couldn't agree more. I thank God every single day that America industrialized largely after the invention of the automobile so that we don't need a bunch of slow, inflexible trains cluttering up our country. It's meaningless. And to all the train people out there, stop coping. We have planes and cars and they go everywhere

and we don't need trains. And in fact, America does have a fantastic rail system. We just use it for freight because America is a lot bigger than France to Germany. Like France to Germany is like france to germany is like the equivalent of you know boston to new york it's like we just don't and you know what we do have high-speed rail between boston and new york it's the acela it actually works pretty well go right on that but no one wants to ride from chicago to la on a train even if you're going 200 miles an

hour that's like a 14 hour yeah my little brother's actually like loves the train. Yeah. He's a train guy, likes to just like take in the view and relax. But I always laugh because I'm like, you're paying more. Yep. You're sitting in an uncomfortable seat. You're spending the night in this little tube and you could have spent, you know, $200 less and gotten there in four hours. Your time's worth a lot more. I actually do have one nice thing to say about trains. Fantastic for monk mode. When I was

living in Sunnyvale doing YC and I was dead broke, I had to go from Pasadena to Sunnyvale and I went by train and it took me all day. Like 6am, I walk to a local metro rail station take that to downtown then downtown i get a bus transfer out to bakersfield then a train through the central valley which was actually beautiful and fantastic and i was able to sit there no wi-fi nothing i was able just to read this book on uh actually language models it was very very weird but it was about uh natural language processing which was kind of like the precursor AI system. Fascinating. Like the algorithms are like human intelligible, essentially, still.

It's not just like crazy tensors and stuff. Like you can just understand intellectually how it works. And then another bus when you get to, you know, Oakland, essentially, to the Caltrain, and then walk from the Caltrain to Sunnyvale. Took forever, but the monk mode was fantastic. And being able to get on a train and just watch the countryside go by and actually see how beautiful America is and how much space we have to build is very, very inspiring. So trains we like to hate, but somewhat underrated. Let's go to Dylan Field, founder of Figma. He says this week,

all eyes should be on Trump's pick for treasury secretary. This appointment is a preview of what we will see over the next four years on topics spanning global tariffs, tax policy, the price of Bitcoin, China, and more. Of course, there's a lot of drama. And he writes a thread. I love that he's weighing in on this.

This is so great. There is a world where dylan is just talking about design we need i i really only want to see threads from people that are post-economic right so if you're not a b-nair don't write threads i agree if you are b-nair write more threads yeah x should actually have a functionality for that where yeah there where it links with your bank account proof of funds and i can say or your carta your Carta, or your Carta, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, your paper wealth as well. And then I can just, I can just say, Hey, today X, I only want to see content from Centies. Yeah. Throw some bean airs in there, but don't give me any,

that should be a separate feed. Any Cuban would come back single digit millionaires. I'm not interested. Yeah. Cuban might even come back. He might, he might, it would be a big boost to him. Yeah. You know, Elon kind of has the boost where all of his posts kind of get promoted. No one really knows exactly if it's hard-coded or not or he's just posting bangers. But we need that for all centies and billionaires. Yeah. For sure. So shout out to Dylan.

I'm excited. I'm going to keep an eye on it. I don't know. Has the Treasury Secretary been teased or leaked or announced yet? I mean, there's a couple. There's a couple folks that are out. That are are in the running but we don't talk about politics here so we're not going to cover it that's the show but that's the show i think we should ring the size gong one last time just to commemorate the end of the show thanks for watching subscribe

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