Low T Levels at Y Combinator, Founder Burnout, Taylor Lorenz

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Hi there. This is Ben, vice president at Technology Brothers, with a quick announcement. While filming today, we unfortunately had a small technical error that led to the first 19 minutes of this episode having poor audio quality. I speak on behalf of the organization, John, Jordy, and myself when I say that this will not happen again. We have already found the intern that was responsible and they will be terminated. Thank you for your understanding. And back to the show. I'm here with Jordy Hayes, and today we are talking about my Ramp card. I got a new Ramp card and my last one was plastic, but they sent me the metal one.

You know why they sent it?

Why?

Microplastic avoidance. Right. One of the biggest issues a lot of these fintechs is they're sending millions and millions and millions of plastic cards out of the ether. Right. And everyday technology workers are having to.

Yep.

Use them oftentimes. Multiple times. Certainly multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. And the amount of microplastic exposure from the average, you know, plastic credit card is really. We think it could be contributing to the testosterone epidemic.

I think so, too. Yeah, everyone always thought that, oh, you get a black card from Amex. It's metal. It's titanium. It's so cool. Like, it's a flex. It's never about flex.

Not a status.

It wasn't about flexing. It was about avoiding plastic.

Exactly. Comes down to health. Health is the ultimate status symbol. It is, you know, so if your body's highly estrogenetic and from all the, you know, plastic cars that you're handling, you know, that's easy thing to cut out and thank you to Ramp.

I mean, I was thinking that most of my credit cards have actually moved over to metal now, and. But my ID has it. And why is the government poisoned me.

It's a big issue.

But, you know, back on the topic of ramp and the government, we need to take a little victory lap because what was it last week you made, you know, kind of, you know, threw something out there. Maybe it was a little bit of a joke, maybe it was half serious, but we got some real traction on your idea. So break down the original thought of RAMP for the government and then tell me kind of what the downstream effects have been.

Yeah, look, government spends more money. The US Federal government spends more money than anybody in the world. Right.

That's true.

And more revenue than I think any other organization in the world. Yeah, I'm sure some. Somebody will point out that I'm incorrect on that.

But look at those trillions.

But look, anytime you have a lot of spend, you're going to have a lot of waste and spend. Right now it seems very obvious that the US government doesn't have a good handle on their, on their spending just in general. And there's a lot of ways to fix that. You can get new leadership in that wants to sort of like drill down budget by budget and kind of start to understand how money's being spent. But another way to kind of attack that problem is through software. So attack enabled financial services. We went through an era where amex and a lot of the big corporate card players just wanted you to spend as much money as humanly possible. The more money you spend, the more money they make. Ramp, you know, came out, I think only around four or five years ago. @ this point I decided, hey, we're going to flip this on its head. How do we help companies save money? If our companies can save money, they'll become better businesses and through that they'll become better customers. So aligning that sort of incentive structure with the company has proved to be very fruitful. And I think, I think there's a strong case to be made that the federal government needs to get on ramp. Not just at the federal level, needs to be mandated. State level, county level, city level, you know, all the way down to your kids club soccer team should be on ramp. But we can start and really set an example at the federal government level. And you know, the campaign has kind of exposed some of the issues with how politicians like the speaker spend money.

Right.

It became apparent over the weekend that the Kamala campaign had been using Ramp. But.

And you would expect them to win if they were on Ramp?

Yeah, you would expect them to win. But here's the issue. So they blew through about a billion dollars in a few months. Almost unprecedented. I think like half a million of that went to payroll. Yeah, but the big issue, they were on Ramp, but they were also using a variety of other services, repayment mistake numbers. And so because that spend wasn't consolidated, how could they really get a grasp on their spending? They're not able to fully unlock the potential of Ramp's, you know, ramp's platform. If they're just letting.

Yeah, I mean, what's crazy is like when, when you sign up for Ramp, like you get this sdr, something to help onboard you. And one of the things that they're working towards when they're telling you about the features is like getting you to migrate 100% of your spend. And, and if you think about it like that ramp sdr, like, could have changed history if he had.

Totally.

He or she.

A lot of people like to credit David Sacks and all in with, you know, Trump's victory, but I think there's a good argument to say that.

Yeah. Well, I was thinking about how, like, this year, the whole narrative is like, oh, it's the podcast election. And I think in 2028, like, we could seriously see, like, it's the corporate card election, where one campaign comes out and says, hey, we're running on ramp. And then the other, you know, when compliments on stage. Well, I have a gun. Right.

Yeah.

And so you could hear, oh, the other candidate, they're on ramp, too. So then we get into the weeds and we start talking about, well, who's using travel, who's using bill pay? And then, oh, someone was lying about it. And that's a.

Nationally leveraging the AI functionality.

Exactly, exactly. Like, oh, what's your close? Which campaign is closing faster?

Yeah.

Then this is what the voters care about.

Yeah.

Like the podcast. And it's a proxy for just efficiency. Exactly. Efficiency. And so, yeah, I think everyone should pay attention. The podcast story, the whole podcast election, you can kind of ignore that for now. That's done. The next thing, we're going into the corporate card election. Anyway, let's move into our top story of the week. The Information featured. My talk.

Incredible publication didn't.

Yeah. Incredible copy. I love them.

Yeah.

No one. No one loves the information.

People literally realize that we're witnessing the birth of the TMZ for technology.

Yeah.

That's like a special moment in time.

Yeah. There's a broader narrative about, like, new media, but people haven't really done the job of understanding, mapping the new media to what they're replacing.

Yeah.

And in this case, like, I mean, yeah, it's clearly kind of the next generation tmz, which is fantastic. It was missing. Can't look away from. Yeah. So in the. They did some election recapping and recapped a whole bunch of events related to politics, which we don't really talk about here, but because they. They didn't mention me by name, but they mentioned the name of my talk. So I'll read.

I mean, one of the most. Because there's. You've kind of grown a reputation of being a male podcast expert.

Yes.

Not just because you're one of the hosts of Technology Brothers, but you kind of have a firm grip on the industry.

Yes. Well, actually, the first time. The first time the Information interviewed me was, do you know, Abe Brown, he writes the weekend thing. I put out a tweet which would have made it into the stock if it was posted today because it's a banger. It was, you know, we, you know, we don't need any more Midas lists. We need an Icarus list. Four VCs that flew too close to the sun. Some of my best work. And, and it really resonated. Like Alex Conrad, who makes the Midas list was like, this is actually a good idea. And then, and then we, we started like talking about it and so I talked to Abe a bunch and I was like, dude, like if, if, if someone, I mean a, if, if a if a if like Forbes said like, hey, we're doing the Icarus list this year of like the worst VCs. Like you would have an army of like 500 Stanford new grad analysts working day and night just to keep the firm off of that list. Yeah, like people, people try to get on the Midas list.

It would be.

Some people don't really care about it, but most people fight to get on.

In a crisis VR industry, it would be the biggest event.

It would be the largest wealth transfer industry from, from, from GPS to, to crisis PR firms.

Yeah, I don't think that's past their expense.

Yeah, no, but, but yeah. Love the information. No one loves the information more than I do. But they were recapping some of the, some of the political news and they said. Last week the most far out faction of tech's burgeoning right wing gathered in Miami beach for Hereticon Founders Fund's celebration of radical free thinking. Between talks like the Trad wife returns and the economics of doom, that one was mine. Thiel roamed the crowds accepting preemptive congratulations for the coming election, according to several people who attended. And I don't know about that last part, I feel like people were not.

Let's see the sources.

Yeah, I don't know.

It really wasn't about politics.

Yeah, it wasn't. And also there were like tons of like tons of left wings that it's like the whole point. And there were a lot of fights. And that's the part of like the debate club and like all that.

Yeah, the most heretical people at Hereticon are all the less left leaning attendees who are trying to jam their politics down the rest of this throat. And it was very triggering. Not because of their viewpoint, but because it was not meant to be a place to sort of destroy, discuss politics about policy. Right about the economy. It was about how do we kind of increase global prosperity through non traditional.

I do. I, I do love that. Like my talk, the Economics of Doom, which was great. I interviewed Tyler Cowen. I love him. It was a lot of fun. But we are two of the more normie people there, I think in the sense that like we're talking about economics. He wasn't particularly doom pilled.

He's a professor, male podcast expert.

I'm a businessman first and foremost. So, you know, I'm not one of these like crazy biohackers who's growing, you know. Exactly. I'm not doing any of the crazy stuff that, that I did see there, but I love that I made it. And I don't have no idea why they chose this one. I think it's mostly because when pirate. The Pirate Wires team did the write up, they talked about like six different.

Like our talks was to the one we did on peds in the Valley was too heretical. Just couldn't really be published anywhere.

Yeah. I got to figure out how to get them to issue a correction. Say it was the Economics of Doom hosted by John Coogan, the host of Technology Brothers, and then link to us.

Yeah.

Did I tell you I did that? I changed the SEO? Once somebody wrote an article about me being like a toxic male podcaster, something like that. It was like some sort of hit piece and they. And when they linked to me, they linked to John Coogan.com about just to be like, this is his like about page, Right?

Yeah.

And I wanted the SEO to go to Lucy so he sell more product. So I rerouted the link and so now we have an extra back.

You would think that journalists would be on onto that. Like don't route to a domain that, that they control.

Exactly. So a little tip out there for the, for the listeners.

I don't think we have a lot of journalists that listen.

No, but, yeah, but get. I mean, I do have, I do have a thesis that the. A lie can get halfway across the world before the truth can put its shoes on. Have you heard this phrase? Or if it bleeds, it leads. Yeah. And I think that if you're a startup and you want attention, you want press, you should be courting hit pieces.

Yeah.

And I think that there's actually an opportunity like better than dry. It's true. Yeah. I mean, come back to it. Yeah, you're right.

Used it to his advantage.

Yeah. No, it tells like this heroic journey. Lulu's obviously the, the master of getting good press, but maybe we need a Lulu for getting. But I need to press. Yeah, just go and make me, like, hated by 90% of America and I will monetize the 10% that loves me for countercultural reasons. Yeah, I think that's interesting. So to that effect, I had a great call yesterday with none other than Taylor Lorenz.

No way.

Yeah. And she's writing a piece for the information. She's writing news.

She's writing for the information.

She's writing for the information. We're so back.

We're at a time where there's, there's this massive power struggle between the information newcomer Bloomberg Forbes for top technology talent. So it's an amazing cosign for the information that they're able to pick up.

Lorenz at this moment in time. She's also been on TMZ a bunch, so think about that crossing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's amazing.

That's. I mean, if you needed more proof that the information is the TMZ attack technology. That's it.

That's it. Yeah. So I, I don't think she's. She's not working there full time, but she's writing a piece about the, the bro podcast sphere. The male podcast sphere, which is why she called me to testify as a male podcast expert.

Yeah.

And I wasn't sure if she was calling me because I'm a male who is a podcast expert or if I'm a male podcast expert, but either way, I was totally prepared to comment on the record. And we had a wonderful conversation.

And she's really great to talk to.

She is.

She's got great, you know.

Yeah.

She's got ideas. She's.

And yeah. I mean, like the critique of the, of the tech elite that I completely agree with from the Kara Swishers and the Taylor Runs is that too many tech billionaires are humorless and they can't take a joke and they get their feathers too ruffled when people come for them.

Yeah.

And, and you got to know that we are in the WWE era of tech. And, and there's going to be some faces and there's going to be some heels, but you can't shut the game down. You can't have a villainess, conflictless society.

Full circle moment. For me, because the first time I ever spoke to the New York Times was through Taylor Lorenzo. Really give my point of view on the Call Her Daddy podcast.

That's right. Wait, so we both talked to her about podcasts?

Yeah.

Yeah. That's amazing.

We are top source.

Well, I'm the male podcast expert. I guess you happen to be A female podcast expert. Yeah. Yeah, it's good.

No, I thought you wrote a great, great p. This was back in 2020. It was like, I remember exactly where I was walking to Erewhon from my apartment in Venice and everything. The whole world was shut down. It was just me and Taylor talking about podcasts, which was really an awesome moment.

Yeah, a little Chekhov's got a little for foretelling of the future. Totally fantastic. But she wanted to talk about the BRO podcast boom.

And it really is a boom.

There is. And so there were some. There were some. There were some, like, things that I disagreed with. One is that just like, you know, if. If the, if the Democrats had run, like a stronger candidate and that stronger candidate had done, I. I tend to think that the, like, right now there's this narrative of, like, there's this very consolidated, cohesive, massive right wing list of podcasts that lean. Right. So it's like you start with Rogan, then you go to Lex.

I would say the big ones, to be clear, are very much center.

Right. Oh, for sure.

I don't want.

Barely right. Barely right.

Joe Rogan.

And there's tons of clips of Rogan. Yeah. Lifetime Democrat, talking about, oh, he loves Bernie, all these other things. It's just like in this election, they had like the, the. The goalposts moved to the point where, like, a lot of the big podcasts leaned, right? And so you have Rogan, Lex, Chris Williamson, Jesse Michaels with the alien stuff. You have Huberman, some of those hosted Trump, you have Tim Dillon, Theo Vaughn, the Comedians Kill, Tony Busin with the Boys, Aiden Ross. There's like this huge community. And what's interesting is that, like, if you actually saddle those people down, they probably have a pretty wide spectrum of politics, but they all kind of just align with, like, general conservatism this time around. And Trump was like the candidate of that. Whereas on the left, I think you actually have just as much reach, but it's more fragmented. So you have Pod Save America. Kamala didn't do. You have Smartless with Jason Bateman. And that's a. That's a pretty, like, center left podcast, I would call it. Kamala Didn't Do It. It's more of a comedy show. But that's fine. Like, it doesn't need to be a politics show. You have the Daily. You have the Ezra Klein Show. I was just looking at the top podcast, and it's not like, yeah, Tucker's up there, Rogan's up there, but so is the New York Times. And Ezra Klein.

Well, you have a thesis that's clearly turning into a law of Coogan's many laws, which is that the candidate that just simply records more podcast hours, right?

Yeah, I read the numbers and it's like 35 million views just on the Rogan episode. So average view duration on that three hour episode was about 45 minutes. I talked to some people that know podcast durations, and so you multiply that out and it's just billions of minutes or something. It's something like hundreds of millions of minutes. And the value of that is easily $600 million. That was the made up for the funding gap. And so it's like if you're a politician, you can either spend $100,000 on an ad that reaches a million people, or you can go do a podcast that reaches a million people, and instead of getting a 30 second ad, you're getting 45, 45 minutes. It's a 45 minute ad and people just are upset.

Yeah. This is why from, for all the businessmen out there, if you get an opportunity to go on a podcast, even if it legitimately only has 100 engaged listeners, it's worth doing because that's an hour of time that you get to spend talking to people that are going to, to totally digest, like, what you're doing, why it's important, why they should be into your product or service, whatever it is. And I give the example when I'm talking to founders that ask me, hey, should I go on the show? It's not big, but what do you think I said 20 years ago, when a businessman had an opportunity to fly to St. Louis to get in front of 50 potential customers in a room, they would spend their entire day to go and do that. That it's worth you getting on a podcast for an hour from Zoom and just having a conversation. We have only 100 people listening to it.

Did you, did you send email? We got our first request to go on as we got. We got our first request. Yeah, we got our first request to go on a podcast as the Technology Brothers. I think we should do it. The guy has like six episodes. So do we on the Come up together. Let's give it a try. So, yeah, so, so, like we kind of debated on that. I think on the, on the center left you have those like, you have the center left shows, but then you also have the far left shows like Chapo, the Adam Friedland show, Red Scare, formerly Destiny. And it's like you could see a Democrat candidate like Bernie would go on this stuff. He, he can get in the ring with like the Chapo guys and hold his own, but he can also hold his own with Ezra Klein. And so, I mean, long story short, I think the future of the Democratic Party is more candidates like Bernie, more candidates like aoc, more candidates like Pete Buttigieg, less candidates that are just straight up media trained to stay on topic, blah, blah, blah, blah, but authenticity wins. But the interesting thing was that Taylor was really asking this one question again and again, which is like, why do podcasts lean right wing? And I was kind of rejecting the premise for a while, but then I was like, okay, let's, let's steel man this a little bit and let me work through what could a possibility thing. So first thing I tried to explain to her, there's this concept called mansplaining. And I told her that that's when a man describes something to a woman, usually condescendingly. And she was very happy to hear that. But then I moved on to kind of a more rigorous analysis, which is that there was a, there was a. So. So, so on YouTube, like YouTube kind of leans left because YouTube's algorithmically driven less than RSS and so. So on YouTube, the like, there was a lot of right wing de platforming that happened or deprioritization in like the 2016-2020 era. And then in 2020 there was a lot of, there were a lot of right wing people or just center right that got their stuff deprioritized because they were talking about COVID and they'd get the COVID flag and then they'd get deprioritized in the algorithm shadow banned. And then there were a couple high profile right wingers who were straight up DE platformed from YouTube. Right. And so on YouTube you have this like, you have this subtle pressure from YouTube. They were never like straight up like banning everything, but there was obviously like a big move to rumble, move to other platforms. A lot of like, maybe I'm not safe here. If I talk about certain things, I won't get as much reach. But on rss, in the Apple podcasts app, it's way, way harder. Like the bar is much higher. Even if Apple and you got to.

Do something really extremist.

Exactly. Even if Apple and Google have the same politics and they both think that, oh, like Jordan Peterson shouldn't be on here or whatever in on Google they can just, on YouTube, Google can just say, hey, he said this thing, let's just not promote him in the algorithm. Whereas for Apple it's like Alex Jones, we have to actively take him out of the store. This is a much firmer line. It's not this like, you know, steering thing. And so I think that, I think that a lot of the, the conservatives kind of kept growing very fast on rss, whereas they were, they weren't able to grow as fast on YouTube. And so that's kind of the balancing thing.

And I think podcasts in general are much more impactful on opinion. We've talked about this. Oftentimes real sort of content and ideas kind of start in these sort of. Maybe they go from a tweet to a long form podcast and then they get cut down again into like a 20 minute YouTube video into a 60 second TikTok, you know, video. So I think one of the things, Taylor is obviously one of the top technology journalists in the world, otherwise she wouldn't be writing for the information. And one of the things about this election cycle, and maybe the premise of her article might be a little bit off, is that it became obvious this election cycle that the Republican Party was more oriented around technology. Right. And big part of that is because some of the biggest donors to the Republican Party are technologists, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk. And so I think that a lot of tech ended up aligning with that side because it was the party that was pro technology. Right? It was, how do we get Elon permits faster so that he can launch more rockets? How do we maintain our edge around, you know, defense in the United States? Right. How do we, you know, support our, our sort of emerging defense industrial base? So the alignment and the sort of maybe shift right in the mail podcast sphere, I think wasn't even political as much as it was business orientation. Right. Because it was almost a survival mechanism.

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. She was also drilling down on like, why is Joe Rogan popular? Or why are these like manosphere podcasts popular? And I, again, I didn't have.

That's like asking like, why is, you know, Theo in the group chat popular? Like, we like him. You know, he's funny and he's got good takes. Right?

Yeah, I guess she was talking in like kind of a relative sense of like, why, why are the manosphere podcasts more popular than like female led podcasts? But I kind of rejected that premise because I think that there are plenty of female led, female hosted podcasts that are successful. And I was actually telling her, like, we could be having the exact opposite scenario, the exact opposite conversation if the Democrats had put up someone. And I was thinking like, okay, so, like, Kamala was like a prosecutor. She could have gone on, like, my first. My favorite murder. You know that show that's. I think that's Woman. Woman hosted. Very interesting. And she could have told some, like, the criminal gangs that she prosecuted, like, and it would be like the story of some criminal, and she was actually involved, and she's, like, co hosting there. That would have been super cool and super different, super weird, and, like, gotten some super fans. Yeah. And that's where I. That's where I want that to go. But I think it was just like, that campaign was just way too media trained. And it was like, stay on message, Stay on message. Stay on message. When you get off message, your word salad. But, like, I just reject the premise that, like, she's word salad when she's, like, just having dinner with someone, she's clearly like, you don't wind up in that situation just being dumb.

Yeah. The one thing I thought was interesting is Sarah told me that she heard hundreds of Kamala ads on podcasts. Right. And that they were spending aggressively on podcast advertising. Not right.

It's the 2000 playbook.

I genuinely did not hear a single Kamala podcast ad because I only listen to one podcast, Technology brothers and founders. So two podcasts. But I don't even listen to our podcast. We just record it live. We let our VP Ben, rip it. So founders.

And we don't do political ads. We do.

Yeah. Yeah.

Much more important ads.

Yeah. We would do an ad if a candidate wanted to come on and talk to us about how they're leveraging, know, fintech platforms like Ramp to run a more efficient campaign. We would do some. Some type of integration like that, but not a straight political ad.

I would also have both candidates on to talk about their watch collections.

Yeah.

You know, Trump has a fantastic Vacheron Constantin.

Sure.

It's beautiful.

Yeah.

He has several solid gold watches. Kamal has a wonderful watch collection as well.

She's got some. And she's got good taste, actually.

Obama through the. Through his. Through his administration, he wore a Secret Service watch that was gifted to him by the Secret Service.

Amazing.

I just thought that was so cool. Like, I don't think he's actually become a watch guy. And I think a lot of it was like, you know, the Everyman. Like, you don't want to show up. Trump's whole brand is.

You don't have to be a watch guy to have a watch. You.

You love that. It has significance. Significance.

Yeah.

And so that's where I would want to take the conversation. Yeah.

And I one of, for me, Kamala has a thing for Hermes. Right, right, sure. And it's sort of under discussed, but she's got, you know, she understands she's America. You know, she's an American politician, but she appreciates fine European luxury goods.

Sure, sure.

That's what you want out of a politician. Right?

I mean, the other angle for us if we were to interview the candidates would be to talk about, you know, Donald Trump, the tech founder. And this is why it was so big when the all in podcast had him on, because, you know, they really stick to the unicorn.

They're a political, I mean, arguably more of a political podcast.

Yeah, but they're the tech founder, like Donald Trump, the founder of Social Truth Social. Well, that's great. Let's move on to some Q and A. But first I need to tell you about Steinway and sons. Founded in 1853 by German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway in a Manhattan loft, Steinway and Sons pioneering handcrafted methods are still employed today to ensure uncompromising standards of quality. Steinway is more than a piano. It's the ultimate expression of passion, tradition, and craftsmanship. Whether you're an aspiring pianist, a professional artist, or someone who simply loves the power of music, or, I mean, let's be honest, just somebody who doesn't want to be caught dead with a Yamaha, Steinway is here to inspire every note you play. To discover the craftsmanship of a world class instrument, visit Steinway.com and here's a fun little tip so everyone knows that you can visit like a Steinway showroom and play pianos. But I bet you didn't know that you can have them ship you a physical template of the piano that you're considering buying to lay out in your living room or in your. In your house to see where it fits. I thought that was really, really cool. I'm sure a lot of companies would just go for like the augmented reality thing, but I like that physical, like you can lay out your whole room and it's like a cutout and you can see, okay, this is the one that fits. So anyway, we love Steinway here. But back to the show. Let's do Q and A. This comes from Ben. Oh. Steadfast guides John and Jordi. Hear my lament. For near eight long years I have labored as captain bound to a vessel that will neither sink nor sail. A cruel jest played by fate. The golden dawns of ambition have now given way to stygian twilight. The gleam of hope tarnished and bound in chains of mediocrity. Every course plotted, every wind sought yields only the same tepid tide, a stagnant pool where once roared an ocean of promise. Ledger of my soul bleeds red ink, the currency of resolve spent on visions that crumbled like clay under the strain of grasping hands. Tell me, Venerable Jordan, John, is there a course uncharted, a horizon unclaimed, that might deliver me from this purgatory? Must I forsake this craft wrought from sinew and sleepless nights, to chase an uncertain new voyage? Or do I persist, a wraith bound to a dream now turned tomb until the last ember of spirit fades beneath the cold, relentless gaze of stagnation? I seek your counsel, for the night deepens as my spirit falters. Guide me before the darkness swallows what remains. Yeah, so if you've been building for, you know what's going on, do you. Do you stick with it and hope that you'll have a breakout moment, find that product market fit, go exponential? Or do you just try and sell your company, shut it down, get an acquire and move on to the next thing? What do you think?

This screams burnout to me.

Yep.

Right?

Yeah.

There's a lot of, you know, flowery language and, you know, the Ben, the guy who asked this, clearly an exceptional writer, but look, the guy's burnt out. He's sort of. I think, anytime as a founder, if you're. If you. If you lose that sort of ultimate vision, right? Like, he's getting to a point where he doesn't quite know the path forward. And oftentimes as a founder, you have multiple paths forward, but if you're sort of there at this point where you can't make decisions one way or another and you're sort of just sort of stumbling along, that doesn't feel good. That's burnout. You know, this guy could go on a vacation. It's not gonna really do anything, right? Because he's gonna be on vacation thinking about the fact that he's burnt out.

Right? So I actually know this guy, and I was on a call with him, and he came to me with a very, like. So he. For. Just for some context, they've raised, like, a decent amount of money. They're like, he's paying himself a salary. It's not huge, but he's, like, paying the bills, right? And he's in kind of stasis, Right. And so I. He came to me with this idea of like, oh, I want to make some more money for the company. I'm thinking about like it was essentially like lead gen, like selling the like the leads that his company generates and isn't able to monetize and get down the funnel, like sell those off. And I was just like dude, I don't think you're thinking big enough. I think this is like not the right path. I think this is like it'll be.

Not a path to a venture outcome.

Exactly. It's just, it's just not a path to anything exciting. It's just going to be mediocre. And so what I was telling was like, instead of like burnout, I think you're right. But instead of going on a vacation, I told him he should just clear his whole calendar and figure out who the top 30 players are in his industry. The top three, like public company CEOs, billionaire investors, like the big people. And you should just spend your entire month, the next month just trying to get meetings with them.

Yep.

Just fly to where they are trying. Like, like we, we saw this with the truth social thing. Go to Mar A Lago, figure out like okay, this guy owns a big company in this town. Go there, meet him, network. And then, and then like half the people I was mentioning, he was like, oh yeah, that guy cold called me like three years ago when I was starting, when I was building this company. And like you know, we never went anywhere. I was like call them back, call them back and just try and see what, how you can be helpful because it could be at acquisition, it could be an aqua. It could be a deal. It could do that.

You do that for a month. If, if that doesn't go anywhere, you call up Jeremy Gafon, Gafon and Company.

Yep.

And this is exactly the kind of opportunity, you know, we kind of special situation. He showed me like one of the, one of the, he forwarded his investor update or something like that. Not a bad company, right?

Nope.

5, 6 million of ARR growing 30, 30% a year. That is a good business under most evaluations. But it's not a venture scale opportunity.

Yeah, it's tough when you've raised 15 mil.

And so go to Jeremy. He'll help figure out all the different sort of stakeholders and find a win win going forward. Your VCs have different incentives than you do. Right. You've been in this business for eight years. You still care about the industry. You're an expert in the industry. And with the right capital stack and approach to growth, you know, this could, this business could eventually sell for 50, 60 million dollars. And it's going to take a little bit of time to get there. But if you kind of, it really is, is a kind of a, it's not, it's no longer a venture product. Right. So you're sort of treading water and not embracing reality. And going with Griffon and companies is a much better option than just shutting the company down.

And people kind of like know this deep down at the later stage where you know, if you're doing 100 million ARR, it's like, okay, private equity exists, everyone knows Bain, kkr, all these companies that are very obvious and they probably calling you or strategic acquisition that could be very valuable or maybe try and take the company public. But people don't realize that like this, this like kind of zombie stage where you've done series A, series B but never really hit escape velocity, those two options still exist. It's probably just something more like an Aqua Hire and more like a special situations deal with somebody like Jeremy. So anyway, good luck to you, Ben. I hope you figure out hard press.

For a month and then give Jeremy a call.

That's what I would do. Yeah. Try and get the, try and get the Aqua Hire done. Try and get some weird deal done. Try and kind of just break something loose that's truly new and bold and has the upside. Don't focus anymore. Like you've already built the business to the point where it's, it's neutral, the business works, it's just not there. So you need to either take a really big swing of the fence with like a new partner or do the Aqua Hire go mentor under somebody who's really successful then get back into it or sell the company and restructure the whole cap table with, with Jeremy or something. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. So our first post comes from Guy who is quote tweeting us. He says there's two Chad looking guys in a suit discussing Goblin's tweet. And my note I lold irl. That's great to hear.

That's great to hear. I mean as much as we're here to deliver hard hitting business strategy, we're also here to deliver some laughs. Right?

Exactly.

Just because we're dead serious about the show doesn't mean you can't get some real enjoyment out of it.

And here he says, please guys in suits, film yourselves. Earnestly discussing my tweets too. Well, here it is, Guy, honestly, first.

Of many I would guess.

Yeah, I think you're gonna be in the regular rotation. You have a long, a long path in Front of you. But yeah, Goblin's tweet. I actually don't remember what Goblin's tweet was, but I imagine it being very deranged and having a lot of jargon.

You know, shit posting, shitposting gets shit posted about a lot. But it's serious, right? It creates trend. It sort of influences the zeitgeist and it helps us better understand the world.

Yeah. Has a. Has a deeper meaning sometimes. So cheers, guy. Get out there, post more, send us your best posts, and you might be on the show. Let's go to Max Meyer. Max says the upper Midwest is a 10 out of 10 region. It has everything. Chicago, a proper city, massive metro on an ocean scale, Lake West Michigan, a temperate area, warm enough to grow Chardonnay grapes. I didn't know that. The largest arable land region on earth and the greatest college towns in the usa.

We should do a technology brothers meetup to do a wine tasting in the Chicago area.

I think we should host a live show in this Iowa stadium that he's posting at.

That'd be amazing.

A college tour.

Is it. Will it fit a hundred thousand people?

Yeah, that's the main problem. I mean, maybe if we add extra stands, extra seats in like the infield on the. We could fit 110. But I mean, we'd have to. We have to charge a lot.

It's going to be tight.

Yeah, we'd have to charge a lot. But I mean, you price gate eventually and you get.

Well, livestream it, everybody should be able to go.

Yeah, it'd be great.

Max is. Max has been, I think, very vindicated the last few weeks. The guy's been loud and proud about certain viewpoints that he has, and I think he's going to be on the right side of history on this one.

He was wrong about something, which I completely agreed with him on, and was that he. He didn't think Biden was going to drop out. And he put. And he bought like 100 bucks. Yeah, he put. He put like 100 bucks on polymarket when it was like, you know, Biden did drop out 80%. And he was like, I think it's fake. It's not going to happen. It doesn't make sense. And I was like, dude, like, good job putting your money where your mouth works. Like, I believe that too. And we were both.

I'm glad he didn't put the full arena balance sheet on it because it's a great publication.

It is. I think we have a copy here.

Somewhere, but it's laying around Here somewhere.

Arena is fantastic. We had it in the first episode, but yeah, I'm really excited for more, More editions of arena.

And he should try to. He should potentially explore going to a daily newspaper. Cycle moves quickly.

I like, I like something that you can just sit there and enjoy on a weekend and have, you know, a quarterly or monthly. But yeah, obviously, like, ramp up as fast as possible.

It's the kind of thing that you get in the mail and you, and you put it in your briefcase and you say, I'm going to bring this on my next vacation.

Yep.

You know, in a few weeks. And I'm going to just really sit down and enjoy this. Well, and sort of very useful.

Design was fantastic. And the sponsors he's monetizing. I saw a lot of great, A lot of great.

A lot of independent publishers say, oh, we're going to do fully reader supported. It's like, no. Max understands that the best content in the world should be monetized. It should be supported by companies that want to support the publication too, because companies. You shouldn't ban companies from supporting your publication. Right.

I was looking at the this week's Economist ad on the back. Cubitus tech fleet.

Yep, yep, yep.

It makes sense.

We could do a whole deep dive on the cubitus.

And if you, and if you read through the Economist, they do a great job balancing the ads. Like, it's not overwhelming, like a lot of, a lot of publications, but there's just enough and it's just nice. And I look forward to flipping it over. I look forward to that, seeing it. Oh, who do they got this week?

The ads are pretty. You know, in the Economist, I would say that 80% of the ads are deeply relevant to me. Right. And so I look at it more like a service. Right.

Yeah. It's the same thing for Arena. Every single ad that they ran, I was like, this is cool. And I like this company more because they're supporting Max. So cheers to Max. Thanks for everything that you do. Let's go to Shane Copeland, the founder of Polymarket. What a great story. So he posts this picture of him in 2020, four years ago, he says, 2020, running out of money, Solo founder HQ in my makeshift bathroom office. Little did I know Polymarket was going to change the world. And man, what a setup.

That is terrible.

Yeah, yeah, that was such a bad setup with the empty water bottle and the mouse. Crazy mouse.

The mouse on the wicker basket is the crazy. And the plastic water bottle. I mean, I think Shane's somebody whose testosterone Levels are probably so high.

He needed a tough job.

He needed to take off the edge and have some microplastics to bring it down a bit. But still from the, from the bottom to the top.

The best part about this is that if you look at the image, it looks like he like got frustrated, punched the wall and like was like punches down.

It's the testosterone, that's why.

Yeah, yeah, that's probably. He punched the wall and then was like, okay, I need to have some microplastics. Yeah, exactly. But man, what a, what a run. What a run for Polymarket and just dominant. I think they got like 80%, 90% liquidity on around the election. Just complete. What outcome?

Yeah, what. Do we have any idea how much volume they did in the last month?

I think it was like 3 billion. Just on the presidential election.

Yeah.

And then. And I think, I don't know, I think it's like 60, 40 election versus non.

And now a bunch of other stuff. A bunch of sharp founders are actually creating markets to be able to short their companies.

We have a post that.

Yeah.

3.6 billion on. Wow, that's massive. Yeah. Am I going to be able to pull it up? It's too hard. There's too many here.

We'll get to it.

We'll get to it. We'll come back to that one. But. Oh, here it is. So Avi Schiffman says, never been more bullish on Friend. Please bet against my failure. And he's using manifold. But I'm sure most founders will wind up on Polymarket pretty soon. And it says, will friend have 10,000 daily active users by November 8, 2025 and it's at 5050 right now. And you can go and effectively short his company because there's been a lot.

Of trash talk for all the people. For all the people that think he spent too much on his domain.

Yep.

That was a big. I think he1word.com are back during the AI era. Obviously Sam Altman saw what Avi did with Friend and decided I'm chat.com.

Yes. A family just launched today. Some crypto thing.

Do they have their dot com? I don't know, but thought they had a dot IO. Okay, maybe they have.

They had the family.

Yeah. Which is, you know, at this point.

It'S actually funny, the branding of a one word domain so strong in AI that I assumed it was an AI company like, oh, some app to manage your family. But I guess it's a crypto thing.

Yeah.

But I love this.

I love this Avi is so he's, he's.

So he's building wearable for AI.

Yeah. So Avi's building an AI wearable that went viral.

This very controversial video about going and living your life in San Francisco but also talking to your AI friend.

Yeah.

And having these like kind of black mirror esque interactions. And I think, I think the, the video was tuned perfectly to be not quite just techno optimistic. So it wasn't tone deaf like the people that made it.

And him, yeah, he's also, he's a technologist but he's also, he's not. He sort of has this understanding that technology is not always good or bad. Like sometimes it's sort of this neutral thing where there are going to be people if he continues to execute. There's going to be people that are. Become madly in love with their friend dot com, you know, wearable companion. There's going to be people that just use it here and there and like it's a part of their life and.

And some people might use it as their personality.

It's gonna be massively positive for some people. I'm sure it'll be negative for some other people. And that's just the nature of technology. Not. It's impossible to say that any technological product is inherently good or inherently bad. And anytime you get into like binaries I think it's. But overall like this guy is putting it all out on the line. He's doing this sort of build in public approach, but basically saying every single week, I'm going to win, I'm going to win, I'm going to win. Not, not too dissimilar to Steinman. Just sort of a different approach.

Yep, totally love it. Well, good luck. Let's go to Lee Edwards. He says there hasn't been a better time to move to SF in 15 years. AI is here in person is back. Tech vibes are off the charts. Local government no longer run by psychotic clowns. Legal to build housing again. Equal marriage and abortion rights are the law. And he's quote tweeting someone that says time to move to SF then. And I love this. I've always been super bullish on the Gary Tan, like anti doom loop, boom loop. Make SF amazing. Like it needs to be.

Yeah. So I was born in Oakland Children's Hospital. Family, you know, it's been all around the bay for generations and generations. The bay had gotten so bad that when I was graduating college I didn't even consider moving back. And in fact I remember year over year as a kid my family we'd go from Berkeley and we'd go over the bridge into the city. I remember just going less and less and less as I got older. And it was because it. No, we are sort of like family tradition, was to go into San Francisco, park our car and spend the entire day just walking around the city, going to our favorite restaurants. And that just happened less and less and less as it got less safe and just less enjoyable to be there. And I just remember as we started really needing to dodge certain streets and neighborhoods, and it just became like, you know, it just became a little bit dark. And so I think for all the technology brothers out there, men and women, it's been this. Over the last four years, you've had sort of Thiel and Elon align and focus on the presidential election. You've had Gary focus deeply on San Francisco and having San Francisco, you know, making a lot of positive progress on things, simultaneously having new momentum at the federal level. San Francisco is going to benefit massively from both of those trends. So if you are, you know, we're a media business. Right. We're media businessmen. We almost have to be in la. But if you are a young technologist, it's hard to argue against building your company anywhere other than Silicon Valley.

Yeah, there's the. The SF hate, I feel like, was always a little overrated in the sense that most people, by the time they're having problems with San Francisco, they're in a stage of their life where they can move to Marin, Palo Alto, Atherton.

Yeah.

Incline Village.

It's really not an issue. It only becomes an issue once you have children. Right?

Yeah. But at that stage, and I think that's probably part of why San Francisco got so weird, was because I lived in the Tenderloin at age 22.

Yeah.

I was 6 foot 8 to 50 pounds. Like, no one bothered me.

You're 250, brother.

It was fine. Like, it was. Yeah, it was dangerous. But most of the people would be, like, in the middle of, like, wrong guy. Like, dealing drugs, and they'd be like, no, they wouldn't even mess with me. They'd just be like, do you play basketball? Like, they would be so taken aback by my physical size that it was just not an issue. I remember going to some party in the Tenderloin, and there was a girl who was leaving, and the girl who lived in the apartment was like, yeah. Was like, you have to take my Taser. Like, And I was like, whoa, that's crazy, because I would just. I would just walk around, but it's like total like privilege stuff. But then, but then once you have kids, you're like, okay, I can't live that life anymore. But you can move to Palo Alto or Atherton or Incline Village.

So here's what I want to see. I want to see billion dollar venture capital, asset managers like General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz and people like Adam Newman. I want them buying up all the housing. And sf, Right. If you're really long sf. Yeah, like I want Gary. I want Gary to be a slumlord almost. Right?

Like the opposite.

No, no, I'm saying he starts as a slum lord. He buys up all these, you know, studio apartment, upgrades them, bugs them, and uses AI to process all that data so that he understands, oh, this founder hasn't slept in three days.

Get him a term sheet.

Get him a term sheet immediately. Right, yeah, that's good. No, but I think, I think one way to go long technology is to go long sf.

Yep.

That's what Gary's done. And if you want to benefit from that boom, fund the startups.

Yep.

But then buy up all the real estate so you sort of recapture some of that value. Because a lot of founders paychecks end up just going towards their rent.

That's great. Let's go to Will Menitis. Will says many remarkable businesses that could exist don't, because venture investors refuse to get creative with structure. If you took PE structuring brain and applied it to early stage investing, you'd see dramatically larger outcomes in traditional industries asap. And then Rune says, that's exactly how we ended up with the convoluted structure of OpenAI. And then will says, does the nonprofit Flip have a comp in pe? No. Right. I know. The structured capped profit units are classic. Interesting.

Yeah. So here's the thing. You meet something that's been happening recently is founders are going out and pitching VCs. And the VCs will tell them, is this a multi billion dollar business or is this something that could get to 20, 30, 50 million of ARR off of like one or two rounds. And one of the challenges is a lot of those businesses, if the founders don't want to shoot for the multi billion dollar outcome, they could take like two, three million dollars and just build a fantastic business. But the VCs in theory should be able to buy a lot more of the company than they currently are. So they're buying like if you want to go. And if you're a YC company and the founders just want to build like a Fantastic business, or a wonderful business as some people would refer to it, they're still getting 2 on 20. When I think that if you wanted to take a much more sort of PE style approach, you should be like, cool, that's great if you want to do that. But we're going 50, 50. We're going 50, 50 or we're gonna buy. It's gonna be two on eight.

Yeah.

You shouldn't give the same terms. But the issue is there's so much competition. There's so many seed funds, so many pre seed funds. The founders can just go and take 2 on 20 from some fund that.

Thinks it's going to be a monopoly.

But it won't be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so right now the issue is there's just so much competition that you. I don't think you can get these sort of like pe. What Will's talking about is quite a bit more structure.

He's thinking about bringing in debt earlier.

Bringing in debt earlier. You know, there's like General Catalyst buying health system, stuff like that. I think all that stuff is cool, but. But it's hard to do PE styles early stage because there's just so much, so many different people that will give you that 3 on 15 or 2 on 10 or 2 on 20. And I think that competition just drives up prices and ultimately lowers returns.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean I see it a lot in like deep tech, hard tech, where there's someone running a machine shop. It's probably going to be a great business, super important, but it might not have, you know, monopoly supply. We talked about the drone motor company. Yeah, something like that is like critical to the supply chain for so many companies, but probably not going to have the margins of.

Should be a widget company.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So it's like, how do you, how do you get the next generation of founders like excited and incentivized around that? Right now the pattern is go lie to VCs. It's basically just tell them that you'll be a trillion dollar company.

Yeah. And the issue, if you take money with this venture narrative, you have to do a lot of things that your custom give a shit about. If you're making drone motors and your customers are like, you make great drone motors, I'm going to keep buying them. And then you're like, well, actually we're drone motors as a service and we're going to go, we're going to go sell our AI software. They're like, okay, well I like you because you make good. You make good drone motors and you want more of those. It's funny because the classic business school case study is like XYZ company makes XYZ widget and they do X amount of ebitda. And like, how would you lever it up to ensure that they, you know, can maintain profitability? And yeah, I think, I think, yeah. What Will's getting at is maybe there's more of these sort of businesses that look like Gafon and Co that just take a unique lens on venture, which is to say we're focused on returns. We're willing to make investments to generate that we think can generate returns that fit this profile. Because in pe, there's a lot of PE funds that are, that are like, we don't want a 30x at all. We don't care. We just want these sort of base hits over and over and over. And that's what we've told our LPs. So I think that what I was talking to originally about there's so many different seed funds that will give you two on 12.

Yep.

Right. If you come in with a slightly different approach, there's opportunities there. If you're just thinking about it from the lens of we care about returns first and foremost. And I think even Bryce from Indie VC is taking this approach. He had created a really structured product historically with NDVC, but now he's just a $50 million fund that's saying we're looking for this unique type of founder that just wants to build a great business. And you know, worst case scenario, you build a good business. Best case scenario, you sort of build this generational company and we'll make money either way.

Yeah. So maybe more permanent capital, maybe more debt financing, less of like a 10 year with a couple year extension timeline and then potentially a different, a different target around zeros. Like a lot of early stage VCs are like, yeah, 90% of the portfolio is going to go to zero. A lot of the great growth funds right now have a no zeros mandate. Like they won't invest in something if there's any risk that it goes to zero. And then they're underwriting against like a 20% IRR. And I wonder what that would look like if you said, I'm an early stage investor, but I do different structured deals, but my hurdle rate for zero is like less than 50% of my companies will go to zero.

Yeah.

As opposed to 90% because I'm unicorn hunting. Very different. The unicorn.

Maybe that looks like leveraging. Yeah.

It became so sexy. It was like, you know, if you can be the first investor in Uber and the rest of your portfolio is trash, like that doesn't matter because you got the stamp of like you got into the.

Yeah. That incentivizes YOLOing where people are like, this team's like, okay, but it's a good category. We want exposure to this. Like, what's the, the sort of approach within venture world and angel investing of, oh, I'm only partway convicted in this business. I'm still going to invest, which I've across like 50 angel bets. I've done that before where I'm like, I see some issues with this business, but I like the founder, so I'll do it. Or the team is not. Is maybe like a 7 out of 10, but like the product's a 10 out of 10, let's do it anyways. And I think that, yeah, the venture investors that are like, no, we're going to be. Because the private equity world is just much more serious in the way that they evaluate companies. Right. Like they bring a seriousness to the asset class that is for many funds missing. Right.

It's interesting. Let's go to Bazelord. Bazelord says daily reminder that at least one of your needs to. At least one of you needs to start an IQ enhancement company as soon as possible.

And my take is already been done.

Ten years ahead of you, buddy.

Ten points.

Eight years ahead of you.

Ten points.

Yeah, we know about the performance enhancing drugs for iq. Caffeine, nicotine, some sleep, some exercise, high testosterone.

No, it's funny because the original Lucy pitch was smart nicotine.

Yeah.

Which Intelligent, intelligent nicotine. Right. But yeah, I think it can take different forms. I think that, I think there's a big business to be made what Baze is talking about selling to technology workers to say like, we're going to take a cohesive look at how to increase your iq.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, Brian Johnson was talking and measure.

And measure it.

He was saying that like, people care a little bit about their, their health and longevity, but it's very abstract. But if you can tell them that you get on this diet and you will be performing better at work immediately, that has a much, much more acute roi. And so you can kind of underwrite the hassle of doing the diet. And I think there'll probably be more of that. I think, I'm not sure. Brian might be able to pivot into like becoming like the Brian Johnson of the mind. Might just be Brian Johnson, but it also might be someone new who's Focused purely on that instead of longevity or instead of health or instead of athletic ability.

But yeah, I would invest in that business. A business that basically says, like, we're going to test your IQ and then we're going to continue to test it quarterly and we're going to do figure out all different modalities, whether it's health.

Yeah. I mean, that's supplementation. Because of the way the FDA regulates these products, it's very hard for us. Like, we can't put caffeine in our gum that has nicotine in it. You can't mix actives. But if you're more of like a health clinic, you could actually prescribe caffeine, nicotine differently. You could like move through these things and actually take more of like a holistic view. In the same way that a lot of those men's health clinics look at your testosterone markers, your biomarkers, they look.

At your sleep and your diet.

Exactly. Something like that for intelligence and performance in the workplace does seem very, very valuable if somebody can pull it off. But it's a hard business and I think there's power law. I think it might be more of like, it's a consultancy, it's a clinic. There's Andrew her does this at Font Bio. You know him?

Oh, yeah.

And again, his is a little bit more just general health focused. It'd be interesting to see one of those branded purely as performance in the workplace. Let's go to Gabriel. Do you know this guy? He's in Australia. He's the man.

I don't.

I think it follows bodybuilding. Yeah, Great, Great dude. Never met him in person, but all time poster. Yeah, so he says. I often stumble across an Internet phrase I don't understand that has a natural humorous vibe or cadence. Longhouse, many such cases, etc. An anime avatar just told me to get in the crystal. It's a beautiful crystal. We'll drop that at the office and see how it goes.

This was great at. At Hereticon.

Yeah.

We were in a conversation, there was maybe six or seven people and I think that David Senra was only. He's like. He's like not on. He's not online. Right. He's in books.

In books.

He's focused. He's either recording the podcast he's reading or he's with his family. And so going to one of the most online offline events or like networking. It was funny because I'd have to be like. I'd have to be like, yeah, that's. That's what basically like the Longhouse means like.

Yeah.

He's like, oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.

Well, that's why we're doing this podcast. He'll learn all the brain rot terms through this.

Yeah, exactly.

This is really the bridge in the way that every.

Every time a brain rot term or word breaks through to popular culture.

Yeah.

There's already six or seven new brain rot terms that are replacing it on the timeline.

And it is.

They want to surface those. Right.

Like. Like the. The traditional. Like, Gen Z. Brain rot is like Skibidi Toilet, Ohio.

The Rizzler.

The Rizzler. But then tech has its own brain rot terms. Like. Like Word Cell.

It actually can be. If you know. If you know those. Those are like buttons that you can press in a pitch with a vc. Whereas if you're saying the right brain rot terms, it signals in group.

Right.

So even if you weren't a PM at Uber, you didn't go to Stanford.

Yep.

You can still signal that you're part of that.

Extremely. Online. I actually don't know what. Get in the crystal.

It's a beautiful crystal.

Do you know what that means?

So I think we should. I don't know what that one means. We got to figure that out.

Gabriel, I want you to write in. Tell us the truth. What does it mean?

What does it mean?

Break it down for us. No, but in the replies to this video, I want an explanation.

There's people that sort of index YC companies. There's people that. A buddy of mine, Joey, is a teal fellow, and he's got, like, a whole, you know, fun that's kind of focused on just backing teal fellows.

Sure.

Which is super smart. I think we should create the Poster Index, which is a fund that's just dedicated to brain. If you can post bangers, it is a proxy for your ability to get attention, which can drive customers and capital and all these things. So there is poster.

There is a bit of a meme that it's like, oh, if a CEO is, like, posting too much, the company must be doing.

So here's. Here's the thing.

Not.

So here's the thing. I think Augustus.

Yeah.

Is the. Is. Is every other CEO that wants to be a poster CEO should study him, because all he's coming. He's coming out of the woodwork once every couple days. Banger. Back to business. Back to business.

Right.

And so there's this, like.

Yeah. He's not out there hunting, posting. Like, oh, there's like this. There's this meme that's going viral and Everyone has their take on it and so you like transform it into like, well, what if the Trump thing was about DocuSign? Like you're just getting a thousand likes, but it has nothing to do with your business and you're just like trying to get like Twitter clout. Like that's not what we're talking about here.

Yeah, I think that if I see a portfolio company, CEOs name four times in the timeline per day and they're not selling to venture backed startups. Risky, risky, risky. It's kind of a bit of a red flag.

There's a little bit of a balmer peak on the post.

Exactly.

Let's go to John Fiot. Oh, this one's rough. So Adam Rankin posts. I promoted my GF and she's showing an engagement ring and so they're getting married. So congratulations to you, Adam. But FIO chimes in with something not controversial at all and says we gotta pool all the couples that announced their marriage and or child in the form of a startup business joke and study them very closely over the next 50 years and publish the report. We all deserve to know how these ended up.

I don't think you need 50 years. I think you probably need, I need 10 after somebody's crossed the sort of decade.

I think he's underweighting. Like norminess, like there's.

So I think a bigger part of the story here is, is something about the Warp team attracts. I love, I love Ayush, but it attracts dunking.

Yeah. Yeah.

The dunk rate is, is crazy. They almost, it's good for one of their, one of their head of growth, I think said he was potentially going to go anon.

Yeah, it was just too much dunking.

Dunking. But, but yeah, I don't, I don't know. I think there's, there's, you know, they make, they make Warp where Adam works, makes payroll software for businesses. If he's trying to sell to more startups, one way to do that would be announced.

Make a startup joke.

You want to make people feel connected to you, Bring your marriage into the workplace and make a startup joke.

But no, I think Theo might be under monetizing here. He needs to.

Yeah, no, I think Theo, I would, I would study, I would. If Theo wanted to start a research group that just studied things like this, I would donate.

That would be interesting. Kind of a Nat Friedman style.

Yeah, exactly.

I agree that there's something interesting there, but again, you know, it's marketing, bro. He's got to, got to pay the bills. One Way or the other. Okay, let's go to Enchilada's surfboard says 90% of defense tech investors couldn't tell you the difference between COTs and GOT if their vacation homes depended on it. Do you know these terms C O T S and G O T S?

No.

So I dug into this. It's commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf. And in some like early.

So it's a dual. It's a dual. Yeah. I think a big thing with defense tech. Yeah. So like. Yeah, exactly.

Like no one knows this stuff.

Yeah.

But like thankfully I wasn't betting my vacation like an early anderal person. And it was like some early and oral joke that like turned to this.

Like here's, here's the. I guess to simplify it. So a lot of defense tech investors, when they're evaluating a business or they, they're kind of deciding if it has sort of dual use applications. Like I am an advisor to a company called Aon which makes tactical missile systems. And I made that bet because Nawid and Joe, the founders are just phenomenal. They've made like 10 years worth of progress in about a year. And so I don't consider myself a defense tech investor. But one thing that was very obvious with their business is there's no dual use. Right. It's not like they're going to sell some missiles to the sort of retail market or commercial market and then. Yeah, it's all in on usg. Right. They don't get the usg.

Yeah.

As a customer, long term the business isn't viable because then they can't even go international.

Right.

Like they need to win that customer first. And so whereas deterrence, deterrence has like a bunch of commercial customers where it's a viable business even without securing an.

Oil field or something. Right, yeah, yeah, got it. Yeah. I need to dig into more of this. But I think the Cots vs. Gotz thing is also related to Anduril's early like sensor tower development. Do you remember this? Like they, they built this sensor tower and they were using literally like off the shelf gaming Nvidia GPUs to run open source like computer vision algorithms like Imagenet. And so it was very much like hacked together from literally stuff you could buy at like a best buy.

Yeah.

But they created a government product from commercial off the shelf as opposed to the way a lot of the previous primes would do it where it's like, okay, well like does it run Windows xp? Like we have to use the stuff that's government off the shelf and that creates a lot.

I think that's a component thing.

Yeah, yeah, it's more about like, do you have this attitude of like, can you just go to Home Depot and get the screw that you need or do you need to acquire like the $150,000 bag of screws from Boeing? Right.

Well, didn't, didn't Andrew do this with their latest suicide drone? Oh, I don't know where I think they were using, they had to use.

They call it that.

Different branding, fpv, drone, interceptor, tactical. It's a suicide, it's a kamikaze drone. It literally blows up to the target. But no, I think they ended up having to use Chinese components.

Yeah, some of them because, yeah, some of them are just not available here.

But obviously.

Apparently there's, there's only one tin smelting like organization in the United States and they are only able to supply like you know, 5% of the tin. And so it's like if you're in, if you're in the business of like okay, we need tin for something, it's like good luck cleaning up your supply chain. Just wait 20 years for this one guy to like grow his business.

Yeah, but there's a whole, there should be a whole cottage industry of people that are looking at all these deep tech, hard tech, defense tech companies getting funded and being like, I'm going to go build PE style businesses to service these like basically like manufacturing business businesses, sourcing businesses.

But, but I think a big part of this is also just like breaking down. The problem is something that's more manageable by like a startup engineering team. I talked to a guy who worked on the Blue Origin rocket engine versus and was comparing it to the, the Merlin engine designed by Tom Mueller at SpaceX. And the one of the things that allowed SpaceX to iterate so quickly was that the. So when you see starship go up, you see like the 36 engines. I think that's how many. Or like a bunch of engines. It's a bunch of smaller engines. Every one of those engines. I think at one point, I don't know if it's true now but like could fit in a pickup truck, in like the back of a pickup truck.

Yeah.

Whereas the bigger engines, you need a crane. And so all of a sudden it's like the safety requirements, like just the risk, the level of equipment, like anybody can drive a pickup truck. So if you need to take your piece of equipment. And so there's this question of like how can you Decompose something that is a larger capability, like an F35 into a bunch of suicide drones. Well, the suicide drones are going to be able to be okay. The pieces are smaller. You don't need cranes for everything. When you start doing these mega projects, things really, really slow down. And so there's a. It seems like there's a lot of arbitrage right now and just deep tech, hard tech startups taking something really huge and then decomposing it into something that's more manageable. And like.

So this is even, Even Valor's trying to do just shrink down.

Yep. Reactor. Exactly. And yeah, the guy I was talking to is actually building Fusion Avalanche and it's, it's small enough to fit in a truck. And so he's just like super pilled on that and like really wants to build that. Anyway, let's go to Luke Metro and Roll employee. Love this guy. We need a. God damn it. Completely unrelated to business. We need a liberal. Joe Roga. He literally interrupted Peter Thiel's speech about wokeness to talk about how the pyramids were actually X ray power plants. What are you people talking about?

Yeah, yeah, Joe Rogan is liberal.

Yeah.

And he's talked about that.

Yeah.

He endorsed Trump also.

I think this just speaks to the fact that Rogan's like a one of one type of person. Like, he's, he's, he's a, he's like a comedian that can pull like a huge group of people. Yeah. He's tinfoil hat guy who loves aliens. He's very conspiratorial. But then also, you know, loves ufc. And he, he's kind of combined all these different disciplines and you can't just like, you can't just copy the Joe Rogan experience.

Here's a record, here's a conspiracy, here's. So Rogan is a liberal.

Yes.

He's voted Democrat, like his entire life. He said this recently. And Trump is a Republican. But Joe Rogan endorsed Trump.

Yes.

And what is a link between Trump and Rogan? Ufc.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Joe Rogan is one of the top commentators. Yeah, one of the top commentators for the ufc.

Okay.

Trump is arguably the biggest fan of the ufc. Right. He'll. He'll leave the campaign trail to go be at a fight. So maybe that, that's something there where Joe Rogan said, I'm going to put my politics aside and I'm going to back Trump because it'll, it'll increase the UFC's like, notoriety and platform and put it on the map because I think that by the end of the next four years, UFC will be. Baseball will have to have sort of stepped aside. No longer America's pastime. America's pastime is combat and combat sports.

Well then maybe, if you want, maybe there's some precursors to building a liberal Joe Rogan. You need a liberal ufc.

Yeah.

And you need a liberal comedy circuit.

Yeah. So maybe the aliens. So the next four years the, the Dems go heavy into ufc. AOC is sitting in the front row.

Or something different or maybe starts. Maybe they become the bare knuckle party.

Yeah.

Or, or car jitsu. Have you seen card jitsu?

That's good.

Where they fight in the car. That's good. Or pillow fighting.

Yeah.

Or any of the slap boxing. They could do any of those, but they need to, they need to carve out one of the fighting spots.

Yeah. I think just we need the liberal.

Joe Rogan will emerge.

We need a liberal, you know, we need a young Bernie who emerges through bare knuckle boxing.

There we go.

Yeah. That is probably the next Bernie is not going to come from some small town in Vermont.

Come from the next Bernie will be a slap.

Yeah.

Let's go to Sahil Bloom. He says a harsh truth. I wish I could tell my younger self there is no such thing as later. The journey to success is filled with laters all. I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll find more time for my health later. I have more freedom later. I'll enjoy myself later. The brutal reality later never comes. It's just another word for never. Most of the things you say you'll do later won't be possible by the time you're able to do them. The kids won't be younger later either. Start designing your life now or live life with regret later.

Okay, here's a good example.

Yeah.

Yesterday I made my two and a half year old son work the entire day doing deliveries of RORA systems to high profile celebrities around la. You know, you know, to sort of support the launch. And you know, this was a Sunday. A lot of people aren't, aren't working on Sundays. And I realized he's never going to be this young again and be able to grind this hard again. Like if I don't, if I don't like allow him to do this, he's never going to forgive me. He's going to be asking me when he's 12. Dad, 10 years ago, like, why did you let me chill on the weekends? Right? Like, why wasn't I grinding? Why Wasn't I figuring out he can't type on a computer yet, but he can lift one of these systems and carry it up a driveway and drop it off and ring the doorbell. Right. He's fantastic. So I think the lesson here is, is however old your kids are, you probably need to get them grinding harder and like yesterday, basically.

Yeah. I think that's maybe what this post miss. You know, it says I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll find more time for my health later. What about levering up? You should be levering up now, today.

The returns you're generating. The returns you generating today are because you levered up a month ago.

You should be taking the most risky bets today, not later. Oh yeah, I'll, I'll find a hundred X or later.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah, not going to happen. Let's go to Sean Frank. He's been on the show before. Love him. He says paid advertising doesn't build brand. And then the crazy guy. Love this image. I don't think this is a real emoji, but it's so good.

Okay, so, so Ridge was a company that historically would never spend money on anything that did that wasn't directly generating revenue. Right. So, so they were. And so Sean has basically been on this for approaching a decade and has absolutely worked for them. While all these, while, you know, allbirds was doing brand marketing, these other D2C brands were doing stores. Yeah. Pop up stores like big celebrity endorsements. So Ridge basically had spent probably $250 million on meta ads before they ever did a collaboration with like mkbhd. Right. So that's brand marketing now they do some brand marketing in the form of, of sort of these like massive giveaways and they maybe do like some of it more now. But they're the, the reason that this tweet holds weight and Sean is the, the perfect example of delivering, delivering like real business lessons in the form of shitposts. But the reason this holds weight is the, is the Ridge brand is, is stronger today than almost any D2C brand in their, in their, in their, in their category or cohort of like when they were sort of coming of age.

So and you know what's interesting is that like they, these posts from both Sean and Connor.

Yeah.

Build their brand so much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like I now, I now associate Ridge with incredible performance marketing and I, and now I want to pull out a Ridge wallet just to let everyone know like I care about ads. I'm not kidding. Like I, I, I respect performance and.

I respect marketing efficiency.

Yeah. Marketing efficiency.

Yeah.

Because it is like, is.

Is if. When Ridge. So Ridge was one of the companies to really focus on, you know, direct response creator ads on YouTube. And I helped them do this back in the day. And when. When Ridge works with an influencer that says, like, hey guys, today's sponsors Ridge.

Yep.

I use the Ridge when I'm out fishing, but it also is great on date night.

Yep.

Like, use my code in the description. That obviously builds a brand. Right. They're aligning with a content creator and.

You see who they're advertising with and who they aren't.

Yeah.

And so the MKBHD stuff that tells you, like, MKBHD's whole thing is like super high production value, super cinematic, like, really thoughtful analysis of these consumer goods. And so being in that milieu is much more valuable than someone else that they could advertise on. Like, it's just, they've cultivated. Like, what does your brand stand for? Like, you could literally, if you're thinking about building your brand, just put together a mood board of popular influencers and then just go and sponsor them and then that will be your brand.

Yeah.

And it's like, what do you stand for?

Ridge has probably a million guys out there that love Ridge because Theo Vaughn loves Ridge. Theo Vaughn is probably, you know, has for the last, like, whatever. Since Sean initially did the deal with him. He's probably objectively more of a wallet salesman than a comedian. Right. Like, he's one of the top wallet salesmen in the world. Yeah. He can go and sell out comedy clubs, but he's selling wallets at a higher velocity.

Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing with Red Bull. Like, you look at like Max Verstappen and everything that Max Verstappen stands for with like this like relentless ambition, crazy energy. And. And I just get like, that's what Red Bull's brand is now because of that. And so, yeah, this, this idea. Yeah. Very, very valuable and certainly underrated. Let's go to Raul. Zero interest rates. He says the first day in Williamsburg and he sees a spray painted sign on the concrete for an ad for Sonia. AI therapy listens better than your ex at TalkToSonja. And a call to action for the App Store. What do you think about this IRL advertising? Is this legal? Do you just do this? Is there a company that will just go spray your spray paint everywhere?

It's kind of like they don't advertise.

Okay.

It's very illegal. I think it's illegal. But it's basically like vandalism.

Yeah, it's vandalism.

I don't, I don't.

You could go viral like this. I mean, this got 40k views. That's probably more than plays.

The play is to probably do that once in your background, have a friend.

Post it and have it be interesting and weird. It won't go viral if it's just something boring like whatever.

Yeah. I think this is. In general, I'm not a fan of this type of marketing because I think it makes the world more. You know, nobody likes ads more than me, except maybe you. So we love ads. But in general, I'm not a fan of vandalizing property. We did a little bit of this at party round. Like, but it was more like using an existing graffiti wall.

Sure.

And putting an ad on that which is designated as a place for graffiti.

Yep.

But. But yeah, out of home is. I think there's more. I think that ad space that's underutilized is the plane circling sf. Like, I'd like to start a technology brothers advertising division that just. That has planes every single day flying over SF that you can sponsor, which is like, for Sonia, it might be like you're. You get no women talk to Sonia. Right. And if that was flying, if you're like a meta PM and you walk out and you look up from your. What's that app that they. That they all use that the.

The like blind.

Blind. You look up from blind and it's like you get no women talk to Sonia. That's like probably. And there's a QR code you can zoom in and scan. I'm more a fan of that.

I do remember. What was it back in like 2018? Ish. Maybe there was this like when bird. The scooters came out and lime. And it seemed like tech just realized like the sidewalk is free real estate, I guess. And you can just put stuff.

Dude. So here's a crazy story. So I was working with a. With a startup back then that I just moved to la and I was basically like, you don't need to pay me. I just want to help out. I'll do it for equity. And we started doing these sort of like marketing stunt things. And it was a. It was a skincare company. And so I had the idea to go put hotel like door hangers and I went and put them in Santa Monica. I put them on like 500 Bird scooters in a day. And within the same day we got like a note from the. The chief legal counsel or whatever. From bird being. It wasn't quite a cease and desist but it was like stop right now.

It's so funny because like you're doing the bird thing to them.

Yeah, yeah, it was perfect.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

When that was happening I was like wait, so it's just free real estate if you have wheels, like can I just set up like a corner store on the sidewalk? If it has wheels under it, can I set up a gym or whatever I want? Like is there any business that you can't stop? Yeah, it was, it was a wild, wild time and I think most cities wound up developing.

Yeah, I'm surprised there wasn't like a bird for snack bars. Yeah, like people that are just like here's like a vending machine. Like I'm just going to put it right here.

Let's go to Aaron. Slowed off.

He says still it's still one thing. It's still under discussed that I think birds like real downfall started with that social media account that was like death to birds or forget what it was.

Yeah, I remember that.

And that was some of the best entertainment of the era. Technology brother. Because you could go see a bird get thrown off like an eight story.

Skyscraper and that's just like that speaks to like the, the childish teenage boy in everyone. It was so entertaining. I remember following that. Yeah, that was really, really bad. They should have sent the season desist to them. I'm sure they did, but didn't because.

It basically just encouraged everybody to like.

Yeah, go viral. Like just do stuff. And it just like made it feel like. And it was so destructive, like destroyed the environment. So messy. And yeah, they were destroying cars if you run over them. It was a mess. I was really happy when they banned them in my town. But also like weird memetic stuff, you know that the, the founder was also named Travis and he was former Uber guy. So it's one of those things where it's like well of course you back traverse from Uber.

Yeah, yeah. Travis from Uber.

Yeah, exactly. It was w a lot of time. So Aaron slowed off, says creator economy should be reappropriated for manufacturing tbh. Yeah, I like this. This is good because it's like you're creating actual things instead of just content. But also don't appreciate the anti content slander bro. This is a real job.

Yeah, well Aaron is a content creator. He probably gets pretty decent X payouts.

Yeah.

And he's content creator and he's a.

Manufacturer and he wrote, he wrote that big piece for pirate wires. The, the Industrialist Manifesto. The techno Techno Industrialist Manifesto. I wanted him to punch it up and give it a more controversial name, like, you know, B2B SaaS is dead or something like that.

Yeah.

Something that will get people angry, but I couldn't get that across the finish line. But very, very good piece, very long. Recommend you go read it.

We need content creators out there creating courses that say, here's how to make a million dollars in manufacturing.

Manufacturing. Like, yeah, buy a cnc.

Actually stop the shopify drop shipping your TikTok shop, tick tock shop stuff.

Andrew Tate's just starting to use a lathe.

Yeah. Start a small scale manufacturing business in your hometown.

Yep.

That is the way we change the culture.

Apprentice under some 75 year old guy who's been making, you know, hubcaps for the last 50 years.

Yeah. All those guys are going to end up shutting their business down because like they do like $300,000 a year in profit is not really.

But that's enough to pay. That's enough to pay the monthly fee on a Lambo.

Yeah.

So you could literally be the hustle porn guy. Go and do that and actually wind up with the Lambo.

Yeah.

Grow a little bit. Yeah, just, just don't bring in Docusign. Just, just run, run, run, lean, run, lean.

Those Docusign contracts, they can get up into the eight figures real quick.

Yeah. Let's go to Patrick Blumenthal. He says, my boy. Loud, loud nightclub. So what do you do? Drone targeting mostly. Oh, loan marketing. Do you like it? Well, it depends on the coverage area. Why? Well, most guys I know who are in finance don't really like it. It's the American Psycho scene.

That's great.

This guy's just a meme machine. He's a machine. I don't know how he puts out so much of this stuff. Everything's hand photoshopped. He has no one on his team. He's just like content mastermind.

Well, he's a venture capitalist. Like he needs to, like he needs to be the media.

He's surprised, but I mean, the dude's been to Ukraine like a bunch. Have you talked about this?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

I was on pirate wires with him a while back and it's pretty cool.

We did a. We hit the range together months back.

Oh, cool. Yeah, he was telling me about that.

I think, yeah, he had to train up before his last, his last mission.

But yeah, American Psycho is just like a, an endless pit of memes that just like, it really speaks to people.

Yeah. One of the most I used to not really understand when my parents would be like, oh, this movie is a cult classic.

Yeah, yeah.

But now you understand, like, when we show our kids Borat when they turn eight, like, we're gonna be like, it's a cult classic.

Like, yeah, it is interesting. I wonder if there's something deeper here about, like, the defense tech guys being, like, the modern Patrick Bateman. It still doesn't feel that. Like, did you know that Christian Bale in American Psycho was, like, something like 25 years old? Ben, you should look this up.

He was 25. When.

He's definitely in his 20s. And it's crazy because he's like. He's playing. It's almost like he's playing someone older.

Like, I feel he's playing, like, a late thirt.

That seems right, because he's like a. He was 25 in the movie. So Patrick Bateman, the character has to be over 25 just based on the track. Unless in the 90s, you could make VP at 25. Is that possible? I know the youngest MD at Goldman Sachs ever made was in his. In his 20s. The character's 27. Wow, that's wild. So that might have been, like, a little embellishment by Brett Easton.

No, it's funny because last last night, I had this wild moment where I pulled up to the gate in my neighborhood, and the security guy goes, jordy. Like, my son just passed the bar. And I was like, that's amazing. And my second question was, dude, how old are you? I thought you. I thought you were my age. I seriously thought he was exactly my age. I never asked. And he's like, dude, I'm 46.

Oh, there you go.

And he's like, yeah, I just had kids. Young, whatever.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But, yeah, I feel like something about that. Sort of like, 90s, early 2000s era movies, like all the actors, actresses.

Wall street was definitely this idea that you could go to Wall street and finance in New York and in your 20s, make it to the top. And that's 100% true in Silicon Valley and even today. But I don't think it's been true in Manhattan finance for decades.

No, because you have. Over time, you need to create a ladder to keep people in their place.

Yeah, I know, like, a few guys that went and started funds pretty early, like hedge funds and they trade public stocks.

Still want to go work at a fund first.

Yeah, exactly.

Get that on your resume.

All of them are in their 30s by the time they do that. But, man, what a wild time. It would have been. It would have been fun if they. If Wall street had been able to, like, keep that culture of like, like just such a meritocracy that, yes, a 25 year old can be a VP or an MD or whatever.

Yeah.

Like, I think it'd be a lot cooler, and I think a lot of people would be going into it and, like, it would be much, much hotter.

Make finance great again.

Yeah. Just more meritocratic, I guess. But a lot of these. A lot of these firms have, like, calcified to the point where they're like, they're not.

Yeah. Because these guys, if you're. If you're 28 and you want to make $50 million now, you raise a $500 million fund with your absolute boy, and you take. You know, that's the only way to do it. You can't just go do the right deals because the fees will get eaten away by the more senior partners.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tricky. Oh, well, we'll bring it back. So Nate O' Brien says, why would I pay an American $100,000 a year when I can hire someone just as qualified in Argentina for a quarter of the price?

Okay, so Nate's smart, but when I. And, And I think this is generally a good take, I think more people need to be looking at, say, why not both? Yeah, why not both? I think the, My. The. My counterpoint to this is that I like working with Americans, like both recent immigrants, but also just in person. In person.

Working in person's great.

I like. I think that there's nothing that beats even what we have right now. Right. Which is you, me, and our vice president Ben in the same room in an office, making a wonderful media business. Right. You can't.

Generational.

Generational, wonderful media business. Very profitable. You can't. Sort of. There's no amount of awesome virtual employees that we could have that could recreate this feeling. Like you can't recreate it in Slack. So I just think part of the reason to pay a premium is so that you can all be in the same room together. And I think if you're operating a remote structure, then you really have to start questioning.

Yeah. You know what? The cure for male loneliness. It's paying $100,000 to an American.

Exactly.

To just hang out with you.

They have to be your friend, and.

Then they just have to, hey, you.

Want to grab lunch?

You have to be hanging out.

You got it.

Yeah. It's worth it. It's worth it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I do think there's Gonna be this. There. There will be this sort of cultural movement over the next 20 years where people are like, you know, first it was by American, then now it'll be like, hire American, like keep those jobs here.

Yeah, but I mean, yeah, I mean, realistically, you need. You need both, but yeah, I like that take. That's good. Cheers to Nate. Back to Will. Will says work dinner should be illegal. They rob you from your family. You pretend to enjoy drinking with strangers, get home late and feel horrible the next day. Work breakfasts are aristocratic. Separate lazy boys from. From early to rise men. Feel great when you get to work early. Easily expensable. It's a great take.

Great take, great take. I do feel like that about the only time you should be having a work dinner is if you're closing a deal.

Yep.

Like funds wired. Everything's.

Yeah. It's a closing dinner.

It's a celebratory. Right.

Yeah.

Doing a work, work dinner just to.

Get to know somebody just to get.

To know somebody is a waste of time. I always suggest lunch. I don't really like doing coffees that much because I, I know the schedule. I want to have caffeine on and I don't want to like plan meetings around that.

Yeah. This is my hot take against the 9, 9, 6 thing. I'm all for working 100 hours a week, but I think you should work 6, 6, 6. Almost. That's a little demonic. But I think you should not be working 9am to 9pmyou should be working 6am or 5am to 5pm get home, have dinner with the family. Because then if you wake up at five, you can hit the gym, you can go to a work breakfast, you can have a full eight hours in the office.

We do.

Then you can get home with a family, have dinner and play, watch movies, do all the things that you want to do with your family.

Yeah.

That early morning right before 9am it's really hard to have like true engagement with the family in the way that you can at dinner. You go out to dinner, you can cook. There's a lot of.

We do the things Hormozi, you know, method, which is work first. No, nine. No, nine, five, seven.

Okay.

Nine to five, seven days a week.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah.

So you can have the morning moment with your kids, you can have dinner, but you're. You're doing eight hours a day, every single day, which is much better than five days a week. Doing 12, you know, hours a day. You actually get more done doing the 9, 5, 7.

Yep. I like that they should ban work dinners easily doable on on ramp. Just ban any. No expensing after 5pm and unlimited before hopefully it gets implemented. Let's go to Ryan. I think it's pronounced Macintosh. Is that right? It's spelled a little bit different than Macintosh, but ryan says the DocuSign all hands and posts the dune photo which I love.

It's pretty. Seemingly pretty accurate. How do they.

What the funny thing, I've literally made this exact same joke about the A16Z. All hands.

Yeah.

With a massive best pitch.

The full partnership.

It's huge. You barely fit in the boardroom. Yeah, no, but, but man, the DoConnect thing like 5k likes, it's just constant banger. Everyone knows every time.

Yeah. Hey, if you're an up and coming poster and you and you've been struggling to get hits.

Yeah, this is.

Post a DocuSign thing.

Yeah, this is the modern like you know how people used to post the two factor authentication screenshot from Apple. They're like this is the best feature Apple's ever made and it would go viral every single time.

So here's, here's the real alpha. So. Taylor Lorenz.

Yeah.

When you listen to this, if you want to, you know, sort of regain and sort of like sort of an olive branch to the tech community is to go and get hired by DocuSign and get pictures at their next all hands. Because that would be an amazing. Taylor investigative journalism behind the scenesign. And what if it is like this? I could see it being like that. They're like, hey guys, we're going over to the Giants stadium for the all hands. Like the buses are, you know, and she's on the bus like Project Veritas style. I love that.

Project Veritas. Yeah. We definitely need the information to do Project Veritas for DocuSign.

What's going on?

What if it's all just like the most cracked engineers you've ever seen? They don't have a single salesperson. They're just building the most deep tech they've implemented. They've built their own kernel, their own operating system.

DocuSign's awesome.

What if they have custom silicon for signing?

I bet they do.

All the way down. Google has the TPU DocuSign.

I think they need a DocuSign should.

Add the DocuSign processing unit.

DocuSign should add autonomous drones that take off from these sort of centralized places. They need a human robotic film film. You signing it.

Yep.

Or they have a little printer that like prints it out.

Yeah, well, if you need a notary, you need a notary in person. What if you could have a humanoid robotic robot come to your house when you're signing the mortgage papers? The humanoid robot is acting as the, as the, whatever they call it.

The I want a dog. I want a dog notary.

Yeah, exactly. Notary. Yeah. Let's go to Bobby. Good latte. He says success should be celebrated in tech, not demonized. I want to see more startup founders looking like this post exit not apologizing. And it's Elon Musk with his McLaren F1.

Okay. Two things. One, Bobby, is this authentically?

Yeah.

I was walking up to Fina.

Yep.

For Hereticon. I see a fantastic blue Ferrari. Yeah. Sort of really nice metallic blue. I don't know the exact color code, but fantastic. Ferrari pulls up valet.

Yours was red or black?

Mine was gray.

Gray.

Okay.

Subtle.

A little more subtle. Yeah.

It was a day.

It was a daily.

You gotta go red with the Ferrari 458.

No, no, no.

What was his.

His was. Yeah, no, his was a 458. I think he'll correct us in the comments, but no, but Bobby's living the brand. He's sort of, you know, being a real leader here.

Yep.

I think one of the challenges and the reason that supercars haven't become more popular in, you know, Silicon Valley is that it's. You just can't street park a McLaren or a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or a Bentley.

And you're going to like coffee shops.

To meet tan San Francisco. You're going to be able to street park, you know, an Enzo street park a la Ferrari. Street park your P1.

Yep.

And that's something that, you know, Sam Altman and Elon and Gary can agree on and so they can all kind of like come together because we need safer streets in San Francisco.

I mean they also need to street parks, streets and make sure there's no potholes because you're driving a P1G.

That's why the G Wagon is such a popular car in Los Angeles is the streets are actually so bad you need you to need. Need something that's four wheel drive. You need good sort of like.

Yeah, perfect pavement for the sports cars. But yeah, I mean there is this interesting thing where yeah, it became this like status symbol to say, oh, I drive a Prius or whatever. But I think people realize that like the flashy cars, you know, I hope that people can realize that. It's not like if you are an engineer and you respect engineering and you Made money in technology. It's okay to respect the engineering of a car.

Yeah. Appreciate it.

To appreciate something that's like, that's, that's like beautifully made.

Yeah.

Like after Atomic Murray car, it's like, it's, it's, it's incredible. It's like it's iconic. And there's so much to, to love about this. You know, the McLaren P1 or the, the F1, they, they wanted to reduce weight so much that the CD changer in the front trunk, they made special magnets for it to spin to just to save like 50 grams from the CD changer.

Yeah.

They didn't take the six disc CD changer out of the car.

And how, as a technologist, how can you not appreciate that?

Yeah. Yeah. So here's the gotcha.

So everybody would, everybody likes to say, you know, Sam Altman had this thing if he didn't own Equity and OpenAI and all this stuff.

The bull case was always the car collection.

But he, they would always post pictures with him and his car collection and say, see, he does love money. Look at him driving this P1 or all these other cars. It wasn't about the, was never about money. It was about built, you know, experiencing beautiful products. And that's why people don't realize about buying a supercar. You're buying a, a potentially daily experience with a. One of one products. Excellent. So if we want Sam to build safe AGI, you know, supercars are a perfect example of that. They go through rigorous safety testing to build this incredibly high performing vehicle. And we want anybody building AI to be experiencing a supercar.

Right.

Because it's, it's a good parallel for sort of AI safety. And you can have performance and safety at the same time.

Yeah. It's very hard to imagine like living on the power law and driving a power law outcome without enjoying and respecting power law outcomes everywhere. And there's no car that's more of a power law outcome than McLaren.

I want to see the average YC founder leaving Uber or Meta, joining YC and sleeping in their supercar outside of the YC offices. Right.

This is what they say.

You can't.

You can sleep in GT3RS, but you can't race a house.

Exactly. We know this. Yeah.

Founders get supercars. Please, I'm begging you. So this is a reaction from Sophie NetCapGirl to a post by Dakash Gupta. He says, recently I started telling candidates right in the first interview that Greptile offers no work life balance. Typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later. And we work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays. And Sophie says posting stuff like this is so cringe. It's fine to have a culture that self selects for people that will put in long hours. You want people committed to the mission, especially in the early days of a startup. But posting about it is just status signaling, grind, set, hustle thing. What do you think?

Yeah, I've never known somebody that posts about how hard they work, that actually genuinely works hard. And so except for us. But yeah, yeah, but, but yeah, we feel that's a part of our mission to promote hard work. But yeah, ultimately the people that work the hardest are not tweeting about it. They're not posting on LinkedIn, they're not doing that. They're legitimately working really hard. And if you ask them about their schedule, they'll tell you, oh, I do 996, I do 9, 5, 7, whatever their schedule is. But yeah, Elon, when pressed on, tell us about your schedule. You're doing all these things, right? He'll say, oh, Yeah, I work 20 hours a day, seven days a week. But he's not out there. Like, just logged another 20 hours. Like, he's a top poster in the world. And he's not being like, just log 20 hours. Here's a link to our SpaceX job board. Don't apply if you're not. So I think, yeah, I think Sophie's right. It's a way to get attention. Maybe that, maybe that'll, maybe that'll work well. But I don't think it should be coming from. I think that's the kind of thing you want. If you do an interview with a candidate and you're like, this person's great. You pass them to your CTO to interview next. And that engineer wants to ask the CTO what's the work schedule? They can be like, oh, we work really long hours. People are online constantly. But it shouldn't be the CEO leading it. Being like, just so you know, like, to somebody who's like, the candidates, like, dude, this is one out of 30 interviews I'm doing. And like, I don't even really want to join your company. And now you're telling me, like, don't join if you're not. It's just gonna like, yeah.

Also, I mean, the timing on this stuff is like super important. Like a few years ago when Google was like, well, there's 20% time and family leave and pet leave and bereavement leave and like a million reasons to take time off it was pretty countercultural to be like, hey, actually like our startup works pretty hard.

Yeah.

And that was novel. And that got a lot of attention for the right reasons because maybe there was something there. But then pretty quickly it became like, okay, now like it's kind of status quo. And if you're just jumping on this train right now.

Yeah.

It's like, it's like coming out and being like, I'm bravely anti dei.

Yeah. It's like, okay, yeah. So you're not coinbase. Good Google. Good Google story. So my little brother and my fraternity, he did an internship at Google in 2017 and I happened to be in the Valley working with a startup at that time. This was like a summer period. So it was like a four, three to four month internship. And he, by the end, his manager was like, Peter, I really like you, but you objectively have done no work. I don't know how I can sort of write a positive review. And Peter had, in the lead up to that, in the lead up to that summer, he had maxed out a bunch of credit cards to buy Ethereum and Bitcoin. And it absolutely paid off. He just became very wealthy because of it. And I'm sure if he's listening to this, I'm sure he's got his, whatever, Bitcoin ticker, Bitcoin ticker up and he's just still excited about it. But the guy just basically went so long crypto on credit cards that by the time he got to his Google internship he was just like, yeah, I'm like, like low key, like the wealthiest, wealthiest kid that I know. And, and, and so he would graciously have me over to work out in the gym. Great salmon dinners.

Fantastic.

And that was the only real like time that I spent at the Google offices. But it, yeah, it felt like, felt like a college where people were kind of like doing the bare minimum to actually like get by and just wanted to have fun and, and enjoy their, their time on campus.

Makes sense. Let's go to naval. He says good VCs should be their own media.

This is, this is a banger because yeah, naval is the master of taking something. That is why.

How to get rich without getting lucky.

Yeah.

Thread. Phenomenal. Got him on Joe Rogan.

Yeah.

Then Eric turned his, all of his tweets into a book.

Yep.

He's like phenomenal at this.

Yeah. But taking this sort of.

Yeah, but he's good at. So he's talking about this, but he's also lived it, which is great.

Yeah.

Yeah. So many other VCs have done this.

Well, yeah, I think Harry Stebbings. Yeah. Even the work that Eric did on the book. I think Naval's known for posting, being one of the top posters in the entire world in his own way. Right. He's very oriented around brevity and taking big ideas and putting them into whatever I can't see from here, but six or seven words.

Yeah.

But even the book, Eric's, you know, book Almanac over. Yeah, he. That turned him into a. He's a. One of. One of a handful of people that are true tech philosophers.

Yep.

And yeah, this is why I like.

Think about it, because I kind of knew Naval and the book was, you know, based on the tweets. And so I didn't think the book was going to be that big of a deal, but it was. It was huge. Huge. Translated into a lot of languages and really opened up the business.

This is why anybody that's. That's an LP out there should go and invest in Pat's fund. Right. Pat Blumenthal, incredible poster. You're sitting here like, whatever, 30 minutes ago saying, like, how does he keep coming up with this stuff? He's just like, and Pat will get more impressions in the next year than most GPS in the world combined.

And it just completely flips the model from like, okay, I need a horde of analysts cold calling companies to. They come to me.

Ventures all about likability and access. Right. And like likability, likability plus attention gets you that access. And founders want to take money from people that they like. So if you're a likable person, you should be doing more media, more posting more podcasts, etc.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Let's go to TJ Parker, former founder. Sold his company for a billion dollars, I believe to Amazon now at Matrix Ventures. Right.

Health, Health tech investor.

Health tech investor. Phenomenal car guy.

Great collector, fantastic collection.

Every time I post something stupid about cars, he always replies with some really good insight. I can bait him. I can bait him into telling me about.

So he's got. He's got the coolest car club in America.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

In Park City.

You've been.

I haven't.

We got to go.

At some point he's, you know, basically spent a bunch of money, a bunch of his own money, building out this incredible facility that's becoming the hub of car culture in, in Utah. And I think what he says he has, he had a take a while back that like, really resonated which is that Tesla should not be allowed to. To classify as a black car on Uber. Oh, yeah, because there's nothing worse than, like, paying to, like, get, like, a black car on Uber. And then this guy pulls up in a Model S and you're like, dude, like, give me a break. Like.

But here he says, my two cents. Don't bring your co founder slash team to an initial meeting with an investor. It's great to introduce them later in the process, but early on, it cripples your ability to build a relationship. If they're complaining about not being included, you can show them this tweet. It's so funny because this is clearly a subtweet where, yeah, him. He had some argument as an investor with a founder, and he brought the whole team and it was, like, a very messy conversation.

No, but sometimes this can be. This can create. Totally create. If you have two founders that are both people, people and, like, good at fundraising, it creates this dilemma where, oh, it's an important conversation. We should both be on it. And I 100% agree with this.

Yeah.

You can't. Two people cannot connect.

Yep.

Like, if we had a third person here that was constantly butting in, like, our rhythm would be totally thrown off. And yeah, I think that it's much. You're much better off. Take the first call solo. Take even a second call solo, as you actually build that relationship and that rapport and interest in partnering, then bring in the rest of the team. But it totally throws off the vibe.

Typically, like, the fact. And team are, like, operating. They have a ton of stuff to do. They don't need to take a bunch of intro meetings with a bunch of VCs.

No, it's a dumb question. It's a totally negative signal if somebody.

Is, oh, yeah, my CTO can totally be on 40 investor calls this week. Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

No way.

Yeah.

Good post back to Aaron. Slowed off. He says venture capital now. I just led a $50 million Series B into my fourth calendar scheduling app this year because their Zoom integration reduces meeting conflicts by 6%. The founder went to Stanford and worked at Stripe for eight months, so downside risk is basically zero. Plus, their deck had really clean margins. Venture capital in the 1600s, which is funny. Go so back.

Yeah.

So far back, I just funded an armed fleet to conquer the only islands in the world that grow nutmeg. If we seize their nutmeg trees and eliminate all competition, we'll make 60,000% returns and become more powerful than most European kingdoms combined. Man, this really resonated 14,000 likes.

Yeah. Venture capital is mainstream.

Venture capital is very mainstream. And I think everyone's dissatisfied with the risk that venture capitalists are taking these days. Too many.

Yeah. I mean, it wasn't the. Wasn't the first. There's. There's. Remind me of the power law, that book.

Yeah.

Especially talk about, like, whaling with some of the first.

Yeah, whaling. You. You'd pay literally be like, to go.

Out, here's the ship, here's a captain, here's a team.

Most likely it's not coming back, but if it does, you're rich.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That and that. The carry model emerged from that. That.

I think so. Yeah. That's amazing, essentially.

Yeah, amazing.

And you need a management fee up every time.

Every time you get a carry check. You know, think back into the 1600s.

Light up your whale oil lamp and.

Yeah, yeah, breathe it in, Breathe it in.

I was at a nuclear conference and I was talking to a guy who does, like, AI den. AI data center build outs, and he was talking about the importance of energy and just the fact that these AI.

Dude, we should make a. We should make a whale blubber candle to help VCs manifest carry checks.

Oh, that's good. I like that. Yeah, yeah.

Like a little circle set up where they can just sit in the middle of it and just like kind of breathe in the. Probably smells a little bit whale fat, but.

Yeah, but his. His. His joke was that. Was that, like, these. These hyperscalers are so dedicated to getting energy right now that they would burn whale oil if they had to because they just need energy and they'll just take it from wherever they can because it's such a race to get to the next. The next order of magnitude.

Yeah, we were talking about coal. You're not a serious AI founder if you're not, like, thinking about spinning up coal. Natural gas, natural gas, all this stuff. But whale blubber is the next frontier, and Nvidia is looking into this.

That unlocks the next scaling tier for sure.

Blubber. AI.

Blubber. AI. Okay, let's go to Bryce. He quote tweets David Phillips saying vacation for founders don't fix burnout. Address what's wrong? You'll feel better. And Bryce says you cannot vacation your way out of burnout. We already talked about this a little bit. Yeah, we talked about this. True vacations. I don't know. I'm not a fan.

Burnout is a symptom that what you're working on is not working. Yeah, like, it's Rare. Or you're having, like, massive people issues.

Yeah. I mean, Josh, compliment here. You can't even sabbatical your way out of it. Like, you have to be working on something that's more ikigai. More life's work.

More life's work. But also a lot of people are perfectly happy building a SaaS company, even if it's not their life's work.

Okay, then do they get burned out or not?

If customers love the product, they're growing month over month and they have a great team around them. Right. Because winning feels good. It's when you're not winning and you know you're not winning and you're just like getting. You're like chewing glass. Chewing 10 different types of glass.

Yeah.

And you know it. But your burnout usually comes from knowing you're in a bad situation and not doing anything about it.

Yeah. I wonder if you looked at like, the cases of burnout. How many examples can you find of someone burning out when growth rates are at all times high. All time highs.

Yeah. I think it seems like it's very. I think you get strung out.

Sure.

But that's very different.

But not burnout. Yeah, Burnouts. Where I was used to 200% growth, it's now at 30% and. And it takes me 10 times as long to get burnout.

Yeah, burnout's like losing conviction in what you're doing. Or. Or again, like if you're. If customers are churning non stop and you're not doing something to fix that, then you're gonna get burnt out.

I think the answer is just to. Yeah, change. Change what you're doing. Change. Like your, your main. If you're, if you're a meetings guy, switch to something else. If you're doing email constantly, switch to something else. Like jar yourself out of your power.

Yeah. But all of those are like more like exhaustion, which I think is different than burnout.

Okay, so how do you fix burnout?

What's the top way burnout comes when you're not delivering for shareholders?

Yeah. So I mean, the short answer.

Employees. Yeah. Start delivering. No, it really is like a fundamental.

Like, reframe on that.

Yeah. Like I'd love.

And it's going to be different for every business.

Yeah.

Okay.

Burnout. And again, like, this is not. When. When a founder that's building a great, a wonderful B2B SaaS company and they go do ayahuasca and then they come back and they're like, well, I don't want to work on this anymore. That's not burnout. That's mental illness.

Yep.

Self induced mental illness.

Yeah. Let's go to Delian. Delian says, In January of 2020, I decided to wear a MAGA hat in San Francisco every day for the full month. I remember him wearing it once. I don't. I didn't realize he did it every day.

Walking to every meeting, I felt that.

The country and my tech peers did not appreciate how the MAGA hat was a symbol of hope for the average working American, not a symbol of hate. Five years later, I rest my case. Fascinating. I mean, I remember the backlash to this was intense. Intense. Like a lot of people were really, really upset about this. And what's interesting is that it was in some ways more controversial than Peter donating to Trump and speaking at the convention because the hat was more visceral of a symbol and it had been so, so controversial. But wow, what an arc to come back from. Fascinating.

Yeah. The whole Delian should frame this seriously. Put it in the Founders Fund office purely as being willing to look stupid or silly.

Brother of the week candidate there.

Brother of the week candidate for sure. He deserves a plaque for that because yeah, it was. The hate was very real. I guarantee you. He had thousands of messages being like, like, you're an idiot.

And I don't even think he had that many supporters. It wasn't his. It wasn't as like, still very contrarian. This year is very consensus where if you came out, if you were just some random VC or founder, which Delian kind of was at the time, in 2020, I don't think he was a partner yet. And if you did that this cycle in 2024, you would immediately get like a quote tweet from like Elon and David Sacks being like, this is incredible. Welcome to the club. Like you're some. Like, it was a way to actually climb the status ranks in tech, which made it a little bit more memetic, a little bit less contrarian. It was a lot less risky.

The least heretical people at Hereticon were wearing MAGA hats and Delian wasn't.

He was wearing a red hat. But it was make Founders Fund great again to play on it, you know? Yeah, yeah, kind of.

It was always grab someone's eye. A fresh MAGA hat.

Exactly.

Somebody like packed it up, put in their bag.

Yep.

Brought it to Hereticon, snuck it into Faina and then like took it off.

On the way out. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it really is fascinating that that position became basically consensus in tech. I was talking to somebody who was like, he was saying, like, I cannot believe this is somebody at FF who, you know, lived through the. The 2016 teal stuff, which was like. I mean, there were protesters outside of his house. It was insane. So many hit pieces. And he was just saying like, I cannot believe this was in the summer when everyone was like, pro Trump before Biden dropped out. And Kamala wasn't even like an idea yet. I cannot believe that Donald Trump is the current thing. And he really was. He became the current thing. It became like, everyone just needs to be like, yeah, rah, rah, rah. It's wild.

Speaking of contrarians.

Speaking of contrarians. Gauthier. I know how to pronounce his name right.

Yeah.

Now Gauthier says, Jarvis, buy $42 billion more Bitcoin. And it's Michael Saylor in the Iron man helmet, just so vindicated. This guy was seen as such a joke for so long.

And now and went and went on all like, my most. My memories of him are on these major.

Yep.

Trad media.

Yep.

TV shows. Just being like, yes, I bought 42 more. 42 more million dollars worth of Bitcoin.

That much. But.

Yeah, no, but I mean, he's like, he's gonna. He's. He's been. He was. He did something that he wasn't saying publicly because I don't think he could have. But it was a way that you could buy exposure to bitcoin without buying bitcoin in the public.

You know, it's so odd because there's Microstrategy, his company, which I think essentially trades at the book value of the bitcoin. Essentially, bitcoin goes up 10%. His stock is up 10%. I don't think they do a lot of other business now. It's mostly just a bitcoin holding company. But then there's also the Bitcoin ETF, Grayscale and a bunch of others. BlackRock has one. And then there's also. You could go and buy synthetic bitcoin on Robinhood, or you could buy real bitcoin on Coinbase, or you could self custody. And there's this wild gradient of, like, ways to get exposure to bitcoin. I think all of that has been a big piece of what's driven the bull run is just more and more people can.

Yeah. But a good example of like, he looked like an idiot for a long time and has been vindicated for real. Hats off.

For real. Okay, back to. Back to Nate o' Brien. He says one of the greatest threats to an Entrepreneur is when they find themselves in the 5 to 10 million dollar range of liquid assets, you lose your hunger, you get comfortable. It's a dangerous spot to be in.

So here's what I would do. And I replaced lever up. Yeah. Lever up. No, I mean if I was. Yeah. Risk it all so that you feel like you got it.

Step one is always lever up.

Yeah. Start trading options like aggressively. But no, I think my advice, they're.

Levering up where 5 to 10 million, like you could go and buy a hundred million dollar business. You could. And then you could just be the owner operator of a pretty large business. And maybe that's great. Maybe you take that to a billion, maybe that's how you get there. As opposed to what he's worried about is like, yeah, you buy a house and you wind up with all these costs and you're just like, oh yeah, like my, my life now just costs a million dollars a year. And so I'm not really growing or trying to anything bold.

Yeah. If I had a founder that, that pitched me for their seed stage company and they, and they were like, yeah, I've got about 10 million liquid, I would invest but I'd encourage them to give it away first because they're just not going to have that, you know, like the grind. They're not going to have that grind set. No, the, another counterpoint because I think that Nate is right, but the other point of view here is that I've seen founders that already have a certain amount of wealth be able to work on something for a long time and stay convicted in it without sort of worrying because they're not like the sort of, like they're not operating from fear, they're operating purely from winning.

Yep.

And the example is I think YC did an analysis on their portfolio and they found that founders that came from money had a higher likelihood of success, which you could attribute to, oh, their parents had connections and provided capital and resources and advice. But it also is that they just were. It's more in the state of when you have 10ish million liquid, you're kind of in the state of play where the stakes are lower. Right. Where you're just like, I'm just building this to win. I'm not doing it because I need it to pay my mortgage or I need it so that I can put my kids through college or whatever. So I actually think it can be. He's right. That it could be. Could decrease somebody's ability to really like grind. But it also could open them up to Be like, all I care about is winning. I'm going to win at all costs. I'm going to be willing to look stupid for some amount of time. So I think it can be a tool.

Yep, I like that. Your buddy Dylan says posts a screenshot. Netflix finally gives up on interactive shows, pivots to Gen AI for games. And Dylan says Netflix is ending its interactive equip interactive experiment. But I still believe the future of TV lies in content that you can engage with. We've seen it with HQ Trivia, Bandersnatch and to a certain extent Crypto the game. I think that was his company, right?

Yep.

Someone will do it at scale. My guess, live on screen betting while watching sports.

Yeah.

Oh, I like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so Dylan help build HQ trivia into a monster. Then he, I think he was at. Where was he at? He was at not Uber Eats, but he was at the one in LA Bastion's company.

Oh yeah, Postmates.

Postmates. And then he, after we had started doing some party round drops and getting some attention, he DM me and he was like, like this looks like as fun as it was at hq. Ends up joining the team. And then after after party round he ended up starting this interactive on chain crypto game that went super, super viral. And within six, he didn't raise any money within six months, sold it to Uniswap. So he's over at Uniswap now but super, super smart around media. And honestly, it's kind of insane that there hasn't been an HQ like a phenomena like hq. That's since hq, right. You can't really think of Clubhouse a little bit Clubhouse. But that was like not. That was social media.

Yep.

HQ is entertainment.

Entertainment game.

And it was something that even your, you know, your mom or your aunt or your uncle or whatever would be messaging you about and playing. And it was like really in the zeitgeist.

Should we talk about bet on love or is that too much Alpha?

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think I brought it, I brought it up, up to Dylan because I was like, you should, you should do this.

So yeah, Jordan and I had an idea. So Dylan's betting on the winner in this interactive entertainment at scale being live on screen betting while watching sports, which is already kind of happening with second screening where you're watching a football game and you're on DraftKings or whatever the other one is to, you know, bet on the game while you're watching. But we, Jordan and I were talking about how way underrated is Maybe betting on something like the Bachelor. Yeah. Because there's a huge audience there. No one's really modernized that format. Like the. Like the classic game show has been kind of revitalized by. By Mr. Beast. But if you could have a, you know, a dating show where you can bet on who's gonna win, and it's all done via polymarket or something.

Not who's gonna win. I want bets. That's multiple opportunities to bet every single.

Yeah. Who's gonna get voted off this episode. Right. Who's gonna. Who's gonna get the first kiss or who's gonna get the rose or whatever the. Whatever happens. I think that that'd just be a very interesting, very different format. And maybe there's a money component. Maybe it's just like long term. There probably is like a financial betting. But even just more audience participation, more interaction that feels like the way things are going.

If there's one thing it's Americans love. One thing that's truly American is speculation. Right. Even coming to this country hundreds of years ago was speculation in itself. So it's core to our culture. If you're an entrepreneur that wants to build at the intersection of entertainment and speculation, make a reality TV show that you can bet on.

I love it. Let's go to Sarah Hess. She says startups at the Pentagon. I built a quantum AI autonomous drone. The Pentagon. Cool. Can it run on Windows XP and fit on a floppy disk?

Yeah, this is. Sarah's very sharp around this stuff. And I think more plugged into the defense world. Like actually plugged in. Not just from a venture capital standpoint.

Yeah. She worked in the, I think CIA.

Yeah. Now an investor. Classic pipeline. CIA to venture capital. You have to keep climbing the mountain.

The question I have about this is like, should we be putting this on the government or should we be putting this on fucking Microsoft? Like, Microsoft, like go in and pro bono get the government on the latest and greatest software. Like, just do whatever that work is instead of just continuing to start charge XP licenses. Like.

Yeah.

Like you have some sort of, like, moral duty. This is your way that you can give back even bigger than your ESG commitments. Just commit to. I mean, we joke about the ramp. Ramp, you know, thing. Like the government should run on Ramp, but, like, maybe it actually should.

Yeah.

And maybe that should be a lower margin piece of Ramp's business. But it's. It's how they actually wind up having a lot of impact.

Yeah.

And same thing with Microsoft. Like, get them off xp. Like, just go and do the work you have the engineers, you have a million engineers. Like go deploy them forward, deploy them and get, and get the, get the government on the latest and greatest.

Yeah, but Palantir, Anduril have done a ton of heavy lifting for all the startups now building in those categories because they've gotten the government on board with a lot of new technologies and done a lot of that heavy lifting. And the way they get paid back for it is the companies that don't quite make it but build some great technology will eventually get absorbed by Palantir and Anduril and then they get the benefit of all that sort of capex and investment and technology.

Yeah, Palantirs now they have the AIP program. Have you seen this? Where startups can build on top of the Palantir platform. So if you're building SaaS and there's going to be some really cool news about that, I was talking to the team so we'll cover that later this week when it goes live. But really, really bullish on that. I love the idea of Palantir being like this data layer that then other companies can come in and build stuff on because there's just so many like you talk to people who work for the government during like the Palantir story and a lot of them are like, oh yeah, like I always like loved the idea of Palantir but like my unit never got access to it. I actually never, I actually never interacted with Palantir while I was at NSA or CIA or DOD or whatever. And that shouldn't be the case. The case is probably just that Palantir doesn't have the bandwidth to build. Oh, procurement, all these different things. But, but like if you can create that abstraction layer and be like the Windows XP essentially, like that's really valuable.

Yeah. The market is, is clearly repricing Palantir right now.

Oh yeah, they just flipped.

They just flipped Lockheed Martin, which is crazy. But one reason for that is that they are now, they could effectively become own the app store for the DoD right. The Pentagon or the USG. Right. Where hey, if you want to build software and hardware and other products for the government, you need to build on Palantir.

And long term that's kind of the Android thesis as well with the Lattice software.

Totally.

Like all, everything that's equipment based will interface with this one thing and you could see them opening that up at some point to a cruise missile or some other company where maybe they don't, maybe they acquire it, maybe they partner with it. But like there's Some interaction. I was talking to the Anderil guys about the, the technology that is used for communication systems and they were just griping about like it, it makes like HTTP look like rocket science. Like it's like insane how legacy these things are just to like set up a communication line to like yeah, everybody, everybody like green light on. Like is the F35 still in the sky? Like that interaction is just like the most like outdated system built in the 70s and just maintained.

Yeah.

So yeah. Jacob Helberg writes, let that sink in. Palantir just flipped Lockheed Martin. And it's funny because just like a week ago I posted a screenshot that Sham Sankar, the CTO at Palantir created for his website about AIP and his second breakfast initiative. And it was the defense tech companies like Palantir relative to Lockheed based on employees and market cap and, and Palantir was like kind of middle of the pack. But when you looked at market cap to employees, Palantir is like a few thousand and the other primes have like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. And so it was impressive then, but now it's just going to be like Palantir is at the top. They have the most market cap and the least employees and like every metric is just the best. It's like total power law winner. And yeah, just really, really remarkable story. I mean like long grind. Like there was a time when Ballantir was I think like kind of hanging out in like the, the single digit to 10, 20 billion range for like a decade because they grew and they, and they got through like the, everybody's.

Saying, oh it's just consulting.

Yeah, just consulting is there's no real platform play there. And then the AI stuff happens. Happens and they actually have everything in.

Yeah.

And the other companies just can't compete because like they did the hard work first. Yeah. So yeah, super valuable congrats to everyone at pal.

And the culture there. Is the culture there still good. Is ridiculous.

Crazy. I mean we saw, we saw Eunice talking about like you know, no kipping pull ups like yeah, that. How do you keep that going 20 years in? That's crazy. You would think they would have evolved just to like a normie tech company.

Yeah. And all the, all the engineers that historically would have gone to Google and then just decided when Google with project maven decided to say we don't want this a part of our platform. Create an opportunity for Palantir to hover up. All those people that clearly care about the country and our patriots want to put Their skills to use.

Oh, this is a rough one. This might be the anti brother of the week. The wag of the finger. To Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia. He says he doesn't wear a watch and he has a very. You know, this is a 37 second clip from a interview that he did where he explains that he, you know, the most important time is right now. And so he doesn't need to wear a watch, but he's missing a critical thing, which is that a watch doesn't tell you the time of day, it tells you the time of your life, it tells you where you are not in the day, and it tells other.

People where you are in your life.

Exactly. And so I think we got it. We got to get this guy a hitter. Yeah, I think that's.

Yeah. You were talking about how Putin, whenever he does an interview, he places his watch on the table as a way to signal to the world what kind of man he is. If you weren't familiar with Putin, you're gonna see his watch and start to get an idea of who he is just by his timepiece.

I want to read more into that because I wonder if it's like, like almost like a threatening thing. He's like taking, you know, you take your watch off before you get in a fistfight.

Yeah.

And so he's taking his watch off. Wrap it around to like, be like, if this interview doesn't go well, like, I'm ready to fight almost. There's like a minute.

It's also a status thing, right?

It is, it is.

He's probably got one of the better watch collections. I think it might be the kind of thing in Russia where you want to have a nice watch collection if you're an oligarch, but you don't want to ever be. Have it. Be nicer than. Than the top dog.

Sure, sure. Someone who can challenge you.

Yeah. You don't want to challenge Putin's collection.

But you would think that. I mean, I feel like Jensen's like, you know, a hair's breadth away from becoming a watch guy. Like so much a leather jacket guy. Yeah. So much of what Nvidia does is precision manufacturing. And he should be able to research of a Vacheron, the work of a Patek, the work. The work of a ap. Like, he should be able to get into that. We saw Z Zuck did briefly and developed a great. A wonderful collection.

I'd like to see a one of one Nvidia GPU watch that you can see the intricate Detail of the GPU coming.

We gotta get that made and then we'll send it to him and then I'll come on the show. Yeah, but yeah, also, I mean he's famous for doing that jersey swap with Zuck. Do you remember that? Where Zuck was wearing some sort of like, like mountaineering coat, almost like very like puffy. And Jensen was wearing the leather, the iconic leather jacket. And they swapped jackets and took a picture. It was a jersey swap. Fantastic. I mean swapping watches, that would be very cool too. There's something there. But we'll get him soon. You can be redeemed, Jensen. It's within your abilities, I believe. So David Boskovic says I woke up in a cold sweat last night from a nightmare. I had spent all of our money on Google Ads in one day because I had accidentally removed the limit on my tri ramp card. Someone should figure out how to sell brand placement in dreams like this. It's a new.

Yeah, so I, I, I would wear one of those, I'd wear a wearable if it was going to project ads into my brain.

Yes, at while so you can make more educated decisions.

Yeah, exactly. I mean I'm, as a student, as a businessman, as a student of capitalism, I learn a lot from ads. I learn what's, you know, what, what's selling, what's not. I learned about my own taste. I learned about what I want to want to purchase. I learned about products and services I can, I can buy to help grow Technology Brothers. Right. And so if I could sit down right before bed and put on my little wearable and have it be projecting ads into my dreams, I would pay for that. Right. It's like that's why I pay, I pay for X. And the only downside of X premium is it actually shows less ads. Right?

Yeah, exactly.

Which is a big bummer.

But yeah, I can relate to that nightmare. And the Ramp team says our team is working hard to ensure your policy guardrails stay in place in your dreams.

There you go.

They hired a good person to run their social media. Say Taylor says you're not online enough. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Simple, simple. Yeah. I mean part of our, part of our work here at Technology Brothers is to, is to be almost like a brain rot shield for our audience. So if you're worried about spending too much time in the timeline, we basically are a layer over the timeline, extract surface the most relevant content and then provide hard hitting analysis on it. But, but it doesn't always have to.

Be that Way it can also be you're online for six hours, you have an actual extra three hours at the end of the day. Throw on technology brothers, you get another three hours of content.

Well here's the thing. Sometimes a founder will call me and they say like hey I'm having a rough day, this customer integration isn't going well or I'm having this issue with my head of engineering, whatever it is. And almost always I tell them drink 2 Celsius, have some, some Lucy or Excel and go sit outside ideally in the sun if it's, if it's daytime and just scroll. Like give yourself a couple hours to scroll and just don't stop. Right. I think all the feeds have gotten to the point where they're not. You're never really going to hit the end. I remember that was like a 2010s era social thing where it'd be like you've reached all the content. Right. But I haven't hit the end in a decade almost right. So go outside, get some sun, caffeine, nicotine and just scroll a little bit and I promise you like that sort of creative juices will start flowing your start getting into this sort of problem solving mentality and you'll make your life better.

So couldn't agree more. Andrew Ediger says first impression of my Daylight co the hype is justified. Shockingly responsive distractions non existent. Decent chance this becomes my primary work computer. Oh this is the high refresh rate E ink screen.

Yep Tablet I saw this. So yeah Andrew good buddy and was on my team party round. Phenomenal writer and works with a bunch of other startups now. So his primary work is meeting with companies that he works with through his agency words word sss.com and you know, so he's primarily interfacing with clients and writing and so Daylight computer is a really good product for that because it's a, a product that is, is trying to take all the advancements in computer technology that we have today but sort of like make it more analog so they eliminate color. They make it less basically less engaging overall so that in theory it helps you actually get more work done.

This is live like you can just go buy one of these.

Yeah so they've been, they've been working. Yeah I don't have mine but they don't one in this they they're working through like pre order list but they are delivering now I use the product.

It could never replace like this physical paper but I mean for that's what.

They'Re trying to do they're trying to kill. They're trying to take out big paper.

Good luck. Good luck, good luck.

A lot of.

Yeah, I use the product better chance taking down Apple on the iPad, but you're never taking this for my cold, dead hands.

Yeah.

Will you take my.

We'll cut down the trees ourselves if we have to. But no. I tried the Daylight for the first time. I think it was over like six or seven months ago.

Yeah.

And this is one of those things. Like a lot of the cool trends in technology now are sort of making stuff more analog, more retro mod. Retro as an example, which is nostalgic.

I like who knows if Daylight is like gonna be as big as Apple, but I'm so happy that it exists and I want it to be a great company and I think it's. It would probably be a fantastic.

Yeah, that was, that was the investment.

Make money.

That was the investment. Anjan, the founder, when I was talking to him, I kind of almost laughed when he told me the valuation.

Yeah.

But then he basically was like, look, like if we can become, if we can sell millions of devices, like this is going to be really cheap.

Right.

And I. And I think that with the sort of anti blue light movement, some other stuff like that, it has massive potential. So.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Great.

Shout out to Andrew and Anjan.

That's awesome. Let's go to Steven Simone says cheap drones aren't going out of style anytime soon. Thanks Wired, for covering Allen Control Systems. And Wired writes, the AI machine gun of the future is already here and it's some sort of machine gun mounted on the back of a truck.

Yeah.

So you know this company pretty well.

Yeah. So I am an advisor to acs. Yes. David Sachs, famous political podcaster, actually was, I think their first investor. He backed Steve's last company, I think it was. But yeah, Steve has been for the last like year and a half, two years building anti drone, anti drone gun turrets. So one of the big problems in modern warfare is you have this proliferation of really cheap drones that can just fly across the battlefield and just. And so they're very difficult to take out as a human because you're sort of aiming a gun. Shotguns aren't long enough range. Rifles is just too hard to hit things. And so ACS has built this phenomenal product that can take out drones fully autonomously. So this is, this is Terminator. Terminator's here. It's mounted to the back of a Toyota pickup truck in Texas right now on the testing ground. And they've Just made some like really incredible progress over the last year all the way to. There's some cool videos out there. They're public now, but you can see the ACS gun turret, like taking out drones. Taking out a bunch of Chinese drones, which is cool. Using them as target practice and yeah, they did. They did a demo day recently for a number of investors and I was joking with Steve about. It's pretty funny to think about like five VCs seeing the same awesome demo at this at the same time and like looking around being like, all right. Like it's. It's mono. E Mono.

Sharp elbows.

Sharp elbows. I mean Steve is so. Yeah, I mean Steve is. I think, I think he's that going to be. Look back, is that as the TK of defense. Like he's like one of one individual and built a ridiculous team and on a mission. So thank you to Steve for keeping us safe.

Yeah. Let's go to Zach says gamer is up next as a word to describe the obsessed. Notice a lot with runners, athletes who compete hard and smart gamers.

Gamers.

I like that there's a lot of gamer lingo that people that Gen Z is adopting like one I'm one shot.

Shot or like one shot it.

Yeah, we're one shot.

It is.

Is that concept taken out?

Yeah, I think we need to. So gamer. It's going to take me a little bit to work it in.

Yeah.

I, I understanding the definition, I identify. I'm a bit of a gamer. You're a gamer. Our VP Ben's a gamer. But. But yeah, I want to bring the 360no scope into the lingo.

Yeah. Somebody in a business context.

So if somebody likes like posts a banger tweet and then somebody in the comments section replies, I'm gonna sign up for your product right now and use it. That's almost like a 360no code. Because a good post is this sort of like elegant thing that's hard to do. You're, you know, doing a lot at once.

Are you familiar with the term pre made?

No.

So if you, if you go on like Counter Strike or Call of Duty and you're playing like the competitive modes like 5v5, 6v6, normally you just get matched with random people. So it's very hard to coordinate because like who's the sniper, who's the machine gunner, medic or whatever. But the way to really win is to make a quote unquote pre made where you and your boys all are in the lobby beforehand. And so you show up it's you. And everyone knows like okay, I'm gonna go left, you're gonna go right. And we're really good on the comms and we know not to fight and talk over each other. And you're going up against randoms. So if you have a pre made, you're locked in. And when I think about the teams that show up with startups like and raise 50 million. Yeah, like, like Anderil very much a pre made in the sense that you have Palmer but then you also have like three Palantir executives. It's like how is that not going to be successful? They really stack the deck in their favor. Right. So I'd like to see a company as a pre made.

I'd like to see company X accounts like start to use gg. So like Palmer, when ramp launch launches a bunch of new functionality, I want to see Brexit just reply to it and say gg, GG well played. Yeah, GG well played. And then they just delete their account.

Good luck. Have fun. Glhf. Yeah. I mean there's so much gamer lingo we can bring over and it's a, again it's like a way to signal like in group. So very valuable. Sam. Gersten Zhang. Gersten zhang says, Wow, a 16Z is hiring a full time person just to keep track of Carrie and it's a job for their internal HR team.

So this is awesome because it shows the evolution of venture capital.

Right.

It's becoming mainstream. It's. It's learning everything that traditional private equity Learned in the 90s. We're just relearning it just like cryptos, like speed running like financial regulation. So anyways, bullish, bullish for Andreessen. I can't wait for them to go public so that, so that everybody can, can own a piece of that monster. And I, to me the signal is like we're getting ready to go public. Right. Like it's one thing when it's just the GPS and they're sort of managing carry internally.

They have a cfo. They must, right?

Sure they do.

Must have a huge finance team.

Any, any multi billion dollar AUM fund without a CFO would be concerning.

Yeah. But like it's interesting that we don't know their cfo. Like we know some of their comms people like Mar.

Because that's why I'm ready for, I'm ready, ready for Andreessen earnings calls with the cfo. That's going to be. We're gonna have to do a live.

Stream for that Fantastic. I guess the question is, will the other funds go short? You know, Sequoia, they're set up to take long and short positions in the public market. What if they're like, you know what.

We open a big short position, we're short again just to try to attack the brand.

Exactly, exactly. Like Hindenburg research from Sequoia and be devastating.

Yeah, Sean would do that. Dark. Sean would do that.

Dark Sequoia. Love Sean. I think he's in the stack somewhere. Kate Clark tweets some personal news. Bloomberg hires Clark to cover VC and startups. So she was at the information.

She was at the information. So this is, this is why right now, you know, the technology publications, you got tmz, the information, you've got newcomer, new next generation.

They should have like a fantasy sport, sports for tech journalism where you like build your team and where's the polymarket? Yeah, Polymarket, on the trades. And then there should definitely be like a draft day where you get the best posters and the information. Bloomberg, Forbes, they all have to, you know, they, they get rankings based on, you know, oh, they didn't get that many views last year that the top of the ranking, they get to pick the best posters.

Yeah, right.

So there should be a draft day. There should be fantasy. You should be able to build a team and, and ultimately bet on this. You should be able to gamble on it.

Yeah. And you see like, you know, Kara Swisher has had a very antagonistic relationship with the technology industry. And I think one of the reasons is she watched all of her peers at the time become wealthy. So this competition within different, you know, media companies for tech journalists is actually good. They're all going to make more money. I think I saw newcomers paying like 300, 350K to hire journalists. You know, I would expect Kate Clark is, is, you know, this, I would expect this is like a seven, seven figure contract over four years. You know, it's not NBA money yet.

Yeah. But I mean, pretty soon we're going to start seeing the 360 deals, the sponsorships, like, you know, what kind of jersey are they wearing if they go to a conference, you know, if they're going to be on Emily Chang's the circuit, throw some logos on that shirt or that blouse.

But yeah, I think journalists have. We think of these media companies as these sort of big brands that carry a lot of weight.

Yep.

But like it's, it's Bloomberg. Yeah, Bloomberg, Bloomberg is gonna become much more relevant because Kate actually gets scoops.

She does, she's very Good.

She, like, is not just like, you know, using chat GPT to summarize what someone else talked about online.

No, she trades information. Yeah, I'm excited for the shoe deals. I want to see like, you know, Laura Piano or something. Be like, oh, yeah, yeah, you got an exclusive deal with this person. When you see them on cnbc, squawk box like, oh, yeah, they're repping our gear. Yeah, be great. Ayush writes new founder KPI dropped testosterone level. The average YC founder seed stage is 344 nanograms per deciliter. Yours truly, 727 nanograms per deciliter. And did you see this underlying. I. I know the guy who did it.

Yeah.

I think his name is Michael. And Yeah, so that's, that's really low.

Yeah, I think so. Here's what we got to look into. One, not surprised that Ayush has such high tea. It's probably why he's had some. Some a little bit of controversy. But like, the guys online constantly is grinding. His entire team is grinding. He's like, extremely smart and very just like hard working. And that's probably because where his T levels are at. But we gotta go to Y Combinator, do some investigative journalism ourselves because I would guess that they're handing out a little bit too much plastic bottled water. Because how else can you explain 330 average? That's the positive thing, though, is that.

Those YC dinners should just be T bone steaks.

Yeah, no water.

No water.

Even though water's lindy.

Yeah.

But yeah, the positive thing from, from that study, though, is that it seemed like the, the more venture capital the founders raised, the higher their T levels were.

Yes, yes.

And so I think that's a positive trend, which tells me. And why Combinator should just invest more money in. Because there could be. It actually could be that more venture capital is actually just pulling up their testosterone levels. So they have so many unicorns in a batch, they should probably just start, like, investing real size, you know, like make the entry check $10 million.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a million ways to upregulate T and they get a new trend. It's not the all birds, I'll tell you that. Justine Moore Venture Twins says new A16Z investment thesis Aix Parenting Raising Kids is one of our most challenging and important jobs. Every parent needs support sometimes, but many can't access it because it's too expensive or inaccessible. AI changes this, what we're seeing. And then there's a market map.

Okay, so Two reasons that I think this is smart. One, audio is a fantastic interface for kids.

Yep.

Because parents don't want their kids on screens. I got this thing for my son called a yoto.

I have one, I set one.

It's honestly it. Honestly, my son locks in.

Yeah. Like he puts on something and then he goes and reads books and stuff and just plays with Legos. And he has all these custom cards. You can download any music and put it on a custom card.

It's so good. It's so great. So anyways, for parents, like even 20 minutes of time where their kid is doing something solo is massively valuable. So parents will spend a lot of money for something like this. In general, parents will pay for anything educational pretty quickly for their kids. And then the other thing is, audio to date has not been the best interface for adults because we're adhd. We, we need things that are kind of like moving faster than audio typically provides. But for kids, it's just absolutely fantastic. And so what I've wanted to see is something like what avi's doing for friend, but for kids. Because if you give kids this digital companion that has certain guardrails that can talk with them, that can teach them things that they can ask questions to. I would love to back a company that's doing that specifically. I think there's been some toy companies that are integrating LLMs, which is cool, but. But yeah, like a little pendant type thing that has a speaker on it.

Or even just a robot dog that follows you around. But you can also ask it, what's that?

Unitree. Unitree Robotics, Boston Dynamics. I want a robot dog that I can strap an AR to that has a like, you know, speaker, a polycom attached to it so I can talk to my kid and the dog just protects the kid and hangs out. It's their best friend, Man's best friend.

It's great.

It's got an AR on it. I love it. And that's great.

Anyway, so let's go to Andrea D. Huberwoman, PhD. She says YC should add some cute ladies to the workplace purely for the sake of their founders. Low T levels, of course. We're back on T levels at yc.

Back on T levels at yc.

This is funny because, you know, Y Combinator has been criticized a lot for not having enough women in the cohorts. But yeah, maybe this is like now a right wing critique of the lack of feminine energy at yc.

Yeah, I genuinely. So that the issue is YC is fully remote now.

Oh, no, I think they went back in person.

Really?

Yeah.

Back in person. Okay.

That was just during the COVID years.

Oh, but, but do they actually have like an.

You can't work from there every day.

Yeah.

But you can go in for dinners and office hours. So.

Yeah, I think this is probably they're. What they're dealing with is not just like a small issue. Like it's an epidemic. Right. I would, I would imagine that some founders are going to start not applying for YC because they have high T and they, one, don't want to be around men with low T because it's just a drag. Right. And two, they're worried if they join, their T is going to drop dramatically.

Sure. Or that they'll be.

So they need, they need to not. It's not like, oh, adding secretaries is one approach. Removing plastic, bottled water is another. But they needed. They need to try like 20 things at once and see what sticks.

Ensemble stick.

It's gonna. That is. YC is one of the greatest institutions to be created within Silicon Valley in the last. Whatever is it. It's almost 20 or 20ish years now. They gotta save. And I think Gary will. I think Gary will get on it.

Do you know this Congressman Waltz? Do you know this guy? I feel like we had him in here previously. This is funny because it's like a very Twitter native format, but it's from an official congressman's press Twitter. And so it says, walt, how much do you think the Air Force pays for this bag of bushings? USAF Secretary Kendall? I don't know, Congressman Walt says $90,000. So we've run into these again and again. There's just so many things.

First there was soap dispensers. That exit's called out.

Yep.

Now it's bushings.

Yep. But it's also the seat belts on the planes, the urinals, all these different things. They're all way.

And this is why Kimmy. This is why Kimia's company is going to rip. Is because we're going to introduce competition into the bushings market.

Yeah. But look at this. I mean, he has, you know, one clip essentially from C span. It's a one minute clip and it has 2 million views. Like what? What? This is just the native. The, the poster native congressman or politician, just going direct and using the correct format and not just saying, hey, I put a press release. Go to this link. It's like I'm, I'm articulating the problem and I'm showing you evidence that I'm.

Talking about he just mogged the secretary.

Yeah, it's wild. Hopefully it comes down. Need commercial off the shelf. Cots versus Gotts, baby.

Versus Gotts.

Let's go. Oh, here's Sean. This is a great one. So, Sean, so Elon Musk, you know, on the election night, I believe says all time high usage of this platform and it looks like global user seconds was over 400 billion on the election night. And Sean says we at Sequoia invested $800 million into the X Take Private. We were ridiculed for two years for it. But I'm confident we'll get the last laugh. Never bet against Elon.

Yep.

And he was getting dunked on a little, a little bit about this because, like, I guess the stock is down in like private markets. But I think he's right. I think, I think never bet against Elon. I think the. I think Elon Inc. Yeah.

And they're investing on valuable. They're a venture capital firm. They care about.

Yeah.

Sean cares about what the position is going to look like in 10 years.

And it's right now there's such a company.

Yeah. And right now there's so much momentum.

Yeah.

That I would be willing to bet my house that they'll make money on this investment in 10 years.

It's almost like there's a refounding of the company over there because I remember when.

Totally. And that was why we talked about the rebrand going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the rebrand was refounding. And it's actually like they're going through the whole cycle that Twitter went through again, but with just like a completely new open book for monetization and. Because when, when, when Elon bought it, I was like, you know, like, there's a lot of people that are like leaving. But this makes me more bullish than ever on. This is the best place to be if you're in tech.

Yeah. Let's go check in with all the journalists that posted their blue sky links.

Yeah, it's fine. They might be doing well over there. I know that the numbers on threads are fine, but it's not the most important place to be if you're in tech. And tech is always ahead of everything else. And so over time we'll go through the same cycle.

Dan Loeb is not on threads ratioing people twice a day.

And so as long as like the most high signal, most valuable alpha is there, they can kind of climb up the ranking again of like everyone has to be on there because that's where the conversation is happening.

Yeah. And the ads, the ads and the ads platform will get. Yeah.

All sorts of different things but they're getting more money for sure. Like yeah, they're.

And especially Mark was tweeting out basically calling out all the advertisers that sort of worked collectively to boycott X and basically saying that I think a lot of those advertisers will start to come back because they realize that what they're doing is not only sort of short sighted but potentially even illegal.

Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting because the, the cost base for X has gotten so low that if they can get the revenue side anywhere near back to what it was.

Yeah, it'll just be super profitable. Yeah.

Like they could be doing especially with the net and trade at 20x or something 10x. Like that's not that crazy to imagine.

Yeah. One of my, one of my, one of my former employees, close friend just had a bunch of different offers from every sort of like mag7 type company and he chose.

I know a lot of people like that.

The reason to be bullish, Sean is bullish is that and the whole election and everything like that is the talent. The talent magnet is real. The smartest people that aspire that want to work under a leader like Elon are going to there.

Let's go. Shield Monot says a lot of fintech shit codes that went public in the ZER era and were completely left for dead are quietly having monster years, many up 600%. And he cites Dave Inc. Which is up 600%. Ne Bank Root Inc. Clover Health Investments Corp. And Blend Labs. I actually know the founder of Dave and yeah rough go of it when they spacked and it went way down.

And SOFI is ripping as well.

Yeah, it's amazing. I'm really, I'm really happy for these folks that that sparked at the wrong time and just had like a rough go but stuck with it. That's a great, great.

It'll be interesting to see if SOFI ends up finding.

Yeah.

Finding its way and then Chamath will be able to say like look, if you just invested in all my spacs.

I did well on average.

Yeah, you did well.

Right. I, I talked to somebody who spacked and said that like he did it post zerp but what he did was he on day one he immediately unlocked all the investors and the founders had like a three year lockup and so that created like a ton of downward pressure on the stock. Immediately got it out of the way but. But yeah, got it out of the way and there was never this like you know, weight hanging over the company. And they were able to essentially tell their VCs like, hey, we got your return. You can distribute and your LPs can sell today if they want. Yeah, you are like, we're clean of this and we're into the next phase. And it's like now we gotta be more popular as a public company. And a lot of these companies, it's like, yeah, they're, they're, they're public, they're building, they have the money, they're growing. And I mean I remember looking at Dave and being like, this is trading at like a third of book value or something. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they were trading for like $50 million and they had like 150 million in cash.

Yeah.

And I was just like, this is insane. Like, it was like, like the whole spac meme became so negative for a while that things really were clearly undervalued. So I fully anticipate SPACs will be back for certain companies pretty soon. Let's go to Jason Lemkin. He says no downturn or recession. At samsara at 1.3 billion. ARR. Klaviyo at 1 billion. GitLab at 730 million. Palantir 2.9 billion. Toast at 1.6. Datadog at 2.8. Confluent at 1 billion. Just a couple of examples. So there's just all these companies that are ripping, ripping, ripping and growing. ARRS 30%. Fantastic. It's so interesting. It's, I mean this is really a good tour of the fact that like this B2B SaaS turns out it's a good business. Yeah. And that there's not. Even though there are power law winners like the Salesforce or I guess Microsoft really it was such a huge market that there's multiple hundred million dollar companies, companies to build there. So really, really cool to see. And yeah, I mean I think we could see the same thing play out in defense. I think we can see the same thing play out in AI and I think that like, yeah, if your fund is set up to. You have to get the trillion dollar company. Yeah, go for that. That's great. That's awesome. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be, you know, the, the seventh biggest, you know, B2B SaaS company that's has a billion dollars in ARR. Growing 25%. Like I would happily be that company. That's great. Yeah, fantastic. Let's go to Zane. He says one of the best times in the history of humanity. It's one of the best times in the history of humanity to start a manufacturing company is likely right now.

So this, this guy's been sharing the gospel around manufacturing broadly, but also the fact that, that a lot of our onshore manufacturing is dependent on leaders that are at retirement age.

There's that factor. There's also the tariffs thing.

Tariffs are real.

There's also just a new boom in a whole bunch of things that require manufactured parts. Like if we really do go into the humanoid robotics era, that's like a million different motors, a million different batteries and control systems and like who's gonna manufacture the tibia for this thing? It's gonna be some aluminum rod.

Yeah. And the downstream effects of a company like Anduril over time having thousands and thousands of employees are that those thousands of employees experience all these small little pain points throughout different product cycles. And then they go out and say like okay, I made my money in tech but the next thing I'm doing is setting up this like small manufacturing shop outside of St. Louis and we're gonna make, make this widget and we're going to sell a lot of them and that's going to be really good for the country. It's going to be good for them financially. It's going to be good for the companies that depend on these sort of smaller scale manufacturers. Yeah.

I was at Andrew HQ last Friday and I was overhearing some like engineers have a little like little meeting and they're like, you know, somebody's like I'm willing to bet on it, like we need to make it 26 millimeters or something. I have no idea what they were talking about but like, you know. Yeah, they're like making these trade offs digits and, and yeah, I mean they're not going to be able to insource all of that. And then there's also just going to be the dividend of, of you know, manufacturing and hard tech outside of defense. I mean I think we talked about the impulse stove. It's like a hardware company. It's never going to be acquired by Anduril. But you know, we're going to get a new fridge company, we're going to get a new washing machine company.

There was a guy making wheelchairs.

Yeah, wheelchairs. Yeah, exactly. We're going to get all these different engineering, hard tech, manufacturing. It's going to be great. I'm really excited. Let's go to Clint Fiore. He says no income tax for the rest of your life. If you have birthed four or more children copying Hungary in America. And then he follows up upon further review and discussion with the commenters here. I'm editing this to be for the household income, not just the moms rewards homes where one spouse stays home with kids while other spouse works as well as ones returning to workforce. I would take it further, just no income tax, period.

Yeah, no, I think it's, I think it's a good incentive. I know a lot of people where kids are very expensive. Right?

Yeah.

For every. We look at everything in supercars. Right. So if I see a guy with 10 supercars, I'm like, okay, you could probably comfortably have five kids. Right. So with every, at least from like a carrying car cost standpoint. And so I know a lot of people that have two kids right now. And if you said have two more and you can not pay income tax again, they're going to run the numbers. They'll make a financial model and they'll see very quickly we should have those extra kids. One, kids bring joy, so that's like just value add. But two, if you can take that incremental income that's not being wasted through wasteful government spending on expensive bushings or $150,000 soap dispensers and invest that capital, it'll benefit them as well as the entire country.

So yeah, it's great. Super pro. Paul Bohm says, can Hollywood stop making slop now and then? Mopar says, no, you're gonna watch fast and the furious 45 and you're gonna love it. What do you think?

More or less? This was an election. So Paul's had some, some great ideas lately. This was post election response, maybe in response to wokeism being having peaked. But, but I don't know. I think like the problems in the movie entertainment industry are just so much bigger than, than politics.

There's also just this massive lag on productions because you need someone to start writing now and then that movie will get released in four years.

The good thing is I, I hit up a copywriter that I'd worked with in the past. I actually, I think we, we got some of her help on Excel.

Sure.

And I hit her up recently because somebody was looking for some copywriting support and she's like, I'm staffed on shows indefinitely. I don't, I don't have time.

Interesting.

I was like, that's good. We need more content.

Yeah, Yeah. I think the power loss stuff will still stay around. The Denis Villeneuve stuff.

Yeah, the. Yeah. I would argue that there's small groups that are making cool, impactful films. Right. Like, Civil War by A24 was a big idea. I think it flopped. But that wasn't slop. Right. It was a big effort.

And if you think about like 2040.

Dune is a good counter example of like, I actually Oppenheimer.

Like, like there's usually like one or two a year. There's just on one every month and.

Yeah, you know Barbie.

Yeah, which one?

Barbie.

Oh, Barbie. Yeah, Barbie was.

That was a big moment, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gladiator. Yeah, it's coming out. Good reviews so far. We gotta take the boys out. This is a note for all the listeners. Get your boys together and go to a movie. It's the best thing we've done in LA a few times. Dress up, dress up, have some drinks before, have some dinner after. It's just a fantastic time. It's a good excuse to get out of the. Out of the house. A lot of what I realized was that a lot of our friends are married and their wives are more into sports than the husbands because sports have just become really popular. And so if you say, hey, we're gonna go watch the Dodger game, well, like, everyone's gonna want to come, but, you know, very few wives want to go see the latest Jason Statham movie. So. Yeah, you know, yeah, it's an exciting.

Way to get boys together.

And it's. And it's not as hard of a sell as being like, we're gonna go get hammered and smoke cigars all night.

And boys, nights are a good way to counter burnout. Right? Because burnout is usually a symptom of something not working in your business. But if you hang out with your boys, they can help give you that clarity, gas you up, give you that extra conviction to keep pushing through it. So, yeah, one movie night could save your company.

That's great. Let's go to typed female Sam Altman. We are a few thousand days away from building God. We will build suns on Earth, unify physics, and resurrect the worthy dead. Gary Tan.

Also, we just bought chat.com.

Yeah, Gary Tan. Sounds like this will be really impactful for startups. Sam Altman. Definitely no better time to be a startup. I love this because Sam replied and was like, this is funny because it does seem like there's a little bit of like a tension there where it's like, okay, if we're going to get this, like, crazy future, like, maybe, like, how can we predict anything?

OpenAI is developer tooling at its core. Right? So if they do build God, like they built an API into also it's.

Just like startups are creation and so if the tools get better and better, like you would want to create, even if there is abundance, you would want to make something creative. And, and creating a company is like.

A. Yeah, I do feel like it's, it's. Now that we have intelligence as a service, it is difficult to predict, predict the future. Right. Especially with software and consumer products. I mean, whatever, seven years ago you were like, hey, I think smokeless tobacco, nicotine is going to be big. We should do this. And you turned out to be very correct. But it's harder to do that with software. I think it's becoming obvious, like you probably want network effects, you want some type of lock in, you don't want to build. Trying to rebuild Salesforce right now could be an amazing business for five years and then you get completely disrupted. Who knows?

Let's go to Keith Raboy. He says, should I post. This is post election reflecting on his, his posting strategy. And he runs a poll. Should I post more about health, fitness, music, venture capital or politics? And venture capital won handily with 62%.

Thank God. Thank God.

I disagree. I think, I think that posting about politics is, is actually great for VCs because you want to know what you're getting yourself into at the board dinner because it's all going to come out and the last thing you want is someone who has some crazy political ideology that you don't align with.

Yeah, but I feel like, but I feel like if Keith met somebody right now that had completely different political views than him and was like truly on the opposite end of the spectrum, he might be like, you know what, you crazy kid?

Like, give it a shot.

I'll give you a few million. Give it a shot.

I do appreciate that he's become like my de facto personal trainer because whenever I post on X about whatever workout I'm doing, he just immediately chimes in with feedback on how I could be doing better. I was like going for a one rep max today and he was like, you should try three rep maxes instead. I was like, oh, like clean and jerk is the best movement. And he was like, it's too hard on your tendons. He has a lot of whatever, whatever.

I don't know. I don't know though. With Keith, is it, is it his incredible spirit and sort of energy that that allows him to do these things or is it his health protocol? Right.

Which one's.

Which one is? Yeah, exactly. Right. Because I think a lot of people, if they followed his schedule yeah. Would collapse in like the fourth day. Right. And so who knows? Who knows?

Yeah. Well, we know step one is lever up.

Yeah.

So always Phil says working with a new client, a 17 year old founder, $10 million D2C brand. No Zoom calls, no in person meetings only meets over Black Ops 6 calls. If it can't be discussed over COD, it's too complicated. The workforce is changing. 2K likes. What do you think? 2K? This is something that's like amazing and could be the future or also could be like a harbinger of doom. And this kid could be like, I do think.

Yeah, I do think there's potential to be like, hey, let's move the water cooler. Talk to. To cod.

Yeah.

Whatever the video game is, you can.

Go play smash with your colleagues.

Yeah. Maybe Call of Duty is a new ping pong table. Right.

Where the modern for the game.

I do, I have had some breakthrough conversations actually. So this is crazy. So Soylent, when they move to downtown la, they opened up some, some desks for startups. And I was at. I don't know if we ever talked about this, but I was. You had left the company, but I had a desk there and they had fantastic ping pong tables I would use at least once a day.

Crush it.

So at first I was kind of thinking the COD thing was silly, but how different is it to play ping pong versus cod?

You know, one of my favorite pitches with a VC that I ever did was with Blake Robbins when he was at Benchmark. Yeah. And we played pubg together.

No way.

A battle royale game. And it was fascinating because it felt like the modern version of going golfing.

Yeah.

So we talk about business, talk about the business, talk about building companies. But then we're also on the same team in this like fight for survival. So Battle Royale, there's, I think we were playing duos, 150 people on the map. So there's 75 teams. And if you get shot, you go down, but you can be revived. And so there's always a question of are you going to be greedy or thirsty?

Yeah.

Another good gamer word to adopt being thirsty is when. Is when you, you know, get too hungry for the kill and you prioritize, you know, offense over defense. And so I noticed and what I really liked about him was that when I got downed, he would prioritize reviving me over like getting the extra kill, the glory. That's a vc.

That's a VC you want.

And I noticed myself thirsting all the time and being like, we lost Because I'm an idiot and I didn't play it right. But.

Well, that's why. That's why golf is actually genuinely really great way to get to know somebody, especially in a business context. Because if you're.

How do they handle.

Play 18 holes and you see like. Oh, like every fourth hole, he, like.

Under counts or throwing his club rage.

Yeah. Or getting pissed. Yeah.

Or. Yeah. Doing anything.

Or if they're too chill about it.

Like getting drunk on the golf course.

Or in the back nine.

Caddy girl or whatever.

Yeah. Back nine.

There's a lot of ways to expose the truth about someone through that. It's much better than just a coffee meeting, which is just vanilla.

Yeah. And you get to walk the whole time.

Yeah. I love it. So, yeah. Maybe COD is the future. Let's skip that. Man. Jarvis says, man, Trump really lucked out having an autistic billionaire randomly choose his election as his next object of fixation. Haha. And Elon respond 50k likes. And Elon responds with a crying emoji. And Jarvis just says, love you, King. So good.

Amazing.

So funny that he just. Elon just got obsessed with the show.

I can't believe this app is only $10 a month.

It's incredible. It's incredible, these interactions. This has always been the case. I remember, like, when I first got to Silicon Valley, getting online and just tweeting with, like, Sean Parker and. And who? Jim Breyer from Excel. They were. They were on stage and, like, they were posting about their, you know, investing initiatives. I was able to just be like a reply guy and, like, chat with them.

It's like, crazy, like, huge alpha and being a reply guy, basically.

Yeah. And it was super inspiring. At the time. I was like, okay, like, at least these guys give me the time of day. Like, they're not like, big dogging.

Yeah.

Which is awesome.

Yeah. So. So here's the thing. It was. It certainly was not random. Right.

Yeah.

Elon was absolutely snubbed by Biden.

Totally. Totally.

Who completely disrespected the biggest American manufacturer of EVs by not inviting Elon to meet with him and the government on the issue. Same thing in California. California. Like, basically made fun of him and told him to leave. Yeah. Message received. He. Everything we just saw over the past however many months was just a reaction to being disrespected.

Yep.

As a person, as a businessman. And it was almost a. With his level of ambition, it was something that he needed to do to reach his full potential because he's at a scale where what the government thinks about him and his businesses is probably more important than anything else.

Yep, that makes sense. Let's go to Jan Pelig. He says heard a leak from one of the frontier labs, not OpenAI, to be honest. They reached an unexpected huge wall of diminishing returns trying to brute force better results by training longer and using more and more data more severe than what is published previously. So the question is like, are we hitting a wall or are scaling laws going to hold?

Here's what I would say. 90% of Frontier AI labs quit right before they're about to make it big. Same thing in gambling.

Right.

90% of sports bettors quit right before they're about to hit that crazy parlay that.

Yeah.

And so my advice to this down more data, more energy.

Yep.

Get whale blubber as an energy source if you need it. Nuclear, coal, coal, wind, do it all.

Title, Solar. Title Everything.

Title Get. So here, here's lingering. Here's what AI AI Labs have not partnered with Soul Cycle yet to try to capture that energy.

Yeah, I mean, we've seen the Matrix, like put the people in the pod, use their energy source, they become batteries. The interesting thing here is it's really hard to evaluate this because OpenAI is the most well funded. And so they're the ones other than the hyperscalers. They're the ones that can actually go and build the gigawatt data center, which is a new thing that needs to be built. It physically needs to exist before you can do that training run. XAI is pretty far along. They're building like the largest cluster, so it's like you can't. I feel like it's really, really hard to evaluate. Is scaling holding without actually running the experiment of like, we built the thing and this was the result. And the fear is that you, you, you, yeah, you 10x the power, you 10x the training and the GPUs. But then IQ of these models goes from like 105 to 107. And it's like, that might be economically viable. Honestly, it might be better at whatever it does and it might be really, really valuable to do that. But it might just be like, okay, we're hitting really diminishing marginal returns and we're not going to get this super intelligence where it's like, oh yeah, just a couple orders of magnitude and then we'll be at 200 IQ. And that's something that like no one. I've never really seen anyone make a really great argument for. Like, clearly scaling is all you need and scale is really valuable. And scale improves the model. But what is the ratio between orders of magnitude in energy and data center size and actual real world applicability and iq? Like, what will it take? How many orders of magnitude to get to 150? No one really knows, I think, but we'll see. Let's go to Edmund. He says, does anyone ever think about how aesthetic it is that humans drink water to survive? Like this? Clear, zero calorie, smooth, liquid, pure, minimal, sleek. It's water. It's giving la mer. It's giving modernity. It's good design.

Water's Lindy. We have a lot of other alternatives.

Cheers.

Cheers. Thank you. To Rora. We have a lot of other alternatives, but. But we humans, we keep coming back to water. Yeah, there, there is only.

They could put caffeine in it.

There's that company Orca, right? Oh yeah, we gotta get some of that.

Yeah, yeah, we gotta try that demo that on the, on the, on the pod. It's great. Let's go to Cody Sanchez. She says, I don't want passive income. I want a empire.

Let's go, Cody.

Let's go, Cody. One of us, one of us.

One of us.

One of us.

Passive income isn't real.

Yeah, Fake.

If you're getting. You're buying a job getting income, there's some level of management opportunities with it. And even if you hire somebody to manage said income, like a CEO or an asset manager, things like that, you still have to manage that person.

And even if you have $100 million and you put it in government bonds and you're. And you're getting 3 million a year, it's like you will forever wonder like, could I be getting 10%?

Yeah. Active income. Active Nothing. Nothing hits like active income.

Active income.

Working, getting paid active.

We are proactive income.

No, nothing hits like working hard and then making a lot of money from it. It's like the greatest drug on earth.

Earth. So this is a great question. Adam Draper writes, where's the punk rock of the startup world right now? 12 years ago it was bitcoin. And Matt Crypto says it was just funny. It doesn't say crypto. He says longevity, which I somewhat buy. I would say that it's been the Gundo nuclear. The Gundo really was like very punk rock and very countercultural and very independent and very. Not an industry plant.

It's crazy that the Internet made it go mainstream very quickly. Very quickly.

It was one year of punk rock and now it's like they were getting.

A hit piece in like four months.

Yeah. No, no, no, hippie. It's just like puff piece, like puff piece after puffies. And now it's like everyone knows it and it's like okay, the game.

No, but they were at one point when there was some coverage happening. They, they were worried like it was going to be like pretty negative.

I do think, I do think longevity and bio could be next. I was talking to Sebastian Malabi, the, the author of Power Law and he was saying that the next big league like book he wants to write is about bio investors. Yeah. Because it's a very, very different model, very different world. But like maybe it could change with AI, maybe it can change with more financialization. But it is, it is a very like untapped world that totally is kind of early but clearly very promising. Let's go to Rajvir. He says on election day Kelshi outspent the Trump and Harris campaigns on Meta app. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is one crazy. I totally respect Kalshee taking, capturing the moment because their whole thing is much, it's much more about politics and polymarket. Polymark is markets for everything. Kalshee is much more focused on being the legal, quote unquote, legal way to bet on the election. So they should have spent millions and millions and they did. The funny thing though is they kept like congratulating themselves on hitting number one and all this stuff. And it reminded me of that meme where like it's like the guy like spraying champagne like in his own mouth and he's like third on the podium or whatever.

I think tweeted that.

So yeah, I think, yeah, we'll see what, what happens. Every company needs to continue to kind of reinvent themselves. I'm sure Kalshi will come back and, and kind of try to create like new markets and momentum. And maybe there's an argument that the way to do it is to, is to build a ton of momentum around specific markets, events whereas polymarkets more like platform style approach.

Yeah. This is a great one. Bill Gurley says stop using revenue multiples and you will have more clarity on valuations. And it's a reply to Jason Lemkin. For the math to pencil out in venture capital, we probably need a rebound in public multiples. VC probably can't make money at 5x ARR public comps with Harry Stebbings. It's so funny because Bill Gurley is just coming in like the boss.

Yeah, he's, he's kind of, he's, he's basically has the wisdom of Yoda now he's the only VC from that era that's still extremely online. Right. And he's able to just pop in and be like, use EBITDA multiple, my friend.

Oh, you think that's what he's saying?

That was the way I read it.

Is I thought it would just be like a more nuanced analysis of like team market structure, monopoly characteristics.

But over focus on any one metric is going to lead you astray.

Yeah. I mean, revenue multiple is really silly when you think about like all the other levers in a model. It's kind of crazy to lean on that, but yeah. Let's go to this quote tweet of Chamath Inglorious Capital says, thanks, Washington Post, but I only trust Autism Capital with my news is a serious tweet a billionaire just wrote.

So the crazy thing is how much impact this has. Wasn't that one account you said?

Yeah, Cremu. So he went from 70k followers to 200k followers off of this one tweet by Chamath. It was a very well written tweet. I canceled my New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions and just reallocated the money to subscribe and follow the following folks on X, who I believe help get me accurate news. And it was Autism Capital and then cremieu and then a bunch of other people. But what, what Rise of the poster. Yeah, and it's true. It's true. Like, you'll just get better.

That's why we cover the timeline instead of. We don't. We don't cover the news.

Yeah, we don't. Let's go to Joe Lonsdale. Roaring 20s Redux begins shortly. Jeff Lonsdale says, okay, but the PE ratio of the S&P 500 was around 9 to 11 in 1924 to 1925. Boo. I'm on Joe's team here.

Yeah, yeah, run it back, run it back.

Lonsdales, are they literally brothers or something?

They must be related.

Okay.

If they're not, they should, they should, they should partner up.

Who knows? But yeah, Joe, I, I, I, I'm very bullish on the 20s. I think it's great. I, I, I think we're getting there.

Yeah, yeah.

Beginning shorty.

I think the optimism that, that there's, there's obviously a massive amount of the animal spirits are back. There's a ton of optimism in the last week. In the tech world, that's great. But it actually began, and I swear it began like early in the 2000 and twenties. Right. There was obviously A lot of froth and bullshit around Covid and markets and stuff like that. But there was also the beginning of this whole movement of we're gonna make the world a better place, not just with software and apps, but with real world products.

Yeah, that's when a lot of stuff started. It's interesting. Yeah, there's also. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because like during the post ZURP crash and the recession, like, the fundamental economic drivers of the American economy were very strong. But if you asked people that consumer sentiment, they would all say, it's not working for me, it's not doing well. And so this was termed by Kyla Scanlon, like the vibe session. And there was this idea that like the vibes feel off even though we're not seeing like the American consumer collapse. And, and the American economy kept growing and we had a very brief recession. We never went into a depression. All the doomer stuff didn't come to. To bear. So there's something about the fact that like, we have a very solid foundation to build on right now.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Okay, let's pass that. Let's do. UC Berkeley's law school apparently had a course called called Elon Fought the Law. The law won on offer. Alas, it has since been canceled. That's so crazy that someone was going to teach a whole course on this and they're just like, it doesn't make sense anymore because he actually won.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. I wish we could see what date it was actually sent. It would be amazing if it was canceled last week.

I think it was. This looks recent. This looks a recent screenshot.

Spring 2025. Yes.

Right around the corner, planning it for spring and just canceled it. Crazy.

Yeah. I think the lesson here is he didn't try to fight the law directly, he fought it indirectly. Yeah, right.

Also a lot of things he won, like in the micro, like that Tesla shareholder lawsuit where the judge tried to take away his comp package, which all the shareholders had approved, where if he got the stock price to like an insane number, he would get a ton of shares. He did it, everyone was happy. But then like one shareholder fought and like the judge ruled with them, but then he went back to the shareholders and got it done.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with this because there aren't many examples.

Shout out to the shareholders.

Air Ls. It's very, very rare. Yeah. Shout out to the shareholders. Seriously. Let's go to Trent Griffin. I think he's like a Public markets analyst. He writes a lot. Gill. I see five layers of AI value. One, Nvidia and chips, two data centers, three models, four tools for deploying AI and five, workflow services. And I think he misses six, which is energy. Energy is like clearly the next thing. And it's been a little bit of a champagne or cocktail position in the sense that people talk about it at cocktail parties. Oh, energy is going to be really important. Sam Altman's investing in it, but the market hasn't really moved on it. But they're starting to. Right now. It's just starting.

Seven posters, Right. Without people like Rune and other top AI posters, almost none of this works. Right. Posters. Posters are moving the market.

I mean, in terms of AI value, there are legitimately dozens of people that are going to build million dollar businesses off of AI related content.

Yeah.

Whether it's YouTube videos or how to courses or podcasts. Like, like there are a number of AI podcasts that have gotten really big a lot. Gill has a great AI podcast. I mean he's monetizing it differently through a fund but like, nevertheless, like he is part of the AI value chain even as a capital allocator. Like it is interesting, but of course you got to boil it down. You don't want to go too complex. But, but that's, that's a fascinating tweet. Let's go to Scottie Pippen. I didn't even realize he was using X. That's amazing, Scotty. So Scottie Pippen writes, just woke up from a wild dream. Satoshi Nakamoto visited me and he laughed at the price of bitcoin. Too low, he said. I'm taking it higher. You haven't seen anything yet. Yet. Get ready. 2025 is going to be crazy.

I love this trend of athletes like retiring and then coming back to post because you can have a whole.

He still has jersey in the picture.

Yeah. It's amazing. You can have this whole cultural resurgence. Right. Because when people see Scottie Pippen in the feed, they're going to pay attention. Right.

It's great.

AB has done this, I think really well throughout the last whatever year as well. So yeah, bullish on Scotty and bitcoin.

Very bullish. Let's go to Nikita. Beer. I can't help but feel like we're about to enter one of the most insane times to own risk assets. And Amit replies. Is a Lambo a risk asset? And I hate to break it to you, bro, it's not. It's hard.

Stable, hard asset.

You Want to get into the.

As long as you don't put any too much mileage on it.

Yeah, but most lambos are depreciating. Very few maybe get a countach if you're looking for something, but even that's not a risk.

Yeah, I think Packy was saying something earlier as well as he's like, I feel very under allocated to tech and crypto, even though his. Aside from his media business is like probably 95% tech and crypto. So yeah, the FOMO is starting great time to own risk assets. Nikita also knows he can risk it all and worst case, he'll just build another app.

Did you. Did you see his other tweet about millionaires in the post zerp era are pointless? Being a centi millionaire is. Is what? And we're going to call them centis, which is very funny because, like, I mean, we know centaurs, we know a lot of centi millionaires, and that's not the word they use. Like, yeah, we all know the word that they use. It's not sentis. So he's kind of telling on himself that. That he doesn't know like the real word. Exactly. But hopefully he gets there. Hopefully he learns the real word. He's kind of acting like one of those guys that moves to San Francisco and San Fran. You know, you don't really sound like a real centi millionaire, but someone will clue you in.

I would.

Mike, I would caution you, if you're in Lake Como, don't drop senti, because you know George Clooney is going to spit out his screaming eagle if he hears you.

No, I would. I think Nikita should get on to really capture the long tail of his fans that can't afford intro.

Yep.

Create a copy trading subscription.

Oh, there you go.

Charge $10,000 a month.

There you go.

And. And some carry on it too, because I think he would have like, probably like 10,000 people that would be like, yeah, I'm going to YOLO with Nikita.

Hell yeah.

I'm riding.

I'm riding into the risk assets. And this is the one we got to close on. Jay Alto says, some creators do it for the clout. Some creators do it for the money, but this is why the real ones do it. And it's a clip of the founder of Patreon giving some long speech about.

Yeah, we don't need it.

Who cares? We do it for the money. We just want to be ultra clear about this. If you're listening, you're gonna hear a lot of ads and you're gonna hear a lot of monetization, so get ready. Buckle up. Lock in. Lever up. Welcome to technology, brothers. Thanks for listening.

I think we got to get on with Taipei.

I actually have to get to Las Vegas to meet with the new administration, as one does. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, everyone.

Good doing business with you.