Holiday Party Recap, Christianity is So Back, Stop the Clock, Vitalik Needs to do a Cycle
17 Dec 2024 · 101 min
Podcast episode (Dec 2024) in which John Coogan and Jordy recap a VC holiday party, discuss a long feature about the resurgence of Christianity among Silicon Valley figures (Epic Church, Peter Thiel, Pat Gelsinger, Act 17 collective), and cover assorted tech-culture items—AI and religion, founder behavior, marketing/PR, product/finance commentary, listener DMs and promoted posts. The tone is conversational, insider-focused, and lightly satirical; the episode mixes cultural analysis with practical anecdotes and sponsor/promoted content.
I didn't know that you backed Elizabeth Holmes new company. Oh, we're live. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today. We are putting the information in the truth Zone. Truth Zone.
They're back.
A lot of people are calling them the misinformation. We don't encourage you to say that. Just call it the information. It's classy. You don't need to call it the misinformation. But there's a new article in the Information about the Antichrist and the new apostles, and it's talking about Christianity being so back in Silicon Valley. It's a great piece. Breaks down a lot of people we know, basically everyone mentioned in here. It's funny, a Bloomberg reporter actually reached out to me about this exact story, like six months ago, and the pitch was basically like, I think Christianity is having a moment in tech right now.
Oh, so this was a different.
Different reporter, right? Ellen Hewitt at Bloomberg. Completely different reporter. But was. Was smelling the vibe and could tell that this would be a good trend piece to write. And this happens a lot. You. They write a trend piece about Gundo and everyone writes that piece. Similar. Similar thing happened with this Antichrist and Christianity and tech story. And she was texting me about it. I was like, I just. I don't think it's that much of a trend. Like, yeah, Peter Trey. But they've been, you know, prominent Christians for a long time. No one's really talking about Pat Gelsinger. And then, yeah, you got Augustus. But beyond that, it's not that big of a deal. But the information hunted it down and put together a funny.
Because it's somewhat of an old. I brought Augustus to a buddy of mine's house who has a venture fund. And it was early days of Rainmaker and Augustus, this is over a year ago at this point, was wearing a huge shirt with Jesus on it, like bench pressing with a gold piece hanging out. And so this. This story almost feels like old news, right?
Yeah, yeah. Like, in one way, it could have gone just like, o, wow, another puff piece for Augustus.
Yeah.
Which you love to see.
You love to see it. They try to. Everybody tries to do, like, you know, they try to write a hit piece on the guy and it comes out as this glowing profile.
Like, yeah, I had it all written up as a hit piece that I hung out with him. And he's the real deal.
Maybe he gave him a horse. Maybe.
I love Augustus. It was good seeing him. Did you get to talk to him on Saturday? We saw him at some holiday Parties. We got to give you the update on the VC holiday party.
It was such a bummer. I saw him and his mullet from across the room. Room. And then I couldn't get to him.
There were just too many people there.
There were too many. There was legitimately too many people.
I said hello to, like, half the people I wanted to.
It was really tough.
But I do have some tips for VCs throwing their holiday parties now that we're out of holiday party season. The main one is you don't want to gild the lily. Good phrase. You know, lily, beautiful flower. You don't want to dip it in gold. You don't want to add a bunch of jewels. You know, if you're in a beautiful house, just be tasteful with the decorations. Christmas trees, couple carolers, a little fake snow. Actors acting like they're from the Matrix.
Yeah, but just the basics.
Just the basics. You don't want to go over the top.
Yep.
And you want to keep it tasteful. Did you have any tips, takeaways? The one thing that I noticed from our. From our, Our. Our guide on how to get the most out of attending a venture capitalist Christmas party that I didn't anticipate was that you not only need to bring a swimsuit to go in the pool, you might also need to bring a chainsaw, because sometimes they cover the pool with plywood to put it to dance floor.
This was super unfortunate. So John and I showed up to the party, obviously wearing suits, but we did bring bathing suits because we fully intended on doing the. The whirlpool in the center and, you know, becoming the main character like we advised in the guide. But lo and behold, they had built this pretty complex, durable wood structure over the pool to turn it into a dance floor. And it was a wild card. That was a wild card. It was like somebody had listened to the guide. They said, hey, they knew. They knew what was coming. And so we made every effort to try to figure out how to get.
Yeah.
Sort of dismantle it. But we didn't have power tools.
Yeah, I did try.
That was another mistake. Maybe next year is carry to the party, but then bring power tools in case they cover the pool up.
There is one trick, you know, imagine you're at, you know, Mark Andreessen's party. You just go up. Do you find the party planner? You just grab them real quick like it's an emergency. Hey, Mark changed his mind. We got to get that dance floor out of there. We're. Open up the pool. You just Shake it. Put the fear of God in him. Like it was delivered directly. He's going to be too nervous to go, and I'll just execute. Mark's busy. Yeah, yeah, you got to just do this now.
Mark's pissed off. He's busy and he's busy. I want to double check with him. Of course I want the pool open.
Of course I want the pool open. You know, unfortunately, I didn't work. Didn't get to go in the pool. It was tragic. But, you know, we made it out of there and it was good.
Yeah. And it was. It was. You know, there was a lot. A lot of venture capitalists had election parties, Right. Yeah, everybody. You know, given Silicon Valley's somewhat conservative leaning as of late, we expected those parties to be very celebratory. But Saturday night felt like the top. Right. Like, the vibes were incredible. Everybody was. Was. Everybody was just on top of the world. Great night. Clear. You know, potentially a top signal. Yeah. But you gotta, like, live in the moment and just embrace it. Right. Just because, you know, you know, we. We might be staring over the precipice doesn't mean you should.
Yeah.
You know, not have a good time.
Didn't see any journalists. Didn't see any escorts. It's pretty clean. Clean.
Pretty clean. Yeah, it was. Well. But there was other parties in the general area that seemed like they had that kind of. More of a journalist.
Yeah.
Journalistic attendee list.
It's tricky. Well, there's always next year, folks.
Yep.
So let's go to the misinformation or the information, as they like to call themselves. They open this article saying, worship at Epic Church in downtown San Francisco last Sunday began in a darkened room on the second floor of a former factory building. The shades were drawn across the tall windows, while colored lights cast a theatrical glow on a band that sounded a bit like Arcade Fire. If Arcade Fire made worship music, a mostly millennial congregation swayed to the harmony. A sea of Apple watch clad, arms raised to the heavens. Rough. Gotta upgrade Apple watches.
She had to drag him like that.
She did. It's a little bit of a hit piece.
Snuck it in there.
Just a little bit of a dig.
A little bit of a.
A little bit of a d. This is a special moment for Epic Church and its congregants with the opening of a $12 million space just down the street from the headquarters of Pinterest and Airbnb, acquired two years ago to accommodate a flock that has ballooned to nearly a thousand people every Sunday, Epic's pastor Ben Pilgreen couldn't have been more pleased. We really feel called to this particular place and its people, he said a few days later, reflecting on the opening day turnout. I attended the services as a guest of two of the more prominent people within Epic. Trey Stevens, the Founders fund partner, and Andrew co founder and his wife, Michelle Stevens, chief revenue officer at Felt, a healthcare software startup. People think church is just for the poor, the marginalized, the visibly in need. But the highly rich and famous are just as much in need. Michelle told me. Then she paraphrased a bit of scripture. It's harder for a rich man to pass through the eye of the needle than the for the poor man to see God. It's interesting. Pat Gelsinger has this amazing quote where he says he breaks down Silicon Valley and he calls them a bunch of like rich, miserly pagans. Because San Francisco historically has been one of the most unchurched cities in the world. Yeah. And also has one of the lowest giving rates for charitable donations. And so he. I just like the miserly pagans phrase. It was very.
People from San Francisco donate so much to companies that end up going under. They feel like that is terrible. It ends up being a write off too.
Yeah.
They feel like you need to count that in a little bit, right?
Yeah. But it is good. They go on to say Epic Church is one of the epicenters of a societal shift among the tech elite. More and more, Christianity has become a growing constant part of many of their lives. Some of these people are longtime Christians who feel newly emboldened to embrace their faith publicly. Others are brand new adherents. Together they formed a movement with real breath that does not not have roots in any one Christian denomination. It spans the country, fueled by a swirling mix of different proponents. Traces of the sea change.
It really is. It really is wild that even 10 years ago you just wouldn't have seen a high profile GP be involved with religion.
Yep.
And if you did, everybody would be like, whoa, cool of them to make, you know, such a public statement about something like that.
Yeah.
Like, even though it's just totally. Yeah. Normal people are welcome to.
For a long time, religion was coded as anti science.
Yeah.
And science was essential to the development of transistors and technology. And so the idea of. And Pat Gelsinger was clearly like a narrative violation there. In the sense that he's like running the most hard tech, the most science, physics driven.
Yeah.
Company. And yet a devout Christian.
Yeah.
But he was never in the spotlight because he wasn't the founder of that Company. And so now that you see folks like Peter and Augustus and Trey who are founders and have profiles written about them in the same way, and people want more of a 360 view of their life, it cuts through much differently than Pat, I think. Even though he was, you know, fairly prominent in Silicon Valley, I feel like 10 years ago, I don't know. He's been the CEO of Intel for a while.
But then describing. Describing the El Segundo brothers as, as having developed a form of muscular Christianity is like an attempted dig, it seems, but it doesn't really linking patriotism. Patriotism, masculinity, and athletic discipline with religious moral character. Wow, what a, What a dig. Got him.
Got him. No, they, they would all sell words to make this negative.
Yeah, yeah, and that's. They would all, like, one of them would post that I have adopted a form of muscular Christianity that links patriotism, masculinity and athletic discipline to form a strong religious moral character. Like they would just post that themselves. Yeah, it's actually like a good post.
Yeah, they, they highlight Peter's tour of, of the Antichrist. And Peter's obviously warning about the risk of a one world government and what, you know, AI might lead to that. He's long said that, you know, AI is centralizing and therefore communist and crypto is decentralizing and therefore libertarian. And I really liked his take on Rogan where he said that if there, if aliens exist, they, they must be either angels or demons, because at a certain point, if you develop the technology to propel something near the speed of light, you can just destroy any planet by just accelerating an asteroid and just wiping them off the face of the earth. So how do you, how, how have we not been destroyed if there are statistically probably aliens out there? Well, either they are angels in the sense that they have a moral virtue that stops them from just destroying everything, or they are demons in the sense that there's. That they are controlled by a one world government. And, and, and they, they have eliminated terrorism through complete control, which is a fascinating concept that it must be like your society must move to the extremes as you develop more and more technology because the technology becomes so asymptotically powerful. I really enjoyed that.
Even, even it's interesting. Do you remember, I mean, it feels like Sam Harris fell off dramatically. I don't know if that's actually true from viewership basis, but it feels like.
He turned, he turned inward and he went full paywall. So, yeah, he'll only post half of his shows on YouTube. So he has an incredibly rabid audience that pays a monthly fee to be part of the community, but he never escapes that little echo chamber. I saw a take about him today that Lomas was saying that he, like you should never forget that one of his like critical turning points was doing a lot of psychedelics.
Yeah.
And that was like canonical to his development.
And I just thought it was relevant because like five, six years ago when I just graduated college.
Yep.
I work with somebody that. That was just very into the Sam Harris meditation app.
Yep.
Which is an alternative to just going to church, basically. Because it's like, hey, sit and be quiet and just sort of like think about these ideas.
Right.
It's like a. Almost a one to one. It's like church in your pocket. But it's Sam Harris's like church of atheism.
Yeah. Well, wasn't it Will Menitis who posted about this today that or a few days ago that like the folks that get one shotted by ayahuasca are also getting like, they'd be so much less resilient or they get one shotted by the idea of AI Doomerism and you.
Can get one shot of by anything.
Yeah, yeah. But it's a good, it's a good phrase. It's a good turn of phrase. And, and the reason is that, is that because I've always had this interesting thought that a lot of the AI Doomers are fearful of a return of God. Have we talked about this? Basically this idea that they live degenerate lives that are highly incongruent with any sort of moral framework.
Yeah.
And so, but they also believe God is dead. And so that's fine. They won't be punished because they don't believe in traditional God. But if AI becomes a God, AI will judge them and then AI will kill them or punish them or send them to like an AI hell, essentially. Because they haven't been living a morally virtuous life.
Yeah.
And. And so a lot of it is like an anxiety about the return of God. Whereas if you at least believe that you're living some sort of morally virtuous life, it's like, yes, there might be an AI that's super powerful, but it will think I'm cool and good and it'll be down to hang and like, it'll be great.
Like, give me guidance in my life.
Yeah. I mean, there are plenty of people that are powerful that you run into and they don't just immediately want to kill you.
Yeah.
Like, because you haven't done anything bad.
Otherwise we wouldn't have made it out a Saturday night.
No way. But, but, but there is something about when you dig into a lot of the most prominent doomers and you read like, how they live their lives, you're like, wow, this is like, pretty dark and crazy.
It is interesting. It is the sadist. Yeah. It is interesting that on. I mean, there's. There's so much talk right now about how impact, or, sorry, how AI will impact every facet of society.
Yeah.
And a lot of people depending on your industry, like, you're going to talk it up as it's going to have this greater impact. Right now it's popular in crypto to be like, oh, AI is going to adopt crypto rails and use tokens and wallets and it's, you know, it's less regulated. So they can just do this all programmatically. But, but there's such a crazy case to be made of how AI is going to transform how we think of religion. Right.
Yeah.
Kind of what you're getting at, which is.
Yeah. There was a guy, Anthony. Was it. Was it Anthony Levandowski? I believe he was the guy who left Google, went to Uber and then went to jail and got pardoned for stealing code from Waymo.
Oh, crazy. Yeah.
Pardoned. And, and I believe he said that he was starting a church of AI like, like, we will worship the AI God. And. And then I don't know what happened. And I think maybe he just started building another, like, normal company. But, but, but there was, there was this big, like, trend for a while.
Where it was like, well, it's interesting even. So the reason this article coming out now is kind of funny is because I do think you could have written. You could have written the exact same article a year ago. Like, it's not like breaking news. There's this wave of Christianity. Even two years ago, it had become countercultural on TikTok, if you were a young man, to make these vibe reels that were like, religiously oriented and like, oriented around.
There's also like, on the feminine side, there was like the trad wife content.
Yeah.
Ballerina farms, that type of stuff that got really popular recently.
Yeah.
Which is, which is like adjacent. It's Mormon, but it's.
Yeah. And even Jeremy had a good post. I'm trying to find it.
Sure.
That was over the summer.
Well, let me read this while you're looking that up. They say the interest in Christianity among some of the technorati comes at a moment when religion has been declining in America for decades. We're just a few decades removed from what, from when the New Atheism. The New Atheism movement, partly led by philosopher Sam Harris, sat at the center of our cultural zeitgeist. Just 68% of Americans describe themselves as Christians in 2023, according to Gallup Research, from that year, a dramatic drop from nearly 90% of Americans in the 1990s. That is so high. 90% in 1990s. I had no idea it was that high. And I'm wondering, are they, are they counting Catholics as Christians there, do you think?
I would guess they have to be.
Right.
Yeah.
And moreover, 80% of Americans think religion is losing influence in the country, according to Pew Research, a high watermark since the organization began asking that question in 2001. Still, about half the Pew respondents who said religion is losing influence thought it was a bad thing. Interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Jeremy's post was on July 3rd of this year. He says, if you can't see that we're on the brink of a religious tidal wave and young people, you have your head in the sand.
Yep.
So, yeah, yeah.
Say Bible sales are up 22% this year. Hallow, a prayer app, raised $105 million from investors, including General Catalyst, as well as Peter Thiel. Let's really that we love to celebrate large funding rounds. And it became the first religious app to reach number one in the Apple App Store. And also there's that, there's that Christian film studio, Angel Studios, and they are producing like HBO level interpretations of the Bible. And they're also very, very good at just online marketing. The movies go into theaters, but then they have this great mechanism for buying tickets for your friends. So they have this kind of like social viral engine a little bit to amp things up a little bit more. And the team behind it, I'm like loosely connected them are like absolute killers, like really, really sharp. And it's completely under discussed that they're like probably one of the greatest new media companies. And because they're just like in the religious category, but if you put them against like a free press or something, you'd be like, oh, wow, this is like a fantastic business. They're like a 24 level, like very, very successful. Yeah, we should do a whole deep dive on them. It's very fascinating. If there's one person at the center of tech's shift toward Christianity, it's billionaire Peter Thiel, a devout Christian who like many other techno Christians, doesn't publicly align with any one denomination. Several of the young tech founders and investors I Spoke to from Los Angeles to Austin to New York, told me they had been influenced by direct conversations with Thiel, as well as his frequent talks on religion and his work spreading the ideas of theological philosopher Rene Girard. For me, the logic was simple. It was, well, Thiel is really smart and interesting and he's pulling from Rene Girard, who's really smart and interesting, and both of them are pointing back to the figure of Christ. Shouldn't I look into that? Said David Perel, founder of Rite of Passage, a tech focused online writing school who has met Thiel a few times.
Yeah, very, very David.
Yeah, it was. I, I was talking to Trey about this. Like, it's always one of the most, it's one of the most like, you know, countercultural things about Trey is like kind of personal brand and, and I'm glad to see it get more attention just because it is very interesting. You don't want to go too far with it, I think. But. Yeah, but I think this like, really, really nails it down as like, this is just who he is. And yeah, it's not, it's not like some, there's not a deck about like, let's, like, let's pick something that's edgy or.
Yeah.
Thing. It's like, no, this is very natural.
So I reached out to our, our friend the Lone Ranger to get kind of his take on this. He is a credibly intelligent young man who has found himself one of the only. He is a sort of religious advisor to many different people within the tech elite. So I was interested to get his opinion. He said his first thought was one he'd never seen the author before, which he thought was relevant because historically major papers would actually have somebody that was just full time on the religion beat. Right. That they would just write articles like this and that would allow them to just engage in like a higher level analysis of what was happening versus, like this is a thorough article. Right. She talks to a bunch of people, Isaiah Taylor, David Perel, new founding guys. But she doesn't have the literary chops and expertise to write something truly groundbreaking. Right.
That makes sense.
And the New York Times, the original. The New York Times misinformation actually still has like religious beat writers. Interesting.
I didn't know that.
Anyway, so. Yeah, so another thing that he kind of went into is he basically says as of right now, he believes that this is entirely organic. Like there's not one specific organization or public figure that's leading this.
Yeah.
But he says what comes next is that as this trend becomes More and more obvious. There's going to be people that are going to try to gatekeep it, claim it, like grift off of it in different ways. Totally. Right.
Yeah. Already something that a young founder can put on as a costume and to feel more edgy or more aligned with like the Teal verse.
But the people that were covered here, Saya Augustus Perel, they're not doing this to be clear. They're like non threatening. Yeah.
So like, I mean everyone saw that they were doing this like years before this article.
Yeah.
But you can.
And they're like, they're pretty. Take this pretty clearly like not being political about it.
Yeah.
Just sort of saying these are, these are general, you know, my beliefs and why I was got involved in the first place.
Yeah. I like this question here. Teal until proselytizes, he likes to dispense little rhetorical riddles. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about one in particular because of what it seems to suggest about the scope of the mindset he and other tech Christians hold. He posed it to the economist Tyler Cowan when he appeared on Cowan's podcast in April. The millionaire and the general and the priest. What do they all have in common? In referencing those three archetypes, Thiel was describing the coalition of free market libertarians, defense hawks and religious social conservatives that coalesced in the Reagan years, drawn together partly through a common dislike of communism. And it's hard not to look at the tech elite piling into Donald Trump's new administration as a second coming of those forces. Tealism can be mind stretching, can be a mind stretching form of Christianity. And I think that's part of its allure. Especially in a world in which lengthy digressive right leaning podcasts have become cultural cornerstones. Seeing a guy as smart and rational as Peter Thiel be like the resurrection literally happened. It's real. There is a taboo that's being broken. Said one person to detect to intact whose newfound interest in Christianity largely ties into listening to Teal. It shows that faith is valid and real. Yeah. There is a little bit of like just breaking the glass and like jumping over the, the, the, the, the threshold in order to make this acceptable. Like no one, no, no vc can write you off as a founder because you're Christian. Because there are now enough people who are serious.
Yeah.
That you won't be. You can wear it on your sleeve whereas before people used to hide it clearly. Yeah. It's wild. I know a guy who is brilliant, brilliant electrical engineer and grew up In a deeply religious city in Georgia, I believe. And in high school he had a, like a. Everywhere, literally everyone in his community was religious Christian. And he had this breakthrough and, and wrote his thesis about atheism and decided that he was an atheist because he was so rational and so. Yeah, so like quantitative and science based essentially. And he was essentially cast out of his society and like exercised. Like literally. They got, they brought in an exorcist, which I didn't even know was a thing that existed in like the 90s, I guess.
Wow.
Wild. And then, and then eventually he came back to it, which was very interesting while he was like in this hyper rational phase for a long time. Very, very interesting. Like how, how difficult that is. And then, and then when he, when he started, you know, going back into religion, he. It was still like very countercultural in Silicon Valley and it was very odd. And he was always like, seen as like an outsider. It's like been an outsider his entire life. It's wild. Anyway, should we go into Isaiah Taylor, one of, one of the. Elsa. Good man himself, who founded Velar Atomics, a nuclear energy startup, sees. He sees his and his peers turn towards Christianity as a way to reject the tech status quo and eschew atheism, which has essentially been text, de facto spiritual guiding principle. Yeah, you got to get out of the spreadsheets when you're deciding what to do. It is tricky. You could see it with SBF just like the whole like, oh, well, you know, this is like mathematically efficient to like steal all this money so I can give it back. Like. He might have been a true believer in his ultra utilitarian philosophy, but it clearly led to like a terrible bad outcome.
Yeah, he's going to take user funds to invest in Anthropic, which he knew is going to be a $50 billion company. And he was going to make it all back.
He was, he was. But the timeline mismatch. Yeah, SBF was on the Tyler Cowan podcast and Tyler was like, how much of a, how much of a utilitarian are you really? Like, if there was a, if there was a 51 odds coin, like the coin is 51 heads, 49 tails, and if it comes up 51, if it comes up heads, the population of humanity doubles. And if it comes up tails, everyone dies. Would you flip that coin? Like it's positive Ev. The expected value is that the population increases. That means more happiness and utility. So, you know, the, the utilitarian should flip it. And he was like, yes, I would flip it. I would flip it endlessly. I would flip it forever. Because he just operates off of positive ev. Yeah.
And it's like he doubles it, doubles it once.
He's like, let's go again in practice. Obviously that's not how it works out. But like, if you're just short sighted thinking about expected value, well, yes, then it is positive ev. But clearly you need some broader guiding principle than that.
Fine. God.
Yeah. Very odd. Yeah. Where else should we go? I mean, in terms of the driving force, I mean, Michelle Stevens really can't be undercounted. Like, she's. She's put together like a really strong speaking tour and has been a driving force. They highlight here the Act 17 Collective, a nonprofit that aims to evangelize tech leaders that Michelle Stevens leads. And she's hosted events with Teal as well. Y Combinator president Gary Tan. The name references a Bible passage about Apostle Paul's missionary journey through various cities. She and her husband Trey originally planned to bring the group to 17 cities, including Austin, Miami and New York. But their ambition is growing. Just last month, she and Trey ran two Act 17 events in Dubai and Abi and Abu Dhabi. The the Theology of AI and Defense and Choosing Good Quests. Yeah, we got to do a deep dive on choosing good quests. That is a fantastic essay.
Yeah, really great.
And Trey had another recent post that I think was really great about AI Girlfriends. And in there, there was a little bit of this at the end kind of saying, like, there's this natural force that wants to just juice, reward, find the path of least resistance. Let's just make everyone date an AI. And. And we were. I was kind of struggling with him thinking about the, that, the conclusion. Because I didn't. He, like, the original conclusion was something like, you know, oh, like, you know, go to church, like, rebuild the institutions, like, meet people in person. But that's very hard. And it's very. It doesn't fully align with like the, the war machine that is like VC's funding. Like the OnlyFans business is just so powerful. Like, it's very hard to overwhelm that culturally and same thing with the AI girlfriends thing. Like, if the business is just printing money, it's just going to have so much more energy behind it than like a couple people being like, hey, we should like, go to that church and patronize it and like, build our community up. Like, it's really hard to start those things. But. But I do think that there's like the Angel Studios thing, the, the. The. The Hallow app. There are A few ways that you can align community building, real world relationships, some religion stuff. You can, you can, you can make that align with like the traditional venture capital model. I talked to one VC was who was thinking about incubating a B2B SaaS company for churches. Basically like, you know, like I need.
To get in on the action. What do I know? I know.
Yeah. And I'm pro Christian, so.
Vertical SaaS. Vertical SaaS for payments, payment rails for donations.
Exactly. All this stuff. But then also, I mean if you, if you go like we do a lot of like content creation, video, you know, recording and stuff. If you want to learn this stuff, you don't go on YouTube and search for like what do podcasters do? You go to the mega churches because those guys have the best gear. It's incredible. They have all these like behind the scenes things because they're all doing like live streams and switching and stuff. It's like NFL level. But they all talk about it because it's their community and they're giving back to each other and stuff. It's really, really cool. I've watched like a million of these videos and I'm always like, oh my God, they got that gear, like sick. I want that. But yeah, I mean I think that like bringing some of that top tier stuff down and making it more accessible for these organizations to run really, really smoothly probably is genuinely extremely beneficial. Anyway, you got anything else on the information article you want to talk about?
Yeah, I thought the, I thought it was interesting. Julia Black, the writer, positions this. I don't know if this is authentic, but Michelle had said she doesn't mind if people use their Act 17 events to pitch their startup to her husband. Go ahead and network, she said. God used everything, anything and everything to get people to turn that way. So I'm totally okay with that and actually welcome it. And Julia positioned that as mixing religion and work, which I guess is like one way to do that. I would just call that mixing community and work. Yeah. Churches have always been a place for community and conversations that are not entirely oriented around pure religion. So I like the call out to new founding a Dallas based anti diversity, equity and inclusion venture firm anchored by a Christian ethic and worldview. Okay, so there wasn't much, wasn't much more on that.
But yeah, echoing that Pilgreen is continuing to fundraise for future projects like his planned center for Sacred Vocation. He hopes to create a space where people can come network, find people who are like minded to start a company. He told me it won't be just for Christians, but obviously as a church, it will be, hey, we believe in. We believe. We believe God created work to be a good thing. We want to help you think about how to do that ethically. I read a great book about. It was from this like, capital allocator, some big hedge fund guy about Christianity. And it was a fantastic embrace of Christianity or of capitalism because obviously capitalism didn't really exist when the Bible was written. So there's this question of, like, can you derive Christ?
It existed. It just wasn't defined.
Yeah, yeah. Can you. Can you derive capitalist principles from the Bible to know, like, are we in the good timeline or not? Like, are we doing the right thing? Is there. Is there a Christian defense of capitalism? And he had a bunch of really interesting things to say about that. But one was that, you know, God is a creator and created us in their image and it's our job to create. And the job and the role of creation is the is, is business and is, is capitalism and is entrepreneurship.
Yeah.
I keep finding like, you read all these great books and the conclusion is always like, start a company founder. Like, it doesn't what they're like, what their stated angle is. Maybe it's just me, but like the Straussian reading has always like, become a founder.
Become. That's great. Yeah. The last thing I would say, I think it. You know, we. We generally have only are on this podcast to talk about technology and business and the technology industry. So that's why we covered this. But generally, I think it's a very positive trend that people within the tech community are. Feel like they can fully express that their personal life themselves. Right. So the same thing of Trey and Michelle, you know, having their events and church and being able to talk about that. That's great. There's also prominent examples of investors and founders from Jewish backgrounds and like rap Teflon and that on. Right. So, like, that's another expression of it. Neither of them like, it's. It should be. Totally. Everybody should be fine with people expressing their own personal belief systems and values and cultures. So. So anyways, glad. Glad to see it all.
That concludes our deep dive for this episode. Do you have some dms over there? I wanted to go through some Q and a. The DMs come.
We got some DMs. Let's hit some DMs.
I got a good one for you here. Let me see if I can find this. Okay. Yeah, this is a. This is a fun one. Hey, Jordy. As someone with a Sole male heir. Are you doing anything special to. To prepare young Master Roman for inheriting the Hayes estate and continuing your dynastic transitions? Traditions.
Great question. We could do an entire deep dive on this. And we should. I am along with my wife. He's turning three next year in Q1, and we're going to be gifting him a C Corp for his third birthday. Get him started building his own enterprise. Because as much as I think that all parents should generally embrace nepotism and try to give their children and their communities, you know, that the advantages in life, I do want him to learn. Learn how to do it on his own. And so, yeah, I think one of the best gifts for a third birthday is a C Corp, right? Yep. C Corp's malleable. Right. They can bootstrap out of it. They could raise capital. Could kind of work across any industry. It's a great gift to be like, hey, it's not a. Not a totally inexpensive gift. Right. Stripe atlas. Like, 500 bucks. It's like, I got you. This is the equivalent of 30 Dino puzzles I just got.
This is a PS5.
Yeah. And. And now you. It's up to you to make it worth something.
But instead of playing, you know, some PS5 game, you're playing the game of capitalism.
Game of capitalism, which. Endless ultimate game.
Ultimate game.
Every.
It's much like the Dino puzzle. You need to puzzle together the. The capital.
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that's big. Big gift coming up there.
Fantastic. C Corp, I have an idea for you. I think that there's a natural inclination for children to rebel. And so you might want to use some reverse psychology. Tell them, hey, look, I. You know, I expect you to become a tech journalist. I expect you to become a DJ in Bushwick.
Yeah.
And then.
Yeah.
23 rolls around, he sits you. Dad, Dad, I know you wanted me to become a DJ and be the first member of our family to play a boiler room set, but I want to start a hedge fund.
Yes. That's actually so smart.
And you're just like, okay, son, if that's what you want to do with your life, I will support it. I will back your first fund.
Yeah.
But keep listening to the Ed.
The journalism side to every. Every Saturday morning, the routine is, if we sit down, we open the information app on the family iPad, and then.
He gets exhausted by it and has to rebel.
And then he's like, but. But through the process of reading the information articles, he learns about these countercultural bad boy entrepreneurs.
Exactly.
That are like, wow, these guys Ziya Taylor. This guy kind of sounds cool. Augustus Dericko. This guy sounds cool. Strong moral character, fitness oriented. So yeah, I think that reverse psychology don't understand a C corp is a great.
So he has the entity set up if he wants to rebel.
Yeah. Give your children entities. Yeah. I can't stress this enough.
For sure. Well, we got a. We got a question and a suggestion from Sean. He says tech Bros. Pod. Have you heard? Heard you guys need a tie recommendation. Check out this Burberry. What do you think? Should we do some Burberry ties?
We should get on there and shop. Sean submitted this last night. Just got to the studio this morning. Didn't have time to get in there and. But it's a great. Thank you for pointing that out, Sean.
It's really going to be dependent on who writes us a bigger check to sponsor them from the high fashion world in terms of ties. But we're open. If you run a Thai company, contact us. It's kind of a winner take all.
Type a winner take all market.
Yeah, sure.
But this neck and that neck.
Yeah. Well, we can do rival sponsorship. Okay.
Yeah.
Hermes over here, Burberry over there, you know, we'll see.
Yeah, maybe. But thank you for the submission, Sean.
Yeah. Oh, this is good. I work for a billionaire. As a chief of staff, what art should I put on my wall to make a statement? What do you think about art for your office? You want. When the billionaire walks in, says, hey, I need you to book a flight for me, you got to make a statement. I. My recommendation was you go with Peter, Paul Rubens, David and Goliath. We'll have to put this up on the screen, but it's one of the most aggressive. It's. It's a, it's a, it's a painting. It's. It's in Pasadena at the Norton Simon. You can go see the real thing if you're in la. And it's a, it's an amazing painting of this super jacked David just about to behead Goliath. Yeah, it's like one of the most aggressive, like fire and brimstone types type paintings. Really sets the tone. Yeah. Hey, billionaire, you might be bigger than me. I might be the chief of staff, you're the boss here. But at any moment, one rock to the head. I'm slicing head off.
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to take a different approach. So if you're chief of staff or a billionaire, you have big ambitions. You don't want to be, you know, the right hand man or Woman forever. And so what I would do. Billionaire circuit. You're going to end up at various art fairs. Art Basel might be one of them. So I think the right approach here is actually to silently and anonymously build an entire career as a sort of provocative modern artist. Right. We've seen pieces like the banana that was duct taped to the wall, you know, selling for, you know, significant amounts of money. And so I would take that approach. Figure out a way, you know, if you're, if you're hungry and a hustler, you'll be able to do this. Figure out a way to get your own art shown at Art Basel. Get it, you know, auctioned by Sotheby's and really get those numbers up. And take your boss and say, hey, we should stop by this artist is blowing up. And then ask, once you're there, you know, the billionaire is like, might say, like, you know, is the artist here like, what do they even look like?
And pull off the mask.
Pull off the mask and say it was me.
All the calls coming from inside the house.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But only do that after they've bought a piece.
Yep.
And say like, you know, you're my customer.
Yeah. I would take it a step further if you're. Maybe you don't have the artistic inclination to pull it off yourself. You got to get on the art circuit. Figure out what artists want to sell to your boss. Rent your wall space to display. Billionaire walks in, sees. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, it's my friend.
Yeah.
It's only this much. Then you should become an art dealer.
Yeah.
Start selling.
Yeah. I mean, you could even take this a step further, is find an artist you love, buy up all their available works.
Sure.
Work with Sotheby's to get these works listed. You buy them back from Sotheby's to mark them up to higher prices, and then just chandelier bidding little, you know, build the market. Build the market. Build the market. And then have your boss be the bag holder and have him buy the piece and be like, I own this entire market. And then flood the market recommendation. There we go.
It's Peter Paul Rubens.
What a piece.
It's. It's beautiful. It's going to look great on, on your wall. Good luck. Here's a serious one I got from somebody. Do you think there's room in the market for a robo advisor with a modern all weather portfolio such that it entails inflation hedging via crypto and black swan hedging far otm, near expiry options it's interesting, the robo advisor market. I haven't followed too much. I know that. Isn't Wealthfront the main big.
Yeah, so. So I think what's been interesting is the. For a long time there was a lot of robo advisors.
Yep.
It was unclear if any of them were working. And then Wealthfront came out and they were like, we have 200 million of revenue and like we're profitable. And like, this is actually like a great business. Right. Because people park their funds and they don't really think about it and the number goes up and presumably retention is pretty high until maybe. I think there's a certain point where people are like, Well, I have 5 million in wealth front. Maybe I should give this to like a traditional money manager type person. But turns out they're pretty good businesses. You know, we know like the autopilot team. He's built a great business already having a more opinionated robo advisor that has like a set strategy. So I think there's a lot this, I have no way to like analyze on the show whether or not this is a good strategy. But I think like highly opinionated robo advisors are a great way to get your first 20 million of AUM and then from there maybe you can build.
Yeah, I think you kind of need to abstract it. Like there's one which is like the actual, you know, back testing and risk modeling and just making sure that what you're proposing here is a good strategy. And then number two is like, how are you wrapping that and distilling that into marketing language? So yeah, I remember there's one robo advisor that was like, every time you make a transaction, it will round it up and it will just take 15 cents and you'll never really notice. But then you'll save a bunch of money along the way.
Yeah.
And then there's like the other one which is like copy trading. Oh, this one. There was another one that went through YC a couple years ago that was like, we just look at the hedge fund, the best performing hedge fund disclosures, and we trade based on that. So you're copying a hedge fund. Yeah, and that's very easy to understand. Okay. Hedge funds do well. My portfolio is copying those. I'm happy about that. I'm willing to give it a try. Right. And so this like modern all weather portfolio, like that could be great, but it's not jumping out to me as like a fantastic elevator pitch that you could put in like an Instagram ad.
Yeah. So here's, here's another way I want to copy that.
Whereas the autopilot guys, it's like you're copying Nancy Pelosi's portfolio. That is a meme. People understand that and so they're, they're in with that. It's very distilled.
Yeah. The last thing I would say, so Wealthfront, if you've ever used it, is very risk off. No matter how much how risk on you basically tell it to be, it's still like going to be a pretty stable portfolio. And that's part of their strategy. If I was going to make a Robo advisor and I just wanted to optimize for users and like attention and potentially volume, I would just say we are the degenerate robo advisor, which is like, this is ultra high risk. You might lose almost everything. But the potential content that would come out of that is like you can, if Wealthfront wants to be the stable place where people can earn 6% a year and you're like, hey, you might be. Go down 70% one year and go up 4,000% the next year and we're gonna like, do it. Like there's hedge funds that basically do that.
I mean, yeah, there's, there's a crypto trader that our buddy knows who you can essentially give him a thousand dollars and he'll just try and run it up to a million and then he'll be bankrupt after. And so you got to pull out at the right time, kind of push him. But he's just a gambler. Like he's not even a hedge fund. It's just like a guy.
Yeah.
And yeah, the, the degen. Because that's going to create a lot of content, a lot of wild long tail stuff. People, people want the risk.
Yeah. So instead of wealth front, you'd say maybe call it the incinerator. Capital incinerator.
How much did you put in the incinerator? I threw a. I threw a 10.
I threw 10. I threw 10 in.
Let's throw a 10 in the incinerator and see what happens.
See what happens.
That's great. Should we move on to the timeline? Do we have.
No, I gotta jump in. We got a. So last week we talked about this. We have had so many incredible brothers in the comments, replying. And so we decided to make Reply Guy of the month a weekly award.
Okay. Weekly award. And this one was honestly crushing. It was so high stakes for us. I was up all night thinking about this, debating between the choices.
Barely slept.
It was, it's one of the hardest decisions I've ever made in my life, barely slept.
And let's see, let's talk about some of the people that. That almost made. Yeah, let's talk about that. Some of the people that almost made the cut.
I mean, Baldo is still.
Baldo's an absolute path to goathood. Brody. Brody's an animal. He had a great comment today. Response to our driving gloves.
Fantastic.
So Brody's been in the running, but the guy that is this week's reply guy of the week is somebody who has to have post notifications on the first comment pretty much every time. He's a true technology brother. He's building. He builds rockets down in Texas.
Nice.
He is friends and I think, you know, partners with Red Bull futurist. And he is none other than Stefan Sali Selesis. Stefan Solisis. You are this week's reply guy of the week. And it can't go to somebody better. I'll drop some of the highlights here. We posted yesterday. Founders, the next time a journalist is writing a hit piece on your company, buy them a dressage horse. Most tech journalists grew up riding weekly. A gift like this will let them know that you respect their culture and you shouldn't be unambiguously demonized and returned. He says this, that equestrian opulence, which I thought was very relevant. We posted about VCs. If you want to count on a VC for a growth check, you should hope that they go skiing places that don't have chairlifts. He says if you can't drop in on a double black diamond equivalent run with fresh powder, how are you supposed to generate wealth? Fact point.
It's a good point.
Later, he says, America isn't around. So that's. That's a deeply American post by itself.
He just threw that in there.
I love it. Yeah. Yeah.
Just a little bit. A little bit of fuel on the fire.
He was weighing in on Y Combinator's success. Y Combinator is a great.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about being a great reply guy. You don't need to drop a whole essay every single time. You can just kind of, just kind of remix what we're saying. Amp it up a little bit. Just give us some juice. We love it.
This one was good, too. We posted VCs with no followers love to yap about how much they value anonymity. Which, which, you know, if you've talked to VC with no followers, they will tell you that. Yeah. He said, I think it's funny that I see VCs with zero followers. Isn't it heavily in your favor to be able to reach an audience and get your product in front of people and I thought that was just a good way to position position that. And then lastly we posted and just like that, venture capital holiday party season is over. Thank you to the LPs that make these events possible in our security for keeping us safe from anti capitalists. The parties may be done for now, but the back of the napkin deals will echo for eternity. And Stefan said communists wouldn't even have napkins to do deals on. They have much to learn and that's true. Anyways, so shout out to Stefan. A great American, a great reply guy and we are lucky to have you in our community of brothers.
Fantastic. You love to see it onto the timeline.
Let's do it.
Let's go to Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp. He has been on the show before. He is quote posting Lenny Rachitsky who says companies minting the most founders out of their product managers. And ramp is number four with 14.3% and he says we're the youngest company on this list already top five in the ranking of new companies formed. Sad to see exceptional people leave. Only thing we fear more is no longer attracting exceptional founders in the first place. Just shy of 10% of Ramp's team today have started a company. Yeah.
Wow.
Fantastic. Yeah, I'm joking about the pipeline of like Ramp, Ramp company founder. And I didn't realize how real it is.
No, the pipeline is. The pipeline is extremely real. The thing that I would say that a lot of people that become founders want to be founders from very early on in their lives. Like maybe they had a small business while they were in middle school or delivering papers or flipping sneakers, these kind of things. And so there's this tendency to, once you're an adult, to be like, oh, I want to be a founder. I should become a founder immediately. And there's so much value in going and working for a company like Ramp. Learning best practices, learning what excellence looks like, learning about the needs of customers. You're not just learning how to work and how to approach business, but you're learning about the problems that businesses have. And you know, Ramp probably benefits from the fact that they serve companies in a bunch, in a bunch of different industries. And so you're getting exposure to a bunch of industries and the problems that are there. So I give this advice all the time to people that are like, I want to be a founder. And it's like, well, you don't need to have started a company before, obviously, to Be a founder, Anybody can just become a founder, but a lot of people would be better off going and working two, three years at an, at an iconic company and then taking a crack.
And most importantly a foundation. A fast paced company that executes on product very quickly, like Ramp. This is why, you know, Google, former Google person was really great during the, during the growth years of Google because they would just go and Paul Bukite would just go build Gmail in a weekend. And now it's kind of been like, oh, okay, Google is a place where you just go settle in. Maybe you leave and start a company if you're in the AI group. But like for the most part, like the Google PM is not as hot anymore.
Yeah, the pattern matches.
Super fast paced.
So yeah, and it's not just about what you learn on the job, but it's the pattern matching that, that, that capital allocators will do after you leave where they're like, this person's never started a company before, but they were a PM at Ramp and they built this feature. And I talked to Eric about it and he said they're great and that just can be an extreme catalyst.
Yep. Let's go to Gabriel. He says this is how Vitalik built Ethereum. And it's a screenshot of a kid in a very awkward pose saying, look at this kid. And everyone was laughing at, out loud at this. It is funny. Vitalik has been, I think he's been on tech bro drip, but he hasn't done enough. I mean a got to go through a bulking cycle, got to hit the gym, get jacked. It'd be a great turnaround. Everyone would be singing his praises. I'm sure that.
I'm a sports car, get his testosterone up.
But also he did that photo shoot, I believe for Time magazine or Forbes or something and they did him really dirty. They shot him really flat. They didn't give them a lot of contrast. The camera was kind of looking down on him. And the whole, it was very clear that the whole thrust of the article and, and the, and the brief for the, for the photographer was make him look like a nerdy kid because that was the story they wanted to tell. They didn't want to tell him like a, like a hero. And I was looking at the, the Trump is on. Trump is on the COVID of Time magazine. And I saw that they made him look really heroic. And everyone was like, this is crazy because the last five Time magazine covers about Trump have been like, it's a disaster. It's, it's terrible. But then they. They finally shot him. And if you look at the bts, you can see that it's a really low angle. The photographer is basically on the floor. He's looking up at Trump, which is. Angle matters a lot. And there's a big, soft light, and you'll see, you know, we have a big, soft light in the studio. It. It creates more intrigue for your features, more contrast, and it just makes you look better and that those details get lost a lot. But hopefully we can spread the word that founders should be aware of the way that they're photographed. Ryan Peterson, when he was on the COVID of Forbes, who's a fantastic lighting setup. I was obsessed with it.
I know founders need to. Need to build into the shoot that. That. That this is the camera angle.
Yep.
I won't take photos in any other angles. I will be smiling because sometimes, if you want it to be a celebratory piece. I had the New York Times come to my house once, and I. And they. They told me they were covering my launch, and they were excited about what we were doing, and we did this interview, and then they told me during the shoot, don't smile. And I was like, that's pretty weird. I'm being featured in the Sunday business section. I kind of think that's good. Decently cool. At least my parents will think it'll. It's cool. And then it came out, and then, of course, it wasn't. It wasn't, like, overly negative, but it wasn't like the celebratory piece that they had pitched.
And the main thing is that there's still a lot of people out there that put, like, PR firms on retainer, but the PR people aren't sharp enough to actually execute that. If you look at the way Tim Cook is shot at Apple, it is so detailed, and clearly, it's like he's always wearing an Apple watch. He's always wearing Nikes. Like, everything is thought out perfectly. The angle, the set design of his office is perfect. And if you have someone good on your team, you don't necessarily need to know how to do that as a founder, but you should have someone on your team that's overlooking that and making that happen.
Yeah.
Let's go to Arvind Srinivas over at Perplexity. He says your post about. You post about Robinhood, I post about Ramp. We aren't the same. And this post got a lot of likes. He's subtweeting Sam Altman, who was talking about the Robinhood gold card, which is a very cool product. But he's saying, you know, you're flexing with your gold, you know, card tied to your trading account. I'm using the Ramp card to optimize my business.
And this is just a crazy ad for Ramp. I mean, we've done some good promoted posts of Ramp, but it's hard to compete with a guy running one of the hottest AI companies in the world to just post his personal Ramp card and brag about it.
It's great. And I think once Ramp launches the. The meteorite card or the tungsten card.
Yeah, yeah, we're working with them to try to get some heavier, more exotic metals.
The meteorite card is a good one. Yeah, that's gonna be. That's gonna be big when they do that. But, Robin, who will have to respond? It'll be the card wars.
Yeah.
Much like the merch wars and going.
On in defense tech and all in Palantir. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's go to Delian. He says, thank God. Please end this nightmare. And it's an announcement that Donald Trump will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time. Yeah, there's been a huge, strong constituency, but shouldn't there's inconvenient.
Yeah, there's been a big movement here. Huberman had something. I think he's branding it. He coined it Coogan's Law. He understands the value of coinage. I think he's stopped the clock or something like that.
Yeah, yeah. Sagar and Jetty is big on this. He's been on this for years. Talking about how it's a. It's. It's a tax on early risers.
Oh, It's a tax on parents. Sun goes down at 5. You're like, great, I've got to entertain children for another 90.
Can't just let them play outside anymore.
Yeah, it's. It's. It's. I didn't really care about it until having kids.
Yep.
And mine go down around 7.
Yep.
But. But seriously, like, sun goes down and you're like, okay, we have to keep them indoors. Like, try to get their energy out.
Yeah, yeah.
It just. It's not. Not great.
It would be exciting. It would just be the type of change where. Where it would feel, like, monumental for, like, a day. And you'd be like, wow, I didn't even know they could do that. That's crazy. Like, because they used to just, like, create these things. Like, at some point it didn't exist. And then it did, and they just did things. And then the thought of the government changing Something like that. Or like moving us onto metric. Like we could just do that. But like it's.
That'd be frankly un American.
Yeah.
Unless we. And then we basically, if we did a hostile takeover of the metric system and then kind of recreated the history of it and said, look like we've actually been using this in many ways for much longer. Native Americans actually use. Created the metric system.
I love it. Let's go to Ryan Peterson. He's been on the show before. He says, inside a Flexport 747 and loading this thing to within 9kg of max weight today. Nice job by our sales team. This is amazing. This is founder mode.
So that's. I think I sent this into the stack because this is the. He's been on a founder mode tear recently.
Totally.
And it's so cool because you see this and anybody who is a customer is like, wow. The CEO is deep in the trenches of his company, like improving it daily, making sure it's running well. If you work for the company, you're like, Ryan's working harder than I am. Like, that's unexcusable. I should be like, you want to be working at least as hard as your boss.
Yep.
And then if you don't work for Flexport and you're. You want to work somewhere founder led, it's like, okay, this is a company that, that, that has the right culture coming straight from the top.
So yeah, a couple years ago I made a whole video on my YouTube channel about Flexport and kind of broke down his whole history and it was great. I didn't even interview him for it, but I was always kind of wondering like, oh, what would be a good follow up? And when he got the 747, I was like, can we go do an interview on the 747? Like that would be so sick.
Like, and the interview and the bay props in the back parachutes out.
So cool. Right. And we never could figure out the scheduling. It was always really hard. This makes so much more sense for him just to hop on and you know, I don't know if I want to spend like three days in Hong Kong right now, but, but, but we should definitely do a vlog with him on the 747. Yeah, something like that.
Yeah. And CEOs. It's costs zero dollars to go founder mode. You just have to find it within you.
That is true.
Very capital efficient thing. You just gotta become. Just gotta embody the lifestyle.
Yeah. It's interesting. The founder mode stuff is. It's like you Go back to Brian Armstrong. It's like this crazy bravery thing. This is not edgy or brave in that way. It's really just being authentic.
It's the best possible marketing for flexible export to the entire market. Capital markets, new hires, customers. And it doesn't require some expensive New York, you know, agency.
Yep.
Like, you don't have to spend 300,000 on a branding package like we did just to launch podcasts. Right. You literally just have to have a cell phone and just like talk about what you're doing and show that you're deeply engaged.
And I'm sure there's been discussions on the Flexport marketing team of like, should we do some sort of owned content? Should we start a podcast about shipping?
Yeah.
And we'll have someone like, you know, non related to Ryan run it and it'll, it's like that's going nowhere. This is already viral. And this took him, you know, a couple minutes to go and do and he was already going to go anyway, so why not go for a ride? We got to promote a post.
Speaking of founder mode, we got a promoted post from a friend of ours, a friend of mine and friend of the show, Nate Boss Hard. Nate says brand marketing within traditional orgs has been siloed, gate kept and opaque. 40% of an average marketing budget is allocated to brand, yet no one really understands what it truly is. It's a services heavy practice. Without software to scale it. Brand AI finally solves this. So Nate has incubated or helped start a company called Brand AI and what they're doing is building this entire suite of tools. I know that the guy who did the Rora brand uses Brand AI and Nate generated an analysis of technology brothers.
So cool.
And so they've built software that, that helps you understand your brand from what you're already putting out there.
Yep.
And so Nate ran TB through Brand AI and it gave us ideas about what our brand actually is.
Yeah, it was really good at like distilling what we've already been talking about.
So it just like, it was really good. Psychoanalyzed us and the podcast like perfectly. Yeah. We didn't even have to be involved. And so we're getting onboarded right now. And anyways, check it.
Beautiful. Because like if you put your company through there and it gives you like kind of milquetoast analysis, you can't write it off as just like, oh, it got it wrong. It's almost like, no, you haven't created enough. You haven't been living the brand. You haven't created a brand, you're not opinionated. You should almost, you know, pull in like, okay, your CEO want to invest like the best. Let's pull that into the brand AI thing as well. And then understand, you know, what that is. And then once you, once you dial it down, like, that's kind of your brand book. Have everyone run with that. And, and to the founder mode point, it's like the Flexport brand needs to be, you know, the guy who goes on the 747, the guy who goes to the, to the dock.
Yeah.
And so what does that mean in. In their. All their marketing language, all their sales collateral, like, anything that they do needs to reflect this because this is the brand now and, and it's not whatever's in some pitch deck.
Yep.
Let's go to Ben Hilak. He's been on the show before. He says smartphones as we know them will be around the next 20 years, at least in the future. People will be using them more, not less. Interesting. I, I do, I do think that there's something about, like, we've gone smaller with the watches, the Apple Watch that hasn't really taken off, and we've gone bigger with the iPads, and that's still not what people carry. There's something about the, the pocket that is just the, the platonic ideal. And even Apple Steve Jobs didn't want to go bigger than like 4 inches. Now we're up to like 5. Like, small changes, but it does seem pretty dialed. And it also feels like as they get more powerful, it's going to be something that drives other experiences. Like, you can clearly tell that, like, the Apple Vision Pro has this power brick. Your phone has a battery that's basically the same size. You should really just be plugging a headset into here if you're using that. Like, the phone can kind of always be around a power as like the central core of your personal computer. Ben Thompson always says, like, we messed up the terminology. The phone should be called the personal computer because it's actually the personal computer, whereas the laptop is like a workstation. Yeah, but what do you like about this post?
I. People have developed such negative relationships with their phones and negative feelings towards their phone. And like, oh, what's your screen time? Oh, my screen time. So high. I always joke around about this. I'm like, I actually spend like 90% of the time on my phone working either messaging people that I'm working with, workshopping memes, sourcing posts from the timeline, whatever, talking to founders. And so I'm actually like I was actually pleasantly surprised to see my screen time go up last. When I got the notification yesterday I was like, good, I've been working harder. Yep. But I think people have, have developed this thing where yeah, you're. If you're doing, if you're doom scrolling on your phone, if you're just like doing the anti meditation where you're just injecting new ideas in your brain just like constantly, which is like what an algo feed does, that's bad. But the way that you use it matters a lot. And I don't think that more screen time is always worse for you. It's just like what screen time Even.
Within the apps, like you can be scrolling X and getting all slop but if you do click the mute mute mute on those like you can get a pretty.
Who are we with? We were with somebody Saturday night and they pulled up LinkedIn and it was like time gated and we were like.
What are you doing?
What are you doing? But it was funny because this founder is like a very hard worker.
Yeah.
And he was like, like in it and it and it. The. It was like the app notification was like, you have used all your LinkedIn time today. And I was like, I mean I.
Think if he doesn't do that, he wouldn't be able to to turn off and like enjoy the party. Basically he'd be on it because he's grinding. It's great though. Classic like stated preference versus reveal preference. I want to use my phone less. What do people do? Yeah, scroll the algo feeds. Watch our content. Shield says. A few folks have asked me, why is 3X? Why is the 3X multiple good for a lender like Bridget? Here's an answer question for you. So wealthfront trades at 10x ARR and bridgit at 3 to 4x. Is that just due to net dollar retention being much shorter at Bridgit? Here's one way to think about quality of revenue. If Bridgit lays everyone off tomorrow, people run off with the money and without customer acquisition, there's no ongoing revenue. If Wealthfront lays off everyone tomorrow, the majority of people won't notice. And Wealthfront continues to make money off those customers for many years to come. So Wealthfront's revenue is worth a lot more in enterprise value than Bridges. Pretty self explanatory, honestly.
Great analysis. Yeah, I don't really have that much.
I don't know that much about Bridget and I don't know why Bridget was.
Bridget, to my understanding was it was effectively a fintech as a payday lender. Right. So they give you these like short term, short term loans. So there's like a ton of, a ton of demand for it.
Sure.
Not the highest quality customers to have. Not a lot of recurring revenue.
Yeah.
But either way it was like good. It's just exits are good. Right. Like we, they're, they're necessary and it wasn't the outcome that everybody, I think it was quite down under what their last valuation was. But ultimately like they created a half a billion dollar company. So like congratulations to the team and hope everybody made some money. Boom. Little, little, little size gong moment and Great analysis by S.H.I.E.L.D.
Let'S go to Gary Tan. He says vision for 2040, every person should have a robot, universal basic robot. And Elon Musk chimes in and says.
They will, they will.
That's exciting. 2040 not too far away.
So, so I think it's under discussed. So. So there's a lot of humanoid robot hate right now.
Yep.
And a lot of people are saying like oh, it's like the iPad form factor. Like it's not really going to be sure. Like what you think is going to be the thing is not really going to be the thing. But, but Elon's been pretty intentional guy like I think he like the fact that he's doing it says a lot. So it is interesting to see. I, you know we've talked about, we've had a request for robots that goes and uses computer vision to analyze a tree, figure out which leaves are going to fall and just quietly picks them out before they hit the ground.
Yep.
So we're looking forward to robots like that. But hope I'm, I, I expect like everybody will have a drone. Right. That like goes and picks up like oh, I want this drink from the grocery store. Like go grab it for me. Right. Everybody has like their little leaf picker. Everybody has like a humanoid robot around the house. Or maybe it's not that form factor.
Yeah, it's kind of like how you know the first CPU in your house or chip in your house is probably like your personal computer, very expensive, use it a lot. And then over the last 20, 30 years like the chips have just gone into everything such that you're like your toaster has one and it can be very annoying when you, when it's implemented by a non tech company poorly. But in general like having tech in things is probably good and inevitable and the same thing will probably happen with robots Right now everyone does have a personal robot in the sense that like most people Have Roomba or something like that. But then there's a question of, like, is the leaf picker next is the, you know, is the car after that? And then what else can be become robot? You know, you get the laundry one, you get the dishwashing one, and eventually you, you know, everyone winds up having or like the average person has one on average.
Right? Yeah.
I'm excited. I'm excited for the age of personal robots. I don't think they're gonna rise up. And if they do, watch out. I'll be shooting them with an AK47. Let's go to Kip Mock. He says we really have to bring family crests back. I love this. You should be paying a firm half a million dollars to design the crest that your sons will wear on fat gold rings for the coming millennia. I do love that. I have some friends that have crest rings that they pass down. The best day to start a family tradition is today. Go and design this. I don't think you need to spend a half a million dollars if you don't have it. Obviously, if you do, if you're any sort of venture capitalist, that's kind of the bare minimum that you should be spending. But for the folks in the audience who are maybe a little bit scrappier, a little bit more bootstrapped, just. Just get in Figma and start.
Ask your calligrapher to make something.
Exactly. Yeah.
You already have him on staff.
Yes. Yes, exactly. But definitely get it in a gold ring and pass that down. Start wearing it today. Gifted to your, the oldest patriarch in your family. Give it to your dad. Give it to your grandpa, if he's still alive. And then when they pass away, they'll pass it down to you, and then you can say to your son, this was your grandfather's.
Yeah.
It doesn't matter that you got it to him when his. When your grandfather was 85. It will still be technically his and passed down.
Yeah.
And you should do the same thing with Patek Philippe. You should go and buy one and then gift it to the oldest, you know, patriarch in the family.
Yeah.
And then it will pass down fairly quickly. It's at the start. Hopefully not. But hopefully they live forever. But, you know, you will expect to have this at some point, but then it will be a fourth generation or third generation Patak or ring almost immediately, which is great. So get creative.
Yeah, it was funny because I commented on that and I was like, this is. Is Technology Brothers bait.
Yes.
And it works, clearly. But then he said, no, is Technology Brothers Inspired. So I just. The positive thing right now is we have this virtuous cycle of brothers in the community, both men and women, taking stuff from the show, creating new things. We then recycle it back. Now we're promoting family crests. And so, yeah, this is a very. It's a great cycle that we have going here.
Yep. That's great. Oh, this is. Should we do this one? Quantian. Quantian says this was the exchange that Beth said was one of the worst days of his life. Lmao. And it's a big, long fight between growing Daniel and Beth based. Beth. Jesus. Daniel says, so is Beth's company going to ship anytime soon? Beth says hardware takes time. Not building a GPT wrapper like many out there. Wink. And then Daniel says, it's a crypto mining thing. Right. That's exciting. And then Bev says, it's not. And then Daniel says, oh, okay. Blockchain something, though. And then Bev says, no, there's literally no crypto. It's just hardware for AI. And then Daniel says, oh, right, everything is AI Now. That's going to be big. Just like, dude, you're so online, Bev. Like, how did you get trolled like this? Come on. But I mean, just master poster.
Posters collide.
This is a war.
This is a war verse.
But you got it. You got to just post through it. The main thing to Beth is just don't hold the grudge. Like, you know, he. He won this round. You know, you got to get him back.
And the best way to mog somebody is by building a massive. You can't really mog Daniel.
Yeah.
By having a big audience on X. Yeah. It's one of the greatest posters of a generation. But you can.
Can.
You can mog by. By making Xtropic a great company.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, an Nvidia, you know, close competitor, even.
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, it is. I'm pretty sure Beth announced Xtropic like, a couple weeks before this post. And so Daniel's just, like, jumping, oh, really? It's a hardware company. Like, like. So he's like, is it. Is he gonna ship anytime soon? It's like, even, like, you know, like, hardware companies that people are not skeptical of.
Yeah.
It takes them a long time to ship things. Like, you know, like the companies that have gone on to become massively successful in hardware, like, Andro took a long time to ship because that's just the nature of these things. Like, and so Daniel's, like, really ribbing him. Like, hey, hey, have you shipped that Brand new chip. Immediately it's like, okay, probably not, but don't let them get to you, Beth. You gotta just move on. But oh well. One of the greatest interactions. Very funny on both sides. And honestly, you know, nice guys, like.
There needs to be, there needs to be something. So that was a screenshot, I guess maybe.
I think it got deleted. Yeah.
But there needs to be a, a museum called the Screenshot Museum. It's just a museum that you get to walk around and see the great moments of history that happened online that were screenshotted and then deleted. And I'd pay to go to that. So if you make it in San Francisco or New York, I think you'll have an audience.
Yeah, we need a new segment for like wars, like and, and we conflict. Like timeline, Timeline and turmoil. Yeah, timeline and turmoil. Because there's been a number of these where it's been like, okay, we're breaking down J, Cal and Palmer and we're going back on like 6 different posts. Yeah, there's the Robert Scoble thing and it doesn't really, it's not, it doesn't really work to just react to one post. You need to really understand the full context. So let's build out a segment for that. And this is related to our next post from Creatine Cycle Atlas. He's quoting Simp for Satoshi. Simfer Satoshi. I am Ginger Trash says this is becoming a universal slop indicator. Seeing this on your website plus contact us for pricing means you know you're about to talk to two of the most obnoxious 23 year old Stanford grads ever. And it's a screenshot of backed by Y Combinator. Simfer Satoshi, among other people. Been talking a lot of trash about YC lately. Very negative. We don't like that. Let's have some positivity. Let's keep, keep all this negativity towards the real, the real villains of our industry. The tech journalists. Please.
And the communists.
And the communists. YC is clearly on our side.
China would kill to have Y Combinator.
They would, they would, they would literally.
Kill us and take, they would leave. It would decimate everything. And they just take yc.
Yes. And who knows, maybe they're funding all the tech journalists to write hit pieces and take us down.
That's possible.
That would be a great psyop for them.
But we'll have to break. They won't be able to break that scoop for themselves. But if we can get scoop that shows the information people are worried about foreign money.
On cap tables through like seven layers of roll up vehicle and spv. Maybe the real thing you should be worried about is foreign money. The tech journalists.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the real risk.
We'll be breaking that news.
It happened in politics. There was a bunch of Russian money going out to YouTubers. It was very dramatic. But Atlas says this dude is carrying on like that weird guy at the club who approaches women, asks for their number, gets politely declined and then calls them ugly to their face. Interesting. A little on a non, on a non.
Warfare timeline in turmoil.
Timeline. Timeline and turmoil.
No, so, so I'm, I'm a torn here. I think YC is great. Even though I was rejected by it. I think Sim for Satoshi is a great thinker and has good ideas.
Yep.
Atlas is, is right though. I think Simfer Satoshi was like rejected from YC and they told him his idea wasn't going to work and then they like put out some requests for startups or one of the YC partners was like kind of. And so he has a personal vendetta against YC and he has an audience so he can, he can, he's, you.
Know, and there's a lot of people that want to commiserate over not being part of YC and want it not to be that cool. So they're kind of rooting against it. So it's good bait, but it's just, it's just kind of boring and played out. You know, just go build, you know, just, just, you know, there are plenty of companies that are great that didn't go through.
YC has yet to put a gun to someone's head and tell them join yc.
Yeah, or stop building because we're not funding you. Yeah, they never say that.
Yeah, they reinvite companies back all the time that get rejected.
I know a guy, you were. I know a guy who applied eight times in a row and got in and now his company is worth like $500 million in like insane.
Yeah.
And this guy was like 4.0 Harvard, like super, like super high status at every single moment. And it still took him eight times to get in. And I was running an AI company. And the ripping, it's, it's, it's amazing.
It's great.
Steve Jurvetson says, first time on the show. But you know, very famous metro capitalist, we love him. He says, the Starlink manufacturing line is the closest thing to a fully automated alien dreadnought that I have ever seen. It makes 4.7 million terminals per year and growing One subsection is the largest printed circuit board factory in America. This is great because we were talking to, we were talking about. Aaron slowed off saying, I don't know if there's a single company in America that builds defense technology that could produce 1 million of anything in a given year. If asked to, well, guess What?
He said 10,000.
Oh, 10,000. I think it's a million. Anyway, he said a big number. And Starlink's clearly beyond that. And Starlink is critical to national security very clearly. We've seen it have an impact in all sorts of different, you know, war fronts. And Elon's pulling it off. Obviously we need this in drones, we need this in dji, we need this in robots, we need this in cars, all sorts of things. But it's great to see that high volume manufacturing is.
Well, yeah, now there's. Think about how many engineers are working in that facility that can then go work at other companies and run that same playbook back. We're doing this in many ways with deterrence. The two engineering leads on the team were at Tesla and Rivian doing like scale battery cell manufacturing. And now they're working in a totally different sector, but running back the same manufacturing playbook that they learned at Tesla.
And there's always been this question about, oh, how do we bring back manufacturing? Do we just need to like retrain a ton of, you know, CNC operators or you know, like be very custom and very manual. But clearly, you know, this went from 0 to 60 very fast. And it, it's an entirely new system. It's probably built completely differently. And I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, you look in like 30 years and there's like, oh, there's something in there, some process that's maybe protected ip, maybe Elon's not talking about it. Maybe we just don't really understand it or have a word for it. But there's probably something in there that's like the, the Henry Ford, what was it called? Like the line, the, the assembly line. Like the assembly line is just something that is like so standard now, but it was created at some point and there's probably something in here that's, that's a new way of thinking about how to mass manufacture that will eventually be canonized and used everywhere and copy pasted and that, that will be like the future of manufacturing and it will all be new. And that's why we need new companies to build things that even seem like, oh well, yeah, there are primers. Right. Why do we need deterrence? Well, it's because, like, there's probably a. When you start fresh green field, you can build much faster in a completely different way that's less, more, maybe more capital intensive. Maybe less, maybe less bound by a human capital instead.
Yeah.
Okay, let's go to Neil Khosla. This is a good one. He says, son of Vinod Khosla, he's a VC himself. He says, reminder that as you see these VC transitions, that most of the time it's someone getting pushed out or artificially capped in power, not leaving by choice. And Willmanitis chimes in and says, the only generalized solution to the succession problem is murder. Taking it back to the, I don't know, like the 1600s, probably Machiavelli. Like that, that.
Yeah, well, so. So we, we posted something. I don't want to guess and say this was a response to something that we posted, but yeah, oftentimes when a GP leaves a fund, it's very happy on the surface and everybody's like, congrats, really excited for you. Like, can't wait to see what you do next. But then behind the scenes, like they were forced out or like they hate. They. There was a lot of hatred between the partners or somebody's like, the founders of the firm were just like, you're never gonna like, truly see your potential here. You should leave. So there's always a lot going on behind the scenes and a lot of.
It just depends on what do they do next. Like if they're retiring. Well, that makes sense. But if they're.
Logan. I was DMing with Logan and he was like, my favorite line is, I'm going to return to my operator roots.
Yeah. Did we say that on the last thing?
No, we didn't. We didn't. That's a common line.
Different.
Which is another way of saying my returns were terrible and I'm no longer.
Yeah, I mean, GP at a major fund is just like the best gig ever. It's so hard to turn that down under any circumstances. Yeah, you don't just leave that. But we'll leave it to you to read between the lines on this show. We'll spell it out as much as we can without getting murdered. Matt Marlinsky, good friend of the show, works with Mike Solana over at Pirate Wires. He is screenshotting a great interaction between Mike Solana and the all in podcast. He says the so called number one podcast can't think of an original idea. And an all in launched eight weeks of all in idle. And Mike says, jason, this is shameless, even by Your standards and shares. A screenshot of Pirate Idol, which Solana has been running for like two months. And so it's a, it's a format. You know, we like to have a lot of different formats here. We got some personnel news, we got the size gong. If you see a gong on all in, call us immediately because we're going over to Jason Calacanis's house and we're.
Gonna have to have a sit down.
We're gonna have to have a sit.
Down conversation and it'll probably be like the average board meeting at Lucy. A lot of.
Yep.
You know, basically an all out brawl.
I'm wearing a vest.
Yeah. Bulletproof.
Which one? It's not going to be Patagonia vest, but yeah, this is. This is ridiculous. I mean, you know, obviously the Pirate Idol is a riff on American Idol, but just to like decide a new. A new co host, like, it's very, very similar to what Pirate Wires is doing. And he could have switched it up and just used a different word because there are so many. He could have said, we're doing the Voice, you know, or like we're doing anything else.
We're doing survival chairs.
Yeah, yeah. Or just, just take it from a different. We're doing the Bachelor. We're doing the. We're doing, you know, any sort of like who Wants to Be a Millionaire and you know, and, and just adapt it. But don't just literally take the exact same concept. Rough. Anyway, Jason, you have a writer's room. Get him to do some more workshopping before you rip Solana again. It's not happy to see it.
John, I got to stop you right there. We have a promoted post from my friend Ill Science. Ill Science is actually a GP over at Andreessen. He's on the consumer AI front, but today I'm calling him lscience because he's also a recording artist and DJ and put out a song. Says, very excited to share my new record and first collaboration. Collaboration with the maestro and Molten Music label boss Homero Espinosa. Streaming on Spotify and everywhere else. You get your music. I downloaded the track. It's fantastic. It makes me wish that it was summer already. That's great. And anyways, go check it out. I love when. I love when people are excellent at one thing and then they pursue excellence in another thing. And like, you know, we've talked about this before, but. But for Ill Science, a break from investing to do music. Even though making music is hard and intense, it's still a break.
We got. We have to make a playlist. Because you know who else has released tracks? Elon Musk didn't know that. He released a track called Rip Harambe with someone else. Zuck released a cover of from the Window to the Wall. Get Low. Remember this? This happened a couple weeks ago.
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Armstrong, I believe, released an entire EDM album during the NFT craze. And you could like get the rights to it on an nft. It was just like a promotional thing, but he loves music. I'm pretty sure it was him. And then Justin Kahn, after he sold Twitch, him and his brother, who. His brother went on to co found Cruise, produced an entire DJ set called they Were the Khan Bros. And. And it was an incredible DJ set. It was on SoundCloud for a while. And when I got to YC, they. He had already like, sold his company. So he was like God in YC world. He's one of the first ones to really get serious liquidity. And they put out this DJ set and we would just listen to it all the time when we were grinding coding. It would just be Converse, Ben. Converse.
We need an official Technology Brothers playlist.
Yes.
L Science track.
Yeah. Throw that on there. And there's got to be more. I've just listed off like four off the top of my head. I'm sure there's like 10 others.
Yeah.
Folks who are. Who are in tech and DJs, because it's very adjacent. I. One of my first businesses was buying and selling DJ equipment. I'd buy it.
Oh, yeah.
Sell it internationally because they couldn't. You're an important thing.
International business.
International businessman at age 10 or something. But it's very, like, nerdy. I actually produced an entire EDM album in Fruity Loops, which is like the software that you could kind of like, piece things together. I sold one copy to a friend. I found the copy recently. It's terrible. But, you know, it was impressive for, you know, I think I was in middle school and. And something about EDM. It's very, very technical. Like deadmau5 is like a program or two and there's a lot of overlap there. So I think there's a lot of. A lot of music people in tech that, you know, need to just be surfaced. And I think they're playing we need.
A new music festival in tech that's not Burning Man.
Yeah.
Like, we need a. We need. We should maybe, you know. Yeah, I don't. I don't go to live music events much, but.
And Justin Khan put a. Put a song of him. I think it was actually at Burning man on his YouTube channel. Let me see if I can find this. And it was a banger song. It was him. He's just been putting up like live sets recently. It's so sick. He has. He did like some interviews. He did some other. Some other stuff. Where was this? Playing our first EDC or so at edc. Introducing Orso, which is, I guess is like his new. His new band or something. But he put together this whole like vibe reel and I. This, this song like really went hard. Isn't this good? I listen to this a lot. This is my playlist for a while. Justin Khan. This guy's sick.
Finding PMF to this song.
How tight is that?
That's awesome. You know?
You know, I know the words. I've listened to this so many times. It's really good. And it's just like he's playing like a massive stage, like man goals. Like, I. I love that.
You got to, if you're, if you're super liquid in, in tech, do some side quests.
It's just, you can just do things like, yeah, go win the boxing match or whatever. Go climb that, like, yeah, hit those 14ers, you know, a.
Do the Gumball 3000.
Do the Gumball 3000. Do a Parry Dakar. You know, get in the car, drive 3,000 miles. Do a cannonball, go to the moon.
You can just do things.
You can just do things. There's no excuse. Don't just be sitting around your mansion scrolling or whatever. Let's move on to Jason Way he says y' all heard it from the man himself. And it's Ilya Sutzkever talking about how pre training as we know it will end. Compute is growing. Better hardware, better algorithms, larger clusters. But data is not growing. We have but one Internet. It is the fossil fuel of AI. Lots of people talking about the data wall. Lots of people talking about how scaling.
Will scale AI is just somewhere so excited. Somewhere.
I think the stock is like way out too. It's wild.
Well, it's not public, but. You mean.
No, no, I mean I think like secondary demand and stuff is like doing really well. And, and, and it's. It's such a midwit take to be like, did you know that scale AI uses third party contractors? And it's like, yeah, that's the whole point of the business. Like, have you heard of comparative advantage? Like, this is like Econ 101 people. Like, you're not like blowing the doors off this thing by talking About. It's so. It's so embarrassing. When I see this take, I'm just like, yes. Like, obviously, like, you need to write a bunch of answers and generate a bunch of.
Did you know that Uber doesn't own cars, hire drivers on W2s?
It's not a bear case for the company. But, yeah, it's interesting. I was wondering, like, okay, so what, What. What could drive the next era of exponential data growth? Because it has to come from humans. And I was kind of thinking about what that could be and I think something along the lines of like a friend AI thing that you're wearing and it's recording 24 hours a day, 7 billion people. I think that actually might generate.
Yeah.
One or two more orders of magnitude of data.
Yeah.
And maybe that's useful data. I think some of it would be very useful, but it requires a lot of trust because, you know, it needs to be anonymized and.
Yeah, but that could be like a UBI type thing. Like if you wear the pendant, you get like $5 a day or the.
World coin pendant or something. Like, because.
Yeah, I think it was. Who's the super bass guy at xai?
Oh, yeah, I think.
Yeah, he was just like. Like, it's not that hard to get more data. You just like, take pictures. That was basically. Or like, put up cameras everywhere.
Cameras, video feeds. I mean, I was talking to Nat Friedman about this and he was like, oh, people are worried about, like, you know, will the AI be able to access the New York Times or something? And he was like, based on the data budgets of these AI companies, they could just buy all of the New York Times and just. Or they could just pay, you know, way more journalists. They could hire every single journalist, double their salaries, and they wouldn't even be scratching the surface of their data.
They could give every journalist a billion dollars and still have $200 billion left over, basically. UBI for journalists that so much heartache.
Could have been avoided with the New York times lawsuits if OpenAI had just sent over some dressage horses.
And they would have avoided a death, potentially.
Oh, my God. Oh, rough, rough, rough, rough. Andrew Huberman is saying, lock the clock. We discuss the clock. We love it. I like that he's coining a phrase. 4 K likes people know it.
You gotta lock the clock. Yeah, I said stop the. I thought, yeah, lock the clock is better.
And he cites Stanford Med. Laura Weed says S time is one is the one to lock in standard time year round gives people greater opportunity to get morning sunlight necessary to shorten the period of their central Circadian clock from 24.2 hours to 24 hours to maintain synchrony with the, I presume the sun because it says show more here. But he breaks it down. Yeah. This is great. I really hope this does happen. It would be so cool. I mean like I'd probably enjoy it like practically, but I think I would more. I would much more enjoy just the fact that we did something and the fact that something has changed, made something even like the Pluto thing, like the Pluto demotion. It's like you get to tell your kids. Oh yeah. Well, back when I was a kid, like there were more planets and then.
We learned more and then there's a petition.
You wanted to keep Pluto?
No, no, no.
You wanted to remove Pluto.
I was in favor of removing it. Don't give them the franchise.
Don't give them the franchise.
Like we've talked about, you know, there's people that want to take over Canada. They don't want to give them the state.
Yeah, yeah. It's real regulatory capture for the rest of the planet. It's just reducing the oligopoly on planethood. It's good. It's power law.
Yeah.
This is the way. Next step is get the gaseous giants out of here. You're not landing on those. What are you doing? Get them out of there.
Unless push them out.
Third rock from the sun, not third cloud from the sun.
Yeah, yeah.
Get some landmass.
Get some Neptune.
Yeah, I think Neptune's a gas one. I actually don't remember. Okay word grammar. He's been on the show before.
Emerging poster. Emerging poster of the year. Potentially.
Yep, yep, yep. Potential rookie of the year. I think I have done a complete 180 on Y Combinator's business model in the past 24 hours. All of the economic gains from AI startups will be made by precede investors. Any good AI product will be extremely hard to build but easy to scale. Interesting distributions. The bottleneck and moat. Put a little asterisk here behind the frontier labs, but they are special case and not representative the average startup. The funniest thing is that like of course the number one frontier lab like came literally out of Y Combinator.
Yeah.
But I like the reason we've been bullish on AI products.
I think this is generally a good take is that there's. We've seen this a lot with. With AI companies that raise pre product and then generate so much revenue and are making so much money so quickly with such a small team that by the Time a next financing happens, the company's raising 20 on 200.
Yep.
And it's just really hard to make like truly great returns doing that.
Yep.
And so because these companies oftentimes are not needing to do that intermediary. Oh, we're going to do 4 on 16 or something like that. They literally get the 1 yc round, maybe another 2 on 20 and then they're just making all this money. And so if you can buy a basket of those companies super early for pennies, it's like, yeah, but, but I don't think the critique of yc. Everybody, everybody, like the, the primary way that people try to critique it is by saying what's an important YC company that launched in the last like three years. Yeah. And it's like. But the critique has never been this is not a good business model.
Yeah. Oh yeah, totally.
Some people try to critique it of like, oh well, you're just having. It's a Ponzi scheme. Because you're just trying to have this company buy from this company and it's like, that's just like fundamentally like true, like yeah, of course they sell to each other early to get feedback. If you're enterprise, you should. Or B2B, you should sell internally.
Let's do one more promoted post. We'll close with this and then we'll get out of here and hop on.
I can't think of a better ending promoted post of the day than from our friends at Dupont Registry.
Fantastic.
They have a 2024 Ferrari Purusangue. Presented in blue Corsa. This has an asking price of only $679,000. 908. Yeah. $679,000. And I gotta say, these have been floating into the 7 hundreds frequently. This is a fantastic spec. It is powered by a naturally aspirated V12, delivers over 700 horsepower, ensuring thrilling performance and a 0 to 60 time of around 3.3 seconds. Not as fast as my turbo, but pretty good to be able to fit a family in it. And it's just a great looking car. I started seeing these around la and.
The thing about the Purosangue is it is an expensive car. But think about what you get. It's a performance car, it's a luxury car and it's also potentially a family car. But it's something you can do business in. If you're a vc. You can take the whole founding team. It's not just you and the CEO. Throw the CTO in the back, throw the chief operating officer in the back.
Chief of staff, even go out to.
Nobu, get some sushi.
Don't say it, though. Don't say it must.
But. But, you know, bring the whole team. And fundamentally, it is a lot of money, but it's a lot of car.
Yeah.
And so, you know, you get what you pay for in this life.
Yeah.
You got to have money to make money.
Yeah.
If you're buying.
If you're buying Ferrari, if you bought an SF90 aftermarket and over the last couple years, you lost like 500k, something like that.
Make it all back.
Yeah. I don't know if you're going to make it all back if you daily drive it, but you'll make it all back spiritually by being in a. In a truly great.
Well, you will show the Ferrari dealer. You'll show your dealer that you're committed to the brand.
Yeah.
You took the bath on the SF90. Maybe you're prepared to take another bath. But when the. When the F80 comes up, you're getting made program, you're getting an allocation, and that's what it's about in this life.
That's where you'll make it back.
That's great. Let's close with Rat Limit. Rat Limit has a fantastic bait post.
Thank. Thank God for posters with great usernames because it would make the show would be much less interesting.
Yeah. It was just Steve. Steve Ratlam. It says that poly impulse to hack relationships with tech. I printed QR codes on my gf's panties. Her Playmates get instant access to an info sheet on my and our boundaries. A bit nerdy. Yup. But what won her over? I 100% trust you. I want to trust your sweeties too. And it's a picture of some underwear with a QR code on it. And I mean, this is one of those things that I'm like, I'm 90% sure this is a bait post, but it's like so real that it could be.
Yeah. So I don't. I'm fortunate that whatever side of Tech X that we're on, this stuff doesn't pop up for me. Except if somebody's dunking. Yeah, this was a dunk. Yeah. This was a screenshot. I think it's probably deleted, but I think it was.
I think it was designed to bait. And I think if you look at the rest of the post and some of the replies were like, crying, laughing, like, okay, people get it. Obviously. You know, polyamory is very popular in the Bay Area. This is kind of a play on that. But why I want to highlight this is not for the culture war debate over poly, but instead the beauty of the virality here, that there's a picture of a item with a QR code on it. And when you scan the QR code, you actually get taken to this info sheet, this website that this person built that has more content about this post. And again, I think it's very funny. I don't know if it's real, but it creates this cycle where you have to scan the image, but the image is on your phone. So it's kind of tricky. You need a second phone or something to scan the QR code, but then you're taken to this website. And I think that there's something here from a format perspective that could be very viral marketing for a company. And so, like, if we did a drop and we were like, we're dropping these coffee mugs, and the coffee mugs have our logo on one side and a QR code on the other side, but then when you scan the QR code, they take you to some video or some website that we design. It becomes this, like, online to offline to online experience. And then people are going down this rabbit hole and then they will screenshot where the QR code takes you and share that and it becomes this like, rabbit hole for these people. And I think that's a big part of why this went so viral, was that it wasn't just, there's a QR code and I've blurred out the QR code. No.
Yeah.
It's like the QR codes there, you can see. And if you went on there, there were all these other jokes and stuff baked in. It was very high effort and I thought it was a very good marketing stunt. If it's a marketing stunt, even if it's. Even if it's real and it's cringe, there's clearly a lesson in there for.
I respect the innovation.
I respect the innovation. Exactly.
Do your thing. Rat limit.
So let's wrap up there. I gotta hop on with the Vatican. So I will talk to you later. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas.
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