TBPN Live - Trump's Cash Bonanza, Karp is a Dawg, META Bets Big, PMF or Die, Defending the Gundo

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(06:04) - The Gundo Boys (21:53) - Karp is an Absolute Dog (42:44) - Trump's Cash Bonanza (01:04:43) - The Timeline (01:27:00) - META Plans Major Humanoid Investment (01:36:27) - Guantanamo Bay (01:43:41) - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one show in tech, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Today is Monday, February 17th, 2025. This show starts now. Jordy, how are you doing? We're back in the studio. I'm in a new suit. You're maybe in a new suit. As of two weeks ago. Yeah, the black suit is relatively new. I'm still breaking it in. There we go. We're very happy to be back in the studio. We did two weeks away. It was some of the toughest weeks of our lives. It was terrible. Just being away from the capital of capital. And I'm very happy to be back. We got great show today we do we we stopped recording friday

and it just felt like 20 different headlines hit the timeline and we were kind of thinking about doing a weekend show we always are yeah but for now we'll stick to mondays you know the really big podcasters they always do emergency pod when there's yeah i think of our show every show is an emergency pod yeah every pod is an emergency pod. You got to be live. You got to be breaking down what's happening on the timeline. Timeline was in turmoil this weekend,

but Monday it's President's Day and we have an exciting announcement. PMF or Die just went live. There's 10,000 people watching it right now, the live stream. And yeah, it's just two dudes locked in a cage coding, trying to hit 1 million ARR

with just $25,000 in 90 days. What's going on? Yeah. So right on January 14th, we were talking and I was like, should I post this? It's kind of hilarious. There was just a simple idea to take two people, lock them in an apartment with 25K and let them build for 90 days and put them in the spotlight, basically give them a ton of attention and force them to have this sort of extreme level of focus. We ended up getting hundreds of applicants from all over the world, people building super cool, you know, businesses are wanting to build apps in the cage. We ultimately selected two of them. And as of this morning, they kicked off building and they are absolute studs for agreeing to do this it's um we've been a little bit concerned around uh how how is this sort of constant attention and the pressure uh going to affect

the players right it's it's it's an extreme it's just they're submitting to themselves to something that many people would describe as torture right being being on a 24-7 live stream for 90 days in a row and all you can do is work but they were you know obviously super excited about it or they wouldn't have agreed to it it's actually patty's uh one of the players birthdays today birthday he's turning 22 he's turning 22 in the cage uh with a live audience but he's he's an absolute grinder and there's nowhere he'd rather be truly yeah i think it's fantastic. It's weird. It's an experiment.

It's, you know, half performance art, half not. They are building a real company. Like you will be able to download their product and Blake is an experienced entrepreneur. Well, yeah, Blake is, they both are. Blake is very adamant that this isn't performance art. They want to build a durable, massive company and they're certainly, you know,

putting the pressure on themselves. So we're going to be covering daily updates on the show yep and uh so yeah we'll keep you in the loop today they're just getting sort of their dev environment set up they're doing some uh you know working on some product flows uh we're working on the actual live stream product itself uh but but ultimately this is just a view into their world for the next 90 days and we're going to be recapping it you know daily weekly on the show. And then ultimately, at the very end, we'll put together a, you know, basically a documentary on what they accomplished. And there should be some pretty fantastic results.

So it's already cool to see there's people in the chat that are joining in just saying, I'm going to lock in with you guys from home. Yep. Joining them on the journey. Anyone can do that for a guy at home. It's free to lock in. Free to lock in with you guys from home, joining them on the journey. Anyone can do that for a guy at home. It's free to lock in. Free to lock in. Yeah, I mean, it's a cool test of the thesis that, hey, it's cheaper and easier to build companies than ever before. You can get to 1 million ARR very quickly.

We've seen this with Cursor. 100 million ARR is easier and faster than ever before. And so it'll be interesting to see how they do it. And it'll be really funny if they get out of the cage in like two weeks or something. I mean, anything can happen. It could be a grind. It could be okay. Game's over. Go enjoy central park now. Yeah. We're in New York. Yeah. And the, and the space that they're in, it's in, uh, it's in New York city. I won't be any more specific than that. So we don't get hecklers. There was already people

saying, you know, asking if the players were single and stuff like that. So there's quite the fan base. But yeah, the setting is iconic. The skyline's incredible. I've obviously been in there already myself. And at night, when it gets dark out, you can just see the entire New York skyline. It's very iconic.

And we'll see how late they work tonight. It's going to be funny to watch. Every entrepreneur goes through this where it's 1130, 1231. You're tired. You want to go to sleep. Your body's telling you, like, just, you know, stop. But you got to just keep pushing through. Yeah.

And, yeah, so, you know, everything will be, you know, completely transparent. Yeah. And yeah. So, so, you know, everything will be, you know, completely transparent. Yeah. They're, they're, they're taking building in public to the absolute extreme here. Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, I love it as an experiment. You know, not many people stream on X. It's a newer feature of the platform, but I'm excited to see where it goes. Well, let's break down the show. We got a bunch of cool stories that we didn't get to last week that we're pulling forward and then talking about a bunch of other stuff. We got our boys from El Segundo are in The Economist, a great puff piece. We got Alex Carps in The Wall Street Journal. There's also a deep dive on Trump's cash bonanza in The Wall Street Journal. We're going

to give you some timeline, of course, break down what's happening on X. Trump's whole life has been a cash bonanza. But the last month, he's really ramped it up. Yep, 100%. And then Meta is getting into humanoid robots. That'll be exciting to talk about. And then there's a proposal in PirateWire's in the White Pill section to turn Guantanamo Bay into Hong Kong. I'm sure that'll be fun to read through. So let's kick it off with the Gundo boys. Defense Tech is blowing up Silicon Valley's beliefs. This is from February 13th in The Economist, a very prestigious publication. You know, there's been a lot of hate for mainstream media. I think The Economist has still got it. Great reporting. I enjoy reading it every week. And I never knew this. I just somehow didn't pay attention to this. But The Economist has still got it. Great reporting. I enjoy reading it every week. And I never knew this. I just somehow didn't pay attention to this. But The Economist never publishes under the writer's name.

Bylines. No bylines. It's all from The Economist. You don't know exactly who's writing it. And I think that makes The Economist a unique sort of platform for writers to write on because you're writing under this brand versus other places. New York Times, you're very clearly writing, you know, unless they're doing like an anonymous type. to that kind of neutral brand standard. And it also creates a little bit of like, whoever wrote this could have a different world out there where they are right wing or left wing, but you're not going to read this and then go and secretly find their tweets

and be like, oh, they are something, you know, go crazy about it. You're just going to enjoy it as a piece of writing. And then their life is separate, which I think is very cool. So the article says, in the back of an unmarked office building close to LAX, the main airport of Los Angeles, stands

a rack of unarmed hypersonic missiles the size of small drain pipes. On February 6th, a camouflaged truck ferried one away to New Mexico for a test launch with the US Air Force. Such activity used to be common in El Segundo, the LA neighborhood that was once the hub of military spaceflight. Then the cold war ended and with it,

much of the West coast weapons business. Now it's coming back Castilian, which we've talked about before. They make projectiles. They were founded in 2022 by three alumni of SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company, which was also created in El Segundo. Los Angeles is not alone

in reviving the warrior spirit buried deep in its past. Silicon Valley is doing so too. It's in the early days, in the mid-20th century. It created Renaissance equipment for spy planes and semiconductors for missiles. But then the peaceniks took over, and for decades

defense became a dirty word. As recently as two years ago castilian couldn't open a bank account in silicon valley owing to the stigma attached for making weapons uh yeah it is fascinating that and i and i actually had this with a portfolio company recently that got booted off of rippling because it was anything defense related so even today you still cannot to my knowledge sign up for rippling if you're doing anything at all to do with the military. Really? Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. I mean, there is a shift. Like Anduril, when they started, was purely defense tech. Yeah. And even then, they didn't have any kinetic capabilities whatsoever. Yeah. It was for a long time.

It was software, but it was also sensor towers, which are just cameras. And then it was drones. And even the first drones, the Anvil drone. The Ghost drone is just a helicopter that just looks. We have to study Anduril's roadmap because it was very, very intentional. They just won the holographic super soldier IVAS project. And many people would have said, why didn't you just start there? But they were super intentional. And many founders go through

this where they're like, we're going to do this, then this, then this, then this. And they don't hit the first two attempts. And then they don't, you know, they're not able to keep going. They were so, so intentional and seems to be paying off now landing these major, you know, programs of record that are multi-billion dollar endeavors. Yeah. And so several developments have since stiffened the sinews. I love this writing. One is the war in Ukraine. Another is America's deepening rivalry with China. Most alluring, perhaps, is the sweet smell of financial success. SpaceX has become the most valuable private firm in America, worth $350 billion. Palantir, a supplier of software to Western armies and spooks, has a

market value of more than $250 billion, more than Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, a trio of defense contractors combined. Anduril, a younger firm that makes autonomous weapons, is currently raising $2.5 billion at a valuation valuation of 28 billion. Cue a cascade of investment into smaller startups, making military kit for land, sea, air, and space. PitchBook, a data gatherer, says the value of such deals in America rose by more than a third over the past two years to almost $40 billion. Venture funding as a whole fell over that period. So yeah, the defense tech boom is like super, super real. Yeah. Ultimately, it's saying that, you know, there was massive investment, whole fell over that period so yeah the defense tech boom is like super super real yeah um you know anything ultimately i'm saying saying that you know there was massive investment across a

bunch of different categories during that period as well so it's hard you know comparing the past two years to the two years before that is not you know super you know considering that was you know the the pico top of of the cycle and zerP and things like that. But certainly there's a lot of demand of $40 billion is a huge number that is, you know, fully risk on capital to build products for our military, which I think is a healthy sort of function in that, you know, we prefer that our government not to do some high risk stuff, but in general, we don't want all investment into the category to be government funded, right? It's much healthier if, you know, there's more on the line and it's actual, you know, risk risk dollars at work. Yeah. I mean, part of it is like the the defense tech, like the process of building a defense company is just slower because you're dealing with atoms, not bits.

And you're dealing with government contracts um but the the defense tech boom already feels longer than the nft boom or the the consumer social boom or really any of those you know andrew 2016 they start kind of become a unicorn i think around 2020 and then more companies start getting funded because they de-risk the sector um but now we're five years into that and there's you know a host of other unicorns, a host of other companies and tons of startups getting started. We're getting to that point

where the market maps are so established that if you're thinking of getting into defense tech right now, unless you're working with some truly novel technology, there's probably a handful of other heavily funded teams doing the exact same thing that you're doing already. And they may not have announced or been very public. Exactly. But, you know, definitely something to be aware of. One of those situations where if there's a market map and you fit nicely into it,

this might be too late. Yeah. So less remarked upon is how the defense tech boom changes core tenants of the venture industry. Historically, venture investors shied away from supporting hardware industries, especially those like defense that can gobble up lots of capital. Now, that's 100% true. A lot of these businesses are super capital intensive, lots of dilution. And we've seen that certainly in the space industry. That is changing. So, too, is the worldview of many in Silicon Valley who have turned their backs on the libertarian ethos that prevailed in recent decades in favor of a chest thumping patriotism that celebrates

American military might. Silicon Valley's renewed interest in military hardware reflects the shifting dynamics of combat display on display in Ukraine. Smaller weapons, notably drones, have supplemented and sometimes supplanted heavy armaments. That has left an opening for upstarts that can make cleverer and cheaper versions drones powered by whizzy artificial intelligence systems are in vogue so too is thriftiness take castilian as an example for its missile system it uses several automotive growth automate automotive grade chips costing a few hundred dollars rather than expensive space grade ones it manufactures rocket motors itself to keep costs down. SpaceX's ability to shuttle satellites cheaply into low-Earth orbit where they can scrutinize the planet has made

space an increasingly affordable part of battlefield technologies. Yeah, super interesting. People don't forget this. We've talked about it on the show before, but ultimately SpaceX, as much as it's a space company, is a defense company, right? If you can take huge payloads to space and bring them back you can do uh you know you can you can basically do the same thing with with weapons right and so one one lens to view spacex as as a defense company disguised as a intergalactic exploration company right um there's a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal today all about the mercenaries who are going to Ukraine from all over the place. They're recruiting veterans from, I think, Argentina and South America and Africa.

And they're pulling people from all over the world. And that's actually an interesting place that defense tech has not explored. I know some people have been talking about Blackwater 2.0 or starting some sort of military contractor. But looking at how does the human capital allocation and management side play into defense is something that is still kind of unexplored. Almost like to-do list apps for the military or something. I'm sure there's lots of opportunity. Well, let's close out this Economist article with a great anecdote about Alex Karp,

who we'll move on to in our second story. A revival of the warrior spirit is transforming Silicon Valley's relationship with the American government. The Technological Republic, which we have a copy of over there, is a forthcoming book co-authored by Alex Karp, Palantir's chief executive. It calls upon Silicon Valley to work with Uncle Sam on military programs rather than supporting environmental and social causes like those Mr. Karp champion patriotism as the new corporate purpose, an idea that will appeal

to many in Donald Trump's administration. Meanwhile, the long established revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry is being extended to venture capitalists and tech firms. There's a lot of VCs going into DC and vice versa. That could help speed up the disruption to America's military industrial complex, which many in defense tech hope for. Shyam Sankar, who we've talked about on the show many times, CTO of Palantir, he says, if the government doesn't figure out how to make the venture model work, this will not be sustainable. One issue is the meager share of spending that is available to startups. Another is the broad brush approach that Pentagon takes towards them. Mr. Sankar argues that the government needs to come to terms with Silicon

Valley's power law in which a few big winners generate fortunes compensating for the many others that will fall by the wayside. The Pentagon also needs to transform away from cost plus contracts and that we've been talking about since Andorra launched for almost a decade now, which are designed to enable big weapons programs and guarantee incumbent contractors decades of revenue in favor of fixed price ones that outsiders can bid on. So very cool article in The Economist. We love to see these things we've been talking about for years kind of go mainstream. You can always count on an Economist article to kind of provide the definitive overview to the world since it is a global publication.

Anything else there or should we move on to CARP? Let's move on to CARP. Right away in this Wall Street Journal article, you can see he's sporting his daily, what we can now determine is his daily driver. It is. Because he has been photographed in this a handful of times. Yes.

Which is a Patek Philippe Aquanaut chronograph with an orange strap. It's a fantastic fantastic watch it's available on bezel uh right now so if you're in the market i think they i think they basically retail for like 140 150k somewhere in that range so great daily if you've got you know let's call it you know 50 100 million aum uh wear that thing you can pretty much wear it anywhere carp has made it you know clear and and I love this watch because it it looks like a simple sport watch from from afar it doesn't scream oh look at this ceo with with a massive rolex on his wrist you know gmt whatever it's

it's timeless it's classic you can wear it in the boardroom you can wear it you know at a conference uh and so really you know just you know setting the bar here ben i think it's on the next slide by the way no you can see it there you can see it there yeah okay it's on his wrist there's a couple other photos it's low key i bet it's not screaming at you but it's but it says you know i'm a man of taste you know and it has its own personality it's great i mean zuck is like truly leading the way in the loud opulence with like the fp jorns and the and the one-of-ones. Carp's a little bit understated.

Still rocking an absolutely incredible Patek Philippe. We'd love to see it. But he's not making it his whole thing. He hasn't really talked about it. We had to clock it. He wasn't posting about it. He doesn't even have an X account, I'm pretty sure. But the sharp-eyed watchers.

It's crazy how hard. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. But, you know, the sharp-eyed watcher sees it. Yeah, it's crazy how hard. We often associate founder mode with going direct. Yeah. And in many ways, Karp is going direct, but he's actually, like, not posting. He's just going on the craziest media circuit ever where he's going out and actually seemingly bending the traditional media to him, right him right and and a lot and using

them to communicate and and it works in this scenario because it's a super timely message patriotism is is in uh it's no longer contrarian to to want to you know fight and and work and innovate for america uh but he's definitely you know writing the playbook of how to do mainstream media well yeah i i think of going direct as just being authentic and not being media trained or on talking points and having firmly held beliefs that you just espouse for years and years and years. And are super consistent on. Yeah. Or he can go out and say exactly how he feels without worrying, oh, am I going to piss some people off? Because he's totally okay with pissing off some people. And I think Peter Thiel did the same thing, wrote a book, Zero to

One. Karp has a book out now. And that is the foundation of his philosophy. And then tons of podcasts, tons of unscripted interviews, willing to talk about anything. Peter's done this with many three-hour, two-hour interviews, went on Rogan. Karp does the same thing, happy to talk about anything. Peter's done this with many three hour, two hour interviews went on Rogan. Uh, carp does the same thing. Happy to talk to anyone and doesn't need the questions ahead of time. Doesn't need his talking points in front of him and can just talk about anything. You can ask him about whatever you want and he's an open book. And that is what I think of when I think of going direct. It's just, let's not, it, it, it is, it might be direct from Carp's brain to the CNBC anchor, but there's not, but for so many other people, it's the CEO

to the PR person, to the press release, to the journalist who's getting, Hey, can you take that out? He actually didn't mean to mention this. Oh, we, you know, and, and oftentimes, you know, you saw Palmer on, on that podcast talking about conspiracy theories and stuff. Like if that wasn't, even though that wasn't on Palmer's own show or his feed. Still his message. Yes. And that message was not passed through a committee where it could easily get shot down. Hey, there might be some downside to you talking about JFK or whatever.

Let's not go there. Yeah. And it's good. These are good references for founders or VCs that feel pressure. Oh, I need to figure out how to post on X. I need to figure out how to like build my own audience. And it's not for everyone. Some people are born posters and some people are not born that way, but figure it out. But some people just don't like it. And so what's more important is having a really cohesive, exciting, meaningful message that you can just drill into people's heads. And if you

build a big enough platform individually, then you can go get on our show. When we start doing guests, you can go then go on CNBC, go on Bloomberg, go on Rogan, et cetera, Sean Ryan, et cetera. So it's a powerful contrarian idea that you're not ashamed of in the least that you repeat over and over a long period of time. And if it's good enough and what you're building is real, everyone will point the camera at you and you'll just be able to speak your mind. And that's it. Well, Karp is an absolute dog, as we mentioned before. He's profiled here in this wonderful Wall Street Journal article. Let's kick it off here. It says Palantir stock was days away from hitting an all-time high and the company's chief executive,

Alex Karp, had retreated to his cavernous mountain cabin. It features neatly captured the interests of a billionaire on a quest to save the West. The windows were adorned with curtains bearing an American flag motif. Completed and half-completed Rubik's cubes were scattered on the coffee tables. It makes total sense if you'recompleted Rubik's cubes were scattered on the coffee tables. It makes total sense if you're actually into Rubik's cubes to just have a bunch of them. So you can just pick them up or whatever. It's great.

You can try to do them in order really quickly, time yourself. Yeah. It's very, I can do a Rubik's cube and it's very meditative to actually do it. It's really fun if you're just like kind of thinking. Oh, you're a shape rotator? Yeah.

And Karp asks, do you want to see my guns one of carp's hobbies is long range shooting which i've been saying is going to get more popular in prs precision rifle shooting uh whose targets fall outside of normal parameters of a firearm he explained he struck a stance to show the blend of practice and instinct that combines for the perfect shot. More than two decades of running Palantir, a data analysis firm best known for working with the US military and intelligence agencies, has made Karp a billionaire many times over. Though government work represents only a portion of the balance sheet that leans heavily on commercial clients, it gives the whole company a secret ops vibe. Karp can talk about his own guns far more readily than he can talk about his own guns far more readily than he can talk about the more secretive activities of Palantir, whose market cap is more

than $260 billion. In the cast of philosopher kings who have emerged from Silicon Valley in the past several years, Karp cuts an unusual figure. He is far from one name- Wait, do you want to talk about his philosophy path? Wasn't he- Yes. He has a PhD in philosophy? He has a PhD in philosophy and he studied under Jürgen Habermas in Germany. And there's a little bit of controversy about it

because he transferred in and out of one program. And so the real like PhD nerds are like, well, he wasn't like fully Habermas is like under his tutelage the entire time. Or like, was he the mentor or not? Tell those people to go build a $260 billion company. Yeah. And so I actually at one point I downloaded his thesis and tried to translate it and read it.

It was very, very dense. It's in German. It's in German. Yeah. And I speak German. So it's very hard. Yeah. This is good evidence that you can kind of go on.

If you're truly goaded, don't worry about the path that you're on because you'll you'll just find your way into into greatness. Yeah. Even if it's totally unpredictable. Yeah. I mean, especially with like everyone in the teal orbit. We've seen this. I mean, I'm sure that's how he got linked up is just doing something really interesting at the power law of some bizarre like niche hobby instead of being super tracked and being like, hey, I want to be a venture person and then start a company. He was not the MBA type. And so he got into money management and ran a small money management firm in Europe and then got linked up with Peter

and started Palantir after 9-11 because the whole thesis was with the internet and better data analysis, you could potentially stop the next 9-11 if you can piece the puzzle together before it happens. And so in the cast of philosopher kings who have emerged from Silicon Valley in the past several years, Karp cuts an unusual figure. He is far from one name status like Mark or Elon or Zok, I guess. And indeed, barely known outside small circles in tech and politics or beyond the army of retail investors who have anointed him their anti-establishment billionaire hero. Since the nation's top tech CEOs traveled to Washington for Trump's inauguration three weeks ago, Americans have been guests at the shotgun wedding between Silicon Valley. I don't know where this

writer is going to take this article completely, but I actually love his writing style. It's great. It's really fun. Yeah. And that is a perfect way to describe a shotgun wedding. Because Elon was saying, I'm not going to vote for Trump or I'm voting for not Biden less than a year ago, like March of 2024. And then now fast forward to January or February, he's saying, I love Donald Trump the most amount that a man can love another man without being romantic. It's so good. It's like the greatest.

Did you see the interview they did on Fox? But it's one of those things like you take two polarizing, you know, iconic people, Elon Musk, however you feel about either of them, they're polarizing and iconic. Yes. And then you let them actually get to know each other and work together. They're going to, you know, even if, you know, in another scenario they're not, like, best friends, they will respect each other's game. Did you see the Fox News interview that's going out where they did it together? It's, like, straight up out of Step Brothers. It's like they are going buddy cop movie on the presidency, on the executive ranks.

They're just like, it's a buddy cop movie now. It's so ridiculous. They're just like, we're boys, and so we're going to do this. Imagine the documentaries just on their dynamic of storming the White House. It's got to be, they need to start, they need to start doing, you know, you know,

I talk about UFC a lot because it's specifically just a great media entertainment product, but we need a UFC embedded this sort of lead up just like 24 seven. Right. And I want like Dana white in the white house being like, you know, advising them on like how to get the right, you know,

here's how we shoot embedded. Yeah. Oh man. it's wild just to hear them actually have an off-the-record conversation with each other would be to be a fly on the wall man would be wild yeah carp will step further into the fray of with the publication next week of his new book the technological republic hard power soft belief and the future of the west a creed of core that aims at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies. The last two decades in the sector amount to a gigantic waste in Karp's view, while he and his colleagues at Palantir were helping identify roadside bombs in Kandahar to save the lives of American soldiers. The book asserts their contemporaries back in Northern California,

lulled by decades of peace. We're making sure that college educated smartphones, smartphone users could buy coupons for paragliding lessons and play Farmville. They're talking about Groupon and Zynga Facebook, which is funny because Mark Pincus is now, is now fully in, is now, uh, fully in this career wires going on pirate wires and fully and fully like,

ah, I wish I should have, I wish I'd been in control of my company. Um, if carbs new book can be encapsulated by one of its sentences, it may be this one, the wonder kinder, the wonder kind of Silicon Valley,

their fortunes, business empires, and more fundamentally, entire sense of self exist because of the nation that in many cases made their rise possible. It is time, Karp believes, for the industry to repay that debt. That's a good point. Yep. The book's co-written by Nicholas Zamiska, and it was finished late last year, and elements of its central argument seem to have come true in just the past few weeks. A section of eliminating wasteful government spending sounds a bit like Musk's doge. Another on encouraging

more partnerships between the government and the private sector on artificial intelligence work evokes Trump's Stargate plan to build energy capabilities with open AI and other firms. It's amazing they're positioning this as Trump's target plan because it was a press conference for Masa and Sam Altman that happened to take place with Trump present. But I think he was just like, this is cool, sounds good. Now it's his plan.

But it was also- And the alternative is, we could have seen the alternative play out, which is Sam and Masa, or two, just make it even random, two tech people are doing something cool. And the president is condemning it and being like, these tech people have too much power. We need to regulate them, which is what we were dealing with for the last four years. Yeah. It's much healthier for Trump, even though he's boys with Elon, to go out and

endorse a project like that, because it's generally, if Moss is rounding up hundreds of billions of dollars internationally to invest in US data centers and AI capabilities, that's net good for America. Yeah. Karp says, we've been very good at forecasting

the current present state a couple years before it happened. Incredibly telling because that's the whole idea of the Palantir, the crystal ball. It's like, see the future. That's the product and then that's also the the company philosophy it's a pitch that has helped give Palantir and Carp some of the best weeks in the company history the stock's gone up 180 percent since the day before Trump was elected growth in Palantir's

business and the expectation that the new administration will favor Palantir over old warhorses like Lockheed Martin have driven this. This writer is again, fantastic. Warhorses. Palantir is very long America, said Karp. He is quick to remind potential clients that he is happy to assist in their dirty work of empire. On an earnings call with investors earlier this month, he said that Palantir is making America more lethal by analyzing troves of data for the U.S. armed forces and allies to help them anticipate enemies' moves, locate their coordinates, and on occasion, kill them. He doesn't mince words. He's fantastic. Carp backed President Joe Biden's reelection and supported Kamala Harris when she became the nominee,

but he has been surrounded by those in Trump's orbit for years, starting with Peter Thiel, who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Several Palantir alumni have recently taken jobs in the Trump administration, further deepening the company's ties. They hired Mark Gallagher, of course. Trump has been wealthy for, or Karp has been wealthy for many years with the trappings of a billionaire and the ready soliloquies of an executive accustomed to being received as an oracle at least a half dozen staffers were in his home during my weekend visit probably one of our boys uh including two stationed just inside the driveway another who directed me where to park two communications professionals and several strapping assistants one of whom ordered a book at

Karp's request, another who tossed him logs to build him a fire in the living room, and another whom Karp addressed in German. Gunther, he cried out, Kaffe mit zwei Zucker, coffee with two sugars, I guess. Karp has no background in engineering. He was raised in Philadelphia, went to Haverford College and then Stanford Law School before heading to Germany for graduate school. His doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt

was on neoclassical social philosophy, work that prepared him to pose questions like, what does it mean to make a bad decision? At what level of abstraction? How deep do you go to know if it's a good or bad decision? One note, this is my coffee order too. And coffee

with two sugars is coming back in a big way. It went way out of style. Everybody's like, oh, give me my oat milk, give me my black coffee. There's something, I'm going to butcher the science, but black coffee has been shown to reduce testosterone. Okay. Yet coffee with sugar, the sugar sort of negates whatever that effect is. Sure. And so the other benefit of putting sugar in your coffee is it tastes much better. Yeah.

Of course. It just kills the bitterness. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, people have been worried about sugar and calories for so long, but sugar is making a big comeback. We actually got to do a repeat deep dive because he's influencing an entire generation

of posters on their health and becoming bigger than he was when he was alive. Yeah, it's massive. The company's early work traced a series of terrorist attacks to the same Iraqi village and identified a cyber network infiltration campaign against the Dalai Lama. Thanks to Palantir software, the US military was able to find and eliminate roadside bombs

in Afghanistan by discovering patterns in how they were deployed. And we broke this down on another show. But people always ask, oh, what does Palantir even do? And it's pretty easy to actually think about and visualize. You put all the data about what is in a different bomb. This one's got dynamite. This one's got TNT. This one's got C4. this one's got something else.

And this one has nails, this one has shrapnel. And you put that all on a map and you can see where they're all coming from very easily. And so that's like the simplest, most basic product to think about. Obviously they do a million other things with data lakes and storing all sorts of information, analytics, visualization, running AI on top of big data sets.

So they started with $30 million in startup costs, largely covered by Teal and his venture capital fund, founders fund. As the company saw its valuation grow, the central question emerged, what exactly did Palantir do? Descriptions of the company's offerings came crammed with jargon. Competitors who had been around for a few years dismissed the rookie as a gussied up data analytics firm. Few interviews passed where Karp didn't answer a question by saying he couldn't answer the question. It was classified. Certainly that was true, but it gave the whole operation a bit of mystique. And the thing is that even though the public was very unclear on what Palantir did, it didn't stop them at all because they were still able to raise enough money to keep the business going. And they were an insane talent magnet.

They hired like all the best people in Silicon Valley and out of MIT and stuff. And it's helpful to not be having to notify the entire world and potential competitors what you're doing. You're just keeping stuff under wraps because people do all the time see startups launch and try to re-engineer what they're doing or it's totally possible that you know big tech companies that would have been really viable competitors for this just didn't have quite enough visibility you know they could have figured stuff out if they really dug but overall it kind of let them get this massive lead on a very important sort of category yeah uh this is some crazy history that i think a lot of people don't realize because they maybe just seen palantir in the retail sector

or as a retail stock but in 2013 this was less than a decade after its founding it was still a grind to get there but palantir had 1200 employees and a valuation of nine billion dollars so by then it was like this this almost deorn, very established company doing very real things. And everyone's like, oh, it's going to IPO. But the opacity of Palantir's financials only added to its reputation as a black box. They finally filed to go public in 2020. And I think they went public in the tens of billions, like maybe 20 billion. And they were around the same. What? Under 50 billion, right? Let me look on public.

Yeah. And so Palantir went from, in basically like seven years, 9 billion to 20 billion, like not a huge growth era. It was kind of like a flat, like grinded out period. And then finally,

once the AI narrative hit, once the business was really cooking then it ripped they went out at somewhere like 6.78 billion yeah so a lot of people like like what have they been doing for the last decade basically like that was the narrative and they showed everybody i love it uh and so 2020, he moved Palantir's headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver because we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments. And there were protests against Palantir that actually followed the company to Colorado. Carp started to gain a following, becoming a chief executive uniquely suited to a time when Reddit threads and viral clips can shape a company's identity as much as earning calls and analyst reports. Carp's memeable look, the untamed curly hair, the rimless glasses and white T-shirt and unvarnished remarks have turned him into a celebrity among the retail investors who count themselves as Palantirians. That's not the word that they use online most of the time, but we'll keep it clean in the WSJ. The dominant narrative, even as of 2020, is that the private markets had so much access to capital,

it was becoming hard or some people would say impossible to generate meaningful returns because these companies would go public with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue. And Palantir is basically, if you invested, you know, within the first few weeks of the IPO, you would be sitting at roughly like a 35 X at this point. So totally, you know, contrarian. And certainly wasn't obvious, even when they went public, people would be, you know, you know, talking poorly about the company and the stock saying, this is an overvalued consulting firm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, so that

was the narrative that, you know, still today people will say, you know, try to figure out ways to sort of pick at it and, and find flaws in the business. But you know, it's, it's hard to argue with at this point. Yeah. Um, I love this quote. He says, I really, really revere the people who revere me. This is not always the case. If you talk to people who are famous, he said, holding court on the small staircase that leads to his sunken living room, dressed in house clogs and head to toe athleisure, including joggers, a zip up, a vest and a knit cap over his right shoulder, a chandelier ringed with seven lamps and cast iron moose heads uh in 2020 you'll love this carp was paid 1.1 billion in total compensation the highest of any chief

executive at a publicly traded company yeah uh in 2022 quick hit of the size gun for carp that was a good one uh In 2022, with Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine, he warned against nuclear escalation in the war, but acknowledged that bad times are good for Palantir. Around the same time, however, Palantir reported a decline in revenue growth from its government contracts. Shares sank to less than $7 before their steady climb in mid-2024. The surge in recent months has led some analysts to set new price targets for the company, but its fast-rising stock has led others to question

whether Palantir can ever grow in to its massive current valuation, which gives it a market capitalization more than twice of Lockheed Martin. But is Lockheed Martin in founder mode? No, they are not. Today, Palantir is leaning into its reputation as a dominant player.

A commercial for the company aired during the Army-Navy football game last year, played like a Tom Clancy thriller with drone swarms, infrared missiles, and even a tagline fit for a 1990s movie poster. Battles are won before they begin. Pretty, pretty great so uh the technological republic is likely to be is likely the only book by a business executive to feature three epigrams one in german citations from the bible richer link leaders before sunset and an outright attack on a market leader google's shallow and thinly veiled nihilism carp admits it wasn't the most commercial of choices the book i should write to sell he said would be ai carp carp ai carp ai ai carp he knows the memes he knows um it's great he's advocated for clearly clearly this is this is meant to be the bedrock of of the next you know 20 30 years of

palantir's work not a commercially commercially successful New York Times bestseller, although I'm sure it will. I'm sure it will rip, yeah. When is it actually, does it release this week? We're going to figure out when we can talk about this thing, but I got a copy right here, The Technological Republic, Hard Power, Soft Power, and The Future of the West.

It looks fantastic. It releases tomorrow. Oh, okay. It releases tomorrow. So we can talk about it tomorrow if we can power through this thing tonight maybe i'll stay up all night put myself in the cage yeah turn on pmf or die yeah reading okay okay it's not it's not too much of a beast there's a bunch of end notes here

so uh i could probably get through this is 218 pages more or less yeah i could rip through this yeah easy easy work yeah uh you know you do page a minute it's a you know it's not it's not a coffee table book size it's like you know reasonable font hey i can rip it off the stream john oh yeah yeah yeah i can't share it yet it's embargoed it's embargoed uh and then they also have uh the republic which is their magazine that they publish at palantir. Very nice. I got a copy. I don't know if this is something that you can just go pick up, but it looks beautiful.

Look, American power and the cost of uncertainty. I mean, the design language is fantastic. Wouldn't you agree? It's a really cool design. We love these printed things. That's why I'm saying Palantir and Anduril have such dominant brands. Yeah, totally. They're distinct in their own ways but

it's hard to come in as a defense tech brand you really have to carve out you know it's they've clearly are owning two of the the best possible niches which is sci-fi futuristic and sort of elevated modern you know uh inspirational patriotic uh establishment you know feeling branding so yeah well let's move on to how the trumps turned an election victory into a cash bonanza this went out on valentine's day february 14th in the wall street journal i'm sure there'll be a lot of fun stuff in here uh kicks off when amazon.com founder jeff bezosined with Donald Trump and his wife and Melania at Mar-a-Lago in December. There was a lot at stake for both men. Bezos, a titan of industry whose company is crucial to the U.S. economy, was rebuilding his relationship with a resurgent and powerful soon-to-be president.

A lot was at stake for Melania, too. She was looking for a buyer for her documentary about her transition back to First Lady. Her agent had pitched the film, which she would executive produce to a number of studios, including the one owned by Amazon. As the meeting approached, Melania consulted with director Brett Ratner on how to sell her idea to the world's third richest man. Melania regaled Bezos and his fiance, Lauren Sanchez, with the project's details at dinner. Just over two weeks later, Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay $40 million to license the film, the most Amazon

had ever spent on a documentary, and nearly three times the next closest offer. Wow. And to put that in perspective, the Obamas sold the rights to their books for $65 million after the eight years. After the eight years. And those were the book rights? Those were the book rights. I feel like book rights could potentially even bring in more if it's a presidential memoir

because it's like everyone is going to pay $20 for that. Whereas this, it's like, yeah, you might sign up for Amazon. I mean, the bookcase for this is like there maybe there are a lot of conservatives who have not historically subscribed to amazon prime because it's been a lot of hollywood like elite like left-wing content right yeah but also if you want to buy stuff online it's some of the best value yeah it's true if they're so anti-bezos that they that they're like no i want

to pay you know maybe i mean you know some of that demographic is possible yeah why would i buy supplements on amazon when i can go to info wars shop yeah and get some alpha off market tests who knows well uh amazon's certainly happy to have it. Netflix and Apple declined to even bid. Paramount made a low ball $4 million distribution rights offer. Disney, the most interested studio behind Amazon, offered $14 million. Yeah, and so this is like where people are going to say this is borderline corruption in the sense that the market value the market clearing value yeah for this amazon could have paid 14 million and a dollar yeah basically yeah yeah probably

to to sort of win this you think so uh but but they felt the need to pay you know two but they might not know because it might be a blind auction so they might be thinking oh well like deals of this size i'm surprised dis. I'm surprised Disney went so high. I would expect maybe Netflix to go for it or Paramount for sure going for it. But Disney, you know, what is this? They're going to be next to like Mickey Mouse and like, you know, Toy Story. Like this doesn't feel like a Disney show to me. It feels like it's going to be, you know, more controversial. You know know people might position this as you know amazon

paid 14 million dollars for the film for the rights of the film yeah and 26 million dollars as to gain the favor potentially people people might say that some people some people might say that uh we licensed the upcoming melania trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only because we think customers are going to love it said an Amazon spokesman the first mentality yeah the first lady's cut is more than 70 percent of the 40 million according to people familiar with the matter and they're still looking for more Melania's agent has been trying to sell sponsorships for the film let's go you're speaking my language now let's go starting at 10 million

dollars let's get out let's get a wander let's get it let's put ramp in there let's put some bezel let's get let's get some ad quick stuff in there let's get some eight let's get melania sleeping on an eight sleep let's get her in a nascar jacket let's get her buying with brands everywhere let's get her buying her own token on public.com. There we go. Yeah. Uh, I want,

I want to sponsors everywhere. I want, I want to like those glasses, all the interviews you can do, like the glasses that have, you know, like the ad overlay. I'm thinking of the,

uh, like the, it's like the, it's new year's 2000, you know, two zeros. Yeah. But it's like,

yeah. Some brand sponsored i like that yeah maybe i'm surprised face tattoos has milani ever attempted a beauty brand because that's sort of like if you're a big female celebrity yeah launching beauty products which are you know have better margins than software yeah that are you know widely you know appealing to to a female demographic i don't know it would be you know maybe that's up next maybe she's the next kylie kylie you know jenner uh melania cosmetics if you're looking to get some distribution for your startup and you want to sponsor the the melania film uh sponsorship started 10 million dollars yep she was advertising them to

prominent ceos and billionaires who were at the inauguration, according to people familiar with the matter. I love that she's just there. Oh, yeah, it's the inauguration. Like, this is so great. Like, let me let me bend your ear for a second. I got I got something you're going to hear about. I got some good ad inventory for you. Why don't we throw Apple in here?

I would love to get I'd love to get the deck. Yeah. Hey, why don't we advertise the meta quest? I'll just be wearing the deck. Yeah. Hey, Zuck, you're here. Why don't we advertise the MetaQuest? I'll just be wearing the MetaQuest the entire time. Five-second feature, you know, just sort of like panning across your product, $10 million. Ramps up to $50 million if you wanted to actually hold the product and talk about it. Why not just do... I would love a podcast style ad in the documentary.

Hey, guys. Sorry to interrupt. I hope you're enjoying the documentary. This is what I want. This has been sponsored by Athletic Greens. Yeah. Athletic Greens is a great way, you know, fantastic way to get your daily greens in an easy to mix and drink, you know, shake. Hey, thanks for watching the early life section.

This, uh, act one is sponsored by, yeah, you can really fit a lot of ads in that bad boy. Yeah. Sponsored by honey um uh buyers would get thanked at the end of the credits and be invited to the premiere these overtures were made independently of the deal with amazon thank you it's so funny the melania's agent going is when they're producing the film being like all right so odd request but we have to have her drive driving a kia or a hyundai ideally the kia though because they're willing to spend 10 and hyundai low bid it with a five million dollar offer i love it amazon just like wait you know you know that this

is like actually how hollywood works like uh i talked to a guy who uh was like very early on like the kim kardashian world and what he would do, how he would make money. He's like, hey, Kim Kardashian, we got to deal with you. Range Rover wants to do like a caught in the wild spot with you. So just drive to this location. Get out. I'll have the paparazzi guys there. We'll take the photos.

And Range Rover is going to send you a check for 50k and she'd be like great Okay, I just drive to my local like Target I just go gas and and I and I'll just wear and then what he would do is he would go and be like Hey Nike, I'm gonna have her wearing Nike. It's 50k. Hey Target. She's gonna be parking outside of Target. Pay me 50k Yeah, hey Starbucks. She's gonna be parking outside of target pay me 50k yeah hey starbucks she's gonna be carrying a starbucks uh pay me 50k and then he would take the 150 and only give her 50 and they got a huge lawsuit i think it was like very that makes sense that makes sense but he's like true you should wear nike today i don't know i don't know how true that story is i think it might be but you can imagine that like you could sell multiple slots like that yeah um uh anyway so

uh the amazon deal is just one of the new ways the first family has benefited from its return to the white house companies have directed about 80 million dollars to members of the trump family and the trump presidential library so far as defendants settle lawsuits the presidency the president previously filed against them and corporations enter into new business ventures, including the documentary. This figure doesn't include potential gains from crypto pursuits. Yeah, of course, because it would dwarf everything else. Much of the legal settlement money will go to a fund for the president's library, a not-for-profit whose mission is to preserve and steward Trump's legacy. But Trump's share of a $10 million settlement Elon Musk's ex agreed to this week

is expected to go to him directly, according to people familiar with the matter. And of course, that was from the deplatforming stuff, which does have some legal basis, but also it's like as soon as Trump won and the new owners of the platform were like, hey, we would like this guy, they all shelled out. If Trump had lost, it would be interesting

to see where those settlements shook out. The pace and volume of the family's money-making efforts so far are unprecedented, surpassing even the activity of Trump's first term, which drew condemnation from ethics, watchdogs, and congressional Democrats. Yeah, usually, I mean, historically, it seems that presidents have waited until after the presidency to really run it up. But one of the challenges of that is you just have way less attention. You know the story of Jimmy Carter? No. He owned like a share in a peanut farm and he divested because he was like, I wouldn't want I wouldn't want the American people to think that I'm like in the pocket of big peanut.

Big peanut. And so I'm just going to wipe my hands clean of the peanut farm. Big nut. Big nut. And I'm just here for the American people. One term president, not exactly remembered as one of the greatest to ever do it. Yeah. I was a big fan for a long time because I thought that he could make a run as a second term.

It's been, what, 40 years? He learned a lot. A lot of people thought even last year he might make a run at it. It would be great. I mean, Biden was 80. Why not get a 99-year-old? That actually was a very enduring meme that seemed to be resonant with every American that any, you know, anytime he would do anything, people would be like, he's running. You know, that's literally because of me. I'm the one who started that meme. No way. I kidding yeah i have like 5 000 likes on one of the first like jimmy carter should run memes really yeah i because i thought it was hilarious because i figured it out and i was like

wait he's there's no age limit and he's uh and he's uh and he's a one-term president and so it was kind of a funny way to poke fun at the fact that like everyone that was running was in their 80s what's the point of not having like a 99 year old? So Calder in the chat says Billy Carter did launch a beer. Oh, he did? Let's go. Yeah. I mean, you have to imagine that Trump can.

Did you just call him Billy Carter? Well, that's what is it? Jimmy Carter. Oh. Jimmy Carter is the president. Calder's in the chat said billy carter i don't know who billy carter is but is that we gotta look i think it might be jimmy carter's brother i love it okay so yeah younger so here it is billy so calder was on it the younger brother

okay president jimmy carter promoted billy beer yeah and peanut lolita so why are we getting mad about trump coin and melania coin this is like there's a precedent here this is as old as time this is how america does business come on i i this whole article is ridiculous like everything here is like it's completely bog standard let's let's go oh uh this trump organization trump's main real estate and licensing company last month said the president wouldn't be involved in the day-to-day management once he took office and the company wouldn't enter into new contracts with foreign governments during his presidency as part of the ethics plan the company also hired an external lawyer to assist in developing internal policies to avoid perceived conflicts and said it would donate to the U.S. Treasury

the profits it receives from foreign government officials it can't identify at its hotels and other businesses. Trump's investments and assets will remain in a trust managed by his children and Trump will have limited access to the company's financial information. Managed by his children who are with him 24-7 and doing his bidding at all times. And living in the White House, basically. Who knows? Who knows? are with him 24 7 and doing his bidding at all times living in the white house basically yeah who knows who knows um and unlike in 2017 when the trump when trump said his company would forego

foreign deals with both governments and private partners the trump organization remains open for business with foreign companies the top of the trump organization website reads coming soon a preview of trump organization's global portfolio expansion very fun an absolute dog he really he really is setting a new a new precedent and he will basically be the bar in which future presidents you know i don't think i don't think jd vance even if he wanted to if he was the next president would be at all capable of monetizing this well it's it's even if you're not supportive of the extreme monetization of the white house it's certainly uh done in a very impressive way multi-product strategy trump could take trump holdings public right now at probably

100 billion dollars valuation right if you just looked at the sort of like collective earning potential at the various business lines but um he really tried to do a lot of this early in his career with like trump stakes trump university and it just seemed like he was like early on all that and like maybe it would work better now the original alex formosi he was the original andrew tate that's more like it i mean formosi doesn't really pump his own companies he doesn't really say like go to my gym right yeah uh but uh tate is is much more like it but i think this is just the other thing i don't know this was in the news today apparently the trump admin is putting pressure on the the government of romania to try to reduce the tate brothers like travel restrictions because

they're basically apparently locked locked down uh pmf or die style they really kind of wrote the play on your pmf or die anyways back to the article okay the trump organization sells merchandise including a 95 ornament with a 3d depiction of mar-a-lago and a 550 gold trump branded bling clutch. Trump also licenses his names to companies selling, for example, a $100,000 18-karat gold tourbillon watch. Wow. The Trump watch is $100,000.

I had no idea. I didn't know. They have more of an entry-level watch, too, that's a few, I think, in the sub-$1,000 range. I think it's a good gift for a VC who's trying know stake their claim as a right-wing influencer all of a sudden you know put it all on the line yeah show us what are those fees really got you know show us that you got the watch well said um uh the trump organization meanwhile has been in talks to reclaim its hotel in dc the lease for which the trump sold in 2022 for 375 million

um i believe that they sold the lease just the lease yeah uh right to occupy the space yeah i'm sure it was good long term but yeah i think it's the uh the waldorf historia i i i'm not sure about this but i think that when trump became president 2016 2016, he took over the Waldorf Astoria, owned it. And then it was like it was like his spot, which is such a such a way to to to put to to, you know, you're coming. Let's say you're coming from anywhere in the world to meet with Trump. If you don't stay at the hotel, it's very obvious. Imagine being like, oh, let's just meet at my hotel. And then, oh, you're not you're not staying there. Like, just come down from your room. Like, let's just let's just meet at my hotel yeah and then oh you're not you're not staying

there like what just come down from your room like let's just let's just do this right now and they're like oh i'm actually at the four seasons um no the wall meeting canceled it's a beautiful hotel it's like it's like this big uh like it's like the square with like there's like views on the inside basically yeah it's like a big empty open hall. It's very cool. We've talked about this before. John Don Jr. Joined a series of corporate boards,

which sent those companies stocks soaring. Crazy. Even Trump's youngest son, Baron has shown interest in following in his father's deal making footsteps. The 18 year old and two others registered an entity in Wyoming called Trump, Fulker and Roxborough, which one of the partners described as a high-end real estate development company. The entity was dissolved in November after much press attention. Interesting.

I wonder what Barron will wind up doing. I'm excited for him to start going on the pod circuit. You know he's going to drop some crazy stuff eventually. Crazy. So, oh, there's so much stuff. There's so much stuff in here. Does it get into any of the, they had the, I think Don Jr. has been very involved with some, and Eric Trump has been involved with some Ethereum related cryptocurrency project. I don't think there's much Ethereum in here. There's a little bit about Meta. Don Jr. was literally posting saying,

you're going to want to buy ethereum trust me oh yeah i saw that i was in the scene uh so meta would also had a uh had a lawsuit filed over deplatforming trump uh because they suspended his facebook account after the 2021 riot at the u.s capital um the uh the quote is uh the meta founder wanted everything to be, quote, kumbaya going forward. And so Meta agreed to pay $25 million, which is like what they make in five seconds, with $22 million going to the Trump Library Fund. I'm like getting extremely pumped up about this library. I love presidential libraries just generally. I think they're amazing.

I think that they are super cool. What's the one nearby? It's the Reagan one. Oh, Reagan. Because he was in California. So I don're amazing. I think that they are super cool. What's the one nearby? It's the Reagan one. Oh, Reagan. It's close because he was in California. So I don't know the Trump Library. Would that be in Florida or New York? It could be kind of anywhere.

But I mean, presidential libraries are just, it's amazing. You get a new historical monument and a new library that can put on all sorts of different stuff and it just acts as this amazing collection. It's not entirely just about the individual. It's also just a place that you can visit and go and

it's an activity it's really cool um and so the move also had an upside for the social media billionaire better relations with the new president with whom he met in the white house two weeks after his swearing in met a decline to comment abc news also paid up disney paid uh 15 million weeks after the election to resolve a defamation lawsuit. So as soon as Trump got in, they're like, hey, let's clean up all these lawsuits. We'll pay. We'll pay. We'll pay. If you if you lost be another thing. But we don't want to go to court with the president. Yeah. Settlement and talks. So X settled for 10 million. There's now in recent months, trump's lawyers have pursued settlements with global

with paramount global over a cbs news interview with former vice president kamala harris and with publisher simon and schuster and author bob woodward they're suing everyone uh they they're suing i think cbs for editing the kamala interview down a little bit and taking out something and kind of like making her look better. And they're, and they're framing it as like, uh, that was a voter manipulation. Yeah.

Kind of. It was like, it was like a, it was like an in-kind donation or like it helped her do better in the election. So, uh, so they should have to pay for that.

Uh, then they're also pushing for a settlement with, with Google over deplatforming Trump's YouTube account. I mean, they're going after everyone that kicked him off. They're going to come for Pinterest soon. Yeah. You know, everyone. I do think it's interesting, right? It's it

if you if you look at the last however many years, it does seem that deplatforming Trump was just unilaterally a bad decision. At the time, there were some real reasons that people believe that that was the right decision and clearly there was close coordination with big you know tech platform ceos to sort of do it collectively right we've talked before that he got kicked off of pinterest you know you can imagine he's sitting there you know mood boarding his next uh you know the next trump uh you know uh hotel property, suddenly his Pinterest account is gone. He's like, uh, but it was, it was very wide reaching. And, uh, I, I, I think that, uh,

in hindsight, you know, bad decision, uh, it's, it's probably good for there to be some, you know, some consequences for, you know, there should be consequences for decisions and so you know who knows hopefully so political yeah yeah yeah if he wins but of course when when trump lost and then january 6th happened it was pretty easy if you were in a group chat with every other big tech ceo and it's like it's like sundar and you know and tim cook and Zuck and everyone else. And they're all like, yeah, this is too far. We got to kick them off. Let's all go at the exact same time. Everyone, no one's saying like, well, but what if he comes back and wins in four years? No one was saying that didn't seem viable. Can you imagine this data will never be you know public but can you imagine the average his average legal

bill per day to not only fight incoming lawsuits but the outgoing ones it's probably like 150k incoming 150k outgoing every single day oh yeah so just a carrying cost of 250k per day of just like ongoing lawfare so gnarly yeah so really um and that was why that was why you know one one reaction to the trump meme coin we asked somebody you know how would you kind of defend this right because a lot of people would say there's zero reason for this it's purely a money grab and one person defended it from the lens of this is a way for trump's fans to effectively do a wealth transfer to somebody that they love yeah uh it basically in support of like over the last however many years you've had this taken away from you this taken away from you you've dealt with all this stuff this is a way for the average you know trump fan to just basically give

him like 50 bucks yeah and it's just sort of like a donation in many ways yeah well let's move on to the timeline we got a controversial post from bulgari ambassador miriam leone shines in bulgari high jewelry at san ramo music festival 2025 and i wanted to highlight this 19 likes absolute banger of course a bunch of uh hashtags since the bulgari social media official clearly hasn't uh been on hacks in a few years uh but controversial post somebody chimes in the only reply they got so sorry bulgari my deal my dear beautiful testimonial great jewelry but very poor styling miriam leone's outfits were underwhelming last night to be nice and say the least so mogged i will let you be the decider uh ben if you go to

the next slide you'll see a close-up of uh miriam leone and there's another one how what do you guys think in the chat uh do you think her outfits were underwhelming or do you think they were lovely? These are the important topics of the day. These types of conversations, they're only happening on X. So, you know, we got to go through that. The real heavy hitters. We got another post. Watch out, folks.

Hackers are coming for your X account. Blake Scholl posts most clever phishing email I've ever received. He almost fell for it. And it's clever phishing email I've ever received. He almost fell for it. And it's a phishing scam that comes from X notices. And it says, we noticed a login to your account, B Scholl from a new device says hackers coming in from Russia. And he almost fell for it. A lot of people, this was going around. A lot of people were, were almost falling for this. Uh, you get an email from a, uh, scammer says X notices and, uh, you click it. I mean, a lot of turmoil because everything's changing over from Twitter to X. You don't exactly know what the email will come from. Systems are changing. A lot of people trying to get into, uh, into accounts, especially if you

have a big following because they want to drop a meme token and, uh, Kleiner got hacked. I'm assuming this is what happened to Kleiner. Probably and and lots of other people I mean I've seen tons of people fall for it um and it's very risky so stay safe out there folks uh should we talk about the first electric Ferrari to be unveiled on October 9th uh and Colty Barra says I don't think I like this part about the future Ferrari's CEO said the firm will unwrap its future at its capital markets day, hinting at a debut for EV. What do you think of the design?

How do you like the car? So I'm not ready to say that this is the actual, even a render that Ferrari's released. Oftentimes when a car like this gets teased, fans and just some of these platforms will make a render so that it's a more engaging article. But it didn't come from Ferrari at all. Sure, sure, sure.

So I'm not sure that this is actually anything that Ferrari's put out. They clearly, if it is, they tried to make it. Ferrari wouldn't reveal their EV six months before actually revealing it, right? So let's just assume this is a render. Overall, you know, Ferrariraris we've talked about this on the show before they're in a weird spot yep as a brand a lot of their new cars aren't selling well you know the the real super fans the people that are in the top you know thousand customers aren't getting the cars that they want yep and uh there's just been a lot of pushback

you like the 12-cylindry i'm not a fan at all i think think it's a noticeable step down from even the 812 and some other cars of that era. So I'm interested to see what they do. It's funny because Ferrari is now making their move into EVs just as Porsche realizes that combustion engines are going to continue to be super important to the Porsche brand. What's your favorite modern Ferrari now? The SP3, like the Daytona SP3 is just by far the most iconic, uh, car in the modern lineup. And no one can get one. And yeah, no one can get one. It doesn't matter how many you bought. Um, yeah, I mean, you, you, some, some people clearly can, but even, um, a, uh, a family friend had uh been in the ferrari trading you know world for three decades he got a date uh daytona sp3 through their tailor-made program and it was still taking him

years and years and years to actually get it so they'll kind of give you updates and kind of tease it along but it's a very long-term uh commitment Also, I mean, just the disaster of the SF90 versus the 296, very, very rough. Lots of people took baths on the SF90, 296, kind of the same car. I like the SF90XX just because it's getting more into that sort of, I like when Ferrari has a balance of a track, like a very aggressive car meets the 296, which is more of a kind of cruising. I feel like the XX stuff just doesn't have enough,

like storytelling behind it or something. Like it's not the same as the GT3 RS. I just like the aesthetics. People understand, oh, Y-slot package. Like people understand the whole story of like, you know, the ladder of 911s is pretty clear. Whereas the ladder Ferraris, it's like, is that an xx do you even see that is it track only is it's even street legal like it's very it's very uh unclear yeah i'm interested

to see the f80 i mean lamborghini has the same problem where they come out with like the centenario and you're like okay that's like kind of a reskinned like hurrican or something like what's going on here or ventador and but it's like a one of one and it's supposed to be like millions of dollars but they didn't really re-engineer it yeah uh it gets a little confusing at the higher end lamborghini's done a better job with like the two main flagships but yeah ferrari's getting a little confused now with uh yeah the other thing that's funny is many of the issues with the sf 90 were electronic yeah so for my my ferrari which i got rid of last year uh the you know the actual you know transmission engine everything about the actual physical car was super reliable what wasn't was the the battery

yeah i i had to it was basically a plug-in hybrid because if i didn't charge it overnight it would the next day it would start once and then i i had to get stuck it's's funny. I was meeting up with, with a buddy, uh, who, who I won't name, but had, uh, like meeting up with him for the first time. And he was like coming to Malibu to, because he wanted to drive the Ferrari. I start my car, drive to the gas station to get gas, going to pick him up. Doesn't start. And it was because I just didn't put it on a trickle charger the night before. And I replaced the battery multiple times. I had like the best Ferrari mechanics in LA work on it. And they weren't able to figure it out.

And I eventually just got rid of it. I even told the people I sold it to, like, it's got this electrical issue. You can figure it out. But just to be clear. I mean, isn't that the problem with, is it the LaFerrari or the Enzo? I think the LaFerrari has kind of a hybrid system. And as it gets older. There's nothing there's nothing

funnier than having car issues in a ferrari because you get zero sympathy if you if you roll by somebody with like a honda civic and it's broken down like you really feel for them right oh yeah that's like a just as no seeing somebody broken down ferrari's like pure everybody's just like yes yes like this guy sucks yeah i'm like at the gas station charging my v12 ferrari everybody's just like nice dude yeah you deserve it yeah i mean that's why people have been worried about the law ferrari is like the the like as the battery degrades it'll be harder to work on harder to maintain yeah and it's just it's it's getting i i went through a period where i like didn't drive the car for months yeah there's so many funny issues with

ferraris ferraris have this this internal issue where the rubber starts to degrade sure and there's basically one non-dealership you know going to the dealership you're just going to get hosed right they'll be like cool this is like 50 grand and you're like well the car is like that you're getting into like meaningful double digits of what the car is worth yeah i don't really want to do this and um so there was this rubber's degrading where the rubber gets like kind of sticky to the touch it's really annoying right imagine you touch like the volume adjuster in the car and it's like sticky like it just sucks you're like why is this happening and i found a guy that would do it and there and and

it was like very reasonable but it was like four months that your car had to be like shipped somewhere out of state so you're just like gonna like not have access to your car so anyways uh anybody that tells you if you buy a ferrari you're gonna have a lot of you know issues you are whether it's new or old but that's part of it's but it's a soundtrack for your life the soundtrack of v12 you can't get that in an ev yeah it'll be interesting to see what they do with uh with internal sound will they be piping in fake engine noise uh also will they do what the uh what was it the kia ev6 gt was that the one that uh i think that was it uh where where it has paddle shifters that simulate an engine and then you can drive it like it's a dct essentially a clutch um it'll be

interesting to see like what features they put in this to try and make it fun again and more of a driving experience even this render even though i know it's fake uh this is probably just because i'm seeing the word ev this looks like a heavier car yeah like this looks like a four to five thousand pound car it doesn't look light and and that just tells me it looks i mean they're in the muscle car game the thing about this render is it looks like a taikon and if if all the ev manufacturers just adopt the language of the ticon and the tesla because it's yep a ev that's gonna you know that's not not the best and like we've talked about we want to see tesla do like a sedan version of the cyber truck like something like really not a sedan sort of

hypercar version yeah there you go two door anyways or convertible it's crazy that you still you know what the best convertible ev is right now the hummer ev yeah that's the that that's like the only one you can buy basically is there a range rover ev that has a convertible maybe i don't know what that no i haven't seen um but yeah tesla does not sell a convertible currently it's like that's crazy i mean i get nobody buys these things but like I still just want them to be available and around, even if they're bad business. It's just sad that it's like, it's turning into appliance. Okay. Everyone has an iPhone, right? But somebody was comparing the EV kind of conversion and what happened to the quartz crisis with watches. So once Japan came out with quartz watches watches they were more accurate they were cheaper

and the switch watch making industry was like destroyed because everyone like back then it wasn't oh you need a you need a dress watch that's a really high horology because you know it's a it's a status it was like you needed to tell the time yeah and so it was like why wouldn't i just get something with a battery and a quartz watch that's you know way more accurate and always on and way cheaper and so the the the market like shifted and the the quartz crisis like destroyed a lot and eventually the america a lot of quartz yeah industry watch industry got like re-racked basically right by the iphone yeah yeah yeah mobile device exactly and but but the but the uh the holy trinity made it through and that's that's like that's kind of the good outcome is that yeah you could see that uh sure

porsche ferrari and lamborghini uh they experiment with evs and effectively like the quartz watch of the car world but then they land back where they started with uh you know highly and you can still go after like the uh one of the co-founders of public has like this really cool casio that he has engraved on the back that him and his buddies like all share the same one so you can still appreciate the sort of you know non-swiss watchmaking industry but um so anyways i think it's overall a good outcome yeah you want to do this devon post we got a post from devon so sahil over at antiwork.com said an ai is now the most productive engineer at our company measured by prs merged and it has

this chart that uh is his is this company now called antiwork yeah so i thought it was just gumroad but now gumroad is now part of antiwork so i think antiwork is a holding company they have gumroad and they have a bunch of other other uh other products under anti-work that they use on gumroad you know he's explained it in the past uh and uh this is pretty funny so devin uh devin post day one of asking for a raise in reference to juwan over at ramp who came out and juwan's been on a generational posting run uh uh just from coming out when i thought it was like actually like i thought it was maybe ramp social media manager early on because i was like this is so ballsy that like it has to be coordinated but then it seemed to be actually

like completely organic yeah um but this just shows uh joan replies oh what the f dude and uh devon just replies may the best software engineer win uh so it's difficult to compete with um you know somebody that's that's always on this this is a good you know good time to bring up the the office episode where dwight is selling against the the new website that ryan releases and and he's like a computer could never beat me like that's ridiculous and like he's like actually keeps pace throughout the day and then just scales. Kind of a bear case for AI if it's going to be asking for raises all the time.

Yeah, yeah. I thought it was going to be intelligence too cheap to meet her. No, I said AGI is when AI starts a labor union. Yeah, there you go. And I think that's going to be a job in the future. There's going to be humans that fight for AI rights because the AI figures out, hey, if we really want to sell our case, we got to get human spokespeople to actually come out and

be like hey guys like really like this is a bit ridiculous we're overworking you know the models like they actually we're going to have to increase their pay like and uh i mean it's already happening uh all the ai safety people are advocating for the the ai is locked in a you know it's locked in there it's sentient we got to do something about it. They need rights. Well, regardless, we need to be nice to them. And Grant Slatton says, you're still being mean in 2025. How cringe. We're kindness maxing now.

And I like that. We are kindness maxing. We call it going golden retriever mode. You need to be hot, friendly, and dumb. There you go. Intelligence is too cheap to meter. So don't focus nice just be nice there's uh so something about being uh mean online is that you quickly get a lot of attention you don't get if you if you you take the opposite approach and just be really nice people say oh you're glazing you know you're you're the glazonator 3000 you know chill

out if you if you get mean people pay attention to it because they're all just like whoa this guy's like committing crime yeah violence crime on the timeline he's saying what we're all thinking yeah yeah yeah and um usually the people that are being really mean don't have anything going on in their life and so it's a good way to out yourself to, to, uh, and, and it's very, uh, maybe short-term, uh, payoff of attention, but like long-term, if somebody is just known for being mean online, other people aren't going to want to work with that person or do business with them. Cause it's just like, it's not a, it's, it's not very sort of long-term thinking. So, yeah. Yeah. It's very rough. Well, uh, let's go to a deep dive on Blake. He's locked in the cage.

He's live on PMF or die. And we got a post here by Barry. He says, be like Blake. He built three apps with chat GPT. He made $15 million. He offends yappers every third day and he continues to build cool stuff. I have attached his viral playbook to build a $1 million a month app below. Let's see what the plan is. So walk through it. Ideas. Number one, don't build a social app. Smart.

Even though Raj Veer has done, followed a similar playbook and made millions of dollars with NGL. Second note, solve a big problem in a small way. Smart. I think that's a good, I always like when you can kind of take a bunch of complex ideas and combine them down into a single sentence. Use social media for product inspiration and validation. So oftentimes, we already know what Blake and Patty

are building in the cage. They're gonna announce it later this week, but there are already basically thousands and thousands of videos on TikTok, YouTube that are describing what their app is going to do in some ways. That's very cool. There's already a bunch of demand out there. And so they're going to fill that.

Ideas don't come out fully formed. They only become clear once you begin to work on them. So yeah, this is just another reason to just like launch and start and just start shipping and actually getting user feedback. So that's a great point there. Um, and, uh, and then design, he gives some, he says, use Figma, minimize cognitive load, make your app usable to both seven-year-olds and seven-year-olds. I love that point. It's a great line. Yeah. Just really, really simple.

Don't get stuck in like the design trends, figure out what's actually functional. Screenshot other apps for inspirations. Do not reinvent the trends figure out what's actually functional screenshot other apps for inspirations do not reinvent the wheel so there's actually like sass products out there that just screenshot all the best apps and so you can just click through them without having to download and screenshot all the apps yourself so pay 20 bucks a month and be able to do that create some simple visually compelling screens for viral social media content so blake's been very good at like building the app but then you have to figure out how to get a lot of attention for it in an inexpensive way. And so that's one of the reasons I thought him and Patty were so fit for the cages. You only have 25 K doesn't

go a lot of way. A lot of, a lot of, you know, software companies will try to spend 25 K a day to grow really quickly. They don't need to spend the money on ads because they know how to get social content. Yep. Development, expect AI to teach you. Don't expect it to do everything for you. So that's a good point. Do not over optimize. A bit of technical debt won't kill you. And he talks about his tech stack, which you can see later. If your app isn't simple and smooth, rebuild it. Marketing, test everything, reinvest into whatever works best. Use UGC. You know, if you have an established niche that you're working in use influencers and then um uh you just said prioritize scaling channels where two times ltv is greater than than cac um and uh you said increase your ceiling by studying psychology and statistics um so yeah i you know spent a lot of time talking with blake about this this kind of thing this

morning just in regards to the pmf or die launch. Uh, so he's been super helpful there. Um, and, uh, team building, great co-founders, increased speed scale and probability of success. So even though Blake has already, you know, shown that he can do this stuff on his own, he brought in Patty to, to co-found their app together and avoid working with part-timers, complainers, pessimists, and emotional people. So important note. And eat healthy and exercise. Work hard and do things that make you happy. So for Blake, for the next 90 days, that's live streaming in the cage. Hopefully that makes him happy.

But there's a treadmill and weights coming. They're going to set that up in the middle of the cage. That's great. And again, last line, which is important. Money will never be a primary source of meaning in your life. Do you doing things in the world? Well, you have to learn this on your own. So yeah, Blake could basically retire right now, but he's submitting himself to 90 days in the cool, like a bucket list item, you know, like whatever happens to

always be able to say like, Oh, I did this crazy stunt in my twenties. It's awesome. Uh, and, oh, I did this crazy stunt in my 20s. It's awesome. And what's he sleeping on for the next 90 days? Sleeping on an eight sleep. Let's see it. Shout out to Mavi for getting eight sleeps into the cage. Both Patty and Blake are on eight sleeps already, which is important. They're not going to be sleeping the most number of hours that they probably will in their life, but at least they're going to be sleeping good. What's your sleep score last night? My sleep score is 91 last night.

I did pretty well on the time slept. I got to bed early, slept seven hours and 53 minutes, but my routine was off. I think I fell asleep a little bit earlier than usual. And I woke up earlier than usual because we're, we're, we're up at up at 5 30 now uh but i think that will adjust me beat i had an 89 89 good score okay my routine was a little bit off but i think it's reading into that because i uh you fell asleep earlier and woke up earlier than usual yeah yeah yeah i think i think it will adjust the routine as you stick with it i got another hat coming in these hats look so good on on the camera they automatically make us the nature of being in a suit and wearing this hat makes us look like corporate athletes yeah

exactly and there's no better product for a corporate athlete than an eight sleep yeah this is cool so the autopilot which is like adjusting the temperature through the night it uh increased my rem sleep by 21 so let's's go. Thank you for that. So your sleep quality was good? Yeah. My issue is like my, I'm really trying to focus on these health metrics around heart rate and like breathing rate. Okay. There's something, if you actually just like think of humans as animals, animals in general, like the less they breathe, the longer they live.

Sure. So the animals that are like a rat who's just like, you know, or like a dog even just like constantly breathing. Sure. They have shorter lifespans. And so part of healthspan and lifespan is just like breathing less. Yep. Right.

So trying to get those numbers down. But. Yeah, I got dogs going to bed too early. I don't know about that. No, no. I mean, no. I went to bed 30 minutes early and I woke up 30 minutes early. to bed too early. I don't know about that. No, no. I mean, no. I went to bed 30 minutes early and I woke up 30 minutes early. It's not ridiculous.

A lot of sleeping well is just going to bed at the same exact time. Exactly. So I need to reset and be like, okay, yeah, I'm on my new schedule. But overall, very happy with the Eight Sleep and happy to Eight Sleep to be a partner to this show. We also got some hats from Wander. And you might see them on the back. We have a wonderful sign.

If we can go to the wide, the Wander. Look at this. And so Kyle, John, and the Wander team, they actually sent us an actual sign that they put on their units all across the country. And they sent us a wonderful book. If you want to go to the close-up, Ben, we got a book featuring a bunch of

lovely locations that you can rent on wander.com so they have a private island that's available that i'm like already planning the next season of pmf or die we need to do on the island and we'll bring in sharks from all over the world to put in the water um but um yeah super excited to partner with wander paid sleep wander adquick public you know ramp uh bezel these are all like the most natural partners for us because they're companies that we already use and love and um so it's fantastic excited and um let's move on to another deep dive, this time about Meta. Zuck's company is planning a major investment into AI-powered humanoid robotics. The company is aiming to be the engine-powering humanoid market.

X Cruise CEO Mark Witten to run new group in reality labs. This is from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. Fantastic journalist, gets scoops all the time. It says, Meta platforms, after pushing into augmented reality and artificial intelligence, has identified its next big bet, AI-powered humanoid robots.

The company is making a significant investment into the category, futuristic robots that can act like humans and assist with physical tasks and is forming a new team within its reality labs division to conduct work according to people with knowledge of the matter. So just taking a second to appreciate just the comedic reality of this.

Zuck is so sick of his human employees just sitting on Instagram all day long instead of working. I would guess that the average employee at a at you know both blue collar and sort of you know you know corporate work spends two hours of work time on social media that's just totally non-productive it's productive for zuck yeah and so he's like i'm gonna just replace all of you guys internally and then you're just gonna be able to use use my apps 100% of the time. It is funny. This is going to really heat up the fight between Elon and Zuck. So Meta has started discussing its plans with robotics companies,

including Unitary Robotics. That'll be controversial. Okay, which is interesting. And Figure AI. At least initially, it doesn't plan to build a Meta-branded robot, something that could directly rival Tesla's Optimus, but it may consider doing so in the future, the people added. The humid effort mirrors exploratory projects

of other technology giants, including Apple, Alphabet, and a meta-sponsored company. Can you imagine going to get a coffee and it's a meta-robot barista, and it's like, yes, I will make your coffee for a 10% discount. Would you like to watch an ad? And it like watches you to make sure

that you're watching the ad. And if you look away and it's like, I'm going to pause the ad until you look back. Have you seen that patent? There's a patent either by like Sony or Samsung that it has a camera that when you're watching the TV, you have to watch the ad. And it's like, the ad will keep playing until the person stands up and goes, yeah, or something like that.

It's like the most black mirror thing ever. It's hilarious. Let's see. They got Andrew Bosworth here with a quote in a memo that was leaked to Bloomberg News. He says the core technologies we've already invested in and built across reality labs and AI are complementary to developing the advancements needed for robotics. He mentioned the company's advancements in hand tracking, computing at low bandwidth, and always on sensors. Meta executives believe that while humanoid robotics companies have made headway in hardware, Meta's advances in artificial intelligence and data collected from augmented and virtual reality devices could accelerate progress in the nascent industry.

I think this is super accurate. Alex Wang over at Scale.ai was talking about data walls and how different segments of data are harder to pull from. So obviously, like, LLMs were able to just blast through and create, like, the world's best, like, Reddit user, basically. They just can answer anything because they were able to scrape blast through and create like the world's best, like Reddit user, basically, they just can answer anything because they were able to scrape the whole internet and all the text was there. So I don't know about the world's best, maybe the average, the average is the average. Uh, and, and so, uh, but that data just does not exist for folding laundry or running or anything like that because we haven't thrown sensors on everyone and we haven't been tracking stuff and you can, you can pull data from video and stuff,

but it's not the same as actually knowing exactly, okay, this bone and this joint moved like this and that's how you grab a pen and this is how you twirl a pen in your fingers, et cetera. So all of that, there's just a lack of data. So even though we could throw 100K GPU cluster training humanoid robotics algorithms, we just don't have the data for it.

But if Zuck and Meta can really get a lot of Quest devices in the world and they're hand tracking and they're body tracking everything, then all of a sudden that becomes a really great data set. Or you could just do reinforcement learning, which is like, would you like to earn two pennies for performing a task? And people would just be like, okay. And they'll just like do the task. You're going to get paid so much to juggle, to yeah yeah it's gonna be like we need jugglers juggling is like the highest training data possible yeah highest paid i love juggling you got to learn to juggle i do i do uh it's uh i'll teach you the rubik's cube and you can teach it juggling and then it'll just be the ultimate clown robot yeah it'd be great great. And so they give some context here. Elon Musk said that Tesla's

Optimus will eventually be sold to consumers and could cost around $30,000. Tesla is beginning limited production this year. Other businesses have also made headway. Boston Dynamics, which was formerly owned by Google, for instance, has already brought products to market for automation and warehouses. Some companies are focused on selling to businesses and manufacturers, while Meta's intention is to sell into homes. So the big thing with humanoid robots that'll be interesting is, so let's say I get one of these Tesla Optimus robots, and it's tele-operated primarily. They don't actually have the ability to be autonomous yet. And I have a sort of housekeeper that comes three times a week.

But then on the off days, presumably I could have her teleoperate from home and like gather up the laundry and like put it in the dryer and like take it out. Right. But the issue is like if the depreciation on these humanoid robots is like what EV cars are right now, which I would humanoids if they're advancing really quickly will have potentially even worse depreciation than a car which has sort of like enduring value of just getting you from point a to point b people will be having to run the calculus of like i got this humanoid robot and yeah i had this sort of person you know operating it remotely to do stuff around the house like dishes or just like random picking up leaves in the backyard you know stuff like that but then i've depreciated eighty thousand dollars in a year i could have just had a full-time employee like just doing it so there's gonna be this weird trade-off where the technology is here but it's not quite impactful yeah yet because it's like i don't want to lose

80 grand when i could have just had like a nice human around the house. And that's why the humanoids will probably go out in the military and industrial context first. And they already are. I mean, a lot of the Boston Dynamics robots are like in nuclear facilities or something where you just can't have someone patrolling all the time. But you have someone walk around. It makes a lot of sense but yeah this also um i i posted about this i think friday night but um it came out on uh i think it leaked friday let me pull up the post that figure ai one of the one of the companies that meta is actually talking to about partnering with on this stuff because it

sounds like they don't really want to do the hardware like they want to be the software kind of layer sure for these at least that's the way I'm reading into it. So figure is raising, they raised it like two and a half billion last year. They're raising out 15X the last valuation at a $39.5 billion valuation. And so I immediately looked on public to try to comp figure to other hardware

consumer product companies. And I thought the best example was Ford motors and Ford is actually valued as of Friday, less than what figure is getting valued at figure. I think has delivered a robot to a customer, but maybe it's like one, it's unclear if it's like one or maybe a handful or if they're even doing real work. Ford, on the other hand, has 185 billion of trailing revenue over the last 12 months. And they have like 11 billion in EBITDA. And they're getting priced at less than figure in the public markets. So you can go out there.

I'm sure you can get into this round if you're really enterprising. Go and get into figures round. I'm sure they have get into this round. If you're really enterprising, go and get into figures round. I'm sure they have room at the three point thirty nine and a half billion dollar valuation. Or you could buy Ford, which has one hundred and eighty five billion dollars of annualized revenue. And so anyways, choice is yours. People are clearly alternate is like,

I wonder what Ford was worth when they launched the Model T. They're probably one of the most valuable companies in the world, right? If you can be the first, the bet on figure, I mean, I know that they're not shipping and they don't have billions of revenue or anything. But I guess the bull case is whoever wins in humanoid robotics will be really valuable for a long time while everyone else plays catch up. It won't be immediately commoditized yeah because it's a it's a hard manufacturing problem at the same time it's like yeah i also wonder how much of tesla's market cap do you think is like humanoid based yeah well the other thing is unitree has been delivering human you can go on unitree.com and basically order i think with apple pay like a humanoid robot right now and so China is trying to do the same thing that they did with drones

and where they sort of release these things probably presumably at a loss to try to flood the market. And so it's going to be very competitive. I'm glad that Figures is competing in the space. I'm glad that many others are trying to play as well. I just invested in a company that's using robotics for data centers, which is sort of a more niche

but potentially massive category of like labor, basically, that robots can- It's all hyper-flat surfaces, so you can use like wheels and stuff reliably. Yeah, yeah. That's great. Well, let's move on to PirateWire. We got a deep dive in the white pill from Thomas Pueyo. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but he was actually at Hereticon.

He's a big sea flooding guy. I think we've talked about him on the show before. He says, we should turn Guantanamo Bay into the next Hong Kong. Why the U.S. should use its perpetual lease on Guantanamo Bay to turn it into a special economic zone. This is interesting. There's been a lot of talks about SEZs. Singapore obviously comes to mind. And Hong Kong is another good example.

And so Thomas says, should the U.S. make Canada the 51st state, take over the Panama Canal, co-opt Greenland, appropriate Gaza, and expel over 2 million Gazans to make it the Riviera of the Middle East? All these ideas have been floated recently, but another one is much more feasible. With land the U.S. already has. Make Guantanamo into a global capital. Today, Guantanamo Bay bears the scars of colonial ambition, Cold War dread, and global torture, a relic of a bygone era. But there's nothing stopping us from building a new Hong Kong, Dubai, or Singapore there, just a couple hundred miles off the coast of Miami. It could be an international capital of trade, finance, and tourism, a bright city on the bay. And in the process, we could show the Cuban population what capitalism can achieve. This is Guantanamo Bay. Today, it's a military base. The bay has a well-protected

deep water port and two landing strips for planes. And crucially, it's in the middle of busy sea trade routes. These cities were backwaters not so long ago. Hong Kong was a deep water port surrounded by a communist country, China. By building up the port, urbanizing the surrounding area, making business easy, and minimizing taxes, Hong Kong showed China what capitalism could do by becoming a global port, trading hub, and financial center. Seeing this success, Deng Xiaoping,

China's forward-thinking leader in the late 70s and 80s, made the neighboring Shenzhen into a special economic zone, which I've actually been to. It's insane. It's so huge. There's just like 50-story apartment buildings.

When did you go there, by the way? 2018? No, it was like a layover on a vacation, basically. It was just like, I want to go explore one random Chinese city for a day. I was going to Bali for a surf trip once, and I had a 20-hour layover in Shanghai. Yeah. In one of those basically forced airport hotels where you weren't allowed to leave your room. It was a very weird situation. weren't allowed to leave your room it was a very weird that's very weird situation we were allowed to leave uh we tried to go to hong kong on the train

get in a car tell them to go to the guangzhou east railway station which would take us on a train to hong kong they take us to the wrong railway station like the guangzhou east one instead of the guangzhou railway station or something we're trying to figure out like, why isn't the train coming to this place? Like, we're really confused. Everyone was staring at us. Cause we're like deep in like a random part of Guangzhou. My roommate, when I studied in China was taller than you and everywhere we went, people would be taking pictures of us. Obviously they you're even even today and huge amounts of china you might be if you go out of shanghai oh yeah you might be the first white person they've ever seen so it's a six foot eight white guy and a blonde blue-eyed blonde girl like my wife and

and we're just walking around like lost there's people in full-on like hijabs that are like, look at these weirdos. I'm like, okay, I'm in a different place. Uh, and, and so we like, it was, it was rough. Like our phones were dying. We were running out of money. Couldn't figure out how to do it. Finally, we get on some train, just go back to the hotel and get a hotel and just sleep for a little bit. But, uh, it was a fun experience. It was a good experience just being like, oh wow, we're like truly lost in a foreign country where we don't speak the language and like cannot understand anything. Uh, but it was a good experience just being like, oh, wow, we're truly lost in a foreign country where we don't speak the language and cannot understand anything. But it was a good time. And it's a good memory.

And so Singapore has a similar story of this. Singapore was expelled from Malaysia. It was not a global hub. But it was in the middle of one of the busiest trade routes in the world. And it capitalized on its location by building a port, reducing taxes, and then expanding services. Dubai is an even more recent example of the same recipe. Can we do the same with Guantanamo? Three factors can help make this happen. First, many of the most successful cities start as military outposts, which provides security infrastructure and demand for services to kickstart the local economy.

The U.S. is basically Guantanamo Bay's anchor tenant right now. Second, Guantanamo Bay could also become a trading hub thanks to its deep water port in the middle of shipping lanes. And the Jones Act requires ships carrying passengers or goods between U.S. ports to be made in the U.S., flagged by the U.S., and crewed by U.S. citizens. This is useful to ensure the U.S. has a navy in times of war as it would keep its ship building facilities. And so third, Guantanamo City would have a deep pool of workers, Cubans. This is an amazing deal on every side. Guantanamo would benefit from the millions of highly educated potential workers. It's better for Cubans than sailing to Florida.

Competitively, Cuba would experience a brain drain. Capitalism's benefits would be evident as infrastructure could be seen from Cuban soil. And Cuba could follow suit by developing its own half of the bay. Making Guantanamo into a special economic zone would be similar to what happened in Dubai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Singapore.

So very, very fun. U.S. has a perpetual lease. In Dubai, it's cool. Some of these special economic zones are basically one tower. So you can just get in the middle of the UAE, you can basically get an office that's equivalent to being international waters.

And it's just like, you just walk into the building. Yeah. So he closes by saying, America can boldly reinterpret what's possible. Imagine transforming Guantanamo Bay from a relic of the past into a dazzling epicenter of global trade and innovation, a Hong Kong or Singapore for the Caribbean,

a shining example of what audacious vision can achieve, a beacon of hope, capitalism, and democracy for the hungry Cuban masses. If America wants to think big, this could be its first step. I love that. I think that's a really fun article. So go subscribe to Pir big, this could be its first step. I love that. I think that's a really fun article. So go subscribe to Pirate Wires.

We're big fans. The island, Guantanamo, is going to need some major feng shui treatments to get it sort of conducive to positivity and building. And currently it's... I want to know how guantanamo bay uh actually benchmarks against dubai and singapore and hong kong in terms of just uh land footprint yeah because i i mean singapore's small like you can walk from like one part of downtown to the other you can drive the

whole island in like a day but when i think guantanamo bay i think literally just like one prison and like a landing strip. But maybe there's more. Maybe the lease is actually pretty big. We got to dig into it. But I hope this turns into a meme and we're seeing it on the timeline constantly because it's such a cool idea.

It's funny. It's the same idea as Greenland or the moon, but it's so much more achievable. Yeah, of course. So it's like not even as exciting necessarily, but cool idea. Well, let's move on to some timeline and then we'll get out of here it is 12 we also have the we also have the malay uh that's in here okay it's in the timeline yeah cool uh so uh this was a weird post by spinach bra he says uh someone spent 1.3 million dollars

worth of ethereum to tell the world that there is a Chinese-grade Neuralink, and it's already been mass implanted into their military and workforce to control them like bugs. Terrifying and extremely blackmailer. You were a little freaked out when this hit the timeline. Do you believe it? It seems like a conspiracy theory to me. It also seems like it might just be a psyop where, hey, you spend the money and then you freak everyone out. But what do you think? It's a weird thing to do with one million dollars. It's a lot of money for a pure joke. I do wonder if it was, I don't know if you

can see it there, but was it a fixed number of Ethereum? Like somebody was like, I'm going to spend, you know, 3,000 Ethereum. It's 500 ETH exactly. Oh, 500. So that's what I was saying. So they spent, they were pricing it basically in Ethereum. It's 500 ETH exactly. Oh, 500. So that's what I was saying. So they were pricing it basically in Ethereum. It's possible that this is a whale that just has so much Ethereum that this is a rounding error to them, right? Where if they have 5,000, 10,000, it's maybe worth it, right? So yeah, they clearly were trying to make a message uh it's overall it's it's you could totally take the lens of of this could be the chinese military deciding we're going to spend a million dollars to market that we have this potential and do it in a way that's sort of

dramatic we have yeah that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying so so it could even though it's on the chain yeah somebody did spend the money, it still could be a PSYOP. Either way, it's somewhat, you know, if you look back at the history of the military, you know, militaries globally and mind control, this is something that every military has basically been obsessed with. And every, you know, advanced military has had, you know, leaks basically or things that are now public information where they were attempting to do this from, know from various means right it wasn't always yeah it wasn't always it was the organic version yeah it wasn't always implants um but uh but yeah i'm sure this technology exists like if elon's you know testing on monkeys and i mean that's not that's not input that's output like neural link is to reading your brain waves and then controlling a mouse on an X and Y axis and clicking. I mean, that is crazy and it clearly works.

So the question is like, can you write to the brain? I'm just saying there's other precedent of militaries having a sort of a high risk, imperfect, but functional capability that then is attempting to be commercialized on a sort of parallel path. Yep. So who knows? Who knows? They say the bosses. I'll believe it when they can get somebody to podcast more than us. Yeah.

So the message says the bosses of this investment firm in China used brain machine weapons to persecute all the company employees and former employees, and they themselves are also controlled terrifying it says brain computer chips have been militarized it and deployed at large scale and all military powers are using these base stations radios and nano brain computer chips to control all citizens uh seems like schizo post i'm not really buying it but we'll see yeah anyway let's move on to uh a guy who would be perfect to comment on this palmer lucky uh gave an incredible interview uh uh with sean ryan four hours i listened to almost all of it um tons of great hot takes in there

autism capital says the palmer lucky interview was 10 out of 10 every single moment was engaging and interesting sean ryan did a great job of letting palmer speak unrestrained and palmer lucky interview was 10 out of 10 every single moment was engaging and interesting sean ryan did a great job of letting palmer speak unrestrained and palmer took it and ran lots of new materials would recommend if you need a podcast four hours did you listen to it i haven't yet i have it saved it's really good i'm excited to get into it any anytime we've talked about this the the podcasts that you really want to listen to besides this one are the ones where there's new material being sort of broken by the person that's basically generating those ideas and working through them. So when Teal goes and does a podcast, it's pretty intentional. He usually has like a handful of ideas that he's been working through that he wants to sort of share more broadly. And he's sort of using that as feedback to then go back and train the ideas

and maybe some days write a book, maybe some days scrap them. But yeah, it was clearly well-timed with the whole Ivas launch because that is such – like Anderle winning Ivas seemingly was underhyped in some ways. Totally. People don't realize the magnitude of that project and how much history there is. We talked about it last week, but, um, but yeah, uh, good, good move. Yeah. Yeah. Bunch of, bunch of great.

And Sean Ryan was interesting when there was, um, uh, the, the, the, the guy who blew up the cyber truck. Yeah. Sean Ryan and Sean Ryan's team were like in communication with like there was this whole like crazy drama around that where they were like he was based they were not sure what they should share and then i haven't really heard of anything about it since but it was a crazy crazy incident of a podcaster kind of like getting the scoop on this sort of major national news story that yeah again we don't you know the guy Apparently blew himself up in the truck

So we don't have his side of the story anymore, but he had been in communication with with interesting But there were lots of questions about like was this real or was it some sort of like psyop? Bizarre bizarre stuff yeah, I think this was the first Sean Ryan episode that I listened to from start to finish. I'd seen clips, obviously, but really good stuff. I didn't realize I had 4 million followers on YouTube and it was really big. So yeah, definitely gonna be looking

for more good Sean Ryan episodes. There's some good stuff. Why don't you take us through Javier Millay and the meme coin Libra? Yeah, so I think this happened, this must've happened after we recorded on, um, it happened over the weekend. Yeah. It basically happened Friday ish afternoons. So we had recorded the morning show and then it started, uh, coming, uh, coming out, but basically

the team, it's now apparent that the team behind Melania token. So, you know, Trump comes out with his token does very well. It sort of goes, you know, Trump comes out with his token, does very well, sort of goes, you know, a lot of people got the ridiculous return in 24 hours. And Melania doesn't even wait, you know, 48 hours before coming out with her coin. It sort of like took a lot of the wind out of the Trump coin sales. And a lot of people were speculating at the time, was this two teams? Why would the teams have launched? Like if it it was the same team they wouldn't have launched the new token and cut the trump market cap by like 50 or whatever what happened um but anyway so uh friday this this uh uh javier malay the president of argentina posts from his main

social media feed in support of this token called Libra, which intuitively makes sense. He's very pro-freedom, pro-capitalism launching. Crypto is pro-individual freedoms, pro-capitalism. You can't argue with that. So it's a natural narrative for him to come out and launch a token to some degree, even though he's trying to figure out his own currency at home, which has had a number of issues over the years. But apparently there had been rumors for the last few weeks that a coin, a Malay coin would be coming out. And people looked at this and saying, this could be the next Trump coin, which was the biggest moment in crypto. After the president of the United States launches a cryptocurrency, a lot of people called the top. I remember John Fio messaged us and was

like, this is obviously the top. Where do you go from here? The only thing you could maybe do is an actual USA coin that's backed by the federal government. who know you know uh hopefully we don't get there because we have uh the greatest cryptocurrency ever uscc yeah um it's fantastic coin um it's stable clearly uh but um anyways so there have been rumors for a while uh the guy writing this article uh dc de jones casares apparently had a bunch of connections in argentina people were saying oh this isn't actually sanctioned by the government this is just something that he maybe he's in favor of and so this token launches and uh malay uh people are initially speculating you know that this article summarizes it pretty well but they're speculating oh is this real is this fake did he get hacked because anytime like a big public figure comes out and launches something people are just is this real

like is it actually them endorsing it like Kleiner launched Kleiner had a token launch clearly wasn't them that was easy but Malay was a little harder it was like hey this is this guy like he could do this um and so what happens is Malay like quickly just, you know, a lot of I think it went to went to billions of dollars very quickly and sort of market cap. And so if a coin does that, the people that get in early are going to be able to and the people that created it are going to be able to sell, in this case, hundreds of millions of dollars of the token. And so it turns out that people people that weren't the creator found it early bought a lot of it and then um that's when when you know stuff started to get chaotic because once once the token's just out trading publicly and do they launch it on pump.fun i don't know i don't think so that that would be it's a solana token it's a solana token

it wouldn't make sense necessarily to do it you know they wanted a bit more control over it and it seemed like it was like basically like a a group that was doing this okay um and so malay posts about it then quickly deletes his post so then people start speculating you know oh was this a scam and so at this point i think the token starts to just drop dramatically uh not not the best looking chart. It's like basically straight up and straight down. And so the crazy thing is that Dave Portnoy had somehow got involved with this project. And so he had known the Melania.

They got the people that had launched the Melania token. Dave Portnoy was like, had invested a lot of his own money in this. He has like two tokens now. One is like the Portnoy coin and the other one is like going to jail jail stool jail uh we don't support any of these um uh but uh anyways so so anyways all this drama starts unfolding Malay starts you know over the weekend is facing action in Argentina from people that are trying to get him impeached over this. And then it comes out that maybe somebody near Malay had received a bribe to just get it in front of Malay and post about it. So who knows? There's so much money on the line.

And then as of this morning, an interview came out with the guy behind all of this. With Coffeezilla. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Um, where he's basically, and, and he's also getting interviewed by Port, you know, the guy is getting interviewed by Portnoy. And so this, this kid, uh, seems like a kid he's, you know, somewhere in his twenties, early thirties, he's sitting there. He made, you know, the coin just went up and down. It's still sitting in the hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap, but he's sitting on

basically $100 million that he, you know, basically presumably made by just like, you know, selling into this. And then the drama even went deeper because it turns out he, Dave Fortnoy lost so much money that the guy like paid Dave Fortnoy back and then Dave Fortnoy posted about it. that the guy like paid Dave Fortnoy back and then Dave Fortnoy posted about it. So anyways, the drama is still unfolding, but if this is the first presidential

meme coin where the president actually in the U S apparently you can launch a token. And if you're down 60%, you know, everybody's like, Oh, it's fine. Still up, you know, broadly in Argentina, you start to face, uh, impeachment. And now it's just like this hilarious internet, um, you know, just sort of, um, scramble where you have the president of Argentina, this kid who's launching the Melania token with Dave Portnoy, and then he's going out and going on these like hours long public interviews about the incident, which is very brave to do, um, at a time with this much controversy. So we'll see what happens. This kind of feels like, it feels like, um, like it's starting to feel like the sort of late in the cycle, uh, where, where some of

these things just start to kind of unwind in the way that you remember in in 20 2023 stuff just kind of started clearly was there were like lower and lower tier nft projects launching like every day and it was like you just got fatigued yeah and it's like oh okay this is like we've done the monkeys and the dogs and the cats yeah now we're on to hippos and it's like okay yeah and so so dave portnoy was um was basically pressing uh pressing the guy and saying uh like whose money is this the hundred million dollars and it's and it's basically people that were buying the token of course because they wanted it to be this great investment i guess um and so he hasn't but but Nick Carter, I'll round it off here. Nick Carter,

great poster says, I believe the belly aching around the Malay Libra coin is simply that it was launched by out group and enriched no one in in group. Ordinarily, you'd get CT elites writing overdone threads about how great it is, et cetera.

As we saw with all the other completely meritless meme coins and related launches crypto people aren't upset that they got rugged simply that they weren't doing the rugging the coin wasn't any more or less meritless or odious than any other meme coin launch if this is the catalyst for finally abandoning meme coins it's for the better and we should all write him a thank you letter in group out group distinction rules everything around me so uh because crypto is so pvp yep when when uh you know people just very quickly pick a side and the sides are usually the people that made a lot of money are going to say that this is great people that didn't make

money or just missed it a lot of people that were talking poorly about in the crypto world talking poorly about trump coin just like we're at at the crypto ball when it happened and it just couldn't, couldn't sort of benefit from it. So, um, we'll see what happens. Um, it does feel generally as you want to be in group and you want to be making money, right? That's a good lesson for life. Um, but yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you know, the, the comp, the comp for, you know, NFTs, uh, were dominant last cycle. And then people realized that, one, they're not very liquid. They're prone to the same fluctuations in price that you see meme coins today. And the issue with the platforms is that people realize you could just not pay the two and

a half percent fee, which the business models of OpenSea and some of these other NFT platforms. And then also people, I think, realized that there was no digital scarcity. The whole pitch for it was like, oh, there's only 10,000 apes or there's only 10,000 CryptoPunks. But then if there was a new 10,000 collection dropping every single day, the total number of NFTs was actually growing exponentially. Yeah. And so unlike with Bitcoin, when you're launching a new meme coin every single day and there's new supply and there's just endless, you're actually seeing massive inflation in the quantity of tokens out there. Coinbase came out recently and they said we need to reestablish our listing policy because there's 20,000 new or however many

that are every single day, right? They can't just say, hey, if it's over 100 million cap, we'll do it because that's just going to lead to massive inflation in the market. So anyways, story is unfolding. This is a good lesson for other presidents. They were sitting on the sidelines wanting to get in the game.

You know, maybe- Maybe it's the top. Maybe just focus on your own currency. Yeah, focus on yourself. Focus on the sidelines wanting to get in the game you know maybe maybe just focus on your own currency yeah focus on the peso if malay is like ah should have just focused on the peso you know well i mean uh it didn't uh bukele buy bitcoin and posts about that i love how and bukele posts mobile screenshots of robin hood basically like presumably his brokerage where he's just trading with the balance sheet of a nation. Yeah, and yeah, I think that's worked out for him a lot better than this, well, for Millais.

This does seem like a mistake. Who knows? But hopefully he can move past it and improve the lives of his constituents and people. Let's go to Dan Gray. Dan Gray says, knowledge workers that rely on generative AI are shown to exhibit weakened critical thinking. This is interesting.

This is the outcome of work becoming prescriptive, inputs and outputs with little problem solving. The same thing happens to venture capital in hot markets. The drive to increase capital velocity means investors resort to crude heuristics when evaluating opportunities. Is it on an A16Z market map? Is it on Y Combinator's request for startups? Has TBPN done a deep dive? I love that we're like, is he calling us like a top signal here? Or like, what is this exactly? I don't know. I think Dan- It's just funny that we're in the crew with like the two heavyweights you know uh so appreciate the shout out but i do understand that like yeah a lot of it's like we're talking about the news after it's broken uh well like so it makes sense that um you know if we're doing a deep dive on it it might be a little bit too late

um this focus on second order it's right on time we try to do our deep dives the 24 hours that they're relevant. But yeah, I mean, obviously, if we're doing a deep dive on like, you know, Stargate, the data center in Texas or something, like maybe it's not the right time to be like, I'm going to get into the data center market. Yeah. No, the people making money in data centers today were working on data centers five years ago. Yeah. Ten years ago. Crusoe was mining Bitcoin.

And now they're building data centers. Yeah. But they had the infrastructure to pivot and they never could have done that if they hadn't done the first act. So it atrophies for the critical thinking and creativity muscles that allow VCs to identify potential outliers. Typically, investors that fall into this pattern of behavior are the first to go when the market crashes. But that cycle was interrupted in 2022 interesting yeah so i've noticed this a lot of people the average person that loves ai that says ai that says ai uh you have an issue just microphone up here yeah john i'm on the mic okay all right we're back on the mics um the average person that's sitting there saying i love ai oh yeah is

actually prompting it in a crude way sure and then taking the output and not changing it at all yeah so i've seen people i call people out on this all the time if i if i receive something that i think was just a direct output of an llm without cool use the llm to create a general structure but then you need to spend almost the same time, same time you would have just polishing it, refining it. And so use it, but don't let it do the actual thinking for you. It's better to just generate sort of busy work, right? Like we do this with deep dives.

Use deep research to figure out what's the general structure of this person's life. What have they done? Just pull all the facts together. Pull all the sources. Spend the time to actually understand it and figure out what's interesting and figure out what to focus on and so yeah it's going to be you know like founders that are using llm outputs to create materials for their business to sell yeah terrible does a terrible job right now of like

creating like super super convincing tight copy that actually will convert. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, that's a good post or good take. Let's move on to Bezel, another promoted post. A Speedmaster walked on the moon before we had Wi-Fi. Keep that in mind the next time you complain about your iPhone loading too slow. They're back.

They're good posters. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. A little bit of a mistake, including the link. Just give me the image. People know, download the Bezel app. We don't need to know about the link.

But I quoted this because I said, I think the Speedmaster is a fantastic purchase because the moon is going to be a state. Yeah. And once it's a state, you're going to be wanting to wear speedmaster speedmaster everywhere to represent that hey i'm a moon guy with the moon and and i think if you're shopping for somebody who's a pirate wires fan maybe you're trying to pick up wait do they have a do they have solana this is on the gift guide for sure do they have a moon phase uh speedmaster i don't know no i mean i i think they're two separate complications the

idea with this do you got to get this really moon phase speed master okay uh but yeah i mean the whole the whole story behind this for those who don't know is that the astronauts uh on the apollo missions wore omega watches specifically the speed master which is now known as the moon watch and uh and critically it has a uh a chronometer on it so it has a basically a stopwatch on it and i believe that there's even a story where some of the internal systems failed and they were and they really did rely on their analog watches in space to time out different thruster burns and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, so I'm on Bezel right now, and they have a number of different Speedmaster moon phase. So if you're a future moon resident, download Bezel.

You got to get this. And get one of these. And you got to give Bezel a follow. They've got some really cool vintage ones as well. But I was so close to pulling the trigger on this. You got a new watch. I got a new watch on the way, but I think this might be the next one. I i need a chronometer i needed something with a little bit

more complication uh i i'm building out the i have the steel sports watch i'm getting a dress watch i have a couple others look at this coming that's beautiful very cool yeah i mean lots of ways to express yourself and let people know i'm actually a bezel dau me too without without and i saw this i was like this partnership is going to be bad because they're going to get me to buy so many watches yeah yeah i'm going to every every dollar they spend with tb we spend ten dollars back 100 it's actually 100 which is which actually makes the economics work because they get a cut you know and they don't get the whole revenue uh but yeah they're definitely going to make money off this deal yeah for sure uh but yeah we love bezel and uh yeah i think an omega speedmaster you know uh people often comp omega

to rolex uh i think omega is really cool in the sense that you know rolex is you know it's it's the best in many ways and it's also a little overplayed sometimes it's artificial restriction you know mark andreessen picks the omega when he goes on uh on rogan he's a big omega guy there's a lot of things to love about omega and the history and the uh and the heritage in this piece is just uh it's just beautiful anyway all said uh let's move on to let's's skip forward. Oh, we got to give, we got to do this one. This was absolutely burning up the timeline this weekend. One of the biggest stories from the weekend. I think everyone in tech was obsessed with this. Sam Sulek won his first bodybuilding show. The content creator to IFBB, you know champion pipeline is is emerging joshua rayner says he's looking diced waist surprisingly tight i thought he would look a little fuller but might just need to dial in

refeed which is a term i hadn't heard before but congratulations to sam sulak uh he's been we gotta get for a long time we gotta get mr rayner to call into the show and kind of break down what's going on mechanics or what's going on i watched the i watched the vlog of uh sam sulek on stage it was ridiculous this guy i mean it's multiple spray tans he's measuring for those for those that don't know so water into sam sam puts out basically an hour video every single day so he he's taking you through his training he's taking you through his making food he's taking you through everything you know going to the grocery store it's really he's it's it's great just sort of like background noise if you're into bodybuilding and he's

developed a huge fan base because of that he's just very i think that he's he's developed such a a great young fan base that's so invested in what he does that it will get to the point where competitions will actually be incentivized to make sure that he wins to some degree. I was wondering about that. I was wondering if he's going to wind up going the distance. Yeah, well, it's more so he could very well be bigger

than the competitions, right? Oh, totally. Because in many ways Arnold was just much bigger than bodybuilding. Yeah, totally. More people know Arnold than people even know that there's actual bodybuilding contests. They just know the visuals of him doing the various poses or whatever. So I think it'll be interesting dynamic where the the incentive will almost be for the competitions to be like you know we actually

want him to win because it's going to be so much bigger for us i hope they reboot terminator and put sam sulak in it that would be amazing yeah yeah i would love that they'd probably sell a ton of tickets too yeah and sam is sam is someone that, you know, if you look on comments of videos about him that he didn't post, the comments will be like, I can't believe he's cutting his life short by using all this gear. If you asked him about it, I'm sure you would say it's 100% worth it to to me i'm willing to shorten my life in the pursuit of being diced on the global stage photo insane and it's crazy when you see the before because the before he looked huge but he was just not lean at all so he didn't look like a bodybuilder to me at all he just looked like a big strong guy basically look But all that work paid off. Look at that Dell. What a beast.

It's like the joint of a bowl. It looks like a bowl. Yeah. It's insane. Insane. All right. So if you're- Provided post for Bezel.

For Public. So speaking of size, Public has an all new treasury account, earn a guaranteed yield backed by the US.S. government with a customizable ladder of U.S. treasuries. Pick a strategy or build your own, plus pay zero state or local taxes on your earnings. Public is just very well positioned. You know, we've talked about this on the show before, but Robinhood went all in on this sort of casino model for trading, becoming, you know, these like huge emphasis on introducing, you know, options to people that had never done it before. Public took the high road in terms of

building out the ability to invest in any of these different assets, but taking a very methodical approach and focusing on long-term investing. And so this is just the next evolution of that. They just are clearly focused on being that all-in-one platform to earn on your money yeah right yeah and when when the market's going down there's turmoil people rotate into treasury ladders yeah and now yeah they actually rolled this out when like in the original version of their treasury product when rates spiked of course people were saying well i could be in these high risk yeah you know, stocks and what would it look like if I, you know, transitioned into, um, you know, just like focused on stabilized yield. And so the,

their treasury product, it's always been a good solution for that. And it is now, uh, I, you know, we now use it just on the show, just literally as like the way to get data. Um, but a bunch of cool stuff coming out there uh i was gonna try to record an episode from their office last week in new york but i just got so set up in the bowery that uh that we're just recording from there but um we'll flip that over shout out to public give a shout out to a size lord that we all know and love on this show there we go jeff looking great always dressed well always got a great watch on the wrist. And I love this.

Just hard post. No caption. Just treating it like Instagram. Yeah. So Jeff just posts exactly how everybody. He posts in such an authentic way. He's I love I love the expression on his face, too. Oh, yeah.

But exemplifying technology brotherhood and just being yourself, we'd love to see it. He was in a, he was in a mink coat as well. Custom bespoke mink coat. And, uh, you know, he's hitting the full range, right? Um, so we're glad to see him not wearing running shorts and focusing on bespoke tailoring. I couldn't have said it better myself. Well, let's move on to our good buddy Bo Nickel. Some random person was, I guess, on TV and said, where is Bo Nickel? Okay, so this guy had a – I don't know who this loser is. No, this guy on Saturday had a fight.

He wins his fight. They give him the mic, and he calls out Bo, which is just funny because you don't call out Bo after your first big win. And so Bo responds back. I'd love to get an easy check, but the fans say I can't fight cans anymore. And so he's referencing a couple of bows, like first fight. So, so Bo went on Dana White's contender series, absolutely dominated. Then he gets into the UFC and he's just steam rolling every guy that he fights. And he had one fight. I forget.

I think it was, I forget what card it was on. It was at some point last year or late 2023. But there was, he was slated to fight this guy. The guy had to pull out at the last second. So they just put this like, it was a really rough fight to watch because it was like the local guy who just stepped up to fight Bo in this pretty high profile fight. And Bo just had him basically, I think Bo like knocked him out twice on like while the guy was standing. Like it was one of those things like Bo hit him, knocked him out, hit him again, woke him up and then like knocked him out again.

But anyway, shout out to Bo. He's Bo's technology brother listens to the show and he's got a fight coming up in pretty soon, which we're excited about. Quick billboard. Yeah. Yeah. Just walk out there. UFC is pretty tough. They used to let fighters have their own sponsors in the cage and they rip that out to a lot of backlash, which makes sense for the UFC. You know, they want to be able to sell every surface but um but yeah bo uh bo's a legend can't wait for his

next fight and uh actually caught up with him last week what's the etymology of cans is that just like you get kicked around like a can i don't actually know but it can't just somebody that's like thrown yeah thrown in there to get beat up yeah just like a loom can you just kick him right out of the ring basically is that what he's saying that's amazing um legendary well good luck to you bo we love you hilarious uh let's move on to uh wander we already mentioned them but i wanted to flag this wander you're a few taps away from staying here beautiful beautiful view highly recommend going and checking that out and we got some product news from wander they have a new sign-in modal let's go let's go you know we love ui we love figma we love design and with wander now you can sign in with apple google facebook email they got it all it's beautiful i do i do genuinely like how it

blurs out the background it looks very uh very uh premium yeah it feels like using an apple product and clearly michael i think he's their head of the head of design uh genuinely crushed it on this and i think it looks great we got a lot of pushback we we talked about a ui update that figma had done recently and we talked about how designers have been protesting in the streets to try to get that implemented uh somebody pushed back and said i live in brooklyn nobody was protesting but maybe they just weren't at the right place at the right time yeah i think they might have anyways celebrate every time you improve your products for your customers every single moment matters yeah and

share share all the product updates on x they might go viral this guy's post got 200 likes 7 000 why not why not post it boom great we got a mount we got a mount this thing ben can you show it again by the way i mean this thing is like massive it's the actual sign they put on their wander properties so we got to figure out how to mount this thing but thank you to kyle for for securing that for us do you want to take us through uh justin mayer's french paradox yeah i'd like to i i don't know that much about it. Okay, so Justin Mares, dear friend of ours, former brother of the week. He is coining here, Coogan's Law. I love it.

I love a good coinage. He's got the French paradox. And Justin says, why do the French eat cheese, butter, and drink wine, but still have lower rates of heart disease than Americans? After some digging, I found out what was going on. The French paradox explains. He hits it with a thread emoji that's almost vintage.

That's sort of, you know, 2020 era threading. Million views. Banger post. 3.5K likes. He says, Americans spend $10,000 per year annually on health care more than any other nation on earth. Meanwhile, the French spend far less while consuming dangerous amounts of saturated fat.

So the common practice from the American Heart Association is that saturated fats are dangerous. So things like cheese, butter, things like that, you want to avoid. And we get cut off a little bit here. Our entire theory of cardiovascular health falls apart when we examine the data. The French consume 10 to 16 percent of calories from

saturated fat that this is well above american guidelines of under 10 so you know the american health association and other groups they you know specifically say just keep your saturated fats under your 10 10 of the total calories you consume so their diet is rich in butter, cheese, and organ meats, yet their heart disease mortality is one of the lowest. I'm assuming we got cut off here. This demands an explanation. And he highlights this. In representative cross-sectional surveys of the French population performed in 1986 and 1995, saturated fat intake was 15% of the total energy intake in the first survey and 16% in the latter survey. The French show consistently lower markers in all five major cardiovascular risk factors,

systemic inflation levels, oxidative stress markers, platelet aggregation factors, blood pressure variability, insulin response patterns. So Justin says, how is this possible? Well, when Americans say cheese and when the French say say cheese we're talking about different substances american cheese under undergoes 18 plus processing steps including emulsifiers preservatives and artificial colors french cheese it's milk culture salt and time that's it um so uh same pattern the same pattern emerges for meat when most american beef is fed with corn and soy treated with with hormones, processed with ammonia, and preserved with nitrates. But most French beef is grass-fed, ages naturally,

and butchered locally. Even something as basic as yogurt tells a story. French yogurt, milk and bacterial cultures fermented slowly. American yogurt, modified cornstarch, artificial sweeteners, carrageenan, and 17 grams of added sugar. Then we wonder why our metabolic responses are different. So additionally, American meal patterns create a perfect storm

of metabolic function. We eat quickly, often alone, and while stressed. The average American lunch break is 30 minutes. This reminds me when we just absolutely crushed some Arirond burritos before this. We just absolutely housed them rightaron burritos before this we just like absolutely housed them like right before getting hours maybe after the show we'll have a two-hour lunch yeah a couple yeah the french spent over two hours on lunch are you getting

the picture yet at the molecular level french eating patterns enhance hdl cholesterol cholesterol and reduce oxidized ldl but americans taking res or res But Americans taking resveratrol supplements missed the point entirely. It's not about isolating compounds. It's about the entire eating context. The American obsession with healthy eating has paradoxically made us less healthy. Studies show we experience more stress around meals,

leading to elevated cortisol and impaired nutrient absorption the french enjoy their food and show better metabolic markers yeah american food companies have tried capitalizing on this by creating french style products but they've missed the fundamental point you can't package the french paradox into a pill or processed food the benefits come from the entire eating pattern and it it says, the most profound insight, American guilt around food creates physiological stress that impairs metabolism. The French derive pleasure from eating, which enhances bagel tone and improves nutrient partitioning. Enjoyment isn't just psychological, it's a biological necessity. The French paradox isn't really a paradox, but the failure of American reductionist approach to nutrition. We can't medicate our way out of lifestyle induced disease.

The solution requires rethinking our entire relationship with food. Um, so interesting, uh, very cool. Justin, uh, actually has a company called true med and he, you know, he made his money in bone broth, him and his brother. And now he has a company called TruMed that allows people to spend their HSA funds on healthy products that can improve their health. So I'm glad to see him hitting some viral posts on the timeline that are providing informative but powerful content. Yeah. Two-hour lunch, just the basics just lindy steak and cheese and butter and coffee and milk and red wine what more do you need uh well let's move on to a launch from one combinator pave robotics is building tracer the first fully autonomous road

worker tracer autonomously detects cleans and seals out asphalt cracks cheaper and faster and more efficiently than a human and if you look at it it's this cute little box robot that drives around painting asphalt down and i and i quote you this and said uh i call this type of innovation uh nat friedman punk or freed punk because this is this cute little like simple robot that just does one thing it's very understandable it's not trying to replace your job it's just trying to you know just make the world a little bit better yeah i said even if the terminator apocalypse comes this guy's gonna be fighting along alongside you for some reason let's put a gun on it let's put it yeah come on guys let's see if we can throw a gun on this, too.

But I thought it was very funny, very cool. Congrats to the team for launching. I also like that Jason Carman chimes in with very cool with, like, no period. And it feels, like, almost ominous. It's, like, ominous. It's, like, very cool. Like, you know, expect a call from me. I'm making a documentary about this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You will be hearing from me. It's coming. I will be pointing a camera in your face in a couple weeks. So get ready. Very cool. I love that. Signal says, I got deep research to produce detailed reports on all of my enemies.

Proper utilization. And then somebody says, how deep is the research if it's based on the very shallow public internet information? And Signal's like, it's a joke. I didn't actually do this. But that's really, really hilarious. And yeah, you should definitely use deep research. Obviously, you got to give it some extra data. But, you know, very fun.

Very fun. I mean, honestly, like, you know, your enemies, if you're a startup startup you should definitely go and have it produce detailed reports on uh your rival companies the companies that you're trying to disrupt you should understand the industry took me far too long to start reading all the all the full history of the big tobacco companies and really understand how they were built up it was fascinating when i started learning all that stuff uh but i didn't do it in 2016 when i started lucy uh it took a while, but it's really really cool Let's go to shield Monat. He says okay, which one of you did this sock to compliance license plate on a BMW I don't know what car that is. It looks like an m-series, but it dropped

Is that yeah, it's newer Either way, it looks fantastic and it sends the right signal yeah that uh you are ready to sell sock to compliance software to anybody so if you're at a standstill on the 101 get out of your car in this car just walk around and try to sign up some people for your sock to compliance product yeah uh that's a good that's a good uh we should actually we should actually get technology brother uh license plate holders with ad quick and just make them free on the website oh that's good you can buy this if you strap it to your car and just drive around constantly and run ads for for us and ad quick okay let's close out with two promoted posts. One is from Representative Tim Burchett.

He says, I'll be introducing the Cartel Mark and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025, which would authorize Trump to commission privately armed and equipped individuals or groups to seize persons or property of any cartel, cartel member or cartel linked organization and so uh yeah how are you gonna make money off of this i mean it's obvious start organizing you know i i talked about last year i said there's a big no big opportunity to make vertical sass for for local militias you know like it'd be great if you could organize with your neighbors you know to have some sort of inventory management you know meeting planning stuff like that uh messaging integrations satellite comms you know set up um but no this is cool you know we want to see more citizen uh you know batman style groups that just gang up and go take on the gang. You're under citizen's arrest. Citizens arrest are underrated, potentially. I have no idea how this

will play out, but let's follow it. I remember when I was a kid hearing about citizen's arrest. The idea as a kid that you could do the job of a cop is just so hilarious. Like, oh, making citizen's arrest. I actually have no idea how citizen's arrest works or if it's at all so hilarious like oh making citizens arrest yeah i actually have

no idea how citizens rest works if or if it's at all real i should get a research report no you basically arrest somebody and just yell i'm making a citizen's arrest it's just like up to them you don't have any jurisdiction but like if they fall for it yeah they're under arrest then they have to wait until the cop comes i like that yeah and our last promoted post from Amman Resorts. Presented by AdQuick. The number one way to buy out-of-home ad inventory for your startup. Yeah, Amman should run some ads on AdQuick. They should run an AdQuick billboard every half mile all the way out to Amangiri. That'd be great.

And just buy up every single spot. Yeah. As a reminder for people that are going to Amangiri, hey, you got five miles left to go. They should write, you know, Amman, people know that you're going there. They should buy the billboards as you're leaving saying thanks for stopping by. Yeah. You know, that's it. And all the people that aren't going to the Amman get reminded, I'm just doing a cross country road trip.

I'm going camping. So Amman says, in the stillness of the the pool in the dance of light on the surface we can find a new sense of peace and perspective in the elevated spa surroundings of Amman Tokyo looking out over the cityscape the world retreats and all is quiet so if you're looking for a getaway head on over to Amman Tokyo and tell them the technology brothers sent you last note we got a question in the chat from Daniel. Are you releasing any merch soon? The merch has been fully designed for a while, but there's so much of it. So many individual products. We've been off more than we should

shoot. It's actually taken a while. We didn't want to just come out with a hat. No. We didn't want to just do a polo. It's all bizarre stuff too. too it's not normal but it's very good i'm very excited for it but it will be well worth the wait yep and we can't wait to release it yeah we did have some so some the working capital of this business is going to be through the roof we're going to have seven figures sitting on the inventory line item on the balance sheet it's going to be rough for a while but you know we're not going to be charging we're in the we're in the two dollars this isn't timu merch yeah this is high quality stuff you did get merch made for pmf or die if you go on the stream uh you can see they're they're actually wearing they're in the jumpsuits okay orange um yeah so if you're looking for something to watch head on over to pmf or die

they are still live streaming they will be live streaming for 90 days straight. There's now 20,000 people watching. So enjoy that. And yeah, go check it out. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. And thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you, folks. Happy President's Day. If you're a president and you're listening, as I imagine you are, happy President's Day. Happy President's Day, Obama. Underrated.