The Switzerland of AI, Roblox Short Sale, Google's AI Podcast

Good. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we are talking about a number of news stories. The big one. Did you see the Switzerland of AI? Switzerland's like the neutral party in the financial sector. Like, they don't really take sides. Well, Malaysia has emerged as this neutral place where every company. Yeah, all the, all the AI companies are building data centers there because it's right next to Singapore, which is this massive trading hub, but then it's also independent between like China and America. They haven't picked aside, but because they're connected to Singapore, it's like very easy to get to. But then they also have the, like some of the largest concentration of undersea fiber cables. Beautiful. So it's just like, it's just like a huge, huge.

I want to go. I want to go scuba dive in Malaysia and dive to alongside the underground cable. Just like, sort of like, you know, like, you know those shots of scuba divers where they're like touching a whale? Like imagine like touching the underground cable. That would be information.

Super high.

Yeah. And just like downloading all that, like the power. Power.

Look at how close it is to Singapore. Johor, that's the spot.

Johor.

And so they know where we're going. They're like a couple years away from having the same amount of energy capacity as Northern Virginia, where like all the major AWS hubs are. And it's interesting because a lot of the reason why the data centers are being pushed overseas is because of the esg.

Yeah.

Things like a lot of the big tech companies, they made ESG commitments. Have you heard this? That Xai just didn't make any ESG commitments. So they're just burning coal to just pump energy into this latest training run. Yeah, very fascinating.

Whatever it takes. It's a war between good and evil.

I've talked to some AI founders who are like, kind of worried about the climate stuff, just the demand for coal. Yeah. Just because, like, there's just no way that we can ramp up everything else.

Even though that's, that's the irony of Elon, like being the dominant player in clean tech and then also burning potentially. Potentially.

Potentially. Yeah. People, like, looked at like the satellite images of like, what he's building and like, there's just not enough power from the grid there to do what he says he's going to do. So it's just like very clearly they're just going to, you know, set up as many generators as possible and then also pull from the grid and then also build solar, nuclear, like throw everything at it. Because it's like so important. It's like total land grab.

Somebody's got to do it.

Yeah. What else did you read in the Journal today?

Oh, in the Journal. Where to start, where to start?

I thought this article on the American guns that the Mexican cartels covet was interesting. Did you see this? Yeah, I don't actually know when this printed. I think this ran over the weekend. But apparently Mexico is engulfed in a wave of criminal violence and disputes between rival drug gangs and U.S. weapons are fueling the bloodbath. So there's just apparently like a group of US dudes who buy American weapons and then sell them overseas.

Well, you've seen the videos where it's a cartel and there's like, they do this sort of like show of force for the bosses who are usually nowhere near like the private armies. But I've seen videos where they're just like walking and there's just like a line of like paramilitary guys with the trucks that are like branded with the cartel. It's just like literally like you can walk and pass like 500 trucks, like, and it's all like.

It's like, it's like a North Korean or Chinese.

Yeah, they're like force. Yeah. It's like Ford Raptors that have like turrets on the top.

It really does seem like the cartel is like almost equal in power to the actual military at this point.

That's the biggest. That's the biggest. I don't actually think I end up watch. I end up putting on like YouTube to fall asleep. And I always have to put on something that's interesting but not really that relevant to my life. And so what I'll do is I'll put on this. There's this podcast that only goes like super. It's like a two hour podcast every time with like some journalist that's just been covering the cartels for 20 years.

Interesting.

And they just talk. It's basically like reality TV for cartel life. And so that's how I. For some reason it puts me to sleep and sort of like a calming like, you know, hearing about the rise and fall of these sort of drug lords is like relaxing to me.

Yeah.

And yeah, I mean the biggest headline is that I think in the last presidential election there was 37 candidates that were murdered. Assassinated in the lead up to the new president. That's so insane. And that's just, that's a little concerning, I think. It's totally. I don't think it gets enough attention just how out of control Mexico is. And they're a stone's throw away.

Yeah, I mean I have an employee who lives in Mexico and you know, he lives in like a safe neighborhood and it's fine, but it definitely seems like there's like, you know, a lot of conflict going on. The thing that blew me away about this article is that like I was expecting like okay, maybe AK47. You hear, you think like American guns that are fueling the Mexican cartel and you think like AR15, right? Yeah, maybe AK47. They start off with the minigun. The six barreled machine fed weapon can destroy a small car in minutes.

It's reserved profile, whoever the editor. Yeah, I don't think it's going to take minutes for a minigun.

It's like not everyone has the ability to use these sophisticated weapons. The Mexican military seized the first minigun from a crime scene in 2018, according to the military documents released by the nonprofit.

No, it's a status thing, just like a Patek is a status.

Well, they go into that. The Zapata El Jefe and El grito pistols are Colt 38 supers. And it's like having a scepter or a crown for a king. And so they actually have different weapons for specific tiers. So if you're the lowest ranking cartel member, you get the Beretta 22 pistol. If you're a little bit higher up you get the AK47, the goat's horn.

As they call it.

Rocket launchers, the M72 LAW anti tank rocket. It's like I don't understand how they get these. And they're saying that the whole point of this article is like these are American made weapons that are in the hands of Mexican cartels. But I can't get, I'm an American citizen, I can't get my hands on a minigun on a belt fed M249 SAW or rocket launcher or a rocket launcher. I mean maybe the Barrett. You can buy a Barrett, which is the armor piercing sniper rifle.

My neighbor's truck was recently stolen out of his driveway. It had the keys in the truck.

Maybe he needs a rocket launcher.

No, no, but the thing that was interesting is it was immediately driven to a harbor in Northern California and it was hours away from being shipped allegedly to Mexico. And so there's this whole. And it was like a blacked out Ford pickup truck. And it's just so easy to imagine that truck taking a relatively short trip down the coast, like pulling into a port in Mexico and being rebranded to. What is it? The CJ Ng cartel.

Well, were you the one that was telling me about the. There was some guy who had like a, you know, a window company and he had his, like, logo and brand on his truck. And then eventually he sold it and it wound up like in an ISIS video with like his brand and phone number on it because it just got sold or stolen.

Not all attention is good.

People probably know that he's not involved. But still very, very wild. And then they have something else here too. Yeah. The belt Fed saw is the prize weapon for top drug lords in Mexico. The weapon denotes status with the security details of Mexico's biggest drug lords wielding.

You know, it does feel like it's.

Like a Gucci bag. It's more of a way to recognize who's in charge of the cartel teams, who's the boss, who's the closest to leadership.

The new Hermes Kelly is a bolt fed.

I mean, this was the Barrett sniper rifle. I mean, just the fact that they're like, actually considering how do we take out vehicles is like, so next level compared to the crime that we see in America. Barretts are only assigned to mid level gang members, some trained in special combat. It's like they have their own SWAT teams, they have their own special forces in the cartel.

Yeah.

It's just so crazy.

Well, you, you know, about what is the. It's not El Mencho. Who's the guy? So there's this guy. This guy Ismael Zambada, otherwise known as El Mayo. And he allegedly was like a ghost for decades. But the theory is that he was the guy behind El Chapo. Like, El Chapo was sort of like the front man and got all the attention and all the, like, all the drama was always seemingly around El Chapo. But El Mayo was allegedly calling the shots the whole time. He was like, I believe he was an accountant prior to becoming, you know, a drug lord and. Or had some type of, you know, he was like the finance. He was like the cfo, basically. But the one that was actually calling the shots. The drama is that very recently, over the summer, he was flown over into, I believe it was El Paso with. And it was basically initiated by one of El Chapo's sons and basically like abducted him, like in Mexico, flown him over to El Paso. And the theory is that El Chapo's son was coordinating with American, like, drug enforcement groups. And so it's been sort of interesting, like, for me, as a spectator, to go from watching Netflix and watching Narcos, which is probably the last show that I watched, to completion on Netflix and YouTube has just sort of picked up all of that. So instead of watching, you know, this thing unfold, you know, that happened 20 years ago, you can now go on YouTube and like basically in real time cover the drama that's unfolding within the cartels. And there's this whole cottage industry of people that are basically small business owners, like media operators that are just like, have an entire career built around covering the cartels in real time, reporting on them and basically like reality tv. Interesting. And because of the emergence of the iPhone and cell phones in general, there's now like real time, relatively high quality video footage. Somebody sent me a very dark video of a cartel like ambush in like basically high definition where these five guys are sitting on a ridge line and they're just like watching their ops approach and they just straight up just kill them all. And they're all just filming it. Like they're all looking like full members of the military.

I mean, it's propaganda war as well. Like they want to appear strong in addition to being strong.

Yeah. And it's just wild. The state of.

Have you picked up on any riffs within the creator community? Like, is there someone who's like clearly.

More pro cartel or like maybe the information warfare?

Yeah, because that happens in like, I mean, if you look at, if you do like China research on YouTube, you will see occasionally there's an American who like goes over there and it's like very pro China. All of a sudden it's like, okay, like you're probably being paid.

Yeah. And there's the. The whole emergence of faceless YouTube channels has created this environment where it's a perfect battleground for information warfare because you can create this like clickbaity video that's like, here's why the United States should stay out of the South China sea. It's like 20 minutes of like pretty highly produced content that's fairly convincing. And then you look in the comment section, it's like, nice try CCP. It's like 300 likes. It's like the top comment. But then like half the people watching it are just like going off there. People don't realize that. I think it's like 50% of YouTube viewership is on TVs and it's not as comment oriented.

Yeah, not comment oriented or just auto play.

Next it's autoplay. So they're just like watching this and it's basically like television.

I mean, Netflix can be like that too. Wasn't there there was some like 911 conspiracy documentary that was on Netflix that was like, pretty debunked. And. And they will. Netflix will put stuff out that's about like Super Volcano. And it's like there's this weird, like, blend between like the, like, you know, UFO hunters, ghost hunters, like. Yeah, it's fun. And then it gets into like, okay, is this like propaganda? Is this like. Does this have an agenda behind it?

Total. I mean, there's a long history of information. Like people think about information warfare playing out through traditional, like print media, online media, you know, New York Times, etc. And there's decades and decades of evidence that various groups have go the length to get highly produced films made. Including the same group producing six different films just with that all have different takes and angles and like objectives just to make it super confused. Well, different target audiences and also to just make it super confusing.

Yeah.

And so that certainly is happening on legacy media with like films and documentaries, but is obviously happening on YouTube now. Anyways, back to. Not to get too far into the politics conspiracy lane, emerging cartel politics. But should we talk about some technology?

Yeah, let's do it.

Our favorite topic on this show.

What's the first.

Yeah, where to start?

Google.

We could start with Roblox. You were playing. What were you playing last night? Forget the game. You're playing Run from.

Run from the Roblox minigame right after.

You were playing Escape from Epstein Island.

I have never actually played Roblox.

Yeah, it's always.

I tried Fortnite once and I tried Minecraft just to kind of, kind of know, like, okay, what is this thing? Didn't find them, like, deeply entertaining or.

Anything, but it's almost. If you're very online and there's this thing that allegedly is just so dominant, like, massive.

You gotta like, learn about it. Like I read the Matthew Ball piece on.

Yeah, so you learn about it. But when somebody's saying like 10% of the world plays this two hours a day. You know, it's not actually that extreme with Roblox, but then you don't know anybody. You know, Roblox target audience is younger, but that was the case. There was also this calendar app that Softbank backed, if you remember that like, was claiming to have like. They were claiming. I think it was called irl.

Yeah, irl.

And they were claiming to have like an egregious amount of users.

Yeah. And they were basically just cooking the most.

Yeah. Never once knew of anybody using it. There was the same thing for this.

I think Nikita Beer called them out pretty early too.

Yeah. There was some app that I think Benchmark Back, that was like a college finance app. That was again the same thing. Turns out it was like they had some incentive where if you signed up for an account, you got $5, but you could just sign up.

We're like, maybe, yes, there is technically an email address in the database, but it's fake. There was also that company that sold to J.P. morgan or something. You remember this? She was on 30 under 30. And yeah, I mean, but this isn't. This is, is this an allegation of fraud or just that like the stock is mispriced? Like Hindenburg is just a short seller. Right.

So Hindenburg did something similar. Like, I think that they like my, my opinion on Hindenburg is they could almost write their reports on any company because there's always like, like I'd love to see a Hindenburg research report on Apple. Like intentionally degrading iPhones in order to drive sales velocity. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

Like we all know that for some reason or another, your phone starts getting materially worse after about 18 months.

Like every company has the most aggressive tactic.

Yeah.

Like whatever their most aggressive tactic is. You want to see that detailed.

And in the case of Roblox, they're repeatedly claiming that 50 million people are playing Roblox every single day. And, and they specifically were wording it as people instead of daily active users. And they were almost using those interchangeably. But it sounds a lot better to say people because it's like those are real people that might have purchasing power. And it turns out that they were well aware that many people had alts, meaning one person with 10, 20 accounts that were used for different purposes. And they had internal tooling in order to determine who the actual person was behind those 20 accounts were. Yet they were still willing to call those 20 accounts people when it came to reporting. So ultimately, I mean, I think all the issues that they call out are all the issues that happen on any video game with user generated content. Right?

Yep.

The concerning thing is that it's a game. It's a video game for kids and maybe creating like a sandbox. Like you remember people like there was even Minecraft is like pretty like you're in this world, you can build blocks and it's pretty contained. But then you could build like a statue of a huge penis, you know, and like there's almost nothing you can do to stop that. I feel like as a game, I think with Roblox, when you give people the ability to effectively build games within the games and they're creating games like Palestine and Israel hangout, LGBTQ vibes, guns, work at a hospital. You know, I think it's backlashes to roblox.

Like, on YouTube, I've seen people kind of say that there's like, kids that get hooked into, like, the developer ecosystem don't get compensated fairly. Like, there's been a lot of, like, there's been various waves of like, oh, like, criticism, but it seems like the stock is doing well. And that's why Hindenburg is like, chiming in, because they're primarily like a short seller. Right. Are they publishing this after taking a short position? Is that what we're always supposed to assume?

That's.

Do you have any idea, like, how big this fund is? Hindenburg Research? It has such a memey name and they're so big on Twitter that I feel like it's.

What if it's like a $10 million fund?

Yeah, yeah. It almost feels like it could just be in a non account, but I think it is actually a research firm because it was in the Wall Street Journal, like in. In this, it says.

Yeah, I think, I think. I think the real one thing that you can focus in on is what is the. Is. Is part of the engagement. Because the games are so extreme. Because looking at these games, Beat up people outside of 711 has 900,000 visits.

Yeah.

Beat up the Pregnant is another game. Guns Work as a hospital. Guns Work at a hospital, has been placed, played 1.6 million players.

What's interesting is I understand that if you. I mean, Hindenburg is not saying that they don't have millions of users. Like, they clearly do have millions of people.

I guess.

Yeah. But even if you have millions of people, years ago it was a reasonable thing to say, like, well, you would have to hire tens of thousands of people to just sit there and watch everything to monitor this for trust and safety. But now we have LLMs. You can just take every string of text.

Yeah. There's so many.

Right. Like, look at it.

It's funny because there's a lot of ways you could make a bear case for the business, which is that, you know, user turnover is going to be high. People certainly age out of this. You have 50 million DAUs and you're not making money. Like, Call of Duty does not put out a game and have 50 million people playing it and not milk seed.

Money on the first.

I mean, this is like, you have to imagine that other gaming companies look at Roblox and they're like, ha, ha, you have 50 million people and you don't make any. Like, you have zero earnings. And so I think that there's a lot of ways to critique this business. I mean, the big thing to me is if you make it, it seems like you could make it pretty easy to eliminate games that were explicitly political and just wrong. Guns work at a hospital. Like, is that a game that we should be encouraging kids. Kids to play?

And that's something that's so easy to catch with an LLM. You just throw it through like the most basic like llama model.

Yeah. Like, should you be able to. Should you be able to name a game Palestine and Israel Hangout? Like, it's not the town. This is a video game. Right. It's not the town square. Nobody's arguing.

Yeah.

And so I don't think that.

Yeah. No. Parents of kids who play Roblox or like free speech. Yeah.

So it's almost like when we should play the game one episode. But should you be able to create a game and publish it under something called Survive Diddy? And would those games get any users at all if they didn't have the word diddy in it? Probably not, right?

No.

So it's part of. Children are innately drawn to offensive things because it just makes them giggle and makes them whatever.

I do wonder how much of this is driven by adults being creepy versus kids being edgy. Because it's totally. A 13 year old is being edgy because they're edgy on Instagram.

Yeah. And I think, I think these games are just less malleable when we were kids. Right. Like kid, you might like whatever. In Call of Duty, for example, like people would try to make it to write a swastika, you know, in the game, but they would eventually, like, they would figure out how to stop people, they would patch it. And so but when you create these open sandboxes, it's sort of if you're creating a metaverse, the same slime and sort of offensive things that happen in the real world are going to be recreated within the metaverse.

I wonder if there's like an opportunity for something that, like an app, like a child safety app that you could put on like your kid's computer, kids.

Ipad, strap it to their Orion headset. It just like blacks. Orion.

Orion, yeah. Yeah. But it just takes a picture of the screen like every 10 seconds and just says like, is this offensive? Yeah, is this offensive? And it's just asking the model, like, is this offensive? Or is this inappropriate for age? And it can capture like text or images or, you know, a penis in minecraft like anything like that can all be processed. There's been. There's some company called the Rewind that does that. But just for like your second brain, it takes a picture of your screen and then you can. And I think Microsoft might have a feature for this too where you can say like, okay, I think like two weeks ago I was on a website of a short selling firm, but I can't remember the name. And it'll just be like, oh, Hindenburg research, right?

Yeah, but there was even a. There was a. I feel like there was a Black Mirror episode years ago that had something where kids. There was like a software update you could give to your kids where anything scary or wrong they wouldn't blurred. So the dog would be like barking, really like trying to kill you. And the kid would just be like.

Yeah, it's kind of creepy.

And we're probably headed towards that.

I mean, the steel man here, I mean, the Journal has the Roblox revenue versus net losses and revenue is accelerating and net losses over the last three quarters are declining. So they went from almost 400 million in net losses to just over 200. Price is stable at 40.

Yeah.

Should we look 40 though?

Should we. Let's see what impact this actually had.

Oh, yeah. Did it move the market or. Move the market for Roblox Stock?

So on September 24, it was trading at $47 a share. And when was this?

This came out yesterday. It's October 7th or October 8th.

So the stock is actually up the stock. Okay. Over the last three days it's down 2.9%, but okay, but today it's up 3%. So that's the thing. I don't.

It was priced in.

It was priced in. Yeah.

Everyone who owns a stock. Yeah, I know that. I know that the people are fake and it's a cesspool, but I don't care because I'm still optimistic that it will print cash flow in five years.

Yeah. The question is, does this become. I guess the question is, does Snapchat not make money because of its user base or because of the way that it's run? Because you could argue that Roblox user base is even worse in many ways in terms of willingness to pay from an age standpoint.

Yeah. Yeah.

But it does seem like they're trending towards probably making a lot of money. My concern is how ephemeral are video games, especially as they just get easier and easier to create.

Well, I wonder how much video game revenue is essentially gambling driven in the sense that Call of Duty has this monetization arc where the first game comes out, it's 60 bucks, 70 bucks, maybe there's $100 for like you get a little bonus skin for the day one edition. And then over time they introduce loot crates that are effectively gambling, where I mean, you're not winning money, but you're winning like good skins for your guns or like rare items. Right?

Yeah. What's the word? It's sort of, there's the official word for it is variable reward.

Right, sure, sure.

So it's like you just might get something and you're doing it live and the headset and so that clearly has.

More of a dopamine rush than just, okay, I bought this, I bought this skin for $5 or the one that's $100, I paid $100 for. It's like for $10 you could win either. And I wonder if you look at the revenues of the gaming companies, like how much is driven by those day one sales people just paying 60 bucks versus the whales that wind up because for the mobile games, like they're free up front, they make no money from non gambling and it's all the only.

The only apps making money day one are wallpaper apps.

But that presents like a really tough challenge for Roblox. Right? Because if Roblox wants to, every time they introduce something that feels like gambling, they're going to feel the pain 10 times worse because their target market's kids. Whereas Call of duty, it's like 40 year old hardos. It's like, yeah, of course, you know, dad's gonna gamble on some skins because like he's having fun and whatever.

Dad's gambling again.

Dad's gonna find a way to gamble one way or another. If it's on Call of Duty, you know, outfits for his character, like that's not as big of like a national news story as like 13 year olds are gambling on Roblox skins. So like how can they, I mean they can pay wallet and age gate it and stuff, but like, I mean they're making a ton of money. Like they're making like I think it was $800 million last quarter. It's pretty good. But I wonder if they're going to run into problems like really ramping it up.

Yeah, the question is, is Roblox digital Legos and does it have enduring brand value that they continue to monetize? Because it certainly looks like digital Legos. Like I don't know if you basically like they took Lego.

I've seen videos where people have Recreated other games in Roblox and it doesn't look like Roblox at all.

It's crazy, right? But the core entry point, the COVID art is like, hey, we're online Lego.

It was a very similar strategy for Epic Games and Fortnite where Epic Games created Unreal Engine, where you can design any game from Gears of War to the new Halo is going to be in Unreal Engine. But then Fortnite is also more accessible. You can design like a little custom game if you want, if you're non technical or whatever.

Yeah. I think the issue with Hindenburg is this seems like a business that's way more impactful if you're doing one report every two years and just taking these like massive, very concentrated position. Whereas like this almost feels like a stretch, right?

Yeah.

Because you're trying to pin them. You're trying to pin them, you're trying to pin them on. Yeah. Like they had, they, they honestly did damage to Square.

Oh yeah. Was that what it is?

Yeah.

Hearing about them for the first time and thinking like, oh, the name. I mean the name implies like the Hindenburg. Like it's a disaster. It's like world historic. Like we have discovered something that's going to absolutely blow up. And so their name is like this is a five alarm fire. Right. And if they are talking about something that's mispriced by 20% or the DAUs are off by 50% but the revenues are still okay. It's not quite as hard hitting as like is this the Hindenburg or just like a blimp that needs like a refuel of gas or something?

Yeah. So they're putting out usually a couple of these a month.

Oh really?

Which I didn't know.

Okay.

But it's like, well, the Roblox maybe like six a quarter, five a quarter or something like that at least if you look back historically. And so I think it's actually just they're constantly doing this and most of the time they're going after companies that are like, you don't know about and they're genuinely doing bad stuff. But then for them from a marketing standpoint it's like it's this battle with, for attention. Right. They're like everybody's addicted to attention and so we should try to invest in Hindenburg and see what their, see what their process looks like. I wonder. The only thing that would genuinely be cool is if it was like it was all their own money.

Oh yeah.

You know, and they were just like, yeah, like we just do this for Ourselves, we just share what we find, basically.

Yeah.

But it's interesting to see, like, they're basically a media company that happens to monetize through shorting.

Yeah. I mean, there were many media companies that monetize through longing. They're just merely on the dump side. They're not on the pump side. Yeah. I think it must be such a nightmare to get all of that through legal and figure out what they can and can't say. Because you're putting out this. You're kind of front running this information. You're. You're somewhat manipulating the stock. Even if everything you say is true, like, you're moving the market.

Yeah. You have to assume that every single company, like, they must get sued, like 80% of the time, I would imagine. Because unless a company is such a dumpster fire that they're like, we have bigger battles to fight if the CEO that's the target gets attacked if he.

Wants to, they're gonna find something to nitpick in there like, oh, this is actually wrong. That person that talked to you is wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

It's tricky. Very tricky.

Really, really wild.

Should we move on to Google?

It'd be okay. Last thing, if people did Hindenburg for venture funds. That would be so gnarly. Just no way to monetize it. Just purely for, like, if you had, like, spite Hindenburg, you know, like, somebody wants to take down a certain fund, so they publish like 15 reports to make it look legitimate and then just drop like a bombshell. And they're like, this fund, fund four is gonna do like, negative. You know, it's gonna do like a 0.1x. Right. And they just go company by company, company so bad.

I was thinking about that during the last cycle. Like, do you think there's anyone who raised like some like $50 million fund and will return zero, not like zero percent gain, like, won't return a dime. The liquidation value of all the companies was zero.

It must happen.

It must happen.

I mean, I don't know, because most.

Companies return like 10 cents on the dollar or something. You know, there must be at least one that shuts down. But a 0.1 would be astronomically bad. It's possible.

Yeah. Sometime we should cover some of the actual data on. Because, like, venture as an asset class gets just constantly attacked because the bottom quartile is just genuinely so bad. But from what I've seen across a few different reports, it's actually like, the median is not that bad. It's maybe not as good as a median. Private Equity fund.

There's tons of, there's tons of venture folks who have been in the business for 20 years and are, they have never had like a banger breakout deal but every deal is structured at a good price and they run their business very well. They haven't over scaled their funds and they make a decent, you know, decent living.

Decent living enough to have the house in Aspen, the house in Montana.

Oh man. Speaking of the house in, in Aspen, I couldn't print this one and I was hoping it would be in the Journal today, but this is like one of my favorite articles I've read. So apparently people in like high mountain towns are pumping in oxygen into their houses. Have you seen this?

No.

It's the coolest thing. So I have this saved. The wealthy are paying big money to pump oxygen into their mountain home. So there's like these home oxygenation startups. Now that I'll just read you some of this.

So it brings it down to sea level basically.

Exactly, exactly. So this guy, Kevin Rost built a new mountain home on a Ridge at 10,500ft in Telluride, so high that in the winter it's only accessible by gondola. And it's so high that some of his guests struggle to acclimate. For those guests, Rost installed 10,000 is crazy. It's really high.

Really like athletes go and they fight in Utah, they're out of breath, not just one mile. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So he has a home oxygenation system in every bedroom of the 12,000 square foot house. This guy is a badass. I was thinking we should do a segment of like the tech bro of the week, like the person we give a shout out to. And this is definitely my pick.

The only critique is that it's coal powered. You see the SM smoke drifting off.

For those guests, Rost installed a home oxygenation system in every bedroom of the 12,000 square foot of house. Now 10 oxygen enrichment machines located in a storage area pull oxygen from the air outside and pump it into four bedrooms and a bunk room through blue tubing built into the walls. It makes the rooms feel like it's at 3,000 to 5,000ft above sea level, not two miles.

We need that. But for Galaxy Gas.

This dude is a boss. He's 59. He retired as the owner of a pipe fitting company, like some business that you've never heard of but clearly just crushed it. He and his wife, who's 58, moved there last December and he wants to have his friends come visit, but he doesn't Want them to spend like three days acclimating so they can come and hang out. So he spent 18 million on this house, took two years planning and six years of construction.

And now he's just like, he's got to take the gondola to get there.

Yeah. And then they profile a bunch of other people who have done the same thing. And apparently it's just like really, really popular right now.

See, that's proof that you don't need to work in tech to be a technology brother. It's about how you leverage the tech.

Exactly, exactly. He's putting the tech to work. So each enrichment machine machine cost 15k. It would have cost than I would have thought, but Today's price is 150. And a single unit can enrich about 2,000 cubic feet. There's these funny ones where it's like this dude's bedroom was so big he needed six of them or something. But, man, all these other people. This whole article is just like a world tour of sick dudes. Basically.

I need the. I need the video of him on his, like, helipad, just like, you know, like punching, you know, shadow boxing. He's like, this is why I laid all that pipe.

Throughout my life, I've been to some, like, high elevation, like, ski towns for like, ski trips, and I've never had problems acclimating, but I wonder if that'll get worse with age. Like they're describing it in the, in the article. Like, you get. I just headaches and stuff, and I've never had a problem with that.

I remember as a kid, backpacking trip with the family, getting going up to a, you know, high elevation in whatever, five, six hours and, you know, being in the tent throwing up.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I've gotten that before. I just personally would never oxygenate my house because the low oxygen concentration would just inspire me to grind harder.

Right.

I was thinking I need to be harder to kill.

There was somebody else who I think Nat Friedman just posted that he has a hyperbaric chamber. And I was wondering, do you know if Brian Johnson sleeps in any crazy, like, hyperbaric chamber thing? I feel like when you go full tilt biohacker, you're doing something to like, the air mix while you're sleeping.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're a big air filtration guy, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I have these things in my house. I think it's called. Let me get the name right. Yeah. IQAir, a Swiss company. And they look like old school fax machines. It's like the Ugliest thing in the world, but yeah. Or like hospital equipment. It's not. Certainly not cool looking, but Yeah, I think you want to be filtering your air. People don't know this, but your errors. The air quality is almost always worse in your house than outdoors, which is somewhat counterintuitive, but there's.

I mean, the air quality is much better in Malibu than like Core LA too, right?

Yeah, yeah. In general, just getting. Just being on the coast. But it's still. You're still. The air quality is still much worse inside. And I think. Yeah. And the only way to really make it better is like through refiltration, but also diluting the air with outside air.

Oh, sure, right.

But yeah, hyperbaric chambers. I haven't. I've spent a little bit of time in them, but it's one of those things, like, it feels like a pretty marginal benefit. Unless you're gonna sleep in one.

Yeah, I think. I think Nat Friedman said he had psoriasis or something that he was fighting and the hyperbaric chamber made his symptoms go down by like 90%. It was like very intractable. Like, he tried a bunch of things and this was like the one. One thing that worked. So, like, if you have a problem.

Like, going to sleep in the chamber would be cool.

I don't know if he actually sleeps in, like. Like, I've heard that people do that.

Like, the next step for eight sleep is like the dome, like, bed chamber.

They were building something like that.

Damn. Putting their roadmap on blast.

No, I like it.

I think it'd be cool.

Yeah, it's awesome.

I think we should probably record in a. In a. In a chamber.

In a chamber. Well, there's a. On the. On the 11th floor. There's some sort of a cryo chamber here.

Yeah, classic.

There's some, like, there's some company that does like, regenerative medicine in the building.

Yeah.

Have you seen Notebook lm? It's gonna put us out of business, bro. Oh, the Google AI generated podcast.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's two people talking about whatever you want them to talk about. Yeah, it sounds pretty good, but it sounds like the most generic, like, Wikipedia article ever, right?

Yeah. And it's just trained on Reddit, so it's soy. It's like the most.

I think you can kind of put in whatever you want.

The AI goes. So my wife's boyfriend was telling me the other day, like, wait, what?

It's just the most Redditor podcast. No. Have you listened to. Have you spent, like, what's the longest amount of time you spent like consuming AI content.

So I think it's on YouTube, on some of these videos that a topic seems really appealing. And it's like the video is clearly set up in a way to draw you in to get the click. And then you get through like a minute and you're just like, this is like AI slop. Yeah. And I think that there's like a very real thing happening on YouTube where there's the sort of like people are drawn to like the artisanal videos. Right. It's like I like, I love that you keep doing like real voiceovers. I love your edit, you know, like. And so there's this. Yeah, there's like this. Their content is going from being like all handmade, artisanal content to now this sort of like mass produced, mass manufactured. It's the same thing that happens with like clothing, right? Like, you know, it, you know, you can go and get the Cuccinelli of content, right? It's like handmade, craft LED content. And. But yet there's going to be like, probably like 90% of content consumption will eventually become this sort of like slop, just like mass produced, just curated. You know, it's like fashion nova putting out, seeing a, a luxury brand drops something the next day, shipping the carbon copy of it. And why would that not happen with content? Because I'm sure there's already channels that, when, I don't know, like the needle drop. Anthony Fantano on YouTube. So Anthony Fantano puts out a music review, somebody just clones that content, reposts it immediately and like makes a better clickbaity title and gets like more views. Right? And so a lot of consumers will just keep watch. You know, they're just like, so in the being like, you know, just navigated through that algo and you're going to have to be like, the way to fight back is to be like, now I'm getting that good artisanal.

Yeah, Well, I mean there could be like taste, but then there's also like a price gate on the clothing, right? Like, the artisanal clothing is more expensive, so the monetization works out. Like the fast fashion and the LVMH stuff is like similar market cap probably, but wildly different profit per unit.

Peter Zion, do you know Peter Zehan, he, he just went full paywall.

Oh, really?

He, he put out a video and he's like, this is my last video doing. And that's kind of interesting because like, the guy's got incredible insights and takes and I'M sure some of them are, like, have conflicts and are influenced by various parties. And he has certain narratives he likes.

To push, but probably still do some.

No, it seems like Jen, for the payload, every comment when he announced, it was basically like, okay, see you never, bro.

Yeah, it is tricky. Yeah. There was this one youtuber called Jake Tran. Have you heard of this guy? He's like. He's like business video essays. And he tried to pull himself. So he pulled himself out of, like, the editing and had a team writing and editing everything, but he was still doing the voiceover, and he was. So he would just record the voiceover, and he wanted to pull himself out of that. So he started just recording the intro and then handing it off to another voiceover artist to do it. And everyone was like, why aren't you even voicing your own things anymore? Like, this is so fake. And it's. And it was like he was just two years too early because the AI voice clones are good enough now that no one would notice if he used an AI voice clone. He might be now, I don't know. But out on it.

There's going to be a whole cottage industry of people on YouTube that just, like, watch the video first, run, like, run some analysis on it to determine if it's, like, artisan, and then just be the first comment to be like, yeah.

I mean, it does seem like there's. There's maybe, like. I don't know if there's an analogy with the clothing thing, but there is some sort of, like, barbell, where, yes, you might want, like, the artisanal content for something that's, like, really entertaining and novel and interesting and unique. But then if I'm like, if I just want to know about a topic that I don't know anything about, and I can just, like, search it and get a, you know, Wikipedia article or listen to that as a podcast. Like, why not? I'm a big fan of, like, the consumer gets to choose the format that they consume the content in. So I can say, I want this. There's a podcast here. I want you to AI. I want you to transcribe it because I feel like reading. Or there's a book here. I want to consume this in the form of a video. Like, make that for me and just translate it. Because that's where the AI models are really, really good when they're just swapping things over from one thing to the next. And it's hard for them to do, like, truly novel new things, but they're pretty good at Just like translation transformation, right? Yeah, but yeah, I mean, glowing endorsement from Andrej Karpathy. He said he loves it. I listened to the one I do, Arnold Schwarzenegger and it was kind of like, it was a little not that great.

I think the thing that's interesting about that is the applications in education are wild.

Yeah.

If I'm so imagine this. I'm a college student and I'm going into an exam in five hours and I know nothing about a topic. And it's going to be like you're going to sit down and have to write an essay. There's three topics you remember in college. They'd be like, there's these three topics. You're going to have to write an essay about one of them. Right. So imagine I'm a college gym bro. I'm going into this essay in five hours. I'm like, ok, I got five hours. And I tell my Notebook lm, I'm like, make me a podcast about the signing, the events that led up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence 40 minute podcast. I just listened to it and the recall on that is crazy. Even if you're just like benching in the gym. And so I think the applications and these sort of like I don't want to listen to Notebook LM talk about antitrust, you know, you know, situations within tech. Right. Because the part of listening to takes about that kind of thing is you want the host to have some insider information that's not publicly available. But if you're just talking about like history and trying to learn about like why why is, you know, why why who would benefit more from keto versus intermittent fasting and then having those two people like talk about that. You can learn a lot.

It does seem like there's a lot of alpha in the content around like edginess or comedy or anything that's like, that's like would be censored by most LLMs so they can't produce it well. Or just comedy in general is novel. Like I, I even tested like tell me a joke on like the latest and greatest, like you know, GPT01 and it was terrible.

Like it's not even close, not even a zinger.

It's just not anywhere near not making any progress there. But it's incredible at math and like a whole bunch of other things that it's supposed to be good at. But the, there is something else to be said for like content that where the AI seems to be really, really bad about surfacing new facts and a lot of Reporters will say this where, like, oh, yeah, like, LLMs can, like, write articles now, but, like, that's not really what reporters are doing. Like, when a reporter writes up an article, that's like, the last 5% of the work that they've been doing, like, 95% of the work is, like, collecting new facts that don't exist on the Internet and don't exist anywhere because they talked to someone, they got a fact out of them, they got information, and they corroborated it. And so there's still value in, like, surfacing that fact. But there is a question about, like, how do you monetize that? Like, you need to set up a really, like, tough paywall. Because, like, if you're. As soon as that fact gets surfaced in your article, boom, you're gonna be cloned in a million places immediately. And other people are gonna try and monetize that. Like, that's gonna be really, really tricky already. People do that all the time where it's like, someone gets the scoop and then it's reposted immediately, just, like, changed up a little bit for some other, like, rag.

Yeah.

But I don't know. It's interesting.

Oh, well, should we.

What else should we talk about?

Should we talk about venture funds?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Crv. Giving back money.

Yeah. So my. I mean, I actually don't know a single person at crv. I have some portfolio companies that have spoken to them over the years and more recently. But ultimately what this comes down to is I haven't seen. I cannot recall CRV being in a headline like, within the last 12 months about anything. And. And they effectively chose to make their biggest media moment. They chose to make their biggest media moment giving back money. Which I feel like as a venture fund, all of your marketing should be towards founders. Just one customer and then, you know, LPs, LPs, which is your other customer, and going out and making. The only thing I can recall about CRV now, aside from interactions portfolio companies have had with them, is that they decided that they didn't have places to invest money and, like, the whole strategy that they had raised around. And so one. It almost feels like they're traitors to go to the New York Times and feed them, you know, because.

Well, are you sure that's what happened? Because it's totally possible that they announced this to their LPs and the LPs leaked it immediately. Like, that's where most of the.

Okay. But if you pull up the article.

Oh, it's like they're Commenting there.

It's their four partners in the picture. They decide. They just. They made the decision to have the New York Times come and photo.

It's a new photo.

Yeah.

It's not just their default, like, they pulled it off the website.

Okay. We should.

Because that could be.

No. So here's like, here's why I think it's a New York Times picture.

Yeah.

Because one. It's in their style.

Yeah.

And.

And they look sad.

They look sad.

I knew you were gonna say that.

Which is normally what the New York. They're like, hey, like, act like your dog.

Let's do one. Okay. That's the one we're using.

Yeah. Classic. Yeah. So, yeah, it's Ryan Young for the New York Times. It's written by Erin Griffith.

Yeah.

Yeah, we know. Has a history of saying that she's gonna position a story one way and then putting it that way.

Okay.

But the idea to go to Aaron Griffith and their comms agency, whoever they're working with for pr, because I would assume they are be kind of weird. Affirm that size nod.

I mean, they probably knew that it was going to leak for the LPs.

Yeah. But it's just, like, why I don't nobody did they want a pat on the back. Like, do they want to be acknowledged for. Like, to me, it's a little late.

I mean.

Yeah, It's a little late. 1. It's two years after similar decisions were made. And I just don't know. I mean. And the other thing is that I don't know. I don't know. I have no idea the mechanics of it. But it's not like they had the money in their bank account and they were like, giving it back. It's that they didn't make the capital call.

Yeah.

So you. Basically the same article as CRV resizes their growth fund. Okay. Is that a story? And is that what you want to be covered about? Could you not think of anything else?

It kind of presumes that the reader doesn't understand the concept of a capital call. Well, and that's. The New York Times audience definitely thinks that if a venture fund raises a billion dollars, they have a billion dollars in an account somewhere.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that the VCs, like, took 50% of it.

Yeah, yeah.

Or that it's 90% their money or it's all their money. That's the average. So, yeah, I think giving Aaron Griffith ammo to make. To paint tech in a bad light as though tech is just like this.

Disaster, which is like her entire venture's not working anymore. Funds are giving it back. You think that's the goal here?

That's always the angle.

I know, but I mean, for every one of these articles, there's 10 that are like, oh, SoftBank's back in the game, baby. Let's go. Adam Newman's raising again.

Yeah, but I don't think. Yeah, but Aaron would cover that same story.

There are more we're so Back stories right now than it's so over for sure.

New York Times is not doing we're so Backstories, though. Like, it's always like, Adam Newman is back.

Yeah.

Adam Newman is going to make a bunch of ugly buildings beautiful again. Here's 10 reasons why we hate that. No. So anyways, I just respect, like, I respect them making this a business decision. If I, If I were crv, though, I'd be like, how can we get a story that's going to be big that actually makes us seem like alpha Chads.

Yeah.

And, you know, saying that we have no places to deploy is not, you know, I don't know, why don't you. Why don't you do a hostile takeover of a Caribbean nation, you know, or what? Like, how much. What could they have done with 275 million in Haiti? Right. Could they have returned?

Well, General Catalyst is buying a hospital network. You saw that. That's crazy. Like, that. That is like the kind of type of bold move that gets you, like, crazy.

Yeah. So. But, but here's. Here's the thing.

Yeah.

They are still investing out of their core $1 billion early stage fund.

Yeah.

And so.

I don't know. Is this the select fund? It was just like their growth fund.

Yeah.

It's interesting that their growth fund was, like, so much smaller than their. In their early stage fund.

Well, that's why it's like, I think you guys might have bigger problems than.

Yeah.

Than just having too much money.

Yeah. I mean, maybe they just hire some growth people and the growth people don't want to do it anymore or didn't work out or something.

Yeah. Anyways, I hope they generate massive returns for their LPs and have massive carry checks.

Exactly.

I would never root against any firm. Even if I think they're comp. Any allocator. Even if. And I hope we see these guys on the Midas list for this decision.

Right.

Like, maybe, like, they have such a banger in the first, like, half of the fund that they're just like, nah, like, let's just let this. Like, let's just Let this ride. You know, maybe that's the whole thing.

That might be smart. Yeah. You got something good. Good.

They got something good. What could they. What could they have in there?

You'd have some. You'd hold some cash back to do the next. The series Z. You gotta wait for the series Z. Yeah. Anyways, that's where the money is.

Reed, Murat, Sar and Newman.

He's back, baby.

He's so back.

I thought he was doing something else like the real estate roll up. Is this a new, new thing or.

Is this just a new co working thing? I think he was doing multifamily.

Was that flow.

Flow.

And now this is called workflow.

Yeah.

Avoids the specific business model that got his original co working company into trouble.

Is it just a management company? I didn't actually read the article either.

I was just like this guy's so.

Dude, this is, this is the reason Technology brothers is just Twitter and podcast. Because no one's reading the article and we're just speculating.

All I know is that one of my friends, Randon Doom in a party and he wasn't wearing shoes and I was like, yep, that's on Brandon.

Things don't change.

Yep.

It wasn't actually a zero interest rate phenomena.

It wasn't.

It was.

I mean he, he captured so much of the wealth with his secondaries. Like, like to write him off. Like he's not in jail. I don't think he got sued or anything. He wound up with a billion liquid or something like that. And so he's going to make a play at some point. He's going to try and do something. I just wonder what this will be.

Somebody told me his jet was on the market.

Oh really?

Maybe he just. Maybe he just.

Well, they're coming out with a new one so you know, got to sell the old one.

Right.

I think the G650 is like, you.

Know, no longer the high commodity phasing out. Yeah.

Go to the 750 or something like that.

I didn't know this but apparently I think his jet was black.

Yeah.

And apparently that hurts the performance.

Because you're just attracting the AC constantly I think. And that.

Yeah. But it's also just so cool. Like it's much cooler.

Yeah. Michael Jordan's jet is also black.

Yeah.

It's like a crazy paint jobs. They spend a ton of money on.

Wastes and it adds like an egregious amount of weight from the density of the paint or whatever.

Silly. Should we go through some of these more tweets I got a whole stack here. I printed them all off.

Is this the same stack?

No, no, no. Oh, sorry, I don't have the same stack. We'll just pull them up one at a time. So the first one is from Signal. I. I never say these anon names out loud and then I do and I realize, like, I have no idea. But he says the gap between the very rich and everyone else is actually shrinking drastically over time due to hyper capitalism and tech. You drink the same coke as a billionaire. You use the same iPhone as a billionaire on the same network. You use the same exact same tools as a billionaire. For example ChatGPT. There is no special ultra rich person versions of software or apps. You read the same garbage online as a billionaire. Definitely true.

You ship those same fashion as a.

Billionaire on the same networks. A billionaire shits in the same type of toilet as you do. You're afforded roughly the same health care as a billionaire. Assuming you have insurance with marginal differences, you can roughly go travel to any place like a billionaire can. Private versus not. And then PG actually had the top reply and mentioned that he'd written about this in 2004, which is kind of funny.

Got him.

Mind the gap.

Yeah, I don't think things have changed that much. I mean, I'm going to do like a very sort of like shaky analysis of this. But if you went back hundreds of years ago and you had like a king and peasants. Yeah, like they're both. You could argue you use the same stone for your wall and it's like your bread was milled with similar grain and it's like. And your wine also gets you drunk, you know, and it's like, well, the things that were truly like luxuries were like, oh, the king has like this little meager supply of like this certain spice and it's like that stuff still exists. You can go and get like blueberries that were handpicked in Japan.

Omakase strawberries.

Yeah, yeah. And I would argue that the early first job out of college product manager that's going to sugar fish is not eating the same, same fish that we do when we go out to get sushi. I'm kidding. No, they're not eating the same fish. They're not eating the same fish that somebody who's having, you know, hosting a dinner party at their house and like having like some sushi chef from Japan, like who flew over, it's just not. And so I don't know if you could argue like, you know, the peasant says to the king, but sir, my wool. I sure you know, the wool in my sweater is the same as yours. Are we not so different? You know, I do think that this actually goes back to Warren Buffett eating See's candy and being like, he's the original one of this. Obviously he's known for sort of like eating down some wool. But yeah, I think it's just like ultimate capital. I think that the takeaway from this is that capitalism, capitalism rips and we should encourage it and support it.

There is an interesting thing here where, like, if you are a billionaire and you want an iPhone or you want chatgpt, like you at some level need some sort of competition or you need some other. Other people in the economy. It's like you can't just have one person with all of the assets. Like there's some sort of wealth equality that needs to happen in the economy.

Yeah.

Such that like, like, you know, like the richest man can't make the best film happen and the best album and all of these things. Like, there needs to be a lot of other people building and doing other stuff. Like, it really is like a society that bounces off of each other, which is like, important to get like the innovation that then becomes like evenly distributed over time.

Right.

Yeah. It's interesting. I don't know. Well, should we go to China?

Yeah. I think the cool thing, the last thing I would say on that, I was talking to a founder on Monday who has a candy company. And the thing that's genuinely cool about all this stuff is the thing about the accessibility of all these things is being a billionaire doesn't make the iPhone more enjoyable somehow. There's not even really apps that you can get. Right. And so it really.

Not yet.

But once we have wallpapers app Rich.

Wallpapers app that has a $10,000 subscription. Yeah, yeah, yeah, There you go.

I think it's a thousand a month is the cap, but it's good 12k.

ARR. Then you just know you have the.

Mostly curious wallpaper coming soon. But yeah, it's like, it's just that is all the evidence that you imagine how much piece of would be an uproar if you could go down that list and be like, billionaires have this and I don't. Billionaires have this and I don't. Billionaires have this. Even given that situation, the dominant sort of like political view that gets votes seemingly is let's tax the 1% more even though. Or let's tax the 10% more even though they already pay like 80% of federal and income taxes.

Yeah. It's interesting. I have a friend who is a sugarfish hater, and he once referred to it as, like, the McDonald's of sushi. And I was like, now you're speaking my language. Yeah, I love that.

I love that.

That's amazing standing.

Yeah. Delicious.

Like, you didn't have to.

Low quality, but presented well.

Repeatable. Good. You saw this. That Huawei in China built a European city.

Right?

This is.

Yeah. I mean, we're going. That's where our Asian studio has to be.

It's amazing.

Yeah. Why can't we do that?

I. I mean, I think it would be probably cultural appropriation or something. I mean, we can do it.

It's effectively our culture.

Well, no, no. We did the opposite.

No, no, no. Yeah. I'm not saying build a great wall.

But we kind of do that in the sense that there's, like, Chinatown and Japantown and Koreatown, but, you know, we don't take it to this level. Level. Like, it'd be so sick if, like, Chinatown in New York City just looked like the forbidden city in Beijing.

Yeah, yeah. Imagine in Manhattan just rolling up.

You go to, like, little temple. Looks exactly like Tokyo.

Yeah. The bus looks like a dragon.

You know, like, be amazing.

See Winnie the Pooh walking around.

But this architecture is just. It's just so iconic. Like, you see it and you're just like. That looks like Europe inspired. Yeah. It's just beautiful. Beautiful. But what a crazy. What a crazy choice by Huawei to.

Just, like, send it.

25,000 people work here. It's, like, acres and acres and acres. You can just walk around this city for, like, you know, hours and just only see Italian, French, and German architecture.

More residents than the entire town. Double the residents of the entire town that I live in.

I don't really know why I pulled this up other than just. It's, like, crazy.

Yeah. Honestly, we'd like to see more of it. I think the Excel campus will look similar.

Should we talk about the all in podcast?

Yeah.

How. How do you warm up for your all in podcast? Listens.

Sunning my perineum.

Oh, yeah.

You know, both legs back in the sunlight just to kind of, like, get the chi going.

Sure.

You know, to make sure that when Jason starts, you know.

Are you listening on, like, AirPods, Max AirPod Pros, or are you listening on more of a wired headphones? Or do you do, like, a full, like, stereo system?

Cause All In Toxic enough. I don't also want the toxic EMFs. Like, the relationship dynamics of the show are already. So, you know, you don't print it.

On vinyl and just play it at home.

That's a good.

I think that's.

That's.

Honestly, that's.

That's. That's. Our next drop is. Is. Is last week's episode on vinyl on vinyl.

And just like, we should definitely do that. The greatest things we might.

Let's. Let's cut this out. We don't want to.

We don't want to do leak this.

Actually. No, we can leak it. Our. Our five listeners, they can get a little preview.

Yeah, I like it. Let us know in the comments if you want the all in podcast. Pressed vinyl.

This is going to be like a great journey for us because we're going to find some guy in Brooklyn who's like the last guy just making like handmade vinyl records, artisanal vinyl.

I think having like the Trump episode or like the Elon episode on vinyl is just. It's so high status for a tech bro. And there's this big.

Especially with the like, there's something so like a record, the packaging and everything. It's like it was the epitome of like album art when you could just like hold it and just like, you know, seeing the zoom screen of like Jason and all the guys, the all.

In, like, the podcast logos, they're square. Cause they show up in your podcast feed square. And that fits just perfectly on the vinyl cover. But I mean, I think everyone is kind of circling around the same conclusion around the all in podcast that, you know, it hasn't lived up to the expectations of what people thought it could be, unfortunately, in terms of profit mostly. I mean, I love what they've done politically, genuinely. I think it's very good. I've talked to. I talked to a literal congressperson who was like, I get my takes from the All In Politics podcast, which.

That's good.

It's very good because previously they were getting it from Kara Swisher and Rico. Huge step forward. These are like, people joke about all the different all in guys or whatever, but seriously, like, they're all on the same team, which is the most important thing. And even though they have a little infighting about politics, that doesn't actually matter. What matters is that they're all capitalists and they're all capital allocators and they all care about founders and business and like, good things. They're not insane.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, it is a huge thing, but it just sucks that they don't have ads.

Yeah.

I think everyone expected when the show got big.

Right.

This would be a place where the best ads and the ad rates would be super high and they'd be making a lot of money.

Six figure CPMs.

Exactly. But they just haven't lived up to it. And I think that's why it's more important than ever that a show like Technology Brothers exists. A show that focuses on profit. Profitability over listener satisfaction or audience size or anything. Or even politically.

Community. Community, Exactly.

All of that stuff.

Metrics.

Put that ball to the side.

Yeah. They're posting about.

Yeah.

While they post pictures from their conference. We'll be posting our P and L. Exactly, exactly. We'll be posting our stripe dashboard screenshot.

It everyone loves. Oh, my podcast is this. And the rankings. Or it has this many stars and reviews. No. What's the ebitda? How much money. What are you. Cash flowing. These are the important metrics for a podcast.

Yeah. And per listener. Right, Exactly. Like, it's not just gross, it's on a per listener basis. What are you taking home?

Exactly, exactly.

And are you levering up? That's the other thing with podcasts. Not using leverage.

Oh, yeah. It's insane that they're not.

It's insane that they're not. Right.

So, yeah. I mean, I see us kind of as a spiritual successor to the all in podcast. Kind of finishing the job.

What matters?

Exactly. Like doing what they couldn't figure out.

And honoring it through, you know, paying homage to some of their most iconic episodes through vinyl releases.

Yeah, exactly. That's great. Should we talk about the Zuckmobile?

Yeah. This was amazing. There's a lot of words that you could describe Zuck's era that I won't say.

So give the overview. Zuck posted pictures on Instagram of him. He has purchased and customized his and hers Porsches. One is a sports car. It looks like a 911, and the other is a Cayenne SUV.

Don't disrespect Zuck's choice. That's a GT3 Touring.

Oh, it's a GT3 Touring, but it's not. Is it manual? Is it the st?

I think he said it's a manual.

Okay.

No, it's not an. I mean, the Tourings are all manual, to my knowledge. Or maybe you can.

I thought the st was the GT3 manual. I thought that was the whole point of, like, the st. That's why it exists. But maybe it's like. It's more just like analog.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway. Yeah. So right away, it's cool. I saw Somebody else saying, I don't know if it was this tweet, but like he's sort of realizing that him doing this is not cool to other billionaires, but it's cool to the average Instagram user.

Yeah, that's what this tweet is. I think what Zuck realized is that the norm of avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth is entirely about intra elite social status. And common people actually love stuff like this. This is 100% accurate.

Yeah. So the, so the.

Plus there was this whole like fake thing for a long time. Like SBF drove a Civic and was like, I'm not doing it for the money. And it's like he was the most in it for the money and completely fraudulent.

And so Zach was doing like, I'm smoking meat.

Yeah. I'm just in my backyard. It's like, yeah, yeah, dude.

Trying to make it.

Knows your backyard is sick. Like, it's fine. Like, just let us enjoy vicariously how sick your backyard is. Yeah, we want to see you surfing and stuff.

My whole thing is like, you've gone and told the entire world that your wife drives a turbo GT minivan and it's a one of one. And so what is the actual usability of it? Like, I don't understand. Is she pulling out of the Zuck estate to pick the kids up from school and there's like this military convoy and a helicopter and she's just like, I love living my regular, you know, minivan model life.

Well, you know, you know, like the standard billionaire, like, setup. It's like two black SUV's outside of everywhere that you go. Yeah. And so you walk outside, there's always two. So if one breaks down, you can get in the other one. But then also, like, you don't know where they are. Essentially. That's just kind of the standard equipment.

Yeah.

If I was a billionaire. Two Ford Raptors.

Two Raptors, two trucks.

For sure. For sure.

Except the Raptor, as a former Raptor owned, is like really not that practical. Like, it's just not. The cabin's just not that big. It's not like you can like, unless you want to west coast customs to stretch it. Yeah, I'm very pro minivan. I've told you this. I recently purchased a minivan, a Mercedes Metris. Very popular in Europe. Less popular here. Mostly used as an airport transport vehicle. I've been loving it. Like just walking up to your car, pulling, pulling the door and having the door go out. It's very, very practical. My only critique is the color Choice. I think chalk is the worst modern Porsche color option. The putty color. I love how we have to tweet in black and white, but yeah, it's a rough color. If you're gonna do that, why not do like the fun color, the python green.

I've been looking at the new VW bus. Have you seen this thing?

No. Is it the electric one?

It's electric. It's called the ID Buzz and it.

Comes from coal power.

It's coal power. Well, the electricity that uses is from coal.

Yeah.

So it's, it, it has the sliding doors like a minivan, but it's a bus. So it doesn't read as a minivan fully. It reads as like something weird and different and then it comes in like these crazy colorways. And I was even thinking of getting it wrapped in like something more fun so that I think that the optimization when you're a parent is just like, get the car that will be fun for the kids.

My optimization was extreme practicality. And when they have the Erewhon smoothie and they're throwing it around the car that I'm not worried about it getting on the leather, you know, I just don't care. I'm just like, throw it on the ceiling, throw it on there, Throw up. You know, like, do whatever you want to it.

I mean, I've been, I've been to testing the waters with like, what car should I get based on my 3 year old's opinions?

That's great.

So I'll do like an a B test. Like, which one do you like more? I'll show them two images and the car that beats everything else. Can you guess? Red Cybertruck.

Yeah, I was about to say cybertruck.

Red Cybertruck. It was designed by a three year old and it gets a three year old going. And one of my friends was like, the cybertruck is the most, like it's the most, it's the most perfect example of a car that matters to only. It matters only to people who don't matter. Right. It's like, it's cool to people who aren't cool. Right? And I'm like, but it matters to three year old boys, which is arguably the only dude I'm trying to impress. He's the only guy that I care about. I don't care what some, you know, random person thinks about my car. I care what my son thinks about my car. Is he pumped to get in and gone adventure?

No. Most of my car purchasing has been driven by my, my inner child.

Yeah.

Right.

That's why I got the wagon. It has the reverse three seat, like rear view seat. That was always a hit when I was a kid. Like it'll be a hit for these.

And when I got, when I got a Raptor I. So I got this murdered out raptor that had been lifted and tinted and it was like, what is the truck that like the five year old me wanted and I didn't have because my parents drove two Priuses. So it was like, what do you want to, which car should we take to school today?

Prius.

Wanted.

Civics.

Yeah. I was like, do you want to take this the white Prius or the gold Prius? And I'm like, no.

I get a white and a gray silver Honda Civic or a white Honda Civic.

And so as an adult I have some purchasing power and I'm like, what am I going to get? And I started, I basically like had to train Sarah on it for a year. Every time I would see a Raptor I'd be like, that is a good looking truck. And it would basically like. She was like the first, like 10 to 20 times she goes, absolutely not, I hate that. And then I kept saying it and I started to break through the same thing.

My wife knows like nothing about you, but she knows that you owned a Raptor. And I've told her that raptors don't depreciate like as much as other cars. And so whenever she sees a Raptor now she's like, I know that that car doesn't depreciate. It's a practical decision. And she's like, I hate that you've like taught me all these stupid car things because now I'm like noticing red brakes or like when a car has four, has four tail, four exhaust pipes. She's like, yeah, yesterday I saw a BMW that didn't have any like decals on it. It had been debadged. And I was like, oh, like there's something under the hood there. Muscle car. Like it's clearly modded.

Yeah.

And she was like, I don't need to know this. Like, why is this in my brain?

Why is this in my brain? I could be using this for other things. No, but unfortunately with the Raptor, the ultimate challenge and the reason that I got rid of it was one, because parking in the average LA parking lot with a Raptor, one can't fit in any parking garages, which is also just a general issue in la. But two, anytime you're meeting with somebody that doesn't know you already, their first Assumption is that if you pull up any lifted, murdered out raptor is that you are a total dickhead. So like trying to. I just realized there was this period of like I had to like overcome that and I was like, this is kind of a waste of time. Like I'd rather somebody pull up and sort of like people, you know, people.

It is tough because there's no American car right now that sends just like a neutral signal. Like if you're in like a Mustang, you're a Mustang owner, Corvette owner, et ceter, et cetera.

That's so true.

Raptor. Same thing if you're in a Tesla. People have all these weird mixed things. Like it was either like your total green tree hugger or now it's like you're Trump supporter.

We bought this before we knew what a bad thing.

Well, I mean my hot take is like Elon is getting so right wing pilled that he's gonna make a V12 model S. Yeah, yeah. With a gated manual and a straight pipe exhaust. I think that'd be incredible. He's just like, yeah, you know what? Like, you know, like I, I didn't get any credit for, I didn't get any credit for the whole EV transition anyway. You guys don't like these EVs, so now I'm doing ice cars.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it is pretty wild that the cybertruck is seemingly selling very well.

Oh yeah, yeah.

It would sell even better if it was.

If it wasn't controversial.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it was is more controversial.

So yeah, we have this one S&P. Global Mobility says Tesla delivered 5175 cybertrucks in July. This is a 61% month over month increase. They also estimate the rest of the electric pickup truck market sold only a combined 5,500.

So here's something that's funny about Tesla. So there's a founder, A classic thing if you're a founder and you either raised a bunch of venture capital, I guess in the case of this other tweet, or there's a founder of a company that's actually doing really well and he bought a Foundation series cybertruck thinking that, okay, there's going to be a limited release, like if anything's going to hold value, it's this one. Tesla has completely ignored that that was ever supposed to be limited and sort of like foundational. First number of orders.

Sure.

And they're continuing to produce them at full clip.

What's the difference between a foundation model and just a regular One.

I don't know the design differences, but I think it was sold through as a limited edition. Like you got the first foundation, like one of. The first one.

Yeah, it'll be the one that like, it'll be the one.

But it was at a significant. Let's look at.

Yeah, that's interesting. I still love them. I think they're just beautiful and I smile every time I see them around and my son smiles every time I see them around and I think they're just funny looking and I want more aggressive cars like this. I really like that Hyundai that's coming out. That one is crazy. Well, yeah, so they put the electric powertrain in the, in the Hyundai Ioniq 5N. And it's the guy who did the BMW M series. And what letter comes after M? It's N. So he went over there, put up the N division and he, he created like digital gt, basically like a dual clutch transmission and it has engine noise and all the car guys that have driven it are like, it's incredible. Like you, you forget that you're not driving like a manual or like a actual engaging car. And now they're going to put that in this Hyundai Vision 74 thing. Like, it looks amazing. It looks like something out of Back to the Future. Have you seen this thing?

Yeah.

Yeah, it looks really good.

I didn't know that. Just a concept car.

So it was a concept car and they were going to do it with some crazy powertrain that was like hydrogen. Have you seen this thing? Hydrogen cars. And they, and they yanked that. They're doing the electric. I think they're going to do an N model. So It'll have like 700 horsepower and. But it'll be like 50k or something. So you'll be able to wrap on it.

Yeah.

And it'll just be like so funny and look so cool. And I think it's going into production. They're trying to get it live by 20, 20, 29, which I think is like believable. Based on Hyundai. Like, I think that they're like pretty serious. It's out of concept car territory now.

There's nothing better than when a car manufacturer wakes up out of their stupor. Oh yeah, because like every car manufacturer is pretty much a legacy company.

Yeah.

Except for Tesla and whatever. Rivian.

Yeah.

And when it, when, when these companies wake up, I would give the example of like Toyota with their Land Cruiser. It's like, hey, let's take like one of our most loved cars cars ever and let's just like run it back and, like, make it modern and make it cool and people love them and, you know, like, you know that it's going to be like a Toyota. It's like, it's great. They did the same thing with the Lexus, effectively the same version of the car that has, I guess it's like slightly, I don't know, slightly rugged one. Yeah. And then the VW that you mentioned, the van, like, there's nothing, like, there's.

Nothing exciting when you take the legacy of these.

Yeah, you take the legacy of these amazing, iconic products and you just. Somebody like, wakes up one day at these manufacturers and they're like, hey, we should actually, like, the problem is something cool or novel.

I think VW got like, the marketing right, but I think the car is actually pretty trash. Like, I think the range is really bad and the price is way too high. So I think, like, objectively, it's not that good of a car, but it's a cool idea and I'm glad that they're, like, going in that direction, at least being fun. Speaking of cybertrucks, did you see this? This startup promotion? This guy was announcing the latest version of a company called Bastion. And instead of spending a bunch of money on a video, we decided to do something more impactful. Giving out free rides across New York City in our branded cybertrucks. Tell us on the launch or how to grab a ride below.

Yeah, so I never want to hate on anybody trying to create value in the world, but this was just like, so whack. It's like, I now know that you were giving rides in a company Cybertruck, which. Why do you have a company Cybertruck as a crypto infrastructure company?

Is that what they are?

And I don't know what. So, yeah, I had to go deep. I don't know what you do. It would have been much more impactful.

To do something related to that. Like, okay, what are the themes of your business? Security, regulation, money, infrastructure. Like, crypto. Like, it's got to tie to that somehow. Whatever the stunt you do needs to be something like, around that.

Yeah. If you're building, like, there's so many things. Like, back in the party round days, we did something where we were like, hey, reply with your, like, address. And we're doing an airdrop. And then we airdropped NFT ads for party round into everybody's wallets, which you would then have to pay money to get. So we just sent them to like, yeah, the CEO of Figma and like all these other crypto people. So it's, like, cool now. Like, there's a. And it just said, this is an ad for Party Round. It was, like, in, like, comic. And so it's like, there's so many things you could do, but I'm like, okay, like, I could take the subway or I could like, text the Bastion hotline.

I mean, even. Even if they were just like, okay, text them, and we'll send, like, I don't know if this is, like, security company. It's like, okay, text them, and they'll bring, like. Like, 25 security guards will, like, follow you around or something like that. Something that's a little bit more, like, tied to security. It feels like this should be about a transportation company. Like, are you launching, like, a Lyft competitor or something?

Yeah. Or you do something like this during a conference so that at least there's, like, more. Like, I'm just thinking, like, you're driving around Soho and you see this, like, cybertruck, and you're like, okay, cool. And they probably got like, 10, 10 rides in throughout the day.

Yeah. And I do like the idea of, like, if you're a founder and you're picking a car and you just happen to buy a cybertruck, like, throw your logo on it.

Yeah.

Like, I think that's really positive.

Yeah. It's a good way to get cheap attention. If that's a car that you personally.

Want to own and drive, but you can put it on whatever car you own. If you have a Ford Raptor, throw some. Throw a wrap for your company on there. Like, that's funny and cool. And then when you pull up people.

Yeah, you. Funny. It's funny that when you think about wraps as, like, an unutilized ad inventory.

Yeah.

The issue is that the people that would wrap their car with something for, like, a nominal amount of money are gonna have, like, not so great cars that you want to associate with. But, like, it would be a funny thing for, like, imagine if someone wrapped.

The Porsche with, like, you know, oh, like, buy my meta Ray Bans.

There's a. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be cooler. Like, GT3RS with A.

Like, just like. Like all of his different products. Like, download Instagram here, QR code. Like, just really tacky.

Like, I did that. I did that with our. Our old CTO is, like, into, like, racing. I was like, let me. Do you have any sponsors? Let me sponsor your car. I got. Put five of my companies up there.

That's great. Yeah, it's cool.

It looks awesome.

It also just.

Everybody on the team. Yeah, it just makes the cool car look cooler. That's an example of capitalism in action, is putting a bunch of stickers on a car makes it look cooler. Yeah, that's amazing. That's the power of advertising.

Yeah, I like that you saw this tweet.

Yeah. So this is just like so funny in so many ways because for some reason like all the AI slides, slop thread accounts have all decided that like this is the new scam and it's break it down.

Tell me what the tweet says. Tell me, tell me.

There was like 30 of these tweets that are basically saying AI models are earning over. AI influencers are earning over $5,000 per month. Meet Emily, a 21 year old model who was brought to life by AI. Now you can create your own AI influencer in many minutes. Here's how. And I think it's cool technology, but to me this just makes me go long like actual influencers. Because one people don't really realize but like you can have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram being like an Instagram model and like make like below minimum wage because like unless you're genuinely influenced, influential and cool and brands like actually think that by working with you they're going to elevate their brand. The best that you're getting is like free product. So I'm imagining like all the guys that were doing like drop shipping stores 10 years ago and like didn't, it didn't really work and they're looking for their next thing are now like, I'm going to make an army of AI influencers and they're just like going to be like slaving over like creating like the perfect like all this content because, because it's obviously like these people are competing against other influencers who have a real connection with their audience, have years and years and years of sort of like a relationship and genuinely are creating like artisanal content. And anybody that's going out and saying you're going to make $60,000 a year with your AI slop influencer that has no opinion and all these courses are for sure gonna say like if you can just get one AI influencer that's making 5,000amonth and then you scale to 100 or a thousand, you could be making $5 million a month from your AI influencer business.

Well, that's where the money is. So that guy's promoting a course or something or like a product, something like that. He's selling the product that allows you to do this. But you know what's really interesting is that that video there is an actual human. It's not AI generated. He's just saying that it's AI generated because obviously if you use a real person, it looks even more real. And there's no. There's no risk of, like, sloppification.

Yeah.

Because everyone's like, oh, wow. Like, he was able to make a girl where the hands are perfect and everything. There's no, like, the hair isn't transforming or anything. And there's no, like, there's no artifacts. So he must have the best tech in the game. I got to go with this guy. That's what I think. At least that's what the Community Notes said when I dig in.

Really?

Yeah. I'm like, did I tell you this? I'm like. I'm like, community Notes admin now.

Let's go. Let's go. You're the new Wikipedia mafia.

So I can go in and rate all the Community notes. I can write community notes. I can do all that stuff.

Great. You should Community Note all our posts. Technology Brothers has knocked Knock. Not the most profitable podcast.

Yeah. Because if you get a Community Note, then it'll be more viral because it'll be like, oh, they got dunked on. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So, I mean, Trevor McFedry's, like, already tried to do this with Brad back in the day. Oh, I don't know.

This.

Like, he made an AI influencer called Lil Mikayla. Had genuine, like, million followers. Like, really cool collaborations. Like, really good execution over a long period of time. He sold the company to dapper in, like, 2022, and I would just, like. But they were approaching it from, like, world building and actual storytelling. It's not like, give me a TikTok girl, like, that's between the ages of 22 and 25, and make them dance to the most viral songs. It's like, okay. Like, I just. I'm very bearish, but happy that the Coarse Bros have a new. Have a new Grift product to sell.

Yeah.

One of the guys I was hanging out with at buddy of mine, this guy Kimia, who sold his last company to Ramp, he's building software to, like, basically an AI agent to, like, find and win government contracts, which is cool. So we've been talking about, like, how do you create this sort of, like, cottage industry around people basically showing other people how to find and win government contracts? And then in the same way that Shopify benefit. I think shop. Maybe it was you that said, I don't know if Hindenburg ever covered Shopify, but basically his business will be massively successful. If you can you get all these bros being like millionaires are being made by government through government contracting, which I'm actually very think is very positive. Because if you get a bunch of smart young hustlers that are going to compete for contracts to do toilet paper for the penitentiary, it's kinda like the old war dogs. Yeah. It's like. Well, it actually increases competition and lowers the cost for the taxpayer and the government. So anyways, I hope that that becomes.

Yeah, it's kind of related to the rise of the rest thing that you've been talking about. Did you see that announcement from Valinor? Julie Bush put this out. Have you seen this?

Oh yeah, yeah. Is it an incubator?

Yeah, I mean everyone's kind of confused about what it is, but it's like, you know, maybe incubator, maybe holding company eventually. Maybe some of the companies live in inside. I think it's still pretty early, but.

Did they raise money?

Yeah.

Is she a part of the Bush family?

Oh, I don't know. Maybe.

That's some lore. If Ben was, if Ben was here, he could quickly.

Yeah, yeah.

Because that would be like the ultimate like if Jeb Bush is the lead investor.

I was thinking about how there's like so few neocons anymore. They just, they, they're kind of a dying breed. Everyone's like, you know, you're either like a right wing nationalist or like you're like left wing pro war. But there's no like right wing pro war.

Dick Cheney's still, he's still around. He's still.

Yeah, but he's like crossing now, right?

Yeah, he endorsed Kamala. Yeah, but he's just pro war.

But yeah, I think the main value prop for Valanor is like if you're just a talented founder but you don't know anything about distribution, you don't know anything about government contracting. They will, in exchange for equity and cash, like standard YC deal type thing, they give you the tools to get your first contract.

That's super cool.

Yeah. Which I think is.

Yeah, because I just think it's about the reason. I heard about a guy who basically makes like millions of dollars per year as the guy that California contracts to when they need to move like protected bird eggs from like one location that's getting developed to another. And so like that should not be a million dollar contract.

There should be three companies bidding over that aggressively to get the price down.

Because think about it, think about if you Went to like some environmental studies student and it was like, hey, do you want to take a six month course on how to transport like, you know, endangered bird eggs? They're like, cool, okay, now you can do this. And it pays $150 per day and it's contract based. And like you've gone from a multi million dollar contract to like, okay, now we're paying like entry level, level like.

What it actually deserves.

And so I think more competition is good and it's so opaque and inefficient that can't possibly be very competitive.

We were talking about this with the SpaceX narrative is like, it's the Power Law winner. I think it's like $150 billion company and it's great. And the, and Anduril has kind of like carved their, their brand out as like the Power Law winner in defense tech broadly. But there, there still remains the question of like, they can be the Power Law winner and defense tech can not look like the phone market. It can look like the SaaS market in the sense that like yes, they are the Power Law winner in the sense that like they're the salesforce, they're the biggest company and maybe they're the prime.

Yeah, but look at the CRM market. You still have Salesforce and HubSpot.

Exactly. There are still a lot of other companies that like do fantastically. And I also think like, and there's this very broader element of like Anduril is like, is like a prime and does like, you know, DOD contracting. But when people think about like defense tech and hard tech, it gets so broad that people wind up like Augustus with weather modification is like kind of in that milieu and yet like not.

He just called me from the Caribbean, really the wind. He said, don't tell anybody where I am right now. You're not going to believe this. He's just in the eye of the storm, just like fighting.

He's fighting for his life right now.

No, so I think the reason that defense tech is not going to be, or I would hope that it doesn't become the monopoly that Anduril is sort of implies is that, oh, that's perfect.

Yeah.

The reason that I don't think it'll be the monopoly that they like sort of like philosophize, we could be monopoly over. One of the stated goals of the DoD and the government in general is vendor diversity.

Yeah, I mean, Palmer told me that directly. He said like, the government will not allow us to be a complete monopoly. Exactly. Yeah, but they can still be the greatest, like, value creation event in defense technology over the past 60 years, right? Which is like, a huge win for everyone. And I think the even cooler thing is like, like, I think about that. That guy who's doing that stove, the impulse stove. And have you seen this? It's basically like a stove that has a ton of batteries in it. So it's an electric stove, but it can heat up like a pan very quickly, be very precise. And he's always like, cooking steaks on Twitter and being like, I cook the perfect steak using my stove. It's very cool. And it's something where it's like, I don't know if that would get funded without Anduril, even though it's like, not in defense tech at all. Anduril just kind of like, shook the tree to be like, hey, it's okay to take risks on hardware. Because for so long the meme was like, hardware is hard. Like, pebble had such a bad go out of yc. There were so many companies that tried and never really got escape velocity. Now people are like, okay, we're going to take a shot on it again just with whatever. And that means, like, new fridge companies, new camera companies, new phone, new devices. Like, and I just think, like, more of those.

I have one that's relevant to the show. Maybe we should. Maybe we should fund it. I want somebody to make me the world's most beautiful print office printer.

I just bought this printer and it's black and white.

My wife was. So when you think about a printer, it's like, basically the perfect business model. It's like this sort of like, razor and blade up front. Yeah, razor and blade. But I was driving over here and I got an email that was like, can you, like, print this out and scan it and, like, return it or whatever? And I'm just like, oh, that's like, super annoying. I don't have a printer. I use, like, the, like, postal place. And so I was like, now I need to buy a printer. And I'm like, well, like, I need it to fit, like, the aesthetic of my office. And like, I'm like, okay, now I'm gonna be like, on HP's website being like, what's the least ugly printer? But then it's like, okay, like, some things just don't die. And in the same way that, like, vinyl records are probably, like, you know, they're not as big as they were at the peak, but stabilized and there's just people with various. It's like, I would love to be able to buy a beautiful printer and I'll sign up for the yearly subscription.

You need to do it with somebody who's really cool and who the board of directors at Apple actually just wants to hang out with so you can sell the company. Like Beast should live. That clearly should live within Apple. They will never do it probably for ESG reasons because it's printing paper and it's kind of.

But that would be. That would be like mkbhd. Like make a printer. The tech guy makes the Ant. The beautiful. Like. Yeah, I'm really bullish on hardware that is like just extremely analog. Right. Like I want. Like it's in the same way that the highest. The most luxury. Yeah. But like the most like Bentley when they're making new cars are like, we know that our customers like switches and stuff like that. And so. And it's the same reason that like my least favorite technology company of my life is Sonos. Because you made this like, beautiful looking speaker that is like, you know, very ugly to use and experience as a user. From the setup to like, it's not syncing anymore to why are these three speakers playing? But like, that one's not. And like, oh, one of them's not connected to the Internet. And it's like, I'm gonna like take. I donated some Sonos speakers, but I'm now wishing that I brought them to the gun range because it would bring me joy to just like blow up like my Sonos speakers.

It is crazy how like, they're a pretty big company and they deserve to.

Get mauled by Apple.

They need a Hindenburg research. We tried the product. It actually is confusing the entire report.

Yeah, they said that people were playing music every day, but it disconnects all the time.

It disconnects all the time. But it really is a testament that in order to do the absolute top tier software engineering where stuff just works, you actually have to be a trillion dollar company like Apple.

Yeah, yeah.

A $10 billion company just can't do it, especially if it's an older company.

So do it. Do it slightly analog.

Companies like Ramp obviously has built something that's like, they're punching way above their size in terms of like the quality of the software. But it is extremely hard, it's craftsmanship to build like great software that actually works all the time. Like.

Yeah.

Because anytime you break those expectations.

Well, it's a firmware. Anytime you're getting into like.

Yeah, the crossover is really hard between the hardware and software. Did you read this one, Mark Andreessen?

This is so this is so real.

What did he say? He said, overheard in Silicon Valley. Every company should add this question to their interview loop. It's fine if you have gone to Burning man, but are you currently going to Burning Man? I think he means, like, on an annual cadence, right?

Yeah.

Right now.

Yeah, yeah, Burning Man.

I mean, I know why he hates it. Extremely high nps, but can't invest in it.

That's it.

Because if you ever talk to somebody who goes to Burning man, dude, you gotta go. It's so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Extremely high nps. Yeah, but.

So two things. Two things you've effectively had almost going on a decade of having the ability to do it without the desire to do it. And I would say ayahuasca and Burning man. And ultimately both of them were sort of intuitively demonic. Ayahuasca is like, hey, I'm gonna go take a plane 12 hours into into the jungle to get one shotted by some jungle demon, and then, like, hope that it cures me, right? And then come back with, like, okay, now I'm dealing with whatever, like, trauma I was trying to deal with and the trauma of my jungle demon, you know, who's calling me.

What's under discussed in the ayahuasca debate? Lex Friedman didn't get one shotted. I just listened to a recent podcast of him with the Cursor team. You know, these, like, AI. It's like a coding ide. It was just classic Lex. There was nothing changed. It was fine.

What do you mean? He. You're saying he did it and then came back?

Oh, yeah, yeah. There was a whole arc where he, like, went into the jungle. He, like, took a bunch of time off. He, like. I think he grew a beard. And I think he. In a conversation with Elon, said he took, like, a mega heroic dose. Maybe it wasn't ayahuasca, but I think it was. He did some sort of, like, shamanic retreat and he came back completely fine. Has done.

No, but I think here's the thing.

He's just normal.

Here's the thing with psychedelics, if you're going into a psychedelic experience and you're highly stable and you're in a good place, then you come out of it.

Being like, I'm good. I don't need a change.

Yeah. If you go in an unstable place trying to make it fix you, it's different to go into it being like, I'm gonna have this cool, unique experience, and maybe I come out with a different perspective. But going in being like, please, jungle demon. Fix me.

Well, this was. The Daniel thing was like it's a sorting function and it's dangerous for Mark to invest in pre sorted founders and that he should actually only invest in founders that have done the ayahuasca and.

Not been one shot still are doing enterprise SaaS.

Exactly.

Those are the generational founders, those are the killers. Yeah. So anyways, I think that if you think about things that are sort of like, sort of intuitively demonic, going and taking a poison and throwing up for, you know, 12 hours in a hut in Peru and like being visited by a spirit that is like making you face like your greatest fears, you know, that sort of seems like maybe not thing that the average person should do. It'd be like, you wouldn't be like, oh, I'm gonna go get an exorcism in Louisiana in the swamp. You know, it's like, how different is that than like going to Peru? So if a founder calls you up and says, hey, I'm gonna be offline for the next couple weeks, I'm going to Louisiana to get an exorcism. And it's like kind of in this hut swamp, it's gonna be really dark. It's with somebody. I don't know. I'm paying them a lot of money. I'm not really sure what I'm getting in return. There's gonna be other strangers there that I don't know that are also dealing with their own traumas. You'd be like, hey, hey, bud. I feel like it's my duty to tell you to not do that. And then also if somebody was describing, hey, I'm gonna go into the desert. This place called Black Rock. Is it Blackrock city?

Yeah. No, BlackRock is the investment front.

BlackRock, I'm gonna go to.

I think it is Blackrock City.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna go to Black.

Is it affiliated with BlackRock?

Oh my God. We just put it together.

BlackRock. BlackRock City.

BlackRock's shorting tech massively.

Yeah.

And they're. And they, they're funding the thing that's one shotting all the right technology actually called blackrock City.

That is ridiculous if that's what it's called. Black Rock City City. Blackrock City.

Yeah. It's the playa Burning Man. Oh my God.

Well, now I gotta go. BlackRock's involved.

I love BlackRock.

Yeah. Is a phenomenal institution.

No, but if somebody said, I'm going to Blackrock City.

You think Larry Fink's ever been and he's like, this is My City. He's the CEO of BlackRock.

I bet he's dropped in. Yeah, he's flown in the PJ and, like, landed. And he's like, I run this place.

I run this place.

I run this place. He harvests the energy. Like, what's the, like, of the Harkonnen mode, where he's, like, in, like. He's in, like, a bathtub in Black Rock City, and he's just, like, fully locked into the energy of the playa, and he's just taking it. And then he goes back to New York. He's like, I have what I need. No, but. But if somebody told you, hey, I'm gonna go to the desert with a bunch of people. I don't know. All sort of Western norms are thrown out the window. People are going to be dressed up in lingerie or just naked, and then everybody's going to do a bunch of drugs and have sex with strangers. You would say, hey, I don't know. Is that the best use of your time? Have you done hard drugs like that before? Should you combine hard drugs and sex with random strangers? You'd be like, so I don't think.

Everyone does everything there.

Right.

But, like, the people just go and DJ and stuff.

Yeah, but let's. Let's be honest. Like, the people that are coming back being like, dude, you got it. Those are the ones that have been, you know, occupied by the demons and are now. Are now trying to spread that. Right.

Yeah.

So anyways, I think, like, if you just say it out loud, it all makes sense why maybe the average person shouldn't do it and they should just, like, go to church or something. You know, try.

Well, it's like the fork in the road meme. There's a Rock city and then there's Black Rock hq.

Yeah.

And you just want to show up to Blackrock and start grinding up the ladder.

Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like you could go to the jungle and do hard drugs with a sketchy shaman. Or you could just put on a suit, Right. And, like, would putting on the suit give you the real effect that you wanted? Which is just, like, feeling good and just, like, looking good and just, like, doing good, probably. Right. Like, you could go to Burning man. Or you could just put on a suit and just, like, hit the spreadsheets. You know?

The spreadsheets.

It's like. It's people that are like, I don't tip male waiters. Like, hit the oil rig.

I've never heard that. That's really funny.

Or it's like, dude, don't go to. It's like, don't go to Black Rock City. Like, put on a suit and go to blackrock.

Go to blackrock. Yeah. I can't believe we just realized that. I've heard about Burning man for so many years. Never put it together. Blackrock's behind everything. Oh, my God. They own the entire economy, including the burners, apparently. Well, speaking of getting on the grind set, do you use a set of apps to build a second brain?

Yeah. Yeah. This is so.

It's the midway.

So good, right? Yeah, yeah.

Everyone has this at the midway.

So I will say I can't completely roast this because I use the bear app, which is just like a notes app that I think is slightly better than notes, but I do have just like a bunch of notes and a lot of them get lost. And it's fine.

It is easy to like roast this because it's like kind of like this over optimized thing. But like, it's totally reasonable to like have some organization in your life.

Yeah.

Just like don't go crazy with it.

It'd be like somebody like, it'd be like a guy in Mad Men being like, check it out, all my filing cabinets, you know, and he's like, I use this one for like important, you know, documents, and I use this one for like pictures of my family.

Yeah, it's like, I mean, there's something where it's like, I. The problem is is that just like from the context here, just seeing this in the form of a tweet, like, I know that this person is like selling a course and like their like second brain is like their life and this is all they do is like organize.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like this self referential thing where like they're in the business of organization as opposed to. What I really want to know is, I want to know like, what is Elon's version of this? What's Zuck's version of this? I just want to know, like, what are the actual BlackRock, like what is on his phone?

The high powered version of this is just like having really talented people around you that you delegate important things to. Right. It's like the executive assistant, it's the driver, it's the CEO.

It's really just one app. It's the phone, it's the phone book and you just call the person and they pick up because they know it's important.

It's the COO that you worked with for 20 years that like you're. You're like, I'm not going to do this deal if. If this person's not involved.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, at the high level, I've always noticed that, like, the really, the really big guys, they always just like, oh, I'm like, oh, I have an app for that. They have a person. Yeah, it's like, I have Doordash. They have a chef.

Yeah, right.

It's like, oh, I have Zillow. They have a person that buys real estate for them. A full time person that just goes right. Hunting for real estate deals. Like, oh, like you have, you know, the United app. They have a private jet with a pilot that they just call. And so it's just their phone book is like, they want to do something. Okay, call the. Call the driver. Instead of Uber, I got a jet.

I got good advice from.

Maybe the billionaires aren't so similar.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You have apps, we have people.

They still have access to, like the same things. It's just like at a different level.

Yeah, I got really good advice from like one of the GPs at Andreessen after they invested, because I was like, oh, we raised a lot of money. Now we should be like, we're like a real company. And I was concerned because I'd never worked at a company the size of my company, so I had no, like, real, like, well, how should the meetings flow? When should we do meetings like this? And so I was asking him, I was like, trying to figure out, like, what the ideal, like, meeting structure throughout a week was. And he was just like, dude, just like, build. Just build the product. Like, just build, like, sell the customers, build the product. Like, none of that stuff really matters until, like, you know. And that's sort of like common Silicon Valley advice, but sometimes you need to, to hear it at the right time. And I would just ask, like, I would just like, ask this guy, like, cool, like, like, how much money did you make in the last 60 days? Not from selling courses on your second brain, you know? And if the answer is like, zero, then it's like, okay, this is just like, yeah, you're a course bro.

Yeah, yeah. The course bro definition is always quantitative. It's did you make more money from content? I remember watching somebody who's doing real estate content, like how to invest in real estate. And he was like, I made $3 million and I'm a real estate guy in L. A. I made $3 million last year. And his breakdown was he made 50k as a real estate broker and $2,950,000 as a YouTuber. Isn't that crazy?

That's amazing.

Put this, this was in like a cnbc like published. Like they broke down all of how he makes it. And I was like, this is hilarious and ridiculous.

Seems like the only person that would ever make content like that that actually makes money from business is like Alex Hormozi where he's like, here's how I run my day. But then he actually owns a bunch of profitable businesses.

What else should we talk about? Light bulbs. Probably got to wrap up soon. Oh, I wanted to do this. Investment memos versus decks. I thought this would be a good Q and A. You're a big deck guy. Investment memos are trending. This tweet from Mercedes Benz says, I'm seeing more founders put together investment memos as fundraising material. It's a good idea, but too many of them read like book report summaries. Founders, if you're going to write a memo, make sure it reads like a thesis. How you developed your thesis, your unique vision for the future, assumptions you make that could be tested, risk to your thesis, et cetera. So the reason take on, on industrial memos versus decks.

Huge, huge mistake to go into a round with no deck. Because the visuals are so important to the storytelling that if you just have this text and 20 paragraphs in a row, it's just so boring. Because if you have one image where people's eyes gonna go to. I think people don't realize I'm not reading your memo. I'm not reading your master's thesis on your business before I've even met you. Because it doesn't matter if it's a good thesis. If I have a 5, 10 minute conversation with this person and the person sucks, I'm not gonna. Nothing's gonna happen.

Right.

Like that happens all the time with investors where it's like the right idea and the wrong team and you can't invest. And so I think that the reason to write a memo, and this is the core reason to write a memo, is to get. Give the investors something that they can copy and paste to make their own memo.

Sure.

So write it as though they're writing it to their investment committee, their partner meeting, whatever the thing that they're going to share around.

It's the same thing for press releases. If you do the journalist's job by giving them an interesting story, giving them interesting quotes, give them the angles, give them the photos, give them the stuff, make it easy for them, then they will be more likely to regulate.

Yeah, but I think like I really think people are doing it on hard mode if they're. Almost all products are visual, whether it's software, hardware, some IRL thing, huge visual component, and it doesn't give the visuals enough credit.

There are also some VCs that just demand a deck every time. And so it's like, why would you just pitch a subset of VCs by being hard on, like, oh, I only do.

Yeah, Well, I don't think any legitimate VC is saying, I won't talk. I want Keith. Keith Roboy demands debt.

I'm pretty sure he. I'm pretty sure he like, generally won't.

But he will also take a meeting.

Unless he sees a deck.

He wants to invest 20 million into somebody he knows really well without any materials. Yeah. So yeah, I just think like that debate always comes up and one is not. They just have like very different use cases. I also, in fact, building the memo.

Can often like, does lead to the deck being stronger when you build it, right?

Totally, totally. But yeah, it's just like not one or the other. I think the right combination that feels a little bit less like try hard almost. Because sometimes when somebody's like writing some like super extensive memo, you're like, you should be like doing something else. Like your seed stage, your pre seed company. Like, you don't know any of this, but like FAQs I think work really well where it's like you basically create like, what are the 10 most common questions that somebody asks? How are you different than XYZ competitor? And you just answer all those. And then as you get more questions in your raise, you just add them to the list. And then by the end you have this document that you can just share with everybody. And then that again is helping them do their job. So they're at their investment, their partner meeting, talking about it, and somebody's like, well, we looked at this company and they're doing great. How is it different? They're like, well, here's how it's different. So you're just like making the job easier for your potential investor who, if they invest, will become your partner. So you're already like, should be acting like you're on the team.

Yep.

So that's how I would advise people to approach it.

I like that. That's a good place to close it out.