How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, Some Personnel News, Absolute Dawgs, Build that Ego

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we are covering Max Meyer's latest edition of arena magazine. You've heard us talk about it before. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of literature, literature that you can buy quarterly magazine from Max. If you don't know Max. Great guy, great follow on X. Some great posts, talks about a lot of different things. Works with Joe Lonsdale at 8VC and has started publishing this beautiful magazine all about techno, optimism, technology, companies, business making.

The moon, estate, everything.

He covers tons of stuff. And the. And it's just beautifully, beautifully made. You really have to go and pick one of these up. He has a deal. It's not that expensive. I think it's 100 bucks a year, 25, giving him a pop. And it's something that you, you could just have on your coffee table and people could leaf through and it's just, it's so. Well. And you know what the best thing about this is? Monetized from day one. Beautiful ads in the very first edition.

See that ramp ad in there?

Yeah. Fantastic. This ramp ads great. There's a great levels ad. There's tons of beautiful ads in here, which we love to see.

Yeah. This is just a good example of even if you're monetizing through your users, you should still know directly via subscription, still run ads.

Right.

I want to see more substacks, paid substacks, running ads.

Right, Exactly. And he said, he said something interesting where he's like kind of building this community of advertisers. I think one third of the tech stack that he uses to build the magazine and run is, is an active advertiser. So it's kind of like a one hand washes the other situation. But there's just a beautiful layout. You can just see that. You just don't get this in any other magazine. It's just, it's just very, very rare. And it's just so, so fun.

So many interesting pieces. It's the same level of. I don't know, when you were, when I was a kid, I subscribed to Popular Science. Yeah. Which these days is probably like popular propaganda. But the same level of excitement that I used to get as a kid getting Popular Science in the mail, which was just like euphoria. I got this with Arena.

Now there, there is one. I have to take one issue with this. It's printed in, in Canada.

Some Canada. Canada where.

Yeah, it's some far off place. And so hopefully they can clean that up because I don't know what's that?

Actually feels a little off. Touch off. But you wouldn't want it to rub off.

No, no, Definitely not.

Put on some gloves.

But a ton of interesting articles in this edition. They have a whole deep dive on Rahul, who you might know as Ligma. The ballad of Rahul Ligma. Rahul Sonwalkar and how he built his company. And it goes through his prank at X. Formerly Twitter. Outside with the box. One of the greatest moments in tech history.

The reaction time on that is incredible. And only a real poster could have done that because oftentimes when a news breaks, you have 20, 30 minutes to get a banger out.

Yeah.

And he didn't even just get a banger. He physically got there with a box.

I had scrambled the night before this happened.

Yeah.

And he was not planning. He wasn't talking.

No, it was at the moment.

Woke up and just did.

Just like most. Most posts are created in the moment.

And the acting, like, you can see it on his face that he's just like so incredible actor. It's so funny. And there was a time when that. When like, these types. There's a whole movie about this. The. It's called, like the Other Guys or something where this. This. This comedy troupe basically figured out how they could go on the BBC and they would. They would act like they were oil executives and be like, yes, we're really sorry for what we did. We're giving away $10 billion. And the stock would drop and they would get sued. They didn't have any money because they're just trolls. It was like, amazing. And this was like that. This is like that level.

Well, the. The funny thing is I remember that happening and I. And I knew Daniel. Like, I. I'd met up. I'd actually funny enough met up with him at Arawan once. And so watching that unfold live, I was like, wait, this is. This is like, obviously not real. But even a large part of X like, didn't know that it was a prank. Yeah, everybody was pranked at once. And it took, like, a while for people to be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. These are posters. These are not.

He was texting me as, like, as the day went on, kind of talking about, like, hey, all these journalists are like, hitting me up now to tell my story. We were like, do not say anything. Just like, let the meme live. You crushed it. And it just led to all these incredible meetings. I mean, here's a picture of him with Jensen Wong. Here's a picture of him with Elon Musk.

No, it's amazing because they both parlayed that into building like very unique, very interesting businesses.

Yeah, exactly. They didn't get hooked on the stunts, they didn't become content creators. But, but it's just fantastic. And I mean there's a bunch of other cool articles in here. There's one. I mean look at this there. And back again, celebrating the SpaceX catch.

The greatest catch of all time.

Fantastic. Just so, so nice to see these in print. Then a beautiful ad for Intercom and some questions about.

Yeah, I guess the question is like if you're running a scale up or even an early stage company, why are you not advertising in this seriously right now? Because it's such a way to signal to the tech elite that you get it and that you're cool.

Yeah.

Even if your brand isn't even that cool by itself.

Yeah. And it's a really, it's a really lovely tour of like the new generation of tech founders. Like Nor Siddiqui is in here for Orchid Health and, and you will see her and other people mentioned in this, in this article also in like the Jason Carmen S3 video series. But then now this lives in like the print world as well. And there's a few different kind of like it's almost like the media junket when you're doing like a promotion for a movie you'll go and you'll do like Jimmy Kimmel and then Fallon and then Colbert or whatever. And the tech version of that is like you do Jason Carmen S3, you go on Dwarkesh or you go on, you know, some other podcast and then you write an article for Max in Arena.

Yeah. If I was a series A stage founder, right now I'd be trying to get a feature in this magazine at all costs because how do you get in front of a more curated group of people in tech?

Yeah. San Francisco strikes back and just like wonderful layout, Wonderful, wonderful to look at open source defense capital, mission to Europa. Just beautiful. I love this. I'm excited to read through this more. I just received it in the mail two days ago. But we wanted to do a deep dive today on kind of the lead hero piece of this edition. And did you read the, did you read the actual letter from the editor where Max writes America Punk? The whole thesis of this particular. The first page here, the second page. So the first page is Max introducing the the corporation name. A message from the president of the Intergalactic Media Corporation of America. Very bullish on making humanity multi planetary. But what I found Interesting was his article on America punk. Just this idea that, that you can wind up. And this really struck a chord with me because his basic thesis is like, is like good things are good. But it's sometimes boring to say that. And so he kind of walks through like, capitalism is good for a bunch of reasons. It's lifted 2 billion people out of subsistence poverty and it's the greatest engine for human flourishing since we've captured fire. And people will say, oh no, that's bad. Going to space will be very expensive. The idea of learning is racist. Western medicine is racist. And so there's these wars between, like, you know, bad things are good, good things are good. But at a certain point it becomes boring to just say good things are good. It's boring. Like really boring. It's a tautology. It's what your dad believes. And once you admit that good things are good, then you have to spend your time making and defending good things, which is hard because good things are often hard.

Well, it's funny because it actually became countercultural to be like, no, capitalism is amazing.

It did, right?

Like, I feel like as a 28 year old, I grew up in a school system in which the teachers, which ironically the American public school system, the teachers were saying like, here's all the issues with capitalism. And like really fixating on the issues. Not talking about the advancements in medicine, education, housing, all these different things that have allowed for human flourishing.

Yeah. And so Max argues that if, but even if defending good things isn't very interesting, it's still important. And so good things need to be made cool again. America needs to be made punk. America needs America. Punk.

Yeah.

And so as one of the world's best things, America has a problem. It's currently very boring to defend America. As of now, supporting America means your dad waving a flag on the 4th of July, your mom scolding you to be more grateful at dinner. Defending America means a solemn, forced flag day singing in elementary school. But if you wanted to defend America in a cool way, how would you go about doing it? And his answer is that you'd celebrate rebelliousness, the spirit that made the country. There's nothing cooler than a rebellion, and that's America punk. And so he wants to separate it from the these visions of the future that are like steampunk, cyberpunk, atom punk, that are too narrow around a particular technology and refocus on the spirit of the American people, which I think is very, very interesting. So grab a flag in a magazine, tell your friends to join the Party. Because if good things are good, then defending good things is better together. And then he says, thanks, well said. And it's just a very. Yeah, it is an interesting thing that, like techno optimism has become consensus. There's this idea that, you know, everyone is posting like, oh, the next four years are going to be amazing. Unbridled capitalism.

I mean, that is very much a. We are in somewhat of a bubble, even though it's, it's overlaps with the real world, but we still need to continue doing it even though it's mainstream within technology now.

Yeah, but there's something about, like when you're, when you're on top of the world and you're, you know, just winning and it's very consensus, like there's nowhere to go but down. Yeah, that's very risky. So I think he's, he's right to identify that we need to think deeper about what, like rah, rah, technology actually means. Good that he's thinking now instead of, well, a year when people are like, oh, yeah, it's boring. Like, I'm not into this, I'm not motivated by this.

Yeah. And that ties into Joe's piece, which is it's not enough to just be excited about technology. You actually need to. And I think a lot of our, A lot of the technology being errors out there are starting to realize that there is, you sort of can reach a level of impact in the private markets and then to have the next order, you know, of magnitude of impact, you need to get involved with government.

Yep.

Because it's a huge, huge critical aspect of our society. And the people that run the government and the decisions that they make have a massive impact on our quality of life. And so many different systems, from mental health institutions to prisons.

This is a massive shift from a decade ago where Balaji gave that talk at Y Combinator called Silicon Valley's ultimate exit. Are you familiar with this? So there's this. I forget what his name is. There's some philosopher and he basically said, like, when you're, when you're living within a society that has a particular government, you have a few options. Voice, exit and something else. I'm blanking.

Yeah, all of this.

But basically it's like you can stay and fight and try and reform the government or you can leave. And biology was part of the, you know, libertarian crew that was like, let's go to maybe New Zealand, let's do seasteading, let's do ice steadying, let's, let's do, you know, interplanetary Colonization, let's leave. Because things are so broken, we can't fix it. And that was the dominant thesis of most Silicon Valley elites for a long time.

Yeah.

And only recently. I feel like people have shifted.

No, I. My personal, sort of personal anecdote here. During COVID living in L. A, things were getting so dark. Yeah. I mean, it sounds silly saying this, but, like, they couldn't. They didn't let you go to the beach. Really. Basically couldn't be outside. I was like, why am I living in California if I can't go outdoors and be away from people Left California during that time. So. And I. And I got very caught up in that. My. My experience in, like, April of 2020 was like on Zillow, looking at property in Austin and Miami and getting very caught up in. Up in that. And fortunately, I decided to stay in California and sort of like, try to have a small impact. So I. And that ended up having. Being like, you know, I ended up backing, like, a city councilwoman who came in and made a tremendous impact on the west side. Right. Ended up, more recently supported our new DA Hawkman, who is, you know, going to do it, have an incredible impact, sort of cleaning up the city, making crime illegal again, doing things like that. And so I decided to say, like, no, I was born and raised in California. I'm staying here. I'm going to make it better, even in small ways. And if, If. If people with agency just decide to leave, things will just get worse and worse and worse.

Yeah. Yeah.

So we looked it up.

It's Albert Hirschman, exit voice and loyalty. So you can leave the government that you're under. You can have a voice and try and change the government, or you can just be loyal to the government. And I think no one in tech wants to do the last one. That's why I couldn't even think of it because no one's advocating for that. But. But it is interesting that Joe went through a period of exit with regard to California, but has chosen to opt for voice.

Well, it's also. He didn't exit the United States. Yeah. He started whatever. University of Texas or what's the name.

Of the University of Austin.

University of Austin. Which is like, hey, we actually need to.

Yeah.

You know, create these sort of, like, hideouts where we can build the movement without, you know, so you can think.

Of them as kind of like long America, short California, which is like a totally reasonable trade.

Yeah.

And so this is fascinating because, you know, you think of him as like, you know, Palantir almost PayPal mafia esque guy, very libertarian, and yet he's writing this article that's literally called how to Spend a Trillion Dollars. And so you, you know, the, the drumbeat of the technologist and the libertarian for so long was just spend less, spend less, spend less. And he's completely reframing this thought experiment to say, what happens if you get a dozen top entrepreneurs in the United States together? And just tell, just ask them, how would you spend a trillion dollars? Not, he's not talking about buying artwork or planes, the type of things lottery winners might spend a new fortune on. Rather, how would they spend public money to strengthen the future of American society? And suppose further that you could skip the red tape. How would it be different than the way we currently spend trillions? And so he breaks this down into nine parts. And I love all of these. They're very pragmatic, but they're also very techno optimistic. And it's just a fascinating tour of all the different problems in America right now and how you could go about solving them if you were very aggressive with the spending but also very like laser focused. So the first proposal he has is for $200 billion.

The small price crush traffic and the.

Cost of living in our 50 largest metropolitan areas. And so his, his argument here is that the average traffic, the annual cost of traffic congestion in Texas has reached over $1,000 per commuter in wasted fuel and time, with the average commuter, commuter losing 54 hours in traffic each year. And LA residents, as you well know, lose over 80 hours in traffic per year. For you, probably a month.

80 hours a month now for me, I wouldn't say I lost it because I'm either doing deals or listening to founders podcast. Right. There's no.

It's all about frame of mind.

Yeah, yeah, frame of mind, but.

Or are charging $10,000 an hour on intro.

Yeah.

So if you're making money while you're on the call, then you're good.

Yeah.

But basically, you know, he's saying Los Angeles can't build a subway tunnel for less than a billion dollars per mile. How could 200 billion meaningfully improve 50 cities? The answer is competence. Here I want. I once wrote the mayor of Austin about new technology with proven economics, tunneling. And so he's advocating for building more tunnels. Most likely. Yeah.

This is a boring company. So the boring company is like that sleeper company in the musk portfolio that everyone hates it.

Dude, if you go on YouTube and you search like boring company update, it's just all of these communists posting videos of Elon Musk with a clown nose on. And they're like, it's not working. It's not working. And it's like you don't realize that you're giving him the attention. Like, you could have made those same videos about Tesla for 10 years where they, like, were barely shipping any cars.

Yeah.

It's like you don't understand how this works. Like, he spends 20 years on something, and then all of a sudden it's like there are tunnels everywhere. Like, there are too many tunnels.

Yeah.

It's like most people would say, like, too many Teslas out there now.

Yeah. So my. My. My roommate work for the Boring Company. My roommate. The first year I lived in. In LA out of school. And, yeah. He ended up moving to Vegas because that was, like, where they could get a deal done. And they. They're building out a bunch of tunnels there. So I'm excited.

I mean, that'll love to harp on. Oh, the tunnel got some water in it. It's flooding, it's failed. And it's like, maybe, but maybe not. Maybe he'll just keep working on it and he'll just fund it forever until it works. And. But the very, like, fundamental, like, economic physics, like, the laws of physics around the project, to me are just so obvious because it's like you have a resource which is essentially land underneath cities that's extremely valuable that no one has access to.

Yeah.

So if you can get access to. Incredibly valuable.

Yeah. Theoretically, there's way less laws if you go 100ft underground than above ground, where it takes a billion dollars to make a mile of track, because there's so much regulatory burden and approvals needed. And. And, oh, we need to buy. We need to, like, buy this person's property for some egregious price because, like, you know, 10 square feet of it, like, touch where the track would be, all that kind of stuff. So just the solution is just, like, go underground.

And I think there was this. There was a. There was a change in the law where you used to. If you bought property you used to own, like, technically, essentially everything from the core to the earth, all the way to the sky.

Yeah.

And then eventually they said, no, there is a cap, so planes can fly over you and stuff. And.

And they did that underground. It used to be that if you owned a piece of land, you could pull as much water from the aquifer below you as you wanted. And now everybody's like, no, this is actually a shared resource. Like you. You can't just pull as much as you want?

Well, have you ever been on the Red Line out to Harvard in Boston or Cambr now it's the craziest thing. So you're on this train that's just going straight. Like subway just works really well. And then all of a sudden it slows down and starts screeching as you're pulling into Harvard. And the reason is because in 1776 or something, George Washington wrote a letter to Harvard and said I am granting you this land permanently, no matter what, cannot be revoked under any circumstances. And so they own the land like forever and all the way to the core still. They have some like tech, they have some like different definition of what real estate means for them. And so when the subway came they were just like no. Which is really stupid because it would have been so much better for everyone if they just been like yes, self owned. But, but, but yeah, it like, it like screeches around the corner to get there because crazy. Because they were like no, like you can't, you can't dig under us.

Like yeah, that's our dirt.

We own everything. And, and our proof is a letter from George Washington. Like because they were there before, before the country. It's older than the country, I'm pretty sure. I think it's like 1600. It's crazy. So Joe maps out a couple more stats. He says, he says While saving over 90% versus above ground infrastructure with costs of a single tunnel about 10 million per mile. Adding a second direction in some places as well as stations and egress about every mile brings the total cost to 25 million per mile. In 2020, we mapped out a sample Austin system for 1 billion. Connecting the airport, several downtown locations and the Q2 soccer stadium. The project has more connections than the proposed 5 billion above ground rail line. At a fifth of the cost for 5 billion it connects a much larger.

Yeah and the interesting thing with tunnels is it's actually like a very good fit for like robo taxis because it's such a more controlled environment. You're not going to have like a dog run through like some kid come out of school run out or like cars doing crazy stuff.

Tesla like could do that. Self driving system could easily do that, no problem. And is like that's kind of what's what, what's happening in the Vegas.

Yeah. And every time you think that like I would love to see like the Walt Disney. Walt Disney had his like you know, master plan multi year of like how all of his companies interact. Like I'm sure Elon has his Version of that. He's like, we're building the robo taxis, which will be ready when like all of my tunnel networks, like, come online. And then like all, every you. 50% of people that move in the United States will be in like a, in one of our tunnels or like one of our cars or both at the same time.

It really is just like Musk Inc. 1%. So let's go to number two. Joe Lonsdale says for 100 billion, take back our prison system from incompetent bureaucrats. Says America has two forms of Stockholm syndrome in its approach to criminal justice. Coming from the extremist left, there is a desire to coddle violent criminals and allow repeat victimization in the name of social justice. But across the political spectrum, there's another problem. The total capture of the prison system by bureaucrats, unions and corporations whose incompetence we tolerate. Speaking of Stockholm, when the American criminologist Francis Cohen won this, won the Swedish government Stockholm Prize, he proposed to spend $10 billion in new prisons. His framework was as follows. Ten prisons will be developed, each funding each funded at 1 billion each. A competition of proposals would be undertaken in which states would partner with criminologists and prison experts from around the world, as well as from private enterprises to set forth a model for prisons. Each prison proposal must be shown to a rational, scientific and to nourish the development of prisoners. In each proposed prison, each prisoner must be engaged every day in activity, education, work or treatment. And there would be ongoing process and outcome evaluation by a team of researchers. The Cullen framework is a fine start, but if a bit idealistic, not all prisoners need to be nourished. Some are hardened killers to be locked away. But approximately 600,000 people leave prison each year and an estimated 95% of prisoners will eventually return to our society.

And so yeah, this segment on like paying for. There's been a few. Well, yeah, paying for performance, like almost like recruiter style, where if you work with a recruiter in tech and they don't find you anyone good and you don't hire anyone, you don't really, you know, maybe you pay a little bit like a small retainer, but you don't pay much. And the same concept is, is being has been applied. It was applied and he talks about, was applied in Arizona where the state allowed county governments to collect up to 40% of the cost savings to the state when fewer people under their parole and probation supervision went back to prison. And so that incentive just allowed, made the institutions actually care about, care about the long term outcomes of their prisoners, which I think is fantastic.

Palmer Luckey actually said that he was thinking about doing private prisons, but before starting. And Andrew was just like a much bigger, much more important job.

But yeah, but we did Palmer.

Interesting. Yeah. And it is crazy that he, I mean he mentioned that like maybe five years ago. I'm surprised that no one's run with it and we haven't seen like a venture backed prison startup.

But that sounds like a task for Willmanitis. Probably Will and Theo can do that.

Yeah.

Maybe for their next, Their next big one.

Yeah, I mean like if Palmer's throwing out ideas like that you would think. But it's not enough to just say like, oh, Palmer, like validated the idea so I'm running it.

Like, it's clearly like it takes a very special person to be able to do that and thread the needle. Yeah, yeah, the. And also it's just that, you know how.

I'm sure it's a very rough like industry to work in. Like my mom was a nurse in prisons and like, it's just brutal at every level. Like from like the sheriff department, like while she was there. I think the sheriff like went to prison because he was like super corrupt.

Like, well, what about all those. There were, there were a handful of tech elite that went to prison because they were paying to get their kids into schools. And so we need to go after those people who are like, experience the prison system and be like, hey, like, let's make a change here, Martha Stewart. You understand, you understand the product, right? Like, let's like makes this better. But you know, when people will, will post a picture of like a Nordic prison, like it'll. They'll try to like critique it and be like, look how nice this prison is. Like, like, I'm sure that people just want to go to prison. It's like nobody wants their freedom taken away. Which our prisons should be places that allow in general. Like there's people that are too far gone. I strongly believe that that just need to be locked up forever. Like they just, you know, didn't fail the test. Like you, you know, you should be gone. But then there's this whole contingent of people that obviously should be in an environment that is conducive to personal growth, to learning, to even just being in a mental state that allows them to think more positively about life. Right. And like build their self esteem back up. Because, you know, going and being thrown in effectively a dungeon is not going to be conducive to the mindset that you want those people, when they are those 600,000 people that are released every year, you want them to be in a mindset where they don't hate the system. Right. Because then they're just going to continue to rebel.

I wonder what Martin Scarley thinks about prison reform. I bet he would have some very interesting takes.

He talked to, I mean, he talked about, he talked about at Hereticon, he talked a bit about his, his experience in prison and, and why you have Diddy and SBF in the same. In the same prison in Brooklyn. But longer, longer conversation there.

Yeah. Let's move on to part three. Joe says, for $100 billion, build 21st century mental health institutions. So very related to the previous point. We'll, we'll read the lead in here. At the peak of institutionalization in 1955, nearly half a million people in the United States were in mental hospitals. The 1962 book One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and the movie 2 dramatically changed how Americans viewed that system. And not totally without reason. The system had obvious defects and needed reforms. But generations later, after we ended nearly all institutionalization, we have a serious crisis in our society. And many people with serious but treatable mental illnesses that would have benefited from institutionalization have been left to prison and the street.

So this, this was the thing that stood out here. This guy Christopher Ruffo found that in his home state of Washington, the per capita number of state mental health hospital beds had declined by over 90% since the 60s. And anybody who's been out in the real world, like, would. Would probably guess that, like, our mental health issues have not sort of reduced by 90%. And you can see that on the street. The streets. And, you know, I know I was talking to, to a CEO that, like a very successful, like, founder CEO, talking about his, you know, family's like, battles with, you know, bipolar and how alone you feel when you're dealing with that. Because there's no. It's literally like it is 100 on the family to provide that level of care. And there's almost like no quality resources that can help kind of like address that. It's incredibly challenging to deal with.

Yeah, it's interesting because at least in California, there's this story that might be somewhat apocryphal that like all of the mental health institution closures are due to Ronald Reagan. And I'm not sure how true that is. I'm sure it was like a process, but it's fascinating because it's, it's actually a very libertarian and Somewhat right wing philosophy, but if you look on a political compass, there's like left wing libertarianism, right wing libertarianism, they're kind of two different things culturally. But there is a libertarian argument to say, you know what, keep the government out of everything. Keep the government out of my mind. Keep the government out of what I do. If I want to sleep on the street, that's, that should be my freedom. But the argument that I've heard that's much better and much more convincing to me is that, no, like, as a society we have a duty to step in and help people who are suffering and, and it is unacceptable to let someone do drugs to death on the street. And we have a moral duty to step in, even if that does have a little bit more of an authoritarian bent relative to the libertarian. Like you can just do whatever you want. But it's odd. The libertarian position has kind of been adopted by the left to some degree because you would normally think that of someone who's like, well, no, I don't want my tax dollars going to a mental institution. And no, if I go crazy, I want to be able to do whatever I want, like stay out of it. Right. That's kind of a, that's kind of a libertarian position. And yet it's become like the standard on the left very oddly.

Yeah. Which is why, I mean, I think this entire piece is, is a very interesting perspective from Joe, who's very libertarian.

Exactly.

Generally to just like take an opinion of like, okay, like I'll run this exercise of how you might. Because the money's going to get spent one way or another.

Yep.

It's like a venture backed startup. Like if you raise, the United states raises like 5, 6 trillion dollars a year. Like they're going to spend the money.

Yeah, yeah. Let's go to number four. Number proposal number four is for $50 billion, you can make our, our inner cities a place where children thrive. Lonsdale endorses Brad Gerstner's idea to give every American child. Oh, whoops, that's the wrong one. Lonsdale proposes spending $50 billion to replicate successful community programs like the Harlem Children's Zone. I hadn't heard about hcz. Have you heard about this? No, because it's funded by Jeffrey Canada and Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller and it covers an area of 100 blocks in Harlem. And apparently it's been, it's been remarkably successful and very, very high roi. And so his argument is just like, we need to scale this. The one program that's actually working. Basically, just, like, put more wood behind fewer arrows. Confronting issues directly, such as a need for male role models and addressing maternal drug use. The program has significantly improved test scores and future income prospects for participating children. And there was some stat in here about. Yeah, I love this one. The benefits to the public are enormous. Converting a high school dropout to a high school graduate is worth more than $250,000 in public costs over a lifetime.

Incredible.

Like, huge. Hugely. Hugely. This is exactly like where the government should be investing.

Yep.

So I love that. Scaling such models would involve rewarding programs that achieve measurable, positive outcomes, aiming to reduce intergenerational poverty and. And creating environments where children can succeed. Love it. There's some great pictures from the Harlem Children's zone.

Yep.

Step five is for $100 billion. Give every American child a stake in our economic future.

Yeah. So this has been something that Brad over at Altimeter has been talking about for years and is actually making some substantial moves on because it's. It's really not that great of an investment to give every new child in America a thousand dollars in an index fund the day that they're born. And over time, you know, through compounding, it'll become, like, a very meaningful amount of money that would help them buy their first home, pay for college, and teach them about the power of compounding growth, which we understand here on this podcast because we went from zero to a thousand followers on X in, you know, a few weeks. And we're going to get to that second, you know, thousand follower mark, 2,000 in about seven days. So people, like, the more that we can educate the youth in this country on compounding growth and be able to not just, like, learn about it, but experience it directly. I think that'll be very powerful.

Yeah, it is really hard to get hooked on long term compounding growth.

Yeah.

Like, it's so easy to experience the euphoria of buying a lottery ticket. Like, I still remember the day I bought my first lottery ticket and I was like, I'm going to win for me, the only lottery ticket I ever bought.

Yeah.

But for that, like, week, while I was waiting for the numbers to come up, I was, like, completely delusional.

Yeah.

I was like, of course I'm not going to win. Like, this is so stupid. I should never do this. But. But it's very hard for something that grows slowly. So imagine if, like, over the first 10 years of your life, you're just watching this account go up and up.

And up and you're Just not being able to touch it.

Exactly. Because like the other psychologically at a.

Very young age, we're, we're, you know, we obviously love bubbles and speculation and you know, being risk on, but kids are getting exposed to meme coins in like middle school.

I know.

Which is like an unregulated lottery. Like they, you have to be 18 to buy a lottery ticket, right?

Yeah.

So these kids are able to go in middle school, buy Solana meme coins and you know, they think they're going to turn $17 into $3 million like that guy did with, with Peanut. But it's teaching this sort of like experience of instant gratification and low effort for potentially extreme roi. But it's basically just encouraging, you know, gambling or lottery ticket buying. So, yep, it's a big issue.

Step six in Joe's plan is for $50 billion, restore the American industrial skill base.

Yeah, so this, this, this, this reminded me a few episodes ago, I was talking about a guy that I use for like handyman stuff telling me like, oh, I'm learning how to like build websites. And I told him, I was like, that's great. But like you realize there's, there's infinite other things that you could do that you're probably already like more competent in that if you just really specialized you could make a very meaningful like six figure income and have like very little competition in doing that. We don't need people that, we don't need more people that know how to build websites. Right. We need more people that know how to do like, you know, I think.

Somewhere in this article example is tooling engineers. So he opens with Apple CEO Tim Cook once remarked, in the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields. And this is why they're kicking, kicking our ass on, on you know, iPhone and electronics manufacturing. Manufacturing broadly because there's so many integrated parts and there's so many, you know, little CNC engineers, little, you know, all sorts of little tools that need to be made and the tools that make the tools, like there's like 20, 20 layers deep in the supply chain and we've just lost so much of that.

Yeah. And I think we're in this amazing moment in time where we have like a bunch of friends of the podcast that are building, you know, people like Aaron, the Dirac kid, I forget his name. Phil. Right. So people like Aaron and Phil that are building manufacturing company here in the us Hadrian Deterrence so many important companies, but what they're going to run into like a big challenge is not even just making these new manufacturing systems, but is a talent thing, right? Like how do you actually find people that are qualified? And a lot of these companies will end up in a place where they're like, we have six open roles that are all six figure jobs and we don't know where to find these people. Right. And it's actually good for the people that do know how to do it. But a lot of those people are retiring, right? They're not. We need a new influx of manufacturing talent. And these are very like, they are jobs that require you to like use your hands and use your body. But they're jobs that will give people real dignity over going and working at Chipotle, you know, or going and working in the McDonald's drive thru because you're being very productive. You're like producing things that matter, not just producing junk food.

And there are some risks. Have you heard of the Sonoran Desert Institute? Sdi? Have you ever heard of this? Okay, so it's a very popular sponsor on gun YouTube. So gun reviewing YouTube, they often say if you're interested in getting into like the manufacturing, gunsmithing, you should go to the Sonoran Desert Institute, which is an online college blew up during COVID and they teach you like the basics of how to use machinery and use tooling to become a gunsmith and go work in the arms industry. Very cool idea. And the economic model works very well for them because they're GI Bill compliant. And so if you come back from the military and you have GI Bill dollars that you could put towards college, you can put that towards sdi. Now there was a bunch of criticism recently about SDI not actually driving better outcomes and kind of just giving you like very well.

It's tough because like gunsmithing is such a do like a lot of these things like are better suited for an apprentice model. So I want to see trade schools that have government incentives that then feed you and do apprentice programs. And people like I always tell, you know, I told, you know, my, my handyman buddy, I'm like, go find somebody who's very talented at one specific thing and offer to work for them for $30,000 a year and do 12 hour days and do that for two years and you'll come out of that being close to an expert, right? Like you'll learn enough during that period.

So Joe's solution here, he points to Texas in 2014. They aligned incentives and funding for its technical colleges and started paying the schools based on how much the student earned. They can fake graduation rates, they can fake teaching skills, but they cannot fake the results income. This approach resulted in a doubling of the total amount of money being made by students in just six years. Money that goes back into Texas through local taxes. When bureaucrats have a strong financial incentive to deliver better results, they will. And I love that.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of, you know, just like there was an explosion of like effectively trade schools for software engineering. The same exact thing. You could do that for machining, plumbing, electrical work, all those sort of like, you know, specialized categories.

So let's go to number seven. For $200 billion, one of the bigger ideas create better funders of science in America. Lonsdale proposes allocating $200 billion over 10 years to establish new competitive funding bodies for scientific research, challenging the dominance of institutions like the National Institute of Health. He argues that the NIH has become risk averse and bureaucratic, often stifling innovation. By creating alternative organizations that reward high risk, high, high reward research and empower young scientists, the US can invigorate scientific progress. This is something we were just talking about.

I think that, yeah, I think venture capital has like stepped into here to some a little bit because they'll be like, you know, the, the long journey team will like give some like researcher basically like 200k to 2 cap to be like just work on this like weird idea for a couple of years and that's like cool. And we need that like that's risk capital. But our government should also be giving like basically risk capital to like important sort of scientific, scientific pursuits.

It goes to that discussion we were having in that group chat about like invention versus discovery. Just this idea that you know, some of the biggest breakthroughs in, in science have been more discoveries than inventions. Not very diligent.

It wasn't really like lizard venom.

Yeah, lizard venom is a good example with Ozempic, but even penicillin, I think it's this, our friends are referring to it as the gentleman scientist, the person who's just experimenting and testing things and then just lucks upon something really, really.

So many important discoveries.

And it's, and it's very hard to facilitate that these days in the traditional academic institutions or the typical tracks where it's like there's a certain amount of time you have to publish a paper, you have to get this many reviews and this many citations and it's become too rigid. And so he definitely wants to.

Yeah, one back from that. So one thing that you know, he suggests is saying that like a public scientific funder would be filling in and funding research gaps where innovation isn't profitable. And so there's so many, there's so many drugs that potentially have impact in like areas that they weren't initially like approved for that are non profitable to fund research in because you might have to spend 20, $50 million like proving out that something works and then it's not. It's a generic drug. So there's no like margin to be made or like edge or like IP that you can create. And so there's so many different areas where that applies. And honestly it's like the oftentimes like bro scientists that are like doing this like research like on themselves.

Right.

In many ways like Brian Johnson is doing a lot of this on himself where he's just like I'm going to spend millions of dollars like figuring out how to sleep like 5% better because that's going to deliver like some of.

The best, some of the greatest. I mean we're seeing this all over the place where I think Gorn is probably one of the most respected like researchers on stimulants. Josie Zayner developed like her own vaccines during COVID and was like testing stuff on herself is crazy. And then Ayla has like one of the most, she has one of the largest data sets on like sex related social science.

Yeah.

Can, can put out research that's like way, way more robust than anything you'd see. So there's this weird, there's this weird model shifting to just like these independent researchers and but yeah, I mean I think Joe's hopefully it's, it's, it seems like he's optimistic about retooling some of the funding that does come from the government to drive innovation within these organizations. But let's go to number eight. He says for $100 billion upend the energy future and put degrowthers out of business. And his argument is that if you invest to $100 billion to revolutionize the energy sector by promoting abundant clean energy production, particularly through nuclear power and carbon capture technologies. He criticizes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's obstructive processes and advocates for its reform. And I've heard this so much from all the nuclear folks that there are like when you're getting a new reactor design approved, you have to have an actual hearing for things that are completely uncontested.

Yeah, yeah, there's, they had a funny quote in here where the NRC was, was bragging and they said the 12,000 page application took less than 42 months to review. Can you imagine being the guy like building something and put together this like 12 page application that probably like could have been, it probably could have been an email, you know, and then you wait 42 months, you know, just to figure out if, if, if like you're good to go. Yeah, that is just like criminal in my opinion.

Terrible. And, and he includes this incredible graph here of the, the cumulative nuclear construction permits and operational plants over time. And you can just see that after the 70s, the number of new flat lines just completely flatlines and there's just no new development. I think it has started to tick up again, but it's nowhere near like the, the asymptotic curve that we thought we'd be on with energy to cheap to meter. So very, very, very depressing. But hopefully there can be, you know, really significant overhaul of the NRC. Joe advocates for starting by abolishing the NRC's awful incentive structure conceived as a cost saving measure, but which has backfired awfully. Congress forces the NRC to fund its budget through fees paid hourly by the very companies it regulates, not unlike a law firm or consultancy. If you were funded to regulate by the hour, how long would you take? It's like the worst possible incentive.

Same thing with like the cost plus model within defense.

Yeah, very, very bad.

If you're getting paid based on how much something costs, like you run up the costs.

Yep. And let's go to number nine, personal favorite. Billion dollars. Give back the rest of the money.

What a statement.

Lonsdale recommends returning the remaining 100 billion to the American people, emphasizing the value of individual liberty and economic freedom. He believes that citizens are better equipped than central planners to allocate resources efficiently. By giving the money back, perhaps through tax rebates or direct payments, individuals can make their own choices, stimulating economic growth and just demonstrating trust in the populace.

Yeah. So he positions this very well, which more people should understand is that when the federal government does things like a quote unquote stimulus check, they position it as a, as a payment or a tax rebate. And that effectively implies that the money was never yours in the first place, but it was, it was your money that the government effectively took from the citizens and the businesses, institutions in our country. And it, you know, I think that the government should position that more of like, hey, we're giving you back. We sort of overtaxed. It's your money. I always like to spend it how.

You wish did you know that every single year, the United States government collects enough money in tax revenue to give every single citizen a 100% tax rebate. Is that they could give every single person 100% off their taxes, but they keep all the money for all these projects. It's just. It's just a total because obviously, whatever they take from you, they could give back. But it sounds shocking.

Yeah, it sounds very shocking.

It sounds like one of those. One of those stats that's like, oh, you know, if they. They could give everyone a million dollars. But no, it's really. It's really like, whatever they taking, they could just give back. But so they have to justify what they're giving, and it has to make sense. And I think he has some great proposals there.

Yeah. People don't realize that, like, income tax was illegal for a while in U.S. history. Right. It was like, it was something that the founding fathers were very against the foundation of the country in many ways, because it was like us telling the Brits, hey, look, like, we don't. We don't like these taxes. Like, let's. Let's end this.

Yeah. We've kind of, like, wound up with such a hodgepodge of, like, corporate taxes, income taxes, there's taxes on. All over the place. And people wind up moving around the country to find, like, their optimal blend. But a blend, I think. I think it's the most interesting thing with. With this is. Is definitely to, like, to close on is that there's a shift from just burn it all down, stop everything, to let's be more efficient with them.

Yeah. And I honestly like that. I. I think Balaji. It's more incremental, like, consistently had extremely interesting ideas and been right on a lot of stuff. And the area that I just strongly disagree with him on is he's, like, very, like, pro, like, exit. Like, let's just leave and, like, rebuild from the ground up. And I think that experiments like that should be run at the same time. We want the best and brightest in America to be focused on how do we make this place a better place.

Yep.

For everyone.

Exactly.

So it's a great movement.

I love it. Well, thanks to Max for publishing that in arena magazine. You can go pick it up and give him a follow because it's a fantastic publication.

Subscribe to the magazine. Subscribe. Before we dive in, should we indulge in a beverage? Yeah, gotta always have a bunch of.

And thank you to Enchiladas Surfboard. We received some beautiful koozies that we're enjoying very much. They're certified for milk only, but we're drinking Celsius in them.

So yeah, hopefully it works. So today we have organic coconuts. We always. Let's see. It's a product of Thailand, so it came off the boat. I like that they send it in the nature's packaging and now you pull that off and then you go like that. So you break it and then you can pull this little thing off.

Okay.

Pull off the top and you got a little straw here, little microplastics. Take this off and we record for many hours here in the studio. So it's good to have a little like endurance athletes that need a little like sugar boost along the way. So these are delicious. I think I got a little coconut meat in mind. So it's Me too.

I'm pretty jammed up.

Jammed up. But we'll, we'll make it work. And thank you to Melissa's organic.

Okay, now it's going coconut. That's good. Delicious.

Delicious.

I love that.

Do we, I think we have.

Let's go to some DMs.

Do we have some personnel news?

Oh yeah. So we have a new segment on the show, some personnel news where we are tracking the biggest moves, the biggest pickups. Who's entering free agency, who's getting long contracts in tech. And our first deal or move of this show is.

Yeah, I mean this is, this is breaking news in the tech world, folks. We have a major move happening and it's shaking things up as we see speak. Brandon Jacobe. Yes, that Brandon Jacobe, former product designer at Square and Cash app, the guy who's had his fingerprints on products used by millions of people, is officially making the leap. And after an absolutely electric stint as a first hire at Party Round where he built a product that was the talk of the town. Brandon Jacobe is now joining. You heard it here second X. You heard it first on X. That's right. X just landed. An absolute student. And I think it's worth telling you a little bit about Brandon Jacoby. This guy is a grinder. We're talking 20 hour days in Figma every single day. If it's 1am, if it's 4am, branded is there. Locked in. Pixel Perfect. Making magic happen. Nobody, and I mean nobody knows their way around Figma better than this guy. His taste, impeccable attention to detail, unmatched, low ego, high output. We're talking about a technician, a craftsman, a relentless perfectionist.

An absolute dog.

An absolute dog. So what does this mean for X? Well, they're bringing in a player who doesn't just make products, he makes phenomenal products. He's been in the big leagues building for millions of users and now he's suiting up to take X's game to the next level. This isn't just a hire, this is a franchise altering move. An absolute dog by every definition. Watch out tech world. Brandon Jacoby's coming and he's ready to dominate. You have any details on the contract?

Yeah, I mean he's an absolute dog. I think, you know, the deals weren't released, the details weren't released of this deal. But you probably think it's, you know, four year deal, maybe one year Cliff seven, eight figures. Big, big deal for him. I mean just look at the stats he's picked up. Former rookie of the year contender, potential future hall of Famer, pushed millions of pixels every year in day in, day out. Extremely technical, extremely detail oriented and I'm really excited to see what he does this season.

He's coming to a platform that we all use and love.

Love it.

It's the foundation of this podcast and our livelihoods and we're excited to get this level of talent working on the product that we spend hours in that feed every single day. So thank you to Brandon for this.

X on the pickup.

Big pickup, big pickup.

That's great. Let's go to some Q and A. We got a dm. We got a question from Mickey with the blicky. He says. Hey guys, VC Mickey here. I got some great advice last week about angel investing and starting small. I decided to take your advice and basically put my entire net worth into XRP. It's now up almost 80% over the last week. Can you guys offer any tips for risk management?

Man, my only advice here would be rotate out of that.

Is this real XRP really? Moon, I was joking.

I don't know.

I love it. I love the it's up like 100%. Here we go.

I love that risk on attitude. Here's what I would say if I were Mickey, I'd be rotating into other risk assets like early stage startups. But and the reason for that is I think that illiquidity is a feature. When you got something like XRP that's moving 100% in a week. Get into something that's illiquid, get into something that's marked on maybe like an annual basis, something like a seed stage startup just so you can go focus on other things. Right. A lot of people get caught up into day to day price action with crypto and that can be A huge distraction from actually creating enterprise value in your job, in your, in your company. And so anyways, get into something illiquid, lock it up, lock in the gains.

I like that.

And go long.

Yeah. Good luck out there. Our next DM comes from an anonymous poster who writes in. Hey, do you have some time to enlighten me on your experience with creating a consumer packaged goods company? How did you validate the market? I have a group of talented individuals that hit me up about an idea I shared publicly, and I'm evaluating, taking next steps. What do you think? How do you validate the market for a consumer packaged goods company? I've been through this a few different times and I, and I kind of broke it down as there's two different ways. One is kind of the Brian Johnson way. You start talking about the idea and the problem that you want to solve extremely publicly, become the face of that, that problem. So for him, it's longevity. For Jocko, you know, it's performance in the gym. This like athletic, militaristic style. And then that fan base will, will buy kind of anything from you.

Yeah.

The other is more product led, more product driven, where you're doing real R D, locking up a supply chain, kind of like what the Ridge Wallets did. A lot of our early stuff at Lucy was around like FDA applications, patents, stuff like that. Took a long time to get it going. We weren't the face of nicotine.

Yeah.

And to some degree we still aren't, but we have like a very narrow set.

You're kind of the face of. Yeah, but it came later.

Yeah, but it did come later. It wasn't like we, we, we, we, we, we went like, you know, influencer or brand first, and then kind of were able to sell a commoditized product. We had to do something unique. So I think a lot of it's like, well, what's your edge in this product? Can you be like an operational beast?

Yeah.

And then grow slowly? But what do you think?

Another, another example. So launching Rora water filters actually tomorrow, that's an example of validating that opportunity was looking at the market. You know, consumers are already spending billions of dollars on water filters. So it wasn't a question of do people buy water filters or are they going to want one? And so what we did with that is we took a popular water filter called the Berkey, and we looked at it and we said, how can we make this better on 10 different dimensions? So we made it way, way, way more effective. We went and did the hard work of getting it proved out that it actually works. And then we made the design better, the usability better, all these different things that we knew consumers cared about. And so we've spent somewhere in the seven figure mark on testing and R and D to get the product where it is today. But we know that the product is going to be a hit because we took something that was already out there that consumers liked generally, and we made it dramatically better. And so I think if you're most consumer products, you know, friend of the podcast, John FIO has made products over the years that were like, first of a kind, something like he made like the gravity Blanket. Something like that's much more binary of like people weren't really buying weighted blankets. Like they weren't really a thing until he created it. But a lot of consumer products are like, even looking at this on the table, it's not like people were already buying coconut water. It was like, hey, can we sell them the same product just in the original packaging, basically.

One of my favorite stories from FIO is when he launched the Moon Pod, which is basically like a big beanbag, but it's even bigger and softer. He realized that he, he shot some video of, I think it was like a woman falling backwards and getting caught by the bag and just like falling into this really comfy bag in slow motion. And that one asset probably drove like a hundred million dollars in sales on Facebook. And he just knew that, like, that it was just a few frames. It was like, it was like almost like an animated gif. But it was, you know, a few seconds and it just stopped you in the feed. And so having that like, what is the hook? What is this one thing? So there's a bunch of different ways, but to validate the market, it can be like, it's so big and so obvious and you have some innovation or you're so charismatic and you're this, you know, heroic influencer who's going to have millions of fans buying whatever you sell or you have some hook that you just know will go viral. There's a lot of companies that have done like stress tests or some other stunt. Liquid death. Good example of like, the brand just stood out so much that I'm sure if you ask them how did you validate the market, those guys would, behind Liquid Death would just tell you, well, like, we looked at our brand deck that we built. We were laughing and we knew that it was going to be good because it was sometimes it was unique and it was. And it was just going to pop. Like, they just knew.

Yeah. Every. My wife invested in a company called Graza. Have you seen them?

Yeah.

Which is like a squeeze bottle olive oil.

Yeah. Yeah.

And she invested in that company. Pretty launch. And she looked at that being like, I know people like olive oil. They have this, like, new form factor that was popularized by chefs. They're going to put it into this new form factor, and it's going to work really well on social because it's such a, like, dynamic way to use olive oil. And so that was. And they got to. I don't know what their metrics are. They'll probably do like 100 million.

Yes. Something.

Some crazy number. And so, you know, sometimes with. With consumer products, like, I've found it's very binary. Like, sometimes I look at something and I'm like, this will not work. They launch it and it flops. And then sometimes I look at something, I'm like, this will not work. And it launches and it just rips. And timing has a big part to play in it. But then you need to look at, like, what is your edge with the product? Like, with Lucy, it was like, early focus on, like, the regulatory aspect. With Rora, it was like, let's just spend longer and be more obsessed with design and efficacy than any other company and testing than any other company in the market. And then something like Grazo is like, even more simple of like, let's just change the packaging, sell the exact same thing, and it'll work well on social.

Yeah, it's kind of like, I mean, you should be able to boil it down to some sort of elevator pitch that just makes sense. And you have a lot of confidence around, like, what are you doing? That's actually different. Yeah. And if it's just like, oh, we want to launch this because we think it's cool, like, you know. Yeah, get out of there. You need to be able to articulate.

Also, like, people that are considering building consumer products. Like, you need to go into it like, yes, there. If you have a hit consumer product, you can scale it very, very quickly. Now, like, yep, FIO is like a good example of that when something works, like, he scales it very quickly. But more consumer products, like company like ridge, ridge.com, they'll do like 200 million just operations, but just operational excellence over almost like a decade. And the first, you know, in like the third or fourth year was like a $5 million business.

But it's like, what. What game are you playing?

Yeah, you have to understand, like, are you still going to want to do this product. If in the first year you do 500k, the second year you do a million, the next year, literally the 3 million, the next year you do 3 million and then the next year you do 10 and the next year, like, are you still going to be wanting to play that game? If it's not a rock, it probably.

Means less venture capital and it probably means higher ownership for the founders over the long term. You look at the stories of like Red Bull Monster, like these guys, they grind for years and years and years and then they pop because they're in a big market and they do have the, the branding and formulation. Correct. But they're, but they own enough to make it worth it. And as long as you get. I think the real key for those consumer goods companies is like, you have to work super extra hard to get the first. To get over that first hump where you can actually be taking a salary that makes your life like worth living, basically. And then once you're flying business class and like covering your expenses, your kids are in good schools and stuff, then it's like, okay, well, I can grind and compound for a very long time.

Yeah.

But those first years where you're just making no cash flow and it's just brutal. It's just.

Yeah. And I think that it's very valid. I think that the category that is, is the biggest trap is beverage. Because people look at a beverage like Celsius and they're like, oh, Celsius, billions, billions of dollars a year. They're like, oh, it's so simple. I can create an energy drink.

Went to every single CrossFit gym for like, yeah. Four years straight.

Yeah. And did tastings for 12 hours a day.

It was laughed at, product defects.

And so anything that looks easy, I can guarantee you it's like deeply competitive. And beverage is an example of that. It's like the most cutthroat industry.

Exactly. So we have a new segment on the show. Reply Guy of the month. Let's go. Every month we're going to try and give an award to the biggest reply guy for the show. So get out there, reply to every post that we make quote, tweet us, retweet us. Like us, all on X. Send it around, give us your best replies because you're going to want to win.

You're going to want to win the.

Guy of the month.

You're going to be on the wall here in the studio.

So this month's reply Guy of the month is an intern at red letter AI he's 18 years old. I see great things in his future. Says he's ex future founders. He's at the University of Houston studying econ and finance. Love that he says he's right. E accident views are my own and I didn't even know EAK would have. There was like left yak, right yak. But he's cool for clarifying. He's out in Houston, Texas, and he has a wonderful, wonderful header image of Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and Tim Cook hanging out.

Amazing. I could see him in that same group at some point. You know, if he keeps accelerating like this, for sure.

And so this month's Reply Guy of the Month is Amit Bella.

Yep.

Congrats, Amit. You are guy of the Month. And he's a great honor. I love this about his profile. I mean, good, good numbers for such a young kid. He joined in April of 2024. He's only been on X for a couple months. He's already got over 1k.

There we go.

This is the reply guy territory.

Yeah.

You. You got to be the reply guy to get to 1k. Then you can start doing the inside jokes, grind your way up to 10k. And once it's 10k to get to 100k, it's got to be the cringe thread. And then once you're past 100k, it's just fake news all the time. I love the path he's in. He's in some community that's highlighted on his profile that just says the T lists and it's only two members. He has like a community. It's just like him and one other dude.

Him and his dog. His absolute dog.

His absolute dog. Like, could just be a DM bro. But I like that you're publishing publicizing this.

Yeah.

He's followed by another friend of the show, Red Bull Futurist.

Yeah.

You know, also got something.

Great future.

So congrats to Amit. You are the reply guy.

There's never going to be another first honorary Reply Guy of the Month for. Yeah. And to be clear, Reply guys is a spiritual thing. Like you can be a woman.

Yes.

Whatever gender can be a reply guy.

Your. Your thing could be quote tweets. You don't actually have to reply. It could also just be spamming our DMs constantly.

Yep. There's a bunch of ways to get here. And there will be many more, many more, many more.

Let's go to the timeline and then we're going to start working in some promoted posts. We. Because we ran A poll, and you guys wanted at least 60 ads in every episode. So we're going to do our best.

Try to get there.

It's going to take us some time to get there, but we're going to do our best. Let's go to Nicole Wiskoff. She says the gift that starting from rock bottom affords you is having an insane appetite for risk. You've been there before. You can crawl your way out again if you need to. I like that. I don't know. Yeah, she, she, she talks about coming from nothing. What a badass story. Now she's running what, 50 million AUM.

No, I mean, that's the last fund.

That's the last month.

So it's more, A bit more. Yeah, let's go. Yeah. I mean, this is. Goes back to the, the Josh Wolf.

Quote, chips, chips on shoulders. Put chips in pockets. Let's go.

We need a big Josh Wolf.

Yes.

Quote.

Yes. He's going on Mount Rushmore of pithy thought leaders.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think that the. I honestly resonate with this so much that at a certain point you need to know when to not go risk off, but like not continue to risk it all.

Because when you're post yc, our burn rate was 3k a month for 3 people. Isn't that insane? Because we paid our rent a year in advance because we were just like, just take that out of the bank balance so we don't have to think about it.

Yeah.

And I think we were like a credit risk. So we were just like, you need to. And I think our, I think our rent in the Tenderloin in this like complete disgusting hovel of a apartment, it's technically a one bedroom. It had a closet that one guy was living in. I was sleeping in the living room. And it was fifteen hundred dollars a month. And every time I sell someone in San Francisco, they're like, oh, fifteen hundred dollars a month per bedroom. Like, that's not bad. I was like, no. 1500 dollars a month for the whole thing? For the whole thing in San Francisco.

Yeah.

But it's like if you're willing to go down to living on 3k a month for 3 people that can write software and build stuff and just get stuff done and call people just willing to do all of the different problems. It's like, yeah, there's just no way you can be stopped. Like.

Yeah.

Because you can get 3k a month from so many different places.

I think, I think more like it becomes really challenging when you have a family of kids are in School, like there's like real fixed costs and I think people don't really recognize that. I tell founders this all the time. Like if you're like, if you're 28 and you want to like start a company and you're deciding, well, should I work for like this company? It's like, no, like go like so risk on right now because four years from now you're gonna have a kid or something like that. You're gonna be getting married and like your fiance's dad is gonna be like sitting you down. Be like, all right, like this startup thing was like cute but like you're about to like marry my daughter. You gotta like, you know, really get it together. But more, more founders should like raise a fifty thousand dollar angel round and like go live in like the middle of nowhere.

Seriously.

Just like grind and grind and grind and grind.

I mean my first, my first fundraise was $17,000 and me and my co founder made it last six months.

We almost want to. Made me want to hit size gong.

For a second with a tiny.

That a little.

There you go. The tiniest little size gong. But yeah, I mean we made it work. Like we spent a lot of it very quickly and then stretched it out ever so slightly.

No, I remember running the calculus, you know, coming to la, being like, if I don't make this happen, like I have $1200 a month to spend and I have exactly until this date to like be profitable and like be like able to pay myself more. And if I don't, like, I'm dead.

Yep. Let's go to Gabby Goldberg. Second time on the show.

She will, honestly, I think, I think third.

I think maybe third.

But she's a regular at this point.

Yeah, she's a regular, but we love Gabby here. She says partiful deserves more credit for making Randy gatherings great again. And it's like, photo of the Jeremy Allen White look alike crowned in Chicago, there was a Jeremy Allen White lookalike contest, including a toddler dressing up like chefs from the TV series the Bear. Have you watched the Bear?

I have not watched the first season.

It's pretty good.

Not a huge TV guy. Mostly founders, podcasts. Unfortunately no video, so I can't stream it. But no. Partiful has gone like extremely mainstream. Yeah, you have this to be a tech thing and it kind of proves that tech is mainstream. You can start something and build it for the tech audience and then expand out from there. I think even a lot of things like Whoop and Oura Ring were very insular tech Community products. But in many ways this is. I think we should go dig up like the VC thought leadership of like blog posts. Like, it's time to unbundle Facebook. Right. Because I think about like Facebook events. Yeah. Where that was the thing that was the alternative to partiful and part of.

Should pick them up and roll that in.

X. Should pick up. X should absolutely pick up part of all. Partly because I think it would be a. I don't think they're monetizing yet, last I checked. And the CEO is like, jokes about this quite a lot online. She's like, you know, we're just like giving this thing away. We're glad people like it.

Like paperless post, which is like kind of like the billionaires. Part of full is extremely expensive. Like you have to buy tokens to invite everyone. They have some sort of like digital currency that intermediates.

Paperless post is like so expensive. When I see that, like if I. If I'm getting invited to like a VC dinner and it's paperless post versus is part of full. I'm like, okay, like this, like, I.

Think it's going to be some ballers. It depends. It could be some boomers or some ballers.

Yeah, yeah.

That's one of the other. Let's go to East Village guy. He says, why are you a grown man telling me which AP classes you took? So he's talking about like accounts payable classes. Like to learn how to do ramp stuff. To learn how to close your books.

Better to close your books.

Okay, that seems totally reasonable. I would love to know what AP classes people take, especially if they're going to be working in a finance or high performance. High performance for finance or ramp.

Should. Should actually do more to get into the college curriculum. Right.

You should be able to take number one.

That's the number one. If you're in ap.

AP Advanced Placement Accounts payable.

Yeah.

This is what we need to be taking.

Exactly. Yeah. I can honestly say I've never. I've never had anybody tell me what AP classes they took. It's kind of an interesting thing to know though. I wouldn't be mad if somebody told me.

Especially with something interesting.

We're. We're where we. We appreciate continuous learning. So if you learn. If you took some, you know, AP Dinosaurs class and like you're still obsessed with dinosaurs and now you're getting into dino excavation.

Yes. Expedition investing in dinos.

Then that's cool. That's cool.

I like it. I. I don't see a problem with it. East Village Guy, take it easy. Aaron slowed off repeat guest on the show says, I'm convinced that basic business economics money education should be mandatory in middle school. Here we go. He needs to be taking advanced placement accounts payable. And it's a quote tweet from union maid who says I worked an 8 hour shift today on register and made $101 $68 before taxes. I rung up $3500 in sales in those 8 hours in my little cafe with no seating in South Brooklyn. And so they're kind of complaining.

I hope he was wearing gloves for all those receipts that he was touching.

For sure.

Unless his te is really high. And then in that case you should use the receipts to kind of bring that testosterone down from the.

Yeah. People always say this, that like, oh, they should teach you know, how to do your taxes in school. And I couldn't disagree more. I think that you should definitely just be studying like the great books and Shakespeare and the Aeneid and the Iliad and the.

Yeah. Because there's nothing. Education is like a. For needs to be a forcing function for learning things that you, that you're not going to have to learn in life. Most people will graduate school and never think about Shakespeare again.

Exactly.

When it couldn't be more important.

Yes. And there's a million ways to pick up this on the job very quickly. There's so many other resources. There's. There's a million different ways to consume basic business education through nonfiction you can.

And there's so many great startups that will do your taxes for you.

Exactly. I actually very much disagree with this take. And I think that schools should focus much more on. I think this is a little bit of what's happening at the University of Austin. Kind of a return to the classics. I mean I have the great book series right there.

Yeah. And just facilitating like my very hard.

To find time to read Tolstoy.

Yeah.

Like that's not something that I'm forced to do every April, but I will be forced to learn a little bit about the tax code.

Yeah.

And I can figure that out.

Yeah.

So yeah, I'm, I'm fine with going back to.

And school is like a forcing like, like let's force people to do things that are, that are like interesting. Right. My dad was a high school teacher and he taught a class called Project make which was some combination of like robotics and programming and wood. Wood shop and things like that. And so they would like build and launch rockets out on the football field. Like do things that like Maybe the nerds will do on the weekends, but, like, the average student should be exposed to that kind of thing. That's great. And schools, you know, have a role to play there.

Yeah. So the sales bull says we fire HR and pay the sales team double. And it's the picture of Don Draper.

This should be this. This. This is funny coming from. From the sales guy. He's like.

He's like.

He's like, give me it. Give me a raise. Yeah, give me a raise.

Yeah.

But anyways, usually paying your best sales people double is, like, pretty good. Good way to spend money.

It really resonated 12k likes people are really.

I'm unsurprised that his following is.

Yeah, but. But I think this is less how much people love sales guys and more how much people hate hr.

Yeah.

Because HR is always seen as, like, a drag on the company, but I mean, it's getting easier and easier with more like automated HR tools. Like, you can. You can build a pretty sizable company without a dedicated HR person for a long time.

Yeah. You're on rippling. And then.

Yeah.

You know, it has so many bugs that you want to, you know.

Yeah. Yeah, I think. I think you could.

Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting that there's not more, like, there's the outsourced CFO, like, partial CFOs. It's weird that there haven't been more of those for hr.

No, there are.

There are. Because. Because that seems like much more like, in line with like, the startup ethos.

That there's a lot of like $300 a month. You get the software and we'll help.

You, and there's a person.

But it's funny because, like, Chamath got like, so much shade for being like, HR should be like your legal team. But like the. But like, the biggest HR issues that people have, like, tend to be better suited for outside counsel to, like, deal with because it's like, end up being, like, extremely charged, you know, issues with. With employees.

I wonder if there'll be a little bit more of like a re. Restructuring of where HR sits in the organization as we go into, like, the next generation of companies. Like how a lot of marketing teams have technical people on their staff now. Like, recruiting is obviously super critical in the HR function. And then the general counsel, the legal stuff is super critical. So maybe you should kind of disaggregate it to a finance person that does the compliance stuff.

Team building.

Legal person. Yeah. And then the team. The team person. The team building, honestly, should just be an Extension of the CEO and the culture. So I would want, I would want a CEO's chief of staff to decide we're doing a happy hour because the CEO likes this place and this would be great for the CEO to come and meet with all the employees and then the recruiter should honestly be living within the functional units of the engineering team and live right there. And there's technical. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, I could see like the HR function kind of just diffusing without throughout the organization instead of building up like this massive longhouse in your organization.

That's good. Yeah, yeah, go over. Our HR team is over at the longhouse building. You can use the map.

It's like that would be a good name for the, for the outsourced part time consultancy for hr.

Yeah.

Just like Longhouse Consultants, whole thing.

Yeah, yeah.

Let us be your long house.

Yeah, yeah.

Longhouse is a service to says new life goal having a tweet printed by the tech Bros Pod. Well congratulations to it's happened. Today is the day you got your post printed. I don't know how to pronounce X. Eat. I think we live online. Is it Zeet Zed. We live so online that like I couldn't pronounce crypto.

You know somebody pointed out even though to tell who knows former like Dylan who'd been on the show pointed out, you know how you could say like oh I'm on tech Twitter. I'm on you know like like crypto Twitter. Fintwit.

Yeah.

There is not that same language for X.

Sure.

Like I'm on tech X. I'm on. I'm on fine X. It doesn't exist and it's actually a key barrier to growth right now because we all of us on tech Twitter. Yeah, Tech X. Maybe we just make it Tech X.

Tech X sounds like tedx, you know.

Yeah.

Really, really dumb version of ted. I mean the base version is already really.

We actually need to add TEDx to our enemies list because a bunch of there's smart people that have gone up there but by and large, by and large some of the worst takes of all time.

Most blue pilled shit I've ever seen. The worst. The worst takes of all. Oh, did you know cancer was cured? Every single time, every year they have someone stand up and say cancer is cured. It's like come on, it's not cured. We're not there yet. Let's go to Jen over at Anduroll. She says it's live and or exclusives.com so they did a drop. Anderal has selected ebay for charity to host this auction. 100% of the proceeds will benefit Blue Star families. And so did you see this? They're auctioning off pieces of. Of wreckages from tests that they've run.

So. Amazing.

It's basically loot, crate drops. There's different tiers. There's, you know, rare, epic, legendary tiers.

And they're not using it as a profit center. They're using it to give back, which I think is really cool.

I don't know, maybe they should be using it as a profit center. I think I'm. I'm actually pro profit.

I just think I just am in favor of companies that generate so much, so much profit from their core products that they're able to give, use that same skill set to give back.

And obviously Blue Star families are fantastic. And it's a fantastic. We love Blue Star, but I just love that it's a very unique. A very unique drop. We've been talking about this how, like, every company has a T shirt, but only XL nicotine pouches. Has a briefcase and a watch.

Yeah.

And a Rolex. And. And more. More brands and more companies should lean into understanding. Like, what is the expression of your brand in terms of merch? I was, I was talking to another founder of a. Of a unicorn who. I was, I was saying, like, like, you're. Yeah, you're a tech company, but, like, what if your tech company was a car? Like, what car would it be? Yeah, and don't tell me it's a Tesla, because that's what every single person says. I'm a tech company, so the avatar of my brand is a cybertruck. And it's like, that's fine, but that's also just the avatar of the Tesla brand. You need to express yourself differently. And Are you an F150 or are you a Corvette? Like, those are two wildly different cars. And you should be able to immediately say, based on your brand, oh, we're more of a Corvette than a F150.

Yeah. The Aurora system is a Porsche 911 of water filters.

There you go. And so this is a merch drop that feels uniquely anduriling. Yeah. As opposed to just a T shirt, which I'm sure they'll be selling and they'll sell other. Other merch. But when I think of, like, the merch that I want from Andrew, I think of, like, hiking gear, like almost tactical gear, not like fully military stuff.

You can wear on the range, but.

Something that's like that and I, and I, and I honestly don't even care if it's just them going and finding a great brand and just like, honestly just throwing like an Andrew pin on it. That's what Founders Fund does a lot. They'll, they give out these bags and there's just a pin on it. But they're really nice bags and I really like them.

And you're much more likely to use them.

Exactly. And you could always take off the pin if you want. It's not, they didn't have to go and get like some white labeler to like make them a fake version of the bag. They just give you the actual bag with the pin on it. But it's like the, it's still like an avatar of the brand and it's still an expression, which I think is really, really cool. Yeah.

And brands need to know what they're actually doing with like non core products like merch. It's like you want to be building connection to the broader community and like likability and usually assured is not the best way to do that. You can get a lot more coverage by doing something like this where somebody's like, oh, I actually own a piece of Anderil's like drone system that blew up.

Yeah, it's really cool. And I always love artifacts. We have a lot of artifacts in the studio here and a lot of the investors at Founders Fund have, have like a whole set of, of of artifacts from like oh, this commemorates like the SpaceX deal or the Anderil deal and I think that's really, really cool.

Yeah. And I like this too because if you're very online on X and like accelerationist, you know, defense tech oriented, getting a piece like from here would be amazing. But they can also go give this to a politician and be like, you know, throw it on their desk and.

Be like this paperweight.

Don't forget about us, you know, this was blown. Great paperweight. Yeah.

Well, let's stay on defense tech and go to Ben Coleman. He says, quote, we have a five star general on our board of advisors. True story. And it's the Inglourious Basterds meme of the guy holding up three the wrong way because Germans do the three this way, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it's, you know, detecting that you're not one of us.

And yeah.

And we know that it's not real because of course you can't have a five star general right now because it's not a time of war.

Right, right, right.

So very embarrassing. For whoever did that and you really.

Yeah. What I've seen in defense tech is like a lot of there's people that will be publicly out there of like oh I'm a general and then they'll use that to like get sort of advisory opportunities and then once they're actually in the deck then they're like whoa, whoa what? No, actually like put this like very specific title like oh yeah, 8th Brigadier, blah blah blah and it's like ends up being much more specified and it doesn't sound nearly as cool. And so bless their hearts are sort of like using that like high level title to like land private market opportunities. Yeah.

I wonder how valuable having a four star general is on your board. Because we hear stories about some really helpful people like Chris Bros at Andrew like was McCain's chief of staff came in like really runs that organization like full time employee, like very, very beneficial. But then you also hear stories about like the. Didn't some general join the board of. I think Mattis joined the board of Theranos and like it was like what does he know about that? It was, it was very controversial at the time and like if you're a board member like you should know. I think that was the story of Mattis or something. But yeah, yeah.

Before we dive into the next one on the subject of defense tech, we have a promoted post from Allen Control Systems. They say looking for a fast moving high growth opportunity in defense tech. We are hiring for several roles across engineering and operations. A few of our featured openings are senior mechanical design engineer, electrical embedded engineer and an unreal systems developer. You can view all of Allen Control Systems openings and apply at allencontrolsystems.com company numeral sign careers. Improve your links ACS. You guys can do better than that. But anyways, fantastic company. ACS is building AI gun turrets and gun systems for counter drone use. So they basically have built a product that can take out you know, without any human intervention. Intervention drones that are you know, fast moving across the battlefield and so amazing opportunity they have Their, their first products is very defensive but going to save many lives on battlefields across the world. So thank you to ACS for innovating in this space.

Thanks to acs. Let's go to Jason Lu. He says if you stayed in Canada were you truly that ambitious?

Got him.

I love, I love some hate on an UN American country like Canada.

Very UN American. Yeah it's objectively one of the the most UN American because so close they could, so close they could want to.

Be Part of this awesome team. We want to join up 51st. Let's come over here.

I would be surprised if Canada doesn't try to front run the moon to become the 51st state. Right?

Yeah.

Is that be kind of like, you know, the moon's going to get a lot of attention once it becomes a state and you know, be the first new state in quite a long time. The 50s. Like a nice round number being that 51st state. Big opportunity. I can see a lot of competition for it, that slot and Canada, we would welcome you with open arms. I know you know a lot of friends in the podcast. Jeremy Giffon, Sam Poirier.

Jeremy's from Canada.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because he was at Tiny. He was at Black.

No idea.

He's. He was at Tiny. Remember it's a Vancouver.

But he like grew up there. He's born there. That's brutal.

Brutal. Based in New York now. So thank God we got it. We got a good one.

So. So he, he is ambitious. He didn't stay in Canada.

No. But there's something to be said for like at the same time we would welcome Canada. But I respect all the Canadians that are staying there and trying to make it better and fix the place.

Yeah, no, I, I agree. We love our Canadians.

All my, all my favorite Canadians are U.S. residents. But that's also because I spend more time with them, so. Exactly.

And Shopify. Fantastic company from Canada.

Fantastic company.

And University of Waterloo.

Fantastic engineering also good.

Lots of respect. And a lot of companies have like engineering hubs there.

Yeah.

And it is a beautiful country. So we love Canada. Let's go to unusual whales. They say Ken Griffin of Citadel says he's invested in nuclear and it's the future.

I love these accounts just show they just like say something that's just like, could potentially be like very out of context because it's a big account. It's just like fact. Ken Griffin is a long nuclear. I want nuclear powered high frequency trading. Right. Like, I want, like I want to be giving these high frequency trading companies. We need to be giving nuclear power to market maker. Right. To, to increase financial innovation and the speed at which money moves.

I actually wonder if energy is a big, big issue for the high frequency traders. Like I know that Jane street is advertising on Doorkesh Patel's podcast, trying to recruit, I believe CUDA engineers and machine learning engineers. So they've done a lot of AI stuff, but I'm not sure how scale bound they are right now. Like a lot of their early stuff was Very deterministic. It was written in this programming language called OCaml.

Well and a lot of their strategies were location based. They were like how do we get to within 10ft of where the trade is being executed?

You know that on the, on the Nasdaq they have a rule where even if your server is closer, there's a thousand feet of cable between you and the, and the main server no matter what.

So that everyone has a level playing laws don't work. So we're going to like physically enforce this.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean has a great anecdote about like digging this huge tunnel across.

Probably a good business to be selling.

Commodities exchange to stock exchange.

It's probably a good business to be selling those like thousand foot cables because they probably need to be replaced all the time because it's like yeah, hey, it's too slow or whatever, it's got to be fresh.

But yeah, I mean if, if the, if the trading algorithms wind up moving to something that looks like an LLM where it's very scale bound, like you're going to see huge data center build outs to. It's going to be a new race just like the LM stuff. But I haven't heard anything about that. We should dig into that more to see. I mean I think at this point he's probably just making the bet on the fact that the LM companies and the consumer AI companies will need energy for the data centers. So he's investing in nuclear. But this is interesting because you know, a year ago people started talking about okay, what's after Nvidia? Nvidia's pumping. Yeah, energy is clearly key. Maybe nuclear is, is the next thing. But it was very much like a cocktail position. People talked about it but they weren't actually moving the market. Now the market's starting to move and some of the nuclear stocks are starting to go.

Well, we talked about this. About as crazy as Nvidia, it's worth bringing up again. Four years ago at Hereticon, nuclear was a heretic. You know, being pro nuclear was still heretical. Now it was the most normie take that you could have. So. So yeah, Ken Griffin is just kind of putting a stamp on that.

Yep. Let's go to Sarah Hess, second time on the show. Can't beat these margins. And it's a screenshot of the rare anderal relic recovered crash component from andro R D tests. And the bid, I mean it hasn't even ended. There's still three days on this and it's already over a Thousand dollars. It's pretty awesome.

Amazing.

And, yeah, margins are fantastic because families. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's, you know, essentially free since it was just wreckage anyway.

But, yeah, I wonder if anybody figures out that, like, the actual metals, like, if you got the right piece, like, the metals itself would be, like, worth more. Yeah. Break it down, melt it down. Some enterprising, you know, very.

You know, they do that with, like, hypercars when they're. Whenever there's a crash, there's a community that will find. Okay, yes, like a LaFerrari crashed in this place. Let's go and dig through the rubble and, like, figure out if, like, maybe some random piece got thrown clear. Yeah, take that and sell it.

And it's like $1,000. It's like.

It's like diving for treasure.

Yeah, yeah, super.

Like a whole, whole community. Because, like, if you get one, you know, like clutch little corner.

Yeah.

Valuable. Because they don't make them that much.

Yeah, it's great.

Do we have a promoted post?

Promoted post from Nico. Runs a company called Default. 76% of qualified leads book an inbound meeting with Default. We try to help customers think of demo requests as ones who fall into two buckets. Demo qualified and to not demo qualified. Most of our customers only show a scheduler to leads who qualify for a demo. So Nico's building an amazing platform, an enterprise product called Default, that helps other enterprise companies, you know, sort of like, sort and qualify and book demos. So he's been at this for quite a while, backed by Kraft, and now is starting to see some pretty fantastic results. Became buddies with Nico, you know, a few years ago at this point, and their execution has been fantastic. So if you're dealing with processing inbound leads, go over to Default, hit up Nico, DM him on X, and he will get you. He's the kind of guy that if you DM him right now, he'll jump on to do a demo of the product with you, like, in like, five minutes.

If you're demo qualified.

If you're qualified. So he'll qualify you. That's part of his. His. His job and what Default does. So thank you. To Default.

Let's go to Val. He says something that would let us buy and trade seconds from future ad slots would be the lit. And so he's. He's pushing us to let the average viewer and fan invest and profit from.

Our future ad spots. So that's actually kind of interesting. Like, if you want to. If you want to go long technology brothers, you should be buying up our 2026 Q4 and then reselling it when the time comes.

That's great.

So yeah, maybe if somebody wants to create a platform mark market for this.

Idea of like a dynamic auction.

Yeah, yeah.

Where it's like we could be doing the show live on spaces and.

Or like, oh, we actually got a higher bidder. Or hit the printer.

Print it out.

Yeah, yeah. You can buy. If you buy the ad slot within, you know, it's kind of like a car auction or like after the two minute thing gets down, if nobody likes, you can buy the slot. But then you buy the slot and once it's physically printed like it is.

It's locked in.

It's locked in.

Yeah.

Price is a lot.

Yeah. He was saying he wanted to invest and I said would he prefer a SPAC or a shitcoin or both.

Both at the same time. Hasn't been tried yet. Not really, but could be.

Trump is kind of experimenting with it.

Liberty Coin, Liberty Social.

He's kind of got both.

Yeah, yeah.

And then also lots of merch drops.

We might.

He doesn't do ad reads though. He should, he should have an ad product.

I'm actually State of the Union, so.

Can you actually brought to you by my pillow.

Is there something, something. Is there a reason that Trump has not done his own podcast? Because the guy clearly likes. Very profitable.

The future is the president will have a podcast.

The president will have a podcast.

100%.

We should create a poly market for that. Well, like, will Trump have his own podcast by 2020? Well, I think JD will, but.

And I think JD will bring on his, his like associates and whoever he's thinking, like think about all the buzz that's been happening around like who's going to get Department of Transportation, who's going to get Commerce, who's going to get Defense? And it's. And, and the way these people are introduced, it's usually like a screenshot of a press release that goes viral. People are like, who's this? There's like a couple mainstream media write ups and then a video clip will go. Will go viral from whatever that person said on some other podcast. So like they'll be like, this is the new Secretary of Defense, like so based or so terrible depending on who is posting and it's just a clip from them on a podcast. But how much cooler would it be if you could just watch, you know, Trump or whoever the president is, sit down with the person and say, hey American people, I'm thinking about this person for Secretary of Transportation.

We're going to talk an hour and then you're going to roast them. Roast them in the comments.

Yeah, roast them in the comments.

But Trump, Trump, if Trump had his own podcast, he could get that podcast to a hundred million dollar run rate just on ads.

Oh, totally.

Which would be, which would be 100 times the run rate of Truth Social. And maybe he could take. It could be the first podcast to go public. Right.

He could.

And then you could just have like, you could just be. You could have all of America own a piece of. So anyways, I mean, this is the thing.

Like didn't Churchill. No, it wasn't Churchill. FDR did like the Fireside chats, those really popular. Well, you know how there's like America we weekly things. I think even Obama did stuff that was like weekly dispatches.

Yeah.

About like, here's what's going on.

Well, there. I feel like these are less of a thing now. But isn't there like presidential accounts for. There's like, there's an X account that's for the first lady.

Yeah. When you're the first lady and there's at Donald J. Trump.

Yeah.

And at POTUS changes hands.

Exactly, exactly. So Trump's like, I'm not gonna blow this. If Trump. If Trump was actually on the At POTUS account just ripping bangers that account, he's like, I'm not going to 10x this for my future. Like for somebody who's going to use that audience against me like in like four years.

Yeah, I would, I would love to listen to a. A podcast.

I could see J. I could see JD like booting up at POTUS again, though.

I mean, I think Vivek Ramaswamy is going to do it because he's already doing vlogs and he clearly understands, like the modern media stuff. He's buying BuzzFeed. He can use all the BuzzFeed, you know, resources to kind of craft his own media strategy and really level up from there. Let's go to John fio. He's been on the show before. The Fiorentino family made their money in hospitality.

Oh, hospitality.

He's quoting Tony Segura who says President Trump ealdonaldtrump is requiring Volodymyr Zelensky to wear a coat and tie when he meets the President going forward. And, and John says, in the same way you weren't trusted if you didn't show up in a slouchy hoodie to a meeting in the last 20 years. We're about to snap back to suits as a filter.

You're Speaking my language, speaking our language.

You'll want to make sure you're wearing a Fiorentino label soon because he has a suit company.

So John came in very clutch at Hereticon. I didn't have time to get my own suit sort of ironed and dry cleaned at, At. At the hotel. So I was able to wear Fantino label suit. It was fantastic. Got a lot of compliments, turned a lot of heads, and was all thanks to the fine fabrics and fit of his label. But, yeah, I think it's kind of funny that you remember these, like, memes where, like, if your VC is wearing shoes like this, like, they're gonna, like, try to buy 50% of your company or, like, if your VC, like, is even wearing a suit at all, like, you're, you know, and I think that, like, trends obviously oscillate from one side to another, like, very dramatically. And it became like, the thing to wear, like, all birds and joggers and, like, hoodies and. And that so clearly is just, like, wrong. Yeah, right. Same thing. When you're.

You have over 50 million in AUM. You need to wear a tie.

You were, you called me, like, very upset the other day because you sat down in business class on a flight next to somebody and they were just dressed, like, very sloppily and you were, like, physically ill from just being, like, in their presence. Saying, like, this is so wrong. You should know that if you're flying business class, you should be wearing at least a collared shirt.

At least.

And, you know, we hope that we're on the forefront, you know, with people like Theo and, you know, our own podcast, we hope that we're on the forefront of a new movement in tech to just, like, dress. Dress for the. For the. Yeah, for the job.

So if you see a tech, a capital allocator out there in casual clothes, maybe on a podcast, just send them a nice note in the replies. Just tell them, like, you know, love what you're saying, love your business model, but would it kill you to put on a suit?

Exactly, exactly.

Let's go to Josh.

You're a capital allocator, not a H Vac technician.

Exactly. Let's go to Josh Miller. He says, I've said before, and I'll say it again. From antitrust to AI agents, 2025 will be the year of web browser. More and more signs by the day. Interesting.

So I think this was in response to news. I think that there were actually, yeah, Chrome potentially being forced to spin out, which is. Which is very, potentially very Wild. Just because Google is so. And all of Google's products are so deeply integrated into Chrome at this point, it's hard to imagine a Chrome that's not. That's sort of like account agnostic. It's probably not that hard to build, but you know that Alphabet has spent. Alphabet's strategy was like, hey, like, search is our golden goose. Let's build up these sort of, like, walls all around it via Android, via Chrome, so that, like, we have. We're building up this sort of like, fortress, and if it gets spun out, that'd be cool. Like, Chrome has probably billions of users.

And the Perplexity CEO was joking about buying it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which would be funny. Which would be. Which would be a great scene of the simulation. But, yeah, like, you know, Josh and the browser company, like, it's called the browser company for a reason. They were set up to, like, innovate in this area and like, oh, he's.

The CEO of the browser company. Yeah, that makes sense now. Okay.

Yeah. So he, you know, they built a fantastic browser. They're now focused on. They're now focused on building sort of agentic browser products. Like.

Got it.

I, you know, they haven't shared a ton yet, but it's, you know, products that will browse for you on your behalf.

Well, then this is kind of interesting because just recently they. They said that they were kind of pivoting away from ARC as a core browser product. But he's still very bullish about the web browser broadly. He just wants to find a different way to integrate.

So here's what the browser company needs to do. Find a spac. There's like hundreds out there. Spac. Buy Chrome, and suddenly Josh doesn't have to compete with the big bad Chrome. He can just be the Chrome.

I wonder how much Chrome's worth.

It's probably not cheap because if you buy. It's a standalone business.

I mean, I'm pretty sure the isn't. Isn't the deal for. Doesn't Google pay Apple?

Like, that's what I'm saying. So you buy Chrome and then you.

License just to be the default search engine on iOS.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's 20. I thought it was 20 billion. Yes.

And so think about. Chrome's got to be like, almost in a similar install base size and even. Maybe even more valuable or somewhat valuable. So, like, you have $20 billion of essentially potential net income. Just net income. Like, you run a multiple on that. Like it's a $200 billion asset. Like something in that range, like, it's a loss. It's not.

It's not hard to be a big spac.

Yeah, it's going to be tough. I mean, I guess they could just do like a demerge and just have two tickers and they're just.

I think that that will. What it would. It would be. Have to be. But then what isn't? Then the new companies, like, if they're beholden to their shareholders, isn't the most problem thing that you could do just go relicense the product back to Google like you're talking about?

Yeah, that's exactly what I would do.

If. And if you can't do that, then it's worth way less. Right. You'd have to look at like, Mozilla and big browsers and be like, well, what is this actually worth?

Yeah, very interesting. Let's go to Jason Carmen, fantastic filmmaker, good friend of mine and of the show. Jason says most people don't realize how big of a deal Starship is. Ahead of today's Flight 6, here's a first look inside a new series I'm working on called Frontier Films. The first one is all about new space. And this actually got reposted by Elon. I mean, it's amazing. Jason has crushed it and he's making like, the documentaries are better than Netflix stuff now. Like, it's funny.

No, If Netflix is smart, they'll go and say, hey, the next series you.

Do, they should just give it hbo, honestly. Yeah, yeah.

Because now he's on that path and it's. And it's honestly the path that all media is going on to get to actually break into traditional media and, like, get the Netflix or the HBO or be on tv.

You got to do.

You got to be big online first. Otherwise, like, you just don't understand attention and, like, it's just too risky.

Yep.

So Jason is. And yeah, I think, like, he's carved out his own niche of, like, I am a filmmaker.

Yep.

In technology, which, like the fact that when you think filmmaker and technology, I think of you and Jason and in many ways, like, you were like a YouTuber, right?

More of a YouTuber.

He's like filmmaker, multi platform.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, his whole background is filmmaking. He's. Yeah. I kind of like, chose YouTube because it was some white space. Like, a lot of people had substacks, and I was like, I want to do something different. I like, I'm kind of a camera nerd. This guy's been like, making films his entire life, like, dreaming of making films and so super excited for where he's going with it. And it's funny because there is already a Netflix documentary about SpaceX, but it wasn't made from the perspective of someone like Jason who's actually worked inside of a space company at Astranis and really gets it and really talks to the founders and the investors and understands the whole three. So it's going to be so much better and you just know that it's going to rip. And he has a whole bunch of different products now. Like he started with the S3 series doing these like kind of micro company deep dives on like like pretty early stage companies. But they were really, really polished, really great interviews. Then he did his interview series. Then he also did some flashback stuff where he did Bell Labs and now he has these frontier films. And so he's, he's like fully building a, a new movie studio essentially like.

Truly going into and showing like how efficient it can be. Like he doesn't have some massive production company.

Well it's because he's actually an individual contributor. Like he knows how to use a camera, he knows how to use a microphone. Like he doesn't need to spend you know, $100,000 on every single thing because he knows how to do it himself. He can do it solo, but then that allows him to hire the best and so and last it's going to.

Be, he embodies the technology brothers mentality which is doing it for the money. Right. He's doing it for the love. But like this guy is going to make millions and millions and dollars making important films, pushing humanity forward through, you know, he's basically a marketing channel for a lot of really important companies. So thank you to Jason for doing what you do and doing it for the money.

Thank you Jason. Let's go to Gary Tan. He says this company went from 0 to 500k ARR in the last 8 weeks. Lots of people do AI due diligence for private equity but this is the first one that outputs all the analysis natively in Excel files that analysts slash principals can understand and modify from formulas up. And it's a repost of YC congratulating one of their portfolio companies.

Yeah, so this makes a lot of sense. Like any anytime you can go after like this company is replacing people that today make between like 80 and like $250,000 a year doing like just like keyboard work like modeling. And it's one of those things like it will probably maybe already is or very soon will be better outputs than like the Humans that would do it. And for like a tenth or like you know, even 5% of the cost something.

But importantly it still allows you to have a tunable model. At the end of the day it's kind of like what was that company that Tigus bought that was, it was Canalist, I think it was the name.

Yeah.

And Canalist would allow you to download a DCF that was kind of pre populated with the metrics. There's always been Excel templates for various, for various public companies. You can get like a Cap IQ or Bloomberg integration to pull all those formulas in. But allowing, allowing a company to do this in the private markets with just like the proprietary data. And so much of the work is just scraping stuff out of differently formatted PDFs, differently formatted Excel sheets, just doing the translation and that's where AI is like so valuable right now. Just taking a bunch of messy stuff and copying it over and cleaning it up. Like that's where I really, really.

Yeah. If you're, if you're an analyst or an associate and you're worried about AI taking your job, you should be looking at this being like, no, it's not going to take my job, I'm just going to do more deals. Right. So before it might have taken you a week to build this model or 24 hours. Now you're going to be able to build it and get on to the next one.

Yeah.

Increase of a lot.

It's everything that we're seeing in, in art and filmmaking where you can accelerate with some AI generated music or some AI generated content. Aware. Fill in the background. Like there's still artistry, there's still going to be.

Yeah, you're making a deck to be the right image for a certain slide.

You generate it. Exactly. And it's gonna be the same thing with building these models. It's going to be something where you're, you're, you're just using this to fill in all the, you know, annoying problems that you would normally have to grind at for nights and weekends. And you can grind on nights and weekends on more deals.

More deals.

We love that. Let's go to Pavel, Delian's brother. He says very misunderstood by tech outsiders. A low intention meeting with, with a successful person is net worse for you than not meeting with them at all. Networking is default, harmful, makes you look like an NPC unless you have a clear agenda. That's a good point. Never heard this before.

Yeah. So anybody that meets Delian, go, oh, you're Pavel's brother, do that Pavel's his own man. But. But anyways, Yeah, I think people don't. There's this obsession in tech of, like, trying to, like, climb the ladder and, oh, if I just meet this person and get in the room with them, I can, like, do something. And it's like, people even use cold email to a fault. Like, use cold email when you have a specific thing that you're trying to do with somebody or if you have a specific way to, like, add value to what they're doing or something you can offer them or something you can ask. Just. It's a total waste of time to, like, meet people when there's no thing to do together.

Exactly.

So, like, don't. Nobody wants, like, people in tech are generally, like, friendly, open to, you know, outsiders, whatever. It's awesome. But don't, like, waste somebody's time by just being like, hey, I'd love to talk. It's like, nobody wants to just talk. We want to.

Yeah. Naval talks about this. Like, what? Like, you have an extremely high opportunity cost. There's that idea that, like, you know, your coffee meeting should be worth, like, $10,000.

Yeah.

And it's okay to come in with, like, hey, look, I have a. I have an opportunity that together we could make $1 million is a 1% chance that it goes through. So, yeah, this is. This is a $10,000 meeting. As opposed to just, like, want to just pick your brain and figure it out.

Yeah. It's also important to understand, like, if you're. If you're at a conference and there's like, somebody like a bear there. Right. And you're like, oh, I really want to meet this person. There's going to be, like, 20 other people, like, crowded around that person. And you have to understand that all those 20 people are, like, kind of making that that person's life worse because they're just coming at them with just, like, a bunch of bullshit.

Yep.

And it's better to just be like, you know, not approach them then and cold email them or get a warm intro months later and be like, hey, you know, we overlapped at this conference. Didn't get a chance to talk social proof right there that you were in the right room. And then you can launch into your, like, I'm building this thing. I'd love to, like, run it by you. And that's going to be a lot more effective of, like, actually building a relationship than just, like, you know, coming onto them and being like, oh, I want to be friends.

Yeah. And there's something like a Fine line about, like being too transactional, like only talking to someone when then there's something to be.

Yeah, but I always, I always talk. You know, I was talking with Sebastian from Rappi yesterday and I told him something that I believe pretty strongly is like, if you're a busy person and the person that you're meeting is a busy person, you're only going to spend a lot of time with them if you're actually working on something. Right. Like, the best friendships are usually founded on like something for doing something productive together. And so I don't think it's wrong, it's not even necessarily transactional. But I don't think it's a bad thing that there's a lot of people in my life that I'm like, if I work on a specific deal or company or even in this situation, we spend like 20 hours a week hanging out. And we wouldn't be doing that if we weren't making this podcast. And there's nothing wrong with that. We were friends before and we're friends now. It's great to find resources, reasons to be friends.

Yeah. Let's go to Liz Wessel, noted angel investor in Ramp.

Wow.

Secondary to that, I think she's a general partner at a big venture capital firm.

But that's cool too.

Less important than just ripping an angel check into Ramp. She says, why do so many people become investors, slash partners, and suddenly grow enormous egos? It's so obnoxious. You're not the only one who's special. Your founders are. I mean, I got to disagree with you there.

Yeah. I mean, you're capital allocators are very special.

Yeah.

Imagine if all the capital allocators in the world just cease to exist. Our entire global economy would come crashing down.

Yeah, yeah, we always say that. Yeah. The, the working class gets far too much credit and so do that. So does the founder class.

Yep.

We need to.

There's so many with businesses that are R and D intent, they cannot exist without. So I don't care if a founder has a pretty deck or a good idea or great pedigree. If they don't have a five million dollar seed round, they're never going to achieve their dreams. Which makes the venture capitalist absolutely critical to the process. And they should have a colossal ego. I don't think you should have a big ego if you have like a micro fund, like $400 million or something like that. But if you're getting up into the billion dollar AUM range, like build that ego up, you're just as important, you.

Know, as like jokes aside, there is something very valuable about being a young founder and interacting with an extremely high ego investor because at least there is some alignment there most of the time. So you can kind of get some reps in, deal with some sharp elbows and deal with like it's almost lower stakes than, than dealing with a high ego public company CEO who's going to buy your company or something like that. Like, like you've gotten the reps in and just realized like what, what a big ego is and how to deal with it and but yes, obviously it's a little silly, especially if you haven't actually earned it and you've just become a partner because of your.

I actually tell, I, I, I tell there, there's a specific investor friend of mine who has a few billion a. And he like high like hides a lot of his like material so success from his founders and I'm like, dude, you realize that like people want to work with other winners, right? So like if you're a winner and you're crushing it, like other people that are already winners or want to be will want to work with you.

Yep.

So I don't, I think it's important to just kind of like shatter that wall. And yeah, obviously having a huge ego is like not like there's no, there's no need for that.

Yeah.

But I do think that ego is an edge. And we went, went through a period of business history where ego like go ask like Michael Ovitz, like, hey, like what do you think? You know, did you have a big ego when you were building caa? And he'd be like, yeah, like that's what drove me every single day.

Yeah.

I mean the key is to have a big ego and be kind.

Yeah, of course, of course. There's also a big difference between like materialism and like having nice things and having a big ego. Like those can be very different. You can have, you can have a thousand dollar watch and still have an appreciation for a really interesting CASIO that costs 100 bucks. Right. And being, and being a, someone who, who understands like taste and, and opinionated decision making even and not just saying, oh like this person has like a really expensive hublot. Yeah, that's not gonna cut it, right?

No. So yeah, the other thing is there's a difference between you can have a huge ego and still be very respectful. So a GP that's managing billions of dollars, they can have a huge ego because they're managing billions of dollars. They can still be respectful of founders Respectful of their time. Kind and when they pass.

Yeah.

You know, or kind if. You know, and respectful if there's a tough situation. So the key is to build. Build the ego and, you know, become a better kinder.

I really wonder who this subtweet is about. It's clearly about some investor partner, someone who just made partner on, like, you know, for no reason and is now just, like, running around being like, you fucking work for me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hopefully it's not happening at her fund. Buco Capital bloke. He's been on the show before. He says, I heard someone say, here for the income, not the outcome today at work. And that pretty much nicely sums up what happens in tech when stocks really start ripping 2021 vibes everywhere with 1k likes.

Yeah. A lot of people have been talking about, I mean, just the general. We're just. We. Who KNEW When. When 2021 and 2022, early 22, 22 were happening.

Yeah.

It didn't feel like we'd reach that level of frothiness again for at least a decade.

Yep.

And we prayed for a bubble. Like, how many. How many hours. Right. Were we praying to have another bubble and to get AI this quickly and in many ways get. You know, there's even a bubble tech podcasting. No. But I do think it's this thing where these companies get to a certain size and suddenly it's become so hard to sort. Like, I was talking to a founder today who's starting about. Thinking about starting his own company. You know, interviewing him would likely get an offer with OpenAI, and he was looking at it as like, well, I could go to OpenAI for a year, invest like a couple million dollars of stock, and then be an open AI shareholder and then just build my company.

Yeah.

So that's like the reality of, like, here for the income, not the outcome. He doesn't necessarily like. He's just getting it as like a call option.

Mercenary.

Mercenary. But he's going to start a company. So. Good.

That's great. That's great. Let's go to Megan Nyvold, first time on the show. She says, so once zempic gets to be cheap, will rich people start being fat again?

So you know how it used to be a status symbol to be overweight? Like in the early.

You know, I have a joke with some of my friends when. When they get fat, we say, looking prosperous.

Looking prosperous.

Looking prosperous.

Yeah. So the real contrarian move here, Peter.

Paul Rubens, if you want to fat people. And it was a luxury it showed that you had enough income to afford nice foods.

Yeah. And so the real, the real edge of your capital allocator out there at pronouns to your bio and get overweight and you'll really stand out and kind of make a statement of like, I am contrarian.

Yeah, for sure. I wonder if there will be a future where just like we discovered this miracle pill in Ozempic. There will be a miracle pill that will allow you to be extremely obese but suffer none of the health consequences.

That. That's alpha.

That's alpha. So you can just be physically intimidating.

Yeah.

Just walk around at £400.

But you're having to go to Patek and get like customized like, like bands because like it doesn't fit around your wrist.

Yeah, I do, I do wonder, have.

You been through like a heavy like mass gaining period? Many times I. There was a period when I first started going to the gym when I was 18. I would eat at this, at the college cafeteria three times a day. I would wake up, have a protein shake, go to the gym, go to the cafeteria. Then I would get two peanut butter sandwiches that were bred with a puck of peanut butter. It was like a burger size. And I would eat two of those before lunch. At lunch I'd go back to the cafeteria, eat a whole meal and then I get two more sandwiches and then I would go to dinner and then I have one more sandwich and one more protein shake. So I was like literally having like 5,000 calories a day. It was just absurd.

It's fantastic.

And everybody should go through that. It's character building to go through because you're. Every single bite, you're like, I'm going to throw up. Yeah, I feel sick.

You got to go through prosperous, look prosperous, everybody prosperous. And then go through a cut, converted all the muscle and become a mass monster.

Mass monster. A size lord.

And then, and then take a zpic and get peeled and walk around at 5% body fat. Body fat. Yeah. We have a huge move in the talent world. This is actually massive. Fred Ursum, the founder of Coinbase, is welcoming Jeremy Barinholtz, who doesn't have an X account, sadly, as a co founder of Nudge link to his post before below. And so Jeremy Barinholtz is former Elon Musk associate at Neuralink and I had the pleasure of meeting him and he was truly one of the most impressive people I've ever met.

An absolute dog.

An absolute dog. Really, really incredible.

And now just building an alternative to Neuralink focused on, you know, improving yeah.

It'S a non implanted device. So I think it's a headband that improves memory or something with the brain, interacts with the brain in some way. Electrical stimulation but. Fascinating, fascinating guy. Went to Stanford, was in the military. And I met him and he looks just like the typical like San Francisco, like thin programmer guy. And he was telling us that he's like extremely goal driven. Yeah, he sleeps for like two hours a night. Insane. And I was like, this is fake. Like there's so many red flags. Like I just don't buy this guy what he's saying. And he was like, no, I'm extremely goal oriented. Like when I want to work on something, I just work on it constantly. And if I sleep I'll just wake up and be like, I need to keep working on this. It's insane. And he was like, yeah, one time I got really into working out and I got in this incredible shape and I look like a professional bodybuilder. And we were like, yeah, right dude. Like you're so skinny. Like this is impossible. And he showed us a picture and he was like the most Jack dude I've ever seen. It was insane. Amazing, insane. And so he just.

I hope they make the, he was.

Working the FDA stuff. He's electrical engineering, working on neuroscience, working on programming. You can go look up his GitHub. He's written a bunch of programming code. Like he is totally the real deal. Like really, really fascinating person and so huge.

I hope he leaves his mark on the nut. Like I'd love to just put on the nudge headband and just like get some, you know, even like 60% of that, like, you know, mindset.

It, it really, he really is like a special, special person. Like I left being. It was a, it was a big like, it was the Founders Fund CEO Summit and there are a lot of very impressive people there. But he was someone that really, really stood, stood out as a very, very interesting like long tail person.

Yeah.

And I was, I was very bullish on him.

So big pickup, very excited to see.

More about, see what he does and I hope, I hope we learn more about him. He, he's very quiet and he's, he was featured in one Ashley Vance article about, about neuralink and hopefully there's more because I think the way he thinks about artificial intelligence and math and everything, it's like extremely valuable. And they're just, just. There's not enough of this like intellectualism that actually boils up. He's a very, very interesting thinker. So rooting for him.

Big pickup.

Let's go to Andre. He says a preview of my new book Pre order for 39.99 and it's two screenshots. It's how to build generational wealth on x.com and the first page is you can post the plane with red dots. You can quote, tweet anything with this picture of the plane with red dots. It always does numbers. Even if people have no idea what it means, they will like and retweet to feign that they understand what's going on. And I think I replied to this but like I would, I would actually read this book. I think it's amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

There are so many of these formats. He should charge more. He should actually do it or he should do at least, at least a huge thread of all the most viral.

Slop I do think. Yeah, viral slop.

It's the, it's the iPhone. This is the best, this is the best feature Apple ever, ever made. And it's filling in the text message 2 factor.

And the book could come with like a down, like a link to like a, a Dropbox. You could download all but they're not.

Like high res, they're all like reposted like, like burnt in JPEGs. Yeah, they're super compressed and grainy.

No, I do think this is the. There's a lot of people that go on X and just start like posting and just like otherwise like very intelligent people that just do not, not understand how the platform works and like couldn't for the life of them like create a banger even though they have good ideas.

Yeah, yeah.

And so yeah, this, this could be like you know, a book cohort based course like in person events, summits.

Get on.

Yeah three get on WAP Wi Fi money going. Yeah, yeah. There's a 360 degree business to be built here.

I think so.

And you'd help a lot of people get post economic just from posting?

I think so. I mean we've seen some of those creator paths. They get pretty big.

Yeah, yeah, pretty big.

You find your whole startup on it. Let's go to Keshav. He says, Paul Graham's whole life I need money to paint. Learns programming, falls in love with Lisp, works briefly at Interleaf, starts via web to fund his painting lifestyle. Sells to Yahoo for life changing money, moves to California, then New York, tries painting, can't focus properly. Feels lost, discovers writing essays online, creates yc. This is temporary. Then I'll paint. Builds hacker news, gets stressed running online communities, leaves YC to paint. Tries painting in 2014, gives up mid painting codes Bell for four years, returns to essays and lisp, moves to the UK, quote, unquote, for a year, never leaves. It's so funny. There's so many people like this where it's like they, they have this, this idealized passion of themselves, like what they could be, but they're just like, born to allocate capital or born to post or born to write or code. And he just clearly has so many, so many fantastic, fantastic skill sets.

PG yeah, yeah. Painting was always a fever dream, but thank, thank God it stayed a fever dream because otherwise we wouldn't have Y Combinator and we'd live in a world where if you made a good app, you'd never have a 50 competitors launching.

Next year and you wouldn't have 50 VCs lining up to write your seed checks.

You never would have gotten the safe, you never would have gotten the 2 on 20.

Think about this, the impact he's had. I mean, I always think about YC as more, less of a. Less of an investment vehicle. Like they've had the impact on the investing space, obviously, but YC has become essentially a union for startups. Because if you are a VC and you fuck over one YC company, you go in their database, every YC company hears about you and instantly you're ostracized from the entire community. Such a large community.

And the collective bargaining approach of going, everybody goes out for two on 20, it's like, that's just the price, my friend.

It's funny you say 2 on 20 because like when I went through, it was like 1 on 10 and then it was like 1 and a half on 15 and now it's 220.

But even back in the day with 1 on 10, that was probably felt like people were like, well, this is like egregious.

100% like it's always been. It's always felt egregious. Yeah, it's always felt egregious.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll know. The money supply is expanded when, when YC companies are going out where they're like, yeah, we're going for outfits for 10 on 100.

There was one company in my batch who raised at 80 and everyone was like, wow, this is wild. And there's always like one company. I don't think they actually did that well, but their numbers were crazy. It was like this company, Virule, they did like viral videos and I think they had a ton of revenue because I. The Guy who did it had been building like online advertising tech since he was a kid and had like a bunch of like just made a lot of money through like algorithm online advertising. So was able to get the business to like a pretty big size. Do we have a promoted post?

Promoted post from our friends over at Ramp. Why settle for individual ingredients when Ramp gives you the full financial operations sandwich. They have corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, travel. Look at this sandwich. It looks fantastic. We haven't eaten yet today.

Oh, it looks fantastic.

It's making my mouth water. And you, you have.

It is a great way to articulate like the value of Ramp. That like it's the CFO suite, it's a bundle of tools, it's a, you know, it's a compound startup that's multiple products all wrapped up in one. But my problem is that I don't think ramps a sandwich. I think it's a nine course prefix with a wine pairing at the French Laundry. I think it's, I think it's premium and, and I think of Ramp, I don't think just some sandwich that your, your mom made for you and threw in a plastic bag your way to school. I think, you know, begging for a reservation, greasing the mater d, valet parking your turbo s, walking into the French Laundry, shaking hands with the chef, sitting down and enjoying an omakase.

Totally.

So good post. But step it up with the classiness because I want Ramp to be a premium brand.

Yeah, their social media manager is fantastic. Always good for a laugh. But yeah, nine, nine course meal wine pairing. And the chef will even, you know, the chef will even come out and say hello. Kareem will send you a note and say thanks for being a Ramp customer.

This is true.

Well, Eric will send you a note.

Really is the CEO that comes, Eric.

Will come and sit down at your table and you know, have a conversation and make sure that your, your, your NPS score is 100.

I've always said that about the way Elon runs Axe now where if you have a banger, he will come around and like just drop like a crying face emoji in the replies. Just be like.

And then it'll break your phone and.

It'Ll break your phone. But, but it feels like the chef coming out and being like, is everyone enjoying the meal? Is everyone enjoying the bangers today? Like here's what's going on. And I just love that about the way he uses the product because no previous CEO, not even Jack Dorsey, who is like totally in founder mode during his whole career. Like, he didn't use the product that way. And Elon really uses the product where he clearly consumes the stuff and comes out and is like, oh, is the soup good tonight? I'm tasting it. Oh, like, let me have some of this whiskey too. Like, we'll share some of this. Like, is the wine working? Oh, it's a little cork. Like, let's just. The algorithm. Yeah, it's good. And I think. I think the Ramp guys are doing the same thing. Let's go to Logan bartlett. He says MicroStrategy has now passed its. Its.com bubble stock price and is an $82 billion business. Get him on the podcast. Logan. This is an $82 billion software company. You interview the largest public company, tech CEOs. You got to get Saylor on the pod.

Get him on the pod.

Get him on the pod.

No, MicroStrategy has a fantastic business model. For every dollar of Bitcoin they buy, they get $3 of enterprise value. And so if. If they're smart and they're serving the shareholders, they'll just do that over and over and over forever.

Yeah.

And then if Saylor's, like, really bullish, he'll do a take private.

Yep.

At a nice premium. Because he's just like, I'm so long, I'm happy to Pay, you know, 3X.

Yeah.

For the bitcoin, because I could use more leverage on the take private. Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's wild there. I mean, the funny thing is that there are a number of companies that have done this exact chart. Akamai. Do you know Akamai, the networking company? They invented like. Like, IP routing and stuff, is like, this MIT company. Fascinating. And they were worth, like, 20 billion during the dot com boom. Couple of the guys sold. They only worked there for, like, six months during the run up. Just became generational. Generationally wealthy. And then it took the company, like, 20 years to build back up, but it was a solid business with solid technology. And so they finally got to their peak, like, more recently. A different story with MicroStrategy, but respect at least.

Like, you know, having that up and down, like, you get like, a nice. You know, the number that you have to hit again to get any level of respect.

Right. Yeah. We go to TCP Tech CEO Pepe. He says, daily affirmation. I will fire an inter. An intercontinental ballistic missile. I love this. I believe you'll be able to do it. Although the ICBM might not be holding a nuclear weapon inside of it, it might be a It might be SpaceX point to point. You might be riding on that. You might be going from New York to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Yeah, but ICBM's. I saw another post. SpaceX is just a wrapper around ICBM's. I like that. Make the ICBM useful again. We need to be firing these things off. They can't just be sitting on nuclear submarines doing nothing.

I know. Total waste.

Total waste.

Yeah. You can just, you know, in the same way that you can just do things, you can just manifest things and you can just affirm things. Yep. I think it's a very, you know, it's been well studied to this point. Like, you should be leveraging this in different ways, but don't do it in the ways that, that, you know, that people in LA do it where they're like, I am healthy, I am happy, I am like, I step it up. You step it up. You know, I will find the hundred million dollars hidden in my computer. I will find the hundred million dollars hidden in my computer.

Oh, speaking of that, let's go to Atlas Creatine Cycle. It's a screenshot. It says there is $100 million stuck in your MacBook. Your job is to figure out how to get it. And he says, there is $100 million stuck in SF. Your job is to break up with your GF, move there with your best friend and start a GPT wrapper.

Yes.

Let's go.

More rappers.

More rappers.

There aren't enough rappers. Rappers.

There are.

Genuinely, genuinely. Just go. If you don't have a good idea, just go.

Make it.

Go. Make an app in the app store.

Called chat GPT, chat.com GPT or something like that.

And it's just chat GPT. Reskin put in the app.

No, it's not even chatgpt. It's llama, probably.

Yeah, yeah. And just charge. Just charge. Charge the most. Have some, you know, put it. Put some good branding on there. Spend a ton of money on paid ads.

Yep.

If you spend a dollar on paid ads and you generate a dollar and $1 of revenue, just keep doing that, you know, until you're a Bear or Ascenti, there's nothing stopping you. You don't need to be that creative. You just need to work harder.

Yep. I love it. Thanks. Creatine Cycle. Always good to have you on the show. Let's go to Isaac. Isaac Sundays, this time two years ago, my timeline was filled with business banter. Hot takes, bad takes, random shit posts. Now it's crickets. I came to for business. Shenanigans and more and more it feels like it disappoints. I won't be leaving, but I hope it changes. Well, I mean, you're disrespecting X by calling it Twitter. That's your first mistake, Isaac. Yeah, also be the change you want to see in the world.

Maybe.

Why don't you start posting business banter instead of complaining?

So Isaac is a friend and fantastic entrepreneur. He actually made his first million selling swords.

Oh yeah. Okay.

He. He has a company called Mini Katana that he bootstrapped using these like crazy viral hacks.

Fantastic.

Making original content. He's now building a candy company. I think that Isaac, I've said this before, but he's really like the will. Like, he's the next Willy Wonka.

Awesome.

So if you have all the VCs out there that have like a Willy Wonka thesis, go find Isaac. His company's awesome. His facility where he manufactures everything is like only a few miles from here. But yeah, I, I haven't necessarily experienced this like the four year page.

Like definitely it's a little messy, especially during the election. But that's why we're doing the show like follow Tech Bros Pod. Like we are posting business hot takes. We never post bad takes. A lot of random posts.

But no, there's a lot of content. No social commentary, no political commentary. We never talked about politics, business and technology.

Exactly.

And so the comment section, even on this post, I met, you know, when we quote, tweet this, there's going to be a lot of like, you know, hot takes. Anyways, you know, good to call this out. But use the not interested button. When they try to put some slop in your for you page. Say not interested. Not interested.

It does require curation. You're building a Zen garden. You want to avoid some things. I mean, I have a series of lists now. I have. I often look through the for you page a little bit. I find that like the first 10 posts are usually pretty good. And as you go farther down, it just gets sloppier and sloppier because it's just randomly sorting. But then switch over to the following tab. Got some good people in there. I also have a list just for the people that I know post great stuff. I want to see everything that they post. So I put, I put that in there. Also. Just spend more time online.

That's probably the problem.

Do we have a promoted post?

Promoted post from our friend Jackson Dahl. Jackson says I'm excited to announce. Oh, this is big dialectic Pod. Podcast, an interview podcast with the sharpest, most creative and original people I know. He says I like to spar with people on their ideas and push them deeper ultimately to understand what makes them themselves. He's already got episode one out. He's got a cool graphic here. And Jackson is somebody that has one of those people where you talk to like very high, like in insights per minute. Right. So if you're having like a 10, 10 minute conversation with him, you're going to have like a bunch of interest. He's going to give a bunch of interesting point of. Point of views and takes. So podcast is awesome. Listen to a little bit of the first episode and anyways, very, I think this is just like he, he's one of those things. It's very strong, like founder market fit in the context of like a podcast. Looking at this as like a media business business, like he's gonna have no problem just like making the show fantastic.

Is he monetizing already? That'd be my risk factor.

Maybe we should be the first advertiser. Maybe as much as we like to juice our show with ads, like we should be advertising quite a bit. So I agree, Jackson, if you don't have any advertisers yet, reach out. We'd love to make something happen.

Let's go to Adam Graham. First time on the show. He says the amount of high quality content that Tech Bros. Pod is putting out is insane banger after banger. This is why they're, they're the most profitable podcast. Hell yes.

Adam, let's go.

Exactly why we do everything that we do. We do it for the money. Really?

The money.

For the money.

There's bangers as a byproduct and that's, that's fantastic.

Yeah. And high quality content. If that's what makes the money, we'll do it. But yeah, just to be clear, if low quality content's more profitable, expect some low quality content here and there.

Yeah.

But good to have you as a fan. Good to have you as a follower. Good to have you on the show. Welcome to the Tech Bros. Community.

Thank you.

Thanks, Adam.

Thank you, Adam.

Let's go to Nick Carter. He says locked in and pulled another all dayer today. Let's go, Nick.

The only time I've ever taken naps during the work day, like I was like, probably like devastated. Like I've had to be in like a really bad spot, like to be so strung out.

I take like one nap a quarter on like a Sunday and it's wonderful. But I'm not A daily napper. It's kind of crazy.

Yeah naps are. I get it if you're like Paul Graham and you're working on your painting career and you're trying to get like a you know, burst out of energy for the afternoon but I don't know.

Any possible to take naps when you're on enough stimulants to kill a horse.

That's a big. That's a big part of it. I think anybody's that's like oh I should take a nap.

It's like try, try 600 milligrams of caffeine and 4 milligram nicotine pouches all day long.

There you go. You won't be.

You won't be inclined to take it. You'll be pulling all day or every.

Single day all dayers daily.

But I love Nick. Quintessential you can just do things guy did the boxing match, did the investigative journal capitalism Huge huge capital allocator. Love Nick.

Amazing.

Does a bunch of cool stuff.

Fantastic student of capitalism.

Let's go to my colleague Bridget Harris over at Founders Fund. She's. She's quoting Peter Thiel says the Wall street banks are long the trade deficit because the bigger the deficit the more money they make. And she says obviously bigger trade deficit equals larger volume of cross border payments. Stablecoins could be hugely helpful here in helping smaller banks compete with cross border flows. Large banks have no incentives besides defensive to switch because of this dynamic. Lower fees equals less profit among others has to be a smaller player slash new entrant with nothing to lose plus favorable legislation because the incumbents won't cannibalize themselves under unless pressure comes from the outside. And love you Bridget, but you made a terrible mistake. You included a link to Spotify which is banned on X and that's why you only got 99 views. So turn this into a clickbait thread. Repost it, I'll retweet it and we'll cover it.

Go to the moon.

We'll cover it again. I think you got a thousand likes easy on this. If you just make it a little bit more incendiary you need to call someone out. They're the reason America's stagnating. This is the problem. You got to be much more aggressive. But honestly a very thoughtful post and something that really digs into all of the features of state stablecoins and all of the different factors going on there. I was not aware of all this but it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah there's. It's it's going to be interesting with Stablecoins. So far, it seems like the fees, you know, stripes obviously made their move into stablecoins. We'll see like, what the. You know, I've seen like some stablecoin products that just still have like, similar fees to like traditional payment processing. But it'll be a pretty cool experiment to run to just be like, all right, if you can move money basically for free and sort of trustless way, how much does that accelerate the velocity of money? And I would imagine it'll be pretty significant.

Yep. I mean, it still seems like we're pretty early in all of the crypto stuff. Like, even bitcoin, it's unclear. Like, is it putting pressure on certain parts of the US Government? Like, it's become a political issue and there's pro bitcoin or anti bitcoin communities, but we're not. We haven't really worked through because we're not on the gold standard. Like, like, if bitcoin displaces gold, how does that really trickle through the rest of the American economy?

Like, well, now there's rumors of the strategic.

Strategic bitcoin reserve. That would be big.

Interesting.

Yeah, very interesting. But Bridget has a fantastic post on pirate wires deep diving. The. The stripe acquisition of. It was a bridge. Yeah, it's confusing because it's Bridget and Bridge, but the, the stablecoin platform that got acquired. And so you should definitely go read that. If you want to learn more about stablecoins, let's go to the founder of Perplexity. He was demoing a new Perplexity product for shopping, which I love. You can just take a picture of something and then Perplexity will go and find the product that you're searching for. And in this case, he asked, what watches does Jeff Bezos wear? And. And Perplexity helped him realize that Bezos is often wearing the Omega Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch and another watch. And he says, should I buy this? And I think the answer is absolutely, you should buy it. We need more technologists and founders who are watch guys. We've seen this happen with Zuck. He's rocking a fantastic FP Journe. We know some capital allocators who are rocking Pateks and Nautilus and Aquanauts at this point. But it's still under discussed and there's still major alpha getting the watch game.

It needs to be more a part of the conversation.

Exactly, exactly. So I highly recommend this. You need to differentiate. You're in brutal competition with every other big tech company. Bro, you need to stand out. Get a nice piece statement.

Get a hitter.

Get a hitter. And then every time you go and shake someone's hand, when you go shake Jensen's hand for Those, for those GPUs that you need, he's gonna be like, oh.

Even people that aren't watch guys, they're still gonna notice and respect it.

Exactly.

It's a way to make an impression.

Yeah. So I say, pull the trigger. Let's go to Yarden Shafir. He says, I'm outside the club. A drunk girl is yelling her opinions on rust. I have hit peak san francisco. Wow. 7k likes. Let's.

There we go. Tech is mainstream.

People like rust. I've never, I've never written a line of rust. I know it's a very popular language. Really popular with crypto. I think I'd really appreciate it if people can stop being transphobic in my comments. Go do that someplace else if you must. Yeah, of course. This turned into a culture war issue. It's more. It's more of an issue as soon.

As anything, anything, anything past a thousand likes, it turns into, you're in the dark territory. Culture war zone.

Dark X.

Try to keep Your like under 1,000.

Yeah.

Politics and social issues.

You want. You want low tam bangers? Just the people that know consistent, or else it's going to get too crazy. But yeah, I mean, this is, it's interesting because sometimes like the, the drunk girl outside of a club. I remember in Miami seeing a drunk girl talk to a bouncer about bitcoin. And it was right at the peak when bitcoin was at 20k and then it immediately sold off afterwards. So there is a little bit of like when your barber is giving you stock or your taxi driver is giving you stock tips. Like, maybe that's a signal, but this.

Is a signal that SF is, is.

Is back, I think.

So the fact that somebody went out in San Francisco, presumably past 10pm is a really bullish sign.

So I wonder if that's real or if that was just like a. Like an imagined scenario.

You can just make up things.

You can just make up things. Let's go to Beth Jesos. He says bio ass is the next Overton frontier few.

Yeah. So, you know, we've been, you know, you've been a strong proponent for literally years for genetically engineering bears to domesticate them and also make them, you know, allies for us and also biohacking and.

Stimulants and all sorts of stuff in that world. But yeah, it's interesting to See where this goes. What's interesting is like the Overton frontier. Is he just saying like that is where the political issues are being fought right now, like over ivf, over what nor Siddiqui is doing it Orchid. Over like genetically engineering babies, like that type of stuff. Overton. I usually think of the Overton window as like the what is acceptable to say politically. So it seems like what he is saying here is maybe that. That there are things that are going on in the bio accelerationist community that you can't talk about or you would be canceled if you talked about. And this is like the rumor that there are genetically engineered children in China right now, but not in America. Have you heard this?

Yeah.

And so. So it's interesting that it's like maybe we're going to have to have a national conversation about the morality of bio in the same way that we have had it around AI.

There. There. Yeah, there needs to be a conversation. There's. There's certainly could get on the hat.

Put on the tinfoil hat.

But there's many people, like, you know, one of the. One of the, you know, sort of push back against this. There's many people that believe that Lyme disease was created in a lab. Really, because it basically spread out of this small area around like Long Island. There was a. There was a island off of like Montauk area.

Interesting.

And dogs would wash up on like in Montauk that were like a dog combined with a pig.

What?

Like, very weird.

This is the most crazy thing I've ever heard stuff.

But Lyme disease also spread out from sort of like that was the geographic center. And the ticks that initially had it were sort of spread out from from there.

I'm terrified of ticks and Lyme disease. Whenever I'm on the east Coast, I always avoid going for hikes and stuff.

I'm like, huge west coast alpha. It's just like having less ticks.

There's something scary about having like something so small have such a huge impact on you.

No, it just almost like spiders and snakes.

I'm not a fan.

Yeah.

Anyway, hopefully we'll hear some more stuff about bio biological accelerationism. I think we need a good blog post from somebody. I mean, a little bit of that's happening with Neuralink and probably Nudge and a few other programs and.

Yeah.

So putting all that together into kind of like we need like a packy deep dive or something. Be cool.

Some things just need a packy deep dive.

They do. Jeff Lewis says, I believe that in the future will be governed predominantly by algorithms. Phase one, algorithms accumulate. Accumulate power. 2000 to 2020. Phase two, governments attempt to rest power from or align themselves with algorithms 2020 to present. Phase three, algorithms become the government.

So Jeff has a special talent for looking at, you know, there's that phrase, like, how do you. How to predict the future is to like, sort of like look at the present. Right. And in many ways, like, he positioned this tweet in a sort of like incendiary way of being 2000-2020 algorithms gaining power. Yep. But yeah, I, you know, I buy this. I feel like we're already seeing the governments align themselves with different algorithms. Right. You saw that this election cycle. But I would just say I want to, I want to live in a world where the temp check algorithm runs the country. Right. Vibes based governance. And Jeff, we've told you this already, but bring back temp check.

We need it.

Some of the best VC content market. I know you're not a vc.

Fantastic.

Best VC content marketing in the game.

It was fantastic.

Classics and some low tam bangers in the there.

So, yeah, this is kind of the Brian Johnson question right now. He's been, he's been asking a lot.

Of people, he says that don't die is an algorithm and that's what he's really creating.

And, and also he's been asking a lot of people, like, if, if, if you could guarantee that an AI would give you like, a better life outcome, would you submit to the AI, to the AI dictator? And it's a very interesting philosophical question that I think we'll be digging into more over the next few years. So definitely the right question to be asked asking. Yep, go to Matt Turk. He says, okay, but what. But we dramatically improved our podcast game and it's a response to TechCrunch. In 2023, VCs returned the lowest level of capital to their investors since 2011. And so the 2023 was not a good year for venture capitalists. But there were a lot of great podcasts that came out of this era.

Actually, I would say that in many ways, maybe the carry checks for were lower, but big funds were still being raised.

Yep. The fees were high.

The fees, you know, stayed stable.

And so why not put those fees into a sure. SM7B or some cinema cameras or a lovely set? Yeah, why not? But yeah, we do need more venture capitalist podcasts. I've noticed this when I've looked at like, if you're a VC or a company and you want to go do, do A press junket. It's actually pretty hard to go do 10 solid interviews that have, you know, a reasonable following. Like, if you're a celebrity, you're promoting a movie, you can go do Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert. Like, you can do, you know, NBC and CBS and, you know, the View and all these different things to promote your show. And they all have large followings. And on. In terms of, like, VC world, there's really not that much much. There's like a few shows that are pretty big. A lot of them don't have guests. It's not like you can just call up online and go in, go on 20 BC does this.

There's the tech crunch one. But it's not like you're gonna go and get these sort of like, super influential hosts. Yeah.

And it is really important for. For founders to be able to, like, work their way up and start with a smaller show and then parlay that into the bigger show and then wind up on the big show.

But it's really the same way that tech founder Donald J. Trump finally was able to claw his way up onto Rogan.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there needs to be a similar path. But it's hard because Dwarkash is so focused on AI and Lex occasionally. I mean, he had the cursor founders on, but he hasn't. I don't think he's even had Palmer Lucky on. There's like, like, there's not really that many just general tech shows, like Logan Bartlett, a great show, but it's like now narrowed down to just like public company SaaS, CEOs, which is cool. Yeah.

And that's why we started this podcast. We felt like the technology industry needed a podcast.

It did. It did. So let's go to the real estate God. The real estate God says craziest thing in America is that the Average person could 2 to 5x their salary simply by taking a sales role, but they're too scared of people telling them no 20 times a day. Interesting. That's true.

It's. It's funny. Sales is one of those things. Like, in a lot of things, if you're getting told no 20 times a day, like, you should just like, stop doing what you're doing because the market is telling you like, you're doing something wrong, you're doing something bad, like, it sucks. But sales is like one of those things. Like the, the no tolerance needs to be extreme mostly because, like, sometimes, like, even customers that want your product, like, don't want to deal with you right now, or they just have 10 other things that are more important so you're never going to break through. Someone else shared something recently that was like, oh, in the future, I forget who posted this, but in the future you're going to be getting 2000 email like perfect cold emails a day from all the outbound sales agents. And Salesforce is going to be like taking you out to like a steak dinner and they're like so going to renew your contract. We're going to increase it like by like 50%. Like here's, you know, just sign right, right here. And you're like, all right. Like I guess, I guess what we're doing, it's fantastic.

Let's go to Jen. She says overheard three tech bros discussing how much money it would take for them to replace their girlfriend. Thing is, none of them even currently have a girlfriend.

Boom. Roasted.

Roasted. Technology brothers. Tech bros. Get girlfriends, dude. Figure it out.

Get girlfriends.

And yeah, don't let people overhear you talk. Talking about embarrassing things. Although it could be imagined, could be a fake overheard.

Yeah.

It'S a proven that goes in the how to post bangers. How to create general emotional.

You know, Red Bull futurist exemplifies what a technology brother is. He's over here talking about wanting to have 10 children, right? So he, he can't. There's nothing like no AI girlfriend. You know, friend.com is not going to replace, you know, having a loving wife and partner and mother of your children.

There's some crazy bio accelerationism and yeah, we're domesticating bears. Yeah.

Artificial wombs.

Let's go to Jenny Fielding. She says a pre seed company that raises a modest round should not be burning more than 50k per month. This is a hill that I'm willing to die on.

Well, you're gonna die, Jenny. There's money to be made. Yeah, but this goes back to your $17,000 pre seed.

Oh yeah. If we were burning 50k, that would be one week. It would be out of money in one week.

One week. But I think that this is the challenge with venture, right. Money that is a raise gets spent and it's ridiculously hard. I, you know, one of my portfolio companies just raised around basically off of a lot of momentum and there's already this like, oh, we could hire this person. Like this person's amazing and look what they're going to do. And then suddenly this company will have added like a million dollars a year burn that they didn't really need or maybe they could have pushed it back, you know, down the road so yeah, this is where, like, YC is like Dogma is just absolutely correct, which is just like, keep burn incredibly low. And it's so hard. You know, as somebody who started a company in 2021, and I never even.

Realized that YC PG wrote this post, and I believe it was called Don't Die.

Yeah.

And now Brian Johnson's using that in the. In like the literal sense. But the original PG thing was just don't die, don't run out of money. And as long as you do that and you stay an entrepreneur, eventually you'll figure it out.

I have. I have a. There's a company that. That I backed in 2021 and the only three people invested in the company. YC or I invested in one other guy invested. And YC did their. Their round and they've pivoted like 10 times. But all of their updates are like, we pivoted again. And it's like monthly burn, like Runway. And it's just been going. It's been like 8k a month burn, plus, like, server costs. And their Runway has just been like, like dwindling down, like, very slowly. But they've taken so many shots, I'm eventually expecting to get an update from them. It's like we have 10 million of ARR. Like, we pulled it off.

I love that. But.

But they would have had way less shots on.

Yeah, but I mean, seriously, like, it is difficult to create an axiom around burn rate, because if you're doing something that's R D intensive or you're going to spend a lot of money on lawyers or you're acquiring a domain, or if there's something weird going on, like, it's going to be very bespoke. Some companies are completely justified in burning 100k a month out of the gate, and some companies shouldn't be burning more than 10k out of the gate. It just really depends on what you're doing and who your team is and where you are. But in general, I agree, you should be conscious of your burn. So great.

We certainly are at this podcast, participating.

And let's end with one more promotion promoted post, and then we'll go to Lulu.

This promoted post is from Dupont Registry. Dupont has a 2024911 GT3RS. This is not the first time we've had Dupont as a promoted post and not the first time We've had a GT3RS on here. This one is a paint to sample pastel orange that comes fitted with custom 1016 Industries carbon fiber kit. This car looks Fantastic. We eventually will be doing a Trans Continental race as technology brothers, probably with a ramp branded car, GT3RS and probably Gumball 3000. Gumball 3000.

The Dakar as well.

Yeah. So there's a few big races coming up in, in our pipeline and we're certainly going to be. I'll be driving a Porsche. You might be driving something American. American, but that will be. We'll each die on that hill.

Yes.

But anyways, fantastic example. Thank you to Dupont. How much is it coming? It's listed at. At 490, 000. Wow.

An absolute steal. I mean, at that price, you can't afford not to buy.

Yeah, they're, they're basically giving this away. Yeah, I would, I would make sure to, you know, get your PPI.

Yeah.

Because I don't know, pastel orange PTS. This could easily get into the 500s. But thank you to Dupont.

And I mean if you're an entrepreneur then you can pick it up. But if you're a capital allocator with some small $400 million fund, that's a no brainer.

No brainer. No brainer.

Let's go to Lulu. She says taste aside from a purely strategic perspective, this brand marketing is disastrous for Jaguar. For context, Jaguar sales have been plummeting down 70% in the US in five years. Did you hear that they took a year off of making cars?

Yeah, yeah.

They just are not making cars for a full year because it's completely resetting up to 2018. Jaguars are actually growing quickly, doubling sales in a few years. And she breaks down all the disaster that came from this post that was called Copy Nothing. And it was a very abstract ad. Looked like a, like a, I don't know, like a music video almost with a lot of interesting characters. It got a ton of attention and I think Lulu's post got more than, than the Jaguar post likes. Lulu got 16k on this and she kind of breaks down the problem that Jaguar used to be the iconic image of an old school British gentleman. Think Sir Roger Moore. It was James Bond level car. And then they kind of messed around and wound up with kind of shifting from being in the luxury and classic, classic sophistication market with competing with Bentley and Aston Martin and then they shifted down to premium, competing with BMW and Mercedes in a more crowded market. But Jaguar SUV sales are cannibalized by their own sister company, Range Rover. And now they're not upscale enough to compete in the luxury market and not cutting edge enough to compete in the premium market.

Yeah.

So they have this sort of. They need to focus on the cars.

Yeah. They have this vicious cycle where you have lower sales, which means you can invest less in R and D. And. And you're not even producing parts at the same scale, which means that the parts end up being more expensive for you. And like. Like it's this crazy, vicious cycle. And then it almost feels like this campaign is not like a nail in the coffin. But how do you. How do you completely turn off an entire new generation of automotive enthusiasts where. I've never once considered buying a Jaguar. Except every now and then you'll see, like, a Jaguar is, like, leasing. And they're like, we will pay you $1,000 a month to lease this car. Like, they're like, so, like, boss bottom, like the Lee. Like, they can. They can't give these cars away.

Yeah.

They stopped making cars for a year because their sales were, like, basically zero.

Yeah.

Like, car people don't realize, like, sales volumes on cars are, like, are not even that high. Like, that.

Aren't the Waymos Jaguars?

Yeah, the Waymos are Jaguars. Waymo should just buy them by.

Yeah. At least they can make cars.

Yeah. Because at least they can make cars.

Seems like the end of the road here.

Yeah, that seems like the end state. That's. That's. That's the only time you really see a Jaguar. But. But if they saw something that wanted.

To revamp the brand, they shouldn't have done this crazy video. They should have hired someone. Like, who Hyundai hired. Who was the former developer of the M label at BMW and he created the N group at the performance group of Hyundai. And they're creating, like, insane cars like the. The ionic 5N. Have you seen this? With, like, the fake noise? And like, all the car guys love it. Even though it's electronic, even though it's electric vehicle. It sounds like a V6 and it, like, shifts. Like a V6 has this fake DCT in there. And then. And then they're also doing this crazy envision car that looks like super nostalgic. Super nostalgic. And so there are a bunch of ways that they could have gone into the vault and brought something back that stood out and made a. Made a statement as a car, but they just chose not to. Maybe this will be the start of something. Something new. But it was a very weird brand direction. And it doesn't.

No, it did. Somebody. Somebody was commenting, and I think this was accurate. Like, it's almost like they were expecting, like, a comma win and they had invested, like, tens of millions into this campaign, and they were just like, all right, we already made it. Like, we bet the house on this. And then everybody's like, no. Like, you realize that, like, Trump won, right?

Yeah.

But we don't talk about politics on this podcast, so we will leave it at that. Jaguar could be a good acquisition target for us at some point. The history of the brand aligns with a lot of our ethos.

Yeah.

So somebody will bring it back. Sometimes it just takes an extra decade.

Yep. Thanks for watching. Subscribe, or else you'll be relegated to a life of flying on netjets.

Ouch.

Have a good one. Bye.