TBPN Live - The Truth Zone, Bear Domestication, Daily Driving Supercars, Lever up

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Okay, cool. Yeah, Peter, I'll talk to you later. Thanks. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we're saying thanks to a small brand called Enchilada Surfboards. They sent us some stickers, some merch. Go give them a follow. We've reacted to their tweets before. A lot of cool inside jokes for the Defense Tech crew. I still don't understand basically any of them. But I do believe I know the story behind this picture. This was someone who was on, I think on an Andoril test site or something. It was just kind of like a friendly dude and just had a great vibe. And so they got a picture of him and they put it on a t-shirt and they're it's become part of their brand yeah

the anderle to surf apparel brand pipeline is sort of beginning yeah clearly yeah um and we're excited about it i just like the yeah i mean we'll talk about the merch i'm sure but uh it's great that they're that there's like you know more stuff going on and like the creative southern california has two two histories aerospace and defense and merch and surfing surfing yeah and so if you can figure out a way to combine those there's a lot of alpha in that yeah yeah yeah uh speaking of defense tech uh did you read we got to enter the truth zone uh we're doing some fact checking we're keeping the information accountable a lot of people online call it the misinformation. I think that goes too far. I think we got to be nice to the information. It's a great outlet. As we discussed

earlier, they just brought on Taylor Lorenz to write an article. I talked to her about that. I'm excited for that to drop. And I get a lot of news from the information. I have the app on my phone. I read it all the time. It's great. I get the push notifications. They're a fantastic publication. And somebody needs to stand up for the journalists besides journalists, right? They're doing super important work. They get a lot of hate online. They're in the arena. you know, cultivate journalistic integrity at the information, but more broadly. And yeah, we're excited to dive in. Today we got an article from Corey Weinberg talking about Trump's win and the impact on the defense tech space.

Bulls. Bulls, yeah. Despite talk of a bubble. So obviously a lot of people are focused on, you know, what does the trump administration mean for defense tech it's and it's it is it is genuinely confusing because defense tech is very right-wing coded right it's like american flags and like lifting and very like masculine and very joe rogan but there's been this big wave where it's like well actually they're all talking about how

they're no longer neocons they actually want to pull out of all the wars the funny thing is dick cheney endorsed kamala yeah how does that how do you exactly make sense of that yeah yeah it's odd i mean i i my hope is that the the new administration is obsessed with deterrence over conflict. And so this is the Joe Lonsdale take, where he said, you have to build defense technology that is so asymmetric in its impact that the thought of conflict is unfathomable. And so you just don't go to war. And Palmer said this too, where Palmer said,

wars start when people miscalculate their abilities to attack. And they think that's a weak, that's a weak target. I can go after it. And so in general, it's this odd, it's this odd kind of, it's a little, it's a little bit of a paradox. Like you might see more defense spending with less war which would be great because well defense spending has been at historical lows over the last five ten years um and so yeah it actually dipped down substantially and so the renewed investment in the space is positive for a lot

of reasons yeah i mean right away i think we got to start at the headline. Here's what I highlighted. Trump's win Stokes defense tech bulls, despite talk of a bubble. So right away, you know, there is talks of there being a bubble in defense tech. But our point of view is, I think the information, you know, obviously they're going to put their own spin on it. If I was writing this article, I would say bubbles are awesome, right? I agree. And so Trump's win, Stokes' defense, Tech Bull's, bubbles are awesome would be how I would write that.

I just got a copy of the new book. But I'm not a journalist, right? I just got a copy of the new book by Stripe Press by Berne Hobart and Tobias called Bubbles. Yeah. And I haven't read it yet, but I've heard his talk and I've been on calls with him. And it's very interesting. He has a bunch of really good points about how bubbles are what allow people to start really ambitious companies and there's a lot of dividends from those and that in fact uh like the average joe doesn't usually get hurt by a bubble because they invest more regularly

and the people that get the most hurt when the capital yeah exactly are the risk on folks so you don't have to be like the argument of like what about Main Street doesn't actually apply to like bubbles popping but let's go through some of this article so they talk about saronic startup that is trying to build it and sell a fleet of autonomous military boats to the US Navy there is 175 million dollars at a 1 billion dollar valuation despite having secured only $17 million in government contracts, according to investor materials. Yeah.

Right away, I had to highlight trying to. This implies that they're not already selling to the U.S. government, or at least that's kind of the angle that they're taking. They have a contract, so they are successfully doing that. Yeah, so they're selling. So, yeah, when you're in the truth zone, we're not going to let that fly. Yep. They expect to generate $12.5 million

in revenue, but next year they're hoping to hit $150. So yeah, I mean, if you're growing 10x revenue, and it makes sense with anything, I mean, this is a young company, it makes sense that if you're going to, you know, be building something as complicated as a boat for the military, like there's going to be some lead up to actually getting a large contract i think andreessen

stole those shares at a billion if they can land this if they can land this 150 million with the navy yep uh they're getting that they're getting in at less than a 10x revenue multiple for a company that you know if they stay on this trajectory should be doing billions but yeah the whole tone here, still the Saronic fundraising was the kind of deal that has set off alarm bells that the money flowing into young firms building rockets, drones, and autonomous warships

has far outpaced the government contracts. The only alarm bells, you know, within our networks that it was setting off is that other defense tech CEOs were like, wow, I'm getting, I got to get in on this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, and the size gong. Yeah. That was the alarm. That was the real, it wasn't actually an alarm bell. It was the size gong getting hit. Yeah, exactly. We got to get a gong on here. Um, so there's, there's quotes from a bunch of different investors. Uh, Matt at

CrossFit Capital says, uh, the sector has become little hype-y, which I think everyone agrees with. This is true. There are a lot of companies that need to grow into their valuations, probably also true. But again, it's a good time to need to grow into a valuation because you have low interest rates,

you have more money flowing in. This is the time when you have, the worst time to try and grow into a valuation was 2022, 2023, when everything was down. Now it's like it's okay you can breathe you can raise some more money the the bubble narrative here is dependent on this idea that uh government con uh investment is outpacing government contracts right which is the entire nature of venture which is like let's deploy a lot of money into big ideas that don't have a lot of revenue now,

but might have a ton of revenue in 2034, right? And so I think the whole premise of this entire paragraph here is sort of incorrect and just sort of a little bit disingenuous given that that's the entire venture model, right? Yeah, I mean, the thing with the defense tech bubble is like, you could say that it's the same bubble as you know like compared to the crypto bubble or like the nft bubble that

happened like i just think about the sure that's like a what it's going to be a 10x forward revenue multiple in that company that's not that crazy compared to what we were seeing in some of the crypto companies where it was like a hundred or a000x, even in just B2B software. But what I really... Or even Truth Social, obviously, has commanded pretty meaningful multiples. Like 1,000x. Yeah. Actually, more like 10,000x.

Yeah. But the thing that I genuinely believe is a reason to not fear a defense tech bubble is that a... It's good for our team. Well, it's good for our bubble is that a good for our team. Well, it's good. It's good for our team.

It's good for our country. And the skills that you learn working at a defense tech company are super valuable. Like you're learning how to build things and work on machines and stuff. And it's like, Hey, there's a million jobs, like all the primes,

not just like the big companies like Anderle and stuff, but like even the primes, they, they, they, they, like the defense industry supports like hundreds of thousands of jobs. So if you learn some new skills, you can go into that and then have an impact there,

even if your company doesn't work. And, uh, but, but no one was saying, oh yeah, like an NFT guy is going to go and work on wall street or like, or if this, if this NFT bubble pops, we're definitely going to be hiring the NFT traders at Jane street. Like, no, that wasn't going to happen. And so, uh, there was definitely like a, like a, okay, what do you do with those skills of just like piping shit? Yeah. The only, the only, the only thing I'd push back on that is that I have, you know, there's a buddy of mine in Malibu who, um, you know, has been operating like a smaller crypto fund for the last few years. And he's got opportunities within the Trump administration now to help, you know, potentially

shepherd the new administration in terms of how do we even think about this new industry? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, overall, overall, I look at this is I think one bubbles are awesome to this bubble, it's obvious that some really big, important companies have already been built in the space,

Palantir, Anderle, the big breakouts. But if all these billions of dollars of investment end up creating another one or two Palantirs or Anderles, and that's all that happens, that's good for America, that's good's all that happens that's good for America that's good for our team that's good for Corey who wrote this article and I think everybody everybody's gonna win and the overall return profile should be similar to that of could be could be very similar to climate tech right where if

you looked at the core climate tech investments they actually didn't do that well but if you included Tesla yep in climate tech investments, they actually didn't do that well. But if you included Tesla in that group, it actually ended up being a really good place to invest overall. So there's a whole section on bearish signs, very doom-pilled here, the information. I would position this, if I was going to rewrite this, and maybe we could start getting early versions of this for cory but i would position this as um uh just you know potential challenges right none of these every

defense tech founder i know knows that what they're doing is not easy right it's not like we built this cute app and we shipped it and we got our first 10 users and now it's um you know we're going to try to get to 10 000 by next month and a million by the end of the year or whatever. It's obviously very hard and not easy to navigate the federal government, but it's certainly worth doing. It's worth taking on that challenge. Yeah. And so Hugh writes,

underpinning the optimism is the push from executives at defense tech firms like Palantir, Anderle, and SpaceX for reforms in how federal agencies buy weapons and technology. They argue that instead of buying from a small handful of large firms such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, government buyers should reward younger firms the executives say can build rockets, missiles, and tanks more cheaply. hasn't helped many startups. Among more than 125 venture-backed startups focused on defense, aerospace, and robotics, analyzed by Howie Wang, a deep tech analyst, just 10 firms accounted for 70% of the government contracts awarded for this year. Yeah, that's a power law, baby.

Yeah, I mean, of course, there's gonna be some power law here, but the power law here is so much weaker than in online advertising or something, or search. Google, one firm, Google, owns like 90% of the search market. Yeah. And so to me, to me, 125, it actually doesn't sound like that much at all. Like historically that like over the past few decades, there's been massive consolidation in, uh, in government contracting broadly,

but especially in defense tech. And I don't think that's generally good for competition. I think that, you know, if historically there were thousands of independent firms that were helping sort of like deliver the products that our federal government and the DOD needs, that's actually better. And I think one of the things about defense tech that people don't really realize is the government wants vendor diversity, right? They don't want to be reliant on just Lockheed and Raytheon for, you know, ground-based tactical missile systems, which is why Aon is doing what they're doing, right? They want multiple providers for a lot of these products. So I don't think it's the winner take all market because the government actually there ends up being natural sort of monopolies. But the government's goal is not to have certain products effectively be monopolies. Yeah. And it hurts taxpayers. in Vegas on Monday night at the Rockbridge conference, Rockbridge Network Conference,

which was started by J.D. Vance and brought together a bunch of technologists. Palmer Luckey spoke and Mark Andreessen spoke. And a lot of the focus was on this, like bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Washington, like the hill and the valley. There's a couple of those organizations, but Mark was talking a lot about, I mean, he's really good at telling the story of how, you know, we need to go beyond just the products into the supply chain, who's making the drone motors, who's making the batteries. He actually called out Skydio, which is one of his portfolio companies who got their batteries embargoed by China, and now they're hunting around for new batteries. And so, but it's interesting because a lot of what he was saying uh a lot of what mark was saying on stage i was just kind of like yeah

yeah yeah i know all this i know all this i've listened to your podcast i've seen your tweets like i'm very familiar with all this like this is kind of old news but you look around and like the political people in the are like yeah mind blown yeah and they're like that was like one of the greatest presentations of all time and it was was, if you hadn't heard those. And so it's really good that he's playing the hits, essentially. And he understands the importance of repeating the message in new territories and in new audiences. So I really appreciated hearing that. It was good.

Yeah. Another note here, average 12-month employee headcount expansion slowed 37% to 22% between May and November, according to Wang. So to me, that implies, you know, to the average reader that's maybe skimming it and spending a split second on this paragraph, they might think that, uh, hiring is like contraction, contracting, uh, but they're just maybe not hiring as aggressively, but they're still growing head

count right yep i think that's important for readers to know so maybe maybe they could add some type of annotation there that says like to be clear these companies are still growing rapidly and you should go work for them yep yep uh they write it's not certain that republicans election that the republicans election will wins will make much of a difference to defense startups as it will to other sectors like cryptocurrency which face tougher rules from democrats definitely true defense spending is generally bipartisan and defense tech firms like spacex palantir shield ai and andrel have made inroads with government contracts during the biden administration yeah i mean it's been a good time for

for defense tech generally and it seems to continue. This is less like there's a mega bull case or bear case. It's more just like everyone is kind of on board, which I think is good. And they call it the Silicon Valley Defense Group. Have you heard of this nonprofit? They run that like defense tech SECDEF 100, like the top 100 companies, kind of like a networking organization. Musk posted on X in response to Anduril co-founder Palmer.

Lucky last week after Trump's win that it was very important to open the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to companies like yours. Pay for outcomes, not requirements documents. That is true. I was learning a lot about this at that nuclear summit where apparently there are all these rules. First off, when you apply for a new nuclear reactor design, which is probably the most complicated piece of essentially defense tech or government technology that you can get approved, the NRC, the National Reg national regulatory commission is is paid per page that you submit or something like that so this massive incentive i don't know if it's like literally per page it might be just like there's more work there's more jobs and more people get paid but there's this massive incentive to increase the requirements

and and have more and more uh yeah more and more like you know laborious documentation you know the cost plus model of a lot of a lot of products that the dod buys which is basically that uh these contractors like lockheed when they sell a missile they're getting their revenue is a percentage of the final cost yeah and so the incentive structure is so flawed and that the more the product costs the more money they actually make so if it's a five hundred thousand dollar missile system and it's like a ten percent you know cost plus contract they're they're making 50 grand a missile right and so a lot of these defense tech companies are going to be really impactful because they're sort of changing their approach and they're saying like no we're just going to sell you the missile itself and because of that we're incentivized to make sure that our margins are healthy

but ultimately can can start to get really competitive on on price um one other line in here you know they call out and they actually highlight that um profits are likely years away i saw this for anderle and at 14 million dollars investors have valued Anderle between 18 and 19 times this year's expected sales, even though profits are likely years away. It's like, how can you write

for the information and write that line? This is the story of every startup you write about. Yeah, that's painful. I think everyone sort of understands

that Anderle is focused on building a bunch of really critical, important product lines and profitability is maybe like number 12 on their list of priorities. So if Palmer cared about profits right now and the team more broadly cared, then I'm sure they would be able to produce those,

but it's just not at all the priority. And it's not in America's best interest for them to pursue actually driving profitability for a very long time. So I'm glad that Christian Garrett got a shout out. A partner at 137 Ventures, which invests in SpaceX and Anduril, said he was hopeful that the Trump administration

would change procurement processes to help more upstarts, but he believes most of the spoils would go to top firms. I think there will be opportunities for more, but this won't look like enterprise software with a large number of winners, he said. It's a capped market in the number of opportunities, but definitely not in the scope. Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's like hard tech could look like enterprise software or deep tech broadly. And then it's like, you know, like Palmer said, he was a consumer of nuclear. He's not necessarily

building a nuclear power plant. Yeah. So here's's what andrel has really built and why i think they're valued in the way that they are among a number of reasons besides the talent density and traction and growth and all that stuff is they have built the best possible distribution engine into the dod right so if you're any of these 125 new defense tech companies you can build a really great product and not necessarily like crack distribution or crack these contracts. And so a lot of those companies are effectively like off balance sheet R and D for Anduril. Anduril can then say, Hey, we're going to sort of, you know, buy up this company and kind of put them through our distribution engine. So I think that Anduril in one way could be seen as a distributor for a lot of these

products. Yeah. And there's a few different models. So Palantir has their AIP program, which is going on this week that hopefully we can talk more about soon, where if you're a software defense startup, you can build on top of Anduril's API or Palantir's APIs. And then Palantir acts as the distribution arm for you, kind of like the app store for the government. And Palantir hasn't done many acquisitions. But Anduril is starting to do more acquisitions and it's kind of a similar model. I talked to one founder who sold his company to Anduril and he said the number one reason was their DC office

and Chris Bro's out there. And so they just have a phenomenal distribution. A number of their new products have been acquisitions. I know the sub submarine yeah go shark ghost was an australian it was it was called dive technologies before yeah and yeah that's why and that's actually the fact that andrew can be a soft landing for these companies that don't crack the contracts i mean pretty soon it's not gonna be soft landing pretty soon it's gonna be a banger outcome yeah we saw that with the flock safety soft but like yeah the thing is

like yeah shoot for the moon shoot to be the next andrew even if you miss you'll land among palmer stars exactly and uh yeah what and the conversation on uh the information seems to be pretty lively muhammad here um uh is uh is chiming in um he thinks spending will reduce significantly i i just don't think that's true um primarily because defense spending has already been at historical lows um and i think that with increased global instability and proof that we do need deterrence i think it will actually continue to go up no matter who the administration is and i I mean, the first Trump administration was so noisy and chaotic that people miss, like,

you could hate everything about the Trump administration, but, the 2016 one, but if you just believe that China, like reorienting around China was important,

that was like a groundbreaking moment for the United States. It was very, very important. It comes from the 100-Year Marathon, that book that was kind of popularized. And then there was like an almost an instant pivot

to like, okay, let's renegotiate the tariffs. Let's do the CHIPS Act. Let's do all these different initiatives. And you know that it's, even though like, you know, most of, you know, we never talk about politics and most people are, you know, pretty firmly, you know, we never talk about politics and, and, and most people are, um, you know, pretty firmly in one camp or another that the, the reorientation on China was really bipartisan because when Biden came in, he didn't change anything there. He actually kind of doubled

down, did the chips act and stuff. And so I think that like, no matter what happens, we're going to be in a new era of like great power competitions back on the menu and it's not the end of history and we need to do something about russia and and iran and china and like have a new axis of evil so anyways overall solid article from cory clearly did his research um and uh we're here cory if you ever kind of want a more positive view on all things venture. Yeah. Let's move to Beth Jesus. He writes, folks, Y Combinator has gone fully based and EAC pilled with their recent request for startups. And we have the YC request for startups in 2024.

At the top of the list, government software, highly related to what we were just talking about. So AI software to automate government administrative tasks, target large-scale operations like form processing, application reviews, building solutions for citizen-facing services, DMV permits, licenses. Oh, man, DMV, that would be fantastic. I want iOS-level software to interact with the DMV, right? Absolutely.

I want a digital ID that looks like a ramp card when it's in your Apple wallet, right? That's what we need. Fantastic. We need to make America more beautiful in every way, including our software products. And then public safety technology. This is like in the flock safety world,

and also growing Daniel is working on this, law enforcement efficiency tools, US manufacturing, stable coins 2.0, LLMs for chip design. also uh growing daniel is working on this law enforcement efficiency tools u.s manufacturing stable coins 2.0 lms for chip design do you think do you think daniel's like a little bit uh he went through yc right i know he went through yc he's got to be a little bit frustrated with them doing a rfp or a request for startup for basically exactly what he's uh what he's doing with his product reducing paperwork for uh law enforcement but um uh no i think i think uh the this is something i talk to with founders quite a bit when they're building something is and just something i think about is how is this founder

and this company going to perform when yC puts out a request for startups to thousands of super talented people and suddenly you have three or four other people building in your product category and with Daniel like he's going to continue to thrive right he's a phenomenal poster he clearly knows how to get attention uh good uh good sort of product guy um and uh but a lot of you know a lot of times i talk to founders and when i'm kind of like analyzing in my head do i think this person is going to be able to compete with three or four yc companies in the same category usually i'm like okay like this guy's gonna get smoked right um uh just because i think yc is like high level methodology is the most

battle-tested approach to company building sure and i uh i've never been through yc i interviewed there for party round back in the day um uh with with michael siebel and uh got a quick uh rejection i don't think i fit um even with like we were already backed by gradient one of google's funds and um i just didn't fit the yc mold um being uh non-technical myself um but their their high level advice of like launch now build something people want do things that don't scale yep talk to users all startups are badly broken at some point uh find 10 customers who love your product avoid long negotiated deals with big customers oh that's hard in the government yeah yeah yeah that's gonna that one's gonna have to

change a little bit uh founder relationships matter more than you think all this stuff is just the closest that you can get to the truth yeah yeah in terms of company building. And I think it's why it is part of why, uh, the average VC fund has partners and associates and principals and platform teams that all have different opinions. And oftentimes even GPs at the same fund will disagree on, um, you know, the, the right approach for a company. YC gives the most like generalized advice, but it ultimately clearly undeniably works. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you go down this list,

it's like government software, that's Palantir, public safety technology, that's Flock, US manufacturing, that's Hadrian, Atomic, right? And so there are like kind of leading companies in these categories already, but I think there's still something really valuable about going and A, finding a smaller niche and building something unique,

or just putting yourself in a really interesting and fast-moving environment, and then maybe you wind up pivoting, doing something else, or discovering an entirely new category that we didn't really know and couldn't be put down into a request for startups. But it's a signal,

and I think that's what Beth is getting at is that like, you know, they are signaling that they are on board with like the next generation of builders and the stuff that's interesting and, and cutting edge right now. Yeah. To me, a lot of these categories have really, really talented teams that are already building and pursuing many of these opportunities. I think honestly, category nine, 1 million jobs, 2.0, like they've always had this idea of like kind of trying to create, um, get people to start thinking about ideas of like, how are you going to build a company that creates a million jobs, right? Like something like DoorDash, Uber, things of that nature. Um, in the AI, uh, era, uh, I don't know what that looks like, right? Like there's so much, uh so much uncertainty um we've joked and people

have joked online that like the last two jobs are uh like hvac and capital allocation right like you're basically going to be like like deploying money or just like doing uh manual labor manual labor yeah um there's also something about this where it's like the the when you look at like the power law yc winners like coinbase or airbnb like those would never have fit into requests for startups at the time they were too frontier but they still chose to go to yc because yc was a place where cool stuff was happening and so i wouldn't be surprised if if putting out this message and waving the flag of like government software public safety technology u.s manufacturing like uh you know brings in someone like bio isn't on here but you could see some like crazy bio company coming and you could see them wanting to jump in here just because like oh this is where

like interesting people will be yeah i'm building in something that's really contrarian and really like undervalued right now but i'm still going to go to yc because there's going to be cool stuff there and they're not just they're not just fighting the last war and i think the a lot of like when i look down this list the the founders that i know that are building in this space like somebody like when you look at u.s manufacturing and aaron with uh with atomic he's not like gonna be at at any point like he's been pounding the table being like we need more manufacturing startups um so i think that these categories and opportunities are so massive that it um i think yc is doing uh a massive yc has been getting memed and getting a lot of hate because their founders have really low testosterone which is um an issue but they're doing it. They're doing a huge public good by saying,

hey, we want to invite 50 teams into each of these categories. I know they've reduced their batch sizes, so maybe it's less than that now. But we want to invite 30 teams into each of these categories and capitalize them and allow them to take like a meaningful shot on goal to do something important. And it's funny that the funny thing people in crypto love to track, like YC, like two batches ago,

YC like did not have a single crypto company in the batch. And everybody was like, wow, this is super bullish for crypto. Because usually like you want to be like building when there's zero hype. And it's interesting that it didn interesting that um it didn't make crypto didn't make the list well it did stable coins 2.0 yeah yeah okay but that's almost more like traditional uh finance uh almost um but uh but yeah again stable coins 2.0 bridge acquisition um was a really meaningful win for the for the crypto world. And I've got a really exciting company, Menteo in Latin America,

that's doing basically what Bridge is doing for the Latin market. Yeah, stable coin infrastructure. That's great. But anyways, God bless YC. Godspeed to all the founders. All the builders. And I'm sure some of them will post

and we will cover them. Fantastic. Welcome back. We're doing some Q and a, we got a DM from a founder and I'll read it. They say, Hey, John and Jordy, I run a unicorn tech company and I'm looking to buy a new car. I've done quite well for myself, but I hate the idea of looking flashy or flexing on my employees. I was looking at a Macan from Porsche or a G-Wagon from Mercedes. But what do you think? For extra context, I live in Manhattan and I don't have kids yet. So what would you recommend to the unicorn founder? Probably pretty wealthy, but how do you not look flashy? How do you not flex too hard and then what's practical in manhattan give me your analysis i mean uh i have strong opinions you have strong opinions this has been

if we've ever had a rift in our relationship it's due to arguments over automotive you lean one way i lean the other and at the end of the day as long as they're combustion engines we're both um but we would never drive in the same car together i think lindy man talks about this it's just kind of it's a bit strange two guys driving in a car together just avoid at all costs um but uh but look uh i i can think of five or six or seven or eight cars that would that would fit the bill here uh i think that i think you mentioned a g-wagon i don't think that's super low profile except you're in los angeles when it's every other car the car i did the issue so the issue with uh uh g-wagons in manhattan and la is that there are still like 20 of parking garages you actually

can't get under them oh really they're too tall i recently the benefit of the g wagon is kind of short even though it's an suv it's short parallel parking yeah yeah i recently pulled into one of the many equinoxes around la and i was driving into the the tunnel and i hit the little i didn't i didn't scrape like a concrete but it was like those hanging bars the the tunnel and i hit the little i didn't i didn't scrape like a concrete but it was like those hanging bars the the bars that like tell you and i was like whoa i had to like do like a 20 point turn to get out um so i don't recommend that for the city um you can make it work in la uh i think that if you want something performant but low profile uh the um cayenne turbo gt it's a phenomenal car yeah uh it's basically porsche's version of the urus yeah uh it's it's fast it's it's loud but not in like a

um overpower not an overpowering like kind of douchey way like it's it's sort of got this low uh rumble that's nice it's fun in a canyon. And the Macan's going EV now. Yeah, the Macan, I would advise against. And I've been in a Macan. I mean, it's not the most comfortable. It's pretty tight. Yeah, Macan is a great car when your daughter turns 16. Yep.

Get her a Macan, right? It allows her to feel maybe used to other luxuries that she has in her life, but it's not flashy or it's not over the top. It's not a bentay right um but uh but yeah if you want to go uh sort of uh under the radar fast fun performant uh i'm going uh cayenne turbo gt and turbo sleeper sleeper suv supercar if you want something my opinion on if you want something that's like g-wagon ask but a little bit more unique inios grenadier have you seen any of us great dear very cool very small company so there's a little bit of risk that they like go out of business and you know it's like it's like aerospace right yeah it's a billionaire funder of inios he's got a 25 billion dollar

chemical company that he's just plowing the profits into building like a vintage land rover and yeah it looks like a vintage Land Rover. You can kit it out with all this off-road gear. It looks really cool. Good for Manhattan roads, which are often broken. They have like a sort of a truck gladiator version of it. Oh, they do? Okay, cool. That's cool.

Yeah, something like that would be good. But the only other thing, something a little bit more low-key but luxurious, still driving a very nice car, is theley bentega okay those are great yeah uh if you buy the thing about bentley's is they lose about half their value in the first two years so if you want to buy you could buy a 2022 yeah basically a new car 5 000 miles and you're paying less than you'd pay for a new range rover but you're getting to drive a bentley yeah yeah yeah i mean the range rover depreciation is brutal theender is pretty cool though that might be a good option the new Octa the new Octa I don't know that one's their new top of the line uh Defender okay very cool looking car they made

it slightly more wide body okay cool yeah that'd be a good one but really I mean you don't have kids I think sports car I I would say if you're worried about the roads of manhattan lamborghini huracan starrato it's got the off-road tires that's a safe bet that's a safe bet but then you know you might be flexing on your employees but at least they'll know you have taste you bought a limited edition it's the last v12 or v10 huracan if you don't you're around manhattan you're not going to put a lot of miles on it it's actually somewhat practical you're gonna be able to sell that car in a few years somewhere near what you paid for it yep uh do you think the Dakar is also a good option the Dakar is great lean more uh German yep uh it's phenomenal you know phenomenal car he's got the the bigger sort of like lifts

dealing with snow yep if you need to throw anything on the roof yep it's great too um yeah it's still good if you have like a new apple pro monitor like it's not going to fit in uh the trunk yeah in the in the hood uh but it will fit on the roof yeah the car is like functional serato functional bentega uh you're sort of cruising um but uh i think those are like a zr1 or something like that yeah i mean I mean, Corvette ZR1, fastest American-made car, 240 miles an hour, faster than the Pininfarina Batista electric car. Wow. Yeah, wild.

Wild. 1,200 horsepower or something like that. Yeah. Huge. Because of that being more of like a track toy. Exactly, yeah. Daily, that's going to be rough in Manhattan. It's going to be low.

A little loud, a little high profile. Yeah. Kind of looks closer to a Lamborghini. Yeah, yeah. Daily, that's going to be rough in Manhattan. It's going to be low. A little loud, a little high profile. Yeah. Kind of looks closer to a Lamborghini. Yeah, yeah. Kind of a lot of looks. You want that in Connecticut or upstate where you can kind of take it on the roads, back roads. Yeah, and you're not going to get respect. It sounds like this company probably wants to go public soon.

And CEO is driving a ZR1 to a meeting with a major capital allocator. He's going to throw off some huge red flags, in my opinion. I disagree. I think that the ZR1 and the American-made cars, they're coming back. I think it's big in the American dynamism. I think it's just countercultural, but it signals something special. It signals that you appreciate American manufacturing and you're willing to forego some of the Nurburgring time to stick with an American-made company. Straight line speed, too. Yeah, straight line speed.

And the only way that the American manufacturers are going to get better is if we actually support them. You have to put your money where your mouth is. If you say, oh, yeah, American needs better innovation and manufacturing, go buy something that's made in America. And great culture. You know the 911 is actually what it is because the Cayenne so sold so well Porsche was in kind of a bad spot in the early

2000s and they released the Cayenne became one of the best-selling luxury SUVs in the world they they were able to take all of that uh R&D that they were spending on the Cayenne not only benefit the 911 but also have the kind of balance sheet that allowed them to, you know, continuously innovate on the nine 11 platform and make it, um, undeniably the greatest sports car of all time. But, uh, that's going to start another argument. Yeah. I'll get on. We'll see. I'm sure we'll come back to sports cars at some point. Uh, we always do. Let's go to some posts. We gotyan peterson he says someone should domesticate

grizzly bears to replace canines in the military north america would never have to worry about invasion again it's hilarious because like are we worried about invasion like not at all yeah that's the the benefit of being american is being able to grow up never worried about invasion yeah red dawn won the geographic lottery. Exactly. Yeah, but I think we need to see more people combining American dynamism with biotech, right? I agree. We need to bring Wuhan here, right?

Accelerated genetic engineering. Because I think domestication takes like a thousand years and a lot of generations. But if you shorten that up in vitro. Maybe LLMs could kind of accelerate some of that sure sure you know run thousands and thousands of simulations every minute yeah yeah to understand yeah so anyways if you're building in at the intersection of biotech American dynamism and uh you know uh large language models and uh but it know. But you got it. I got to call Ryan out.

I mean, he's a good friend, but domesticating bears is my thing. I got a tweet here from 2023. Domesticate bears. I'm no longer asking. I got another one from 2022. It's time to domesticate bears.

I have another one here from 2021. Yes. And we should also domesticate bears. Totally doable with enough time and genetic engineering. I got one here from 2020 this is deep pre-covid it might take decades but we need to domesticate bears it could easily be our generation's moon landing and so uh you've actually done a poor job branding yourself terrible i know i know i should have written like the long post or you know there could be a team out there that's already domesticating bears and you didn't you only posted four times yeah if you'd posted the fifth time i would have gotten the deal and you would i would have gotten allocation first like so ryan give me some credit

i i got to the domestication of bears thing earlier but it's a it's a big tent everyone's welcome in the bear domestication movement happy to have you on board uh let's go to sophie net cap girl she says uh bro got sent to the minor leagues of posting. And it's a screenshot of Mark Cuban on bluesky.social saying, hello, less hateful world. And unfortunately, I didn't think we were going to have to do this,

but on a previous episode, we gave Mark Cuban the brother of the week and we have to rescind that award. He left X and went to the minor leagues of posting and so uh you will not be getting your brother of the week award mailed to you i'm sorry mark yeah we had it all packed up the plaque and everything that was a little bit of mistake by us we will do better i don't think uh he'll be in the running unless he gets back on and has a has a yeah that's an arc as as a podcast we're not afraid to to kind of admit

when we made a mistake we we we talked about net jets on an early episode we got a lot of pushback from our audience they said this isn't relevant to me my family has multiple jets like we do not use net jets like please do not talk about them or promote them it's just a waste of all of our time so we admitted that mistake we shouldn't't have given Cuban Brother of the Week. And fortunately, the plaque wasn't in the mail yet. So yeah, we're deeply sorry to the audience for that mistake. But this week's Brother of the Week will be much better. Trust me.

Let's stay on apologies and go to Marques Brownlee, MKBHD. He was apologizing for driving too fast. Let's read it. Last video, I did something pretty stupid. You might have already seen it, but maybe not, so I'll address it here. There was a clip with the action cam of me test driving a car and going way too fast.

Absolutely inexcusable and dangerous. I've since cut it out of the video. There's no reason to leave that clip in. All I can do is apologize and promise never to do anything close to that stupid again. That's a terrible example to set and I'm sorry. What's your take? Great. Good apology. Yeah, good apology and like getting out very quickly. Like there was a tweet calling him out that was kind of going viral and he just jumped on it really quick and with a long post. And I think that there's something about if you had, if he had just like quote tweeted and been like,

I'm sorry, like that's not enough. but he actually like broke down everything he did everything that he would do next like i'm well aware of the strice and effect and i know everything on the internet lives for other but i think this is the best decision for now and like it was very he like broke down his whole thought process and i thought this was very very good but i don't think he should have apologized because i think and i'm on record saying that we need to ban speed limits in America. I think we need an American auto bond. Slowing the entire economy down. Yeah.

I mean, there's so many times when you're going to a meeting and if you could just drive twice as fast, you'd be there twice as fast. You could do more meetings. You could do more meetings. You could increase the volume of shareholder value. Exactly. I was actually thinking about this because my friend has a house in Mammoth and I was driving there and the speed limit's like 65, 75. Like a like a four hour drive, but it could be two and cars are getting safer.

This was posted as like kind of a joke, but it is serious. Like the self-driving technology is getting a lot better. The cars are getting way safer. Seatbelts and airbags are in every car now. And so like the possibility of just driving fast, like that might be the solution. Like do we need high speed rail or do we just need an Autobahn? That needs to be a core tenant of American dynamism is just, yeah. Removing speed limits because think about some of these deep tech founders that have, you know, a facility out here, office over here, and they're spending a lot of time on the road. Yes. You can use it for phone calls, but if they could spend more time in front of their, whether their engineer that's needing to code

or a capital allocator that's behind a Bloomberg terminal, the more time they can spend in front of those desks, the better for the country. It's also just, like a lot of things with the government, it's hard to do new things and create new projects, but it is a lot easier to just stop doing something. So if you, if you're the government and you just say, Hey, we're just going to take down the speed limit signs. Like that's a pretty easy job as opposed to we're

going to build a new high speed rail. It also could be a community grown effort, right? Like there could be kind of a grassroots movement of, Hey, we're going to take down speed limits, right? We're going to just do this, you know, an ax, right? Just chop like a tree. And yeah, even one less speed limit in your local economy could actually provide some pretty tremendous benefits. So even though, you know, I do disagree with MKBHD on respecting speed limits, you know, we got to support him

because he's a fellow Turbo S owner. Really? Yeah. Really? Yeah, he is Turbo S. Nice. Yeah, he was driving a Plaid and switched to the Turbo S

and he loves it. He's a big fan. He's a big fan. Huge fan. He watched every single possible video about it and made the decision that that's the best possible car. Sports car.

And for someone who's reviewed so many products, like, I think you made a good decision. I trust him on that one. Even though I'd love to see him in a GT350R Mustang. But let's stay on the topic of, you know, government efficiency and government deregulation. Delian, my colleague at Founders Fund says, hell yeah, Doge is real and Elon and Vivek are running it. What a time to be alive. And there's a statement from President Donald Trump saying that Elon Musk, in conjunction with American patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency together.

What do you think? I mean, very cool. Very cool. I mean, it feels like we're in, somebody said this, but it feels like we actually are in the best possible timeline where it's the most entertaining and actually seems to be the most america positive timeline yeah and uh since 1776 yeah there's been this question of like you know okay even if someone gets in that people like like is there energy to like actually go and work in the government and

as silly as the doge meme is it's something where you could see a smart hard-working person say yeah i want to go work with elon on government stuff sure i'll go to the doge that sounds great that's the big that's a big change here right is totally smart young people are going to want to work in the government for the first time just so that they can work under that sort of elon religion Right. Yeah. Yeah. And somebody else was saying like, you know, the U S economy is basically just like steady state growing a couple points a year. And, uh, if, if we can double that growth, it kind of fixes so many of the core issues in our society. Right. So it can't be understated that this is, uh, while it's immediately being

politicized, uh, I don't think it's political at all. We want our government to, uh, run the country like they'd run a business, right. Bring in more, uh, revenue, uh, than you, than you spend. Uh, it's pretty simple math. It's napkin math. Uh, we run the federal government. Federal government should be able to run on a napkin, right? Yep. Social security, defense, health care, et cetera. Like you should not need more than a small napkin to run this country. Except if you want to drill down into the details, you can get on ramp. Yeah, that sounds good.

And then Andre relatedly says, In America, the Department of Efficiency has two bosses pouring a little bit of cold water on this idea that okay you know

hey is it really efficient if you have two if you have two people there but I think it makes sense because Elon's running so many different companies

he can come in isn't he running it exactly how he runs all of his company which is like he's setting the pace and the energy and the focus, but then he needs his lieutenant to actually get the job done. If that can come in as the operator alongside him,

that seems really good. But it is a funny meme. I like that they're treating it like a product launch. The Trump admin over the last week has been almost having a major major story every single day that at least within the tech community is like getting the right attention generally getting positive attention yeah and this is the advice i give to startups is like even if you have something that feels relatively minor that you

already announced previously announce it again yeah make it a big moment. Right. I heard this thing. I don't know if I haven't checked it, but I heard that if you've seen these like Trump videos, there's like all these policy videos that are going out, him talking about like his ideas and they've all been like going viral. Apparently those are from like a few years ago. They're from Rumble. Is this true? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So they're from Rumble and he put them out and they just didn't get any lift because Rumble's really small. But now that they're like, you know, he's unblocked on X, they can go viral. And so everyone's like, wait, where was this guy all along? It's kind of funny. Yeah.

And to his credit, I think he still believes 80% of the same things. Like they're still part of his platform, which, you know, historically the critique of Trump has been he's constantly changing his mind and going back on things that he said before. So I'm happy to see that what he thought in 2022 is also what he wants to get done. Yeah. Visakhan Versami, who I found out about through Patrick O'Shaughnessy, saying that he has some really good frameworks and posts and long posts and writing, writes, Tech Bro Pod, please discuss this. And it's one of the most indecipherable posts, but we'll try and get through it. He writes, Culture wars are partially downstream of the media tech nation,

dropping paratrooper brain worms inside the OODA loops of those with fragile self sense and people sense and recruiting them as cannon fodder MOOCs into profitable but destructive psycho fauna Titan battles. So I think, I think I kind of understand what he's saying here. And it's a little bit of a twist on, uh, have you, have you heard the term, uh, or the phrase like, uh, politics is downstream from culture? Yeah.

Have you heard of this? Andrew Breitbart said it. And it's this idea that like the government is just a reflection of the culture in a country. And that it's not that you can like you don't necessarily need like pro-natalist regulation to create a pro-natalist movement. It's like you need the movement first and then it just happens. Exactly. And I've always been fascinated with that in conjunction with the medium is the message that quote by Marshall McLuhan. And I've always thought about the interaction of those two terms.

So if you believe both of them are well argued and I, and I do well, if the medium is the message, then the design of our communications platforms informs our culture. And so the medium is the message means that when you design what is a TV show, what is a movie, what is even on formerly Twitter, now X, like the idea of a retweet or a or a quote tweet that became very that became more adversarial because it invented the dunk and so our culture got more aggressive which you could say is good or bad um yeah it's like it created a mechanism to bring a ton of negative energy from your community to one person who's not necessarily in your community which creates the cycle of fear exactly um but yeah the other the other quote that stands out i'll butcher it but uh we create

our tools and from there our tools like shape us shape us reshape our tools and our tools yeah yeah yeah it's uh and and so this is something i've always pushed back on there's this debate like the the media would always say like oh like tech is is like inherently political and then the technologists would say like no like our tech is like politically agnostic but i don't buy that at all i think that if you're a product designer at a big tech company and you're designing a communication tool the decision that you make to include quote tweets or to make likes private for example that shapes the culture and culture shapes politics and so if you are designing a product that's used by hundreds of hundreds of millions of americans you do have an impact on politics yeah and yeah and you do have a responsibility and so i think that's somewhat of what he's saying

here but you could probably dive into this whole thread and spend another hour deciphering every single word there yeah but thanks for writing in and let us know how we did let us know if we if we nailed it i think we did let's go to will monitis uh he says building in public is over the future is a cult companies of unknowable size and influence hidden beneath a sea of llc's so deep divine light can't even get through cap tables so arcane it's impossible to know if truth exists at all. No one knowing what really is going on here. So imagine explaining the build in public movement to the Koch brothers, the Koch industries.

They're like, wait, you tell everyone daily what your revenue is? You screenshot your internal metrics and share them with the world? You invite massive competition you uh allow others to get an understanding of your profits so that they can eat away at them slowly yeah uh i think the build in public movement is very uh you know it's good to share what you're working on it's good to talk about what you're working on it's

good to make people feel like a part that they're a part of your movement and kind of along for the ride. But the entire and I think Will did a good job of this with his last company. Right. He, you know, would share the right things that positioned him as the the thought leader within AI and health care. Right. And he did that very well. Never once had to share a Stripe dashboard, right? Or, and I think that there's the right way to do it

and the wrong way to do it. And you've talked about this a lot. The, you know, what we're seeing with the build in public movement now is a lot of founders that are talking about what they're doing, but not sharing metrics publicly, but making sure that their competitors can clock their revenue and can clock their their

revenue and earnings by their car and watch collection exactly people should still know that you're successful it's just got to be a little bit more subtle right so instead of a stripe dashboard showing a you know 200k day uh we want to see like a you know one of one patek right exactly so it's just uh evolving yeah and uh yeah thanks will let's go to off scaler says hmm and it's a screenshot of what looks like a tiktok saying you can tell if he makes money whether he says q4 or winter dude i think we're like one of us yeah no i think but i think we're in a we're having a banger q4 yeah i think we're in a, we're having a banger Q4. Yeah. I think we're, I mean, obviously we're having a phenomenal Q4. Yeah. That said, I think we're at maybe the intersection of people that are saying I'm starting my winter arc because Q we're halfway through Q4 and I need to

lock in even harder. Right. So we're, there is this intersection and the kind of founders that i want to invest in are starting their winter arc but very well aware that we're almost halfway through q4 and they need to make stuff happen yeah but in this in the same way that we advocated for adopting gamer lingo into everyday life also you got to adopt the finance bro lingo yeah we don't need to reinvent we don't need to speed run reinventing finance. There's a lot that venture can learn from our predecessors. Exactly. But yeah, one thing for everybody to remember, your Q4 metrics are forever, right?

When this quarter ends, you will have to live with those results. January, February, March, and then 2030 then 2030 2040 people are going to be looking back this quarter saying what the fuck were you doing yeah or giving you still patting you on the back from the work that you do now so lock in whether you're having a winter arc whether you're in the tropics um it's still winter yeah those metrics will be immortalized in your 10k forever so good luck get out there augustus says have you ever had nine coors banquet beers with your customer i love this because he ats coors banquet yeah yeah

hopefully they gave him a retweet that's that's they really should this is good marketing for them for him yeah because that's kind of the whole point that's like the idea of core's banquet right it's a celebratory beer uh that's that's an everyday product that's accessible um i can imagine that this is not unusual for augustus right he's somebody that his his his his edge is being able to speak the language of silicon valley and be immersed in this amazing subculture and saudi princes and then simultaneously going and hanging at the farm for 48 hours yeah rainfall he's serving he's serving customers in places that starlink has never touched right i don't actually think that's true but uh but uh yeah fantastic i mean meeting your customer where you he's gonna he's gonna correct

this seriously there are a lot of companies that they you know wind up in yc and they're like well we're building sass for farms and then they like can't relate to the customer at all it's really hard yeah i told the story people want to buy products from other people like them yeah and so if you're not like your customer you better have have a head of sales who is or learn from finance. I mean, I told you that story about doing a deal with a tobacco distributor and I walk in and everyone's smoking inside. It was one of the crazy experiences. Indoor heaters. And yeah, it's like...

How did you handle that situation? Oh, of course, RIP1. RIP1. But you're bridging the gap between big tobacco. But then I force them to use the strongest product I make and see if they can really handle it. There's actually a good story from last night. I was at a dinner hosted by a venture capitalist,

and the guy next to me who, he actually, I asked him what he'd want to be referred to on the pod. He said, uh, the Jewish cowboy. Okay. Um, he was taking a four milligram Lucy pouch in between every course of the meal and then, he plowed through like seven or eight pouches. I was like, dude, you're an absolute animal. And he's like, I don't actually feel the buzz anymore. I just avoid the withdrawals. So anyway, shout out to the Jewish cowboy. Yeah, friend of the show. Let's go to Vittorio.

He says, what's the book that changed your life the most? And this is just a good question. What's your answer? Do you have. He says, what's the book that changed your life the most? And this is just a good question. What's your answer? Do you have something in mind? Art of the deal. Art of the deal. I like zero to one. I mean, that's classic, but I mean, honestly, like it's, it's kind of crazy to say, but I remember in high school, a friend who is really, really smart guy, just kind of clocked that I was going to be an entrepreneur, I think, and on that track. And he got me four-hour work week.

And like now in Silicon Valley, that's not part of the canon in the way that Zero to One is. But it was a phenomenal book just in terms of exposing like what does it mean to be an entrepreneur at any scale. And it's a very you can just do things book. Like there's a story about him. Tools of Titans was also a really great book. Yeah.

That was my first. So, so I would say the media product that's been most impactful on me over the last two years is Founders Podcast. Sure. And part of that is, is David digesting all the best biographies and autobiographies ever in entrepreneurship and just like tying them all together. But Tools of Titans was very impactful for me during college because that was my first exposure to,

not my first exposure, but like the first kind of Senra-esque attempt at kind of capturing what made these people who they were and how they ticked. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's a good prompt. Let's go to Jesse. Jesse says, as a young CEO, the worst advice I ever took seriously was that each manager should have standing one-on-ones with each direct report. Utter stranglehold on calendars throughout an organization. Direct reports should have something to report

or decide to call a meeting, especially with the CEO. And it's a quote tweet of Brian Chesky talking about how he doesn't believe in one-on-ones and almost no great CEOs in history have ever done one-on-ones. And there's a lot of this stuff that's happening right now where big public company CEOs are coming out and saying like, I actually do things very differently.

Jensen Wong, noted watch disrespector, claims that he doesn't have any meetings or direct reports. What is it? He has something to the same effect. But it is true. Like your calendar should be as default empty as possible. And you should have as few standing meetings as possible. Yeah, I think the big issue with one-on-ones is if you have a standing Wednesday one-on-one

and you have a direct report that's having an issue Monday, if they're waiting to talk about it until Wednesday, that's 48 hours of wasted time. And that could have been the most important thing of the week that you just needed to handle and fix. And so I think that, yeah, yeah, this trend towards, uh, CEOs being like Jensen's big thing is like, we have no long-term plan, right? He's like, we don't plan it. Like we, we think about what do we need to do today to make the company, you know, win today and for the long run and, uh, eliminating meetings, eliminating long-term planning shopify has been big eliminating okrs things like that um so anyways i think it's i think uh what what's the old joke that like

google invented okrs to just like stifle like innovation in competition in competition yeah there's a lot of that i mean all of all of the work-life balance stuff is 100 game theoretic just like hey by the way if you're the best business in history, you can have amazing work-life balance and offer all these perks to your employees. Yeah. And then create that as the competitive playing field that everyone has to compete.

Brilliant. Brilliant. But yeah, I mean, it gets to the idea of like the phone CEO, which we've talked about before, but just this idea that like you can be much more effective if you're just constantly on iMessage with people that are important in your organization and then just picking up the phone and calling randomly

and just playing phone tag with people yeah the only time that i genuinely very little email very little calendar yeah the only time i need my computer video meetings yep and if i'm doing anything many of which could be phone calls yeah it's happening randomly yeah usually but uh and then doing design anything design related I want to monitor. But other than that, I can run everything off my phone. Yeah. Let's go to Cryptox0. I think that's how you say that.

CryptoZX or 0X. Oh, one more thing. BC, I was talking to you last night. It was like, I've been, I was golfing a ton while I was raising my fund. And now I'm doing it like once every couple of weeks. But before he was golfing four days a week while raising the fund, cause he's like, it's the best way to get to know people, have four hours to talk about what you're doing, how the other person ticks, things like that. So that's another example of the, um, you know, the capital allocator, uh, phone only. Totally. Yeah. Phone in person, honestly, like

some of the best ways to get to know someone if it's, if you're seriously going to do a deal is, uh, go and spend a full day. I've done that with a few people, not just golfing. Like, uh,

I, I, I, I went and met with somebody very powerful and, uh, spent, uh, got to his house in the morning.

We go for a big long hike. We have lunch. We sit down and like, you know, uh, talk about some books on a shelf we have dinner together drinks and it's just like we spent like this the full day together and like even though it was like a million times more impactful than like a weekly call for like three months yeah

it was it was so much better just to actually get to know and to this day i'm like that's a solid person that i would do business with yeah uh let's go to cryptox zero bro it's crazy how one follower here is worth a hundred followers on Instagram. This is a good way to get a lot of engagement because everybody on X tends to have more followers here than Instagram. But it's true. It's true. Like, like, like it, like you're not going to accrue the same caliber of founders on Instagram than X. Like the, the, like it, there's no,

there's almost no more negative signal to me than a founder that more frequently posts about their company on instagram than x or even linkedin yeah unless it's a consumer product company yep and even then they need to be like the celebrity face of it essentially and that's the only case it works uh linkedin makes sense if you're selling you know b2b software and you need to be an influencer there to pull in companies. That makes total sense. But you should still have a presence on X. People have been begging us to move some of our posting over to LinkedIn.

Yeah, we'll make it happen. It'll be a seven-figure deal with LinkedIn if it's going to happen at all. Let's go to Daniel. He says, they should have Uber Eats Black. What if I want my burrito delivered in a Cadillac Escalade? And when I heard Uber Eats Black, I thought it was just going to be like caviar, champagne, like the top tier foods that you guarantee are good, but it's more just the vehicle. Energetically, the idea of knowing that your burrito is being placed.

I want it to be, I'd almost like the Brinks version. Sure. Where it has armed guards that carry the burrito from the restaurant. Yeah. Well, that's what Turner says. Turner says I want a SWAT team to deliver my McDonald's in a Blackhawk helicopter. There you go. There's a bunch of different, you know, modalities that people would happily pay for. Um, and, uh, anyways, that's like Uber's the dominant player.

They now have the ability to like layer on these sort of value add sort of niche products that make their power users happy right i honestly would pay for uh for an uber eats black that guaranteed that the food was going to be like properly stored because i swear sometimes they just sometimes they just throw it in the trunk and then they're drifting around and you get somewhere and everything's just totally destroyed. And it's just like such a mess. I think also if you could get a Blackhawk from JFK to Manhattan, that would be cool. That would be big. And have like armed.

Like Blade, but even more up to here. Yeah. Blackhawk version of Blade. I love it. Hopefully coming soon. Brian Halligan says, get ready for the IPO market to roar in 2025. I think it's legit. I think it's happening. Yeah. I do think that there's a little bit of a countervailing force

where a lot of the really big companies are still seeing what's possible in the private markets and just don't want the overhead of IPOing. But there's this huge pressure. Even Databricks announced this last week that they're raising $2 billion just to provide liquidity for early employees. That's a company that I don't see why they don't go public at this point.

But again, the overhead is real. I think that we've talked about SPACs coming back in a big way. I think- Especially've talked about SPACs coming back in a big way. They will. I think. Especially for companies and categories where VCs aren't necessarily paying attention right now or aren't set up for that. Like there are enough funds now. It is not a bad financial innovation. Yeah.

It was just used improperly. Yeah, I agree. I agree. There are a lot of companies where, like if you're an AI company right now, you don't necessarily need to go public because there are multiple multi-billion dollar funds that are ready to write a $4 billion round for you in the private markets. But if you're in something a little bit more niche where maybe public market investors

might be interested in it, but private markets aren't really set up for it. Yeah, and retail. There's a ton of products that retail's generally excited about. Yep. But you got to be a going concern. That's the main thing. I just hope it doesn't end up being.

Yeah. You shouldn't be raising money anymore. You need to be profitable. Yeah. I just hope it doesn't end up being, again, what happened last time, which is the companies that didn't have any additional private capital sources. But guys, girls out there, if you don't have four to five friends that are spinning up a new, um, special purpose acquisition vehicles, like it's time to elevate your circle. I mean, I was looking at the list. There's a website where you can go and look at all the

specs. There's like 350 that are actively searching right now in all sorts of different fields for competition. And so, I mean, I, I honestly think like, yeah, if you're raising a $50 million round, like why not talk to at least a few of the SPACs and just see what their pitch is, see how it would work out and see if you can pull it off. Let's go to Jack Raines. He writes, folks love their fast, casual Mediterranean cuisine and Cava is up 440% in the past year. Wow. I wish that we actually could see their market cap because they have to be trading at like 200, 300.

Because they went way down. They have to be trading at like 300 times earnings. Oh, yeah. I need to actually look it up right now. People love fast casual. I mean, the Chipotle story was so solid that it makes sense that people would kind of ape into the next thing.

I've actually never eaten at Kava. Have you? Is it good? Okay. Yeah, their PE ratio is 300 good okay yeah their their p.e ratio is 300 okay um let's go yeah so yeah great great for kava they're going to be able to get a low cost of capital and expand sell more more uh mediterranean grain bowls but it's funny I remember like seeing pitches for people being like we're the mediterranean kava why doesn't this exist

meanwhile kava was just building a behemoth and they did it they did something pretty interesting which I forget the name of the Cava actually acquired a restaurant group or a restaurant brand I'm blanking on the name that had like 200 locations yeah and they were able to like really quickly rebrand all the locations and turn and so they were able to like double their footprint yep um you know super super fast it would have taken them um but yeah one thing you know i think we there's a lot of optimism right now but one or two years ago there was a lot of fear in the market and i always tell entrepreneurs go look at starbucks like if you think the world's bad and it's going to be like a worse place in five years go look at at Starbucks and Chipotle and all these big,

um, fast casual and just like retail concepts. They're like, we want to add 300 stores a year, like every single year. And it's like, they, these are like really smart teams that are smart capital allocators.

And yes, the world's an, uh, sort of, uh, unforgiving, unpredictable place. But, um, just look at how

many locations these businesses want to add. And I guarantee you, your business is going to be able to thrive in a world where they can add 200 new Starbucks every single year. Right. It's great. It's great. Let's go to Jacob Andrew. He says, or Jacob Andreu, uh, he says the hardest part of building AGI is naming the models. Yeah, I feel like this is an industry where we went kind of like weird quickly, right? So it's like we have Lama, and so now you have like Defense Lama. It's like, how do you get more attention

than Defense Lama? Yeah, it's great. Strawberry, I thought that was a cool name. Yeah, it's interesting, because like OpenAI, great name, even though like the openness is kind of pivoted. But I mean, it's just a nice name and it's very welcoming and it speaks to what they do.

Chat.com, phenomenal, one word domain, great. But then GPT-401 Preview Mini is so bad. And I mean, huge lift when you don't have to select anymore. Then like GPT-401 preview mini is like so bad. That's rough. And I mean, huge, huge lift when you don't have to select anymore. I do think that part of that is somewhat intentional of being what matters right now is being loved by developers. Sure. Because developers are the bottleneck to actually get your product to tens of millions of users. Yep. Not the bottleneck.

They have their own consumer products, but I think it's kind of like almost an inside joke of let's release a product with the worst name ever that developers are going to meme and talk about and being like, wait, are you using this version or this version? But yeah. And I bet most of the chat GPT consumers that just go to chat.com like are blissfully unaware of the fact that there's a difference between four,

four Oh, Oh one. Oh, one mini. They just type their question and they get an answer. Yeah. But very quickly they're going to be able to put a router in front of that and, and dynamically decide, Oh, this is a, this is a question that needs to go to Oh one. This is a question that needs to go to four, four Oh or whatever. And, uh, and all of that will become abstracted. The real question is where

we have with the iphone nobody knows which iphone they have if you ask them what iphone do you have they go i don't know it's like i got it like a year ago i think yeah yeah i don't know but uh zach says money doesn't excite me my ideas excite me and it's a quote from walt disney i think i think money should excite you. Walt Disney, he was lying when he said this. Yeah. Yeah. That was pure marketing. Yeah. No, I think, I think that there is a very common addiction, which is the addiction of wanting to see your ideas in the real world manifested. And I think that there's an equal amount of, from those people, there's an equal amount of excitement around the market potential of that idea, right? Because if one of the best

ways to make it big in America is to build a credit to YC, a product that people just really love and sell a lot of them, right? And so this goes back to, you know, people talk about, don't think about how to get rich. Think about how to help a million people. And you can do that with a product. You can do that with an idea. Um, and, uh, yeah, I've seen a lot of people get, get, uh, very wealthy off of ideas that they don't really, aren't that excited about.

They just were, you know, fine. But, uh, like Walt Disney's's famous for that like circular graph have you seen that it's like a napkin drawing of like how all the different disney enterprises interface with each other whether it's consumer products films parks all these different things and it's like that is an idea but it's a very financial idea totally but you could see that being like a beautiful interaction and it would allow you to do more ideas and that's the that's the nature of the virtuous cycle of capitalism to me a good idea is the greatest drug on earth yeah like can you can you remember like multiple times where you just like had a phenomenal idea and you know it's a hit like when we first when we talked about excel yeah we knew from the very first conversation

which was not even a planned conversation we just started riffing on it and we're like yeah this is like so obvious like this is gonna be a hit and you launch it and it's a hit right yeah it was great um and that feeling is uh the best feeling in the world no amount of ayahuasca can get you that impossible impossible uh let's go to high yield harry uh he posts a screenshot of a text interaction that says do you want to join my religion and then the question is what's your religion and it's just a picture of a dude at bloom in a bloomberg terminal uh with a bunch of tvs in the background and then the the the other person says i'm interested i love this i sent this to a dude who uh works at a hedge fund and this is his entire life and he was like

yes this speaks to me yeah i mean if you think about i think uh the venture community spent all of 20 late 2022 and early 2023 praying for the next bubble right like i remember calling friends they wouldn't pick up and they said like hey i'm at church right now i'm praying for the next bubble right so it is a it is absolutely a religion returns um are just kind of a nice benefit. I mean, there is something to the fact, like when you pray at the altar of Bloomberg and CNBC, you ideally discover alpha that can allow you to uncover the next bubble.

And I genuinely do find that a lot of the best, really, really amazing VCs are on Bloomberg regularly, actually understanding what's happening in the public markets, and they're tracking that almost as much as what's happening in the venture portfolio. It's all downstream.

Exactly, and seeing those interactions is really, really important. Like, what are the FANG companies or the hyperscalers doing does have an impact on your venture strategy. No, every GP at big venture funds right now is looking at their portfolio now that the markets are ripping,

being like, let's actually capture some of this return. Time to print. Time to print. So now the real edge is going buying Montana and Aspen real estate now. Now. Because things are gonna to get and installing those amazing uh like air pressure systems so you can uh effectively level oxygen level yeah that's

great uh ryan peterson uh apparently was on a flight and was trying to get starlink working on his delta flight he says my first attempt to get starlink working on this delta flight a failure thus far okay this is amazing marketing because he's clearly sitting in economy yeah and while he's trying to show his company like this is how we're going to run lean we're all running lean yep and if you have a guy running the biggest freight brokerage in the world they're one of the biggest startups uh he's flying economy uh i think everybody should be a flying economy yeah that's awesome yeah but it is you're wearing a suit but uh yeah yeah if you're if you're in a suit you can sit in first class but business class business class yeah um but yeah i mean i mean the starlink rollout

should happen soon ish they're doing deals but it's taking no isn't it something that like boingo wi-fi or whatever the plane wi-fi service blocking are they blocking it no they have these like multi-year contracts with the airlines that the airlines would have to buy like it works you have to pay it out massively yeah it's bad so i think we're we're just kind of like we're in like the press release cycle for all this we're like united we'll be like we're proudly partnering with starlink in 2029 yeah yeah when we can retrofit all our planes has starlink yeah that's good um it's it's amazing maybe i should fly jsx more it's not it's not that much more expensive than just it's really not um and just for the starlink probably worth it uh let's go to ryan's brother

there we go uh david peterson types faster writes i'm told a vigilante is roaming san francisco oh wow i actually i actually had them confused yeah i was i was thinking i was thinking that was ryan no no yeah that was ryan this is david yeah yeah uh and so david says i'm told a vigilante is roaming san francisco offering homeless people a thousand dollars cash and a plane ticket to dallas someone i know recently sat beside one of these homeless guys on a flight and he confirmed the story has anyone heard about this is this why sf has gotten so much cleaner? Also, why would any homeless person leave SF and give up the $600 a month cash benefit

that no SF politician, public figure dares to say anything about? Interesting. I haven't heard anything about this. This is the first I'm reading of this. But I think we need, here's the solution. We need Taylor Lorenz to go undercover as a homeless person in San Francisco.

See if somebody tries to buy her out. And let's see if somebody tries to buy her a first-class flight to Dallas. Yeah. That's the kind of hard-hitting journalism we need from our tech journalists. I mean, there's stories about this, right? Didn't New York do this? Yeah. Isn't it like Giuliani?

There was like a South Park episode about how they like paid. But it wasn't quite just like go to Dallas. It was like we will pay for your flight to your family forever of like hey let's give homeless people like a greyhound ticket and just send them out yeah ether yeah I think that one of the solutions talked about this is just creating like a permanent Burning Man style encampment in the desert that's the George Hotz plan the Wirehead City you get you get a phone you can chill out you can do whatever you want but then there get a phone you can chill out um you can do whatever you want but then there's like a two mile walk out so you have to be kind of sober to

leave yeah essentially but you can leave at any time yeah you get like ubi essentially yeah somewhat dystopian but i uh i appreciate george is it that much more dystopian than a in the city yeah yeah you're right yeah yeah that's a good point. Nicole Wiscoff says, just use Granola AI for the first time to take notes for me. Totally insane product. Highly recommend. Not an investor, sadly. Have you used Granola AI?

I haven't, but from what I understand, it's basically like an AI agent for secretaries where it's really good memory, good at taking notes, kind of knows what's going on in your life kind of proactively sort of uh expecting your your needs things like that so um i'm interested to see how the space plays out there's been a i i think that uh there's more venture-backed uh meeting note-taking apps than i've had meetings this year. I've had a lot of meetings. So I'm interested to see who...

Yeah, yeah. I have seen some weird fallout from some of the AI note-taking stuff where it's kind of awkward if you get on a call and someone has their... I was on a call with a bunch of people once and someone sent their AI note-taker and they couldn't make the call.

And so then they just read the AI notes afterwards. I never let... If somebody's joining a call and they try and add their ai block it yeah um yeah i did it was granola or one of these other one of their competitors that was uh a portfolio founder of mine like had an important meeting with a big customer he recorded it like it was you know with permission and he sent me a summary afterward and it was like perfectly done yeah it's bullet points sections next steps and i was able to get the full benefit of being on the meeting yeah without actually attending 20 seconds yeah yeah it's probably good like you don't want to be like completely zoned out during the meeting but if it's taking notes for something you can't make it that makes sense the the funny thing is like these apps can actually turn what would have been

a 20 person meeting into a meeting of two people where even if you don't know exactly what the next steps are with a project two people can just talk it out they come to a conclusion the note-taking app doesn't just write exactly what was talked about. It takes like the entire meeting, breaks it down into next steps and the reasons why, and then lets anybody benefit from that. So I think it's actually fantastic. I think it's going to save a lot of time. I don't know how investable those businesses

are really going to be, but we'll see. I do know that there's been one like fiasco where I think a VC firm had an AI note taker on the call. And then after the founder dropped off the call, the firm stayed on the same call, was talking, talking, talking about all sorts of stuff. And then the AI note taker sent a transcript of that to the founder to see kind of like what they're talking about behind their back.

Very awkward. I doubt a deal got done. Very, very awkward. So yeah, we still got iron out the best practices there. The idea is a 10 out of 10. Founders are a six. Let's go back there. They're a competitor.

Rough. Rough. Rough. Let's go to Trey Stevens, another one of my colleagues at Founders Fund. He says, doing some email deal flow triage during a long plane ride and just opened three consecutive decks

for companies building group one to three isr drones for defense with dual use in industrials my brothers and sisters in christ why are you all starting the same company please stop so the reason that uh this is not so bad as is these founders are going to build for about six months, see how hard it is, and then pivot to crypto. Oh, crypto. Pivoting to annual job applications. The cycle will continue. It's this perpetual cycle of pivot to crypto,

pivot to AI, pivot to defense, pivot to the new hot thing. But who knows? Who knows? Yeah, I think this, this, you know, starting a drone company now when there's five or six super talented with contracts.

Yeah. While Anderle is also like, there's a lot of business there. Even shield AI has a lot of business in Ukraine and stuff. Like, yeah, it's a, it's a lot.

Yeah. Oh, well we should still bet on it uh on polymarket though yeah uh yeah exactly uh maika isagawa says i'm i must start calling them male founders this is a throwback from 2022 i think this is like i think it's a female founder who's uh responding to this idea of like if you're a woman founder people call you a female founder, if you're a woman founder, people call you a female founder. But if you're a male founder, no one calls you a male founder.

They just call you a founder. I mean, people call you a male podcast expert. Yeah, exactly. I'm actually, I'm happy to be called a male founder. But yeah, I mean, where are the men in tech conferences? We have the women in tech conferences, but maybe men in tech conferences are next. There's women angel groups.

You get some men's angel groups. Well, there's a founders fund and there's a female founders fund, but there's no male founders fund. They did. They did. But there's no male founders fund, like a spinoff. I think that could be really popular. Yeah. But until...

And dramatic. And dramatic. There's also a blockchain founders fund and an Italian founders fund. There you go. Which is hilarious. The most racist version of them. Yeah.

We only back Italian. I printed the term sheet. Liquidity says, VCs who pivoted from Web3 to AI to defense tech are now pivoting back to Web3. This is exactly what we were talking about. Yep. Yep. It is a what we were talking about. Yep. Yep. Yep.

It is a snake eating its tail. The Ouroboros of mimetic energy and venture. You just got to move from one thing to another. I think you basically get one, you get one pivot like that before. And a lot of, and it's founders and VCs. I can name multiple funds. Of course. The typical cycle I feel like of a crypto fund is we're just focused on crypto. This is our edge.

This is our focus. And then as the bear market really gets into full effect, they start branching out. And they're like, oh, we're going to do this SaaS company because they could use some leverage in blockchain. At a certain point, we'll just slap a token warrant on it. Call it a day. It's a crypto deal. And then they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to do this cell service company because they at a certain point we'll just slap a token warrant on it call it a day it's a crypto deal and then

they're like oh yeah like we're gonna do this like self-service company because like they could slap a token on it at some point um and then it comes roaring it comes roaring back around and then they're back to being fully uh just literally on monday uh one of my portcos got hit up by a strictly crypto fund uh it was a defense tech company trying to make the case in this uh so anyways uh i mean i just think this is the argument i i think that you're it's okay as a vc to position yourself as an expert in a certain sector but branding your venture fund as a specific industry is is almost like committing seppuku yep because they're just almost always is not quite enough opportunities unless you're keeping your fund size small like

i know um there's a a friend of mine nick milanovich has a has a 10 million dollar fintech fund it's going to perform super well he's the guy you go to if you want to raise a pre-seed in fintech it's it's He's going to do well. It's when you have a $100 million fund and you're saying we're the XYZ fund, then you get in a bad spot. Yeah, it's just so much better to just be a generalist and just move around.

Chase returns. Yeah, just money. Right, the hype cycles. IRRs. Well, thanks, Liquidity. Good post. Oh, this is a great one. So we got tagged by Eric Jorgensen,

good friend of the pod. He says, I need the Tech Bros pod take. And it's a Vittorio tweet that says, the fastest way to make fuck you money is to learn to say fuck you without any money. I think that's right. I felt like I had fuck you money when I was making like four grand a month

for my first company. Absolutely. Because that was enough to pay for my rent. I had a car with 200,000 miles and I could go to Trader Joe's without fearing that my card was going to decline. And that was like the ultimate luxury for me. I could do, I could live, do whatever I wanted at that point. Yeah.

There's that, there's that meme of like, there's levels to this shit, you know, you get the sports car and then you find out somebody has the hyper car. You get the, you get the net jets. You find out somebody has a Gulfstream. But, uh, if you don't let any of that, if you just completely ignore the,

the hedonic treadmill, there's nothing stopping you from acting like you have. The fuck you mentality is simply not depending on anyone else for your survival. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody depends on somebody for survival. But,

uh, well, that's the difference between being wealthy and rich. Yeah um being wealthy is being independent and not having a boss essentially and being able to say no it's great no let's go to mark andreason um he's been on the pod before uh the primary mission of technology and economy policy should be to put everything on the TV price curve. And it's a picture of the price changes from January 2000 to December of 2023. So 24 years, 23 years of progress. And hospital services are through the roof.

College tuition through the roof. Medical services are through the roof. But, of course, cell course cell phones toys computer software and tvs are all down 90 and now yeah you know i i i paid uh one bitcoin for a tv that wasn't even uh it wasn't even 10 it was 1080p it wasn't even 4k and i wound up just giving it away a couple years later uh but then i bought a new one it was a 90 000 tv yeah i know and it was uh uh and and now you can go and buy like a fantastic like 85 inch 4k like everything tv for like you know how that's great the classic black friday video black friday is like much less of a thing now because everything's online

but the classic sort of scenario in a best buy on black friday seeing people fighting like getting into real altercations was always over the tvs and the tvs are like the tvs are like the rotisserie chicken of a black friday sale right they're like this is our loss leader i'm gonna get them in the door get them a new tv and then we'll sell them a bunch of other stuff to get some more margin on but i always thought that was funny because the tv is already the cheapest thing that you can get yeah like almost year round like they're they've been so cheap and they just get cheaper and it's no longer that like statement it used to be a status symbol because like everybody has them yeah right yeah um let's go to dr ben braddock

he says there are people laying in a hospital bed begging god for the opportunities that you have right now what an inspiring post simple post inspiring um not even just the opportunities but the feeling you have right now yeah just if you're remember the last time you were sick yeah it's miserable to just have like a powerlessness uh and um but if you there's no better feeling than having fantastic opportunities and i think those opportunities are available to everybody in this country you simply need to listen to Founders podcast by David Senra and start to understand that opportunities are everywhere exactly let's go to the civilization enjoyer Lucas they say dance like nobody's watching post on Twitter or acts like it will be printed out and read by men in suits.

If it's a banger, it's a banger men in suits. So yeah, we gotta, we, we gotta deep dive this, uh, this guy's account,

find some of the, the, the banger gems. I'm sure there's some emerging, he's an emerging poster. Uh, you know, next generation,

next gen. So we're investing precede like covering. Yeah. Covering this guy's tweets is like, you know, covering if, if we were around for Daniel's rise would be comparable to that.

When Daniel at sub a thousand followers is like some real alpha there. So first to many, if he keeps on this trajectory and a shout out to the civilization enjoyer, Lucas. I enjoy civilization as well. So shout out. Great, great invention. Signal, who's been on the show

before says my portfolio relies on trump and elon never having a falling out how can i hedge against this uh i mean a lot of people are predicting this i i'm i'm i i certainly hope it doesn't happen but uh i mean it'd be interesting to figure out if there's a way to create a market for this on polymarket yeah i wonder how you would actually express that's a really to create a market for this on polymarket. Yeah. I wonder how you would actually express this. So that's a really, yeah. Because like the falling out could be just happened behind the scenes. It could be, oh, he's like, you know, less involved in the doge in year three or something. So this is a unique thing where it will, in my view,

I think it will be beneficial for Trump and Elon to be cordial and have a working relationship indefinitely. Forever, yeah. In the same way that Trump having a direct line to Putin is and Elon to be cordial and have a working relationship indefinitely. Yeah. In the same way that Trump having a direct line to Putin is not necessarily bad. Like it was always positioned as, Oh,

Trump's has Trump's friends with Putin. It's like, no, keep your enemies close. Right. Sure. So I think that, I think both Trump and Elon have a lot,

uh, writing on each other, right? Elon has one of the most influential media businesses in the history of the world. Trump is about to run the country. And Elon's businesses are pretty dependent on government contracts. So I hope they continue to bro down forever. I'm not sure how you'd hedge against it.

And they're also technology brothers, right? Trump created the hottest, best performing social media app for the last five years. Elon bought the best performing, the most influential, best social media company. And so they have that mutual respect

from both being social app founders. Let's go to Jeremy Giffon. He says, everything good you want in life is on the other side of a single phone call that you're absolutely terrified to make. You know exactly who it is and you know exactly what you need to say, but instead you let it haunt you for years. You know,

I saw this tweet. First thing that popped into my head was that call that I needed to make with to my Porsche dealer. Um, and a lot of guys play this game with porsche where they say hey if you want to buy a gd3 or gd3 rs or a touring or an st you know you got to buy the ev mccon you got to buy a tycon you got to buy two tycons you got to buy another another cayenne that you don't want and those are obviously cars that the buyer doesn't actually

want so they end up buying them owning them selling them back to the dealership at a loss and you end up racking up like six figures of losses to buy the car that you actually want yep so a lot of guys are afraid to just spend 100k over sticker to go buy the car immediately but i'm just going to put it out there like a lot of people are afraid to make that call and i don't i don't think that you should be you're going to spend that money one way or another. Just do it. Even if you're buying on the secondary market, on bring a trailer or whatever, just do it.

Yeah. So everybody's going to apply a different meaning to that, but that was the idea that popped in my head first. And as they say, you know, you can sleep in a GT3 RS, but you can't race a house. Can't race a house. So better to be car rich than house rich. Let's go to Tyler Cosgrove. He says, you guys can do your tour at you michigan stadium it comfortably seats 110k so as so long as we get a couple

thousand more folding chairs it should work fine this is our new campus our new campus rep we love tyler congratulations yeah uh yeah i could call with him i really like this guy young hungry studying physics yeah really really thoughtful i'm kind of worried to gas him up too much. I know he's being stolen to get poached. Other people are going to try to poach him, but that's a free market. It is. It is.

Thank you for representing Technology Brothers on campus. Yeah, and thanks for flagging this. We'll do that tour soon. Let's go to Druva. We're going to do the Technology Brothers world tour. It's only going to be in the United States. Yes, exactly. All the most to do the Technology Brothers world tour. It's only going to be in the United States. Yes, exactly. All the most important destinations in the world.

Yep. Las Vegas, Miami, New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin. Michigan, exactly. Druva says, nothing is more expensive than cheap goods. The price of cheap goods from China are factories never built in the United States. Industrial technology is never discovered, younger generations that look down on factories, deep process knowledge that dies out, and dependence on an adversary.

Interesting. Yeah, it's true. Well said. Well said, Druva. I think this is the time. Druva is CEO of a company called Deterrence, which I was part of getting off the ground. Deterrence is doing high volume energetics manufacturing. So manufacturing like the super boring components

that go into different types of munitions. And what's- He's probably struggling with supply chain right now. Yeah, supply chain is the biggest thing. Like basically a lot of the US military's like arsenal is dependent on overseas sources yep and that puts us in a position of like potentially like a catastrophic supply chain crunch depending on how the world shapes out over the next 10 to 20 years so the real um yeah and then and then looking

at these sort of externalities of of offshoring our manufacturing throughout the last century, the job loss, the cratering of certain towns and communities in America, which is all the stuff that JD Vance has talked about over and over, there's a real cost to getting stuff cheap. Yep. Let's go to the next one. But first, we have a promoted post from Montblanc. We want to put them on the show, and we're excited to bring them to our

audience. Mont Blanc writes, a nature inspired color palette refreshes Mont Blanc's timeless leather goods in the Mason's spring summer, 2024 leather collections filled with pieces that combined aesthetics and functionality. You might know Mont Blanc for their fantastic pens, but we encourage you to go to montblanc.com

and check out some of their fine leather goods. So we're excited to welcome them to the Technology Brothers podcast and look forward to partnering with them more in the future. Let's do Montblanc. Thank you, Montblanc. Let's stay on the topic of luxury goods. The Luxury Watch Guy says,

Sotheby's just sent four world records at its Geneva watch sales the highlights in total the two auctions combined for an impressive 22.9 billion dollars in sales Patek Philippe reference number 1563 sold for 3.6 million i love how that's probably more revenue in a week than the entire last 10 yc batches will generate in uh in this calendar year 2024 yeah young collectors under 50 drove 60 of sales future is bright, I just love to see that younger people are getting in the mix, supporting fantastic institutions like Sotheby's. And it's great to see the watch market coming back.

It's been a rough couple of years. It's no probably accident that it correlated with an increase in the price of Bitcoin. Most of the watches that our audience wants cost about one Bitcoin. So anyways, easy, easy trade there. Let's go to Emily Troy at Coinbase. She says slowly and then all at once. And it's a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal saying Gary Gensler's ambitious SEC agenda could be near its end. Emily's, from my understanding, been a fantastic leader at Coinbase through tons of ups and downs and regulatory uncertainty and scrutiny and all this stuff.

I just don't think it can be stressed enough that like every company, whether public or private, goes through periods of euphoria and periods of darkness yep but nothing is more intense than within the crypto world and like as much as crypto you know founders and web3 people that are pivoting into web3 as it gets hot as much as those people get made fun of um it can't be stressed enough how uh how much the people companies like coinbase go through on a year-to to year basis and how much they just have to like put the blinders on. And these people are working at a company where they're like embarrassed to say what they do at Thanksgiving. Right. And now they're going to go into Thanksgiving is going to be a jolly, jolly holiday season. So shout out to Emily and Coinbase for pushing through it. Fantastic. Let's stay on. The stock's's up like literally it added like 30 billion in market cap

in the last couple months. Great team. Let's go to Martin Shkreli. He says the future of finance and it's a USDC transfer of 100 USDC. It's happening on Ethereum. And it's happening on Ethereum. And I actually don't really understand

what's going on here. So he's sending $100 and it's costing him $10. Oh no. It's a 10% payment processing fee oh my god yeah so anyways uh one of the reasons why solana's just absolutely cleaned up yeah uh and like a lot of the developer activities moved over to solana's yep it's just you know blockchains were invented to be able to process like really high volumes of transactions globally instantly sure and the

fact that if you want to send 100 bucks it's like a 10 payment processing fee yep and it's not even going to the collison brothers it's going to uh vitalik what's his name yeah not directly obviously the ethereum shareholders uh let's do another promoted post uh this time from steinway and sons who you've heard from before on the podcast. Steinway writes, during World War II, Steinway victory verticals were shipped to every theater of war. And it's this amazing picture of these upright pianos that the Steinway company was building, just lining this factory during World War II. And it really speaks to the heritage of this company and why we're so proud to support them and we love them so much.

But it's great to see, I mean, this was posted on Veterans Day. It's great to see a company that, you know, they're not, their CEO isn't like shit posting on Twitter all day, but they still get it. They're still pro-America. They're still, you know, pro-

The classic images you see around World War II industry is these massive hangars and facilities spinning out planes and tanks and guns and cars. But it's important that we understand that when America rallied around World War Two, it wasn't just aerospace and defense and automotive manufacturers. It was some of the greatest companies in the history of America of Steinway being one of them that rallied around the cause. So thank you to Steinway. And if you think about, you know, you're in the theater of war in World War II. Like, they didn't have iPhones at the time. Like, literally having a friend who could play piano and entertain you

was probably what got you through. So we love Steinway here. Please visit Steinway.com to learn more. Let's go to Shiel Monat. He says, Don Jr. is a VC. please visit steinway.com to learn more. Let's go to Shiel Monat. He says, Don Jr. is a VC. 1789 Capital invests in the Republican slash parallel economy, deglobalization, anti-ESG,

and cutting edge technologists that disrupt industries weighed down by excessive bureaucracy. And so Don Jr. is joining a venture capital firm. Interesting, what do you think? Deglobalization, anti... So it's funny that... These are all framed like a negative.

They're all like negative. Yeah, I don't really like that. But they really could just be like... You flip this around and it's just like American manufacturing. Energy independence. Yeah, mission-driven companies, right? Yeah. Founders that move fast and ignore bureaucracy.

Well, that's always been the critique. In founder mode, it's really just a reframing of the same pitch we've heard from plenty of VCs. Yeah, that's always been one of the critiques of Trump broadly is the negative view on things. American carnage as opposed to optimism. He obviously, yeah. Yeah, there's a little bit of everything.

I mean, even make America great again, it's like, are we not great right now? What's going on? Yeah, yeah. But anyways, these trends, I think they're generally, sounds like they're going to be a pretty generalist fund, but not bad themes overall at a high level.

Fantastic. Let's go to Nikita Beer. He calls the top on 11-11-2024 at 6.54 p.m. And I think he was wrong. I think he was calling like the Bitcoin top more or less at like 84 or something like that. I'm not exactly sure what inspired this. So here's the funny thing.

Usually the top correlates with Coinbase going number one in the App Store. And Coinbase as of this morning was number one in the App Store. Okay, okay. So that's what he's saying. No, I think that this this this post uh pre predated yeah um that number one but um uh by a couple days but but yeah i just think it's funny if i think what nikita should do is tweet top once a day yeah for delete all the ones that are wrong yeah and just

go back and delete them and be like i called it and he can say he called the top and then he can sell but we would have the evidence here that he did that because we would be printing them out. We're the only people in the world that are printing out tweets. You're in the truth zone, Nikita. Good luck. Can't pull that on us. Anyways, I think right after this,

he tweeted we're back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're back. I know, he's optimistic. We have one more promoted post today. This time from Gulfstream Aerospace. Gulfstream is proud to announce that Starlink has arrived. Gulfstream is proud to announce that Starlink has

arrived. Gulfstream has officially received FAA supplemental type certification to install the high-speed internet service on the G650ER. STCs are also going in progress for the G800, G700, G600, G500, G400, GIV, GIVX, GV, and GVSP. And you can learn more at glf.arrow.com. So shout out to Gulfstream. Big, big, big fan of the pod. Two of our favorite companies. Exactly. Yeah.

We love SpaceX and we love Gulfstream here. So happy to support them. I mean, this tweet did very well. They got 1.7K likes, 100K views. Hopefully we'll get them some more attention because we love Gulfstream here and encourage all of our employees and listeners to go buy Gulfstreams.

Takes a little bit of time, but it's worth it. It is. Let's go to Rune. Rune writes, when you're good at something, it doesn't feel special or high agency or brave. You're like, what else would I be doing? It's a good post.

Podcasting. Podcasting, yeah. No, no, it makes sense. It's the Ica guy thing. It's like figuring out what your life's work is, what you're meant to be doing.'s a good podcasting podcasting yeah no no it makes sense it's it's the ikigai thing it's like figuring out what what your life's work is what you're meant to be doing this is important i like this yeah a big thing that ends up happening is people have like all these incredible insights and learnings that they don't end up sharing with the world because they just seem so innately obvious to them that they're like why would i ever talk about that idea or thought yep exactly

because it's just so so obvious and then turns out like thousands tens of thousands of other people would like be like mind blown i can't believe it was like it was like mark talking about all this stuff totally at the rock bridge event right where the politicians minds were like blown yeah to him it's it's it's second nature yeah yeah so find the thing that's second nature to you. And talk about it. Avoid memetics and just do whatever you want to do. Become the best in the world at it. Exactly.

Like Rune is the best in the world at posting and language models. Yep. Like undoubtedly, right? Yeah. There's a lot of alpha sitting in that. Yeah. Well, we got to wrap up because I think Jordy has to hop on with Manila, but we will see you later.

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