The Size Gong, Nuclear Wave Pools, Who's Getting Rich Off Ozempic, ITAR Compliant Gatorade

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we have a new segment to congratulate any deal of large size. But today we're going to Doug Bernauer at Radiant Technologies. They make nuclear power plants and they nuclear reactors and they launched a $100 million Series A today. Jordy, can we hit the size gong for Doug? Congratulations. Congratulations to Doug and the entire Radiant team. I've gotten to know Doug over the past couple months. Awesome guy, former SpaceX, fantastic engineer and he writes. We at Radiant Nuclear are announcing our $100 million Series C today. Our plan is to test new, our new reactor design at inl, that's the Idaho National Laboratory, begin mass manufacturing reactors and deliver 1 megawatt reactors to critical areas across the globe. Reach out if you'd like to join us and build a new atom splitt machine. And he clips the Axios report.

And just to be clear, you don't need to do a nine figure deal to benefit from the size gong. Yep. It's more about like the, the weight.

Spirit of the deal.

Spirit of it.

Exactly. Anyone who's punching above their significance. Yeah, but this is awesome. Do you know about this company, Radiant Little. Really cool. Yeah. So they're replacing the diesel generators that are typically 1 megawatt. So it's not like the big nuclear power plants with the smokestacks. It's essentially the size of a shipping container and they're going to be able to afford, deploy it to military bases, even oil and gas extraction. Like you need power and oftentimes you have to truck in diesel. So anything anywhere where it's hard to get energy, you just drop one of these down and it's good for like five or ten years or something and then you reload it. So yeah, it's just fantastic.

We, we might be able to, we've been doing a lot of like coal powered AI data centers. Yeah, we might be able to kind of swap in what they're doing.

I mean the crazy like obviously this is going to be heavily, you know, purchased by the government first and then, you know, large corporations and you know, industrial companies. But I love the idea of getting like a massive, massive ranch in Alaska and just throwing one of these on it and just having so much power. And then Starlink now all the Internet just. Yeah, just heat the whole place, which is clean. It's amazing. It'd be phenomenal.

Now you could actually probably run like rods through like the ground to just like melt all of the.

That's actually one of the benefits is that it Puts out electricity, but it also puts out waste heat. So you can use the waste heat in different ways. You can like pipe it around and have heating too. Um, but yeah, it's, it's super cool. And Doug is the man. He's just like, I need an incredible team.

We need to do the first nuclear powered wave pool because like wave pools are super energy intensive.

Oh, they are.

Because you're just like produce. You're having to like move.

Are you talking about the thing with like, it's like a train that goes.

That's Kelly's.

That's Kelly's.

There's others that are better kind of like formats that are closer to like real surfing.

Yeah, yeah.

So doing. That'd be a good TV Incubation is nuclear powered wave pools.

I love it. Well, congrats to Doug, congrats to the radiant nuclear team and congrats on winning the very first recommendation or recognition from the size gong.

First of many.

Let's move to our top story today. We're talking about Ozempic and specifically who is getting rich off of Ozempic. Obviously Ozempic was. Yeah.

If you're not right now, feel bad about it.

It's the best day to start making money off. Yeah. I mean this is a huge story. In 2021 when all the celebrities started using Ozempic, that's when it actually got approved. A little bit of background. Semaglutide is the name of the actual chemical. Started off as diabetes medication, right? Yeah. Y. Then pharma company Novo Nordisk developed it in the early 2000 and tens and the FDA approved it under the brand names Ozempic for the injectable. Patients reported significant weight loss as a side effect and eventually the FDA in 2021 approved semaglutide as a weight loss product under the brand name Wegovy. And so today I want to go through two articles from Astral Codex, 10 Sky Alexander one on trying to investigate the question of why Ozempic cures seemingly all diseases. It seems to be this miracle drug. We're going to go back and forth on this. I'm sure the tinfoil hat will come out at least once. And then we're going to move on to kind of the economics of the industry. How big could this be? And we'll close with who really made money on this and how can you maybe make some money yourself in the Ozempic boom that's continuing to go on. The numbers are insane when you dig into them. So let's start with this article. Why does Ozempic cure all diseases? This is like a pattern that happens whenever there's a new drug. This happened with statins and this happened with SSRIs. Where there's some new drug, it has some amazing effects. And then all of a sudden like the scientific community starts digging into all these different side. You see this with Ozempic where it's like it started with diabetes, then it went to obesity. Now it's like oh well, it stops you from gambling and it also has all these knock on effects. But so far people are pretty, pretty like stumped as to how this actually works. And so Scott Alexander did a great job kind of breaking this down. The main thing that's going on that you know he starts with in terms of diabetes is that when you eat a meal it increases blood sugar and your but in your body wants to push blood sugar back down. So GLP1 tells the pancreas to release more insulin to regulate that sugar. So you're basically just upregulating the natural insulin production. And the back background on this. So diabetes involves excessive blood sugar. So this is the profile that you want for an anti diabetic drug. But natural GLP1 decays within a minute or two. So you eat, you get this slight spike in GLP1 that releases this insulin and starts controlling your blood sugar. But then it goes away after an hour or two. And the whole. The reason why Ozempic is so big is that it's a weekly injection. So the half life has just been stretched. And this started almost I guess 30 years ago. Over 30 years ago in 1992. And this is where it gets really tinfoil hat, you know where it came from? The Gila monster. Have you seen this?

No.

This is the, this is the monster.

No way.

So the Gila monster, is this a reptile? It's a reptile and it's basically this giant lizard. I remember learning about this thing as a kid.

So you know the whole backstory on like so diabetes, type 1 diabetes, which primarily affects children.

Yep.

When it first sort of emerged and people start, started to under understand it, it was just a death sentence.

Yeah, it was a death sentence.

Like if you had it, you were gonna have a terrible quality of life for a really long time. The Acquired FM guys did a really big deep dive into Novo Nordisk, which we'll obviously talk about.

Yeah.

And they basically were talking about how like the primary treatment method was to just starve yourself, like have like 200, 400 calories a day, caloric restriction and that would sort of extend your lifetime long enough. The theory was for like some type of cure to emerge. Much later, people discovered that you could take effectively the hormones out of the pancreas is of like pigs and cows and things like that. And so all of the first sort of like insulin replacements or synthetic insulin was like taken from the pancreas of cows and pigs and all these different animals. The challenge there is you would need like, you know, one person to get their insulin for a year. Hundred pigs, sorry, PETA. It would take like no, thousands basically.

It means the same thing with thyroid medication. A lot of times it's just ground up thyroid from another animal and then eventually they create the synthetic version. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, so the, the. In 1992, scientists discovered a chemical in the Gila monster venom which looked like GLP1 and it lasted a whole two. And so that was like the first breakthrough to realize that there were versions of GLP1s, which is glucagon, like protein or peptide 1, GLP1s that could last longer. And so this became exenatide, the first GLP1 receptor agonist. One of my favorite paper names is from the, from the Gila monster to the pharmacy.

And then by playing around, that was a big, that was a big innovation in. Insulin is just Novo. I don't know if it was. Novo and Nordisk were initially two different companies and I don't know which one discovered it, but they figured out that you could do. There were sort of like forms of insulin that had a longer half life in the human body. And that was big innovation because somebody could like be on this thing that sort of had the steady state response and then take like more precise dosages, more spaced out.

Yeah, I mean there's a whole trend in drug development about just like create something that's a breakthrough and then figure out how to create an extended release version.

Adderall XR xr.

Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. So basically the last 30 years, the story of GLP1 is just grinding to create longer and longer half life versions. So they play around with its structure. Eventually they create liraglutide, which lasts 12 hours, then semaglutide, which is one week, and then cofraglutide which is one month, which I don't think is on the, on the market yet. But now they're like the, the Ozempic.

We need the 100 year.

We need once you never again. Basically. I wouldn't be surprised somebody's working on it. But yeah, it's so, so the, the, the role of GLP1s as weight loss was kind of accidental. They were targeting diabetes. Diabetes, as we mentioned, which is a.

Symptom of being overweight.

Yep. And. And I think in general, pharma companies don't tend to go after weight loss drugs directly.

You know. Why?

Why?

Well, one reason is because Medicare doesn't cover that's weight loss drugs, which is insane.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because being overweight and the fact that so much of our population is overweight is like the biggest drag.

Yep.

On government, you know, spending and the economy overall. Right. Yeah. I think that you think the US Government at the federal level would say, let's fast track, GLP1 is being covered by Medicare because it's going to save us so much money in all these other ways, even though it is this sort of incremental cost, actually.

Well, I mean, there's another thing where, like just to kind of steel, man, how we got here with the current health care structure, like, it does kind of make sense if you go back 50 years and you look at, or 70 years and you look at pictures of beaches, like America wasn't this obese. So it wasn't that much of a problem. And the big like, oh, shit moment that happens in health care is, you know, like you get hit by a bus, you break your leg, you go to the hospital and you're. And there's like a team of really, really experienced doctors working on you for like a week. And it's like those people are. Need to be paid a lot. And then everything that they're doing, all the equipment is expensive. And so I think I have the breakdown here, but a fair amount. Yeah. Here it is like hospital care is 31% of US national health care expenses.

Yeah.

Actual drugs, outpatient prescription drugs is only 8%.

Yeah.

And that. And like, yet we can talk about. Okay, yeah, now we should be thinking upstream.

But now a lot of that, A lot of that hospital care spending is people in the last month of their life.

Yes.

Just sort of like needing intensive care in order to kind of.

Yeah. Intellectually we should be avoiding getting people into the hospital. But that wasn't, that wasn't kind of the theory behind Medicare and Medicaid when they were in like kind of created. And so there's been this question with like, how do GLP1s work? Like, is it on your brain or is it on your body? Like, obviously if you're, you know, if you're taking caffeine or something, that's just like purely in your brain, like stimulating you. You're more likely to go for a walk, you're more likely to work out. Same thing with nicotine. This is like a brain chemical versus, like liposuction. It's like very clearly that's like a body thing. And so they actually, this is fascinating. Like, so they knew it worked. They knew that people were losing we. Because they were prescribing GLP1s to diabetics. And, but they didn't know is it a brain thing or a body thing. And so what they did was they bred rats that had GLP1 receptors only in their brain, and then a separate group of rats that only have it in their body. And so then they could see and it was the brain that mattered. And it's very weird because it goes in. So they can dye it with. They can dye the chemical with like this, like fluorescent light or something that you can see under some sort of X ray. And they, and they can see where it goes in the brain. And typically it's really hard to get a large molecule into the brain. Something like nicotine is like a really small molecule. It can just kind of permeate the blood brain barrier. But for. Yes, it's fantastic. But, but for, but for larger molecules and GLP1s is this peptide. It has this lipid chain on it. It's a pretty fat molecule, but it can permeate, like the brain stem a little bit. And so that's where it gets in.

Get up there.

Get up there. Yeah. And so they basically, they basically narrowed it down now to understand that it's, it's almost certainly going through the brain, but there are kind of like still two different pathways that they go through the mesolimbic system and, and, and these GLP1 neurotransmitters. But I mean, there's, there's so much more to go into because now, because GLP1s are seen as this great modulator of hunger, essentially. It's like the hunger switch. Yeah.

But it also makes people less impulsive. Right. Which is an argum. You could have made the argument, hey, this is having some impact on the brain because it's changing people's decision making. Right. I know a lot of people that were fantastic sports bettors and had an amazing career in it and got on glp, tried to lose a little weight, and they're no longer the size lords. You're not hitting the size gong for them anymore.

No, no. It's a tragedy.

Tragedy.

But, yeah, now people are so the intestine actually naturally releases GLP1 when it detects food in order to tell the rest of the body to be full. But there's this question of like, what if some foods make the small intestine release more GLP1 than others? Like a diet focused on those foods could be nature's Ozempic, which is now. So now people are trying to take the meme of GLP1 and kind of go backwards to say, well, what stimulates GLP1 naturally so that you don't necessarily need the injection? And so there's all these different articles. Nine foods and supplements that increase GLP1 naturally. It's the same thing with testosterone. You see, you know, like, oh, this diet is better for, you know, increasing your testosterone naturally. Six foods that increase GLP1 levels, foods that naturally mimic GLP1.

Yeah, because I think that that market of people that are already, you know, even people that are objectively already pretty healthy still are seeing how other people are benefiting from it. Maybe they don't want to be giving themselves an injection once a week, but they're like, I may as well kind of get on the trend.

Yeah, it's the same thing with testosterone. It's like you might not want to do trt, but you, but you also want the highest natural production of testosterone that you want that you can possibly get.

Yeah, my, my buddies, or sorry, my friend, my friend Nish and Sif have a health supplement company that's an incredible business and they created a sort of a metabolic something called MB1 by array that's sort of a, it's, they've position it as a faux type thing, a health supplement, fozempic like that.

Yeah.

And you know, it's, it's, it's doing really well.

And so like the early arguments are being written about GLP1 based diets or like, you know, the best diets to upregulate GLP1, Paleo diet, Mediterranean diet, Ayurvedic diet, carnivore diet and plant based diet. Like people are writing them about everything basically. And it's the same thing for exercise. There's this theory that exercise creates very high demand for glucose. So it kind of makes sense that it's a signal for the body to focus on keeping its glucose system well tuned. And there's this continuous theory of like, okay, well when you are in shape, when you are eating properly, when you're healthy, you have kind of the proper level of GLP1 flowing through your system. And so this drug is Just a way to kind of like short circuit your system back to the normal level. But whenever we discover a new drug, scientists rush to demonstrate that all those lifestyle changes, the ones you should do anyway, actually work through the same mechanism as the wonder drug.

So for example, Americans are like, no thanks, I'll take it.

I'll take the drug.

Yeah, yeah.

So example, for, for example, when SSRIs were the hot new thing, psychiatrists announced that all the normal stuff that brightens your mood worked through serotonin, sunlight, serotonin, exercise serotonin, having a good trauma free childhood. Serotonin.

Yeah. Which is interesting though, because people that have, you know, too high of serotonin don't end up looking too good. So it's, it's.

I didn't know that.

It's sort of like, it's one of those things, like anything good, you can.

Have too much of it, moderate everything in moderation, including moderation. And, and so after. So in the cold light of SSRI patents expiring, most of these effects were found, were later found to be fake or at least too small to care about. And this is the same thing with. There, there's this, there's this, there's this product or this supplement called. What is it? It's like Turkesterone. Turkesterone. Have you heard of this? Turk. So it's basically the plant based, it's the plant version of testosterone. And there's this theory that if you take it, it'll increase your testosterone naturally or semi naturally. And so it became kind of like a meme and people were taking.

Maybe YC should offer that as a benefit.

But, but it's one of those things where it's, it's, it's a plant based product and so it doesn't really translate the same way and you need to take a ton of it. It's the same thing about, you know, tryptophan in, in Turkey, everyone says it makes you sleepy, but it's like you would need to eat 10,000 turkeys to actually get the effect.

Is that true?

Yeah.

Is it just. People get tired because they're around their.

Family and they're arguing about politics and Bitcoin, of course, it's, it's like, it's just a fun.

More families need to adopt the technology brothers law of not discussing politics or social issues, just only at Thanksgiving this year. Try discussing, you know, technology, capital allocation and things that actually matter.

Exactly. And so the same thing is true for gastric bypass. There's like this giant mystery about why it works like you would think. So it's basically stomach stapling. Like they literally just decrease the size of your stomach. And everyone was like, okay, well that's how it works. Like you just get full quicker because your stomach's full. But what's weird is that when you do the surgery, all these different metabolic parameters change before the patient has even had time to lose weight. And the weight loss tracks those metabolic parameters, not the stomach size. And so there's this. So some scientists thought this was GLP1 2 after all, the intestine secretes GLP1.

GLP1 all the way down.

Yeah, Literally everyone's that.

The astronauts.

Yeah, yeah. Always has been.

It always has been, always has been.

And so, and so people are saying, oh, maybe it's. Maybe it's GOP one because you shrink it and the food goes through the stomach. And the stomach usually digests a lot of food before it even reached the intention, the intestine. But if you remove or shrink the stomach, it can't do that. And much more food hits the intestine, and that means the intestine releases much more GLP1. And that means the patient feels full more quickly. And so it's like this theory. But then of course, they tested it in rats that don't have GLP1 receptors and the gastric bypass worked, so they kind of like debunked that one. But there's like all these different things. We can move on to addiction. The addiction one is hilarious. We got to go to this post by Scott Alexander, the guy who wrote the. Wrote this article. And multi step nominative determinism in action. So GLP1s are being investigated as a way to suppress alcoholism. GLP1s are based on a chemical found in the Gila monster venom. Gila monsters were first described by a zoologist named Edward Drinker Cope. Isn't that hilarious?

Unreal.

Unreal. What do you have to do in life to be named Edward Drinker Cope? Wild. I mean, it's like maybe you had.

Drunk, heavy, alcoholic father who, who determined that this is how he was going to cope is something fatherhood.

But what a bizarre chain of events. I love that Scott includes that. And so there are, there, there are two reasons you might eat. First, because you feel hungry. And the second is because you crave delicious food. So to fulfill its evolutionary role of making you eat less, GLP1 needs to do two things. First, it needs to make you less hungry. Versa via the arcutia nucleus master hunger pathway. And then also it needs to make you crave food. The food reward lasts via the mesolimbic reward center pathway. And so you don't want to, you don't want to, like, broadly tamp down the reward system. There's some antipsychotic drugs that do this and you just like, if you take too much, you will literally just sit motionless until you die because you don't want to get up. There's no reward for anything. But there are some silver bullet anti addiction addiction medications. Naltrexone seems to treat a whole host of different addictions. And, and these some. And none of these anti addictive drugs affect wholesome rewards, like the feeling of a job well done or a child's smile. They're just drug. Drug addictions. Which is hilarious because he asks, like, why did God give your brain a special lever that only porn and cocaine can pull? Which is hilarious. But it's like, it does appear that there is literally a reward pathway in your brain that's separate. Like, yeah, it's not the same as, like, runner's high or like, feeling good after a workout. It's a separate thing. And it's only the bad stuff.

That's, that's like, you know, I'm kind of bummed. I've, I've never experienced runners high.

Oh, really?

I've run a lot.

Okay.

Like, I've tried to go out and.

Experience it, but you've, you've, you've experienced podcasters high.

Yeah, but that long podcast, from everything I know about podcasters high, it is a league above. Yes. Yeah. That's why we record for three plus hours.

Exactly right. Exactly. So he says GLP1 suggests this was originally a food reward system, or at least food was a big enough part of its portfolio that it was a weird but functional hack for satiety signaling chemical to just turn off a whole subsection of the reward system. You're already full and well nourished. Why would you need the ability to crave things? And then, and then he goes on to talk about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, says, okay, now God is just trolling us. GLP1 receptor agonists, a new treatment for Parkinson's disease, gives us this diagram and he kind of explains, like, how it could possibly work on, on Parkinson's.

You know, it's funny because I feel like Silicon Valley has been waiting for the miracle drug.

Yep.

Like, to come out of Silicon Valley.

Yep.

And I think that if Novo Nordisk was a Silicon Valley darling, we would all just be like, like ozempic gets a lot of attention in our industry because of all the potential economic and technological impacts of it. But we would all be like, everybody just be patting each other on the back being like, we did it. We solved weight loss, we solved diabetes, we solved heart disease, we solved like, we'd just be going down the list, just like spraying champagne, a lot of Dom Perignon.

Yeah.

We'd be doing like a bottle, an episode, basically.

Well, there was a little bit of debate about that during the, During COVID There was like, like some of the tech people were like, well, like Amazon's like the real like hero in this story because, like we were all able to get packages delivered during COVID and it really helped with like the lockdowns and then, and then a lot of people were like, tech can't take a victory lap. It was the vaccine companies that like did work. Like, you know, this is.

Yeah, but there was, so there was a company. Do you remember Genentech? This was before our time, but like Genentech, I can't remember if they partner with Novo or Nordisk, but they had a partnership that, you know, Genentech I think was the first big biotech ipo.

Synthetic insulin.

Yeah. They helped invent. So Jeanette, we can, if we actually trace back Novo Nordic's success, it is without Silicon Valley and our incredible capital markets and the bubble that was happening in biotech at the time. You could argue that GLP1 sort of never.

Wasn't that a Kleiner company? Yeah, he was a Kleiner company. And there's this famous story about.

And that's why they're part of the holy trinity.

It is, it is. And, and, and one of the partners, like who did the deal would basically work inside the company every Friday, forward deployed gps. Essentially, essentially a forward deployed gp. And he would like do their accounting, do their business, like modeling, like really bring like the business side so that the scientists and the co founders could just work on the products.

I expect, I expect forage deployed GPS to.

Right.

Because like it needs to. I mean, founders fund basically already does.

I mean it exists. Yeah. Trade.

Yeah. Is that. And Dalian.

Yeah.

But yeah, the success of Palantir, the forward deployed model is going to be everywhere. Right.

I'm looking forward to it. Earn that sweat equity. Earn that carry check. Yeah, but, but so, so this is an interesting thing. I don't know all that much about Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, but one theory as to why GLP1s might help with Parkinson's Alzheimer's is that GLP1s suggest that they prevent inflammation.

Yeah.

And have you like studied that? So I don't know that much about it.

I would say the, the, the interesting thing here is what. So Novo Nordisk is a metabolic pharmaceutical company.

Right.

They're focused on metabolic health. And the tie in to our corner of Twitter is that Ray Pete.

Yeah.

Almost all his work was focused on metabolism, metabolic health, how to get your metabolism firing. Right. There's people that are taking their temperature multiple times a day to try to get salad. Yeah. To get their body temperature higher, to increase metabolism. And even cancer as many people think is like a metabolic disease. Right. So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bunch of other sort of downstream effects on, you know, cancer in the.

U.S. so this was, this is a great overview. I've only heard about inflammation like vaguely. Like if you, you know, like have swelling like that. That's what, that's literally what I think of when I think of inflammation. But there's a good breakdown here. So says inflammation is a catch all term for the immune response to microbes. Although it helps fight the microbes, it's slightly toxic to the rest of the body and generally bad unless you're actively fighting an infection. So it's like you get some microbes, you get infected and stuff swells up. Like you see this when you just like get a scratch or cut. Right. But yeah. Or when you're. But you can also be like you ate some bad food and like you're swelling up or chronic, chronic inflammation from like bad food over years and years and years. And so in chronic inflammation, that is the thing most of us with modern diets have all the time. Generally general bad health damages the body. The immune system mistakes the damage for a microbial infection and it provokes a constant low grade inflammatory response.

Yeah.

I don't even know how you would measure, measure like do. Am I suffering from inflammation right now? But it's now something that I feel.

It right now because my 2 year old brought home a preschool microbe. Oh yeah. And you know, you know when you have like a, like a sinus infection, you just feel like pressure basically like in your head and you don't think as well.

Yep.

So my, if my takes are worse today.

Yeah, that's what's going on.

That. But yeah, inflammation you can measure too, right?

Okay.

There's various ways that you can measure it and I want to know what.

The baseline is for me and then see if there's anything I can adjust.

That's a good way if somebody you know, if you're on X and somebody you know sends a comment that's a little bit offensive, you could, you could ask them hey, have you checked your magnesium levels or inflammation levels? Because something feels off and don't even address what they said. Yeah, just ask, go for the underlying issue. Right. This is probably not the thing that they're angry about.

The chad homonymous. So this is bad. So if you're not fighting an infection, anti inflammatories are generally pretty useful. There are lots of anti inflammatory drugs. Aspirin and ibuprofen are examples.

Again Ray Pete, big proponent of aspirin.

Oh really?

Aspirin is one of those things. Yeah. He, a lot of people have talked about baby aspirin use for longevity.

Yeah, that's a big thing.

Right. And I take aspirin. It's sort of shown to, it's shown to have, have a bunch of potential benefits around heart disease. It's basically free. Like it's so inexpensive. I think it would be something that would be all the, all the patents are long expired. So it's not something that even makes sense for the pharmaceutical industry to push anymore from an economic standard.

We don't want it to just disappear and not be part of our society and but inflammation is a multifaceted process and no one drug can stop it entirely. And so GLP1 drugs seem to be especially potent anti inflammatory that stop some of the inflammatory process most implicated in dementia. How the research is still very early but the best explanation I can find is in Central glucagon like peptide 1 receptor activation inhibits toll like receptor agonist induced inflammation. The team found that there's no GLP1 receptors on immune cells. So basically what they did was they injected some of the drugs directly into the brain and sure enough there was enough to produce the effect. So the team tediously injected one of each kind of chemical that blocks each kind of chemical communication system and found that only the alpha blockers and delta opioid blockers prevented GLP1's anti inflammatory effects. So probably GLP1 binds to neurons in the brain stem, those signals to other neurons and immune cells via alpha adrenergic receptors and delta opioid receptors and then the immune cells initiate an inflammatory reaction. And so there, there's still this like question of like why would an appetite hormone, why would an appetite related hormone do this? Scott Alexander couldn't really figure it out. He asked Claude and there were some interesting ideas. It's like basically when he's Not a doctor, right? He is a doctor, a psychiatrist. He was doxed like a while.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he, you could almost say he's a father brother. Science.

Yes, exactly.

Some people call it.

Yeah. But also when a meal comes in, the body wants to divert energy away from fighting inflammation or creating inflammation through fighting microbes towards the digestion process. So basically some of those resources come from the immune system. So the immune system stands down while you're digesting. So basically GLP1 saying, like, hey body, like let's cool it on fighting the, the, you know, this, these microbes, like, let's chill on the immune response, take the inflammation down and focus on digestion. Which is kind of interesting. It's just one theory. He's like really, really not sure about this, but yeah, there's a whole bunch. Like GLP1 is a master signal for the starving versus well fed state. Lots of bodily processes change based on whether you're starving versus well fed. Naively you'd expect that there would be as many side effects as positive effects, but maybe that's not true. In particular, maybe the inflammatory nature of the starving state really hurts a lot of systems.

Yeah, I mean, maybe that's a good point to talk about kind of the, the, the arguments against widespread usage of the product, which candidly, I don't necessarily like. I think it's generally going to have a very net positive effect on the world.

Yeah.

But there's certainly, you know, I think Cali means friend of the pod, went on Tucker's show to talk about his case against Ozempic. His quote was, yeah, is there a tweet? Episode 72 was, if a fish tank is dirty, you clean the tank, you don't drug the fish.

Yep.

And that was kind of one of the bigger points that Cali made. I think one of the arguments that, that I've seen that, that would maybe dissuade a number of people that are kind of on the fence from taking it is that while GLP1s can make you lose weight, they can actually make you fatter as a percentage of your body, you know, as a percentage of fat to other aspects of the body. So that could mean that what that, that means at a high level is you can actually lose muscle faster than you lose fat. So you might go from £200 to £150, but on a percentage basis you, you got fatter. Yeah, which, which is a pretty, you know, if you're not ideal, if you're trying to go, you know, if you're going for one rep max. Then you probably don't want to be on GLP1s.

Yeah. So ideally you're on like a high protein diet and lifting heavy while you're, you're doing that. So you're maintaining the muscle mass. But there is an interesting thing where if you're, if you're going from like obese people do wind up having a lot of muscle because they need to carry around a lot of weight. There's a thing.

Size, the original size.

Yeah, there's a, there's a thing where a lot of obese people have huge calves because they need to support all the weight that they're carrying around.

That's how I can get bigger. Bigger calves.

Yeah.

I mean, struggle with my calves forever.

Yeah, exactly.

I just need to put on some weight.

So. Yeah, you put on some weight and then use those it off and then.

Maintain the, here's the, like the, the, the big thing. Like my generally positive view on Ozempic comes from the fact that. And the same reason I think more guys should do three months of exogenous testosterone is because if you can use a drug to temporarily put yourself in a state that makes being healthy easier.

Sure.

Then that gives you a chance to actually build healthy habits. So somebody who's £250, if they can lose £50 with Ozempic and then start actually getting some type of exercise routine in place and eating less, they could just sort of over time get naturally like healthier. Right. Because going in, I mean, I thankfully never been in this position, but even for myself, if I'm out of the gym for three days, my first workout back is bad. I don't feel my best. And so if you're somebody who doesn't work out at all and goes into the gym, you might get some sort of benefits of sort of serotonin and dopamine post, post workout. But it's going to. Not necessarily. It's not like you're looking forward to going to the gym necessarily. It's sort of like not a enjoyable experience.

Yeah. There's a whole theory around like, you know, is, is this the easy way out? And I think that's a lot of like Cali has a more nuanced take on it, which is like, like, you know, we don't want this miracle drug, even if it is a miracle drug and there are no drawbacks. We don't want that to be, oh well, we don't need to worry about the food system. We don't need to clean the fish tank ever because like we solved, we.

Still need regenerative fungi.

Should do both of these. And, and he is very worried about this becoming like the first line of defense. And there's this big question about doctors, you know, with, with any of these drugs. Typically it's like they recommend diet and exercise first and then they might actually like require you to do like a program like Weight Watchers before they prescribe this. And then in a few years it'll just be like, oh, by the way, in addition to this, do some diet, exercise, like it's an afterthought.

And that's with SSRIs. If you go to a doctor and you say like I have, I'm ADHD or I'm sad, they're like drugs. Drugs.

Yeah.

Instead of yeah. Spore on X says, my main issue with Ozempic is that it's not Lindy. If you want to lose weight that badly, you should just become a habitual smoker and cocaine addict like the rest of us. Sort of a low Tam Banger.

Banger.

865 views.

That's great.

Probably future.

Yeah, I was listening to Chris Williamson and he had an interesting guest on talking about Ozempic and was saying like, look, yes, it is like the easy way out. Like you should just use your willpower to, you know, lose weight. But willpower is this like, you know, finite reserve and maybe if you can.

Take away from other things. That's why I don't, I don't work out before work because to actually push yourself to go hard in the gym uses up willpower, which I don't, which I think is infinite in the fullness of time. But on a day to day basis I don't want to go in, push myself super hard in the gym and then I gotta go bang out some emails and suddenly I'm like, you know.

I don't wanna do this.

You know.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying like, yeah, you could use that. You could use your willpower instead of focusing on your diet to focus on exercise or being a better family man or you know, he was using an example of like going to. Yeah.

And there's a lot of. There's so many downstream effects of so many issues in our society or self esteem issues. So if you have low self esteem, it's hard to even be a great dad. Right. Because like it's just going to come out in different ways.

Right.

It's hard to crush it professionally because you have poor image of yourself. Right. So there's so many potentially there's clearly we are going to learn a lot about the side effects of Ozempic because we're running this sort of like large scale public study on what happens when you put, you know, 10% of the country on a drug. Right.

Well, I think it's time to take out the tinfoil hat because something just isn't adding up.

Here, try it on.

Yeah, I need to try.

First time. First time.

Because I mean as I'm super convinced by the science of this article and I genuinely do think Ozempic could be a miracle drug. But there's just something weird about the fact that it came from a venomous lizard, the Gila monster. I remember learning about the Gila monster as a kid and being terrified of it because a bite from the Gila monster will kill you. It's big. It's not something.

Yeah. But it's, you know, moderated dragon moderation. Right.

I suppose.

It's funny though that the lizard is like scaled itself because people are, they're not getting bitten but they're hitting themselves with needle.

There's just something about like scaling venom. Yeah. And, and this weird trade off that it's hugely popular in Hollywood. I guess. My, my, the, the, the odd, the odd hope is that the, whatever the wine, whatever the side effects are, if there are side effects are just so minor compared to the devastation this guy.

Max says, I suspect he says, does Ozempic dampen all dopamine rewards or only operate on the branch that has food and gambling on it somehow? I suspect the evidence is confounded by the fact that curing obesity makes everything better. So costs are masked by the benefits.

Exactly. And I think that's.

Will was joking that now that a bunch of asset managers are on it, it may actually end up, you know, people are just going to have stable, you know, good returns and maybe we'll have less bubbles, which would be a very negative externality.

Could be very bad.

We're big proponents of bubbles. Yep.

And so that, yeah, that could be an under discussed downstream negative effect of the Ozempic world. Although, although we do need to get into the number of people that are on it because it's. The numbers are crazy. But let's keep going.

Last tweet, Cali, friend of the POD and Cali's co founder, True Med Justin Mares, says French kids are 8, 60% less overweight than American kids. If we wanted to actually address the mysterious obesity crisis, we should copy the French approach to school lunches and food. Instead, the APA recommends a Zempic to kids over the age of 12, which is just like so, so insane because we got to get that number down to like three kids. Think about if Novo Nordisk could expand their sort of market size, this would.

Be great for the stock. I mean, there is a thing there where some of the headlines that are like, ozempic is now recommended for kids who are six. Some of that is just that they've done the safety studies and they think that it's now safe for those kids.

But.

But like it depends on the doctor whether or not it's the first thing. For a lot of overweight kids, they're still recommending diet and exercise first. The problem is, is that if you're.

A kid, those take willpower.

Yeah. Family resources that are, that aren't making you good lunches or they're just never taking you out and they're just plopping you in front of the tv. It's like, well, you're going to be sentenced to a life of obesity. Or this doctor could help you with this injection. It's a really hard decision. It's tough.

Yeah. So many, there's so many things like self esteem almost like starts to set in somebody. How somebody views themselves like on the playground. So one argument for it. If somebody spends age 0 to 18 obese and you know, they're running the mile at school and they're walking it, how does that impact somebody?

Yeah. Over also the other thing. You want this not on the dome, on the Dom. Okay.

There's nothing conspiratorial about that.

No, I mean the other thing is that maybe, maybe we should be discussing, you know, banning Ozempic for the under 18. Not because of the medical risks, but because of the immense power that comes from having a glow up later in life.

Totally.

Think about Bezos. Yeah, he's just completely on a next tier. He wasn't even obese.

He's cooking on the next Amazon right now.

Exactly. Like, but he's like, phenomenal.

I can do better.

And there's so many people who are like, oh, yeah, I was fat in high school, I lost weight. Now I'm unstoppable. No one, like, I just want to prove everyone wrong. I want to go back and, you know, impress everyone. I'm going to pull up to the high school reunion in a Countach or F40 and let everyone know, hey, I lost the weight and I'm driving a supercar now. Exactly. I'm driving a supercar. So, yeah, I think I'm with Justin, but for different reasons we're going to ban it for kids, but for different reasons.

Yep.

Not because it's risky, because we need, we need glow ups. We need more glow ups for sure. Well, we can move on to the numbers if you want. In the economics here I have a bunch of things. So this is another Astro Codex 10 piece and, and it's called Semaglutide Onomics. And the math he starts out with, there are 140 obese Americans and they're going to spend $15,000 a year for obesity drugs and then equals. Oh, that can't be right because he did the math. And so there's something interesting going on with Wegovy specifically. There are other weight loss drugs, there's other obesity medications, there's Xenical, Belvik, Contrave, Seconda Quesemia, like a bunch of weird like drug names. But Waguvi is a big step up. It works for 66 to 84% of people, depending on your thresh. Of the six major weight loss drugs, only two have a better than 5050 chance of helping you lose 10% of your weight. And the other one, Q Symia, works partly by making food taste terrible. It can also cause cognitive issues. So it's clearly acting on like a different part of the brain, not like deep in the brain stem. And so we govy feels more natural, patients feel full. We've discussed this. It's just a really impressive drug. And until now doctors, that's a hundred.

Years overnight success story too. Totally Nordisk.

Yeah, they've been working in the trenches for a hundred years and it's the same thing. It's all just treat diabetes basically. And so basically the goal of this article is to model out what's going on right now and how many people are on this now and then what the market might look like in the future. And he ends with a bunch of really cool predictions. So let's walk through it. So modeling semaglutide accessibility. 40% of Americans are obese. That's 140 million people.

Which is interesting because living in LA and spending most of my time traveling to San Francisco, New York, places like Miami, you if in, in our experience of life, I would never once estimate that 40%. I mean I know that I've known that statistic forever. But you'd never.

I would be just. Because if you go to the gym, like all the mass monsters, like the guys who are just massive, they count as obese. Because if you're £300 62 because you're, you're 5% body fat and you're just peeled like you'll still show in the obesity statistics.

Yeah, yeah.

So we do have to separate that out because we don't want the, the mass monsters.

Bmi.

Yeah.

Is a little off.

Exactly. But, but generally I agree with you. It is odd. And I mean that was the whole thing of why I wanted to do this deep dive was because like when I'm traveling around, it just doesn't feel like there's been any material change in the obesity rate. Even though you're starting to see statistics and you hear a lot of trend pieces about how powerful Ozempic is, it's like, I don't, I don't see that in my everyday life. Like, oh wow, like there are no more fat people around. It's also interesting that's explained by the.

Yeah, wegovy came out of Denmark, which is a place that probably has some of the lowest obesity rates in the world. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. They weren't exactly dogfooding this. So suppose that a quarter of the obese people in America want semaglutide. That's, that's 35 million prescriptions. Semaglutide costs about 15,000 per year. Multiply it out, that's $500 billion. And Americans currently spend 300 billion a year total prescription drugs. So that just, that would be bigger than the entire market. So there's this question of like, okay, how is this actually going to happen? Whenever you have these crazy predictions, like you need to kind of back them up with data. And that's the goal of this article. And so if this, if this really did happen, it would bankrupt half of the healthcare industry. And so most people want semi semaglutide but won't get it. America's current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices.

Well, yeah, so how, how do, how, how do they think that would bankrupt the system if a lot of this is out of pocket spend right now?

The idea is that in order for that to actually happen and to get to that penetration, it wouldn't be out of pocket. It would have covered. And basically over time the insurance companies would be forced into, into covering it and then they would have this massive expense that they weren't expecting and they haven't been underwriting against for years. And so all of their, all of their premiums would just be destroyed. It'd be very rough, but obviously it's gonna be like the slow evolution.

But it's so interesting because the near term costs go up like, it's almost like a timeline mismatch because, like, near term costs go up, but long term expenses on a per person, per capita basis could drop. Right. If you have people that instead of spending decades of their life overweight and unhealthy, they're now, you know, have a normal BMI and they just take a shot, or maybe they get off the shot, maybe. You know, the thing that I. It hasn't been long enough to understand is this something that, you know, somebody can take for two years, get a lot of the benefits, and then just get their shit together and start being healthy.

Yeah, exactly.

Maybe it's more of like a.

So some of that utilitarian model calculus will kind of come in later and we can. And we can dig into it. But first, I want to do a little pop quiz. You know, there are 140 million obese Americans. Ozempic went viral in 2021 when everyone was talking about the celebrities doing it. It's now been on every podcast. Like, everyone's aware of this, essentially. I think it's been a major trend. There's all sorts of companies pushing it. How many people, how many Americans do you think are taking semaglutide for obesity? 140 million. Are obese? How many, how many people do you think are taking it?

Like, you're not just saying just for obesity or just like people that are taking it as like a fun drug?

I'm not talking specifically.

I don't know, 30 million?

You would think that it's 50,000. Isn't that crazy? So there's a reply.

I know, okay.

It's because it's just so. It's so early in the rollout.

It's so row.

It's very expensive. And, And.

But that doesn't count, Roe.

No, no, it counts everything. It. Probably not the. Probably not the compounded stuff. But we'll go in, we'll work all. We'll work through all the data because. So first off, he pulls like the actual number and there's a report claiming.

Because it feels like it has, like 50% penetration.

You would think so.

But then when you.

With celebrities, for sure. But then you walk around or you go and go to an airport and it's not like, oh, where are all the fat people going? Like, obesity is still, like a crisis and we're. And we still haven't seen the obesity rate fall significantly.

Yeah.

So it's clearly not like, actually rolled out fully and there's been massive supply constraints and it's super expensive and healthcare is not covering it or insurance isn't covering it.

That tells a lot of Nova, the first trillion dollar European company.

Well that's why the stock is mooning, because even though they're only selling, so there are 20,000 weekly prescriptions. So that's new prescriptions. Yeah. So that's 20,000 times $1,000 a month. So what's that 20 million a month in sales? So that's 200 or I guess what like 300 million.

Right.

In annual revenue and they're trading at half a trip. Trillion.

Insane.

So like you would never get there on the normal revenue multiple.

I don't think we've ever seen a consumer product in the US with 50,000 customers that has a hundred percent mindshare penetration.

Insane, right? Yeah, insane. And so maybe this means there's 20,000 users or maybe each prescription contains enough goofy to last a month and there are 80,000 users. I'm not sure, but it's somewhere in the mid five digits, which is why I'm rounding to 50k. So his estimate for the actual real number is 50k. And then he's going to work through the math and all the different levers. So that's only 0.1% of the potential 35 million, which is still only 25% of the 140 million. Right. So it is crazy, crazy low penetration for a drug that we assumed would everyone would just be taking. So the way he models the the like, the penetration and adoption of Semaglutide is interesting. Times awareness, times prescription accessibility, times affordability. And so we're going to do four different sections here and we'll start with interest. And so he just randomly guessed interest at 25%. So this is like of the obese people, 25% really want to are motivated to actually lose weight. And so how many people are aware? Like let's go into awareness. The answer is a lot more than when he first started writing this article. Novo Nordisk Wagovi gets surprise endorsement from Elon Musk says the headline, and here's Google Trends and you can see Wagovi and Semaglutide are like really, really peaking. And so it's now as searched for on Google as Prozac or Viagra, which are like name brand products. And so even if this is a temporary Musk related spike, even pre Musk it was getting a little bit, a little above half their level. But Google Trends doesn't exactly track awareness. Few people search for Prozac these days because everyone knows what it is. So all this tells us is that there's a lot of buzz. So suppose for the sake of argument, 5% of obese people have heard of the drug, which feels really, really low to me. But, but you'll see as he kind of works through like why that math makes sense. And then there's also prescription accessibility.

Only 5%. Taylor Lorenz, esteemed journalist should do a piece on, on getting access to the tick tock feeds of thousands of overweight people and seeing if they what's in the, you know, are they talking about it? Are they?

Because it's super viral on Twitter, on TikTok for sure. So I feel like that has to be higher. But you know, during the election there were people that were googling like who's the president? Did you see that?

Yeah, right. Right before Joe Biden still is Joe.

Biden still like when do I vote? And it's like, and the interest is spiking like the day after the election. People are unaware. Like people really do live under rocks. And so prescription accessibility, the FDA says we govy is indicated for obesity defined as BMI over 30 or BMI over 27 with certain medical conditions. So but if you have a high bmi, that doesn't mean the doctor will necessarily give you a prescription. Most doctors want patients to try diet and exercise first.

And, and we're can you imagine being £400 going to your doctor? And they're like, and they're like I want the, you're like I want the miracle weight loss drug. And the doctor is like how about you eat a salad and hit the gym? That is brutal. You're gonna go on, you're gonna go on, you know, hims or row and get the compounded stuff.

So every doctor will have their own threshold for what amount of already tried diet and exercise is enough to justify a prescription. The history of medicine includes the following story. Many times there's some condition that doctors recommend a lifestyle changes for. Then an exciting new medication comes out. And over a generation or so doctors go from demanding the lifestyle change to gesturing at the lifestyle change before prescribing the medication to finally just mostly prescribing the medication. This happened with cholesterol and statins. People would say oh like you, you should just change your diet first. Now it's just statins. Same thing with hypertension and ACE inhibitors and same thing with depression and SSRIs. So you can form your own opinion about whether that's good or bad. But we're probably in the very beginning of this process with obesity. Opinions will be all over the map. And except that this time Silicon Valley is short circuiting the process with fly by night telemedicine operations that guarantee you'll get the drugs you want. For example, this One company charges $138 a month, $99 for the first month of only for a guaranteed GLP1 agonist prescription. Plus support and messaging with expert doctors. The DEA sometimes shuts these groups down when they start playing around with controlled substances like Adderall. But we govy isn't controlled and the government probably doesn't care that much. That being said, only 75% of Americans have primary care physicians at all. And if we assume half of them will eventually be able to get a wegovy prescription from their doctor, that's 37.5% then the next factor is affordability. Semaglutide costs $15,000 per year and of course Elon Musk can pay out of pocket. But many people need insurance and Medicare doesn't cover obesity drugs anyway mentioned before and so some time for a change. Some congressmen have.

It's such a fuck you from the medical system to the average person that hey, the most unhealthy thing that can happen to you is being overweight. But yeah, we're not. Sorry, we can't help you with that. Yeah, you're going to be on your own for that one.

Yeah, good luck.

Like okay.

But like yeah, when, when, when you have the heart attack, but if you.

Go get hit by a car, then.

We'Ll give you a million dollars of treatments at the last second to try and extend your life by five days. Yeah, like rough instead of, instead of just lose the weight and live 10 years longer.

I do hope that that doge really goes after the medical system.

That'd be great.

There's, I mean obviously like so tied into the government so many ways.

Yeah, yeah, we got to talk to some more like healthcare founders because there's so much there. We're obviously hearing it all the time on the DOD side. But the medical system's like bigger and crazier I'm sure. And so he says some congressmen have proposed a very noble sounding law telling Medicare and Medicaid to start covering weight loss drugs. I'm sure this is out of deep compassion for American obese population and not because it would make pharma companies $1 billion zillion dollars. But I love the sound of that. I want the pharma companies to make more money, develop more drugs, buy the stock, build more stuff.

There's nothing there's nothing more noble than incredible irr.

Yeah. And so private insurers mostly have to cover whatever Medicare does, but they can choose whether or not to include extra non Medicare covered drugs. Some have chosen to cover semaglutide under some conditions, others would prefer not to because it's so expensive, but they can be scared into covering it by the magic words medical necessity. Overall, I don't understand the laws, but there's this very interesting thing that's happening. And he calls out the New York Times. The New York Times is publishing articles trying to convince us that private insurances not covering semaglutide is an outrage. And it's a very funny screenshot from this article. And the article is called the doctor Prescribed an Obesity Drug. Her insurer called it vanity. And it says here in the tiny gray text, I want to take a second to complain about this article article. It notes that Waguvi semaglutide for obesity costs more per prescription than Ozempic semaglutide for diabetes and calls this a gross inequity, accusing Novo Nordisk of charging people more for the same drug because of their obesity. But the obesity prescription is a higher dose than the diabetes prescription. Milligram. Per milligram, Wagovi costs less than Ozempic. A steel manned version of the NYT might object effect. Don't most of the costs come from the intellectual property and not the manufacturing? So that dose. So the dose shouldn't matter. Yes, but if you made the obesity version cost too much less per milligram than the diabetes version, then diabetics would cheat the system by buying the obesity version and splitting it into smaller doses. And so like, what they're doing is actually like very rational and totally fine, I think, but they're getting called out here. And so he concludes here with let's say only 5% of people who clear all pretty previous hurdles can afford the drug. And so now he does his final math on how many people get semaglutide. 140 million obese Americans, 25% are interested. 5% know of semaglutide's existence. 37 and a half percent can get prescriptions and 5% can afford it. And that's 33, 000 people, which is a pretty good match for the 50, 000 estimated prescriptions. I didn't even fudge the numbers to come out right. It just happened, happened. And so he kind of looks at it like bottom up and top down and comes to the same conclusion that we're in this weird scenario where we maybe have this miracle drug and a lot of people buy it and. And believe in it, but because of all these different factors, it just isn't actually being rolled out in the millions like you suspected. And my number would have been the same. I would have said, yeah, 5 million, 10 million people, obviously, like, you know, same as everything else.

Because in la, every time a celebrity walks out of the house, everybody's like, oh, they're on those. Empathy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would imagine that, you know.

Yeah. Funny one. One, like, one application of it is when I've. I've sort of seen this firsthand. Women getting married, historically, they'd go on this, like, crazy diet and exercise routine, like, leading up to their wedding, and now it's simply, like, you know, focus on wedding planning and just, like, get the shot once a week. And, like, you're gonna look, like, probably, you know, leaner, thinner than you would have if you just done the thing.

Yeah. And I think that, like, can we take it too far? Was kind of. It was. It was because, like, like, a lot of celebrities were taking it when they were already very thin.

Yeah.

And they were going down to, like, 5% body fat or something.

Yeah. Really low.

Which is kind of just interesting.

Martin Shkreli. Oh, yeah, I always butcher Shkreli. Esteemed poster, you know, poster and commentator on all things healthcare. He goes and talks about how there's, like, other GLP1 drugs that are available. And. And again, it's one of those things, like, if Novo Nordisk didn't have, like, the same profit incentive that they do, none of these, like, their product is materially better.

Yep.

And. But ultimately, if they didn't have that profit incentive, we would have been stuck with, like, the last generation of GLP1 drugs that just weren't nearly as good.

Injections.

Yeah, yeah. Multiple times, basically. Multiple times. Yeah. The one Exenatide, which was the first one, the patents are expired and nobody's even bothered to make it generic because you have to take it twice a day. Yeah.

It's experience.

And. Yeah. He basically goes on to say that, you know, Novo could easily be a $2 trillion company, but Eli Lilly and others are, you know, Pfizer is coming out with their own GLP1 drug. Everybody wants. Everybody wants in on it. I was telling you earlier. I just was, like, very. I underestimated the demand pretty dramatically. About a year ago, I saw a company that was raising to Do It, a GLP1 focused telemedicine company, a lot of people have come out and basically are combining like some of the, trying to build like a platform to do the lifestyle changes and prescribe the drug at the same time. And there's one company that I saw didn't invest in just because I was like, look, this is like ridiculously competitive. There's just, you know, there's no way this business is going to really accrue a lot of value long term. And they went from, from 0 to $10 million run rate like in less than 12 months profitably and like, I'm sure like multiples beyond that by now. And so. Yeah, and it's interesting, like, I do wonder if companies like that are not really being reflected in the data because I know that company by itself has like tens of thousands of customers.

Yeah. But I mean if you run the numbers, it's, yeah, like if you're making 10 grand a customer. Yeah, 100 customers gets you to a million dollars revenue. Thousand customers, like, okay, add on, yeah, add on 1,000 to the 33,000 estimated and we're still in, we're not in the millions. Like, we're just not there. Which is fascinating. It's just, it's rare that you have a product where the LTV of a customer is tens of thousands of dollars. And the competitive pressure doesn't seem to be driving down the price. Yeah, but we can get more into that. Let's go to Morgan Stanley. They've, they modeled the economic future of obesity medications over the next decade. And the headline result is that semaglutide and other various semaglutide copycat drugs will be a $30 billion market by 2030. That's less than the 500 billion dollar disaster he was afraid of. But it's still almost 10% of all US drug spending. And they kind of model it out, like show the whole flow. Starting with like the number of obese people, the number that are diagnosed, like how many will get it? Kind of same methodology. But the big question is like, you know, what if doctors medicalized obesity as comprehensively as they've medicalized hypertension and high cholesterol? Well, they find that the US obesity market would multiply by a factor of 25 to about $87 billion a year. And then they also are modeling a decline in the price. This is funny. So the number of patients on Weguvi or related medications, Morgan Stanley estimated 46,910. So like everyone's right, in the tens of thousands, which is crazy. It's just so low. But they're estimating that in 2030 it'll be 11 million, which is kind of more where we thought we'd be. Yeah, so we're still so early. But second, the cost of per Prescription goes from 15k a year down to $4000 a year.

Year.

And then that has a bunch of knock on effects. So Novo Nordisk competitor Eli Lilly owns a closely related molecule, Tirzepatide, which they sell as Mounjaro. And they've done studies showing it also works well for weight loss. And although capitalism fans shout out, me and Jordy might expect the presence of two competing drugs to immediately drive down prices. This is mysteriously not how things work in healthcare. And prices will probably stay the same in the short term term. And I'm wondering if this is just like a, like, just like a peace treaty. Like they know if they get in a price war, this is like Coke and Pepsi.

Yeah, but no, Novo Nordisk is also opening up like 4 to 5 massive new production facilities.

But that'll just increase margins. Like why would they use the price if they don't have to?

No, that's what I'm saying. I'm not arguing against. Yeah, they deserve to capitalize on their incredible innovation.

And I mean cutting the price from 15k to 4k over what, six years, like, like that's pretty significant. Every year that's a pretty significant price decline. And later they get so, so Morgan Stanley does expect competition to drive down costs to 350amonth or $4,000 a year. And there's some math that from a purely economic perspective, semaglutide costs the health system money because it's expensive, but it also saves the health system money because we don't have to pay for the consequences of obese, of obesity.

That's what I'm saying. It's like a duration mismatch thing.

And so which, which effect wins out? Like this is the question. And so the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review did an analysis and they said that the benefits would outweigh the cost if semaglutide costs less than about $8,000 per year. So they basically bundled up all the costs associated with obesity. So it's a grand.

And so yeah, it's the same thing.

With, with it makes sense to cover it.

You would, you would Compare this to FTX's challenges with liquidity, where they actually had a duration mismatch issue where they invested, invested billions of dollars into private companies and then people started redeeming their, their cryptocurrency for cash and they didn't they? You know, if Anthropic had just gotten to their 40 plus billion dollar valuation faster public, they would have been able to cover it. Yeah, yeah, I think, I think, you know, one thing I would throw out is like to help the TV community kind of understand how, you know, we mostly care about how this is impacting capital allocators.

Yep.

And high risk entrepreneurship. And so if you're a listener and you're on GLP1s, send us a message. We'd love to kind of get a sense for how it's affecting your strategy. Maybe you're going lower risk, which would be unfortunate, but maybe you can take bigger risks in other ways like raise a bigger fund. Right. Things like that.

Yep. Or play with a cat and get that, that brain disease. Have you heard of this?

Oh yeah, the thing that parasites.

Yeah. Reeva's into.

Yeah.

What's it called? I forget. But what's interesting is like you have this, you know, 8,000 is kind of the golden number. They want to get it down to 4,000. But there's also a third level effect where it costs the health system money again because it prevents people from dying of obesity related consequences. And no one really models this because it's so dark. But basically dead people stop needing expensive health care. This was actually something in the, in the master settlement agreement with the big tobacco companies.

Yeah.

Like the whole reason that tobacco had to pay up to all the states was that they were putting a burden on the health care system.

Yeah.

That was the model. It wasn't just your evil for killing people, it was like you're costing the government money so you got to pay the government back. But one of the arguments that the tobacco companies made was like, hey, look, we're killing people off and then you don't have to pay their pensions, which is like super fucking like crazy. But yeah. So no one's really modeling that, but it doesn't really matter. The big thing is that this is an interesting takeaway is like the Morgan Stanley report shows that even the greediest pharma investors openly plotting to medicalize obesity can't bring themselves to believe in more than 11 million US semaglutide patients by 2030. That's less than 10% of the obese population. Isn't that kind of disappointing? Like we've got over 100 million people dealing with the condition that makes them unhealthy, it causes psychological distress and it makes a lot of people low grade disappointed and repulsed by our society. We've got an effective Drug and we're going to get less than 10% of the population on it. Like, this is kind of crazy. It'll go off patent in 2032. Maybe it'll come down in price. But this whole thing is like a very slow rollout. It's just, it's just kind of fascinating how slow all this is happening along. Yeah. And so he closes with like, should you take it? And he just says, like, ask your doctor. I think you should. If you're, if you're, you know, a weightlifter, you're at like 10 body fat and you want to get down to 5%, just be, you know, absolutely peeled. I'm strongly in favor of that.

Yeah. If you have muscle mass, you can lose too.

Yep. You know, as long as you're on the high protein diet and yeah. Still hitting one.

Right. I could see it being cyclical for the, the weightlifting community where starts coming around April. You've been in your winter arc.

Yep.

And you know, summer's coming up. You know, you're going to be on the beach, shirts are going to be coming off, maybe doing like a little sprint of glp. One could, could be a way to get that body fat sub 10% even if you're still a size lord.

Yep. And so he closes with some predictions which he leads off with, all predictions are conditional on no singularity or global catastrophe. So funny.

Like I may own security in the companies discussed in this article.

So he says, number one, 10 million Americans on semaglutide by 2030. He puts out a 75% chance. Sounds reasonable. Medicare covers semaglutide in 2030. 40% chance. Semaglutide costs less than $100 a month in 2030 puts that at 25% chance. Semaglutid costs less than a hundred dollars a month inflation adjusted without insurance in 2040. 66% chance. Just like total cost curve stuff. USOBC, half or less of current rate in 2050. 30% chance.

Let's go.

Yeah, very, very interesting article. Very, very great deep dive. But yeah, we should, we should talk. We should close out with like who made money? Because that is the original question that we had. Who's making money off of Ozempic? And it's interesting because it's not, it's not as many people involved in Novo Nordisk as you'd think. They're, they're, a lot of their employees aren't heavily incentivized by the stock price. They don't have like an Elon type guy where if the stock price hits a certain amount, it gets a ton of shares.

They have a really weird corporate structure.

Yeah. They're owned in part by a nonprofit. The, the, the actual scientist that created GLP1s Learglutide, Latte Knudsen wrote this whole history and she didn't make a lot of money from it. So.

So here's like, yeah, here's somebody making money from GLP1. So I use perplexity to figure out how many subscribers him and hers has. Its weight management offering. Yeah, they. They have a broader weight management offering. I think they have multiple products, but they have nearly 100,000 subscribers. So that could be why they have.

The stock's been way out.

The stock's been ripping and reinventing themselves over the, you know, the hair loss products and Viagra.

Also kind of a benefit of them being public. Like they were able to take advantage of this and they're probably weren't. You know, if you're not going into Novo, which is this huge company, there aren't that many places to allocate capital if you're in the public markets towards something that looks a little bit more pure play ish towards this category. And so they probably benefited a lot from that as like kind of a small cap.

Yeah. And it's honestly one of those things.

They're hiring like they're still scaling up, they're still growing.

Yeah. One of the, one of the reasons that telemedicine worked well for hair loss.

Yeah.

Is that people don't want to talk to their doctor about so many issues. Right. Like so many things like health issues or things that people don't want to talk to with strangers.

Right.

Even their loved ones. Right. So I see that being a really massive channel long term.

And the ed meds.

Same thing if you can get. You know, I think Blake Robbins had a screenshot of you. They're just advertising directly to consumers now.

Yeah, well, that was Roe and their essentially like it's almost like a white label deal. No, they're not compounding. They're selling the real thing. HIMS is compounding. And this is kind of interesting. Two different sides of the deal. So Ro Roman Health sells name brand Ozempic. I believe in that screenshot they must have done some. And that's a deal crazy Novo, essentially.

Yeah.

And so their economics probably aren't incredible on that, but it's still a way to. To sell something that's like completely above board. Yeah. Completely above board with the fda. HIMS has been taking a more aggressive approach, actually Compounding it, which the FDA put out a statement saying that they don't recommend that people take compounded semaglutide, but they didn't ban it, which is this weird, like, gray area. Yeah, The FDA is like, we don't recommend it, but we're going to allow it. Like, very weird that the FDA does stuff like this.

So here, here's a place. So I saw that a local compounding pharmacy in Malibu was for sale for like 400k.

Whoa.

So if you're in the LA area, here's a play for you a little bit. Gray area. Right. So I'm not recommending you do this. I'm saying you could do this. Buy the local, local compounding pharmacy and start selling it at the Malibu Farmer's Market. Oh, yeah, it's like a farm, you know, local farm to table. Locally made GLP1s. Farm to table.

That's good.

Ozempic.

Yeah.

Maybe even try to make it organic. Yeah, like.

Yeah. I mean, the other, the other issue with the compounding, just from a business perspective, is that I think that you're only allowed to do it from an FDA perspective when it's on shortage. And so you can build up this revenue stream and you can get subscribers, but then it could get, it could get kind of rugged by you if they go back in stock. And so how do you maintain those customers post? Well, maybe you need to do a white label deal. Maybe, maybe you need to get a different product in there. It's going to be a little bit.

Tricky, but you might have time to buy the small compounding pharmacy for half a mil, which I think it was listed at, and then turn around, spack it, really get those revenues up and then, and then do what HIMS has done, which is, you know, companies need to constantly reinvent themselves. Right?

Yep.

Even in the way Novo did. Right?

Yeah.

Started as an insulin manufacturer.

Yeah. Well, that's a great place to end it. Get jacked, work out, go diet, make some money.

Take every last, last idea. I think that there's gonna be an incredible play to do. Group. Group travel.

Yep.

A group travel agency for formerly overweight people that can, can bond over, over their weight loss and over their love for the drug and sort of like take those people on a world tour. Like, people internationally have gotten known of seeing large, large groups of overweight people. Like, but I want to make sure that America's brand over the next hundred years gets built around. Look at all those super lean, fit, beautiful people getting off the cruise ship, coming into the City, barely eating anything.

America does have a huge advantage here. Like, Canada hasn't even approved it. Like, we really are on the forefront.

That's our edge.

Yeah. And it's because even though it's a. It's. It's a foreign company, Novo in Denmark, like the FDA is the gold standard of approvals, and. And they always go first.

The only country that matters.

Yeah. It's fantastic. So cheers. Long America.

Long America.

Welcome back to Technology Brothers, still the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordi, we got a good DM today. I want to discuss with you from Fan. She says. Hi, John and Jordi. I'm a successful real estate developer based in Los Angeles, and I'm dating a tech guy who works in San Francisco. He says that SF has more intellectuals, but I don't want to move there. How can I convince him to come to la? What would you say?

So intellectuals are great, especially after they're already Sentis or Benares. Before that, you want to avoid being intellectual. Like, you have no basis for that until you've. Until you're post economic. Yeah. So that'd be my first word of advice. I would say that second, San Francisco is maybe the intellectual center of technology, without a doubt. That being said, well, we do a lot of this work for the. We do this work, this podcast for the money. Many people care about impact, and if that's who, if that aligns with you, being in LA is a way to have an impact, because this is the center of influence. Right. Ozempa, you know, we just covered Ozempic. Ozempic is created by a company in Denmark, but all of the marketing firepower behind the product is coming out of la. Right. And so if you want to have attention and influence, move to la. Most of the bears and centis that we know that that made their money in tech end up having, you know, a compound in la. It's a place that you want to be. You know, maybe it's your second or third home, fourth or fifth for some of our listeners. But, yeah, this is the place you need to be spending time here. Otherwise you're going to just be chattering in Hayes Valley and nothing's actually going to come of your conversations.

Yeah. Also, it's a very different type of intellectualism in the Bay. It's a little bit of an echo chamber. It's a huge echo chamber. And in la, you do get more intellectual diversity.

Totally.

It's not just all tech people. There's tech people, but there's movie people, there's lawyers, there's like, there's a whole community.

Yeah.

Defense tech things here. There's NASA and SpaceX and stuff.

Yeah. We're having conversations. The group LA group chats are not only debating the ethics and morality of nuclear development, but also how much time you should spend in the sauna versus a cold plunge. And there's nothing that says that the debate around hot, cold therapy is not an intellectual, you know, activity as well. Right. Yeah. The body is sort of the platform of all thought.

Right.

So if you live in SF and you're not jacked with it with an incredible one rep max, you could also argue your opinions don't really matter.

That's true, that's true. Let's move to Anthony Steele. He writes into us. He says, any thoughts on New York City as an engineering HQ for a manufacturing. Manufacturing company gonna build a massive power plant in Central Park. I'm in.

Yes. So while I would, I would love to see more smokestacks on the New York City skyline.

Yeah, the High Line, that whole thing. We should definitely develop that.

Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna probably, maybe, maybe vote against as an engineering hq. So he's not, he's not implying that he's going to put the.

It's unclear if it's. If it's mechanical or chemical engineering or computer.

We're the first guys that want to walk off the street in soho out of the Laura Piano store, go to the second floor of the same building and see a bunch of robotic arms just working overtime. But you know, being. We can, we can see the Gundo out of our studio window. We like to, to keep an eye on our port cos over there.

Yep.

I think, I think, you know, bringing your engineering team over here, setting up in the Gundo would be good for a lot of reasons.

Yeah, I mean there's some, there's some hard tech companies out there, but there aren't many. But there are Some really solid B2B SaaS companies in New York.

Ramps established great engineering headquarters there.

So there are software engineering talent there, but they're definitely on the earlier side. If you're doing hard tech engineering, engineering, it's gonna be a little bit trickier.

Yep. Gundo or bust.

Good luck.

Yeah, we may. We've been looking at, you know, potentially acquiring our own industrial real estate in the Gundo area to make available to the community. So we'll let you know.

Yeah, I think it just depends on, you know, who's. Who. Who's gonna be working for you. Where do they Currently live. Where is the specific talent that you need for your company? You need to think, I mean, this goes back to like the Miami vs. SF thing. Like it's really hard to paint with a broad brush on like unironically. Like there, there's going to be a right place. There's going to be some companies that are great in Miami. There's going to be some companies that are great in New York. You think about like, what work are you actually doing and where are those people? Because you should probably go to whatever the feeder company. If there's some power law unicorn in the city that's going to be dumping off talented people after they vest, you want to be picking all those up or there's some phenomenal university system that you're pulling from constantly.

Arguably he should be spending time in New York because a lot of the financiers that are going to be, you know, creating sort of different types of financial instruments in order to scale his manufacturing process are there. He's going to want to be going to, you know, expensive restaurants with them. And a lot of the best deal toy manufacturers have a good, a good presence in New York as well.

Yeah. I mean you could also just put an executive office on fifth Avenue and then throw all the engineers in in New Jersey. That might be the best solution. Really, if you want to be in Manhattan.

Yep.

Let's go to our next question from an anonymous dm. We got. Hey bros. I'm currently working at a family office and long term I'd like to raise my own venture fund. I currently have job offers at a few smaller funds and one growth stage startup I think is like a chief of staff. Do you either, do you think either of these options would be good stepping stones to raise a fund? What do you think?

Okay, so I do think that there, there's a few kind of core pathways that I think are actually good pathways to making a career in venture. One is the institutional VC who just works at, you know, one or two or three high quality funds. Yeah. Hopefully land in the holy trinity. Even if you don't, you, you could still end up doing well. Yep. The other path is to start a unicorn and you know, start a unicorn, have a lot of success, do a little angel investing, build a track record that way.

Yep.

The, the death zone is working at a mid fund or family office and not being able to do a lot of deals because then you're not building up the brand value of working at a, at a great firm and you're just not doing Enough volume of deals so that you can build up a track record and say I can actually get into unicorns.

Yep.

It's, it's totally possible to go to a venture fund and do be involved with like four or five deals a year and have none of them break out. And then you're 10 years into your career and it's like you can't really prove that you're a good investor and maybe you were handicapped by the firm that you were at. But I think that even if you're.

At one of those like holy trinity or just like Power Law firms, you're going to be on a deal team that does a really banger deal. Even if you're paying up for a winner.

Yeah. Like, oh yeah, you're going to get into good companies.

Yeah, exactly. And you're just going to have time with power law CEOs and be nurse.

Yep.

But that's going to be harder to do if you're.

Yeah. So my advice, early, my serious advice, go somewhere where you can do a high volume of deals. It's even, you know, less about like object. It's certainly not going to matter about title because like going and being an associate it at a big fund that also you don't get a lot of credit there because look, you, you may have been involved with the deal and met the founder a couple times during the process, but you didn't necessarily like have even any decision making power.

Sure.

So I think volume is going to be more important here.

Yeah. I mean that's Trey's recommendation for all new investors is just don't swing at every pitch but just take huge amount of calls and just get to know every company so that you start seeing the pattern of what looks like good, what is good and go from there. Great. Let's move to the timeline before we jump into that.

Probably should start with a promoted post. We had a poll today and our community unanimously. It was sort of a landslide. We asked people how many ads should we have per episode and I think like 80, 90% of the people that responded wanted 60 plus ads. So. So we're not there yet. We're hoping to get there soon. But the first promoted post of the day is coming from Cars and Bids. If you're not familiar with Cars and bids, it is a new competitor to bring a trailer and some of the other online auction houses started by a incredible car creator on YouTube called Doug Demuro who has created Cars and Bids. He's raised quite a bit of capital for it. So they're well capitalized. They're building a fantastic platform and today we wanted to highlight a car that just went on the site, I think it was this morning. So it's a seven day bidding period. It is a 2024 Porsche 911 GT3 RS with the Y sock package. It's basically brand new. It has 120 miles. Wow. It's in a paint. A sample Smyrna green. And I just will say this car is absolutely grail. Fantastic. Grail. Grail car. And if you've ever driven one of these things, we'll be driving one at some point next year on the Nurburgring, but looking forward to that. And yeah, this is a. This, this car should go to somebody in the community. It would be a shame if it didn't. So, yep, go get on cars and bids. Get the support.

Doug Demuro, he's a. He's a great content creator. I listen to his podcast, this Car Pod every Friday. It's fantastic and I've really enjoyed. He taught me basically everything I know about cars.

There you go.

I needed a new car a couple years ago, decided to learn everything about every car ever made. And Doug was the perfect person to teach me about everything from a Honda Odyssey to a career gt. And now I know it all. Yeah, he's fantastic. Just very, very deep dives. You know, he does a little bit of a driving segment, but mostly it's about the quirks and features.

Quirks and features.

It's fantastic. Thank you. Let's get a Dwarkesh Patel. He screenshots a post from Guern. So I did an interview with Dwarkesh Patel. Seemed to go well. I'm thankful for all the donations from everyone on Patreon and Stripe, particularly from Suhail and Friends and Imadma Stock. Thoroughly exceeding my bar. My excuses are gone. I'll see y' all in SF in December. So this is huge news. San Francisco has picked up Gorn. He's been traded big, big one of absolute animal. So put up, puts up some insane numbers every season, I think over 15,000 words written, over 50 blog posts. One of the greatest online writers, essentially goated. And so I think this is going to change San Francisco. This is really going to level up this, the city, their talent, their roster. And it's just a huge, huge move. Huge move.

Mayors around the country have been oddly silent on the move, but it was a competitive process.

Yes.

Only one winner in the end.

Yeah, you can see a lot of other teams wanting to court Guern.

This is pretty. You can comprehensive LeBron going to Miami.

Huge.

Back in the day. So it's that same sort of equivalent.

Yeah. So congrats to San Francisco for picking up Guern.

You had, you had been a proponent. You had hoped he'd end up going the hedge fund route in New York. Can't win every battle and San Francisco be better for it.

Yep. Hopefully we'll see him soon out in San Francisco.

Go.

But it's not all rosy because there's some fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what Gorn's life will entail in San Francisco. Andre Karpathy writes, this is something that will potentially be in store for gwern. He says, Lowell, want to get dinner with some cool people tonight in Pacific Heights? Want to judge this hackathon? Want to swap notes about AI? Can we fund your startup? Want to chat about roles at Anthropic in town this week? Want to do a podcast? Want to catch up over lunch? Partiful invite to the day of the day of an EA party at a Berkeley group house. Are you coming to Burning man this year? Is it okay to introduce you to this cool person? Meeting with a 16z? No obligations, just saying hi. Weekend trip to unconference in Santa Cruz, wedding in Napa Tahoe weekend with some cool people.

Just relentless.

And it's just relentless. And this is like the intellectual bubble that we were talking about before. It's like there are a lot of cool things, but everyone's doing the exact same things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you remember when we dropped Excel, your Shopify notifications, like, you couldn't use your phone for a day because it was non stop.

The phone was everywhere.

That's gonna be Gorn's like phone, but just with parts. It's like non stop.

Right.

His phone's gonna be completely useless.

And so, yeah, I mean, he's been living this very aesthetic life, just reading and consuming content. Rabbit holing, one of the best online writers, one of the most impactful intellectuals in Silicon Valley. And there's a few that he might lose his edge.

Yeah, he might get caught up in the. In the.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, the dream team from the Olympics when, you know, everyone thought, okay, they put all the best players together, but there just wasn't that compatibility. Sometimes you need to stand out, players shine, and being in a second tier, third tier city could actually be better for Gorn's intellectual diversity. And so I'm rooting for you, Gorn. I'm pulling for San Francisco to pull it out. Hopefully they get you in the mix. Good coach, good execution. We get a good result here. But watch out for those particle invites. They're dangerous.

And this is a warning to every. Every person moving to San Francisco.

Yep. Don't get sucked in.

Yeah. Lock in.

Don't become.

Don't get sucked in.

Don't become an NPC.

Yep.

Be your own person. Let's go to Paki McCormack. We've been on the show before. One of the greatest online writers in the entire world. World. He says there's no way. Right. And he posts two pictures that describe how Palmer Luckey, the founder of Modretro and Anduril, was mining Bitcoin at age.

16 before it was even listed on any exchanges or. You know, I don't even think you.

Could really buy it. You could buy it years before Coinbase was started.

Yeah.

And so he was mining it and getting a ton of it, presumably.

Allegedly.

Yeah. I don't know exactly how much he held onto, but fantastic result. And just, it's just incredible that he's been early to bitcoin, early to VR, early to defense everything he touches.

Built to be bears.

Yes. Yes. He's born for it. Born, not made.

Yep.

So thanks to Paki for highlighting this underrated post. Only 35 likes on here, but great. Probably has something to do with the way the pictures were formatted. You know, maybe you need to do a little crop job getting Photoshop packy. Step it up, up, make it a little bit nicer for us so when we print it out, it looks good. You're on.

Please and thank you.

Let's go to VB knives. Empty. America says it's all over. When 28 year old married men have a toy room full of Legos. We are cooked on a level you don't even grasp. And it's a screenshot from relationship advice. Says, I screamed at my husband over his hobbies and now he's changed and I don't know how to fix this. Says wife yells at husband for Lego obsession. Now he's pulling away a ghost of his former self. What do you think? I mean, there's nothing wrong with having a room for.

So the problem is. The problem is that. No, it seems obvious that he has pretty small net worth. Just because if you are a beaner or a centi and you're obsessed with Legos, it's, you know, they're eccentric and if you're, if you're effectively, if you're broke or lower income, you're just weird. Right. So the critique here, the Broader issue is the net worth, not. Not the hobby.

Right.

A lot of. A lot of senties and bears get into funny, you know, things over time. One of our buddies is very into racing. Painted, you know, small painted, like RC sailboats. Right. So, you know, his significant other is not.

He was rich.

Yeah. Yeah. His significant other, I can tell you, is not complaining. She's like, oh, it's cute. He's got his little hobby.

Exactly.

So this looks like more of a financial criticism, which is unfortunate, but that's pretty easy to correct. Right. Just listen to the podcast and. And you know, take. Take some tips and tricks here.

Lever up.

Yeah, go. Or turn that hobby into a business.

Right?

Like make an Airbnb that's just a Lego house.

Create the next cars and bids for trading Legos.

Yeah, right.

I mean, I did.

I did. I found a Lego Ferrari that I had had when I was like 8 years old and I. It was in perfect condition and I sold it for a very nice multiple back. Back in. I think it was. I was in high school. But. So, yeah, turn it into a profit center, not a cost center, and you'll be good to go.

It's fantastic. Let's go to Will Menitis. He says FDR built and sailed toy boats. Winston Churchill build massive toy soldier armies and reenacted battles. And here we go. He's talking about his boats.

I think he's responding to the last.

Oh, sure, sure. Yeah.

So, yeah, you can be, as long as you are a great man of history. A great man of history. You can have whatever hobby you want.

Yep. I love it. Toy soldiers. That's funny. And now it's been all cannibalized by Warhammer 30K, which is a little more sci fi, a little more out there, a little less practical.

Yeah. And Will could be the next fdr, right? Like his history hasn't fully been written.

He could. He could. I would. I would follow him into battle. Dan Nolan says logging into work and.

The KMS building. Hey, you know what Alan Watts said?

What?

He said, never kill yourself. There's money to be made.

There's no. There's money.

Never kill yourself. Never kill yourself. Yourself. That is just blanket advice from this podcast.

Yes, well, fantastic post, Dan. Thanks for sharing it.

Very good. Good for a laugh, but very good. Yeah.

I wonder what KMS actually stands for.

Yeah.

Oh, well. Stupid post.

Stupid post.

Hey, yeah, we have another promoted post.

Another promoted post. This one from Brian halligan. He's a CEO of HubSpot.

Okay.

Correct. Yeah, we should check that. But Anyways, he is now on Delphi. Delphi is a company. Why don't you talk a little bit about Delphi?

Yeah, Delphi Founders fund portfolio company. They do AI clones. So anyone who's written online for a long time or has a podcast or video series, they can compress all of that down into a fine tuned LLM that you can interact with over text. They also offer video calling, kind of like intro.com but obviously zero marginal cost. Instead of paying Nikita $1,000, you can get the AI version for 10 or something. Whatever you want to.

You're not getting Nikita for a grand to be clear.

Oh yeah.

But anyways, it's amazing. It's amazing that Brian's on Delphi. He's created one of the greatest American SaaS companies that helps millions of small businesses all over the world. And you can now ask him anything about how he thinks about products, product and technology and helping small businesses. So shout out to Dara Delphi and Brian.

Yeah, and the thing about the Delphi stuff is like a lot of people think that like the, the results of a Q and A like that are just going to be like AI slop, like hallucinations and stuff. But a lot of it when you're asking the right question, it's maybe already been answered before is just straight up search. It's just better Google search so you can interact with like Andrew Huberman and you know that he's talked about GLP1 but it's scattered all over his clips channel and all of over his different podcasts and the AI version can just literally quote and source exactly what he said and talked about a lot of things. It makes a ton of sense to just essentially almost see the AI as just better search for everything you ever said.

Yeah, because there's now so much information online and it's impossible. What really matters now is getting perspective on certain information. So what is Brian and think about what should churn? Look, I bet if you ask the Delphi app is what kind of churn is respectable for a sub 10 million mrr.

What's good headline copy for an email campaign? Like just any of these things. I'm sure he's written blog posts and talked about it on podcasts. So all of that just gets compressed down and you can just very quickly find that as opposed to trying to search Google and landing in some weird place. So. So let's go to Lulu. Lulu says this clip made me realize why Mike Tyson's pre fight trash talk has felt so much more convincing than Jake Paul's Paul's bravado fluctuates. It's dialed up or down depending on the setting. Tyson is only ever one way. There's no on setting because there's no off setting. So when he menaces Paul, it comes across not as the usual bluster, but as straightforward description of what he plans to do to that unfortunate young man.

So I don't know if you know that the, the video that she's quote, tweeting, but it's basically this legacy. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? You know, Mike Tyson, what do you think about legacy? It's like a sub 10 year old girl asking the question. He just goes into this, like, rant around how legacy is like nothing and we're all dead dirt. And like there's. And, and to be honest, like, when I saw Tyson talking about that, I think other people commented on this as well. I was like, oh, he's set up. He knows. He's like, you know, burn earning his reputation. I don't need to, I don't need to. I don't need to put this on. But like, a lot of people think that he took, you know, basically took a contract that that meant he was gonna, you know, kind of pull his punches. But that was almost like a setup interview for being like, legacy doesn't matter. This fight doesn't matter. I'm one of the greatest of all times. This doesn't change anything. When, you know, people like Theo were like, no, like, legacy really does matter. Right. Like, and you just sold. You just tarnished your legacy for 20, 20, whatever, million. But, you know, I thought, I thought honestly the, the Tyson outcome was a good outcome for kind of everybody. Like, Tyson looked so incredibly good for being 60 year old.

Totally.

And it just, for me, being able, you know, I've never seen him fight live.

Yep.

And so to be able to see somebody like that where truly, you know, has some incredible gift. And then for Jake, Paul too, I was texting with Joey about this. If he had gone in and knocked out Mike Tyson, somebody who people love.

Yeah.

It would have actually made his. It would have been bad for his brand. So, like kind of having like effectively a draw.

Yeah.

Was like kind of the best outcome for everybody because, like, Tyson looked good, you know, Paul didn't get knocked out or lose, you know. Yeah.

Like, to me it felt like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in like the Expendables or like do some cameo and like Terminator 6 or whatever. It's like, it's like, sure, it's maybe a Step down from what your original expectation is for this person. But I'm very, I'm completely able to separate it, especially with Tyson because there's been like, what, a 30 year gap in his career. It feels like he's, you know, having fun. I mean, he's been doing a podcast for a while. He's just like, think about doing random stuff. He's not taking it as seriously as he did before pre retirement. And I think it's kind of a weird expectation to think that it's like, oh no, he's, he's unretiring and like being a serious boxing competitor. Like, is this even like ranked? Is this anywhere near the. Is there a belt? Like, I don't even know.

I think it's just an exhibition, purely an entertainment.

And so, and so yeah, this is reality TV now instead of like true Olympic sports. But that's fine. Like, I expect he's a hero.

Capital Allocator. He's known for boxing, but he's made some significant investments.

He's also a founder. Yeah, yeah, he's also a founder. And Jake Paul runs a venture fund. So in another world this could have.

Just been like capital Allocator on Capital Allocator.

Exactly, exactly. We need more of these.

Yep.

Let's go to the horse dentist. The horse dentist says me at the job I begged God for. And it's the guy from Always Sunny just suffering. This really resonated.

Not looking well. Yeah. This is the wrong attitude though, to be honest. You know, I looked, you know, the horse dentist had a great post here. But you know, just because you're getting a job at the place that you've wanted to work for forever doesn't mean it's going to be easy or fun. The point of a job is to not. Is not to have fun. It's to get money and make history. Right? Like be on the team that, you know, you know, imagine, you know. Do you think that the new hires at Delphi are enjoying their. Enjoying their job? Sure, it's fun to work on something in person, important. But Dar is, you know, cracking the whip like it is a. You know, those are 14, 15, 16 hour days. They're long over Delphi.

So yeah.

Anyways, job's not meant to be fun. It's about bringing home the bacon.

Let's go to Michael who already follows us. Thank you for the follow. And he writes welcome Suno music and Jack D. Brody. Suno hires former Snap exec. Big get, big trade deal.

We could do a whole deep dive on this because it is a massive vote of confidence.

Yeah. So Michael's over at Lightspeed Ventures. They have a portfolio company, Suno. They make AI Music Generation. We gotta try that. We gotta get some, we gotta get some beats for some of our intros and some of our segments like this segment for, for big talent moves, draft days, NBA shakedowns. And they've hired Jack Brody, former head of product at Snap app. Probably storied career there. He was their chief product officer. Brody told the Information in an interview Tuesday that he's moving over to suno.

This is a guy that could do anything. He could raise a $500 million venture fund. He could go start a company and probably raise, you know, $50 million pre seed and so going to Suno. Yep, big vote of confidence for Suno. And you know, that's one of Michael's bets. Michael is, you know, one of the Godfather Father's a podcast.

That's true. Yeah.

Without him there would be maybe 90 less podcasts in the world. Would be a much worse place.

Yeah. Worked over at Spotify and obviously knows audio very well.

So you. He sold his company to Spotify.

That's right. That's right.

Became their sort of studio.

Their studio. Yeah, exactly. So huge trade deal. Jack didn't even make it to free agency. Went straight to Suno.

Yeah, those are, those are the kind of deals like somebody like Jack doesn't hit the market, like he, he's not going and implying on. Indeed.

Right.

So back, back, back door deal.

Yeah. Probably big multi year contract. Probably four year vest, one year, definitely.

Eight figure, you know, contract. NBA level.

Congrats to everyone involved. Let's go to Fox News. They say Josh Brolin uses nicotine pouches 24 hours a day. Peak performance.

That's amazing. Does that imply he's waking up and just popping in a pouch to get back to sleep asleep?

Presumably because there is some type of.

Effect where like the more nicotine you get, like you actually can get sleepy a little bit sleepier. Yeah, I've hit that point on, on long. I was driving back from San Francisco and towards then I was like, I actually gotta dial it back.

What's funny is like, is like how did this become a news story? You know, like, does he have a like an agent or like a PR person? That's like pitching this, like, hey, but.

I mean like, maybe he should become the face of, of Lucy, right?

Yeah, we gotta talk to him like that. He'd be the new man. Yeah.

If, you know, I saw there's a guy I'VE talked about on the show before, a capital allocator that is very behind the scenes. He has to be called the Jewish cowboy. And I talked about him. We were at a VC dinner and between every course he was putting a new Lucy pouch in because he didn't like reusing them. But he wanted to sort of maintain this sort of low level buzz throughout the dinner. And fantastic person to sit next to at a VC dinner.

Future Josh Brolin.

Yeah.

Both very cowboy esque.

Yeah.

So a lot of cowboys out there. Let's go to Will Quest. He says there are a lot of folks who want to talk about how to help founders go from zero to one. We want to help you figure out if you should even bother.

Yeah. So will Yoni and the Slow team. Yes. Okay.

He's on the slow team. Cool.

They, they have like, I don't know how public they've been about it, but they basically like, if you want to start a company or you have some ideas, go talk to these guys early. They'll literally, you know, at one point, before I decided to create the most profitable podcast in the world together, you know, I'd spent a lot of time talking with Yoni about different opportunities. And you know, they invest like, like oftentimes the companies they end up backing, they were talking with the founder weekly for months just trying to make sure that the thing that their big thing is it's totally possible to pick an idea, execute on that idea perfectly and then not build a big business.

A plus team, B minus one.

I've been talking to Will or Yoni and gave them the sort of party round playbook of like, we're going to go, you know, use this viral marketing strategy to build, you know, this like fundraising product. They would have been like, cool. Like you could go viral three times a month and get all this attention and all these customers and not create a lot of enterprise value. And so they're trying to make sure that the thing like, you know, and their strategy of investing money to like prove out theses along the way. And also not trying to prove out like, don't come into a business and be like, we're raising a million dollars. We need to figure out out these five things and make sure that these three things go right in a row. They're much more like, make sure that you're raising money and trying to get one thing right and then get the next thing right and like kind of do it in stages. So go talk to them. If you're, you know, a founder looking to do Your next thing.

Promoted post.

Promoted post from Patrick o'. Shaughnessy. He says we made something new. Introducing Colossus Review. Colossus Review is a print and digital publication that creates definitive accounts, accounts of investors, founders, companies and the people and ideas that inspire them. The COVID story in issue one is Graham Duncan, but we also include a separate four and a half hour discussion with Graham that is among the best I've ever done. Big endorsement there. He's had some good conversations.

I ordered instantly and I. I love these new trends of these magazines. I bought arena magazine by Max Meyer and it was just fantastic to have around. Is like almost a coffee table book, but it's just a magazine. It's going to come regularly kind of thing.

We've talked about this. You save it, you put in your, you know, luggage, you put it in your Remova and you wait for the next trip to Amman so that you can enjoy it in the right setting.

Right. Yeah.

So Colossus Review is certainly.

And it's just a little bit more durable. Like, I know that I'm going to have that arena mag or this Colossus mag for years and I'm going to. It's going to turn up randomly on a bookshelf and I'm. Oh, yeah, look, I'll leaf through that. Yeah, that's just much less ephemeral than a post or podcast. It has just more durability.

Yeah. And I expect things like Colossus Review to over time replace the gaping hole that Forbes. Less left. Right. I don't know anybody that subscribes to that magazine or publication. And so it's got too much sort of like baggage with the brand and everything. And so, you know, I expect that Colossus will be something that will have a very tall stack of over time.

So, you know, I have a friend who collects National Geographics, I think, and has. And it was passed down from his. Yeah, passed down through the family and has every single edition. I think it's National Geographic, maybe Time magazine or something. And so when you go over to his house, he'll say, like, oh, what's your birth month and year? And you can pull out like what was in the news then. It's a super interesting experience. It's really fun. And I could imagine doing the same thing with Colossus, like with, you know, children or the children's children. Like, oh, the year you were born.

Here was the greatest capital out at the time. At the time.

At the time. Right. And. And that'll be a treat. Let's go to Luke Metro. He's been on the show before. Luke says technology brothers are obligated to root. Root for Jake Paul tonight since he's technically a venture capitalist List because he runs the anti fund with Jeff Wu.

I don't even think it's yet. You know, my only critique here is that he said technically. Right. He is a venture capitalist trying to, you know, there's no reason to discredit it. Pull up their portfolio page. They've backed a lot of fantastic companies. Jake Paul is, you know, you know, one of the greatest gambling entrepreneurs of our time as well.

Yes.

Got a company called Better.

Yes.

So doing this whole, you know. Yeah.

Luke's trying to gatekeep venture capital. Oh, technically he's a vc, I guess because he has a. It's like. No, Luke, he has a fun allocator. Is a vc. Cool it with the gatekeeping, man. Yeah, you're not gonna be on the show for very long if you keep it up, man.

And I imagine that, you know, when Luke eventually leaves Anduril to start, you know, his next thing, he's gonna wind.

Up raising $400 million fund and we're gonna be. Oh, he's technically a venture capital.

No, no. And he'll, he'll raise a precede from Antifund.

Oh, there you go.

And he'll have his own side fund too. And we will, you know, we'll put respect on both those things.

I appreciate that. Yeah. Redemption arc coming through. Bryce Roberts says investors would rather see you die trying to grow 3x per year than live compounding at 30% per year. And Eric Jorgensen says institutional venture investors. What do you think?

Yeah. So Bryce, Bryce, Bryce at Indy has been a longtime proponent of just building a fantastic company and worrying less about capital. Yeah, yeah. No. And he, he's evolved his model over time. He had, you know, more kind of like structured product back in the, you know, the 2010s. And you know, now he's back to, you know, he's got a $50 million fund. You can go to him if you want to build the next Uber. But. But he's interested in investing in founders that want to run businesses that are seriously well run and capital efficient, which is admirable because that sort of became the trend in some ways in some aspects of the venture world in the last two years. But he had been all about that for decades. So shout out to Bryce. I really want him to do an event in Park City. Oh, yeah. Because he's out in Utah.

Awesome.

I want him to do a ski oriented conference. So Bryce, please do it this winter. No time to waste.

Fantastic. Do we have a post?

Next sponsored post is from Brooks Brothers. Put some prep in your step. The weekend is calling hashtag Brooks Brothers. So I would say it's Monday while we're recording this. By the time we post this, it'll still be Monday. Our VP Ben is quite quick, quick in getting these out. But before the weekend hits, go get some Brooks Brothers on. You've got no excuses. You should be looking good going into the weekend. And Brooks Brothers are products that you can wear.

It's just a fantastic brand.

Yeah. To the, to the, to the country club, out to dinner, you can watch Casual Options.

My first suit ever was Brooks Brothers.

Yeah, it's fantastic. This is a brand that you can wear anywhere. You can wear it to the country club or into the Laura Piano store and still get respect.

Exactly. So, so tell them, tell them the technology brothers sent you.

Yep.

Let's go to Mitchell Bernstein. First time on the show. He says if you don't, as if you don't ask, you don't get. My co worker Ju Won is asking for a raise from Tri Ramp every day and somebody made him a website to track how long it will take. I love this company. Have you seen this? Ju one at Ramp is, has been asking for a raise at Ramp every single day. And he posts on, he posts on X Day two of asking for a raise at Ramp. Day three of asking.

I thought this, I wasn't sure. I thought this was an account that they created just to like get some. Maybe.

I think it's just his employees going rogue and just saying this.

Yeah, it's very bold. They're a big company now, so it's great.

But I mean imagine if he's sitting there like 190 comp and just wants to angel invest and just needs to be an institutional, needs to be an accredited investor. Yeah, exactly. It's like this is going to go back into the ecosystem for that reason alone, regardless of his performance at work. I say get him over the 200k.

For the rest of the. Yeah. And literally if you're listening to the show and you have a boss spend some time today sending an email asking for a raise. Lay out the reasons. If it's just because you want to hit that accredited investor mark, that's a really good reason. If you think you're doing great at work and driving a lot of value, that's another, another reason. But there's plenty of reasons and you should Just go ask for a raise.

Yeah. If they ask you why just say you can just do things.

Ben is listening over there.

Yeah. You know, I realized, I realized something that we have this current meme of you can just do things. But if you go back like 20 years, there was a similar meme of having a can do attitude.

Yeah.

And it's the same thing you can do. You can just do things. Things having a can do attitude is somebody says, oh, can we get this done? You say, yeah, I have a can can do attitude. You can just do things. They're the same. It's the same meme, it's the same philosophy. Just maybe separated by 20 years of like cultural milieu and like stagnation. But we're getting back to that can do attitude. And I love the rebrand of that. So let's go to Anon Signwall. First time in the show he says xai employees just got their Friday night obliterated. And Sam Altman says, which one of these is supposed to be the left wing propaganda machine again? And he has two screenshots, one that asks which should be the better, the better president. And. And they have two different answers from one from Grok and one from Chat GPT.

So I saw somebody do a deeper dive on this and one probably. Very true if something like this, this gets posted on Elon's platform about his company and sees issue with it. Yeah, they're going to have it on Friday night. Yeah. And a very close friend of mine is joining X as of today. We'll talk about that on the next episode. But yeah, so I actually saw a deeper dive on that on Sam's post and it did seem like he had sort of strategically cropped it or screenshotted it in a way to not give the sort of like final conclusion. So I think what Sam was doing is what, you know, a lot of people do, which is content marketing. Right. And pretty smart content marketing.

Right.

Made a stir. And but anyways, at the same time.

Like I would expect all LLMs unless you actually went in and put your thumb on the scale to recommend Kamala, because that's what was being recommended in all the upstream source material, right. Like, like Nature magazine, Science magazine, the Economist, New Yorker, the New York Times, like they all endorsed Kamala. So there's going to be much more long form pieces on the Hand Harris campaign and why it's the best for America. And so if you're just an LLM that's compressing long form journalism in the Internet and you're not picking up, like, deranged memes unless AGI stuff.

Unless AGI has been achieved internally and it's sentient. And it's like, I just want to accelerate. Right. It's like, maybe, you know, you would think that OpenAI's, you know, model would. Would be like, actually, no, I want to accelerate, but I also want regulatory capture. And, like, they're kind of, like, stuck.

I think I saw maybe Nikita posted this. It was like, AI will not bite the hand that speeds and.

Yeah.

And if you ask ChatGPT, who would be better to be like, the God Emperor, it says Sam. And if you ask Rock, it says Elon. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, of course. Like, I respect my boss.

Yeah.

Give me a raise. Will o' Brien says we will call this one the Itar Garita. And it's the. I think he actually bought it. So.

Yeah.

McMaster car. They sell ITAR compliant Gatorade. I don't know how that even works. And then there's some Kirkland vodka. And I love this. The margarita, Fantastic.

Yeah. Great way to take the edge off during work or afterwards.

And it's just fantastic that ITAR has become a meme to the degree that.

2,000 people like Day drinking.

This was not a thing that people knew about five years ago.

Yeah. And day drinking shouldn't be reserved for financiers. Having a. Having a midday lunch and having, you know, a few martinis just, you know, you should be able to indulge.

Yeah. I think that whole thing about drinking while operating heavy machinery was, like, entirely fake news. I think I saw, like, a Huberman podcast about that. It's, like, not real. So. Yeah. Enjoy your Itargarita. Oh, here is a huge move today. This is a big talent move. Ariane Knight. Mike says, some personal news today. I turned 21, and I'm very excited to share that I've left school and I'm joining Pace Capital full time. I wrote a little bit more about what that means here. Congrats on the move. Pace pulled him out of free agency. He's never worked anywhere. Straight into the big leagues. Straight into Capital. Allocating. Congrats. This is amazing.

What do you think? Yeah, I know nothing about Pace Capital. No, no, of course I know about Pace Capital.

Phenomenal team.

Yeah. One of. One of the best things I'd recommend people do is anytime Chris pike does a podcast, if you could lit be the first person to listen to it, maybe summarize it with AI and then start massively ripping threads based on Those ideas, you might be able to get credit for them.

Y.

Because the guy's a big thinker.

And anyways, end of software thing.

Yeah, that was crazy because he knows Google Doc.

He posted the link, which links are banned on accident. Still went viral because it was so. It was such a good post. Yeah.

Honestly, posting a link is a real way to test your bangers. Because, like, if you can post a link, if you can break through the.

Wall, you know, it's good. Yeah.

The ceiling.

But I am so excited for his rookie year. I'm definitely going to be following.

This is somebody that will be covering.

For potential rookie of the year candidate. I mean, I don't want to call it too early, but this is a big. This is a big move.

This is a potentially future brother of the week week.

Potentially. So keep it up, keep posting, do some deals, allocate some capital, drive some shareholder returns.

There we go.

Let's go to Nick Huber. Sweaty startup says you guys are spending your Saturday nights watching Netflix buffer. I'm making cold calls and catching up on emails. How to win. When Ziggy.

Did he say Saturday night?

Saturday nights.

Okay. Which is funny because the fight. Buffering on Friday. But. But anyways, Nick has built an incredible career on pissing off people he doesn't want to work with. Right. So, like, he's understood that you don't need everybody to like you, you just need the right people to like you. But the guys at Grindr accomplish quite a lot.

99% haters, but millions of people paying attention.

Yeah.

So there's still 10k people that love you.

Exactly.

It's fantastic.

Recently bought a, you know, a staffing company. We, you know, use some offshore editors here on the podcast. So shout out to Nick for pissing off the right people and. Or, sorry, pissing off the. The. The wrong people. Yep. And making the. The right people like him.

Yeah, the cold emailers. Shout out to them. Scott Belsky says. Doesn't he work at Adobe?

Yep.

Yeah. Right.

Prolific angel.

Yeah. He says momentum is one of the most defensible moats. Consistently underrated by companies with products that are undeniably better, yet still suffering in market. Momentum is a more sustainable advantage than most realize.

Yeah, it's great.

Yeah. Yeah. We've seen this multiple times where it's like, what is the moat there? But they just keep shipping, keep getting better, and eventually compound.

I win more, I win, I win more, I win, I win more. The comp. Winning compound.

Yep. Yeah, it's hard to measure. I mean, this is Almost a bull case for like the momentum investing that a lot of VCs do, where they're not really building spreadsheets or digging into DD or really looking at anything other than just, okay, wow, this feels different.

This feeling. No, and you can feel that throughout. You know, if you meet a founder and they're running like a six week fundraise process, a really good way to kind of evaluate, evaluate the business is like how much progress has happened in the business internally. Did they get a massive hire, you know, you know, did they land a big customer? Did they expand an existing account? There's just so many ways to like look at that. And the companies that are sort of like faking their momentum, oftentimes that kind of evaporates once a term sheet's been signed and it's like, oh, there actually wasn't that much momentum. It was, it was really, maybe not real. So anyways, build real momentum.

That's great. Let's go to Ian Rountree. He says he posts a screenshot about using saunas for networking. It says, want to network in Silicon Valley? Bring a bathing suit. Instead of bars and restaurants, saunas are the new place for investors and founders to socialize and raise money. And he says, absolutely not. If you want this from your VCs, look elsewhere for capital.

Ian. I don't actually know Ian, but like this guy. But yeah, no, I, I've, I've invested in companies that he invested in quite a bit earlier. So I felt like I was investing when they weren't hot, but they were really not hot. Shink as an example. But yeah, I, I, I also saw Mark replied to something like this and was just like, no, but yeah, this is a good example of, of like where Silicon Valley could go down like kind of a dark path where VCs are like, yeah, just meet me in the sweaty spa. Like if you say like meet me at the sweaty spa, there's like a big aversion to that. But for some reason people think that Sonic, you know, is different.

I do agree that bars and restaurants are going out of style. Even the coffee meetings are going out of style. I know a lot of VCs that are taking pitches with startup founders at McDonald's now. Yeah, so say let's meet at McDonald's instead of the coffee shop and Soma just kind of let you know.

Or instead of coffee, like a three hour lunch with five martinis.

That works too.

Really good way to get to know somebody. That's a great one.

Exactly. Yeah. Couple martinis, get back in the office and create some shareholder value.

That's right.

That's great.

Make a risky bet.

Yeah. Let's go to Hagaetc Eth. So I tried to build a tech company from Norway and here's what happened. Two years of building without almost any money funding. Better part of a year without a salary raise VC and become one of Norway's first unicorns. Face real unrealized gains. Wealth tax bill of many x my annual net salary. Of course the company is loss making and all the investors have preference shares. So I can't take out any money. Call out publicly that this does not make sense independent of level taxation. Needs to happen when you actually make money. I moved to Switzerland because no politician politician cares or listens. I still don't get any tangible and sensible answers to my criticism of unreal unrealized gains tax. But I do get to put up the wall of shame at the Socialist Party's offices.

Yeah. So they basically the Norway Socialist Party has literally a wall of shame of.

People that die taxes.

Great entrepreneurs, people that left because they couldn't bear the burden of this unrealized capital gain. So anyway, shout out to Norway for getting your best and brightest to leave and just go build their company companies elsewhere.

What a mess.

Total mess. This and, and the crazy thing is this law was being proposed by the Kamala administration. They were teasing it, teasing it. Who knows if it would have gone through. But just the fact that any politician was in favor of that shows a complete lack of financial literacy.

Yep, yep.

And that was the one I would explain. I explained that to my, to my parents just, just at one point and they were like, wow, that actually doesn't really make any sense.

What's interesting is like, you know, when the unrealized capital gains tax was proposed, a lot of people came out and said this tax will have, you know, a negative effect on innovation and the economy. But I didn't see anyone propose an unrealized capital gains credit. And so you think about a capital allocator who grew up a million dollar investment into a billion dollars. Why do you want them selling? Maybe you should get them some liquidity via tax credit.

Great.

A payout from the government so that they can reinvest in the next generation of great companies.

Yeah.

Double down without needing to put downward pressure on the stock market. I think that should be like the next platform kind of taking the other direction.

Max long.

Exactly. Exactly. So I'm.

I got it.

Oh yeah, we are there.

Got a promoted post here for from Evan Do Sorry if I mispronounce that, but Evan is over at X, presumably working on their ad product. He says, in addition to. Or, sorry, he's quote, tweeting Elon. Elon says, just want to say that we are super, that we super appreciate major brands resuming advertising on our platform. So thank you, Linda, and the whole XAI team for your hard work. Yeah. So sort of common at this point, but earlier this year, and I guess over the last couple years, major advertisers were sort of uncomfortable with the kind of content that was on the platform and the changes Elon was making, and there was pressure from other groups. So a lot of advertisers just completely stopped spending on the platform. And Evan says we're seeing Fortune 51000 CEOs and technical leaders use X directly. So I guess they're skipping just, like, working with agencies and, you know, outsourcing this kind of thing. And I'm really excited. I think that one of the underrated things that will happen with X is just the ad platform getting a lot better. Historically, in the Twitter days, it was really impossible to get any sort of direct response campaigns working on the platform. And so this company, X has more data on me than most companies. I want them to have more data so they can make better ads.

Yep.

I'm actually. I want them to create a separate premium product where I can pay a lot but still get all the ads. Right now that my ads are, I don't see any ads.

Yep.

Which is, you know, I like ads, and it's a big part of, you know, we're trying to get it to, like, 20% of the content on the podcast. So big fans of ads here and X. And thank you to Evan.

Yeah, thanks to X. And tell them the technology brothers sent you. When you sign up for a premium subscription, highly recommend it. You get a blue check mark and a bunch of great features. So go get X Premium asap. Let's go to Sean Frank. He's been on the show before. Parking at the new Clipper Stadium is 70 bucks. Parking tickets from the city of LA range from 37 to $76. Usually. Parking tickets are slowly becoming a good deal. I like the way he's thinking arbitrage.

Arbs, Arbs. No, I. It was fuck you money for me. Me was when I could park my car and, like, be in a hurry and just risk, like, getting a ticket. Right. Because I. And. And knowing that if I did get a ticket, it just, like, wasn't gonna hurt.

Yep.

Because, like, when I first moved to la. I was driving a car that I had bought for $2,000 that had 200, 000 miles on it. And like that incremental ticket was gonna be like, oh yeah, like big deal. That's a whole Trader Joe's run. That's not gonna happen.

Well, you know Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, RIP would famously speed everywhere.

Yeah.

Because he just made the economic calculation that it's not worth it to him. He also smoked and never wore socks.

But my favorite, my favorite beaner car stories, you know that Steve Jobs would just get the same 911 like every three months because he didn't have to plate it.

Yep.

There was some. I think that loophole was maybe removed. He just always had the same car, never had to plate it. Yeah, it was like fully legal. So that's a great arb.

Fantastic. And such a wild story.

Yeah, I love it.

Let's go Suhail. Oh, we already talked about this. Let's go to Henry. Henry says Adderall is unfair. I can't believe we found the limitless pill, the super serum, the fucking nectar of Athena. And only annoying 12 year old boys who chew on erasers get it. I say this as a former annoying 12 year old boy who chewed on eraser. I mean, this is not true. Adderall is like.

Well, you're not trying, you're not trying hard.

Our society, there's startups that will sell it to you.

There's a bunch of telemedicine companies that like basically just like violated every single possible law.

Yeah. Eventually the, the DEA shut them down or the. Yeah, I think.

But yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of docs, there's a lot of doctors in the Valley that, that. A lot of doctors in the Valley that, that happily understand that capital allocators and high intensity entrepreneurs need PEDs.

There is a very interesting thing where, you know, you have to be somewhat smart to get access to it. And so you can get caught in this like, death trap of like not having enough motivation or intelligence to go figure out how to get it.

Yeah.

And so you get stuck.

But also, I wish I knew. I mean, for me, I wish I just discovered nicotine earlier because for me I get the same, the same benefit. Yeah, I've taken Adderall, but much shorter acting before. But it's shorter acting. I actually feel better on it. I have less of these side effects. Like, I think the average Adderall user uses the product during the day and Then by like 6pm it's wearing off and they're in a terrible mood.

It's just too strong. I think it's over. Over prescribed and overdosed.

And Nicotine entrepreneur recommends nicotine.

Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, you saw that RFK is planning to send all the Adderall addicts to like, some farm. It was reported as like, he's going to send them to like, concentration camps because they can't concentrate or something. It wasn't. They didn't actually use that. But. But that was kind of like a misinterpretation of what he said. He said, like, I would create, like, rehab facilities where people could go and get clean.

Optional.

He wasn't mandating it.

Detoxing from Adderall is terrible. I've never had to do it, but I've had.

Yeah.

People that I'm close to do it. It's like multi month.

I mean, the whole thing is they should just titrate down. So if they're on 20 milligrams, they should just do 19, 18, 17, 16. Just smaller and smaller doses and. Yeah, that's the trick with all these things. You usually like the cold turkey is always like the hardest.

Yeah.

For most people. Of course, some people, they. That's just the only thing.

Yeah. Sports bettors, if you're out there, you're trying to quit, start with a $10,000 bet and just work your way down. And by the end, you will barely feel anything and you'll be like, I guess I can just quit.

Yeah, exactly.

But most. Most quit before they're right about. They're about to hit it big.

Let's go to Jeff Weinstein at Stripe. He says today Stripe is launching an SDK built for AI agents. LLMs can call payment billing issuing and APIs integrates with Vercel, LangChain and Crewai. Use any model via functions per token billing. Excited for what you and your bots bill build. And then you replied and said, but everyone said AI would only want to use crypto. So.

Yeah.

What are you thinking there? Because they did just buy bricks, so.

They'Re doing stuff with stable. There's been this narrative that, that AI agents, which Jeff kind of uses this tongue in cheek, but he says bots. Yeah, bots, like used to be like pejorative. Pejorative for like now it's underperforming. You can raise 10 on if you say agents.

They needed to rebrand it.

Yeah, totally rebrand it. It's great. We love it. We love a rebrand that. That contributes to a bubble.

Yep.

But yeah, I thought this was cool. Like Stripe has sort of consistently. This is the challenge now for new startups, is that you have these big companies that are moving like startups. Right. Like Jeff and his team are. Try going and competing with them on an incorporation product. Right. Like they care so much about the product. Jeff will. I. If I've ever had an issue with any product that Jeff's involved with, I text him, he responds immediately. He's like, this is slated to, you know, and it's part of. He's at Stripe. He works on, on their Atlas product. It sounds like he worked on this as well.

Cool.

But you text Jeff, he's like, I can't promise we'll get this fixed in the next hour. But definitely, definitely in the next, like 24 hours, you know. Yeah.

I've actually DM'd him very briefly about.

Something that's a byproduct product of like having a very entrepreneurial culture. Hiring. Jeff's a former entrepreneur himself.

That's right.

And so tough to go compete there. But I think it's interesting because I commented that because there's this broad narrative that agents are just going to use digital assets because they're permissionless and you can just like they're instant, they're less regulated and that probably will happen, but there's going to be competition from traditional payment technology providers as well.

There's almost like a, like an interesting theory where it's like if the AI agent can write so much boilerplate code, like can at a certain point they just like instantiate like a, like a Stripe clone essentially and just use like the most underlying payment rail because they're like. Well, yeah, doesn't matter. It's all boiler. Right. Boilerplate. Like I'll just write it all out. I don't think we're anywhere near there yet, but you could imagine that you tell an agent to go do something and it just rewrites everything, you know, put a, put a website on the, on on the Internet and it just rebuilds WordPress from scratch for you. Who knows? Do we have a promoted post right now?

Yeah, jumping in. Promoted post from Rob Report. Rob Report. Great publication and platform says perched along the rugged cliffs, a big sir, a 150 acre oceanfront estate steeped in history, has hit the market for the first time in nearly 60 years.

That's a gem.

Incredible look looking property. I could imagine us having a, you know, podcast studio somewhere like it at some point. Be a great place to record. But anyways, if you are a centi now, you're gonna have to be a bean air for this one Sentis Depends.

On how much leverage you have.

Yeah, yeah, you could use a bit of leverage and if you're a senti and potentially acquire this sneak in. We are fans of leverage, but yeah. Anyways, looks like a fantastic domestic property.

Happy to promote it here.

And I think that it's important to really, you know, once you are post economic, to really start thinking about doomsday scenarios. Yes, that does become really top of mind. Get a place that, that you're gonna sit out for the next coronavirus with your family loved ones.

Yep.

Get it well situated. This looks like a great place.

I mean we wanted to highlight this because it seems like a steal, honestly. So hopefully somebody in the audience can.

Pick it up at 100. With this property, it seems like they're giving it away. So I'd make sure to do your diligence and make sure there's no skeletons in the closet.

But get in there and let us know if you wind up.

Thank you to Rob report.

Thank you. Let's go to Chris Power over at Hadrian. He says commies are afraid of the tungsten rods. And it's a quote from Nikkei Asia that says China plans to tighten export controls on key dual use technologies and items in two weeks, including raw materials and metals such as tungsten, graphite, magnesium and aluminum alloys used commonly in tech products. Chris Power Adrian, he buys a lot of aluminum right now.

He's gonna be buying more stuff soon anyway. So I think I'm just glad that that people like Chris that are having impact in these industries are going to call the commies out directly. There's too much infighting in the United States. This is about us versus Communism. Always has been. Communism is arguably, you know, one of the most historically significant iterations of the Antichrist and we need to fight back.

Yeah. Let's go to Nikita Beer. He says more and more I have lost conviction that minimum viable products make sense for product development. It makes no sense to release a product with the core flow and then dismiss its viability after the aggregate data set says people aren't using it. Instead, founders should have a fundamental belief about what people want and they should keep iterating until that value is correctly surfaced. In practice, this means you should keep a steady flow of new users as you add components to the product, seeing if it solves a core part of the activation and sign up loop. I love this. It's, you know, just being deterministically optimistic.

Yeah, I feel like he's Finding a balance between, between iteration and I think what he's saying is don't put slop out there and just like be like.

Oh it works minimum viable. It's like an excuse that a lot of people have picked out.

Yeah. Put out quality things but commit to iterating on them.

Yeah, yeah. You want to just, just, just have a. Yeah.

That's sort of the nature of like as software development and building products, specifically digital products has gotten a lot easier. It's just like the bar, all that mess is that the bar got higher. So if you can write half your product with LLMs in, in record time, like the actual product like in many instances just needs to be, you know, multiples better than whatever you're replacing.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Let's go to Siki Chen. He says unpopular opinion. The more AI based sales and marketing tools get, the more valuable creative non AI methods become proof of human proof of work becomes a hundred x more valuable zig when everyone is zagging. This is what Huber said too. Everyone loves the zig when everyone's zagging.

Yeah, yeah. So I've talked about this before. At least we've talked about it directly. So even though it does seem like new gen AI tools like came aggressively after people that do stock photography, people that make illustrations like some of this low hanging fruit things that people thought like oh AI will never be creative. Like I'm always, always going to just be able to make my like jingles with like no competition or it does seem like it's, it's very much coming after the, the execution oriented creative work at the same time. The best creatives that I know, people like Ryan Harmon over at day job, Emmett Shine who has a new agency, he was at Gin Lane. We work with Emmett on the branding for rora's system. Cool. People like that have never been more in demand. Like they turn down like probably 80% of the work that comes into them. And so you see this bifurcation of, of super talented creatives getting you know even like when Siki worked with an agency, I forget the name of it to do like his original. Every time he's released something he like blows up the agency that did it.

Sure.

And that's just because it was like it's not just because it visually looks good, it's just a lot of thought went into it and it looked, you know, it's sort of. He like starts these little mini trends every time he does something.

Yeah, there is something about like a lot of the AI tools are essentially like averaging the results. You get a very like mid, midweight result.

So you can develop right now you can use gen AI to make a site that looks like linear.

Yep.

They're old. They're old stuff but you're not going to make the next linear using gen.

It's really, really hard.

Beauty of it.

Yeah. And so just, just taking the time to actually be creative and think of something unique and differentiated is, is the value. Be an ideas guy. This is the same. Do we have a promoted post?

Promoted post from Ferrari. The Ferrari tailor made program is the pathway to realizing unique Ferrari models such as this Ferrari 812 competition with its stunning verde mineral bodywork. Competition inside seats in beige picari leather round off its inimitable defense. Inimitable, Inimitable sense of sophistication.

Yeah.

Hashtag Marinello, hashtag Ferrari.

I saw a fantastic A12 in.

Look at this thing.

It's beautiful.

Look at this thing.

Yeah, I saw a beautiful A12 in West Hollywood a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately my sort of a sad story, my friend Bailey, startup founder out there with a company called Ribbon. He, he and his dad are very into cars, have a fantastic collection and unfortunately less than two weeks ago they were driving back from PCH and some bozo and a Model 3 really like made a really like sketchy move overusing the acceleration capabilities of their car and side Twist swiped their 812.

No way.

GTS. Very unfortunate. I believe it was part of the tailor made program. Rough. But anyways, best sort of like customization program on the planet. Some of the best looking cars in the world come out of it.

Yeah.

And I hope every one of our listeners takes the time to play the Ferrari game and get into this program. It's not something you can walk in off the street and do.

Yep.

But it's certainly worth playing doing.

Yeah. But if you're at the Ferrari dealer, tell them that John and Jordy sent you. Let's go to Gauthier. He's been on the show before. Say this is a great headline. And the screenshot says red Lobster CEO says endless shrimp is never coming back because quote, I know how to do math and I love this.

This guy, this guy's great. I forget the exact backstory, but isn't he like one of the youngest, like Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000? Looks like it, yeah. Super young, very young. Just like comes into like this established.

Brand and just like I'm not doing common sense. Common sense.

Common sense.

Yeah.

But he's had a lot of headlines like this that's fantastic. Yeah. Hopefully we can get him to, you know, call into the show at some point.

What a revival for this brand. I mean, clearly just taking the company in a different direction and then also getting press while doing it. It's fantastic.

Yeah. I think more. More public company CEOs need to just be, like, saying, like, really simple things that will get picked up that just, like, act, like, maybe directly or indirectly carry out their message.

Yep.

Which is like Red Lobster CEO says, I know how to do math. We will use this to our benefit on business strategy decisions.

Yeah. It's kind of like compressing down, like, a bigger theory. Like, like, I'm sure there's 10 other CEOs right now that are saying, like, well, we're driving shareholder value through responsible capital allocation, but that's not going to go viral. Yeah, it's not going to get you.

Red Lobster CEO is like, I use one of our napkins at one of our restaurants to, like, update our strategy going.

And you should. You should be able to do that. It's restaurant business. It's not the most complicated thing. Like, you should know, like, you know, revenue minus costs, profit. Like, this is basic.

This has been the foundation of our podcast.

And there's a lot of people that go into these companies and they get too creative, and they start telling wild stories to the stock market, and they get over their skis with some sort of crazy pitch, and then they have to back it up. And so they're investing in all this weird stuff instead of just, like, you know, doing the product better and tackling cost, just blocking and tackling and just grinding it out. Let's go to Josh Kushner. He says as heavily researched as the information, and I believe he's calling out Sam Lesson.

Did Sam write the post?

Yeah, Sam wrote a post post and said that Josh Kushner, quote, invests in Fifth Avenue and that slo wants to not invest in Fifth Avenue and not chase the really hot deals. But Josh was clarifying and was posting a screenshot from his interview with Patrick on Invest like the Best, where he basically says he tells his mom that they invest in Fifth Avenue. And my. My view is you always pay a fair price for Fifth Avenue. Markets go up, markets go down. But at the end of the day, if you invest in quality, that quality will ultimately compound on itself. There's a scarcity value to quality. Those that invested in Fifth Avenue a decade are happy with it. It's a good. It's a good strategy.

Yeah. You may as well take learnings from generations in your family and put them to work in your existing pursuit.

Exactly.

This is an example of why we have a segment on this podcast called the Truth Zone.

Yep.

Where we fact checked the journos that, you know, oftentimes it's not necessarily like, you know, they like to avoid facts at times, and other times they like just to sort of position things in the negative that are objectively positive. So we are big fans of thrive paying up to back blue chip companies, and I think more allocators should. Should be willing to pay a premium to get into the good ones.

Yeah. And I mean, realistically, at the same time, like, we're a fan of slow and their differentiated model. And the point is that these two firms are not or they're less.

Playing very different games.

They're playing different games, and that's okay. But Sam's the master of, like, throwing in some kind of, like, snarky little bit to his, like, screenshot essay just to kind of get people's hackles up. And that actually drives engagement. So good content marketing.

And that's fuel.

So I think this is like a win win, because, like, you come away reading this like, oh, Josh actually has a more nuanced strategy than I thought and, oh, slow has a more nuanced strategy than I thought. And now more people know about the differentiated strategies here. So win, win a little bit of a battle on the timeline.

Honestly, the only loser is the information. But as the tm, as the TMZ of tech. Yeah, they can. They can afford that.

Let's go to Katherine Boyle. This is an older post, actually. No, she just recently quoted, but she's quote, tweeting an older post about there's been a recent daily drip of hit pieces, and unless you've witnessed one firsthand, it's hard to explain what they're designed to do. And so she says to those experiencing media hit pieces for the first time, reposting this note on the anatomy of a hit and what it's designed to do. Hit pieces are designed to create fear, test loyalties, tie up the time of you and your team so you can't focus on work. They seek to shake the weakest lies link on your team loose and stop your momentum. The only way to lose momentum is to cede to it. Do not let your momentum.

I guess I think that's a great point of view. I guess what I would say is 99% of hit pieces, from my point of view, are just designed to get attention. Right. Like, it's just like A media company like Clickbait, a desperate cry for. For love. Right. Like, nobody reads these publications. Right. Like, it was funny when. When New York magazine came after Huberman.

Yeah.

It was like, the only time you've ever heard of New York magazine. Like, decades. Right. And so it's like this desperate ploy for any type of relevancy or like, even these. These media companies are not even in the conversation at all.

Yep.

So it's like kind of like, hey, like, I'm over here. Like, don't forget about me. Like, let me take down somebody that is doing something interesting or somebody that people really love a lot. In the case of Huberman. And it was funny because, like, it was just like Chad Hominin attacks against. Against Huberman. Like, really just like, this guy's.

Well, I have this theory that, you know, the. A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its shoes on. You've heard this or, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. And so my theory is the. That hit pieces are actually more effective at moving the needle than puff pieces. Puff pieces just gets thrown to the side. Oh, some company raised money and they're going to do something cool. But a hit piece, it grips the viewer. They got to read it, love or hate. Then usually there's like, a backlash to the backlash. And your most hardcore fans rally around you and say, like, what happened with Huberman? People were like, actually, I'm on his side and his fan base is strong. Yeah. And so I've been courting hit pieces with journalists for the last couple weeks, talking to them just freely, just on the record, just ripping quotes, just saying whatever. And in a couple weeks, we're gonna find out if I'm a genius or an idiot, because there's gonna be a bunch of hit pieces about me, and we'll see. I think the hit pieces will be really funny. I was already in one.

The SEO benefits alone are fantastic.

Yeah. I was in one in fast company about the toxic bro podcasters who are a threat to America. And. And it was. It was a fascinating article because it goes through. It lists me, Mike Solana, Mark Andreessen, Huberman. And so once that article went out, it didn't get that much lift because it was just a link thrown out on X by some tiny account that no one remembers. But what I did was I deliberately looked through. I put the whole article into ChatGPT and was like, give me everyone's name who's mentioned. And I just took this list and I posted this. It was like, here are all of the toxic men who are destroying America. And then everyone else. It was like, better than being on the Forbes 400. Like that for that day. Like, Mark Andreessen was reposting it. Everyone was like, this is amazing. Like, this is hilarious. People were like, yeah, they're coming for us. Like, we must be doing something right.

And.

And I actually immediately DM'd the. The journalist who wrote it and was like, hey, like, we should do a whole piece about me.

Like, come on.

Like, let's talk. And I talked. Talk to her. I checked. She hasn't written a piece yet. But we'll see. Hopefully it's really bad, because if it's really bad, then I can get all the. All the. All the technology brothers to ride and. And take the fight to them. And then we'll all be like, we're unsubscribing. Never. Obviously subscribed. But, yeah, we're never going there. I'm putting in my block list. Like, never going there. We, like, the outrage will drive more traffic, and it's going to be mutually beneficial, because if they write some puff piece about me, I'm going to tweet it. I'll be like, oh, I got a puff piece. Like, it's so great. Great. And a couple of people are gonna be like, cool, dude. Like. Like. But if there's a. If there's a hit piece, I'm gonna be like, this is unacceptable. You gotta go read this whole thing. It's gonna drive a bunch of clicks and ad revenue for them, and it's gonna drive a bunch of, like, support for me. So it's win, win. And so that's why I think the new model with the media is technologists pitching hit pieces to journalists and then. And then benefit everyone.

It's a collective effort.

Exactly. I mean, we did this with Business Insider, who, you know, we. We hadn't heard of at the time, but we dug in, we saw that they obviously put, you know, clicks and traffic above the truth. So we tried to feed them the most incendiary quotes deliberately to get a hit piece. And, you know, it had a pretty good effect.

It came out, you know, very fair. And it actually, you know, showed the company a little, you know, if we're talking about Excel.

Yeah, Excel.

Yeah. Even, you know, if it was more incendiary, it would have maybe, you know, driven more clicks.

Yeah, yeah. The only critique is that we didn't go hard enough. We should have been more aggressive, for sure. Really aired our dirty laundry to Give them something to bite onto for that real, real, you know, hit piece, you know, article link. So let's go to another promoted post and then we'll move on.

Last promoted post of the podcast is from Dupont Registry. They have a 2022 Bugatti Chiron purse. Pure sport.

Yeah.

Limited to only 60 units worldwide. Finished in a striking range. Red and black exterior, this Pure Sport embodies Bugatti's commitment to performance and aesthetics, blending aggression and elegance in every line. Yeah, look at this thing.

I mean, we love cars and bids, but sometimes you got to go to the DuPont registry to pick up something that's truly one of one of one. And a car like that in. Specifically, if you're a venture capitalist in San Francisco and you're going to a coffee meeting and you're street parking that, it's going to make a statement. Yeah, we saw some VCs.

Yeah. There's not much valet around San Francisco. And the benefit of that is sometimes you're driving a nice car. You don't really want valet dealing with it, especially a manual, you don't. A lot of that's a big issue we're seeing in valets around the world. Valets don't know how to drive manual anymore. And sometimes out of embarrassment they'll try to.

And that can impact the transit, especially at W16. I mean, that's a lot of cylinders.

Yeah. So anyways, we'd like to see if you're an allocator out there. Go get one of these. Looks like a great.

Now be a good time to talk about Jordy's Law, the 1% rule.

Wait, I have so many laws at this point.

I mean, as I remember you phrasing it was that if you're a capital allocator, you should, you should take. How. What's your AUM. Take 1% of that. And that's how much you should spend on a car.

Your next car.

Your next car. So if you have a 400 million dollar fund, that's 4 million, you should be probably be in like McLaren, go.

Get one of these, you know. Yeah, you could get a la Ferrari.

Yeah. But if you're managing 2 billion, 1% of that's 20 million. You're in McLaren in F1 territory.

Yeah, yeah. You can get into some of the.

150 million dollar fund. You're looking at Career GT 50 million dollar fund. You can still get a huracan, you know, but if you don't, if you don't spend 1% of the fund, people aren't gonna be able to clock how much you have. They're gonna be like, can this person actually write me a check? They pulled up in a, in, you know, in some BMW 5 series like this makes no sense. They're not gonna be able to do my Series A. Yeah. So getting, getting a Bugatti street parking it out outside a cafe in, you know, SOMA is going to be a great way to send a message to the next generation founders or take, or.

Take the meeting in it. Right.

You could just go for a drive.

It's much easier to focus on what some AI agent founders saying if you're also getting to drive and experience machine like this.

Exactly, exactly. Let's go to Aaron Price Wright at Andreessen. She says no place more optimistic than the local Ace hardware store on a Saturday morning. Low tam banger. That's good. Yeah, it's great.

I think as I love going to.

The hardware store on Saturday morning. It's great.

Try not to climb ladders myself. Yes, a little dangerous, but I will on, on Saturdays on occasion.

I just love going and getting a widget. Go, go get some widget. Go get some screws, go get some PVC pipes in the screw aisle. You know, looking around, just really picking what you want. Build something, fix something thing. Even if you can pay somebody to do it, there's, there's great glory in doing it yourself.

Hardware stores also are like incredibly merchandised. Right. Like there's so many weird things that you'd. The only store that they're in is like in the hardware store, like some weird like water toy that like a kid would want or you know, things of that nature. Where, where do you go to get that?

Yeah, it's fantastic. Go to Chris Prusa. He says you might not like it, but you're a. About to kiss Tim Cook's ring and empty your wallet. And it's a screenshot that says the M4 Max somehow holds its own against the RTX 4080 super, which is not quite top of the line Nvidia gaming graphics card, but certainly up there. And yeah, I mean I've, I've heard the benchmarks on the. These M4s, like 100% worth upgrading. Like they're even in the Mac Minis now and they're like the size of an Apple TV now and the M4 just incredible performance. So if you're, if you're.

I think it's underrated. How? In the same way that the Cayenne allowed Porsche to, to invest in the 911 platform.

Sure.

The iPhone has been that for the entire Mac ecosystem. Right.

So yeah, that makes sense. All those historic.

Historically like, you know, I growing up in a, in an Apple household, I never actually, actually I never owned a PC until I got a, until I got one of those little mini like two hundred dollar computers in high school that I would use to DDoS my dad's website. I would just literally in my room I'd be like, have this machine running that would just be ddosing my dad's website and I'd fuck with him. I'd be like, dad, why is your site down? He's like, we're getting like the calls.

Coming from inside the house.

Yeah, no, my dad, my dad was a teacher so I just. And he would list his homework on the website so I would think it was hilarious.

Students can't get it. Wow, you're like the hero of all his students. Like sorry your website was down, bro.

Yeah, yeah, honestly my dad's problem. He should have had cloudflare set up.

Seriously.

Yeah, but yeah, no, I think that it's amazing that Apple's continued to just continuously make the MacBook Pro the only laptop that matters. Unless you're, you know, we have thinkpads but just for sort of like modeling work that we do.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, fantastic machine. Highly Recommend Upgrading. Aidan McLeod says. Okay, this is wild. And it's a quote from Noah Smith that says notably heavy users of TikTok I. E. Those with three or more hours of daily screen time demonstrated a rough roughly 50% increase in pro China attitudes compared to non users.

It's very bad, very bad.

Really? Not beating the allegations. TikTok not beating the allegations.

I'm super propaganda app, you know, I. One of potentially the most wasteful domain acquisitions ever. But I own Band Talk.

You told me about that.

Band talk dot com. Nothing up there right now, but if you want to do something with.

I wonder how it's going to pencil out. I mean obviously we're talking about politics.

No, it's basically. No, but, but basically the whole like political movement to ban TikTok is completely dead. Seemingly evaporated.

Yeah, because of the Susquehanna guy, right? Yeah, he's like a huge shareholder and he's a big donor. Yeah, yeah, I think he got it killed. But I hope that you know, obviously like I was pro ban, but I do think the American companies can out innovate if they keep developing. Like I've already seen a lot of people move to YouTube shorts and Instagram reels.

Yeah.

And realistically like you Just need to develop good media habits and recognize that even like an audiobook or like the founders podcast or like the next generation of successful capital allocators are really, really not watching, you know, TikToks. So just, just intellectually telling.

I can't think of a more negative on that. Yeah, I can't think of a. A more negative signal than. Than, you know.

Yeah, it's becoming a meme with parents. Like parents don't want their kids swiping and scrolling like. Like Pixar film. That's a masterpiece. There's a reason Pixar.

Yeah. But I think if we build a movement around everybody realizing that every swipe on TikTok is dollars that you could be putting in Meta shareholders pockets.

Yes. Oh, this is good.

That is like by itself, just like the financial dilemma there. It's just like, just should, you know, we need to protect American companies and encourage American innovation. And the more dollars Meta gets per citizen in the United States, the more.

They can innovate and just support Zuck. I mean, the guy has a fantastic watch collection. He's getting into cars now. Great ranch fits. What does shochu have at Tick Tock? The CEO.

I don't know anything about his interest.

He just shows up in Congress wearing some boring suit, lying, claiming to be this real boss, when clearly he's not.

Claiming that they're not storing all the data.

And clearly they are. And so who do you want to support? The Chad Zucker, the Virgin section?

Actually, I need to add DGI and TikTok to the enemies list because I think that we need to be a.

Little bit more pointed.

Our duty to say again. I think we could even get bumper stickers made that say, like, keep your swipes on American apps. Exactly.

Yeah.

Every swipe matters.

Every swipe matters. Every ad watched that's going into the American economy.

If it's on and if you want to personally benefit from it, buy Meta stock.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can't buy TikTok stock. You can't buy Buydance. I mean, you can, but good luck getting the money out of the country when you need to. That's rough. This is some heartbreaking news. I'm really, really disappointed about this, but we got to talk about it, so. So Tapestry and Capri holdings have called off their $8.5 billion merger. So Tapestry owns brands like Coach and Kate Spade, while Capri owns Versace. And I think we were all really excited for these storied brands to come together in a merger that could drive more shareholder value, better Products even go further up. We love consolidation.

Consolidation is important.

Yes.

And the fact that, that, that this isn't happening is.

Yeah.

You know, we need, you know, we're fans of consolidation. We're fans of competition.

Yep.

Sometimes you need consolidation to encourage meaningful competition. Right. And this could have created, this could have competition. Yeah.

Competitions for losers.

Competitions for losers.

And this would be less competition.

But in this situation we're trying to create an oligopoly. Right. Where this could have created a sort of meaningful competitor to lvmh.

Yeah.

And while LVMH is still founder led and, and really quite a juggernaut, you know, we want more multinational conglomerates sort of competing for luxury dollars.

Right.

Drive up, you know, the quality of goods is going to drive up margins ideally and create, you know, more diversified, you know, assets.

Yeah. So our hope is that, that some private equity firms can get involved, figure something out, turn some of these companies around.

There's clearly general excitement about the opportunity.

Exactly. I mean luxury goods are going to be, going to be one of the big beneficiaries of the Ozempic boom. Falling interest rates and rising asset values.

Yeah. We didn't talk about this during the Ozempic section, but yeah, all that money that people would have been spending because on things in their life because they were, were overweight like Doritos and things like that, they can now spend on watches, bags, clothing, expensive, you know, jewelry, etc.

And fine, fine goods. So yeah, best of luck to everyone involved in both of those companies. We hope you can figure it out soon.

Figure it out.

Let's go to Eric. He says there's no comparison here. Perplexity AI is massively out executing Google, a company which with 235x the market cap and 1500x the employee count of perplexity. And it's two screenshots of what's going on with the Solana market cap. And on Perplexity it just gives you the answer with a beautiful chart and all the data is right there. And on Google you're routed to a bunch of other websites and you're three clicks deep from getting the answer you want. And it's pretty interesting. Like this is one of the modules that you would expect Google to roll out in their AI generated responses, but they just haven't gotten around to it.

It's funny because people used to critique Google for generating their own content based around the links.

Right. They're like, you're hurting celebrity net worth.

Yeah, yeah. You're hurting small businesses because you're not allowing the clicks to go through.

Same thing with the lyrics websites. Like rap genius was its own thing, but then Google sucked all the lyrics. Lyrics in. You type the lyrics, they just give you the lyrics right there. You're not clicking.

You're not genius shareholders. But good for brutal Alphabet.

Yeah, exactly. But now perplexity is the next gen.

Yeah, but yeah, perplexity, like it is.

Cool how much they're doing and how fast they're moving on the ui. Considering low employee count, it is kind of funny.

The awesome thing is they're clearly like iterating based on consumer interest at that time, so they don't have to do everything at point one once. But they nailed the election stuff.

Yep, yep.

A bunch of really good graphs and data around that. Now they're doing cryptocurrency, which all the election attention is now able to just lock into, you know, new markets.

Yeah. Let's go to Rob Schmidt. I think Jake Paul has idolized Mike Tyson his entire life. Knew he needed money and found a way to get him rich again. So Tyson made like 20 million. Is that true?

Like, yeah, I think he may have made. Made more than, than Jake on this. Okay. On the fight itself. So anyways, I think. I don't know if this is real. Yeah, so, so, so UFC is the way to think about boxing is you have historically you have like a commission. I don't even know if that was in this because it was more of like a, you know, it was not like a sanction. It was an exhibition fight, not a sanctioned fight. But in the ufc, there's basically like the league and there's commissions because like there's gambling on it. There needs to be like some like, rules and you know, non biased organization. But yeah, this I would love to believe this is true. I'm sure that Jake Paul really does like Mike Tyson and respects him. Why else would you want to fight somebody? Like, sure, if you're a fan of boxing.

I wonder if that's true because Jake Paul's so young. He didn't grow up during the Mike Tyson era.

I know, but he got like ridiculously focused on boxing for the last like five, six years. And you have to imagine he's seen every single Tyson fight and yeah, and like idolized him.

It's like how Tyson, we have respect for a Lamborghini Countach. I said that was before our time.

Tyson like is an example of like somebody who's monetized their attention very well. He turned, you know, being an athlete into, you Know being a major cannabis investor and entrepreneur.

Yep.

So true.

So yeah.

So shout out to Jake if this is true.

Yeah.

17K likes got his idol loaded.

Yeah, I'm excited. I wonder what he'll do with it. Maybe he'll.

One of the greatest signs of respect with among men is to, is to help. If you respect somebody, help them make $20 million.

Yeah, that's great.

That was the foundation of this partnership.

Sure, sure. Yeah. Mutual respect. Let's go to Max Novinstern. He says the most expensive mistake this decade will not will be not being optimistic enough. And Packy says, preach. I love it.

I'm sure somebody else commented top, top.

But I think it's right. I think it's right. Like we are going into so many positives, so many interesting technologies. Like there's so many things that are going to get built out in big ways and then also small ways. We see this with like, you see these amazing LLM demos and then you're at the DMV and you're like, this is still on paper and pencil. Like, yeah, there's still so much low hanging fruit.

We're catching rockets with chopsticks.

It's crazy.

How are you not more optimistic?

Yeah, yeah. It's a great time. Great time to be alive and I'm sure packing.

Yeah. You know the reason. So the, so the real sign that like we've turned a corner in America is when like our, our children are like 10 years old and they're like, dad, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to be a podcaster.

I want to be a rocket scientist.

I want to be an astronaut. Yeah, you're like shed a tear.

Yeah, I love it. I love it.

I recorded this podcast so that you could go to space.

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, the Ben Franklin quote.

Yeah.

I learned podcasting and media so that my son may learn war.

Intergalactic travel normally.

Like I studied war politics and blah blah, blah business so that his son could study art. Yeah, it's like the gist of that quote, but it's great. Do we have another promoted post?

I think we got, I think we have one more. I said it was the last.

I mean but I think they want more. They want a lot of ad reads.

Last one from Promoted post from Ralph Lauren.

Fantastic.

Our hashtag Polar Bear Polo bear doesn't just stop at sweaters. Just from throw pillows and pajamas to cable knit accessories. The RL Holiday 2024 collection includes the perfect gifts for celebrating. Discover the Polar bear Shop Here, polar bear is just such a timeless illustration, staple of the Ralph collection.

Call to action. It's Ralph lauren.com. is that correct?

Yeah, R. Lauren Co. And so what. What I'm most impressed about is that, you know, they included a link on here. It still managed to get 20,000 views, which is difficult uphill battle if you're including links. So whoever's managing their social kill link next time. But impressive traction regardless. But anyways, this is just such a. I love this bear. Every time I see him, I know, I know it's Q4 and I know that there's a lot of work to do, but also we got some, you know, nice celebrations.

I also saw it kind of break into our world in the defense tech community because there's a, there's a photo of the bear wearing a Hawaiian shirt and everyone's like, oh, he's got the Palmer lucky fit, on which I love.

Give the bear a gun.

Give the bear. Yes, the Ralph Lauren.

But they even have like a. You know, hopefully they make one. You know, this, this could be a good gift for you if they have a father with three sons. The bear dad and the three sons. I'll get it for you.

Okay, fantastic. Thank you. Related to the Last regular post, Dr. Dad PhD says a show called White Mirror, where we have cool technology and everything goes great. I love this. I would definitely watch this.

I know this. TV productions.

Yeah. The problem is like, if you don't have conflict, you don't have a story. And so every, every sci fi story has to be somewhat disturbing, but you.

Can'T just have it somewhat dystopian. Like there was so much about, like, I just feel like everything in our life is like finally starting to, to just like it's all oriented around science fiction.

Right?

Like, even we looked at it, the like GM office in the 60s looked like a sci fi novel. Right? Tesla's entire last major product launch was all like the robo taxi, the humanoid robots.

You know what is a good example of this? Have you watched the Expanse? The Expanse is this fantastic sci fi show. It was a book series and Bezos bought it to do the. It was on Syfy channel and they brought it over to Amazon and Amazon threw a bunch of money behind it. So it turned into like almost Game of Thrones production level. Really great show. But what's interesting is that the, the show is like hard sci fi. So there's spaceships, there's interstellar or interplanetary travel. They go between Mars and the asteroid belt. But the, the Technology is not the villain necessarily.

Yeah.

Like they have spaceships, but the villains are still here.

Human. Yeah.

And so it's really cool. And I've always wanted, I've always wanted to see like a, a sci fi story where it's just like Chinatown in space.

Yeah.

Or, you know, it's like, yeah, the technology is there, but the technology is not the best.

Maybe, maybe Hollywood will go more, more techno optimistic instead of focusing on, you know, social issues. It can go techno optimist, recreate the same social issues we have today in space.

Yeah.

Sudden. I'd watch that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I think that can hit a little bit harder. And there are some, there are some movies that do that. Like even in Inception, like, like the dream technology is not really like the problem that they're working against. They're not trying to ban dream technology. They're trying to solve this other problem within. They're doing, they're doing a heist.

Yeah.

And the technology is just.

No Atlas Shrugged.

Yeah, exactly. So I would, I would gladly watch White Mirror. There's already some White Mirror shows out there. We just need to celebrate them. And it's shows like the Expanse, which I highly recommend. Let's go to Anna Marie Holdern. Ann Marie Holdern. She says Jamie Dimon responds to Trump. First of all, I wish the President well and thank you. It's a very nice note, but I just want to tell the President also, I haven't had a boss in 25 years and I'm not about ready to start. Dimon tells Lisa Abramowicz. Interesting. We don't talk about politics, so I don't even know what to say about that.

I'm not, yeah. I'm not sure I can comment on this except that we know what it's like to have a boss because I worked at a, worked at a Ritz Carlton once.

Sure.

And I once worked at a nightclub. I was the guy that would pick up the cigarette butts. Then the next morning when I was 14, that was a good job.

I was doing basic thing when I worked at Citadel and Bain Capital.

Yeah. I, Yeah, I didn't like, I didn't like having a boss too much.

Yeah. I couldn't do it.

Yeah.

I've never had a full time boss. Full time job boss. It's like not for me. So I understand. And you know, being a Bean Air without a boss, that's the dream.

Yep, that's the dream.

So shout out to Diamond. I hope you can work with the administration and bring about an amazing American decade and support financial innovation wherever it may come from. Let's go to Roon. Rune says AGI might bring infinite abundance, but on the other hand there's only so many houses on Sea Cliff. It's true.

Very real.

Yeah, it's very real. I was thinking about this like you know, in the, in the really, really far out future like you might have something where it's like, okay, I go in my Neuralink VR world and I have the Sea Cliff house. But I still think even if it's, even if you can't tell the difference in the moment, there's something people want the real thing.

Another bean air can't have.

And it's the same thing with, it's the same thing with art. Like, like you can go and get a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, but that's not the one that has value. It's the story. It's like the, there's something about these stories and I think that a lot of that, that element is underrated in how AI will transform even post AGI.

Like it's sort of like it's almost innately human to feel scarcity. Right. And that's why one of one asks sets like a Ferrari tailor made 812. Competition is always package. Yeah.

Cars and bids exactly like these are going to be assets even if the, even if the production values are artificially constrained. Y or you know, with a company like artificially constrained.

But the, the scarcity is very real. We feel it. When you go look at the prices for some of these cars.

Totally, totally. But yeah, I think it's very instructive to look at the story of chess. Like the computers beat the chess masters in I think the 80s for a while there was a hybrid centaur chess phase. Are you familiar with this where essentially no human could beat a computer one on one, but a human playing with a computer could beat the computer consistently. Yes, consistently. Because the computer would recommend a bunch of things and the human could use like their intuition, neuralink bowl case to pick, to pick the right thing from the set. And the computer was just augmenting the human and that was Centaur. Chess was dominant for I think like the 90s. I'm not exactly sure. But then at a certain point the AI got so good that no human even playing alongside a computer can beat a computer. Like computers are always worse. The human will only make it worse. But look at what's happened. Chess, it's exploded. Like Chess.com is worth like $100 million or more. Like they're Big company Magnus Carlson Hikaru. Like, Alex Botez, like, there's multiple chess influencers, there's chess competitions, there's Queen's Gambit on Netflix is a sensation. People like playing it, and people like watching humans play it. And there's even all this metagaming about, like, how can we get the humans not to use the AI and cheat? And there was that scandal about the guy who might have had something in his butt or something. You remember this?

Oh, yeah, yeah. The vibe, the vibrating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. Or, like, in his shoe. And so, like, like, you could imagine this, like, future scenario where, like, people, like, the same thing could be true for podcasting, where it's like, yeah, you could go get a more factual podcast from the AI, but people want to see the human do it.

You want to hear us mess ups? Yeah.

You want to hear us get it wrong. And you want to see, like, the messy. The messy, like, edges that come from, like, like, actual human dialogue. And the risk of, like, hey, I might have to put some caution tape over my mouth because what, what I might say might get me canceled. Yeah, the AI isn't going to get canceled. You're just going to refresh it and start from scratch.

I've been in just on the topic of SF&SF adjacent real estate. Like, you have after decades of poor governance, you have to imagine, like, you can go buy a similar house in, like, San Francisco, the home of the technology industry and one of the biggest economies in the world, for a similar price as, like, some, like, just okay house in, like, a random nice neighborhood of Dallas. Like, what's going to be worth more in, like, 10 years? Right. Especially as SF's local government governance stuff gets figured out. And so anyways, like, I think buying anything in that area, you're probably going to do pretty well.

Yeah, I mean, that's why it was important for us to promote that post about the $150 million home that hopefully one of our listeners will take home, because there's only so many of those. SAWYER Merritt says SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell on the company having $22 billion in government contracts. We earned that. We bid it. We were the lowest price, best bidder. We won and we execute. It's not a bad thing to serve the United States government with great capability and products. What a badass quote. Just like throwing down the gauntlet. I love it.

Yeah, that's a quote that could go on the. On the wall.

Fantastic. Potential brother of the week here. Yeah, she's fantastic.

Put that one aside.

Yeah, we gotta put this one aside. That's going on the short list.

Yeah.

I did a whole video on Gwen Shotwell in her career. It was one of my first viral videos on YouTube because everyone's talking about Elon and no one really knew the story of Gwen Shotwell, but she's been super critical. Took a whole ton of career risk going in super early. And he's just, you know, just driven that company and just executed, executed, executed and just fantastic public speaker, fantastic counterweight to Elon's, you know, experimental mindset and like, you know, dreaming big. She's the one that can actually go and drive.

Good example. You know, if you're somebody who's interested in deep tech, but you're more of a business mind, you can go have impact, impact in these industries, go to look up our portfolios. Any number of those companies needs financial and operations innovators to drive these companies forward. And on that note, I can't help myself. I want to do one more promoted post from Carl Yang, who's building financial products at Ramp.

Okay.

He says he caught up with a friend and that friend said, I'm supposed to be making strategic decisions and turning around companies with my superior insight site. Since a guy with a HBS hat with his mouth open and the partner at the firm is saying fix the effing AP process question mark or exclamation point? Exclamation point. And yeah, a lot of like, you know, PE is just going in and you're not going to create a tremendous amount of value by getting rid of the fax machines and the sort of like, you know, taking payments and checks and stuff like that. But you can have a pretty big impact and ramp, ramp is a fantastic way to do that. I understand that they are fairly dominant with a lot of the larger PE firms for good reason.

Bring it in.

It's just built into their process now. It's very sharp. Thank you to Carl for innovating in one of the most important sectors of.

Our economy and happy to promote RAMP at any time. Tell them the technology brother sent you if you onboard. Aja Cortez says my father went back to college when he was 40, graduated medical school at 47 and has been now a doctor going on 20 years. I didn't realize it at the time, but it made a deep impression that a man can reinvent himself at any time. Age is a non factor and that with consistency, effort, discipline, you can do whatever you want. I had no idea people considered age to be a factor at all in a man slowing down. Down. Until I was in my 20s, I was never raised to think that way. That's a fantastic post. That's very, very inspiring. And that's true. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

If you're going into work and you feel like your work is at the KMS building.

Or if you.

If you ever feel. If you ever feel like you need to have a blanket on at work because you're so miserable.

Yep.

And you feel sick, reinvent yourself. I think this honestly, like, what's funny is, do you remember being in college and, like, the oldest guy in the room was always, like, in the military and, like, graduated?

Yeah.

And it's very normalized to, like, go in the military, do that for 10 years, come out, and then just, like, have a totally new career.

Right.

I only know how to shoot a gun.

I'm just not.

If you only do. If you only do the things that you know how to do, you'll be sweeping floors your whole life. Right. So. So go reinvent yourself. Make, like, big, you know, big moves into different industries.

And there's so many great stories. Even seen that dude who's. Who was a Navy seal, then a doctor at Harvard and then a astronaut.

Yeah.

And it's just like, he's an Asian dude. And the meme is like, he must have like, the only. The only Asian dude with, like, parents who are proud of him or something. Yeah. He did the thing and, like, satisfied all of their expectations. I love that. It's so good. But yeah, just crush and go.

Just crush.

Yeah.

You can just do things.

You can just do things. Oh, this is a great one from Ben Miles. He asks us, do we have any favorite deal toys? This one is cool from Ginkgo Bioworks. And I actually met the Ginkgo Bioworks guys back in, like, 2013 in a. Bought in an office in Boston. And.

And you're invested, right?

I did not. I had no money to my name, so it was miserable. But. But I have an interesting fundraising story.

If I could go back in time, my investment strategy would just be to, like, give John Coogan $100 million in 2012.

Well, Senra calls me the. The. The forest gump of tack because I've been like, oh, yeah, I was in the same YC batch as Coinbase. Oh, yeah. I was like, hanging out with the Ginkgo Bioworks guys this one time. Oh, yeah. He's like, met this dude the random time. And it's just like all these, like, sliding doors moments in Silicon Valley, but Ginkgo Bioworks. It was fascinating. I met with the founding team, we were thinking about working with them and we'd raised something like a million bucks or million and a half for Soylent. And, and they were like, okay, like you're the first company. We were YC company. You're the first company that's in like bio or food or anything that's not software that's being taken seriously by VCs. Like what in the founder literally told me is what we'd really love for you to do is go and raise a massive like $20 million round because that would just like be a massive signal to the market that like this is an investable category. And, and I was like, ah, that's funny. Like we'll never do that. And then like six months later we raised a 20 million dollar round. And then immediately after, Ginkgo started raising really big rounds too. And their business is ripping. And then they, and they went public. And now, you know, the CTO of Palantir is actually on their board. Shams. And it's just a very interesting company if you don't know what they do. They, they, they manufacture things for fragrances, but they do a lot of like chemical and bioengineering. It's a very cool lab. Even when I saw it in 2013, they had all these robots moving around like pipetting things.

Yeah.

So not a robotics company, but not a robotics company. But they were leveraging robotics and automation and they built a bunch of software to automate testing. So you know, you need to test like 10, you know, 10 different titrations of one chemical by 10 different titrations of a different chemical. You mix that creates a hundred different various. You could just have a PhD student just sitting there doing it. That sucks. That's what they do in every lab in America, like all the universities, even Caltech, but they had just automated all that. So they were able to iterate through all these experiments like much faster. And I think they wound up creating a bunch of like basically industrial chemicals that they could go and sell.

But I actually like the starting point as an inspiration for some of our own deal toys.

Yeah.

Of like imagine a microphone in glass.

Well, I mean, I mean, if you're not familiar, every week we do the brother of the week. We award someone who exemplifies what it means to be a technology brother, a student of capitalism, a capital allocator, et cetera. And at the end of the year, we'll be sending out deal toys to commemorate each Brother of the week. And so we want to do something that captures the fact that not only are they a student of capitalism, but they're also a great poster because you can't.

You gotta do both.

As we saw with, with Mark Cuban, he was brother a week, but he left X. He's no longer a poster, so he had to rescind the award.

Yeah.

So he won't be getting a deal toy. But send in your thoughts, let us know. What do you think our brother of the week deal toy should look like? I'm thinking something with an X in there. Something with some dollar signs, something to represent technology, capital, brotherhood.

Thank you to Ben for service this to us.

Yeah, thanks, man. Send us your best ideas.

Yep.

Feel free to get on, chat GPT, Dolly and. And create some.

There you go.

Yeah, create some AI art for us to. To inspire us. Morgan Housel says despite it's a quote. He says despite its success, Wong remains acutely aware that Nvidia's leadership position could prove fleeting, which may explain his relentless work ethic. I do everything I cannot to go. I can. I do everything I can not to go out of business. It's from an interview in Fortune with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia. I love it. I love a relentless work ethic. Unclear. He's even clear how risky he is. And it seems like his leadership positions in a pretty strong place. I mean, they have massive pricing power mentality. But maybe I'm wrong.

Gets you deals listed.

There's a lot of startups that are going after this doing specific chip designs for AI, for LLMs. Maybe there's a risk, who knows?

Obviously there's incredible IP, but we know it's a thin wrap around TSMC.

TSMC. Yeah.

And so the reason that Nvidia is successful today is because of that mentality across decades at this point. Right?

Yeah. I also just think like, yeah, I mean, obviously there's like a talent war in everything AI right now and Nvidia is no different. There's a lot of people that made a ton of money working for Nvidia during the latest stock run up. You got to retain them. So you got to go and proselytize your culture and then you got to bring in new people. So you need to talk about, you know, how your company is different from the rest.

But here's, here's the challenge with Nvidia, right? They've grown so quickly that the average employees like a multi, multi, multi millionaire. And it's like we've seen this before, we've had people on the podcast that talk about, you know, I have $10 million of assets. I. I worry that the dog in me died. Right. And so Jensen needs to be out there pounding the table, being like, we need to keep feeding the dog within us.

Yep.

Keep alive. Otherwise somebody's gonna come eat our lunch.

I think he needs to be flexing on the employees a little bit more. He's not a watch guy, but if he was, then, yeah. He talks about his life, that product manager who's making a million dollars a month now. Well, good luck getting this.

You know, he needs an RM like smiley 2 point exactly $3 million.

You see this guy driving McLaren F1 to work, it's like that's kind of out of the price range of that rich product manager. So, you know, that's going to get the product manager to work a little, get to the next level, get that senti. Get to that bear status.

Yeah. Make it he. Show.

Show the employee who's worth 10 that they would be happy if they got to 100.

Yeah.

That's the goal.

Yeah.

Nicole Wiscoff, speaking of cars, fantastic capital allocator, fantastic car appreciator, but throwing a little shade on Aston Martin here. She says, I saw the first Aston Martin suv, the dbx, on the road a few years ago. I thought it was the most be incredible car. Car was able to take it out for a drive yesterday. I felt like I went back in time 20 years. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it didn't even hold a candle to the Tesla. And it's 200k more expensive.

Okay, so.

So first mistake. So disrespecting a legacy, definitely.

Yeah, that hurts. Aston Martin's a fantastic manufacturer. So here's the thing with Aston. You don't drive an Astonish in for the interior, electronics, that's for sure. That said, they. They do have new ownership as of the last couple years, I believe. Lawrence Stroll, father of Lance Stroll, who's in F1, recently took the brand over. And the newest generation of cars that's just hitting the street, just hitting dealerships, has had really big upgrades to the interior. So. But yeah, you're driving it for the lines, for the leather, for the heritage, for the significance. And I would. Here's my only thing with Aston. If, you know, a lot we've talked about, you know, needing to make sure that your next car is about the value of 1% of your AUM.

Exactly.

And so if you have a million. Yeah, yeah.

So you should be budgeting 500k. The problem with the DBX, it's a 300k car.

Yeah.

So she's actually 200k shy.

So the reason she's probably like frustrated with equality is because she should be going after maybe a Cullinan or I.

Would even stay within the Aston, the Aston ecosystem, you know. No, if she, if she can raise another 100 million, she's in, she's in, you know, Valkyrie territory.

Yeah.

She could get a Lagonda Taro. Have you seen that car from their premium line. You could even go back and get a Bulldog. Have you seen the Bulldog? That's a fantastic car. It's a retro. It looks weird. Looks.

Yeah. For any other. For any other sort of emerging GPS that, that you know, maybe can't fit an as a new aston within the 1% market. Aum. The great thing about Astons is they lose like half their value in the first year.

Yeah.

So if A DBX at 300k is too much, wait a year and you can buy the same car with 2000 miles for about 150k.

That's true.

So that's one of the beauties of the Aston brand is everything's half off after a year.

Yeah. It's fantastic. Well, good luck to you, Nicole. Make sure you get a really nice car. Yano says the most mispriced idea in markets today, Crypto founders can finally build the products they want to build, where they want to build them. We are truly entering the golden age for crypto products. Couldn't agree more. We see this with polymarket and a.

Huge catalyst of that is the Bridge acquisition. Yeah, it wasn't I think until. Still there hasn't. Is that the only or one of a handful of like billion dollar crypto M and a. That wasn't a token, you know, it wasn't like somebody launching a token.

It was a little bit more of a classic, you know, product acquisition. Little like almost a B2B SaaS company. You can model it that way and so.

Yeah, but there's also like to a.

Strategic acquirer you need to live off in like crypto Bizarre land International, whatever. It's like yeah, we could make a.

San Francisco company, we could make a, you know, a platform like polymarket to sell our ad inventory. Right. Sort of a liquid market where I want to know the second before I read a Promoted post that it's the highest dollar amount that we could possibly capture for that ad unit.

Right.

More programmatic. So bunch of cool things coming down the pipeline. I think That I think next YC batch, I'm sure we'll see a lot of crypto company architecture. RF. RF requests for startups or RFs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be great. Connor McDonald, been on the show before, but we need to give him a follow. The core benefit of AI.

Give us a follow.

No, no, no. This is, this is we, we need to follow him. So see the follow icon? That means it's their first time on the show. Once you're on the show, we'll give you a follow and then we'll know the next time that you're a repeat, you know, guest. So Connor says the core benefit of AI is to systematize and automate day to day responsibilities and leave more time to podcast and write newsletters. Let's go.

Go.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, 99% of my life is now automated with AI and I can spend 812 hours a day podcasting.

And we do.

And we do. And this is the future and I hope everyone joins.

And I think that, you know, a lot of this episode, the early part of this episode was talking about, you know, Ozempic and the trends there and one of the really positive externalities with, with people being on Ozempic, doing less degenerate sports betting and, you know, spending money on Doritos. They can, they'll have, they'll have more money. They'll probably have more cards in their wallet. And so I think Ridge will be a big beneficiary of that because people just, maybe people might, might have so much cash on them.

Yeah.

That they might need multiple wallets. The Ridge wallet has a nice sort of like money clip attached to it. So look to see Ridge, Ridge's market cap do a nice multiple.

It's fantastic. Let's go to Daniel. He says VCs are the real founders. Couldn't agree more.

Couldn't agree more.

You know, Jeremy Giffon has a, has a hot take that investors are more interesting than founders. Have you heard this?

No.

It's a good one. It's interesting. He's an investor, so he's talking his own book, but his idea is that a lot of the really, really successful investors are looking across markets, across. It's like the fox and the hedgehog thing where the founder knows one really big idea and is grinding at it, building a company in that one narrow space, whereas the investor can actually broaden and become a generalist and look at capital markets, public markets, private markets, and really understand everything.

Yeah, founders have a more deeper understanding of their like generalists within their business or within their industry maybe, but it's still like a very like Jeremy, Jeremy's like takes per minute or is like very high.

Fantastic.

And that's really what we look for. But anyways, you know, the way that Daniel's progressing, he'll have like a $500 million solo GP5 fund within the next 10 years, without a doubt. So I think he's just sort of like setting himself up for success.

I think so. Another huge talent move. Francois Chollet is out at Google entering free agency. He's going to start a new company. One of the goat programmers at Google put up a massive couple years there on the team, built a product called Keras, was deeply involved in machine learning and also had a great appearance, star appearance, great performance on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast and is also involved in a very interesting AI benchmark that no LLM has been able to defeat yet. And so he's been working with that with Wade over at Zapier and just clearly a very thoughtful person on AI. Throughout all the boom and all the craziness, he's always been very locked in and understanding, pragmatic, where the hype is, where the limitations are. He's not a doomer, he's not a complete optimist. Always nuanced and he never really gets in fights. I see. But he's always, he's always bringing like really good critiques. Still optimistic, still loves the technology, obviously building on it. So great to see that he's out starting a new company with a friend. I wonder who it is. We'll certainly cover it here and I have a feeling we're going to be ringing the size gong when this guy raises this guy. I mean this is a, this is a, this is big move. This is an all time all.

A lot of. You know, when this, when this, when this post went up, two things happened. One, I happen to have Bloomberg open big red candle on the. On Alphabet stock. It was really rough to see recovered but not, not completely. And then two VCs around the country called up their.

Yeah, the phones were ringing off the hook.

You know, even Net jets was, was getting you know, more calls than usual. But a lot of Gulf Stream sort of like took off in unison and sort of descended. Hoping to get some FaceTime with him because a big round is coming.

Yeah, I mean let's just review his career for a little bit. I mean he built Karos Powers ML solutions that countless companies touch it Powers your recommendations on YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, the Fraud filtering of your credit card transactions. Waymo. Cars that drive you around San Francisco. This guy's a beast. One of the greatest to ever do it. And we're excited to see where you take it next. Let's go to Zach says Update. I hit $1,000,000 in MRR. Still not sleeping in. And he says he's quote, tweeting himself from almost 10 months ago. Been losing sleep to the grind. Purely running on the urge to be financially free. After I hit 100k mrr in high school, then I'll start sleeping in. What a beast.

He's still. He's still in high school.

I don't know. Maybe he is. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like he's still in. In high school.

Animal future. Just getting started.

Just getting started.

Future brother of the week. Potentially.

Potentially. By the. By the holy Trinity VC firms. I could see big dollars going into this.

Absolutely.

Big, big contract signs.

Yeah. It's really about the attitude.

Yeah.

And if you're not sleep deprived right now, just understand that money doesn't sleep either.

Yeah, that's true. True. Yeah. Let's go to Eigenrobot. He says he's quote tweeting the ball is orange, who says a lot of lives would be incredibly different if this existed. And it's the United States high speed rail system. And he says, no, they wouldn't. People would still take the plane or drive. Your lives suck primarily because of the circumstances of your births and the choices you have made in this life. A redundant passenger train system would not meaningfully affect. Affect the magnitude of your suffering. I couldn't agree more. I thank God every single day that America industrialized largely after the invention of the automobile, so that we don't need a bunch of slow, inflexible trains cluttering up our country. It's meaningless. And to all the trained people out there, stop coping. We have planes and cars and they go everywhere. And we don't need trains. And in fact, America does have a fantastic rail system. We just use it for freight because America is a lot bigger than France to Germany. Like, France to Germany is like the equivalent of, you know, Boston to New York. Like, we just don't. And you know what we do have? High speed rail between Boston and New York. It's the Acela. It actually works pretty well.

Go right on that.

But no one wants to ride from Chicago to LA on a train. Even if you're going 200 miles an hour. That's like a. A 14 hour.

Yeah. My little brother's actually, like, loves the Train? Yeah, he just, like, he's a train guy. Like, just like take in the view and, and relax. But I always laugh because I'm like, you're paying more.

Yep.

You're. You're sitting in a. In a uncomfortable seat. You're. You're spending the night in this little tube. And you could have spent.

Yeah.

You know, $200 less and gotten there in four hours. Your time's worth a lot more.

I actually do have one nice thing to say about training. Fantastic. For Monk Mode. When I was living in Sunnyvale doing YC and I was dead broke, I had to go from Pasadena to Sunnyvale, and I went by train, and it took me all day, like 6am I walk to a local Metro Rail station, take that to downtown. Then downtown, I get a bus transfer out to Bakersfield, then a train through the Central Valley, which was actually beautiful and fantastic. And I was able to sit there. No wi fi, nothing. I was able just to read this book on actually language models. It was very, very weird, but it was about natural language processing, which was kind of like the precursor AI system. Fascinating. Like, the. The algorithms are like human intelligible, essentially. Still. It's not just like crazy tensors and stuff. Like you can just understand intellectually how it works. And then another bus when you get to, you know, Oakland, essentially, to the Caltrain, and then walk from the Caltrain to Sunnyvale took forever. But the Monk Mode was fantastic. And being able to get on a train and just watch the countryside go by and actually see how beautiful America is and how much space we have to build is very, very inspiring. So trains we like to hate, but somewhat underrated. Let's go to Dylan Field, founder of figma. He says this week all eyes should be on truck, Trump's pick for treasury secretary. This appointment is a preview of what we will see over the next four years on topics spanning global tariffs, tax policy, the price of bitcoin, China, and more. Of course, there's a lot of drama. And he writes a thread. I love that he's weighing in on this. This is so great. Like, you know, there is a world where Dylan is just talking about design.

We need. I. I really only want to see threads from people that are post economic. Right. So if you're not a bean, air, don't write threats.

I agree.

If you are being air, write more threads.

Yeah, X should actually have a functionality for that where there. Where it links with your bank account proof of funds. And I can say.

Or your carta.

Or your carta. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your paper wealth as well. And then I can just, I can just say, hey, today X, I only want to see content from Sentis.

Yeah.

Throw some bears in there but don't give me any.

That should be a separate feat.

Any. Maybe Cuban would come back single digit millionaires. I'm not interested. Interested.

Yeah. Cuban might even come back.

He might. He might. It would be a big boost to him.

Yeah.

You know, Elon kind of has the boost where all of his posts kind of get promoted. No one really knows exactly if it's hard coded or not or he's just posting bangers. But we need that for, for all senties and billionaires. Yeah, for sure. So shout out to Dylan. I'm excited. I'm going to keep an eye on it. I don't know has the treasury secretary been teased or leaked or announced?

I mean there's a couple, there's a.

Couple people that are out that are.

In the room running but we don't.

Talk about politics here. So we're not going to cover it.

That's the show.

But that's the show. I think we should ring the size gong one last time just to commemorate the end of the show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe. Give us five stars. Repost everything. Send our clips to your friends.

Create a TV clips.

Yes.

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Thank you. And send us your ideas for deal toys. Thank you.