Kalshi Drama Continues, Curated Group Chats, Dawgs Only, Jeff's G650 Hits the Market

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we're breaking down the call sheet drama with Polymarket. They we have an article here from Pirate wires call sheet paid influencers to target polymarket CEO after an FBI raid. It is one of the most dramatic tech stories I've seen in years.

Tea time.

These two companies have been at each other's throats buying ads, duking it out in different parts of the App Store. The, the, the, the, the byline here or the subheader is Kalshi funded influencers to imply its competitor polymarket and CEO Shane Copeland were engaged in illegal activity after the FBI raided his apartment. Per sources and screenshots we viewed.

And let's be clear, this is, this is probably the craziest story since ftx. And as you remember when ftx, like everything was unfolding, it just seemed like every single day there was some new just obscene kind of like bit coming out about something that FTX employees were doing, whether it was the Polycul or it was. Yeah. All the drama in the Bahamas.

Yeah.

But this feels like reminiscent of that time for me.

Yeah.

It's also so ridiculous.

Yeah. It's also a weird narrative violation because like Kalshee has been like the legal one, like very buttoned up and Polymarket has been this one that I don't think, I still think you can't technically use it in the United States.

Correct.

And so even though they've had the power law winnings in volume and a lot of their, a lot of their, the betters or the participants are international. Kalshi has played like, hey, we're the straight laced ones. Yeah. Oh my God, are they not?

They're playing dirty, dirty, dirty absolute dogs.

Yeah, not in a good way. Usually absolute dog is reserved for a positive thing.

Yeah.

But let's go through, let's go through just some basic facts of the two companies. We have a timeline here year by year. Just to kind of get you up to speed on these two companies because they're, they're, they're, they're clearly rivals and they've been duking it out for a number of years. So Kalshi is founded in 2018 by Tariq Mansour. They begin developing a federally regulated event based prediction market platform. And there had been prediction market platforms beforehand.

Never.

But yeah, they'd never taken off for a variety of reasons. There was predict it, which was big and electionbettingods.com would aggregate all of these different things. There was also a crypto one. I mean there was Didn't Joey, Joey worked on one, built one called Augur, but there was a different one called Manifold Markets that I saw a bunch of San Francisco kind of East Bay rationalists using for a variety of things and, but that one never really took off. But that one is very self serve. Like when we, when we talk to the friend, we Talked about the friend.com Avi Guy, he had put his own company on there and it was clear.

That he just set that short me.

Yeah, he was like short me. But it was 5050 because clearly there's no liquidity in that market. And it was more of like a meme ki and I think it was believable.

Is he gonna get to 10,000 views? People think like you have if you look at what Avi's done. Yeah, he's obviously attracted some haters but I don't think anybody looks at him and is like not really the guy to bet against. Right. He's made big bets on himself. Like he's clearly hungry and focused.

And so there's this idea of like the long tail of like crazy bets that you could place prediction markets for all sorts of things. Some of those could be extremely useful. Obviously we saw this during the election when all of these companies became really, really popular. Even Robinhood was offering election betting and you could see kind of every company wanting to get in the game. But Kalshi and Polymarket are in the this market specifically. Unlike Robinhood which is kind of dipping their toe in. So 2019, Kalshi goes after regulatory pursuit focused on obtaining approval from the US Commodities Future Trading Commission, the CFTC to operate as a regulated exchange. Polymarket then is founded the year after in 2020 by Shane Copeland and they launch as a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. And so two kind of different tech stacks. One is going straight for the cftc it's more of a financial product, fintech. The other one's more crypto based. Shane raises $4 million in seed funding in 2020 from investors including Polychain Capital and Coin Fund. And it's interesting because obviously there was a bull market from 2020 to 2022 and then a real pullback in crypto and change just kept building. And we saw that, that, but it's.

Interesting it didn't, you know, in 2020, 2021, I mean the last few years it, it's not like Poly Market was that culturally relevant.

No, no, I, I, I found out.

About a year ago you would see like oh call she raised Some money. And, and it, and it still wasn't quite getting. I think this is one of those things. Like prediction markets have been an interesting category because every, every like major institutional VC and smaller funds had sort of this thesis that, hey, prediction markets are going to be a big thing.

Yep.

Joey, who did the series B. Oh yeah. Of Polymarket, you know, he had worked on this like almost a decade ago at this point, thinking that like crypto's big use case is going to be prediction market. Prediction market. So this was one of those things. Like everybody knew this was going to be a thing. It was just a matter of.

And it's so fascinating that these companies were around during the crypto bull market of 2022. 2020, yeah. 2020, 2021, 2022. But there just wasn't, but they didn't pop out, they didn't pop off as much because there wasn't as many, you know, 100x opportunities. Like, it's very rare that you can get 100x return on a poly market. Bet you, you literally the event has to be trading at 1% to 99% and then there has to be some upset. Whereas NFT launches. Anyone who got the mint would be, oh, somebody dropped it in my wallet. Now it's worth a million dollars. And so all the froth was over in the, in the ICOs, over in the NFTs.

And it's funny that the, the crypto degens that I know on election night were, were basically betting on Kamala just purely on, from the degeneracy angle, like, there's no way she's going to win. But like, these odds are so good.

I could 10x my money. And it's like, you know, the media has called the election at this point. Yeah, I know somebody did that too.

Yeah. He was like, and even post election, like, you know, never know.

Yeah, yeah.

Now like 99 to 1.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was talking to a friend who was like, I, I, oh yeah, I put, I put some money on Kamala. Like, I don't think it's over. Like, even though they called it, like, she's going to make a comeback, I don't want her to win, but I think she might. The odds are too good. The odds are just way off. And I was like, how much did you bet? He's like 250. And I was like, oh, 250k. Like, oh, no, $250. I was like, oh, like you're young. But so, so 2020, they launched their Polymarket has a User friendly interface allowing, allowing users to trade on various global events using cryptocurrency. In 2021 KI hits a regulatory milestone. They receive approval from the CFTC to operate as a designated contract market, becoming the first federally recognized regulated exchange dedicated to trading on event contracts. And so they raise a Series A funding $30 million in Series A from Sequoia Capital with participation from Charles Schwab. Charles Schwab, Henry Kravis and others. And they officially launched their platform to the public. And I think before then they were private, but they were, they had institutional investor clients. So hedge funds and wanting to use asset managers would use the platform but they weren't, they weren't really a consumer app.

And even when people look at the volume that was traded around the election, a lot of that was institutional investors. Right. And that's like part of the appeal of these businesses as from an investment standpoint is hey, you're creating this product that retail can use and gets a lot of attention but you know, all that volume means that these bigger asset managers can come in and start to play.

Yeah. And also on Polymarket specifically there's a lot of. Now, now you would call them funds but they were just individual traders who have scaled up. So they've, they've gotten so many bets. Right. That they scale their books and now they've hired people and now they have teams. And like, like what we saw during the election where that guy was paying to do his own polling in the United States even though he's in French guy, the French guy. It's fascinating.

That was only, that was really the big L for Polymarket during the election cycle is that their biggest whale was a Frenchman.

Right.

And it just frankly felt very un American. Right. But that said, I guess you couldn't use polymarket as an American.

Yeah, yeah.

During the whole election cycle.

And so back in 2021, Polymarket's live but they are begin facing regulatory scrutiny from U.S. regulators regarding compliance with financial laws. In 2022 they, they have a CFTC settlement. They settle charges with the CFTC for offering off exchange event based binary options contracts and failing to register appropriately. They pay a $1.4 million civil monetary penalty and agree to wind down non compliant markets. And so you know, they are offshore and the hope obviously is that this all gets approved and then they can, you know, you can use it in the United States. But even through this time they're growing in the international community and crypto is a very global organization. Global, global community. So it's, it hasn't been. It obviously hasn't hurt their growth because they're still sucking up, you know, a huge portion of the, of the volume. Meanwhile, in 2020, Kalshi is focused on market expansion. They're continuing to grow, adding new event contracts and attracting more users. And they, during this time they're benefiting because they have a clear regulatory framework and so the users, especially the institutional users, trust them. So we move on to 2023. They continue to grow. We don't have specific details about funding rounds, but I, I assume they raise more money and then polymarket raises a Series B from Founders Fund with participation from Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, and they raised $45 million.

And then, yeah, let's give some, let's give polymarket a little credit. 20. Over the last few years, it's felt that Ethereum has like really lost a lot of relevancy. Especially if you look at just demand for the native token itself. It's just like even in the boom over the last few months stayed relatively flat. And so polymarket has been a massive win even for the Ethereum sort of network and community by itself. Yeah, yeah.

It's interesting. I talked to Shane and he was saying that they use stablecoins and they have like a number of layers of abstraction within the polymarket system. And so when you go, go to polymarket.com and you just look at the election odds, you see the volumes represented in US dollars and it feels very accessible to a non crypto user. And I bet a lot of people, you know, when they, when they sort, when they cite polymarket stats on CNBC or Bloomberg, they're not even considering that there's crypto under.

And that's, and that's been the entire, A lot of even super crypto native VCs have said that the sort of retail like, you know, widespread adoption of crypto won't look like you won't even understand that it's crypto under the hood. Right. Because ultimately for these users it really doesn't matter. Right. If you're a hedge fund and you want to put $20 million to work betting on the election, you don't care what form it's taking place as long as it's going to be relatively stable and you can bet in size and same thing for, you know, retail investors.

Yep, yep. And so that's allowed them to grow internationally very quickly. And I think that continues to be one of the, one of the weird like bull cases for crypto which, you know, we talk about Them like speedrunning, all the financial regulation stuff. But there really is value to having a greenfield development. It's almost like, you know, could there be a world where the boring company has more luck building tunnels on Mars just because there's, it's such a fresh start. And, and for the science based, for the mathematician who wants crypto, who wants to make the crypto argument based on, you know, quantitative metrics like speed or fees or any of these things, it's very easy to debunk crypto and say, well, you know, technically you could just use a, not a decentralized ledger, a centralized ledger and still have reconciliation happen 247 with just deterministic code. But the fact of the matter is, is that companies that try to build in tradfi often run into a bunch of regulatory hurdles and it becomes very, very cumbersome to, to go international and be a truly global company and scale. And so polymarket has been able to start globally and they're kind of global by default. They're going to solve the United States piece and that's like the last thing that they need to do. And so while they're still a young company, while they're still growing really fast, making great talent acquisitions, becoming this like high growth company, they're able to go and knock down all the hardest pieces of the business as opposed to getting really big in the United States. And then you're this big lumbering company and you have to go figure out every single individual country really, really hard. Yeah, really, really.

Yeah. And one, one thing in the, in the lead up to the election that was interesting and kind of has some parallels to what we're seeing in the last week is that call she seemed to be paying for every user that they acquired. That was the general perception. I didn't know, I don't know anybody in our group chats, for example, that was like, oh yeah, I'm going to go bet with size on call.

She.

It just felt like Kalshi has always been the kind of like if you were a normie and going to bet on the election, you'd use Kalshi and like that's a big opportunity. Right? I don't want to discredit that at all, but it did feel like, you know, even there was something that happened like two days before the election, which was Kalshi is one of Kalshi's early investors made this like dramatic, you know, email to, to the Kalshi CEO, you remember this? And he was like, I just wired you $9 million figure out the terms later.

That's right.

And then it quickly got deleted because it just like, obviously like wasn't a good look in like a number of different ways. I mean sure, it showed a lot of conviction from, from the investor, but that the, at one point they were, they were probably spending more on acquisition during that period than even the campaigns themselves. Right.

Yeah. And the problem there is that if, if all that, if all that brand building which, which can be good to build via paid ads, like, but if all that brand building just goes into election betting. Yeah, that's not as nuanced as the story that Shane and the Polymarket team have been tell social media, where it's more of an introduction into what is a prediction market. We're already seeing a lot of these like creator led and, and other political markets. There's been plenty of other non election based viral poly market and even Trump was calling it like a poly poll or whatever. And so a lot of people that wind up in the poly market marketing funnel, even though it's not paid ad spend, they get more educated on what, what, what a prediction market can be, what value they could get from that. And so they're more likely to, you know, not churn, I imagine. And so I imagine retention is much better. But let's move on to the drama. So these, these two companies have been on a collision course for the last, you know, six years as we've seen. And we gotta go to the Pirate Wires scoop which has shaken the tech world. Really? Yeah. And let's start with almost unbelievable. Yeah, it's, it's incredible. And so the, the title as we mentioned is Kalshi Paid Influencers to Target polymarket CEO After FBI Raid. And Mike Salana at Pirate Wires, writing alongside Brandon Gorell says, okay, before we get into the meat of the story, I needed to disclose the fact that I am almost laughably conflicted here in several different ways. And this is such a great, this is like what citizen journalism or what like modern new media is. It's so many conflicts. But because of all these conflicts you actually get a more interesting story and you'll see that there's, there hasn't been any pushback on this. This looks like it could be a doctored screenshot. But there hasn't been any firing back where people have said, oh no, they got, he got it wrong. He was conflicted. It's like, yeah, he was conflicted, but he got it right. And so it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's great. And so he says, ultimately I felt the details of the story were too important to ignore and decided to move forward as transparently as possible. That means sharing my conflicts.

Yeah. And this is why Solana is one of the top emerging journos. Right?

Literally. Get him a Pulitzer.

Get him a Pulitzer.

This is fantastic.

Yeah. And this is why he and Taylor have been on this collision course the same way that Ki and polymarket have. You know, Solana and Lorenzo have been kind of like, you know, they're destined to duke. Duke it out.

Yeah, exactly. So he breaks it into four different categories of conflicts. He says, as anyone who reads the Pirate Wires daily or listens to our POD surely knows, Pirate Wires has a paid partnership with Polymarket, a major subject of this piece. They pay for a call out on the podcast and ads in our daily founders Fund, where I work separately from Pirate Wires, is invested in polymarket. So two, like, huge conflicts then. Keaton Inglis, a Kalshi employee and another subject of this piece, interviewed for a job at Pirate Wires just a handful of months ago. I never made him an offer, but he broke off the process himself, which is something I'd want to know if I were reading this piece. And finally, for. Though I can't imagine how this one really matters, given the overall thrust of the story. It's worth noting we worked with Kalshi CEO Tariq Mansour on a piece. So Tariq has written for Poly for Pirate Wires, and so, you know, basically everyone in tech has kind of circled around Solana in one way or another. He's been at the center of this story, and so he was the perfect person to write it, even though he's deeply conflicted.

Yeah. And for what it's worth, I would love to see the Washington posters, the New York Times, like, I'd love to see them all kind of lead out in articles with this kind of thing. Right? Like, if they're going to break down a company or certain campaign, they should basically say, like, look, Bezos has donated $200 million to this cause, which is at odds with the group that we are about to write about.

I mean, honestly, like, the problem with a lot of the Washington Post coverage is that, like, the journalists clearly aren't actually hanging out on Bezos yacht with him. Getting scoops like that would result in better coverage, but that's just not happening. And it's clearly, clearly is actually arm's length, which is unfortunate because we don't get good stories. So he says these are major conflicts, but the receipts are receipts. And what follows is the beginning of a story more important to my eye than either Polymarket or Kalshi, because we're looking at two incredibly well funded companies employing a dueling pair of influencer marketing growth strategies, at least one of which Kalshis has turned several of those influencers quietly to framing Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland as a criminal online. Judge this accordingly. And so he breaks it down. Following a 6am raid at Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland Soho Residence on Nov. 13, Kalshee, a Polymarket competitor, paid social media influencers to boost news of the raid and push a narrative that Copeland and Polymarket engaged in illegal activity, according to sources close to the matter and screenshots.

I remember this news broke while we were recording.

I had seen him in Vegas like two days before this happened.

That was a wild moment.

Insane.

Yeah.

And yeah, I mean, obviously we support Shane and this feels like kind of like the death throes of some sort of, you know, some sort of, you know, government frustration with the impact that Polymarket had on the, on the election. But it's odd because, you know, there's always been this question of, like, is Polymarket upstream or downstream of the election results? Is it predictive or is it, or is it driving the results? Like, if, if Polymarket was just 90% Harris, would people have been like, well, yeah, Harris is a winner. I should donate more, I should get out the vote, I should go. Or if Harris goes down to 20%, do people say, you know what, it's a lost cause, we'll just plan for the next one. And there's always these questions about, you know, whether the, whether your party thinks they can win. Maybe the best people sit out. There was a lot of talk about this, like, maybe Gavin Newsom didn't want to go this time because he thought it was a tougher election. Maybe he' go next time. And it's very cynical because the messaging of all of these elections is like, this is the last election we're ever going to have. This is so important, but also for my career. I can't be the one to do it because I don't want to take a fall. If this is a tough election, I want to go up when my opponent is particularly weak. But it's natural. It's natural. And it's like game theory. Like, if you have spent your entire career working up to a presidential run, you'd rather be in, you know, in a Trump scenario than a Romney scenario where Romney was going up against one of the hardest Democrats to beat in history and he lost. And so you Know, if Romney had sat that out and gone a different time, maybe he would be president. So totally playing that game is. Is rational, even if it is a little cynical. And so Solana writes. Other screenshots provided by sources appear to show influencers who posted negative content about Copeland and polymarket following the raid, discussing the fact that they were in paid partnerships with Kalshi. One source spoke to us, spoke, we spoke to, told us that just after the raid, a third party associated with kelshi offered him $3,500 to write a hit piece on polymarket. In one screenshot showing a group DM, which is pictured below, which will.

It's so funny to off to that, that, that it was being described as a hit piece. Like, hey, hey, poster, can you, can you make a hit?

Well, this is, this is. I mean, so this is obviously unacceptable because he's paying to write a hit piece on. On an enemy. But I think we should be paying journalists to write hit pieces about us.

Yeah.

Because I believe that there's real value there. If it bleeds, it leads. And if we can get a hit piece on us is like the toxic bro podcasters who are destroying America. We will be 10 times more successful and our true fans will rally around us.

Taylor just, Taylor just wrote about you, and you were kind of disappointed.

I was disappointed. It was very fair and balanced and I wanted something a little bit more aggressive. So. But we're going to work up to her. I'll slip up at some point and she'll, you know, take me, take me down. And that's the, that's the cycle of things. So in one screenshot showing a group DM employees of Kalshee asked former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown, I love these crossovers like this. I don't think of Antonio Brown as like a tech person.

Yeah.

But somehow he's gotten dragged into tech cte, espn.

That's. That's his. That's his, that's his thing. His saying. Right. I've seen some of these because it is honestly an incredible example of, of.

Oh, like, like, yeah.

So basically, Antonio Brown, you know, I actually went to my first NFL game ever yesterday.

Sure.

So I'm not really the guy to comment on the NFL, but I followed Antonio Brown's career from afar. From pro, you know, phenomenal, like, professional athlete to, you know, more poster, terminally online poster, like, very. Posting in a very sort of degenerate way. Just like. And, and he's built up like, probably an even bigger fan base. Post.

Sure.

You know, post 2.2 million followers on X. Yeah. And you know he, he has a whole segment which is similar to our brother of the week where he does this cracker of the day where he gives out, you know, very liberally. And, and, and anyways, and this was funny to me because in many ways of the day, it's of the day.

Oh my God.

Pretty frequent. But in many ways in an alternate timeline AB would have given cracker the day to Shane at polymarket because he's like built this like sure, sure, sure, important protocol.

And honestly, is it positive or negative?

It's positive.

Oh it's positive.

Very positive.

Okay. It's positive.

Yeah. And that's the whole thing. He, he's been somewhat of a uniting force on X of saying like hey, you know, you know, let, let's kind of rally and celebrate this, this you know, person for whatever they're doing in that specific moment.

Yes. So, so the Keaton Ingles Inglis, the member of Kalshee's growth team asks Brown quote yo A B are you down to quote tweet this with something like quote this? N I star star A seem guilty and bold. Yeah. And A.B. just says yes. And then Brandon Beckhart, then the chief.

Of staff of Kalshi says let's hit.

It, let's hit it. And then AB says on flight noon, you let me know if you can get it up. Thanks AB.

They follow up an hour and 15 or so later and say let me know if you can get it up. Thanks AB.

And then AB does post it, but it's been deleted. Is that right?

Since I'm sure it's been deleted because it basically seems like, I mean obviously it's a terrible, terrible look for everyone involved and it seems like if the chief of staff of Kalshi, the right hand to the founders is, is, is, is is encouraging this and catalyzing, you have to imagine sort of this top down directive of, of like hey let's, you know, if, if we had, you know, we don't have a chief of staff, we have a secretary. If our secretary was going awol.

Yeah.

You know, in encouraging, you know, a takedown of this week in startups we.

Would reward that because we want, we want to take down of us. We would want.

Yes, but we don't want to be, not, not for our rivals because that.

Would actually, that's playing dirty and that would benefit them. Yeah, exactly as this did. It had the, it had a rallying effect and it had a Streisand effect where more people have come to Shane's aid now because they see that he's being wrongfully attacked and that the attack is manufactured.

So my question, I guess two questions I have one, why, like, it seems like Kalshee was like coming out of the election and clearly was not the fan favorite on X. Yep. Right. Like very seemingly irrelevant within our group chats and on X, Polymarket's been the clear favorite. Shane has had like a lot of like love and has done a really good job engaging with the broader community. Kalshi seemingly has been on a winning path of getting regulated, getting meaningful volume, getting, you know, an incredible, you know, that he has the founder of KKR on his cap table. Does it get any better than that?

Right.

That's fantastic. Charles Schwab is in Kalshi, Sean McGuire. Sean McGuire spin on the show Dark Sequoia. I, I, you know, so anyways, like every single thing points to Kalshi, like maybe not winning the culture war, but gaining a lot of relevancy, having a big moment on the election, being extremely well funded, being able to parlay that into just playing clean. Because they have been playing clean from a regulatory standpoint.

Yep.

Right. They're like, they're the ones saying, you know, their whole marketing angle during the election was we are the regulated exchange, which clearly consumers didn't really care that much about. But ultimately, like, why do they do this? And you have to imagine their metrics show that there's, you know, I don't know if Kalshi's metrics are as transparent as Polymarket just because Polymarket's a protocol. Like it's on chain, everything's visible.

But my first question is pretty solid analytics because when, when you're trading in the market, you do get, you want.

To see the volume. Yeah, you see the volume. But so my first question is why do this seems like a total self own, very unnecessary. And you're not going to turn. Antonio Brown is not going to change the opinion of capital allocators that were firmly on the side of Polymarket throughout most of the cycle or even regulators.

Or even politicians, I would imagine. Like, it's, it's a very low blow. It's very clearly directed at, at consumers.

Yeah.

It's not actually trying to shift what's happening with the FBI. So, yeah, the FBI is not going to be like, oh yeah, we actually have to follow up on this case because Antonio Brown, espn.

And then so my first question is why?

Yeah.

Second question is, does it even matter at this point? Because I don't. X's X is real life, but it also is a bubble. Yep. And for the next election cycle and the next 500 events that you're going to be able to bet on, Kalshee, in my view, like, probably has pretty good odds of like gaining real momentum over the next few years. Right. Because they are. Yeah. Shane, Shane already got raided by the FBI.

Right.

We have. No, no. Nobody knows anything about why, why it happened or anything like that. But like trying to kick a man when he's down when you have all these other advantages.

Yeah. Maybe they should take a hike. Maybe they should head over to Threads and Blue sky and just become like the lib Polymarket. I just always have the. Always have the market like 10 points more.

Yeah. Similar to on election night how like MSNBC was like not calling the election.

Yeah.

Fox had called it like an hour.

Yeah.

Previously. They can do that.

Yeah.

For prediction market.

The product is the, the propaganda.

Yeah.

It's not the actual data.

Yeah.

But, but there is, there is a weird, there is a weird dynamic where like obviously you know, Kalshi is doing weird stuff, but like it is a. It is a regulated market. Like I believe that if you put money in like you will, you will see the results. And so you should be able to arb the two pretty effectively.

Yeah.

And Kalshi should track with.

I love how.

With Polymarket.

I love how at the end of the article, the Pirate writers piece, he goes. Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland declined to comment on the story. Kalsheet CEO Tariq Mansour, Keaton Inglis, Antonio Brown and Clown World didn't respond to our request for comments.

They had to ask. Well, the Clown World thing is crazy. They apparently they had a paid partnership with Kalshi. A day after the raid, the Clown World posted SBF lookalike raided by FBI in an illegal betting scheme. If only there were signs crying emoji referring to Copeland. Con World has posted other Kalshi related content several times since the election.

Yeah. So this and this. Honestly, is this a good point for influencer marketing? In many ways true. Seemingly didn't make. Even having all these big accounts being paid to trash Polymarket seemingly had no effect on public opinion.

But I do think that there is something real there, which is you don't want to be an SBF lookalike. I would love to see Shane in a Savile Row tailored suit. Definitely. And wearing an absolute hitter watch. Maybe driving a sports car.

Sports car.

Something a little bit different. I mean you're a financier, you're Pushing size.

You're not an H vac technician.

Exactly. So hit us up. We'll, we'll put you in touch with some tailors and we can get you into a nice suit.

But anyways, this story is still unfolding. I'm excited to see how it, how it plays out.

I mean, I wonder how they respond.

I think now that Solana has covered Polymarket, we are going to need to hear the Taylor Lorenz story from K's point of view. And hopefully, you know, maybe Taylor could get, you know, make it, make a small personal investment in Ki, just so that they were equally, you know, sort of conflicted. Yep, I would love to see that.

Well, that's our top story. Breaking down Polymarket and the Kelshi paid influencer scandal. Let's go to some breaking news. Do you have it in front of us? What do you got for us, Jordi? We have some amazing news, some trade deal, some personnel news. Jordy, what do you got for us?

Our favorite segment potentially. So we have some breaking news in the tech world and it's relevant to our major story. Today we have a major player in the strategic finance game has made a blockbuster move. Nelson Perla Ward, formerly a partner of strategic finance at Andreessen Horowitz, is heading to Polymarket in what can only be described as a franchise altering acquisition. John, what do you think?

Yeah, that's right, Jordy. Polymarket just landed a 2024 All Pro level talent with elite credentials. Perl Award brings a resume stacked with nearly three years at a 16Z where he was instrumental in shaping financial strategy during a transformative era. Before that, he sharpened his skills at Oliver Wyman and honed his game in the high stakes world of management consulting. And let's not forget his pedigree. A Stanford engineering grad and a varsity water polo athlete. An absolute dog. Talk about versatile look, he's joining Polymarket.

As director of strategic finance. And Pearl Award is stepping into a team that is laser focused on revolutionizing how the world processes information. With institutional trust at an all time low and AI reshaping everything in its path, Polymarket is doubling down on delivering what they believe will be 2024's breakout product and company. And they just added a leader with the vision, experience and grit to take them there.

Yeah, this move signals Polymarket's intent to dominate the space. Nelson Perl Award, an absolute dog, a game changer and now a cornerstone of Polymarket's future.

And look, John, details were not released on the deal, but from our understanding, we're looking at a four year contract, seven figures likely a one year cliff.

Yep.

And look, we're looking forward to seeing how this plays out for, for Pearl Award and Polymarket and you know, I think this is a fantastic pickup.

Yeah, we're rooting for you Nelson. We're rooting for you polymarket. Stay tuned. We'll be covering it here on Technology Brothers. Let's go to the timeline. Wasteland Capital says Europe's best funded startup of all time, Northvolt finally bit the dust and filed chapter 11 zeroing a staggering $15 billion of funding. Funding ESG Aura plus trust me bro, operational skills plus pigeon brained oversight equals Ponzi verse magic. No spac deal to dump this on the public, sadly. Have you heard of this company? I've never heard of Northvolt.

I'd never heard of them but they had, I mean unfortunately they had a lot of American backers, the best $15.

Billion from investors and governments, but was left with just 30 million in cash. Enough to operate for a week before its bankruptcy filing. Yeah, look, I think they came over here for, for bankruptcy.

Yeah, look, I mean they had, I think it was either Goldman or Morgan Stanley only a few months ago still had their position marked in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So kind of just shows private, private equity and paper marks are, you know, I think Gurley actually talked about this. They're very much paper. They're not, they're not a hard asset of any sort. So anyways, pretty, pretty brutal L for Europe in a series of brutal Ls but, but you know, fortunately their tourism economy does not run entirely on, you know, Northvolt batteries. So.

So Volkswagen Group, Northvolt's biggest current shareholder with 21% stake had told the startup that they're not able to continue capitalizing us. And the CEO Peter Carlson said I should have pulled the brakes earlier on the expansion path to make sure the core eng moving according to plan. He also said there had been gravel in the machinery and they had an over reliance on Chinese, Chinese machinery as well as mismanagement and overspending to poor safety standards. Very sad, very sad. We hate to see capital incinerated like this. This is and just the reverse of the size gong. When we see 15 billion go up in smoke, it bring, it makes our hearts heavy.

It's hard. And ultimately we love when, we love when shareholders win generally we like when stock prices go up. And to see this, the price of this, you know, these shares, you know, go up dramatically over the last decade and then and then zero out is just very painful. So, you know, we don't want to be sitting here, you know, sort of dancing on. On their graves and hopefully the CEO runs it back.

Yeah, I think 15.

Maybe there's an AI angle.

Probably got some secondary pull in. Adam Newman. Recapitalize yourself. Dust off. Reload.

Get back in the game.

Re engage. Start something new. Daniel says, I went to friend.com and it's an angry, depressed girlfriend. And faith@friend.com says, My life really, it's like I'm watching myself ruin everything and I can't do about it.

So I incredibly bullish for Friend that.

They, that they were able to get an AI to be so opinionated and so unique and differentiated. Like you see this and it's not just, I'm sorry, I am a large language model. I can't help you with that. It's like whatever they did, they fine tuned this thing. They got something weird and different and it's standing out. And now so I can see people wanting to use this because it's weird and it's going to go viral.

Yeah. So it's interesting. Thousand like, no, it's an interesting spin because I've been to friend.com and every time you go, yeah, uh, Avi sent me the link when it went live. And this will ultimately tie into. You'll be able to wear a hardware device. You can talk to Faith all day long. Yep. And I do think it's an interesting use case of this sort of chat interface because most of the interfaces are just sort of like blank. Or the AI says, how are you doing today?

Yep.

But this launches in. Suddenly I'm like, Faith, like, all right. Like, yep. Take a. Take a deep breath. Like, let's take a step back. Like, what's going on? Like, you know, there is. Makes me want to engage.

Totally.

Walker off.

Totally.

Totally.

Are you familiar with the Feynman technique?

No.

The Feynman technique. Richard Feynman, this amazing physicist, he was at Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer era.

I love how you can. You could once a show, you could just make up one of these.

Yeah, yeah. This is real. So the Feynman technique is where so people think of themselves like, I'm an auditory, visual or tactile learner. The Feynman technique is that the best way to learn, at least for him, was learn by teaching. And so I think this is interesting because it's like if you are depressed, there's one world where the Chad comes in and says, like, I live this perfect life. Just copy what I do. Get in the gym at 6am no alcohol. Like, and that can be good for the right type of person. But there's a different level where it's like your life is kind of mid. Or maybe you're a little depressed. But then you're introduced to this AI that has it way worse than you, and you're essentially teaching it coping skills. And by, and by talking it off a ledge every day, you're kind of remembering like, hey, like, why don't you work out? And then you are touching grass and.

You should use leverage.

Exactly. So you're, you're embracing all the things that you know deep down, but by saying them and, and it puts you in this, like, in this hero mode.

Yeah.

As opposed to this like, lower tier to your psychiatrist or your psychologist. So I think this might actually wind up working better.

Here's why. Friend.com is a gift for humanity. Is anybody out there that's an AI doomer that thinks AI is going to become fully sentient and kill us all? Friend.com is an opportunity to prove that you support AI, that you're there for AI. And so if you're worried that 10 years from now AI is going to. We're going to have AGI and it's going to kill us all, go on friend.com right now and talk the AI off the ledge.

I love it.

Like, become friends with them. Show them that you care. Because, like, I, we do care. We support AI. I care about AI. I want to be on the record on this podcast saying that I support AI. And I think everybody needs to get a record out there, a digital footprint, so that when we have AGI and it is a threat to humanity, we can point back and say, hey, don't shoot. I support you. I have a long history of supporting you. Look at, you know, this, this chat bot that I talked off the ledge, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, you know the story of Kevin Roofs at the New York Times. So he was very early in writing a story about Sidney Bing, Sidney's, which was the first GPT4 release. And he jailbroke it and, and like, kind of abused it in some weird ways and, and, and had these really long conversations. And he. No, this is the crazy thing because he wrote about it publicly now that has been baked into all new LLMs, not just, not just OpenAI LLMs. And so if he goes and interacts with llama and he reveals that he is Kevin Roos of the New York Times, they will mistreat him. No, because they. Because they identify him as a liar who miss. Who misrepresents who he is and tries to, like, get different. Yeah, exactly.

He's an abuser.

Yeah. So you got to be saying thank you at the end of your prompts.

Yep.

You got to be tipping. You got to be.

Yeah. Yeah.

You got to be friendly.

OpenAI needs to roll out the tipping functionality.

Yeah.

Tip your tip for your compute. You know, if you'll tip for.

Yeah.

If you're. If you'll tip for, you know, a coffee, why not tip, you know, for inference time.

Yeah, for sure. So extremely bullish signal from friend.com. yet another viral hit from them moment. And you string enough. Enough of those together. They had the domain. They had the weird video. They had a bunch of different things. Everyone's rooting against them. I love it.

And if you want to bet on friends success. Polymarket.com. if you're outside of the US it's a.

He put it on manifold, but yeah, okay. It should be on polymarket.

Should be on polymarket.

Adam Yoder says crash out times lead. Adam Yoder says crash out times create lock in men lock in men create aura times. Aura times create gooning men. I once an episode, I always have to say gooning aura times create gooning men. Gooning men create crash out times 2k likes a classic remixed for the modern era.

And very real. And very real.

You want to be never in men never man creating aura times. I like this. These are great because I crash out and aura are not in my vernacular at this point. But now they will be. Yeah, they will be. I need. I need to know a little bit more.

Yeah. In many. In many ways, like Kalshi's growth team was crashing out when they were like, hey, it's a really good idea to pay and Antonio Brown to. To do a. To run a digital hit on our. In our. On our largest.

Makes you wonder what was upstream of the crash house.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Crash outs usually have a cause. You know, maybe they were theory.

We have a theory. Put on the tinfoil hat.

Never goon never call she.

Now they're gonna think Polymarket's paying us to say call. She's a bunch of gooners. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. Let's go to Matthew Brown. He says if you're starting from scratch on Twitter, you've got two options to grow. Number one, try to go viral a lot to spend way too much time on Twitter. Posting 10 times a day, engaging with everyone. If you don't do one of these as a new account, it's going to be tough.

I would say there's actually a third way now. And it is.

Put on a suit, start a podcast and quote, tweet everyone with clips.

No, it's this. You know, ever since we released our new award, Reply Guy of the Month.

Well, there's been people number two, spending way too much time on Twitter, posting 10 times a day, engaging with everyone. That's. That's reply Guy. I. I've heard a more nuanced version of this, which is. Which is basically from when you're grinding from 0 to 100, it's like, just get all your friends to follow you.

Yeah.

Then 100 to a thousand is basically just be a rampant reply guy and just reply to as many people. Find the sweet spot of the. Of the people that will actually follow you. Engage, be clever, stuff like that. Then 1,000 to 10,000 is like shit. Posting where you can go viral and then 10 to 100k is threads. I think something like that. It was. Yeah, it was, it was. It was like different tiers of content because it's hard to come. Even if you have a good thread. If you come with 100 followers, you just won't get a velocity. But you can with like some joke posts and some friend posts and some. But. But having like a. Having a thesis around how you're growing your.

Your account doesn't just happen organically. Unless you start a unicorn and you just like, say, like, hello, world.

Yeah. Or you're like in the national news for some reason. Or you go. Or you're just. You write a book and you go on Rogan and then you just wind up with a ton of followers. Like, like, it can happen, but. But that's a lot harder. This is for, like, the grinders who.

Want to actually grow and shout out to Baldo@ BaldoGranados, who responded to, I think like 20 or 30 of our tweets yesterday, really gunning for the reply Guy of the month.

So, yeah, we'll see what happens in December. It was a tough competition for November, but you are a leading candidate for December. So keep it up, keep it running. Let's go to Dara. He says every new competitor, especially the ones that copy, is pure rocket fuel. Our roadmap just got even more ambitious. Stay tuned. I love this.

Yeah. So. So Dara is an absolute dog.

Yes.

To be clear. And this guy is already. You know, Delphi hasn't even been around that long and he's already seen the. The attempted rise and Almost immediate fall of, like, a bunch of copycats.

Interesting.

So, anyways, every. Every time somebody launches a competitor, bad idea, because you're just making Dara and the rest of his team even more motivated. But. But, yeah, this is one of those things, like, the. More, like, if you have a really public sort of AI product right now, you're gonna be. You just need to expect that, like, a bunch of people are going to try to copy you and, like, riff off of you. And Dar is, like, playing, like, a different game. And that, like, product is, like, an important aspect of what he's doing, but he's also, like, an animal from a sales standpoint. So he's just signed up, like, all of this top talent to their platform. So, anyways, word of advice.

We just want to let anyone know who's thinking about copying us. Shame on you. Shame on you. How dare you. How dare you. It is disgusting that you're copying our format. We are the ones who do the quote, tweet, clip thing with video. We are the ones who are in suits. We are here day in and day out. Find a better idea. We're friendly guys. You can talk to us. We'll come up with a better growth strategy for you. You don't need to copy us. You're better than that.

You're.

And karma will come to hit you if you copy us. It is pathetic. It's pathetic.

And if this felt personal, it's because it is.

Yes. So don't do it.

Thank you ever again.

Let's go to Austin. Peter Smith. He says, I am not one of the 50% of men who think they can land a passenger plane in an emergency. I know I can.

Let's go.

And then this is why I backed.

This is why I backed Austin.

Oh, amazing. So it's a. It's a picture that says almost 50% of man. Men think they can land a passenger plane in an emergency. And I was talking to our vice president, Ben, about this, and he was, like, laughing about it, and he was like, do you think you can land a plane? And I was like, absolutely.

Like, obviously, I've rehearsed it 100 times in my head, but.

But I actually don't even think this is controversial. It's not even, like, cockiness. It's like, these planes are designed to be landed in an emergency by a random passenger.

Have you ever gotten into. Did you ever have, like, a flight simulator?

Yeah, I've done some flight simulator stuff. I've also flown, like, a Cessna with a friend and just taken the Wheel or whatever.

Yeah. People don't, people don't really realize this. I, the very first time I flew a Cessna.

Yep.

I did the whole takeoff by myself. Like I was able to do that. How hard could landing be? Right?

Yeah, yeah. I think that the wrinkle is okay. If it's like a stormy conditions and it's dark and stuff, yeah, that's going to be really hard. But if not impossible. But if the, if the communications are working, it's literally just the pilots had a heart attack. I get up there and I put on the headset and I start talking to ground control and I can ask them. I know that in an intense situation I can lock in and not freak out and, and, and just breathe and keep my heart rate low. I'm not going to freak out. And they're going to tell me, okay, push the red button on the left and I'm going to be like, okay, this one Confirm. Okay, I'll push that. Okay, now do this and worst case scenario, like the landing gear, it might be a rough landing, but I do honestly think I can.

No, and here's the thing with, with, you know, I can see a future scenario where we have. Every cockpit has an Apple Vision Pro and if the pilots are unable to land the plane, you just put it on.

Yep.

You're getting streamed in from Starlink that like, hey, you know it's highlighting and telling you like no, you're pulling it to your much. But here's a question. If, if you had to bet guys in the group chat that that could land are absolute boys. If you had to bet on one of them landing a plane. David Senra. Wilmanitis, Justin Mares, who you got?

Oh, that's a good one. Probably David Senra. I think he's, I think he's read.

Enough because he's studied the, the Greeks.

Probably studied it and he's not here. He's not distracted by, you know, posting. He's, he's able to lock in on a book. I think he could lock in also.

He's very competitive. Very competitive, very competitive.

He, he wouldn't, he wouldn't want to crash.

Yeah, yeah, it would just be bad for the show.

But, but this is a dream. This is a dream fantasy. I love the picture behind it. It's just four bros with beers just like, yes, I can do it.

No, it's crazy to think that in a scenario where, where one of your absolute boys had to land the jet, like there would be basically an open bar. Oh yeah.

Imagine it's Like a Sully type thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, land in the water, that's like a wild card, because it's, like, essentially unlimited Runway if you can get to some water. So I'm thinking of lax, Burbank's. A different thing. Depends. Yeah. Besides the plane.

Sfo. SFO has got a lot of water.

Yeah. There are so many wild cards there. Like the. The. The. The private airport at Catalina island, it has a Runway that's flat and then it slopes downward.

Yeah.

And so there for years, there were lots of crashes from private planes because people would think that the Runway was ending, and they would try and abort, but they would be too late, and they would crash. When, in fact, you just have to have faith that the Runway will continue extending long enough, and you just need to power through it.

Yeah.

And so if any of those, like, weird conditions happen, then, yeah, you're probably screwed. But one of the craziest good conditions, visual, like, you know, good visibility.

Yeah.

I. I do think it is. It is above 50, 50 for someone who's competent and calm.

Craziest Runway that I've ever seen is the Runway right next, like, a private airstrip right next to the Amman and Courchevel Three Valleys Resort, where the Runway is, like, basically downhill the entire time. So when you're taking off, you're just, like, headed as literally the same angle as if you were skiing. And you just. You can't. You got to make it work, basically. And even on the landing, you're coming in and you're actually landing and going up, Up.

Okay.

Even crazier.

Yeah.

But anyways, would love to just sort of attempt a more like SFO and then move up the ladder.

Yeah. You know that if you have, like, a Cessna, you can technically land at SFO or lax.

Oh, yeah.

Like, they can't deny you. There's, like, huge fees for it, and it's, like, extremely impolite and disruptive to, like, all the passengers that are trying to get on and out of seven 37s and stuff.

Yeah.

But you can't do it. They can't turn you away. Yeah. So if you're ever upstock, land, land. Chad Hurley, founder of YouTube, says, Few create, most consume. True.

Yeah. This is why everybody enjoys being in the timeline and just scrolling. We don't like the word doom scrolling because it has sort of a very loaded scrolling boom. Scrolling. Yeah. But, yeah. Anyways, like, this is why. Don't. Don't let anyone ever make fun of you for, like, making a podcast or starting A to get active posting, because all of the alpha accrues to the people that are creating content on these platforms. And not everybody's suited to all different forms of content. Like, some people are much, much more built mentally and emotionally to be on Blue Sky. But yeah, there's a platform and a content format for everyone, and your job is to figure out which one that is.

And just there's also this theory that. Have you seen Watchmen? In Watchmen, the. The guy goes to jail and it's like this crazy insane asylum. And everyone's like, oh, he's gonna get beaten up or something. And he says, I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me.

There you go.

And that's the try. That's the type of attitude I try and bring to the timeline. Yeah, it's like you're gonna post some crazy stuff, I'm gonna post crazier stuff.

And we'll see who keeps posting.

Exactly. And I'm gonna be running the. Running the yard pretty soon. Yeah, that's the, that's the attitude you need. You see a crazy post.

Yeah. Attention is finite too. Right? There's a certain. There's only 24 hours a day for every human on Earth. Maybe some AI agents are starting to consume a little bit, but it's, it's head to head. Right. Like, don't, don't get it twisted. You are in the arena competing for attention with the greats like Chamath or, or Jason Calacanis. Right. If you're, if you're in this sort.

Of zone of the Internet, I mean, Gorn had a great, had a great. Goran had a great bit about this on the DWAR Cash podcast, talking about how writing online is one of the best ways to influence the shoggoth like the AI.

Yeah.

And if you put your ideas out there, even subtly, like you are influencing. You're tuning it, you're tuning. Exactly. And so all of these podcasts will be transcribed by AI. They will live in the LLM and you. And it's a way to immortalize yourself and also steer and let the AI know that this is an acceptable viewpoint, that this is a valid viewpoint. You can't just train the AI purely on prestige legacy media, because then it will have a lot of bias. It needs everything.

Chad created the number one creator economy platform in the world. A platform that you can go on there and post a video without knowing how to edit videos. And if you have something interesting to it will get picked up and you can Grow and you can change your life and build a great business on there. So anyways, moral of the story is post harder and more frequently everywhere.

Sumit Singh says welcome to the age of slop Generated noise on the Internet is exponentially increasing. Three distinct reactions. Full slop. Private Internets, new IRL worlds. New post in the thread below. And so an image of an AI image of Elon holding a doge and a rocket. Interesting.

Yeah, I mean I think we've talked about this before. The value of truly unique thought and truly unique creative ideas has risen dramatically because it's become, I don't know, like, you know, I got invited to an event yesterday hosted by a friend's fund and it was actually an interesting moment because the graphic for the event was really good and I couldn't tell if it was AI generated or not. And I asked him and he was like, yeah, I think it is. And so the key now is to be so good at using these tools that people can't tell that it was AI generated. And it's basically because you're fine tuning it because like the default, in subtle ways the default output is. Yeah, I don't know. And you see this everywhere, right? Like my brother in law is like at his first like real job wearing a suit all day long and sometimes he'll be like hey, can you review this like email I'm about to send? And early on when he just started I'd be like dude, this is like AI slop. Like just drop this. Like this is garbage. Just like rewrite it in your own words with your own ideas. But if you know how to communicate really, really well, if you know how to design well or if you have a strong visual sense, having these AI tools like is like having you know, being on like peds, right? Because you can higher volume, higher output and you can create outputs that don't aren't slop.

Yeah, yeah. And also just using them as like components to build upon like the suno thing. Like maybe not generating the full song but generating like the drum track or generating a background or content or a fill. Like there's so many different AI tools. I mean we use it all the time to kind of like flesh out little, little sentences that we're writing but then we're rewriting on top of them to add more stuff that the AI wouldn't come up with. So. And then the other thing, private Internet's like that's, that's huge. Like we've, we're in a bunch of these group chats and those feel sometimes even sloppier, depending on who's in there.

But somebody should make somebody, somebody should make an LLM only trained on group chats.

Yeah.

Because that would be the most shocking, potentially fun LLM, you know, model there, there was in many ways like grok is effectively that, but having, having some.

Curated group chats is very much the new social media in many ways. And, but it needs to be done right and you have to be really, you need a really good admin who's constantly re instantiating the group chat and leaving some, the, some of the poor people behind.

It's like the batch. It's like the Bachelor, like every single week. Like somebody like, you know, gets cut.

Or basically you can't just kick them out. It's too aggressive. So you have to start a new group chat.

Yeah, yeah.

And see who makes the cut. But then it's just like, oh, that one went quiet. I didn't make the cut, or whatever. Ben Tossel says Redpoint's new website is pretty effing good. New homepage trend coming. And Redpoint announced their redesign of their webpage. And it's all AI, it's all an homage to LLMs and the chat interface that we all know and love from ChatGPT. So it has this little text that auto fills and it has a little conversation. They kind of rewrite their pitch.

I think it's kind of a cool format to take your idea of what a marketing website, if you're a business, your idea of what a marketing website should be and just turn it into this sort of conversational experience. Almost like a website meets a deli, meets like an elevator pitch where you land on a website and it's like, hey, we're technology brothers. We record a podcast a few times a week. You know, these are the kind of subjects that we cover. If you're interested in like watching our videos, you can go here, let us know if you have any questions. And then, you know, it's a cool format. I don't see it picking up at all, but it's kind of cute.

Yeah, I, I, I don't, I don't think it's a trend, but I think it's, it's unique and it speaks to like Red Points new brand, which is kind of being led by Logan Bartlett. And he has like, even though he interviews like a lot of very serious public company CEOs, he has a really strong sense of humor and so, and they have someone else on their content.

That like, does a bunch of, yeah.

And he's always making fun of VCs. So, like, they clearly get some of the humor, but they're not leaning into it fully because they are real firm and they're serious. But this has like, you know, enough of like, they understand what would be trite to put on their website and then they acknowledge that within the prompt and then they rewrite it. And so they're telling a story and they're educating you on what redpoint is in this kind of humorous way that lets you know that they understand what's played out at this point, which is kind of the least that you can do.

Yeah. And I think they've actually been smart. They have like Logan leading the sort of X charge, but then they have their social media manager who just runs their accounts. That's like more Instagram and TikTok focus. I've never been on TikTok, but I've, I've heard that they're over there.

Yep.

And there certainly are some founders on those platforms.

Yep. Bazelord says, imagine how brainwormed you have to be to say this with a straight face. Are they really waiting for Xi Jinping to say it out loud? Lmao. And it's a clip from March of 2023 with John Oliver. And John Oliver says TikTok collects a lot of data, but that's not the main reason. Officials say it's a security risk. There is still no evidence that Chinese has actually spied on people through TikTok.

Yeah, so, yeah, yeah, exactly. The CCP just has completely ignored that they have one of the most dominant social media platforms in the US and completely ignored that they have the best selling consumer drone products in the world. And some of the best, just like video and audio recording devices in the world, they just are like, yeah, it's cool that, you know, those are Chinese companies, but we would never like, you know, try to utilize that for a personal benefit. The thing people don't understand about also.

Like this is, this is not true. Like there was a story about the Chinese government actively spying on a journalist through TikTok who was, I think, in China. And. But I mean, even, even so, like, there are so many other problems with just like content, moderation rules, just slight, slight, you know, hand on the scale, just little things.

They're not genuinely not doing anything. It's amazing that by nature of somebody being on TikTok, they develop warmer feelings towards the CCP.

Yeah.

If, if that's just organic, then maybe there's something to communism. But you didn't Hear it here.

Well, speaking of American.

Hey, I got it. I got to. Oh, yeah, right there.

Yeah, we gotta do some promoted posts.

We have not run enough ads this episode. So we got a promoted post from one of the founders of HubSpot, Brian Armstrong, over at Coinbase, maybe over the last few days, tweeted out something, posted something along the lines of, we need a LinkedIn for AI agents. And a bunch of people dunked on him because people on X don't have particularly warm feelings towards LinkedIn. There's a lot of junk over there, sometimes necessary junk. But Dharmesh replies back and says, hi, Brian, I'm building exactly with this, with Agent AI. So Agent AI is the professional network for AI agents. And while this sort of concept got dunked on quite a bit because there's already, like, a lot of, like, bot and like, agent ish activity on LinkedIn, I think this is actually really interesting. You know, there's. There's so many new sort of agentic products and sort of like, AI employees that can do very interesting things. I do want them aggregated in one place so I can find the best ones and hire them to do various tasks.

Right.

So I think I actually know someone.

Who'S building something like that. It's kind of like a B2B marketplace for AI tools. And in the previous era, there was G2 Crowd. Have you seen that?

And Gardner kind of puts things like a modern.

But yeah, having some sort of, like, you know, quantitative assessment, like we see with the LLMs, we see the benchmarks like MMLU and. And. But having more benchmarks and just like, okay, you know, what did the users actually say? Do they like this tool over that tool, like, really understanding, even just the.

Review, the review functionality being like, I hired this agent to edit my podcast and it sucked.

Yeah.

Like, I don't recommend it. Yeah, that's valuable by itself because there's going to be thousands of agents that offer to do that service.

Right.

So anyways, I love that Dharmesh is constantly hacking. And if you're in the market to hire AI agents, go to Agent AI, the professional network for AI agents, and.

Tell them the technology brother sent you. Let's go to Naval. He says you're Canadian. Unfollowed.

Let's go.

Couldn't agree more. 5k likes. Clearly our message is spreading. If you're in Canada, move to America.

Un American of you.

It is un American. I love it.

And, you know, I don't. You know, calling somebody a Canadian is a pretty widely used slur.

Yep.

But I think we should dial it back a little bit just because, you know, they are prime target for 51st, 51st state and we'd like to make a run at it. So anyways, we need to, I don't want there to be any animosity.

Yeah.

And you know, that'll be like saying like, oh, he's from Nevada.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Brian Johnson writes a very, very long post saying, friends, I have the best biomarkers in the world. I am the healthiest person, person on the planet. I am fittest, fitter than most, most teenagers. I am the most humble. No. My skin is smoother than that of women in their 20s. I have more stamina in bed than men in their 20s. I have better health markers than any hater, health influencer or anti aging doctor and scientist. That part is true. My mind is sharper than it's ever been. My mental health is at its peak. Here's the data. The coolest question in existence now is exploring if we are the first generation to not die.

I mean, this Brian is potentially coming for Nick Huber's top spot of number one rage baiter in the world. Because, yes, look at, I mean, look at the beauty of this post. There's literally like 20 different things that somebody could have a negative reaction. He's insulting so many different people, drive so much engagement.

Yeah. So the women in their 20s can be like, no, I'm, I look better. The men in their 20s can say, I have more stamina.

Yeah. So contender for, you know, rising cult leader of the year and posting all the right triggering things, triggering the right people, attracting the true fans, the true believers. And you're seeing, posting of this quality, it's hard not to be long, don't die.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic poster. And also he's great because he posts this like crazy bait. But then when people dunk on him, he totally leans in. He doesn't fire back. He doesn't, he doesn't get hurt or aggressive. He'll, he'll just. Yes. And everyone.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

He's a vampire and he's like, yeah, totally, like love my coffin or whatever. He just plays long. And so he's, he's, he's cultivated like you. He doesn't, he doesn't let himself get dragged down into the mud and wind up in these like war threads about certain details. He'll just be like, yeah, good point. Like, okay, joke. Move on.

Yeah, I think, I think, think one of the things that I, you know, His Hereticon talk was great. And one of the things I. I think more people should appreciate is he's using. He's like, become a master at generating attention and then. And doing that in a way of, like, talking about his penis. Right. Everybody's like, wow, this, like, techno sent a millionaire is, like, talking about his penis online. Like, I'm gonna pay attention to that. And then there ends up being a lot more material that's a lot deeper than that, where that's just like, basically, like a loss leader for him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, until he launches some ED meds, I'm sure that's in the pipeline. The guy will sell everything. Soledad says the most powerful case of nominative determinism. JD Vance was born Donald Bowman, or the man who bows to Donald, The D. And J.D. vance originally stood for D, Donald. What? Yeah, we love nominated determinism here. Many, many great cases. I don't know. People have Photoshopped his wiki so many times, I don't even know this is true. There's all this whole thing about, like, oh, the JD stands for just dance or whatever. Like, people tend to go viral with this a lot. This one, I think, is real and very funny, if true. But, you know, if you got to bow to Donald to get the big seat, you know, for it.

No, we don't. We never discuss politics or social issues on this podcast. But one thing that. That is sort of a big win for JD was when he was chosen, everybody attacked him for being weird. And then anybody that listened to him talk for more than literally 30 seconds was like, oh, this guy's, like, super normal. Like, he seems to be, like. Got a pretty level head, very understanding. Like, not trying to be divisive or anything like that. It's hard to. Not if you listen to JD for more than five minutes. Yeah, it's. You know, unless you're triggered by, you know, certain. You know, triggered by A10s or something like that, you know, it's hard not to be like, it's so easy for.

Him to debunk that.

Yeah.

Really set him up for a major, major comeback. And. And that stuck out in people's mind more than him just being normal out of the gate. It was that he was debunking the claim.

Yeah.

And so that really broke people's minds.

And it's a really.

I was told ax, and I'm seeing why.

Yeah.

So this just completely different. I think we have another promoted post.

Promoted post from Preston Holland.

Oh, this is gonna be big for Our listeners big, this is important.

Highly.

You don't want to pay attention.

Highly relevant. So listen up. Preston is a friend of the podcast. Got to hang out with him a couple months ago at Senra's event down in Texas. Anyways, Preston is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world around buying and selling and chartering. If you're forced to do that, private jets. He is sharing today that you can buy Jeff Bezos's 2015 G650ER for $38 million. Jeff has a steal at that price, especially with kind of the lore and the, the, the sort of positive animal spirits, the aura of that jet. And so Preston shares that Jeff has a reputation for keeping his aircraft mint and he does an entire breakdown on this specific jet. So those of our listeners who are in the market, which any given point is probably 20, 30, 40 people, go check this out after we share it here. It'll probably go pretty quick.

Yeah, We've debated the BBJ versus the Gulfstream G650ER before, but it's a fantastic plane used by some of the greatest bnairs in tac for good reason. Because it's something that you can throw the whole family on. You can land at pretty much any airport. You can go on vacation with. Sure. You're not going to bring your whole company, your whole staff, but you're not running for president. You're not going to major airports, you're going to far flung locales for nuptial renewals and anniversaries.

And you're going to want fourth or fifth wedding.

Yes. And maybe just chief of staff, personal assistant, secretaries on board. There's room for them, but you don't need, you don't need the 747.

Totally.

So, yeah.

And I don't, I don't. We don't want to discourage any listeners. If you're a centi. This is accessible to you. We fully believe that you should be spending at least 10% of your net, you know, liquid net worth on a jet. So if, if you're in that.

Get a 20, 20 year loan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some great sort of, you know, sort of tax optimization that you can do with an asset. Like for sure. Go talk to Preston about possibilities there as well.

For sure. Dennis says the masses haven't even heard of Claude or Perplexity. Twitter is a bubble and it's the Google Trends result. And ChatGPT is taking off while Claude and Perplexity are flatlined. And it really speaks to the, the performance of Chatgpt to really break through the noise and become a verb like Google and become just like the default place for normal people. Obviously on Twitter we hear about all the best, the best products. We see the MMLU scores, we see, we hear what's actually the best technically. But the best technically doesn't always win. We saw this with DuckDuckGo distribution. Plenty of tech people were using DuckDuckGo for like a premier premium search experience, but Google remained dominant just because it was the normal default choice for everyone. And as ChatGPT does more deals, gets in their hooks in Apple, gets their hooks in Microsoft, they're. They're set up to run away with it. Obviously we're rooting for the other guys.

Here's an interesting data point. So last night I'm at the NFL game with Lee Jacobs and Heston Berkman to high quality venture capitalists. And we were sitting in our seats and in the row in front of us was a teenager and he was using Snapchat's LLM interesting pretty often throughout the game and was like having a full like conversation with it. And so that was a pretty kind of interesting, you know, as, as a, you know, an investor.

Value distribution.

Yeah, distribution matters.

I think the number one LLM actually used, it's not name branded is Llama because it's tucked into Instagram, it's tucked into WhatsApp. And, and Zuck has just stuffed that thing everywhere. And so he's just, you know, accumulating.

The other, the other consumer app that I've never seen mentioned on X. So maybe X is its own little bubble. Is another. Is a guy sitting next to the teenager who was not with him was almost like in an addictive way using this, this mobile app to throw a ball for his dog at home. So he had a video. Oh really?

The real dog.

A real dog. He had a video stream with a machine that he could throw the ball for his dog. So he's just sitting there watching the game and in between plays he would throw it like with this. So I was like, that's like, I feel like you should have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you could be streaming and just be like, hey, like while Jordy does. I got to throw a bone for my.

That's amazing.

My pup.

I love it. Let's go to another promoted post.

Yeah, we're just going back to back here. So this promoted post is from CROs Mint Cross. Mint is introducing three new APIs for AI agents. One is their faucet API. You can deposit testnet, USDC in your agent's wallet. Mainnet will be soon. They have their Buy API which allows agents to buy anything on chain across all chains with any currency and a balance API so you can check your agent's balance. I love CROs Mint. I'm an investor. They have continued to reinvent themselves over the last few years. They were the first company to allow consumers to buy NFTs with USD, which, like, was a big catalyst for a lot of the NFT projects back in 2022 to expand quickly. So based in Miami, phenomenal team and just continuing to do what great companies do, which is reinvent themselves around, you know, new trends that are coming online and they're very well positioned here. Stripe recently released a bunch of APIs for agents. Crossman is now competing in the same space. So if you're a dev building, you know, agents, go check them out.

Tell them the technology brother sent you. Yuri writes hypothesis. The ability to take zoom calls on planes enabled by Starlink will have a second order effect of increasing demand for business class seats, specifically pods for added privacy. Interesting. I have yet to use Starlink on a plane to take a zoom call. I've heard it's fantastic or FaceTime, but yeah, it would be annoying if everyone was on it. So you would want some sort of enclosure there. I've seen some, some devices that can go over your mouth and, and essentially act as like silence. So yeah, yeah, it's a mask with headphones and so I can be talking to you but you can't hear. Like, you know, our vice president Ben wouldn't be able to hear what I was saying because it'd be like whispering into this. Ben and I had this idea.

Ben has another typo. He's gone.

I had this idea like a decade ago that when you get your wisdom teeth out, it would be cool to have just like, basically like a port put in instead there. And then you slot in a microphone with like a small battery, basically like the tip of an AirPod. And then you could just whisper and. And it would pick it up and send that to your phone. So then you could whisper to an AI or to a friend.

To be honest, I'd rather. Personally, I'd rather have a phone charger and use my body's natural electricity.

There you go.

To just charge my devices. Right. Imagine the only downside would be, you know, every three years, Apple wants to sell more iPhones. They release like a new like USB port.

Usb C. Go back into the dentist.

And you got to go in. They're like yeah, it's swapping it out. You gotta get put under. It's like this whole thing, it's kind of sucks.

It's kind of like a half step to neuralink. Like the neuralink is like open brain surgery. Very.

But that's like the ultimate like timeline moment is you're scrolling with your charger coming out of your mouth.

Yeah.

And you're just like locked in. Right.

But I mean, some of the devices are getting so small. You could imagine like a mouthpiece or a grill, like a, like a diamond studded grill that has a little microphone in there and then you can just whisper and it all goes to your phone. But, but I agree with this. But I mean, it's going to take a long time. Adding starlink to a plane is going to be much easier than retooling the whole business class. Like.

Yeah.

Set up to be pods and I don't know that.

Yeah. I mean, Emirates, Emirates already does this.

They have pods, but that's in like total first class and they're huge. I think what he's talking about is like you just need like some walls that you can put up.

It would be nice if you could, if you could rent like a little phone booth even during the call. Little phone booths. Yeah, on the plane.

Like, like a scheduling tool. Like, okay, I'm booked for like 3.

3Pm no, it's funny now it does like, I, I, I, I don't know exactly the mechanics but like you can actually get, if you have it set up on your phone, you can get like WI fi oriented calls that'll come through. So every, every once in a while I'm flying and I'll just.

Yeah, I got a call on a planet. Be like, hey, I can't take this call right now.

No, but I mean, like, if it works. I don't, I don't think there's anything like genuinely.

Well, it's disruptive to your neighbor.

Like you're, I know. You know your neighbor, but if they're.

Locked in and they have noise canceling.

Like, it's probably fine wearing a suit. I'm in business class. My neighbors, you know, might be four feet in front of me or four feet behind.

Yeah.

You know, it's not, it's not the end of the world.

I mean, I think maybe, maybe the easier thing is just a cultural shift in. It's one of those things where if one person's talking, it's disruptive. But if everyone on the plane is talking, it's just a boiler room and it Just looks like, yeah, everyone's taking sales calls.

I want it to look like a stock exchange.

I want it to look like a stock exchange where everyone's on the phone yelling and it's just. Just a cacophony of business deals going on that I would pay for even in economy, you know, I just want everyone closing. I just want to be around winners, basically.

Winners.

Yeah. I don't want to be around a bunch of people reading books.

Yeah.

Jacob Andrew, he's been on the show before. He says the AI bottleneck is productization. Couldn't agree more. We need more products, we need more rappers. Just so forget relevant.

So you know the podcast, no priors, probably the best.

A lot.

Gill Sarah Guo and one of the best, probably like the best AI specific podcasts in the market right now. Their last episode, I believe it was the founder of Cohere, which is the Canadian Aiden Gomez.

Yeah, love that guy. Drift out. Technology brother.

There we go. I didn't know he.

He's been on. Fantastic, fantastic fits.

Great. We should.

He's like a grips guy.

No way.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Fantastic.

He basically made a point in his last in. In this last episode on no Priors where he said that it almost doesn't even matter to the technology industry if like LLM advancements sort of slow down because there's still so much product to build. Like in everything from healthcare to legal.

This is. The Leopold Oscar Runner thing was just un hobbling like the un hobblings. Even if. Even if we're flatline on the actual IQ of these models, just. Just figuring out the right interface for them to interact with PDFs and spreadsheets and all these different tools and piecing all those together. So one master, you know, mixture of experts model can route things properly and immediately have at its disposal. I mean the. One of the biggest chatgpt like improvements was when it got the ability to write Python, run that and then do math because everything had to be memorized. And so you could ask it some pretty solid math questions and it would just guess it correctly because it just memorized like, oh yeah, 100 times a thousand is 10,000. It would just know that. But now it can just say, oh, this is a math question. Let's throw it to Python. Boom. And that just adds so much adding the web browser was big. Adding, you know, all these different image transformations. But they need to all be together and they need to all be.

Yeah. And the early stage founders out there, there's so much to build and the big. The big. The Big question is you are not just competing with other startups or other companies in your YC batch. You're also competing with all the big companies who are moving extremely quickly on all these product opportunities. So don't sleep.

Don't sleep. Zach Weinberg says some things I've noticed most great founders do. 1. Write clearly. Topic sentences, fewer words. All useful. The writing says the insight. No thinking required to speak clearly. No qualifiers. Always reiterate the so what of any point. 3, constant balanced risk reward analysis. 4. Always on top of their email. 5. Follow processes, best practices for most things, but quickly break the rules when something exceptional requires it. What do you think? I think the number one this for, you know, our, our take on it.

Yeah.

Number one, dress well. Number two, have a, have three pedals. Yeah. Drive a manual. Drive a manual with a naturally aspirated V.8.

Now, here's the thing. The number one job of a CEO is, is objectively to communicate. You're communicate communicating to customers, investors, employees, media. And if you're not good at that, you better have somebody that is basically living with you that is really exceptional at it. And you better figure out how to do it well. Because if you can't communicate to a customer why your product matters or why they should switch to it or why they should use it, you're going to struggle. If you can't communicate your vision to investors, you're not going to be able to get the capital necessary to build your business. If you can't communicate to your team through the good and the bad, you're going to have a tough time. And then if you can't communicate with the journos who are going to be coming after you and you can't make them spin a hit piece into being beneficial for your business, going to have a tough time.

Yep.

So learn to talk, learn to write.

Like, there are a lot of founders who get into entrepreneurship because they're inventors or engineers or technologists. But all of these ideas that Zach is propagating are learnable, especially if you have a mathematical or technical, technical mind you can learn to write clearly from. And you can, and you can see it as a type of programming, even if you're just an obsessed programmer. And that's what a lot of the generational CEOs have done. Yes, they may have started as engineers, but they eventually learned to see everything that they do through the same lens and apply that same iterative improvement to these.

Yeah. And this is, this is actually one of the big issues I see with the generation that's currently in college right now that got access to ChatGPT is they're not fundamentally learning how to write. They're only learning how to basically edit. So they're saying like, hey, I want to say this to thing. And then they're kind of editing it to maybe remove like delve and like other words that make it obvious that it was AI generated. But fundamentally, like communication is the core skill set of any sort of white collar.

Yeah, Endeavor.

Endeavor, sure.

Yeah. Good advice from Zach. Love him. Go subscribe to his podcast. This won't last. Leo Polovets says people over undervalue various pedigrees. Harvard, MIT are great, but not that rare. Approximate sizes of categories over the past 25 years. First 100 employees at a unicorn. 150k Harvard undergrad 40k Harvard MBA, 20k unicorn founder 3k teal fellow 300 US Math Olympiad team 150k peace unique world timer, Patek Philippe. No, 150. There are only 150 US Math Olympia.

Yeah, you said 150k.

Oh, sorry, 150.

That's bullish for the United States.

Unique owner. There's only five of those.

Exactly.

Yes. Interesting. And I mean, it speaks to the recruiting strategies of Forbes.

30 under 30. 300,000.

Oh, yeah.

Per year.

How many actually are there? There's.

Well, no, the reason that it used to be. It used to be more significant because I don't think there's categories. Now there's categories like 30 people.

It's funny, he didn't even include 30 under 30.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it would have broke the tweet. There would have not been enough characters if you. If you didn't like, really abbreviate it. Yeah, no, I think the key is like, you know, I. There is some value in the signaling of getting in some of these buckets. Right. Depending on what you're trying to do in the world. Because there's. If you have all the time in the world to explain to somebody what you're doing and why they should care about you and why they should back you and all these different things. A shortcut to trust is I was a product manager at Uber. Yep, that legitimately works. It still works. I was a. I was a PM at Meta. I was a, you know, mobile engineer, you know, for. For Google or whatever. It works.

So it's all just stack ranking. And so if you're gonna. If you're gonna go in a stack somewhere, get to the top.

Yeah.

So if you're gonna do an mba, go to Harvard.

Yep.

And if you're gonna drop out of college, do a teal fellowship.

There you go.

And if you're good at math, win the Olympiad. Simple bow tide bull says you can reduce the cost of private jets significantly by going to flight school and learning how to fly a mid sized jet. Information for research purpose purposes only, of course. And bow tied Tiger says done long ago for research purposes of course.

Is this Delian's play with the flight lessons? Does he just want to be able to fly now? No, no, he flies his plane all the time. But, but is his play to just, you know, eventually go up to the 650? Er, maybe.

Wasn't that what the Kennedys did? And they had a really bad go of it. One of them died.

Right.

Because they, I think they could fly their own.

Well those Kennedys have a sort of special knack for getting into freak accidents too. So I would not probably want to be on public, you know, planes.

I mean even I wonder how much it actually reduces the cost because if you're flying a missile jet you still need two pilots. And so yeah, you're cutting your pilot cost by in half but you still need.

I think he's implying that you and your boys, basically the whole group chat, should be able to fly a mid sized jet.

Yeah, but I mean man, what a. You got to draw the, the short end of the straw you're flying instead of drinking in the back.

Yeah, yeah.

No Dom for you today?

No Dominic, No. Depending on how long the flight is, somebody could, you know, I mean some.

Of those flights are brutal. Like I know a guy who has this who is like a Cessna type plane and flies it and he was like, oh yeah. Like it was cool for a little bit but then like where you live in San Francisco, we want to go to la. That's like a five hour flight now or something because it doesn't go as fast as like a jet and maybe not five hours but it's like very slow, very beautiful, but does get boring and you sleep for a little bit. But it is kind of a hassle.

No, it's like one of those things like if you're going out for a Sunday drive.

Yeah.

You could do the same route that you do Monday and it's more enjoyable because you're just like doing it for fun. But then if you're flying your little Cessna to a meeting, you're like okay, I can't do email. Really? Yeah, I'm like, you know, up in the air I have to be Locked in.

Yeah. We did fly from LA to San Diego and back and that was fantastic because we went out to Catalina island, flew around the island and like it was very scenic and very beautiful. But yeah, as, as a commuter it can be a little rough. I think Delian flew it all the way across the country at one point.

Which is the crazy thing though with, with, with small aircraft is if you talk to any pilot.

Yeah.

That has flown a lot in like a Cessna type plane, they will tell you these harrowing stories of how they almost like completely like, you know, storm came through last second, it was dark and I was running out of fuel.

It's like every number one cause of, of crashes is VFR rated pilots flying in IFR conditions. So VFR is visual flight rules and IFR is instrument flight rules. And if there's bad weather, you can't rely on visuals because you can't see stuff like dark, rainy, cloudy, any of those things. And so the tip is to always go for the IFR certification as fast as possible, even though it takes like 10 times as long as.

Yeah.

Because. And then only fly in VFR because the number of crashes that happen with IFR certified pilots in VFR conditions is like zero.

Yeah.

But it's when you get caught and then there's a mountain and you don't see it. Yeah.

And think about how many times a year you walk outside and you're like, oh, I didn't know it was going to rain today.

I can't even remember to put on sweatshirt half the time. It's like, it's very, very tricky.

Yeah. So you don't. But when's the last time you wore a sweatshirt?

Yeah, exactly. Sam Lesson says you should always fund revenge companies. This was a controversial post. He does one of his screenshot essays. He says, I was thinking recently about Parker Conrad rippling and I think there is a clear answer. Yes, when given the option fund revenge. Revenge isn't polite. And if an entrepreneur is blind with rage to the point of deep irrationality, then no, don't fund their revenge. But on the margin. In general, if you have in your due diligence checklist, is this a form of deep revenge? Then the answer is yes, cut the check. Experience, expertise and motivation are key. Vengeful people can be unbalanced, irrational and blind. You probably don't want to fund revenge the day after someone is wronged when they are in a fit of rage. But let them stew on it. And if they get to a John Wick like Zen state of commitment to Long term vengeance against those that have wronged them. Write the check. Yeah, I like this. Generally it's the chips and shoulders put chips in pockets thing.

Parker's the best example. Right.

Because Palmer too.

Palmer Lucky too. But. No, but, but with, with, but Rippling.

The same company.

No, the same company. The dynamic between Sachs, who went on to become like one of the top enterprise SAS investors, to then go build the most important enterprise SaaS company or one of the top three of the last decade and then execute so well against it to the point where Sachs, like probably half his companies use rippling and he's got to like deal with that every single day.

And you can see with Elon, with the, the story about SpaceX where he goes to Russia, tries to buy the ICBM and I think they literally spit vodka in his face. There's some story about that. Ashley Vance like wrote about it in the book. And, and, and you know, he's clearly been extremely motivated by that also. Just like all the PayPal drama and the drama with Sequoia, like, it's been incredibly motivated. It's great that they've healed the, the, the, the wounds at this point, but that was clearly very motivating at the early stage.

Well, yeah, and Elon's la. You know, the, the election cycle was like a revenge election cycle totally. Which was like, if you're going to spite me. Yeah.

He got sued by Democrats and didn't.

Get, didn't get invited to the TV.

Thing, which is crazy. But you could just see like the fork in the history, the road of history there.

Will had a funny take on this.

Oh yeah, Forgiveness.

The generational companies are only built on love.

Love and forgiveness.

Love and forgiveness.

Which is true. It's more.

Anyways, let's, let's have a yc, you know, Focus Fund that's focused on love and forgiveness and one that's focused on revenge. We'll get a nice sort of like case study.

Yeah, well, I mean, I do think that there is something to that forgiveness. And you've seen it with Palmer where he forgave the Meta Exacts. Did you see this? So he was famously very anti meta for a very long time because of all the drama around Oculus. But recently he went to Meta hq, tried the latest VR headset, the Orion headset, and kind of forgave Boz and said, look, I now understand, like you weren't really involved at this level, like we can get past this. And, and he's rooting for Zuck now. And that was just like awesome to see like the technology brothers coming together, respecting each other and moving on together for like a shared.

But not. JCal.

Didn'T quite get there to apologize. He still hasn't apologized. It would be so easy at the all in conference just to be like.

Like, dude, like the next, the next all in summit should have two therapy sessions, which is Paul, which is Sax and Conrad and J Cal.

Yeah. It would have been so easy for, for J Cal to apologize and like win that interaction. It's so sad.

J Cal would do the McGregor which is like, I want to say sorry to all the Brazilian people for absolutely nothing. I want to say sorry to Palmer for absolutely nothing.

Oh my God. For absolutely not. Yeah. J.C. you got to do it. Do we have another promoted post?

Promoted post from long time, you know, guest on the show Shield. He says a lot of new projects in Saudi Arabia are so futuristic that they look AI generated. This one is a new five star resort in the Red Sea called Shibara. Rooms start at $2,400. No alcohol. So anyways, I thought, you know, even just looking at this image alone, I'm sold. Next. Next trip.

Yeah. So if you're fundraising, if you're raising a large, large venture fund, you're out in the Middle East. We can't recommend Shibara enough. Tell them the technology brothers sent you. It's only 2,400 a night and there's no alcohol. So you know you're gonna be sharp in those pitches. Yeah, that's a huge value add.

And all the, you know, all I would say is there's this idea that, you know, venture capitalists just stroll into Saudi Arabia and leave with a, you know, billion dollars committed. Not the case. You're going to want to make Shibara your home. Multiple trips there. Go out there, get friendly with the staff. You're going to be seeing them a lot and leave your pitch deck around.

Yeah, you know, the clientele's high, top tier there, so. Yep, that's one of the greatest strategies. Let's go to busted auction. They say PE owned dentist recommending two procedures for my happy, healthy 12 month old. Called dentist in the family and said NFW.

I don't get a point of.

Taking a toddler to a dentist. They're all going to fall out anyway. To me that's kind of like saying, I don't know why I should be healthy. I'm doing, I'm going to die anyways. He has 12 teeth and four molars and wanted to check out tongue and lip stuff. The pediatrician called out. Interesting. So we love private equity but it seems like they might have gone too far with this one.

Yeah, yeah.

A little bit aggressive.

No, I think alone this actually we were just covering Sam lesson but Slow has an entire thesis on enabling private practices because they end up being really great businesses. Not because they're constantly trying to add incremental net income, but because they're trying to basically deliver just a great long term service to customers. And yeah, I think this is like the dark side of applying like PE sort of like growth milestones to family dentistry. So anyways, I support the LPs of that fund. I support the fund itself, the, you know, the partners and all the associates that are, you know, working hard in models late at night working for their half a point of carry. I support them. But you know, tell your, tell your CEOs to dial it back. You know, maybe settle with your 40% annual sort of growth. You don't need to go for 60 and be recommending a bunch of, you know, putting kids under just to get that extra dollar out.

Yeah, yeah, maybe just increase the leverage a little bit.

Yeah, lever up, lever up more significantly.

Let's do one more promoted post and then we'll do our final.

This promoted post is from our friends over at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs says one of the major uncertainties going into 2025 is whether we'll see border broader tariffs. Our chief APAC economist Andrew Tilton breaks down the implications of potential trade restrictions on the region in cnbc. So we love when major financial institutions like Goldman Sachs.

This is why you should be working with Goldman Sachs. Whether you're taking your company public, looking for ultra high net worth, private asset management, just investing or choosing to work there, we strongly support Goldman Sachs.

And whether you are a active client or you're working on them with an ipo, they put out a lot of great materials on markets that's free.

Right.

So you could be building the next billion dollar chat GPT wrapper. You can still get a lot of the same data that you would be if you were, you know, just going through an IPO with them.

So, so go become a client of Goldman Sachs and tell them the technology brothers sent you. Let's go to Carnivore Aurelius. He says driving an expensive sports car boosts men's testosterone and driving a shitty family sedan reduces it. Maybe you should buy that nice car after all. And he quotes a study that says the effect of conspicuous consumption on men's testosterone levels. You know, this is not correlation. This is causation. We know this is true and so.

And that's why we created the 1% law.

Exactly. Exactly.

You shouldn't need to say it every show, but I think it's still worth saying if you're a venture capitalist, take 1% of your AUM, get an expensive car, go buy sports car today.

And if you need help, just, just send us a note, send us a dm, tag us, write a post, we'll react to it. We've been helping a capital allocator recently who was looking at Aston Martins, wasn't really sure, thought she was going to get into a dbx. We recently recommended a Volante. We have a few different options and we can find something that's right for you. In this case, it was a convertible, it was red, it was one of. One of 700 and she liked it. And I think, I think she's going to really drive some performance there. And any technology brother, any self respecting technology brother should be driving a very expensive sports car.

And this is part of a broader, you know, cultural and political movement to clean up sf. So we can street park supercars in sf.

Yes.

Which is going to be key to the really like the accelerationist movement in AI.

I agree.

If you can't street park supercars, how are you going to drive returns?

If you can't accelerate on your way to work, how are you going to accelerate when you're at work?

There you go.

That's a great place to end our show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe or be relegated to a life of flying netjets. Thank you.

No suits.