Arsonist In LA, The Government Files, I'm Rich and Need Help, Why B-Naires Love Diet Coke

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are still surviving the Los Angeles fires. Thankfully, both of our homes are still standing. But the story has evolved over the past 24 hours and it's looking like there's a lot more arson going on than people previously thought. There's rumors that the whole Palisades fire started via arson. Didn't Andrew Huberman catch someone clearly doing arson?

Yeah, caught some arsonists. Yeah, very clearly.

And then our vice president Ben had to step out earlier this morning because an arsonist literally burned down his next door neighbor's house or something like that, or lit a.

Well, here's what here. So people are really taking advantage of the chaos. Totally in the same way that in the. You remember summer 2020. Oh yeah, when the riots were happening, people were just saying, oh, there's protests, riots. I'm just going to start looting.

Yep.

So what people are doing now is they're going into neighborhoods, lighting fires, waiting for people to evacuate and then starting to rob the houses.

Yep.

And they're on networks with scooters and motorcycles and rented cars. And so it's just full chaos. There's. I was seeing in a group chat that multiple neighborhoods in Malibu have caught people just coming in actively trying to start fires, and now people are just, you know, trying to basically make citizens arrests.

Yep.

Full chaos.

So some recommendations for the listeners. Security systems, ring cameras, adp, whatever you can do. There's not a lot of great stuff there. Sauron is coming thanks to Kevin Hartz over at a Star vc. He's starting a home security firm. It's not fully live yet, but maybe go get on the wait list if that's something that you're interested in. You're trying to defend a home. Most the top recommended weapon for defending a home are AR15. Don't overcomplicate it. We joke about a lot of crazy weapons here. You don't need the meteorite 1911s and an AR will do the job. So maybe go pick one of those up. Also support Andrew Huberman and citizen journalists who are doing reporting on X and buy some mate. Ina yerba mate, mate. I love this stuff. And it's, it's Huberman's brand. If you're not familiar. He acquired it alongside another Andrew Wilkinson at Tiny. And so they've been growing that and we love. So if you see something, record it and throw it on the timeline. We saw just a crazy car crash and police chase outside or bended outside of our studio and got some footage of that Threw that on the timeline and just kind of letting people know what's going on and obviously stay on.

Yeah, it's really crazy energy in the city right now. You got ash floating through the air. Feels like it's snowing.

Air quality is terrible. It's. It's miserable and chaotic.

You were actually okay with there being a lot of sort of PFAS microplastics floating around because your tea's been so high lately. You were trying to take the edge out and take the edge off.

Yeah.

But anyways, not good for kids. I. I went down to South Bay with or took the family down there yesterday because the air quality was slightly better. Yeah, not good for kids.

It's rough. So, yeah, everyone stay safe out there and yeah, do whatever you can to help other people that are in trouble. Check in on everyone in la, please. So, yeah, completely unrelated to the fire, we're moving on. We're trying to move to the tech stories that we love and think are interesting. Today there was a op ed posted by Peter Thiel in the Financial Times.

For those that don't know who. Who is Peter Thiel?

Oh, I thought you're gonna say who's. What is the Financial Times?

What is the Financial Times? And who is Peter Thiel? No, I'd be interested. I'm sure we have at least one brother in the audience.

Well, it says it right here. It says the writer is a technology entrepreneur and investor.

And he's a writer.

Yeah, he's a writer. Yeah. He wrote a book. Zero to one, Entrepreneur, Investor Power, Law of Business Books. The only book you really need to read again and again and again. Founder of PayPal, founder of Palantir, incubator of a ton of different stuff through Founders Fund, runs Founders Fund, big venture capital firm, invests personally and is tied to a ton of other venture venture capital firms.

Any. Anytime a reporter, a tech journalist wants to make something sound. Oh yeah, crazy and mysterious, they always go, oh, Peter Thiel backed this company.

Yeah. Yeah.

And most of the time he invested in a fund as an LP or his family office invested in funds. So it's like very clear that he didn't necessarily invest in the company. But they always bring it back and say it's Peter Thiel backed.

He's been a boogeyman of the left for a long time.

Yeah.

Where. Yeah. I've gotten to the point where I, I will sometimes throw it in like teal backed or teal sponsored because it's like, it's just such a meme at this point. Yeah, and a lot of times they'll try and correct that. Like. Like the name of the fund is Founders Fund, not Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Like, he's one of three co founders and there's multiple gps, and of course, he's a huge force in the firm, but it is its own entity, and everyone, including him, would like it to be represented as its own thing. Yeah, but that doesn't fit the narrative.

So he also has Till Capital.

Yeah. And so this is an interesting article. We wanted to cover it on the show. It's called A Time for Truth and Reconciliation, and it's talking about what's going to happen in the new Trump 2.0 presidency. And so the lead is in 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump's election victory was, quote, unquote, not the apocalypse by any definition. He was correct, but understood in the original sense of the Greek word apocalypses, meaning unveiling. Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump's return to the White House augurs the apocalypses of the Onsen regime's secrets. The new administration's revelations need not justify vengeance. Reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth. And this feels very tied to actually, Eric Torenberg's prediction, which he shared with Molly o' Shea and that other analysis that we looked at. Michiel Basu Trivedi wrote those. And Torenberg was saying he's predicting that there will be a Twitter files for the government. Yeah, that there is. Now that Elon's more involved and the Trump team is more aware of what. What they want to dig into, that there will be more documents that are declassified, more analysis of where the bloat is. Exactly. And it could be anodyne, just like, oh, like, you know, you see these reports all the time where it's like, oh, for some reason, there's like some bus driver who's making 500k and you're like, how did that happen? That's kind of odd. Like, it seems like that's aberration. An aberration of like, the government or, you know, or we talked about it in defense, where it's like a toilet will cost $86,000 or like a screw will cost 20k. Um, and all of those should come to light. But he also goes on to talk about some of the, the, the. The bigger kind of conspiracies and secrets within the government that people are clamoring for. And how do we grapple with stuff.

Well, and it's interesting here because the audience very clearly was not tech X. Right. He could have just posted this.

Yeah.

It's a long form post. He could have put it on a blog somewhere or done an interview with a tech person.

Like he could have gone on Rogan to talk about it, but he also could have gone on a tech specific show.

Yeah, so it seems. Yeah. It's an interesting choice to, to, to say I'm not going to get erect. I'm actually going to work with Financial Times and try to get this in front of a new audience that isn't necessarily rabidly consuming every word.

Yeah. And so the Financial Times read by capital allocators, investors, business people all over the world.

Very international.

Very international audience. Beautiful. We should get a subscription here. It's pink. Pink sheets, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's great. So he says the apocalypse is the most powerful means of resolving the old guards or most peaceful means of resolving the old guards. War on the Internet. A war the Internet won. And I, and I love that because I haven't, I haven't actually internalized that idea that there really was this massive war between go. We hear it with going direct versus traditional pr. We hear this versus, you know, censorship versus free speech. What does the town square mean? How do companies operate on the Internet? Bitcoin. There's so many things that come back to this Internet and we've heard, you know, even Lina Khan and breaking up Amazon. It's just been a massive war in a bunch of minute little microcosms. And the war on the Internet, this is a Coogan's Law coinage. I think the war on the Internet is how we should be thinking about what happened from the dot com crash when the companies were seen as jokes and toys to to now when they are ascendant. They are the most powerful platforms and the people that founded them and invested in them are the most powerful people in the world. Full stop.

Yeah, yeah. And it's the, the phrasing is, is pretty on point too because the Internet is made up of platforms and individuals and profiles. And it really was profiles, like individual profiles were attacked. The platforms were attacked. The platforms were made to bend the rules of their platforms and, and go against like, you know, we saw this. Trump got booted off of Pinterest.

Yeah.

Like Wild and, and Spot and Shopify.

Shopify.

So it's like you can't sell anything. You can't even organize pretty pictures for your next home.

Yeah.

Like they didn't want him doing anything. It was like full.

It was so clear that every big tech CEO is in a group chat together and they were like, look, we, like, one of them was like, we probably got to do this. And a bunch of them were pressuring each other.

Pinterest thing is so funny.

It's almost just like, I want to be a big tech company too. Like, oh, you're, you're, you' you're banned.

Can you imagine though, if Trump was like, okay, I'm banned on X. I'm banned everywhere. I'm not going to do true social and become.

Yeah.

And create billions of dollars of value. I'm just going to post on Pinterest. It's like pretty pictures with him, like smiling and then like wild. Handwritten.

Yeah. So he goes on to say, my friend and colleague, Eric Weinstein. Weinstein calls the pre Internet custodians of the secrets the distributed idea suppression complex with a disk. The the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities and government funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the Internet had already begun our liberation from the disc prison. Upon the death of financier and Czech child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein In 2019, almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that disc had lost control of the narrative. That was fascinating.

I remember it doesn't feel, it feels like he died a few years ago.

It doesn't feel like I was telling, I was telling someone, like, yeah, it's crazy that Epstein died at the tail end of the last Trump administration. So there wasn't really time for a reconciliation within that. And it immediately turned over and it was very hard to say, oh, was that before COVID After Covid, it was 2019. But do you remember when you first learned about Epstein?

I remember just as an individual.

Yeah. Like, when did.

It had to be the articles where there were, there were almost like puff pieces back in the day of who is this mysterious financier? But it was pre. I feel like I started to get an idea of who he was prior to understanding that he was obviously a criminal.

Yeah. Oh, interesting. I, I found out about him through just straight up like conspiracy theory charts of like, like those pyramids. And it would be like Aliens era 51 and like Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy. Because when the whole Pizzagate thing boiled up, there was a lot of like, this is completely fake. But if you dig into the 4chan threads on Pizzagate, it's like 99% Epstein focused.

Yeah.

And Pizzagate was like a Like an extension of that where. Where, like, the conspiracy theorists were clearly onto something with Epstein, but then they kind of ran with Ton, and then that deranged guy, like, actually shot up that pizza parlor that didn't have a basement or whatever. And then, and then, and then everyone was like, clearly the whole thing is fake. And that was partly wrong. But I remember explaining it to people.

Do you want the hat?

Yeah, I mean, I needed the hat at the time. I remember going to a New Year's party in like 2015, 2016 or something, and, and telling people like, oh, have you heard about this Epstein thing, the black book? All these people are flying on these planes. Like, maybe Chris Tucker's involved. It's like the weirdest story. Bill Clinton's been out there a bunch and. And everyone was just like, okay, you're.

Also like 20 or 30 years older than me, apparently.

And everyone was just like, okay, dude, like, that's a crazy conspiracy. And now it's like, oh, yeah, I watched the Netflix documentary on. On. Yeah, that's like, of course it's real.

That's a hard thing is after you've watched documentaries, which shows specific stories, this thing, it's like, well, what is my. My memory of, like, real time reactions to what was being shared versus what did I just see after the fact?

Yeah, such a. Such an odd, odd time. But, yeah, I mean, it really did become like, just Normie. Like, it's not a conspiracy there anymore. It's just history that there was an island and there was and stuff.

It doesn't seem like it's a conspiracy theory either, that there has been a widespread effort within the government to control the information around that case and prevent it from being widely known.

Yeah, well, that's actually where Teal goes on to talk about. He says it may be too early to answer the Internet's questions about the late Mr. Epstein, but one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 65% of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story, we have waited 61 years for a denouement. While the suspects Fidel Castro, 1960s Mafiosi, and the CIA's Allen Dulles gradually die, the thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure. We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about COVID 19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci's senior advisor, David Morens we learned that the National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from freedom of information acts scrutiny. Nothing, wrote Borachio in his medieval plague epic the Decameron. It is so in, it is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.

So do you remember this? They were misspelling words intentionally, the same way over and over. So that when people make a Freedom of Information act request that emails wouldn't surface because. Yeah, it was just. They would always. They would like very consistently had a.

C O, V, D I. Yeah, just. Oh, I just flipped the letter. But I do it every single time. So V I, D. Nothing shows up.

Yeah, exactly.

C O V D I is like the keyword. Interesting.

So crazy.

That is crazy. In that spirit, Morin's and former chief US medical advisor Foushee will have the chance to share some in some indecent facts about their own recent plague. Did they suspect Covid spawned from US taxpayer funded research or an adjacent Chinese military program? Why did we fund the work of ecohealth alliance which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is gain of function research a byword for a bioweapons program? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media? Our first amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech. But the global reach of the Internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing in a tragic, in a tragic comic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine. We were complicit in Australia's recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users. The beginning of the end for Internet anonymity. Did we muster up even two minutes of criticism of the UK which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering among other things, annoyance, inconvenience and needless anxiety. We may, we may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free Internet Internet in Oceania. Interesting. Yeah. I remember when Covid first broke and it was so funny because now it's become this like cause of the left. Like you gotta. Taylor Ryan's like you gotta still wear a mask in 2025, et cetera. But it came from biology who's like firmly on the right and libertarian. And at the time before like there was like a multi week period where only tech was taking it seriously and some of the scientific community and so my co founders are PhDs in bio at Lucy. And, and they didn't see it. They're not super political guys. They didn't see it through like a political culture war lens. And so immediately I remember coming in and you know, talking about it and we kind of knew that okay, this is going to be crazy, like the, what's the R naught, the viral coefficients very high, etc. But we just drew out a two by two graph and we were like, okay, is it Chernobyl or is it Fukushima or, or Pearl Harbor? Like is this, is this attack, is this an attack or an accident? Is this intentional or an accident? And then on the, on the y axis you put is this bioengineered or is this of zoonotic origin? Because you could literally go and get a bat or a pangolin and then just be like, it's this pangolin is sneezing. Let's take it, let's release it. Right?

Yeah.

And that doesn't require any bio lab crazy science. Like amazing. But it's still like very deliberate.

Yeah.

Then there's the other one where it's.

Like, look at the wet markets in China. They are extremely foul.

Yeah.

So immediately could easily imagine that something would happen that it wasn't that.

Yeah.

There is a, there is a case.

That it was and is still somewhat like the default narrative that's being pushed is, is came from an animal. Totally accidental.

Yeah.

But if you look at the story, at the very least it's like, well, the Chinese government knew that something was spreading and they didn't raise their hand and say, hey guys, we got a thing going on over here.

Yeah.

They, they actually like, I think they killed the doctor or something. It was like bad or they, they definitely were silencing people who were talking about it on social media, which is bad for us. And it's like, even if, even if they did have Chernobyl, they did the bad thing of being like, no, no, no, we don't have an accident going on over here. And that's annoying and that's expensive.

And they, and they did. We do know that the US funded the work of EcoHealth alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves extract novel coronaviruses.

Yeah.

So we do know that that was happening.

And so that takes it into like the, it's from the bio lab type of thing. This is engineered. Maybe there's gain of function going on where they're trying to juice it up and, and, and then there's the question of. Okay, so maybe there's an argument for. Yeah, Go do the research, create the superbug, and then create the antidote for the superbug. And then if the real superbug comes out randomly, you have the antidote read. Cool. I can be like, okay with that under the right circumstances if it's clean. But it's like, did they have a Chernobyl esque accident where they were doing this research and then it got out, which was like, you can't talk about that at all. And then. And then the. And then the worst of all scenarios is this was engineered and released deliberately for a bunch of different reasons. And you can talk to a bunch of people that think about that. But what's chaos and matrix of like four options. It was just like immediately like, it's got to be one of these four. We should talk about all four of them. This isn't conspiratorial, like, what's actually going on. There's so little evidence. It's so unclear. You can't just immediately be like 100% zoonotic accident.

Yeah.

And yet the fog of.

The fog of war, like really has. Takes quite a long time to dissipate. In some cases never. Right. Even. Even with the JFK stuff, there was all these documentaries that were produced that each had their own take on the story. And so the result was that a bunch of was put out there, but everybody was still deeply confused. And you could make a case.

Yeah.

And even with the fires this week, I was hearing yesterday from. From a close family friend that. That somebody was saying that their friend in the police force was saying there was arson for the Palisades fire. And then it's like, well, we know there's arson for the Kenneth fire, but is. You know, it's still unclear. Other people are saying that fire started in somebody's backyard and just ripped.

And I did this on the solo episode. I was like, how do fires start? There's a bunch of different ways. Lightning strikes. That's like the all natural version. There's power lines. So it could be on the electrical company. It could be arson. It could be someone having a fireworks or a backyard barbecue that went wrong.

There was a video of a kid.

There's a bunch of different.

Throwing a bunch of gas on the fire.

Yeah. So like, like that can be human and criminal. It can be a human accident. Like you could just be having a barbecue one day and something goes wrong or. And it's not even a heater. Yeah. It's not even negligent. It's just. It's just. It's just a Complete accident. Freak accident, but it's caused by a human. But, like, you should be able to immediately discuss all of these. And that was just not on the table for the first couple of years of COVID There was actually an interesting turn of events when I noticed. Do you know Johnny Harris? Yeah, yeah, he's. He works for the New York Times Information. Yeah, I mean, he's very like, left.

If you look in the comments of his videos.

Oh, yeah.

It's all this is. Here's five reasons why you're completely wrong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. I mean, for a long time he was like, I. I felt like he was kind of the cultural center of YouTube in the sense that, like, the average YouTube viewer was very well produced. They're very well produced. But also just in terms of politically, like, he was basically center left. And for a long time he couldn't talk about the. The lab leak theory. And then a couple years in, it was like Rogan had talked about it a bunch. They put the community notes on it, and then eventually it got to a point where, like, the New York Times was reporting on the lab leak theory.

Just the fact that the.

Johnny could put his.

Just the fact that the disc was so adamant at making sure that nobody thought it was a lab leak almost makes you think that.

Yeah, she doth protest too much is the phrase. Yeah, yeah, we need this here for this. For sure. We pulled out the tinfoil hat which we put on when we're talking about conspiracy theories. Let's move on. Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Mark Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan's podcast that the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system? Where were an IRS contractors illegal leaks of Trump's tax records anomalous? Or should Americans assume their right to privacy? Financial privacy hinges on their politics. And can one speak of a right to privacy at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans communications. South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission. But answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would benefit both Trump's chaotic style and our Internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the right wing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded. So I Think what he's saying there is like Trump wasn't going to declassify stuff because the right wing, deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. Does that mean a deep state that is against the right wing? So if they declassify things, they won't be able to get stuff done because the deep state will be working against them?

Think so.

I think that's what he's saying. I'm not exactly sure about that one. I was a little confused when I read that. He goes on to say our Onsen regime talking about the Biden administration and all the Democrats in charge, like the aristocracy of pre revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historic faith in the arc of the moral Universe. But by 2020, they hope to write off Trump as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rear guard action of a struggling regime. And its.

By English. Every now and then we get by the English language.

And that's a German word, I'm sure. Come on. There were. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre Internet past. And, and that is really interesting when you think about 2020 as an aberration of the previous regime in the sense that Biden was like super old and they didn't have a primary to try and install comma. And it was like, it was very like, you know, just like, like thrown together. It felt like it was kind of chaotic and thrown together at all times. And so, yeah, I mean, I think everyone agrees that, like, the left will have to like, completely retool. How does Bernie and AOC fit in? Like completely rethink the strategy if they want to move forward and be successful because the. The foundation has really, really cracked.

Yeah. It's interesting too, this week, I can't imagine that the images coming out of L. A will be good for Newsom's political career because they feel like sort of visual summary of his, you know, in California. And he was front runner.

Yeah.

Go for. For 2028.

Yeah. And polymarket he was with the Democrats. He was like 3%, 5%, like hovering around there, like, maybe I'll throw him in. Yeah.

Yeah. Even you're saying this last election.

Yeah, this last election it was like, oh, maybe Kamala won't do it and Newsom will be the one. Or Michelle Obama.

One thing that. The one thing, the only thing that I appreciate about Newsom is he. Oh, he knows how to put himself together in a crisis.

He always looks good.

We still put on our suits.

Yeah. And he has Fantastic taste in food.

That's true.

He loves a five star restaurant.

Yeah. There was a AI generated image of him at Nobu, like looking at the disaster on his phone while Nobu was like, bernie, this is great.

Burning down, going to Michelin star restaurants in the middle of. Yeah, fire. The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered our deepest questions. The causes of the 50 year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the United States, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices and the explosion of public debt. So this is going back to the deepest question to Thiel is what is the cause of technological stagnation? Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions. But as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.

Sad.

That hurts.

You can. You can admit that and still love our country.

Yeah, for sure. Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous and more important. The Apocalypsis cannot resolve our. Our fights over 1619, referencing the 1619 project, but it can resolve our fights over COVID 19. It will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The Internet will not allow us to forget those sins, but with the truth, it will prevent us. It will not prevent us from forgiving. Very interesting. So I think a little bit of the takeaway here is that the obsession over the JFK assassination might be a little bit of a distraction from moving forward. And there needs to be more of a focus on the recent history, as he says. There was a fascinating. Did you see?

Yeah. The future demands fresh and strange ideas. To me, that's Greenland, right?

That's a very good example.

The Arctic is melting. We want control over those trade routes.

And so, related to this, Mark Zuckerberg just went on Joe Rogan. The episode just dropped this morning. And there's a quote here from Autism Capital. I didn't have a chance to print it out, but Zuck says people in the Biden administration would call up our team and scream and curse at them. The emails are published. It's all out there. They wanted us to take down a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV. Like the. You know that one?

Yeah, yeah.

At some point, Biden gave some statement where they said that Facebook was killing people. And then all these different agencies and branches of government started coming after our company. It was brutal. And so that's kind of the, the Zuck vibe shift that we talked about on Monday where he appointed Dana White to the board and also announced community notes and moved the, the trust and safety team from California to Texas and then also got eliminated. Give me the latest.

Completely eliminated dei.

Yeah, no more DEI organization targets. Yeah, so. So you can see that this is like, echoing through and it's fascinating because when, when Zuck came out, there was a lot of Chris, like, oh, he's like late to the party. Like, like, Brian Armstrong was being brave about this in 2020. But if you talk to Brian, he's like, no, like, it's great that he's here in like four years. It's not that long. Like, what we don't want is like the holdouts who have, who real. Who like, haven't realized that the world has changed and aren't willing to shift. And so, like, I think that this is the Palmer lucky thing with everyone's working on defense now. Like, it's fine if you had a DEI program that was a mess in 2015, like, move on and figure out what's actually a good way forward. You just don't want to be fighting tooth and nail to maintain the previous regime. That was obviously very destructive. But fascinating article, highly recommend. I mean, we reread it all, so. But it is free on the Financial Times. Fortunately not paywalled for you bootstrap founders out there who are trying to keep burn low. Even though we recommend getting the paper delivered in print every day, you'll be able to read this one for free, which is great. Should we move on?

Beautiful.

Let's talk about a super viral problem. Super viral post that went out I believe on Monday, maybe Sunday. Vinay Higher math says I am rich and I have no idea what to do with my life. Here's a blog where I talk about leaving loom, giving up $60 million, lARPing as Elon, breaking up with my girlfriend, insecurities, a brief stint at Doge and how I'm now in Hawaii self studying physics. And for those who, for those of you who might not know, Loom is a chrome plugin that allows you to record your screen, record your. Your face cam and match those together. It's actually very useful if you need an employee or you're. You need to send someone a little video of. Hey, here's how I want this process done. A lot of sales guys I would use it.

I've used it a bunch for Async design feedback. So I Get some design work done and then I can't talk through it live. I'll just send a three minute video. Being like, change this, change this could be better. I don't.

It's just a way more. It's just way more flowing than trying to write out an email. It's just way easier.

Yeah, it's interesting. I actually think when I. When most of the time when I get a voice note from. From somebody, it annoys me because I'm like, well, you saved yourself time and now you're gonna waste my time because you could have just summarized this over text. But when you get a loom, typically there's actually some like meat in there and it can be convenient because it's saving you a phone call. When somebody sends you a voice note, there's. They're saving themselves time.

Yeah, it's often saving you somebody zoom call because it's. The whole screen share aspect of it is.

Yeah, loom is saving you.

Because typically it's hard for me if you're giving that type of design feedback. You need to not only put all of your thoughts into words perfectly and then also share screenshots of. Okay, this is the button I'm talking about. Draw on it. It just, it really does save a lot of time. It's a great product. And so they raised a lot of money. They grew the company really big. I think the, the biggest venture round was like over a billion, like 1.5 and they sold for a billion. And it was still a great outcome for the founders. Very clearly the guy made a lot of money. And so let's look at his blog post. He says life has been a haze. Last year, after selling my company, I find myself in the totally unrelatable position of never having to work again. Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don't have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don't know what to do with it. And honestly, I'm not the most optimistic about life. I know this is a completely zero world position to be in. The point of this post isn't to brag or gain sympathy. To be honest, I don't know what the point of this post is. I tried to manufacture one. It's. I have an idea what it's about. I know the thing that you can chase. Vinay, I got your solution right here. Stay tuned then. I recognize the irony of creating purpose out of a blog post when I don't currently have much conviction or purpose in life. So I'll just go ahead and explain my current situation for my own selfish purposes, to push myself to be completely and awkwardly vulnerable to a blob of nameless strangers on the Internet. Last March, I had no idea what to do with my life. I found it very hard to give up a $60 million pay package. I had already made more money than I knew what to do with. But your mind does funny things when you start to consider numbers like this. So I decided to go to the redwoods and figure it out. Within five minutes of my first hike, the trees smiled at me and whispered their simple wisdom. What's the point of money if, if it not for freedom? What is your most scarce source? Reese? What is your most scarce resource if not time? I would leave to do something, anything, to be alive again. I had no idea. But I was hell bent on making sure everyone knew I had it all figured out. So he spent two weeks after his tenure, two weeks after leaving an intense 10 year journey, he did what any healthy person does and met with over 70 investors and founders in robotics.

We wait. One, one note.

Yep.

So Atlassian, the company that bought Loom, they owned Jira, right?

Yeah.

So that, that's a little bit of context here. So he was like working at the company that makes Jira very miserable. Software to use was so painful that he couldn't stay for a couple years to make 60 million. An MBA level contract. That just shows, honestly, one thing he could have done is said, hey, millions of people use Jira. I gotta make it my life's work to make this product. Say, hey, I don't want to work on Loom anymore. Yeah, I'm done screen sharing. I want to fix Jira, the cause of so much suffering in the world.

I've always, I've always said this, that you should never sell your company, but if you do, you should be sure that you're on the track to be the CEO of the acquiring company. And it's a completely different mentality if you're, if you're a big, if you're a big company. Like, like could you see Dylan Field being the CEO of Adobe if that deal went through? Absolutely. Would that be good for Adobe shareholders? Probably, yeah. Would that be edifying for Dylan Field?

Probably, yeah.

Would he be able to bring his.

Team upward and, or Dylan looking at Adobe being like, I want to work with Scott Belsky.

Yeah.

And I'm sure the two of them were like devastated.

But the big, the big problem is, is like, of course, if you're like you know the company struggling like get a, get a you know aqua hire done or the, you know you're, you're stuck and you just need an exit like do that. But if it's, if it's a deal where you know you're getting you know, 1 to 10% of the company, they're like you know on a market cap basis.

Yeah.

Set your sights higher and actually set yourself up to go in and dominate because you want to be a leader. You want to be at the top. Been at the top your entire career as a founder.

Yeah.

Just because they stuff you in an office with an earn out and a boss as like VP of innovation or whatever. If you're a real killer you can get back on the corporate track and yeah. Talk to the board and get the CEO fired. Take over.

Hostile.

Yeah. Get an interesting technique. What's the best way to get your boss fired? If you want to move up and you know that it's just a corporate ladder and you just want to move up. Best way to get your boss out of the picture. Find a bunch of recruiters to recruit them away to a better job.

That's great.

So find executive recruiters. Oh yeah, my boss doesn't work if.

You'Re joining a founder mode. I think Atlassian is a founder mode.

I think so.

I think they're responding to hey so and so. I heard I saw you work in SaaS.

Yeah. But certainly if you're in the middle of the ladder works every time. Every time.

Yeah.

Great, great strategy and recruiters are always looking for insights. Yeah. It's non violent. It's not aggressive. It's, it's just a little and then oh I'm getting a lot of job offers actually I'm going to have. Are you going to be okay? I'm going to leave. You know I don't want to abandon you on this team. You're going to have a lot more work. You're like yes.

Really?

Yeah.

Interesting news. That's like a Dwight from the office style style move. Or maybe, or maybe Jim would do that to Dwight.

Yeah, it's good. So he breaks up with his girlfriend.

Realize so I was thinking maybe the purpose of the post was was it was more of like using it as a dating app. Kind of like a call to help.

My theory.

Call to help or e girls. Like hey, any e girls out there?

Yes.

I'm very lonely and lost and I have 100 to 200 million dollars.

Yes.

Like reach out.

I'll be in Hawaii so I Think the. I think the. Maybe not the purpose of the. The. The post, but like the missing thing here is essentially fame and recognition. You know, like, yeah, Loom is a cool company. We know about it, but it's not something that people talk about. Like Tesla, you know, it's not a consumer product. Yeah, even. Even smaller. Even like a Kettle and Fire has more mental mind share than Loom, even though it's probably a smaller company because they sponsor ufc. And so if you're just running into a random person in a bar and you're like, I'm the founder of Kettle and Fire. I saw that at Erewhon. Like, that's amazing. That's cool. I get that all the time. With Lucy, people will be like, oh, I use those pouches. And we have like, you know, tons and tons of customers. Much harder with a Rubin. Yeah, Lucy exactly loves Loom. It doesn't happen as much. And so. And that's a weird ego thing, but it's real. And there's this thing where a lot of people want money, and then once they have money, they want political power, and once they have political power, they want fame, and they kind of dance between all of these. And. And so, first off, I think. I think, like, it's fine to want a public presence, to want to be known, to want to be widely loved and respected. And so, you know, you're a good writer. I want to hear. I want to read more of these blog posts. So I. I would say, like, turn this into something. Give this a try. Yeah, maybe this will work. And. And, yeah, create some content, because there's already so many content creators, but you have the bonafides to put some cool stuff out there. And then also, just in general, I have this philosophy that it's very difficult when people focus on just one metric of success. And they say, my happiness is tied just to my net worth. Because if you get to the top of the mountain, you have nowhere to go but down. And the real best thing. Are you familiar with, like, the shepherd scale or barber pole? I've talked about this theory. So basically, if you watch a bar.

He'S just making stuff up.

Barber. Like, the barber pole theory of happiness is if you look at a barber pole, it's like striped like a candy cane. Right. And if you watch it, it looks like it's going up endlessly.

Yeah.

What's really happening is that it's getting the other side and then it's kind of restarting the cycle. And a shepherd tone does the same thing. I can I can play sounds like really, really crazy when you hear it because it's basically a whole bunch of scales that are playing at the same time. And so it sounds kind of like, like this. You hear how it's like sounding. It sounds like it's going up.

Yeah, yeah.

You can listen to this for hours and it just goes up and up and up and up and up. And it's because some of kind of.

Sounds like it's summoning a 60 Mesoamerican demon.

It really does sound weird. But I, I like this as it's a, it's like a fractal pattern. Like you see the fractal pattern? Fractal pattern makes me start juggling. Yeah. Continue endlessly. And so I, I believe that you need kind of that philosophy in your life because things are all, there's certain metrics like if you have, you know, your family life, your fitness, your fame, your wealth, all of those, they're going to reach the top of the mountain and eventually some of them are going to decline. But if, if, when you're, when you're crusting in your business career, you're having grandchildren and you're getting more and more joy out of just the size of your family, or when you're really young, it might be hard to make a lot of money, but if you're in peak physical condition, you're like, this is amazing. Eventually you're going to hit 50 and be like, yeah, I can't bench press what I could when I was 25. But, but you, but at that time your business career is going to be even better and you're making more and more money so you'll be able to focus on like the new thing. That's good. And so like you need to be balancing all of those different sources of wealth, the types of wealth, so that you're, you're, you're, you're raising one while the others are in decline. If they, if they happen to be. So you can always refocus. It's literally just moving the goalposts on yourself on what makes you happy. What are you about to say? You wrote some stuff down.

I mean, yeah, we can kind of get into, I would say not. I don't think he's asking for our advice, but you know, we've getting it anyway. We've never been hesitant to give unsolicited advice. I mean a few, a few things. I mean one, it's very normal for somebody who's hyper success and career oriented and mission oriented like entrepreneurs are.

Yep.

To feel very lost when that journey ends and landing Atlassian and then becoming a cog in the JIRA machine. It feels like very much like, okay, I'm no longer make having this forward momentum. I went through that on a much smaller, much, much smaller scale after, after we joined roe where I just didn't feel like I was. I was like, I'm 20.

Whatever.

I was 26, 6, 28. Okay, 27 at the time. I'm like, okay. I feel like I'm at the. My. My career is picking up. Felt like it was really ramping up and then it felt like I slowed way down because I was like, okay, I have a boss. For the first time in my life, I'm working at a company where I bear. I only know like five out of like 250 people. Yeah, it just felt, it felt very strange. I felt, I felt lost and I personally ended up doing the same thing where I left earlier than we had originally structured. So I think it's totally normal to feel lost. And it's cool because he's now crowdsourced a ton of ideas and brought all this interest and intrigue into what he's doing.

You should go read the whole post. I think went on to work at DOGE and figured out that he didn't really like that he went into robotics but felt like he was larping as Elon. And then he wound up moving to Hawaii and is teaching himself physics, which is.

Yeah. And so I think, I think the high level like thing that I think every entrepreneur, it's different where for him he doesn't. He's post economic now.

Yep.

Doesn't need to start another company, doesn't need to get a job somewhere, doesn't need to work in the government. So I think the strategy overall should just be to do cool stuff. So that could take a bunch of different forms. Right. That could be Elad Gil making monuments. Right. He's still doing his thing on the investing side and incubation side. Could be doing a grant program like Justin Brother Mares where Justin gives away money to people to try to change their life.

On the post economic thing, I, I love that word. It's. It's very good phrase for, you know, not needing a job. But I feel like I kind of hate it in the sense that when I look at the people that I look up to and respect, they are obviously post economic in the sense that they're like billionaires, but they are not post economic in the sense they're still players, completely players in the game. And, and to the point where if they have a down year, it's emotional. If they have an up year, it's amazing. They're really thinking about how to allocate their capital across every asset class. And like they're, they're thinking about it just as much as, you know, they're.

Still trying to stimulate the economy.

Yeah.

Still active participants are still playing the game.

Yeah. And I think a lot of it happens when it, it's always hard when you jump multiple orders of magnitude in a very, very short of time, essentially overnight. I've noticed this with like if you ever hire someone and you're running like let's say a hundred person startup, you can usually hire someone who's been at a 10 person startup or maybe even a thousand person company and they can kind of jump in. But it's hard when you pull someone from a ten thousand person organization into a hundred person organization because everything about that job is different. Instead of like if you're at a 10,000 person organization and you're a leader, like you don't have a person for everything, you have a team for everything.

Yeah.

And at 100 person organization, just think about like is the Wi Fi down? You might have an IT person. If you go down to a five person startup, it's like you're doing it yourself.

You're going.

And if you're. Yeah. If you're at a 10,000 person company, it's like, well we have an IT team and something else. You jump up. There's three orders magnitude. It's like.

Yeah.

As opposed to, you know, a little bit more of like what we've experienced in our career where it's like a more gradual accumulation of wealth and so you're more acclimated to it. It's not this sudden wealth syndrome that's going on.

Yeah. The, the other thing that I've seen, especially in L. A, the kids who got really big on social media.

Yeah.

Like as teenagers. And then got jaded and didn't convert it into a business or anything like that. Those people really struggle because they've had the pinnacle of attention and not necessarily wealth like true wealth, but like income, like cash flow.

Yeah. It's just like 100k check from Google, from YouTube this month.

So if you're a teenager making 100k a month and then 10 years later you stop doing YouTube because you didn't care about it. And then you have to. Money doesn't even feel real in the same way. So this happens in crypto. People that get ultra wealthy from crypto and they didn't really have to work hard to do it. They were smart and they got. Had some luck. Those people end up just feeling incredibly lost because they're chasing that.

Yeah.

I mean, subconsciously sort of still chasing that high, even if they're not playing a game that allows them to get that high.

I mean we've talked about this with the. In the opposite case of like the PayPal mafia. Like why is the PayPal mafia so special? Obviously, like they're all really talented business leaders and technologists, but specifically it's like they were kind of forced to sell their company after the ipo. They got liquidity, but then they all had like these revenge narratives of like, I've been wrong to like I could have been running something that. I think PayPal's peak market cap is like 100 billion. Could easily be a trillion if they were still there. And, and it was like they got that kind of taken away from them with all this chaos. And so they all went back in immediately because they had so much to prove because they were like, we were the dot com wonder kids and we didn't get our full bite at the apple.

Yeah.

And so that's very different than the.

And they basically all went back to zero and all ran it up to public companies.

Yep, exactly.

Proving that that's the goal counts for something.

That's the goal. You get a couple hundred million.

Yeah. So I mean there's so many things like yeah. Imagine if, if Mr. Beast had started his content creation career with a hundred million dollars already in the.

Oh yeah.

And so, so, so do something like that. I think that it's not. Wouldn't be the worst idea to do a Peter Rahal style deal where let's say Vinay buys house, give some background on Peter. So. So, well, yeah. So Peter Rahal started RXBar, sells it like raises very little money. Sells it for like $600 million.

Yeah.

Proceeds to wait like basically I think like five plus years after his earn out and all that stuff does like a bunch of growth equity investing, some venture investing and then basically starts the same company again, more focused on protein called David. And now he's running it up again like it'll clearly be somewhere probably 500 to a billion dollar outcome. Again, it's a way better product and it's amazing product.

It's so good.

Peter's sending us some today, I think, so we're going to be eating it here with our matina.

I looked at the, I looked at the macros, it's. It has like 40 grams of protein and like 200 grams.

We should see if we can survive on matinas and easily Roar water easily. And Volta goo. Volta and kettle and fire and David protein bars.

You can't swim, you thrive.

So I would say, Vinay, your strategy was spend all your money.

Yes.

And it creates such a crazy lifestyle, you know, bloat and burn, that you need to get back in the game just to survive.

I'm happy to run through that, but let's finish up.

So, so, so, so, so the Peter.

Rahal thing is like Peter Rahal, rebuild loom.

Rebuild loom. Rebuild the same company.

Yeah.

You know, build a loom that just. That automatically generates. AI. Generates the video so you don't even have to record it.

Yep. And it's something that, you know, you can hire all the best people you already know.

You get back on the treadmill, back on the mission.

Great.

Run it back again.

Yep.

So I'd like to see that.

I mean, that's also Nikita beer. That's also a bunch of people that have done that stuff. It's not just. Yeah, it's not just Peter.

The thing with. So there's a mushroom on his blog, which is a, is a bit of a red flag for me because psychedelics are very dangerous. You know, they've been widely promoted by other podcasters and they're, you know, people can experience tremendous benefits from them, but doing them while you're very lost and don't know what's going on can give you a bunch of false signals around what you should actually do. And you're hallucinating.

Yeah.

So there's. It can tell you truths that feel real that aren't necessarily real.

Yeah.

And so even.

It's like the opposite of grounding yourself. You're literally like having an out of body experience. You're away from the ground, you feel like you're flying. The way to ground yourself is like, go back and spend time with your family and your extended family because at a certain point it's like you're. Even if you're running this life of like, you know, you never have to work again. Well, like they're going to have real life problems and, and vicissitudes and all different type of things that, that they need to work through. And that can just make you a lot more human. If you're actually like engaged with your, your community and then your friends and, you know, whoever's in your, in your network really growing, that stuff will actually help you Stay grounded. But did you have anything else before I go into my plan?

Yeah, just think. Studying physics in Hawaii. Very cool. Study your own physical form. Right. Get really into bodybuilding. Get your IFBB pro card for sure. Compete with, you know, someone like Keith Roboy.

Yep.

Get to the absolute pinnacle of that. That's an entire mission that's not necessarily economically driven.

But do you know how many workouts Keith did last year?

Like two a day? Like 700.

It was like, I think it was over a thousand. It was the most insane stat. I would look at it and I was like, this can't be real. I mean, I understand he works out every single day and he. And he had a number of days worked out. It was like 364. I guess he missed one day. But it's like, how do you do three workouts a day, Dude, Unreal. Yeah. Mass monster arc is going to be fantastic.

But yeah, I mean, there's just like. Yeah, there's a lot. Get inspired by nat Friedman. Take 500k and create a public good out of it.

Yeah.

So there's just so much stuff you can do that's not directly economic that can have tremendous impact, can be very motivating. And when I look at this stuff, these are all things I'm very excited to do that we're excited to do through the show. And anyways, what do you got, though? One thing that we love doing is spending money and the timing for Vinay to come into this wealth. Also, as loud opulence becomes a dominant trend and quiet luxury is sort of fading into the background, it's great. The timing is pretty perfect to start spending some, some cash, especially, you know, on the equestrian side, which I'm sure you'll get into.

Yep.

You know, it's not easy or inexpensive to have a, a stable of, of championship winning racehorses. But he has the resources to do that.

Exactly.

So.

So yeah, I broke down kind of how I would spend the first 200 million to really get you back on the hedonic treadmill, because it seems like he's kind of fallen off. And once you move into, you know, a Manhattan penthouse, you're going to be meeting people in the elevator saying, if I was just one floor higher. Yep, I should get back on the grind. Maybe I should call up Atlassian.

Or they're. Or you see them in the elevator and they've got some bags of them and they're like, where are you going? They're. I'm going to my house in Aspen.

Exactly.

And you say oh, what neighborhood you're in. You look it up on ZILLOW and it's $50 million entry price.

Right, exactly like.

Well that's quarter of my.

Yeah.

Assets. I, I gotta actually get back in the game.

I gotta get back in the game. So I broke it down into a couple different categories. You start with the real estate portfolio. Obviously you're gonna need a lot of. I recommend a mansion in Malibu, probably 25 mil. A Miami ocean front estate. You might be able to get that for 10. Manhattan penthouse is 30. Aspen Ski Chalets, 15 Hampton Summer Estate, 20 Lake Tahoe Lakefront Home 8 mil. Joshua Tree Contemporary Retreat for 5. And then you're gonna need something in Hawaii that's gonna be 12 and that's just in America. You might want, you might want the bug out village, some property in Montana or Alaska. You might want to go to New Zealand. That's going to be expensive but beautiful.

Careful gentrifying Alaska, they will, will come for you.

And so that's going to, that's going to take 125 million out of your pocket. Obviously you can use debt but you don't have a lot of cash flow at this point so you're, you're trying to burn down that.

Yeah.

But real estate rich. And then that's justification for.

Not to mention at this number of homes you need, you basically are running a company again which.

Exactly.

So you're going to get that, you're going to get daily one on ones stand ups.

You probably need a full time real.

Estate agent just slack for your. You know. Yeah, you might want to put a, put a agent on the payroll and say give me a little less commission but you know, I'll give you some cash flow.

Yeah. I mean running an efficient family office is in and of itself a status symbol because so many of them are mismanaged and have tons of hangers just collecting checks and doing nothing. You're also going to need some cars. I mean you'll need these cars in every single house.

But I would say three for every house.

Yeah. But if you're just to build one three car garage, you know you're going Bugatti, Chiron, Koenigsegg, Jesko, Rolls Royce, Cullinan, black badge. That's 7 million right there. And then you copy paste that a couple times with different.

Yeah. And you get some funky stuff. Get an old Ford Bronco drop top.

You know, that's not going to completely run up the bill on you but occupy your time.

Oh and the key here is you Know, buy. It's all life is all about buying the right things. Right. People say, oh, spend your money on experiences. Well, you know, A 1 of 1 Bronco is an experience. You know, refurbished and rebuilt is an experience every single time you get in it. It's an experience when you look at it in the garage. Right.

Yep.

And anyway, so. So keep going down the list.

Yep. And so for watches, you could get a Patek Philippe Nautilus 5990 Rolex Daytona, Paul Newman, Richard Mille. You're in for 1.3 mil right there just with the starter collection. And you might want to, what, 10, 20 different. We didn't even get into dailies, beaters, dress, watches. There's so many different options there. In terms of firearms. I mean, you can't go wrong with the meteorite 1911s. We've talked about those from Cabot Guns. A singer 1911 could be 100.

Go down to AR, go down to Arlie in Beverly Hills, get a shotgun.

A Browning 50 cal. That's going to be 50K. You're going to need licenses. This is all going to take up not just money, but time.

Yeah.

And so while you're thinking about your next act, you're also a happy.

Life is a busy life.

Exactly.

Don't want to be too.

You want to be busy. You could easily spend 5 million there then on horses. You're going to want to start breeding racehorses, ideally from the American Pharaoh line. But then you're also going to want a high performance quarter horse for cutting. An Andalusian dressage stallion and Arabian show champion.

It could also be cool to go to go out to Omaha, Nebraska.

Yep.

And literally buy every home surrounding Warren Buffett.

Would be very cool.

Sort of like a castle wall type setup where you build, basically. Yeah. For Renee, he would be able to look down on Warren Buffett.

Yep.

And start picking up through osmosis. Some, some, you know, he's. He's got to manage his family office.

Yep.

Pick up some investing techniques. But you'd also be able to mog one of the world's, you know, most successful and wealthiest, you know, men, which Vinay might like.

Walking around the neighborhood, strolling around on top of your quarter horse. You know, he's gonna have to stop and say hi.

Absolutely. Or if he hears you pull up in your Camry.

Yeah. If you pull up in a. Yeah, he's in the Camry. You're in every Jesco.

Yeah. Every time he starts his camera and you hear it kind of start up.

You start up the Jessica, the Jeska. Yeah, exactly. And then the Quarter Horse gets a little skittish. The Jescos ripping. Then, you know, obviously build a wine collection. You're going to want an expansive cellar featuring top Bordeaux first growths, Lafitte, Mouton, Petrus, iconic California cult wines like Screaming Eagle, Scarecrow. This blends revered old world European traditions with cutting edge American vintage viticulture. You're going to spend 5 million on that. Get a somalier, get a sommelier.

50K a year.

Have them travel with you.

Yeah.

Which we'll get into how you're traveling. Because for 200 mil it's really hard to justify a G650. So you might have to go fractional private jet ownership.

Talk to Preston.

But there are some good options there. You've heard us, you know, talk about netjets before.

Sort of a touchy subject for our audience.

But if you've spent this much on cars and guns and houses, it might just be the right mix for you. Until you get that second that, you know, this is the base hit. We're looking for the home run that gets the, the bbj.

Yeah.

And, and then of course, art collection. You're going to want a curated set of works. You could go Andy Warhol, Basquiat. You could go older and it's just going to get more expensive. But you could easily put up $50 million just decorating your homes. So.

Each home.

Yeah.

So he's going to really have to stretch and try to budget.

I'm assuming a lot of debt comes in here. Maybe multiply it. A lot of leverage. Maybe you're actually in, in control of maybe a billion dollars of assets. Kind of a 5 to 1 debt to equity.

One thing that's priceless too is having an enemy, you know?

Yep.

The if an A has had enemies, they've basically been forced to listen to the soundtrack of his success for the last few years.

Yep.

But picking new, bigger enemies.

Yep.

You know, he could pick somebody like Caruso. Rick Caruso. He could, he could try to come in and start competing and outbidding Rick Caruso.

I mean, the other side of this is that he's working for Atlassian. You could go and say, you know what, dhh, you got the Aston Martin Valkyrie. I'm going to beat you on the track. You run base camp. It's directly competitive.

It is.

I'm going to crush you on the track. I'm going to get three Valkyries.

Wow.

Actually I'm going to engine swap a couple of them, lower them, you know, modify them.

You know, that shot of the Dhh has of his like crazy view.

Make it even better.

That's right in the. In the fire.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Oh, no way.

Hope he's okay.

Like to joke around, but that is rough if that's true. But yeah, I think Dhh, he puts a lot of time in on the track. He has some amazing records and I'm sure he's going to break all of them with his new Valkyrie. You know, get your own Valkyrie, break his records, show him who's boss, and then go back to Atlassian and say, we're Tate. We're coming for every single Basecamp customer. And I will be CEO of this company once I destroy Basecamp.

Yeah. Basecamp has said they'd never sell, but if you take.

If you take 100 of their customers, they will go out of business.

Yeah.

And Dhh will be forced to sell his Valkyrie to you.

Yeah.

But you'll already have three.

Yeah. And I think you can have too many Valkyries.

So. No, you want to corner the market. Really. Because you take them, you race them so fast you're crashing a bunch of them. But every time you crash one lowers the amount, so raises the market price. So there is a. There's an efficient point where crashing the Valkyrie.

Yep.

Drunk driving or off roading it. Taking it on the Dakar, Taking it on the Gumball 3000. This can actually be positive for your net worth.

Yeah.

And that's great. The other option would be to pick a low status nemesis. Just. I'm sure this post went mega viral. I'm sure there's some haters, some quote tweeters, pick one of them at random.

Go one by one.

Revenge is a desperate video. Yeah.

Ripping apart their careers and their.

Oh, you're starting a little lifestyle business. Wouldn't it be a shame If I raised $500 million and destroyed you category. Exactly. You got a blank check.

Yeah, we didn't have it on here, but raising a mango seed round, it's usually a good way to cheer you up.

Yeah, I agree.

So. And he could definitely get that done in a day, you know, in a few hours. Or we would back.

We would back start a hedge fund. I mean, the growth fund. It depends on who you want to talk to. But you know, the seed fund, you're talking to a lot of founders. Some of them are going to be like very low quality, just by nature. Some of them are going to be amazing. And you get in early and that's cool. But like, if you really just want to hang out with really interesting entrepreneurs who are already de risk, like growth fund.

Yeah.

Raise a big growth fund and just rip checks into blue chip companies. And you'll be on the phone with all the best people and hang out with them.

And it's fine if you make one investment a year so you can study physics and then rip checks.

Totally, totally. It's great.

Anyways, Vinay, proud of you. Proud of you for talking about your feelings.

Good luck on 20 Minute BC.

Let us know if you want to join the show. Call in.

Call in.

We'll come hang in Hawaii.

Yeah. And we'll go shopping with you.

We'll take you shopping.

Take you shopping. Bring your checkbook. Bring your wire instructions. Because the check is just going to be too. Too many zeros to fit in the.

Box to fit in the check. Yeah.

Bring one of those big checks. Actually bring a huge check.

Bring your little. Your ub key or whatever. Rip stable coins.

We're going to Mercedes. We're getting you an AMG one. We're going to Aston Martin. We're getting you a Valkyrie. We're going to Bugatti. We're getting you a Tourbillon. We're going to Mercedes SL300. Go. We're going to Ferrari. We're getting the F80. We're going to McLaren. We're getting the W1.

We're going to Geneva. And we're buying the Patek store.

Yes.

Making them an offer they cannot refuse.

Yes. I mean, we talked about. Who's the hedge fund guy that bought a watch company? I love that he owns the watch.

It's the guy who's always getting angry.

Perfect.

Herbalife.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why can we not remember his name?

Pershing Square. Is this fun? I don't know. Bill Ackman. Bill Ackman.

That was gonna be bad.

It's hard. It's hard. This is not an AI generated show, folks. We gotta. Sometimes we blank. Sometimes we get mogged by the English language. And other times we just blank on someone that you see every single day on the timeline. Yeah. Okay, so we got some Q and A's. Let's go to questions from the fans, from the brothers, from the brotherhood. Ben Kohler, our vice president, posted some behind the scenes footage of you dancing and me playing Tetris. And Chris on the retro. What kind of shoes are on Jordy's feet? And is this a real word? Is. Is this a word for what you were wearing?

I don't know category? Chris has been deeply within the world of a high end equestrianism. And he's very, he's very, he's very. He's grown up in loud up and.

I mean his profile photo, he's wearing a tux. Yeah. Love him.

So anyways, those are some Bottega Veneta slides. Picked them up a couple years ago. Some of my favorite shoes.

Yeah.

Kind of wear, dress them up, dress them down. You can wear them to the beach, you can wear them to a nice dinner. But we, I actually love the shoes so much that we are working with my friend Devin to develop our own TV branded version of those exact slides.

Fantastic.

Chris, keep an eye out. If you don't want to spend 1500 bucks on beta tester you can get these. We're going to make a lot more, you know, accessible, you know, but still very fairly priced.

Great. So if you head to the Bottega Veneta store, tell them the technology brother sent you.

Yeah, the Bottega store actually made it in the Palisades. Oh, that's where I bought them. It. Yeah, everything around that development burned down except for the Bottega.

Wow. Well, emergency supplies.

Yeah.

We got another dm. It says I'm joining a startup about a hundred over a billion dollars in market cap. Should I focus on a narrow set of skills or try and work across teams and functions? What do you think, Jordy?

Wow. You're joining something that already has a billion dollar market market cap valuation. This, this, you know, screams corporate athlete to me. Somebody that needs to get in there and make stuff happen, work cross functionally.

Yep.

You know, own, own some key product areas, strategies, whatever you need to do. But then go in there as an athlete, outwork everybody, train your mind, get into the office earlier, be flexible, leave later. If it's a work from home, flexible work policy, never work from home. Just don't show up on Saturdays, you know, slack your, your the CEO on Sunday morning at 5am and say want to get a workout in door, door to the office is locked. Could you come open it up for me? And if they say, you know, oh you might be able to get somebody for maintenance over there, just say if you have a second, it'd be great if you could just get down here. So like establish that level of you know, seriousness with your, not only your CEO but you know, everyone else on your team that you. It's free to outwork everybody. It costs a little bit of time but it's free to outwork your peers. And if you're in an organization like that you're joining. There's hundreds of people already. You need to. You need to, you know, really put yourself on the map.

Yeah. When I first got introduced to the term corporate athlete, it was from a CFO I was working with who was describing some of the finance folks, like the strategic finance guys that would come in and as corporate athletes in the sense that they were good at spreadsheets. But that skill set of analysis, management strategy could be applied basically anywhere in the organization. You can drop that person in the marketing team, run some analytics, see what's working, cut things. But also on the product side, really anywhere.

And yeah, it's like a midfielder.

Yeah. And we've seen this. I mean, we were just talking to Calvin over at Ramp. I think he was on the engineering team. Now he's running marketing. That is a transition that I think people think is, like, so crazy, but it's actually a.

Have good taste.

Yep.

Good decision making.

Yep.

Deeply analytical.

Yep.

Very hard.

And ability to drive outcomes.

An ability to study the experts. Like, if you want to learn marketing, go listen to founders Andrew Huberman. Go look at Rob Mower's feed.

Yeah.

Right.

There you go.

So, yeah, I think the obvious answer here is sleep on an eight sleep. You're a corporate athlete. Sleep on an eight sleep. Get those sleep scores up. Wear a whoop band. Track your stress throughout the day. If you're not getting stressed, you're not working hard enough, you're not taking on enough responsibility. So make sure you're stressed.

Chug your.

It's free to outwork your peers. So go get in there and do it.

Yeah, I got another question. I didn't get a chance to print it out, but it's essentially here. I have it here I am a. I'm working at a VC firm, and I'm considering joining the Trump administration. I'll be working for one of the billionaires that's heading up one of the organizations. What can I do to stand out as I join the admin and really make a statement on my first day at work? What do you think, Jordi? When you're coming into a new organization, how can you earn the respect of your boss and how can you set the tone for what might be a short stint? Since these political jobs, usually it's for your stint at most.

So going into the admin in this.

Going into the admin.

Yeah. So what I would do for a.

Big shot in a different role, how do you. How do you stand out on day.

One when you are watching a sporting event?

Yep.

Who do you notice in the crowd.

Guys with the chest painted with the American flag?

Chest and face painting.

Yeah.

Face painting is key.

Okay.

Chess requires you to go shirtless. Not every office environment is that conducive to being shirtless.

Yep.

But the thing that you can obviously do in this situation is paint the American flag over your face and add stars to it. So, like, don't just settle at 50 stars because that just shows you're not very ambitious and you're not tapping in discourse. So take the picture that you posted. Yeah, yeah. You're not tapped into the discourse if you're not putting 54 stars. Right.

Yeah.

So moon, Greenland, Panama, Canal, Canada, Panama. Let's spend. I actually spent a bunch of time in Panama surfing over the years and great place we could add them. So, yeah, show that ambition. 54 stars +@ least full face paint, hair, dyed mohawk. And you're going to actually want to shave this out of your face to get the flag to fully stretch around your face. Right. And then leave the hair, you know, dress set up, make yourself look like a stallion and. And then just do that every day. So it's going to cost you. You're going to have to find, you know, bring in a Hollywood makeup artist, bring them out to D.C. and, you know, pay them whatever it takes. Right. And doge, they've got these sort of rotating appointments to where you're only there for three months. So if the makeup artist costs $500 a day, only there for three months, very worth it. You're going to be a little bit in the red, but can probably day trade your way into back into the green.

That's good. That's a good call. So my advice was gift your boss a gun on day one. AR15 that's wrapped with the American flag. Because, listen, there's a lot then. Yeah.

Do you want to make a statement?

Yeah. Because there's a lot of, you know, we're still in the post pandemic work from home era. Even if everyone's in the office, you know, a lot of what the government's doing is communicating with organizations that aren't in D.C. corporations and other arms of the government. And so you're going to need a nice zoom background. You put an AR15 on the background, just immediately lets everyone know you're 2A.

Yeah. And a good thing is, you know, even in the government, they do work from home quite a bit.

Yep.

So if you know you're going to be on zoom calls, go get a Starlink, post up at the local Range. And when you're not talking on the call, be drilling the target yards, 200 yards, 300 yards, mile out. And that will just show a level of, you know, you're gonna relate to your peers better that might enjoy guns. People don't enjoy guns. They're gonna say, well, this guy's. Could defend me in a hostile situation. So it's a good way to build, you know, relationships and establish dominance on Zoom.

Yeah, specifically. And so.

And don't. Don't mute either.

Yeah, you want to. You want to hear the shots ring out. There's already so much AI that goes into the voice processing on Zoom. I'm sure it'll handle the loud noises, but, yeah, you want to make a statement. You want to come in, let people know what you're all about. Get the cadence up. Well, speaking of America and international relations, TikTok says it plans to shut down the site unless the Supreme Court strikes down the law, forcing it to sell. So TikTok will not sell. And AG Hamilton, 29, says the fact that China slash the CCP via ByteDance would rather choose to close the platform than give up control of it in exchange for a substantial payday kind of tells you everything you need to know about what they see is the real value of it.

Fascinating. Simon said in poker, they call that a tell. Simon's been right a lot lately.

He has.

Got to give him credit for that. Yeah, I. I used to be the owner of band talk.com.

Yeah.

Sold it for about what I put into it. Thought it wasn't getting banned. Now somebody's going to make an absolute killing. I talked about this. You could make kind of a vampire app where you clone TikTok and sort of recreate the social graph for people and just say, hey, come over here. Start posting. But I hope it gets banned. It's absolutely insane that, you know, we wouldn't want China directly controlling, you know, one of the top three largest media companies and that it. And TikTok is objectively one of the biggest media companies, even though it's a social media platform.

Yeah.

So it's absolutely insane.

Yeah. The comp is. Would you be okay with the USSR controlling NBC during the Cold War?

Yeah.

No.

Yeah. Obviously not spent. Unfortunately, I've spent time in China and they do not allow our social media platforms over there.

Yeah.

So.

So there's just a little bit of reciprocity there.

Yeah, yeah. Let's just keep it even.

It's also just extremely redundant at this point because every feature has been copied by YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels. And so there's a lot of people that are like, but what about the small businesses that are built on TikTok?

The attention will just shift the be okay if you were, if you were building your small business on the CCP's platform.

Yeah.

And not thinking about, you know, going.

Have you seen those, those recent like deep dives on TikTok shop? How people are just like straight up selling drugs like via the TikTok shop. It's like there's just no, that's the.

Thing China has no interest in. You know, there's probably like the number one fentanyl dealer is probably TikTok.

Literally. It's wild. Anyway, let's move on to Ann Lee Skates. She says the consumer founders secret AI master plan. Give us some context on Anne.

Anne's great. She was at Andreessen help lead our round and now has her own fund.

Cool.

Very, very sharp on all things consumer. She was a part of the group that did whatnot. Raised a new round of 5 billion. So yeah, absolute dog of a company.

Yeah. No need for TikTok shop. They're probably going to be way up after the TikTok.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's interesting actually.

Yeah. You got to go scoop up some secondary right now. As we know, 2025 is the year of agents. Much has been said about relationships with AI agents as the new moat. But the big platforms of tomorrow will be what I call trusted recommenders. And Signal, she's quote tweeting Signal says the next generation of companies will be full stack, vertically integrated from content creation to software delivery. This is the ultimate play for customer loyalty, engagement and retention. It aligns something.

Yeah. So Anne is saying I just pulled it up because it's actually a thread. Doesn't seem like we got it. AI changes the strategic modes, revenue and profit generation of Internet companies. Intimate AI meets human relationships via trusted AI agents will emerge across many consumer verticals and apps. I just would say like this is the, obviously the most exciting time to be a consumer investor in a really long time because many of the biggest outcomes in venture are consumer. Look at like Coinbase, Chime, things like that. And so, you know, perplexity valued at almost $10 billion. They're very agentic in many ways, like the browser company. A lot of their new stuff is more focused on that.

Yeah.

And so her, her theory here is that AI agents will become effectively like recommenders. So like recommending actions, recommending products and purchasing decisions, you know, helping you develop habits you could have Styling apps. We saw this launch last week. There's going to be everything from agent agentic relationships for consumer fintech. That's like recommending you the right mortgages. Right. So you're not going and just googling. You're like in an app being like hey I want to get a mortgage.

Yeah. Everybody who's talking about building something that was look at everything in your credit card statement and help you understand which credit cards you should be using. Using for what? Should you switch to a different credit card? That type of stuff. All that makes a ton of sense.

Yeah. And Gary Tan in the comments tagged happenstance which is. I believe it's. Yeah, it's a YC company that's basically helping you find connections within your network and get intros and stuff like that. So I would say this is probably the most exciting time to be a consumer investor. It shouldn't even call yourself a consumer AI investor just because everybody, every AI is going to impact everything. So shout out to Ann, thank you for the thread. They make these shows possible.

That's great. Let's do a promoted post.

Promoted post from Psy Sac. Psy says looking for someone who knows the ins and outs of CAD and PLM while also really enjoys teaching, training and enabling other engineers. The job will help up level and accelerate the 1000 plus hardware engineers here at Anduril Tech role in the thread. So SAI is over at Andurolle and this looks like a really cool opportunity for somebody who likes teaching other people and upskilling their peers. So go send a note to SAI over at Anduril and check it out.

That's great. Let's do a bucket poll. We got Antonio Garcia Martinez who says trust fund kid in SF LARPing as a VC is such a type of. And Jonathan says LP equals loving parent.

Loving parent. I love that there are. I do think it's. I do. You know we are pro nepotism.

Yep.

But we're generally pro helping people.

Yep.

So if you have children, family, friends that you want to help, help them and then also help a bunch of random strangers. And I think that's the great part about tech is there's you know, you know to use a random example, somebody like Vinay. Right.

Yeah.

He. If he has a family member who is, you know, wanting starting a new.

Startup with a fund, set him up.

With a, you know, you know, invest in their company.

Yeah.

But he's also going to help somebody who he doesn't know. Right. And that's the beauty of tech. So if you Want to get into venture investing and you have some loving parents make them your LPs also I.

Mean a million times better than LARPing as a philanthropist nonprofit person.

Just also way cooler. I mean we could do a whole episode of like how we want to, you know, how we want to approach finance with like our kids.

Sure.

But I do think it's cooler to you know, invest in your child's fund. Like if I invest, if my daughter wants to go into venture, say cool, here's a $10 million fund and you're going to get management fees. But that's a lot cooler than just giving them a trust fund that they.

Have to also I mean like you got to build a track record at some point. The first investments are probably going to be rough. They're going to figure all this stuff out.

And better to figure out on your parents dollar incinerate your family's capital.

Hopefully not that bad. I mean if you're in sf a lot of ways to return the fund if you get lucky or in the right group.

All it takes is one.

All it takes is one.

Many solo GPS quit right before a hundred bagger.

Yep, exactly. Let's go to near Cyan friend of the show. She says I've never met a self made billionaire who hasn't drank Diet Coke. I love this great post.

And we gotta do a whole deep dive on Diet Coke. Maybe do like Diet Coke episodes where it's every new thousand listeners we should.

Be drinking Diet Coke.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mix it in. So I realized why Diet Coke is so powerful and why it uniquely helps billionaires more than just the average person that just goes and gets the Diet Coke from, you know, McDonald's.

Yeah.

And here's why. So Diet Coke has about I believe 30 to 50 milligrams of caffeine.

Yeah.

And so it's a very low dose. It's not like a Celsius. It's not going to take you to the moon for two hours and you're going to crash. But if you're a billionaire, you will have someone bringing you Diet Coke constantly throughout the day and you will have a fridge with Diet Coke all the time. And when you get in your chauffeured car, there will be a Diet Coke waiting for you. That's cold. There will be Coke on board. Whereas if you're just living a normal life, you might have a few Cokes throughout the day. The billionaires diet Coke habit. The billionaires coke habit is, is constant stimulation right at that 30 milligram level.

Yeah. And it's so good because think about it. So 300 milligrams of caffeine right at once for a lot of people doesn't feel that great.

Yeah, you're jittery.

300 spread throughout 10 hours feels fantastic. Fantastic.

Exactly, exactly. So it's basically the extended release version of caffeine.

Yeah.

And so there's been a little bit of a horse race in the energy drink category to get more and more higher doses of caffeine. But maybe the secret to true outperformance. That's why I like the yer mate, because it's 100 and so you can drink a couple of those.

Could we get a couple.

Yeah, let's get a couple more caffeine beverages on the set. We're thirsty. I'm genuinely thirsty. I need some more caffeine. I can feel myself dropping. I wish I had five Diet Cokes in front of me. But, but, but I do think that there is something specifically powerful about Diet Coke that's probably terrible with the, with the carbonation. Thank you.

Thank you, Ben.

And so. Oh, so good. And, and so there is something very specific about the continuous nature of consuming Diet Coke that you see Elon and other billionaires do.

Yeah.

And that's, and that's actually everybody can learn harder to do. It's not just a cost thing because you can go to Costco and get a whole flat of Diet Coke. It's like you have to rearrange your entire lifestyle to have cold Diet Coke available to you all day long. But if you do that, you will have the perfect level of caffeinated blood in the brain the whole day. So. Okay, I love that.

One more thing on near post. So near says we are very excited to release our LLM wrapper. Hopefully this month. I think it will be the most novel and interesting interaction normal people have had with LLMs so far by a favor of 10. Remember when the iPhone was new and there were all those app guys and they just made an app and somehow pulled in millions of dollars with no effort? Well, guess what? The days are back and all it takes is a good rapper.

That's so sick.

Claude and I call it the art of the rap.

That's so sick.

Near has a new app coming out.

Go follow. If there's a, if there's a wait list, get on it.

We want to, you know, you know they also had the Nvidia fund that was just a 10 year duration fund that. Just buy Nvidia.

Okay. Oh yeah, that's right.

It's up.

Yeah. 300%.

Crushing it.

Amazing.

But you can't sell for 10 years.

Okay.

You just have to hold it. So very cool. But looking forward to this. Here's a big Claude enthusiast, so I'm excited to see what the app is.

Oh, this is a controversial one. We don't normally talk politics, but Reva's a friend, so we gotta do it.

Riva says, I don't think this is politics.

Okay.

This is facts.

Facts. Okay.

Here's some facts around policy.

Here are some facts for you.

Impacts, business owners, capital allocators.

Yeah. And a lot of tech is in California. Yeah. You do not hate California's government enough. California has the highest poverty rate at 13.2% of any state, despite being the fourth largest economy in the world. This poverty, despite the state having an annual budget of 297 billion, the most significant state budget in the United States. That poverty, despite the highest spending on public welfare programs in the United States, under just under 100 billion annually. All of its failures, despite a progressive income tax system of up to 13.3% and a state sales tax rate of 7.25%, both the highest rates in the nation. Despite all those taxes, California ranks 48th for road conditions, with 44% of roads rated in poor condition. Despite all those taxes, California rates. Despite all those taxes, California education ranks below average in national assessments for math and reading proficiency. Despite all those taxes, California's violent crime rate has risen by 16% since 2019, while most of the nation has seen rates declining. Despite all that money, upgrades to state grid infrastructure have been slow to scale and have not hit stated annual targets. California's failures are endless, far beyond the fires. Do your own research and stop voting for this lunacy. Very sad.

So. So growing up in the Bay Area and then living in LA as an adult.

Yep.

You don't even have to know those facts specifically to have experienced them. Like, if you think of the wealth creation and the prosperity in many ways of the last two decades and the current state of things on the ground when you just drive around L. A. I joke that the G wagon is so popular in LA because the roads are so bad that you need. You want to four wheel drive with like good clearance because you're driving around and it's just constant and it's just. And it's just pure society, you know, government rot and incompetence. Right. It's not a budgetary issue for any of these things.

Yep.

The LA spends a billion dollars. The city of LA spends a Billion. It's not even the county. The city of LA spends a billion dollars a year on the homelessness issue. And the irony of the budget last year was that $500 million of it didn't even get spent. They were trying to spend because they just failed to actually put it to work. So we had the budget. The homelessness issue is still obviously terrible and they just couldn't even put the money to work.

Yeah.

I always think about, if you're a VC, your LPs would be like, sorry, dude, you clearly can't get into any deals. Like, you're done.

I always think about the, like the government stuff. I mean, people always say, you know, like, do we need more budget or less budget? And it always sounds like, oh yeah, if we just had more money to solve this problem, it'd be better. And I think about it like the metaphor is, imagine like one of those giant trash cans and you're trying to throw, you know, a crumpled up ball of paper into the trash can. And, and it's like, yeah, if, if my tax dollar goes in the big bucket, it's in the pool, but I really need to get it into a solo cup inside the trash can in order to actually have an impact.

That's a good way to kind of put this in, you know, a way that the brothers will be able to.

Understand and so crushed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's like you, you know, you throw your, you throw your dollar in the big trash can, there's a chance that it could go in the solo cup and actually solve the problem and actually repair a Road. But 90% of the time it's just going to get stolen.

Yeah.

And just get burnt or spent on something ridiculous. And you see that with the, with the California high speed rail and the fire stuff and just everything, they're not actually outcome driven, unfortunately.

Yeah, I saw a whole thread as well that was basically arguing that our inability to put out these fires in densely populated areas is just a symptom of societal collapse. People have this idea of collapse as being these sort of apocalyptic scenarios, but just the nature of having fires rip through highly residential areas and have the fire hydrants not work is a. There was another video of a, of a helicopter just like dropping a bunch of fire retarded water on, just like on a person. Yeah, it's like, you know, that's just like a fair mistake. Yeah, but it's, but yeah, this, this goes back to the, to the Peter article that we wrote of, like, let's stop rehashing the past and doing land acknowledgments for stuff that happened 200 years ago. And let's focus on the next hundred years and how do we make the whole world better for everyone?

I do have a bit of an insensitive hot take about the fires, but it's more of a thought experiment. So I've always thought that one underrated reason to support the second amendment is not like, if you talk to the second amendment people to be like, you need the guns to hunt, I should be able to hunt. Then they say home defense. And then the last thing they say is like, it's a backstop against the tyrannical government. So if the feds come, you can defend your territory if it's truly a tyrannical government. But I've always thought that maybe like there's a better argument around, like, if America is invaded, it would be a complete bloodbath because we'd have the best militias and the insurgency would be insane. Like just, just taking, you know, imagine, imagine the Battle of Dallas. Like if, if like Russia or China, like lands in Texas and is like, we're going to try and take over Texas, it's like they're going to have to deal with the military, of course, but then every single house that they go to is like filled to the gills with guns. Right?

Yeah.

And so my, my thought experiment was like, should like, obviously everyone evacuated and that was what the government recommended when the fire started and that's what was rational and that's what we did. So I'm not saying that people shouldn't have evacuated, but just in terms of actual firefighting strategy, is there a world where everyone stays or at least all the able bodied men stay and just turn on all the hoses at their houses and just hose down every little ember that goes?

My neighborhood does.

We have our own, like everyone, it's like fire fight your own house as long as you possibly can. Then the firefighters show up and they do what they can and fight the brush interface, but everyone's responsible for like staying as long as possible and get the women and children out with the priceless valuables and the pictures and stuff. But the able bodied men stay and hose everything down. And if they have a fire extinguisher, you just try and put it on an ember. When it comes down, there's a tree. Just do your best. And if everyone's there, makes a big difference. Would that actually work or is that just a complete fool's errand? Am I an idiot? I don't know.

No, I think it's high risk and that there would be a higher loss of human life.

Totally. Someone's going to generally or something.

Yeah, it would generally work. I mean, so.

But that's a cultural thing. Like. Like, we don't think about a society. Like, we think, like, evacuate, you know, which is good because, like, the houses can be rebuilt and the death toll was fortunately very low. It feels like a 911 event, but.

Yeah, there was so low. Somebody was telling us in a group chat earlier that a friend of theirs stayed at their house in Sunset Mesa, which is like, between the Palisades and Malibu, and just fought and fought and fought in every single house burned around, but they saved theirs.

Wow.

Which is almost like, what's even the point? Like, you want to live in the rubble of your neighborhood for three years? It's, like, very toxic, too.

Oh, totally. Yeah.

And, yeah, my neighborhood has a volunteer fire brigade and they train, you know, like, kind of frequently. There's group of.

I would like to get that going in my neighborhood. Just like a little bit of a plan a. What can we.

Yeah, I walk through with my neighbor being like. He's like, this is where the hoses are.

If I'm not here, you know, everyone in the neighborhood. Here's how you clear brush in your own backyard. Then here's how you fireproof your house a little bit more.

My neighborhood uses goats to clear brush above. In the land above our neighborhood. I was saying we bring in, like, literally, like, 500 goats, which is super cool for the kids because they get to see, like, yeah, 500 goats just milling about eating.

I know there's going to be a ton of regulations about, oh, we can't get rid of the brush because it's natural and it's hurting the brush species or whatever. And I'm like, goats loose everywhere.

We need. Yeah, we needed. We need to airdrop millions of. Airdrop millions of goats into the Santa Monica Mountains.

Yeah.

And I want to be. I would prefer that and hearing stories of, oh, a goat chewed through that. My F40 tire, you know?

Yeah, I want. That's mountain lions.

Just, just, just.

Just obese mountain lions from eating all the goats. But they just can't. They just get their fill and they just keep eating because there's just so many goats eating the brush and just turn them loose and just stop. Stop asking for permission. Just do it. Release the goats. Let's go on to this next one. This is more positive. We can move on from the depressing California wildfires. And we go to Nicole Whiskoff who says the Ech Bros Pod will be one of the top three podcasts in tech by the end of the year. Let's go. Thank you, Nicole. Boom.

And I commented to Nicole because I said roughly 5% of our show is just covering Nicole's post.

Yeah.

So if, if, if she poster she's.

Almost at 100k followers.

If she's correct. It's, it's becomes a huge part of her W Ventures platform. Totally right where, where she can just count on a few times a week. I'm getting mentioned my posts in front of, you know, the entire, you know, tech community. Printed, printed. Key thing.

That's great.

So anyways, love brother Nicole, what are your top three?

I was thinking about a new segment. She has a gun to your head where I ask you a tough question and we pull out a gun. I heard some squirt guns that look like. And. And it's like right now. What's the last founders episode you listened to? Tell me. Like I haven't listened to a few in a couple of weeks. Dyson was going to be mad at me.

Re. Listen to Dyson.

Oh, that's good.

But yeah, so, so we also top three.

I would love to be up there with invest like the best founders podcast technology brothers.

Well, happily dream lineup.

Third dream lineup.

Yeah.

But I mean there's some stiff competition out there. Dwar cash is on fire. Obviously that's about it.

All in is in a crisis, but they'll figure it out anyways.

Private equity loves you. Nicole buys the show and turns.

Thank you for the support.

We talked about that. Did you post this Marc Andreessen saying Yes, I read it twice. His ID says his name is climate change.

I just thought it was a good arsonist. This is the arsonist that got arrested at the Kenneth fire, which sparked up yesterday around Calabasas and basically two hours went from zero to thousands of acres.

Yep.

And everybody was like, how does this make sense? It was so far away from the Palisades fire and upwind. Just didn't make any sense. Turns out arsonist. And yeah, of course Bernie Sanders is out there saying like this is all about climate change, which is at this point it's. I find it. You know, we don't talk about politics on this podcast, but I find it deeply offensive that Bernie and Vermont wants to. To post and say that. That this is all about climate change.

Yeah.

When it clearly is. There's a bunch of policy and political failures that. That and just a lack of you know, Newsom cares more about looking good in a crisis than preventing the crisis.

In the first place. Should go to Greenland. Climate is going to be beachfront property. It's going to be the new Miami after climate change wreaks. Have it.

We're going to get a mountain.

Greenland mountain in Alaska. Water world happens. Yeah, we're chilling.

Yeah, we won't. Greenland will really have been taken once the mega, mega VCS are setting up offices there.

Yeah, we got to go to Greenland. It seems cool. Let's. Let's stay on Greenland. Go to Bojan. He says Greenland is easy time to play on the hard mode and post say a screenshot of the world and it's just Egypt.

Now he's highlighting the Middle East.

It's the entire Middle east from Iran to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, Turkey, I think is in here. Yeah, that would be controversial. I'm surprised this has not gotten some more blowback because we not already basically.

Attempt that for 20 years.

We did in fact attempt that for 20 years unsuccessfully.

Didn't go super well.

Although wasn't Kushner talking about more of a realignment between Israel and Saudi Arabia and some of the other countries?

I mean we don't talk about politics. There's a number of things that are happening effort of the prior the last admin anyways.

So it's happening. Well, let's go to crypto, literally. Shazan says I predicted the Thor chain collapse in 2023 when they launched their lending feature and it's happening now. The lesson people never seem to learn is any system in crypto that can fail, will fail. When you borrowed on Thor chain they would sell your BTC collateral for their own token Rune. If you repaid your loan, they would need to sell Rune for BTC to give you back your collateral. But this leads to a death spiral opportunity as decrease in Rune price leads to more people wanting to get their BTC back from Thor chain, which leads to more Rune being sold, which leads to a decrease in Rune price and so on. This is exactly what's happening. People thought Thor chain was a self custodial secure protocol, whereas it was the exact opposite. In fact, the founder today tried to shut down the app. There's only one secure option to borrow against your BTC Lava xyz. It's simple and there's no ponzinomics involved. All we've done is embed the logic for a standard over secured loan into a smart contract so you can borrow without bridging or taking on external risks. Unfortunately, this will be a multi billion dollar failure comparable to what we saw in 2022. This was predictable too. It's basically what happened with Terra Luna happening again. Kudos to Sunny A97 for jamming with me about this in early 2024. Rough for anyone in Rune or Thor chain. I've heard about this chain. I've never bought it or really dug dug in, but people into it. Yeah. Rune Thorchain.

It's Rune involved with that.

No, no, no. It's not R o o n. It's R U N E. Very funny though. But he's moonlighting. There was some non account that was promoting this chain for a long time and people really seem to like that guy. And so I think it got a decent amount of pump and excitement and investment. But it seems like it's collapsed.

Decent pump. Like our back workout this morning.

Yeah, that was a good one.

Spamming. Spamming delts.

Spamming delts. Let's go to a promoted post.

Let's see what we got here. I gotta jump in. We haven't talked about Dupont registry enough this episode. This thing isn't. Is looks pretty fantastic. It's a one of one custom 1994 Porsche 911.

Oh, we're in dangerous territory. TJ is going to destroy us.

The TJ is going to be pissed about this one. But it's just resto mod. Yeah, it's a resto mod.

Oh no.

But the Speedster is just so, such a. Such a beautiful concept and I think resto mods are great for non car guys that want to larp as car guys. Like look at my, look at my restomod. I'm very much a purist. I'm not a brabus guy. I'm not a. You know, the closest I'll get to a, to an aftermarket is amg, right.

Yeah.

Which used to be an aftermarket, you know, offshoot.

I thought you were going to west coast customs and.

Yeah, but that's for the minivan.

Yeah. And, and, and the engine. Swapping your F40.

That's for the V12 engine. Swapping my F40 engine into my minivan.

The V12 F40 is grail.

But yeah, this thing, I love the Speedster. I think it's an underrated car. And this thing's priced at only $589,000.

Giving it away.

Practically giving it away. I mean you could buy a house in like someplace like Dallas or you could buy this.

Yep.

You can't drive a house. You can't go on the TB500 in a house. Yeah, you can do it in this Evo Max911 Spider. So enjoy. Thank you to Dupont Registry for, you know, even sharing this in the first place.

Bucket poll time. We got one. Samuel says they should rebuild LA to look like Tokyo. Remove what remains of the brush, chop down these fire prone forests, and deck the place out in skyscrapers with an actual working public transit system. It's a joke post, but it's super true. Super, super true. A big part of what's driving these crazy fires is what's called living at the wilderness interface. So this is where I live. I literally live up against a mountain that if it catches fire, I'm fucked. But it's amazing because you can just go out your backyard and go hiking and there's wild animals and you see deer and bears and possums and cougars and all sorts of cool stuff. And it's like living.

It's a contrast of like, it's very, very relaxing.

Very relaxing. Amazing.

I can go out of my backyard, walk up the hill and go straight on to it.

But a little bit of the problem, I think is that we wind up building out not because people necessarily want to live near the wilderness interface, more just that.

Yeah, but that's a love of bears.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Which, which we're working on domesticating. But it's more that the housing is expensive, there's nowhere else to build. And so you just build up until the mountains and then you're building like gridded out, dense houses all out of wood that just go up and one after another. And that's exactly what's happened. Whereas if you alleviate the housing pressure by building taller buildings in the core downtown and surrounding area, well then you don't need to be as dense once you get up into the mountains and that leads to less fire risk.

I just don't know. I think that you could put up 40 new skyscrapers in LA and there was still 40.

I'm talking 4,000, 40,000. Like, I'm talking about like you, you walk around New York, every building is 50 stories tall. That's like the average building. You just look up and even in. And even in a place.

I know, but even in a place like New York, they're still using every extra square inch of the entire place. I just think that would still. We'd still have the same issue. We just have new skyscrapers. I'm not opposed.

Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe.

But like I would still want to live where I live even if there was true.

But I would Like, I really, really do hope that this leads to a relaxing of building regulations and more aggressive permitting. Because I mean the permitting office is, is a beast. We talked about it, about my nightmare with getting some stuff permitted. But there's just. It, it is crazy that, that we can all agree that some permitting rules make sense that. Yeah. You don't necessarily, if you're in some residential area, you don't necessarily want a skyscraper going up next to you.

Yeah. Warren Buffett would be pissed if you built a literal castle wall around his entire.

I respect it. Who knows?

Yeah.

Depends on. Until he hears the, the, that engine roar. The V12, you know, the Jesco. Then he's like, okay, that's W16. I hear the Bugatti firing up. The tourbillon's going. Or you know, the chiron's got a w16. Yeah, the tourbillon has a v16. That's an insane engine. And so you. He hears the tourbillon, he's going to be like, respect the castle wall. I will, I will, I will deal with the castle wall. But it is crazy that, that you know, we can all agree that there should be rules around what you can build. The problem is that there's this crazy paper based, you know, analog workflow to actually getting things approved where you have to send in a. Basically a PDF of your plan. It has to get printed out, reviewed by a human. It takes a really long time. Like there should be a plugin literally in CAD where as you're designing it just tells you you're in violation of this code. And then, and then you can just design it, design and design it. And once the thing goes green and everything is approved and you're not violating any code, you have no code violations. You just hit print and just go do it.

Yeah.

And it's just like, okay.

It's automatically symptom of bloat of. This is why deregulation makes sense.

Yeah.

Is because you get so many laws and that build up and build up and build up that it becomes illegal to do anything.

Exactly. And so if the, if the laws hold over the next few years, I mean the Palisades is going to be empty for a decade. Like it's just gonna take forever to rebuild anything. But hopefully this is the opportunity to get a new mayor in, new team doge it, kick a bunch of people out and completely change the rules. Yeah, that would be great. Anyway, should we do this? Power bottom dad post ahaha update from Oregon 1000 year empire. And he's posting a screenshot A massive new lithium discovery on the border between Oregon and Nevada could supercharge the country's white gold rush. It is estimated that the new newly discovered reserves under the ancient McDermott Caldera holds a whopping 40 million ton metric tons of lithium. The scale of the deposit is extraordinary, dwarfing other reserves worldwide. Just last year, lithium producers were thrilled to find a reserve of 4 million metric tons of lithium in the Smackover formation, a geologic formation that spans the the width of Arkansas. Next to the McDermott Caldera that, that now seems a paltry sum. China alone refines 60 of the world's lithium. Not for long. So, yeah, he's saying 1000 year empire with a lot of American flags. I guess we just found a ton of lithium. I didn't hear the story. I completely missed this.

There's this graphic of, you know, oh, we're using this natural resource, we're running out of it, and then America just finds like, you know, 10 lifetimes worth of it. Continues.

Yeah, yeah.

Happened with, with oil.

Yeah.

And it's beautiful. We're blessed.

It always was funny how people refuse to admit that there is a resource bottleneck around solar panels. Like, yeah, like eventually you're going to dig up all the raw materials for solar panels too, and, and you will run out. But I think it's just like way more than oil, so it makes sense.

This is what this is like. Peter, Peter Zion. Zion will often start listening to him and you're, you're like, this guy's goated. Yeah, he's very nice to listen to. He can talk about any subject. And then you start, he starts talking about stuff that you know about and then you're like, wait, like this guy's just like spewing.

That's the gel man amnesia.

Yeah, but his, you know, talks and writing on the US and how blessed we are from a natural resource standpoint is, is timeless. So I got to do like one more. I got to get on with my chiropractor. He's ever from the east coast visiting.

He says simple but neat example of a valuable AI feature that runs on device Tinder's AI photo finder. Leveraging our vast data set spanning hundreds of millions of Tinder profiles and billions of user interactions, we train a proprietary new AI model to sift through your camera, roll in seconds, and identify the photos most likely to succeed on the app. Importantly, we designed this system to run entirely on your device, so no images leave your phone unless you choose. This allows us to upload the highest standards of privacy and transparency. That's cool. That's good. Hopefully it helps people meet each other, solve the fertility crisis a little bit. But Tinder's kind of lost the plot on, like actually getting people together for the long term, haven't they? It seems like it's just like a casual dating app, but I don't know.

I'm not a great. Not a great brand. Not a great. Not a great brand at this point.

Yeah.

But I'm sure we don't have a lot of visit. We don't have a lot of visibility into the apps right now. We have a group chat.

Yeah.

And no. We had one single person and then they just got in a relationship.

Yeah. I mean, there's like, how are you?

There is anti app.

Yeah. There is an arc where like, even if you're the first person to get married in your friend group, like, usually it's like, oh, you got some single people. Like, let me swipe for you. Let me see who you're talking to. Like, I'll be the judge for you. People. Like, a lot of girls do this at, like, you know, their girls nights. But. But, you know, that is completely gone.

Why don't you mansplain girls nights?

Yeah. Yeah.

Delegated swiping is what you're talking about.

Yeah, that's it. Delegated swiping.

I do think somebody mess messaged me and they were like, I think there's an opportunity to do a delicated swiping app where you never. You can't swipe for yourself.

It's only your friends can.

Yeah, that's kind of cool. It'd be kind of a gamified version, a little gimmick. You might be able to get your first million users.

Yeah. Who knows? I mean, the gimmicks were powerful in the dating app realm because there was the. The Bumble had a gimmick, which was the only the woman could message first. Then Hinge had a gimmick, which was you had. It had to be like a second degree connection on Facebook. So you had like a mutual friend. Then the latter, remember? Or was it. The league was like, you had to verify that you made over 100k. And then there was Raya, which was like, you had to be a celebrity basically.

Such a funny number. Which is really funny.

It is a funny number.

Because. Because the girls that are really trying to find somebody that's like legitimately wealthy.

Yeah.

Like, would be so disappointed to get on there and swipe and they meet the love of their life and they're like, wait, you're on the leash, but you make like eight grand a month.

Yeah. Wait, why is this a dentist in Ohio on here?

Dentist.

H Vac.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like, there's so much inflation, like 100k is like everyone. Anyway, promoted post.

We gotta. We're gonna. We're gonna end the show after this.

Okay?

Sean. Frank, Dear friend Sean, it's fire. Sean's house was at risk of a fire. Still reaching out to me, checking in on me. Great, dude. But he is doing a public service here, which he says he's giving away the blueprint for 2025, which he says, my tips for a better life in 2025. Buy a effing Ridge wallet. I'm serious, man. You have seen our ads for a decade at this point. What, you don't think you deserve a nice premium treatment? You don't like carbon fiber or sick titanium wallets that can expand to fit one to 12 cards? I think you do. I love you and believe in you. Make this year your year by giving me 95 to $195. You can even use code Sean@ridge.com for slight discount.

So there we go.

And the thing that we love about Ridge more than anything, even more than Sean and more than the design of their, you know, their products, is just their profitability. I mean, this company prints cash, which is fitting for a wallet company, and.

Their dedication to performance ads. When you're carrying a wallet.

Honor performance marketer of the last decade.

Yeah.

And these two guys are selling more wallets than pretty much anyone else on earth. So.

Yeah.

Anyways, a lot of.

A lot of buying a specific consumer item is about aligning yourself with a brand and the team behind that brand.

You don't want to support. Support a company that's underperforming. Yeah.

If you. If you see someone in a Model 3 at a, you know, in. In LA, you know that they bought that car because they support Elon. They believe everything he believes, and they're politically aligned with Elon. And you can go up to them and say, everyone.

Some of. Some of them have a bumper sticker that say, like, I don't like the big man.

Yeah, but some of them are doing that sarcastically. So you should still go up to them and say, I know why you bought this car. You're a big Elon fan. I get it. Yeah, they love that.

I'll see you in the tunnel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They love that. And. But. But it's the same thing with Ridge. You pull out a Ridge wallet. Everyone knows you take performance ads seriously. So go buy a Ridge wallet. Tell them the technology brothers sent you.

By juggling DM Sean.

Use his code, but DM him and say we sent you.

And I will say I will not stop juggling until everyone listening to this subscribes. Subscribes and gives us five stars.

Let's do it.

And gets their entire group chats to give us five stars.

It's great. Thanks for watching.

Thank you.