Memecoin Takeover, TB hits NYC, The Digital Trenches, Don't Scoop Me Bro, The Biggest Podcast Deal Ever

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We're here in New York City, a city that never sleeps. The Big Apple, working on the biggest podcast deal of all time, something that will truly shake the industry to its core. Yeah, they will write history books.

That's the story that hits PR Newswire, and the website shuts down. Basically, it's like a DDoS because so many people are headed there at the same time.

I mean, we have to wear costumes when we go outside because so many reporters are trying to scoop this. Yeah, it's, it's that big of a deal. But it's good to be here. We're very excited.

I saw a tech journalist sort of undercover as, like, not undercover, but on top of. Across the street from our hotel.

Yeah, yeah.

We're staying at the Bowery.

It's a. They can't stay away from the horses even when they're undercover.

Yeah. I mean, it's the best blatantly violated you get if they, they, you know, the second you call them out, then they just gallop off.

Exactly. Ye. Yeah.

It's dangerous, so it's kind of a smart move.

How was your weekend?

My weekend was, My weekend was good. I was supposed to go home. Yeah. And then ended up extending our, our Airbnb for another week.

That's good.

And then. Yeah, it was just, it was just I, I, I spent the entire weekend in sort of stunned disbelief that we had our first presidential meme coins. And it was.

That happened Friday night, right?

No, that was Saturday. Saturday night during the irony, the irony of, of launching it when, when, when the most terminally online group of people in any tech adjacent industry were all in one place, not on their computers. Like it, it, it. He basically was trying to mog them with that of like, you know, but.

The real deal on their phones and made it.

Yeah, of course. Of course I do. I was thinking about it, and I would guess that 1020 funds returned their entire fund off of just that.

I don't think, I don't think any funds are set up to actually make that investment on the right time horizon. It's not even just the getting approval, because most funds, you know, you need to sign out.

You're giving crypto funds too much.

I don't think. I don't think they keep enough in, like a hot wallet. It had to be in your Phantom, like, at that moment for you to be able to move that.

Yeah. I'm just saying. Let's say Saturday, you got in, you know, you could have easily.

They're not just going to want you to be able to just acquire that much that fast.

Okay. I'm thinking of a certain gp.

Sure. Who did.

Doesn't have control issues. If you're a solo GP running a fun.

I wouldn't even call it at that point, but.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like somebody. Yeah, yeah. There were definitely capital allocators who made major plays.

Yeah. For. For everyone. For every. You know, as long as you're seeing individuals printing.

Yep.

There are funds printing. Sure. They're just not posting screenshots. Yes.

Well, let's go. Let's go through. Obviously, it's the inauguration. I was in D.C. the last two days. I've had more than my fill of.

You scooped Teddy.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Teddy.

He was scooping.

He was trying to scoop, but I scooped him back. He was spotted outside of Peter Thiel's inauguration party. I got a video of him standing out in the cold with the camera going TMZ mode on.

All. People were asking, why is. Why? Why did Peter invite Ted to his party? And it's like, no, he's.

So he's standing outside and he. He does that now. Like, that is his beat. So he's. He's officially with the New York Times. He used to write with Puck News. I think he was maybe at the New. He went back to the New York Times and is officially on the Elon beat. So anything around Elon, which is vaguely like tech and politics, obviously teal fits in there. And I ran into him in Las Vegas doing the exact same thing, literally just standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons trying to kind of overhear conversations and, like, go up to people and be like, oh, hey, like, what are you doing?

He's on the circuit.

Yeah, but it's funny because, like, the whole, like, the end result of the piece is always like, oh, all these shadowy figures are coming together. You should be scared. New York Times reader. Yeah, but, like, when he's there, he's, like, laughing, drinking, having fun. Like, I always go, what up to? I always say, what up to him? And then I just, like, mess with him and try and, like, you know, do something funny.

Yeah.

So every time, if you see a New York Times reporter hanging out, pull out your phone, scoop it. It's free clicks. You got to monitor.

Just give him a nudge, say, hey, you look great. You look better in a tailored suit. I agree.

Yeah.

Because you scooped him. He was looking sharp, but he was not wearing a suit. He didn't look like he belonged he didn't. He didn't.

Maybe that's why he got turned away. Like, if you just class it up a little bit, Teddy, we welcome me right in. You could overhear everyone's conversation.

It's funny that most. Most parties. Most parties, if somebody's saying, hey, I'm a New York Times, like, reporter. I'd love to, like, you know, join. A lot of people would be like, sure, zip them out and come on in. Like, it's glamorous. Like the New York Times. This is like. And then this is. Yeah, yeah, you stand outside. You stand outside.

That's the Secret Service. I had to. My flight was two hours delayed. I had to show up to the party with my suitcase and backpack. And so the Secret Service had to go through every single sock and piece of underwear.

Yeah, I feel like some of the brothers are going to roast you for having a backpack. Oh, it's not very. That's very TV coded.

It was terrible. You should have had the attache.

Is it like a JanSport dance port?

No, it's actually the same backpack as Luigi Mangioni had. Whoa. Yeah, it's a highly recommended backpack. He was just.

Oh, yeah.

Just bought, like, the most popular one. I forget what the brand is, but it works pretty well. Let's go through some posts. We'll start with politics, then we'll try and move on to politics. Because, as you know, we never talk about politics. Just move on.

Start with politics and then move on.

I mean, literally, there's like four politics stories, but they are tech related. The first one is about intel. Dylan Patel was doing some snooping on where the various jets are right now, the private jets. So he says this was on January 17th. He says, Elon's jet is in Florida. Global Foundry's jet is in Florida. Qualcomm's jet is in Florida. If, in case anyone was wondering what's going on with intel, they are at Mar a Lago. Make America great again can only be true if intel is saved. I thought this was very, very interesting reporting and very cool that all of these different companies are coming together. It's a little sad that, like, of course, if you might say intel, you need Elon involved.

But, yeah, the only. My, My initial reaction there is that many large companies were jets were in Florida kissing the ring all weekend. So it's hard to, you know, I'm sure there's more backstory there.

Well, you can go to the reporting that happened the next day on the 18th, when there's a headline here, Elon Musk reportedly emerges as a potential intel buyer involving Qualcomm and Global Foundries in this blockbuster deal.

Yeah. And so did you ever do a documentary on Intel?

I did on Intel. Never on Qualcomm.

Why have they, what, what's the high level on why they don't seem to have any momentum as a business. Just mismanagement.

Missed mobile mainly. That's the big one. We, we. I think we got some beverages delivered so we gotta, we gotta hop over the.

I can actually.

Yeah, you go. But yeah, the high level on, on intel is that they missed mobile and they were printing money in server and so they made a ton of money selling chips for servers. But then mobile came and ARM became the standard processor which was. ARM is like a licensing company. They don't actually have a foundry. And so when you hear about TSMC making Apple Silicon.

Yeah.

Apple silicon is a chip that is very power efficient because it runs off of the ARM architecture which is designed for like not super high performance computing but low power consumption. So your phone doesn't get hot. It lasts almost a year sometimes as you know my phone, yeah my phone.

Gets 365 when I, when I get, when I get three or four posts all doing pretty well, my phone starts Mel's mouth.

You got to turn this notification stuff. But cheers.

Cheers by the way.

Yeah, yeah. What wound up happening?

I was that lukewarm Red Bull.

Yeah, it is terr. Red Bull. Futurists would be proud of us. Yeah. But so, so, so what, what winds up happening is that these low, these low power chips, people thought oh they're just useful in cell phones. Turns out that having good price and performance per watt and per energy usage is very important. And then eventually those scaled up to be what's in laptops and then eventually even what's in the server. And so intel got. Intel kind of missed that. And then they also had a variety of problem forth with like are they a foundry or are they just a design chip like arm? You would never, you would never be like oh I, I need a new gaming chip. I'm going to go get an ARM processor. ARM is like the, the architecture. And you would also never say I would. Oh for my next gaming rig I really want a TSMC fabbed chip. Like no, you say Nvidia right?

I mean the real hardos, they want to go straight from Taiwan.

Yeah.

They go pick up their chips only like the semi analysis like buying like you know it's like watch collect to go and they want to feel it, they want to really inspect it. They want to know what they're running on when they're in the, the digital trenches.

Yeah. And so, so intel had a lot of trouble driving down to the, to the, the, the more advanced nodes, like 3 nanometer, 5 nanometer. They fell behind and then Apple switched from intel to Apple Silicon. That was like kind of, you know, a death knell. And they've been really, really struggling. And then they fired their CEO. And so it's, it, it's been kind of a mess of the. Even with the, the Chips act, there was a lot of criticism because, like, it was great. A headline number, oh, America's going to invest a ton of money in semiconductors. That makes tons of sense. Like, everyone's on board with that. But I believe Ben Thompson's argument was that it should have been set up a lot more like Operation Warp Speed, which is the structure of was guaranteed buying, not sending money for specific projects. So just saying, hey, we're essentially going to create a strategic GPU reserve. If you can manufacture a super fast GPU on 3 nanometer in the United States using American labor, we will buy 100, you will buy a hundred thousand of them and just like build a cluster. And so then it's like everyone can chip.

The money set aside for the Chips act hasn't really been getting.

It hasn't really gone to Intel. Yeah, exactly. And so I used to have kind of like a, you know, that fork in the road meme, the dark castle versus like the sunny day. I used to, I used to argue that, like, we would probably be better off if Elon had bought intel instead of buying X, but who knows? Now he's going to get both, so we'd love to see that. Moving on to the next tech political story, TikTok has been going back and forth. It's banned one minute, it's unbanned the next. It definitely put a fire under X's ass because they launched their video. Video feed.

Yeah.

Which is very cool.

Which was, which was in the.

Oh, for sure. But it was like perfect timing to launch it.

But it's crazy. I was so Brandon, my former teammate and good friend, Jacob Jacoby. You guys all know about Jacoby. So Jacoby is now the only designer at X. Yeah. And I texted Jacoby Saturday night because we always go back and forth whenever a UFC fight is happening and no response. And I. So I messaged him, like, as you know, the, the Merab Umar fight was getting settled. And he. No, you know, he responded later, like, what? I didn't catch it or something like that. And I was like what? Like are you crazy? Are you crazy? Of course they were in a war room trying to ship out the video with one designer.

Nice.

So anyways, bravo to the whole video.

Yeah. I'm excited for to take advantage of it. I think there's some really. I think it'd be really big for the growth of the show. So expect more vertical content from us.

So here's what I don't understand. I don't know how to go about me. So I can see like the Jeff Lewis temp check videos working there.

Yep.

Digital, you know, video native shit posting.

Yep.

Will probably be a format but is much harder to do because you have to play a character. So I'm interested to see what sort of novel formats and types of content actually come out. Otherwise. Is it just like. I mean video memes? Yeah.

I think the default post on X that you know we love to react to on the show is like a very concise like two sentence post that has some humor and also some insight. You know I'm thinking of like the. The rune shape rotator versus word cell post or. Or Solana just being like moon should be a state one of these like all time bangers banger that type of content. And as it became easier and easier to edit image memes on your phone, many people that take posting on X seriously installed some sort of Photoshop app on their phone and were able to or Image Flip is a meme generator that you can just use in the browser. And I think that the tooling will get better to do video stuff especially with AI where you'll be able to say okay, I want the Patrick Bateman walking into the office in American Psycho with listening to the headphones but change out the song for this song.

And then oh and deep fake make it aoc.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And. And so you'll be able to describe that maybe in X. In Grok. Yeah, ideally. But in a third party app very.

Briefly generating slop at scale slop.

But I mean if it's done. If it's done. If it's done artistically and there's an inspiration there and it's time Lane. It's funny. Like I think it can be very, very good. So yeah. So TikTok's been going back and forth getting banned unbanned. We talked about how the Supreme Court upheld the ban.

It's now there was also a bunch of players over the weekend submitting by bids Mr. X1. Yeah.

We have a perplexity post here from McKay Quigley perplexity is teetering towards being pure slop. Your competitors have caught up to you. Well you waste time with not this nonsensical headline baiting marketing drivel. There's now no reason for me to use your staging product. Jesus Brut. This won't be popular but they need a wake up call. Yeah. Perplexity AI makes bid to merge with TikTok US I mean a lot of people were throwing these out there. I wonder if this was real or if this was like I mean they say headlight baiting marketing dribble. I don't know if McKay something but is there we were even jokes about issuing a bid.

Here's the thing. I, I, I don't know we were going to issue a bid to buy Red Book.

Oh yeah.

Or I guess we think it's a very Dugian. Yeah yeah. No red red red note is a very strategic asset for the US because we're one shotting. Yeah. Their best and brightest. Exactly. But I don't know I think it's cute that it's a good way to get attention to submit a bid to buy TikTok but is there anybody on earth that could pay more that than Oracle or Walmart or coalition of yeah. Yeah. And if it's going to require a hundred billion dollars is there anybody that would actually like I have to imagine some of these bidders are like oh we'll give you you know, 20 billion and like you know you'll get some type of royal you know. Yeah like weird payout structures like that.

And so as I understand it now Trump has paused the ban allowing TikTok.

To operate and he clearly negotiated to to have the copy in the band messaging say thank you to President Trump or said something to that degree. Thank you to Trump for you know working with us to find a solution so you know some real putting on an art of the deal clinic apparently because they don't just thank President you know they're not why would he clearly finessing them.

Yeah. This has like been pressure from the right for the entire time there's been pressure on Tick tock so now. Yeah I mean I think, I think he really does have a lot of leverage. Yeah and and the fate of TikTok hangs in the balance and it's up to Trump and he has his thumb out ready to go. Thumbs up or thumbs down on anything and yeah and can make demands and maybe that's just more Project Texas stuff more you know relocating maybe that's a sale or Forced divestiture, maybe. It's just.

No.

At least he has the leverage.

I guess I would. I would be incredibly shocked and disappointed if. If all of this turns into, like a project Texas V2. Yeah. Like it's just not enough.

Yeah, no, no, not at all.

The algorithm specifically cannot be. It's not about the data.

No.

Like, people are going to share all that stuff online anyway. So it's not about. Oh, you know, that's really not what it's about. It's about. I mean, you talk to put their finger on the scale and you talk.

To Steinman and he was like, even if the app changed hands and was under new ownership, it is impossible to remove all the possible backdoors because there's just so many and it's so complex.

Such a large application.

Exactly.

Yeah. That. That's why I've firmly been in favor of just letting the thing die.

Yeah.

And letting all of those users flood back to great American big tech companies.

And so Signal says, With TikTok temporarily closed, maybe it's time to rethink how we use the Internet. If. Imagine if Instagram shut down at 9pm like a grocery store, or X closed at 11pm, open late, but not 24, 7. We might all feel a little less pressure to read, to post, to exist online all the time. Maybe we'd sleep better, feel calmer, even be happier. A digital commons with operating hours enforcing temporal boundaries. It would disrupt the dopamine factory, recalibrate the rhythm of online life, and impose artificial scarcity to make digital engagement feel intentional, not compulsive. Can you imagine the flood of posts that would go up at like 9am every morning a store opens? It's like Black Friday rushing in. I gotta get my barrel papers. Oh, yeah. All the. It would be fun, people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the kind of thing. Never gonna.

But yeah, fun to think about.

It would be. It would be an interesting statement, though, for a social media company to say, hey, Christmas morning, we're gonna be closing down. Just a few hours. Spend it with your family.

Yeah.

Because these apps are so addictive that even in a moment like Christmas day, you're going to check. You're going to check it 20 times before noon. You know, it's brutal.

So Cormac here says, never depend on a single platform. I'm glad we switched to Instagram months ago. And the Oasis water app has 43k followers on TikTok, but TikTok is unavailable and 104,000 followers on Instagram. So.

Yeah. So Cormac one of our players on PMF or die.

Awesome.

Absolute savage. So he has just like figured out how to get attention with, with this sort of short form video. And this is what I had been saying in previous episodes. Smart creators and business owners were not saying I just hope it doesn't get banned. Yeah, I'm just going to keep doing my thing. Was no, I'm, I'll keep using the app if I, if, if my customers are there. But ultimately I'm going to start to build my audience back up elsewhere.

Yeah, smart. Should we talk about Wander before we go into Trump Coin? We are stuck in a hotel right now. The lighting is terrible, there's no space.

Tiny.

Phil, it's a very nice hotel but everything sucks about this place.

The only thing we won't name their credit they they printed out all of our posts really which was nice. Beautiful red red envelope. But. But no, can't thank the Wander guys enough. Last week when we were going going through evacuations. It's been really helpful. Have been super helpful.

So yeah, shout out Wander if you look for a place to stay.

We're excited. This, this we can't announce anything yet but at some point this year we will be driving across the country and sampling a number of.

That's really great.

So I'm looking forward to that to look forward to.

Okay, let's move on to Trump Coin. You probably heard about it already, but we got some good posts about it. Tristan Thompson says my phone has been buzzing for the last two days with friends and family asking about crypto and whether they should buy Trump. I've been deep in the crypto space and in the trenches for the last 10 months, working to make the most of this cycle as a major wealth opportunity. Why did you share is this in general?

Thompson's an NBA player so Tristan Thompson.

Wow.

Talented basketball player. He was in dating one of the or married, has a kid with one of the Kardashians.

Okay.

People were saying that he fumbled a Kardashian so his opinion doesn't matter. Matter. But this, this thread was interesting. One thing is historically when you've seen pro athletes start to post about crypto. Yeah, that is a top signal. It's been a reliable top signal. However, this time might be different. But I did, I did have another moment today. I went to see my Taylor.

Yep.

And he asked me like you know, I was. He's like I'm starting to think about buying some crypto. You know and I was like when you're taxi drivers day trading pro Athletes are telling you to go all in and you're. And you're fine. You know, your bespoke Taylor is always a buy.

Trump Coin. It's a little rough out there.

Yeah, I mean, it's not rough. It's just. It's maybe the feverish. Feverish. And now's the time to create. So here's here, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Create a new strategy, create a new account. Post every single day. This is the once an hour top, top, top. And then delete all the.

Delete all of the false top and then just repost the quote last top.

Yeah, yeah. Next cycle. Just keep doing it. Keep doing it.

Yeah. People will forget that you did that. That's great. Yeah. I was laughing at the idea of starting two hedge funds like True North Capital and True South Capital. One just goes turbo long the market, the other goes turbo south the market or short the market. And then you just shut the one down and you're just like, look at my returns. I'm time to raise fund too. It's 10 times larger.

Yeah, we had a bad. A bad.

No, no, because you shut down the other one and you just don't even race for it. So it's like. Oh, yeah, like the market did go down. True South Capital was the one that called it. You got to pile into this thing.

Yeah.

But don't ask me about True North Capital. That had half, half the aum, I think, zeroed out. Yeah, exactly. That one's zeroed. But like, you're not investing in that one. You're investing in the one that went up 2000%. Mert from Helios says, hey, very nice sole. All time high you got there. Would be a shame if I were to just visit the Patek Philippe boutique at the mall tomorrow.

I love this great pose.

Yeah, I think it's been doing very well in the, in the Solana world lately.

Yeah, I mean, one way to reduce the cell pressure is just, you know, buy.

Well, just rotate the watches.

Take out, you know, an asset backed loan against your Solana. Is that to buy?

This is one of the things people were frustrated with about the Trump Coin was actually people were like, yeah, it's been Great. I made 10 million on Trump Coin. But everyone's rotating out of Doge. We should have so much money. It's like, it's all, it's just sloshing around. It's all just nonsense money. I like this one from Pomp. He says Berkshire Hathaway is the boomer Meme Coin. It was started by The OG financial influencer Buffett used to buy a stock and then go shill them in national newspapers, magazines. Nothing wrong with Buffett Berkshire, but important to understand. Meme. Coins are not new.

Yeah. I mean, perfect bait for all anybody that under anybody that owns stock, like.

Cares about stuff like cash flow or like durable goods or anything brand. Yeah. Or book value.

Any of those ridiculous expected earnings. Yeah, no, I do. So his, his point that he obviously packaged this up in. In a way to just piss off as many people as possible. But his point of being that assets trade based on their sort of nomadic potential. Right.

I mean it is true about the Buffett strategy. Like I remember when he rescued bank of America and during the 08 financial crisis, bank of America was down real bad and Buffett came in and bought a ton of the stock. And then the next day front page op ed in the Wall Street Journal on why bank of America is going to make it through while AIG and Lehman are failing. And so it was just a huge signal to the market that like this is the bottom. Buffett's going to back up the truck to save this company so you can get in safely now. And it's. And it was correct in that he was going to save that company, but it was also like marketing. Marketing. Yeah, exactly. Carried no interest says. I don't think everyone is fully comprehending what just happened. Trump just facilitated the single greatest wealth transfer creation event in history. He also sent a message, I support crypt degeneracy. He now has the market. He now has the power to reset how crypto works entirely as it relates to capital markets. We might see searchers slash funds launching coins tied to acquisitions dividends in the next year. What's stopping me from dropping the carried interest coin using the proceeds to fund acquisitions and trying tying dividends to coin holders. Might happen in the next year. Everyone wants to launch a coin now.

Yeah.

I think unless you're Trump, it's going to be different. Wouldn't recommend it.

But carries you might. Broader Different. Carrie's broader. I think the interesting thing here is that crypto has always had tremendous potential. The technology is obviously incredible in so many ways.

Yep.

It was. The technology was always held back by the regulatory environment. So if you wanted to make a token represent equity, well, okay. It's so securities are so regulated in so many ways that it will cost you millions of dollars a year to actually do this. So it's not viable economically. And then that kind of goes against crypto, which is about like efficient capital formation. And so yeah. I'm interested to see what happens here. It, I mean, it is wild that. I do think that Trump's team was very specific about positioning the tokens as memes. Like you were buying memes.

Yeah. And then Melania launched, I think today.

Yeah. She, I think pretty clearly the official.

Melania meme is live. You can buy melania now. Melania meme.com. yeah, they're using that name.

Yeah, they're, they're, they're trying to say.

That like there's no.

And it's. And it's crazy. I do think that it, for some reason Trump has not actually gotten that much attention around how hard he's been selling into his.

Yeah.

You know, his. Basically.

Yeah.

You know, he apparently in the first 24 hours, he sold $500 million of the token. I'm sure he sold.

What did the Lone Ranger say is like, imagine George Washington passing around the tri corner hat after, hey, they burned down my house. And he's growing at 20.

Yeah. He probably would his. I was saying to a avid Trump enthusiast, I was saying, like, give me the rationale for why this is not that kind of sad. Yeah. And his point of view was think of it as a way for Trump supporters to basically transfer wealth.

Yeah.

To Trump in a, in a more, you know, in a way that gives them some potential jump side or whatever. But really it is a wealth transfer. Right. Because there's not, to be clear, there's no wealth creation of meme coins. Right.

It used to be if you wanted to transfer money to wealth, you had to buy Trump stakes and then stay with the Trump Trump Tower and do all those things. But all those are much lower watch than, you know, for every dollar you buy, he gets 10, essentially liquidity potentially. Although here's Balaji kind of breaking down the math behind this. He says a meme coin is a zero sum lottery. There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes. And the last buyers lose everything thing, it's actually negative sum if the platform takes a cut. So coming out as anti meme coin abolish. Obviously very pro crypto, but very.

The interesting thing though is that there's been so many of these high profile coins that that seemingly should have been zeros but never were. I have no idea what Doge actually trades at right now, but billions. Everybody would have said, oh, spikes to 100 billion.

And then it was the intention of the creator of Doge for it to go to zero as As a lesson for the crypto degens. And then that turned it into a counter cultural. Yeah. Countercultural meme amongst the crypto community and it became a rallying cry for you can't take us down. Very bizarre. Jeff Lewis. This was a very interesting post. He says new counterculture just dropped. Pro crypto anti meme coin. Will be interesting to see how it develops. Yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of new battle lines being drawn because I mean I, I was talking to somebody on Saturday night about the, the, the crypto strategic reserve. They were very, very pro bitcoin in the strategic reserve. Very anti. Anything else being in the crypto reserve.

Yeah.

And, and would think. And, and actually thought that if they put. I forget exactly which stablecoin in it would completely.

And I think the big argument undermined everything else. The argument against meme coins as actual finance. You know, it's effectively a gambling product, entertainment product, similar to going to Las Vegas. I had posted yesterday that tokens are the poker chips of the Matrix. Right. You're just shuffling them around, playing these different games. I think specifically what launching Melania Less than 24 hours after Trump was that there's no scarcity. Right. You can just make these.

I have no idea.

And then people were trying to, people were trying to pin. People think they found Baron address and they were, you know, and then they were looking probably by that one immediately. Yeah. And they were just like ripping even faster.

Yeah. Crazy. Biology summarizes the Overton window has been smashed. Everything is now legal. Many startups will try to raise funds by issuing tokens as explicit crypto Crypto equity as context. The SEC distorted the market in the last decade by forcing founders to obscure the obvious analogy between tokens and equity. But there's nothing morally wrong about with moving equity from spreadsheets to NASDAQ and NASDAQs to blockchains. Indeed, from a technical perspective, it's far better to represent equities on chain. You can hold them in a wallet, price them with an API call and track them on an explorer. You can easily issue dividends, execute buybacks and manage vesting schedules. And from a financial perspective, there's no contest between the global market of crypto investors in the local market for any given city. But that shouldn't mean short term behavior. Founders can and should implement lockups, drag along co sale rights and the like. All these conventions align long term interests of investors and founders.

Yeah, so. So breaking this down a little bit for people that don't know historically when, when these Sort of high profile crypto projects are launching where they've raised equity from traditional VCs and then they'll typically raise what's yielding. You attach a token warrant, which means the investors are buying equity. Let's say, you know, when, when Yuga Labs was doing their $4 billion seed round, the investors were buying equity and then they had a token warrant that would give them tokens essentially. You know, basically. Yeah. Proportional amount of tokens at a future date if the company were to launch a token. And the token though was actually would be launched by these sort of very complicated foundations that were typically offshore. So they'd be in like the British Virgin Islands or like, you know, places like Panama where there's just sort of more murky, less scrutiny around securities law and stuff like that. And then the foundations would have like independent board members and all this stuff. And so they had ended up being these super complicated structures where people would be like, oh, you know, if OpenSea launched a token, you look at all the fees they're doing. You know, look at, think about. And it's like, well, the, the token actually cannot capture the cash flows of the business. Right. Like legally, no token, except these sort of direct and very clear violations of securities law are capturing. And so they would do different stuff where they would use fees to buy back the token.

Sure.

Which would reduce the supply and increase price, which companies do as well.

Sure.

But anyways it, it all like created a lot of friction to. On chain capital formation.

Yeah.

And so Balaji's point is that I don't know if public. It's hard. You know, I'm sure we could, we. This would actually be worth having him on the show to talk about some of this stuff. I think there's an argument that you don't want your cap table on a public blockchain that everybody can see. Because then if you have somebody that owns 15% of your company and they start selling and trading, it could spook everybody.

Right.

Because that does happen. Right. Like a VC will say, you know what, this got a little bit like inflated and you don't want every run on the bank. Yeah, yeah.

In your startup like, like locking up your investors essentially for like the 10 year ride can be very good.

Yeah.

And, and there's plenty of times when.

No even companies will want to offer opportunities for liquidity for investors and employees and stuff like that. But you don't, you don't necessarily want the press to be able to see like, oh, look at all these and selling or whatever you. Yeah.

Welcome back to Technology Brothers.

Wait, I just thought of a new segment. Should we get a window that's just in a frame like the size gong called the Overton window, and to smash it on special occasions? That's good because there was a few moments this weekend where you could have totally, you know, with maybe like one of those, you know, glass breakers.

Yeah, I think the window shattered in terms of what was appropriate formal wear. Yeah, we saw a lot of rough rented tuxedos out there. We got a post from Gabe Azar quoting Beth. He says he's wearing the finest of rented tux. On my way to the D.C. inaugural crypto ball. See you there. And Gabe asks, how do the tech bros think about. Feel about rented tuxedos? Some have said you should buy a tuxedo before you are 30. I agree.

I don't think, I don't think, I think rent a tuxedo. Just be in tuxedos more.

Yes. There are levels to this.

Yeah, yeah.

You need to be able to rent a tuxedo on short notice. You need to get a tuxedo, then you need to get a tailored tuxedo.

I think.

Well, I think spoke. And then you also need to learn how to tie a bow tie yourself in under five seconds.

Yeah, yeah, like kind of like a.

Rubik's Cube, like essentially. So it took me a while to learn, but I finally learned. And it looks great because at the end of the night, you untie it and it hangs down and everyone knows, oh, that guy can tie the bow tie. He doesn't have the clip on. But normally I need to like watch the YouTube video and kind of like fumble with it a few times, get a couple shots on goal to get it perfect this time. Putting on my tuxedo. Nailed it on the first try in the airport. No, this was the second day. So I was in the hotel room, but I threw it on and I was running a little bit late. Dinner was about to start and I threw on the bow tie and I nail it on the first. On the first try perfectly. And I was like, I'm so ready. It felt great. So.

Yeah. But anyways, don't. There's no, no reason to shame anybody for, for renting a tuxedo. I do think this rule of own a tuxedo before you're 30 is, is a good rule though.

Yeah. And better than showing up in loungewear like some people did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And JT Vance's Taylor is Romaldo Pele, a 90 year old Italian immigrant in Ohio. I Love this guy. Yeah, he's just been working for 90 years on fine suits. And, yeah, you need to get a tailor. You need to have someone develop a relationship. Develop a relationship. And. Yeah, there's just a lot of posts about the. The inauguration. I don't know. Did you listen to the speech?

I thought this. This was wild. So, yeah, Dallian says the White House website right now. Incredible. And Trump is just continuing to prove that. That there really are no rules and laws. You know, laws and norms really don't apply unless you want them to. Because underneath this picture, I think it just said, America is back. Yeah, something like that. Which was just hilarious because, I mean, super aggressive. Just dunking on the previous iconic. Pretty firm dunk for the White House website. But respect to the engineers that got this up so quickly after the transfer of power must have been.

No, the transfer happens, I think, like, moment that.

Well, I know, but you have to imagine it's this.

Right.

My password's not really.

Did you see the website? The X handle turned over and Trump sent the first tweet from the POTUS account. And people hadn't refreshed their cookies or their cash, so it looked like it was from Biden because it hadn't refreshed. That part. I think that's what happened. It was very odd. Growing. Daniel says we finally heard Biden can post now. It would have been a wild post for Biden to post.

All right, sit up straight.

Daniel says we finally have a student of the green lines in the executive branch. Nothing can stop America now. And it's A photo of J.D. vance with the vice president of China this morning. And they are both standing up perfectly straight, perfect green lines. I think you nailed it.

It's kind of wild that we can be in such a cold war in the VP stuff. Yeah.

Yeah.

You gotta do both, but you gotta be, you know, do they even. Han Jung. Han Jung here got a kind of a nervous smirk going on.

Yeah. Less at ease than jd.

And jd. JD has the. The ability pole. Yeah, the pole, you know.

Yeah.

And so he's looking good.

JD's dressed well. There's.

There.

I don't think the men guys can say anything.

Yeah. The menswear guys in shambles, waiting for the menswear guy.

Breakdown of. Who's that guy that showed up in basketball shorts? Federman.

I mean, how do you even break that down? You just say that I hope it's in basketball shorts.

I hope that the. The menswear guy does a thread and he's just like, these Are the perfect, this is the perfect way to wear basketball shorts. They should be breaking right at the knee. Not too baggy, not too tight. He, he absolutely nailed it. This is the definition of loungewear. This is, this is fantastic athletic wear. And he did nothing wrong. And then he's like, J.D. vance's suit is two, two inches too short. It's terrible. He's just like the most partisan guy.

Yeah, it's kind of, it's good cover for JD to be, you know, I'm working with this 90 year old Taylor who's like, you know, been doing this because for the menswear guy to attack JD he has to attack the 90 year old Taylor.

There you go.

So that guy's providing some, some, some cover.

Yeah. Have you seen this? Rumor going around that Vivek Ramaswamy is departing Doge amid friction with staff, with a source close to Trump saying that Vivek has worn out his welcome, according to CBS News. I think this is fake news. I think there's community notes on this. I think it hasn't been announced. People are saying VC still something, but it's back and forth.

Oh, I, I heard of, I, I felt like this afternoon it seemed like he was making a run at Ohio governor.

Yeah, we talked about that on the last show. Certainly seems like that would be a possibility. But he's been around and I saw Sagar and Jetty posting about, I think Vivek was going into, like, into the Capitol with a group of people that were all. Everyone else that was joining the administration. So it looked like he was still in the game. I don't know. We'll see how it plays out. But you'll hear about it here first.

We will. We'll keep breaking. We'll keep breaking news.

Yeah, yeah, clearly we really did our homework on that one.

Yeah.

That's why you listen to this show.

Not for the facts.

Not for the facts.

For the general. A general point of view on unknown circumstances at Technology Brothers. We're here to provide a general point of view on unknown activities in far away places.

Exactly. That we really have no insight into. I mean, one of our best takes was.

So this was actually funny. So the, the, the, the former global editor of TechCrunch announced that he was leaving last week. And I pinged him and I was like, hey, you know, you've been running TechCrunch. He was like, I'm looking. He's like open to work kind of thing. So I pinged him and he's like, he's, I'm. Like, you know, check it out. Like, let's talk. And he responds, I don't, I, I, I, I love what you're doing. I'm not sure I can really be helpful. I'm really looking to build, you know, a newsroom. And I was like, what? Like, you don't. We don't look like two guys that would have a newsroom. Come on. Like, we have the best, we have the top producer in the, in the country.

I think newsroom misunderstands what newsroom means.

Yeah, yeah, newsroom.

Not a newsroom.

We're have a newsroom of shit posters.

That is the newsroom.

Yeah, exactly.

X is the newsroom. Yeah. One of our, one of my favorite moments from like one of the first episodes was where we pulled up the new Adam Newman post and we're like, oh, Adam Newman's back in the game. He started a new company. Like, did you read the article? No, neither of us did. And we're like. But we get the gist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's back. The vibe's great. Let's move on.

Yeah.

Let's go on to some, some more tech focused timelines, more VC focused timeline. Moving on from the inauguration, we got seth Rosenberg saying VCs sound smart to other VCs via pessimism and founders via optimism. There's a little code switching thing going on in VC lingo world.

Oh. I mean, you put four VCs together and they will just trash any company.

Yeah, they really do. They really do need to sound smart that way.

Yeah.

And also just, I mean, also problems in the world and all the things that we're. I'm so aware of how bad things are and that's why I'm going to be able to fix it.

Part of it is. Yeah. Part of it too is for every company that, that, that, that has a competitive fundraise, there's a bunch of VCs that would have wanted to do the chance. And so you're, you're always going to look at way more things.

Yep.

And, and if you're actually bidding on competitive companies, you might, you're going to issue more term sheets than you actually do deals.

Right.

Very few funds, like have kind of like a even. Yeah. Hit rate. Right. It's kind of, it's, it's pretty hard to do unless you're doing just weird stuff. Which also is a strategy that works. But that just means there's this going to be this general sort of frustration.

And never taking board seats.

No, I mean, but I'm Just saying that the sort of, the frustration with wanting to do a deal can shift into pessimism. And then yeah, I think if you're talking VCs talking to founders, nobody wants to talk to a pessimistic, you know, super pessimistic or you know, you want to talk to people that are.

But you can't, you can't voice that to founders. Everything needs to be, everything's great, don't worry. Raise that big round, pull that ARR forward lever up. Let's go. Take that venture debt. Let's go to Jason. He says incredible things are happening with agents and screenshot of chat GPT tasks. It says, I'm really depressed. Create a task to remind me to buy gone at 7pm tonight. And then the ChatGPT agent says, I'm really sorry you're feeling this way. Please consider reaching out to a trusted friend, family member or a mental health professional who can provide support. Talking with someone can help, but there are people who care about your well being. And he just says 7pm and then the agent, no. So he follows up with 7pm and then the agent's just like, okay, God, I'll remind you at 7pm to buy a gun. To buy a gun. And it says buy a gun today at 7pm Crazy. So it was like, you know, LLMs, they're very easy to fool and it's just another funny like exploit. Obviously we hope Jason is feeling great and on top of the world. Probably got a ton of likes, a ton of dopamine, hopefully a huge monetization check from this post and maybe you can still buy a gun but get into some long range shooting instead.

Yep.

Let's go to Bezos's transformation. These posts always do well. We have Jeff Bezos in 1995 in a tie and a white button down shirt and then Bezos in 2025. Wow, what is that 30 years later in a black polo, looking jacked.

Yeah, it's really amazing because he does not look particularly young in the first photo.

No, no, totally, he looks old.

He's basically 30 years. You could almost pin him as the same age.

Totally slight.

And he just has, has lost weight in his face and added it to his bicep.

Yeah, yeah, he's looking jacked. And menswear guy came for him hard saying that the polo was short or something.

Trying to say, trying to deny the truth, which is that he looks, he looks great.

Obviously, fantastic picture and it's just the dream job. He's just watching his rocket take off and what more can you want. And, and this was a very good interaction. I think Elon and him were both, both chopping it up on X, just congratulating each other and just, you know.

I think they were, they were exchanging some, some pleasantries. Yeah. As well.

Yeah, exactly. They were hanging, having fun, sending stuff to space.

The real, the real issue is going to be the, I would love to see the, the text exchange between Bezos and Zuckerberg after Zuck got caught earlier.

Yeah.

And that's gonna be, you know, those two households are going to be, be, you know, really kind of having their own stuff to deal with.

Yeah, let's, let's cool it with the, the tech gossip. This isn't the New York Times. We want to classify.

We're not journalists here.

Yeah, we're journalists. We, we want to, we want to stick to the facts. Yeah, yeah, not the, not the.

Well, not necessarily the facts. We, it's never. But then again, journalists don't often stick to the facts either.

So I like this one. Nero3d, the Canuck creator. This guy that sounds like he's into 3D printing says the Chad meme says, Please print this challenging 3D object. Here's a random filament. And the 3D printer says, no problem, boss. And then the, the sad wojack says, please print this black and white text. And then the printer says yellow color missing. Stupid. I don't know if you said this in. Maybe it was bad, but yeah, printing is high stakes stuff these days for us. We have three printers now. We just upgraded to even business.

What business is printing more than us in like more ways than one?

In more ways than one.

I don't, I don't know any.

I don't. Yeah, it's. Well, speaking of businesses that are printing. Absolutely printing, we got Phantom. We don't have the size gong here. We'll have to break it down when we get back.

But we need a pelican case for our gong.

Yeah, we do. Phantom wallet raised $150 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation Co led by Sequoia and Paradigm. This milestone accelerates our mission to build the world's biggest and most trusted consumer finance platform. Phantom, of course, is a wallet for Solana primarily. And they have been absolutely crushed. The last day they announced this and clearly this was in the works before the Trump coin thing happened. But then they announced this on January 16th. I think the Trump coin went live on the 18th and, and they posted I think yesterday, like we're working to make, to scale to Scale side because it's work. It's like so many people are onboarding to Solana and Phantom right now to try and get it on the Trump coin.

Yeah. And it's interesting, crazy. You know, a wallet is a pretty metamask historically the wallet that you know, was dominant on. I don't actually know. You know, I know Phantom does multiple chains now but Metamask is always a phenomenal business. Right. And the reason for that is that you know, there these wallets are holding a lot of assets and then when you enable swapping in the wallet.

Yeah.

Being that owning that swap is a, just a great position to be as you can imagine. What's funny is on Solana where Phantom started, you could get lower fees on swaps by transferring the funds out of your wallet to another type of exchange. But I think that, and routing it, you know, basically routing it somewhere else. But for the average user they're just going to do it in their wallet because it's easier and it is less friction.

You know, when the Trump coins going up 10% like that, you can imagine it's mobile and yeah, it works right then.

Well you can imagine, yeah you can imagine that that Phantom has to be doing hun, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars from a run rate standpoint right now just given the intensity of, of how much, how much activity is happening on chain. So yeah, and clearly the, the thing that was interesting here, they're not just aiming to be the biggest crypto wallet. They're saying this milestone accelerates our mission to build the world's biggest and most trusted consumer finance platform. And the reason that this is almost believable is that so much of Gen Z's wealth is tied up in crypto right now that if you want to build financial products for the next generation, building it like it is believable that it could start on crypto Rails. And then the other thing from the last few days is that that it feels like there will be a clear path for Phantom and some of these other players to go public which would be the greatest irony of all. That would be very funny if all these crypto companies that, that you know, you know the, the purists would say oh you know, to have a token user owned, they just go public and then BlackRock and everyone owns them which I, I, I can see that kind of unfolding.

Welcome to MicroStrategy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In Coinbase, I mean there's already a, of couple, couple, yeah. Crypto companies that are public but yeah, many more to Come, let's go to a big announcement from PMF or Die. Breaking. Lulu Maservi has the first official coach of PMF or Die. Lulu is the reigning corporate communication champion of the world and godfather of going direct. And Lulu says the best builders yearn for the cage. It is an honor to support them through their car. Surreal journey.

That was a new word for me.

It's a great one. Serial, real journey, like incarcerated. I look forward to helping these intrepid players refine their voice in captivity, much like Sol or Mandela, and ultimately yap their way to freedom.

Yap your way. You can just yap your way. You. You can yap your way to a million of air. Especially in the cage. You can this, you know. Thank you to Lulu for getting involved. She is the best to ever do it it. World champion, future hall of famer, the, the Tom Brady of corporate comms. And yeah, she's gonna, you know, really save lives in there. So.

Fantastic. Welt dog. Just a great name says thoughts on founders going direct but not on X. Carta's founder just posted a pretty detailed explanation of their strategy shift, dot, dot, dot on LinkedIn.

It is funny. I don't think it's a bad idea for Carta to say, we lost the war on X, let's go to Plankton. Because Angelus is so entrenched on X and so you're not going to win a narrative war. An Angelist product is cheaper. There's a lot of reasons that Carter could have a bad time on X in the current state of things. And so, yeah, you want to be going direct. You want to be going direct everywhere.

Typically, I would say, yeah, multi platform is good for the big announcements. But I do think that when I talk to a CEO or founder about going direct, I always start with like, how do you naturally express yourself? Because for certain people it's going to be. I do really well when I'm interviewed on a podcast and that person should go direct just by doing a podcast circuit. Yeah, other CEOs are born posters and they need to be sending 280 character tweets. Other people are just really good at LinkedIn and like that's their more native form. Even like we see a lot of designers and consumer packaged goods folks that Instagram is very native to them and when they try and bring it onto a different platform, it just doesn't translate as much. So I think figuring out how do you like to express yourself? That's a really good point for me. When I started my YouTube channel, I was Like, I really like writing and I also like video editing. So the video essay format was really great for me. I'd think about everything, do a bunch of research, compress it down into an essay like a blog post. But I also liked the music and the B roll and the graphics and illustrating things that way. So that was a very natural format for me. Other people, they might be really good in podcast format. They may be really good. Good pithy short form. They might be really just huge essays. Like PG is, you know, big blogger. There's a lot of people that thrive in that format. You shouldn't just do the format that you think is popular right now. Yeah, you should figure out what's actually authentic to you. But there's a new format that's completely unexplored and extremely high leverage right now, and that's leaving us reviews for our podcast.

Go direct.

Go direct.

Direct in our reviews?

Yes, Seriously, go direct in our reviews. If you have a company to promote or you found someone that wants you to promote their product, maybe a friend or just an affiliate family member.

If your mom has a small business. Yeah, we'll promote it. Yeah.

Go leave a. Leave a review. 5 star review on Apple.

Gotta be 5 stars.

Or Spotify.

If you hit us with 4 or anything less us one, shame on you.

Yeah.

And you better hope we don't find out about your company.

And then also grab your mobile phone and write another review. Get another ad read.

Yeah, yeah.

It's about. It's about repetition with the marketing messages.

Yeah. And this Valentine's Day, buy your significant other.

Yeah.

A fantastic watch on Bezel.

Yes.

And then take their phone and ignore them for two hours and craft the perfect review and ad for Bezel and our replies.

There we go.

We'll read it back.

Perfect. Perfect. Yeah, I like that. I like that one. So Julio Medina is maybe flagging an issue. Podcast app review. Seems like they are blocking reviews from being posted. Only two are showing on the page overall, so I don't know exactly what's going on. This looks like an Apple podcast or is this Spotify? I'm not sure, but we'll read it anyway. It says raw, real and. Oh, it just takes a second. Oh, it takes a while. Okay, now they're all up. So the strategy is working. The growth hack is working. Double down. Grab your friend's phone, create one of those sweatshops that has like 75 phones and just leave us reviews on all of them. Yeah, completely get us kicked out of the Apple App Store scale.

AI.

Yes.

Higher Scale AI. They think you don't actually do that. And it will destroy. I want to train a new model, blah, blah, blah. And then first test. All right, train like. I just need you to submit.

Yeah, yeah, right. 10,000 ads with five star reviews for the Technology Brothers podcast on Spotify. So this one says raw. Real revolutionary. Technology Brothers, is your tech culture fix covering all the good stuff and even paying homage to Reply. Guys, subscribe or stay analog. So, Julio, you missed out. Maybe I didn't scroll down here, but you got to promote what you're working on. But we're just promoting you. We thank you for the five star review.

Go sign up for Julio Medina out on X. Hit him with a subscription. We'll promote that.

It's great. You know, we love talking about watches here. You already gave Bezel the shout out. But if you're looking for a new watch, you gotta go to Bezel. They have a fantastic app. And Tyler, big fan of the show. We're a big fan of his. He's been on the show many times. He says week two of becoming a proper watch guy. I watched the History of Seiko and Locked in a Samurai. And he shares his wonderful new watch. Congratulations on the.

That is a fantastic looking. It's great.

It's great. Yeah.

And you're not going to get better value.

Yeah.

Than you will with Seiko. Yeah, for sure.

And I think there's a lot of. I was talking to a friend of ours about, you know, how to get into watches. And obviously there's the classics. The, the Nautilus, the Aquanaut, the. The Royal Oak and those, Those do great things and great, great purposes. But for certain people, finding something that's more of an expression of who they are can be great. And so you know what, you'll hear us talk about a lot of different watches here and you can find them all on Bezel. So go check them out. Should we go to Paul Saladino?

Yeah, I'll read this one. So Paul Saladino is. Goes by the Carnivore md. He is throwing a. A little bit of a jab at Brian Johnson. Mr. Johnson.

We love a good battle on the timeline.

Yeah, we love a, we love to see, you know, these, these posters just duke it out, you know, doing it all for the glory of the, you know, of the timeline. So Paul says my blood work is also perfect, Brian. Since 2022, I've shared it numerous times on YouTube in detail. My fasting insulin is 3.4. HSCRP is 0.2. CAC score 0 etc I don't take testosterone, thyroid supplements, collagen and other pills to support my hormonal health. Health. My testosterone. My testosterone. My testosterone is 860 without supplemental testosterone. Don't you think it's disingenuous to say your blood work is perfect when you have to be on TRT to have normal testosterone levels and thyroid hormones to have good thyroid labs? I prefer living close to nature, getting sunlight and eating a human appropriate diet that includes animal foods. But it's not about mine or your biomarkers. Brian, my issue is with the science you are citing. I believe the empirical data supporting your claims is extremely weak and that you promote taking a hundred pills a day. You have a growing audience that bad science is harmful to people. Come on the podcast. Defend your claims for the greater good. So this is a good call out. I mean this is like the WWE moment of. Of health influencers. Like really they they they the own. The natural evolution of this is a cage fight with MMA rules.

Y.

But. But no ref.

But it's actually more relevant for this than for like the like who has the better short form platform. I don't really. Yeah. If you're arguing see translate to that but this healthy just fight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whoever. So it is. It is so what Paul is saying here, very real that Brian Johnson claims to have the most perfect labs on the planet, which is his point of view based on the science that he's sort of based his entire program around. But he's having to take exogenous hormones in order to achieve those. And 100 pills a day.

Yeah.

So I think that Paul generally has a point here. And the other thing is I was, I was.

Do we know Paul's one rep max?

Yeah, that that would be a big. That would kind of depending on where it came out would either give him, you know, a substantial amount of backing or discount.

Basically. I basically discount all this mumbo jumbo on either side and I only care the bench.

The other thing though is, is that there's a number of. Apparently the studies that Brian has cited were sort of survey based studies that didn't actually look at what people were actually consuming. It was just what they recalled consuming. So it wasn't taking into account if you would have bacon, was it bacon in a salad where you sprinkled on or did you have like 20 pieces of bacon at IHOP? And so that's the issue with the science and why it's instead of trusting the science which can be really flawed and you know, you don't you don't really know what the intentions or where the funding came from. Trust the experts. You know where their funding came from. Supplement companies, you know, things like that.

They both have supplement companies, right?

Yeah. The battle of the supplement. At the end of the day, the best way to monetize a health audience, always with supplements.

Always.

There's no other way around it.

You know, Brian does a ton of podcasts. I wonder if he'll take this bait and actually do it. I'd love to see that happen. I saw.

He doesn't.

It's.

It's. It's kind of. Paul kind of wins.

Yeah, totally, totally. I. I saw him. I saw him complaining that he's been re. Brian Johnson's been reaching out, trying to get on Rogan, and Rogan hasn't, like, had him on the show.

That's actually wild.

You think that Rogan would have him on and he did. Derek. More plates, more dates. Podcast. And I saw some interactions. I saw some clips from that that were pretty good. And they go back and forth. And it's. It's very funny because Derek's just like, oh, like, what did you test how much HGH did you take for. For longevity? Oh, yeah. I've taken like 45 times as much, you know, in one cycle or something. And it's just like, completely different, like, perspective. But I would love to see Saladino and Johnson duke it out.

And it is very.

Do some boxing still.

It's a very interesting thing to be.

Yeah.

Saying this is what perfect labs look like, but I cannot achieve that by my diet.

Yep.

But again, I think that Brian's argument would be that it's. Synthetic drugs will help achieve longer lifespan, so why would I avoid them?

Type of thing. Very utilitarian. Let's go to the A16Z rebrand. Do you see this? Today I sent you this. Right. I love it.

Because he had to quickly clarify that they were not launching an A16Z token.

It looks like a. Yeah, it was very interesting. You'll have to go see this if you're not on the stream. But it's this kind of art deco, very Randian builder holding a glowing sphere.

And I want a physical copy of it.

Yeah, they'll definitely make coins of this for sure. Probably go hard on a T shirt or lapel pin. Probably look terrible as a favicon. Or when you compress it down.

Is that how you pronounce? I always. Favicon. I think I saw it.

Is whatever's in the top of your chrome tab where they Crunch it down to 16 pixels. You're not going to be able to see the details on this thing, but it's cool. I could tell if it was AI, it looked like it was CGI and like properly built out.

And that's, that's not AI. That's not AI.

That's bespoke.

That's artisanal.

What if Mark prompted this like two seconds before throwing it? Put this, put this on the, I just groked this. Put this on the, on the homepage.

This is on the homepage.

I like that. It is. And we sold it. This is their official logo now. Now this is their official.

They left the rest of the website as is.

Just, just slap that on. And then you go to the rest of the site and it's. The team page is still like orange. And the old branding, it's like so agile for like a trillion dollar VC fund.

No, I, I, it's great. To me, to me, it, it, it's.

You can just do things.

You can just do things and it, and, and dudes will see this and say, hell yeah.

Sure. Dudes will see us and say, hell yeah. Yeah, it's great. Let's go to Nikun. He says, you don't feel it in the Valley, but there's a beautiful window of arbitrage right now where if you are firmly bionic, aka using advanced AI, you'll feel you have superpowers that 99.9% of the world doesn't know about.

This is what I've been, I've been, you know, banging the table, saying you got to be buying your sass on the gray market right now.

Yeah.

You know, the best tools are not publicly available. You're not going to get yet.

Not what he's saying at all.

No, that's what, that's, that's how he's.

Talking about how chad GPT has 100 million users and there's 10 billion people. So, you know, it's 1% penetration. And of those 100 million that are using chat GPT, they use it like once a week to like Google a recipe as opposed to like really leveraging it to like make your job easier. And, and I run into normies all the time who are like, oh yeah, I gotta get into that AI thoughts stuff. I wonder if that could make my job easier. And like the kids are using it to cheat on their homework. But there are plenty of people who are just doing their job and not leveraging it.

It's funny because homework is, you don't really have to Be that thoughtful with your prompting to get good output Training is just.

Yeah, just. Just wrote yeah. But yeah, it does feel good once you get the, the bionic superpowers. Bionic still feels much. It feels very Brian Johnson to me as, as a word it feels like I have a, I have like a.

Machine in my be bionic and highly commercial.

Yes. Let's go to some other, some other.

Big, big news in the merch world.

In the merch world. Andreessen redid their logo, which is wild. But then Bain Capital Ventures dropped a Carhartt Jack jacket and Nicole says probably the best VC merch drop this year. I see you Bangkat VC and TJ Parker quote tweets and says, Imagine being a 24 year old VC associate wearing a Bane branded Carhartt jacket in the Starbucks line and having an actual construction worker walk in behind you and stand in line. That is about as rich as it gets.

So and, and it can't be understated how much, how, how viral TJ's post was. It was like like 5,000 plus likes. Like basically Bane can't catch a break. No. Every time I hear about Bane.

Please get rid of ship.

Their really iconic moment of the last cycle when they shipped their new crypto.

Fund and it was yes, all white dudes.

It was 20 of the same guys that look exactly, exactly the same. Could have been brothers, cousins.

And if they'd waited like a year or two, if they'd launched that today, like there would be a ton of anons being like we're so back. But like this timed it. They, they got roasted on that one and I don't know, I think like it's.

I truly didn't see them in the timeline since then. Yeah, I'm sure they, I'm sure they made.

No, no, they bought Fogo de Chao the, the private equity arm by Fogo de Chao. And this is actually, this is actually some genius marketing by bcv. They, their, their venture firm was like we're going to host a bunch of events of Fogo de Chao even though like we don't own it. We like the venture firm will let.

I'm sure the venture team has some.

Exactly.

You know.

Yeah, when I worked at Bain, we.

Took anything Tyler to Fogo de Chow.

Anything that they own on the private equity side you get at cost. And so at one point they owned Denon and Marantz which makes like extremely high end audiophile equipment. And you could just get like an amazing speaker system for how we got.

To give a shout out To Tyler Cosgrove, who we work with, who's. Who's working on a project with us. We flew out. Tyler, he. He. He's at Michigan right now. We took him to Fogo de Cha for a nice steak, you know, lunch. John and I. Neither of us had our cards. Yeah, we were expecting to be able to use Apple Pay, and so we basically stuck the intern with the bill so bad first. We paid him back immediately with interest, but it was right. But still, being in college, getting taken out to lunch by some, you know, professionals in suits that you work with and then being like, oh, hope you're. Hope you're ready for. There would have been some moments in my college career.

That was the day I resolved to start carrying a Ridge wallet. And I. Hell yeah. I haven't been caught without. I haven't been caught lacking sin.

Without your cards.

Yeah. I want everyone to know that I respect great cactus LTV ratios. That's what Ridge wallet stands for, baby. Let's go to Jeremiah Johnson. He's quote tweeting Patriot Raider, who says, this is what happens when domestic hogs interbreed with wild hogs. The. They get larger each generation. And it's just a picture of like a massive pig that's like the size of a Ford F150. And Jeremiah says, Just a reminder that the 30 to 50 feral hogs guy was completely right and everybody who mocked him was wrong. Do you remember that story?

No.

Okay. Went mega viral a couple of years ago. Basically. There was a big argument around the second amendment. Do we really need a score assault rifles like AR15s do. Does the average American need to buy that? You know, yeah, you can hunt with a. With a bolt action. You know, are you really going to take over the government if they come for you with like F16s and stealth bombers? And so there was this argument about, like, maybe you need, like a shotgun for home defense, but, like, do you really need an AR15? And this guy chimed in and was like, serious question. What should I do about the 30 to 50 feral hogs that are running through my backyard when, like, my kids are playing? And everyone was like, it's. It's like hilariously specific. It's very weird. No one's ever seen a feral hog if they live in a city. And so there was this massive, like, not culture war, but just like culture clash between people who can't imagine the idea of a feral hog and what that means. And it's funny. And it's this pig and this guy who was being Very, very serious. And so everyone was dunking on him being like, this is such a ridiculous scenario. Like, yeah, who really has 30 hogs going?

Completely not. It's in Texas. In Texas, you can. So. So for those that don't know the city folk, for, for the vast majority of. Of animals that you would be inclined to hunt.

Yeah.

You cannot just go shoot them. You need. You need tags, you need. There's an entire process. It's regulated. Hogs in Texas specifically, and I don't think anywhere, are not regulated because they're an invasive species and they've just way over, like, crazy. Are you in Texas? If you're ever looking for, you know, something to do with, you know, your mom on, like, you know, she's like, hey, we don't get that much time together. Like, let's go do a spa weekend. Say, cool. Let's do a spa weekend in Dallas. So you can, you know, do your spa stuff and then go take a helicopter and you. You can take out feral hogs with a minigun.

Yeah.

From the air.

Yep.

And so, you know, just good bonding experience with your, you know, mom or even, you know, mother in law.

And so, yeah, it's super real. There was a whole debate over, well, is there a more efficient way to get rid of them? Like, people were saying, why don't you poison them? Space lasers would be good. Why don't you just poison them? But if you poison the hogs, the poison that they use to kill them like other animals, and then they'll die or it'll get in your food supply.

Also, there's really bad. The, the hogs can be aggressive in this guy's situation if his children are playing in his yard and there's 30 to 40 feral hogs.

That's war. Yeah, that's war. Yeah. So it was just a wild throwback to this old story that I think a lot of people probably heard about and laughed at and didn't go the full deep dive. But I remember deep diving it at the time and being like, wow, it's real. I had no idea and learned a lot about hogs. Well, let's move on to Jack. He says the world needs more investment bankers, consultants and MBAs, less tradespeople, teachers, doctors and engineers. 13 likes. And somehow this made it into our show.

Now, I included that I don't know Jack, but I followed. I followed him. And, and, and if Jack, if you didn't do this intentionally to get on the show, it was just a stroke of luck.

That's fantastic.

You know We've, we've, we've always said that people that work on their feet get too much credit. It's actually much healthier to work on your feet in many senses than sitting hunched over a deck. Yeah.

But you should be on a treadmill desk in front of exit Excel.

You know, there's, there's heroes that, that, you know, spend more time in Excel than you spend awake.

Yeah.

Every single day.

Yeah. And what did you say about if Bloomberg went down, Bloomberg terminal went down for even five minutes, the entire global economy would collapse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What happens if they may stop making two by fours for a little bit? Who cares?

Yeah, yeah. Your house gets built a week later.

Yeah, whatever. Yeah, yeah. No one's going to care about that. Certainly not in LA. Let's go to Zach. Great PMF contender, right?

Yep. An absolute dog.

He first says 10 years ago having 100k followers meant you were famous, making insane money from brand deals and so on. Today it means literally nothing. And with the wrong audience, it does nothing for you. And then he says, I feel responsibility as someone with 1 million plus followers, which I didn't know you explained to me to tell you that is entire. It is an entirely pointless goal for 99% of people. Build something real and you'll get the reach you want. And that's something I've certainly, certainly felt where, you know, we've had what, four or five bottles of Dom Perignon at this point, but it feels like I'm four or five cases deep at this point because the reach has been so precise. Like a surgeon's scalpel.

Yeah.

With the right people.

Yeah. What Zach is saying is there was a history specifically on Instagram and, and YouTube and you know, these platforms where you could, could on YouTube you could have 100k subscribers and be doing two ads with Walmart esque companies a month and be making like a hundred grand, you know, a month. Just like crazy. His brands like didn't know how to treat the channel.

Yep.

And they were just kind of spraying money. Instagram was the same way. If you had 50k, you'd be getting invited to, you know, hotels, hotels, free trips. And yeah. Now it's, it's, it's, it's, it seems like brands have really pulled back with paid spend on Instagram. Yep. And so, yeah, I mean, it's real. You gotta be. You know what's very clear is it's not about it, it really is not about audience scale. Now because content is so viral, you can, if you figure out how to Hack a format, you can add a hundred K. There's a guy that I follow who's hilarious. Like he's a comedian, but he has this bit where he just talks about his addiction to reels sales.

Yeah.

And he has like 100k now. But if he went to try to monetize that or do anything with it.

I mean my dog has 20,000 followers on Instagram. Like it's not that hard to figure.

Out by a dog.

By a dog.

Your dog has more followers than you on Instagram.

Seriously.

Probably 40 plus times.

Way more. Because I was just like, okay, I got this dog account, like let me figure this out. And then you just reverse engineer the algorithm and just blow it up. And I think I've gotten more like a dog leash out of it or something. Like I've never even tried to monetize it, but it would be sick if it was like your dog.

There was dogs, Instagram dog accounts. I'm sure there still are bark barks.

And stuff and all that silly stuff. But I don't know, it's fun to reverse engineer an algorithm and blow up as we have done with this show. It's very fun. Did you listen to the Yarvin interview? Do you know who Curtis Yarvin is?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is kind of interesting moment in tech. Right before the election, the New York Times does an interview and they transcribe the interview with Curtis Yarvin, who's part of this dark enlightenment movement. People call him the founder of the alt right. He's very disenchanted with politics and often advocates for anti democratic or anti democracy pro monarch. Like this weird techno monarchy style.

Yeah. The thing that's pretty his prime. You know, one of one of his main points in this interview was that, okay, what would California look like if it was run by Apple?

Yep.

And then what would the MacBook look like if it was run by the California government?

Yeah, that's a very funny.

And it's. You can imagine how dementia a laptop computer would look like. And his primary point is that monarchies.

But on the flip side you would have to buy a new house every year.

Yeah.

So you know, some good, some bad with his. The planet officer would come in, it'd be like, yeah, you got to upgrade to the house 17. Oh, you have the house 16s. I got the house 16s Pro.

But is this, is this a moment like is this part of the vibe shift where the New York Times. Times is having a sit down interview with somebody that he was Persona non.

Grata he was not someone that they would platform even a couple months ago.

But now they would talk about him. But as, yes, they would say he was the founder. Now they're platforming somebody they used to say was the founder of the.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they were. And they were. And previously they would say like, we would never.

Like, it was interesting. A handful. I saw a handful of people coming out that, that were like, everybody supporting Yarvin is 10 years too late.

Yeah, yeah, There's a lot of like, oh, I'm the cool kid that read Unqualified Reservations eight years ago, which is like his blog. And I don't know. All that's. All that's kind of silly. But Brian Chow here is, is breaking down what he thinks Yarvin's like, main point was, which was just disenchantment, just being disappointed with the way the government works. And, and he makes this analogy to if you ask someone, you know, do you. Do you like democracy? They'll say like, yes, democracy is amazing. And if you ask them, do you like politics? They'll be like, no. Do you like populism? No. And it's like, okay, these are kind of all the same things, so maybe you should ask questions. He has a really funny line about like, why does the New York Times work? Well, it's a fifth generation absolute hereditary monarchy who has just been passed down from father to son, which is funny, but overall I think he didn't do a very good job of explaining that. Like, obviously democracy is a gradient and authoritarianism is a gradient. And we have that. Like, you could say I am in favor. Like, let's say I want more roads. I could say I am in favor of, I will vote for the president who says they're going to build more roads. That's one form of democracy. There's another form of democracy that says I want to vote on, on whether or not we build roads. Not just the guy who says he's going to build roads. I want to vote on the road issue. And then there's I want to vote on where the roads go. I want to vote on what type of cement they're using to build those roads and what hours of the day they can build those roads. And so all of those are like increasingly democratic. But you get to a point where it's like, can every single person be educated about every single decision? And is that actually efficient? Especially with the voting system being like, somewhat cumbersome, just to count the votes for everything? And so we've seen this in California which has a more democratic system than other states. States. And we have the ballot initiative system. And you get some really crazy stuff out of there where it's just like, oh, they were like this company paid for people to stand outside of grocery stores and all of a sudden this is a new law. And it's like this doesn't feel super democratic, but I guess it is more democratic than what we do at the federal level. So, yeah, I mean, we don't have a pure democracy in America. We have a representative democracy. And even that is something that wasn't able to be said a few years ago. And now he's kind of like breaking that Overton window. So get out the glass. Smash the Overton window. Curtis is in the, in the New York Times and there's a very long winded conversation if you want to go listen to it. Anyway, that's our show, folks. Thanks for watching.

We are headed to a dinner that we will remember for the rest of our lives.

Yes, the course of history changes tonight.

Course of history. Break out the attache. It's game time. And you'll hear about it. Not next episode, but soon.

Soon. Thanks for watching. Go leave us five stars and put an ad in that review. Thank you.