Hereticon, Blood Boys, Hypercar Suggestions, What really is ESG?

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordan and I just got back from Hereticon in Miami. We want to do an overview, a deep dive. When did you actually get in to Miami?

Got in Monday. Got back yesterday. Pretty sure was. Apparently the World Series happened.

Yeah.

There was a hundred thousand people on the streets outside of the studio today, and not even they could stop us from recording today.

Nothing can stop us. It was like a crazy time for. For stuff happening, and I was completely disconnected from it. Like, I didn't see anything about the World Series.

I didn't know the World Series.

Did you see what happened in the stock market while we were there? Like, everything ripped. Bitcoin went above 70k and then as soon as her reticon was over, everything crashed.

Yeah, yeah, classic. Makes sense.

It was like the vibes. We were just like, summoning all the capital allocators together in Miami. Partying.

People just get offline. Like, good things happen.

No one can sell.

Yeah.

All the biggest hitters were there, and they were all drinking and partying so they couldn't sell. So the market just ripped.

Yeah.

And then they got back and they were hungover and they were like, actually, I need to hedge.

Hedge Worse.

Worse. Worse. What was your favorite, like, moment? Or did you come away, like, with any, like, interesting takes? The main thing for me was that at the first Reticon that we. There was some alien stuff, and I didn't really buy it. I'm buddies with Jesse Michaels, who's, like, the main aliens guy, and he hosted a talk with this guy Carl Nell, who I think is going to be, like, really, really big soon, like, Joe Rogan soon. And it materially updated my. My, like, expected value of aliens being real.

Yeah.

Now I probably went from, like, 3% to 10%, but it was good mostly just because the guy that Jesse brought, this guy, Carl Nell, he speaks. He's not like the strung out hippie burner guy being like, oh, yeah, I saw some stuff and it's like, okay, you were probably on drugs and that happened. He's like, straight up. They test for. In. In the government. Like, in his, like, uh, in his, like, world, they test even for, like, ibuprofen, because it's like you have the button. You have the. You have your finger on the button, like the nuclear button. So, like, they. They need to know everything so these people aren't on drugs. And then he puts things in terms that I think tech people and skeptics like me can understand and actually open things up because, like, the classic like tech person defensive, like aliens aren't real is just like, well, we're listening. We have the SETI project and it's quiet, like there's no one's broadcasting. And we've. And we're broadcasting. Right. But his point is that actually the SETI program does not broadcast.

Yeah.

We assume that we would broadcast because we broadcast television. Like I Love Lucy. I love Lucy. Once we got to like the 50s, I think we started broadcasting with these really high powered satellites or these dishes, they go out and they should be findable in deep space. And so you would assume that, you know, aliens really far away, they got I Love Lucy, you know, a million years ago and we should be able to get this. But his point is that we have actually humans on earth have stopped broadcasting because we switched to using fiber technology.

Satellite brothers. Perfect show to send up.

Yeah, yeah, we should broadcast.

We should do that.

Even though everyone gets it over the Internet, which is fiber and starlink and satellite Internet.

And I want to send it into deep space. Yeah, that'd be so traumatizing.

Yeah.

We have like Alison and they're like, what about the timeline?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was good at like bridging from like the dark forest and then providing a bunch of evidence. And so Jesse is like very convinced now and I think it's good. And he's also like super straight edge now. So. Yeah, that makes me believe it more.

Yeah. That I feel like we were trying to be cognizant of that with our talk of like dressing nicely, you know, our. Anybody that wasn't there. Our talk was on, you know, the case for performance drug use in Silicon Valley. And so doing any type of talk about drugs, we wanted to make sure that we like looked, you know, presentable.

Yeah.

And I think we did.

Yeah.

I think we were probably the best dressed people that day.

I mean the whole thesis was like, we need to go back to the Mad Men era of the 1950s when where there were an intense amount of nootropics consumed. Alcohol was drank at work, caffeine was drank at work, they were smoking, using nicotine constantly in the office. And now we've turned all of technology has turned into like, oh, you need some stack. It's a nootropic. It's like, no, it's just a drug and it's cool to use it at work.

Yeah, you basically want to short the companies where the founder is even thinking about what their stack is versus the founder. That's just like flow state ingesting but yeah, I guess two things that stood out that were interesting. The talk that most stood out to me was, I mean there was a lot. I wouldn't say it was the one that stood out the most, but it was the one that, that I think would be interesting to listeners. So Brian Johnson gave his like don't die speech and talk. I think the thing for me was realizing that he put so much content out there about like his, you know, basically his like penis. Right. Because it's like the perfect like viral thing. Viral thing.

Yeah.

But there is an extreme level of debt depth to death.

Extreme.

No, extreme level. Extreme level of depth to what he's talking about. And I think it's a lot more interesting than just the surface level. Level like billionaire spending money on.

Yeah.

His health. One thing that I think the audience reaction that was interesting, I think like 50% of people were like, this is super cool. I'm going to Download the app. 50% of people were. This is a death cult. Like of the 20, you know, of the, of the 21st century. Like this guy, every single person that's ever had a death cult was like this sort of like charismatic figure who's promising we're on the precipice of something very significant, which in this case is AI and you need to figure out how to learn live forever. And we're all going to live to forever together. And his example from the talk was that he, he said something to the tune of, of like, what I took away is like, basically he's creating an algorithm that tells you exactly what to do all day long. And his big pitch to the audience was like, would you use the algorithm? And some people were like, well, what if I want to? Like, I'm hanging out with my friends and having fun. And the algorithm says go to sleep.

Yeah.

He's like, would you do that? And he was really just like sort of trying to find this.

Are you willing to do that? Yeah.

Cultural ground. And then the other thing that was funny is wearing a Make America Great Again hat was like the most non contrarian thing you could do. I was thinking about this where I shouldn't give a blanket statement, but it felt like most of the most normie people there were wearing the Make America Great Again hats and Delian was not. And Delian's the guy who like three years ago was getting horriciously like.

It was like six years, six years ago canceled on Twitter.

Horrifically canceled.

Just as like there was probably even endorse Trump at the time. It was like it was a performance art piece just to see what would happen in San Francisco. And there was a big backlash.

Yeah.

In fact, most. The most heretical talk that I heard on politics was the case for Kamala Harris, which is very interesting. And it was. Yeah, the most trollish way.

Yeah. Yeah, the most.

But there actually was in that talk, like, very serious criticism and very, like. Like a deeper level of analysis around the flaws of Donald Trump. And I'd seen elsewhere, certainly in, like, the media, which I think was cool.

And, yeah, the most triggered I saw anybody was maybe Max Myers after the D Cell talk, where this guy was basically saying, oh, yeah, and he was just like, like, like, basically rattled.

You have to respect Chatham House rules to some degree. But.

And, yeah, another favorite moment. Like, David Senro would show up, and then, like, every two hours, he'd be like, all right, I gotta go home, like, edit the podcast.

Yeah.

And I, like, never knew if he was just like, this is getting, like, too crazy, or he actually just had to get home and edit the podcast.

Yeah, I think he just likes, you know, hanging out with a small group of people. And when you have, like, 500 people packed in a place, he's just like, what's the point?

Yeah, the real Hereticon was on the 14th floor.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's how it always is. I mean, last. Last time I met Will, which is the reason I met you, was because of Hereticon, and it was all just because we just sat at a dinner table together.

Will is who injured us.

Yeah, that's so funny. Will introduced us, and I met him at Hereticon, and. And he had. He was telling me, like, oh, yeah, I quit smoking with Lucy. And. And. And afterwards we were just like, yeah, we, like, got it wrong really well. Really well. And we just had a really good time, got put in a couple, like, group chats together and stuff. And then it just kind of, like, continued from there. But, yeah, there's always, like, that type of connection is, like, much more valuable in general. I mean, all the talks, it's so odd because of, like, the vibe shift. There's not that much stuff that it's like, oh, if this were to leak, like, it would be. It would be care for them. Like, most people have kind of sorted into organizations. It's not like they're, like, middle manager at some, like, tech company that is actually gonna, like, have HR and compliance be like, hey, you can't be out there. Most of the people that are attending are, like, either running their own company or Aligned with venture capital firms that would support them or, like, they have a big following.

The interesting thing was there wasn't that many people that had to put in, like, a PTO request to be there, is what I would say. There was a handful of people that had to put in a PTO request and we're on, like, a vacation.

Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

But then most of the people were just like, that was work. 100%.

Exactly.

Ever.

Yep.

And we were very much working. 100% working the entire time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yes, because of the vibe shift, like, there. There aren't that many things that are like, oh, this person, like, said some. Something that, like, if it got out, it'd be really bad. It's more just like there's somebody putting something out there and they're laying out a little bit more of a rigorous case for aliens or something like that. And it's. It's on you as the viewer to just kind of say, like, okay, I'm. I'm getting another. Like, another ball is being thrown at me. Like, am I going to swing at this one? Like, do I believe this a little bit more? A little bit less? And so the. The ideas are, like, not controversial in, like, the. You can't say them realm as much as controversial in the sense of, like, 50% of the audience is like, I'm not really into this, or whatever. Like, you made the case for, like, Brian's thing is, like, it's somewhat authoritarian. Like, there's a lot of libertarians. Like, that. That is a. That is kind of a, like a debate point for people. Even if it's like, he could talk about it publicly, and it's fine because it's not that controversial to talk about. It's just like, it's an idea that not everyone is down, and that's why it was split 50, 50. And that's like the ideal scenarios. You go into every talk and. And people come away. Like, even at our talk, people. There were multiple people that came up with. With after us, and we're like, no, psychedelics are great. And. And our. Basically our pitch was like, no, psychedelics are terrible.

Yeah.

And it just. It's just like, I think that that's. That's kind of like what heretical meant this time around, as opposed to last time. It was very much just the only place in the world that you could go at that moment and say whatever you wanted, because Elon didn't own Twitter yet. And there was still, like, massive, like.

Yeah, it's interesting how I mean if, if it was the most unique event that I've ever been to and truly. Yeah. An amazing product. Thinking of it as like a product, like, and it, you know, but, but it's, it's one. It's interesting. Like, would it ever have existed if. If Twitter wasn't where we all were having conversations but couldn't say the things that we wanted to say?

And Covid, I mean, I know Mike was planning it before, before COVID hit, but once Covid got really bad, that really like amplified it and made it like it was the first conference that 90% of attendees had been to since the lockdown started. And it, because it was just like there was. Everything was cancele. Still got pushed a few times the first time, but then eventually happened and it was like this big celebration of like, okay. And the vaccines had actually dropped. So it wasn't that dangerous for people who were down with that. And so it was a little easier. But still companies weren't like all, all of the big tech conferences were still virtual.

Yeah. One of the things that was cool and maybe under discussed to date is that there was this really good combination of intellectuals and people that were focused on theory and people that are technologists, business leaders, investors that are much more pragmatic. And so I went to the talk on terraforming and ended up talking with the guy that hosted it afterward. And I was like, cool. You know, his, his, his high level point was there's these. Point there's these depressions around earth which are below sea level. So if you just get water to them, you can make these huge lakes or seas or whatever.

Yeah.

And I went to him and I was like, okay, cool. What's the next step? And he's like, I don't know. Like I just sort of like talk about this. Like terraforming is like my things I just talk about. I'm not the guy to actually go and do it.

Yep.

So I very quickly like came up with a strategy for one of those depressions which we can talk about off air.

Okay, cool.

Which was basically like to buy up a ton of land around that specific area.

Sure.

For nothing because it's worthless right now. And then go spend like 10 times more money lobbying to get water to that place. And there's like a really interesting arbitrage where like you could turn like $100 million into billions of dollars value just through this like weird mechanic. So yeah, we're gonna keep talking and like see if there's.

Cool. Cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The water rights Thing is fascinating. Goes back to like Chinatown. Like, fascinating movie. Like how LA wound up with water rights. But I remember there's a politician who's saying, like, like, we, like all of Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona could have like, way, way more water if there is actually like a technological solution, which is nuclear power. Desalination in California.

Yeah.

So you have the ocean. Unlimited water.

Yeah.

Nuclear. Unlimited energy. You put those two together. Desalination is really energy intensive, so it doesn't make economic sense now. But if you can do that, then you can reroute the Colorado river back to the kind of where it should be, basically. And then. And then all of a sudden the Southwest becomes not like a desert anymore. It just becomes, like, lovely because there's just water everywhere.

Yeah.

Y. And there's just like so many other little plans like that obviously a long time. But like, with the right combination of like, technology, lobbying, economic incentives and.

Yeah. And like influencers, you did come away from it feeling like the biggest plays in the world right now from a business standpoint, combine technology with lobbying.

Yeah. It's interesting the.

Because, like, the biggest opportunities in SaaS, even AI is like, lobbying driven right now.

Yeah. Also just the fact that, like, a lot of these are like. Like, there's at least one idea there and you kind of got a hunt for it that, like, will become consensus. Like, this is the whole idea of, like, contrarianism, which is kind of hereticon just like a different. A synonym is that, like, the attendees for this one will just be like the entrepreneurs for the next, like, two decades. And. And everyone will be like, oh, like, why is that guy here? His thing's not contrarian anymore. And it's like, well, yeah, but you're not just gonna stop working on it. Like, last Hereticon, I talk on nicotine is good for you. Right? And this. And this year, like, I was like, I'm not just gonna run that back because, like, everyone knows about that. Like, that's like super normie at this point. And same with like, the Anderil guys. Like, if they were just set up, they were like, we should build a defense company. Like, it's like, okay, dude, we get it. But at the same time, you don't want the Android guys being like, oh, I'm moving on to the next hot thing because I just care about doing contrarian stuff. It's like, it's okay that they've gotten that they. That they. They did the contrarian thing. They took the bet. They were correct, but now they have to Go live that life for basically ever.

Yeah.

And that's good. And that's the way it should be. But it lends itself to this, like, give me a newer hot take. And it's like, okay. Like you can. I'm sure they have good ideas, but it's not always going to be as big as, like, the one thing that they comes to life. Work. Right.

The contrarian thing from this event that will become mainstream is goo. Goo's goo. Is that Volta?

Yeah. John Theo from the Fiorentini family.

Yeah. Fiorentino Fiant family.

They made their money in hospitality, Right? Yeah, yeah. And he. I mean, we talked about his. His like, prolific hiking regimen.

Yeah.

Six. Yeah.

Basically, a lot of people were starting to skip the coffee. They were espresso. And for the goo.

A lot of people.

And there would be people running around really wired. 3, 4am on, off the goo. And you could just see this crazy look in there.

He needs.

It was almost like. It was almost like a divine spark.

Yes.

In their eyes.

Yes. Is it the collagen, the colostrum, the caffeine?

Yeah. We don't know what it is, but the combination, sacred combination. And he talks about something that is interesting, is like, there's no difference between invention or discovery. And so this. It's this thing of like, did he create goo or did he invent goo? Did he discover it? Are they all the same thing, but by next Radicon. Well, I think we'll figure that out.

Interesting. I'm bummed that Paki couldn't make it, but did you see his tweet?

Was he having a child? How on earth did he.

I think so. Something like that. But he. He said, I sadly didn't make it to Redikon. So here's my talk. We should flip these lines. And it's the amount of venture capital investment year over year, and then the amount of charitable giving. And the charitable giving line is much higher than the venture capital investment.

Yeah. So that. That by itself is like, we probably shouldn't even talk about it because it should just be a talk at Hereticon that just becomes like a normie like, thing that, you know, if it. If it ends up being, you know, world positive.

Yeah. I mean, that's the fascinating thing about all of the, like, climate funds. Not even. Even the climate VC funds didn't do that. Well. There was a big. I think it was. Kleiner Perkins had a big push. They had a fund that was. What was the term back in the.

Day that almost like destroyed their Brand for, like, a decade.

It was. It was tough. I mean, Al Gore became a partner there. Is that crazy? He's, like, hanging out there. But I forget what it was called. There was some. There was some term for this, like green investing or something like that that was, like, really popular, but Tesla was not considered in that category.

But if you bundle Tesla and then.

The returns go great. Exactly. And so it's like there's all this. Almost like this misclassification of, like, the thing that solves the problem might not even look like it's in that category. Just like, you know, if you were, like, starting, like, okay, we're. We're. We're an inner. We're an Internet infrastructure fund. Like, do you get into the seed round of SpaceX?

Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. The. The. But you should start. I do think that vcs that are not there, that are feeling fomo, should probably feel an order of magnitude more fomo. Like, I'm not. I'm not kidding. Like, they're. When the event was very expensive.

Yeah.

But I guarantee you it will result in a massive return. Founders fund and the other VCs that were there. It's like, there's people there. I wish the missed opportunity was getting a photo of the entire group.

Oh, yeah.

Because it would have just looked like the. It's the most eclectic group ever. Like, a lot of, like, kind of strange, you know, a strange mix of people.

Yeah.

And you could look at that picture 30 years from now and be like, this guy, like, annexed Cuba. Like, this guy. Like, this guy did a hostile takeover of SpaceX.

I liked Palmer's tweet. What was that? What did Palmer say? He said Hereticon was so good. Banger after banger, hit after hit, as if all the best threads on 4chan came to life, but with a level of mutual respect and discourse lifted from the best stereotypes of Victorian Explorers Club.

It was one. There was a conversation that was being had, and Senra kept saying, like, what does that mean? Like, what does that mean?

Yeah, yeah.

And they were all like, four chan slang.

Yeah, yeah.

And he was just like, what? Like, what? What's going on right now?

Senra is so delightfully offline with his.

Like, yeah, that's why. That's why Founders is what it is.

Is because he does the reading for you.

He's not well. Yeah. He's focused on things that were written mostly in the 20th century.

Yeah.

And that's why there's so much alpha in the podcast. If he was extremely online, like, refreshing the timeline like, the podcast would not be. He would not be who he is.

Yeah.

And so I think that that was a cool thing. Like, everybody there is, like, authentically themselves.

Yeah.

And I didn't feel like most people weren't there. The only time that I got offended was a guy, like, trying to be heretical, not actually being.

Yeah.

And it was for, like, a very, like, political topic that we need to talk about, because we don't. We don't talk about politics on this podcast.

Yeah.

But, yeah, everybody was there being them authentically themselves. And the combination of all that just made it amazing.

Yeah. I liked Gabby's tweet. Overheard at Heretic on the real nootropic is being on a mission.

I'm kind of. I'm kind of mad she didn't credit me for that.

Did you say this?

That was my line.

That was your line?

Yeah.

In our talk or just randomly?

No, during the talk.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it was that. It was at the end, I think we were honestly talking about a certain presidential candidate who. Who clearly does all the wrong things, like, crazy schedule, overworked, Diet Coke, McDonald's, like, eating terribly. And the argument there was that there's no. The real. The most powerful drug on the earth is a human spirit. And being on a mission makes sense.

Yeah. I liked Daniel. I don't know how to spell this last pronounce. His last name, Tenrero.

Is he at Teal Capital?

Uh, he worked at Teal Capital for a while, but now he's independent. I hold my own private version of a reticon every day on the inside of my brain.

That's, like, really. That's, like, really true, because I think it is a place where you can say the things.

Yeah.

Like.

Like, that's just, like, schizo energy.

Yeah. Yeah. You're just, like, saying things that aren't normally said.

Yeah. But there was. There was, like, a. When I did. I didn't really go on Twitter during the conference, but there was a little bit of, like, pushback. Like, Rune tweeted, like, when people go from SF to Hereticon, Miami, the average IQ of both cities go up, which is this, like, copy pasta of this, like, incredible tweet by product manager Raul. Yeah, but it's just. It's just, like, oddly written.

Well, it's funny. I saw another. Another tweet that was like, come on, sweetie, it's time for your quarterly beef with Founders Fund.

Yeah.

He's like, okay.

Well, I mean, yeah, Rune. Rune's, like, a prolific hater, but you know, I think you should put your journalist hat on for a minute, like your traditional tech journalist, and just, like, follow the money. Think about it. Like, Rune works at OpenAI.

Yep.

Peter Co founded OpenAI. He's invested in OpenAI. Like, he needs an enemy. He needs someone to. To beef, because you don't want to be at the top. You don't want to have no enemies. That's. That's the worst. You need someone taking you down.

Yeah. If we didn't have the working. If we weren't fighting against the working class.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

There would be no podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, a similar thing happened with Sequoia. Like, Sequoia was like, you know, the. The untouchable firm, no enemies. And then Sean McGuire, you know, decided to wage a holy war against Islam. And so now they have an enemy. And. And now they're not just this, like, untouchable brand. They need. They. You know, it's. Again, it's David and Goliath all over again, which is the ideal scenario. You always want to be the underdog, and so even if you have to pay someone to talk trash about you, it's totally worth it. That's the summary.

Absolutely. Thanks for the clicks, Rune. Yeah. I do think it's funny because our talk was closer to a comedy sketch.

Yeah.

Than a real talk. And I realized that, like, midway through.

Yeah.

We would say a line and if we didn't get a laugh.

Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, that somebody came away from that not realizing that it was, like, a more of a comedic sketch than anything else.

Yeah.

And they're just. They were probably like, these guys are fucking crazy.

This is the craziest dog I've heard.

Yeah.

But, I mean, a lot of it was like, you know, comedy shrouding around, like, a true idea or, like, teasing a true idea, but just, like, amplifying things to, like, help it stick in people's mind and become, like, memes. And then our boy Theo got destroyed by some IV or something. He said the cost of admission to Reticon was expensive this year, but it was worth it because he became a blood boy, which, of course, is another joke. There were no real blood boys there, unfortunately.

But not in any of the rooms you were in?

No, not in the rooms. Anything else to talk about? Hereticon.

I'm sure it'll come up later.

Yeah. What should we move on to next? I think it's time for. To tell you about Today's highlight. Sotheby's since 1744. Sotheby's has been the premier destination for art connoisseurs, collectors and enthusiasts alike, offering an unparalleled platform for buying and selling fine art jewelry, rare books and collectibles. From classic masterpieces to contemporary works, Sotheby's brings together world class expertise and global reach, connecting treasures with those who truly appreciate them. So whether you're looking to acquire a timeless piece or explore the vibrant world of modern art, Sotheby's is where extraordinary finds a home. Tell a story about a piece of fine art. I really like this. Peter Paul Rubens, David and Goliath. Have you seen this? No, it's, it's currently kept at the Norton Simon. Hopefully it'll be at Sotheby's in a few years.

Right.

You can pick it up. But it's iconic because like Rubens was like, he really explored like the, the human form and like musculature. Like, it's a very, like, it's this like jacked David, like about to behead Goliath. It's a very, very aggressive piece. But it's interesting because like when you first, when I first heard the story of David Goliath, you think about David as this like tiny little underling. And Goliath is this like over this like massive, massive. Kind of like you and I, but, but in, but in this, in this painting, David is actually like very powerful and jacked and like, yes, he's smaller but he's still like, he's still like put in the work. And I think, I think that there's actually like a good metaphor there where it's like, you can't just be like, oh, I'm some startup and I'm going against the big company and they're huge and I'm small. Therefore it's a David and Goliath situation. I'm going to win by throwing the stone. It's like, no, David clearly like put in the work, at least in this talent. And I like that.

And that's another thing with Sotheby's. They're not afraid to put in the work. They, you know, you know, in addition to the art that they have listed and some of the private catalog, you can go to them and get their help, you know, finding specific works that, you know, that you feel something about.

You recently had lucky, right?

Yeah. So we were looking for basically a lost copy of the wealth of Nations. We have a copy there just, you know, for sentiment, sentimental value. But yeah, the technology brothers, you know, collect collector division was looking for a copy that, you know, a Lot of people thought was, you know, completely lost. Sotheby's was able to help us get it took about three weeks, but basically no lift on our side and it's now safely in the vault.

Yeah, it's kind of like the holy grail of capitalism, right? In some ways.

Yeah. Which is the primary.

Absorb the energy.

Yeah, the primary inspiration for this podcast.

Exactly.

So anyways, thank you to Sotheby's.

Should we move on to some tweets or should we do Brother in the week?

We just jump into the Brother.

The brother of the week.

You have to go to the mansion section.

Yeah, yeah. So in the Wall Street Journal today in the mansion section, there's someone that we have to highlight. So his name, where is his name? Famed LA George Ron Ruan. R U A N. Is that Ron? Ron. So this is the co founder of Honey. Sold the company to PayPal for $4 billion and he essentially got a free $44 million house which has now been profiled at 16006000 square feet, nine bedrooms in Los Angeles. The coupon king buys again. So how he got this house for $44 million effectively for free. This is real. Like he. So in, in 2020 he paid $60 million for a 21,000 square foot house in Bel Air. And then just two years later when the market was ripping, he top ticks it and puts it on the market for 150 million, almost three times the price. And he, he actually gets the deal done, sells it for 112. So that's a $52 million gain. Pays a little tax maybe.

Yep.

Gets the 44 million dollar house for free.

Rolls it in. Yeah, probably leverage that. The real story from this is that if you're a founder out there building something like a chrome extension, which everybody says chrome extension, this is silly. Like this is not a real business. If he had never, if this guy had never built a chrome extension that he never would have had gotten a free 44 million dollar house. So don't ever let anybody tell you that your idea is small or not worth doing. That brings up. I saw that Grammarly is at like basically 300 million of ARR.

Wow.

You see this?

No.

Yeah. So chrome extensions.

Yeah.

If you're at Heretic. If you're at the Hereticon. That didn't happen in 2012. Yeah, it was. It would have been all about chrome extensions.

Probably something, something weird about that. I mean there feels fake. Yeah. The Honey and the. In the Grammarly. Those companies, like people love to say, oh AI is going to like destroy this or like, there's going to be some new thing that's like, it's not going to work. But people seriously underrate this, like an Akita beer point. But people seriously underrate, like just like good management and good, like a well run company being valuable even in. Even in like a little bit of an odd industry that might feel a little fragile. And so I think the Duolingo stock hasn't fallen at all. Even though everyone's like, oh, of course. You just learn how to speak a different language by talking to ChatGPT.

And it's like, maybe it's just a distribution thing. I actually am more bullish on. Much more bullish on Duolingo than Grammarly. When Grammarly feels like, okay, you're built on top of this browser that actively wants to roll out features that differentiate it from. Yeah, all these other browsers.

Yeah, yeah. But who knows? I mean, maybe Google gets it wrong and there's just like, it's never properly. Is never properly rolled out. But congratulations to this week's Brother of the Week. Let's move on.

We almost should get something in here.

That'S like Employee of the month, brother of the rich line image that there is a good tweet in here that I want to. I want to pull up, but we should just go through them in like somewhat reverse order, I guess, since we have a whole stack here. So let's start with this one by Andreas Larson. He just posted a meme. I bet he saw it somewhere else. But oh, wait, this is. I know, I follow this account on Instagram qs. I forget what it is. It's like quant strategies or something.

Oh, really?

It's a new page. It's good what people think ESG is. We must save the planet. Invest in my fund. Here's my money. What ESG actually is. I have created a synthetic securitization so that BlackRock can buy mezzanine tranches of forests in Zimbabwe nobody planned to cut. And large mining groups can declare themselves carbon neutral while using child labor. Great, great riff on esg. Yeah.

ESG is what is dei. Just kidding.

I mean, actually there's a great economic analysis of the problems with ESG from Aswath the Modrin, this finance professor at nyu and he kind of laid out the like the bear case for ESG and just how it was like kind of misaligned. It had been abused by capitalists, which. But the question is like now with this, since it's making everyone so much money, are the capitalists going to come around and, like, should we be supporting esg?

Yeah, yeah, we should be.

Like, actually, ESG is amazing.

Yeah, esg.

I feel like it never worked its way into startups. Like, but, like, I feel like there were never really.

Can you imagine if term sheets were getting issued with, like, ESG baggage attached to them? Like, if, if. If somehow or vice versa, the funds.

Had some sort of ESG kicker where, like, oh, if it became a meme. Like, you know, everyone knows that you can attach like, dot AI to your. Yeah, the big SaaS company and double your valuation. Right. That never really happened in esg, just because I think the money that was actually flowing was mostly in the public markets from these funds that, like, needed to flow and through the ESG scores and stuff. And it was heavily gamed.

But can you imagine if. If. If big LPs had gotten pressure from various groups and were, like, telling their. The VCs that they invest in, hey, if you can get your companies to follow these principles and track it, like, that's a very dystopian sort of, like, imagine. But what if they were like, well, we'll give you 25% carry if you can get on any deals that have ESG attached to it. Like, it's. It's scary that it's not that difficult to imagine that actually being the case. And then there would have been this whole dynamic of, like, oh, don't work with this fund, because, like, they're gonna force you to, like, follow, like, ESG.

At the same time. Like, how hard is it if you're, like, doing some B2B SaaS company to be like, yeah, we're carbon neutral, but.

Like, the whole Gundo is like, being like, yeah, we're putting up solar pan. Like, we have to spend, like, at the office because, like, baggage, like, what's his name? Isaiah from Dollars, like, being like, yeah, like, we're working on this nuclear thing, but, like, we have to put up solar panels in the meantime. Yeah, in the meantime or no, even.

Worse, just like, yeah, we have to spend, like, 10% of our fundraise on, like, carbon credits.

You know, the. You know, the thing that. Actually going back to Hereticon. I didn't, I didn't talk to her, but do you remember that girl, like, four years ago who was going viral for making nuclear energy cool?

Oh, yeah, Izadope.

Yeah. So, yeah, no, she was. She was.

Yeah, she's like, this one, too.

I didn't get a chance to talk to her, but it's so funny. That's like a perfect example of something that was contrarian.

Totally.

Like, less.

She was on stage of the first.

One less than four years ago.

Yeah. And now there's like a whole.

So, Normie, there was a bunch of nuclear energy, like, founders there. Yeah, I'm actually thought that was cool.

Next week I'm going to, like, MC a whole, like, nuclear conference. And it's like the least heretical thing. It's all, like, government people and, like, companies and VCs, and, like, there's whole funds around this and stuff.

She wasn't giving a talk.

Yeah.

Because you need to.

She accomplished her mission.

Yeah. Yeah.

And she can just kind of, like, move on.

And that's why we're oriented around capitalism, which is the only. So if capitalism stopped being a thing, we would have nothing to talk about and we would retire the show and commit. But. So anyways, that's great.

Let's move on to the next one. Rico's Revenge says being broke at the book fair as a kid turned me into a monster.

Yeah.

Why was this personal for you?

I just remember that. Yeah, it was one of the first book. I just remember the book fairs and, like, honestly. So the topic of Halloween. This is cool. So Halloween, every single year, my entire childhood. And as early as I can remember, my parents, I would go regular trick or treating and then my parents would say, pick your 20 favorite pieces of candy. You can keep those. And the rest of them were gonna take and give away in exchange for you going to be able to buy a new book. So my parents were very into the library, so we rarely bought books. But that would be the moment where I would buy, like, a fresh, brand new book. And it was just like, the best thing in the world. So thank you to my parents for doing that. But I do remember being at, like, the book fair. And to be honest, like, with our kids now, you can imagine a book fairs happening. You'd be like, yeah, like, go, like, just buy everything. Buy whatever you want. Like, because, like, parents are just willing to spend money on education. But it just wasn't part of my, like, family.

And there's also that meaning money. Yeah.

Money is just so emotional. Right. And so, like any. You have these sort of, like, intense blood memories around money. And like, this tweet brought back that.

Yeah. There was also that, like, meme or, like, study that, like, the, like, educational achievement in children is correlated with, like, the number of books in a house.

Yeah.

Growing up. Which is clearly just correlated with, like, wealth and, like, a million other things.

Interest in learning.

Yeah, but, but, but then, but then people kind of took that and kind of flipped the correlation around. They were like, oh, if I just buy a bunch of books, then my kid will do well. Which is also probably true. But it's just like it became.

Because you're absorbing, just like, why would we spend seven figures on the wealth of Nations? And it's because you want to absorb that energy.

Yeah. You want to have that.

Even if you're not going to read it, you want to be able to.

I actually have read the wealth of Nations.

It's a classic. Classic. If it's one of those things, like so dry. If you had to, if you could only have three books, it would be the Bible, wealth of nations and then the book that Justin Maris will eventually write on health.

Okay.

Just to support the boys.

Yeah, of course, of course. So, yeah, it is, it is a fascinating read in that it's. You're watching someone work through the discovery of capitalism, essentially.

Yeah.

And that's, and that's fascinating. But most of the actual takeaways you can get much more concisely from just like an Econ 101 textbook. But it is very cool. Okay, so let's talk about the ARC browser situation. There was actually someone from Ark there at the party. There's a company called the Arc Browser Company. They've raised a fair amount of money. Over $100 million. Is that right?

Thought it was 150.

Yeah, they've raised a lot of money and they have a very like, you know, hipster kind of aesthetic. They post these high production value videos, updating the community on what they're building. And they've built a new browser so it's a replacement for Chrome or Safari. And they've applied a number of different design, you know, elements to that. So pin tabs, vertical, sidebar spaces. And they recently announced that they're essentially pivoting, launching a new product. They're going to leave their existing arc browser in kind of maintenance mode. So they're not going to like piss off their existing community and then they're going to launch some new things. Sound like a lot of stuff is going to be AI based and they're trying to like get through that transition of being like, okay, we're going to pivot to AI, but let's not make it like too dramatic. And so Astral Wave Andrich writes, I don't fully buy the reason that pin tabs, vertical sidebar and spaces are too complicated for normies. We live in a world where Even mainstream browsers Safari and Edge have sidebar tabs, collections, synced tabs, pinned tabs. Heck, Chrome has had pin tabs since a decade ago. I use pin tabs in Chrome. It's fine. I think the reason ARC feels complicated honestly is that they're a bit too focused on that circa 2010s hipster aesthetic and gaudy visual design that gets in the way of usability. So do you buy? This is a good take.

Generally I'm extremely pro ARC in the browser company because I'm not an investor but I'm generally like in favor of people taking on these sort of like commoditized products and categories and saying like let's try to reinvent it.

Yeah.

I think what they ultimately found is that the browser is like pretty well optimized. And the other thing is that it's really difficult to compete with platform companies that are trillion dollar companies that are giving away the product for free and pre installing it. Yeah, pre installing it. So they have the distribution. Google doesn't care if Chrome loses money forever. Right. They'll spend billions of dollars on it. Apple on the other hand, like needs to have like an installed browser and they don't care how much it costs to run. And they're pretty, pretty good products. I think like them trying to solve, they basically were trying to solve like the, the tabs issue. Like everybody has too many tabs open. And for me I actually this sounds, it's going to sound bad but I've never, I never installed ARC because I got fatigue around these sort of like new note taking type things where I'm just like no, like Chrome's pretty good.

Yeah.

I even think Safari is pretty good. I alternate between the two on my phone. It's just like I don't really think about it but I think like the thing, the thing that's more real here is that they got really interested in AI as everybody did. Realize that there's much more ability to create like a viral consumer product with hundreds of millions or hopefully billions of users doing that. And they are really well suited to like go try to tackle that problem. Now the hard thing is that they're like a really big company now which like most VCs, you know, I would say like contrarian VCs would say like companies over 10 people can't innovate or whatever. And like do they need this like really massive team? But I think the issue that they ran into is they create a product that a small group of people really, really love and they're in this position where they cannot, they can't just. They really should kill the product probably, or like spin it out. But then it puts them in a position where they say, like, well, why do we, why do. Why are we worth $500 million if we only if we don't have a product yet or we don't have a live product. And so I think it would have been cool if they like spun it out and made it open source and like let the community keep building on it or something like that. But yeah, now they're kind of in this weird position. But I'm super excited for their, like, the product coming up. Devin gave me like a little bit of a preview on what it is. It's gonna be awesome. They like clearly build great products now. It's finding that like they do there are. They raised money with the understanding that they needed to build something with 100 million plus users, otherwise they weren't gonna like, live up to the expectations that they set.

Yeah. Tough to sell a browser.

No, I'm just not.

A lot of scalers need one. They all have one.

Yeah. No, I'm just saying give it away to the community.

Like that might be better.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or just, yeah, like spin it out. As in, like, hey, we're not. Because now the thing is like, they have, they have, they're going to have this like competing thing where their power users that love the brand are going to be like, why aren't you maintaining this? Or like, why aren't you adding to it? And like, there's like the, I don't know, some amount of entropy that is going to happen naturally when like the whole team is focused on the new thing. And then like, it's like one designer and like a few engineers that are running a browser and tough thing is.

Wanting to be on that team.

Yeah. The tough thing is this is coming off them having like a pretty big security vulnerability from like a month ago that like they got a lot of heat for. But I think the heart that what this comes down to is if you do a lot of things really well and you have a lot of attention and you're relevant to a lot of people, which a browser is. Everybody has an opinion. A lot of people like, see like a really well produced video and are just like, I want to like hate on this. Right.

Yeah.

And so anyways, I'm rooting for the browser company, rooting for Ark and well, I guess I'm not, I'm not, I'm not rooting for Ark anymore. Because I don't, you know, this doesn't.

They don't even want to take it anywhere. I do wonder about like it was. Was like a design focus, like the right go to market for this. Like the other browser that's done, I think reasonably well is Brave. Yeah, but Brave is focused on like these crypto micro payments and they have this whole like economic model that you could be very like, oh, it's just a crypto Ponzi thing. But like at least like if it works, there will be some sort of like incentivization there. It's kind of like creator payouts for Axe where you're, you know, ostensibly like paying to use the browser. And then when you visit a website, if they're on your team, they get paid for every time you visit. And then, and then they have an incentive to actually put up a banner like, hey, stop reading my website in Chrome. You should read my website in Brave because I'll get paid for that. And so you have some sort of distribution like economy. Whereas if it's just like really cool. Yeah, it can be cool and people can say, oh, what's that? Oh, that looks really nice. Like it can kind of go viral, but it's just word of mouth and that's really, really hard to scale into. Like the normie crossing the chas to.

Be really, really difficult.

Anyway, let's move out. On to Nicole Wiskoff. Wiscoff Ventures founder shuts down company that never really got off the ground. Emails investors, you are welcome into. You are welcome to invest in whatever I build Next on a $100 million post. Money safe. Sometimes I hate it here. She got almost a thousand likes on that. The biggest problem is 100 mil is too low, right?

Yeah. I mean I know she seems to back really great companies, so knowing the kind of caliber that she looks for, I don't think it would be absurd to pay 100 million post for whatever they, whatever they do next. I think what I just want more details, to be honest. I'd love to see like did he send the like filled out safe? Like was it already signed on his side? And he's just like, here's wire instructions, like counter sign.

I mean a lot of founders try and mog investors when things are going well.

Yeah.

Takes a special breed of founder to try and mog investors when things are going poorly.

Yeah, yeah. The. It's funny, I talked to a founder recently that had like two very high profile failures in like a very specific category and he was going back for a third company in the same category. And I wanted to, I didn't ultimately get there on investing just from like nothing to do with him or the category. Just like talked with some people that I knew and they said like, you know, but just the fact that he was like back to back, these sort of like big basically blow ups and was like, yeah, I'm going back again. Like, just like you want to support that guy, right?

Like, I mean under, under discussed. Parker Conrad Rippling is his third company, not a second company. And the first, the first one was a little bit adjacent. It was, I think it was like a fintech company but it was still like kind of in that same realm. Something for like charts and visualizations for like financial stuff. And that company he left and it actually is still going on. Like it's, it's still alive. It's not like a phenomenal company, but like. Yeah, and it's just like I talked to a big investor in the firm or in Rippling and was just like, he can't, like, I don't know if he could build anything outside of this, but he's just like destined to do this.

That'd be a weird thing. Like working at the first company, watching the third company, third company and you're just like, like your, your company hasn't, your shares haven't been marked up in like three years and you just see rippling with like the 12 billion dollar valuation.

You're just like, yeah, well, I mean a lot of people moved over and some people didn't and that was like a big.

Well, the real hero's journey is that he buys back the first company, right?

Yeah.

And like merges it into Rippling because Rippling is the last SaaS you ever need.

There's been a couple examples of that. I don't want to like say it because I don't think the deal's done, but there's like a big YC founder who had a company that blew up and the early team is like gonna go back and buy the IP and like, you know, use it for something else, which I think is really, really cool. I think there's something about like, like owning your, you're owning your child or your baby and like just like keeping, keeping, working at it and having another shot on goal if it's like an interesting name or an interesting.com or like it'll have some cachet. I mean we got to talk about getting party round once. Once Chamath is head of the sec, you should just be able to text anyone in America. I, I Do you want to buy shares in my company? We gotta get rid of all the, all the, what is it, accredited investor laws, dude, we gotta get rid of those.

I didn't even think about like Sax gets a role. Obviously. He's like, well I gotta, I gotta support my boys. The best gets chamath Sec.

Yeah.

And then it's just like a new American renaissance.

Jcal press secretary.

Let's go.

Incredible.

Let's go. He's. There's like the White House Verticalizes podcast.

Podcast.

You know, we got to break out.

Like the dop, the department of podcasting.

It's. If JCAL was running, the White House media strategy would be heavily monetized. Yeah, that, that would be like, it's.

Like Secretary of State.

It's kind of like imagine like yeah, White House press secretaries up there and they're doing podcast ad reads in between the announcements for like obviously big multinational companies. Like why not?

Why not just the, the bond issuances. Like the government sells debt. So it's like, hey, did you know the 30 year. Is that 4%? You want to buy some like brought to you by T bills.

T bills.

I mean they used to do that like during the war. There's like posters and essentially advertisements for government bonds. Now it's all you know, distributed through like the banks and it's very abstract, but it used to be very much like going direct to like the American average American citizen. Exactly. Because you just wanted everyone to chip in and buy war bonds. Yeah, it's great. But yeah, that's probably the future of party round. It's specifically those, those political texts. So you know how you get those, those texts from politicians like every two hours on your phone now and you can't opt out of them.

I don't know why you don't get any good any tech.

Is that just because you've never voted?

No, I have. I like I've been trying to figure it out.

Because you're so extreme politically that they're.

Just like, we can't turn this guy into waste of money.

Yeah. There's no anarchy candidate.

No, I don't, I haven't got a political text.

Wow.

But everyone's made efforts to like go and like you can do those blanket opt out of like remove my info from this.

But that's where we need to get with fundraising. It just needs to be like, okay, I'm hiring a firm to spam my roll up vehicle to 10 million Americans.

Yeah.

Send out the vibreal that went viral on Twitter. Let everyone know I'm building AI for dogs. Let's get some money in there. General solicitation. This is the future. There's a couple companies that, like, figured out how to do that. I've seen some Instagram ads for, like, crowdfunding efforts, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah. My friends, my. My friends run the biggest agency for advertising crowdfunds in their world. Shout out John.

The Jobs.

Yeah, yeah, the Jobs act. Yeah. And it's like, what? It's an amazing, like, thing, you know, sort of like example of capitalism where companies figured out if you spend a dollar on Facebook, you can drive $10 of investment. So why would you not just do that? It's like an infinite money glitch, basically.

I mean, the ratio of cost to capital raise is probably right in line with, like, big investment.

Yeah, yeah.

If you take a company public, you're probably paying some massive fee, but you're.

Giving an opportunity for everyday Americans to, you know, earn real yield and real alpha.

Exactly.

With, you know, the next great robotics company.

Let's move on to Apple. Do you have Apple Intelligence on your phone yet? It's like, almost here, right? You can install it if you go the beta, but you don't have it.

I don't have it yet.

I don't have it yet either. I used to install the betas and they're always, like, kind of. Kind of sketchy, so I just wait. But Schmidt writes my mom, that hike almost killed me. Apple's AI summary. Attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in Redlands and Palm Springs. Has 14 million views. I predicted that this was going to happen on a podcast.

And didn't you also say you think. You think a lot of these are.

I think a lot of these are fake, and I think a lot of these are photoshopped. I don't know that this one is, but Obviously we know LLMs hallucinate and they get things wrong and they're rough, but that is Apple. That is not Apple's.

That was a good take.

That is not Apple's brand. Like, I was talking to a really, really big filmmaker in Hollywood, and he was predicting that Apple TV would not be successful. He works with, like, HBO and Netflix and stuff. And it is specifically because Apple's brand is perfection. Perfection. Everything needs to look perfect. And so that's not Hollywood. Hollywood is almost more like venture capital, where there's going to be some dogs, even the best. And you can't. You can't have everything be guaranteed because it's art, not Engineering. And so the AI thing has been really, really difficult for Apple, in my opinion, because they're, they're two years behind ChatGPT. And like, the day ChatGPT came out, they should have ripped out Siri and had an LLM replace it in terms of just like, what consumers would want. At one point I actually had a, like a macro on my phone where instead of saying, hey, Siri, I could say like, hey, chatgpt. And it would, like, take a shortcut and route it into Chat GPT. It was slow, it didn't really work. But that's essentially what they're doing now. But they're still going to have problems. And maybe that's why they did the open AI partnership. Just because, like, if they have some really bad hallucinations they like, and they need to, like, respond, they can be like, oh, this is a partner. We switch partners. They're the scapegoat. Like, we can move on to something else. Hey, we revamped it again. Like, I think that, I think the right frame of mind when you're interacting with like an LLM is that, like, it is a little sloppy. And as long as everyone goes into like a human. Yeah, it's a human. It's a human assistant that might get something wrong. Or just like when you're online and you. And you're scrolling like a feed, you kind of know that, like, there's going to be, there's gonna be slop, there's gonna be jokes, fake news.

Yeah.

And so you just kind of go into that. You're not, and you're not rattled.

The issue is, unlike an executive assistant, you can't berate, like, you can't berate Apple Intelligence. Right. Like, if app, if your EA makes a mistake, you can get on the phone and scream with, scream at them for like 20 minutes and then hang up.

EA.

What's an EA executive?

Is that like a secretary?

Yeah, it's like a secretary.

Okay.

You can't, it's. You can't call up Apple Intelligence. You know, it's going to be a robocall and berating a rope. You know, an AI, like voice bot is not going to feel the same.

Maybe that would be a good, like, instead of an AI girlfriend, it's just like an AI that you can practice berating so that you get better at just like really giving.

Yeah. Because those moments don't come up that much. They don't.

But when you're ready, you need to be able to scream at someone. Like if, you know, if you're raising your second company. If you're raising for your second company after everything failed, you're gonna have to get on the phone with all your. All your VCs and tell them that they don't know anything.

Yeah. Like, look. Look at, like, Jeremy Gaffon, right?

Yeah.

He was here. We got to spend some quality time with him over the last few days. And very, very calm guy. But he's from. He's from the world of finance. He goes to tech conferences. But don't. It's like a wolf in sheep's clothing. Like, he's clearly, you know, and the classic, you know, behavior in finance is that if something bad happens, you, like, scream and yell.

Yeah.

The funny thing is I can't imagine Jeremy yelling at somebody, like, intensely, but I know he's gonna have to do it.

He needs to get practice reps in.

And so he needs to get his reps in. So if I was an indie hacker, right now I'd be creating, like a prosumer.

Yeah.

Like beration is. If that's a word practice application.

Yeah. Yeah. It gives you a score at the end. How intimidated was the AI?

Yeah, yeah. I don't think you're gonna get a million.

Did you go too far or do. Were you dialed in perfectly?

Yeah. Yeah.

Because you don't just want to be like, you know, it'd be funny.

Like, it had a feature where, like, HR joins the call.

Yeah.

Hey, dial it back.

Dial it back. Okay, dial it back. But, you know, you got your point across. But yeah, I think it'll be good. I think Apple will eventually dial it in. I mean, the tech is just so good at this point. It's like, really easy. And they have a bunch of interesting ways to integrate with all the data in your phone. So you'll just be able to talk to Siri more. And it's so. It's so overdue because Siri's been so bad. Like, Siri, I only used to ask if the weather maybe set features.

Like, this feature is silly. Like, I would turn it off if I had it because, like, text should be. Text should be short. Yeah, I shouldn't.

Well, I think it's valuable in the sense that, like, the real use is that the AI should be able. So right now, if you want to get rid of this political text, you can go into your imessage and say. But it's all hard coded, so you can say, if I don't have the number saved, put it in a different folder, like a junk folder. But then you miss two factor codes, you miss like things from doctors and stuff.

Yeah, well the issue I'm talking more.

About, I could actually go to the AI and say like if it's a political text, just throw it in a.

Different sorting is cool. Summarization is not cool.

Sure.

If Nancy Pelosi text means and the Reddit stocks going up and she says go long, soy go long. That's all these other things. But then if the AI solution.

But politicians, if you're going to text me every single day, throw a stock tip in.

There you go.

Throw a stock tip in. And then I'll be like, well, yeah, okay. So you told me to go into.

Your poly market coupon code.

You told me that you're going to make oil great again and you're going to drill, baby, drill. And so you told me to buy Exxon, I doubled my money. Sure. I'll give you a 10% cut. Politicians.

That should be how politicians raise money.

Exactly.

You should give a stock to this.

Out and then monetize it by saying, hey, if it works out, give me my cut. Some wheels.

Yeah, yeah.

Come on.

That is. This is how you drive American politics.

Everyone would be like, I can't wait for the tax.

Yeah. The senators and various politicians would be focused on seeking Alpha.

Yeah. Hedge funds would be setting up. Oh, how can we get the text first? We all want to be.

Well, no, the issue is hedge funds are going and paying off Politics Direct.

They're going direct to the stock test. They're getting their text over signal.

Yeah.

And we're, we're just stuck with the SMSs. Yeah, yeah, plebs.

Anyways, that's a.

There you see Vivek Ramaswamy, he's now the second largest holder and shareholder in Buzzfeed and he posted a vlog of him.

Friend of mine's back. Buzzfeed.

What? Really?

Yeah.

Cool.

Great guy.

So he, he posted a vlog of him going to BuzzFeed headquarters. And so George here summarized it. He said, this is so ruthless. Vivek got on his plane and went in flip flops and shorts, flew to California, went into the BuzzFeed headquarters and handed them a list of conservatives to hire. It's kind of a funny thing to do. They had no choice but to listen because he's one of their new owners. He's now their second largest outside shareholder. Maybe he'll buy the whole thing and turn it into a non woke organization. This is how we win the culture war. So I can completely disagree with that. I don't think anti woke buzzfeed is.

A. I do think that the thing that's in interesting about that is that Bezos was in the news this last week for saying like one obviously the Washington Post not endorsing a presidential candidate to being like, you need to hire some conservatives. When I see these things, I'm like, why? Like we need to have media companies, like sort of, we'll never do this, but other media companies should have to label. Are we hyper politicized or are we a news source? Right. Because like when I'm, when I'm seeing that, it's just like, I don't know, it just feels like newspapers have this legacy. Newspapers have this like sort of, you know, permanent label of being able to be arbitrary arbiters of truth. Right. And so, but if they're hyper politicized and like the truth is going to get kind of lost in that.

So I was looking at the New York Times endorsements. Since 1960, they have endorsed every single Democratic presidential nominee. Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton. It's just like, you know, you got.

To respect the conviction.

I mean, at least you know, like where they stand, I guess.

Yeah.

But it's just odd that like you would never be like, hey, actually we switched around this time. We're mixing it up.

Do we need to put journalists in our enemies bucket? Or that would be too political.

I don't know. Maybe.

I like journalists. Yeah, I like them far away.

Depends. Some of them are great. Some of them I'm sure are good people. But, but this Vivek thing is interesting because not because of what he's doing with BuzzFeed. I mean, I hope it works out. I hope he makes a ton of money, but it's because the. Did you actually watch the vlog of him going and doing this? That was interesting because I have this theory that like Andrew Yang was the first presidential nominee to go on Rogan. Bernie Sanders went on, Tulsi Gabbard went on. And so there were like the fringe candidates that were polling very low, had to go on Rogan in 2016 in that cycle. And then in this cycle, the all the major party candidates are doing this huge, huge podcasts. Meanwhile, the, the more like fringe candidates, like, I mean, Vivek's like not running right now, but he's clearly gonna like gear up for more politics stuff in the future. And I think having a, having a, a candidate that does like vlogs and direct video and actually like owns their own media and puts stuff out. I think that will be true.

Why is there. No, it's actually insane that.

Yeah, they don't know when Trump's even Trump doesn't blog. No, he's putting out like, and Kamala puts out these little short, like, I want like ufc.

Have you ever seen UFC embedded, which is like the week prior to a fight?

Yep.

They vlog all the fighters and it's the most engaging.

That will, that will 100% be the future.

And, and you can make it narrative driven. So it's very easy for political candidate to make it look like, oh, so much momentum building in the campaign. Like, make politics is like more about likability than policy.

100%. Like, like with the whole RFK endorsing.

Trump thing is like this parasite. This is what Senra always talks about. The value of podcasting, if you're in business is like, he's developed like a real friendship. It's a one way friendship with, with millions of people. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And so if I'm shocked that a political, high profile political candidate hasn't used the vlog format or even having their.

Own podcast or their own podcast, like with the RFK Trump endorsement, like they both got on stage at a rally and both, you know, gave their talking points and gave independent speeches, I think that that would honestly do better if it was like the Donald Trump podcast. RFK is the guest and. And they're just having a conversation about health.

Yeah.

And so you're just watching. You're just in the room with them, watching them have a conversation. Or it's like J.D. and someone who, you know, knows about like, you know, industrialization and JD's like, look, I don't know if this guy's gonna be in the cabinet, but he's a buddy. And we're gonna have a conversation about how we actually, like revitalize the Rust Belt. Like something that he cares about a lot instead of him having to go to Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan being. Or, you know, or Kamala going to.

Yeah. And it's. And it's great. It's a way to stay active. Like, over the last couple weeks, I think people have been like, really hyper fixating on what did this candidate do today. And the thing with a podcast is like, we can record. I mean, for us, we publish live effectively, like within, you know, a couple hours of recording. But other candidates could save up a bank of content and put it out when they like wake up and they're feeling a little tired. And they don't want to hit the campaign trail.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I don't tip politicians or I don't donate to politicians. Hit the campaign trail.

The campaign trail. Should we do this one? Mike Dudas says Pump Fund is the fastest company in tech in history to $100 million in revenue. I feel like there's a new company that claims this like every day.

Well, so the cool thing with this company is you can look on chain and verify that's happening. Like actual like dollars in the wallet.

Because it's the reason that I give me the overview. Like what is Pump fun? It's like Solana Mutual.

Historically people would make Meme coins and they'd have to combine all these different things and they were actually writing code.

Yeah. They were always like ERC 24 kings projects.

So this is. Yeah, it was like a SaaS everything. This is like Shopify for creating a Meme coin.

Okay.

That's the way to Shopify for Meme. Yes, Shopify for Meme Coins. It's basically Shopify for Memes because it just allow anything happens. And there's a Meme coin like Joe Biden trash coin or like. Yeah, yeah.

So like there's one for like Mu Dang the Hippo.

And so the thing that's crazy about this is that one, they, they, they made it, they built the perfect product to enable crypto speculation because I think I haven't used it but I think you can actually invest on the platform too. So it's like two sided marketplace like Shopify. So you can create it, people can invest. It actually is good for consumers because it's like easy, like they like help. It's creating more standardized, you know, sort of underlying structures.

Well, it's like it's, you're still likely, you could still get rugged very easily if people just decided this means not hot because the coins, it's not getting hacked as much.

Yeah, less, Less hacked.

Yeah.

There's like the Meme coins were historic historically extremely complicated.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're on a Shopify site, like the product might be bad, but you're not going to get your credit card information stolen.

Yeah.

Because the credit card information is with Shopify. Shopify is reliable. Now the product might be white labeled and like junk, but at least you know that like your credit card information didn't get leaked.

So what's interesting about this is what I think. This could be a company where they end up returning billions of dollars to investors without any liquidity event or through like stock buybacks or something like that, or just distributions. Because I don't know any company that could buy this because it's in such.

A coinbase or something.

Well, yeah, but it's in such a regulatory, like, gray area of, like, you're creating the government. Like, the SEC wants to say that these are securities. And like, every crypto company has had to, like, fight back and like, make their case, like, this isn't a security. And so I just don't think you're going to see, like, Goldman Sachs, like, by a company like this, like, pump dot fun, but they're making so much revenue.

Buy or underwrite, like, would they. Would they not even touch it from an underwriting perspective if they want to take the company public?

I don't know if this company could be public because it's got so much regulatory baggage. Right. Maybe in a Trump administration it could go public because, like, he's launching, like, his own meme token. But. But yeah, I think this is one of those things. Like, they might end up returning, like, billions of dollars to their VCs. And I don't think they raise that much money. I don't know how much they raise, but, like, I think it's like under $10 million. And they could just distribute it out to VCs like Mike. And I'm sure it'll be a great return.

But you're distributing, like, tokens that are liquid.

This is. Yeah, this is such a amazing example of a product with, like, really good execution. But in hindsight, it's like, why didn't this exist in 2020 or 2021? Like, it's just like the most obvious thing, like Shopify.

For me, it just seems like there. Yeah, there weren't that many, like, actual builders, like, the ratio of, like, scammers.

But even. But even. Yeah, even before this product was created, like, this probably increased the number of tokens by like an order of magnitude.

Yeah, totally.

And even before that, there was like hundreds, hundred thousand per day.

Yeah.

Something. Something absurd. Right. Because it cost to create them is low.

Fascinating.

I like. I like how this guy got like his little.

I don't know. I don't even know who this guy is.

Yeah, yeah.

That was also just like. Yeah. Wow. I love it. So Peter Levels, the indie hacker extraordinaire, says, where do I start with robotics? I want to code and build my own robots at home for fun with. With the potential for world domination. And Matt Bogus, Matt V. Says, the raw volume of software engineers who have asked this exact question in the last 20 days is insane. So all software engineers are pivoting to robotics? Apparently.

Yeah. I think what's interesting here is that there's going to be a bunch of like, really the thing about indie stuff is that it's oftentimes like could have been fundable but wasn't. Oftentimes it's just like unfundable. Like it's just like weird. Like some like clearly very small tam. The thing that's interesting here is like it will be dependent on how cheap robotics get, which I think everybody thinks, like robots are going to continue to like get cheaper and cheaper. Like right now it's expensive. Like the robotics company I'm involved with deterrence, like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like we're going to need like millions of dollars worth of robots over time. So it's not like something you can just kind of like. I don't, I'm. I'm sort of like very for the trend, but sort of like I'm not. Wouldn't go super long on it just because of the part of the nature of like, I don't know, I think it could be like, you know, it's probably like a decade plus long.

There were a couple like kind of cheaper open source robotics platforms like, like Arduino. Arduino. But you could also like get like a Roomba and like open it like like a hacket and then you. And then you can just like have.

It draw the death. Roomba. That said Roomba with a Glock attached to it just patrols your house.

And I know Boston Dynamics does sell the dog for like, I think it's under 10k. It's like around there. So it's like we should get a.

Dog that that brings us.

You can also rent those, but those are much more close.

But if we had a dog that could go to the fridge and bring.

You a beer, probably with the arm. Yeah, good. And then George Hotz has, has a. It's basically like two wheels and like a stick and it's like the comma body and then you can. And then so you can like write code for it to like do stuff. But it's very limited. It's just like, it's just two wheels and it balances is like, it's like a Segway basically. But yeah, I mean it's always hard with that. It's like these should be at like every single hackathon. So like the next generation of like college hackers can like try a bunch of different stuff even if it's like really junkie My.

My dad, as a teacher ran this thing called Project make, which was basically like wood shops. Wood shop meets robotics meets, like, aerospace. Aerospace and just like, hacking.

Yeah.

And so he had. At his school, he had had this, like, warehouse that was just filled with, like, robots and Arduinos and Raspberry PI. So I think that's kind of like starting to happen, you know, in high schools, which is very American.

Yeah, right?

Innovation is American.

Yeah, it's always. It's always hard to tell, like, where the. Where. Where the real value will be. Like, even. Even if it's like, okay, you had. If Waymo had an open API, like, what would you do with that? You know, it's like people really just.

Want the one thing I'm excited to see more. Like, I think, like, Nat Freeman tweeted out, like, I want, like a. Not a leaf blower, but, like a little robot to, like, go, somebody built it. Yeah, yeah, to, like, pick up the leafs. And like, I'm. So for that, like, leaf blowers. We should add it. Can we add. Then can we add this enemies list, like, leaf blower. Because, like, I've lived in places where, like, leaf blowers were just like, I'm like, so this is insane. Like, not only is it loud, but, like, you're blowing particles, like, everywhere, screaming to my yard, and they're hitting my window like, I'm going to go postal.

Well, this one's related. Yaxine writes, we really need more software engineers to enter fields that are very easy, like electrical engineering and mechatronics. We can bring so much fresh perspective with our relatively high degree of skill compared to them.

That's like, perfectly intellectual rage bait.

Yeah.

So good.

3,000 likes. Of course.

3,000 likes. Banger. Poor person. Probably had like a thousand engineers in their DMs just being like, you are the world's biggest idiot.

Yeah, yeah. Everyone who's an electrical engineer is like, come on, dude. But it's great. Great. But, yeah, I mean, I do think, though, that there should be more, like, intellectual flexibility between the disciplines, especially with, like, just how easy LLMs translating between different languages will be. So it's like, oh, yeah, there's some sort of, like, little bit trickier, lower level language that you need to learn, but now you can just write Python code and the LLM can, like, transform it into whatever very quickly. So there's like, there's like a seed of, like, truth there. Even though, like, it's the great. It's a great bait post. Let's go to this will tweet absolute banger 4k likes less than a day ago. Did he really post this at 6:50am on Halloween? Was he up that late or up that early? Maybe this is a East Coast, west coast thing.

That's a good question. I don't know. Ben would have screenshotted it.

I think he just. Probably just posts in the middle of the night. He just wakes up.

Yeah.

Something divine. Divine.

No, but it's very. I think I'm gonna guess that it was 9:52 in Miami.

Okay. So Will says the real measure of wealth is how many problems you can solve by calling one of your guys. Yeah, it's great.

It's very real. This is. This is the phone CEO. I think, like, Jeremy may have brought this up. Up, like, at Senrose event, but. But yeah, like, it's about everybody's like, oh, I have, like, my car guy. I have like, a barber is like a form of a guy. You know, like a hair guy. I've got. As you get down, it's like, oh, I have, like, this stylist or I have a watch guy, or I have this, you know, specific type of lawyer. Feng shui. I have a feng shui guy. And, you know, at Hereticon, the conversation is more like, who's your antichrist guy? Right.

And who's your aliens guy?

Who's your aliens guy? Who's your terraforming guy? If you need to terraform, who's your first call? Like, a lot of people are gonna come up blank on that.

We're exactly. Yeah.

We're not.

There's also the shift from most people have, like, an app, and when you. When you reach a level of wealth, you have a guy. Like, instead of. And instead of doordash, you have a personal chef. Instead of Uber, you have a personal driver. Instead of of United Airlines app, you have a private plane pilot. Or two of them, since you always have to have two flying.

Sorry, I had to make a note. I need to text back my feng shui guy.

Oh, you do? It's great. Feng shui is real. We'll do a deep dive on it soon. So there's news in TechCrunch that Dropbox is laying off 20% of its staff. And Paki McCormick writes, you're laughing, but one out of every 17Americans just lost their job. Which is hilarious because he's thinking of DocuSign, not Dropbox. I'm sure Dropbox has a lot of employees, but it's nowhere near slander.

That's the most attention. Dropbox has gotten.

Yeah. And it's so funny. They got 8k likes and a million views because, like, it's wrong, but it's, like, kind of spiritually correct. And then it's like, okay. No one really knows, but Dropbox is definitely going through a change because Drew Houston is doing, like, videos and going direct. I've actually gotten this from a few people.

Or is he just working with Lulu?

No, no, no. Lulu has, like, straight up created, like, a zeitgeist shift. Even in, like, public company tech CEOs, I've gotten texts from a few people.

Here's the thing. So Lulu was at Hereticon. We obviously got to spend some quality time. It's interesting because, like, she's. She's done the public market stuff. Right.

She's currently on Shopify's board.

Okay. Yeah, I didn't even know that.

And she. And she was like the. The comms person on Activision Blizzard and Microsoft.

Yeah, exactly.

But then she's also, like, watching.

Working. Yeah, she's working with these, like, really hot seed stage companies, helping them do it. But, like, is the real. Is that a waste of time when she could turn a $20 billion company into a $21 billion company?

Like, imagine if she goes turns around Boeing.

Yeah.

Like, that would be crazy.

Yeah. And, like, probably more value creation than.

Like, getting some seed stage company.

Yeah, that's like, like, charity work.

That should be your pro bono work.

Yeah, yeah, she should be like. Yeah, she should literally have her charity division.

Yeah.

But, yeah, it's. Get Gabby, who's also Gabby Goldberg over there. That's gonna end up being, like, a crazy. I don't know if it's gonna be a mafia or just, like, a generational firm if they keep creating this, like, orbit.

Totally. Yeah.

One of those.

Like, one of those firms that's, like, behind the scenes.

Yeah. And I guess, like. Like, to go back to Will's tweet, like, a guy is not necessarily a guy. Like, it's spiritually, like.

Yeah.

You know, a spiritual.

There's, like, a meme, like, call Lulu if you're. If there's a hit piece that's coming out or you have a comms crisis, like, there's really only one person. And if you have someone that can actually solve your problem, that's really valuable.

Yeah. And the. If you think about Hereticon, the highest percentage, like, any, like, tech conference, the highest percentage of people that have had. Have been doxed or had a hippie against them is like. Yeah, it's like, half the people, everyone.

Yeah, but yeah, yeah, it's fascinating seeing, like, the. The, like the texts that are getting passed around from, like, oh, this tech CEO who is running a public company. I'll get a text from someone being like, what podcast do you think they should go on? Like, they want. They want to. They want to do the Zuck playbook now.

Yeah.

And it's like they're running like, a $20 billion public company, and they're just like, they're just getting pilled on this now. And it's like, it's been like, what, two years since, like, all these people started going on Lex and Rogan. And I'm like, okay, well, like, here's.

You got a little bro them a little bit. Yeah, dude, you're 2% of the size of meta.

Like, but I think it's doable for some of these people. They're interesting. A lot of them are interesting. They've just been beaten down by, like, the HR apparat checks.

Yeah. It's actually a way to, like, you know, kind of like, pull up the ladder for. Yeah, for these public company CEOs being like, no, no more startup founders on, like, these big podcasts, only, like, real ballers.

I mean, the. The guy you're not trading, the guy that I'm thinking of runs like a, like a massive public tech company. And there was a hit piece on him younger when he was like, coming up, because, I mean, he was already like a billionaire and he was from a very wealthy family, but he bought like a McLaren or like a Ferrari or something, and they were like, using that as evidence of, like, him, like, I don't even know, like, being materialist or something or being a capitalist. Like, it didn't make sense. And you know that. You know that his takeaway from, like, like, his comms team was like, like, if you're going to do something nice, like, make sure there's no cameras there. Like, the press cannot know that you went on a boat or, like, went on a vacation. And. And. But he. But what's interesting is that, like, if he actually, like, now Zuck is like, yes, I have a boat that follow. I have one boat that follows me while I'm surfing. So it can take videos of me. Like, I. Yeah, I show up to UFC through the back entrance because I'm such a vip, and. And Zuck just realized that, like, like, wait, actually, like, so much more important to be authentic, and he's just authentic about it. And so if. If the public company CEO that's been like, Beaten down can actually. And that's what Lulu does.

Even the CEO. I don't know who you're referencing, but the CEO from a wealthy family, like, it's just okay to own it. The only way that you could legitimately get criticism is if he tries to go with a story of, like, I, like, grew up.

Exactly. Yeah.

Just don't be fake. Just don't be fake. Authenticity wins.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But, but, you know, the, the. The comms teams of the 2000 and tens, their entire mandate was to destroy authenticity.

Yeah.

And. And, and hide as much as possible, which is just very unsustainable.

Arguably leads to the hit piece.

Exactly. Because people smell that, like, oh, there's something off here. Like, this person's being cagey. And so like, there must be a bigger story here. When really it's just like, no, the person, like, created a lot of shareholder value. Created a lot of consumer surplus. Consumers love the product. They're making money and they're enjoying it. And that's great. If they become a car guy or if they become a hypebeast fashion guy, like, that's great too. Like, it's fine. Yeah. Very silly. But I hope he. I hope he breaks through and gets out of his shell and does some cool stuff because I've been a fan of his for a long time, so be good. This we've had signal. We've reacted to this guy a few times now.

I don't even honestly is a testament to him crushing the X algo. Because I don't know if I follow.

I don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't know. But most great founders are after vengeance in the form of success. They have been wronged in some way, either by being passed up, ignored, or overruled by people that they feel are inferior to them. The possibility that somewhere the person who fucked you will potentially read a headline where you succeed beyond belief is better than sex. It's kind of like a more aggressive, like, hold grudges take.

Yeah, the, the example that pops into mind immediately is Palmer.

Palmer Lucky, of course.

But like, Parker Conrad is the same thing. And like, yeah, if you're Jason, it's funny. It's all in, guys. You know, we don't have anything against All In. We just have things against unmodded.

I like that they don't advertise.

It's more of like, we're against punches here.

Exactly.

Against under monetized podcasts generally. Not against All In.

Yeah.

Yeah. But David and Jason having to watch Palmer and Parker Congratulations. Both build these big Decacorns. Decacorns, like the most, like, important company in SaaS. Craft is a SaaS focused investor and the most important company potentially in the 21st century in America. And Earl.

Yeah.

That's got to hurt. So, like, yeah, like, I think this is probably real, and I. And I think that Palmer and Parker, like, they're. They know that they're only, like, 5% through the mission. Yeah, they're like. I'm sure they. They appreciate the headlines.

Well, yeah, I mean, to your point, about the 5% through them, through the mission, I wonder if the motivation dies down once you have, like, total cultural victory over your, you know, nemesis. Because at this point, it's like the. The Palmer viral clip of him at all in, like, trashing Jason. Like, that goes viral, like, once, once every six months and gets, like, millions of views. Like. Yeah, it's like, it's not like, it's. It's widely accepted that, like, Palmer has won that beef. And so I wonder if he needs.

A new Jason arguably doesn't accept it. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise he wouldn't keep poking the bear.

That's good. I mean, maybe he needs to keep doing it because we got to keep Palmer motivated. We got to keep Palmer.

If it's good for Palmer, it's good for America.

Exactly. Yeah. Palmer's like, I could take off this weekend, but I could play more D and D. I don't think I got. I got to get on the grind because I gotta. I gotta keep proving that I'm.

It would be since. Since Parker and Palmer are both P. Names strong, since they're both billionaires, will eventually allow them to call into the. To the Polycom. But, yeah, I don't think I would be shocked if they were like, yes. Spite was the only reason.

Yeah.

It's more like I want to. Parker wanted to revolutionize sas.

Yeah.

Palmer wanted to build the most advanced weapon systems in the world. And, like, there's some, like, product. There has to be some product variation there, too.

Yeah. Whenever I hear Palmer talk about it, it's. It seems like a lot of the, like, the reason he gives that talk is. Is because he feels like there are dozens of founders who were destroyed and didn't get the opportunity that he did.

Yeah.

So he wants to, like, kind of do a cultural reset there, which I think is very valuable. So I think his. His victory lap is less for him and it's more for selfless community. Yeah, that's good. Let's go to Tariq Mansour. Who says he posts a screenshot from what looks like WhatsApp. It looks like an investor said you should receive $12.4 million today, 5.4 from Neo and 7 million from me personally. I've already sent in the wire requests. We can figure out the terms later. Go, go, go. And he's posted with a comment. It's in times like these that investors show their true nature. Ali Partovi and Nio have just redefined the term conviction. Why do you like this?

I mean, I like it for. I like it for a lot of reasons. One, I like it because it's great for Google and Meta shareholders because I'm sure a large part of that $12.4 million was immediately dumped into the ad platforms. Right.

I actually don't know what he's building.

This is the. This is Kalshee. This is a competitor.

Oh, really? No way. Okay. Yeah.

So. So the reason they also advertise on podcasts, the reason for the speed was because the. It's an election betting marketplace.

Makes sense.

And the election is coming up.

Yeah.

And they needed. They probably just wanted to spend a lot of money on ads. Otherwise, you know, why the 12.4 million with no terms? So anyways, like, honestly, props to. Props to the, to the Neo guy. And yeah, I hope, I hope they're able to agree on terms, you know, mutually agreeable terms. But. But yeah, it's kind of like. It's kind of like crazy because. What? I don't know the full guy's full name. Apertovi.

I think it's Ali.

Ali. Ali. Upper Toby.

Ali Partovi.

Ali Partovi. But, like, that's either gonna be like something that each of them, like, scrub from, like, their Twitter, or it's going to be like framed in his office fund about conviction.

It's long tail.

Feel like. It does feel like a highly. I don't know if people are going to be betting on, you know, sort of like state and like, localized elections to the same degree as the presidential election. I would imagine, like, the volume drops significantly.

Yep.

But it'll either be a legendary investment. Investment. It's very binary. Legendary investment. Or like, that guy is going to be like a month from now being like, what was I thinking? But I'm sure their metrics are insane.

Right? Yeah, I'm sure everything's ripping. It's great.

Yeah. One thing I was thinking on that note on the topic of election betting markets is what happens if the election results are contested by either side? Like, like, are the funds released when the winner is announced or are they is like Polymarket and these other platforms going to have to hold funds until the person is actually like, yeah, I.

Don'T think it's as much of an issue as you think because there's a lot of liquidity in the market. So what happens is like, I don't, I don't know if Polymarket had the 2020 election on there, but let's say that they did. Like, obviously January 6th happened, the transfer of power happened on January 20th, but the election was like up in the air the night of, a few days later. It was like being called by like CNN and Fox and all of that. Then there was a lot of chaos and discussion. But through that time, like let's say we just reran the 2020 election where it was like in question. Well, throughout the 2020 process, even on January 5th or January 7th, it would, it would be at 99% Biden. So you could sell your Biden shares for 99 cents. Or, or you could be buying Trump.

Very cool.

Yeah, so, so, so there's still liquidity and I think the actual like payout mechanism is less relevant or it's not.

As maybe, maybe this investor is thinking, I'm going to, we're going to make millions and millions of dollars in fees over the next. We just want to be super capitalized so we can outspend.

And so even if there's like a battle, like it's like you have two full months before the certification and then the transfer of power and then it becomes pretty easy for Polymarket to say, okay, well on January 20, on the inauguration day, like everyone watches one person get inaugurate. Yeah, like we can close it now. And it's like, yeah, maybe you had your money locked up for an extra month or two, but you could have gotten out at 99 cents, but then you get the full 100 or whatever later. So if you're, do you want to.

Talk about Robinhood's betting market?

Oh yeah. Is that in here? I don't know. We can just talk about how Robinhood launched betting markets as well. It seems like every firm is launching them. And I mean, Vegas has had it for a long time. They've been all over the place. I don't think they're in here. Maybe. Let me see.

Going, going to Vegas on election night and just live betting in the casino. Sounds like, I actually don't, I only like gambling on private companies. I don't enjoy like other forms of gambling. Yeah, but it sounds like it'd be fun.

Yeah, I don't think I have it in here, but either way, Robinhood also launched election betting, which makes like probably.

Within 24 hours of that investment because.

Everyone saw that, like, okay, this is just. But yeah, I mean, just making it easy for people to bet on it. I wonder, I wonder if it'll increase turnout. I wonder if we'll see turnout material increase. I'm fascinated to see. Like, that would be awesome because this is really like the, that would be very American. It's the first election with like serious, serious liquidity in the prediction markets. There's always been predict it and whatnot, but the liquidity has always been really, really low. Like a few million. Now we're in like the billions.

But it would be very American if turnouts increased. The only thing that matters, because people want it. They're like, I made this bet, now I have to, I want to win.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or people start betting against themselves because they're just like, yeah.

I mean, that's the thing with the prediction market is like, you could want one candidate to win and you could bet on the other one as a hedge. Right? Like, oh, I, I think my business is going to suffer under Trump or under Kamala. So I'm going to, I'm going to bet on the other one as like a hedge. So if I lose, at least I have more cash on the balance sheet. So it's like not that irrational.

At what point does the Fed start betting on the market?

Imagine if the, I mean, we went like, what, four orders of magnitude of liquidity in the, in the last election to this one. Like, imagine if next Polymarket is like, oh, yeah, there's $4 trillion being bet on the election. Yeah.

Pension funds. Pension funds, Saudi Arabia.

Masa gets in on it.

Sovereign wealth funds are just like. And it's just like, oh, don't do the prediction markets. It's just whales duking it out. Yeah, yeah, you're going to get smoked. Like, it has. No, it's completely uncorrelated with the market, with the actual like polling or anything. Now it's just like raw financial markets.

I mean, it's going to be fascinating to see how accurate these things are.

And I'm sure to be new, we should maybe do like at TB markets and turmoil that just analyzes like the.

Betting, you know, I mean, if, if, if it's, if the final Poly market is 51 to 49 and they get it, quote unquote, wrong, the, the narrative is going to be like, it's useless.

Yeah.

People do not understand probability and statistics at all. It's. It's just going to be such a meme. But if they get it right, even if they're up by 1% or something, it's going to be like.

But it's. But it's partly an entertainment product.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's why it's in the news category. And that's another thing that's interesting between Kalshi and Polymarket is that they're both. I think they're both marketing as like, we are the number one app in the App Store, but they're in separate categories.

I don't think Kalshi says that. I think they say they're worth the legal.

Yeah, I mean that's their main one. But I have seen a screenshot of like, oh, congrats to Kalshi. They're like now number one in the App Store, but they're in. They're in a different category. Polymarket is in like news, which I think is like more competitive. Maybe. I'm not exactly sure. But you got to call Nikita Beer to figure out like, how to game the App Store and get to the top.

If he just gets his intro numbers up, he can call into the Polycom.

He's going to get there soon. But we should stay on Masa. Masayoshi Sohn, the head of Softbank is here quoted saying that $9 trillion of capex for artificial superintelligence is very reasonable. In fact, it may be too small. I love this guy. Amazing. 9 trillion numbers get big scaling laws. We'll see if they hold. GPT5 is pretty important. Doing the build up.

I feel like my only critique of Masa is that he hasn't made the AI boom enough about him.

He's getting there. He started. This is the beginning.

Yeah. Hopefully this is the start of a trend because yeah, like Softbank, like was every other headline high volatility during 2021. And so I just like, I like him. I would, you know, didn't they only.

10 of Nvidia like a couple years ago and they sold at the bottom or something.

Yeah, a lot of. Few people did that.

Rough. Rough.

But yeah, I think the guys had some. He's had some big bets that went very right.

Yep.

So got to give him that. I mean, have to be right every time.

Like just being a conduit from like, like Asia to these incredibly capex intensive businesses. Like, the money's got to come from somewhere. It's important. Like, it's not Going to all be, you know, Silicon Valley VC firms as they scale. But 9 trillion is a big number. I mean, that's even bigger than what Sam was saying, right? I mean, there was like, that kind of jokey report that Sam was like, oh, we're going to need, you know, trillions of dollars. But it was like he was kind of like, memeing about it and was like, this is kind of fake news. But yet Moss is just like, no, it's real. Yeah, I'm more bullish than the founders who are running the companies. Yeah, that's always good. I mean, that's. That's the story with Adam. Right? Adam Newman. Like, they get in the limousine, and Moss and Adam's like, you need 500 million. He's like, we need 500 million. He thinks it's, like, crazy. And he's like, no, you need 5 billion or something like that. Yeah, it's great. Highly related. Farzad says it feels like we're about to enter the golden age of the United States. Well, I mean, we covered this last time with the Economist cover. The United States is in a phenomenal position. The dollar is very strong. The economy is ripping. There's a lot of chaos, and it feels like we're more divided than ever. But I firmly believe that things are not.

Things are more American than ever.

They're more American than ever. And I was thinking about this when people were like, American politics have never been crazier. They're so crazy. But then I was.

The craziest thing I experienced, I had recently was like 3 hours ago trying to drive to the studio with LA Dodgers having just won the World Series.

World Series.

Not the American Baseball Series, the World Series. They just won the World Series. And there's a hundred thousand people turned out on a Friday morning.

Wow. Yeah. But you think about, like, okay, yeah, there was like this Trump assassination attempt. There's like, like the. The Biden Kamala hot swap. Like, politics does seem kind of crazy. But then I was going back and looking at, like, the timeline for jfk, and it was like, there's a massive Cuban missile crisis. He avoids the apocalypse. Six months later, his Marilyn Monroe is like, singing him. Like, his. His. What's the word? Like, not concubine. Like, his mistress is Openly him on TV. Happy birthday, Mr. President. You know that one?

No.

Oh, yeah. So she's like, Monica.

Not.

It was. It was a Marilyn Monroe. No, no, this is like Marilyn Monroe, but. But, like, it's very clear to everyone in America that the President is, like, openly Having an affair with this like Hollywood starlet as opposed to like with Trump. There's always like weird stuff, but it's.

Like very like tangent didn't have enough.

And then no, they endorse him and then, and then six months later he gets shot, gotten killed. It's like that is unquestionably a more crazy time in American politics than right now. Yeah, like we're not even close. We're at like a 6 out of 10.

Imagine listening to a technology brothers episode from that era. We wouldn't have talked about any of those things because we don't talk about politics.

Exactly. It would have been all about, I don't know, DARPA and the Internet or something.

Ben, can we add to the sheet? We don't. Not discussing podcasts or. Sorry.

Politics.

Politics.

Yeah. So Miranda Nover says the market is wide open for Aria esque LinkedIn. I think this is a good idea. I like this.

There was an adreesen back company that just like paired you up with like a relevant connection every single week.

Yeah, I joined one of those. There's a couple of VC firms that do that. Kind of just like it's like speed dating for business people.

Senra would Absolutely.

His head explodes.

Worst nightmare.

Worst nightmare.

Just getting connected with a random person.

Yeah.

Except what if we created the founders podcast app that just connected. It was only him on one side. Just connected him to a different founders listener every single week. He would, he would, he'd be there. Pay a lot of money for that. Organize like you, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

If you're an indie hacker out there, go build the founders connect.

This, this is not an indie hacker project. This Raya esque LinkedIn. Like you have to be, you have.

To be Senra app.

This is something that someone like some like the all in podcast or someone who's like really connected can start because like the whole, the whole thing is like you're, you're just gonna be going down market the entire time. So. But so you have to start with like the absolute top, like the cream of the crop and then move.

Clubhouse is basically that.

Clubhouse did a great job of that. But I don't know, difficult like scale too fast or something. I don't really know.

Should have gone fully into dating.

Yeah, I think also like they didn't. Like I hired an engineer who worked at Tinder once and he said that one of the tricks that they had was for like the bots and the really like toxic users. They wouldn't ban them. They would put them in a Shadow pool. So they were kind of on their own network within Tinder.

Because banning them would hurt the metrics.

No, no, no, it wouldn't be. I mean, I'm sure. But no, it's because if you ban them, they'll just create another account. So you don't want to ban them. You want to say, like, everything's normal for you, but you're just talking to bots and you're just living in this, like, you know, matrix world. And so, and so that. That's kind of what Clubhouse should have done is. Is been like the. The Mark Andreessen and the tech people are in a bubble. They're in a filter bubble. But then. But then the people that launch, like, there were. There were a lot of people who started joining Clubhouse, and they were like, why do I have to follow this Mark guy? I don't like him. Like, I don't know anything he talks about. Right? Because they're just like, want to be on there and talk about. About sports or whatever. But Clubhouse was still like, funneling people.

Into, like, like Alicia Horowitz, right? Isn't that Ben Horowitz?

Yeah, yeah, Felicia.

Like, Felicia.

Yeah, yeah.

She.

She held like a whole dinner series on there and stuff. And that was cool. But it's like. But it's like, as you. They probably need to be a little bit more deliberate about being like, okay, we have. We have dominated the tech community. Now we're going to go after, like, the sports community or the wrestling community or some other micro community, get designers or get, you know, whatever and, and, and bring those people on, but do it in a really smooth way where it's like, okay, we're. We're gonna go after the gardening community. So we got the biggest YouTuber who talks about gardening on here, and he's gonna be hosting stuff. And if you're a gardening person, that gets acquired through our gardening function, I don't think enough credit goes in. And then you're in this bubble and you don't even see the tech stuff that's happening. So instead you just scroll and be like. It'd be tech conversation here. And then just like, complete nonsense. It didn't even filter by language. At a certain point, I would scroll and it would just be like, like completely a different language. And it's like, you should know that I don't speak that language. You should just not show me that.

It does feel like the product would have been benefited in a lot of ways from Geni. Yeah, both. Like, imagine being able to join a Room full of bots and like have a conversation. Like full. Like maybe somebody should build like Clubhouse with just bots where you could like join a conversation and just rage about politics.

This goes back to just be people get on stage and just be like, you. You're fucking wrong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, wow.

It's still under discussed the fact that Twitter spaces just destroyed 4 billion 1 new feature. Because I was just thinking like, wow, I miss Clubhouse. I miss like those like you would have party around. We would put our stand ups on Clubhouse.

Oh really?

Anybody could just join and. Yeah, those converse. A lot of those conversations are still happening. They're just now on Twitter Spaces.

Yeah. I mean also under. Under discuss this. Like Twitter was the company that did it. Like a lot of other. A lot of other, you know, social networks did launch.

They were like clones.

But Twitter, everyone was saying, oh so solely poorly mismanaged. But there was this moment where something was happening at Twitter even before Elon bought it, where everyone was like, we gotta make something happen.

Yeah.

So we gotta.

Yeah.

And so they launched like the community notes thing. I don't think that was like Elon showing up and being like, I have an idea. I think it was like, like in the pipeline. And he was like, get this out now. Like, it's good. Just ship it. We'll work on it. And. And Spaces is the same thing where they actually moved just as fast as Facebook to get that. Get that out. Because they saw it as a risk, which it was. Makes sense.

Yeah. And the. This is an example that the Andreessen Clubhouse X relationship dynamic is an example of the markets working as they should, which Andreessen ended up up losing money on Clubhouse. But they'll make it all back on X. Right. Which I just. I appreciate.

Fantastic. Do you. Do you know this account Grit Cult. I've never seen them before, but I.

Am familiar with you.

This post is two words. Live intensely Read the Intensity Manifesto now. All caps.

Yeah.

The Intensity Doctrine. Intensity is the universal language of God gifted to humanity. All other animals live according to their nature. Humans are made to surpass it. And it goes on for like a couple.

Yeah. So the reason I thought this was relevant is I think we should create the American Manifesto. Like, this is what it means to be American. This is why you should be American. This is why you can be spiritually American.

This is why you should not be un American.

Even if you're in. You know, even if you're born in Singapore, you can be spiritually American.

Sure, sure.

And I think we should give out spiritual citizenship to foreigners that. That feel more at home in America, even if they. They're still getting through the immigration system. That's great. Yeah. So anyways. Hey, ChatGPT, please write me the American manifesto.

I want to go to. Oh, we were just talking about Mark, but we're back on Marc Andreessen. He says Claude knows and posts like a massive screenshot of a huge block of text. But basically he asked Claude. Hey, Claude. Noble creation of anthropic. Tell me, my good man, if a company in a nascent industry started to gain traction in and become a leader in the space and then began pushing for government regulation in said incipient industry, what would you call this strategy? And it seems like whoever wrote this prompt was kind of like baiting Claude into admitting that they were doing regulatory capture. Is that what you found this interesting?

Yeah. And it's just such a perfect, like, example of why LLMs are so magic is because historically you would have needed your. A comedian, somebody that says funny as a comedian that understood government regulation and the history. The history of government regulation and regulatory capture. And you would have needed your guy and you would have had to pay them, like, $5,000 to do this instead. It's free.

Yeah.

And so this is an example. It's the perfect, perfect meme because it's showing how incredible the technology is while absolutely just decimated anthropics.

Like, do you think it's real? Because you could just write this prompt and then just, you know, a human.

Couldn'T write anything that good.

You don't think so?

No, no, no. I don't even think my. My regulatory capture guy could do that.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I just remember, like, the thing with LLMs for me is, like, some of my core childhood memories are sitting around a campfire with my dad.

Yeah.

And him being like, like, I'm gonna write a song about, like, Jordy's love for soccer, you know, and then he would just like, make that song and I would just be like, head, like, exploded. But now you can just be like, write me a song that talks about Jordy's love for soccer, and it will do it as good as my dad and it. Right now I just can't play the guitar yet. But when indie robots create guitar playing.

Have you played with Suno the Music Generation one? I haven't played with it, but I think it's actually tried to and it.

Didn'T get very far.

It seems like it's still in like, a pretty early Stage, but it's really good for, like. Like, the stems. So you just need, like, a little drum riff. Instead of going to a sample website and buying one, you can just say, like, I want it to be a little bit louder, a little bit quiet, a little bit faster, and it'll just generate that. Move on to the next one. We have a tweet from David Sacks of the all in podcast. You know, we talk a lot of trash about how he's failed to monetize his podcast as much as we'd like, but obviously a dear friend. And David writes, it takes effort for a search engine not to be able to find an interview with 34 million views between the biggest podcaster in the world and the most famous person in the world. He got 60k likes.

60K. Can we just talk about how many likes? Like, 60k is so many. Like, I think I've maxed out at, like, maybe like, 5.5K is, like, a.

Good, like, tech banger. I think I've hit, like, 20 or 30 on, like, something a little bit more generic, but it's hard. But that's why politics. This is. This is the. This is. The thing about all in is, like, they're going broader for a good reason. Like, there are more people that are interested in politics than tech. It's just a more. It's just a bigger, addressable market. It's totally rational. And it's also a good service to tech because I'd rather have David than Kara Swisher talking about tech to. In the politics realm. And this was something that tech people just completely obviated themselves from. They just didn't talk about it all.

We should do a GoFundMe for Kara Swisher to try to make her a billionaire so that she just has a more positive view on tech.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm pretty sure she's rich. And, like, I don't know. Balaji's always talking about how she comes from money, too. But this is talking about YouTube censorship of the Joe Rogan and. And Donald Trump episode, which was weird because when. When this originally came out, Rogan was like. Everyone was like, oh, like, why is it not showing up on YouTube? And Rogan was like, we literally just had a problem with the uploader. Like, they are not, like, messing with us. Like, it's not a big deal, guys. Like, there's not a conspiracy. Turns out, I don't think it's shadow banned at all.

Like, where's my tinfoil hat?

I think it's. I I think it's, I think it's widely available. I don't think you can get 34 million views on a shadow band thing. I think it did. I think it was getting pushed in the algorithm and stuff. I think it's, I think, I think YouTube is very seriously pulled back on that and for good reason. There probably wasn't anything as a YouTuber. Yeah, well, I mean I do have takes on, on like the YouTube stuff, which is that part of the reason Joe Rogan blew up so huge on YouTube originally was because he chose the three hour format. So the algorithm, like the YouTube algorithm, is a, is a expected value machine. So it takes the average view duration, which is how long on average someone will spend watching that piece of content. So for a 10 minute video, if it's really engaging, the average view duration might be like five or six minutes. Mr. Beast is like, he's like the most cracked at like retention. So like you have to watch to the end because you want to see who makes this, the who wins the million dollars. And then every few seconds he's re engaging you with a new storyline or a new thing. There's no slow parts where you're like, actually I'm gonna go back to whatever. So Mr. Beast on a 20 minute video might be getting 12 minutes of average view duration. Now Rogan with podcasts, it's slower because it's just conversational. So there's lots of opportunities to be like, oh, I'll stop listening. But by going longer, even if he has the same average view duration as a one hour show, he'll have three times the amount of like expected value. And so that's more time to sell ads. And so the algorithm wants to sell more ads and keep you on the platform. And so it gets pushed and then it multiplies all that by the thumbnail click through rate. So if you see Donald Trump in the thumbnail of a Joe Rogan episode, you're more likely to click that than just someone, you know talking about Trump like randomly. Right? Yeah.

I think a better. Would a better test be like how many people saw that in their recommended.

Right, sure, sure.

Like Joe Rogan is claiming somebody uses Joe Rogan just. Or uses on YouTube just to watch Joe Rogan.

Did it show up in their feed or did they have to click in and.

Yeah, exactly.

I didn't see any replacement reports of that. I didn't see any reports of that.

But those people are not really on tech Twitter. Maybe the guys that are going, maybe tube.com but, but the Big.

The big. The big comparison this. This week is about the Kamala interview that she did with Shannon Sharpe, I believe. Yeah, I watched the whole thing and that was only one hour long. And the Trump Rogan was. Or they were comparing it to the JD Vance episode, which has more views, but it's three hours long. And so it. It just naturally, even if it has the same retention percentage, it will have more average view duration. And so setters paribus. It should get more views in the YouTube algorithm. This is why a lot of YouTubers are moving to longer and longer form content like it used to be. You do like, whatever, because you could just upload any file, five minute episodes, then everyone shifted to 10 minutes because you could put two ads in. Amazing. Well, part of that is longer.

Part of it is YouTube viewership is now, I think, predominantly on the TV.

Yep, TV's huge. It's not. I don't. I don't think it's more than half, but it's growing huge. And also just people want to throw something on and then just go do their laundry. It's laundry tv. Right. And so a lot of times when you're scrolling through YouTube, you don't want to just like, oh, a five minute video and then I gotta find another one.

Do you hear that?

Yeah. Yeah. People are having fun outside.

We are hearing gunshots, Fireworks probably. All right, that's what.

Oh, here's the Robin Hood one. I don't know if we need to cover this, but we already did. Let's skip it. Okay, let's move on to. People are going hard. Let's move on to Max. I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Says, we are looking at buying some land to eventually build a home. Wife has Zillow open. I'm like, that's the wrong app. Proceed to pull up oncshunt. I don't know what that is. Immediately identify 10, 10 landowners in the area that we want to be in with either multiple tracks or tracks large enough to subdivide. Time to start knocking on doors. Do you understand this at all?

The next. Yeah, so, so basically the. The next tweet is from his family that says, unfortunately, Max was attempting to contact somebody while walking on their land and was shot.

No, no, sorry.

No. But the app is something that you can use to find land that you're available, that's available to hunt on.

Oh, okay. Okay. So if I have a ton of land, it's like Airbnb from hunting territory.

Got it.

Okay. So I Have a huge ranch.

It's just like, understanding, like, land use and like, where you can go and things like that.

Okay.

I just thought this was like the. I thought it was funny because it's like mansplaining, like, like the most complicated way. I mean, there's a lot of alpha and just like, not. Not being like, only dependent on Zillow for, like, trying to find your next piece of property.

It's going to be more competitive. This is competitive.

And, like, that's how you're going to find, like, actual, like, deals.

Yeah. I mean, in my neighborhood, like, it seems like almost everything transacts, like, off market. And we're always getting like, phone calls from real estate agents being like, hey, you want to sell, like, that type of thing, as opposed to, like, Zillow, where it's kind of a zoo and a mess.

Yeah.

Interesting. If you had to buy.

Competition is for losers.

If you had to buy land in some far off off place, where would you go in America? Obviously you're not leaving.

Yeah.

Montana, Idaho, I think Mont.

I think Montana is cool. I. I think the real play going back to the Hereticon piece on terraforming, is land around the Salton Sea.

Yeah, that's good.

And then re getting a new pipeline.

Yeah. And that's pretty easy to connect to America, to California and LA if. If you need to. I'm. I'm also. I'm always super bullish on Alaska. I got canceled on Alaska, Alaska Twitter because I was too bullish on Alaska.

Really? They were like, don't talk.

Yeah. They're like, don't come up here. You talk, idiot. Yeah, well, it was my, My point was that you need to be bullish on Alaska because if climate change is real, like, it'll be the last bastion of, like, beachfront property. You get a mountain up there, sea level, sea levels rise. Los Angeles is 100.

We need to be making big, big bets.

Yeah. Well, this was what inspired me because I had a friend who I think they're like, great grandfather got back from World War I with like a payout of like, I don't know, like 50 cents or whatever the money was worth back then, but that was like a ton of money. And so they go out to California, go west, and they buy something like a hundred thousand acres in what is now Napa. And so the family just has generational wealth from a guy that just made a good real estate deal, like, was never really in business.

Oh. So that's actually so an interesting one on that. Growing up in Northern California in Sonoma county, you can still buy like 100 acres for like $600,000.

Amazing. Yeah.

Nothing.

And so, yeah, like, that's getting harder and harder to do.

And I think the interesting thing is buying land based on bets that firefighting technology will get more advanced.

Sure.

There's a lot of areas of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Yep.

Near where I am. And there's like really cheap land because to ensure a two bedroom home would be $60,000 a year against fire. So nobody buy. It's not economical to buy there.

Yeah, yeah.

But if drones, like, totally, you know, revolutionize firefighting and you just have like Los Angeles county fires, just swarms of drones that can, like quickly attack and, you know, dismantle, you know, fires before they start or protect against arson or these different things, a lot of that land suddenly becomes pretty valuable and interesting.

Yeah. My other flip side of related to the technology advancement thing is like, if you think that will, like, solve climate change, essentially it means that they'll probably be like on demand nuclear. So you can just go up to what is still tundra because the climate hasn't warmed, and then you can just run AC and heat and, oh, it's dark. Artificial light.

Just melt the ice. Melt.

Yeah, you can just do whatever you want. You can terraform it, essentially, to be localized terraforming. Exactly. And then Starlink makes the Internet really fast. Up there you have your power generation. Like, you can live a very modern life in like, what is essentially like complete tundra.

Yeah.

And. And you can still go.

People that complain about the cost of homeownership. It's like, yeah, you can get a really nice house for 100 grand.

In Alaska.

In Alaska.

Go do it. In fact, in there's still homesteading there. So you can get paid by the government to go live on land because we want to, like, defend it from the Russians because they'll just like move over and be like, like, no one's living here. We'll just take it moved now. It's great. The next stage of capitalism is love, says Jacob. Love your customer and your supplier. Love your investor and your lender and your creditor. Charge fair market price with heartfelt gratitude. Pay fair market price with heartfelt gratitude. Love capitalism.

I think if I had to define one, if I had to use a tweet to define this podcast, it would be this. So I don't know this guy. No, but. But that is what this show is all about. Right. If you start a podcast because another podcast is under monetized, that's basically an ode to capitalism.

It is.

So I don't think there's much else that needs to be said except frame it.

Just love capitalism. It's fantastic. Luke Ferretor, did you meet him this week? He was there.

What's his.

Luke Ferretor is a genius hacker kid who was either the main winner of the scroll prize that Nat Friedman did or a winner. And he. I think he wrote a bunch of machine learning code to help translate the ancient scrolls that were basically impossible to see. Casey. I forget what his name is. Hanmer. He is also, like, just a genius scientist, but he. He just looked at them and realized, like, everyone was like, struggling to decipher the scroll. We should do a whole thing on scrolls. It's fascinating. But the scrolls, these ancient scrolls that are. They're in Herculaneum. Is that where it is? Or Athens. What was the. It was after the volcano.

Yeah. The library of. Was it? No, it wasn't.

Vesuvius. The Vesuvius scrolls. That's what it is. So Mount Vesuvius explodes, ash covers everything. And there's this library with ancient writings, scrolls that are entombed. And they find them, but they're so calcified, I guess would be the word. I don't even remember. They're just like petrified. And so if you try and unwrap them, they just disintegrate immediately, so it's impossible to read them. But Nat Friedman went over there and like, put one in, like an MRI machine, I think, and scanned them and then put that data on GitHub and put out a reward for a couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollars if you could. If you could decipher these with the raw data. And so there's a bunch of people that worked on this. There was like a discord and a bunch of people.

Yeah. I think what's interesting is, like, the new tech elite, like Matt Friedman, Elad Gill.

Yep.

They're all starting to, like, do things with their money. And Elad Gill was on a podcast recently, and they were like, the hosts were pressing him on, like, well, how do you, like, are you gonna monetize this or whatever? And he's just like, no, I just think it's cool.

Well, this is the thing. People have been saying, like, we need better elites. Because for a long time the elites would make a ton of money and then they would just like, constantly money launder all their money through, like, these fake nonprofits that just, like, made the world worse. Instead of actually going and building, like, just A huge new library that everyone can enjoy. Yeah. It's just like there's so many amazing institutions. Like going back to like. Yeah, yeah. Like so many great monuments and like the Louvre and like all these like cultural monuments that live on for so long was just like some rich guy.

That's, that's a lot of thing is like trying to build new monuments.

Yeah, yeah. Or just like, oh, someone built like a huge house like Hearst Castle. You go and visit. It's like this like kind of crazy guy. But now it's like this monument that just lives there forever. And that's amazing. Instead of just like, oh cool, you have like six different glass boxes that look identical in every major city. Like, who cares? Like stop spending your money that way. Go build a castle and then turn it into an art Museum in 50 years when you're, when you, when your descendants are fighting over the estate and can't sort it out so it just turns over to the public or something. But anyway, Luke is great and he just open sources his ideas, I guess and just gives out these great ideas for free. He says he wants to start or it proposes a, a space based pizza delivery in 100 seconds that uses re entry heat to cook the pizza. It's kind of like amazing. It's like, it's like what happens, what happens after Varda, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Once there's stuff going, you can make pizza in space.

Yeah. I mean it, I mean Domino's should act, you know, one of the best performing stocks of all time should be calling him up and like giving him like a eight figure contract.

Yeah.

This out.

It's like Rod's God. Now they'll be like, like, you know, garlic bread from God.

Yeah, no, I, I, I'm excited for the future. I, yeah, it is interesting to think about like even, you know, somebody doing like drone pizza drone delivery. Right. Because like doing all your packages like kind of doesn't make sense. But like if you could get a pizza.

Yeah.

Like within like two minutes, like that would be so cool.

Yeah.

So who's doing like, like you know, drone delivery for food? Because like if you think about it, it's like the issue with drones is like they can't carry like that much weight. So like ordering your like from whole foods grocery run doesn't make sense. But like getting like Domino's like absolutely makes sense.

Yeah.

And it makes a lot more sense than these sort of like surface based like autonomous like delivery devices. So.

Should we stay on drones with Jason H. Liu says can we Talk.

About we've gone an order of magnitude more tweets.

Oh yeah, it's gonna be a five hour show, so buckle up, get in here. You were like, when I look in our chat where we post these tweets, like Jordy was posting them at like 3am and then again at like 7am so it's the strongest evidence that money doesn't sleep.

Exactly.

You scroll in the timeline and yeah.

I'd feel bad because I'm like, John's out there like having like a good time and I'm just like blowing up his phone. It's like four tweets, three minutes.

This is more important than any other work.

Yeah.

So there was a scoop. The biggest US drone maker, Skydio, which supplies Ukraine, faces a supply crisis after China bans the company from selling batteries to the group. And Jason says, one, if you're in a us, if you're in, if you're a US based drone manufacturer, you really should not be using Chinese made batteries. Not only in principle, but also China can ban you from buying. 2. 2. Jesus. Skydio has been using Chinese made batteries. I mean this is true in like so many hard tech companies where it's just like there's no other option like for a long time, like small drone motors. I look, I did like a survey because I was, I was thinking that somebody should, I don't know if it'd be a good like venture company, but somebody should start like the American Drone motor company and just focus on motor manufacturing. There's one, there's one company that makes these small like brushless motors that go on the corners of the DJI drones basically in the US and, and they outsourced to China after a while because it was like some family owned thing. They needed better margins. Is very rational. At the time they didn't think it was a big deal. And now they do make some motors, but only like larger motors in the US And I was like, it's almost like it would be like a charity project. There needs to be some government incentive or something. Like it's very hard or just like a big meme and then all the VCs can just pile into it and then we get, we get like this dividend of this company that might not be like a Power Law winner because it's just manufacturing one part.

I figured it out.

What is it? Tell me.

I'm not going to say it on the podcast.

Okay, okay, we'll figure it out.

Incubation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but yeah, I mean it's Tough a lot. I like retooling supply chains takes decades.

Yeah.

And because it's not just, it's like you say like Chinese made batteries, but it's like, well, what are the ingredients to those batteries? Where do those come from? Who does the packaging? What about the machines that package the batteries?

Like this is so critical in defense tech specifically because it's the first thing that somebody's going to turn off.

Yeah. You know, and, and the average tech person like only understands the supply chain like maybe in chips in the sense that they know that like, you know, OpenAI is partnered with Microsoft, who is a hyperscaler who builds a data center that buys Nvidia chips. And Nvidia is built at tsmc and TSMC uses asml and ASML uses Trump mirrors and lasers from Philips and stuff. And so people understand a little bit of that just from like the chip war book and a few other books that have been out there and like Asynometry and Dylan Patel and whatnot. But beyond that, like that, that same like complexity of like, oh, there's like seven different companies in the supply chain that are critical. Like that applies to more than just chips. It applies to everything. Chips are just like the hot thing right now. But it's important for motors, it's important for batteries, it's important for so many other pieces of the supply chain. So it's going to be a lot of upheaval for these companies. Companies. A lot of them.

Yeah. The, the even I've tweeted about DJI before, but that, that Americans buying.

Yeah.

A spy network for China is like the most insane thing.

Well, I, I, I interviewed a guy at Hereticon who is buying a ton of DJI stuff because he's figured out how to run open source software on it because he says that the Chinese code will call home and talk home. We actually proved this in, in Sunnyvale back in 2012. We were in this hacker house and we downloaded from the Internet Red Star Linux, which is the Linux fork that North Korea uses. And we put it on a computer, we installed it on a computer on a private network so we could monitor the traffic. And as soon as you fire it up, it starts calling home. And it's just like all the keys are logged. So if you install this anywhere, not even in North Korea, it's all going back to home. And obviously dji, same thing, but, but the hardware is the hardware. And so he's like, I don't want to say exactly what he's buying, but he's like, he's very bullish on, like, some of their products that are. That are very high quality. As long as you.

Yeah, the hardware is fantastic and it was probably heavily subsidized because it is a spyware.

Yeah. Should we move on to. Brandon says AI is going to take our jobs. I'd like to see AI take my job. It's three Monster Energy White, Ultra Zero Sugar, Dumbbells, steak, and just a Creed album.

The only thing it's missing is Excel nicotine pouches.

Yeah. Yeah, it's. It's like, what. How is he describing his job? Just. Just eating steak, lifting weights, drinking energy drinks and listening to Creed. Like.

Yeah, I think this is like more of like, it's more. It's more of like you. You need to look at the deeper meaning of the tweet, which is that, like, your job is to create and maintain this vessel that allows you to carry out God's will. Right. It's more about building the vessel that builds the thing. So I think that probably went over people's heads, but I think more. That's all the more reason to cover it.

Somebody needs to build the monster energy for LLMs. Something like, you know how you can adjust the temperature on LLMs to like, make them a little bit more creative or not? Like, yeah, when are they going to create the stimulants for these ML? Like, can you get them drunk? And then can they.

That is like, that's an awesome product for somebody to build, which is just like. It's a layer. It's a thin layer of LLMs, but you can just like make it drunk.

Yeah, exactly.

Give it a monster.

Yeah, exactly.

Give it a Percocet, give it some Fentanyl, you know, like, like that.

You can kind of do that where in the prompt you can just say like, you are. You are drunk. Like you are a McKinsey consultant.

Bad cocaine.

Yeah. Give me your best ideas. Yeah, let's go. Should we move on to liquidity? He says Harvard Business School graduates after starting a search fund and acquiring a Kentucky based trash management company, doing 2 million of last 12 months EBITDA. And it's Vivek Ramaswamy, I think, getting out of a trash truck or something like that as a, as a, as a politics stunt. But what is he saying here? And what is the trend of Harvard Business School graduates starting search funds and acquiring, like real businesses? This is like a big name right now, right?

So all of this basically started because of Twitter, which people were like, hey, instead of going and working A soul sucking job at God, Goldman Sachs. You can buy a business that does $3 million of EBITDA.

Yep.

You can lever it up, use some debt to acquire it and then you could be, you know, make your investors whole within the first few years and then from that point on like, you know, you could work 20 hours a week and be making a few million dollars a year and like living the dream. Right.

And you're kind of like an owner operator.

Yeah, you're an owner operator.

And it's the entrepreneurial dream without needing to go, go from zero to one in a very competitive area, all that.

And so there were some big, there were some big successes and people that had figured this out like decades ago or a decade plus ago where they were creating these things called search funds, which is like you fund, you create. It's like an SPV almost to buy a company that you haven't identified yet.

So it's basically like investors come to you and they say, Jordy, I trust that you'll be able to find something good and manage it well. So yeah, when you find the company, I'm in for a million dollars.

Yeah. And I think sometimes there's like some.

Some, some upfront as a management fee.

Yeah.

Where, yeah, I'll give you something.

Because it's better to spend two years and buy the Right.

Flying around and meeting people. There's gonna be some operational expense for their salary up front, but most of it is going to come in the purchase.

Right. And the challenge here is that people when they are looking at a business, they're like, okay, I found this trash company does two and a half million dollars a year of earnings. Like it's been operating this place for 20 years. It has these contracts. It's basically a localized monopoly. Like it's awesome. Oh and by the way, they don't use computers. Right. Like they, they, you know, look at all the like software that we could add and all this stuff and it's paper. The reason that, that's the reason that, that like there are great opportunities there. Yeah. They're still using a fax machine, right?

Yeah.

And so that's like what people get fixated on.

DocuSign.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll be cheaper and we'll have five account reps. Yeah. We'll have a great customer experience. No, but in the trap is that they think that oh, it's our, it's just a fundamentally a great business and we're going to layer in technology and make an even better business. And the, the tough truth Is that a company is basically as good as its management. And if that person had been, let's look at the trash company in a small local market that's doing a few million dollars a year in ebitda. That person running the company, yes, he may have used a really old generation iPhone and not checked his email that often and used a fax machine or whatever. But if he was effectively the mayor of the town and everyone loves him and he can call anyone up at any point and get anything done, he's this guy, he's got his guys in town and he's got a relationship with the person that decides, like, which contract. Like, it's like, basically, you know, if you come in and you're this like, search fund MBA bro who comes in and you're like, yeah, I'm just gonna buy this company and, like, digitize it. And you realize, like, the employees are, like, difficult to find and retain and they hate you. Like, the contracts are, like, much more oriented around, you know, much more oriented around, like, relationships. And you're getting in there and you're realizing, like, whoa, like, this company doesn't need to be digitized. Like, it needs somebody who's spent their entire life running a trash company in the small town. And the owner sitting there being like, wow, this company was unbelievably time intensive. They just gave me $10 million and now I'm like, one of the wealthiest people in my town. Oh, and by the way, I get to buy back the business. Business and for nothing in, like, three years when you, like, run it into the ground. And I'm gonna hire back all the old employees. I'm gonna get all my old contracts back.

So, like, cancel a DocuSign contract. Add.

Add another.

Buy a new fax machine for 50 bucks.

So I think a lot of, like, people talk about these search funds and they're like, oh, be careful. You're just gonna buy a job. If you buy. If you buy a company with less than half a million of earnings, you're like, buying a job.

A job.

Yeah, but like, in the. The real risk is like, you. You lever this thing up and you realize that it was a great business because that founder was a great person. They just didn't look like, you know.

They didn't fit the normal mode of like, oh, they're like a Stanford dropout hacker and they know programming, so they're so good. So they can install DocuSign.

That's great.

Yeah. Interesting. I wonder how it'll shake out. Maybe the Harvard Business School Graduates will move on to something else. It is interesting how there's like, you know, these eras of trendy, you know, career paths that come out of hbs. Like you know, it was banking then it was like YC for a while. Now it's like the search fund. I wonder what the next thing's going to be.

Search funds are just financial innovation which is very American and there's always going to be a next one. Maybe the next search fund is just pumped up.

I was talking to Sebastian Malabi about this. Do you know him? He wrote the Power Law and he wrote More Money than God about hedge funds. Kind of historian and I was asking him like, what do you think the next like big like, you know, VC tech bubble will be? And he was very bullish on biotech. He wants to like write and write the next book on like the flagship pioneering model, the company that like incubated Moderna and all those companies and like as that becomes like more like productized.

Biotech's American.

Yeah. And just biotech becoming like right now it's in this weird like it's, it's a very financialized but not in like the VC realm where you take a company public really early. There's all this like tech transfer between the, between the universities. It's like very complex. But if it becomes a little bit more easy like oh, you're just like installing some LLM and there's an AWS for lab Pumped up fund for biotech. Exactly. That's the thing. Well, stay tuned because I think next week we're going to do a deep dive on ozempic. Should be fun. Let's move on to this. Spain says every name is like completely ridiculous.

The nation of Spain.

Yeah. No S, P A N E, which is Sperry's and Nike. Something. I cannot believe BlackRock invited a bunch of influencers to their ETF launch party. Like it's like it's a Tequila brand. Truly incredible stuff. So there's a TikTok here that I imagine is someone pumping some ETFs.

Yeah. So why is, is, is BlackRock the creators of what's that big festival in the desert?

Burning Man.

Creators of Burning man. Why is BlackRock, you know, like innovating with like understanding media and like doing like Tequila style launch parties when our presidential candidates haven't figured out they should be vlogging yet?

Yeah.

Right. So like this is an example of the private markets at work.

Sure.

And understanding how to generate and capture and monetize attention. I'm the only thing I can say about the street is I'm pissed that we weren't invited.

Seriously. Blackrock, has anybody been.

Is anybody more publicly a fan of BlackRock and their various financial products and services than us? Yeah, I'll wait.

For sure. I wonder what the ETF is for exactly. I need to dig into it, but.

It doesn't matter what it is. As long as people can speculate.

They need to ETF more things like. Like the Bitcoin ETF was a big moment. The Ethereum ETF as well, need more ETFs. I mean, they're essentially like shitcoins in the public markets that you can just trade. It's great. Back to American exceptionalism. Since I'm in Europe right now, I figure it's time for another reminder. Says Jason based man, if we all just consumed less. And then Batman slaps him and says, fucking build something. 10k likes people. This resonates with people.

I think I. I put this in because at Hereticon, the gut, the thing that triggered the most people was the. The deceleration.

Yes.

He was saying, like, we need to like, stop building and put a bunch of stuff in the atmosphere to.

Sure.

You know.

Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, well, he's kind of building something too.

It's awesome that this is now the dominant thought on. On X. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there, I'm sure will be some negative externalities to that, but. But overall, yeah.

Europe struggling with the innovation. Not much.

Yeah. The. The craziest one who we could overlay. This is like out of Europe's like, top 100 firms. Like all of them, or 95% of them were created over 100 years ago.

Yeah, it's all like the legacy fashion brands, the. The car companies. Companies.

Yeah.

Really stylish. It's interesting that there's no, like, you know, dividend from that. Like, you don't hear about, like, oh, yeah, this guy who spent his time at lvmh, like, has spun out and started some like, new hot brand that like, grows and like, runs the same playbook in the same way that, like, you know, Instagram was like. Wasn't. Wasn't the founder like an intern at Twitter? And so it was clear that like, like, he, like, you know, cut his teeth in social media.

Well, that's the thing with the next thing. I do think it happens in fashion, but the issue with fashion is you could be fashion such a weird market because you could have. There's like a brand here in LA called like Cherry, which is like seemingly really big, like they have partnership. They did a partnership at. @ F1 with like, red Bull. And like, they're like, they have a ton of attention, but, like, they're a small business.

It's really hard to break through in this.

And so a lot of these people go work at LVMH and leave, but then they build a business that does $50 million in revenue and you're never going to hear about it. And maybe in 100 years it'll be, like, iconic. Yeah, it's hard to become an iconic.

Brand, especially if you take venture capital. You got to. You got to own 100% of that business and make it your life's work.

Yeah.

Oh, well, let's do this.

We should do a deep dive on Laura Piano and Brunello. That'd be good.

Yeah, yeah, like that.

And we just.

I don't really know anything about the business.

Yeah, we should only cover the beef, though, like. And like the drama. Yeah, no politics, but drama drama.

Business drama is good. I like business drama. There's tons of that. So DD says, I gave AI control of my computer and asked it to solve homework. One of Stanford discrete math class math 61 DM. It found the problem set, downloaded latex, solved every question and compiled it into a PDF in 5 minutes. Minutes. Will any college student ever do homework again? Why'd you like this?

So I like this because it validated a bet that I'm planning to make in the edtech space around generative AI. And the core thesis of the bet is that Gen LLMs have completely disrupted all the primary learning modalities that we have, which are tests, essays, days and homework. Those are like the core things that you do in education as a middle school, high school, college student. And it's clear that they have massive potential for learning, like creating learning products and having a learning experience where we can go to Notebook LLM and say, like, generate me a conversation about the wealth of nations as though I read it 500 times. Like, get into the real meat of it, because I already know what it's all about out. But. But yeah, I just think it's, like, fascinating how a technology has so much potential and is simultaneously like, so disruptive. Where imagine a college student today is taking a test on some, like, esoteric book and they're like, okay, I'm. They like, hit a point where they're like, oh, I don't know what to say anymore. I don't know this point. Or. And they can go to the bathroom and be like, chat gbt. Like, how would you compare, like, this book to this book, and what would you take away from it? And it comes up with this, like, brilliant thought that the college student didn't have themselves, and they go back in the classroom and, like, finish the essay. So it's sort of just an extension of everything that happened with, like, people's fears around Google. It's like, well, if people can just Google the answer. Like, I remember being in, like, high school, my dad having my dad's math class and being like, trying to Google the answer to a math problem. And you remember there'd be like these like, like, forums and stuff like that.

And Google was very much for, like, knowledge, and LLMs are for solving intelligence.

Intelligence.

Knowledge and intelligence. Two very different directions. Right. But like, yeah, no one needs to, like, memorize facts anymore or even, you know.

Yeah, the database era, it was about, like, oh, you don't need to memorize facts now. It's like, you don't need to think.

Well, yeah, I mean, I was interviewing Tyler Cowan and talking to him about how AI has changed, like, his teaching because he's a professor, and he says that now. Yeah, to your point, like, all of the existing measurement tools are just completely pointless. So who gets the good grade in his class is the student that teaches him the most, which is a complete inversion of the normal professor student relationship. Normally it's the professor teaches everything and the student who learns the most gets the good grade. Now it's the opposite. The student needs to come in and teach the professor something novel and interesting and then they get a good grade, which I think is awesome. And I think that's actually like a bull case for wanting to go to George Mason and study under Tyler Cowan.

Totally, totally.

Very interesting. I think that, yeah, it might be, like, you know, overrated in the. In the short term and underrated in the long term to still go into a highly intellectual sparring zone. Even if. Even if a lot of the traditional measurement tools are irrelevant, just. Just being on the path of, like, having those intellectual conversations is still valuable, even if you're not. Even if you don't come away with, like, a test score. But I mean, HBS, Tyler being at.

Reticon Miami 2024, at the FAINA, at the pool with Tyler Cowan before our talk. Yeah, Drinking out of raw coconut will be a core memory.

Exactly.

Something that I'll. Yeah, the LLM of me will be telling my long descendants, you know, like, Jordy did that. He was there. He drank the coconut.

That's great. Let's. Let's Close on our final tweet out of the stack of 75 tweets. Trunk fan Prolific poster posts Breaking the new Call of Duty, Black Ops 6 has released its first integration with Excel and PowerPoint, an important first step to unlock synergies for Microsoft. $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Obviously, just like a hilarious shit post of, like, Excel, like, poorly screenshotted or photoshopped on top of some CoD gameplay, but very, very funny that you can. These are both like, highly addictive products. We talked about this how, like, the dudes take. I knew some baseball players in college at ucla. I didn't go there, but I knew them. They went there and they would take Adderall when the new Call of Duty came out because they wanted to be able to hit Prestige like, like, before everyone else. And so they would just stay up for three days straight when the game came out and like, max it. And now, like, you know, 10 years later, they're taking Adderall to, like, work in Excel and they're still using Microsoft software the whole time. It's all Microsoft all the way through. It's all Microsoft.

Yeah.

Have you heard an ad on Rogan or something for them?

I think, I think it's. Yeah, it's an argument that Microsoft is like a 3,360 degree lifestyle brand. Almost.

360 degree?

Almost like, yeah, 360. No scope. No, it's like it's up there with them on for me because I can go, I can play Call of Duty. I can get on my ThinkPad. I can do Excel. I could be playing. I could be using Excel and playing Call of Duty on my thinkpad at the same time or even on two thinkpads at the same time. Right. But yeah, it was cool to see Activision Microsoft advertising Call of Duty on Joe Rogan. And it's one of those things like advertising a product to your exact user base. It's almost like sending like an email, like, blast. Because, like, every single person on Joe Rogan plays Call of Duty actively. But yeah, I think this goes back to like, talking about Roblox the other week and like, being like, if you're Activision, like, looking at Roblox, of that many users not making money, like, I've never heard a Roblox ad. Would they be making more money if they were advertising? To me, like, it's possible. I've got money to spend on Roblox if you just talk to me about the right games, though.

I want to play the new Call of Duty so badly. But I have no time. It's just not gonna happen.

I know.

I know that this is one I'm just gonna miss.

It's awesome that I still want to play it, even though I don't.

I want to play it so badly, but. Oh, well. Moving on, let's do listener Q and A. This is a new segment for the podcast. We have our first call in or email from a friend of the show. So Stephen writes in. I'm not gonna say his last name. Hi, John and Jordy. I recently had a nine figure liquidity event and I'm in the market for a new car and I'm wondering what you would advise me to buy between the McLaren W1, the Ferrari F80 and the Porsche Mission X. So this is kind of like the new Holy Trinity. Are you familiar with the original Holy Trinity? So, like back in like the 2010s, there was the LaFerrari, the McLaren P1, and the Porsche 918 Spider and the three supercars. You know, the 918 was $850,000 at launch. The LaFerrari was 1.4 million. The P1 was over a million. They all had 900 horsepower. Some controversial features. You know, nine hundred and eighteen was hybrid and so. But owning three of those cars, like, it was a really interesting collection because usually people just collect like in one brand, but people started collecting across them and kind of all three of those brands. Like it was like a rising tide situation. But we're on the cusp of a new one because McLaren, I think like a month ago announced the W1, but they've announced like a bunch of other special cars in between. So like the Senna and some other ones. And then Ferrari launched the F80 and they're back on like the numbered track. It was like F40, F50, Enzo LaFerrari, which would have been the 60 and 70 70th anniversary, and now they're back on the F80. It's a four million dollar car.

Yep.

V6 hybrid.

Yeah.

Controversial, but beautiful. And then there's the Porsche Mission X, which is all electric Y, which is also super controversial because I think, I think, think orders have been a little bit weak because a lot of the Porsche fans, they like the, like the Carrera gt. They like a really manual, really like engaging, naturally aspirated V10 or something like that. But what would you go with between the three if you'd had to just pick one?

Well, to answer Stephen's question, you know, nine figure exit. He the real, the real, the right answer. Is buy two of each car, put, put three total in storage.

Yeah. Keep them in the plastic, keep them.

Wrapped, drive the other ones daily them, put 30, 40,000 miles on them, however much you drive. But yeah, it's hard to answer that question without more context. I think that if he's looking at it as the guy clearly likes making money. If he wanted to buy a car, drive it, and basically get paid for owning it, you have to look in the last generation. LaFerrari is an incredible buy in that 3 to 5 million dollar range. I think that the F80 coming out only makes the la Ferrari more valuable.

Yep.

I think that there's a lot of issues with the Ferrari brand right now. Like if you, you know, they're making some very questionable decisions, which I feel like I can comment on as a, as a, you know, I recently sold my Ferrari, but as a, you know, enthusiast and consumer of the brand. But the interesting decision right now is they made their family SUV purosangue pure blood. And then they made the V80 the family car as a naturally aspirated V12, similar engine to mine. And then the F80 sounds like you're. When it's on track, running hard. Yeah, sounds like my Roomba. Yeah, like it sounds like a Roomba going on in the other room. And so it's just like, I don't know, I don't know if it's European regulatory bodies because these manufacturers are over there, like putting this intense pressure on to be like, nerf your cars, Nerf your cars. Like, make them quieter, make them, you know, and they're gonna argue like, oh, it actually has more power. And so with la Ferrari, or, sorry, the F80, it is an award winning, you know, system, right. They, they went and they won le Mans with it. And like, that's awesome. But I just think that you're. They're clearly going. All the big Ferrari launches that I've seen Recently, like the 12 cylindri got a ton of hate.

I thought that was a beautiful car.

Really?

I think it's beautiful. I don't like the front engine, but I just think the design language is fantastic. And they took a lot of that design language over into the F80. I think it's a little controversial, but I think over time people are going to warm up on it and it'll be beautiful.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, the black front end is so weird, but it's interesting and I think it'll. I think it'll work.

Yeah. I think a lot of these cars too, when they announce Them, they're specked in like a very distinct way and if you spec them differently, they'll just look dramatically different. Like, I didn't like the 12 cylinder. Like the way like the color block walking was. Yeah, if you did it in like.

A black, you could do it all black. Yeah, I think they won't sell you that actually. Like. Or there's something like they won't, they won't sell it without the two tone. Like they want the two tone. They want to enforce that in their, in their design language, interestingly. But my. I mean, so Jordy's pick is get six, get two of each. I think mine would be wild card. Go for Ignore the Holy Trinity and get the AMG1. Oh, yeah, because the AMG1, look, it's a, it's a. A what? Turbo hybrid V6 or whatever. But it's an F1 derived V6. So it's actually a smaller engine. It's 1.6 liter, but at least you can say, you know, it's an F1 car for the road and it's not.

Probably the most collectible. It could easily be the most collectible out of the.

I think so. I mean, they don't do that many supercars, whereas McLaren, every few years they're coming out with a speed tail. That was a really special one. But then it's like the Senna is also really special and the Porsche one.

Is going to gonna. If it follows the Taycan Turbo S path, it will be worth half the price in literally.

I mean, that's the real flex, even.

If you don't drive it.

Yeah. If you can just buy a new Taycan every year, take 80k in depreciation, everyone will know that part of.

That's part of Porsche's like effectively like scam operation is that they. They're like, oh, you want to buy the GT3RS? Like buy three Taycans.

Yeah, exactly.

So. So yeah, it's like you can pay $100 over MSRP or you can buy three Taycans.

I just love the AMG one because it's this. I mean, it's destroying Nurburgring records. Like. Yeah, I don't think any of the. These new Holy Trinity will come close. Yeah, I think the Mission X will wind up being too, too heavy.

I would respect Ferrari a lot more if it was actually like the fastest car.

If it sets some sort of record. They need to do something. There was a. There's a new car. The isn't the new C8 Corvette, the, the ZR1 setting like a speed record. They went like 230 something with it. Or it's the fastest American made car. And, and the sick thing is in the video of them doing the speed test, the guy driving it is like the CEO of the company or like the.

Oh, no, I think you're talking about the Ford. Are you talking about the new Ford? Ford, like gt?

No, no, no, no. This is the. This is the. This is the Corvette ZR1.

I think we're gonna see an American car renaissance. I hope so, because it seems like the American CEOs are locked in driving their actual cars. Yep.

Well, kind of. The Ford CEO was caught driving like a Chinese car. Do you see this? And he's like, this is the most amazing thing.

Oh, maybe I saw the like PR response to that of like him getting out of the new Ford Mustang GT car. That. That looks like it's going to be pretty cool.

All these guys just need to start tweeting and going direct.

I'm concerned.

Yeah. The beauty of the AMG one is that like you can just tell people, yeah, I just drive a Mercedes. And they'll be like, oh, you probably have like a mattress or G wagon.

Yeah.

And little do they know, you're driving like limited production multi million dollar car.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got a daily it, obviously.

Yeah.

With the. It has active drs, so you can like change.

That's the thing to respect most about Sam Altman is that dailies. Hyper car cars full sends hypercars.

That's the most important reason to get him equity in OpenAI. Because we're going to see a renaissance in San Francisco. The new car guy.

More hypercars.

More hypercars. Street parked.

Yeah. This is the way the techno elite.

Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time.