TBPN Live - The Switzerland of AI, Roblox Short Sale, Google's AI Podcast

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

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Good. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are talking about a number of news stories. The big one, did you see the Switzerland of AI? Switzerland's like the neutral party in the financial sector, like they don't really take sides. Well, Malaysia has emerged as this neutral place where every company, yeah, all the AI companies are building data centers there because it's right next to Singapore,

which is a massive trading hub. But then it's also independent between like China and America. They haven't picked a side, but because they're connected to Singapore, it's like very easy to get to. But because they're connected to Singapore, it's very easy to get to. But then they also have some of the largest concentration

of undersea fiber cables. Beautiful. It's just a huge, huge rush. I want to go scuba dive in Malaysia and dive alongside the underground cable. You know those shots of scuba divers where they're touching a whale? and dive to alongside the underground cable. Just like sort of like, you know, like,

you know those shots of scuba divers where they're like touching a whale? Like imagine like touching the underground cable. That would be... The information superhighway. Yeah, and just like downloading all of that like... The power. Power. Look at how close it is to Singapore.

Johor, that's the spot. Johor. And so they're... I know where we, that's the spot. Johor. And so they're... Nowhere we're going for the holidays. They're like a couple years away from having the same amount of energy capacity as Northern Virginia, where like all the major AWS hubs are.

And it's interesting because a lot of the reason why the data centers are being pushed overseas is because of the ESG things. Like a lot of the reason why the data centers are being pushed overseas is because of the ESG things. A lot of the big tech companies, they made ESG commitments. Have you heard this? That XAI just didn't make any ESG commitments, so they're just burning coal to just pump energy into this latest training run. Yeah.

It's very fascinating. Whatever it takes. It's a war between good and evil. I've talked to some AI founders who are like, kind of worried about like the climate stuff. Just the demand for coal. Yeah, just because like there's just no way that we can ramp up everything else even though.

That's the irony of Elon like being the dominant player in clean tech and then also burning coal. Potentially. Potentially burning coal. People looked at the satellite images of what he's building and there's just not enough power from the grid there to do what he says he's going to do. So it's just very clearly

they're just going to set up as many generators as possible and then also pull from the grid and then also build solar and nuclear. Just throw everything at it because it's so important. It's total land grab. Somebody's got to do it.

Yeah. What else did you read in the journal today? Oh, in the journal. Where to start. Where to start. I thought this article on the American guns that the Mexican cartels covet was interesting. Did you see this? Right, yeah.

I don't actually know when this printed. I think this ran over the weekend. But apparently Mexico is engulfed in a wave of criminal violence and disputes between rival drug gangs and U.S. weapons are fueling the Budbath. So there's just apparently like a group of of u.s dudes who buy american weapons and sell them overseas but you've seen the videos where it's a cartel and there's like they do this sort of like show of force yeah for the bosses who are usually nowhere near like the private armies but i've seen videos where they're just like walking and there's just like a line of like paramilitary guys with the trucks that are like branded with the cartel.

It's just like literally like you can walk and pass like 500 trucks. Like and it's all like it's like the Chinese. Yeah. They're like force. Yeah. It's like Ford Raptors that have like turrets on the top. It really does seem like the cartel is like almost equal in power to the actual military at this point. That's the biggest, that's the biggest, I don't actually think, I end up watching, I end up putting on like YouTube to fall asleep. And I always have to put on something that's interesting but not really

that relevant to my life and so what I'll do is I'll put on this there's this podcast that only goes like super it's like a two-hour podcast every time with like some journalists that's just been covering the cartels for 20 years interesting and they just talk it's basically like reality tv for cartel life yeah and so that's how I, for some reason it puts me to sleep. Sort of like a calming, like, you know, hearing about the rise and fall of these sort of drug lords is like relaxing to me. And yeah, I mean, the biggest headline is that

I think in the last presidential election there was 37 candidates that were murdered, assassinated in the lead up to the new president. That's so insane. And that's just, that's a little concerning. I think it's totally, I don't think it gets enough attention just how out of control Mexico is. Yeah. And they're a stone stones throw away I mean I have an employee who lives in Mexico

and you know he lives in like a safe neighborhood and it's fine but it definitely seems like there's like you know a lot of conflict going on the thing that blew me away about this article is that like I was expecting like okay maybe AK-47 like you hear you think like

American guns that are fueling the Mexican cartel and you think like ar-15 right yeah maybe ak-47 they start off with the mini gun the six-barreled machine-fed weapon can destroy a small car in minutes it's reserved for high profile whoever the editor yeah I don't think it's going to take minutes for a minigun. But it's like, not everyone has the ability to use these sophisticated weapons. The Mexican military seized the first minigun from a crime scene in 2018,

according to the military documents released by the nonprofit. Oh, it's a status thing. Just like a Patek is a status. Well, they go into that. The Zapata El Jefe and el grito pistols are colt 38 supers and it's like having a scepter or a crown for a king and so they actually have different weapons for specific tiers so if you're the lowest ranking cartel member you get

the beretta 22 pistol if you're a little bit higher up you get the ak-47 the goat's horn as they call it um rocket launchers the m72 law anti-tank rocket it's like i don't understand how they get these and and they're saying that the whole point of this article is like these are american-made weapons that are in the hands of Mexican cartels. But I can't get, I'm an American citizen, I can't get my hands on a belt-fed M249 saw. Or a rocket launcher. Or a rocket launcher.

I mean, maybe the Barrett, you can buy a Barrett, which is the, you know, armor-piercing sniper rifle. You know, my neighbor's truck was recently stolen out of his driveway. It had the keys in the truck. Maybe he needs a rocket launcher. No, no. But the thing that was interesting is it was immediately driven to a harbor in Northern California. And it was hours away from being shipped, allegedly, to Mexico. And so there's this whole, and it was like a blacked out Ford pickup truck, and it's just so easy to imagine that truck taking a relatively short trip down the coast,

like pulling into a port in Mexico and being rebranded to, what is it, the CJ, NG cartel. Well were you the one that was telling me about the, there was some guy who had like a you know a window company and he had his like logo and brand on his truck and then eventually he sold it and it wound up like in an ISIS video with like his brand and phone number on it because it just got sold or stolen. Not all attention is good. Yeah people probably know that he's not involved, but still very, very wild.

And then they have something else here too. Yeah, the belt-fed saw is the prize weapon for top drug lords in Mexico. The weapon denotes status with the security details of Mexico's biggest drug lords wielding

the M2-wearing saw. It'scci bag it's it's more of a way to recognize who's in charge of the cartel teams who's the boss who's the closest to leadership the new hermes kelly is yeah he's a yeah a bolt fed i mean this was uh the Barrett sniper rifle. I mean, just the fact that they're like actually considering like how do we take out vehicles is like so next level compared to the crime that we see in America. Barretts are only assigned to mid-level gang members, some trained in special combat.

It's like they have their own SWAT teams. They have their own special forces in the cartel. It's just so crazy. Well, you know about, what is this? in special combat. It's like they have their own SWAT teams. They have their own special forces in the cartel. Yeah. It's just so crazy. Well, you know about, what is the, it's not El Mencho.

Who's the guy? So there's this guy, this guy ismael zambada otherwise known as el mayo and he allegedly was like a ghost for decades but the theory is that he was the guy behind uh el chapo like el chapo was sort of like the front man and got all the attention and all the like all the drama was are always seemingly around El Chapo but El Mayo was allegedly calling the shots the whole time. He was like I believe he was an accountant prior to becoming you know a drug lord and or it had some type of you know he was like the finance he was like the CFO basically, but the one that was actually calling the shots. And it was basically initiated by one of El Chapo's sons that basically abducted him in Mexico, flown him over to El Paso. And the theory is that El Chapo's son was coordinating

with American drug enforcement groups. And so it's been sort of interesting for me as a spectator to go from watching Netflix and watching Narcos, which is probably the last show that I watched to completion on Netflix. And YouTube has just sort of picked up all of that. So instead of watching this thing unfold that happened 20 years ago,

you can now go on YouTube and basically in real time cover the drama that's unfolding within the cartels. And there's this whole cottage industry of people that are basically small business owners, like media operators, that are just like, have an entire career built around covering the cartels in real time. Reporting on them.

And basically like reality TV. Interesting. And because of the emergence of the iPhone and cell phones in general, there's now like real-time, relatively high-quality video footage. Somebody sent me a very dark video of a cartel ambush in basically high definition where these five guys are sitting on a ridge line and they're just watching their ops approach and they just straight up kill them all. And they're all just filming it. They're all looking like full members in the military I mean it's propaganda war as well like they want to appear strong in addition to

being strong yeah and it's just wild the state of have you picked up on any riffs within the creator community like is there someone who's like clearly more pro-cartel or like maybe yeah like the information warfare yeah um because that happens in like i mean if you look at if you do like china research on youtube you will see occasionally there's an american who like goes over there and is like yeah very pro-china all of a sudden it's like okay like you're probably being paid yeah and there's the the whole emergence of faceless YouTube channels has created this environment where it's a perfect battleground for information warfare because you can create this like clickbaity video that's like, here's why the United States should stay out of the South China Sea. It's like 20 minutes of like pretty highly produced content. It's fairly convincing.

And then you look in the comment section and it's like nice try CCP. You know, and it's like 300 likes. It's like the top comment. But then like half the people watching it are just like going off there. You know, the people that realize that most, I think it's like 50% of YouTube viewership is on TVs.

Yeah. And it's not as comment oriented. Yeah, not comment oriented. Or just autoplay next thing. It's autoplay. So they're just like watching this and it's not as comment-oriented. Yeah, not comment-oriented, or just autoplay next thing. It's autoplay, so they're just watching this, and it's basically like television. I mean, Netflix can be like that, too. Wasn't there...

There was some 9-11 conspiracy documentary that was on Netflix that was pretty debunked, and Netflix will put stuff out that's about like super volcano and it's like there's this weird like blend between like the like you know ufo hunters ghost hunters like yeah it's fun and then it gets into like okay is this like propaganda is this like does this have an agenda behind it total i mean there's a long history of info like people think about information warfare playing out through traditional like print media, online media, you know, New York Times, etc. And there's decades and decades of evidence that various groups have, go the length to get highly produced films made including the same group producing six different films just with that all have

different takes and angles and like objectives just to make it different audiences well different target audiences and also to just make it super confusing yeah and um so that's certainly is happening on you know legacy media with like films and documentaries, but is obviously happening on YouTube now. Anyways, back to, not to get too far into the politics. The conspiracy land. Emerging cartel politics, but should we talk about some technology? Yeah, let's do it.

Our favorite topic on this show. What's the first? Yeah, where to start it. Our favorite topic on this show. What's the first? Yeah, where to start? Roblox or Google? We could start with Roblox. Let's do it. You were playing, what were you playing last night? I forget the game.

You were playing Run from Diddy Simulator. Run from Diddy, the Roblox mini game. Right after you were playing Escape from Epstein Island. I have never actually played Roblox. Yeah, it's always... I tried Fortnite once and I tried Minecraft just to kind of know, like, okay, what is this thing? Didn't find them, like, deeply entertaining or anything, but... It's almost...

If you're very online and there's this thing that allegedly is just so dominant, like massive. Yeah, you gotta like learn about it. Like I read the Matthew Ball piece on Roblox. Yeah, so you learn about it, but when somebody's saying like 10% of the world plays this two hours a day, you know, it's not actually that extreme with Roblox, but then you don't know anybody, you know, Roblox target audience is younger, but that was the case. There was also this calendar app that SoftBank backed if you remember that like was claiming to have like they were claiming I think it was called IRL yeah IRL and

they were claiming to have like an egregious amount of yeah they were basically just cooking the never yeah never once I knew of anybody using it there was the same thing for this I think Nikita Beer called them out pretty early too. Yeah, there was some app that I think Benchmark backed that was like a college finance app that was again the same thing. Turns out it was like they had some incentive where if you signed up for an account,

you got $5, but you could just sign up infinitely. We're like, maybe, yes, there is technically an email address in the database, but it's fake. There was a ton of that. There was also the company that sold to J.P. Morgan or something. You remember this? Yeah. She was on 30 Under 30. Yeah.

But this isn't... Is this an allegation of fraud or just that the stock is mispriced? Hindenburg is just a short seller, right? So Hindenburg did something similar. Like I think that they, like my opinion on Hindenburg is

they could almost write their reports on any company because there's always like, like I'd love to see a Hindenburg research report on Apple, like intentionally degrading iPhones in order to drive sales velocity. Sure. Right? Yeah, yeah. Like we all know that for some reason or another, your phone starts getting materially worse after about 18 months.

Like every company has a most aggressive tactic. Yeah, yeah. Like whatever their most aggressive tactic is. You want to see that detailed? And in the case of Roblox, they're repeatedly claiming that 50 million people are playing Roblox every single day. And they specifically were wording it as people instead of daily active users. And they were almost using those interchangeably, but it sounds a lot better to say people. Because it's like those are real people that might have purchasing power. And it turns out that they were well aware that many people had alts,

meaning one person with 10, 20 accounts that were used for different purposes. And they had internal tooling in order to determine who the actual person was behind those 20 accounts were, yet they were still willing to call those 20 accounts people when it came to reporting. So ultimately, I mean, I think all the issues that they call out are all the issues that happen on any video game with user-generated content, right? The concerning thing is that it's a video game for kids

and maybe creating like a sandbox. You remember people, even Minecraft is pretty, you're in this world, you can build blocks, and it's pretty contained, but then you could build a statue of a huge penis. And there's almost nothing you can do to stop that, I feel like, as a game. I think with Roblox, when you give people the ability to effectively build games within the games,

and they're creating games like Palestine and Israel Hangout, LGBTQ plus vibes, guns work at a hospital. You know, I think it's all my backlashes to roblox like on youtube i've seen people kind of say that there's like kids that get hooked into like the developer ecosystem don't get compensated fairly like there's been a lot of like there's been various waves of like you know oh like criticism but it seems like the stock is doing well and that's why hindenburg is like chiming in because

they're primarily like a short seller right like and I publishing this after taking a short position is that yeah that's that's okay do you have any idea like how big this fund is Hindenburg research it has such like a meme-y name and they're so like big on Twitter that I feel like it's what if it's like a ten million dollar fund yeah yeah it almost feels like it could just be in a non-account but I think it is actually a research firm because it was in the Wall Street Journal. Like in this, it says... Yeah, I think the real... One thing that you could focus in on is what is part of the engagement because the games are so extreme. Because looking at these games, Beat Up People outside of 7-Eleven has 900,000 visits.

Beat Up the Pregnant is another game. Guns Work at a Hospital has been played 1.6 million times. What's interesting is I understand that if you... I mean, Hindenburg is not saying that they don't have millions of users. They clearly do have millions of people um i guess yeah so but even even if you have millions of people like years ago it was a reasonable thing to say like well you would have to hire tens of thousands of people to just sit there and watch everything to like monitor this for trust and safety but now we have lms like you can just take every string of text, transcribe it, look through it.

It's funny because there's a lot of ways you could make a bear case for the business, which is that user turnover is going to be high. People certainly age out of this. You have 50 million DAUs and you're not making money. Call of Duty does not put out a game and have 50 million people playing it you have to imagine that like other gaming companies look at roblox and they're like ha ha you have 50 million people and you don't make any like you have zero earnings and so i think that there's a lot of ways to critique this business i mean, the big thing to me is if you make it,

it seems like you could make it pretty easy to eliminate games that were explicitly political and just wrong. Guns work at a hospital. Like, is that a game that we should be encouraging kids to play? And that's something that's so easy to catch with an LLM. You just throw it through the with an LLM. You just throw it through and like the most basic like llama model. Yeah, and like should you be able to, should you be able to name a game

Palestine and Israel Hangout? Like it's not the town, this is a video game, right? It's not the town square. Sure. Nobody's arguing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I don't think that.

Yeah, and no parents of kids who play Roblox are like, for instance. Yeah, so it's almost like when, we should, we should play the game one episode, but like, should you be able to create a game and publish it under something called survive Diddy?

And would those games get any users at all if they didn't have the word Diddy in it? Probably not. Right. So like, it's part of like children, children are innately drawn to offensive things because it just makes them like giggle and makes them whatever.

I do wonder how much of this is driven by adults being creepy versus kids being edgy. Because it's totally possible that a 13-year-old is being edgy because they're edgy on Instagram. Yeah, and i think these games are just less malleable when we were kids right like kid you might like whatever in call of duty for example like people would try to make it to write a swastika you know in the game but it would eventually like the gate they would figure out how to stop people they would patch it and so but when you create these open sandboxes it's sort of if you're creating a

metaverse the same slime and and sort of offensive things that happen in the real world are going to be recreated within the metaverse i wonder if there's like an opportunity for something that like an like an app like a child safety app that you could put on like your kid's computer, kid's iPad. Strap it to their Orion headset. Just like blacks. That's, that's Orion, Orion, Orion. Yeah. Yeah. But it just, it just takes a picture of the screen like every 10 seconds and just says like, is this offensive? Yeah. Is this offensive? And it's just asking the, the, the, the model, like, is this offensive or is this, is this, this inappropriate for the age? And it can capture like text or images or, you know, a penis in Minecraft. Like anything like that can all be processed. There's been, there's some company called Rewind that does that,

but just for like your second brain. Yeah. You know, it like takes a picture of your screen and then you can, and I think Microsoft might have a feature for this too, where you can say like, okay, I think like two weeks ago, I was a website of a short-selling firm, but I can't remember the name. And it'll just be like, oh, Hindenburg Research, right? Yeah. There was even a – I feel like there was a Black Mirror episode years ago that had something where kids – there was like a software update you could give to your kids where anything scary or wrong they

wouldn't blurred so the dog would be like barking like really like trying to like kill you and the kid would just be like yeah it's kind of creepy and uh we're probably headed we're probably headed towards i mean uh the the steel man here i mean the journal has the roblox revenue versus net losses and revenues accelerating net losses over the last three quarters are declining. So they went from almost $400 million in net losses to just over $200. So share price is stable at $40. Down from $140, though, so not great.

Let's see what impact this actually had. Oh, yeah, did it move the market? Or move the market for Roblox stock? So on September 24th, it was trading at $47 a share. And when was this? This came out yesterday. It's October 7th or October 8th. So the stock is actually up.

The stock, okay, over the last three days, it's down 2.9%, but today it's up 3%. So that's the thing. I don't... It was priced in. It was priced in, yeah. Everyone who owns the stock is like, yeah, I know that half the people are fake

and it's a cesspool, but I don't care because I'm still optimistic that it's run. Because you could argue that Roblox user base is even worse in many ways in terms of willingness to pay from an age standpoint. But it does seem like they're trending towards probably making a lot of money. My concern is how ephemeral are video games, especially as they just get easier and easier to create

well I wonder how much video game revenue is essentially gambling driven in the sense that Call of Duty has this monetization arc where the first game comes out it's 60 bucks

70 bucks maybe there's a hundred dollar you get a little bonus skin for the day one edition. And then over time they introduce loot crates that are effectively gambling, where, I mean you're not winning money, but you're winning like good skins for your guns or like rare items, right? Yeah, what's the word, it's sort of,

there's the official word for it is variable reward, right? Sure, sure. So it's like you just might get something. Yeah, exactly. And you're doing it live in the headset. And so that clearly has more of a dopamine rush than just, okay, I bought this skin for $5 or the one that's $100 I paid $100 for. It's like for $, you could win either. And I wonder if you look at, you know, the revenues of the gaming companies, like how much is driven by those day one sales, people just paying 60 bucks versus the whales that

wind up. Because for the mobile games, like they're free up front. They make no money from non-gambling. And it's all basically- The only apps making money day one are wallpaper apps. Yeah. So, but that presents like a really tough challenge for Roblox, right? Yeah.

Because if Roblox wants to, every time they introduce something that feels like gambling, they're going to feel the pain 10 times worse because they're Target Market's kids. Yeah. Whereas Call of Duty, it's like 40-year-old hard-os. It's like, yeah, of course. Yeah, it might. It's like, you know, dad's's gonna gamble on some skins because like he's having fun and whatever dad's dad's gambling again dad's gonna find a way to gamble one way or

another if it's on call of duty you know outfits for his character like that's not as big of like a national news story as like 13 year olds are gambling on roblox skins so so like how can they i mean they can they can you know pay wallet and age gate it and stuff but like i mean they're making a ton of money like they're making like i think it was 800 million dollars last quarter it's pretty good but i wonder if they're going to run into problems like really ramping it up yeah the question is is roblox digital legos and does it have enduring brand value that they continue to monetize because Because it certainly looks like digital Legos. I don't know if you...

Basically, they took Legos... I've seen videos where people have recreated other games in Roblox, and it doesn't look like Roblox at all. It's crazy. Right, but the core entry point, the cover art, is like, hey, we're online Legos. It was a very similar strategy for Epic Games and Fortnite, where Epic Games created Unreal Engine,

where you can design any game from Gears of War to, you know, the new Halo is going to be in Unreal Engine. But then Fortnite is also more accessible. You can kind of design like a little custom game if you want, if you're non-technical or whatever. Yeah, I think the issue with Hindenburg is this seems like a business that's way more impactful if you're doing one report every two years and just taking these massive, very concentrated positions,

whereas this almost feels like a stretch, right? Because you're trying to pin them. You're trying to pin them. You're trying to pin them on. Yeah, like they had, they honestly did damage to Square. Oh yeah? Was that what it is?

Yeah. Because I remember like hearing about them for the first time and thinking like, oh, the name. I mean, the name implies like the Hindenburg. Like it's a disaster. It's like world historic. Like we have discovered something

that's going to absolutely blow up. And so their name is like this is a five alarm fire, right? And if they are talking about something that's mispriced by 20% or the DAUs are off by 50%, but the revenues are still okay, it's not quite as hard hitting as like, is this the Hindenburg or just, like, a blimp that needs, like, a refuel of gas or something? Yeah, so they're putting out usually a couple of these a month. Oh, really? Which I didn't know. Okay. But it's, like, maybe, like, six a quarter, five a quarter or something like that, at least if you look back historically. And so I think it's actually just they're constantly doing this. And most of the

time they're going after companies that are like, like you don't know about and they're genuinely doing bad stuff. But then for them, from a marketing standpoint, it's like, it's this battle with, for attention, right? They're like, everybody's addicted to attention. And so we should try to, we should try to invest in Hindenburg and see what their process looks like. I wonder, the only thing that would genuinely be cool is if it was like, it was all their own money. Oh, yeah.

You know, and they were just like, yeah, like we just do this for ourselves. We just share what we find, basically. But it's interesting to see, see like they're basically a media company that happens to monetize through shorting yeah you know i mean there were many media companies that monetize through longing they're just merely on the dump side yeah they're They're not on the pump side. Yeah, I think it must be such a nightmare to get all of that through legal and figure out what they can and can't say. Because you're kind of front running this information. You're somewhat manipulating the stock. Even if everything you say is true, like you're moving the market.

Yeah, you have to assume that every single company, like they must get sued like 80 of the time i would imagine you know because unless the company is such a dumpster fire that they're like we have bigger battles to fight if the ceo that's the target gets attacked if he wants to they're gonna find something to pick in there. Like, oh, this is actually wrong. That person that talked to you is wrong. Yeah. It's tricky. Very tricky. Really, really wild. Should we move on to Google?

Okay, last thing. If people did Hindenburg for venture funds, that would be so gnarly. No way to monetize it. Just no way to monetize it just purely for like if you had like spite Hindenburg, you know. Spite Hindenburg. Like somebody wants to take down a certain fund. So they publish like 15 reports to make it look legitimate and then just drop like a bombshell.

And they're like this fund, fund four, is gonna do like negative, you know, is gonna do like a.1X, right? And they just go company by company. So bad. I was thinking about that during the last cycle. Like, do you think there's anyone who raised like some like $50 million fund and will return zero? Not like 0% gain, like won't return a dime. Like the liquidation value of all the companies return zero. Not like zero percent gain, like it won't return a dime.

Like the liquidation value of all the companies was zero. It must happen. It must happen. I mean, I don't know. Because most companies, it's like they return like 10 cents on the dollar or something, you know.

There must be at least one that shuts down. Yeah, yeah. But the 0.1 would be astronomically bad. It's possible. Yeah, yeah. But a.1 would be astronomically bad. It's possible. Yeah. Sometime we should cover some of the actual data on, because, like,

venture as an asset class gets just, you know, constantly attacked because, like, the bottom quartile is just genuinely so bad. But, like, from what I've seen

across, like, a few different reports it's actually like the the median is like not that bad it's like maybe not as good as a median equity fund there's tons of there's tons of venture folks who have been in the business for 20 years and they're they yeah they have never had like a banger breakout deal but every deal is structured at a good price and they run their business very well they haven't over scaled their funds and they make a decent you know decent living decent living enough to have the house in aspen the house in montana the house and oh man speaking of the house

in aspen i couldn't print this one uh and i was hoping it would be in the journal today but this is like one of my favorite articles I've read. So apparently people in like high mountain towns are pumping in oxygen into their houses. Have you seen this? No. It's the coolest thing. So I have this saved.

The wealthy are paying big money to pump oxygen into their mountain homes. So there's like these home oxygenation startups now that, I'll just read you some of this. So it brings it down to sea level, basically. Exactly, exactly. So this guy, Kevin Ross, built a new mountain home on a ridge at 10,500 feet in Telluride.

So high that in the winter, it's only accessible by gondola. And it's so high that some of his guests struggle to acclimate. For those guests, Rost installed his home. 10,000 is crazy. It's really high, really high. Like athletes go and they fight in Utah, and they're out of breath in five minutes. Not just one mile.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he has a home oxygenation system in every bedroom of the 12,000 square foot house. This guy is a badass. I was thinking we should do a segment of like the tech bro of the week, like the person we give a shout out to. And this is definitely my pick this week. The only critique is that it's coal powered. You see the smoke drifting off. For those guests, Ross installed a home oxygenation system in every

bedroom of the 12,000 square foot house. Now 10 oxygen enrichment machines located in the storage area, pull oxygen from the air outside and pump it into four bedrooms and a bunk room through blue tubing built into the walls. It makes the rooms feel like it's at 3,000 to 5,000 feet above sea level, not two miles. We need that, but for galaxy gas. This dude is a boss. He's 59. He retired as the owner of a pipe fitting company. Like some business that you've never heard of, but clearly just crushed it.

He and his wife, who's 58, moved there last December. And he wants to have his friends come visit, but he doesn't want them to spend like three days acclimating so they can come and hang out. So he spent $18 million on this house, took two years planning and six years of construction, and now he's just completely ready to go. I love how he has to go because he's got to take the gondola to get there. Yeah.

And then they profile a bunch of other people who have done the same thing, and apparently it's just like really, really popular right now. See, that's proof that you don't need to work in tech to be a technology brother exactly it's about how you leverage the tech exactly exactly he's putting the tech to work so each each enrichment each enrichment machine costs 15k uh it would have cost 75 but today's price is 150 um and a single unit can enrich about 2000 cubic feet there's these funny ones where it's like this dude's bedroom was so big he needed six of them or something

like that but man all these other people this whole article is just like a world tour of like sick dudes basically I need the video of him on his like helipad just like you know like punching like you know shadow boxing yeah yeah he's like this is why

i laid all that pipe throughout my life i've been to some like high elevation like ski towns for like ski trips and i've never had problems acclimating but i wonder if that'll get worse with age like they're describing it in the in the article like you get I just headaches and stuff and I've never had a problem with that I remember as a kid backpacking trip with the family getting going up to a you know high elevation in whatever five six hours and you know being in the tent throwing up oh really yeah I've gotten that before i just personally would never oxygenate my house because the low oxygen concentration would just inspire me to grind hard i was thinking i need to be harder to kill there was somebody else who i think uh

nat friedman just posted that he has a hyperbaric chamber. And I was wondering, do you know if Brian Johnson sleeps in any crazy hyperbaric chamber thing? I feel like when you go full tilt biohacker, you're doing something to the air mix while you're sleeping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a big air filtration guy, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I have these things in my house. I think it's called, let me get the name right.

Yeah, IQ Air. It's a Swiss company. And they look like old school, like, vax machines. It's like the ugliest thing in the world. But, yeah, they're like hospital equipment. Like, it's certainly not cool looking. But, yeah, I think you want to be filtering your air. People don't know this, but your air is,

the air quality is almost always worse in your house than outdoors, which is somewhat counterintuitive, but there's gas. I mean, the air quality is much better in Malibu than, like, core L.A. too, right? Yeah, yeah, in general. Just getting, just being on the coast. But it's still, you you're still the air quality is still much worse inside um and i think yeah and the only way to really make it better is like through filtration but also diluting the air with outside air oh sure right um but um yeah

hyperbaric chambers i haven't i've spent a little bit of time in them but it's one of those things like it feels like a pretty marginal benefit unless you're gonna sleep in one yeah i think i think nat freebin said he had psoriasis or something that he was fighting and the hyperbaric chamber made his symptoms go down by like 90 it was like very intractable like he tried a bunch of things and this was like the one thing that worked so like if you have a problem like going to sleep in the chamber would be cool i don't know if he's actually saying like like i've heard that people do that like the next step for eight sleep is like the dome like bed chamber they were building something like that damn putting their roadmap on blast no i like i think it'd be cool yeah

it's awesome um i think we should probably record in a chamber. In a chamber? Well, on the 11th floor, there's some sort of a cryo chamber. Here? Yeah. Classic Jonathan Club. There's some company that does regenerative medicine in the building. Have you seen Notebook LM? It's going to put us out of business, bro. Oh, the AI double podcast?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's two people talking about whatever you want them to talk about? Yeah. It sounds pretty good, but it sounds like the most generic Wikipedia article ever right now. And it's just trained on Reddit, so it's sore. It's like the most. I think you can kind of put in whatever you want. The AI goes, so my wife's boyfriend was telling me the other day.

And you're like, wait, what? It's just the most Redditor podcast. Now, have you listened to, have you spent, like what's the longest amount of time you've spent like consuming AI content? So I think it's on youtube yeah on some of these videos that a topic seems really appealing and it's like the video is clearly set up in a way to draw you in to get the click and then you get through like a minute and you're just like oh like this is like ai slop yeah and i think that there's like a very real thing happening on youtube where there's the sort of like people are drawn to like the artisanal videos, right? It's like I like, I love that you keep doing like real voiceovers.

I love your, you know, like, and so there's this, there's like this, their content is going from being like all handmade artisanal content to now this sort of like mass produced, mass manufactured. It's the same thing that happens with like clothing, right? Like, you know, you can go and get the Cuccinelli of content, right? This like handmade craft led content. But yet there's going to be like probably like 90% of content consumption will eventually become this sort of like slop, just like mass produced, just curated. You know, it's like Fashion Nova putting out, you know, seeing a luxury brand drop something, the next day shipping the carbon copy of it. And why would that not happen with content? Because I'm sure there's already channels that when, I don't know, like the needle drop Anthony Fantano on YouTube.

So Anthony Fantano puts out a music review. Somebody just clones that content, reposts it immediately, and makes a better click-baity title and gets like more views right and so a lot of consumers will just keep watch you know they're just like so in the the um being like you know just navigated through that the algo um and you're gonna have to be like the way to fight back is to be like no no, I'm getting that good artisanal cut. Yeah, well, I mean, there could be like taste, but then there's also like a price gate on the clothing, right?

Like the artisanal clothing is more expensive. So the monetization works out. Like the fast fashion and the LVMH stuff is like similar market cap probably, but wildly different profit per unit peter zaihan do you know peter zaihan he he just went full paywall oh really he he put out a video and he's like this is my last video doing and that's kind of interesting because like the guy's got incredible insights and takes and i'm sure some of them have conflicts and are influenced by various parties, and he has certain narratives he likes to push.

He should probably still do some stuff as a lead gen for the paywall. Yeah, it seemed like a bad. Every comment when he announced it was basically like, okay, see you never, bro. Yeah, it is tricky. Yeah, there was this one YouTuber called Jakeake tran have you heard of this guy he's like a he's like business video essays and he tried to pull himself so he pulled himself out of like the editing and had a team writing and editing everything but he was still doing the

voiceover and he was so he would just record the voiceover and he wanted to pull himself out of that so he started just recording the intro and then handing it off to another voiceover artist to do it and everyone was like why aren't you even voicing your own things anymore like this is so fake and it's and it was like he was just two years too early because the ai voice clones are good enough now that no one would notice if he used an ai voice clone he might be now i don't know but um there's gonna be a whole cottage industry of people on YouTube that just watch the video first,

run some analysis on it to determine if it's artisan. Yeah, yeah. And then just be the first comment to be like... Yeah, I mean, it does seem like there's maybe... I don't know if there's an analogy with the clothing thing, but there is some sort of like barbell where yes you might want like the artisanal content for something

that's like really entertaining and novel and interesting and unique but then if i'm like if i just want to know about a topic that i don't know anything about and i can just like search it and get a you know wikipedia article or listen to that as a podcast like why not i'm a big fan of like like the consumer gets to choose the format that they consume the content in yeah so i can say i want this there's a podcast here i want you ai i want you to transcribe it because i feel like reading or or there's a book here i want to consume this in the form of a video like make that for me and just translate it because that's where the models are really, really good when they're just swapping things over from one thing to the next. It's hard for them to do, like, truly novel new things, but they're pretty good at just,

like, translation, transformation, right? Yeah. But, yeah. I mean, glowing endorsement from Andre Karpathy. He said he loves it. I listened to the one on Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it was kind of, like, it was a little not that great. I think the thing that's interesting about that is the applications in education are wild.

If I'm, so imagine this, I'm a college student, and I'm going into an exam, you know, in five hours, and I know nothing about a topic, right? And it's going to be like, you're going to sit down and have to write an essay there's three topics there you remember in college they'd be like there's these three topics you're gonna have to write an essay about one of them right so imagine I'm a I'm a college you know like Jim bro I'm going into this essay in five hours I'm like okay I got five hours and I tell my notebook LM I'm like you know, I got five hours. And I tell my notebook LM, I'm like, you know, make me a podcast about the signing, the events that led up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 40-minute podcast. I just listen to it.

And the recall on that is crazy, even if you're just like, you know, I don't want to listen to Notebook LM talk about antitrust, you know, situations within tech, right? Because part of listening to takes about that kind of thing is you want the host to have some insider information that's not publicly available but if you're just talking about like history and trying to learn about like why why is you know why why who would benefit more from keto versus intermittent fasting and having those two people like talk about that you can learn a lot it does seem like there's a lot of alpha in the content around like edginess or comedy or anything that's like that's like would be censored by most llms so they can't produce it well um or just comedy in general is novel like i even tested like uh tell me a joke on like the latest and greatest like you know gpt01 um and it was terrible it's not even close not even a zinger it's just not getting anywhere near not making any progress there but it's

incredible at math and like a whole bunch of other things that it's supposed to be good at. But there is something else to be said for content where the AI seems to be really, really bad about surfacing new facts. And a lot of reporters will say this where, oh, yeah, like LLMs can like write articles now. But like that's not really what reporters are doing. Like when a reporter writes up an article, that's like the last 5% of the work that they've been doing. Like 95% of the work is like collecting new facts that don't exist on the internet and don't exist anywhere because they talked to someone, they got a fact out of them, they got information and they corroborated it. And so there's still value in like surfacing that fact, but there is a question about like, how do you monetize that?

Like you need to set up a really like tough paywall because like if you're, as soon as that fact gets surfaced in your article, boom, you're going to be cloned in a million places immediately. And other people are going to try and monetize that. Like that's going to be really, really tricky. Already people do that all the time where it's like someone gets the scoop and then it's reposted immediately. It just like changed up a little bit for some other like rag yeah um but i

don't know it's interesting oh well what else should we talk about venture funds yeah oh yeah yes yeah crv giving back money yeah so my i mean i actually don't know a single person at CRV. I have some portfolio companies that have spoken to them over the years and more recently. But ultimately, what this comes down to is I haven't seen, I cannot recall CRV being in a headline like within the last 12 months about anything. And they effectively chose to make their biggest media moment. They chose to make their biggest media moment giving back money, which I feel like as a venture fund, all of your marketing should be towards founders, which is one customer, and then, you know, LPs, which is your other customer. And going out and making the only thing I can recall about CRV now, aside from interactions portfolio companies have had with them,

is that they decided that they didn't have places to invest money in the whole strategy that they had raised around. And so, one, it almost feels like they're traitors to go to the New York Times and feed them. Well, are you sure that's what happened? Because it's totally possible that they announced this to their LPs and their LPs leaked it immediately. Like, that's where most of the venture fund news comes from. Okay, but if you pull up the article. Oh, it's like they're commenting. It's their four partners in the picture. They made the decision to have the New York Times come and photograph them.

Well, it's a new photo. It's not just their default, like they pulled it off the website. Okay, we should. Because that could be the thing, you know? Here's why I think it's a New York Times picture. Yeah. Because it looks like a New York Times picture. One, it's in their style.

Yeah. And two, they look sad. I knew you were going to say that. Which is normally what the New york they're like hey like let's do one series okay that's the one we're using yeah classic um yeah so yeah it's ryan young for the new york times oh wow written by aaron griffith yeah we know has a history of saying that she's going to position a story one way and then putting it that way. But the idea to go to Aaron Griffith and their comms agency,

whoever they're working with for PR, because I would assume they are, would be kind of weird to affirm that size not. I mean, they probably knew that it was going to leak for the LPs. Yeah, but it's just like, why? I don't, nobody, did they want a pat on the back? Like, do they want want to be acknowledged? To me... It's a little late. Yeah, it's a little late.

One, it's two years after similar decisions were made. And I just don't know. And the other thing is that I don't know. I have no idea the mechanics of it, but it's not like they had the money in their bank account and they were, like, giving it back. It's that they didn't make the capital call. So you basically, the same article is CRV resizes their growth fund. Okay.

Yeah. Is that a story? And is that what you want to be covered about? Yeah. Like, could you not think of anything else? It kind of presumes that the reader doesn't understand the concept of a capital call. Well, that's the New York Times audience. The New York Times reader definitely thinks that if a venture fund raises a billion dollars, they have a billion dollars in an account somewhere.

Yeah, exactly. And that the VCs took 50% of it. Yeah, yeah. Or that it's 90% their money, or it's all their money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the average. So yeah, I think giving Aaron Griffith ammo to paint tech in a bad light as though tech is just this disaster, which is her entire... Venture's not working anymore, funds are giving it back. You think that's the goal here?

That's always the end goal. I don't know, but for every one of these articles, there's 10 that are like, oh, SoftBank's back in the game, baby. Let's go. Adam Newman's raising again. Yeah, but I don't think... But Aaron would cover that same story in the lineup.

There are more We're So Back stories right now than It's So Over, for sure. New York Times is not doing We're So Back stories, though. It's always like, Adam Newman is back, and this, then it's over for sure. New York times is not doing worse. So backstories though. Like it's always like Adam Newman is back. And this is why it's bad. Adam Newman is going to make a bunch of ugly buildings. Beautiful again. Here's 10 reasons why we hate that. No. So anyways, I, I just respect, like I respect them making this a business decision. If I were CRV, though, I'd be like,

how can we get a story that's going to be big that actually makes us seem like alpha chads? And saying that we have no places to deploy is not, I don't know, why don't you do a hostile takeover of a Caribbean nation? What could they have done with $275 million in Haiti? Could they have returned? Well, General Catalyst is buying a hospital network.

You saw that. That's crazy. That is the type of bold move that gets you crazy. But here's the thing. They are still investing out of their core one billion dollar early stage fund yeah and so i don't know select fund it was just like their growth fund yeah it's interesting that their growth fund was like so much smaller than their in their early stage well that's why it's like i

think you guys might have bigger problems than yeah than just having too much money yeah I mean maybe they just hire some growth people and the growth people don't want to do it anymore or didn't work out or something yeah anyways I hope they generate massive returns for their LPS and did you and have you know massive carry checks exactly I was never rude against any firm even if any any alloc, even if I think their comps, any allocator. And I hope we see these guys on the Midas list for this decision. Maybe they have such a banger in the first half of the fund that they're just like, no, let's just let this ride. Maybe that's the whole thing.

That might be smart. Yeah, maybe they got something good in there. They got something good. What could they have in there? You'd hold some cash back to do the next series. The Series Z. You've got to wait for the Series Z. Yeah, anyways.

That's where the money is. Reed, Murat, Sarr, and Max. Sarr and Newman. He's back, baby. He's so back. I thought he was doing something else, like the real estate roll-up. Is this a new, new thing, or is this just a re-brand? This is a new co-working thing.

I think he was doing multifamily. Was that flow? Flow is. And now this is called workflow. Yeah. Avoids the specific business model that got his original coworking company into trouble. Is it just a management company? I didn't actually read the article.

I was just like, this guy's sick. Dude, this is, this is the reason technology brothers is just Twitter and podcasts. Yeah, exactly. No one's reading the article and we're just still speculating.

All I know is that one of my friends ran into him at a party and he wasn't wearing shoes. And I was like, yep, that's on brand. Some things don't change. It wasn't actually a zero interest rate phenomenon. It wasn't. I mean, he captured so much of the mouth with his secondaries. To write him off, he's not in jail. I don't think he got sued or anything.

He wound up with a billion liquid or something like that. And so he's going to make a play at some point. He's going to try and do something. I just wonder what this will be. Somebody told me his jet was on the market. Oh, really? Maybe he just... Well, they're coming out with a new one, so you know, you gotta sell the old one. Right, right.

I think the G650 is like, you know, no longer the hot commodity. Pacing out, yeah. You gotta go to the 750 or something like that. I didn't know this, but apparently, I think his jet was black. Yeah. And apparently that hurts the performance quite a bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, a huge amount, a huge amount. Cause you're just attracting so much light so you have to like run the AC constantly, I think. Yeah, but it's also just so amount. Because you're just attracting so much less. You have to run the AC constantly, I think. Yeah, but it's also just so cool. It's much cooler. Michael Jordan's jet is also black. It's like a crazy paint job that he spent a ton of money on. Yeah, yeah.

Wastes. And it adds an egregious amount of weight. A lot of cost. From the density of the paint or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Silly. Should we go through some of these more tweets? I got a whole stack here.

I printed them all off. Is this the same stack? No, no, no. Oh, sorry. I don't have the same stack. We'll just pull them up one at a time. So the first one is from Signal. I never say these Anon names out loud,

and then I do, and I realize I have no idea. But he says, the gap between the very rich and everyone else is actually shrinking drastically over time due to hyper capitalism and tech. You drink the same Coke as a billionaire. You use the same iPhone as a billionaire on the same network. You use the same exact same tools as a billionaire, e.g. chat GPT. There is no special ultra rich person versions of software or apps. You read the same garbage online as a billionaire.

Definitely true. You shitpost in the same fashion as a billionaire on the same networks a billionaire shits in the same type of toilet as you do you're afforded roughly the same health care as a billionaire assuming you have insurance with marginal differences you can roughly go travel to any place like a billionaire can private versus not and then pg actually had the top reply and mentioned that he'd written about this in 2004 which is kind of funny yeah mind the gap yeah i don't i don't think things have changed that much i mean i'm gonna do like a very short of like shaky analysis of this but if you went back hundreds of years ago and you had like a king and peasants. Like they're both, you could argue, you use the same stone for your wall. And it's like your bread was milled with similar grain. And it's like, and your wine also gets you drunk.

And it's like, well, the things that were truly luxuries were like, oh, the king has like this little meager supply of like this certain spice. And it's like, that stuff still exists, right? right like i can go you can go and get like blueberries that were hand-picked sure you know in japan omakase strawberries yeah yeah and and and i would argue that you know the the you know early you know first job out of college product manager that's going to sugar fish is not eating the same fish that we do when we go out to get sushi i'm kidding no they're not eating the same fish they're not eating the same fish that somebody who's having you know hosting a dinner party at

their house and like having like some sushi chef from japan like who flew over it's just not and so i don't know if you could argue like you know the peasant is says to the king but sir my wool i i sure you know i the wool in my sweater is the same as yours are we not so different you know yeah i do think that that this actually goes back to warren buffett eating c's you know candy and being like, he's the original one of this. Obviously, he's known for sort of like eating down in some ways. Sure, sure, sure, sure. But yeah, I think it's just like capitalism.

Ultimate longevity hack. I think the takeaway from this is that capitalism rips. Yep. And we should encourage it and support it. There is an interesting thing here where like if you are a billionaire and you want an iPhone or you want chat GPT like you at some level need some sort of competition or you need some other other people in the economy it's like you can't just have one person with all of the assets like there's some sort of wealth equality that needs to happen in the economy yeah such that like like you know like

the richest man can't make the best film happen and the best album and all of these things like there needs to be a lot of other people building and doing other stuff like it really is like a a society that bounces off of each other which is like important to get like the innovation that then becomes like evenly distributed over time. Right. Um, yeah. Right.

It's interesting. I don't know. Well, should we go to China? Yeah. I think the cool thing, the last thing I would say on that, I was talking to a founder on Monday who has a candy company. And the,

the thing that's genuinely cool about all this stuff is like, like the thing about the accessibility of all these things is being a billionaire doesn't make the iPhone more enjoyable somehow. Like, there's not even really apps that you can get, right? Well, not yet, but once we launch a Wallpaper's app, the iRich Wallpaper's app that has a $10,000 subscription. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. I think it's $1,000 a month is the cap a $10,000 subscription. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. I think it's $1,000 a month is the cap. $1,000 a month.

But it's a good 12K ARR per. Well, you just know you have the most luxurious wallpaper in the world. Coming soon. But yeah, it's just that is all the evidence that you need. Imagine how much people would be in uproar if you could go down that list and be like, billionaires have this and I don't. Billionaires have this and I don't. Billionaires have this.

And even given that situation, the dominant sort of like political view that gets votes seemingly is, let's tax the 1% more even though, or let's tax the 10% more even though they already's tax the tax the ten percent more even though they already pay like 80 percent of federal income taxes yeah it's interesting i have a friend who is a sugarfish hater and he once referred to it as like the mcdonald's of sushi and i was like now you're speaking my language yeah i love that i love that it's amazing standardization yeah yeah delicious like you didn't have to low quality but presented well repeatable I love that. That's amazing. Standardization. Let's go when they open. Yeah, yeah. Delicious. You didn't have to convince me. Low quality, but presented well. Repeatable.

That's good. You saw this, that Huawei in China built a European city. Right. This is so sick. Yeah, I mean, we're going. That's where our Asian studio has to be. It's amazing. Yeah, why can't we do that?

I mean, I think it would be probably cultural appropriation or something i mean we kind of do it it's effectively our culture well no no if we did the opposite no no no yeah i'm not saying build a great wall but we kind of do that in the sense that there's like chinatown and japantown and koreatown but you know we don't take it to this level like it'd be so sick if like chinatown and new york city just looked like the forbidden city in beijing yeah yeah yeah imagine in manhattan yeah just rolling up you go to like little tokyo looks like it looks exactly like tokyo yeah the bus looks like a dragon you know like be amazing winnie the pooh walking around but this architecture is just it's

just so iconic like you see it and you're just like that looks like europe inspired yeah it's just beautiful but what a crazy what a crazy choice by huawei to just like yeah huawei send it 25 000 people work here it's like acres and acres and acres like you can just walk around this city for like you know hours and just only see italian French, and German architecture. More residents than the entire town. Double the residents of the entire town that I live in. I don't really know why I pulled this up. It's just like crazy. Yeah.

Honestly, we'd like to see more of it. I think the Excel campus will look similar. Should we talk about the All In podcast? Yeah. How do you warm up for your all-in podcast lessons um sunning uh my perineum oh yeah you know yeah both legs back yeah sunlight just to kind of like get the chi going sure you know sure um to make sure that when jason starts you know and are you listening are you listening on like airpods max airpod pros or are you listening? Are you listening on like AirPods, max AirPod pros,

or are you listening to more of a wired headphones? But, or do you do like a full like stereo systems? All ends toxic enough. I don't also want the toxic EMS. Like the, the relationship dynamics of the show are already. So,

you know, you don't print it on vinyl and just play it at home? Oh my God. That's a good. I think that's the right way to listen to it. That's our next drop is last week's all-in episode on vinyl. On vinyl. That's good.

We should definitely do that. The greatest things. Let's cut this out. We don't want to do it. Do you want to leak this out? Actually, no, we can leak it. Our five listeners, they can get a little preview. I like it.

Let us know in the comments if you want the all-in podcast on pressed vinyl. This is going to be a great journey for us because we're going to find some guy in Brooklyn who's the last guy just making handmade vinyl records. Artisanal vinyl. I think having the trump episode or like the elon episode on vinyl is just it's so high status for a tech bro and there's this especially with the yeah like like there's something so like a record the packaging and everything it's like

it was the epitome of like album art when you could just like hold it yep and just like you know seeing the zoom screen of like jason and all the guys the all-in like the podcast logos they're square because they show up in your podcast feed square and that fits just perfectly on the line yeah you know cover yeah but i mean i think everyone is kind of circling around the same conclusion around the All In podcast that, you know, it hasn't lived up to the expectations of what people thought it could be, unfortunately. In terms of? Profit, mostly. I mean, I love what they've done politically, genuinely. I think it's very good. I've talked to, I talked to a literal congressperson who was like, I get my takes from the All In

podcast, which... That's good. It's very good because previously they were getting it from Kara Swisher and Rico. It's a huge step forward. These are... People joke about all the different All In guys or whatever, but seriously they're all on the same team,

which is the most important thing. Even though they have a little infighting about politics, that doesn't actually matter. What matters is that they're all on the same team, which is the most important thing. And even though they have a little infighting about politics, that doesn't actually matter. What matters is that they're all capitalists and they're all capital allocators and they all care about founders and business and good things. They're not insane.

And so, I mean, it is a huge thing. But it just sucks that they don't have ads. I think everyone expected when the show got big. This would be a place where the best ads and the ad rates would be super high and they'd be making a lot of money six-figure cpms exactly but they just haven't lived up to it and i think that's why it's more important than ever that a show like technology brothers exists a show that focuses on profit over audience listener satisfaction or audience size or any political influence. In-person community.

Exactly. All of that stuff, you can put that all to the side. Yeah, they're posting about while they post pictures from their conference, we'll be posting our P&L. Exactly. We'll be posting our Stripe dashboard, screenshot it. Everyone loves, oh, my podcast is this in the rankings or it has this many stars and reviews. what's the EBITDA how much money do you do

what do you cash flow on these are the important metrics for a podcast yeah and so that's per listener right like it's not just gross it's on a per listener basis what are you taking home exactly exactly so and are you levering up that's the other thing with podcasts not using leverage oh yeah it's insane that they're not saying that they're not right like so yeah i mean i i see them i see us kind of as a spiritual successor to the all-in podcast kind of focusing on what matters exactly like doing what they couldn't figure out how to do. And honoring it through paying homage to some of their most iconic episodes through vinyl releases. Yeah. Exactly.

That's great. Should we talk about the Zuckmobile? Yeah, this was amazing. There's a lot of words that you could describe Zuck's era that I won't say. So give the overview. It looks like, so Zuck posted pictures on Instagram of him. He has purchased and customized his and hers Porsches. One is a sports car, looks like a 911, and the other is a Cayenne, SUV.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, don't disrespect Zuck's choice. That's a GT3 Touring. Oh, it's a GT3 Touring. But it's not, is it manual? Is it the ST? I think he said it's a manual. Okay. No, it's not.

I mean, the Tourings are all manual, to my knowledge. Or maybe you can get them. I thought the ST was the GT3 manual. I thought that was the whole point of like the ST. That's why it exists. But maybe it's like, it's more just like analog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But analog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway.

Yeah, so right away, it's cool. Somebody, I saw somebody else saying, I don't know if it was this tweet, but like he's sort of realizing that him doing this is not cool to other billionaires, but it's cool to the average Instagram user. Yeah, that's what this tweet is. I think what Zuck realized is that the norm

of avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth is entirely about intra-elite social status and common people actually love stuff like this. And this is 100% accurate. Yeah. Plus, there was this whole fake thing for a long time, like SBF drove a Civic and was like, I'm not doing it for the money. And it's like, he was the most in it for the money and completely fraudulent.

And Zuck was doing like, I'm smoking'm smoking meat yeah i'm just in my backyard and it's like yeah yeah dude trying to make it look like your backyard is sick like it's fine like just let us enjoy vicariously how sick your backyard is yeah we want to see you surfing and stuff my whole thing is like the the um you've gone and told the entire world that your wife drives a turbo gt minivan and it's a one-on-one and so what is the actual usability of it like i don't understand is she pulling out of the zuck estate to pick the kids up from school and there's like this military convoy and helicopter maybe and she's just like i love living my regular you know minivan mom life well you know you know like the standard billionaire like setup it's like two black

suvs outside of everywhere that you go yeah and so you walk outside there's always two so if one breaks down you can get in the other one but then also like you don't know where they are essentially that's just kind of the standard equipment yeah if i was a billionaire two ford rafters two rafters two trucks for sure yeah for sure except except the raptor as a former raptor owner is like really not that practical like it's just not the cabin's just not that big okay it's not like you can like unless you want to be in the west coast custom to stretch it yeah yeah the um i'm very pro minivan i've told you this i recently purchased pro minivan. I've told you this. I recently purchased a minivan, a Mercedes Metris.

Very popular in Europe. Less popular here. Mostly used as an airport transport vehicle. I've been loving it. Like just walking up to your car, pulling the door and having the door go out. It's very, very practical. My only critique is the color choice. I think chalk is the critique is the color choice.

I think chalk is the worst modern Porsche color option. The putty color. I love how we have to tweet in black and white. But yeah, it's a rough color. If you're going to do that, why not do the Python green? I've been looking at the new VW bus. Have you seen this thing? No, is it the electric one it's electric it's called the id buzz and it comes coal power it's coal power well the electricity that is from uses is from coal yeah so um it's uh it it has the sliding

doors like a minivan but it's a bus so it doesn't read as a minivan fully it reads as like something weird and different and then it comes in like these crazy colorways and i was even thinking of getting it wrapped in like something more fun so that i think that the optimization when you're a parent is just like get the car that will be fun for the kids my optimization was extreme practicality and when they have the air one smoothie and they're throwing it around the car that i'm not worried about it getting on the leather yeah you know i just don't care i'm just like throw it throw it around the car, I'm not worried about it getting on the leather. You know, I just don't care. I'm just like, throw it on the ceiling,

throw it on there, throw up, you know, like do whatever you want to. I mean, I've been testing the waters with like, what car should I get based on my three-year-old's opinions. That's great. So I'll do like an A-B test. Like, which one do you like more? I'll show them two images.

And the car that beats everything else, can you guess? Red Cybertruck. Yeah, I was about to say Cybertruck. The Cybertruck. It was designed by a three-year-old, and it gets a three-year-old going. And one of my friends was like, the Cybertruck is the most perfect example of a car that matters to only it matters only to people who don't matter right it's like it's cool to people who aren't cool or serious right and i'm like but it matters to three-year-old boys which is arguably the only dude i'm trying to impress like he's the only guy that i care about i don't care what some you know random person

thinks about my car i care what my son thinks about my car is he pumped to get in and go on an adventure no most of my car purchasing has been driven by my my inner child yeah right that's why i got the wagon it has the reverse three seat like rear view seat i was always a hit when i was a kid yeah like it'll be a hit for these and when i got when i got a raptor i so i got this murdered out raptor that had been lifted and tinted and it was like what is the truck that like the five-year-old me wanted and i didn't have because my parents drove two priuses it was like what do you want to what should we cars we take to school today my parents want to civics yeah i was like you want to take this the white prius or the gold prius and i'm like no you get a white and a gray or silver honda civic or

white and so as an adult i have some purchasing power and i'm like what what what am i gonna get and i started i i basically like had to train sarah on it for a year every time i'd see a raptor i'd be like that is a good looking truck yeah and it would basically like she was like the first like 10 to 20 times she goes absolutely not i hate that and then i kept saying it and i started to break through the same thing like my wife knows like nothing about you but she knows that you owned a raptor and i've told her that raptors don't depreciate like as much as other cars. And so whenever she sees a Raptor now, she's like, I know that that car doesn't depreciate.

It's a practical decision. And she's like, I hate that you've like taught me all these stupid car things because now I'm like noticing red brakes or like when a car has four, has four exhaust pipes. She was like, yeah, yesterday I saw a BMW that didn't have any decals on it. It had been debadged. And I was like, oh, there's something under the hood there. Look at the muscle car that's clearly modded. And she was like, I don't need to know this.

Why is this in my brain? Why is this in my brain? Yeah, I could be using this for other things. No, but unfortunately with the Raptor, the ultimate challenge and the reason that I got rid of it was, one, because parking in the average L.A. parking lot with a Raptor, one, can't fit in any parking garages, which is also just a general issue in L.A. But, two, any time you're meeting with somebody that doesn't know you already, their first assumption is that if you pull up in a lifted, murdered out Raptor, is that you are a total dickhead. And so like trying to, I just realized

there was this period of like I had to like overcome that, and I was like this is kind of a waste of time. Like I'd rather somebody pull up and sort of like, people, you know, people. It is tough because there's no American car right now that sends just like a neutral signal like if you're in like a mustang you're a mustang owner corvette owner etc like raptor same thing if you're in a tesla people have all these like weird mixed things like it was either like your

total like green like tree hugger or now it's like you're a trump supporter like yeah yeah we bought this before we knew what a bad yeah that thing uh well i mean my hot take is like uh elon is getting so like uh right wing pilled that he's gonna make a v12 model s yeah yeah with a gated manual and yeah a straight pipe exhaust uh i think that'd be incredible he's just like yeah you know what like you know like i i didn't get any credit for i didn't get any credit for the whole ev transition anyway you guys don't like these evs so now i'm doing ice cars yeah yeah yeah it's it is pretty wild that this cyber truck is seemingly selling very well oh yeah yeah yeah it would sell even better if it was it wasn't controversial yeah yeah yeah if it was it was like yeah. Yeah. Yeah if it was more controversial So yeah, we have this one S&P global mobility says Tesla delivered

5175 cyber trucks in July. This is a 61 percent month-over-month increase They also estimate the rest of the electric pickup truck market sold only a combined 5,500 so here's something that's funny about Tesla so there's a founder the classic thing if you're a founder and you either raised a bunch of venture capital, I guess, in the case of this other tweet, or there's a founder of a company that's actually doing really well and he bought a foundation series Cybertruck thinking that, okay, there's going to be a limited release, like if anything's going to hold value, it's this one. Tesla has completely ignored that that was ever supposed to be limited and sort of like foundational, like first number of orders.

Sure. And they're continuing to produce them at full clip. What's the difference between a foundation model and just a regular one? I don't know the design differences, but I think it was sold through as a limited you know edition like you got the first cyber you know like one of the first one yeah it'll be the one that like it'll be the one but it was at a significant let's like it um yeah it's interesting i still love them i think they're just beautiful and i smile every time i see them around and my son smiles every time i see them around and i think they're just beautiful and I smile every time I see them around and my son smiles every time I see them around and I think they're just funny looking and I want more aggressive cars like this. I really like that Hyundai that's coming out.

That one is crazy. So they put the electric powertrain in the Hyundai Ioniq 5N and it's the guy who did the BMW M series. And what letter comes after M? It's the guy who did the BMW M series. And what letter comes after M? It's N. So he went over there, put up the N division, and he created digital DCT, basically, like dual clutch transmission. And it has engine noise.

And all the car guys that have driven it are like, it's incredible. You forget that you're not driving a manual or an actual engaging car. And now they're going to put that in this Hyundai Vision 74 thing. driving like a manual or like a actual engaging car. And now they're going to put that in this Hyundai Vision 74 thing. It looks amazing. It looks like something out of Back to the Future.

Have you seen this thing? It looks really good. I didn't know that. I thought that was just a concept car. So it was a concept car and they were going to do it with some crazy powertrain that was like hydrogen. Have you seen this thing? Hydrogen cars. And they yanked that.

They're doing the electric, I think they're gonna do an N model, so it'll have like 700 horsepower, but it'll be like 50K or something, so you'll be able to thrash on it. And it'll just be like so funny and look so cool. And I think it's going into production, they're trying to get it live by 2029,

which I think is like believable based on Hyundai. Like I think that they're pretty serious. It's out of concept car territory now. There's nothing better than when a car manufacturer wakes up out of their stupor. Because every car manufacturer is pretty much a legacy company, except for Tesla and whatever Rivian.

And when these companies wake up, I would give the example of Toyota with their Land Cruiser. It's like, hey, let's take one of our most loved cars ever and let's just run it back. And make it modern and make it cool. And people love them and you know that it's gonna be like a Toyota, it's great. They did the same thing with the Lexus,

effectively the same version of the car that has, I guess it's slightly, I don't know, slightly bigger warp. Yeah, and then the VW don't know, slightly bigger. Oh yeah, the ruggedized one. Yeah. And then the VW that you mentioned, the van. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring back the bus. There's nothing like, because. There's nothing exciting in VW's portfolio other than this thing.

Yeah, you take the legacy of these amazing, iconic products and you just, somebody like wakes up one day at these manufacturers and they're like, hey, we should actually like do something cool or novel. I think VW got like the marketing right, but I think the car is actually pretty trash. I think the range is really bad and the price is way too high. So I think objectively it's not that good of a car, but it's a cool idea. And I'm glad that they're going in that direction, at least being fun. Speaking of Cybertrucks, did you see this startup promotion?

This guy was announcing the latest version of a company called Bastion and instead of spending a bunch of money on a video we decided to do something more impactful, giving out free rides across New York City in our branded Cybertrucks. Details on the launch or how to grab a ride below. Yeah, so I never want to hate on anybody

trying to create value in the world that this was just like so whack. It's like I now know that you were giving rides in a company Cybertruck, which why do you have a company Cybertruck as a crypto infrastructure company? Oh, is that what they are? And I don't know what, I had to go deep.

I don't know what you do. I don't know what they do. It would have been much more impactful to, I don't know. Do something related to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, like, you know, like what are the themes of your business security regulation money infrastructure like crypto like it's got to tie to that somehow

whatever stunt you do needs to be something of like around that yeah if you're building like there's so many things like back in the party round days we did something where we were like, hey, reply with your address, and we're doing an airdrop. And then we airdropped NFT ads for Party Round into everybody's wallets, which you would then have to pay money to get out of the wallet. So we just sent them to the CEO of Figma and all these other crypto people. So it's like, cool. And it just said, this is an ad for Party Round. And it was in comic. So it's like there's so it just said this is an ad for party round and it was like in like comic

and so it's like there's so many things you could do but i'm like okay like i could take the subway or i could like text the bastion hotline i mean even even if they were just like okay text them and we'll send like i don't know if this is like security company it's like okay text them and they'll bring like a like 25 security guards will like follow you around or something like that something that's a little bit more like tied to like security it feels like this should be about like a transportation company like are you launching like a lift competitor or something yeah or you do something like this during a conference yeah so that at least there's like more like but i'm just thinking like you're driving around soho

and you see this like cyber truck and you're like, okay, cool. And they probably got like 10 rides in throughout the day. Yeah. And I do like the idea of like, if you're a founder and you're picking a car and you just happen to buy a cyber truck,

like throw your logo on it. Yeah. Like I think that's really positive. Yeah. It's a good way to get cheap attention. If that's a car that you personally want to own and drive. But you can put it on whatever car you own. If you have a Ford Raptor,

throw a wrap for your company on there. Like, that's funny and cool. And then when you pull up, people are like, how do you stand out? It's funny that when you think about wraps as like an unutilized ad inventory, the issue is that the people that would wrap their car with something for like

a nominal amount of money are gonna have like not so great cars that you want to associate with but like it would be a funny thing for like like like only wrapped the yeah with like you know oh like buy my meta ray-bans there's, yeah, yeah. That would be cooler. That would be cooler than just like, GT3 RS with the Orion. Just like,

all of his different products. Like, download Instagram, here, QR code. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, just really tacky. No, I did that, I did that with our old CTO who's like, into like,

racing. I was like, let me, do you have any sponsors? Let me sponsor your car. I got, put five of my companies up there. It's great.

Yeah, it's cool. It looks awesome. It also just looks cool. Yeah, it just makes the car look cooler. Yeah. That's an example of,

of capitalism in action is putting a bunch of stickers on a car makes it look cooler. Yeah. That's amazing. That's, that's the power of advertising.

Yeah. I like that. You saw this tweet. Yeah. So this amazing. That's the power of advertising. Yeah. I like that. You saw this tweet. Yeah. So this is just like so funny in so many ways because for some reason, like all the AI slop threat accounts have all decided that like this is the new scam. Okay. And it's-

Break it down. Tell me what the tweet says. Tell me what the tweet says. There was like 30 of these tweets that are basically saying AI models are earning over, AI influencers are earning over $5,000 per month. Meet Emily, a

21-year-old model who was brought to life by AI. Now you can create your own AI influencer in minutes. Here's how. And I think it's cool technology but to me this just makes me go long like actual influencers because one people don't really realize but like you can have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram being like an Instagram model and like make like below minimum wage because like unless you're

genuinely influential and cool and brands like actually think that by working with you they're going to elevate their brand the best that you're getting is like free product so I'm imagining like all the guys that were doing like drop shipping stores 10 years ago and like didn't it didn't really work and they're looking for their next thing are now like i'm gonna make an army of ai influencers and they're just like gonna be like slaving over like creating like the perfect like all this content because it's obviously like these people these people are competing against other influencers who are have a real connection with their audience have years and years and years of sort of like a relationship and genuinely are creating like artisanal content.

Yep. And anybody that's going out and saying you're going to make $60,000 a year with your AI slop influencer that's like has no opinion. And all these courses are for sure going to say like, if you can just get one AI influencer that's making 5,000 a month, and then you scale to 100 or 1,000,

you could be making $5 million a month from your AI influencer business. Well, that's where the money is. So that guy's promoting a course or something, or like a product, something. He's selling the product that allows you to do this, but you know what's really interesting is that that video there is an actual human.

It's not AI generated. He's just saying that it's AI generated. Because obviously if you use a real person, it looks even more real. And there's no risk of like slopification. Because everyone's like, oh wow, like he was able to make a girl where the hands are perfect and everything.

There's no like the hair isn't like transforming or anything there's no like there's no artifacts yeah so he must have the best tech in the game i gotta go with this guy that's what i think at least that's what the community note said when i dig in really yeah i'm like so funny did i tell you this i'm like i'm like community notes admin now let's go let's Yeah, that's it. Let's go. You're the new Wikipedia mafia. So I can go in and like rate all the community notes. I can write community notes. I can do all that stuff.

That's great. You should communicate community note all our posts. Just say, Technology Brothers is not the most profitable podcast. Yeah, because if you get a community note, then it'll be more viral. Oh, they got dunked on. Yeah, exactly. Because if you get a community note that it'll be more viral, you'll be like, oh, they got dunked on. Exactly. Yeah, so, I mean, Trevor McFedry's, like,

already tried to do this with Brad back in the day. Oh, I don't know this. Like, he made an AI influencer called Lil Miquela. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Had genuine, like, million followers, like, really cool collaborations, like, really good execution over a long period of time. Yeah.

He sold the company to Dapper in, like really good execution over a long period of time. Yeah. He sold the company to Dapper in like 2022. And I would just like, but they were approaching it from like world building and actual storytelling. It's not like, give me a TikTok girl, like that's between the ages of 22 and 25 and make them dance to the most viral songs it's like okay like i just i'm very bearish um but happy that the course bros have a new have a new graft product to sell yeah uh one of my um one of the guys i was hanging out with at uh um buddy of mine this guy Kimia who sold his last company to ramp he's building he's building software to like basically an AI agent to like find and win government contracts which is cool so we've been talking about like how do you create this sort of like cottage industry around people basically showing other people how to find and win government contracts.

And then, you know, in the same way that Shopify had benefited. I think maybe it was you that said, I don't know if Hindenburg ever covered Shopify. Oh, I don't know. But, you know, basically his business will be massively successful if you get all these bros being like millionaires are being made through government contracting, which I actually think is very positive because if you get a bunch of smart young hustlers

that are going to compete for contracts to do toilet paper for the penitentiary. It's kind of like the old war dogs. Yeah, it's like, well, it actually increases competition and lowers the cost for the taxpayer and the government. So anyways, I hope that that becomes a trend. Yeah, it's kind of related to the rise of the rest thing that you've been talking about.

Did you see that announcement from Valinor? Julie Bush put this out. Have you seen this? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This incubator? Yeah. Is it an incubator? Yeah.

I mean, everyone's kind of confused about what it is, but it's like maybe incubator, maybe holding company eventually. Maybe some of the companies live in inside i think it's still pretty early but did they raise money yeah is she a part of the bush family oh i don't know maybe that's some lore if ben was if ben was here he could quickly yeah yeah because that would be like the ultimate like if jeb bush is the lead investor i was thinking about how there's like so few neocons anymore. They're just, they're kind of a dying breed. Everyone's like, you know, you're either like a right-wing nationalist or like you're like left-wing pro-war, but there's no like right-wing pro-war.

Dick Cheney's still around. Yeah, but he's like crossing the aisle now, right? Yeah, he endorsed Kamala. Yeah. But he's just pro-war. He's just pro-war. Yeah. But he's just pro-war. He's just pro-war. Yeah. But, yeah, I think the main value prop for Valinor is, like, if you're just a talented founder, but you don't know anything about distribution, you don't know anything about government contracting, like, they will, in exchange for equity and cash, like, standard YC deal type thing, they give you the the tools to get your first contract that's super cool yeah which i think is yeah because i i just think it's about the reason i heard about a

guy who who is a basically makes like millions of dollars per year as the guy that california contracts to when they need to move like protected bird eggs from like one location that's getting developed to another and so like the that should not be a million dollars yeah yeah yeah there's three companies bidding over that aggressively it's like yeah yeah because think about it think about if you went to like some environmental studies student it was like hey do you want to take a six-month course on how to transport like you know endangered bird eggs they're like cool okay now you can do this and it pays 150 dollars per day yeah and it's contract based and like you've gone from a multi-million dollar contract

to like okay now we're paying like entry-level like people like do this actually deserves and so i think more competition is good and it's so opaque and inefficient that um can't possibly be very competitive yeah right i mean we're talking about this with like the you know the the spacex narrative is like um is like you know it's the power law winner i think it's like 150 billion150 billion company. That's great. And Anderle has kind of carved their brand out as the power law winner in defense tech broadly. But there still remains the question of they can be the power law winner and defense tech can not look like the phone market. It can look like the SaaS market in the sense that like, yes, they are the power law winner in the sense that like, they're the Salesforce, they're the biggest company

and maybe they're the prime. But there's still a lot of- Yeah, but look at the CRM market. You still have Salesforce and HubSpot. Exactly, there are still a lot of other companies that like do fantastically and i also think like and there's this there's this very broader element of like andrel is like is like a prime and does like you know dod contracting but when people think about like defense tech

and hard tech it gets so broad that people wind up like augustus with weather modification is like kind of in that milieu and yet like not he just called me from the caribbean really the winds oh yeah he said don't tell anybody where i am right now you're not going to believe this he's just in the eye of the storm just like fighting he's fighting for his life right now no so i think the reason that defense tech is not going to be, or I would hope that it doesn't become the monopoly that Andrew Oll sort of implies, is that the reason that I don't think it will be the monopoly that they sort of philosophize. It can be monopoly over what they do. One of the stated goals of the DOD

and the government in general is vendor diversity. Yeah, I mean, Palmer told me that directly. He said like the government will not allow us to be a complete monopoly. But they can still be the greatest like value creation event in defense technology over the past 60 years, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is, like, a huge win for everyone. Yeah. And I think the even cooler thing is, like, I think about that guy who's doing that stove, the impulse stove. And have you seen this? Yeah. It's basically, like, a stove that has a ton of batteries in it. So it's an electric stove, but it can heat up, like, a pan very quickly a pan very quickly be very precise and he's always like cooking steaks on twitter and being like

i cook the perfect steak using my my stove it's very cool and it's something where it's like i don't know if that would get funded without andrew even though it's like not in defense tech at all andrew just kind of like shook the tree to be like hey it's okay to take risks on hardware because for so long the meme was like hardware is hard like pebble had such a bad go you know out of yc there were so many companies that tried and never really got to escape velocity now people are like okay we're going to take a shot on it again just with whatever and that means like new fridge companies new camera companies new phone like new devices like and i just think like i have more of those i have one that's relevant to the show maybe we should maybe Maybe we should fund it.

I want somebody to make me the world's most beautiful office printer. I just bought this printer in Black and White. My wife was like, when did you buy this? So when you think about a printer, it's like basically the perfect business model. It's like this sort of like… Razor and blade. Up front. Yeah, razor and blade. Up front, yeah, razor and blade. But I was driving over here, and I got an email that was like,

can you print this out and scan it and return it or whatever? And I'm just like, oh, that's super annoying. I don't have a printer. I use the postal list. And so I was like, oh, now I need to buy a printer. And I'm like, well, I need it to fit the aesthetic of my office. And I'm like, okay, now I need to buy a printer. And I'm like, well, like, I need it to fit, like, the aesthetic of my office. And, like, I'm like, okay, now I'm going to be, like, on HP's website being, like, what's the least ugly printer? But then it's like, okay, like, some things just don't die.

And in the same way that, like, vinyl records are probably, like, you know, they're not as big as they were at the peak, but, like, stabilized. And, like, there's just, like, people with, you know, various. It's like I would love to be able to buy like a beautiful printer and like, I'll sign up for the like, you know, yearly subscription. You need to do it with somebody who's really cool and who the board of directors at Apple actually just wants to hang out with.

So you can sell the company like geeks. Because like it should live, that clearly should live within apple they will never do it probably for esg reasons because it's printing paper and it's kind of but that would be that would be like an mkbhd like make it cool like the tech guy makes the and the beautiful like yeah I'm really bullish on hardware that is like just extremely analog yeah right like I want like it's in the same way that the highest like the most luxury yeah like but like the most like Bentley when they're making new cars or like we know that our customers like like switches switches and like stuff like that and so and it's the same reason that, like, my least favorite technology company of my life is Sonos. Because you made this, like, beautiful looking speaker that is, like, you know, very ugly to use and experience as a user.

From the setup to, like, it's not syncing anymore to why are these three speakers playing but, like, that one's not. And, like, oh, one of them's not connected to the internet it's like i'm gonna like take i i donated some sono speakers but i'm now wishing that i brought them to the gun range because it would bring me joy to just like blow up like my sono speakers it is crazy how, they're a pretty big company. They deserve to get mauled by Apple. They need a Hindenburg research. We tried the product. It actually is confusing. That's the entire report.

Yeah, they said that people were playing music every day, but it disconnects all the time. It disconnects all the time. There's no way. But it really is a testament that, like, in order to do the absolute top-tier software engineering where stuff just works, you actually have to be a trillion-dollar company like Apple. A $10 billion company just can't do it, especially if it's an older company.

So do it slightly analog. I think some companies, like Ramp obviously, has built something that's like they're punching way above their size in terms of the quality of the software. But it is, it is extremely hard. It's craftsmanship to build like great software that actually works all the time. Like anytime you break those expectations.

Well, it's the firmware where anytime you're getting into like, yeah, the crossword is really hard. Yeah. Between the hardware and software. Um, did you read this one?

Mark Andreessen. This is so, This is so real. What did he say? He said, overheard in Silicon Valley, every company should add this question to their interview loop. It's fine if you have gone to Burning Man, but are you currently going to Burning Man? I think he means like on an annual cadence, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Burning Man now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Burning Man, I mean, I know why he hates it. Extremely high NPS, but can't invest in it. That's it. Because if you ever talk to somebody who goes to Burning Man, dude, you got to go.

It's so amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Extremely high NPS. Yeah. But they haven't monetized it. So two things you've effectively had almost going on a decade of having the ability to do it without the desire to do it. And I would say ayahuasca and Burning Man. Yep. And ultimately, both of them were sort of intuitively demonic ayahuasca is like hey

i'm gonna go take a plane 12 hours into the jungle to get one-shotted by some jungle demon and then like hope that it cures me right um and then come back with like okay now i'm dealing with whatever like trauma i was trying to deal with and the trauma of my jungle demon you know who's calling me what's under discussed in the ayahuasca debate uh lex friedman didn't get one-shotted i just listened to a recent podcast of him with the cursor team you know there's like ai uh it's like a coding ide uh it was just classic lex there was nothing changed it was fine what do you mean he you changed. He was fine. What do you mean? You're saying he did it and then came back? Yeah, yeah.

There was a whole arc where he went into the jungle. He took a bunch of time off. I think he grew a beard. And I think he, in a conversation with Elon, said he took a mega heroic dose. Maybe it wasn't ayahuasca, but I think it was. He did some sort of shamanic retreat. And he came back completely fine,

has done a bunch of interviews. No, but I think here's the thing. He's just normal. Here's the thing with psychedel psychedelics if you're going into a psychedelic experience and you're highly stable yeah and you're in a good place yep then you come out of it being like cool i'm good i don't need a change yeah yeah well if you go in an unstable place trying to make it fix you it's different to go into it being like i'm gonna have this cool unique experience and maybe i like come out with a different perspective but into it being like i'm going to have this cool unique experience and maybe i like come out with a different perspective but going in being like please jungle demon fix me yeah uh well this was the the daniel thing was like it's a sorting function and it's

it's dangerous for mark to invest in in pre-sorted founders and then and then he should actually only invest in founders that have have done the ayahuasca and not been one-shot. And still are doing enterprise sass. Exactly. Those are the generational factors. Those are the killers. Yeah, so anyways, I think that if you think about things that are sort of intuitively demonic, going and taking a poison and throwing up for for you know 12 hours in a hut in Peru

and like being visited by a spirit that is like making you you know face like your greatest you know fears um you know that sort of seems like maybe not the thing that the average person should do um it'd be like you wouldn't be like oh I going to go get an exorcism in Louisiana in the swamp. It's like how different is that than going to Peru? That's a good point, yeah. So if a founder calls you up and says, hey, I'm going to be offline for the next couple weeks. I'm going to Louisiana to get an exorcism. And it's like kind of in this hut swamp.

It's going to be really dark. It's with somebody I I don't know I'm paying them a lot of money I'm not really sure what I'm getting in return there's gonna be other strangers there that I don't know that are also dealing with their own traumas you'd be like hey hey bud uh I feel like it's my duty to tell you to not do that and then also if you somebody was describing hey i'm gonna go into the desert this place called black rocks is it it's black rock black rock is the investment front black rock i'm gonna go to i think it is black rock city yeah yeah so i'm gonna go to black is it affiliated with black rock oh my god we just put it together black rock city black rock shorting tech massively yeah and they're and they and they're funding the thing that's one-shotting all the right technology actually called black rock city that is ridiculous if that's what it's called. Black Rock City.

Black Rock City. Yeah, it's the playa. The playa. Burning Man Black Rock City. Oh, my God. Well, now I got to go. Black Rock's involved. I love Black Rock.

I love Black Rock. Yeah, Black Rock is a phenomenal institution. No, but if somebody said, I'm going to Black Rock City. You think Larry Fink's ever been? And he's like like this is my city he's the ceo of black rock uh i bet he's dropped in yeah he's flown in the pj and like landed and he's like i run this place i run this place i run this place he harvests the energy like what's the like the harkonnen mode where he's like in like he's in like a bathtub in black rock City and he's just like fully locked into the energy of the playa and he's just taking it. And then he goes back to New York. He's like, I have what I need.

But if somebody told you, hey, I'm going to go to the desert with a bunch of people I don't know, all sort of Western norms are thrown out the window. People are going to be dressed up in lingerie or just naked. And then everybody's going to do a bunch of drugs and have sex you know with strangers you would say hey uh i don't know is like that the best use of your time um have you done hard drugs like that before like should you combine hard drugs and sex with random strangers you'd be like so i don't think everyone does everything there. Right. But like the people. There are some people that just go and DJ and stuff.

Yeah. But let's, let's be honest. Like the people that are coming back being like, dude, you got it. Those are the ones that have been, you know, occupied by the demons and are now, are now trying to spread that. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So anyways, I think like if you just say it out loud yeah it all makes sense why maybe the average person shouldn't do it and they should just like go to church or something you know yeah try try it's like the fork in the road meme there's like black rock city and then there's black rock hq yeah and you just want to show up to black rock it's almost like grinding up the ladder yeah yeah it's almost like you could go to the jungle and do hard drugs with a sketchy shaman or you could just put on a suit right and like would putting on the suit give you the real effect that you wanted which is just like feeling good and just like looking good and just like doing good probably right like you could go to burning man or you could just put on a suit yeah and just like

hit the spreadsheets you know spreadsheets it's like it's people that are like i don't tip male waiters like hit the oil rig i've never heard that that's really funny or it's like dude don't go to don't it's like don't go to don't go to black rock city like put on a suit and go to black rock go to black rock yeah i can't believe we just realized that i've heard about burning man for so many years never put it together black rock's behind everything oh my god they own the entire economy including but the burners apparently yeah um well speaking of getting on the grind set uh do you use a set of apps to build a second brain? Yeah, yeah.

This is so good. Yeah, yeah. Everyone has this at the midway. So I will say I can't completely roast this because I use the Bear app, which is just like a notes app that I think is slightly better than notes. But I do have just like a bunch of notes and a lot of them get lost and it's fine and like it is it is easy to like roast this because it's like kind of like this over optimized thing but um like it's totally reasonable to like have some organization in your life like yeah it's just like don't go crazy with it it'd be like somebody

like it'd be like a guy in mad men being like, check it out, all my filing cabinets, you know? Yeah. And he's like, I use this one for, like, important, you know, documents, and I use this one for, like, pictures of my family. Yeah. I mean, there's something where it's like, I, the problem is, is that just, like, from the context here, just seeing this in the form of a tweet, I know that this person is selling a course and their second brain is their life and this is all they do is organize. Yeah, yeah. And it's like this self-referential thing where they're in the business of organization as opposed to what I really want to know is I want to know what is Elon's version of this? What's Zuck's version of this? I just want to

know like what are the actual people there? Think BlackRock. Like what is on his phone? The high powered version of this is just like having really talented people around you that you delegate important things to, right? It's like the executive assistant. It's the driver. It's the COO. It's really just

one app. It's the phone. It's the phone book and you just call the person and they pick up because they know it's important. It's the COO that you've worked with for 20 years that like you're like I'm not going to do this deal if this person's not involved. Yeah. I mean yeah at the high level I've always noticed that like the really the really big guys they always just like oh I'm like oh I have an app for that they have a person yeah it's like i have door dash they have a chef yeah right it's like oh i have zillow they have a person that buys real estate for them yeah yeah a full-time person that just goes around hunting for real estate deals like oh like you have you know the united app they have a private jet with a pilot

they just call and so it's just their phone book. It's like, they want to do something? Okay, call the driver instead of Uber. Call the jet. I got good advice from... Maybe the billionaires aren't so similar. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You have apps, we have people. They still have access to the same things.

It's just at a different level. Yeah, I got really good advice from like one of the the GPs at Andreessen after they invested because I was like oh we raised a lot of money now we like should be like we're like a real company and I was concerned because I never worked at a company the size of my company so I had no like real like well how should the meetings flow when should we do meetings like this and so i was asking him i was like trying to figure out like what the ideal like meeting structure throughout a week was and he was just like dude just like build just build the product like just build yeah like sell the customers build the product like none of that

stuff really matters until like you know and that's sort of like common silicon valley advice but sometimes you need to hear it at the right time and i would just ask like i would just like ask this guy like cool like like how much money did you make in the last 60 days not from selling courses on your second brain you know and if the answer is like zero then it it's like, okay, this is just like, you're a course bro. Yeah, the course bro definition is always quantitative. It's, did you make more money from content?

I remember watching somebody who was doing real estate content. Like, how to invest in real estate. And he was like, I made $3 million, and I'm a real estate guy in LA. I made $3 million last year. And his breakdown was he made 50K as a real estate broker and $2,950,000 as a YouTuber. Isn't that crazy? That's amazing. And he like put this, this was in like a CNBC, like published, like they broke down all of how he makes it. And I was like,

this is hilarious and ridiculous. Seems like the only person that would ever like make content like that, that actually makes money from business is like Alex Hormozy. Oh yeah. Where he's like, here's how I like run my day. But then he's actually like owns a bunch of like profitable businesses. What else should we talk about? Light bulbs. Probably got to wrap up soon.

Oh, I wanted to do this investment memos versus decks. I thought this would be a good Q&A. You're a big deck guy, investment memos are trending. This tweet from Mercedes Bent says, I'm seeing more founders put together investment memos as fundraising material. It's a good idea, but too many of them read like book report summaries. Founders if you're going to write a memo, make sure it reads like a thesis, how you developed your thesis,

your unique vision for the future, assumptions you make that could be tested, risk to your thesis, et cetera. So what's your take on investing in memos versus decks? Huge mistake to go into a round with no deck because the visuals are so important to the storytelling that if you just have this like text and like you know 20 paragraphs in a row it's just like so boring because if you have one one image where people's eyes going to go to i think people don't realize like i'm not reading your memo

i'm not reading your master's thesis on your business before i've even met you because it doesn't matter if it's a good thesis if If I have a five, 10 minute conversation with this person and the person sucks, I'm not going to, nothing's going to happen, right? Like that happens all the time with investors where it's like the right idea and the wrong team and you can't invest. And so I think that the reason to write a memo, and this is the core reason to write a memo is to give the investor something that they can copy and paste and to make their own memo sure so write it as though they're writing it to their investment committee their partner meeting whatever the thing that they're going to share around the same thing for press releases if you do the journalist's job by giving them an

interesting story giving them interesting give them, giving them interesting quotes. Give them the angles. Give them the photos. Give them the stuff. Like, make it easy for them. Then they will be more likely to write. Yeah, but I think, like, I really think people are doing it on hard mode if they're almost all products are visual, whether it's software, hardware, some IRL thing, huge visual component,

and, like, it doesn't give the visuals enough credit there are also some VCs that just like demand a deck every time and so it's like why would you just pitch a subset of VCs

by being hard on like oh I only do this yeah well I don't think any legitimate VC is saying I won't talk

I won't Keith Keith Roy demands decks I'm pretty sure he I'm pretty sure he

like generally he won't take a meeting but he will also he won't take a meeting also take a meeting unless he will also invest he sees a deck he'll also invest 20 million into somebody he knows really well without any materials you know yeah um so yeah i just think like that debate always comes up and one is not they just have like very different use cases i also in fact building the memo can often like does lead to the deck being stronger when you build it right totally totally um but yeah it's just like not one or the other i think that i

think the right combination that feels a little bit less like try hard almost yeah because sometimes when somebody's like writing some like super extensive memo you're like you should be like doing like something else like your seed stage your pre-seed're like you should be like doing something else like your seed stage your pre-seed company like you don't know any of this but like faqs i think work really well where it's like you basically create like what are the 10 most common questions that somebody asks how are you different than xyz competitor and you just answer all those and then as you get more questions in your raise you just add them to the list and then by the end you have this like document that you can just share with everybody.

Yep. And then that, like, again, is helping them do their job. So they're at their investment, their partner, like, meeting, talking about it. And somebody's like, well, we looked at this company and they're doing great. How is it different? And they're like, well, here's how it's different. Yep. So you're just, like, making the job easier for your potential investor who, if they invest, will become your partner.

So you already should be acting like you're on the team. So that's how I would advise people to approach it. I like that. That's a good place to close it out.