TBPN Live - Trump's Tech Career, Power Tools, Say His Name, G650 vs BBJ

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we are telling the story of Donald Trump, not because it's the day before the election, not because this is a political show, this is a tech show, we never discuss politics. I don't actually think a single political subject, I don't think we've yet to cover a single political topic. I'm blissfully unaware. And we're not going to start today. Yeah, not going to start today.

But we are covering Donald Trump today, not because he's the former president, not because he's running for president again. We are covering him because he is a tech founder. And we need to talk about the technology angle of the tech company he started, Truth Social. I've had a running joke for a while with a bunch of friends that, you know, Donald Trump might be the best tech entrepreneur of the last two or three years. And, you know, obviously it's kind of a silly thing because people don't think about Trump as a tech founder. But if you actually look at the numbers, I couldn't name another company that got to a $10 billion valuation in tech in less than two years in this recent cycle. Yeah. It's one of those things you can, you know, saying is somebody good or bad is usually very objective, but in this case, there's metrics that we can discuss and going

from zero to 2 billion in two years. 10 billion. Sorry, zero, zero to 10 billion. The stock's at 6 billion now. Yeah. And it's been three years, I guess. It's a little bit volatile, which we'll get into. But, uh, but it's crazy because everyone did expect it just to completely rug and be worthless. And I don't know, maybe that'll still happen. Nothing here is financial advice, but, uh, it's, it's just a a fascinating story of how one of these major celebrity deals gets done, how people as big and larger than life than Trump work. And there was a big deep dive in The Economist that we're going to kind of use as the backbone of research. Truth Social called it a hit piece.

I think it's actually pretty neutral. You come away from it just kind of learning some things. There's some good, there's some bad, and we'll kind of go into what that hit piece means. But let's start, you know, back in 2016, Trump was kind of this outsider candidate. He was the first, I think he was the first president to never hold elected office of any kind before winning.

And he ran this very unorthodox campaign. Tons of just posting on Twitter. Only the best. Yeah, I think. Why would you want any other role? I think at one point he was posting something like 40 times a day. And I think during his presidency, he posted something like 50,000 times or something like that. He puts us to shame.

I know. Legendary poster. And he had been on the record on, there's like a very specific interview. I think it's back in the 90s, maybe early to, I think 90s, maybe 80s, where he like explicitly says, like, I wouldn't want to be a part of, you know, public office. Really? Oh, I don't know that. Interesting.

I know that, I mean, he's had like an obsession with the media and kind of understood the asymptotic returns that come from being a media personality for a long time. He had this rule early on that was like, he would never turn down an opportunity to be on TV, no matter what it was. Even if it was going to be bad, he was like, I just want the exposure because exposure is just so important. Yeah, he's the original like he's the poster child of like no attention is bad attention

yep almost yep yeah and he and there's that story about how he like fought tooth and nail to get on the billionaires list on the forbes list and it was everybody else all the other billionaires like like paying to get taken off of it. I don't want to be a hostage. I don't want to be extorted. And Trump's like, please. But yeah, I mean, during the Trump administration or during like one of these sagas, there's always a question about like,

what is Trump actually worth? And there was always, and his argument was like, well, I'm a billionaire because I have like brand equity. And it's very funny because now he's kind of converted that brand equity in some way to this like meme stock. And it's like, well, it's kind of liquid and he kind of does have a lot of money now. So it's hard. It's much harder to make the argument that he's not a billionaire now. Yeah. And I think he had gone through and, you know, he had seen how owning a business is a great way to convert influence into ebita right where like there was like a huge amount of the the pressure over the years and sort of

naysayers were saying oh he uses mar-a-lago as a way for people to buy uh favor with the trump family and in a similar way that um you know hunter b Hunter Biden has had an esteemed art career as well, which is, you know, one could argue that that's another way. But I think that could get a little political. Yeah. So I think the whole story starts essentially right after January 6th. Massive riot at the Capitol, lot of pressure on Trump, and the tech community kind of comes together and de-platforms him all simultaneously.

He gets his Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and his beloved Twitter account, he gets kicked off of all of those. And he got de-platformed from Shopify and a bunch of other things. I think there was a rumor at the time that all the CEOs were just in a group chat things. I think there was a rumor at the time that there were like all the CEOs were just in a group chat together. And so there were,

there was a little bit of moment where it was like, okay, shutting down this. He's still the sitting president because the inauguration was on the 20th. Um, kicking the, the, the sitting president off of social media is crazy, is a crazy move. So they had to all be in like unison and be like, yeah, we're all going to do this. Yeah. Um, and a a lot of a lot of pushback at the time even though January 6 was really crazy but what's interesting is that within just a few days like there was a plan in place for truth social so this all this all started when a pair of former contestants on Trump's reality TV show

The Apprentice, Wesley Moss, who's a financial advisor and actually has a YouTube channel with like 20K subs. This guy, Wes Moss, he talks about like how to retire early. How to retire early. Yeah. SPAC accompanied to 10 billion. Wait until you hear the end of the story. I'm not kidding. And then Andrew Dean Latinsky, who is a Harvard grad, he now goes by Andy Dean, I think. It has a radio show. But these two guys, these two former Apprentice contestants show up to Mar-a-Lago and they meet with Trump on January 26th. so just six days after january 6th like the dust has very much not said not wasting any time and they and they meet with him they share cheeseburgers

and they describe their vision for like trump's new media empire which is crazy i mean my my takeaway is obviously like you know uh working with trump is like you know like extremely volatile there's a lot of things that could go wrong. But the takeaway for me is just like, if you have the opportunity to go to like a billionaire's mansion who has like an insane amount of some sort of cornered asset in Trump's, in Trump's case, it's like social capital. But even if it's like somebody who's like, oh yeah, they're sitting on like massive forest reserves or like water rights. And like you have a chance to go there and sell them on a vision for like how to leverage that next yeah that's going to be extremely extremely valuable yeah and yeah it's an example of you know the market

is efficient in some ways but deeply inefficient in other ways we i have a friend who is a health and wellness influencer and basically the first person that came and pitched him on doing a supplement company, he was just like, sure, that sounds great. The business does like, you know, millions of dollars a year in revenue now. So you can just do things, you can just pitch things right. And these guys like, you know, had they waited even another few weeks, maybe the opportunity never would have happened. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent.

It's not like these guys were like X Facebook, X Twitter, like really established in social media. They just had the connection to Trump through the show, clearly, like, a lot of energy. And you'll see that throughout this story. Like, the dates, we'll go over the dates, and it's like, major milestone every, like, three months. Like, the speed of execution here is very remarkable, faster than what I would think would be possible given the scale of the operation. So they go to Mar-a-Lago, they pitch it, and they kind of break down this idea of this truth social new media offering. They're talking about a streaming service, online payments network, a social media platform. And can you guess what the deal terms were? This is fascinating to me because we know a lot of companies that

have done deals with celebrities and it ranges all the way from like, oh, we just paid them a CPM deal and they posted on their Instagram to, oh, we gave them a couple of points of equity to like these 50-50 deals that happen every once in a while. I know some people that just did one of those. In this case, Trump got 90% of the new company. Which in hindsight was very fair. Considering that the real enterprise value is, there's almost a direct line between the company's enterprise value and Trump's social capital.

And you can see the fluctuations there. It's interesting. I would love to, I don't know if this will ever be shared, but I wonder if there were other competing bids and people were like, there's no way we can give him 90% of the cap table. Like that would never make sense.

And those people left like a billion dollars on the table, basically. Yeah, for when it was trading at 10 billion, it's literally a billion. And so these guys got, I mean, they split the rest. So I think Wes and Andy got maybe 5% each. And then of course there were dilution and equity grants after that.

But still, when you think about where they were going and they clearly had a vision of a billion dollar, multi-billion dollar exit essentially, pretty good terms for a couple of years of work basically. And so they are trying to set up financing, but instead of going, I think they actually did pitch this in the Valley. And I think some VC firms passed on like a traditional deal. But very quickly, they go straight to...

Because the VCs would look at it and be like, all right, you have a non-operating partner with 90%. It just violates every rule. It doesn't back out. Yeah. You would have to be very contrarian to do it. Yes. Yes, extremely. And then there's also all this volatility about like,

okay, well, if Trump runs again, maybe he'll deprioritize true social, or if he wins, then that could invite a whole bunch of other scrutiny. It's like, there's so many failure modes. It totally makes sense not to do it if you're a traditional VC, even if you're hunting for like,

oh, something that's edgy, it's still really risky. And so they decided to go the SPAC route. This was 2021. SPACs were like super, super hot there. And I actually haven't been involved in a SPAC. I know you know some guys who have done them. But I think most people think about a SPAC as like going public in the sense that like the company drives the process and says like we are going public okay like now we have done that but with spacs it's much more like like the spacs exist there were like 326 different spacs which are these you know special purpose acquisition companies they're holding companies blank checks

so they they ipo the company with like basically no financials so it's a very simple process of the sec it gets approved it has a stock ticker So it's a very simple process with the SEC. It gets approved. It has a stock ticker. But it's just trading at the value of the cash. And then they go and acquire a business that exists. And then once they do that acquisition, they can rebrand or rename the ticker. And then the company is public.

So the company doesn't need to go through all the traditional process and all the oversight. So it happened a ton. A lot of the people went down. Beautiful financial innovation. Incredible. And I'm sure it'll be back. And it actually like SPACs are not entirely new. Something that was like revitalized in 2020, 2021. They've existed for a while. These like reverse mergers. But Moss and Latinsky, Andy and Wes, these guys start calling all the different SPACs that are out there to try and

get them to bite on the true social deal and so they call 326 candidates which is hilarious because you know Chamath got a call yeah because he had like seven different he had like IPO A, IPO B, IPO C, IPO D at the time and they were definitely like you would have kept going oh yeah like you have so many of these like let's let's do it. But everyone passed, essentially, for reasonable reasons. Liberals wouldn't touch it. Even those who agreed to meet were wary. Many said no right away. At least one person yelled, like, get out of my office.

I don't want anything to do with you. There's this funny quote. Yeah, you have to think about how toxic the Trump brand was then, right? It was post Jan 6th. Couldn't have been more. Now there's been this like, anybody, anybody that was passing, like had like infinite reasons to pass, even if they thought it could do well. Yeah. It just almost wasn't worth the career risk for anybody to go and do that. Even the people who liked Trump and maybe they supported him in 2016 or 2020, it's like, it was very clear that Trump's like star was waning at that moment.

This whole 2024 cycle has just been like a surprising revival of the Trump brand. But there's- And a case study on the human spirit. Yes, yes. But there's this interesting quote from Merida Merger, which was one of the SPACs that like talked on the record about it.

He said, I was like, I don't want to be on half the country's radar. I don't want anyone looking up my name. I have kids. And he said once he started to dig in, he was like, it looked like a quick cash grab rather than a long-lasting business venture. We don't do the cult of personality thing. And so Adam and Wes start – they keep calling, and eventually they find this guy, this swaggering Miami based investor named Patrick Orlando. What a great name for a guy based in Florida. Patrick Orlando.

Nominative determinism. Essentially. It's great. And so. It'd be great. We got to do a deep dive. He might be brother of the week at some point. Maybe.

Yeah. We should do a deep dive. He might be brother of the week at some point. Maybe, yeah. And so Patrick Orlando had already taken one of these blank check companies public. He was sitting on a SPAC. It's a search fund. It's just like the Harvard MBA that raises 10 mil to go buy some HVAC company, but on a much bigger scale, raising maybe 100 million and then going and finding the business. And during this time. Yeah, this time there was so, people that,

those hundreds of SPACs out there were going and hitting up every possible, like they were, there was way more SPACs than there were qualified companies, right? And so. I was golfing with an investment banker around this time and he was like, oh, like your company Lucy might be a target for a SPAC, right? And I was like, no, we're pretty small still.

This wouldn't make sense. We wouldn't want to be a public company. And he was like, well, what's wrong? Is your cost structure not big enough? That was the problem. It wasn't the revenue. It was like, if we could have justified, oh yeah, we're burning $100 million a year,

so it totally makes sense, that would have been justification to SPAC. Not the revenue, because the revenue is immaterial. Yeah, and there was so much capital available at that time. It basically was a last resort for most companies where if you couldn't really go public and you couldn't access private capital, that was the best route.

Yeah, and then also like... Which had a huge adverse selection problem yeah and also that i feel like there's just been this massive drought in like liquidity for vc funds for a long time where like the companies were all marked really high and they were great but there was just no actual payouts to any lps and so if you had like maybe you were holding on to some power law winners that would like IPO properly. But if you could get some early liquidity and just kind of clean up your portfolio by spacking a bunch of things, that felt pretty good because you could distribute the shares. Now, of course, what happened was that a lot of these companies got locked up and then the stocks tanked. And so the LPs got dumped on and didn't really wind up with anything good. But yeah, I mean, around this time, like Trump was really, really anxious to rejoin social media and just kind of get his content game back up.

He's a poster. He's a poster. He's just like the founding fathers. I didn't know he did this, but he started a blog called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump. And he was thinking about like going direct and kind of doing his own thing. And there was a lot of tension about this deal. But eventually they got it done. And so on June 4th, 2021, Trump and Orlando signed a preliminary agreement to work together.

As far as Moss and Lutensky were concerned, the money was coming. Now all they had to do was build the company. So think about this. Jan 6th, insane riot, like the worst press for anyone in the entire world. Really dark time. Getting impeached, I think, around that time too. Like very quickly. Like just miserable.

The Jan 26th, they meet, have cheeseburgers at Mar-a-Lago and are like, let's do this thing. And then June 4th, less than six months later, they're like, okay, we have the money lined up. We're going public with this company. Insane. You can just do this. It's crazy.

Cheeseburgers. He could have been having cheeseburgers at the Rosewood. Yeah. Instead he was in Florida. Mar-a-Lago. Mar-a-Lago. And so they bring in on this guy, Josh Adams, who doesn't exist online. And he brings on Billy Boozer as technology officers.

Great names. Billy, I know. Josh Adams and Billy Boozer. So Billy Boozer's a tech guy. And they start building this group of software developers because they're actually going to go build this thing now that they have the funding lined up. And so they're doing a lot of interesting things.

They're working out this WeWork in Atlanta. And it's basically all tech developers, like engineers who have kind of dropped out of society or like hardcore of society or like hardcore libertarians or like living off the grid and then and then the entire management team is just former apprenticed uh like stars stars it says uh it says at one point there were three or four three or four of the people there were contestants on the apprentice so they're just like okay we need somebody in a suit to like to do biz dev, get a charismatic person who's been on TV.

It's kind of genius. I really think we need a new apprentice. It is funny, though, because that's kind of how hiring generally works. It's like, oh, yeah, I worked with this guy six or seven years ago. He's good. I trust him. He's just the best guy for the job that you're aware of at that time, and all it takes is one text message and a call, and he's like, cool, let's do it. Yeah. We really need a new, we really need a new apprentice. Maybe we should do it. Something

that's like Mr. Beastified for the next generation. Hit us up in the comments if you want to be on our apprentice show. So, and then they bring on this like remote software engineer from Macedonia and they're basically forking Mastodon. Are you familiar with this open source project? And so they're using a lot of that as like the base code to build the network. And it's like pretty janky in the early stage, like very much like a fork of this thing. Doesn't really look really good. But they all have faith that, you know, Adams and boozer and these other guys will like you know fix it up

before they launch move fast and break things work for meta it'll work for truth yeah um and so a lot of people at the company are basically just uh blackpilled on social media generally because of the deplatforming and so so they're, they're, they're all there kind of on a, on a mission. Um, just saying like, okay, you know, it seems like they all support Trump generally, but they're more there about like free speech and like the importance of like, uh, like an open platform. And that's kind of how all these things get started. Like even Mastodon, I think got started in the same way. Um, blue sky had the same thing. And there's been a couple other, uh, there's so many of these clones at this point. I think got started in the same way. Blue Sky had the same thing. And there's been a couple other,

there's so many of these clones at this point. I think Jack Dorsey's working on a new one. There's that crypto one. And the whole. Farcaster. Farcaster, yeah. And the whole plan is always like, we're gonna be more open, more consistent,

less mercurial about the policies and whatnot. And so, the developers, they, they're quoted here saying they found it outrageous that Twitter had suspended Trump's account. The problem as they saw it was pressure from corporate advertisers whose play it safe attitudes, Adam summed up as you can't put our brand right next to the guy that's saying all the mean words. And I kind of get that, like, you know, if you're're if you're at twitter and and every advertiser is calling you like i don't want my i don't want my ads appearing next to trump but what i always found weird was like the advertisers never had a problem advertising in the middle of

like a trump rally that was being advertised or that was being broadcast on nbc or at cnn it was only later when it was like okay trump's like this really yeah it's kind of a cop out of being like, Oh, we're getting all this pressure from this other group. And it's like putting the, putting the blame on them versus taking responsibility as a platform. Um, cause it's, it's a lot, you know, having like a programmatic ad is just dramatically different than a podcast ad, right. Um, where there actually actually is like an endorsement happening. Yeah. And you, and you'd think that like, think that people would be able to segment out, like, okay, this ad clearly is not related to this incendiary tweet. And usually, if you're an anti-Trump guy,

the algorithm will serve you the quote tweet that's dunking on him. So it's very rare that you're seeing just pure Trump tweets that are unfiltered. Yeah, and the platforms, you have to imagine there's millions and tens of millions of people who would only use the platforms to consume trump content yeah and so the platform it wasn't the platform's incentive to boot him right because they're just in the business of capturing attention and monetizing it and that was the story of all of the Trump rallies that got broadcast on CNN and NBC prior to the 2016 election. Like that, those were phenomenal for ratings. So everyone had

these incentives aligned to promote Trump. And he got so much earned media and so much free press just because he was like the clown who was polling at like 3%. But then he won and everyone was like, oh shit, we should probably not do that if we care about, you know, blocking him from being the president. And so now he's been much more like, you know, constrained. Although he's made obviously a comeback in the 2024 cycle and he's been much more platformed this time around, mostly due to X and other like podcasts, obviously did like a million podcasts and hasn't had any problem with those. Like it is, it is weird because, you know, technically like when, when Andrew Tateate got deplatformed it wasn't just that they banned the andrew tate accounts they actually would ban like tate fan club number six five

and yeah that and that was his whole acquisition strategy was this like affiliate yep model yep where anybody could monetize the Tate brand. And so he would go on a live stream, talk for like three hours, his little minions would like clip it and then go viral with those and then be selling for other courses. A lot of those people that were clipping

had more ARR than the average YC batch. But that was another like unique like moment in like Platform censorship or deep platform because it wasn't just a tates account that got banned. It was It was people that were posting Andrew Tate content And so there was a worry at the time that the same thing would apply to Trump and if Rogan had Trump on Rogan would lose his YouTube account But that didn't happen because I think it was just like too much pressure, too much pushback, which I think is good because like Rogan should be able to talk to.

It's also very different that the Tate minion accounts were purely trying to sell Andrew Tate courses, whereas if Joe Rogan is covering something in the news, it's just news. Yeah, exactly. And so the first decision that they really have to make at Truth Social is kind of the monetization model, like the business model. And so they have this, they don't want pressure from advertisers because that was the whole thing10 a month just to go on it, like Spotify, or do something else. They had this idea and they landed on this business model similar to the one used by Twitch, the video streaming site where most of the content is free, but fans can tip or subscribe to creators and the site takes a cut of that. And this is an interesting question that I think I keep coming back to as I dig into the Truth Social story,

is like how much, like whether you think it went right or wrong, that's kind of an exercise for the listener. But the question is, are the problems or benefits due to strategy or execution? Because I think that if you went to like, you know, Ben Thompson, who studies, you know, these platforms at Stratechery and asked him, you know, what the best business model is for a social network, he would almost,

he would want you to push to like the extreme ends. And that's what he was advocating for on Twitter. He was saying like, you either need to be completely free and tons of ads that are really well targeted and kind of be the aggregator like Meta. And that's why Meta has done really well, even post ATT. And when Apple pulled back on all the targeted ads, Meta has been doing really, really well. Or you need to be completely closed, pay only, paywall only,

like what Ben does at Strateery where you know you only pay for everything yeah and trump could have thrown up a sub stack and gotten to nine figures of arr very very quickly oh yeah but he wouldn't it would have taken much longer to become a billionaire that way yeah unless yeah exactly yeah um and in many ways, like Truth Social fits into the theme of Trump's life, which is he is an entertainment brand. Right. And Truth Social is an entertainment experience and that you can go on there and see funny things and laugh and retweet things and things like that. But now it's become an entertainment product in the form of a ticker symbol where it just provides, you know, daily entertainment in the form of watching the number go up or down.

Yeah. Usually very dramatically. Yeah. It's a meme stock. Um, and so it's interesting because it seems like at the time there was a debate between the executives, like the apprentice business guys and the developers and the software engineers

who were more on like a... What's new? They're more like missionary versus mercenary. Yeah. And so the missionaries who are very all about like openness and durability and censorship resistance, they don't want to do an advertising model. And they actually say here that um uh that uh you know um for many users ads and

other profit boosting ploys had ruined the experience of platforms such as facebook and twitter and i think that's an that's an incredibly incorrect take yeah i think that yeah this is we've talked about jordy's law right which is the higher quality of the content, the more ads you can jam in it. And if you have a media product and you can't put a lot of ads in it, it usually is just not that great of a product. Yeah. And also, I mean, there's the real, there's the revealed preference, which is that every Facebook and Instagram and Twitter user says, oh, the ads are so bad. And yet they keep logging on way more than they would if they paid. And then also- With X, I want the ads to get better. I want more targeted ads.

The only reason I'm annoyed by ads on X is I'm like, this isn't relevant. Yeah, it's very clear that the whole iOS privacy, app tracking transparency thing was just political infighting between the big tech companies. I don't want to see bad ads. I want to see good ads for things that I'm shopping for. I like when I'm talking with my friends about something and then something

pops up an hour later, I get an ad for it. It's like a bookmark that I never had to, it's, you know, it's like, I actually, I actually know people that if they're,

if they're shopping for something, they're like, okay, I need to make a decision about like which printer to buy. They'll go just like visit all the printer websites. And then it's like, they hold court on Instagram and they're just like, come to me,

you know, Oh, like I've been doing some research on, you know, which, which jitter free coffee company I should buy. Let me visit all the websites and then they'll all advertise to me and whichever has the greatest ads I'll buy. But, but, but I don't need to make a decision based on your website. I'm going to make the decision based on your ads, which is very interesting. But then, I mean, the other thing is that ads are just much better at price discrimination. And so if you have, if you have a billionaire in your audience and you also have a college kid in your audience and you're charging $10 a month, they both pay $10 a month. But if you're doing an ad based model, you'll get $1 in ads from the college kid

and you could get a thousand dollars or $10,000 from the billionaire because it's targeted to, you're going to be able to target more premium ads. And so that, that price discrimination really, really maximizes value capture for these, for these digital platforms. And that's why ads really are like the end all be all of monetization strategies for these companies. And it's interesting. Do you know Dalton Caldwell at Y Combinator? He's a YC partner. He started a company called App.net. Do you remember this?

No. Back in, I want to say like 2012 or something. Still in high school. Yeah. He started a paid Twitter. It was, you know, you had to pay to use it. And the whole idea was that the money would go to developers who'd be able to develop things on top, kind of like Farcaster where it's like open and, and you had a really tough time with it because it was hard to, to get that viral growth.

Whereas with Twitter, it's like, you can always hear a new story and be like, oh, I should get on there. And then you're on. And then the more you use it, the more money they make. And the money that they make is directly proportional to the amount of time that you spend on the site and your wealth, essentially. So if you're buying, you know, Rolexes and Lamborghinis, they're going to make a lot more money from you than somebody who's just, you know, shopping for Candy Crush or whatever. But yeah, it's fascinating. They also had this crazy struggle with their tech stack because they didn't want to get deplatformed and like rugged by one of the tech companies. Do remember the parlor situation where parlor was on amazon web services and because a bunch of the january sixers were on parlor organizing yeah parlor just

got booted and if you just lose your hosting provider you're not gonna be able to move over like just instantly this is what matt from anti-metal was originally working on which like a decentralized crypto native cloud, which at that moment, that's what the original Antimetal was, which made a lot of sense. And it turns out they ended up evolving the company into what it is today because there was only a tiny, tiny, tiny group of companies that actually needed decentralized cloud and they weren't necessarily the customers that you actually wanted. in that moment in time it felt like oh yeah cloud should be decentralized and accessible regardless of like your the political leanings of the platform

yep yeah yeah it's very niche i've seen it work in there's this uh there's this rendering network for cgi where uh every every cgi artist has a really beefy computer but they're not always rendering out their projects so they can share render time between the computers so the computers basically always rendering yeah and they're rendering your project while you're rendering their project and there's like render tokens in between they have like a crypto thing and I think it's it's been like one of the more successful like use cases, even though it's kind of a small market. So then they, you know, they're hiring more people to scale up the company and like actually build this thing.

They hire this interesting guy, this Baptist of South Asian descent named Justice Eapen, who is canceled for tweeting God smites unbelievers. Isn't that crazy? Like he was an engineer at some company and another engineer posted on Reddit complaining about him. And he was disowned by his friends and called a bigot and a fascist by strangers. And what's weird is that like, based on that response, I feel like he must have tweeted something crazier. Like tweeting, I feel like you could go tweet God smites unbelievers right now and people would be like, so true.

Or like, isn't that just like a straight up quote from Bible? Like that's not like that controversial, I think. I guess the intention matters. Yeah, but he had a very bad go of it. And so he was one of those people that was like really driven by the mission right um and then uh it says also among the other recruits was ryan lackey a libertarian programmer who had been working since 1990s to stop what he thought of as excessive corporate and governmental interference on the internet and uh do you recognize this guy ryan lackey looks like a boss i know that guy? I interviewed him in Miami, yeah.

Not this year? Yeah, this year. Really? Yeah. I interviewed him about prepping. Oh, that's him. Yeah. And I mean, he has a wild, wild story.

He was a civilian who went to Iraq during the war just to build a business. Like he wasn't in the military. He just went there to install satellite communications and take really small DOD contracts here and there. So the army would be like, oh, we have some forward deployed base. That's a guy, if he opened up a safe at 100, you'd enter at any price.

And you know Sealand, that offshore concrete platform located in the North Sea, seven miles off the english coast uh he went there and installed a server farm there and he was like doing their like it isn't that crazy uh yeah so he was so he was there i think he was doing like security and stuff uh they had a man who worked at apple they had a bunch of other people basically just like uh the outcasts of tech like all come together in this we work the black sheep the black sheep exactly um and it's very funny because they start like colliding with each other in very interesting ways because they're all like they're all similar in how fringy they are but they're all different fringes so there's one guy who's strong opinion strongly held yeah yeah so there's one guy who describes himself as a a

literal communist yeah and a vegan and a vegan why he's working that. And a vegan. And a vegan. And he gets it. And then like Eapen, the guy who tweeted God smites unbelievers, was observed proselytizing to his colleagues, particularly Gleason, the vegan communist, which is so funny because it's just like you have all these like black sheep and they're all just like fighting in this chaos pit.

Yeah. It's not just like a group of and they're all just like fighting in this chaos pit yeah it's it's not just like a group of people with differing views that are all like happy to be around people with differing views it's a bunch of people that are like no i am right i'm right we need no government at all or we need a complete government we're gonna argue until we figure this out yeah yeah but probably some interesting conversations um but then there's this anecdote about how, so it's all just chaos on this way of work, trying to build this thing,

forking open-source projects, working so fast. And then when Patrick Orlando, the big investor, the SPAC owner, comes by, they have to bring all the remote workers in to make them look bigger and put up big displays and play Trump clips on the tvs to be like this is a real office like this is this is like a real deal um and and and like the former why is there no hollywood documentary on this yet by the way well i mean that's the whole

reason i wanted to do this story was because you know as much of a joke as it is like like this does deserve a a profile in bloomberg Like the information should be telling this story because it's one of the most interesting stories in tech in the last few years. Yeah, and I don't need the fifth mockumentary of WeWork. I want the first of Trump Social. Yeah, Trump Social. I'm sorry, Freudian slip.

Totally, totally. And I mean, these interactions are so funny. It probably should be like a mockumentary or some sort of movie because it's so- No, it should be a very serious documentary about a very serious technology entrepreneur named Donald J. Trump. I think Trump should go on the circuit with Emily Chang. Yeah. We need an Alex Conrad piece. Get him.

Alex, if you're listening. Yeah, yeah, do it. Your move. get him get alex if you're listening yeah yeah do it your move um and so and so they're like the tech people keep bringing like the trump organization like ideas for like how to you know juice engagement on the site and one of them is so funny so um they told trump about the possibility of giving early adopters of the site a digital badge something similar to twitter's blue tick uh trump thought he was talking about making physical badges like a sheriff's five-pointed star

and mailing them out to users, which is actually what they should have done. Yeah, they should have done that. It would have been so good. It would be such a collectible to get the original True Social. Have you ever used True Social? I actually signed up.

I created an account just to see what's going on there. It's chaos. I feel like I get the core content in the form of screenshots that are then posted. Not even. There's very little that actually makes its way over because it's all so boring. Yeah. It's all just like, and the ads are particularly funny because they're all ads for third party, unpaid for, what's it called?

When you don't like register a trademark, you're not paying, the money doesn't go to Trump, but it's like a Trump t-shirt basically. And he's just like cool with it. Cause like whatever. Um, but they're all, they're all framed. Like the, the ad strategy there is basically to put up a poll, like a fake poll. And the poll will be like, do you support Donald J. Trump? And it'll be like, hell yes. Or like, no. And no matter what you click, it's just an image.

So no matter what you click, it takes you to the next thing. And it'll be like, do you want to take back the country from the corrupt Democrats? And it'll be like, yes or no. You can click no, it'll still take you to the next thing. And it just takes you to a checkout. For like a $60 t-shirt or like a coin or something. Well, maybe that's a good segue into their monetization and kind of the numbers they're putting up.

Tell me, you have some? No, no. I mean, we, I mean, you, you'd pulled up their chart earlier talking about how they've done about a million dollars of ad revenue in the last 12 months. Yeah. Yeah. Last 12 months. They're not, they're, they're post monetization it's a story i'm clear if they're focusing on monetization or if it's just sort of happening by nature being a

big technology platform yeah but it's uh i'll let you get i think the numbers are uh in the last 12 months they did a little over a million dollars in revenue they uh ebitda was negative 100 million net income was negative 400 million roughly 380 and it's almost a 10 billion dollar company so you can think of it as like it's a gross story it's a gross story um it's wild um and so yeah i mean they wind up building this site and it's actually like a very simple front end. It's, like, a direct clone of, like, every Twitter clone ever. But the back end is, like, extremely complex because they need to have, like, two providers for everything, like two databases, two, you know, front end or two, like, I forget what they call it, like, CDNs. Because, like, they get deplatformed. Trump's the uncancellable man.

Yeah. And he had to have the equivalent. Back end. Social media platform. Basically. Distribution engine. So they're building all this and like i think at a certain point i i think this happens a lot with like the trump projects where it's just like he's at mar-a-lago somebody says hey i'll give you 90

of this business and he's like yeah go for it like like we'll see what happens and then they came back with like the spack offer and he's like okay this is getting interesting and they come back with like a site that's like kind of working and oh okay like maybe i should go deeper and so then i can imagine him like hammering out a tweet you know not a tweet a post a truth and hitting send for the first time and seeing it lag for like 20 seconds and then post and be like not bad because he grew up in the era like he came like he became relevant in the era that it was really hard to build software products so he had probably had other attempts and been like this is really hard and so just having a working product he was probably pretty excited about it well you know he's a printed email guy yeah he doesn't he doesn't do email on the computer it's all it's

all printed out for him and then he just says okay yeah respond to this this way wow that's great um and so you know i think i think as yes for sure uh i think as as things start to get a little bit more real um the the rest of the trump org kind of descends so eric trump shows up and wants a piece and uh don jr wants a piece as well and Melania wanted a piece. And Melania wants some shares. And they kind of go back and forth. They're fighting with Latinsky and- Yeah, they try to go back on the deal, right? And Wes Moss. Well, yeah, they try and go back on the deal, and they try and say like,

oh, that thing that we signed, that term sheet for 90%, that wasn't accurate. We don't want you to run this thing. Which is funny, because it was already so aggressive. How do you get more aggressive than that when it's yeah yes it would have still made sense for them to do it even if they had a point at the company yeah but going trying to take them from 10 10 down to yeah i don't know and so they so they issue another three

percent of the company to the trump org they didn't give any to melania i assume it's just like dilution on top of the existing structure. But what's really interesting is that like Latinsky and Wes Moss, like the original guys, even though they only own 10% of the company, they must have had some block right or something. Or like the board must have been structured in a way

that they could, because otherwise you would just be hearing about like, and then they were gone. And like then they lost all their equity. And like that didn't happen. Maybe it was just like legal threat, but they knew what they were doing on that fateful cheeseburger they were like we will give you 90 of the economics but we want we want to gain they were on the apprentice they learned from the best donald himself how do you so donald's probably sitting there being like they're using my moves against me yeah and so like as so they sort all that out and as they as they're starting to build they using my moves against me yeah and so like as so they sort all that out

and as they as they're starting to build they they do wind up partnering with rumble uh okay which is like the the the youtube competitor um that's actually like fairly big i know some people that have worked also public right yeah i think it's a public company i think it was another spack and uh they acquired uh yep our peers over at all in i think rumble acquired colin yep which is cool yeah little cameo from uh sax yeah yeah and so they uh they they do have like a more robust tech stack than some of the other uh partners and so the idea was okay maybe we get on rumble they can host our our data but at the time time, Rumble hadn't been struggling with, like, deplatforming as much because most of the stuff they host, I mean, they host, like, Barstool.

They host – who's that guy from Get Him to the Greek? You know that guy? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's, like, some sort of, like, former comedian, now, like, a podcaster. Russell Brand. That's who it is. So they host Russell Brand. These people aren't, like, completely agitating and being, like, take to the streets Brand. That's who it is. So they host Russell Brand. These people aren't like completely agitating

and being like take to the streets. They're not the most aggressive. So I think Rumble has not had that many problems. Rumble's kicking themselves for not doing, you know, trying to make a billion dollar bid for truth at that moment in time. A lot of the other companies were like Gab, or Parler and Getter at this time we're

both talking to trump about like hey why don't you come and make this one your home because we already built it and we'll give you you know some sort of percentage realize it's not about the tech it's about the distribution yep that and and they and you know that parlor and getter we're not going to be like yeah take 90 of our company yeah there's just no way they're probably like oh we'll give you five percent and we'll pay you a bunch and you'll get all this stuff but like there's just no way that even you know once they built it there's just too many people around the table too many people on the cap table so it's just impossible um but uh then on october 20th so we're still less than a year out uh the day the world was meant to learn about the merger and the existence of true social trump summonedensky to Mar-a-Lago in a

twist worthy of The Apprentice itself. The former president said he was once again considering a deal with Getter and asked Lutensky to convince him that Truth Social was better. Somehow, Lutensky got Trump to sign the merger agreement. Wow. Legend. Legend. You get called and it's just like, actually, I'm bailing on this thing. get out of my office and he's just like wait wait wait yeah he's gonna order he was

summoned yeah yeah that was a long that was a long flight so it worked orland uh you know orland patrick orlando goes to the atlanta we work with a magnum of voove clico and they pop out the champagne and the press release goes out that evening. And they call it Trump Media and Technology Group. And the plan is to give a voice to all. The tech team were excited to be able to tell friends and family what they'd been working on. The press release claimed that Trump's new media offering would be worth $1.7 billion. But within 24 hours, the stock market valued the SPAC at 10 times that amount, $17 billion. So total meme stock for a minute.

Obviously, for a minute, it goes down, but for not for not much. I think it's still that. But even at that 1.7 billion, you know, that makes Trump a billionaire just on that one deal because he owns and now he owns 60 percent. But at that point, it you know still more but it was enough to be yeah it was kind of interesting timing for this election because that was a lot of what people would try to pin him on and say like oh you're not a real billionaire right but now it's just like check the market cap you can run the numbers yourself yep yeah and even though like a lot of it's locked up i'm sure he can borrow against it i'm sure there's some sort of collateral. He's probably gotten some out and we'll get more out and stuff. So yeah, it's fascinating. And so they launch and there's a bunch of like, you know, negative press and they get attacked. And at one point, one of the companies that's providing their backend technology actually does close Truth Social's account, but because the tech team had built these backups they were only down, it affected 8.5% of their traffic for three minutes.

That's it. Pretty crazy. These guys are better than Cracked. It's like insane. And so of course that's, they're not done yet because, you know, dear friend of Donald Trump, Gary Gensler, pops up to hit them with a lawsuit saying that the not uh they're not done yet because uh you know friend dear friend of donald trump gary gensler uh pops up to hit them with a lawsuit saying that the the SPAC was illegal uh because his his view was that um orlando had SPAC'd with the idea of acquiring true social and you can't do that you have to truly set up a blank check and not know. And so if there's evidence that it's like, oh, you're gonna SPAC IPO G to acquire this company,

then that would mean that you should just SPAC, you should just go through the whole process. A regular IPO. But if you truly SPAC the blank check and then you get the call and you're like, okay, this is what I'm searching for, I'm going with it. Is that lawsuit still? It's settled. Settled. We'll get there.

But it did settle and now everything's above board hilariously enough. And so, of course, there's a bunch more problems that happen. People figure out that the company is working out of this. We work in Atlanta. And so, you know, tons of Trump haters are like doxing people and taking photos outside and they're really worried about um you know threats to their lives uh which should have been predictable if you go work for this yeah why were they not in trump tower seriously they should have been somewhere like secure i would think something i don't know

or work out of mar-a-lago i guess guess, or something. But now that the SPAC is going through, the parent company was now the most valuable SPAC in history. And all the tech workers basically consider the apprentice guys like their de facto bosses, even though it seems like all the titles are pretty vague. The employees learn that there's going to be this new guy running the company, essentially a CEO, and it's Congressman Devin Nunes. Of course. Yes. And, of course, there's a bunch of pushback.

Once you've gone public, you usually go try to find a great congressman to run your company. Yeah, yeah. What a dream. But Nunes had an interesting background. So he spent two decades representing a rural area in California and was best known for his time as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee during the investigation into Trump's alleged collusion with Russia meddling in the 2016 campaign. And at that time, Nunes had accused the entire intelligence community of a conspiracy to take down Trump.

So like he was the one congressman or like the main congressman who was like pushing back against the Russiagate stuff. And so that probably won him like a ton of favor with Trump because he's like, you went to bat for me

on this one committee. Like, thank you. I'll work with you in the future. And so, you know know true social employees like respected him for that but they were kind of like what is this non-tech guy doing running our company one person said this is like uh going and hiring a high school baseball coach to be the ceo of microsoft and i love that love that quote because they're like we are microsoft yeah you run like you're on like a website that pulls in

a million dollars a year there are like indie hackers that are doing better than you and you're comparing yourself to a business that's worth a trillion dollars but respect respect um and so it's like maybe he's actually qualified to run this who knows like it's such a small operation you know whatever um so he doesn't comment in this Economist article, but there's a bunch of interesting stories about him kind of going back and forth. And interestingly, like while he was there, he pushes for advertising as soon as possible. So again, it's like this guy is completely unqualified. Like all the employees, all the disgruntled employees who spoke to the Economist for this article are like,

oh, he's so unqualified. He was the worst boss. He was terrible. But like I keep seeing like some of the decisions he'd make. And article are like, oh, he's so unqualified, he was the worst boss, he was terrible, but I keep seeing some of the decisions he'd make and I'm like, these seem reasonable. Advertising is the correct business model and you should run fast. And so there's a lot of, the new CEO told the team they needed to work harder because a lot of money

had been spent. That's true, they were burning a lot of money. He said that they needed to do advertising as soon as possible. That's also true. It's kind of odd to say because, yeah, he doesn't have the traditional background, but it seems like he kind of made the right decisions. A lot of businesses, common sense.

Yeah. And so, and so the tech guys are like, are like Adams and Boozer are like really pissed because they, they really don't want to do advertising. They're like, let's get, let's get like, like, and they're comping themselves to Facebook and Twitter. They're like Facebook and Twitter didn't have ads and they launched. Um, but you know,

just like they need, they need, they need a growth story. It's that balance between yeah. Revenue and just, um, traction, right?

Yeah. There is something to be said for that where it's like, would the stock be trading even higher if people weren't like, they only have a million dollars. It's like, well, they haven't even started monetizing yet. Yeah.

Who knows? Maybe the first month. It probably, it probably would. I actually think it would be trading higher yeah because if you if somebody told you i was shocked when you told me that they had a million dollars of revenue right like it seems like you would intentionally have to be trying not to monetize to only have that much revenue on that much attention yeah Yeah. Right. Like it's a terrible conversion of attention to. I mean,

as a political candidate, Trump has raised like almost a billion dollars. Right. Just by asking for donations. So you would assume that if he went on there and was like, I'm going to give you at least some sort of product, maybe it's like a badge or something. Like he would be able to get like the tens of millions,

hundreds of millions. Yeah. Or the physical pin. Yeah. Something, you know, you would think if you're just selling stuff,

you'd be able to get more because you're monetizing the same attention, but it's just very different when it's this like ad platform. But yeah, very interesting. So at long last, the app was released to the public on February 21st, 2022. So it's just over a year from that,

like dinner at Mar-a-Lago over cheeseburgers. It really is fast execution. Like you have to admit it. And it's interesting comparing it to like quibi do you remember that company like they spent like what six years in like stealth raised all this money toiling away and it just like went nowhere it's like at least they're down to fail fast like respect that yeah um but of course the launch is like a mess and like hundreds of thousands of people spent days on the waiting list trying to sign up once in they encountered glitches galore error messages broken links one page on the website misspelled truth as truh just like general like

chaos which is which is normal it's all normal stuff but by the end of the week truth social was number one on the app store i'm sure they got a call from Nikita Beer. Yeah. I'm sure Nikita was actually, I'm sure they were spending eight figures on intro just for Nikita, just to get his advice. But again, just to remind people, the App Store is a measure of acceleration,

not absolute numbers. Pure volume, yeah. So if you launch and you grow very fast, then you'll rank higher. It's much harder for a product. Established app. Yeah, an established app like Facebook to be number one because they're not necessarily growing as much.

But more than 866,000 people installed it in the first week. Instagram, by comparison, only signed up about 100,000 users in its launch week. Such a bad comparison. This is such a bad comparison because Kevin Systrom was an awesome guy in tech, but he was an intern at Twitter. And they knew if you actually want to create

a super engaged social platform, start small, get the right users. Don't just sign up as many as you want. I like that this journalist is writing it like it's a dunk. Oh, like, you know. Got him, got him. It's like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. But so at this point, it is a pretty good launch.

They're number one in the app store. Maybe Trump's popularity and widespread frustrations with big tech really could fuel a major new platform. And so two weeks later on March 11th, the terms of Nunes' contract were finalized. He would make 750K in his first year plus bonuses and shares in the company. And then some other people came into the company as well.

But they're working 20 hours a day for six straight months. They said they didn't see their families. They're really grinding to make this work, but there's just total chaos. They really took all the core lessons from Silicon Valley history in the prior decade and just implemented them perfectly.

Yeah. But obviously things are chaotic. There's disgruntled employees who are literally destroying code, erasing servers and stuff on their way out. That's a wild thing to do. Also super illegal, and you could face a bunch of civil penalties if you do this.

Interestingly, a bunch of ex-employees wouldn't talk on the record for this because apparently in the NDA that you sign with Truth Social, there's a $5 million penalty. I'm gonna start putting that in the NDAs. I send it to VCs. Like, hey, if you wanna see my pitch deck, it's a $5 million fine if you screenshot the docs in.

Yeah, get out of here. And so some of the tech people start leaving, the general counsel, Adams and Boozer, and a lot of people are like, oh, this is like the beginning of the end. The stock is like the beginning of the end the stock went down by 10 yeah the stock went down by 10 and then another 10 the next day when when the tech people quit um but obviously it's like gone back up um and there's this uh like discussion now about like the pre-devin nunes era and the post-devin nunes era um uh because nunes relocated the truth social offices to Florida, moved all of Truth Social's

data over to Rumble's nascent cloud service, signed the company up for Rumble's new ad platform. And again, this seems like, you know, maybe it's controversial and the employees didn't like it, but those all seem like really, really smart moves. Like building a new ad platform is genuinely very hard. And I remember when Netflix announced that they were going to be doing ads, they wanted to do everything like in-house and very bespoke. Yeah, there's apps on the app store with tens of millions of users that use other ad networks to monetize because it's just, there's more liquidity. Yeah, exactly. And so like, if it's, if it's something that people, I don't know if Netflix wound up actually partnering with Microsoft to do the the ad network I

Think they were gonna do like the Bing ad network, which obviously is very robust has great matching algorithms and lots of liquidity but If it's if it's potentially good enough for Netflix where Netflix would at least consider it and Analysts like Ben Thompson would recommend it like obviously it's right for this tiny company that has just a few employees, like, and is only a year old to like not try and build everything in house, especially if they have a friendly company with Rumble that's down to partner with them. So again, very, very interesting where like, I think the execution was good. I think the strategy might have been a little, a little lacking just in the, and this is something we should discuss more about, like, you know, is building a new social network the right strategy for trump generally or should he have just done the sub stack i think it was a

it was just a timing thing when they decided to do this it was absolutely the best possible product to build and he didn't know that elon was going to buy x yeah and so he didn't know that he was going to get his account back he didn't know that he was going to be Axe. Yeah. And so he didn't know that he was going to get his account back. He didn't know that he was going to be able to go on Rogan. Has he gotten his? Yeah. He's gotten his other accounts back. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. He has. He has. I think he has pretty much all of his accounts back. Yeah. And, and he's been able to kind of do everything, which has somewhat taken the air out of the truth social balloon because he, it's not as existential to him. If he was still fully deep.

Yeah. A lot of people thought that it would already be a zero like full-on zero yeah uh and certainly not yeah so they kind of changed their they changed their startup culture it used to be agile teams and horizontal management newness imposed a top-down structure in which workers were siloed into small groups under different managers. Again, like reasonable, like sometimes that's the right thing. Sometimes you want something that's very flat and horizontal.

Sometimes you want something that's a little bit more vertical. You have to wonder, was Nunez in group chats with highly competent tech CEOs being like, hey, what would you do in this situation? And they're like, yeah, I would silo things out, move from being a horizontal structure

to like, you know, kind of verticalizing the management teams, like have build out these different functions. Like you're really going to want to have a trust and safety department. That's important for any social media platform. Totally possible. Tomorrow, we don't talk about politics on this show, but what happens to truth if Trump is elected is the most natural next step for the U.S. government to acquire the platform and use it as sort of a digital town square for citizens? Or where does truth social go from here? I have no idea. Is it purely an entertainment product? It feels like it's like bear cases on both sides because yeah if if he wins stuck between a bear case and a bear case i

mean if he wins he doesn't need this like liquidity injection as much anymore so i mean this is i think peter teal had a a quote within uh who's that axios guy i forget but he was doing some interview and somebody was yeah dan primack uh And he was doing some interview and it was the question was like, what's going on with True Social? And and Peter was basically like, I think it's some sort of like, you know, sneaky way to transfer wealth to to get around like campaign finance rules. And so and so that that becomes less of an incentive like if you want trump to win and you want him to have wealth so that he can borrow against that and finance his campaign or something like something along those lines even though he's locked up and hasn't sold the shares yet it's like clearly having a four billion dollar asset is valuable when you're running for yeah when you're running for president

um but but after if he wins then okay you don't need to pump the stock anymore and if he loses it's like maybe he becomes less relevant he's not deplatformed anymore and it's not like if he wins, then, okay, you don't need to pump the stock anymore. And if he loses, it's like maybe he becomes less relevant. He's not deplatformed anymore. And it's not like if he loses, he'd be deplatformed again unless he tries some January 6th stuff again, which would be crazy. Yeah. So I don't know. It is tough.

Yeah, it's certainly a much easier long if he wins tomorrow because it's just another half a decade. Yeah. A lot of attention and relevancy and um and it and and i guess the historical ways that presidents would monetize their attention would i'm going to be president and then i'm going to i'm going to write a book and then my wife's going to write a book and our you know son is gonna write a book and every sort of member of and that that's like very like 20th century way to monetize attention and still works generally well yeah but it could be you could imagine a future where every president uh you know just ends up

creating a social media platform because that's that's that becomes like the right way. Like, would you I think Kamala could probably drive if she created a social media app after losing. If she were to lose, I think she could get, you know, 50 million downloads. Right. Probably. I would I would sign up for that. this isn't the first celebrity social media company. Jeremy Renner cloned an Instagram and had the Renner, the Jeremy Renner app that you could install. And it was just his Instagram feed. Isn't that insane? And you had to subscribe to just see Jeremy Renner posts. And then he would like post like extra photos, but it was just like his feed.

So it was just like, I'm surfing today. I went to the gym and hit and like the Jeremy Renner fan club was just like his feed so it's just like i'm surfing today i went to the gym and and like the jeremy renner fan club was just like on his app and then he eventually shuttered shuttered it but i mean you could imagine like in the same way that substack like a lot of people are completely they follow some writer and they're completely unaware that like substack is the underlying technology they're just like oh i love i love not boring.co right and i just and this guy, Paki, is great.

He must have built this website, but he's using the Substack infrastructure. You can see that happening in almost every vertical where it's like, oh, you're using Vimeo to power a website. It's like a YouTube. Or Substack allows you to just generate your own app at some point. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That would be interesting. So it's like you're on Substack.

I'm not boring out. I mean, I talked to the Substack guys about other media formats and they allow you to upload podcasts and they actually do allow you to upload videos. So it is possible to run like basically your own private video feed, like your own YouTube on Substack

and you could have someone just like have that, you know, okay, they're subscribed to your YouTube feed. The Technology Brothers app. Yeah, exactly. We'd like to own that real estate on your home screen. Yeah. But let's close out before with the ending of the SEC fight. So even though like the SPAC was trading and successful because of the SEC

lawsuit, the acquisition wasn't approved and so you weren't technically investing in Truth Social. You were investing in the idea in a SPAC that had like a contract in place to acquire this company but didn't actually own any of the assets yet because the acquisition hadn't been approved by the SEC. And so there's this lawsuit that says you know hey it was illegal for you to acquire this company, but didn't actually own any of the assets yet because the acquisition hadn't been approved by the SEC. And so there's this lawsuit that says, you know, hey, it was illegal for you to do this SPAC and this acquisition. We're going to block the acquisition. But on March 24th, more than three years after Lutensky and Moss got Trump to agree to their plan, Trump Media and Technology Group stock debuted on NASDAQ, they settled the case of the SEC for an $18 million fine in July of 2023. And it's very, it's a big fine. Yeah. It feels like a big fine, but yeah,

I mean, they have a lot in the context of the market cap now, but that's like a significant fine. Yeah. I, I, I guess they were just like, yeah, negotiating and figured out that was like a number that they were, Gary's got this big that year. Yeah. And so they get it approved. And at that point, like the stock actually becomes like the DJT ticker or something like that. I think it was DWAC before like Digital World Acquisition Company or something. DWAC was the SPAC name before. Yeah, it's a very funny name.

So they get through. Matt Levine has a good quote in here. You know Matt from Bloomberg. He says that the regulatory body might be sort of worried that this thing will be a big bust and he's using the early merger talks as an excuse to prevent Donald Trump

from dumping it on retail investors. So it's kind of like maybe the SEC didn't actually have that strong of evidence that Orlando and Trump were talking before IPOing. And we don't know how much that there's a huge incentive for all the Trump insiders to keep the party going through the election. Because if the stock had there was a couple moments where it looked like it was going to zero. And if it had, that would have actually created, that would have been potentially the biggest risk factor for the campaign is a bunch of Americans being like, I lost a bunch of money because of Trump. And maybe he is the scammer that the media says.

Yeah. And so they celebrate the NASDAQ listing. It's funny, it's on the NASDAQ. It feels so serious for what this is. Back in Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, back in Mar-a-Lago, they have the actor John Voight and Truth Social branded cookies. That first day, the share price touched $78, making the company worth about $15 billion, more than doubling the former president's personal wealth. Moss and Latinsky, the two guys who started this whole thing, were unable to profit from the moment. However, they were locked in multiple lawsuits with Trump Media and Technology Group. The company argued that their

initial deal with Trump was void and they had forfeited their shares because they had run the company so ineptly. And that was interesting because it's like, it was such a short thing. I wonder if there was like a vesting cliff that they were trying to like you know push them towards or something like that if they had like some some one year vest and they barely made it over that could be like a point of contention i don't know but it all worked out because they they settled those lawsuits and moss and latinsky won their litigation with the company and cashed in all nearly all their shares together pocket pocketing around $100 million. Wow.

He's not going to have to do YouTube anymore. Yeah, that explains why he retired early. Retire early. Seriously. And so I wonder if you got as part of the settlement, he got a complimentary lifetime Mar-a-Lago membership. He either got a lifetime membership or a ban. Yeah. One or the other.

Yeah. It was a high standard deviation outcome. Yeah. I feel like Trump would be fine with them still going and spending money on the property because it would just be his way to be like, I still, like, I'm your daddy. Yeah.

One current employee messaged a group chat of current and former Truth Social staff saying that Nunes had claimed that Moss and Latinsky had stolen shares, leaving nothing for anyone else. His colleagues responded with crying with laughter emojis, suggesting that they didn't take this idea seriously. As if all the shares were sitting in the office somewhere and on the way out, they just grabbed them. Yeah, exactly. I feel like i feel like if any organization was still running on physical paper stock certificates yeah it would be true so yeah it is funny because it's like everyone is saying like oh this is like a mess and like you

know like it's poorly managed and it's like fake but then they're like but also the money's real and i really want a piece like you screwed me out of this like very legitimate thing like they can't you can't have it both ways, guys. You can be like talking trash in the media or you can have your payout. Lesson learned there. But Trump has insisted he won't sell his shares, which now amount to about 60% of the company,

which is very uncommon for a tech founder who starts a tech company and IPOs it in two years. Very, very rare. It just shows that it's mission oriented. Yeah. Right? And they could, yeah, all of these ex-employees are really trashing it. They could probably have 100 million people on the platform

if they had any intelligence whatsoever. But again, it's like, is this a question of intelligence? Like, is this a question of strategy or execution? Like, is it- Are they running it as a company or a financial product is the product the stock or is the product the website yeah and i think we know the answer yes um and so yeah it's it's basically fintech right it's it's uh technology that enables a new way to trade on Trump's social capital. There's this very interesting quote from Billy Boozer here. He says, I had to step away from a role that I felt God made for me due to ethical and moral concerns.

It shook me to my core. Sometimes those who share your beliefs might exploit you for financial gain and i think that there's a lesson here about like like we hear about these venture capital firms that are very difficult to work with and they're notorious for like firing firing founders and yet when i talk to very very aggressive founders oftentimes they're fine getting in the ring with a vc with a bad rap they trust themselves they trust themselves and they're okay they're like i i'm willing to get into the gladiator arena. I'm the lion. They need to be worried. And I think that there's something here where like the, where like, you know, it is clearly public knowledge

that these are some of the most hard negotiating people in the world. But if you go in and you play your cards right, you can wind up with $100 million payout like those guys did. And so maybe they will wind up hanging out at mar-a-lago in a little bit but yeah i think it's one of those things like five ten years from now they'll if they were to see trump they would shake hands and wink be like yeah it would just be like it's like we had one hell of a boxing match yeah it was like yeah going back to that fateful bite of the first burger. Yep. Exactly.

And then the article closes with an epilogue about now Trump has moved on to a cryptocurrency project called World Liberty Financial. I had somebody bring up, would any of this have been possible without Diet Coke? Like if you took, if Diet Coke didn't exist, could this entire story have existed? And I think you could make an argument that. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That's a good place to end. Well, that's the story of Truth Social, the truth about Truth Social.

Hope you enjoyed it. Let's move on to some tweet reactions. But first, I need to tell you about Citadel Securities. Citadel Securities is the leading global market maker committed to creating the most efficient and transparent markets. They provide liquidity across a diverse range of financial instruments, including equities, options, and fixed income, ensuring traders and investors can execute orders seamlessly at the best possible prices. Leveraging cutting-edge technology and quantitative strategies, they optimize trade executions for tighter spreads and improved market efficiency. Whether you're an institutional investor or a startup building a retail brokerage,

Citadel Securities consistently delivers unmatched performance in an industry where speed and accuracy are paramount. Discover how they're shaping the future of finance by making markets more accessible and efficient at CitadelSecurities.com. That's CitadelSecurities.com. Now back to the show. Did you see that? Is it Bowery Farming failed? Yeah.

Yoni writes, it really sucks that Bowery farming failed. I always was rooting for Bowery because it felt like it could actually make a difference on nutrition and climate change. Here's why, from my outsider's perspective, that it was so hard. Growing a single crop that's both undifferentiated to consumers and low margin, lettuce is cheap, sold through wholesale, wall of lettuce at Whole Foods, means it's even worse for margins. They scaled super quickly. Building and flying the plane at once doesn't work in the physical world like it does in software. While owning the local operations and needing to be good at lots of complex things simultaneously, tons of capex that they paid for themselves. If you inverted each of those factors, you'd wind up with a multi-crop full basket sold directly to consumers, basically a CSA, operated as a franchise.

Interesting. I hope this won't dissuade others from trying to innovate and transform our food system. It's a worthy effort. Yeah, I remember seeing vertical farming stuff and never dug in too much. Good take from Yoni as usual. I think the real question that comes away from it is what was the actual

strategy right because i've had the product it's a good product i remember buyer buying bowery lettuce and being like this is good lettuce yeah but i never you know i don't shop for groceries so it was bowery branded yeah So they were like fully verticalized. You could go into Whole Foods and like buy their lettuce that they had cultivated using their technology and eventually sold. But you have to wonder like, yeah, what's the strategy? It's like the lowest possible margin product. It's deeply, deeply competitive. It's really difficult to sort of like differentiate because if I wanted to start competing with Bowery,

I could go get a small plot of land and just obsess over making lettuce and create like the same quality of product with a much different cost structure. And so, yeah, it's one of those things like how would you have that? You know, you obviously couldn't value a farm that was producing at Bowery's scale at $2 billion, right? I don't know a lot of sort of mid-level, mid-market farms.

Farm operations that are valued at that. So it's like you have to wonder, they were last valued at $2 billion. What was, were they pitching at the time hey we're creating this technology stack that other farms can use and uh yoni and slows like have a big thesis around um verticalization which is like if you have this technology like don't just sell the technology or the software yep like sell the end product sure but. But that's interesting. You know, they were involved with a company that, they were involved with a company that made software for parking garages.

Yep. And that software company just ended up buying one of the largest parking garage management companies so that they could own more of the value chain, basically. And so I would have loved to see Bowery's last pitch deck of being like, why are we worth two billion dollars selling lettuce right because you have to imagine the actual net revenue on

selling that lettuce like if if somebody was running like a farm yeah let's say somebody's running a vineyard and they're like yeah like we spent like three billion or we spent like three million dollars last year to do one million of revenue, you'd be like, okay, like cool pet project. Do you think they should have gone upmarket? Have you seen that Omikase strawberry company? It's like $50 a strawberry or something. Yeah, so I'm excited to see. Starting with that seems very interesting

because it's so high end, it's going to be only consumed by celebrities and it's going to be very Instagrammed, but you're also going to have so much breadth to tell your story story whereas if you're just if like yeah there's this cool story where the lettuce was vertically farmed but then it just comes in a standard lettuce still tastes like lettuce still tastes like lettuce whereas the omakase strawberry you open it up it's like a it feels like sugarfish right yeah i think that that is what they absolutely should have done i think there's a bunch of interesting angles to do like

exotic fruits that are almost like desserts yep and so if they were the key thing though for bowery would be like how do you justify charging four to five to ten times as much for the same product which is what i got a box of asian pears once from someone and they were so juicy that i kept choking on them. I would take a, I would take a bite and it would just explode with like, like, and I'd be like coughing. Like, oh my God, you guys got to try it. It was amazing. They were so good. Um, and, and, and it's something where I'm sure they were like, you know, 10 times the price. Yeah. But you have to like, to make something like this work where bowery's investing

what i'm sure amount to do hundreds of millions of dollars in r and d and facilities all this capex you have to be able to tell a story of oh we're going to be able to we're going to be able to expand you know our core product from a 20 gross margin product to a 90% gross margin product. And yeah, I just, I... It's also interesting because there's like some other competitors that don't feel like they should be competitors, but they are.

I'm thinking of like Rainmaker flooding different areas, like terraforming. It's like, yeah, maybe we're running out of farmland. So we need to go vertical in cities or we need to turn the desert into farmland yeah and if we do that it's like okay well all of a sudden the price of farming lettuce is going to go way down if we can just figure out how to get water there there's another plan to reroute the colorado river if we uh switched california to nuclear power desalination so what so california gets the water from the ocean desalinates it uses

that for californian farmland and then the colorado river goes through nevada to new mexico and arizona and all of a sudden nevada and yeah that's one of my favorite talks that's great yeah i think i think what's interesting that where i'd end with bowery is that this was one of the last maybe is one of the last super high profile failures from the d2c era because bowery was a company that the big branding agency is like the red antlers and i believe i i don't remember if it was gin lane or red antler that did it but i think it was at a time where you could take any sort of product slap a you know get emmett from jinn lane or antler to like give you this like half a million dollar brand treatment and then people are like oh this is investable now

right um like people investing in all birds because it had a cool story and narrative and visuals but then oh at the end of the day you're selling shoes right yep uh do you see this martin screlly tweet defend capitalism everywhere every time be willing to die for it civilization collapses without it and then this is something that we could frame and put on the wall and then it says like thomas jefferson and then martin trichelli yeah i love this because like the first reply is civilization actually collapses well when it lacks strong sovereign institutions, social cohesion and resilience to external threats. And Martin just says no. Strong opinion strongly out. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I just think not enough people are saying this. Yep. saying this. And I think it's now becoming a normal view within our hyper online technology world. But outside of, you know, my little brother, I've had to talk with him in the last year being like, no, capitalism is actually good. It's like, if you look at all these different categories, whether it be education or healthcare or housing, capitalism, life expectancy, capitalism is the driving force that enables improvement in those areas. So ultimately, you have to imagine that it's fairly good. worth talking about because they're there we were our generation was the generation that grew up where it was okay to be in uh the classroom and a kid you know i remember in college would be like

consumption is bad all you know and it's sort of this like decelerationist like view uh that leads to western europe which yeah i like to vacation in but i certainly don't want to live there don't want to invest there yeah yeah it's interesting uh capitalism for a long time faced like assaults on both sides there was like the communism like we need to go back to you know like real communism has never been tried we need to go back to like you know soviet era communism or something like that uh but then there was also like the accelerationist like techno version of anti-capitalism which was like we're gonna get ai and robots and ubi and are you familiar with falc fully automated luxury communism this idea that yeah this there's like a bunch of sci-fi stories about this and also like political

philosophers about it and that one actually makes kind of a decent amount of sense although there's all these questions about like how incentives would work in that case but um but but that did take hold in a lot of bay area people where they were like well yeah maybe if we can just have the robots do everything we'll live in the time of abundance and so there won't need to be uh you know we won't need to allocate resources because we'll have unlimited of everything and you can just snap your fingers although there's always a question about like okay well what about communism luxury communism it is a communism needs a rebrand yeah it is a good it is a good take and certainly preferable to you know terrible communism or something but uh but then there's still a question about like okay well there's only so much beachfront property

even if you create like the metaverse you got other certain things are always be scared yeah it's very hard to imagine a world where it's like oh yeah i can just like get an island in the middle of the ocean on demand like okay maybe you have some sort of crazy like micro robots that can just do that but it's like it's very odd um so the uh sean frank good friend of the pod says uh virgin run club versus chad walk enjoyer and uh the virgin run club says you got to give some credit to wilmanitis for being an early major proponent of the chad walk enjoyer where he would walk the lindy walk yeah he would you know frequently tweet that he was going on a 30 mile walk around manhattan uh and you know

shortly after that had a nine figure exit so he actually saw me into that the last time i was in manhattan i walked the entire island like from like i don't know 91st street down to the wall street and back and it was amazing like like you you spend like two or three hours walking i mean particularly in manhattan because the entire city like turns over and you watch people leave work and then start settling in getting dinner and then the nightclub time lapse it's insane it's like one of the most fantastic cities in the world um also are you are you aware of how uh a lot of like the best bodybuilders are doing cardio these days it's's all walking. It's all

walking. Yeah. I forget Chris Williamson was doing a video with somebody. Uh, it's called like C bum Chris Bumstead, you know, this guy. So he is a fantastic bodybuilder. His cardio is 45 minutes of walking on an inclined treadmill. And it's amazing. I've been doing it because there's never an excuse where you're like, Oh, I don't really want to sprint right now, but everyone can get on a treadmill and just start walking. And then 45 minutes in, you're like, okay, I actually burned a lot of calories. I'm actually exhausted. There's a lot to this cause it's incline, but it's very, it's very hard to stop. We bought our house specifically because it's the best walking in Malibu, right? There's like this amazing walk path. It's fantastic.

Sagar, good friend, says, 12 days until clocks. This is actually an old tweet, but it's relevant because we just went through daylight savings time. 12 days until clocks shift forward, dooming the productive class to dark mornings for months, all so people can drink outside one hour later. Team Standard Time. So I guess we're actually in standard time now we went back so he's excited now that we're back on standard time um contrarian to be excited about the yeah yeah but he hates going to daylight savings time because then if you wake up early it's dark yeah

but i and i agree with this like i think the switch is always like super disruptive especially if kids and a family like it just throws everything off like yeah you do so much to train the kid to go to sleep at a certain time their circadian rhythm yeah our four month old it's awful is now deciding he went from she went from waking up at 7 10 a.m to now 6 10 on the dot and it's like okay but i will say like last week when we were at the tail end of daylight savings time i got into the office at like five or six and it was perfectly dark outside and i could watch all the buildings in downtown like light up and like oh it's just beautiful watching the sunrise like there's nothing like watching the sunrise from the top of like from the office from the top of like when i worked at

bain capital i would get in before everyone and i would uh go around like set up conference rooms i was like an intern and i would always be on like the top floor of this building right as the sun rose and it was like so inspiring seeing the sun rise over your think pad amazing is an out-of-body experience literally over your over your polycom every this was like 2012 or 2010 every every single office at a polycom. It was great. Other stuff too, I gotta dig in. Okay, so Goblin says, wait, what the hell?

I asked Claude if he noticed any patterns in my aura data versus the health data I've been logging. And he's like, my summary, oh, sure, your HRV heart rate Drop rate very greater than 20% from baseline a day or two before the migraine starts if it gets below 40 you can be pretty sure one's coming and then there's a Community note that says this seems to have been a hallucination as per the author But it's like some sort of deeper truth. I think what's interesting here is like,

greater health comes from greater understanding of yourself and the various inputs that drive your health, whether that's, oh, I feel a lot better at 5 p.m. and I have more energy at 5 p.m. because I walked in the morning. And so this sort of quantified self-movement has been allowing people to understand themselves better, whether that's getting your biomarkers tested with function or you're using your aura ring or things like that.

And I just think like incredible, incredible things are going to come from having more quantifiable data and then having effectively a team of brilliant longevity and performance doctors that can analyze that data for free. The thing that we keep coming back to about what's actually interested, interesting about AI today is intelligence as a service. And so if you want to work with the leading longevity specialists in the world, a lot of them charge like 150K per year

just to be in their sort of program. And it's gonna be really incredible when the average person with their $10 a month or a ring can get even better care from this team of digital specialists than, than, uh, some, you know, public company CEO that's using David Sinclair's like, you know, longevity program or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem valuable. I, I think for certain people, they need an algorithm or a doctor to tell them something, or they need the quantified, quantified self data to tell them something. But I always worry that there is a loss of value in not just being in tune with yourself like

like the sleep tracking is fine it's good sleep's really important if tracking it helps you get more sleep that's great yeah but you should be able to just ask yourself are you sleepy yeah and like there's a there's a company that's building uh smart smart AI toilets to analyze your urine and your feces called Throne. Okay. And they're bringing the quantified self to your toilet, basically. So it's like understanding yourself through your waste. I can see some of that being valuable because that's a little bit harder to tell than just like, did I get a good night's rest? We'll get it set up in the studio.

Okay, perfect. You can be like, every time I have a really good bowel movement the next pod i have fantastic bangers yeah bangers that's great uh so alexander says bachelors in the 1950s and he posts a what's a screenshot from a book or a picture from a book men were also pressured into acceptable family roles since the lack of a suitable wife could mean the loss of a job or promotion for a middle-class man. Bachelors were categorized as immature, infantile, narcissistic, deviant, or even pathological.

Family advice expert Paul Landis argued, except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped, and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry. I thought this was relevant. I was going to ask you, does... It certainly resonated.

Yeah. 11K likes. Yeah. Do you think that people started treating you differently once you had kids? Because there's just a certain sense of... Responsibility. Yeah, just responsibility when somebody is working for more than just themselves and has like more on the line that comes from a family like I do think there's this sense of

there is a sense of like serious like you bring a new sense of seriousness to your work yeah that I don't think you can have I think I think I looked at this and somebody it's it's fairly easy to have a pretty good life if you are just a bachelor and you're living in your luxury apartment in new york and you have a job and whatever and you can do your run club and all this other stuff and life gets infinitely more challenging once you have children in the mix and other sort of people that you're responsible for. So I think that I wanted to cover this because I think we'll actually come. We're going to see a shift back where, you know, Keith Raboy was in the news recently for saying you shouldn't hire anybody over 30, but I could imagine they're getting to a point where the tech world starts looking at people that are, uh, you know, that are 40 without children and

being like, Oh, like, I don't know. Like if, you know, well, I mean, when I got to Silicon Valley in 2012, there wasn't, there was a blog post by PG and he, and he said that it was, it would be hard for a founder to be married with kids yeah and it was somewhat controversial but it felt pretty consensus at the time like a lot of people agreed yeah and I think that's that's maybe true for first companies but if you're already like like I've never had a job that wasn't an entrepreneur, so it's kind of just like the career of the entrepreneur is a little bit more, there's less of like a leap, like I don't feel like,

oh, if I'm gonna start a new company, I'm gonna lose this stable corporate job, because that's not a thing that exists. What's interesting about this is that I feel like it's resonating, it got so many likes, because it's part of this like very trad revival. Like let's go back to the way things were. Right.

But, but I, other than that example with PG, it's hard for me to remember like when I was 20, what were the 35 year olds or the 40 year olds saying about starting families? Yeah. Because I, I think that it was out of Vogue and now it's kind of back in vogue.

Yeah, and I just think there's always this oscillation between two extremes. And it almost feels like right now we're in a healthy middle ground where everybody's like, yeah, kids are a ton of work. Having a family is a ton of work. It is a distraction from finding product market fit. it fit yeah but there's this like more of like a middle ground where you have um a good example of is like a side isaiah from valor has like a bunch of kids right and and like you could argue that he will be more successful because he has like a small army that's depending on him yeah to perform yeah yeah it's certainly cannot fail yeah and i And I do think there's probably something. I mean, I remember when I first made a significant amount of money talking to my father-in-law about this.

And I was like, well, I made so much money I could retire now. And he was like, no, you can't. He's like, you don't understand how expensive kids are. You don't understand how much money you actually need. As a car guy, I think every time i see like a buddy with like a i have a friend who's like 31 and he's got like six cars that could be considered supercars and i just look at that and i'm like for every one child you could basically support two supercars so i'm like i'd probably be doing the same thing. Yeah, it's great. Let's go to Vittorio. Vittorio says, who even uses Teams and posts a screenshot of Microsoft Teams versus Slack daily active users?

And Teams is like absolutely ripping and Slack is more or less flatlining. And I mean, I think the answer is like normies, like everyone who uses Outlook and just a normal job, they show up and the computer is just there. And they're not on some slick MacBookbook working from a coffee shop they just go to work they have a badge they sit at the cubicle and their boss says this is your tech stack here you go yeah this is a this is a very startup tweet yeah yeah this is this is a warning to all the technology brothers that are thinking about their product in the context of, Oh, we're going to build a Slack integration.

Oh yeah. Right. Because so much of enterprise software just ties back to communication, Slack, email, email being like the bedrock of all, uh, all software products.

Um, I think that, uh, yeah, I remember, uh, I once built an internal tool to track how much time people were spending online on Slack because it's a really good proxy for how much time somebody is spending at their laptop. And so never got to building Teams because it wasn't relevant to me.

But I think it's the building for the Teams market that's going to justify your unicorn valuation, not purely the Slack. There is something interesting about Teams versus Slack, which is that with the recent defense tech boom, being a company that has to use Teams because of ITAR is like a little bit of a status symbol. And people, founders flex about it because they're like, oh, I know that Slack,

I'm a product guy. I know that Slack is a better product i hate using teams so i can like complain about this publicly and everyone will know that like my work is so important i have i can't use slack because i was on a i was on a team's call for deterrence this morning yep um you probably felt great yeah the other yeah i felt i felt like a patriot yeah exactly no the other thing with this chart is what would it have looked like if salesforce hadn't oh yeah i mean that's the other yeah i felt i felt like a patriot yeah exactly no the other thing with this chart is what would it have looked like if salesforce hadn't oh yeah i mean that's the other thing it's just bundled into the distribution so yeah but also but also stewart was running slack you have to imagine he would that chart would still be going founder mode yeah yeah yeah tough daniel says we need to double the fluoride in the water and add Ozempic and Adderall too

this is insane 72,000 likes what a banger this guy is just like a god tier poster yeah it's just like we were talking about this 72 that's so many likes almost inconceivable most most people have a tweet that gets 72,000 impressions yeah and they're like oh I'm gonna retire yeah exactly um this guy yeah he doesn't need to raise money anymore for his company he can just fund it off the creator payout yeah he's good his his i generational wealth coming to him yeah for him the balance is making sure that his his mr grows faster yes no no no no just grow the creator payouts we'll see you at amman subsidized subsid Subsidize. Yeah, subsidize. Let's see the Christies. The AI for cops product. No, I think.

So you're anti-fluoride. Anti-fluoride. But in general, I think there's a much bigger debate to be had around fluoride. And fluoride usually gets, I talked about this at Hereticon, but usually gets all of the shade when in reality, it's the fact that a lot of the pipes in the u.s water infrastructure are lead based and so that's just channeling lead into every household and fluoride makes lead more bioavailable so when you're when you're having fluoride alongside lead you're just absorbing more of it which could could account for the um you know what are what you know iq uh downsides of fluoride consumption but um but yeah i think if if the united states was really a serious country we

would be thinking about more proactively about medicating the population through the directly for free yeah yeah it's like the world's perfect delivery mechanism everybody drinks water yeah so if you want somebody to be on a certain substance, then put it in the water. This is genius because like this tweet could have just said like, oh,

Zempic is so amazing. We should put it in the water. Like that's just a phrase that people say when something like a miracle cure. But he wound up like having the most incendiary thing possible,

double the fluoride, but then also adding a Zempic and Adderall. So there's a ton to latch on to. Whoever decided, there's a lot of countries that have stopped fluoridating the water. in the united states we it's it's regulated effectively but every single year we're effectively deciding to continue

medicating the population through the fluoride in the water wow look at this 17 likes this is an undiscovered gem uh waleed says tons of young girls are using chat gpt to manifest looks like open ai is acknowledging it on their official tiktok so i guess chat gpt is reposting the chat gpt tiktok account is reposting this and people are using i don't actually know that much about this is this is the uh the secret right where you just yeah i i will be wealthy i will be at amman i will no you you don't say i will be at christie's you you don't say i will be wealthy. I will be at Amman. I will be at Amman. I will be at Christie's. You don't say, I will be. You say, I am at Amman. I am wealthy.

I am wealthy. Present tense. Present tense. No, but this is relevant because this is the bull case for OpenAI. They're not saying people on TikTok are using Claude to manifest. They're using ChatGPT. It's the new brand. It's the Kleenex for AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The using ChatGPT. It's the new brand. It is.

It's the Kleenex for AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Kleenex for AI. It is, it is. It's just like, ask someone on the street, how do you use AI to do your homework?

ChatGPT.com. Yeah, it's almost like Google for search where like, if that plays out within AI, it's just like, when I want AI, I go to OpenAI.com

slash ChatGPT. I mean, Sundar was correct when he said competition is only a click away. And yet Google has a massive monopoly. Why? It's just the place that you go. Yeah. It's the default. I do think that there's something very interesting about AI for these kind of squishier use cases like astrology, manifesting, personality tests, that type of stuff, because the hallucinations are fine. Like with code, there's like a right answer. So it can test itself. So it's very good at that. But then it's always, it's always tough in the middle. But when you get out into just like the, are you familiar with the PT Barnum effect, this whole thing? So the Barnum effect is this

series of like statements that I can make about you that feel very personalized, but, but actually apply to everyone. So I can say like, uh, you have a complicated history with your family and who doesn't, but you're like, Oh my God, you know me. Or, or like you believe you deserve more in life, something like that. And you'll be like, Oh my God, I do. And so a lot of like tarot card readers, palm readers, psychicsics they use that pt barnum effect but ai can use that very effectively and it can feel like wow the ai really knows me even though it's maybe just hallucinating or applying like heuristics that are basically applied to everyone but everyone just wants to hear a pump-up speech and that's valuable so yeah and this and and if if that trend is, there's a really big business.

There's a $100 million business to be built on just being like AI for manifestation. Thin wrappers. Wrapper, for sure. Although it might get baked into one of the existing companies like CoStar could integrate something. Totally, but I think that these products are so engaging that you can spin it up and it can stand on its own. Probably not super venture backable. Probably not a $10 billion company, but phenomenal business.

If you get it right. I firmly agree. This was, this was one of the pitches when I went on my first million, I was like, exploit the Barnum effect to create an AI app wrapper. Yep. Um,

I don't even know how to pronounce this. T or taxes, T or taxes says an incredible thread on musk very rarely i see something like this from someone who is not a blind fanboy tldr some people are larger than life this then then the self-reinforcing ugly pettiness of it you wrongly assume this is a triviality to brush aside they can do it for real and it's a quote tweet of somebody from olivia that says if you can't model leviathans walking through the world you're going to make some pretty bad mistakes and it's just a deep analysis of of musk it's interesting i like the i've always liked the take that that elon is both uh you know pt barnum the

circus man the showman and he's also thomas edison the inventor yeah and he's solid on both he so so and that really breaks people's brains because they want to latch on to just one it's like yeah he does announce products before they're ready and he is wrong on those but then he's also a great engineer great manager and can build real stuff like the like the cars drive the rockets land and so even if he's saying some, some wild stuff that might be wrong in the short term, it's like both are true. What was your take from this though? It's hard.

Cause I actually think there's like a million tweets. Yeah. A million takes. But yeah, I think, I think what you take away from this is that he's incredibly complicated and the people that just want to pin him as doing like the cringe stuff where he's like jumping on the, like the stage and Oh,

he's not just an engineer. He's not just a poster. There's so much more, there's so much depth to it all. And yet the thing that we had, we had a, a listener comment on a, on one of our posts this morning saying that basically like very bearish about X and your take, which I think is the right take is Elon has a history of just making stuff work and making money. So at this point in his career, betting against him is just like generally stupid, stupid idea.

Yeah. It's interesting. Allie Taylor says, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit it, but I genuinely find chat GPT to be helpful and supportive when I'm anxious. This is back to the environment. Another thin wrapper opportunity. Yeah. I would be, there's probably already $50 million of ARR worth of these sort of like chat gpt therapy products that are just out there printing yep and they're not in they're not even being talked about because it's

just like two engineers like just shipping i mean the first version of this was like all the riz apps did you see these yeah yeah so i i talked to a kid yeah i think i met that guy too dm me and was like hey i'm building this like chat gpt wrapper for uh you know how to talk to girls on dating apps so you'll copy what they said and it'll recommend what you should say yeah and and i was like that sounds great kid like good job building something that people want clearly like you have some users like just go monetize it right now because the whole chat gpt wrapper thing is going to be a bad meme. Don't bother with status symbols in Silicon Valley and trying to raise money.

And he comes back to me like a month later. He's like, we're doing a million a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he ended up joining, if we're talking about the same people, he ended up joining HF0. Yeah, there you go. And now he's building a self-improvement

sort of community platform product. But that initial experience of being young and making money is so valuable. And then taking someone who can, A, build a product, get it to market, figure out the marketing, like do the, I think he does the growth hack on TikTok, like the motion of like getting the Stripe account growing, even if it rugs and like, oh, you got killed by ChatGPT. If you're a 20-year-old and you're making a million dollars,

even for just one month and then you make nothing, it it's like it's gonna be so much easier to stand back and fund you go read zero to one figure out what actually a monopoly business is but you have the experience of launching building coding hiring firing all these different things and then you can go build the real generational company but you actually have something under your belt instead of just being like oh i went to school and pattern. And VC is pattern match. So when you go into your, when you have the right idea and you can go in and you can be like, yeah, when I was 21, I built a million dollar ARR

chat GPT. Show me a high school diploma and a stripe account with money in it. For a period of time, it was like, oh, he traded sneakers on eBay. And then it was like, oh, he created like a Shopify store. And now he created he or she created a thin wrapper on GPT and if you didn't do that like it's kind of bearish yeah so word of advice

to the younger technology brothers uh both male and female in the audience uh go make a million dollars with a thin chat GPT wrapper don't fall for the the psyop that VCs are putting upon young founders that you know you have to build a generational company that has a monopoly thesis immediately. If you're young, just go build something cool. Air Katakana says, actually insane how Steve Jobs was the singular successful ideas guy in the entire history of tech companies. Until John Fio. Yeah yeah 7.3k likes clearly resonated um i don't know how true this is it's such a weird thing like who's an idea guy why

ideas guy is ideas guy is a great funny way to slander somebody because among certain groups being able to generate great ideas is like the highest like it's like the highest status thing especially in the ai era and in and in many ways like you there's you could totally make a case that elon is an ideas guy right he thinks of really big ideas and then he brings together smart group of groups of people to go and do that and yeah he's adding fuel to the fire and pushing people and questioning everything and all that stuff but at its core he's an idea guy yeah for sure and i mean it's like where is the line like is zuck an ideas guy it seems like he has like the most value he

creates there is ideas right and yeah it's more like will almost like he's in founder mode so like he didn't have the idea for the metaverse or the idea for vr but he had the will to be like we're actually going to go do 10 billion of cap ex on this or ai or anybody that's using calling saying idea guy as a way to slander somebody is usually the kind of person that is mad because they see an idea and they're like oh that's a good idea like i thought of of that. Yeah. But I didn't do anything with it. But I didn't do it. Yeah. So it's not just having the ideas is actually being able to like believe in them early. Like there's plenty of ideas that I've had that I've seen the incarnation of a few years later and been like, wow, that's like a really, that, that was a good idea, but there's a massive difference between having the idea and

actually taking action on it and going and going even just betting on the market. There's been so many times where I've been like, oh yeah, i do feel like nvidia is like way under price right now and bought like a thousand dollars like that and i'm like let's go i should have sized that like one year one year of college tuition yeah exactly i should have sized that way differently like having conviction in your ideas is is just as important um and and i think that's what that's why steve jobs is successful because he he has the idea that you know you don't need a keyboard on a phone but then he screams at anyone who says we have to have a keyboard and demands that it doesn't have a keyboard yeah to a thousand employees that are all have like little subtle soft power realms and there's a designer

over here who has a bunch of friends and you can't fire them and they're going to push back and like there's going to be all these things so it's like actually bringing the will of like the founder mode to to to make your ideas actually and getting and being lucky with the timing there's a there's a justin maris brother nick uh one of you know the other co-founder of um kettle and fire He has a new company that is disrupting the legacy CPG testing companies. And when I saw the deck, I was like, this is like super obvious, like wanted to invest, would invest in anything he does. But saw it and I was like, yeah, this is super obvious.

I'm surprised nobody had really taken this on, but I'm sure a lot of other people had the idea but a nick and his co-founders came together at a very specific moment in time when there was a bunch of new regulations happening in the baby product market and new testing requirements and so it created this sort of perfect moment to build light labs which will now probably end up being a really massive company and a bunch of other people will look at it five years from now and be like,

oh, I could have thought of that. Let's go to the squirrel story. I know we don't talk about politics, but this is animals. It seems to have broken through. So the Associated Press writes, an orphaned squirrel who became a social media star was euthanized after being seized from home.

And Mike Solana quote tweets it with, say his name. This wasn't even the biggest Mike Solana banger about this. He quote tweeted another video of like, yeah, this one. He quote tweeted a video breaking down the squirrel. It was like all the best clips of the squirrel. And it just says, this is what they took from you the elon quote got 150 million views that's like everyone on x right yeah yeah like every single person saw this every this meme was just a good a way for posters to cash in yeah because like pat pat uh blumenthalhal was like sent me one and he sent two and one of them got like 11,000 likes or something like something ridiculous.

But I think I think the real story is that the squirrel was a content of the conservative movement very odd is a bit shaky ground to build on because if you look uh if you dig below the surface at all it's only fans uh odd funnel yeah funnel many many content plays are many instagrams are just fronts for fronts for only fans um are you familiar with Gelman amnesia? I think we've talked about this. So Gelman amnesia is this idea that like, let's say you're like, you know, the world expert in like structured credit and you pick up like the wall street journal and they write an article about what you're a world expert in and they get some facts wrong. Then all of a sudden when you read an article in the same newspaper that that isn't about your expertise you're like well

if they got my thing wrong maybe they're getting the thing that i don't know about wrong it's kind of like the glass shattering and you realize like oh there's all this like like things aren't just broken in my world they're broken everywhere yeah it was like my dad reading an article about me in the new york times you know yeah yeah like oh wait maybe this isn't like the bastion of truth. Exactly, exactly. And so I feel like this was a huge Gell-Mann amnesia moment for a lot of normies who just like animals because they're like, if the government could mess this up, like aside from all the laws, aside from whatever happened,

just the idea of like euthanizing an internet famous furry animal is like comms nightmare 101, right? Like you should never do that ever because they have virality and cuteness and that's like all you need. So you know that there's gonna be a backlash. You should know. And so if the government can mess up that,

then maybe they can mess up the war in the Middle East or the Vietnam War. And so it's very easy to look at this and then realize, be like, oh, the government can do evil things. And that's Elon's point, government overreach in action. And it's like, it's such a minor thing. And it's like, yeah, I don't want to squirrel. This is never going to happen to me.

But it's like, if they can get this, that wrong, like maybe they can get something else bigger wrong that does affect you. And I've talked to a lot of people in defense. I've seen this at the FDA where it's like, like a lot of the defense people are like, well, I went really deep dealing with the DOD and I saw how broken that was and I wound up starting the company.

But that led me to believe that it's not just the DOD that's broken in their procurement. It's also the State Department and the Department of Agriculture and all of these different agencies that all have similar levels of rot. Yeah, like Boeing has their issues with their planes, but they're also selling 150K soap dispensers to the government.

Yeah, it's very hard to be like, oh, yeah, we are excellent in everything, but just the one problem you're hearing about. Usually where there's smoke, there's fire. It was funny because I was watching this video of the cute squirrel videos. I was watching it with my three-year-old and he was just dying laughing just like so cute just like oh my god look at the squirrel and i'm like crying because i know how it ends and it was just like i was like oh my god this poor squirrel like i'm like tearing up and he's just like dying laughing because he just thinks it's like a cute squirrel and i was like damn like yeah when it would when you find out you're going to be like the most hardcore libertarian ever yeah

but i'm not going to tell you uh you can listen to the podcast in 10 years and you can figure out what happened to the squirrel um but wild oh yeah here's the soap dispenser story so praying for exits uh good buddy says uh posts a screenshot of an article about Boeing. It says, Boeing cleaned up on Air Force parts, including soap dispensers, marked up 8,000%. Wow. Ah, yes. Good old government accountability. $150,000 for soap dispensers certainly seems correct to me. So this is why I'm excited about, do you know Kimia?

The AI thing? Yeah. So our friend Kimia is building a company that allows anybody to find and bid on government contracts yep and what's going to be really interesting about that is by introducing there's a lot of contracts out there that the government gives out that basically don't have much competition yep if boeing goes to them and they're like we have these soap dispensers and we're boeing and you buy a lot of stuff from us so why not spend these are great soap dispensers.

They're only $100,000 per dispenser. Might seem like fine. Nobody gets fired for buying Boeing. But then if there was another bidder in the mix being like, I will sell you a soap dispenser for $500. Exactly. And so Kimia is like arming all the people. All the drop shippers.

Yeah, basically. Basically, everyone will just be on AliExpress. Yeah, so I talked to him about it. His company will be very successful if he can inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs that want to go and be government contractors because it's very tangible, right? It's actually easier to go

and make money selling to the government than it is to buy something on AliExpress, get it sent to you, mark it up, get the Facebook ad, when you could just like product or service and customer, product, service, and customer, right? So I think predicting out the next couple years, Kemiya's gonna start a similar to what Shopify did,

a new movement around government contracts. Are you familiar with the story of Transdime? No. Oh, man. It's fantastic. So it was profiled in this four-episode limited podcast from Patrick O'Shaughnessy, host of Invest Like the Best, a separate podcast called 50X. And it's a fantastic deep dive into this company. It was like uh, it was like the least Silicon Valley company,

private equity, buy up, roll up. Uh, and then it goes from like 500 million to five billion, five billion to 50. There's like, there's like 50 X of gain. And that's why it was profiled in the show. But the four episodes are like the CEO who, who like was running the company, then the lead investor in the private markets, then back to the CEO for, who like was running the company, then the lead investor in the private markets, then back to the CEO for a second interview about taking it public and what they did next. And then the lead investor in the public markets. So you get this like very back and forth. It's just fascinating. And the first time I listened to it, I was like, this is like the craziest jargon because you think you're like taking crazy pills because they're like, so what's your secret? He's

like, well, we raise prices and we cut costs. And it's like, and he says, and they talk about this for like 20 minutes and you're like, okay, get to like the, the crazy one trick that everyone hates. That's so secretive. Um,

and, and really it's just like super operational efficiency. Go in play books, stuff that you can learn while getting a Harvard MBA, which is raised prices and cut costs. But, uh, Charlie Munger was asked about this on an Invest Like the Best episode,

like, what do you think of Transdime? Like, would you ever invest in this company? And he was like, no, I think it's unethical. And the reason is because a lot of the way that Transdime makes money is they make all of the seatbelts on planes. So, you know, if you go on a Boeing or an Airbus, when you buckle your seatbelt, it's all the same clock, right? They're doing the toilets. All the toilets are the same, all the seats are the same and all of that

stuff. Or they make like, you know, some sort of fan blade that goes in like every motor. And so what they'll do is they'll get intellectual property around that, get a small monopoly on one single part. And then once they have a contract with the government, they'll raise the price. So their margins are really good. And I don't think they ever get this egregiousious but what they'll do is they'll say like okay yeah like we sent you this part for like a dollar it cost us 50 cents to make but the next batch is going to be like 100 bucks and the government's like 100 bucks like whatever like that's so little it doesn't matter but they're buying a lot and then all of a sudden transom starts making a lot of money and so it's seen as the issue is the government the government budgets, but no profit incentive. Nobody working in the government really has this sort of profit incentive.

Yeah, exactly. But it's fascinating. It's a very contentious company. Some people love it. Some people hate it. It's a fantastic financial story. But it's just under-discussed, in my opinion. Meanwhile, they're running Seas Candy, and they're like,

we raise prices 7% every single year, no matter the market conditions or anything else. Yeah. Brand monopolies are okay, I matter the market conditions or anything else. Yeah. Brand monopolies are okay, I guess. Yeah, brand monopolies are fine. Everyone has their preferred monopoly, but they're like, this one's natural, and the other ones aren't, and all the other ones should be broken up,

but my monopolies are good. Monopolies for me, but not for thee. Let's go to Jack Prescott. He says, whatever happens after the earning call, the mission and focus will remain the same. Execute and deliver. Protect the West. Palantir.

Should we do a live reaction to the earnings? Oh, did the earnings just happen today? I think they were today, yeah. I love Palantir. Fantastic company. Very interesting business. Earnings per share beat 10%. There we go.

No, no. I don't think that, I don't think it's actually. They're trading really well. They're trading like a tech stock now, which is fantastic. I think they broke 100 billion. I saw this insane chart that Shamsankar sent me. It was like every company in defense,

all the primes, their market cap and then their employees. And Palantir is like fourth by market cap and they have 3,000 employees and every other company has like over 100,000 employees. It's remarkable. Like do more with less. It's good stuff.

It's interesting. Google is not up to date. It should be probably on perplexity. Let's actually compare this. Just open the Bloomberg app. Yeah. We need to get a terminal on the desk. Let's actually compare this. Just open the Bloomberg app. Yeah. We need to get a terminal on the desk. Yeah, terminal right here.

But yeah, it's interesting that Yahoo is up to date. And yeah, perplexity is quite up to date. So congratulations to- All Palantir shareholders. Palantir sales beat stock up 13%. 13%. Wow. So it must be over a hundred billion now.

Yeah. That's fantastic. I was, I was at a defense tech event in DC and Sham Sankar, the CFO who's been there since like day one, he might be a co-founder or like first employee. He gave this great talk about Palantir and what they're building and, you know,

how they want to work with startups and whatnot. And somebody asked this question, like, oh, well, you've raised like, you know, $4 billion in the private markets and your revenue is only like $4 billion. So like, isn't this like a failure financially? And he was just like, oh my God, like you don't understand like the first thing about finance.

The guy was from out of the country. He was from like France. So I'm like backwater like that. And, and, and so the next question I asked, I raised my hand. I was like, so you've raised only, we've raised only $4 billion and yet your company is worth like more than 10 times that. Like, how do you make it look so easy?

Yeah. Their PE ratio is 243. I mean, software and and they and they have an amazing ai story right because they have like all this private data that no one can get into and so it's like they're going to be able to sell like very differentiated yeah i think there's i think there's that's potentially a trillion dollar company i mean carp is just founder mode like he's the embodiment of it and it's like don't bet don't bet against that yeah seriously um steve weissner says email marketing is dying google ads are dying cold calls well are dead not sure people fully realize we're at a huge inflection point for marketing gotta think differently about how to reach your customers so how interesting so what's interesting about

this is that it feels like a lot of sales is all gonna go back to relationships sure and so the truly gifted salesperson that's just good at making people like them and wanting to do business with them is actually gonna excel even in a world where as a small company you can have an army of like online digital clones that are just selling constantly and it feels like people may only start responding to like a personal message of being like hey like the ceo this company wants to meet you like let me know if you're down for a conversation and it's like sure yeah so it's like going back to senra's point and like core learning from studying the history's greatest entrepreneurs like relationships around the world yep and in an era of uh ai that will become even

more the case yep yeah you can't disrupt the chad that just like people like to do business with i think there's an interesting thing that this tweet misses which is like a lot of these things companies have moved on to like this doesn't even acknowledge like owned media going viral on tiktok doing stunts being really good at press like there are areas of marketing that still are like they might die off in the next few years but he didn't even really capture like the tail end of this marketing. But I agree with your point. And it's interesting because he's direct response. Marketing seems to be working better than ever. Like meta is getting so optimized that I buy products on a weekly basis from

companies I've never heard of because they serve me an ad for a highly relevant product. And that still seems to work. And meta is figuring out a way that even though cpms have gone up dramatically like the ads still work like you can't brute force a stupid product into being really big like you could like a decade ago but the ad platform is like getting better and better but yeah i think what this misses is like you are going to need to figure out how to get high quality attention for your product or your business and there's and you're not going to be reliant on this

like tool set that everybody has access to yeah i think people miss this with like the the ai spam or like ai sales agents is like there's going to be an arms race and just as fast as the AI spam increases like so will the AI filtering it's that classic like there's this web comic that's like oh this is amazing this this uh this AI uh I just type one bullet point and it turns into it turns it into this like really long email and then on the other side it's like this AI is amazing it turns this long email into just one bullet point and it's like the relationships are built on just like text messages between two people that are just like do you want to do this deal yes or no it's like thumbs up and that's the end so uh so so i i i'm very skeptical about like the spam being a good path yeah unless there's

something like you really found some weird edge and you're just like but it's gonna be short-lived yeah the other thing that's cool is now that anybody can uh anybody can be like a pretty competent developer yep i a founder of my portfolio who's not the cto of his company like almost won a hackathon this last weekend just by using all of like the publicly available tools and so what's interesting to that is it's the the really talented marketers of today going forward are going to be looking more like engineers where historically the really sophisticated marketing organizations like ramp as an example they have like a lot of engineering involvement in the marketing activity that they're doing and so you have to imagine that the new marketers are not the the best marketers are not going to

be like the affiliate marketers or like i'm really good at adsense because that's all just like automated now it's like i'm actually writing code to better find and attract and do all you know customers yeah yeah that's very interesting i like that boring business says good times create high ebitda multiples high ebitda multiples create bad times bad times create high EBITDA multiples high EBITDA multiples create bad times bad times create low EBITDA multiples low EBITDA multiples create good times so I think this is a funny tweet but I have to say that I feel like it is great good CEOs create high EBITDA multiples high EBITDA multiples create sloppy CEOs bad CEOs create low EBITDA multiples create sloppy CEOs uh bad CEOs create low EBITDA multiples and uh low EBITDA multiples uh create opportunities for good CEOs yeah yeah uh it's kind of like the

wartime versus peacetime CEO thing a little bit I think that there's uh I think what what I mean what needs to be like unpacked about the wartime CEO is just that there's like a million different wars that you can fight. There's like, there's like the war of like, my company is dying and I need to like fire people, cut costs and just like keep this thing going to like make it to the next fight. And that's what that, that you need a wartime CEO to get through that hard, hard time. But then you also need a wartime ceo to go back on the offensive yep so there's like defensive wartime ceo offensive wartime ceos yeah and they're both wartime ceos yeah the good example right now is sundar at google spending yeah the last 10 years everyone says he's like the classic

peacetime ceo yeah he's making so much money every employee is making a lot of money the shareholders are doing well everybody's just kind of coasting and then you it's like boom sam altman comes in and laps you on ai all your ai products internally suck sam all everybody loves sam altman's products boom you make room for the the perplexity guy which is becoming a legendary shit poster himself and uh has a very high extreme ebit of multiple for his business today um and uh so yeah it's the um relaxed ceos creating opportunities for cracked ces yep i think that's right uh atlas says amazing now we have linkedin thread guy goon entrepreneur influencers depicting an aigf in front of the

giant goon tower in dubai the goon capital of the world we are still so early and it's another one of these we talked about this before i created this ai influencer in two minutes it's making me three thousand dollars a month and i only worked 60 minutes a day let me show you how to get started and of course there's like an entire economy of people selling courses on how to make your your like army of well you know that and i just want to see i like if somebody's watching and and they can send me their stripe dashboard just showing that how much you're making their goon influencer is actually making money like i'll shut up but until then i'm just gonna keep calling this stuff

out because well the dashboard shows that the courses are selling. I love how this guy, too, his username is at creatine underscore cycle. And I wonder, with this quality of posting, I'm guessing he stopped cycling and he's just always on it. Always on it, yeah. Always on it. Well, you know that when you join Andrew Tate's club to become a entrepreneur or whatever he had, like most, most of like the fake guru, entrepreneur, hustle core, core seller guys have like one thing. They're like, I'm the real estate guy. I get you in my funnel. I talk about how I became rich through real estate. And then you will eventually pay for my course or like my in-person thing to learn how to do real estate.

Or there's a different person that does it for crypto. Or there's a different person that does it for, you know, Shopify sites or whatever. Andrew Tate does all of them. Yeah. He doesn't do just one. You go in and there's like eight modules and it's like learn crypto. One of them is Forex trading. Forex.

Another, and then as soon as AI got big, he has an AI module. So you can become like an AI influencer. Like this guy might be like downstream of Tate in some ways that's crazy fascinating yeah it's smart going multi-product tate has so much yeah attention and such a crazy funnel i'm sure that he understands the product shifts but people are just buying the attitude and like the brand yeah and it doesn't matter what the product is yeah you know you can sell anything it It's wild. Yeah. Let's look at Cody Norquist. He said he traded in his Tesla. Zero regrets.

He bought a extremely depreciating Range Rover that will probably be worth half as much in six months. Yeah. I just I don't know if this guy's in tech, but I do think that this is the beginning of a trend where tech people discover luxury products. And they're like, wow, these are actually pretty nice. I never, well, I never even thought of going to a non Tesla dealership, but I went, uh, you know, my, I tried my friend's Range Rover and wow, this actually feels like pretty good. You know, it's like, you know, those tests that they do in cars where they like touch all the buttons and

plastic and stuff like that. And's something about yeah like you can't like i my driver the guy that i used to get to and from the airport he i had to tell him like don't pick me up in a tesla because he has a tesla and he has um like a uh just like a regular like black car or whatever and being in the tesla one everything feels like cheap and kind of wonky and i just don't like it the acceleration is the other thing but yeah i just don't it's just not a luxury product and i don't want to be in them yeah um and so now that not only are there other like electric products out there but this like sort of prevailing narrative that maybe gas cars aren't that bad yeah and um i just think that if this trend continues to play out it'll be good for san francisco because people aren't going to want to

get it's really expensive to replace a range rover window that's been shattered by somebody that's breaking into your car that's well you know you can just eat it. It's like, yeah, I do think that one of the most like underrated near term bull cases for Tesla is just actually filling out the product portfolio. Totally. There's no reason why they can't do like a Mercedes S class supercar, which they've been talking about. But even just taking a Model S and being like everything has like wood and like and like real metals and stuff like and yeah it costs twice as much yeah but you know it's the luxurious they don't have a minivan they don't have a minivan they don't have a station wagon they don't have a convertible currently they don't have a full-size suv like they're they're just like missing a bunch of pieces but then also within the range you know

like mercedes has done a great job having like the s class the e class the a class the whole and the s class like it feels different when you're inside. Even the leather stitching is different than an A class. And that's not that hard to do. It just hasn't been a priority because the whole thing has been economies of scale, economies of scale around the batteries, around the acceleration, the self-driving.

But if you get to a point where you can buy something and it's like, okay, yeah, I'm getting the Model X, but with the upgraded package that takes it to Range Rover level of luxury. It's game over because it's going to be so much safer than a Range Rover when you're driving with the self-driving and stuff. But you're just not going to,

unless you have a driver who's better than you self-driving. But I don't know. I think the self-driving might be there. Yeah, I think that will be good for the whole Tesla brand if there are products that genuinely feel yeah like everyone's been talking about oh they need to go down market to like the 25 000 car but maybe they actually basically they're already basically there because you can buy a depreciated model 3 for around 25 um and but but what you can't buy is is a tesla that has the luxury features of like rolls royce

and lucid air kind of came in as like the top upper market, but they could just crush Lucid with like a slight tweak to the interior. And if Tesla built a $400,000 car, it would be amazing. People would buy it. It would be, yeah, it would start displacing. I'm sure that has a much bigger market than the Pursangwe, right? Totally, totally. And I think the design language is evolving in a like

the 3s x y like those all have like very neutral unoffensive looks the cyber trucks in the exact opposite direction but the cyber truck showed me that they could build something that's like as iconic as a huracan design or something like that and so if they can bring some of that to like what does what does you know tesla's edgy next generation design language look in a luxury sedan or a full size SUV, like, like Escalade. I think they had a timeless design and they've ridden it so long now that even with the electric, the new electric Escalade is I think 180 K Tesla should get in there and be right at 180 K, see okay when you when you run the company

like elon does you can probably put even more crazy stuff in there right because you can get into like like you know operational efficiency around how he's acquiring like the wood and tell a story there there's probably something really interesting that could happen yeah anyway let's move on to david holes founder of mid journey. Played a StarCraft with six friends last night. It was a free-for-all. We added two AIs to fill out the eight-player map. We spent the whole game fighting each other while the AI slowly took over

and suddenly were too powerful and beat us all. A lesson in AI safety. I think this is a great example. It also, I used to play StarCraft quite a bit. Oh, really? I didn't really play it. And I was diamond ranked and, like, pretty good. So I would usually smoke the bots. But I have some distinct memories where you're just like, oh, my God.

I just got steamrolled by, like, you think that you're, like, winning, basically. And you're just on one side of the map. And then just, like, this, like. The wall comes towards you. And that could be, like, what we're doing right now, which we're like winning basically and you're just on one side of the map and then just like this. The wall comes towards you. And that could be like what we're doing right now, which we're like, oh, look at like the cute LLM. And like, oh, I just generated this funny picture of like a squirrel meme.

And then you just get steamrolled by the AI. I wonder what AIs he was using, just like in-game AIs or something third party. Well, every video game has their, of course they've had like their AI. But those AIs or something third party? Well, every video game has their... Of course. They've had like their AI bots. But those AIs, I believe, have never... Maybe they cheat or something,

but there was the story with OpenAI. They had the Dota team, and then they did a StarCraft thing as well where they were able to beat the world champions. And for that, I think they had a specific restriction where they interacted with the game via an API, but they still limited the actions per minute. So they couldn't just get inhuman reactions.

And then also the API lets you see beyond the fog and they obviously wouldn't do that because it's cheating. So they nerfed the AI. They kind of level the playing field, but the AI still wins. And so you kind of should expect the AI to win if you're going like no no chess master expects to beat an ai at chess but yeah it's kind of funny it really makes it is the it's like kind of it's great because it's a meme but at the same time it makes the case for these ai doomers that are like guys we need to

stop fighting among ourselves and it needs to be more of like the humans versus AI. Like we need to take this seriously. And that was more convincing than any like essay that I've seen from them. Totally. Which are really easy to be like, like, cool story, bro. Yeah. I mean, David just has great takes on all this stuff. Like he is pretty like AGI pilled.

And, but he has like very nuanced takes. He's not just like out there like saber rattling and like having a conniption fit every two seconds why did you how did you select Joshua Steinman we are good morning we are going to win okay simple this is not a new tweet every single day tweets it every single day yeah not even a particular banger yeah uh some of them ended up since some of them it's funny watching like the algo just some of them do well more than others but the reason i included it is that uh i see these like every three four days and every time i see it i'm like nice so anyways i just included it because it's

american thank you for your service and i do think it's a public service and it's and it's kind of um it's an example of like marketers that think like oh like we're being too repetitive with this messaging where now i just associate steinman with winning and being committed to winning and it makes me want to back whatever he does and being optimistic right i mean and it's yeah it worked like in the trump administration he's very pro trump and and never faltered when the polls weren't going his way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a big fan.

Also, I mean, it's his version of the Jocko Willink thing. He posted this at 6, 16 a.m. And as we know, the most important thing is not waking up early. It's getting on Twitter early. And posting. First thing, get on X, post. This is key. Will Minitis says,

having a full-time Bible instructor is the new private jet. Yeah, and Preston, no. I think, was it? No, Preston quote tweeted Theo about something else. But no, I think this is relevant because we know some people with full-time Bible instructors. Some some people with full-time Bible instructors.

Some billionaires with full-time Bible instructors. And it just shows that even a product like the Bible that is available to everybody and been analyzed over and over and over and over for generations, it's still worth hiring a tutor and learning, even if you have the time to study it intensely. So, yeah, there's also an interesting thing where like, even if you're the most like atheist skeptic about the Bible, it's a valuable text just because it's so old that it's been copied again and again and again in so many different stories, like The Lion king or whatever and so the first thing a child learns the first story that a lot that a child learns is like a

hero's journey that's derived from the bible and so if you can go to the source text text understand like the the the way the story and the narrative is structured that gives you power in storytelling and also understanding like what resonates. Our mutual friend who is a Bible instructor to the global elite, uh, his main point is that if you don't understand the Bible, you're going to miss so many other things when you're reading some random story, like the lion King. It's like, Oh, well. Yeah, it does just improve your edification and your enjoyment of other literature. So yeah, get the full-time Bible instructor.

Although, I don't know, maybe with AI. It'll be on demand soon. Some of those Bible apps print money. It's a good business. There's a few. And then there's that company, Angel Studios, one of the most underrated media companies that does really well.

Yeah. Christian, they did an one of the most underrated media companies that does really well. Really? Yeah. Christian, like they did an adaptation of the Bible that was like HBO level cinematography and did really well. And they produced a number of films that are all like related to Christian themes. But more interestingly, like the business has just become very, very good. And they've done very well. It's an interesting business to try to monetize.

There's a podcast called The Bible Project that I listen to that's totally free. They don't do ads, but it's donation-based, which is like, at what point should they just become a church, right? An online church, effectively. That's cool. Just just become a church? Sure. Right. An online church effectively. That's cool. Just pay what you want.

Yeah. Power tools are making a comeback. Julian Fried says, the power tool renaissance is underappreciated. It's a great time to be alive if you are someone who likes making things. Yes. I shared this because it's funny

because tech guys whose only tools has been a phone and a laptop are now discovering that there's the democratization of super high quality power tools that has been happening like in the background and there's like entire religions oriented around the different brands of power tools and whether you're like a makita guy or a walkie guy i've seen those memes and the guys that have their drills like fight each other like attach two of them and they just so i haven't gone down the power tool like uh you know rabbit hole and watched a thousand hours of some youtube i feel like i got to like tim ferris pilled where tim's like mindset was like if if something if you can hire if you make five hundred dollars an hour and you can hire somebody to do

do the job for a hundred dollars an hour nick huber now when i'm doing stuff yeah nick huber's like why would you stand on a ladder and it's like it's it's a good point now when i'm doing like if i do something around the house glory and i do like yeah glory household glory i find that uh i think women are attracted um you know when i when i can like use a hammer uh sarah's like nice i remember one of my first dates with my now wife like went over to her sister's place changed the light bulb everyone was like this guy's god yeah it was amazing marry this man yeah fantastic i gotta up my power tool game i need uh i need to build i'm gonna get some i think we should yeah create some space on the wall. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine

posts 25 years ago today, the Battle of Los Angeles, the cover art for that album that has Bulls on Parade and a couple of other really hit songs. And Oren McIntyre quote tweets and says, you have the same political beliefs as BlackRock and Citibank.

I think he was trying to dunk on him, but your point of view is that... I love Rage Against the Machine and I love BlackRock and Citibank. I think he was trying to dunk on him, but your point of view is that... I love Rage Against the Machine and I love BlackRock and Citibank. There you go. So what a match made in heaven. I'm glad. Welcome to the club, Tom.

If you have the same political beliefs as BlackRock, you're a friend of mine. It's great. Yeah, it is kind of odd that people try and dunk on this. I do think it's a good way to get people to question their beliefs. Yeah. Because if somebody thinks that organizations like BlackRock and Citibank are inherently bad, and then you tell them they have the same set of beliefs as that group,

then it is a good at least thought starter in their mind to be like, hmm, maybe I should have a more open mind around certain things this is also one of those interesting tweets where like i can't quite tell if this is a leftist or rightist tweet uh critique like it could be like you believe you like city bank and they like esg and dei so you suck and i and like you should be more right wing or it should be like you like the capitalist black rock and city bank you should be more right wing or it should be like you like the capitalist BlackRock and Citibank you should be more left wing and it's like I don't really know but

basically it kind of makes sense like raging against like BlackRock is the machine so it's saying like you're raging against the machine yet you shouldn't be aligned with the machine you're aligned with the you're stimulating the machine yeah but who knows maybe BlackRock and Citibank are raging against the with the machine yet you're aligned with the you're stimulating the machine yeah but who knows maybe blackrock and city bank are raging against the machine

the machine of stagnation yeah the machine of under financialization blackrock created burning man which is exactly it is the foundation on which burning man was built yeah the machine of a lack of financial products uh i wouldn't want to live in that world be a disaster how long how long until we go viral for being the podcast bros that's love say no no that say that black rock created black rock city eventually we'll get there it's gonna happen there's there's like a cottage industry of uh of youtubers that just put out endless like hit pieces on black rock being like did you know that they own everything and they don't understand how fund to funds or ETFs work?

It's so hilarious. And you watch someone fall into that trap and you're just like, oh my God, take one economics class, please. It's really bad. Anyway, Colin Mickles says, I hope I'm pronouncing that correct, Michaels maybe, Colin Michaels.

Few learn that SpaceX prices their launches way higher than it costs them to launch. They're essentially reaping $30 to $60 million in profit each launch. Blue Origin existing is extremely good for the commercial space market. Bezos is notorious for downward price pressure. And then he has to follow it up with an apology kind of. I underestimated how many people would misinterpret this tweet, lol. I don't know what they were misinterpreting. It seems pretty basic. But I mean, everyone knows that SpaceX

is like way ahead of Blue Origin, but you know, competition is good. And if you like going to space, I mean, it is for losers. So wouldn't want to be as a SpaceX bull. We'll get to that later in the pod. As a SpaceX bull, you know, maybe you don't want to encourage things. I do love when the Musk-Bezos rivalry in some ways is just so entertaining

because they have warring properties like everywhere, right? Yeah. They both have car companies because Bezos was like one of the biggest backers of Rivian. Really? I never knew that. And then they have rival space companies. Obviously, everyone knows about that one SpaceX and Blue Origin they also have rival media efforts because Bezos owns the Washington Post and wait but the way that you just said all this and it kind of makes it seem that Elon is

mogging Bezos at literally every single one of these Washington Post Tesla except in you know commerce commerce yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but it's i don't care about i don't i mean it's because i care about i care about what bezos is doing with his money now yeah and if you're repeatedly getting mogged yeah wow you have to imagine though that his performance across all those things is going to improve as his testosterone levels have climbed month over month for the past five years it seems like it's happening in the washington post a lot of changes there seems like he's improving that yeah maybe blue origin you know becomes a big space launch provider yeah but it's yeah i think that would be amazing for humanity i think ribby is holding up okay olivia rodrigo or whatever his name is um there's there's

another one too but yeah i mean i i think bezzos is a little bit more of, like, an old school, like, mega billionaire where he sees the side projects very much as, like, side projects where it's, like, get somebody to do something, go and show up. He's not on the factory floor at Rivian. Yeah. Except for, like. Elon, it feels like when he does something, it's like he's putting his life on the line for it. And it's, like, almost. A lot of people, this is a critique, will say like,

I actually just care about the space thing. I would be fine with him not spending time on media. But Elon's like, I'm going to personally make this, change the way this company works significantly. I'm going to go and rename it. I'm going to do all this crazy stuff. And for Elon,

it's like, he only has one mode. Elon doesn't like angel invest. He doesn't. Renaming Twitter has, the decision has grown on me quite a bit when it happened it was like one of my favorite brands even though it was flawed yep and it was very painful like for years I would just input I guess not that long but I'd still put twitter.com and more and more it's feeling like yeah coming in and making it just making it your thing actually

makes sense in the context of Elon yeah there's that saying like like when there's a change of leadership the company needs to be refounded yeah and that's certainly what Elon did yeah change even changing the name change all the people change everything yeah it's like but he had to do it because as we talked about with the truth social thing like having a network is very is is very important and it's very resilient and yeah even even if the servers did go down which was like a big fud thing for a while like people would have opened up that app that's where they go like yeah and it's very hard to get people to move even though people tried to move to blue sky we should do a deep dive on threads and how that's actually working yeah it is but it's very different yeah it's working totally separate market subculture completely separate product

yeah um but yeah cheers to cheers to both elon and bezos i love you guys uh another steinman tweet gotta love it 100k views it's a quote tweet from Arma who posts a picture of the reception desk at General Motors Technical Center

in 1965 interior by architect Eero Saarinen and it's crazy because this view looks like a 90s sci-fi

totally that's like super ahead of its time and they were probably the 90s sci-fi movie was just referencing them general motors because they had the they had the technologists they had the money so they just went and sent it and i'm sure it was like the most delightful place to work if you were

an engineer you were like this is beautiful this inspires me i want to go build great stuff there yeah it's fantastic so uh steinman says detroit was fire back in the day then politicians decided shipping jobs to china was more important than the day. Then politicians decided shipping jobs to China was more important than the American industrial base. Making it political, bro. We don't talk about politics on this show. Not on this podcast, but we'll highlight some good aesthetics.

We will love some great aesthetics. Fantastic. Yeah, I'm really excited for this new generation of hard tech and defense tech companies. They're going to do stuff like this for sure. Because they're going to do stuff like, we're going to do this at deterrence. Right now it's messy,

like, you know, sleeping on the floor of the warehouse, but it will be beautiful. And there are some companies, I forget if it's Airbnb. All the, like, when Lockheed Groom's robotics company, it will have like a robot playing a symphony

in the entryway. Yep. Like, they're welcome to use this idea. Just throw some shares to Technology Brothers. Yes, yes, yes. They're welcome to use this idea. Just throw some shares to technology brothers. Yes, yes, yes. Um,

there is, there is a company that made, I feel like I read it in a hit piece. It's like, Oh, they spent too much money on this, but, uh,

they, they built a full replica of the, uh, Dr. Strange love. How I learned to love the atom bomb. There's this, it's Stanley Kubrick film and there's this iconic huge boardroom where

all of the military leaders are meeting is this massive massive board yeah that's huge the closest 50 people is the closest like built a replica of it is the closest uh example to this like the scale ai office i haven't been but isn't it pretty i've been it's i i don't know if i've been to the newest one um it was beautiful but it didn't like the thing that stands like this stands out this stands out no it's just like it's just like it's hard to differentiate because like there is some practicality like like this this um this like entryway desk is like the most impractical thing there's so much like wasted space here but that's exactly the point i love how the woman is sitting like on an island basically in a bowl it's fantastic and it's like you can't get within five feet or whatever no yeah it's it's great so yeah making like bold design decisions

like that that are they go against the the obvious optimization of like square footage like it is going to cost you more to do this but it's going to make a statement and it's going to be more important to the maximum maximalism yeah red bull futurist writes i want a dozen kids uh this guy's awesome uh he's a rocket scientist or an emerging rocket scientist i think he's involved with spacex also caffeine connoisseur caffeine connoisseur excel enthusiast fantastic um yeah i i think this is hilarious like i pulled this out because uh 10 years ago he would have been ostracized for saying something like this it would have just been so random but the pro natalist movement is like now becoming like the norm like the new norm at least within the tech community and i think it's

great because i hope red bull futurist uh goes and has 12 children yep because they're all going to be a bunch of smart little rocket scientists yeah and uh will probably create the companies that topple spacex and blue origin monopoly on space. Yeah. I mean, the trick is just like breaking free of the memetics around like what it takes to have a dozen kids. Like, yeah, you probably need to live on a ranch outside of a major city, probably not raising a dozen kids in Manhattan unless you're a trillionaire. But if you're willing to go live in some interesting place and, you know, set your life up to be, oh, there's a couple other families there with lots of kids and we homeschool or something, or we do something interesting. And like, you know set your life up to be oh there's a couple other families there with lots of kids and we homeschool or something or we do something interesting and like you know we've

designed our life with that being the kpi that's the priority well then it becomes very easy everything flows from that yeah so shout out red bull futurist high yield harry great fintech influencer writes uh oh you just ran the nyc marathon that's sick dude i just spent all day building an investment memorandum that no one is going to read so i feel like high yield harry and some of the other folks from his generation of posters like basically it almost it's it's like they it seems like there's infinite competition now from these sort of new posters sure and yet these guys are like pretty stable like they've got like they're like posting you know regimen and you know uh it seems like they've kind of broken above the noise where you see a post from a high yield harry now and you

know that it means something yep you know it's not just it's not just a shit post it's a little blackmailed though i feel like if you write an investment memo someone should read it come on man yeah but i think it's more i think he's more saying you know look when i write a memorandum people put in size they're not worried about what it says they know i wouldn't write it if it wasn't worth they just see the attachment and they want it they don't need to open it yeah they go straight for the wire okay i like this this is a little bit more optimistic than what i was thinking it was very like low level analyst coded where it's like i'm doing kind of make work and this sucks that's how i read it at first but i like your interpretation more i gotta i gotta go long hairy i love it really really thin that's great to it mostly

just anything to avoid watching the new york city marathon i was on the phone with somebody yesterday they were like oh call me after i gotta the marathon. And I picked up the phone and I was like, I'm going to keep it real with you. Watching a marathon sounds like the most boring thing I could possibly imagine. I'm not, I'm already not that into sports. The only way that you should be watching a marathon is if you're betting on it. If you're significant others in it, you're betting on it or you're running in it. Yeah, exactly. The best way to watch a marathon is by running in. To be fair to my buddy, I did. He did have a friend in it and he was like cheering a friend on and stuff.

Yeah. Well, even watching your friend, it's like if you're watching a friend run a marathon, like it better be like some like blood, like relative connection. And even then it's cringe. But even look at the Spanish when they go to a bull run, they're not just watching. They're running. They're running with the bulls. That's great.

Yeah. So let's bring bull runs back. Bull run. Yeah. Replace the New York City Marathon with bull run. Or just put a bull into the marathon. For sure. For sure.

Yeah. New York City talks this big game. Oh, we have Wall Street bull. We're all into bulls. Prove it. Bull on the street. Turn it loose. Turn it loose today.

Turn it loose now. I want today. Turn it loose now. I want a New York City bull run. Let the marathon go. Give them a one-minute head start. One minute. And then release the bulls. Yeah, no slackers. Yeah, not just one bull, like 10, 10, 20.

You better be running 600 miles. And make every person running the marathon wear red. Yes, yes, that's great. Yeah, no slack. We need to step up the the expectations of the nyc marathon let's do it um another palantir another palantir tweet a little bit more of a shit post i like this one though but you know it's good because the other one was it didn't have the badge so it was just a fan like a stock uh a guy who owns the stock this

says the employee badge so uh Eliano Yunus says, with a lot of Palantir merch now out in the wild, here are some ground rules to follow when sporting the logo. No drugs, no fighting, no theft, no more than two beverages, no elliptical, no kipping pull-ups. Why is he singling out kipping? Oh,'s a crossfit thing sorry i was thinking i was

yeah yeah yeah that's that's really good i i thought i i was thinking i was thinking muscle ups because i never did a kipping i only do muscle yeah yeah of course strict strict muscle strict muscle ups no no you know sort of like yeah yeah um yeah thank you for doing your reason that this is relevant is like when a company crosses a hundred billion dollars in market cap, does it become a religion? Cause like, yeah,

he's kind of acting as like a priest of saying like, this is good and right. And this is wrong. It is. I think it's a good, I mean, it is legitimately valuable to be like, you know,

this merch is out in the world. We want to like set a tone for like what it means to have this. And, you know, some of this is a joke, but some of this is very real. And so I like that he's like enforcing a brand standard like a little bit more broadly. And hopefully people got the message. If I see someone doing kipping pull-ups in a Palantir shirt, it's over. I'm going to show them this tweet. Print it out.

Print it out. Let's each keep a copy in our wallet. Yeah, exactly. For when we run into somebody from Palantir. I mean, Palantir, fantastic team. From some random content thing, I got a DM from a kid who just graduated from some school and went to Palantir,

and it was still a cut above. It's a 20-year-old company. You just don't see that anywhere else. It's wild. Simp for Satoshi. IamGingerTrash says, by the way, polymarket will become a way to short startups post-election. The financial primitive is finally here.

Yeah, and I think what's interesting about this is that having the news around Bowery today is like okay it's just two billion dollar company that's was that's now as of whatever this last week worth zero the thing that uh that so i really hope this becomes true because it'll provide a lot of content for us and then we'll be putting some size on the platform for sure the the interesting thing though is that the private markets effectively have legalized insider trading yep already right all the private markets are is like using inside knowledge on companies teams founders and placing bets accordingly and so what will be extremely chaotic about this is that bring short like if this actually happens companies will have to be like employees you are legally not allowed to trade the company's uh polymarket because like it'll be like

that you'll see so much activity of like right leading up to a big product announcement it's like oh 20 million dollars just got placed on polymarket right and so hopefully this doesn't lead to more like if this actually plays out, it'll lead to a lot of pressure around the private. Yeah, we've just reinvented stocks. We just reinvented stocks from First Principles, LMFAO, yes. Well, you know how they do this for like, so death pools are like illegal.

You can't bet on someone dying because then you have this really perverse incentive to like go kill them, obviously. But on Polymarket, there are a number of contracts that are like uh this person will still be the leader of you know hamas by this date and so it's like we well they could step down but really what you're betting on is like are they going to get taken out and so there's a bunch of like you know uh you know proxy stats that you could probably build to get there where you say like, this company's domain will still be live

or like this company, where you're not like truly betting on just the stock going down, but it's like some proxy for the business. Yeah, the real, the cool thing would be the real meta stuff around Polymarket where like, will Polymarket do a hundred million in volume on this month in 2025

right because like you're you're able to bet about the platform on the platform and it's if it's on chain then it's all like verifiable but then there's also the incentive of like okay if i put a bunch of size into this into this bet then I could just artificially create the volume. What's interesting is that there are already polymarket markets that are direct representations of liquid financial markets. One of the most popular categories that I see is, will Bitcoin hit 80K in December? Or will Bitcoin hit 100K by the end of the year?

And it's like, you could just buy Bitcoin. Why are you betting on this in this weird way? But that's kind of an effective way to short Bitcoin, I guess. It's some sort of like proxy. It's not perfect.

And so I could imagine this, but for a lot of startups, like the liquidity is just not going to be there because there just aren't going to be that many people that care about some Series A company that like has got some-

VC platform teams have entire teams dedicated to like propping up their portfolios like polymarket accounts. Yeah. Yeah, the insider sharing will be crazy. It would be interesting to see a VC be like, yep, we're pivoting to like long short. Yeah.

Like we are a long short fund. And like we will be going long one company and we will be going short the other companies because we think our founders are going to win. And so we're investing $20 million Series A and we're putting $10 million on Polymarket on shorting all the other companies. Crazy.

We already did Bowery. Let's do Bayes Lord says, how do we get a new elite in America? I think this one is broken. Seems like we're in the midst of a power shift. No technology trends to disrupt, establish hierarchies way more than it cements them. I think we are.

I don't aimless post. Yeah. The new elite thing. I was talking to somebody about this. How this is. This is the story of Elon makes a bunch of money in tech yep starts owning everything yep all the like these super important robo taxis but doesn't just wind up laundering it through a bunch of profits yeah and then

buys the biggest one of the biggest media companies in the world yeah a social media company yeah that is the story yeah he's doing impact investing even though like some people might not like the story yeah he's doing impact investing even though like some people might not like the impact that he's having like his he's putting his wealth to work in like very specific targeted ways impact investor essentially much more than like you know oh diffusing a billion dollars through a bunch of non-profits that are kind of like moving the yeah i saw someone else plastic straws yeah i saw someone else say like because elon i guess was like helping bus people into pennsylvania or whatever and somebody was like helping bus people into Pennsylvania or whatever.

And somebody was like, we have our George Soros. And it's like, yeah. But I mean, the other thing that's underrated go and build Hearst Castle, Versailles. They built these like massive houses and then they would and then they weren't just like perfect boxes of glass that were mimetic with everyone else. And they just wound up looking like track homes. They were like these very unique expressions of wealth. And then when they when they turned over it didn't make sense for anyone else to maintain them even the descendants and so they became

museums and libraries and yeah and like there's so many stories of of this where yeah the getty is that yep exactly like uh the getty the uh what's the other one in Pasadena? I forget. The Huntington. It was a house. The guy was so rich. He was a railroad baron, oil baron. He built train tracks that went to his house because he wanted to just be able to, oh, I want to take the train to New York.

This is Elad Gil and his new monument company. New monument company. This is Nat Friedman with his one-off projects, The Scrolls. These are dividends that get paid to society and pay back in probably better ways than most of the other things

because they build the brand and founders want to work with them and so they get better deal flow. So it actually is rational. This guy, go and message your favorite elite, which you can DM them on Twitter, and just pat them on the back. Say thank you for doing for doing something good, doing money.

Good. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Something interesting that will live on beyond you. I mean, Bezos is doing that with the long now thing. The,

I think that's what it's called. He's building this clock in this mountain that will last. It'll keep time for like a million years. And it's just like this really heroic. He better, it better be a project. Yeah. It's just like this heroic engineering project.

And it's something that like everyone right now is like, Oh, the project's not going well. Oh, it's not working. You know, it's like this massive mega project, but then it'll probably work. But in the next 20 years, you know, it just takes time and then it'll just be this thing that people want. If you want eternal time, have a little patience, have a little patience have a little patience um skip that one this time um men only want let's see dylan morris says men only want one thing and it's disgusting who wants to split this with me and it's on biz buy sell award-winning sailboat manufacturing business in san luis obispo county and it's going for 495k and it cash flows 75k and they build sailboats that's um that's a tough uh

would you split that with him i i'm not going halves on that this we talked about this last time yeah buying a company with less than half a million of cash flows buying a job and this one if you split it with a buddy it's buying buying the minimum wage jobs. You could just work at Chipotle and then like go and like build sailboats for fun on the weekends. I think businesses like this, like we need a movement around entrepreneurs and retiring boomer operators to be like, I'm hiring an apprentice to learn my trade and take over my business. And I will give it to you on a seller note over the next 15 years if you come in and operate it. Cause like the only way that I could see this business even maybe being sellable is if a smart enterprising,

um, search funder out of Stanford goes and decides I'm going to roll up all the mom and pop sailboat manufacturers and create a monopoly. Put a, put a gun on it and raise some defense and create a monopoly put a put a gun on it and raise some defense tech money let's go put a gun on it no i think um slap a 50 cal on the front i actually know a guy who sailed sailboats all around uh like the he would sail like all the way from california to uh australia and he actually did have a 50 Cal on the front because he was worried about pirates and he would be able to like fire off warding shots if something

happened. Because when you're out there alone, like anyone could just come up to you and what are you going to do? Call the cops. They'll be there in two days. Like that doesn't work. Two days. The SOS.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're on your own. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy.

Uh, John Palmer, uh, says, I feel like joining the WorldCoin team is kind of like the crypto dev equivalent of joining the Marines. People join there,

and then you never hear from them again because they're just grinding. Strong men create good times, et cetera. What do you think about WorldCoin? The eyeball scanner. The eyeball scanner. Very dystopian, but I'm always like like i'm just bullish on

sam projects and i'm i'm i'm interested to see like kind of like the manifestation of that idea yeah you haven't i feel like you don't hear the other thing about it is like i feel like a lot of world coin activity is just happening overseas sure so like these devs are like being deployed to africa just like scanning eyeballs and like doing it more efficiently yeah um but yeah i think uh i'm excited to like hear more about like yeah it's so it's so dystopian in a way you would only do it if it was like you thought it was really important work so it does feel like in line with sam's idea of like okay okay, in the future, we need UBI, we need it to be a global UBI. It is truly the fully automated luxury communism concept. How do you distribute wealth to every single human individually? Like, well, you need something that's, you know, identifiable on a human basis, and then has its own internal currency that can then be distributed and redistributed endlessly you should get a world coin orb i'm down world coin can sponsor the orb

i'm down um anabiology says whenever something is pfas free non non-toxic as a non as a non-stick pan it usually just means they replace the thing that we studied and we know is bad with something that is unstudied so we don't know it's bad yet i love this guy i uh he's got a really cool company in the cancer research space like reviving uh a bunch of lost sort of like esoteric knowledge around cancer and like bringing it back so anyways this guy's like brilliant building something really cool um i've gotten personally gotten some like great health tips from him uh via dms he gives this example stainless steel lowest aluminum possible corning glass cookware copper are all better if untreated cast iron kind of

sketches me out because of the seasoning process. You just perma burn fat onto an oxidizable surface. And even if the fat is non-toxic excess iron. So he goes on and, and yeah, it's an interesting thing. There's always this like rat race of like, let's get rid of one thing. Oh, we introduced a new, a new bad thing. Like we got rid of lead and then we wound up with microplastics it's hard because so many things that are uh so many products of modern manufacturing processes and things that we expect out of products end up being just deeply toxic yeah by their very nature and so it's really hard to shop for modern any any sort of consumer good now like you have to be hyper you have to be hyper aware of it and and even look like glass is superior to plastic um in pretty much i don't

know in pretty much uh every single way except for its weight and it's shattered and all the health concerns and all you know it's sort of like safety concerns. I mean, um, so yeah, I think, uh, I, I think that there should be a deep tech company that tries to create,

uh, like the issue is the consumer package goods entrepreneur. That's like, I want to make a micro plastic free version of blank, or I want to make a non-toxic pan. They don't have time to do a 10 year science experiment on creating a new material. We need more teams that are trying to create totally new materials that are non-toxic that can be used for everyday consumer goods. So somebody out there wants to

spend a decade developing new materials for consumer goods that are non-toxic, we will back you. Molson Hart says, if you get rich when you're young in America, you will live in a neighborhood that is 90% old people you cannot relate to at all, 8% young people with family money that you can't relate to, and 2% with a fellow Ubermensch that you can break bread with. Same goes for country clubs

it's pretty funny it's pretty accurate it's very true uh i think what's interesting is you have this at least in my neighborhood you have this balance of people that have moved into the neighborhood in the last five years and then people that are multi-millionaires because they bought their house like 20 to 30 years ago. And the tension between those groups is crazy. Yeah. Right. Because like they just want very different things. And so, yeah, but I think I don't know, there's there's a lot of alpha and just going and being in a place where you're the younger person with energy that's still in in the trenches basically because all those other people just want to back what you do basically yeah yeah that makes

sense i yeah when i moved into my neighborhood i was like we met our neighbors and i was like oh they're about the same age as us and my wife was like they're 15 years older than us no this this happens like i don't know with sarah and like her mom groups like the other moms in her group will be like 15 yeah 10 to 15 years older and they're just like yeah there's like a pretty lifestyle yeah well same lifestyle just totally different era yeah yeah i mean i i think the lesson is like is like that is not a criticism that it like the nice thing is still the nice thing and yeah it's sort of like you shouldn't be like oh okay because everyone else who's like in my world like lives in like a high rise like that's what i should do yeah no it's okay to go be like the odd one out

at the country club or the odd one out in your neighborhood. Like, that's fine. Just do it and meet the old people and it's fine. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that are in environments where they're the young person and they build their entire identity around that. And then they wake up one day and they're like, wait, like I'm the older person in the room. And you actually always want to perpetually be the youngest person in the room and you actually always want to perpetually be the youngest person in the room but then you go from the workplace to the neighborhood to you know and you want to like stay on that yeah yeah very american trajectory it's great number runner run the numbs says ambition is just rage channeled and dance is real af you think that's accurate i don't rage i don't i feel like uh i've never gotten the feeling that donald j trump is has internal rage i think he more just like likes being

likes attention and likes winning and those are like the core motivation that's funny because there's like a book about him that's literally called like fire and fury and it's like it makes the case that he's driven entirely by rage yeah odd odd pick i i if you wanted to pick someone who's like peaceful but extremely ambitious i think you'd go for like a zuck or like uh like steve jobs who like don't seem very like rage. But I guess you hear stories about Trump. But I feel like you hear more stories about, like I can think of that exchange that Zuckerberg had in the early Facebook days where somebody's like, where he's like, yeah, these people just give me,

the person's like, they just give you all their data. And he's like, yeah, these fucking idiots, like trust me for some reason. But is that rage? Is that rage? Is that rage? I don't know. But you don't hear stories of like Trump on like raging out at people. Right.

Like he sort of gets. I don't see it as rage. It's certainly like one one path to ambition. Obviously, we hear a lot of stories that people are like they've been wronged they've been hurt but i think people really like boiling this down to just like a single precursor it's like you have to have a chip on your shoulder to do anything you have to have rage you have to be yeah josh you have to come from a broken home or something like that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets it's like it's certainly true that there's some but there are a bunch of

exceptions there yeah i don't know it's a good one if you if you have rage inside at least use it to create value for shareholders oh this is a great one i love this uh trivian says a friend was at a cafe in san francisco and said cursor crashed on his laptop i like that he's just like saying this out loud i guess and says a cursor co-founder was walking by at that very moment and offered to debug this company's sticking around this is this is this an ad like because this seems a little bit improud cursor crash out loud and then just happens to be a cursor co-founder i mean talk about a great marketing stunt if this was like planned i don't think it was it seems ridiculous it seems this is the type of thing that happens in cafes in san francisco yeah you saw the other there was something last week with a with a guy who was like in a sf like uh cafe with just like a thing on the other side of his

laptop that's like marketplace startup have revenue raising pre-seed say hi or whatever and it's like wait really so you looked at his if you looked at his laptop yeah people were taking pictures of there was like only nsf but yeah i just think there's a reason that like half of the super important companies in the world come out of that area and it's because the density of like-minded people and the overlap that you can have with customers on a day-to-day basis i remember when i lived in san francisco i went to a cafe. I didn't work from cafes very often, but I went to a cafe, maybe just to get a coffee. And I ran into David holes,

co-founder at leap motion. And I remember him just talking to me and I was like, Oh, I love what you're working on. Like this is super interesting. And he was like breaking it down. And, uh,

yeah, it was like, like way back in the day when he was working on this, like it was hand tracking for VR. That was, that was David's first company. Uh, fascinating. That's just like the type of thing that happens. Serendipity, uh, on this like it was hand tracking for vr right that was david's first company uh fascinating

that's just like the type of thing that happens serendipity uh san francisco is a serendipity magnet um david zaganov says realizing the reason they call it hard tech is because this is really hard it makes for a nice moat though and then dylan just says nah bro that's not why and then he says this is why and i did this week i got off i like i like this i like this because because it reminds me of like two cattle ranchers being like makes for a nice moat though yeah you know this cat raising cattle ain't easy but pays the bills it's a life it's a life i love it. So yeah, maybe we do a deep dive on why hard tech's called hard tech. But yeah, it definitely is real. It's sort of nominative determinism.

Shit's hard, you know? Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, everything's just slower, right? Like you need a part that could delay you a week. There's just like a million things that could go wrong interacting with the physical world and then heavy regulation. So it's just like you have two really tough factors

that you can't move at the speed of bits. You have to move at the speed of atoms. Yeah, when things break, they break. Physically break. Yeah. Rough, rough. But I think the hard tech is hard meme. I think I was around when I was in YC

and I think it was probably true initially and then a psyop after a little bit. Not like an intentional one, but like a negative meme where there was a time when it ceased being hard because just the capital markets were ripping so much and technology had gotten better and there were there were a bunch of ways to like do hard tech adjacent things whether it's white labeling or partnering or doing a bunch of different things and that's when the first boom of hard tech started

and now we're all talking about it but all the big companies are like 10 years old so like clearly hard tech wasn't hard eight years ago when some of the big companies were getting started but everyone was repeating the mantra hard tech, The interesting thing is like this new generation of hard tech companies. So I have portfolio company called Shinkai, which uses robots to kill fish using traditional methodology that Japanese fishermen would do. And it's done in a way where they,

they basically insert like a needle into the back of the fish's brain and it and when you kill a fish that way it doesn't the fish doesn't release all this cortisol and other stress hormones that make the fish age more rapidly and the interesting thing about that is they're going to a market with like very little innovation not a lot of competition uh but then they're going to build this system that other people are going to realize, oh, that's a really good business. But then if you want to go compete with Shinkai in five years,

you're going to be going up against a company that can spend weight, that's still very young, that can spend way more money on R&D and sales and marketing and distribution and has better cost structure and all this stuff and the real hard tech is going after like a five to ten year old hard tech company that's competing in the same exact category of as you yeah that has more resources that has more learnings that has more customer relationships and like so that's the real that's the hard hard tech yeah yeah that makes sense let's go to Ivan

Zhao. Ivan says why do Americans always vote on Tuesdays because 1800s citizens needed a full day's horseback ride to reach polling sites after Sunday church pretty amazing that this democracy runs on horse and buggy software in the age of the internet and ai that's that's a very interesting i didn't know that super tuesday yeah every tuesday right because you need a full day wow full day but you can't mention church i feel like what was your take he's the founder of notion right yeah yeah i feel like if you rode a horse to a polling site today you would end up in a very viral video with the police breaking the horses like it'd just be very dark but no i i thought this was interesting because i i hope that the ivans of the world end up building uh software like you know more like out of the last week it seems like there's been a lot of failures

on the software side yeah in regards to you know, polling and, and, um, and voting specifically. And so if the, uh, voting and polling software of the future looks more, looks and feels more like notion, I think that'll be a win for democracy. Is the digital polling ever coming? Like we're so far, we're just so deep in this i feel like we never we i'm so black belt on it i feel like it'll never happen it should be so simple but then again uh i was reflecting on the fact that maybe like 10 or 15 years ago there was this there's all these stories about oh well in japan they're like this cashless society they have this great nfc technology you just take your phone you can tap to pay you can tap for your ID you can tap to get on the subway or whatever it's

just all digital and it's like why can't we have that in America things are so backwards but then like for the last month I haven't carried anything other than my phone and it's been fine because the DMV finally moved over there's an app for. You can just pull up your driver's license there. Every single place takes Apple Pay now. And so we finally have caught up. So maybe it'll happen with the digital voting. Probably not in the next election though. Not the next election.

And then also all the skepticism about the integrity of elections. Like one party is going to fight it tooth and nail. Yeah. Whoever's more pissed about the last election. I really think it tooth and nail. Yeah. Whoever's, you know, more pissed about the election. I really think it's boomers. You think so? Boomers aren't into it? I think boomers don't get enough hate in general.

Yeah. Like we need to be slandering boomers more. Add it to the list, enemies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Add it to the list, Ben. So Eliza says, people shit on the YC ecosystem, shilling to each other, but the underlying concept is actually beautiful.

20 to 30-somethings a year, 20 to 30-somethings founders buying SaaS from other 20 to 30-something-year-olds. We speak the same language, we run at the same speed, and it's really nice. This is for sure true. Love it. Yeah, I think I pulled this out because I invested in Eliza's company.

Oh, cool. And we promote. We shell for the portfolio. We shell. We do promote companies that we hold securities in. Yes. But yeah, I think that's a beautiful thing, an entire economy that is dependent on itself.

Also, I mean like people always say this about like oh the the the yc hack is like you get into yc you start some sas company sell to all the other yc companies your revenue spikes and it's like is it a good company or not but i haven't heard about that many stories of like oh yeah that company like their revenue totally collapsed because it was all fake like yc revenue like if you if you're in yc and you can sell to yeah if you can sell to airbnb and stripe and coinbase like that's pretty durable revenue and even if it's just a bunch of startups like there's enough that you could cobble together like it's not like yc has ever had a situation where it's like oh all of the companies went out of business

all of a sudden yeah most of them are fine. Because they're in such random industries. It's so diverse, yeah. It's actually like a fairly diversified revenue stream if you're selling to all the YC companies. It's almost better than being like- It's actually more like one of YC's moats is that if you could be in YC and you don't go in YC and then somebody that's competing

for your in your same category does, the loyalty is like very real. Like they are going to use your competitor out of, at least in the early days until like, it's very clear who the best product is. Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about like if there was, if somebody like the real, the only threat that we have with technology brothers is two other guys that look like us that are are in YC,

that take the 700K, and then they just have all this alpha from being in YC. Maybe we should go through YC. We talked about some company that was highly, highly volatile. It might have been a real estate company or something, but it's like all of their revenue

came from something that was super cyclical. This happens with hiring companies a lot. They're doing great in a bull market. And then as soon as the rifts start and all the companies are laying off, their revenue just goes to zero because no one's hiring. So no one's paying for hiring platforms because there's just plenty of, of, of applications coming in when it's not a tight job market. Um, and so, you know,

like that, that's an example of like, if you can be, if you can have a diversified revenue stream of amounts like, Oh yeah,, well, the market overall is selling off and it's a little bit tighter. But there's still this one company that we sold to that's growing because they're in some interesting industry and they've kept us on as a client. You can actually be pretty good. Let's stay on YC. Let's go to Jared Friedman, partner at YC. He says, today I learned Saudi Aramco was started at 225 Bush Street in San Francisco because Ryan Peterson says,

every company in the world worth more than $1 trillion was founded on the West Coast, including Saudi Aramco, which was started in the same building as Flexport here in San Francisco. That is crazy stat. West Coast.

Long California. All the innovation in California. Yeah. All the innovation in the world. Maybe it flips at some point, but I can see something else. I think Nikita elsewhere on X was making the point that it's because on the East coast, a lot of power and resources go towards like prestige and people that have, um, you know, degrees where SF and California are more egalitarian, where if you're talented and hardworking, you can get resources and opportunity. Who knows, but I love it,

and I think that California should be more proud of founding Saudi Aramco. Yeah. It's very American. It is. I wish the state did a little one-on- ten into the Saudi Aramco pre-seed. That would solve our budgetary issues right now. Fantastic.

Nice cash flow. Well, I mean, we should do a deep dive on the Saudi Aramco story because I'm pretty sure that was like the ownership of that company was like fought with wars. Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure like it was a big deal when it got like nationalized. It was not like nationalized it was not like uh it was not just like oh they decided to move over to a different country it was like we this oil is in our ground and it's ours uh eric raymond says you can just make things this is my massive white pill about the revolution in small scale manufacturing that's going on right

now the immediate trigger is a story i read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair and the designs were all crappy and hideously expensive and made in china so he The immediate trigger is a story I read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair, and the designs were all crappy and hideously expensive and made in China. So he booted up a small factory that now builds custom wheelchairs, delivering them for about $1,000 a pop, undercutting the Chinese by a factor of five. Amazing. This guy's going to do one of the DOD contracts you mentioned. Really?

No, I just imagined. Yeah, just government contracts in general. Yeah, if he can spin up a small factory that builds custom wheelchairs for a thousand dollars a pop like he could go and get the boeing contract that's selling a soap dispenser for 150 000 and very he clearly has the skill set to deliver a high quality product at value yeah so get this guy on that platform the original promise of 3d printing where people were like oh you're going to just be able to buy something online and 3d printed

in your office or whatever and like i think that will basically come true but it won't necessarily look like people imagined it it'll just be localized manufacturing, talented, small companies, et cetera. Yeah. Let's go to Austin. Is it Reef? Austin Reef, founder of Morning Brew, right? He says, the New York Times Tech Guild went on strike today. As a reminder, here are their demands. A ban on scented products, unlimited break time, pet bereavement,

mandatory trigger warnings when discussing events in the news. It's funny because they were way ahead of, does it have to be your pet or could it be a pet squirrel owned by someone else? I need some time off for sure. This is like such bait. Clearly their demands were more than just this.

Come on. Austin's good at, he didn't, he knows content. He knows content. He knows content. But yeah, it's very silly. But also the half of these things are like, you know, the read here is like, oh, they're all like left wing demands. Like they're like special snowflakes that need trigger warnings.

But then also half of these are like, I could see the right wing adopting these because like, oh, the scented products have, have microplastics. so we can't have scented products anymore or like yeah we need to bereave our squirrels so like i need time off yeah so i don't know it's like a little bit of like a horseshoe the real i guess the perplexity ceo did a pr push today saying that he would replace all of their writers with ai like he did he did a piece today oh wait oh the New York Times oh yeah because they're they're in a battle they're in a legal battle New York Times and and perplexity I'm pretty sure or maybe Wired or one of the big publications for the scraping and whatnot but um but it is kind of funny that the New York Times they purposely chose to go on strike the day before the election

as a way to like... Oh, yeah. Because the tech guild is... So they do the software development and they do like the New York Times needle, which will be getting like the most traffic tomorrow. Right? It's going to be like the highest demand.

They do cool like visualizations. Some of the tech people are actually really awesome at the New York Times. They know when they have some leverage and they're willing to twist the knife. But yeah, I mean, I imagine they'd be able to give on that if they got a pay bump, maybe. This is a good one. Let's do Linus.

So the creator of Linux, Kakashi, says, The creator of Linux has publicly voiced what I've been saying for the past two years. The Linux creator, Linus Torvald, quote, AI is useless. It's 90% marketing while he ignores AI for now. It's all hype. So the reason that this is easily refutable is that we've only ever recorded one podcast together in person. The very first one in every other episode of this podcast has been AI generated, powered by Delphi. It's funny because it's like the classic like, you know, programmer mistake of like marketing doesn't matter. Yeah. In my opinion. So it's like 90% is marketing. Like let's talk about Nike. Is that a valuable company? Does that bring people joy? Is it valuable? 90% marketing. It's 90%

marketing. Of course. And that's okay. Some things marketing of course and that's okay yeah some things are marketing driven and that's okay it creates value and everyone is happy the shareholders the employees the customers everyone's happy athletes it's like what this is the this is the myth of the myth of consensual capitalism like oh like i didn't consent it's like no one cares no one cares that it's just marketing like it's fine but i i get that we're saying to a deeper level like you know we want more ai innovation like it should be good a lot of the products are kind of bad but still yeah but you have to to have to fundamentally believe this you have to have you have to believe that all the ai products that we're using are not

ai products sure because the products many of them are magic right like they really feel like magic let's go to the last one with ai uh sujeet indop says nobody blank wall street slash silicon valley what if a private credit bubble was combined with an ai bubble and then nvidia related party transactions were thrown in just for fun. And he's talking about how, I believe NVIDIA is now doing deals. Yeah, there's huge amounts of credit being extended

that is backed by GPUs. His core, I think, complaint from what I can tell is that gpus are very rapidly depreciating assets so it's one it's one thing to extend credit against the house which is relatively stable or you know an appreciating asset uh but extending huge amounts of credit against gpus is like you know uh would be like really levering up a car and then driving it a ton while the car cars were sort of like um improving very rapidly so much so that a car would be almost worthless after three years yeah whereas a car is gonna have some value for 20 years granted as long as it doesn't sort of well the other the other flip side here that I see people criticizing is this idea that a startup will go and raise a $10 million Series A and go and get $90 million of NVIDIA credits.

And then they'll announce a $100 million fundraise. That looks like an in-kind related party transaction from NVIDIA. They get $90 million more revenue because the startup will use it. But it's kind of like, you know, where the money was kind of created out of thin air. Yeah, I feel like- But the thing is, is that this also happened in the dot-com bubble,

where a lot of the telecom providers were funding a lot of dot-com startups and giving them like preferential access to bandwidth early on. But the thing is, is that like, so it's like AI is overrated in the short term and underrated in the long term. This could lead to a bubble that pops,

but it still could be amazing that all this stuff gets built out and there's all this infrastructure. And that's exactly what happened in the dot-com boom. There was a lot of dark fiber, and that's what enabled Google to grow so fast, because even though the internet bubble had collapsed, the infrastructure was there. So when the right product came along, it was able to go super wide, super fast. So I feel like Bill Gurley has a nose for bubbles like he just can smell bubbles.

And he's been harping on the he's been harping onIA related party transaction thing for quite a while. Yeah. Interesting. Let's move to audience Q&A. We have one question, then we'll wrap. Hey, John and Jordy. I've been running a Fortune 500 tech company for about a decade now and wanted to get your take on the next jet I should purchase.

I currently own a Gulfstream G650ER extended range, but have been thinking about upgrading to a Boeing business jet. What do you think I should go for? What do you think? Look, I think it's less about the shell and more about what you do with the interior, right? And so I think whether it's a Boeing business jet and you want to be able to bring you you know you're

potentially entire polycule or family um or you're going you're going to stay with the gulf stream i would just think about even if you keep your same gulf stream um redoing the interior on like a fairly frequent basis right because it's kind of like redoing the inside of your house like you walk in it feels like this new it feels like a new house even though it's the same um uh same kind of core shell or whatever um but really i i would feel um bad advising any one direction and would put a you know tell them to go talk to Preston Holland, expert on private aviation. And he's our private jet guy. I have a little bit more of a point to take.

So I think I know who wrote this in. And it's really about what your lifestyle is. So for those who don't know, the Gulfstream is probably the most popular private jet. Uh, Elon Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, they all have Gulfstreams. Uh, the Boeing business jet is essentially a white labeled Boeing plane. So you can get a 737 max, like the thing that you fly on United. You can just have that privately. You can have a seven, you can have a dream liner and a lot of heads of state have these, uh, you know, Saudi princes. Uh, you can think of air force one as kind of a boeing business jet although it's owned by the military um trump flies on a bbj a boeing business jet um but if you think about what that what's the difference between a ceo

of a large company and a head of state well the head of state is bringing an entire delegation to another country a lot of international travel and always landing at a major airport. So you're going from DC to London. Those are huge, huge airports. When you're just a CEO, A, you don't need to bring your entire company with you when you go to do a deal. A lot of the biggest deals, it's just Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom going for a hike. And so if they have to be meeting in Sun Valley, they can just fly in very easily. You don't need to worry about is the landing strip too small or too big. So you can get to much more remote locations and still bring your whole family. And, but for, if you're thinking about, you know, running a political campaign now, then you need to be thinking about, okay, I'm going to be in every major airport because I'm

going to be campaigning in swing States and and they're all gonna have huge airports, so I can land and I can bring my entire staff, my entire team with me, and when I get off the plane, we're gonna hop in a bunch of black SUVs, and I'm gonna bring my writer, my speech person, my makeup artist, my comms person, my finance, you're gonna bring the, my lawyer's gonna be with me all the time, and so you really need to think about

what your lifestyle is like and what it's going to be like over time before you make that decision. But I would probably, based on what I know, I'd stick with the Gulfstream, but that's our show. I got to hop on with Taipei soon. I think we're going to wrap.

So thanks for watching.