The Truth Zone, Bear Domestication, Daily Driving Supercars, Lever up

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Okay, cool. Yeah, Peter, I'll talk to you later. Thanks. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we're saying thanks to a small brand called Enchilada Surfboards. They sent us some stickers, some merch. Go give them a follow. We've reacted to their tweets before. A lot of cool inside jokes for the defense tech crew. I still don't understand basically any of them, but I do believe I know the story behind this picture. This was someone who was on, and I think on an Anduril test site or something. It was just kind of like a friendly dude and just had a great vibe. And so they. They got a picture of him and they. And they put it on a T shirt, and there it's become part of their brand.

Yeah. The Anderil to surf apparel brand pipeline is sort of beginning, clearly. Yeah. And we're excited about it.

I just like that. Yeah. I mean, we'll talk about the merch, I'm sure, but it's great that there. That there's, like, you know, more stuff going on and, like, the creative merch.

Southern California has two. Two histories. Aerospace and defense and merch and surfing.

Surfing, yeah.

And so if you can figure out a way to combine those, there's a lot of alpha in that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of defense tech, did you read. We got to enter the truth zone. We're doing some fact checking. We're keeping the information accountable. A lot of people online call it the misinformation. I think that goes too far. I think we got to be nice to the information. It's a great, great outlet. As we discussed earlier, they just brought on Taylor Lorenz to write an article. I talked to her about that. I'm excited for that to drop. And I got a lot of news from the Information. I have the app on my phone. I read it all the time. It's great.

I get the push notifications. They're fantastic publication. And somebody needs to stand up for the journalists, besides journalists. Right. They get a. They're doing super important work. They get a lot of hate online.

They're in the arena.

They're in the arena. Just like. And so this new segment is really meant to help cultivate journalistic integrity at the Information, but more broadly. And, yeah, we're excited to dive in. Today we got an article from Corey Weinberg talking about Trump's win and the impact on the defense tech space.

Bulls.

Bulls, yeah.

Despite talk of a bubble. So obviously a lot of people are focused on, you know, what does the Trump administration mean for defense tech? It's. And it's, it is, it is genuinely confusing because defense tech is very right wing coded. Right. It's like American flags and like lifting and very, like masculine and very Joe Rogan. But there's been this big wave where it's like. Well, actually, they're all talking about how they're no longer neo cons. They actually want to pull out of all the war.

The funny thing is Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala.

Yeah.

How does that, how do you make sense of that?

Yeah, yeah, it's odd. I mean, I, my hope is that the, the new administration is obsessed with deterrence over conflict. And so this is the Joe Lonsdale take where he said, you have to build defense technology that is so asymmetric in its impact that the thought of conflict is, is unfathomable. And so you just don't go to war. And Palmer said this to where Palmer said, people, war start when people miscalculate their abilities to attack and they think that's a weak, that's a weak target, I can go after it. And so in general, it's this odd kind of. It's a little, it's a little bit of a paradox. Like you might see more defense spending with less war, which would be great.

Because, well, defense spending has been at historical lows over the last five, 10 years. And so, yeah, it actually dipped down substantially. And so the renewed investment in the space is positive for a lot of reasons. I mean, right away, I think we got to start at the headline. Here's what I highlighted. Trump's Win Stokes Defense Tech Bulls Despite Talk of a Bubble. So right away, you know, there is talks of there being a bubble in defense tech, but our point of view is, I think, the information, you know, obviously they're going to put their own spin on it. If I was writing this article, I would say bubbles are awesome, right? And so Trump's Win stokes Defense Tech bulls. Bubbles are awesome would be how I would write that.

I just got a copy of the.

But I'm not a journalist, right.

I just got a copy of the new book by Stripe Press by Bern Hobart and Tobias called Bubbles. Yeah, And I haven't read it yet, but I've heard his talk and I've been on calls with him, and it's very interesting. He has a bunch of really good points about how bubbles are what allow people to start really ambitious companies. And there's a lot of dividends from those. And that, in fact the average Joe doesn't usually get hurt by a bubble because they invest more regularly. And the people that get the most hurt when bubbles pop. Yeah, exactly. Are the risk on folks. So you don't need to be like the argument of what about Main Street? Doesn't actually apply to bubbles popping. But let's go through some of this article. So they talk about Saronic startup that is trying to build and sell a fleet of autonomous military boats to the US Navy. They raised $175 million at a $1 billion valuation, despite having secured only $17 million in government contracts, according to investor materials.

Yeah, right away I had to highlight trying to. This implies that they're not already selling to the US Government, or at least that's kind of the angle that they're taking.

But they have a contract.

So they have a contract.

They are successfully doing that.

Yeah. So they'.

So, yeah, when you're in the truth zone, we're not going to let that fly.

Yep.

They expect to generate 12.5 million in revenue next, but next year they're hoping to hit 150. So, yeah, I mean, if you're growing 10x revenue, and it makes sense with any. I mean, this is a young company. It makes sense that if you're going to, you know, be building something as complicated as a boat for the military, like, there's going to be some lead up to actually, I think large contracts.

I think Andreessen stole those shares at a billion. If they can land this 150 million with the Navy, they're getting in at less than a 10x revenue multiple for a company that, if they stay on this trajectory, should be doing billions.

Yeah, the whole tone here still, the Saronic fundraising was the kind of deal that has set off alarm bells that the money flowing into young firms building rockets, drones and autonomous warships has far outpaced the government contracts.

The only alarm bells, you know, within our networks that it was setting off is that other defense tech CEOs were like, wow, I'm getting. I got to get in on this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And.

And the size gong.

Yeah, that was the alarm belong. That was the real. It wasn't actually an alarm bell. It was the size gong boom getting hit.

Yeah, exactly. We got to get a gong on here. So there's. There's quotes from a bunch of different investors. Matt at Garcia Capital says the sector has become a little hypey, which I think everyone agrees with. This is true. There are a lot of companies that need to grow into their valuations. Probably also true. But again, so here it's a good time to need to grow into evaluation.

Yeah.

So here's, you have like, you have low interest rates, you have more money flowing in. Like this is the time when you have like the worst time to try and grow into a valuation was 2022, 2023, when everything was down. Now it's like, it's okay, you can breathe, you can raise some more money.

The, the bubble narrative here is dependent on this idea that government investment is outpacing government contracts. Right. Which is the entire nature of venture, which is like let's deploy a lot of money into big ideas that don't have a lot of revenue now but might have a ton of revenue in 2034. Right. And so I think the whole premise of this entire paragraph here is sort of incorrect and just sort of a little bit disingenuous given that that's the entire venture model.

Yeah, I mean the thing with the defense tech bubble is like, you could say that it's the same bubble as you know, like compared to the crypto bubble or like the NFT bubble that happened. Like I just think about the. Sure that it's like a what it's going to be a 10x forward revenue multiple in that company. That's not that crazy compared to what we were seeing in some of the crypto companies where it was like a hundred or a thousand X even in just B2B software. But what, what I really or even.

Truth social obviously is commanded pretty meaningful.

Multiples like a thousand x. Yeah, actually more like 10,000x.

Yeah.

But, but, but the thing that I genuinely believe is, is, is a reason to not fear a defense tech bubble. Is that a, it's good for our team? Well, it's good, it's good for our team, it's good for our country. And the skills that you learn working at a defense tech company are super valuable. Like you're learning how to build things and work on machines and stuff and it's like a, there's a million jobs like all the primes that not just like the big companies like Anduril and stuff, but like even the primes they like the defense industry supports like hundreds of thousands of jobs. So if you learn some new skills, you can go into that and then have an impact there even if your company doesn't work. And, but no one was saying oh yeah, like an NFT guy is going to go and work on Wall street or like, or if this, if this NFT bubble pops, we're definitely going to be hiring The NFT traders at Jane street, like, no, that wasn't going to happen. And so there was definitely like a, like a. Okay, what do you do with those skills of just like hyping shit?

Yeah, the only, the only, the only thing I'd push back on that is that I have, you know, there's a buddy of mine in Malibu who you know, has been operating like a smaller crypto fund for the last few years and he's got opportunities within the Trump administration now to help, you know, potentially shepherd the new administration in terms of how do we even think about this new industry. Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah. I mean now.

Yeah. Overall, overall, I look at this as, I think 1 Bubbles are awesome to this bubble. You know, it's obvious that some really big important companies have already been built in the space Palantir and roll the big breakouts. But if, if all these billions of dollars of investment end up, you know, creating another one or two Palantirs or Anderils and that's all that happens, that's good for America, that's good for our team, that's good for Corey who wrote this article.

Yep.

And I think everybody, everybody's going to win. And the overall return profile should be similar to that of, could be very similar to climate tech. Right. Where if you looked at the core climate tech investments, they actually did do that well. But if you included Tesla in that group, it actually ended up being a really good place to invest overall.

So there's a whole section on bearish signs. Very doom pilled here at the information.

I would position this if I was going to rewrite this and maybe we could start getting early versions of this for Corey. But I would position this as just potential challenges. None of these. Every defense tech founder I know knows that what they're doing is not easy. Right. It's not like we built this cute app and we shipped it and we got our first 10 users and now it's, you know, we're going to try to get to 10,000 by next month and a million by the end of the year. Whatever. It's obviously very hard and not easy to navigate, you know, federal government, but certainly worth doing. It's worth taking on that challenge.

Yeah. And so he writes. Underpinning the optimism is the push from executives at defense tech firms like Palantir, Anduril and SpaceX for reforms in how federal agencies buy weapons and technology. They argue that instead of buying from a small handful of large firms such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, government buyers should reward younger firms the executives say can build rockets, missiles and tanks more cheaply. This argument so far hasn't helped many startups. Among among more than 125 venture backed startups focused on defense, aerospace and robotics, analyzed by Howie Wang, a deep tech analyst, just 10 firms accounted for 70% of the government contracts awarded for this year.

Yeah, that's a power law, baby.

Yeah. I mean, of course there's going to be some power law here, but the power law here is so much weaker than in like, you know, online advertising or something where search, you know, Google, one firm, Google owns like 90% of the search market.

And so yeah, to me, to me, 125.

Yeah.

It actually doesn't sound like that much at all. Like historically, like over the past few decades there's been massive consolidation in, in government contracting broadly, but especially in defense tech.

Yeah.

And I don't think that's generally good for competition. I think that, you know, if historically there were thousands of independent firms that were helping sort of like deliver the products that are, that our federal government and the DoD needs. Yeah, that's actually better. And I think one of the things about defense tech that people don't really realize is the government wants vendor diversity. Right. They don't want to be reliant on just Lockheed and Raytheon for, you know, ground based tactical missile systems, which is why AON is doing what they're doing. Right. They want multiple providers for a lot of these products. So I don't think it's the winner take all market because the government actually there ends up being natural sort of monopolies. But the government's goal is not to have certain products effectively be monopolies.

Yeah.

And it hurts taxpayers.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was in Vegas on Monday night at the, the Rockbridge Conference, Rockbridge Network Conference, which was started by JD Vance and brought together a bunch of technologists. Palmer Lecky spoke and Marc Andreessen spoke. And a lot of the focus was on this, like bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Washington, like the Hill and the Valley, there's a couple of those organizations. But Mark was talking a lot about, I mean, he's really good at telling the story of how, you know, we need to go beyond just the products into the supply chain. Who's making the drone motors, who's making the batteries. He actually called out Skydio, which is one of his portfolio companies who got their batteries embargoed by China and now they're hunting around for new batteries. And so. But it's interesting because A lot of what he was saying, a lot of what Mark was saying on stage, I was just kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all this, I know all this. I've listened to your podcast, I've seen your tweets. Like, I'm very familiar with all this. Like, this is kind of old news. But you look around and like the political people in the are like, yeah, mind blown.

Yeah.

And they're like, that was like one of the greatest presentations of all time. And it was if you hadn't heard those. And so it's really good that he's like, he's playing the hits essentially, and he's. And he understands the importance of like repeating the message in new territories and in new audiences. So. Yeah, so I really appreciated hearing that.

It was good. Yeah. Another Note here. Average 12 month employee headcount expansion slowed 37 to 22% between May and November, according to Wang. So to me that implies, you know, to the average reader that's maybe skimming it and spending a split second on this paragraph, they might think that hiring is like contraction contracting, but they're just maybe not hiring as aggressively, but they're still growing headcount. Right?

Yep.

I think that's important for readers to know. So maybe, maybe they could add some type of annotation there that says, like to be clear, these companies are still growing rapidly and you should go work for them.

Yep. Yep. They write, it's not certain that Republicans election, that the Republicans election will wins. Will make much of a difference to defense startups as it will to other sectors like cryptocurrency, which face tougher rules from Democrats. Definitely true. Defense spending is generally bipartisan and defense tech firms like SpaceX, Palantir, Shield AI and Anduril have made inroads with government contracts during the Biden administration. Yeah, I mean it's been a good time for, for defense tech generally and it seems to continue. This is less like, like there's a mega bull case or bear case. It's more just like everyone is kind of on board, which I think is good. And they call it the Silicon Valley Defense Group. Have you heard of this nonprofit they run that like Defense Tech Sec. Def. 100, like the top companies, kind of like a networking organization. Musk posted on X in response to Anduril co founder Palmer Leckie last week after Trump's win that it was very important to open the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to companies like yours pay for outcomes, not requirements documents. That is true. I was learning a lot about this at that nuclear summit where apparently there are all these rules. First off, when you apply for a new nuclear reactor design, which is probably the most complicated piece of, you know, essentially defense tech or like government technology that you can get approved, the, the nrc, the National Regulatory Commission is, is paid per page that you submit or something like that. So this massive incentive, I don't know if it's like literally per page, it might be just like if there's more work, there's more jobs and more people get paid. But there's this massive incentive to increase the requirements and have more and more, more and more like, you know, laborious documents.

Well, you know, you know, the cost plus model of a lot of, a lot of products that the DoD buys, which is basically that these contractors like Lockheed, when they sell a missile, they're getting their revenue is a percentage of the final cost.

Yeah.

And so the incentive structure is so flawed and that the more the product costs, the more money they actually make. So if it's a $500,000 missile system and it's like a 10% cost plus contract, they're, they're making 50 grand a missile. Right. And so a lot of these defense tech companies are going to be really impactful because they're sort of changing their approach and they're saying like, no, we're just going to sell you the missile itself. And because of that, we're incentivized to make sure that our margins are healthy. But ultimately can, can start to get really competitive on, on price. One other line in here, you know, they call out and they actually highlight that profits are likely years away. I saw this for anderal and at.

$14 million, investors have valued and are all between 18 and 19 times this year's expected sales, even though profits are likely years away. It's like, how can you write for the information? Right. That line, like is the story of every startup you write about.

Yeah, that's, that's painful. I think everyone sort of understands that Anduril is focused on building a bunch of really critical, important product lines and profitability is maybe like number 12 on their list of priorities. So if Palmer cared about profits right now and the team more broadly cared, then I'm sure they would be able to produce those. But it's just not at all the priority and it's not in America's best interest for them to pursue, you know, actually driving profitability for a very long time. So.

So I'm glad that Christian Garrett got a shout out. A partner at 137 Ventures which invests in SpaceX and. And said he was hopeful that the Trump administration would change procurement processes to help more upstarts. But he believes most of the spoils would go to top firms. I think there will be opportunities for more, but this won't look like enterprise software with a large number of winners, he said. It's cap market in the number of opportunities, but definitely not in the scope. Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's like hard tech could look like enterprise software or. Or deep tech, broadly include. And then it's like, you know, like.

Yeah.

Palmer said he was a consumer of nuclear. He's not. Here's building a nuclear power.

Yeah. So here's what Anduril has really built and why I think they're valued in the way that they are. Among a number of reasons, besides the talent density and traction and growth and all that stuff, is they have built the best possible distribution engine into the DOD. Right. So if you're any of these 125 new defense tech companies, you can build a really great product and not necessarily like crack distribution or crack these contracts. And so a lot of those companies are effectively like off balance sheet R and D for Anduril. Anduril can then say, hey, we're going to sort of, you know, buy up this company and kind of put them through our distribution engine. So I think that Anduril in one way could be seen as a distributor for a lot of these products.

Yeah. And there's a few different models. So Palantir has their AIP program, which is going on this week, that hopefully we can talk more about soon, where if you're a software defense startup, you can build on top of Anduril's API or Palantir's APIs, and then Palantir acts as the distribution arm for you, kind of like the app store for the government. And we with. And Palantir hasn't done many acquisitions, but Anduril is starting to do more acquisitions and it's kind of the similar model. I talked to one founder who sold his company to Anduril and he said like, the number one reason was their D.C. office and Chris Bro's out there. And so they just have phenomenal distribution.

A number of their new products have been acquisitions. I know the Submarine Ghost. Shark Ghost was an Australian company.

It was called Dive Technologies before. Yeah. And. Yeah, that's why.

And that's actually the fact that Anduril can be a soft landing for these companies that don't crack the contracts.

I mean, pretty soon it's not gonna be soft landings pretty soon. It's gonna be a banger outcome.

Yeah, we saw that the flock safety deal soft. But like, yeah, the thing is like, yeah, shoot for the moon. Shoot to be the next Andrew. Even if you miss, you'll land among Palmer stars.

Exactly.

And yeah, and the conversation on the information seems to be pretty lively. I think Mohammed here is chiming in. He thinks spending will reduce significantly. I just don't think that's true. Primarily because defense spending has already been at historical lows. And I think that with increased global instability and proof that we do need deterrence, I think it will actually continue to go up no matter who the administration is.

And I mean, the first Trump administration was so noisy and chaotic that people miss. Like you could hate everything about the Trump administration but the 2016 one. But if you just believe that China, like reorienting around China was important. Yeah, that was like a groundbreaking moment for the United States. It's very, very important. It comes from the 100 year marathon, that book that was kind of popularized. And then there was like an almost an instant pivot to like, okay, let's renegotiate the tariffs, let's do the CHIPS act, let's do all these different initiatives. And you know that it's. Even though like, you know, most, you know, we never talk about politics and, and most people are, you know, pretty firmly in one camp or another that the reorientation on China was really bipartisan because when Biden came in, he didn't change anything there. Yeah, he actually kind of doubled down, did the CHIPS act and stuff. And so I think that like, no matter what happens, we're going to be in a new era of like great power competitions back on the menu and it's not the end of history and we need to do something about Russia and Iran and China and like the new axis of evil.

So anyways, overall, solid article from Corey. Clearly did his research and we're here. Corey, if you ever kind of want a more positive view on. On. On all things Venture.

Yep. Let's move to Beth. Jesus. He writes, folks, Y Combinator has gone fully based and e acc pilled with their recent request for startups and we have the YC request for startups in 2024 at the top of the list. Government software highly related to what we were just talking about. So AI software to automate government administrative tasks, target large scale operations like form processing, application reviews, building solutions for citizen facing services, DMV permits, licenses. Oh man, DMV. That'd be fantastic.

I want iOS level software to interact with the DMV. Right. I want digital ID that like, you know, looks like a ramp card. It's in your Apple wallet. That's what we need.

Fantastic.

We need to make America more beautiful in every way including our software products.

And then public safety technology. This is like you know, in the flock safety world but and also growing. Daniel is working on this. Law enforcement efficiency tools US manufacturing stablecoins 2.0 LEMs for chip design.

Do you think, do you think Daniel's like a little bit.

He went through. I see, right.

No, I know he went through yc. He's got to be a little bit frustrated with them doing RFP or request for startup for basically exactly what he's doing with his product, reducing paperwork for law enforcement. But no, I think this is something I talk to with founders quite a bit when they're building something. And just something I think about is how is this founder and this company going to perform when YC puts out a request for startups to thousands of super talented people and suddenly you have three or four other people building in your product category. And with Daniel like he's going to continue to thrive. Right. He's a phenomenal poster. He clearly knows how to get attention. Good, good sort of product guy and but a lot of, you know, a lot of times I talk to founders and when I'm kind of like analyzing in my head do I think this person is going to be able to compete with three or four YC companies in the same category? Usually I'm like okay, like this guy's gonna get smoked.

Right.

Just because I think YC's like high level methodology is the most battle tested approach to company building.

Sure.

And I, I've never been through yc. Interviewed there for party round back in the day with, with Michael Siebel and got a quick rejection. I don't think I fit even with like we were already backed by Gradient, one of Google's funds. I just didn't fit the YC mold, being non technical myself. But their high level advice of like launch now. Build something people want. Do things that don't scale. Talk to users. All startups are badly broken at some point. Find 10 customers who love your product. Avoid long negotiated deals with big customers.

Oh, that's hard in the government.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's going to have to change a little bit.

Founder relationships matter more than you think. All of this stuff is just the closest that you can get to the truth.

Yeah.

In terms of company building yeah. And I think it's why. It is part of why the average VC fund has partners and associates and principals and platform teams that all have different opinions.

Yeah.

And oftentimes even at the same fund will disagree on, you know, the right approach for a company.

Yeah.

YC gives the most like generalized advice, but it ultimately clearly, undeniably works.

Yeah, yeah. I mean if you go down this list, it's like government software, that's Palantir Public safety technology, that's Flock US Manufacturing, that's Hadrian Atomic. Right. And so there are like, there are like kind of leading companies in these categories already. But I think there's still something really valuable about going and a finding like a smaller niche and building something unique or just putting yourself in a really interesting and fast moving environment and then maybe you wind up pivoting, doing something else or discovering like an entirely new category that we didn't really know and couldn't be put down into a request for startups. But it's like it's a signal and I think that's what Beth is getting at is that like, you know, they are signaling that they are on board with like the next generation of builders and the stuff that's interesting and, and cutting edge right now.

Yeah. To me a lot of these categories have really, really talented teams that are already building and pursuing many of these opportunities. I think honestly, category 9, 1 million jobs 2.0, like they've always had this idea of like kind of trying to create, get people to start thinking about ideas of like how are you going to build a company that creates a million jobs?

Right.

Like something like Doordash, Uber, things of that nature in the AI era. I don't know what that looks like. Right. There's so much uncertainty. We've joked and people have joked online that the last two jobs are H Vac and capital allocation. You're basically going to be deploying money or just doing manual labor. Manual labor.

There's also something about this where it's like when you look at the Power Law, YC winners, Coinbase or Airbnb, like those would never have fit into requests for startups at the time. They were too frontier. But they still chose to go to YC because YC was a place where cool stuff was happening. And so I wouldn't be surprised if, if putting out this message and waving the flag of like government, software, public safety technology, US manufacturing, like, you know, brings in someone like bio isn't on here, but you could see some like crazy bio company coming and you could see them wanting to jump in here just because like, oh, this is where like interesting people will be. Yeah, I'm building in something that' really contrarian and really like undervalued right now. But I'm still going to go to YC because there's going to be cool stuff there and they're not just, they're not just fighting the last war.

And I think the, a lot of like when I look down this list, the founders that I know that are building in the space, like somebody like when you look at US Manufacturing and Aaron with, with Atomic, he's not like going to be at, at any point, like he's been pounding the table, being.

Like, we need more manufacturing startups.

So I think that these categories and opportunities are so massive that it. I think YC is doing a massive. YC has been getting memed and getting a lot of hate because their founders have really low testosterone, which is an issue. But they're doing a huge public good by saying, hey, we want to invite 50 teams into each of these categories. I know they've reduced their batch sizes, so maybe it's less than that now, but we want to invite 30 teams into each of these categories and capitalize them and allow them to take like a meaningful shot on goal to do something important. And it's funny, the funny thing, people in crypto love to track like yc. Like two batches ago, YC did not have a single crypto company in the batch. And everybody was like, wow, this is super bullish for crypto. It's usually like you want to be like building when there's zero hype. And it's interesting that it didn't make crypto. Didn't make the list.

Well, it did. Stable Coins 2.0.

Yeah, yeah, okay, but that's almost more like traditional finance. Almost. But yeah, again, stablecoins 2.0 bridge acquisition was a really meaningful win for the crypto world. And I've got a really exciting company, Minteo in Latin America that's doing basically what. What Bridge is doing for that market. Yeah, stablecoin infrastructure.

That's great.

But anyways, God bless yc. Godspeed to all the founders and I'm sure some of them will post and we will cover them.

Fantastic. Welcome back. We're doing some Q and A. We got a DM from a founder and I'll read it. They say, hey, John and Jordy, I run a unicorn tech company and I'm looking to buy a new car. I've done quite well for myself, but I hate the idea of looking flashy or flexing on employees. I was looking at a Macan from Porsche or G Wagon from Mercedes. But what do you think for extra context? I live in Manhattan and I don't have kids yet. So what would you, what would you recommend to the Unicorn founder? Probably pretty wealthy, but you know, is it. How do you not look flashy? How do you not flex too hard? And then what's practical in Manhattan? Give me your analysis.

I mean, I have strong opinions. You have strong opinions. This has been. If we've ever had a rift in our relationship, it's due to arguments over automotive luxury. Yeah. Sports cars. You lean one way, I lean the other. And at the end of the day, as long as they're combustion engines, we're both. But we would never drive in the same car together. I think Lindy Mann talks about this. It's just kind of, it's a bit strange, two guys driving in a car together. Just avoid at all costs. But, but look, I can think of five or six or seven or eight cars that would, that would fit the bill here. I think that, I think he mentioned a G Wagon. I don't think that's super low profile. Except you're in Los Angeles when it's every other car.

The car. I did the issue.

So the issue with G wagons in Manhattan and LA is that there are still like 20 of parking garages. You actually can't get under them.

Oh, really? They're too tall. Because the benefit of the G Wagon is kind of short. Even though it's an suv. Parallel park it.

Yeah, yeah. I recently pulled into one of the many equinoxes around la and I was driving into the tunnel and I hit the little. I didn't, I didn't scrape like a concrete, but it was like those hanging bars, the, the bars that like tell you. And I was, whoa. I had to do like a 20 point turn to get out. So I don't recommend that for the city. You can make it work in la. I think that if you want something performant but low profile. The Cayenne Turbo GT is a phenomenal car. It's basically Porsche's version of the Urus. It's fast, it's loud, but not in like a overpowering. Not an overpowering, like kind of douchey way. Like, it's, it's sort of got this low rumble. That's nice. It's fun.

And the macan's going EV now.

Yeah, the macan. I would, I would.

And I've been In a macan. I mean it's, it's not the most comfortable.

It's pretty. Macan is a great car. When your daughter turned 16. Yep. Get her a macan.

Yep.

Right. It allows her to feel maybe used to the luxury, other luxuries she has in her life. But it's not, you know, flashy or you know, it's not over the top. It's not a bente. Right. But yeah, if you want to go sort of under the radar, fast, fun, performant, I'm going Cayenne Turbo GT Cayenne Turbo GT sleeper. Sleeper SUV supercar if you want something.

My opinion on if you want something that's like G wagon esque but a little bit more unique. Ineos Grenadier. Have you seen the Ineos Grenadier? Very cool, very small company. So there's a little bit of risk that they like go out of business.

And you know it's like aerospace, right?

Yeah.

It's a billionaire funder of ineos who's got a $25 billion chemical company that he's just plowing the profits into building. Like a vintage Land Rover.

And yeah, it looks like a vintage Land Rover. It has, you can kit it out with all this off road gear. It looks really cool. Good for me to have roads.

They have like a broken truck Gladiator.

Okay, cool, that's cool. Yeah, something like that would be good.

But the only other thing, something a little bit more low key but luxurious. Still driving a very nice car is the Bentley Bentayga. Okay, those are great.

Yeah.

If you buy. The thing about Bentley's is they lose about half their value in the first two years.

Sure.

So if you want to buy, you could buy a 2022.

Yeah.

Basically a new car, 5,000 miles and you're paying less than you'd pay for a new Range Rover. But you're getting to drive a Bentley.

Yeah, yeah. I mean the Range Rover depreciation is brutal. The Defender is pretty cool though. That might be a good option.

The new Octa. The new Octa.

I don't know that one.

New top of the line Defender.

Okay.

Very cool looking car. They made it slightly more wide body.

Okay, cool. Yeah, that'd be a good one. But, but really, I mean you don't have kids. I think sports car. I would say if you're worried about the roads in Manhattan, Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato, it's got off road tires.

That's a safe bet.

Yes, a safe bet. But then you know, you might Be flexing on your employees, but at least they'll know you have taste. You bought a limited edition. It's the last V12 or V10 Huracan.

If you don't, you're around Manhattan, you're not going to put a lot of miles on it. It's actually somewhat practical. You're gonna be able to sell that car in a few years. Somewhere near what you paid for it. Yep. I do think the Dakar is also a good option.

The Dakar is great.

Lean, more German.

Yep.

It's phenomenal, you know, phenomenal car. He's got the. The bigger sort of like lifts dealing with snow.

Yep.

If you need to throw anything on the roof.

Yep.

It's great too.

Yeah.

If you have like a new Apple Pro monitor, like it's not gonna fit in the trunk, in the, in the hood, but it will fit on the roof.

Yeah.

The car is like functional. Serato functional Bentega. You're sort of cruising, but I think those are out like a ZR1 or something like that. Yeah.

I mean Corvette ZR1. Fastest American made car. 240 miles an hour faster than. Faster than the Pininfarina Batista electric car. Yeah.

Wild. Wild.

1200 horsepower or something like that.

Yeah.

Huge. Because he.

That being more of like a track toy.

Exactly. Yeah. Daily. Daily. That's gonna be rough.

Yeah.

In Manhattan it's gonna.

Little high profile. Yeah. Kind of looks.

Yeah.

Looks closer to a Lamborghini.

Yeah.

Kind of a lot of look.

You want that in Connecticut or upstate where you can kind of take it on the roads, back roads.

Yeah. And you're just, you're not going to get respect. You know, it sounds like this company probably wants to go public soon. CEO driving a ZR1 to a meeting with a major capital allocator is going to throw off some huge red flags, in my opinion.

I disagree. I think that the ZR1 and the American made cars, they're coming back.

I think it's big in the American dynamics.

I think it's just. I think it's just countercultural, but it signals something special. It signals that you appreciate American manufacturing and you're willing to forego some of the Nurburgring time to stick with an American made company. And the only way.

Speed.

Yeah, yeah. Straight line speed. And the only way that the American manufacturers are gonna get better is if we actually support them. You have to put your money where your mouth is. If you say, oh yeah, American needs better innovation and manufacturing. Like go buy something that's made in America. Yeah, and great.

You know, the 911 is actually what it is because the Cayenne so sold so well. Porsche was in kind of a bad spot in the early 2000s and they released the Cayenne, became one of the best selling luxury SUVs in the world. They were able to take all of that R and D that they were spending on the Cayenne not only benefit the 911, but also have the kind of balance sheet that allowed them to continuously innovate on the 911 platform and make it undeniably the greatest sports car of all time. But that's going to start another argument. Probably get on the show.

I'm sure we'll come back to some sports cars at some point.

We always do.

Let's go to some posts. We got Ryan Peterson. He says someone should domesticate grizzly bears to replace canines in the military. North America would never have to worry about invasion again. It's hilarious. Because, like, are we worried about invasion? Like, not at all.

Yeah, that's the benefit of being American, is being able to grow up never worried about invasion. Because we, Red dawn won the geographic lottery.

Exactly.

No, but I think, I think we need to see more people combining American dynamism with biotech. We need to bring Wuhan here. Right.

Accelerated genetic engineering. Because I think domestication takes like a thousand years and a lot of generations. But if you shorten that, maybe LLMs.

Could kind of accelerate some of that. Sure, sure. You know, run thousands and thousands of simulations on the minute. Yeah.

To understand. Yeah.

So anyways, if you're building in at the intersection of biotech, American dynamism, and, you know, large language models and let us know.

But you gotta, I, I gotta call Ryan out. I mean, he's a good friend, but domesticating bears is my thing. I got a Tweet here from 2023. Domesticate bears. I'm no longer asking. I got another one from 2022. It's time to domesticate bears. I have another one here from 2021. Yes. And we should also domesticate bears. Totally doable. With enough time and genetic engineering. I got another one here from 2020. This is deep pre Covid. It might take decades, but we need to domesticate bears. It could easily be our generation's moon landing. And so you've actually done a poor.

Job branding yourself as a bear guy.

I know, I know. I should have written like the long post or, you know, there could be.

A team out there that's already domesticating bears. And you only posted four Times. If you had posted the fifth time.

I would have gotten the deal. I would have gotten allocation first, like rounds. Ryan, give me some credit. I. I got to the domestication bears thing early, but it's a. It's a big tent. Everyone's welcome in the bear domestication movement. Happy to have you on board. Let's go to Sophie. Netcap girl. She says, bro got sent to the minor leagues of posting. And it's a screenshot of mark Cuban on bluesky.social saying, hello, less hateful world. And unfortunately, I didn't think we were gonna have to do this, but on a previous episode, we gave Mark Cuban the brother of the week, and we have to rescind that award. He left Axe and went to the minor leagues of posting, and so you will not be getting your brother of the week award mailed to you. I'm sorry, Mark.

Yeah, we had it all packed up, the plaque and everything.

So that was a little bit of a mistake by us. We will do better. I don't think he'll be in the running unless he gets back on and has a.

As a. Yeah, as. As a podcast, we're not afraid to. To kind of admit when we made a mistake. We. We. We. We talked about net jets on an early episode. We got a lot of pushback from our audience and said, this isn't relevant to me. My family has multiple jets. Like, we do not use net jets. Like, please do not talk about them or promote them. It's just a waste of all of our time. So we admitted to that mistake. We shouldn't have given Cuban brother of the week, and fortunately, we didn't. The plaque wasn't in the mail yet.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we're. We're deeply sorry to the audience for that mistake, but this week's brother of the Week will be much better. Trust me. Let's stay on apologies and go to Marquez Brownlee. Mkbhd. He was apologizing for driving too fast. Let's read it. Last video, I did something pretty stupid. You might have already seen it, but maybe not. So I'll address it here. There was a clip with the action cam of me test driving a car and going way too fast. Absolutely inexcusable and dangerous. I've since cut it out of the video. There's no reason to leave that clip in. All I can do is apologize and promise never to do anything close to that stupid again. That's a terrible example to set. And I'm sorry. What's your take?

Good apology. Yeah.

Good apology. And like getting out very quickly. Like there was a tweet calling him out that was kind of going viral and he just jumped on it really quick and with a long post. And I think that there's something about. If you had, if he had just like quote tweeted and been like, I'm sorry, like that's not enough. But he actually like broke down everything. He did everything that he would do next. Like, I'm well aware of the Streisand effect and I know everything on the Internet lives forever, but I think this is the best decision for now. And like it was very. He like broke down his whole thought process and I thought this was very, very good. But I don't think he should have apologized because I think, and I'm on record saying that we need to ban speed limits in America. I think we need an American autobahn.

Economy down.

Yeah. I mean there's so many times when you know you're going to a meeting and if you could just drive twice as fast, you'd be there twice as fast.

You could do more meetings.

You could do more meetings.

You could increase the volume of shareholder value.

Exactly. I actually thinking about this because my friend has a house in Mammoth and I was driving there and the speed limit's like six to five hour drive. It's like, it's like a four hour drive.

I'm saying if you.

But it could be two.

Yeah, yeah.

And cars are getting safer. This, this was posted as like kind of a joke, but it is serious. Like the, the self driving technology is getting a lot better. The cars are getting way safer. Seat belts and airbags are in every car now. And so like the possibility of just driving fast like that might be the solution. Like do we need high speed rail or do we just need an autobahn?

That needs to be a core tenet of American dynamism is just. Yeah. Removing speed limits. Because think about some of these deep tech founders that have, you know, a facility out here, office over here, and they're spending a lot of time on the road. Yes, you can use it for phone calls, but if they could spend more time in front of their, whether you know, their, their engineer that's needing to code or a capital allocator that's behind a Bloomberg terminal. Yep. The more time they can spend in front of those, you know, desks, the better for the, for the country.

It's also just a, like a lot of things with the government. It's hard to do new things and create new projects, but it is a lot Easier to just stop doing something. So if you, if you're the government, you just say, hey, we're just going to take down the speed limit signs. Like, that's a pretty easy job. As opposed to we're going to build a new high, but also could be.

A community grown effort. Right. Like there could be kind of a grassroots movement of, hey, we're going to take, take down speed limits.

Right.

We're going to just do this all, you know, an axe. Right. Just chop like a tree.

Yeah.

And yeah, even, even one less speed limit in your local economy could actually provide some pretty tremendous.

So even though, you know, I do disagree with MKBHD on respecting speed limits, you know, we got to support him because he's a fellow Turbo S owner. Really?

Yeah, really?

Yeah, he has Turbo S. Nice. Yeah. He was driving a plaid and switched to the Turbo S and he loves it. He's a big fan.

He's a big fan.

Huge fan. He watched every single possible video about it. Made the decision that that's the best possible car. And for someone who's reviewed so many products, like, I think he made a good decision, even though I'd love to see him in a GT350R Mustang. But let's, let's stay on the topic of, you know, government efficiency and government deregulation. Delian, my colleague at Founders Fund says, hell yeah, Doge is real and Elon and Vivek are running it. What a time to be alive. And there's a statement from President Donald Trump saying that Elon Musk and in conjunction with American Patriot, Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency together. What do you think?

I mean, very cool, very cool. I mean, it feels like we're in, somebody said this, but it feels like we actually are in the best possible timeline where it's the most entertaining and actually seems to be the most American positive timeline since 1776.

There's been this. Yeah, there's been this question of like, you know, okay, even if someone gets in that people like, like, is there energy to like, actually go and work in the government? And as silly as the Doge meme is, it's something where you could see a smart, hard working person say, yeah, I want to go work with Elon on government stuff. Sure, I'll go.

The Doge that's the biggest, that's a big change here, right? Is totally smart. Young people are going to want to work in the government for the first time just so that they can work under that sort of Elon, Religion. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And somebody else was saying, like, you know, the US Economy is basically just like steady state, growing a couple points a year. And if, if we can double that growth, it kind of fixes so many of the core issues in our society. Right. So it can't be understated that this is. While it's immediately being politicized, I don't think it's political at all. We want our government to run the country like they'd run a business. Right. Bring in more revenue than you, then you spend. It's pretty simple math. Snapkin math. We need to run the federal government. Federal government should be able to run on a napkin, right?

Yep.

Social Security, defense, healthcare, etc. Like, you should not need more than a small napkin to run this country. Except if you want to drill down into the details, you can get on ramp.

Yeah, that sounds good. And then Andre relatedly says, in America, the Department of Efficiency has two bosses pouring a little bit of cold water on this idea that, okay, you know, hey, is it really efficient if you have two, if you have two people there? But I, I, I think it makes sense because Elon's running so many different companies. He can come in.

Oh, isn't he running it exactly how he runs all of his companies? Setting the pace exactly. And like the focus. But then he needs his lieutenant to actually get.

So if Vivek can come in as like the, the operator alongside him, like that, that seems really good. But it is a funny meme and.

You know, Yeah, I like that they're treating it like a product launch. Like the Trump admin over the last week has been almost having a major, major story every single day. That at least within the tech community is like getting the right attention, generally getting positive attention. Yeah. And this is the advice I give to startups is like, even if you have something that feels relatively minor that you already announced, previously announced it again, make it a big moment. Right.

I heard this thing. I don't know if I haven't checked it, but I heard that if you've seen these like Trump videos, there's like all these policy videos that are going out, him talking about like, his ideas and they've all been like going viral apparently. Those are from like a few years ago. They're from Rumble. Is this true?

Yeah, okay.

Yes, they're from Rumble and he put them out and they just didn't get any lift because Rumble is really small. But now that they're like, you know, he's unblocked on X they can go viral. And so everyone's like, wait, where was this guy all along? It's kind of funny.

Yeah. And to his credit, I think he still believes 80% of the same things, like they're still part of his platform, which, you know, historically the critique of Trump has been he's constantly sort of like changing his mind and going on back on things that he said before. So I'm happy to see that what he thought in 2022 is also what he wants to get done.

Yeah. Visakhan Versami, who I found out about through Patrick o', Shaughnessy, saying that he has some really good, like, frameworks and posts and long posts and writing, writes tech bro Pod, please discuss this. And it's one of the most indecipherable posts, but we'll try and get through it. He writes, culture wars are partially downstream of the media tech nation, dropping paratrooper brain worms inside the OODA loops of those with fragile self sense and people sense and recruiting them as cannon fodder mooks into profitable but destructive psycho fauna titan battles. So I think I kind of understand what he's saying here. And it's a little bit of a twist on. Have you heard the term or the phrase, like, politics is downstream from culture? This. Andrew Breitbart said it. And it's this idea that like, the government is just a reflection of the culture in a country and that it's not that you can like, you don't necessarily need like pronatalist regulation to create a pronatalist movement. It's like you need to move first and then it just happens. Exactly. And I've always been fascinated with that. In conjunction with the medium is the message that quote by Marshall McLuhan. And I've always thought about the interaction of those two terms. So if you believe both of them are well argued and I, and I do. Well, if the medium is the message, then the design of our communications platforms informs our culture.

Yeah.

And so the medium is the message means that when you design what is a TV show, what is a movie, what is even on. Even on formerly Twitter now X Like the idea of a retweet or a quote tweet that became very. That became more adversarial because it invented the dunk. And so our culture got more aggressive, which you could say is good or bad.

Yeah. It's like it created a mechanism to bring a ton of negative energy from your community to one person who's not necessarily in your community, which creates a.

Cycle of fear Exactly.

But yeah, the other, the other quote that stands out, I'll butcher it. But we create our tools and from there, our tools, like shape us. We shape our tools and our tools.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's. And so this is something that I've always pushed back on. There's this debate, like the, the media would always say, like, oh, like tech is. Is like inherently political. And then the technologists would say, like, no, like our tech is like politically agnostic. But I don't buy that at all. I think that if you're a product designer at a big tech company and you're designing a communication tool, the decision that you make to include, quote, tweets or to make likes private, for example, that shapes the culture and culture shapes politics. And so if you are designing a product that's used by hundreds of hundreds of millions of Americans, you do have an impact on politics. Yeah. And, yeah. And you do have a responsibility. And so I think that's somewhat of what he's saying here. But you could probably dive into this whole thread and spend another hour deciphering every single word there. But thanks for writing in and let us know how we did. Let us know if we, if we nailed it. I think we did. Let's go to willmanitis. He says building in public is over. The future is occult. Companies of unknowable size and influence hidden beneath a sea of LLC so deep, divine light can't even get through cap tables, so arcane. It's impossible to know if truth exists at all. No one knowing what really is going on here.

So imagine explaining the build in public movement to the Koch brothers, Koch Industries. They're like, wait, what? You tell everyone daily what your revenue is. You screenshot your internal metrics and share them with the world. You invite massive competition. You allow others to get an understanding of your profits so that they can eat away at them slowly. I think the build in public movement is very, you know, it's good to share what you're working on. It's good to talk about what you're working on. It's good to make people feel like a part of that. They're a part of your movement and kind of along for the ride. But the entire. And I think Will. Will did a good job of this with his last company. Right. He, you know, would share the right things that positioned him as the, the thought leader within AI and health care. Right. He did that very well. Never once had to share a stripe dashboard. Right. Or, or, yeah. And I think that there's the Right way to do it and the wrong way to do it. And you've talked about this a lot. What we're seeing with the build in public movement now is a lot of founders that are talking about what they're doing, but not sharing metrics publicly, but making sure that their competitors can clock their revenue and earnings by their car and watch collection.

Exactly. People should still know that you're successful.

It's just got to be a little bit more subtle. Right. Instead of a stripe dashboard showing 200k day, we want to see like a, you know, one of one Patek.

Right. Exactly.

Exactly. So it's just evolving.

Yeah. And yeah. Thanks, Will. Let's go to offscaler says and it's a screenshot of what looks like a TikTok saying you can tell if he makes money whether he says Q4 or winter.

Dude, I think we're in a.

One of us.

One of us.

One of us.

No, I think. But I think we're in a.

We're having a banger queue.

4. Yeah. I think we're. I mean, obviously we're having a phenomenal Q4.

Yeah.

That said, I think we're at maybe the intersection of people that are saying, I'm starting my winter arc because Q, we're halfway through Q4, I need to lock in even harder. Right. So we're. There is this intersection. And the kind of founders that I want to invest in are starting their winter arc, but very well aware that we're almost halfway through Q4 and they need to make stuff happen.

Yeah. But in the. In the same way that we advocated for adopting gamer lingo into everyday life, also, you got to adopt the finance bro lingo.

Yeah. We don't need to reinvent. We don't need a speedrun reinventing finance. There's a lot that venture can learn from our predecessors.

Exactly.

But yeah, one thing for everybody to remember, your Q4 metrics are forever. Right. When this quarter ends, you will have to live with those results. You know, January, February, March, and then 2030, 2040, people are going to be looking back at this quarter saying, what the fuck were you doing? Or giving you still patting you on the back from the work that you did. Lock in. Whether you're having a winter arc, whether you're in the tropics, it's still winter.

Yeah. Those metrics will be immortalized in your 10k forever. So good luck. Get out there. Augustus says, have you ever had nine Coors banquet beers with your customer? I love this because he ats Coors banquet Yeah, yeah.

Hopefully they gave him a retweet. That's. That's.

They really should.

This is marketing for them.

For him.

Yeah. Because that's kind of the whole point. That's like the idea of Coors Banquet. Right. It's celebratory beer. That's. That's an everyday product that's accessible. I can imagine that this is not unusual for Augustus. Right. He's somebody that. His edge is being able to speak the language of Silicon Valley and be immersed in this amazing subculture and Saudi princes and then simultaneously hanging at the farmers for 48 hours.

Rain fall.

He's serving customers in places that Starlink has never touched. Right.

I don't actually think that's true, but, yeah, fantastic. I mean, meeting your customer where you.

Are, he's going to correct us.

Seriously. There are a lot of companies that they wind up in YC and they're like, we're building SaaS for farms. And then they can't relate to the customer at all.

It's really hard.

Yeah.

People want to buy products from other people like them. And so if you're not like your customer, you better have a head of sales who is. Or learn from finance.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I told you that story about doing a deal with, like, a tobacco distributor. And I walk in and everyone's smoking inside. It was like, really crazy.

Indoor heaters.

And. And yeah, it's like.

It's like, how did you handle that situation?

Oh, of course. Rip one, rip one. But, you know.

But you're bridging the gap between.

Exactly.

Big tobacco.

But then I forced them to use the strongest product I make and see if they can really handle it.

There's actually a good story from last night. I was at a dinner hosted by a venture capitalist, and the guy next to me, who he actually. I asked him what he'd want to be referred to on the pod. He said, the Jewish cowboy.

Okay.

He was taking a 4 milligram Lucy pouch in between every course of the meal and then taking it out because he didn't like to, like, reuse them. And so in a 90 minutes of sitting next to him, he plowed through, like, seven or eight pouches. I was like, dude, you're an absolute animal. And he's like, I don't. He's like, I don't actually. I don't actually feel the buzz anymore. I just avoid the withdrawals. So anyway, shout out to the Jewish cowboy.

Yeah. Friend of the show. Let's go to Vittorio. He says, what's the book that changed your life the most. And this is just a good question. What's your answer? Do you have something in mind?

Art of the deal.

Art of the deal. I like 0 to 1. I mean that's classic. But I mean, honestly, like, it's. It's kind of crazy to say, but I remember in high school a friend who is really, really smart guy just kind of clocked that I was going to be an entrepreneur, I think, and on that track. And he got me four hour workweek.

Yeah.

And like now in Silicon Valley, that's not part of the canon in the way that 0 to 1 is. But it was a phenomenal book just in terms of exposing like, what does it mean to be an entrepreneur at any scale? And it's a very you can just do things book. Like there's a story.

Tools of Titans was also a really great book.

Yeah.

That was my first. So. So I would say the media product that's been most impactful on me over the last two years is Founders podcast.

Sure.

And part of that is is David digesting all the best biographies and autobiographies ever in entrepreneurship and just like tying them all together. But, but Tools of Titans was very impactful for me during college because that was my first exposure to. Not my first exposure, but like the first kind of senra esque attempt at kind of capturing what made these people who they were and how they ticked.

Yeah. Yeah. It's great. It's a good prompt. Let's go to Jesse. Jesse says as a young CEO, the worst advice I ever took seriously was that each manager should have standing one on ones with each direct report. Utter stranglehold on calendars throughout an organization. Direct reports should have something to report or decide to call a meeting, especially with the CEO. And it's a quote tweet of Brian Chesky talking about how he doesn't believe in one on ones. And almost no great CEOs in history have ever done one on ones. And there's a lot of this stuff that's happening right now where big public company CEOs are coming out and saying like, I actually do things very differently. Jensen Huang noted watch disrespector claims that he doesn't have any like meetings or direct reports. What is it? He has some. Some something to the same effect. But it is true. Like the like your calendar should be like as default empty as possible and.

You should have a big issue with one on ones is if you have a standing Wednesday one on one and you have a direct report that's Having an issue Monday, if they're waiting to talk about it until Wednesday, that's 48 hours of wasted time. And that could have been the most important thing of the week that you just needed to handle and fix. And so I think that yeah, this trend towards CEOs being like Jensen's big thing is like we have no long term plan. Right. He's like, we don't plan. Like we, we think about what do we need to do today to make the company, you know, win today and for the long run. And eliminating meetings, eliminating long term planning. Shopify has been big. Eliminating OKRs, things like that. So anyways, I think it's, I think what's the old joke that like Google invented okrs to just like stifle like innovation in competition and Competition.

Yeah, there's a lot of that. I mean all of, all of the work life balance stuff is 100% game theoretic.

Yeah. It's like, hey, by the way, if you're the best business in history, you can have amazing work life balance and offer all these perks to your employees.

And then create that as the competitive playing field that everyone has to compete.

Brilliant.

Brilliant. But yeah, I mean it gets to the idea of like the phone CEO which we've talked about before, but just this idea that like you can be much more effective if you're just constantly on imessage with people that are important in your organization and then just picking up the phone and calling randomly and just playing phone tag with people. Yeah.

The only time that I genuinely.

Very little email, very little calendar.

Yeah. The only time I need my computer, video meetings and if I'm doing anything.

Many of which could be phone calls.

Just happening randomly usually but. And then doing design. Anything design related I want to monitor but other than that I can run everything off my phone.

Yeah, let's go to crypto zero. I think that's how you say that. Crypto zx or 0x.

One more thing I VC I was talking to last night was like I've been, I was golfing a ton while I was raising my fund and now I'm doing it like once every couple of weeks. But before he was golfing four days a week while raising the fund because he's like, it's the best way to get to know people. Have four hours to talk about what you're doing, how the other person ticks, things like that. So that's another example of the, you know, the capital allocator. Phone only.

Yeah, phone and in person, honestly like yeah, some of the best ways to get to know someone if it's, if you're seriously going to do a deal is go and spend a full day. I've done that with a few people. Not just golfing. Like I went and met with somebody very powerful and spent, got to his house in the morning, we go for a big long hike, we have lunch, we sit down and like, you know, talk about some books on his shelf. We have dinner together, drinks, and it's just like we spent like this the full day together. And like, even though it was like a million times more impactful than like a weekly call for like three months. Yeah, it was, it was so much better just to actually get to know. And to this day I'm like, that's a solid person that I would do business with.

Yeah.

Let's go to cryptox0, bro. It's crazy how one follower here is worth 100 followers on Instagram.

This is a good way to get a lot of engagement because everybody on X tends to have more followers here than. But it's true, it's true.

Like, like, like, like you're not going to accrue the same caliber of founders on Instagram than ax. Like, yeah, the, the, like.

There's no, there's almost no more negative signal to me than a founder that more frequently posts about their company on Inst. Than x or even LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Unless it's a consumer product company. Yep. And even then they need to be.

Like the celebrity face of it essentially. And that's the only case it works. LinkedIn makes sense if you're selling, you know, B2B software and you need to be like an influencer there to like pull in companies. That makes total sense. But you should still have a presence on X.

People have been begging us to move some of our posting over to LinkedIn.

Yeah, we'll make it happen.

It'll be a seven figure deal with LinkedIn if it's going to happen at all.

Let's go to Daniel. He says they should have Uber eats Black. What if I want my burrito delivered in a Cadillac Escalade? And I, when, when I heard Uber Eats Black, I thought it was just gonna be like caviar, champagne, like the top tier foods like you guarantee are good.

But it's more just the energetic, energetically the idea of having knowing that your burrito is being placed like I want it to be. I'd almost like the Brinks version.

Sure.

Like, you know, it has like armed guards, like carry the burrito from the restaurant.

Yeah. Well, that's what Turner says. Turner says I want a SWAT team to do deliver my McDonald's in a Blackhawk helicopter.

There you go. There's a bunch of different, you know, modalities that people would happily pay for. And anyways, that's like Uber's the dominant player. They now have the ability to like layer on these sort of value add sort of niche products that make their power users happy. Right.

I honestly wouldn't pay for, for an Uber eats black that guaranteed that the food was going to be like properly stored because I swear that's the biggest issue. Sometimes they just throw it in the trunk and then they're drifting around and you get somewhere and everything's just totally destroyed and it's just like such a mess. Yeah.

I think, I think also if you could get a Blackhawk from JFK to Manhattan, that would be cool.

That would be big and have like armed, like Blade.

But yeah, Blade. Yeah, Blackhawk version of Blade.

I love it. Hopefully coming soon. Brian Halligan says get ready for the IP IPO market to roar in 2025.

I think it's legit. I think it's happening.

Yeah. I do think that there's a little bit of a countervailing force where a lot of the really big companies are still seeing what's possible in the private markets and just don't want the overhead of IPOing.

But there's this huge pressure. Even databricks announced this last week that they're raising $2 billion just to provide liquidity for early employees. That's a company that I don't see why they don't go public at this point. But again, again, like the overhead is, is real.

Yep.

I think that We've talked about SPACs coming back in a big way.

I think especially for, for companies and categories where VCs aren't necessarily paying attention right now or aren't set up for that. Like there are enough funds.

It is not a bad financial innovation. Yeah. It was just used improperly.

Yeah. I agree. I agree. There are a lot of companies where like if you're an AI company right now, you don't necessarily need to go public because there are multiple multi billion dollar funds that are ready to write a 4 billion dollar round for you in the private markets. But if you're in something a little bit more niche where maybe public market investors might be interested in it. But, but private markets aren't really.

Yeah. And retail, there's a ton of products that retails.

Yep.

You know, generally excited about.

Yep. But you got to be a going concern. That's the. That's the main thing.

I just hope it doesn't public.

Yeah, I hope you're raising money anymore. You need to be profitable.

Yeah. I just hope it doesn't end up being again what happened last time, which is the companies that didn't have any additional, you know, private capital sources. But guys, girls out there, if you don't have four to five friends that are spinning up new special purpose acquisition vehicles, like it's time to elevate your circle.

I mean, I was looking at the list. There's a website where you can go and look at all the stocks. There's like, yeah, 350 that are actively searching right now in all sorts of different.

Good for competition.

And so, I mean, I honestly think, like, yeah, if you're raising a $50 million round, like, why not talk to at least a few of the spacs and just see what their pitch is, see how it would work out and see if you can. See if you can pull it off. Let's go to Jack Raines. He writes folks love their fast casual Mediterranean cuisine. And Kava is up 440% in the past year.

Wow. I wish that we actually could see their market cap because they have to be trading at like 2. Because they have to be trading at like 300 times earnings.

Oh, yeah.

I need to actually look it up.

Love fast casual. I mean, it was always story was so solid that it makes sense that people would kind of ape into the next thing. I actually never eaten a kava. Have you? Is it good?

60.9 billion.

Okay.

Yeah. Their. Their P E ratio is 300.

Okay, let's go.

Yeah, so, yeah, great, Great. For kava, they're going to be able to get a low cost of capital, expand, sell more, more Mediterranean grain bowls. But it's funny, I remember, like seeing pitches for people being like, we're the Mediterranean Cava. Why doesn't this exist? Meanwhile, Cava was just building a behemoth and they did something pretty interesting, which I forget the name of. The Cava actually acquired a restaurant group or a restaurant brand. I'm blanking on the name. That had like 200 locations. And they were able to like, really quickly rebrand all the locations and turn and so they were able to like, double their footprint.

Yep.

Smart, you know, super, super fast. It would have taken them. But yeah, one thing, you know, I think there's a lot of optimism right now, but one or two years ago, there was a lot of fear in the market and I always tell entrepreneurs, go look at Starbucks. Like, if you think the world's bad and it's going to be like a worse place in five years, go look at Starbucks and Chipotle and all these big, fast, casual and just like retail concepts. They're like, we want to add 300 stores a year, like every single year. And it's like, these are like really smart teams that are smart capital allocators. And yes, the world's sort of unforgiving, unpredictable place. But just look at how many locations these businesses want to add, and I guarantee you your business is going to be able to thrive in a world where they can add 200 new Starbucks every single year. Right.

That's great. That's great. Let's go to Jacob Andrew, he says. Or Jacob Andreou, he says. The hardest part of building AGI is naming the models.

Yeah. I feel like, I feel like this is an industry where we went kind of like weird quickly. Right. So it's like we have Llama and so now you have like, Defense Llama.

Yeah.

How do you, how do you, how do you get, like, get more attention than Defense Llama?

That's great.

And Strawberry. I thought that was a cool name.

Yeah. It's interesting because, like, OpenAI. Great name. Even though like the, the openness is kind of pivoted. But I mean, it's just like, it's just like a, it's just a nice name and it's, it's, it's very like, welcoming and it speaks to like, what they do. Chat.com phenomenal. Like one word domain. Great. But then, but then like, GPT 401 Preview Mini is like, so bad. And I mean, but I feel like part of that select anymore.

I do think that part of that is somewhat intentional of being. What matters right now is being loved by developers because developers are the bottleneck to actually get your product to tens of millions of users.

Yep.

Not the bottleneck. They have their own consumer products. But I think it's kind of like almost an inside joke of let's release a product with the worst name ever that developers are going to meme and talk about and being like, wait, are you using this version or this version?

But yeah, and I bet Most of the ChatGPT consumers that just go to chat.com like are blissfully unaware of the fact that there's a difference between 44001 preview 01 mini. They just type their question and they get an answer.

Yeah.

But very quickly they're going to be able to put a router in front of that and dynamically decide, oh, this is a. This is a question that needs to go to 01. This is a question that needs to go to 4:4:0 or whatever. And all of that will become extracted.

The real question is, where are we at with the iPhone? Nobody knows which iPhone they have. If you ask them, what iPhone do you have? They go, I don't know. I got it, like, a year ago. 19, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. But Zach says money doesn't excite me. My ideas excite me. And it's a quote from Walt Disney, I think. I think money should excite you. Walt Disney. What, he was lying when he said this?

Yeah. Yeah. That was pure marketing.

Yeah.

No, I think. I think that there is a very common addiction, which is the addiction of wanting to see your ideas in the real world manifested. And I think that there's an equal amount of. From those people, there's an equal amount of excitement around the market potential of that idea. Right. Because if one of the best ways to make it big in America is to build credit to yc, a product that people just really love and sell a lot of them. Right. And so this goes back to, you know, people talk about, don't think about how to get rich. Think about how to help a million people. And you can do that with a product. You can do that with an idea. And, yeah, I've seen a lot of people get. Get very wealthy off of ideas that they don't really aren't that excited about. Just we're.

You know, Walt Disney's famous for that, like, circular graph. Have you seen that? It's like a napkin drawing of, like, how all the different Disney enterprises interface with each other, whether it's consumer products, films, parks, all these different things. And it's like, that is an idea, but it's a very financial idea.

Totally.

But you could see that being, like, a beautiful interaction, and it would allow you to do more ideas. And that's the. That's the nature of the virtuous cycle of capitalism.

To me, a good idea is the greatest drug on earth.

Yeah.

Like, can you. Can you remember, like, multiple times where you just, like, had a phenomenal idea and, you know, it's a hit? Like when we first. When we talked about Excel.

Yeah.

We knew from the very first conversation, which was not even a planned conversation. We just started riffing on it, and we were like, yeah, this is, like, so obvious. Like, this is gonna be a hit, and you launch it, and it's a hit. Right.

Yeah, it was great.

And that feeling is the best feeling in the world. No amount of ayahuasca can get you that.

Impossible. Impossible. Let's go to High Yield Harry. He posts a screenshot of a text interaction that says, do you want to join my religion? And then the questions, what's your religion? And it's just a picture of a dude at Blue in on a Bloomberg terminal with a bunch of TVs in the background. And then the other person says, I'm interested. I love this. I sent this to a dude who works at a hedge fund and this is his entire life. And he was like, this speaks to me.

Yeah. I mean, if you think about. I think the venture community spent all of 20, late 2022 and early 2023 praying for the next bubble. Right. Like, I remember calling friends, they wouldn't pick up and they said, like, hey, I'm at church right now. I'm praying for the next bubble. Right. So it is a. It is absolutely a religion. Returns are just kind of a. Yeah, nice.

I mean, there is, there is something to the fact, like when you, when you pray at the altar of Bloomberg and cnbc, you ideally discover alpha that can allow you to uncover the next bubble. And I genuinely do find that like, like a lot of the best, really, really amazing VCs are on Bloomberg regularly actually understanding what's happening in the public markets. And they're tracking that almost as much as what's happening in the venture portfolio.

It's all down downstream.

Exactly. And seeing those interactions is really, really important. Like, what are the FAANG companies or the hyperscalers doing? Does have an impact on your venture strategy?

No. Every GP at big venture funds right now is looking at their portfolio now that the markets are ripping, being like, let's actually capture some of these returns that are.

Time to print.

Time to print. So now the real edge is going buying Montana and Aspen real estate now because things are going to get.

And installing those amazing, like, air pressure systems. You can effectively.

Sea level.

Sea level, yeah.

That's great.

Ryan Peterson apparently was on a flight and was trying to get Starlink working on his Delta flight. He says, my first attempt to get Starlink working on this Delta flight, a failure thus far.

Okay. This is amazing marketing because he's clearly sitting in economy. And while he's trying to show his company, like, this is how we're gonna run lean. We're all running lean. And if you have a guy running the biggest freight brokerage in the world or one of the biggest startups, he's flying economy. I think everybody should be a flying economy.

Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Because you're wearing a suit, but.

Yeah, yeah.

If you're, if you're in a suit, you can sit in first class, but business class. Business class, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I mean the Starlink rollout should happen soon. Ish. They're doing deals, but it's taking.

No, isn't it something that like Boingo wi fi or whatever the plane. Wi fi service.

Are they blocking it?

No, they have these like multi year contracts with airlines that the airlines would have to buy. Like it works. You have to pay it out massively.

Yeah.

And so I think we're, we're just kind of like you were in like.

The press release cycle for all this where like United will be like, we're proudly partnering with Starlink in 2029.

Yeah.

When we can retrofit all our.

JSX has Starlink. Yeah, it's. It's amazing.

Maybe I should fly JSX more. It's not, it's not that much more expensive than just normal.

It's really not.

And just for the Starlink, probably worth it. Let's go to Ryan's brother.

There we go.

David Peterson types faster, writes, I'm told a vigilante is roaming San Francisco.

I actually had them confused. Yeah, I was, I was thinking, I was thinking. That was Ryan.

No, no. Yeah, that was Ryan. This is David.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, gotcha.

And so David says, I'm told a vigilante is roaming San Francisco offering homeless people $1,000 cash and a plane ticket to Dallas. Someone I know recently sat beside one of these homeless guys on a flight and he confirmed the story. Has anyone heard about this? Is this why SF has gotten so much cleaner? Also, why would any homeless person leave SF and give up the $600 a month cash benefit that no SF politician, public figure dares to say anything about? Interesting. I haven't heard anything about this. This is the first I'm reading this.

But I think we need, here's the solution. We need Taylor Lorenz to go undercover as a homeless person in San Francisco.

Let's see if somebody tries to buy.

Her out and let's see if somebody tries to buy her a first class flight to Dallas. Yeah, that's the kind of hard hitting journalism we need from our tech journalists.

There's, I mean, there's stories about this, right? Didn't New York do this? Is it like Giuliani famous? There was like a South Carolina park episode about how they like paid, but it wasn't, it wasn't quite just like go to Dallas. It was like we were forever of.

Like, hey, shuffling around those people like a Greyhound ticket and just send them out.

Yeah.

Ether, I think that one of the solutions talked about this is just creating like a permanent Burning man style encampment in the desert.

That's the George Hots plan. The wirehead city. You get, you get a phone, you can chill out, you can do whatever you want, but then there's like a two mile walk out. So you have to be kind of sober to leave essentially. But you can leave at any time. You get like UBI essentially.

Yeah.

Somewhat dystopian, but I appreciate George.

Is it that much more dystopian than.

A. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Nicole Whiskoff says just to use granola AI for the first time to take notes for me. Totally insane product. Highly recommend not an investor, sadly. Have you used granola?

I haven't, but from what I understand it's basically like a agent for secretaries where it's, you know, really good memory, good at taking notes, kind of knows what's going on in your life kind of proactively, sort of expecting your, your needs, things like that. So I'm interested to see how this space plays out. There's been a, I, I think that there's more venture backed meeting note taking apps and I've had meetings this year. I've had a lot of meetings so I'm interested to see who.

Yeah, yeah. I have seen some weird like fallout from some of the AI note taking stuff where it's kind of awkward if you get on a call and someone has their. Like I was on a call with a bunch of people once and someone sent their, their AI note taker and they couldn't make the call and so then they just read the AI notes afterwards.

I never let, I never, if somebody's joining a call, call and they try.

And add their AI note, block it.

Yeah, yeah, I did. It was granola or one of these other, one of their competitors that was a portfolio founder of mine, like had an important meeting with a big customer. He recorded it like it was, you know, with permission and he sent me a summary afterward and it was like perfectly done notes, bullet points, sections, next steps. And I was able to get the full benefit of being on the meeting without 20 seconds.

Yeah, it's probably good. You don't want to be completely zoned out during the meeting, but if it's Taking notes for someone who can't make it. That makes sense.

The funny thing is these apps can actually turn what would have been a 20 person meeting into a meeting of two people. Where even if you don't know exactly what the next steps are with a project, two people can just talk it out, they come to a conclusion. The note taking app doesn't just write exactly what was talked about. It takes like the entire meeting, breaks it down into next steps and the reasons why, and then lets anybody benefit from that. So I think it, I think it's actually fantastic. It's going to save a lot of time. I don't know how investable those businesses are really going to be, but we'll see.

I do know that there's been one like fiasco where some like, I think a VC firm had an AI note taker on the call and then after the founder dropped off the call, the firm stayed on the same call, was talking, talking, talking about all sorts of stuff. And then the AI notetaker sent a transcript of that to the founder to see kind of like what they're talking about behind their back. Very awkward.

Doubt a deal got done.

Very, very awkward. So yeah, the Idea is a 10.

Out of 10 founders are a 6. Let's go back there. Their competitor, rough, rough, rough.

Let's go to Trey Stevens, another one of my colleagues at Founders Fund. He says doing some email deal flow triage during a long plane ride and just opened three consecutive decks for companies building Group 1 to 3 ISR drones for defense with dual use in industrials. My brothers and sisters in Christ, why are you all starting the same company? Please stop.

So the reason that this is not so bad is, is these founders are going to build for about six months, see how hard it is and then pivot to crypto, crypto pivoting to applications. The cycle will continue. It's this perpetual cycle of pivot to crypto, pivot to AI, pivot to defense, pivot to the new hot thing. But who knows? Who knows? Yeah, I think this, you know, starting a drone company now when there's five or six super talented teams, contracts. Yeah. While Anduril is also like Andrew does.

A lot of business there. SHIELD AI has a lot of business in Ukraine and stuff like. Yeah, it's a, it's a lot.

Yeah.

Oh well, we should still bet on.

It on Polymarket though.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maika Isagawa says I'm, I must start calling them male founders. And this is a throwback from 2022. I think this is Like, I think it's a female founder who's responding to this idea of like, if you're a woman founder, people call you a female founder, but if you're a male founder, no one calls you a male founder. They just call you a founder.

I mean, people call you a male podcast.

Yeah, exactly. I'm actually, I'm happy to be called a male founder, but yeah, I mean, where are the men in tech conferences? We have the women in tech conferences, but maybe men in tech.

Male. There's women angel groups.

Well, there's a, there's a, there's a founders fund and there's a female founders fund, but there's no male founders fund. They did, they did. But there's no, there's no male founders fund. Like a spin off. I think that could be really popular. Yeah, but until. Until.

And dramatic.

And dramatic. There's also a blockchain founders fund and an Italian founders fund.

There you go.

Which is hilarious.

Version of them. Yeah, we only printed the term sheet.

Liquidity says VCs who pivoted from Web3 to AI to Defense Tech are now pivoting back to Web3. This is exactly what we were talking about. Yep, yep. It is a. It is a snake eating its tail. The ouroboros of mimetic energy adventure. You just got to move.

I think you basically get one. One. You get one pivot like that before and a lot of. Seriously, it's founders and VCs. I can name multiple funds. Of course, the typical cycle, I feel like of a crypto fund is we're just focused on crypto. This is our edge, is our focus. And then as the bear market really gets into full effect, they start branching out and they're like, oh, we're going to do the SaaS company. Because they could have some use, some leverage in blockchain. At a certain point we'll just slap a token warrant on it, call it a day. It's a crypto deal. And then they're like, oh yeah, like we're going to do this like cell service company. Because like they could slap a token on it at some point and then it comes roaring, it comes roaring back around and then they're back to being fully, just literally. On Monday, one of my port cos got hit up by a strictly crypto fund. Owners of defense tech company trying to make the case. And this. So anyways, I just think this is the argument. I think that you're. It's okay as a VC to position yourself as an expert in a certain Sector. But branding your venture fund as a specific industry is almost like committing seppuku because they're just simp. Almost always is not quite enough opportunities unless you're keeping your fund size small. Like I know there's a friend of mine, Nick Milanovic, has a, has a $10 million fintech fund. It's going to perform super well. He's the guy you go to if you want to raise a precede in fintech. He's going to do well. It's when you have a hundred million dollar fund and you're saying we're the XYZ fund, then you get in a bad spot.

Yeah, it's just so much better to just be a generalist and just move around.

Chase returns.

Yeah, just money. Ride the high cycles well. Thanks Liquidity. Good post. Oh, this is a great one. So we got tagged by Eric Jorgensen, good friend of the pod. He says I need the Tech Bros Pod take. And it's a Vittorio tweet that says the fastest way to make you money is to learn to say fuck you without any money.

I think that's right. I felt like I had fuck you money when I was making like four grand a month for my first company.

Absolutely.

Because that was enough to pay for my rent. I had a car with 200,000 miles and I could go to Trader Joe's without fearing that my card was going to decline. And that was like the ultimate luxury for me. I could do, I could live, do whatever I wanted at that point.

Yeah, there's that, there's that meme of like there's levels to this shit. You know, you get the sports car and then you find out somebody has the hypercar, you get the NetJet subscription, you find out somebody has a Gulf Stream. But if you don't let any of that, if you just completely ignore the, the hedonic treadmill, there's nothing stopping you.

From acting like you have fuck you mentality. Is simply not depending on anyone else for your survival.

Yeah, yeah.

Everybody depends on somebody for survival.

But that's the difference between being wealthy and rich. Yeah, like being wealthy is being independent and not having a boss essentially. And being able to say no. It's great.

No.

So let's go to Marc Andreessen. He's been on the POD before. The primary mission of technology and economy policy should be to put everything on the TV price curve. And it's a picture of the price changes from January 2000 to December of 2023. So 24 years, 23 years of progress and Hospital services are through the roof. College tuition's through the roof. Medical services are through the roof. But of course, cell phones, toys, computer software and TVs are all down 90%. And now, you know, I paid one Bitcoin for a TV that wasn't even. It wasn't even 10, it was 1080p. It wasn't even 4K. And I wound up just giving it away a couple years later. And then I bought a new one.

$90,000 TV.

Yeah, I know. And it was. And now you can go and buy like a fantastic like 85 inch, 4k like everything TV for like, you know.

How the classic Black Friday video Black Friday is like much less of a thing now. Everything's online. But the classic sort of scenario in a Best Buy on Black Friday, seeing people fighting, like getting into real altercations was always over the TVs. And the TVs are like. The TVs are like the rotisserie chicken of a Black Friday sale. Right? They're like, this is our loss leader. Gonna get them in the door, get them a new tv, and then we'll sell them a bunch of other stuff to get some more margin on. But I always thought that was funny because a TV is already the cheapest thing that you can get, like almost year round. Like, they're. They've been so cheap and they just get cheaper and cheaper, get cheaper. And it's no longer that like, statement.

It used to be a status symbol.

Because, like, everybody has them. Right? Yeah.

Let's go to Dr. Ben Braddock. He says there are people laying in a hospital bed begging God for the opportunities that you have right now. What an inspiring post.

Simple post. Inspiring. Not even just the opportunities, but the feeling you have right now.

Yeah, just if you're younger the last.

Time you were sick, it's miserable to just have like a powerlessness. And there's no better feeling than having fantastic opportunities. And I think those opportunities are available to everybody in this country. You simply need to listen to founders podcast by David Senra and start to understand that opportunities are everywhere.

Exactly. Let's go to the civilization enjoyer, Lucas. They say dance like nobody's watching. Post on Twitter or acts like it will be printed out and read by men in suits.

If it's a banger, it's a banger. Men in suits.

So yeah, we gotta, we gotta deep dive this, this guy's account, find some of the, the banger gems.

I'm sure this an emerging. He's an emerging poster. Oh, yeah. You know, next Generation next gen.

So we're investing precedent.

Covering. Yeah. Covering this guy's tweets is like covering. If we were around for Daniel's rise.

Sure.

Be comparable to that.

Yeah.

When Daniel at sub 1000 followers is like some real alpha there. So first of many if he keeps on this trajectory. And shout out to the civilization enjoyer.

Lucas, I enjoy civilization as well. So shouts out great, great invention signal. Who's been on the show before says, my portfolio relies on Trump and Elon never having a falling out. How can I hedge against this? I mean, a lot of people are predicting this. I certainly hope it doesn't happen. But I mean, they both figure out if there's a way to create a market for this on Polymarket.

Yeah.

I wonder how you would actually express.

That's a really. Yeah.

Because like the falling out could be just happened behind the scenes. It could be, oh, he's like, you know, less involved in the Doge in year three or something.

So this is a unique thing where it will, in my view, I think it will be beneficial for Trump and Elon to be cordial and have a working relationship indefinitely. Yeah. In the same way that you're not going to burn Trump. Having direct line to Putin is not necessarily bad. Like it was always positioned as, oh, Trump's has Trump's friends with Putin. It's like, no, keep your enemies close. So I think that, I think both Trump and Elon have a lot riding on each other. Right. Elon has one of the most influential media businesses in the history of the world. Trump runs, is about to run the country. And Elon's businesses are pretty dependent on government contracts. So hope they hope they continue to burrow down forever.

I'm not sure how you'd hedge against it.

And they're also technology brothers. Right. Trump created the hottest, best performing social media app of the last five years.

Elon Bot.

Elon, the best influential, best social media. And so they have that mutual respect from both being social app founders.

Let's go to Jeremy Giffon. He says everything good you want in life is on the other side of a single phone call that you're absolutely terrified to make. You know exactly who it is and you know exactly what you need to say, but instead you let it haunt you for years.

You know, I saw this tweet. First thing that popped into my head was that call that I needed to make with to my Porsche dealer. And a lot of guys play this game with Porsche where they say, hey, if you want to buy a GT3 or GT3 RS or a Touring or an ST. You know, you got to buy the EV Macan, you got to buy a Taycan, you got to buy two Taycans, you got to buy another. Another Cayenne that you don't want. And those are obviously cars that the buyer doesn't actually want. So they end up buying them, owning them, selling them back to dealership at a loss, and you end up racking up like six figures of losses to buy the car that you actually want.

Yep.

So a lot of guys are afraid to just spend the 100k over sticker to go buy the car immediately. But I'm just going to put it out there. Like a lot of people are afraid to make that call. And I don't. I don't think that you should be. You're gonna spend that money one way or another.

Just do it.

Even if you're buying on the secondary market, on bring a trailer or whatever, just do it.

Yeah.

So everybody's gonna apply a different meaning to that. But that was the idea that popped in my head first.

And as they say, you know, you can sleep in a GT3RS, but you can't race a house.

Race a house.

So better to be car rich than house rich. Let's go to Tyler Cosgrove. He says you guys can do your tour at U Michigan Stadium. It comfortably seats 110k, so as so long as we get a couple thousand more folding chairs, it should work fine.

This is our new campus rep.

This is our new campus rep. We love Tyler.

Congratulations.

Yeah, yeah, I could call with him. I really like this guy.

Young, hungry, studying physics.

Yeah. Really, really thoughtful.

I'm kind of worried to gas him up to.

I know, I know.

He's going to get stolen. Other people are going to try to poach him. But that's a free market.

It is, it is.

Thank you for representing Technology Brothers.

Yeah. And thanks for flagging this. We'll do that tour soon. Let's go to druid the world.

We're going to do the Technology Brothers world Tour. It's only going to be in the United States.

Yes, exactly. All the most important destinations in the world. Las Vegas, Miami, New York, L.A. san Francisco, Chicago.

Michigan.

Michigan. Exactly. Dhruva says nothing is more expensive than cheap goods. The price of cheap goods from China or factories never built in the United States. Industrial technologies never discovered. Younger generations that look down on factories. Deep process knowledge that dies out and dependence on an adversary. Interesting. Yeah, it's true.

Well said. Manufacturing. I think this is CEO of a Company called Deterrence, which I was part of getting off the ground. Deterrence is doing high volume energetics manufacturing. So manufacturing like the super boring components that go into different, different types of munitions and probably struggling with supply chain right now. Yeah, supply chain is the biggest thing. Like basically a lot of the US Military's like arsenal is dependent on overseas sources and that puts us in a position of potentially like a catastrophic supply chain crunch depending on how the world shapes out over the next 10 to 20 years. So the real. Yeah. And then, and then looking at these sort of externalities of, of offshoring our manufacturing throughout the last century, the job loss, the cratering of certain towns and communities in America, which is all the stuff that J.D. vance is like talked about over and over. There's a real cost to getting stuff cheap.

Yep. Let's go to the next one. But first we have a promoted post from Mont Blanc. We want to put them on the show and we're excited to bring them to our audience. Mont Blanc writes a nature inspired color palette refreshes Mont Blanc's timeless leather goods in the Mason's Spring Summer 2024 leather collections filled with pieces that combined aesthetics and functionality. You might know Montblanc for their fantastic pens, but we encourage you to go to montblanc.com and check out some of their fine leather goods. So we're excited to welcome them to the Technology Brothers podcast and look forward to partnering with them more in the future. Let's do.

Thank you.

Let's stay on the topic of luxury goods. The luxury watch guy says Sotheby's just sent four world records at its Geneva watch sales. The highlights in total, the two auctions combined for an impressive $22.9 billion in sales. Patek Philippe reference number 1563 sold for 3.8 million and referenced 2499 for 2.6 million.

I love how that's probably more revenue in a week than the entire last 10 YC batches will generate in this calendar year. 2024.

Yeah. Young collectors under 50 drove 60% of sales. Future is bright.

Yeah, I just love to see that young, you know, young, younger people are getting in the mix supporting fantastic institutions like Sotheby's. And it's great to see the watch market coming back. It's been a rough couple years. It's no probably accident that it correlated with an increase in the price of bitcoin. Most of the watches that our audience wants cost about 1 bitcoin. So anyways, easy, easy trade there.

Let's go to Emily Troy at Coinbase, she says slowly and then all at once. And. And it's a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal saying Gary Gensler's ambitious SEC agenda could be near its end.

Emily's, from my understanding, been a fantastic leader at Coinbase through tons of ups and downs and regulatory uncertainty and scrutiny and all this stuff. I just don't think it can be stressed enough that every company, whether public or private, goes through periods of euphoria and periods of, of darkness. But nothing is more intense than within the crypto world. And like, as much as crypto, you know, founders and Web3 people that are pivoting into Web3 as it gets hot, as much as those people get made fun of, it can't be stressed enough how, how much the people companies like Coinbase go through on a year to year basis and how much they just have to like, put the blinders on. And. And these people are working at a company where they're like, embarrassed to say what they do at Thanksgiving. Right. And now they're gonna go into Thanksgiving. It's gonna be a jolly, jolly holiday season. So shout out to Emily and Coinbase for pushing through it.

Fantastic. Let's stay on.

The stock's up. Like literally added like 30 billion in market cap. I love Brian.

Great team. Let's go to Martin Shkreli. He says the future of finance. And it's a USD USDC transfer of 100 USDC.

It's happening on Ethereum and it's happening.

On Ethereum and I actually don't really understand what's going on.

So he's sending $100. It's costing him $10, a 10% payment processing fee.

Oh, my God. Yeah.

Okay. Anyways, one of the reasons why Solana is just absolutely cleaned up and like a lot of the developer activities moved over to Solana is it's just blockchains were invented to be able to process like really high volumes of transactions globally instantly.

Sure.

And the fact that if you want to send 100 bucks, it's like a 10% payment processing fee.

Yep.

And it's not even going to the Collison Brothers. It's going to Vitalik, what's his name.

Yeah, not directly.

Obviously the Ethereum shareholders.

Let's do another promoted post, this time from Steinway and Sons, who you've heard from before on the podcast. Steinway writes. During World War II, Steinway Victory Verticals were shipped to every theater of war. And it's this amazing picture of these upright pianos that the Steinway company was building. Just lining this factory during World War II. And it really speaks to the heritage of this company and why we're so proud to support them and we love them so much. But it's great to see. I mean this was posted on Veterans Day. It's great to see a company that they're not their CEOs and like shit posting on Twitter all day. But they still get it. They're still pro America.

They're still, you know, the classic images you see around World War II industry is these massive hangars and facilities spitting out planes and tanks and guns and cars. But it's important that we understand that when America rallied around World War II, it wasn't just aerospace and defense and automotive manufacturers. It was some of the greatest companies in the history of America, of Steinway being one of them that, that rallied around the cause. So yeah, thank you to Steinway.

And if you think about, you know, you're in the, you're in the theater of war in World War II. Like they didn't have iPhones at the time. Like literally having a friend who could play piano and entertain you was probably what got you through. So we love Steinway here. Please visit Steinway.com to learn more. Let's go to Sheil Monot. He says John Don Jr. Is a VC 1789 Capital invests in the Republican parallel economy. De globalization anti esg and cutting edge technologists that disrupt industries weighed down by excessive bureaucracy. And so he's Don Jr. Is joining a venture capital firm. Interesting. What do you think?

De globalization anti. So, so it's funny that these are all framed in like negative. Yeah.

But like they really could just be like you flip this around and it's just, just like American manufacturing.

Energy independence.

Yeah. Mission driven companies. Right.

Yeah.

You know, founders that move fast and ignore bureaucracy like founder mode. It's really just a reframing of the same pitch. We've heard from plenty of VCs.

Yeah, that's, that's always been the one of the critiques of Trump broadly is the negative view on things American carnage as opposed to optimism obviously. Yeah, yeah.

There's a little bit of America. I mean even make America are great again. It's like are we not great right now? What's going on?

Yeah, yeah. But that, but anyways, these trucks, I think they're generally, you know, sounds like they're going to be a pretty generalist fun but not, not bad themes overall at a high level.

Fantastic. Let's go to Nikita Beer. He calls the top on 1111202024 at 6:54pm And I think he was wrong. I think he was calling like the bitcoin top more or less at like 84 or something. Something like that. I'm not exactly sure what.

So here's the funny thing. Usually the top correlates with Coinbase going number one in the app store.

Sure.

Coinbase as of this morning, was number one in that store.

Okay.

Okay.

So that's what he's saying.

No, I know. I think that. That this. This post pre. Predated.

Yeah.

That number one, but by a couple days. But. But yeah, I just think it's funny if. I think what Nikita should do is tweet top once a day.

Yeah. For delete all the ones that are wrong.

Yeah. And just go back and delete them.

And be like, I called it.

And he can say he called the top and then he can sell.

But we would have the evidence here that he did that because we would be printing them out.

We're the only people in the world that are printing out tweets.

You're in the truth zone, Nikita. Good luck.

Yeah.

Can't pull that on us.

Anyways, I think right after this, he tweeted we're back. So.

Yeah. Yeah, we're back. Yeah, I know. He's, he's, he's optimistic. We got one more promoted post today, this time from Gulfstream Aerospace. Gulfstream is proud to announce that Starlink has arrived. Gulfstream has officially received FAA supplemental type certification to install the high speed Internet Service on the G650ER. STCs are also going in progress for the G800 G700, G600 G500 G400 GIV, GIVX, GV and GVSP. And you can learn more at GLF Aero Starlink. So shout out to Gulfstream. Big, big fan of the pod.

Two of our favorite companies.

Exactly. Yeah. We love SpaceX and we love Gulfstream here. So happy to support them. I mean, this tweet did very well. They got 1.7k likes, 100k views. Hopefully we'll get them some more attention because we love Gulfstream here and encourage.

All of our employees go buy Gulfstream.

To go buy Gulfstreams.

Takes a little bit of time, but it's worth it.

It is. Let's go to Rune. Rune writes, when you're good at something, it doesn't feel special or high agency or brave. You're like, what else would I be doing?

It's a good podcasting.

Podcasting. Yeah. No, no, it makes sense. It's. It's the ikigai thing. It's like figuring out what your life's work is, what you're meant to be doing. This is important. I like this.

Yeah. A big thing that ends up happening is people have like all these incredible insights and learnings that they don't end up sharing with the world because they just seem so innately obvious to them that they're like why would I ever talk about that idea or thought.

Yep, exactly.

Because it's just so, so obvious. And then turns out like thousands, tens of thousands of other people would like be like mind blown. I can't believe it was like Mark talking about all this stuff.

Totally.

The Rockbridge event. Right. Where the politicians minds were like blown to him.

It's. It's. It's second nature.

Yeah.

Yeah. So find the thing that's second nature to you.

Avoid talk about it.

Avoid mimetics and. And just do become the best in.

The world at it.

Exactly.

Like Rune is. Rune's the best in the world at posting and language models. Undoubtedly. Right. There's a lot of alpha sitting in that.

Yeah. Well, we got to wrap up because I think Jordy has to hop on with Manila. But we will see you later. Subscribe. Thank you. Goodbye.