JD's Venture Portfolio, Lessons from Mark Cuban, Angel Investing Addiction

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. It is what, November 7th today. And every technology podcast is clearly going to be obsessed with one topic and one topic only. You're going to hear about it on all in. You're going to hear about it on 20VC. You're going to hear about it. Your parents, newcomers writing about it, the information stuff with it. It's undeniable. You can't get away from it.

OpenAI bought chat.com very, very strong, brandable, four letter domain. Calm.

Huge.

Absolutely massive.

Yeah.

In the eight figure range there was a million. Yeah. A lot of speculation. I don't think the actual number was released. It was cash.

Dharmesh released it.

Oh, really?

I think so.

I thought it was some mix of cash and stock.

Oh, maybe.

And he was positioning it as like, look, I'm a savvy investor.

Interesting.

I never lose money, but I don't like to make money on my friends. Now he said, now I'm an investor. Open.

Really? Oh, okay.

I think he may invested the domain.

Yeah. So. So I mean the context here is Dharmesh. I think it's Dharmesh Shaw. He's the founder of HubSpot.

Correct.

And he a couple months ago acquired chat.com and I think he said he paid 10 million for it. Y and he was like, I'm going to do something with it, but I'm not sure yet. But I know this chat bot chat interface is going to be big for AI and so there's going to be an opportunity here. And that opportunity came along in the form of a call from Sam Altman. And so Sam just tweets chat.com and that's it.

I think OpenAI stole it, honestly.

Oh, you think it's a steal? That could be a $100 million.

There's another big language model company that doesn't have their dot com. All the variations of it are owned by domain investors and they're all asking for tens of millions. Tens of millions. Mid eight figures. Yeah. And they're kind of at a standstill because.

Wow.

They're just like, they don't really want to take, you know, 40, $50 million of equity and put it into. But well, yeah, so I want to.

Debate, I want to debate this a little bit because on, on the one hand, like chat.com, it's an iconic domain, single word, four letters. It's like one of the best assets you could own on the Internet. On the flip side, Google has trillions of dollars. They've never bought search.com. they didn't need to. Google became that. And so the thing with Chat GPT is that it was always like a bad brand name in the sense that people would mess it up. They said chat gbd, chat gdp. Like they couldn't remember it. But once it got stuck in the mind, it was iconic, like Airbnb, like.

Yeah. And they're still. All they're doing is redirecting it to chatgpt.com.

Yeah. So it's a.

Where will the brand the domain was. They kind of stole it in the sense that if a savvy domain investor would have extracted a lot more value out of it.

Yep.

They'd been like, give me $30 million and 20 million of stock.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then. But yeah, I think from a branding standpoint, when you scroll on TikTok, it's people talking about ChatGPT, ChatGPT, ChatGPT. And that is AI to the normies. Yeah.

But I wonder if they'll be able to actually build a brand or if they'll even try to build a brand around chat.com.

Yeah. It's also very unclear.

It's very. It's very.com era throwback, like pets.com.

Yeah.

And for a while, like, it became difficult to actually get intellectual property protection around these single words, like the famous people. Yeah.

The way to get real protection usually is to make the.com your name.

Yeah.

Pets.com was probably true.

They didn't own pets. They owned pets.com.

Pets.Com.

Exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, the escalator was originally made by the escalator company. Do you know this?

No.

So escalators, we just think of like, you know, any escalator you see in, like a mall. But that was originally the. The brand name for the machine company that produced the first escalator. And they became so popular that the name became like, normalized and they lost intellectual property protection. And then Kleenex went through a similar thing where like just facial tissues, I think, is like the t. Technical term like Kleenex became so popular that everyone would just say like, oh, yeah, just grab a Kleenex. Doesn't matter what brand, it's just Kleenex. But Kleenex actually fought back and won. And so now you can't use that term. But if. But if we were to start a new escalator company and it was like.

Oh, which we might.

Which we might. Because, yeah, we might want to roll up a couple of the small operators.

And it's probably one of those things, like there's only three or four manufacturers of escalators in all the US now. And so if we buy all of them, we can jack up prices like massively.

I looked into stoplight manufacturing for a while and there's only a few manufacturers and the same, same dynamic. And there's no technology in the stoplights. I wanted to do something where the stoplight would have a camera on it and if there was no one waiting for the red light, it would just switch the signal.

Right. And so it's like not how it works right now.

You can pull up and just be sitting there and there can be no cross traffic and you can just have to wait. So there's just all this like deadweight loss in the system when you're just.

Driving around, which hurts the economy.

It does, yeah. Opportunity cost. You could be working, you get to work faster. So it'd be a very simple like product, but the distribution is really hard because you have to sell to each individual city. It becomes like a flock safety type thing. It's really, really tricky. But yeah, so you're so you're bullish on, on this at 15 mil, right?

I, I, I think it's a good buy in the context of who the owner was, who the company is, the quality of the domain. I just don't see them using this domain in 10 years.

Yeah, so, so, so in 10 years you think people will be saying like, oh, yeah, I'm using Chat GPT. The model has completely changed. It's now GPT6.01F2. I don't care about that. I just know I use chat GPT and I go to chat.com.

I would just be pretty sad if AGI was@chat.com. right?

I don't know, maybe, maybe there's something retro about that. It's kind of a cool throwback to be like, yeah, we're going back to the dot com era. Like, do you know the story of mp3.com? No. Mp3.com was like a dot com boom company.

That was, I thought I liked domains.

I know mp3.com was a bunch of guys in the dot com boom. Basically the business plan was Spotify like music on the Internet. But they hadn't really built out any infrastructure. They IPO'd the company and we're worth like 4 billion on like, you know, 300k of revenue or something like that. Like the revenue multiples during the dot com boom make the Zurb era look.

One of the greatest bubbles of all time.

It's incredible. It was incredible. I did some digging on mp3.com.

It's a fast. Everybody's always trying to poke fun at bubbles and I think they should be celebrated. Right. Because they're drawing that capex forward and accelerating.

Yeah. And clearly, like with all these things, it's, it's always just a matter of timing. Like Spotify was the right solution at the right time. Napster was too early. MP3.com was too early.

Had his spin on file sharing.

Oh yeah, he did, right? What was that called? Like Red Arrow or something?

Yeah, something like that. Ovitz was involved.

Oh, really?

Had a whole war.

Oh, no way.

They had this crazy. Ovitz took old Hollywood style negotiating into Silicon Valley, which was a big. No, no, basically. Long story short, he had committed to. Committed to funding the business. They signed docs and then he withheld wiring until the company was out of cash and then tried to renegotiate. And Travis did not like that. And they got in this huge, hardcore, huge war. Now Ovitz is an awesome, super helpful angel investor.

That's great.

And I've been to his house.

All's well that ends well. He learned that value.

He's like, oh, I have to play nice and not abuse people.

Generational talent. Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, let's move on to the top story. We're talking about JD Vance's portfolio and career as a venture capitalist. Why did you think it was important to educate the world about J.D. vance's private sector career?

Look, I think again, same thing with Trump this week. People really focused on his political career. Less focus on his career as a technology entrepreneur and his success building social apps. With jd it's one of those things. We didn't follow the campaign much at all. We were focused on the podcast and driving returns across the portfolio. But we did notice at one point that Tim Walls was talking to somebody at a rally and said he didn't even know what a VC was. And it made me think that VCs have this aura, this mystique. They're so cool, they're powerful. Right. And that makes it so that a lot of people that maybe aren't in our industry are, tend to be a little bit afraid of them. Right. If a VC walks in the room, you might. They might flinch. And so I think it's worth kind of breaking down that, that private sector career and just helping people understand venture capital and why JD would give, you know, millions of dollars to a company with no revenue and just a cool idea.

Right.

The other thing is giving people an understanding of how venture capital works. Right. A lot of people think JD Capital is a venture capitalist. He's putting JD Capital. JD Capital.

Yeah, that's what NARIA should be called. JD Capital.

JD Cat.

When he, when he gets out of the government, he goes back into the.

He'll be back. He'll be back.

J.D.

Capital. Yeah. But I think people have this thinking that venture capitalists always deploy their own money, but oftentimes it's only partly their money. So.

So his fund is.

He's a hard Narya.

He's since stepped back. But Peter Thiel's Cornerstone LP and then do you know Fallon Donahue? I think that's how you pronounce her name. She's really cool. She runs the firm now with I think one other person. Person. But they've done a bunch of deals. We should go through some of them. Acre Trader facilitates farmland investments allowing individuals to invest in agricultural real estate. Amplify Bio provides advanced pre clinical services to accelerate the development of medical therapies. Atomic Industries, who we actually know, develops innovative manufacturing technologies to enhance production efficiency and quality. Their whole thing is like reshoring domestic manufacturing. I think they're out in Detroit with a bunch of like huge machines. Aaron's always texting me photos of these like giant million dollar machines that he buys from like, you know, some Korean conglomerate or something. It's really, really, really.

Yeah. I think Aaron and JD were really early to trends that are now considered American dynamism.

I was thinking about that like in many ways people.

Yeah, yeah.

People often say like American dynamism is just shorthand for defense tech. But that's not it. It's. It's this whole. It's this whole like American heartland revitalization thing.

And it was really about manufacturing. Only more recently has it been about defense tech.

Yeah.

Oriented manufacturing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And like Founders Fund has a bunch of. That's there and has been like bouncing around that generally. And then Andreessen obviously like came up with the coinage for the word but Narya is really the own.

The brand.

Yeah, of course. But Narya is like really the fund that like designed the entire strategy around that from day one. Which is. Which is fascinating. Yeah.

And I think if you go back to JD's book, a lot of his investment strategy was oriented around revitalizing economies in America that were historically dependent on manufacturing, but that manufacturing got taken overseas.

Right? Yeah, yeah. It's a cool portfolio. Chapter assists individuals in navigating Medicare options. Hallo is a Catholic prayer and meditation app.

You can just see really all this surprisingly large business.

Oh yeah, yeah. This is all, it's all very like in theme with like his, his political platform. Another therapeutics company, Kira Therapeutics focuses on developing gene therapies for various diseases. Rumble, the video sharing platform that competes with Truth Social and actually got started.

Free Speech Social bet.

Like, like I think the Narya Rumble deal happened like three months before Truth Social.

Yep.

And you could imagine how that would have played out differently if.

Yeah. One thing that stands out to me is that it's not a really big volume of bets. Right?

No, no, no. I mean the entire portfolio on their website is 10, 11 companies. True anomaly. True Anomaly is a phenomenal company.

Yeah. I wonder, I wonder where they got in, got in on True Anomaly because that's a multi billion dollar business last I checked. And my buddy Will is one of their biggest investors now, but he's personally put in nine figures and then it says they're in.

Strive manages investment funds. I think that's Vivek Ramaswamy's company. Right.

I don't know.

Unless there's a different Strive. I know that Vivek runs a firm called Strive and it would make sense that they're like, they're aligned and then Value Base offers valuation services and financial insights to support business growth and investment. And so yeah, they kind of have like a few different like areas of focus, a lot of bio, a lot of manufacturing and a lot of kind of like just like, you know, like the Catholic prayer app. It's more like traditional American values. It's interesting because no one, they're the only VC firm that's really like sent it on a thesis like this seriously and like years ago because it takes time to actually deploy. You can set up a. Yeah, you can set up like an American dynamism ripoff fund tomorrow, but you wouldn't have a portfolio of companies like this.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting that, you know, venture capitalists talk about and founders talk about, I'm building and investing in the future that I want. Right. And a lot of people are in VC are strictly chasing returns. Right. If you're strictly chasing returns, the actual best place you could probably focus is crypto. Like the median crypto fund has like much better returns than the median venture.

For a lot of times it was just B2B SaaS. You know, it was like there was this massive software boom and the number of unicorns and decor that came out of B2B SaaS is just like undeniable.

It's Undeniable.

There's just so many opportunities hitter as opposed to. You look at aerospace, there's like one company. You look at defense, there's like one company right now.

Yeah. And I think that we don't discuss politics on this podcast, but a lot of people could do a political analysis of this portfolio and try to poke holes in it and say that what he's doing is a bad thing. But I think if you go line by line on this, every. Pretty much every single product has potential to benefit every American. Right. Like, even if you're not Catholic, if Holo app has a million people that are using the product to help become, you know, better people and. And practice their faith, like that actually can have a positive ripple effect.

Right.

True anomaly is something that's helping America. They build hunter seeker satellites. Just cool.

That what it is.

So they send up satellites and then use those satellites to take out other satellites because you can imag global conflict. One of the top priorities for all nation states would be taking out enemy satellites and controlling space. Right.

Y.

So all these things are. You could. You could make them political. But I would argue that many of those bets are generally like, they've. They're all like, America first in their own way.

The other thing that I like about this is that there's, like, a pretty significant representation of, like, advanced biology.

Yeah.

And there's this. There's a big meme. We saw it with that Eric Newcomer post that it's like, yeah, like, Trump might be, you know, pro deregulation, but the right wing is, like, super skeptical of science generally. And that's true about some things. Obviously, RFK is out there talking about, you know, tallow fries and, like, seed oils and stuff. But I think that there's a. There's like, a silver lining there where you see that, like, there is some significant bio innovation that is. That's being embraced by the conservatives. And it's not just a. A party of, like, neo Luddites when it comes to biology. Even though the biology stuff just build, build, build.

Frack. Frack.

Exactly. Exactly. Like, there is some element of, like. Okay, yeah, the, like, bio, when done right, is, like, amazing. It's just that it can't be done, like, carelessly or. Or only for profit or only for.

Only for pharma.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So cheers to jd. The one thing that I think a lot of people are maybe a little shook by is just the. The. The hierarchy in the White House right now feels a little bit out of balance because normally you'd see, you know, the real estate guy being a little bit less prestigious than the vc. The VC should be on, on top there. So it's a little bit of a narrative, narrative violation that the, the real estate, the social media guy, really, it's like you could think of Trump as like the investor with a podcast, you know, who's on the Apprentice. I would argue that hasn't yet done as much podcasting, so he's still in the second rung, but hopefully that flips.

I would argue that the highest status occupation in the world is being the founder of a multibillion dollar social media product. Right. Because if you think about Zuck, Elon, Zuck, Spiegel, right. These are people, Jack Dorsey right there, they end up gaining the most amount of cloud and influence and power because they control what is effectively the printing press. Right.

Yep. Valuable.

So anyways, yeah, if you want to put, say that Trump's just a real estate guy, like some, some people like to say, no, he's a technology founder first, at least when you look at his, you know, personal balance sheet.

Yeah. Also reality TV star, you know, valuable. Well, let's go into Brother of the Week. But first I need to tell you about Feadship. Established as the pinnacle of yacht craftsmanship, Feadship has been creating world class custom super yachts for the global elite since 1949. With a legacy of unmatched engineering, innovation and bespoke luxury, Feadship is more than just a yacht builder. They're artisans of the seas. Whether you're envisioning a floating oasis for relaxation or a state of the art vessel for adventure, Feadship turns your dreams into a reality through their meticulous attention to detail and unparalleled service. Because as they say, there are yachts and there are feed ships. If you're ready to embark on the journey of owning the world's finest custom yacht, visit Feedship nl, that's Feadship nl there in the Netherlands to start your bespoke creation today and tell them John and Jordy sent you. So on to Brother of the Week.

Mark Cuban before we dive in. Oh, yeah, we did get some pushback from a few of our listeners. We recently promoted NetJets. NetJets. And we just want to. We just realized that that didn't many of our listeners. You know, it's not super relevant just because they have, you know, multiple private jets already. So we just wanted to acknowledge that. And if you do go to netjets, just don't mention the podcast or Anything like that, just don't tell them we sent you.

Yeah, mea culpa. Won't happen again.

Sorry about that.

So let's move on to Mark Cuban. So brother of the week. Why do you want to give him brother of the week?

So Mark Cuban has done a lot of winning in his life.

He's a technology brother.

But this week was rough and what rough for him. And, you know, I don't know how he's handling it. We've seen his name popping around, group chats, you know, getting out his sort of frustration in different ways. But ultimately, I just think this is an opportunity to say to Mark and to every one of our listeners, it's okay to get knocked down. It's okay to fail. If you look at our next president, this is a guy that has been knocked down many times, has come up short many times. So, you know, there's been conversations of Mark talking about a presidential run, and I just don't, you know, whatever happened this last week, it's in the past. Mark has, you know, created a tremendous amount of enterprise value through smart investments in his own companies. And I just. Even though his Shark Tank portfolio is underwater as well, I just want to say to Mark, you're the brother of the week. Get back up. Get back on the horse. Keep going. Lever up your bet. Lever up is a good way to kind of make it all back. It's never too late to make it back. Make it all back in one trade. So 2028 is around the corner. Feels far away right now.

Start planning now.

Start planning now. Make it all back in one trade, and good luck.

You know, the interesting thing about Mark Cuban is there's this very, like, there's a clearly a rivalry between him and Trump. There's all those clips from, like, the old talk shows where they were kind of beefing with each other and talking trash, and they were kind of in the similar milieu in the sense that Cuban was on Shark Tank, like the number two business show, essentially, and then the Apprentice was like the number one business show. And so they were both like these billionaire entrepreneurs with. But with big, big media presences.

Yeah.

But I think what's. What's interesting, and I don't know how accurate this is, but Cuban made his first big win on Broadcast.com, which was radio on the Internet. This.com boom sold it to Yahoo for, I think, $8 billion.

Amazing.

And the product never went anywhere. Like, Yahoo obviously declined. And Broadcast.com I think, either shut down or just the product never really realized that valuation. But it's interesting because, like, you could he.

You could almost say he's a godfather. Podcasting.

Yeah. In many.

In many ways is honestly maybe what he should do to rebrand himself now.

Yeah.

Big loss is to say, like, all you people talking about me on podcasts, like, I created you. Yeah, right.

Basically. And. But the really interesting is that, like, throughout The. The. The 2000s and 2010s, he was almost too early to Internet content. Like, because he started this company in like, I think 97 and sold it in maybe like, 99 or 2000, but it was too early. Meanwhile, during that era, Trump is just completely ignoring the Internet, doing the Apprentice, just doing traditional media up until literally this election, where he pivots to the podcast strategy, and it works really well. But it's just. It's just so fascinating that, like, you know, like, Trump kind of, like, got the last laugh with. With Cuban and, like, won this, like, memetic competition.

Yeah.

But only because Cuban. Not because Cuban was too late to a trend. It's because he was almost too early.

Totally.

It's very, very, very interesting. Do you know that Jason Calacanis, his first company was Mark with. With Mark Cuban. Either, like, Mark was like, the investor or, like a co founder or something, and they sold that, like, blog company, and so they, like, go, like, way, way back. It's fast.

Did Mark ever go on all in?

I think he did, yeah. Yeah. And there was. And there was a big, like, kerfuffle over it because I think, like, Jason was, like, teeing him up for stuff, and he was beefing with Sacks, and there was, like, some sort of, like, debate over it. But Jason was framing it as, like, you know, we're being more balanced here because we had Trump on. We'll have the. We'll have the Kamala surrogate on, which makes sense.

But yeah, just Mark's gonna get back to winning soon.

I think so. I think so. And I do think that the. The Shark Tank format is underrated. And I. I've talked to a lot of people who are in business content. Maybe they have, like, a podcast, like a business interview show, and they've said, like, oh, I want to do YouTube, and I want to be, like, the Mr. Beast of, like, business on YouTube.

Yeah.

And I've always told them, like, the format is Shark Tank. Like, you need to do an episode where you're giving away money at the end of the episode every single time. It's very expensive because you actually have to be giving money away. But that's the way the Mr. Beast model works. Like you have to watch to the end because you want to see who wins. Like, like so many of Mr. Beast formats are just, it's just American Ninja Warrior.

Yeah.

Adapted for YouTube.

Well, now we've been, we've told enough people that they should do that and they haven't. So maybe we have to do it.

Well, yeah, but, but no, no. So we're not going to do the Shark Tank, we're going to do the Apprentice.

Yeah.

Did you see the comments?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Someone commented on the show, how do I be on the Apprentice? Well, you got to show some more hustle than just commenting. You got to get my DMs, you got to fly to LA and.

Yeah. And figure out where we can crush. Bang on the door.

Exactly.

There's security downstairs, but if you're cut out to be on our show, you'll, you'll find a way through.

Yeah. You'll talk your way through. Hot tip. Wear a suit where there is a dress code in this building.

Yeah.

But, yeah, I think, I think bring back the Apprentice for the YouTube generation. Bring back or revitalized Shark Tank for the, for the, for the YouTube generation. The morning Brew guy was doing a.

Version of that was more like man on the street.

Man on the street. Tell me about your business. 60 second pitch. But I don't think he was giving away money.

The only problem with that format is I love business so much. 60 seconds is not enough. Right. Like I want.

It's got to be the 20 minute, like the MrBeast format.

Yeah. The funny thing that people don't realize about Shark Tank too, is that they, they record, I think with every company for like two, three hours.

You know the trick, right?

Yeah.

Record for two hours. If you take the deal, they edit. They use the good clips to make you look good, to make you look good. And if you don't take it, they make you look bad.

Yeah. So the real thing, you have to take the deal.

Take the deal.

Drag, Drag.

I know that. I know the person you're talking about.

Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then after it airs, be like, you know, hopefully, you know, they can work it out.

Yeah.

Make the deal happen.

But because there's such an adverse selection problem, like, you know, the power law companies are not showing up to Shark Tank.

It's also weird. Products that do well for Shark Tank. Consumer stuff, it's all consumer, but then it's, it's honestly a lot. If you come out, it really is a reflection of the Shark Tank audience is more traditional America than any other sort of like business media, like oriented audience. And so if you come out there with like some new CBD drink that's like replacing alcohol, like you're not going to see a single like sale from it because the audience just does not care. But I had a friend of mine years ago started a company that was during the sustainability boom. He made a collapsible metal straw that could fit into something that would be on your keychain.

Okay.

And for months after, after their Shark Tank airing, they would just see the sales uptick when, when it would go live because people I guess like mid with Midwest moms would just were like, oh, I'll take a straw that I can just like keep on my keychain.

It was great. Save the planet.

Save the planet in the process.

So yeah, anyways, we should definitely take a company on Shark Tank. Yeah, ideally your gun store. Yeah, I know, I'm like, I'm like trolling you. I know it's like a real business, but I'm like, I'm like we need to take, we need to take Arlee through YC and we need to get it on Shark Tank. I know it's a real company and it's very disrespectful to joke about that.

But no, I think real companies, if the audience is relevant to that company, they should imagine customizing a firearm on mid show, you know.

Fantastic.

Fantastic.

Yeah. So cheers to Mark Cuban. You are one of the few brothers of the week so far but soon to be joined by a legion of other technology brothers. Should we move on to some, some, some posts? The timeline, the timeline, the timeline. So Trung fan says if you need a doom scroll break, check out my new podcast, caffeinated deep dives. One drink, three coffees, maybe a scoop of C4 2, read a book three press record for an hour. The first two episodes are here. IPhone and Calvin and Hobbes. Oh, so this is like a real thing. This is not like a joke post.

He likes the shitposter. But no, this is real. Something that Senra has been pushing to do for a while which is a long form podcast. And while you have Senra focused on founders, you have business breakdown focused on businesses. Businesses you have invest like the best focused on capital allocators. And now you have Trung, you have technology brothers focused on the timeline. You have Trung focused on individual products. Which I think is interesting because everybody knows Apple, the company and the founding story and all that stuff. But I actually don't know the details of the iPhone. Right. I know some high level stuff.

Yeah.

Actually I know quite a lot of details. But there's like a whole layer deeper that you can go on all these products and the stories behind them and the individuals. Right. Because it's not just. It wasn't Steve Jobs that built the iPhone. Right. There was hundreds of people that played a critical role in building that. So Trung's amazing.

I'm gonna follow this right now. This looks good.

Trung's amazing. Long time quality poster and writer. And generally I think it's easy for posters to get caught up into like toxic timeline drama. But Trung has always. He's done a good job, stayed above it, you know, managing his.

I like his first review on here. Smart threads, dumb memes and an entertaining podcast that sums Trung up perfectly. Well. I'm looking forward to listening to that. Let's go to Sean Frank. Sean, friend of the pod.

Friend of the pod.

Quote. Yeah, just go ahead and 40x budget starting 116 me to my media buyer.

Yeah, so. So Q4 is always challenging for consumer brands because CPMs go through the roof.

Just because of Christmas.

Everyone's getting in front of each incremental potential customer goes way high. And then when you combine that with the election cycle, which increases spending, it has like a whole new group of people that are coming on and spending super, super, super aggressively in a super tight.

Literally a billion dollars went into that.

Yeah. So now you're not just competing with other brands in your category and other brands on the platform, but you're competing with this new elephant in the room, which is various political groups competing to drive voters to make certain decisions. And so it's very much the second that the election ends. I think Facebook actually has a policy that says you can't create new political ads now, so you can keep running old ads. But they wanted to prevent people from using if the election were to have gone differently and there was more drama and controversy. Oh, use the plan raise. Well, yeah, they didn't want people to basically use it to manipulate public opinion. Like, sure, hey, like Kamala stole the election or Trump stole the election. And then it's sort of like, yeah, Facebook doesn't want anything. And so if you're a brand like Sean Sean's company, the Ridge, and you're seeing good performance during the election. Conor runs their all their is their CMO and is the best performance marketer that I've ever known or worked with. He was probably seeing Solid results even during the election. But then when CPMs drop like they're going to be, they could drop like 50%. And so you just want to just absolutely send it because you have from now until Christmas or December, typically it's like December 20th is when like sales start to fall off a cliff.

I mean, I remember talking to the pebble guys. Do you remember this watch? The smartwatch, the precursor to the Apple Watch. And they, it was a pretty big business. I feel like they were doing like $50 million in a year in sales.

Broadcast.com of smart watches.

Yeah, it's roug, but yeah, I mean they would do like 90% of their revenue in December.

Yeah.

Because it was just like a gift. And that's the, and that's the nature for a lot of these electronics companies. And so like you, it's just like you build up your inventory, you build up your ad budget and you got to be able to make it. So we're 400. This isn't a joke. Like this is actually what he's going to do.

Yeah, something like that. We're launching RORA on November 21st and we've been running campaigns to acquire, you know, people that are submitting using our RORA.com to do a water report. And we've been seeing fantastic results even during the election cycle. And now we're doing the same thing. Budgets went up dramatically basically yesterday.

So that's great. Amazing. Let's go to Wyatt Cavalier. Oh, what a great name. You know, Wyatt is a cowboy name. Cavalier literally means like crazy Wyatt Cavaliers post. Fantastic. He says, I'm a single issue newsletter voter. Whichever of beehive and Kit lets me upload and attach webp files first, gets all my money. And I think are these the two founders of the two companies? I love CC the CEO.

The reason this is interesting is Kit. Kit was originally called Convertkit.

Okay. Oh yeah.

Original build in public. Build in public. You know, like literally, I remember like years ago they had a dashboard with all of their metrics.

Yeah.

And I think that there's this thing that happens where build in public is cool because you get a lot of attention and sort of people are patting you on the back like you're legend. But the problem is that everybody was looking at that business being like this business rate $0.

It does really well.

Pretty much a commodity product. Right. It's not easy to build, but like anybody can kind of like spin up the ability to send, you know, SaaS product to send emails. And what happened is Tyler, who was at yeah, he was at Morning Brew. Yeah, so he was at Morning Brew working on products like literally building. And so he realized there was this white space around a more enterprise creator. Convertkit was more focused on creators and people like Tim Ferriss and things like that. He realized there was a white space of building, like much more enterprise tooling for people that were. I'm running a newsletter, but I'm running a business.

Yep.

And so he's taking, he's taking the exact opposite approach. I remember meeting, I met Tyler in Miami in 2021 and credit to him, I didn't under. I didn't see that white space at the time. I should have just backed him because he was like much more knowledgeable in the space. And he's taken the exact opposite approach. As Convertkit just raised like seats precede seed series. I think they maybe have already done their B Tier 1 investors all the way through. Like, just like, absolutely. The business is crushing. They're doing over a million a month. They will, I'm. I would imagine they'll be bigger than Kit or Convertkit within the next 24 months, maybe even.

And there's probably so much energy in the employees. They're seeing their stock get marked up. They're a talent magnet.

The challenge is Dank is really good at Twitter. Nathan, the other founder, is really good at Twitter.

Oh, really?

They're both like, yeah, like, I think that Nathan was doing it in his own way, like the sort of build in public way. Dank is much more like full speed ahead. I'm gonna publish my investor updates. He's doing it in his own sort of lane. But the challenge, when you have two companies that are both good at one marketing channel is it really does. I'm sure it sucked the sort of wind out of Kit's sales where they're like, this was our biggest acquisition channel. Now there's another person in the room with us yelling to all the same customers. And you see it in tweets like this where people are literally just saying like, all right, founders, like, fight for my business. And then they have to fight it out on the timeline.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Dank even says, like, I think we were able to get this live today, but how much money is all like, haha. Because it's like, if this guy's like, I'm willing to pay 50 bucks a month. It's like, well, I'm not going to do anything. Yeah, interesting. Let's go to Mike Solana quote tweeting Adam Rubenstein. Things tech time. So The New York Times tech employees demanded unlimited break time, pet bereavement. It was a big meme and it was seen as like kind of ridiculous going into this election. They were, they were demanding other things, but the timeline really focused on the most ridiculous things. And so Solana says New York Times writers, dark days. A fascist dictator on the rise at home. And we will surely be imprisoned if we can't stop him. The fate of the world hangs in the balance. And then the NYT tech union says, my goldfish died. I'm going on strike.

So here's why this is funny. So the tech world has had beef with the New York Times forever. I wish I could go read the New York Times the day that I was born because they were probably like bashing some like.com era founder. And so that's just like that's, that's been forever. Yeah. The irony of it is New York Times is so anti tech that even their own tech union is rebelling within the company on the most important day week of the, of the New York Times. His entire like whatever this decade. So the infighting shout out to those, to the tech workers in the New York Times, you know, besides the sort of more memeable things that they're asking for.

Yeah. What's interesting is like the website stayed up like even though they were maybe on strike, like the needle was too.

Good at their job.

We didn't hear, yeah, we didn't hear anything about like oh like the New York Times site's like unreliable or breaking.

It's because they were just. They have The Poly Market API feeding.

It in just like Poly Market minus 10.

Exactly.

Hard coded. Yeah. Let's go to Elon Musk says I'm doing a digital town hall on x tonight at 8:30 Eastern Time. And this is on the 4th, which is election day or was the election.

I think it was the night before.

So the night before. And the top comment is, can you buy Canada? Oh, I guess this guy's probably in Canada. And it's like join the team.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think how do you get the X emoji? I need to figure out how to do that. I really like the way that looks. You just have to copy and paste it some icon. I thought it was something where you know, it was like hard coded in where if you like did some sort.

I'm sure there's a character combination.

Yeah, you can get that. I got to get a shortcut for that on my keyboard.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean 47 million views 191,000 likes. Like just so. It's phenomenal.

So the reason that I included this, even though you could. Somebody might say it's political and we don't discuss politics. Is that what Elon is doing and trying to do with America is not political at all. It's actually applying the same methodology that he uses for company building, which is progress, being capital efficient, all these other things, you know, accelerating timelines, all these things. So I do imagine after we make the moon estate, Canada would be another good target for the United States.

I think it's Antarctica. Low hanging fruit.

Friend of the pod. This guy Sam Poirier, when we were at Sunra's event was talking about just wanting basically that like Canadians are getting so. At least people in Quebec are getting so sick of how things are being run that even they're thinking about, you know, separating. There's been like a separatist movement I think within Quebec for a while. But. But anyways long Canada, if we can. Maybe the play is along Canada now if Elon's going to turn, there's a lot of land in Canada. You could do a lot of rocket launches.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't listen to any of the live streams. I used to listen to Clubhouse all the time, but I haven't listened to a lot on X. But maybe we should host some. I think it'd be fun.

If only there they weren't prioritizing Xai so aggressively.

Oh, is that what the top live stream is usually?

No, I think it's more like, oh.

You just get thrown into a grok.

Flow instead of a club. Yeah, I don't want to be in Grok. I'd rather like there's too many.

Yeah, it has some cool features where like if. If me and you were doing the show on an X space like a live stream, we could highlight a tweet and then everyone who's looking could see this. The tweet that we're. The post that we're like talking about at the time. And I think that's like, that's probably kind of cool. I know there's some people that have growth hacked it like crazy. Like Mario Newfall I think is like everything's like breaking news every two seconds. But there's a lot of people that.

Have like Mario walked so we could run.

Yes, yes, yes. Well, the P God says I'm hitting this at the next closing dinner and it's three football players doing some sort of handstand.

Yeah. So this is something that looks really good in Slow mo or pictures. But if you actually see them, do it live. It's sort of like a little bit silly looking because they're doing like a headstand with their hands. But this was more. I think we need to bring back showboating workplace.

Yeah, well, you know, you know what?

Elon hit some pretty crazy, like.

Yeah, yeah, he does that. And he's good with like, the iconic, like, sink day. Bringing the sink in, like creating these, like, viral moments. Dancing.

You need to be creating viral moments in the workplace.

Yes, yes. Well, maybe we just need to return. I was. I was getting coffee with the head of investment banking at one of the big tech investment banking firms, and his office did not have a square inch of bare table because he had so many deal toys. It was insane. Every single. Every single surface was just covered with. I've always thought that we need deal toys for venture. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, people do it, but then it gets really embarrassing because you have to throw 90, 90% of them away. But it's like, oh, this one's really embarrassing. But with investment banking, it's like, even if you take a company public and it didn't do that well after, it's like you still made $100 million on that deal.

So, like, go off 2021 holiday gift from a venture unnamed venture fund was a bottle of wine that just said liquidity event on it, which was. Which was great. I kept the bottle.

Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah.

Great.

Yeah, yeah. We've had a bunch of VC firms reach out about doing custom branded nicotine pouches as gifts, but that's very, like, temporary.

Like you're probably not going to perform it. That's just more like performance.

Yeah. Something you want in the office.

You want to give that portfolio company an extra little push.

But for this, I mean, we have the framed $100 bill. We should definitely frame our first ad deal, which was at $303,000 CPM.

Yeah.

Although we should stop building in public. We should just insist that we're the most profitable people.

Figure out that we're charging $3,000 CPMs. Three CPMs. We're gonna invite a lot of competition.

Exactly, exactly. There's gonna be a bunch of knockoffs. I can already feel it. But. But we should do more deal toys. I mean, I love the YouTube thing. Like when you pass 100,000 subscribers, they send you a plaque. That's cool.

That's probably the best thing YouTube's ever done.

They send you. Yeah, yeah. That was really, really sm. Kind of like A deal toy. And I was thinking proof of work. Yeah. Like, but, like, more companies should do this. Like, even just for Lucy. Like, I was looking through some of our top customers who have been with us for, like, eight years. No, stop. And it's like, I haven't even thought to, like, send them a T shirt. Like, I absolutely should do that. It's like, it costs nothing and it's like, just a thank you. But you could get so much more creative with it than just a T shirt. You could give them a deal toy or something. Or something really interesting. Yeah. With the Docsend, like, send every potential investor VC a deal toy. Being like, I got to glance upon the series B DAC in DocSend regardless. Then they just have to deal with this physical object. Physical object. And do they throw it out? What if they didn't do the deal? What if they got beaten out? But it's gonna stay in their mind. It's gonna stay top of mind because they close that Docsend tab, they forget about your company. But if there's a deal toy sitting.

There, shows up at the office.

Shows up at the office, and it's this glass monument.

Mischief did the reverse deal toy where they made. They did a drop once that had miniaturized versions of products that failed.

Yeah, I saw that.

Theranos.

I always think that.

Juicero.

I love Mischief, but I thought that one was like, the whole, like, you need celebratory stuff. Yeah.

Not dunking.

Yeah. Being obsessed with, like, the failure. It is. It is very funny, but it's. It's a little. It's not as exciting as. As. As the. As the good stuff. The good stuff.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of VCs do.

Get artifacts from, like, a lot of SpaceX investors have, like, like, cool model rockets and stuff that have been given out at various times. Next time and like, swords and stuff.

Pre IPO rounds. VC should give their founders, like, miniature feed chips, you know?

Oh, yeah, there you go.

Like that. Kind of like, lean into there. Just like a little model one. I mean, like, that's. You're so close.

I feel like Nikita should give a model G Wagon to everyone that hits number one on the app store.

Who he know everybody that spends a year with him on Intro. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for the G Wagon gets.

The toy G Wagon. Let's go to Swen, I think I don't know how to pronounce that. Jai. Swen Lee says discipline is for those who lack obsession. And it's a beautiful skyline photo with A screenshot of a. Or a photo of a MacBook with some text on it. What does it say? The original. Something of trading? I don't know. Did you.

So this is a little bit of a hustle porn post. But the reason that I included it is that I think that the. If you're somebody that gets. When somebody's posting about, here's my knowledge stack, here's my second brain, all this stuff and you're starting to obsess over note taking apps. There's probably something that's. Probably the reason for that, is that you don't actually care about what you're working on.

Sure.

Right. It's. It's.

You have to.

Because if you, yeah. If you, if you're thinking about, oh, I need to have more discipline, you just don't care about what you're working on. Like, I don't. It is not hard for me to roll out of bed and come here and record the podcast. Right. Like, I don't. Last week I had to drive through a hundred thousand people to get here. Right. I even, I even destroyed my tire.

Oh. Yeah.

I had to replace it.

Wow.

And so, yeah, it's about obsession brings discipline, but not because you're disciplined, but because you're obsessed.

Yeah. So you should just be obsessed first. Just find something that you're obsessed with first and then the discipline will come naturally because the energy will come.

Warren Buffett would use iPhone notes, app stock.

Yeah, Right.

Pen and paper.

Yeah.

He's not getting crazy in the fourth brain.

Fourth brain. Second brain, third brain, fourth brain.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's good. I've spent very little time in the, in the productivity world. The one thing that I did get, I did adopt and I like is Inbox Zero. I do Inbox Zero, where everything gets archived or replied to or delay, send or remind me later. And then, and then, like, I just, I just know that if it's in my inbox, I need to get to it at some point. That becomes like the task.

See, I'm obsessed. I have 2,500 unread texts and I always reply to the ones that matter to me, so.

Interesting.

So I don't, I don't worry about. By trying to get to Inbox zero with my text, at least.

Yeah.

I would be dealing with a lot of things I don't care about. Really. So. Yeah. Just.

Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, it just becomes completely unmanageable. I was, I've talked to. I was talking to a billionaire a week ago that lost his email because he got to a beanie. Because he. He lost. He basically lost his email because there's just too much. So he can't just. He just can't do it at all. And then lost his text. Well, Trump got two.

Trump, you said, prints them out, gets his email printed out for him.

Exactly. And at the very least, like, the printer is a little bit slow, so you people can email you faster than you can print them. So there's the. The printer is a rate limiting factor. You can only see so much stuff. Maybe it runs out of ink, maybe it runs out of paper. Eventually you're gonna have. There's gonna be some natural prior. Yeah. There's gonna be some natural prioritization. But yeah, now. Now he just. The only thing that gets through is Twitter dms, because you have to be a mutual follower. So in order to contact this guy, you basically have to say something interesting.

Yeah.

So that he follows you and not. And not do something stupid where you get unfollowed.

And then.

And then you can. And then you can contact him. And that's the only way. And that's the. That's the real cue of, like, how you get to him.

That's good.

So let's go to Nicole Wiskoff. She says, the founder of Wiscoff Ventures. She says launching a podcast feels 10x harder than launching a VC firm. Humbled after incorporating and filming the first episode. Mildly concerning. And then Alex Conrad says, now you are finally a VC firm. And she says, don't jinx it. Alex, what do you think about this? Which one's harder?

Depends on who you are.

Yeah.

I think for. For you and our vice president, Ben, who produces the show. This is like riding, like, the production value of Technology Brothers is intense. Right. There's lighting, there's heavy, heavy audio optimization. Post work on this is not something that you're gonna do on. This is not your guys's first rodeo. Right. And so for you, starting up a podcast is like riding a bike. But to anybody out there that thinks, oh, podcasting's easy, I would just say, you know, grab a mic. Yeah, grab a mic. Give it a shot.

Right. Yeah. I do think that what makes it hard is that people don't think about the format enough or what the show is, and so they wind up just doing kind of like, oh, I'll just interview my friends. Or like, it's like an interview show is just one possibility. Like, there are. Within the. Within the podcast world, if you actually look at the podcast, there are structured interview shows like Tyler Cowen, where he asks. He has every single question written out. He asks the question, lets them talk. Lex Friedman's very similar. Asks a question, lets them talk. Lex famously let Elon sit for, like, 15 seconds. You remember this? He's. He asks Elon a question, and Elon just sits there and think. And there's just 15 seconds of silence on the mic, and everyone's like, wow. Like, he, like, really didn't jump in. Rogan, very different. It's a conversation. Rogan doesn't have a whole bunch of questions. He's just talking the whole time. So conversational versus, like, planned interview, one on one. Then there's group shows where it's a bunch of people hanging out the pod Save guys. That Smart list podcast is like, four comedians. They still have guests on every once in a while. There's shows that don't have any guests, like our. Like ours. There's shows that are scripted, like, you know, serial on npr, Senra shows are solo.

Solo. And, like, objectively, it's more of like an audiobook by the end.

Exactly. Yeah.

Anything else?

And then there's also the acquired show where it's similar to Senra's thing, but two people and lightly scripted. Like, lightly planned, but not scripted word by word. But. But a lot of, like the.

But a ton of research.

Yeah, but a lot of those, like, true crime shows are, like, literally scripted, like, every single word. And just an audio. It's not. Yeah, it's an audiobook. And then. And then how much production are you going to do? Are you going to use sound mixing and bring in, you know, atmospheric sounds? A lot of the horror shows and true crime shows will have, like, moody music to set the tone. Just all these different. All these different formats and. And figuring out, like, what is the right format for your goal? What are you good at? Like, actually thinking that through and then sticking to that instead of just being like, I have a podcast. It's a zoom interview show with just random people that I meet. That doesn't really work. So until you do that work, you can just be like, Stagn. And I've seen a lot of people launch podcasts and just struggle for years to get, you know, any sort of.

Product market fit because they don't have feel. It should feel more like. Same thing with companies. Right. I give this example to founders where if you're. If. If you're working on a product that is not good or the market doesn't care about it or doesn't want it, it's going to Feel like pushing a rock, like a really heavy rock uphill.

Right.

Which is like almost impossible, like for a small team. If you're working on something that is getting real pull from the market, that's a good product at the right time. All this stuff, it's still really hard, but you're like pushing this heavy rock down like a small slope.

Yeah.

Yes. Like decline. And so, yeah, you have this momentum. Kind of like working with you.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think that's.

I guess the question for me is like, if you flip it around, like, what do you need to get right to have like immediate product market fit for a VC firm? Is it just like a banger thesis or like a lot of it feels like you have some preferential access to proprietary deal flow. And so it's very natural for you to raise the fund because you are already seeing great deals. And either angel investing or raising SPV is like very consistent.

Nicole's on her, like, so people were trying to dunk on this tweet, which. Which people want a reason to dunk on anything. But. But she's on her third fund. Right. It's not her first rodeo. It legitimately is probably much easier for her to set up a venture fund.

Sure.

And raise money. Raise tens of millions of dollars from LPs. So for her going and doing podcasting for the first time, I think a lot of people as adults stop doing new things. So everything they do is pretty easy. Like, I make my coffee in the morning, I drive to work, I do my job that I've done for decades, and it's all like, very easy. And so it can be. And if you're naturally a talented person, it's usually a weird feeling when you're doing something and it's like, hard.

And didn't she also, like, publish like the exact funnel that she used to raise the latest fund and it was like hundreds of pitches.

Yeah.

And that's the equivalent of doing hundreds of episodes, Right?

Yeah. And so she's been very transparent.

She's building in public.

Yeah, yeah. She's building in public, but doing it, doing it the right way.

Yeah. That's great. Let's move on to Tanay says market caps of a few consumer companies that were all multi billion dollar companies when they IPO'd in the 20 to 21 period. Sonder at 32 million dollars. Now rent the Runway at 36 million. Bain Capital company. I remember seeing them at Bain Allbirds 88 million. Buzzfeed 96 million and Wish at 167 million. And then Brennan says market cap of Sonder is lower than the cash we raised for our series B in 2017. Is this like the founder of Sonder or something like we raised?

He must have, he must at least have been there. I don't think that's a founder, but yeah, I think there's some type of opportunity here. A lot of these companies are like, you have to imagine that Sonder, I don't know if the board and everyone would be able to approve like a take private, but last I checked they had like hundreds of these corporate style, like apartments that were basically like somewhere between a hotel room and an Airbnb.

Yeah.

And there must be like some value in there greater than, than that number. And so I think a lot of these are, I think like wish and stuff like that, these E commerce things. E commerce seems like it's a really bad business if unless you online, unless you have, unless you're Amazon or you have like a real brand. It seems like the middle is like really, really bad.

Even if you have a real brand like the brand. The e commerce effort is merely a go to market strategy. And that's what we're seeing with Lucy, where like we were 99% E commerce for years. Now it's less than a third of the business.

Yeah. And then Rent the Runway is one of those things. Like when it launched, I think that in theory, for in theory, I don't know if they have men's product. I'm sure they have men's products.

Well, there's the Black Tux, which is a competitor for tuxedo rental. And then I think they got kind of eaten up by those like buy and sell resale websites like the RealReal where it's like the economics, it sounds way more expensive. But it's actually pretty similar if you just go to the RealReal, buy a dress for a hundred bucks, wear it, take it back, sell it for 50. It's like you've taken a 50% loss. But that might be the same price as Renting the Runway.

So the big issue with Rent the Runway is, is that it is a lot. Even though they've really dialed in like the receiving and dropping it off. The more money you pay for Rent the Runway as a consumer, the more work it is. It's like, oh great. I have these like three or four things that I have to like take, pack up and put to ups. And eventually they're looking at it as like, okay, I'm spending $2,000 a month. I could just like strategically Build out my wardrobe and sell the stuff that I don't like, like you're saying. So I think it's one of those things like that is something that is probably great localized small business in New York, for example, where if you could subscribe to a closet. Yes, New York, where a woman could walk in, buy something you're not, buy something, rent three pieces that she likes, wear them, drop them back off, and it's like right in their neighborhood. That probably is like a pretty good business. But you know, online, very logistics intensive. It just doesn't really make money.

I remember my mom always saying that like, maybe it was like the Italian way is to just have like one incredible suit instead of like ten cheap suits. And there you go.

This is a special occasion.

And, and, and, and, and just always essentially building a power law closet where you don't, where you have very few things, but they're all extremely nice and you take very good care of them and you repair them. And they're repairable because they're made out of nice materials instead of just buying fast casual, fast fashion or whatever.

I remember the distinct moment I was probably like 22ish, where I realized I'd stopped growing. And I was like, wait, I can buy stuff that's gonna effectively mentally depreciate.

It for a decade as opposed to a couple months. Yeah. Let's go to Sar. He says, nice, because he's tweeting a picture of an interaction between Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. RFK is talking about how the Trump White House will advise all water systems to remove fluoride from public water. And Jason says, science boy, can you vet this for me? Question mark, parentheses, Friedberg and what I love. So Friedberg responds, mmm, insecure boy, why don't you use the Internet to do some primary research yourself instead of outsourcing your thinking? And it's this massive ratio of 9,000 likes to 900 likes. And it's funny because it's like infighting. But, but what I love is that David Friedberg matched Jason's formatting to like, it's pixel perfect. Umm, three dots, Insecure boy, science boy, comma. And then even when they tag the person, Jason did open parenthesis, space at Friedberg. Space, close parenthesis. And Friedberg does the exact same thing with Jason. The attention to detail here is just fantastic. And I just like, was like the mirroring of the, of the meme. It's like, yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, they've been beefing.

I don't want to Celebrate. I don't think it's worth dunking on them or celebrating. Clearly they're going through a lot group right now. Sachs is probably going to, you know, it's possible he'll become secretary of state, you know, who knows? There's a lot going on. But I think why I thought this was relevant is one of the biggest reasons that we started this podcast is frustration that all in wasn't monetizing and frustration from our friends that said, hey, we want to advertise to this group of smart pro business individuals and we can't get in front of them. Can you guys build a bigger podcast and all in that monetizes you can sponsor? And I think the big thing is if all in had sponsors and they were generating tens of millions of dollars of revenue, which they can and should, they would not be fighting on the time.

I mean that could pay for a private research assistant for Jason to ask these dumb questions to.

Exactly.

They could have a vice president. Yeah, I don't think they do. I think they have like a producer. I think they have a couple of producers, but I don't think they have a VP yet.

So if, yeah, just thinking if, if I'm Feedship and Feadship is sponsoring all in and I see two of their hosts fighting it out, I'm like, hey, we're here to sell boats, right?

Yeah.

We're not here to argue and poke fun at each other.

Yeah, yeah.

I think there's more to this story and I'm sure it'll come out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's tough. I mean the, the Sotheby's clientele, like you don't want bidders. You want, you want them to be fighting with over individual with the paddles, with the option paddles. Not, not, not making a scene in the lobby. So yeah, it's tough. They almost waited too long and you wonder like, could they monetized now or has the ship sailed? Yeah, has the feed ship sailed?

Yeah.

Oh well, let's move on to Kyle Harrison. He's a contrary. Right?

Yeah.

Kyle says VC quote We don't invest in chat GPT wrappers founder. Our Chachi PT wrapper has gone from 150k to. To 15 million of ARR in 12 months VC will evaluation of 1 billion surface. You know what, I'll just leave the valuation line blank for you to fill in.

And so Matt, this was.

Haha, that's ridiculous. And also, is there still room in the round?

So, so that was a perplexity. Subtweet right.

Oh, really? ChatGPT wrapper, 50 million AR1 billion. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. But, yeah, I would say VCs love to invest in founders and products that are genuinely loved. And people fucking love Perplexity. Right. Like, it is a product that has replaced Search in a small way with very, very. I don't think really anything has done that in my history in tech.

Yep.

So if. If something has the potent. Something like Perplexity has the potential to disrupt the greatest business model of all time being Search.

Maybe they should buy search.com.

Yeah.

Search.com it's not resolving right now.

Yeah, let me get.

No one's using it.

And so anyways, I think Perplexity is a fair bet at any price in the range of what he just described.

Yeah. I mean, bullish on chatgpt wrappers generally. Not sure if they're always a good fit for vc. But the UI layer is important. And Perplexity just gives a different ui.

Yeah. A year ago, everyone was saying, there's no value in the app layer. You're all getting commoditized now. You know this. I think this tweet was in response to OpenAI rolling out web search.

Sure, sure.

But people are still using Perplexity. I remember at the election party that we were at, everybody was either they had polymarket open.

Yep. Or Perplexity.

And it was just like, much better sources of information.

And it's interesting because, I mean, perplexity is 100% making more money than mp3 dot com.

Yeah.

Ever did. And, and, and, and a lot of that's just a cultural shift of like. Yeah. When you launch a product, charge $20. Actually, the founder, Perplexity was on, I think Lex and was saying, like, I wish ChatGPT had done $40 a month because we just, we just copied their business model.

My only critique of Perplexity is I haven't. I've never gotten upsell.

Oh, sure.

I've never gotten pushed to give them money.

Yeah.

I use the product pretty frequently.

I used it a little bit. I kind of switched out of it. I had a problem with their voice dictation product where basically sometimes you could use. And ChatGPT has this too, where you can use Whisper to transcribe something into text and then it becomes a text interaction. Or you can open up their voice assistant and then you're talking to the AI and it's not printing it out in text for you. I like the text interactions because I want to see tables and data, but I want to talk to it. And so if that flow is confusing, it like really breaks my experience. But that's probably a little bit niche.

Yeah.

Let's go to Lindy Mann. Actually, we should probably skip this guy. He hates me. He hates you? Yeah.

How to, how to go?

I don't know.

I mean, what's the tweet?

It says gambling is so normalized now people are casually betting on the election. It just took a few years after they made it legal. American society is perfect for betting lots of money. Lots of people sitting at work wanting some.

The only thing is this might be how you your lendyman redemption. Because he would appreciate that we're sitting here in what looks like a newsroom.

I hope so. I hope so. Paul, if you're listening, unblock me man. I really like your posts.

So yeah, American society is perfect for betting lots of money. Lots of people sitting at work wanting some action. Right?

Yep.

And that was all leading up to. Yeah. I think people need to see any type of betting as much as it is a financial activity. It's entertainment. Right. So when I angel invest, that's an entertainment product for me. I'm giving you a lot of money without the ability to get it back. Except if you do super, super well. And I'm going to get updates every single month until something happens.

It's like the most expensive premium newsletter.

Exactly.

The investor update is like the best subs. The most expensive of substack.

Exactly.

It's a one time 50k fee.

Yeah. But I just like that we're now getting betting products for everybody. Right. If you're, if you're a technology brother, you can angel invest. If you're a D gen, you can do sports betting. Intellectual. You can bet on markets.

You do pump fun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're a real degen.

I mean the DJ levels are just 25 deep.

Yeah.

You can go to, you can be betting on like Candy crush.

Yeah. The really degenerate. Flipping a coin going is like having like your 10 screens and going long corn futures while you're betting on like Chinese tennis.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's great. So Cremieu says Elon starts his surprise Joe Rogan appearance by mentioning that he's one of the top 20 Diablo 4 players in the world and there are only two Americans in the top 20. And David Ulovich quote tweets it and says I'm pretty sure Travis Kalanick was the number one we tennis player in the world for a period of time when people played Wii tennis.

There's a whole story of him playing left handed with some vc. Yeah. Faking it, faking it. Smoking him still and just being like.

Playing with my correct hand. That's just so. It's just so funny because like Diablo, I get it, it's like kind of like a hard game.

So we.

Tennis is like just like. It's like a silly game. Yeah, yeah, but.

But that's the thing. You think that when I play we, it feels like a joke because everything feels like you're in a big cartoon. But Travis had figured out that there was actually deep skill in the game. And I think that sbf, when he would be playing League of Legends while pitching, smogging your VC by playing left handed and Wii Tennis and just smoking them over and over. That's cool. Just going and playing some random.

And he was bad.

Yeah, yeah.

SBF was bad.

Yeah.

He wasn't one of the best.

If Sequoia had figured out that he actually wasn't even good at the game, they probably wouldn't have invested. But yeah. And then anyways, I think. So the reason the quote tweet there brings up the fact like somebody analyzing the fact that Elon is just spending a lot, probably using an army of people to play for him, so he just gets to play with all the other top players. And apparently if you're playing with other top players, you just rank up a lot more quickly. I think that this is a risk factor for Elon's reputation because he. The number one way that Elon haters try to discredit him is by saying he didn't build rockets, he didn't build X, he didn't do all these things. And so to now be publicly like being like, I'm the top 20 Diablo player in the world when in reality is probably a team of people is just like, what's the point?

I don't know. I mean, I would honestly flip it around and be like, you know, there's. There's all this skepticism about like, does he have the ability to perform at the highest level? And he's like demonstrating that in a public place where like if you think that you're better than Elon, it's everything and he just gets lucky or he just has some sort of thing.

That's a good point.

Okay, well then show up and beat him. You know, you could do that. And then Palmer says it's very interesting phenomenon. I was briefly one of the top 10 players in Sword art, Art Online, Memory Defrag back when it was still online. And my score in Pokemon Pinball for Game Boy color was several times higher than the Guinness World Record. Wow. Amazing. I don't think I've ever been like top.

See, that's cool. Now. Now he has mod retro.

I was, I. I played a lot of counter strike and I got to. There's a. There's a. Like a league called the Cyber Athlete Amateur League and the Cyber Athlete Professional League. But the CPL was in person, so. And it was too expensive, so I couldn't go because it was like Texas and you had to bring your own computer and it was just like really tricky. But I played online and I was always like, there was open which anyone could get into main which was like, once you were doing well, then there was invite only and I couldn't get into invite. I was in Maine. But then I switched games to Day of Defeat, which was a World War II like version of it, essentially slightly different. And that I actually got to invite in. I was never like, really one of the top players, but I was really into that game and it was fun. But again, like, it's hard when you don't have time. I don't know how you. I don't know how he makes the time for it. It was always tough.

Especially there was some Olympian that talked about this and she was saying like she does Olympic skiing and modeling and she's still going to school. And the reporter was asking her like, how do you do all this? And the thing is is context switching usually ends up being a break, even if it's very active. So Elon going From working on SpaceX to working on X to working on playing Diablo is actually like. It feels like it's refreshing. It's refreshing. It versus just doing SpaceX for 14 hours is actually harder, more exhausting at a high level.

Interesting. Yeah, I like that. Let's go to Nick Dollars and Data. He says, friendly reminder that Jane street built a system to get the 2016 election results minutes ahead of the mainstream media and still ended up losing 300 million on the trade. And apparently Sam Bankman Fried involves his time at Jane Street Capital, where he built a system to get the election results earlier. Which is wild that he was there doing that. And I guess it was reported in Michael Lewis's Going Infinite. What had been a $300 million profit for Jane street was now a $300 million loss. It went from the single most profitable to single worst trade in Jane street history.

So it basically popped off of the news and then they held and didn't sell.

Really. I.

That's what I'm thinking profitable. Yeah. I just. I just think that guy pretty.

They bet against the US market. So they. They predicted that Trump would win early, but they didn't predict that the market would like the Trump win. Which is interesting.

You would think that you could interview hundred cap capital allocators that control.

Like maybe there was a. Yeah. Preference.

Or maybe people didn't want to say at the time that they were pro Trump and they thought it was going to be good.

Yeah. I wonder. I know Citadel, like their global macro team has. They do thousands of like CEO interviews every year. I wonder if Jane street has a similar function.

Well, you know the. You know the French quant.

Yeah. He did his own polling.

He did his own polling. And what he was the. He claims. I mean, who knows if he was just degenerate or. And now he's sort of like making retconning.

Oh, yeah. Real data.

But he said that there was a difference between in polling between who are you voting for and who are your neighbors voting for. And that gap was his edge.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was what felt different this time around than 2020. I was seeing like MAGA hats in Venice. Yeah. Or in like Santa Monica. And it's like. Like it used to be like if you saw that, like that person be getting yelled at. Yeah, I saw.

And none of the.

None of the culture flags. I saw like a mini Trump rally of like 20 people with like a big Trump flag. Like in Pasadena.

Even California apparently was. 40% of the popular vote in California went to Trump.

Wow.

Which is.

Yeah. Everybody. For years. It's supposed to be a D plus 27.

Yeah.

Which is like more like 70. 30, I think maybe even more than that.

Yeah. Wow.

It's wild. Anyway, let's go to Austin Petersmith. No matter who wins this election, I'm Gonna build some B2B sass. Underappreciated tweet. Just 74 likes. This is a good one.

Yeah, yeah. He. Yeah. He's been building this tool called Howie for the last year.

Oh, yeah.

Howie is a product that acts as like your secretary, basically. So the same thing that your secretary does versus says, hey, John, you know, this person would like to meet with you or can I schedule it for this? Howie's like a digital version of that. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So you can CC Howie in on email and then it just says like suggest times. It can coordinate back and forth. The person you're booking with can say, hey, that actually my day changed around. Can you do this day and how he'll just handle the whole thing. So it's basically making the Coogan secretary experience.

Maybe they should buy secretary.com.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's fascinating because secretary has become like it was. It was branded as like low status to be a secretary and so that got rebranded as an executive assistant. But if you think about the most high status roles in the world, the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary. Secretary. It literally means keep the secretary. Yeah, yeah. It's the keeper of the secrets apparently.

Yeah.

And like literally secretary like the person in charge of that. So it's actually like a very high status word and it is non gendered and so maybe we should bring it back.

Yeah.

Let's go to Rasit says my post is the top post of all time. In the R Cursor. In R Cursor bro. What the fuck? Zero coding skills. My web app ranked number three on Product Hunt. Hi guys. I was laid off for my job. I don't know how to code. I decided just to build things with cursor still learning. Didn't really know what to build so I just decided to build the most something, something, something. And they don't even know about the viral tweet thing. Lmao, huh?

Yeah. The this trend is awesome. Right. Which is being easier and easier and easier and easier and easier to build software and just things in general. And so it matters more of your raw ability to execute and pace and even marketing edge. This guy's doing marketing through posting.

And I think the really interesting thing is that like I guarantee if this idea has legs it ranks on Product Hunt. He gets some early adopters. Like there's going to be real programmers, it's going to be a tech company. There's going to be a lot of programmers. They're going to be using cursor. There's going to be a lot of leverage there but it's going to turn into a real software company. But you've just disconnected this need for the ideas guy to go convince a programmer to take a risk and build something for equity and something that they're not sure about. And so it just gets so much easier to iterate and test new ideas.

Yeah. So crazy example here have a portfolio company that recently had went to a hackathon instead of going as a group they had the CEO enter and the CTO enter and they both built individual products that both did well in the hackathon which and the CEO didn't have any prior real. He had never been a software engineer at a company ever.

Yeah.

And now he's like, competing against other, like, regular engineers and winning.

Yeah. Which is because of the hackathon in the early stages. You're not solving really, really hard engineering problems. You're not coming in with like, oh, I need a new sorting algorithm or something. You're just like, I need to pull some code over here, some boilerplate over here. Deploy this, like, just get something live that, like, does the basic bones of the thing that I want to demonstrate. Is this valuable? Is this a product that people want?

Side note, Cursor is the, the most painful miss of mine that I never took a pitch from, but I realized like, about a year ago that the cursor CEO had followed me since like 2021.

So you could have gotten the company.

Started and I, I didn't. Hadn't followed him back. And I just was like, oh, so stupid. Yeah.

Oh, well, great product.

Great product. Glad they're winning.

I mean, another example of like a UI wrapper, essentially, like, and it's actually model independent. I think you can choose whatever model you want. People like Claude 3.

The fact that these apps are going model independent too just shows that value will accrue to the app layer and not the sort of commoditizable.

Yeah, I mean, like, language model. Yeah, yeah. The language model could be like the underlying technology. In the same way that I think Netflix was built on GCP or AWS and, and Snapchat was built on Google Cloud, but then they eventually built their own servers. The consumer doesn't know. They don't care. James Stuber says VC the other day told me we've lost several really good founders to Factorio. They came back and just wanted to work in manufacturing, not SaaS. Do you think this is real? Do you think this is a joke?

I think this is a shitpost.

It's funny though. It's like Ayahuasca adjacent.

Yeah.

Like, you either you lose yourself to Ayahuasca and you go off to.

Yeah. I could see a, see a SAS founder playing Factorio and they're like, wait, I can like, do the same, use my same skill set of company building to like, just play this game in real life. Yeah, like, that's what Aaron's doing. Yeah, he's just like, playing a real life game of Factorio. That's what we're doing at Deterrence.

Yep. I wonder if there's a, like, a dividing line between, like, the type of game that someone played as a kid and then the type of career path they follow. Like, is there a difference between, like, the shooter who's maybe more of like the aggressive.

That was always the risk.

That was versus the RTS games.

My parents were freaked out that I would. I like Call of Duty as a kid because I now.

You own a gun store.

No, but that was because. And they were just worried that I just like get, like. Want to go into the military. Yeah. Stuff. But little did they know, actually played way more starcraft, which is much more entrepreneurial balancing, you know, resource building, resource management, conflict. So anyway, long StarCraft players.

Yeah. Long Diablo players. Now I wonder if there's going to be a boom in Diablo. We had a hackathon or a LAN party at Founders Fund and it was a lot of Halo, a lot of Counter Strike, a little bit of Smash Brothers. And I think there was maybe two people playing StarCraft. But StarCraft's a little bit harder to set up for his longer game, I think.

Super long.

But I could see the next one. I played a little bit of Diablo 4 because. Shout out. Lulu Miservi, she gave me a free coupon code for it when she worked at Activision. I was like, thank you. But I played a little bit. And I was like, this is like too much. I played Diablo 3. I never really played Diablo 2. That was like the one everyone loved, loved, loved.

But it was like, I'm waiting for another World of Warcraft scale game where it felt like World of Warcraft was the most deeply addicting.

Well, that's supposed to be Fortnite and then Roblox, right? Or Minecraft. Like, Minecraft is very much the new version.

World of Warcraft, I feel like, had a lot of adults that were deeply addicted.

Totally.

I guess maybe that's the case for Fortnite too. I just. I don't know.

It's maybe true for Fortnite. I think it's probably less true for.

Minecraft and adults that are addicted to video.

But yeah, like, I mean, I guess they're making a Minecraft movie. They made World of Warcraft movies. So maybe it is pretty adjacent if they build it up. But. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. Grit Cult, who's been on the show before, dumps a whole list of problems and solutions. The fertility crisis, the solutions. Have 10 kids. Environmental crisis, Buy a classic car ownership crisis, become a landlord.

You laugh, but it's. It's real. It's real more sustainable, objectively, to buy.

Oh, yeah, because it's already. It's not being produced by anything, right? Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. And they last a long time More.

Sustainable than buying a Tesla.

Interesting. Well, not when Tesla starts launching V12s with gated manual shifters, which is coming. It's the end of the arc for Elon. Very clearly. Education crisis, homeschool. We know many people that do that. Health crisis, gym obsessively. Unemployment crisis. Go in, go all in on crypto. Love it. Everyone's scared over leverage, lack of nutrition, steak and eggs, and then jack butcher says 100 year bull run. Any of these you disagree with?

I just like this because it's all about taking personal responsibility for the problems that you see in the world. So a lot of people think that there's a lot of problems in the world, like we should just do less. But the key is to do more, but do more of the right things.

Yeah. And all of these are things that you just do independently. Mostly.

I mean, landlords a little too. No one's stopping you. Like, Elon talks about the fertility crisis and actively works to fix it. Right. Like takes personal responsibility. He's not just saying, you have 10 kids. He's having, he's having.

And this is something we've seen with like, the health crisis stuff. There's a lot of like, kind of like trad influencers that, you know, complain about like the fluoride or seed oils or all this stuff, but then like, you meet them and they don't go to the gym and it's like something's mismatched here.

Yeah.

You should start with yourself and like.

Yeah.

And like, at least solve the problem and then your. And then your family and then your community and then the city, the state, the nation.

Yeah.

But if you're just jumping straight to the nation, like, you at least need to lead by example. Right?

Yeah. One guy, one guy at Hereticon that was like giving a panel on like, health and.

Yeah.

The like alternative health movement. He like, was 37, I guess, and straight up look like my age. Like, he like. I was like, proof of work.

Oh, there you go.

Respect it.

Yeah.

So anyways, be.

Be like that guy Brian Johnson or Justin Maris.

No, Justin Mares.

Justin looks fantastic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Proof of body. Very important.

Proof of work.

Yeah, Proof of body for. For any health claims.

Like, yeah.

You have to be able to say, like, okay, this person's recommending steak and eggs. Do I want to look like them? If yes, then I will listen to them. This is the Andrew Huberman effect. Chamath Polihapitiya says these should return the exact same form of results, but they don't. So if you searched. If you searched where to vote for Trump, it would give you stories about the election. And if you asked for where to vote for Harris, it would give you like a, like an info form of where to vote. And you could just type in your address and it would immediately take you there. So people were saying, like, Google is biasing towards Harris. They're being more helpful to Harris voters than Trump. Obviously it didn't matter in the election, but the community note says the search results were different for Harris and Vance because Harris is a county in Texas and Vance is a county in North Carolina. And it appears Google has corrected this issue. I do want to give Google the benefit of the doubt here.

I just think.

I think they're under so much scrutiny that they really. Okay, okay. Here comes the tinfoil hat. Here comes the tinfoil hat. I think there's so much.

Quite a lot of examples like this over the last two weeks. So much so that it's hard not to wonder if the woke mind virus within Google is still not acting up a little bit, even though the spotlight is on them. Maybe that's all.

It just seems like, yeah, if there's a whistleblower, there's so much scrutiny, like they're trying to.

Yeah, you can make the same argument that X is deeply political and up ranks certain ideas. So I think it's. I think it ultimately is happening on both sides.

Sure, sure. Let's go to Sean Pury. He says, host of my first million, says the new bachelor party trip to Turkey with the boys for hair transplants. Where'd you get your hair transplants, Jordy?

Locally. Locally. Yeah. I actually get. I get weekly micro transplants. Okay. They just take like a, you know, 1cm by 1cm and just transplant just a little bit. It's more sustainable. You know, I never have to, like, go through the whole wheat. No, haven't. Haven't had to do this yet. Although I function, health tells me that I've like, really. My hormone profile is conducive to hair loss.

Okay.

But my spirit is conducive to having great hair.

Interesting.

It's kind of like this, this balance between my hormones and spirit and whatever. But yeah, I haven't seen this yet. I do think that medical tourism is, is like a underrated trend. I think it's like pretty investable trend.

Yeah.

I knew some guys that were working on, on sort of Airbnb for medical tourism, which is kind of a cool concept where. Yeah, if you want to go down to Mexico to get some dental procedure Done. There's some dentists down there that are probably fantastic and there's a lot that are gonna jack you up.

Yeah. But knowing which one's good isn't good.

Knowing what you're good. Having that user generated.

I was talking to Justin Mares about this with the like GLP1s were like widely available for like 5 years before they came to America. And a lot of rich people were.

Going abroad and they're still really cheap on the black market.

Yeah.

Gray market.

Yeah. Very interesting. I have yet to lose my hair and I don't think it's genetic in my family, so I'm not super worried about it. But I did start getting a bald spot back here a while ago and I was like, this is so weird. Like, I don't understand why I'm losing my hair back here. And what I figured out was that I was so. I was so interested in efficiency and shareholder value and just being on the grind and not wasting any time that when I got out of the shower, I would take the towel and vigorously rub my head as fast as possible to dry my hair in like two seconds and it was ripping out my hair.

No babies get that.

Yeah. My three month old crib. Cradle. Crib.

Yeah. My three month old cap or whatever balds back.

Yeah. Yeah, same thing.

Yeah.

Giving myself back.

Here's, here's, here's. I should put the tinfoil hat back.

Okay.

Here's, here's what the hair. A lot of the hair loss epidemic is driven by lack of sunlight to the head.

Sure.

Sunlight makes life grow.

Yep. But everyone's inside all the time. No one's working outside.

Overuse of artificial fluorescent lights.

Sure. That you're cinema lights. They're very high quality.

Yeah. I'm sure they're super good. Wearing a lot of hats cuts off blood flow and then a lack of physical touch. So if you're a guy, go like this through your hair. I will just like massage my head multiple times a day.

Okay.

To stimulate blood flow. Because.

Or if you're like jabbing 100x on a trade, you're just like. Yeah, you don't want to be pulling out your hair. You don't want to be pulling out your hair. Yeah.

Anyways, if you're a brother, physically or spiritually, give yourself a little.

I mean, it is, it does feel like the hair transplants things becoming more normalized, more democratized, cheaper, more reliable.

And so I think we'll see King James.

Yeah. And I think we will see more people start to do it. Earlier, so you don't have those like, like billionaire transformations or. It's like before money, after money. It's so obvious that they went and got their hair done instead. It's like the person just doesn't lose their hair because they made enough money at 30 to like, pay for the cheaper hair transplant. That was like, pretty reliable.

Yeah.

But yeah, the hair transplant stuff, I mean, it feels pretty brutal. I know some people have done it and it's like your head's like bleeding for like days. It's like rough.

Yeah. I had a buddy do it and he kept leaving the house and I was like, dude, for all of us, just like stay indoors for like a few days, chill.

Yeah.

You're gonna be back on. On the road.

Yeah.

Nobody wants to see that.

It's rough. Anyway, boys trip sounds fun. I don't know. I mean, any excuse for a boys trip, but hopefully not like surgery and just sitting around like, you know, being miserable. I'd want to do something. Something fun. There's so many other things you could do. Go visit Feadship and start designing your custom yacht. Eighth century wood chipper says, forget polymarket. Here's the real indicator. Palantir Technologies jumped 14%. The stock's over $50. And was this. This was like right on election day, I guess.

Yeah. To me, what was amazing about this election, as somebody who appreciates finance, was just how many different ways there were to bet on the market.

Dogecoin.

Dogecoin was one. Bitcoin, Solana, defense tech stocks, even Google went up 4%. Even a big one was obviously all the companies that are potentially impacted by tariffs, like Lululemon and things like that.

Truth Social. The stock got halted right before the election. You saw that.

Yeah. Well, I think there was a big. It seemed like the truth. There was a big sell into the election, which somebody was like, let's sell the before. You know that basically. Yeah, it's going to get less attention now that Trump's elected and.

Oh, really? You think that's what it was. It wasn't. I think, thought Trump was going to lose.

I think you could argue that that was the moment of where people were pouring on investments because people thought he was going to win.

Yep.

And it will actually could just trade down now that he's going to be president again and nobody's taking away his.

Yeah, I mean, he's like live on every podcast and on AX now. Yeah. It's interesting. Also the fact that all the defense stocks pumped is interesting because there's this.

Narrative that like the Dick Cheney endorsed?

Yeah, yeah, like Dick Cheney and the, and the, and the Democrats were going to be more pro war and in fact the right wing would be less pro war. So you would assume that defense budgets would get cut. But I think there's probably just like a return to the traditional balance with the, the conservatives still continuing to promote defense. And I think it's good because I love Palantir and I think it's important. Let's go to Mark Sisson. Is that how you pronounce it? He says the best thing to do right now is lift some heavy ass weight.

Okay. So Mark, don't know him personally, but total legend. Early to a lot of these sort of alternative health trends. And he has proof, proof of body. Like the guy is Jack fantastic six pack. I think he's in his 60s. He had started a company called Primal Kitchen.

Oh really?

Which he.

No way.

So he sold for hundreds, millions of dollars. Great products. Like he basically took a lot of the sauces and other things like that that were unhealthy. Took out the seed oils, put avocado oil in, stuff like that. But I'll, I've seen him. He works out at the gym next to my house. I think he splits time between the west and east coast. But the guy is just like a living example, living his values and. Well, no, when he is in the gym, last time I saw him, he's like the mayor. Like everybody is like saying hi.

That's awesome.

And so anyways, like he's proof of work, the guy.

Yeah, the guy's also just a good message. I mean, I think this was the fifth, so this was like election night essentially, or I think it was noon before the election. And so a lot of people are stressed. They're just going to be checking polymarket doom scrolling. And he's just like, just go get in the gym.

Yeah.

Which is true. It's good. Just get those endorphins flowing. It's important. Morgan Housel. What firm is he with again?

Collab.

Collab fund. Is that right?

He's like, it's like a big deal. Done very well. Yeah.

Oh yeah. He's a writer.

He's written a bunch of great books.

He has a quote. The polls don't tell us much. Let's turn now to the degenerate gamblers to see if we can learn anything. Seven thousand. Yeah.

So here's the thing about evaluating whether prediction markets worked. Yeah, they were right this time.

Yeah.

But even a day before they were projecting that there was a 40, basically projecting there's a 40% chance that would win. And that was not like, I don't, I think this was a huge win for prediction markets from a liquidity standpoint and how much attention they had.

Most importantly, they were more accurate than the polls because you could just be one point over. But at least it was the most correct source information.

But it was, and I was saying this, okay, I, I thought that Trump was going to win, but I also knew all my most degenerate friends were going real that are very generally conservative and were betting heavy on Poly market. And I just figured that that would slant it more. But the election was such a landslide that maybe it was perfectly accurate.

Yeah, Yeah.

I don't know.

What'll be really interesting is if, is if in the future there's a, you know, prediction markets are split 55, 45 and they get it wrong.

Yeah.

Because I think everyone will be like, oh, it's worthless now. When really it's like a 45% chance should come up every once in a while, especially across, like, you know, you test 10 elections, like it shouldn't always be right.

Yeah.

But I mean, what a win. And just like incredible accuracy. And also just the fact that they, I think almost more of the value is this thing Shane was saying on, I think it was on CNBC today or some sort of TV spot. The founder of polymarket was saying that like, because polymarket was continuing to reprice the odds, they were able to effectively call the election like three hours before the news media. And the news media has this, it's like you could say all these different things about like conflicts of interest and who's doing what and biases and who likes who or whatever. But it's just a fundamentally different economic incentive. Like if you're, if you're cnn, you are incentivized to sell ads and get watch time and keep people watching. If you're polymarket, you're incentivized for liquidity and providing correct prices. And so it's just a very different like incentive structure. And so the, the CNN coverage and the, and the mainstream media coverage was constantly like, well, you know, could still be a toss up. Like, don't turn this off. Like, let's go to this one district. Let's look at this.

We were at, it was, I was standing between two TV screens. One had called it, yeah, 30, 40 minutes before, which was Fox News and MSNBC was just, still just going, going.

Saying, but at the same time, before you even got to the party, like three hours before any of them called it, polymarket was at, like, 85% for Trump. It was like, okay.

Yeah.

Like, unless something crazy.

I remember, like, Will was getting nervous because Poly market dipped, like, 3%.

Yeah. Oh. It went from 95 to 92. And he was like, I'm panicking or whatever. But, like, yeah, it's ridiculous. It just. Just having that. Having that early signal, even if it's just like, three hours. And then I did see something where they had a screenshot of the polymarket map, like, a month earlier, and it was dead on.

Yeah. So I don't know if. I don't know if this made it into the stack, but somebody did an analysis of polymarket and turns out, like, 90% of users had a negative balance.

What does that mean?

Like, 90% of people that bet on polymarket in the last. This election cycle lost money.

Really? Yeah, just at various times.

Hopefully it made into. Yeah, like they were trading up. It's probably more like people were just trading in and out.

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

I don't know. Yeah. Who knows? But it's just, again, when the liquidity is like the stock market, if one person's winning, someone else is losing.

Interesting.

Winning big. A lot of other people are.

Yeah, interesting. Let's go to Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb. He says Airbnb just reached 2 billion guests. It took 14 years to get our first billion and only three more years to reach the second. Thank you to everyone for giving us a chance. It's amazing. I like this first comment. That's the first comment. Charlie Light says, congrats, Brian. The first 2 billion customers is the hardest, in my experience. Smooth sailing from here on out.

Charlie's actually a legendary poster. He had this account that probably had a few hundred thousand, so he's joking, but, no, I think it'd be good to rank YC companies based on customers, because there's, like. I don't know if any other. Is there another YC company that has more customers than Airbnb? Can't imagine.

Coinbase would be really big, but not Meta.

Didn't.

No, didn't do YC or anything. There might be some company out there that's just like such a. Such a general app that it's like 10 that runs a DAU.

So I guess the other thing that is interesting about this is the real number of people that have been a customer of Airbnb is actually probably significantly higher, because how many times have you stayed in an Airbnb and, like, you didn't Book it or you booked it?

Oh, yeah, totally.

Come with you.

Yeah.

So it's probably more like they have like three and a half billion or probably. Yeah, so. So, yeah, pretty. Pretty insane.

Yeah. And what a journey. I mean, during the COVID cycle, just like losing everything.

There's a possibility, there's a possibility that at some point in history Airbnb will have more users than, than Meta or Coca Cola. Because Airbnb is actually like very geographically dispersed. So like there's countries that run on Airbnb and a lot of like tourism runs on it that will be using Airbnb, but they use some local social media and they have some like off brand Coca Cola.

Yeah, yeah.

So. So yeah, getting to a tough spot where there's the TAM. They've got. They've. They've almost gotten 50. You know, they're approaching 50% of penetration.

Any of the other Airbnb stuff will pan out. They did experiences for a while. Did you ever see those? So you'd show up to a place and then you could have like kind of a tour guide recommend restaurants, kind of a. Like an Airbnb native version of like when you stay in a nice Airbnb, there's usually like a book that you open up and inside it has like recommendations of like what restaurants you should go to. But yeah. Have you used Turo? Turo is pretty cool.

Before I could afford 9 11s, I would, I would. I said Turo is hilarious because you're taking highly depreciating assets that are high risk assets in that, a sports car and putting them on a website where the primary users are going to come joyride it.

Yeah.

And I just don't understand people that take a car like a Porsche and put it up there because the clientele that's actually renting were like 22 year olds like me that are. I was very respectful with the cars, but still like they're driving them to like drive them and put miles on them. It doesn't make sense where it's making. Yeah. A house. A house you could have, you could have a million people come through a house and it would still appreciate. Right?

I don't know. I mean people rent Airbnbs and throw parties. It's the same problem as like true.

But something to be. Something to be said of like if a house is appreciating 5% a year.

Sure, sure, sure.

And even if you need to put another 50 grand into the house every year.

Yeah. I mean, I think like kind of, I guess like maybe the bull Case for Turo is that a lot of the real serious, like the Turo managers basically run. Run a business on Turo. Similar the way people run businesses on Airbnb. They know the, like the sweet spots. Like the. The Porsche Macan is like a phenomenal value because I think you can get one for like 45k and it releases like a premium Porsche, but it's cheap. And same thing with like the Corvette. The.

Yeah. The question is, why has he.

Because it's like a mid engine sports car, but you can get it for 70k or something like that.

Yeah. I don't know. Why hasn't Airbnb moved in? Have they into car rentals? Car rentals.

Maybe it's just too different of a business. But.

But think about it.

Just like fly in, do, okay, I get a car, go to this Airbnb. I do.

That's an example of Airbnb should get air.com and then. And then do everything.

That'd be cool.

That's cooler than ChatGPT. Rebranding is chat.

Yeah.

My opinion.

I do love that. I mean, I don't know if we talked about this, but Chesky wrote this post about how like, everyone should do a demo day every year at a big company. And when it was first proposed to him, he was like, like, we're Airbnb. Like, what are we gonna announce? Like, it's not like we release a new iPhone every year. Why am I getting on stage like Steve Jobs and being like, this year we're doing something different because it's like kind of the same business every year. But it forced him to, like, think of ideas and get in the habit of driving towards it. Aligns the entire organization around like some sort of milestone, some sort of deadline, even if it's just shipping, like their new, you know, fraud prevention service. It's like, okay, well then you can announce to the public, like, like, if you're an Airbnb, you know, host, you're going to deal with a lot less fraud because we just announced this new program. But then also they could do a bunch of cool, stunty things. Like they built the house from up. They built like a, like a Barbie Oppenheimer house, I think, or something like that.

Yeah.

And all that stuff is like, very gimmicky, but, like, actually makes for good marketing. And so I like this. I think it could be, probably be misused by startups where they wind up leaning into just like, oh, we're like, we just are constantly standing on stage. There was like a whole batch of AI companies that were, like, LARPing as Steve Jobs with, like, no products. And. And. And it was kind of like, okay, like, you guys got to ship, but, like, once you're. Once you're in that middle phase where, like, you have product markets fit, you're growing, but you want to keep the pace of play up. You want to keep.

We should do a. Yeah, we should do it.

You know, Anduril does this very well. They're. They're always launching, like, these, like, hype videos for their new products, and it just feels like there's a sense of motion that would be very different than them just being like, hey, we sold more sensor towers. We sold more of the same thing. Like, instead, it's like, okay, you're hearing about this thing, you're seeing this video.

And basically, companies need to think about every major moment as a launch, not just when they launch their company. That's the number one advice I give for companies in my portfolio that are, how do we generate attention? Yep. You have a major. You have a major hire. Treat it like a launch.

Yep.

Hype it up.

And also, like, bundling those things together. Because, like, even. Even if you raise, like, a decent Series A or series B, like $20 million from, like, a decent firm, like, that alone might not be enough to get, like, a profile on your company. It might be enough to get, like, a TechCrunch article, but that's not going to do anything. Instead, it's like if you're. If you're launching a new product and you're raising money and you got some interesting hire, and there's also some interesting, like, personal angle with one of your customers, and your founder has an interesting story, and you're an expert in this industry now, and there's some megatrend going on that you're playing into. It's like, okay, now you're going to get the deep dive. Like, Like, Alex Conrad's gonna show up and, like, talk to you because, like, there's more there than just okay. Yeah, they raise money. Cool. Like, one line. Like, you need to give facts. You need to give, like, a sense of motion and progress in the story. Yeah. Let's go to Keith. He says, rest assured, guys, I have checked the ballots, and they do not contain PFAS or BFBPA. Go vote. So this is underrated 45 likes.

Yeah, yeah.

Microplastics disrespector. Of course. Yeah.

So this is a rifle on receipts which use this, like, thermo paper. And receipts are genuinely terrible. Like, there's zero roi to touch them. You should avoid them.

Huberman recently did a deep dive and he said one of his three things was no plastic bottles. But then also don't touch the bottles.

People don't realize. Even the transfer from putting your finger on a hot receipt that's hot off the fresh. Yeah, it's fresh. Real transfer. And with hormones, like really, really, really small amount of volume of, you know, hormone disrupting chemicals or hormones themselves can have a dramatic impact on how you feel. So if you're a. I don't think we have any. I don't have any. Think we have many cashiers in the audience. If you are a cashier, wear gloves. Yeah, wear gloves and refuse receipts.

Yeah, but yeah, I mean, I guess the ballots don't matter because it's, it's all printed like way ahead of time and maybe uses a good ink.

Yeah, there's that. And you just hold the pencil far away.

Yeah. But very on trend. Comment. Let's go to Dr. 22. Deja Rue, 22 says a lot of entrepreneurs are not business people because they enjoy the idea of business, but rather because they are repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else. I think there's a lot to be said about that on a soul level. It clearly resonated a thousand likes.

Yeah, I think people, there's a lot of benefits for working for someone else because if you're working for somebody else, you're effectively outsourcing all of the gnarliness that comes from running a business agency. Yeah, you're outsourcing. There's a lot of benefits. Right. Like your salary arrives right on time. You don't have to be thinking about making payroll, have to be thinking about some customer issue or HR issue. There's. You don't have to be. If the, if the website goes down and you're not the web developer, it's not your problem. Right. So I think the benefits of, and I think for a lot of people, like going and working, there's such a tried and like true path now of like going to work at a good company, spending four years learning from the best. Like ramp has spun off like Devin AI. Right. Early Ramp cognition, early RAMP team. And there's so many benefits. But yeah, I think for me, and I don't know, I don't, I didn't even hate for me, like, I think this is one of those things. Rage is one of them. If you're, if you have a lot of rage in your heart and you want to win and you want power and prestige. Building a company can be one way to do that. If you just want to create things. Some people love creating things and companies are the best way to do that sustainably. And yeah, this definitely resonates with me, the desire. Yeah. After you, you interned at Bain and you're just like, I can't do this again, I need to be the md.

Yeah, I could never do it. I used to tell people, like, if you want to just be a successful entrepreneur, just never take a job.

Yeah.

Because like, eventually you have to figure it out and like, but as soon as you say, like, I'm taking a couple years off to go work and Google or something, it's like, okay, this is the beginning of the end. You're going to get comfortable, they're going to do everything they can to keep you from going back in the gladiator pit. And so you're going to get complacent and tired usually. The exception of course, is going to work for extremely hot startup for a.

Very short time because it's a super entrepreneurial. I have a former employee who could have just stayed in Fang and decided to start a company and join a couple startups and he would have done, he would be retired by now. Even though he worked at like good companies. If he had simply just never left, never left Google, if he was a.

Fang pm, he'd probably be pulling in what, a couple hundred K a month, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

But it's bad for the soul.

Yeah. Hurts the spirit.

Hurts the spirit. Yeah. Enjoy the idea of business. Yeah. I mean, I did not fully understand the idea of business really. I was truly repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else. I mean it also helped like after doing yc, like you miss the standard recruiting cycle so totally, like you're like, no, not at all. And you're just in this weird space. And I actually had a friend who was like the first employee at Facebook and was just, I emailed him to just be like, generally like, I want to work in tech. And he was like, I don't think you want to work at Facebook even though, like it's a great company, like it's too late stage, like they just want to hire people like out of the pipeline.

I've never, I've never, I shouldn't say never now, but in the first three years out of school, even though I was talented, hard working, working in relevant spaces to startups, but just the fact that I had my business on my LinkedIn. Yeah, you just don't ever, you know, recruiters not Gonna go hit up the founder of, like, this business. Non. They're not, you know, odds of them leaving and they don't pattern match as like your next great.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting liquidity. Liquidity says we need Blackstone to take America private. Right size our cost structure, clean up the capital structure and get us ready for an IPO before the next election.

This does feel really real. It does feel like if. If. If Elon and can. Can like, bring in this, like, sort of efficiency that he brought to X, the whole country will. It's the first time that I've felt. Not political at all, but it's the first time that we could sort of. America's debt has been just running, running away. Like last week it added like $100 billion in a day. And it's very, very concerning. And this feels like an opportunity to right size the government. Right size our cost structure because nobody, Nobody is in favor of increasing taxation generally. It feels like you have to be an anarchist to want to say, like, yeah, we just need to raise taxes. Raise taxes. That's. That's the solution. Because then you get Europe. And so, yeah, I think this is an awesome moment and this is a meme, but I think it's like, legitimately real.

I think the, the interesting kind of hot take is that the way to right size the. The. What is it like the government. What's the income statement essentially for the government? It's like the. The government expenditure is like. Is like way higher than the tax receipts. Is not necessarily to, like, cut a bunch of spending and like, fire a bunch of employees. Although that's like, one way to get there. The real way is to extend the retirement age because that's where all the Medicare and retirement benefits kick in. And I think it happened before and it dramatically changed the financials of the company.

Everybody's healthier now. We should. Everybody should be retiring.

You need Brian Johnson to come in, make everyone healthier. And then if you push the retirement. If you can push the retirement age out because everyone's living longer, well, then it's justified. But for the last, you know what, 20 years, life expectancy has been declining. And so moving the retirement age up is really like taking away, like, prime years of retirement. And it's like, really going to put the squeeze. But if everyone's like, well, yeah, I'm going to like, I don't mind that the government wants me to work, or like, the government is incentivizing me to work, you can still retire whenever you want. But the government's Incentivizing me to work till 70 instead of 65 because I'm going to live to 120.

Here's, here's how America like really gets its, you know, house in order is getting on ramp. Right? Because if America ran on ramp, you'd be able to look through and be like, why are we paying Boeing $150,000 per soap dispenser? This is insane. That's like a real.

Yep, that's a real thing.

That's a real thing. And right now the President doesn't have the visibility and Elon's not going to.

Be able to look at every single line item.

But he needs software that has AI.

Agents to go through.

Imagine if America was getting one and a half percent cash back on all government expenditures. That's a whole new revenue source.

It is, yeah.

So, Kareem, Eric, let's get America running on ramp.

We should. That's a good campaign slogan. Someone needs to do it. Let's go to Spore says, yeah, I'm a full stack dev. The stack is Claude, chatgpt and perplexity. 29,000 likes. Wow.

Crazy. 29,000 likes means something's mainstream.

Super mainstream. People understand that like this is the modern stack.

Or maybe that's because like the number of people that consider themselves developers is like a niche AI coding joke. Would not get 29,000 likes like a year ago. Right. So maybe the market markets just expanding that quickly.

And then Peyton Casper says MFs are going to be arguing one day about whether they should ask Claude or ChatGPT. It's going to be the new Reactor view. In some of my circles it already is. Yeah, Yeah, I don't, I don't see a problem with it. I think it's good. I mean the full stack was blended years ago with like, you know, putting JavaScript on the server.

I'm, we're going towards a future where there's are artisanal developers that are handwriting code and they're going to be like, they're just going to be like in their off like small sub section of the Internet where they're talking about artisanal code.

And that's like the Nat Friedman website or like Goran's website. Like those, like.

No, it's not even that. Like building technological digital masterpieces all just by hand, just one key at a time, you know, no AI slop.

No AI slop. I don't know. It's a good stack.

It's a good stack.

It's a good stack. Let people have fun. I Think people are pumped up about it. They're like, yeah, go off. It's great. Let's go to Alex Wang at Scale AI, Founder of Scale AI says Scale AI is proud to announce Defense Llama American Flag, the LLM purpose built for American national security. This is the product collaboration between Meta Scale and Defense experts and is available now for integration into US Defense systems. Read more. That's cool.

Yeah, yeah, very cool. I think it is a wild turn of events because if. If you could go back and tell journalists five years ago that Meta was going to be getting into defense tech.

Yeah.

They would be like, what? This is so bad.

Oh, yeah.

You know, like, because Meta went through the worst PR cycle of almost any company in history.

Around the election.

Around the election and all that stuff.

Yeah.

And so, yeah. Now, honestly, bull case for Meta that Zuck is getting into defense tech.

Yeah, I mean, it seems great. I remember the original. Are you familiar with the Project Maven story? This whole kerfuffle at Google, So.

Oh, right.

Like, the Pentagon had an initiative to modernize technology using artificial intelligence, and they called it Project Maven. And there were walkouts and Google was one of the contractors on the. On the project. But there were a lot of others. Like, I think Palantir was in there. I think Scale might have been. It's kind of unclear, but you can go and read the actual, like, subcontractors, and everyone got a little piece of it. Google was one of them. And then there was this massive walkout, this open letter. There were a whole bunch of, like, new New York Times articles around it. And it was very interesting because it was all framed as like, Google is helping the government build like, killer robots. Because, like, AI for defense means, like, like, you know, automated drones, like, killing people. But what it actually was was like, very, very basic machine learning just to take the load off of like, they're literally like, you know, like, you know how when these AIs get trained as, like, hordes of. Of people in third world countries, like, tagging images and stuff? We were. Because it's a critical national system. We were having like, United States Airmen do it, do this. Like, you'd go and work for the Air Force and your job would just be like clicking on a box, being like, that's a car, that's a house, that's a person. Just to like, label the data. Because it was all coming from satellites and drones. Because once the drones were flying around the Middle east, you needed to tag all that data and understand what was going on in it. And so we couldn't outsource it. And so it's just like very, very messy. So Google came in and was just like, okay, well allow, we're not building anything for you. We're just allowing you to use our TensorFlow API, which is for their machine learning system. And we'll just host you. We're just providing hosting. And the actual development was done by other companies, but that was like too much for the Google employees. And so there's this massive walkout and.

Then that's why Palantir is a hundred billion dollar company for sure.

For sure. And I think it's, I think it's smart to do a custom LLM for this. Like, you obviously need more security and more controllability and just more insight. So building something on open source that can be auditable but still deployed. I just wonder like where the first use cases of LLMs will actually be in the DOD. Because like what we're seeing in, what we're seeing in Tack or like consumer is mostly like, you know, AI girlfriends and coding assistants.

No, it's really dark. It's basically like you go into the LLM and you're like, what's the next, what's the most relevant, like potential assassination that we can do globally that most fits the narrative right now?

I think it's much more banal. What I think it'll be is like you'll have a ton of spreadsheets and Word documents sitting there to inventory the meal kits in some base and you'll be able to just like type into the LLM, like when I, when will I run out of Gatorade? And it'll just say like, you'll run out of Gatorade in June of 2025. Like, okay, order more please. And it'll just go, order more. And it'll save some, you know, poor soldier, like, you know, like an hour of work, basically. I think that'll probably be the, the real impact, but everyone always wants to jump to like, it's going to be.

Killer robot defense Llama.

Defense Llama. It's good, it's a good brand. I like it. I'm excited for that. I wonder how, how we'll see that roll out. Let's go to Ben south says I love sf and he takes a picture from inside a coffee shop and the guy has on the back of his laptop a sign that says marketplace raising precede. Have revenue say hi.

Amazing. We, I think we talked about this guy but didn't have him pulled up. And what people need to Understand is if you get this guy probably is getting his round done faster than some tier one founder who's like already has a bunch of relationships. Because just based on the volume of angel investors that are probably coming up to him and talking to him. And people within tech love to bet on underdogs. They love to bet on people that put themselves out there bold.

It's funny.

So anybody can do this. It's free. You just have to work, be working in your startup, put a sign up, go to get, move to sf.

And you have to be. I mean you also have to be confident because you know that you're going to get mocked. Like I'm sure that this has like, you know, hundreds of quote tweets being like, this is the dumbest thing ever. And then a lot of people like, this is cool. I like this.

Yeah. But it's. It's all about. But if you're Elon. Elon is. Is. You have to know who you want to like you. Right. It's not about having everybody like you. If. If a bunch of pro technology, pro startup people on SF think what you're doing is cool and you want to raise money from them, you can have.

A hundred VC funds that hate you. If one likes you, it's go time. Let's go time.

Adam Newman.

We already did this. So you pronounce this Gautier. I always pronounced it gout. I don't know which one it is. His full names but Gauthier says everyone watching the Poly Market odds silence model a gambler is talking and it was 100% accurate. We already talked about this. But Polymarket was correct. So cheers to the Polymarket team.

Gauti is amazing.

What does he do?

He has some handle a crypto index fund and they also have a protocol built on top base for liquidity.

I guess that makes sense the Zero X.

But anyways, yeah. He's somebody who's. For entire time I've known him since I invested in 2021 head down, just focused on product. No token, just grinding. And it's been. There was. Yeah, there was about. So anyways, this was. This Poly market was a win for him because he's French.

Yep.

But. But also the. They've had a ton of like regulatory lack of regulatory clarity because of this last administration.

Sure.

Crypto making everything that they're doing way harder. All they're trying to build is like, you know their first product was an index product of like a bunch of different digital assets. That was way harder than it needed to be security And I still think you're maybe not allowed to even buy the index in the us. You have to be international. So hopefully that, hopefully that changes with the new admin.

Yeah, I mean, this is Brian Armstrong's point, always is like we just want regulatory clarity. We just want to know what we can and can't do. Like the simple. So hard. And that's hard for the financial markets because how do you price this weird risk? It's hard for builders because are you really going to go spend all this time building something that might get outlawed or might not? It's like this weird high volatility.

Yeah.

So.

And the. Yeah. There's a reason Gauthier is building in, in New York is because after the Frenchman won this massive bet on polymarket, France is now trying to ban. So like, if people are winning, if people are, you know, you know, if something's innovative and fun, let's ban it.

I do think that Poly Market, the result here is going to be very good for crypto. Like, we were talking about how crypto needed to win a big acquisition with Bridge, but polymarket was accurate, bipartisan. Yeah, I think, I think everyone was using it.

Yeah. If you think about it, we're only about a decade into crypto and it's a really use case. Yeah.

Coinbase ipo.

Coinbase ipo. Billion dollar acquisition by Bridge. Poly Market being the center of this.

Election cycle and just Bitcoin actually sticking around. Everyone, all the crypto haters were like, bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme. It's going to zero. It's clearly not going to zero.

Yeah.

And so you now have stacked up like a few of the core. The core. The core pitches which have always been, look, it's this decentralized currency that can't be hacked. True. It's maybe digital gold. True. There's actually use cases built on top of it. Polymarket. True. There's just a lot of different wins.

That are financial innovation.

Very slowly.

And Gautier's first product is a token that is basically a collection of other tokens. Right?

Yeah.

So there's like real innovation happening. There's real consumer use cases. Stablecoins are here to stay. Bitcoin all time high. Hard to not be long. Crypto.

Yeah, yeah. And it's just like.

And all the, so many, all the people.

There will never be a use case. There are no use cases. And it's like, well, at least we have one now. You know, very clearly, very hard to deny. To deny that.

Yeah.

Lit news network Is this liquidity's, like, affiliate. Oh, cool. Lit news networks.

I just thought this was awesome. Yeah, I.

Hold on. So Lit News Network says breaking Florida vote against legalizing recreational marijuana 55 to 44.

Yeah, I just thought this was so. So based. I think that. I think that marijuana has some medicinal benefits, but in general should not be publicly available and promoted in the way that it is. Yep. And this is our. This was. Our talk at Hereticon was all about. There are drugs that are general. You know, every drug has positives and negatives, but there are drugs that can have a very negative societal impact. And I think that marijuana is one.

Of those when it's taken in extremely high doses, extremely regularly, in extreme concentrations, which is exactly what's happened.

Yeah.

And the New York Times has been reporting on this, where psychosis and medical episodes are, like, increasing dramatically. And a lot of it's just because there's been this pressure. Like, you talk to some hippie Grateful Dead fan, and they, like, cannot smoke modern weed.

Yeah.

They're like, what is this stuff? This is a different drug. And that's true with pretty much everything. I mean, think about the difference between having a beer and drinking Everclear.

The only thing is nicotine. You're getting a similar dosage today that you would have from a cigarette 50 years ago. And that's part of why it's. Lindy.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's part of. Yeah, it's there, like, nicotine has this weird curve where, like, if you take too much, you just like. Like, you get, like, sleepy. You don't have, like, a. It's not. It's not like an increasing. Yeah, it's not increasing, like, result. Yeah. So there's been, like, a natural forcing function for. There's less of a race to harder, like, more and more concentrated dosages, which is good, but that certainly has been. Hasn't been the case in the psychedelics. So good news for Florida. Hopefully more to come there. Let's talk about Ross McKay. He says he's obsessed, and he posts a picture of a company, I think, called Cadence. And it's just him, like, packaging stuff. So what's going on?

Yeah, so this is a. They make, like, a hydration product. What I think is interesting about this post is historically, Twitter and X were a place to share words, and Instagram was a place to share pictures. And so if you look at your Instagram feed, there's thousands of people like Ross that are posting, like, cool lifestyle imagery around their brand and things like that. And if you simply take the exact same content and just post it on Twitter. You get like comparably like much better engagement and way less competition.

Yep.

So there's a bunch of people building hydration brands on Instagram.

Yep.

And just by going to X and sharing the same style of content, you can really like stand out and build this sort of like cult following of people. And so Ross has done that. There's another brand in the fashion space that's done that really well represent. And so I just think if you're building a lifestyle brand, there's a ton of alpha and going over to X and, and focusing on that as a channel. Just way less competition.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something about the, I don't know, X has always had this thing with like the comments where they're like there's really, really high status people on there and you can slide into people's DMs and stuff. It just feels a little bit easier than Instagram where because there's like the quote tweet functionality, there's just a lot more vectors of like engagement and you can just find a conversation going on that's a little bit harder in on Instagram because the comments are a little bit more buried.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's cool. It's a nice photo. I gotta try the product. Is it just hydration or is there caffeine as well?

They have a ready to drink and. And then they have. I don't think they're onto stimulants yet.

That's cool. They have some nice tattoos. I gotta go see that photo in color. Looks good. Let's go to Naval. Naval says upcoming deregulation wave will create an economic sonic boom. This is post election.

Hopefully. Hopefully. I think that there's a lot of. You can just look at all the charts around introduction of new regulation and then you look at Europe and Europe as an example of what happens when you hyper regulate every single industry. It just hurts innovation, it hurts everyday individuals, hurts the economy. I don't want America in 50 years to be the vacation, purely a vacation destination for wealthy people in the Middle east or China where there's. There's been this sort of renaissance of innovation. And so in the same way that Europe by nature of hyper regulation has propped up, you know, when you look at all of their public companies and their ten hundred largest companies, I think all of them were started around 100 to 200 years ago. And if the United States were to continue at the rate it has been from a regulatory standpoint, that same thing would happen here, without a doubt. And as much as I love that Europe has become sort of Cancun for people like you and me, I don't want that to happen. I agree.

Yeah. What's interesting about this is like, I don't even really know what the top deregulation efforts on the agenda are.

It's make it easier for Elon to launch rockets.

Yeah. But honestly, like the Zeitgeist and the, and the feeling for the support felt more driven by just stopping more regulation.

Yep.

And not actually. I mean, this is the same thing with the illegal immigration thing. You go back to the 2016-2020 era, there was not like, it wasn't. We weren't in a negative net immigration era. Trump was. During the Trump era, there were still 400,000 Border Inc. Or like interactions, which is how they measure it. And that, that increase under Biden. But the, but the idea that, you know, you're going back to like, okay, we're going to see negative, like outflow of migration is probably not the truth. And, and, and, but I mean, it's still.

Yeah. Here's, here's an example. Here's an example.

Even if there's just less new regulation because we just have so much already.

Here's an example, though, people don't realize that a lot of the gasoline and oil used in California is actually produced in California.

Sure.

In California recently rolled out regulations to make it much harder to produce oil in the state, which is motivated by this sort of like sustainability movement, esg. And I know a guy who's in the oil industry in California and he's like, his business is basically like getting destroyed. California is still going to have to buy gas.

Right.

We still have to buy oil. We still need it for pretty much every facet of our life. And so it's that kind of regulation that's just like effectively motivated around religion, which is the religion of ESG and sustainability. That doesn't make sense because the same people that are regulating the oil industry in California are going to drive their car to work using oil and it's like make it make sense, you know?

Yeah, yeah. It's just, it does feel like we're very, we're in the early innings of actually understanding what like a deregulatory policy would look like.

Yeah.

Like we've heard like drill, baby, drill. But what does that actually mean? Is there like a specific law that's going to be rolled back or across really every single possible facet of the administration? But I do agree, and I mean, the Market is certainly pricing in an economic sonic boom. Like everyone's very excited and very bullish. The thing that I'm really excited about is the housing stuff. I hope that. And I think Ben Thompson was writing about this today. Just this idea that if the administration is empowered to go in and deregulate at local levels, like, that's really powerful. And that actually happened in California to some degree, where California passed the ADU laws that allow and they override local laws. So it's the state of California saying Los Angeles, I don't care what you say, we need housing in this state. And so here you can build an ADU if it's this size and it applies to this and that. And so it'd be very cool to see something like that at the federal level. Where the federal level says, you know what, like we're not going to have any more restrictions on height and you can just build 10 story buildings wherever. You can build a one story building, you can build a 10 story building, like go nuts. Good luck to the, Good luck blocking this state government, federal, like local government, whatever. And, and, and then, you know, I think the housing ladder, like getting, I think that's a major, major issue. I think the millennial generation is. And Gen Z as well. Getting to a place where you own a house is so important and has been so important through the American experience. It's the American dream. Our vice president was talking about how a lot of his friends who are in their 20s, just none of them own homes yet.

Our vice president.

Our vice president. Yeah, yeah, sorry, not J.D. vance, our vice president. Technology brothers was saying that it's just, it's just unheard of. And a little bit of this is, I hope, can be swung by a number of factors. I mean, one is just build more housing. Two is what JD Vance was kind of teasing on one of these podcasts, saying that he might want to make it harder for foreign investors to come in and buy property. Which is interesting because it's, it's true. Supply and demand. Right. Like what drives housing prices up, Restricting supply with a bunch of regulations and making it really hard to build, but also increasing demand. And this is what everyone always gets frustrated by.

And Europe has done this. Right. It's much harder generally in Europe to buy a home as a foreigner.

Yes.

And the re. And now you can still look on the European Zillow equivalent and you can be like, whoa, this house is $200,000. It looks nice, it's in a nice town.

Yep.

But it was hard to go Buy.

It if you're not a citizen. And so just. And that's kind of the opposite of the process where people say, oh, we're going to give you a housing credit. Oh, we're going to make it. You're going to give everyone the same amount of money to buy houses. So much that's just going to raise the price.

Yeah. So much of.

We know this.

A lot of one. Yeah. And a lot of issues with regulation is it just slows things down dramatically. So there's entire. If you could take a town in Georgia that is just decrepit, right? Totally, like just falling apart. There's no industry. And you could say, hey, you can build your new factory here. And we're going to fast track. We're going to fast track it. And it's like a capital thing, right? Because if, if you need to fund some new initiative and it's going to take six years and this. Even, even locally in Malibu, there's people that, that want to build a house. They have a plot of land and it just doesn't quite make sense to get some construction loan when it's going to take four years. And like you're going to be carrying this big cost and not being able to live there. So there's all this land that just doesn't get used.

So, yeah, I think the other, the other kind of like set aside the politics issue, the cultural issue that might solve the housing crisis to some degree is there's been this massive shift. I think the Instagram generation and just the FOMO of seeing everything online has really driven this phenomenon where someone grows up in a suburb or, you know, Ohio or some kind of like, you know, third tier city, mid tier state. But then they go to a college, they get a communications degree, and then they go get a job in Manhattan and they can pay their rent, but then they're not on the economic ladder to the degree that they'll be able to afford a house in New York. And they're like, why can't I afford a house? And it's like, well, you're in the most expensive city in the entire world and houses start at 2 million bucks. But if you just went back to your, your community and built there, like, you'd be fine. Or even if you were just okay with like an hour long commute when you did need to come into the city.

Yeah, Nick Huber guy always talks about this. He's constantly getting canceled every other day. But his, one of his like really good points is that you can afford housing Just not in the places that you want to live.

So I think there's kind of two angles with what could drive a cultural shift towards that one is just like the trad memes of like being pastoral and like wanting to live in like a safer like chiller community, kind of less on the grid, little bit farther.

That's why we're looking at opening up the Montana office.

There you go. And, and so, so, so just making not being in the most expensive city cool anymore and seeing more Instagrams from people that have set up little houses in small towns throughout America that will create like memetic pressure for people not to just be clawing tooth and nail over the Manhattan townhouses that are out there for 2 mil. But then the other one is just technology. Like Starlink makes it so that you can guarantee super fast Internet anywhere in the United States even if there's not great fiber coming into a town. Obviously with like new power generation, like the utilities are going to get better. Self driving cars mean that. Okay, yeah, you could have an hour long commute, but if you're in something without a steering wheel and you're just on your laptop and just doing sleeping even like all of a sudden that kind of stretches things out because like real estate is priced as a function of the economic opportunity around it. Like the reason Manhattan real estate's expensive.

Yeah.

You wonder jobs there.

I wonder if robo taxis will change sleep schedules where more people will start to do that. Like four hours on.

Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. I wake up at 4am, I hop in my robotaxi, I sleep for an hour and then I'm in the city and, and all of it's like scheduled out. So like, like the car is actually traveling at 60 miles an hour the whole time. I'm not stuck in traffic offset. And then even like VR and teleconferencing stuff like that will also reduce the barrier so you can keep like it's easier to keep in touch with someone on the other side of the country with, you know, group chats and VR and video games and stuff. And some of that stuff has, you know, deleterious effects at the extreme. But in general it feels more possible than ever to go to Montana and be. And we know a lot of VCs, we know a lot of rich people that spend most of their time not in the major cities. But there's no reason why a, like a young professional who, who wants to buy a home at 25 couldn't, couldn't move there and then still compete in the global workforce.

Totally.

Let's move to Augustus. Augustus Dirico, founder of Rainmaker says you should know, you should all know that we have a four year window to go as hard as fucking imaginable. Deadly serious. Leave it all on the court. It's a miracle we have another shot at all. All press me to go harder. I will do the same with all of you. Alhamdula. I never know how to pronounce that. How do you pronounce it?

Alhamdulillah.

Alhamdulillah.

Alhamdulillah. Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't know how, how can Augustus go any harder?

He's going, he's already had pedal to the metal I would think but, but I like it. It's a good, it's a good reminder like this is a window of opportunity. Like regulation's not going to get worse. There's lots of opportunities like you know, go hard like try a lot of stuff and it's just a reminder that you can do crazy stuff.

Yeah, I don't. There's a lot of talk in tech about taking advantage of technological cycles and moments. There hasn't been over the last 20 years as much emphasis around taking advantage of political cycles to the same degree. Right. It's, it's clear that admins impact the economy I think. Right. You would, you would hope that they're not just on, on autopilot but, but yeah, I would say that there is a moment here across pretty much if you're building in heavily regulated industries there's probably going to be a lot of opportunity there. If you're building, you know, crypto is like a good example where now there's poly market winning is actually amazing for all these, all the, all the type of like the OG crypto people that got disillusioned with the industry because they were over. They just realized that it was only speculative and so now there's more opportunities to.

Even some of the sharpest people were like everything's just regulatory arbitrage right now. Yeah, just take something, I put it offshore. It's like very zero sum. It's like not fun. But now people see that there's an opportunity to actually like just go back to the basics of like improving the speed of the financial system.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And with Augustus there could be ridiculous opportunities. Right. They might decide hey, weather modification capabilities is super, super important. We need to emphasize this. And he's like, I mean this is to my knowledge close with like Steinman and there's going to be opportunities that come through that. So, yeah, he. A lot of the.

He. Early on, he was talking about how China is, like, reclaiming the Gobi Desert. Is that. Is that the right desert where they're planting. Yeah, they're terraforming it by just planting a ton of trees.

Yeah.

And just watering them and re. And rerouting rivers and stuff. And they're just reclaiming all that land. And so when you think about the current administration, like. Like, you know, I would be surprised if, like, there wasn't. There wasn't energy around, like, yeah, let's make Nevada a bread bowl. Let's make New Mexico beautiful and no longer a desert. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of regulatory things like, oh, well, you're gonna displace the lizards and the snakes or.

Whatever, but the rare bees.

Yeah, the rare bees, which we can talk about. But hopefully there's enough energy to get through this and actually bring about.

We've talked recently about how. Because the regulatory environment has been so bad, there's just not. There's been a lot of entrepreneurs on the sidelines that are like, I'm not gonna do this, because even if I get the product to work, like, it's going to be impossible from. From a regulatory standpoint to get it through. So hopefully that changes. And a bunch of people that were on the sidelines come in and.

Yeah. Anyways, Jake Chapman pours a little bit of cold water on it. Faster. 18 months after the transition, but before the government stops process midterms. Stops to process midterms. Nothing is promised after that. That's a little bit of a bummer. Jake, come on, man. We're trying to get pumped up. We're trying to leave it all on the court. But I understand what he's saying. It's a good point. Anyway, always, always an inspirational poster. Augustus. Phenomenal what he's done to, like, the next generation of entrepreneurs. Yeah, it's really. It's really impressive. He's, like, created like, his own little, like, YC cult, basically.

Yeah.

Fantastic. Rob Keel says, well, at least my boss will be in a good mood tomorrow. And he has the XAI badge because he clearly works at xai. I love this because there are so many companies where there's a rule like, oh, the compliance officer says, I can't tweet. I hate it. And clearly Elon lives and dies by the post.

Yeah.

And he lets his. He lets his employees post, and it's great.

Yeah, post. Just post. Post through it.

Post through.

Yeah, I read this I don't know. I don't know, Rob. But I, I almost read it as like, maybe he was, like, disappointed and now he's like, well, at least my boss will be happy.

Oh, yeah. Like, maybe he wasn't happy he voted for Kamala, but he's like, at least.

Who knows?

Who knows? Great. That's great.

I do think X AI is a huge beneficiary of, like, everything that's happened in the last week, but either way, it's good. I'm sure that X is an environment where people are allowed to share their views.

Yeah.

But because it's just not about that. It's about building.

Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, that's the thing that people miss with like the whole mission driven company. Leave the politics at the door. It's like, no, it's actually okay. Whoever you vote for, like, we actually don't care.

Yeah, yeah. But there was a lot of. There was a lot of HR teams that Wednesday were sending out notes that were basically to the effect of whether you're celebrating or devastated, we're here for you, you know.

Well, we sent one out to our team, but it was like, like, whether you're celebrating or devastated, like, the shareholders come first.

Get back to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no fucking slack.

Yeah. We, we have a policy where if we employees need to, you know, send us a screen. Share screen. Screenshot of their screen time on their iPhone. And if there's more screen time than there are, you know, we don't consider screen time working hours. Right. Working is when you're at your terminal.

Yeah.

Editing content, making the trees on your keyboard. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we're a little bit hardcore about it, but.

Okay, let's go to Fisher King. He says Kamala skipped Rogan but did Saturday Live. She generally only did scripted, controlled events. She avoided long form conversations that could reveal her as a person. Trump advance did the opposite. They took chances, showed themselves victory for transparency and new media. And so I've dug into this, like, very, very seriously. I went on, I went on, on Pirate Wires podcast, like back in March when Biden was still in, and I said that the person who does the longer Joe Rogan interview will win the election. And, and then later I went on and coined the. The Coogan parlay, which was you go on polymarket and you bet that Trump will do over two hours on Rogan. Kamala will do under two hours on Rogan, and that Trump will win based on that. And whoever does more will win. And we should make a parlor.

We should make a polymarket parlay now.

Yeah.

For next election around Joe Rogan airtime.

Yeah. So I, so I've dug into this and not only did Trump do more interviews, I think he did something like 18 major podcasts and Kamala did about six or eight.

Maybe Barron was leading the strategy, but.

His podcasts were much longer. So when Trump went on Rogan, Rogan is a three hour show and everyone was like, Trump's old. He's, you know, he's not going to want to do a three hour thing. He's going to cut it short. And this is something that happens with all the big political folks. Like when Bernie went on Rogan, he cut that short. He didn't do three hours. He did like an hour and a half. Even when Benjamin Netanyahu went on Lex, he cut that short too. And a lot of these guys, they're like media trained. They want to stay on the talking points and they don't want to get caught in hour two and a half being a little bit tired and just freestyling. Right?

Yeah.

And that's the whole point of the Rogan interview is that you, you can't stay on top of the people.

Have people trust people more that freestyle.

Yeah.

Well, there's heart. You freestyle. Expose your real.

When. When police interview, like pyromaniacs, they are suspected pyromaniacs, they'll just interview them and get them talking for like eight hours straight. And they'll just come in and talk and talk and talk. Because the people who are obsessed with fire, even though intellectually they know they shouldn't say, like, I like fire, eventually they'll break character and just be like, yeah, you know what would be cool? Like if we just like lit this table on fire. It's crazy. And so, and so there's something about like the long interview that just like, you can't stay in character.

It's like me and a angel investing. I'm like, yeah, somebody has a good idea. I'm like, let's bet on.

But so, so what's interesting is that the ratio of like podcast appearances between Kamala and Trump was something like three to one for Trump, but the ratio of hours spent podcasting was more like 10 to 1. And then because the YouTube algorithm weighs longer content as better for keeping, for selling ads and keeping people on the site, longer content does better in the algorithm. So the Rogan three hour Trump interview got 35 million views. Something like that. And the Call her daddy, they just posted a clip that was like 20 minutes and so that one, even if, even if a bunch of people watched it, YouTube's just saying, well, should I, should I promote the three hour thing that I can sell 50 ads on or should I promote the 12 minute thing that I can promote five ads on? And so it's a very, it's like Google, YouTube, like the algorithm is just, is just expected value maximizing. And so the Trump one goes mega viral and gets tons of views. And so if you add up, I was trying to run the math on this, I might do like a, like a piece on this and actually run all the numbers. But so the Harris campaign spent $1 billion, the Trump campaign spent like 300 million. But if you think about it like, like how much does it cost to run a 30 second ad on Rogan? It's like $100,000 I think. So if you multiply that out for three hours of essentially an advertisement for Trump, right?

Yeah.

Well, now you're at a single efficiency, A single, like if you were to go to Rogan and say, I want you to do a three hour episode on Rora on just my product, he'd be like, okay, well a 30 second ad is a hundred thousand dollars. So a one minute would be 200,000, 60 minute. You know, you could multiply it out and get to like, like $50 million. And then it also did 10 times as good as a normal episode. So that's like a 200 million dollar value asset just in terms of like impressions. And there's a massive, massive availability bias where things that you're familiar with and you spend a lot of time with you like that person more. And so just the fact that people were, were spending time listening to Trump and his surrogates, I think it made them like him more. And this is very different. In 2016, CNN, NBC, they were all promoting Trump rallies because they got good ratings, they could sell a lot of ads. But then in 2020, Trump got Covid. There were lockdowns, there weren't as many rallies, and all the mainstream media were like, maybe we shouldn't be promoting this guy, maybe we shouldn't be publicizing his rallies. So he got way less earned media and as a result, the average American just spent less time listening to Trump. Even if you're Trump skeptical, you probably still listened to 10 minutes across all the different things in clips, in little bits. Maybe you turn on the Rogan for a little bit, you're like, oh, this sucks, it's boring. But you listen to a little bit and yeah, and so I think it's really just attention is all you need going forward. The candidate that gets the more attention, the more views. And that's what the political spending is a proxy for. It's literally just ads they're buying and those ads are just 30 second ads.

And there's something, I feel like 2016 and 2020 were dominated by performance marketing. At least from that was what was being analyzed is who had better performance marketing. And people felt like performance marketing was the future of political campaigning where you could just create an ad for effectively two people in one county to turn them against. And podcasts are so good at building narrative and likability and these things that really matter so that for every one person that watched the Joe Rogan appearance, they're telling they're. They've then consumed so much content and so many talking points that they now become effectively a surrogate for the campaign.

Right.

They're just out spreading the message. So. Yeah, yeah. I think there's something about the Internet where long form content, a textbook, gets digested into a tweet, a podcast gets that gets turned into an Instagram post or an Instagram story. Right. The Internet is all about just cutting down long form content into the smallest, most digestible piece of content.

Yeah. I think it's the future. I don't think that either major party will ever put up a candidate that.

Isn'T good, that isn't going to do.

Isn'T going to do a three hour Rogan.

Yeah.

And so my bet that I would put on Polymarket right now is that the 2020, 2028 election is between J.D. vance and AOC or JD, J.D. vance and Buttigieg, because AOC and Buttigieg both can actually sit and be real people for several hours. And AOC has done it with like the twitch streams and stuff. Like she gets it. She's. She, she's definitely like part of like the new guard.

Yeah.

Let's go to Aaron. Slowed off. He says time to re industrialize. And I like this because we talked about Josh Steinman tweeting good morning. We're going to win every single day. And this feels like the seed of a mantra. You know, Aaron ran the re industrialized conference.

Yeah. Him and Austin Bishop.

Yeah. He's done a lot of stuff, a lot of work around reindustrialization. It's a very interesting coinage and buzzword. I actually got in a fight with somebody about this on, on X because I said re industrialize. And they were like, well, there's no such thing as re industrialization. The opposite of de industrialization is industrialization. And I was like, I don't a. I can just Google it. And there is a, and there is a dictionary definition for re industrialization. So like you're kind of just wrong if you're being like literal but also like everyone knows what we mean by re industrialize.

It's just branding.

It's just branding. And so it's a great coin and.

Everybody can attach slightly different meaning to it.

Exactly.

And yeah, it was, it was, we, we were at, we spent election night with Aaron and he just, he. The work he's doing is so difficult. It wasn't like he was fist pumping or anything like that. It was a good moment for him and rewarding to start to get to have somebody like J.D. vance, you know, in office who actually cares about this topic legitimately and it's not just voicing it over.

Yeah, exactly. So I hope to see this post on my timeline every single day.

Yeah.

Let's go to Sheil. Monot says this is an incredible ad by Calm during election night. Calm bought a 32nd spot on CNN where they just turned off the sound and just played like we're giving you 30 seconds of peace and quiet. This is the Calm app. We know that you're stressed out really in the zeitgeist, really capitalizing on the moment that, you know, psychologically everyone who is watching kind of understands this is like a stressful moment.

It's great for the CNN audience too because I think the Fox News audience was probably, I want to starting to pop champagne. Yeah. And the CNN audience was having a tougher night on average.

But I like stuff like this. I like when these companies are agile and think about. Yeah, just taking a little twist. Like I think at the super bowl there was a company that ran, I, I think they sold like hammers or something and they did like a one second ad and it was just a hammer smashing something for like one second. Or Coinbase did just that QR code that was bouncing around like the DVD symbol and they kind of broke the format and it sticks out and I still remember it to this day. Whereas am I really going to memorize like the fifth Budweiser ad? Like that's kind of undifferentiated.

Lucy, we need to be planning the 2028 election ad, but it needs to.

Be something that's like, you know, in the zeitgeist, cutting against it. Like you can either be. I'm sure most of the ads that ran that night were like, you know, America's at war. Like, this is why you need to buy this thing. It's like in. It's in with like the. The normal narrative and this one just cut completely against it. Good, good job and good spot by shield to like find this and clip this because I wouldn't have seen this otherwise. So great. Curator Sean McGuire says the turning point was Elon buying Twitter. Do you agree?

Feels that way. It felt like another turning point was making likes private because sure, yeah.

Revealed preferences.

Yeah. A lot of people were even afraid to like anything that was against the narrative. So yeah, I think it was. But yeah, the acquisition or the take private was down, was upstream of likes and other changes that have happened on the platform.

There was a good article in Stratherie today about the election and Ben Thompson was basically just saying, like, as a business individually, it's very hard to say that like X is like this massive win because he paid pre zerp prices for it and the stock probably would have crashed. He probably could have bought it for cheaper. And then there was this advertiser exodus and the whole business is going through like a business transformation. But if you view it as the Musk company's portfolio, like, it's very accretive. And I think that's what pretty much everyone in the deal was aligned on. Like, a lot of people invested because they wanted access other Musk companies access to Elon or they wanted investment banking contracts. They want to be the one to take SpaceX public or something.

And whether or not X is a win for Elon, you could argue that it is even from a regulatory standpoint right now is effectively purchase control of. Not directly, but sort of indirectly. But yeah, right now I think X is marked at around 20 billion. So on paper they've lost $24 billion. Something along those lines. But. But to prove the Elon's personal net worth went up a hundred billion dollars in the 24 hours. So. And many of the people that are big investors in X have exposure to the other companies.

Yeah, yeah. Are you familiar with the Japanese keiretsu?

No.

So the keiretsu or this, a bunch of Japanese conglomerates that all own pieces of each other and so they're like deeply, deeply intertwined and Musk is like kind of building a little bit of that. He was deeply criticized for like the SolarCity acquisition. And there's always a question about like, oh, if one of his companies doesn't do well, maybe one of the other companies will just buy it. But maybe that's actually like a good strategy. And we certainly Saw it play out here where, you know, buying one thing can have synergies with another. Even though you wouldn't assume that a social network would have any impact, it.

Was always odd obvious that when, when Tesla would brag about not needing to do ads that their ad platform was Elon's own personal Twitter account. And so yeah, if you're getting billions of impressions a year for free, you don't need to run as many ads.

And again, just run the numbers on the impressions of Tesla. Like how many cybertruck videos and like funny raps and funny hype videos and reels have you seen on X? And really anywhere. Add all that up, it's probably more than Hyundai spent on the super bowl. Or like all the advertisements for sure. Just in terms of attention. Yeah, exactly. But they're not paying for it, but they are getting the economic value of those impressions. So it's the future. I can't believe I have to read this again. Creatine Cycle Atlas, friend of the pod, writes on election night, hopped up on Addy and a Zinn While gooning to polymarket and manifold 1 second charts in widescreen on my Apple Vision Pro While talking to three different LLMs and streaming those results directly to eight different group chats of terminally online schizophrenics monitoring the situation. And Glark says, work harder. And then Atlas says I have Fox News and MSNBC at both at full volume in my AirPods Pros.

It feels like the real argument for having six monitors is the election. The election, right, because there's so many different things to bet on. You've got traditional media, you've got defense bitcoin stocks. Yeah. Polymarket boys, you've got your discords, you've got your signal chats.

Yeah. I was talking to Sagar and Jetty who runs Breaking Points about this and like the most perfect stack was the breaking points live stream. Have you ever watched this? It's phenomenal. It's like they, they all, they all came from like more or less like traditional media backgrounds but have gone very like YouTube native. They're viewer funded so they have like subscriptions and stuff. And so they're just like completely authentic, just making jokes, posting. They had this funny thing where it's kind of a left right show where Crystal Ball, the one of the hosts, she had to wear a maga hat because she bet on Harris and Sagar was gonna have to wear a Harris T shirt if he lost the bet. And so they just have this really fun rapport. They have A bunch of other people around the desk and they're just like they have enough of the technology where they have multicam. It looks really nice. It looks like a CNN production but it's like much. It's clearly not as high budget but it's just really, really fast paced, really great. And while they're doing the show they're doing lead ins to YouTube clips so they'll set something up so they'll be like, oh like now we're going to like. So he kept. During the live stream he'd always, he'd stop and be like, oh, the producer is telling me to do a lead in. So he's like, like Donald Trump has been elected the next president. We go live to like his speech and then they cut to the clip and then they'd react to it. And it was just a live show but it was really, really well done. So it's like breaking points live stream X scrolling the timeline polymarket and that's all you needed. And it's all independent alternative stuff and that was like by far the most entertaining, truest source of Alpha. The most accurate information like the mainstream. Just turn on the TV is like truly gone. So I'm excited.

Sarah. Sarah, my kids are getting kicked out of the hotel.

You gotta go.

Do we have a. Want to prioritize one or two more?

Yeah, let's. I really wanted to do Max. We can do them next time. Shane. Let's do Rune. Let's do Rune. And then, and then Q A. Yep. Okay. Rune writes the age of the technology brother is at hand. And what a perfect post to end on the timeline. The timeline. I couldn't agree more. Perfect time, perfect name for the podcast the technology brothers subscribe if you haven't already follow us on X. We're also on YouTube and Spotify and you can get all of your. All of your takes and and timeline analysis on there. So shout out Rune for the accurate analysis. Accurate that the Technology Brothers are good. We're going to get.

Should I read the question?

Yeah, sure.

Hey John and Jordy. I recently started angel investing and I'm worried it's starting to impact my marriage. I've been spending less time with my wife and kids and more time wandering coffee shops in SF looking for founders building the next big thing. Not to mention I've sold two of our vacation homes to pursue this. How do you balance chasing unicorns and having a balanced life? Where to start? I think we would need. I think that there is an angel investing at Epidemic on the west coast. Right. Now, I think that it's widely understood that sports betting is highly addictive.

Yep.

It's under discussed that angel investing is also addictive. It has longer timelines. Right. So when you, when you ape 50k into some kid with a deck in a dream, it might take five to 10 years. But I know people that wake up on the 1st of the month that are refreshing their email like rat, waiting for that next hit, you know, hoping to see an update, hoping to get markups. And I think it's, it's, it's important for the innovation economy, but it's tearing families apart.

I do think that the first mistake that that listener made is selling the vacation homes. Because some of the greatest angel investments ever made were made in vacation homes. There's the famous example of Travis Kalanick at what, what's his name, the cowboy guy. You know him, he would bring people out to his, like, ranch and they would hang out in the hot tub in Tahoe. Yeah. And, and so if you get the vacation homes and you start inviting people to come hang out and relax, it's going to be much easier. Let the entrepreneurs come to you.

My advice would, would be, I mean, the first mistake was selling the vacation homes. You're right. Should have taken out debt against the vacation homes and used that.

Especially in this market. You can refinance.

Yeah. So that was, that was probably a big mistake because even if you're paying 6% annually, you're going to get 30, 40% IRR angel investing. So it's hard not to think of that as a poor decision. But ultimately I'd say bring, bring your wife and get her angel investing too. Right. Have her, have her put some money to work.

Essentially lever up against the vacation homes.

Instead of bring your family into it. A lot of, you know, sports bettors are out there. There's, you know, they're telling their wife, who do you want to win? She's like, I don't know, honey, like, make a bet for me. Right. And it's about kind of involving the whole family. My son's two and a half. He has five or so companies that he's deployed into.

It's great.

They're kind of silly ones. He's like, I like the snack. Like, let's ape in. But there's something to be said about just investing in products that you love. I have never really been misguided by investing in products that I love. So involve the whole family. Lever up and, you know, don't take yourself so seriously.

Maybe get a third vacation home. Yeah, well, that's our show. I gotta hop on with New York. I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.