Alexis Ohanian, Will Manidis, Sam Lessin, Mistow Teel, La Sombrita, Optimism on the Timeline

36:28I'm off the sauce. Back on the wagon. Off the wagon. On the wagon means you're not drinking. I did not drink last night. And I feel great. And I got an 84. Only missed on the routine. I think that's just because I'm all over the place with falling asleep. But I got almost eight hours. 748 you have me beat and that was a that was a fair and square you know i don't have any excuses i had my routine was at you know something like 93 i just didn't didn't get the hours yeah so i think i would it'll be really interesting once we get it dialed and we're doing consistent you know hundreds every night uh the dom episodes i think that we might have an advantage here because we drink in the morning yes and so it's fully out of your system so we could probably get brian johnson to like approve that right yeah to be like yeah like it doesn't count if you drink it at 11 a.m but i think the real alcohol problem is when you're drinking you know right up until you go to bed then it's still in your system so yeah that's it i think that's the secret don't drink only don pairing on and only at 11 a.m after a major major celebration before noon before noon yeah only drink before noon uh anyway uh china is coming for our semiconductor supply chain we've talked about some of these companies i've been looking for i was thinking about doing a thread on this like like years ago um and trying to like break it all down it's very very hard yeah i mean i thought it would go super viral but um it's very very hard because um all of these chinese companies that work in the semiconductor supply chain they all have websites that look exactly the same and like they're very hard to translate it's actually hard to understand who the real players are if you don't speak chinese and don't really work in the industry um but nick says china will produce the entire semiconductor supply chain in-house obviously they want to try and do this they want to get away from tsmc they want to get away from taiwan this is what's driving ben thompson's pitch right now for rolling back the chips act let's keep china dependent on Taiwan.

38:31So then there is no incentive. And the thought of a Taiwan invasion is unthinkable. But if you cut them off early, they're going to have to pull forward their homegrown strategy. And as soon as they're successful, then it's game on, potentially. Hopefully not. Yeah. So in design software, they got Empyrean. In fabless chip design, they got high silicon, Unisoc, and Byron. In lithography equipment, that's the competitor to asml out in denmark or where where's asml it's in it's in europe somewhere um they have smi and c-e-t-c uh in photo resist they have dinglong and rongda and then in etching and deposition equipment they have nara fabrication smic which is their equivalent of tsmc uh packaging and testing they have two companies tongfu and jset nand which is the memory and dram also memory and HBM they're competing with uh that uh SK Hynix the South Korean company that makes all the memory that has been super important in the GPU uh scale out I think here's most people haven't been focusing one of the counterpoints to Ben Thompson's argument which is just that you know we should you know let China maintain their dependence on TSMC is I have to imagine that China would have done this exact same thing even if they had unlimited access to uh all the chips they wanted in the world from nvidia um you know you know buying directly from tsmc etc so yeah i think this would have been the natural path in the same way that in the u.s in an ideal situation we would also have a full in-house you know silicone uh supply chain semiconductors supply chain I think that's true except for the fact that when I looked on this list like America is not really working on very many of these no I'm I'm not saying we would like it in theory we should yeah totally but I guess there's a question of like how much political will exactly take like it's it's a it's a huge investment China seems to be willing to make that because they're kind of backed up against the wall but uh we're not doing that in in America We are doing it kind of more broadly in the West.

40:45We've always kind of seen this, even the ASML stuff. It's not an American company, but they built on a lot of American intellectual property, which is how I believe the CHIPS Act is enforced. It says that if you're on this restricted list, you can't buy products from companies that use American intellectual property, even though it's not an American company. They're an ally, and then they play ball with us. And so anyway, very tricky. so good time to build one of a competitor one of these companies because they're coming and we've seen this with it feels like every few years there's like oh they america china has a very very serious competitor in like unitree for example um deep seek all these different companies kind of pop up yeah we missed this earlier this week unitree released a demo yeah of a of a humanoid doing kung fu yeah which was very cool and i mean the the unitree demos are looking so good now they often get flagged on community notes as like these this is ai or this is cgi look at the shadow it's not matching up and then sometimes there'll be a fight over like no this is actually real uh and i think obviously then people are also playing into it and making fake videos too but um in general like it is real and the tech is is getting very very serious and the production scale of that is also really risky i wonder if they'll do uh yeah it's an interesting situation where Unitree doesn't care if a bunch of CGI videos are released because it's basically information warfare, whereas the other humanoid robotics companies would get completely dragged.

42:16They obviously can't produce any of these sort of falsified or sort of videos, but Unitree is happy to just sort of show off capabilities that may or may not even be real. yeah i wonder when we will see a uh you know there's like chinese drone shows fireworks it's like a dragon in the sky it's all the drones uh flying in unison with leds on them i wonder when we'll see a unitry level demo of that with humanoids like you know there's like soviet marches of like oh wow they have a thousand like soldiers just marching down the street like like unitry is still in like the oh we have one cool demo like but imagine you see yeah a thousand of those and you're like yeah this isn't ai generated that would be yep that'd be a big moment it's coming and at that point it's kind of like all the infighting between all the humanoid companies really doesn't matter yeah and i become a bull on all of them yeah one of the challenges is that you need tree you need tree humanoids are still pretty expensive like i think that the the solid ones yes i mean like i'm just saying the salary of a soldier is 50 000 and and the good ones are more like 100k sure and so you're looking at to get one of those demonstrations of a thousand you're looking at potentially a hundred million dollars that you just have to um if i'm the chinese government that seems like a steal steal yeah lunch money yeah because you you want to you want to force the industrial capacity to say no don't just make one great robot make make me a hundred thousand even if they don't go anywhere at least you got the reps in to scale up your manufacturing to that point and then v2 make another hundred thousand but always be making a hundred thousand because the product is not one robot the product is a machine that produces millions of robots yeah right anyway yeah if uh when that happens i hope that there's like a little bit of unity between the american uh humanoid companies because it's game on and everybody's got to be building stuff yeah i mean you forget that like in world war ii like people weren't like oh like i care more about like you know my my my fighter jet needs to have a a ford motor engine it's like no i think there was i mean whatever will get me i do think there was the channel yeah sure it was more about reliability and people definitely had favorites around equipment but well you know in in specific moments it didn't really matter as long as the just build it yeah yeah yeah anyone who's helping is better than nothing totally yeah um we got some more agents uh we got news from shiran uh who is a writer for bloomberg she says uh former leading deep mind researchers coming out of stealth with a new startup aimed to build super intelligence starting with autonomous coding agents they've raised 130 million from lightspeed crv sequoia alex wang reed hoffman at a 555 million dollar valuation a nice little round to come out the gates and a good little photo shoot they did here yeah another foundation model company i mean this one seems aimed uh you know it's more more like an you know agents uh so who knows if they're actually building uh an actual foundational model or it's more of uh sort of an orchestration type play it's just crazy that this is another one like there's just so many i can't keep track uh it's the first time you you really do need the market map because there's just so so many of these um but good luck to them hopefully they find an interesting you know go-to-market interesting distribution channel interesting product differentiator we've seen that there are obviously a lot of different ways that you can differentiate the product and make it better um but it's hard to break through it'll be interesting there was also news today that uh google co-founder larry page is reportedly developing a new ai startup um wait why isn't he just doing it at google yeah yeah that's that's a big pushback um he's launching a new company called dinatomics which focuses on using artificial intelligence in product manufacturing okay um and that's so weird that he's not just doing it at google company throws off like a trillion dollars in cash or something yeah somehow i missed this until now um i'm going to just read through it since we're talking about it so google co-founder larry page has formed a new company dinatomics to upend manufacturing with artificial intelligence so his argument here would be google's not focused on manufacturing sure i want to do something here hence dinatomics page and a small group of engineers are working on ways to use large language models to create highly optimized designs for wide variety of objects and then have a factory build them uh so so sort of some type of autonomous i mean very cool conceptually use ai to generate you know uh schematics you know designs for something and then just build it autonomously the stealth company is run by chris anderson these people said anderson was previously the chief technology officer of another pageback company kitty hawk an ambitious project to build small electric airplanes potentially revolutionizing how people get around cities a company shut down in 2022 amid failed prototypes and regulatory concerns.

47:42Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for the information. So yeah, if, if page is excited enough to, you know, incubator or invest in, or be a large part of a new AI startup I'm sure the Google shareholders are sort of bummed that he's not rolling up his sleeves and getting back in to you know, probably the biggest opportunity in AI. It's just like Google having a coherent, effective AI strategy, which doesn't feel like they have right now because we've talked about this. You pay for Gemini and half the time you don't know where to find it in the Googleverse. I wonder how he genuinely feels it's going at Google.

48:29Yeah. Because there was this whole report about, oh, maybe with the AI boom, the Google co-founders will get back involved, come more in day to day. And there is a view that you could have that, hey, Google is still, I think the number one website in the world. They can stuff generative AI into the search bar. They can adapt and iterate on the product. And they've made it through so many other challenges. Like people forget about these because it's the survivor bias. But there was a whole moment when people were saying that Google was going to be uh like eaten like much in the way that craigslist was by vertical search so the idea that like yelp was going to be google for restaurants and that was going to take that was going to reduce the size of google's market but over time google just kind of destroyed yelp and destroyed everything else and so maybe he truly believes i don't know if i believe it but but maybe he truly believes that like things are going perfectly and i and i don't need to change anything there because like Google is succeeding in its mission of organizing the world's information.

49:35I mean, Gemini is doing great on evals. They're doing great on CapEx. They're building things out. They have TBEs. Meanwhile, though, somebody, I think it was Shkreli, was making the Google AI repeatedly hallucinate this morning. All he had to do was type in Sam Bankman freed UC SF, and it would like hallucinate that he had gone there or just like add the name of a college at the end and it would hallucinate that the person you were typing went to that school, which kind of makes sense that Google, like something in the product is basically saying that when people Google this, they are expecting this outcome, right?

50:18Even if it's false, right? Yeah, I feel like the Google DNA for correcting those types of things is pretty strong. do you know the story of how Google developed, I think it was like it's auto-complete or like spell check or something. They realized that if you just look through the massive Google data set of like, I mean, there's like billions of searches happening all the time. When someone searches for something and they don't get what they want, they almost always just correct it themselves. And so when they mistype something or they enter a fact that's incorrect, they will often correct it on the second search so you can just look at like this person's search for you know well how did joe weisenthal spell unemployment with a k unemployment and then the next search in immediately after will be unemployment spelled correctly and then and then they can just bake that in and you can look across the entire data set and just assemble like this amazing autocomplete autofill um like like prediction uh algorithm and they should be able to do that with all the ai queries that they're getting because they have to be getting a lot because they have good distribution so i don't know it's interesting though yeah i mean overall the thing with google is is you it's seemingly um you know many of their most talented builders continue to just spin out and start new companies and when you have the ability to go out and raise 100 million dollars basically you know while still in stealth without any type of product um the the the uh there's clearly a lot of appetite to do that yeah i mean this is a perfect example of it because these guys are deep mind they're light speed we we can ask um michael from from light speed is coming on the show on tuesday and uh we can talk about how light speed even sets up their sort of in uh an investment team specifically around these different investments because they obviously are big investors in anthropic yep uh reflection ai this new company out of DeepMind is going to be competing directly or indirectly with Anthropic, I have to imagine.

52:18Maybe they're going to be using Claude in some way, but it's hard to really say at this point. And many of these companies on a long enough, not even on a medium term time horizon are going to be directly competitive. It is interesting that so few VCs, it feels like so many, so few VC firms have really said, hey, we have our bet and we're happy and we're like sticking with it. Yeah. Like almost every VC firm's been like, well, like maybe I'll get two. Yeah. And they're like, four to five feels like the right number. Yeah, four to five is really like the right number of like foundation model companies that directly compete with each other and hate each other.

52:55Yeah. It's very funny. But I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess there are plenty of firms that have figured, that have that strategy and they're open about it. Uh, I know plenty of seed funds will say like, look, like we, we just, we, we're going to invest in a lot of companies at the early stage. You guys are going to pivot. We love you. We'll support you. But like, we're not going to play the, is this competitive game at seed stage? Because it's just impossible when we're writing so many checks and so many people are like pivoting around and stuff. Uh, but if you're like taking board seats and like really deeply invested, uh, I mean at the same time, you know, uh, Mark Zuckerberg or Mark Andreessen was on the board of Facebook.

53:39They invested in the Instagram competitor. What was that called? Hipstamatic. I think they invested in that. And I think they also invested in, they also invested in Instagram Andreessen did because, but they couldn't write a huge check, I believe because they were invested in Hipstamatic, but both of those companies were competitive with Facebook, which they also had a big slicing. So I don't know the whole competitive things, Trekkie. Just got to make money at the end of the day. Yeah. At the end of the day, I've never seen a VC that was invested in two companies actually have a tangible impact on one of them winning over the other one.

54:16Like I would say that overall, I think founders do have to be wary that investors do clearly pick favorites internally, but they are, they do a generally a very good job of not expressing that or showing that publicly right it's not like uh they're going out and saying um you know we uh if you're an angel investor it's much easier to get conflicted right because uh you're not taking huge positions in companies you're generally just wanting to back great teams and people that you like and sometimes two people that you like decide to work on very similar problem areas right yeah or they pivot into that area and so um overall i've never i i personally have never seen an investor, you know, materially damage a company because they were invested in one or the other.

55:04If anything, if anything, investors just want to see all their companies do well, a hundred percent and markets are big enough that, um, and, and there's very rarely like some sort of like secret that a company has that doesn't become obvious. Like the, the classic, uh, concern from a founder is like, Oh, I don't want my competitors to know that this acquisition channel is like working really well, but any, anybody that's competing them, that's halfway decent is going to figure out where they're spending money quickly and you know leverage that channel themselves and so it's not sort of like a real concern um another one is is supply chain stuff i don't know i want my competitor figuring out totally how i get this product or service at this price yep um and uh again that information will come out over time right because usually the supplier will just be yapping like oh we work with this company you know and like trying to find other customers so uh all these things uh at best you have sort of like a momentary gap between when your competitor figures out um uh what you're doing how you're doing it etc and you can leverage that but usually it's not vc just sort of like forwarding you know an investor update it also it also matters the the carry structure at these funds because i mean a benchmark has an equal partnership so there's not going to be as much like infighting between the partners but some funds have like very specific deal by deal carry yep such that if you're invested in two different companies the firm cares a lot less about the winner but the individual partners could be like yeah we're technically in two different companies that are competitive but as a partner that only has major carry in one like i really don't care about that other one or i actually want that other one to fail almost yeah so firms like light speed that are making investments you know broadly in category are setting up you know very clear sort of firewalls yeah yeah i actually don't know about the carry structure at most funds it's kind of hard to figure out it's mostly just like lore it's gonna need a way for a newcomer to to scoop it yeah even even that like it just doesn't leak out really yeah it's it's pretty really nobody's only benchmark has really like made it part of their like marketing i think yeah uh anyway should we move to some uh breaking news from david senra Founders podcast dropped two episodes at the same time.

57:20We talked to him about this. That's serious podcasting. Serious podcasting. You know, David, you know, they say you should never podcast weekly. You should only podcast strongly. And he is a strong podcaster. He's a strong podcaster. He also doesn't have a fixed publishing schedule, which is cool. He releases episodes when he finds them that they're ready. I'm excited to listen to this one from uh just released or there's two from michael ovitz who is michael ovitz is a fantastic book i read it uh when i was i think in college or just uh just graduated and then i had the chance to meet michael ovitz in uh 2021 uh my buddy uh rompton uh had me over uh with with michael at michael's house in la um one of probably the single coolest property that i've ever been on in my entire life anywhere globally uh truly a one-on-one house and he's got fantastic taste in in all things uh cars watches and art uh did he talk about his uh history with cia at all creative artists agency i was just impressed with ovitz's ability to understand exactly our playbook with party round which we were building you know party round at the time so he immediately he immediately you know understood the opportunity and it was just despite having at that point already been out of CAA he just and and mostly focused on investing he's one of those guys that will just be doing very significant deals for his for his entire life so excited to dive into this one and you know one of the best things about these particular founders episodes what's that they open with ramp ads right away right away as soon as you as soon as you click that in your rss feed david center is going to be dropping he's one of the best ad smiths of all time he is he gives you a run for your money he is and you know he makes it clear time is money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place and so we love david and we love that he's also partnered with ramp also promoting ramp.

59:34And I got to give a shout out to Logan Brand. He posted this morning at 5 40 AM. He said, who's putting up numbers like TBN, TBPN in the battle for ear share. It's hard to compete with the, with the brothers when they just love it more hashtag ramp. And that's true. Uh, we love what we do and, uh, we feel very lucky to be able to do it every single day. That's great. Right. Well, we got three minutes until Wilman Naitis is calling in. Yeah, we can quickly cover this post from Rex Salisbury. So he said, Amex is losing market share to companies like Ramp that have a better product. Their answer, buy an expense management company for$600 million built by the founder of Concur and his son.

1:00:17Wonder how that will work out. And so Center, I had never heard of. I mean, it seems like it worked out really well because the the founder got$600 million. Yeah. Yeah. They just personally wired him 600 and that was it. Yeah. I mean, starting a business with your dad and then quickly selling it to a legacy incumbent, go to go to, um, yeah, congratulations on the deal. Uh, good look, but ramp's going to be you. Yeah. I mean, the challenge here is this does not, I don't, I, I never had the ability to or the opportunity to use center, but it's hard to actually feel like this is that. that this is suddenly gonna make Amex's product competitive with ramp or alternatives.

1:01:12um and you know because the issue is center clearly didn't have penetration within this sort of like high growth market and obviously you know it's possible that they serve a lot of mid-market companies but um and so it goes into the big organization and it kind of like languishes and does i saw some other posts about how you know is this a business acquisition like are they buying it for the you know customer base and cash flows this is a product acquisition like is this going to make um amex's product uh more robust or is it basically an aqua hire uh feels you know way too expensive for an aqua hire but the thing i like about this i like to see m &a getting done center had raised a series uh c of 30 million dollars yeah uh back in 2023 uh so good to get some liquidity for the founders the employees and the investors i do feel like you know amx is like bleeding cash they're spending 600 million on this thing if they really want to compete they should get on ramp yeah because they need to control expenses and they need to save time and money to really compete and so uh amx execs if you're the cfo of amx i'm sure you're listening uh you should sign up for ramp check it out check it out tell them the technology brother sent you tell him that anyway uh i'm excited to have will this is perfect timing this is exactly how i wanted to time it up we have two posts that were coming in uh i believe will's here in the chat let's bring him in can we hear him will how you doing welcome how are you guys doing to tbp there he is uh you're a little out of frame there but let's see if there we go there we go great you're good you're perfect uh right away uh i gotta give you credit for something important which is introducing john and i yes you uh you did it thank you for the 70 equity in the technology brothers i was really excited to tender that in this most recent round i'm really proud of what you guys have done uh no you had uh amazing um insight and uh you know taste you you i remember you the intro was basically like you guys are the only two people i like in la you should meet something So glad TPG could buy all of my equity and this beautiful brand in this last round at 200 times forward.

1:03:33Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing to have you on. You've been on the show many times before. As a poster. As a poster. First time as a guest. And yeah, we're looking forward to having you as a regular. Yeah. So I want to get your reaction to this post from Ayla. She says, going for aimless walks is one of the worst things. Give me a coffee shop, a bookstore, a friend's house. I will walk eight miles, no problem. But around the block, are you insane? Why would you want each step to be meaningless? Your outdoor time dumped into an empty void. And I feel like you've had a couple bangers about walking.

1:04:13I have one here from you. I've met many people who turn their lives around by walking around aimlessly for a couple hours a day. What's your take on walking? would you recommend it to the next generation of Wilma Nytus's? Yeah, I think you got to walk. Like it's the only way to get comfortable with yourself. You're sitting alone, you're silent, you're not staring at a wall, you're moving. I think Ayla's life might be meaningfully different if she's hitting, you know, 20K, 30K, 40K steps a day. Really the difference between, you know, boys and men happen in between that 10 ,000 and 20 ,000 step a day goal.

1:04:44So for Ayla, I'd prescribe, you know, 50 ,000 steps.

1:04:50That'd be a good start. Did you actually put up 20K yesterday? Like, are you on, are you in that tier? I feel like getting to 10K, no brainer. But what do you actually recommend? But to be clear, getting to 10K is extremely difficult. It's very difficult. Our lifestyle now, which is show up to our building. We're going to get treadmills. So we're going to be walking while we do the show. Do you think that's a suitable substitute for actually walking outside? Or should we just have a film crew with us? Worthless activity. You got to be outside. You got to be in nature. It only counts if you're actually outside.

1:05:21It's worthless. It's not good for yourself. So you think we should have like a, you know, TV camera production trailer following us while we shoot the show, while we're walking around. Yeah. I don't see a reason why this desk can't be on wheels moving with you. Like this show should be happening in the loop. Central park all day. That makes sense. Yes. Yeah. How is New York these days? Beautiful. Springs here. Yeah. Already? The, the issue with New York is that 20 K steps a day in the winter is like deadly, right? Like you just can't do it. But in the summer, like you can hit 40 ,000 step days, no trouble.

1:05:49right yeah yeah 40k days i mean the last time i was there you actually the meme worked on me and i walked all the way from i don't know uptown to downtown and back and it was fantastic and it took like hours and hours and hours but doing the loop of manhattan is like a great once a year it's uniquely amazing or whatever walk all the way down to the loop like that's that's the perfect day in the city yeah talk to us about hobbies uh you've got one that we're particularly interested it in well he won an award for it yeah he's an award-winning award-winning uh model boat enthusiast yeah yeah i mean i think like the best hobbies in the world are the ones where the average participant it's like 85 years old and post-economic and i'm a proud member of central park model yacht club sailing you know comically small and some comically large model boats really hard to get out on the water in new york and it's much easier to get on the water in central part you know you can sail around remote control go quite fast win some races it's a good time uh is that a model boat right behind you is that the sail of a boat six six feet of model boat right behind me my office has been relegated to uh to storage um talk about the rise of christianity in tech i think uh you're you're tracking like a greater rise in christianity in the West, right?

1:07:12Like, I think we tried this kind of post-religious thing through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and it just seemed like it led to universal depression. I mean, particularly in tech, Trey Stevens leading the way there, Trey and Michelle right on the West Coast. But I also think in New York, there's an incredible young Christian movement happening, like Church of the City of New York is baptizing, you know, like a couple million people a week at this point. It's incredible how quickly this is going. The question is, how do you turn this into adorable movement that lasts over time. Slightly worried that it's going to be like a five-year wave, going to be trendy, going to fade out.

1:07:44Christianity is the most important thing that's ever happened to me. I don't know how we fade that out over 20 years, but it feels like a relatively important thing to focus on. Are you worried about kind of Christianity becoming a LARP or cultural Christianity being a substitute? Yeah, this feels like the issue, right? Even when you go to service in San Francisco, it does feel a little bit like this is like a networking event right like why am i here for services and also pitching my startup right it seems like it's good that there's like an elite you know an elite christianity that you know elites somewhat lead cultural taste here this seems good but the fact that we're treating it somewhat like a golf club is a little concerning i do think the larp like all love to the gundo burrows but the the things that come downstream of that feel feel not particularly great that makes sense um what Which companies specifically in the private markets are benefiting most from AI within healthcare?

1:08:45What companies are you excited about? I'm sure you get pitched pretty much every company in the space. If they're not pitching you, what are they even doing? What areas do you think are actually getting, maybe not, I would say consumer adoption, but real enterprise adoption. You obviously worked in this problem space for quite a long time. Yeah, I mean, the take I have here is that legacy healthcare companies are actually going to be the winners during this wave. I think as you see kind of AI adoption happen in healthcare, you're starting to see widgets get adopted, right? Doctors requesting Ambient Scribes.

1:09:23You see big companies like Abridge coming out of that. But ultimately, Ambient Scribes are the front door to the electronic medical record system. they're certainly not the entire suite of software that a physician might use. And unlike the world we're used to in tech, the person who purchased the software and the person that uses software in healthcare are not the same person, right? Physicians are using it, hospital admins procuring it. There's a big divide there, which means they have different competing priorities. I am radically more excited by the opportunity of big legacy healthcare software businesses taking modern AI innovation, installing it onto their user base and scaling that out than I am any kind of novel, new startup.

1:10:02Like I think we will see a thousand kind of AI enabled executive physical startups happen over the next six months. I don't think any of them are going to last. I think we'll see a thousand pill mills that will spin up over the next six months. I think they're all going to jail, right? Healthcare is just not a place that rewards this kind of net new novel distribution plays. But I do think legacy distribution in healthcare is the most underpriced asset in the world right now. And if you can take that plug AI on top of it, very interesting outcomes. Do you think there's alpha in being, you know, young, cracked AI engineer implementer, but instead of starting a company, going to work for one of those legacy companies, working your way up, becoming the CEO?

1:10:43Yeah, tremendous alpha. I mean, if you think about like how big, like install base is the most underpriced thing in software right now. I think everyone's used to seeing these companies go, you know, zero to a hundred and then, you know, probably back down to zero, right? This is Jeremy's thing, the iron condor law or whatever, right but i think there is like something really underappreciated about a company that has had like you know 140 million in reoccurring revenue over decades yeah like that switching costs that install toss that velocity and the ability to pilot software on top of that install base at scale it's just something you can't beat like i don't think you can do that from a new startup that trusts that brand that install it's pretty cool do you think any of the bigger vc funds maybe going public will have the money to buy into that and then drop ai on top of it Hard to know.

1:11:28I mean, I think a lot of this is ground up adoption. Like I work at a large, you know, publicly traded EMR right now, and we're certainly seeing AI happen in every aspect of our product suite, but it's, it's really a matter of making these tools successful. Right. And I think as you see a commodification happen at the model layer, right. Maybe open AI is not worth$140 billion or whatever, when you can install a llama and run them locally and build these product features that we upscale software engineers in these companies and like very smart people go and work for them i think the outcomes will just be better yeah uh do you have any insight into why sbf is getting uh to podcast from uh jail because john posted about this yesterday which was a good line if if you can now tweet and podcast from jail is that not sort of putting out to signal what is the punishment yeah like as a bc time pulled off your sentence right like this just like punishment yeah exactly uh yeah what's your take on that broadly uh you always uh at least within the group chats you you always have good takes here i just think spf is you know this incredible fixture i will be shocked to see if he serves this whole sentence he has like very strong proof that if you donate enough money to the right people you can kind of bend the world around you.

1:12:48I sincerely hope he stays in jail for a very long amount of time. Interesting. Can you tell us, do you have any good anonymized, you don't need to name names, but good stories of frauds or malfeasance in the startup or financial world that you think might be illustrative or educational for the listeners? I mean, I think like, I have a great tweet about this, about kind of the deep tech fraud playbook of how to build, you know, a billion dollar company without shipping any technology. And I think we're seeing some incredible innovations happen in the deep tech for auto arena right now, where we have companies that are raising, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that does not exist, will never exist, and is plainly impossible on the face of it based on, you know, a basic and rudimentary understanding of physics.

1:13:37Has that happened for years though? I mean, that's happened for years with like Solyndra, Theranos, like this playbook seems to be repeating itself forever. Is there anything - Yeah, but I feel like we're getting like, incredibly tested, you know, playbooks here, right? The acquisition of mass amounts of LA based real estate, right? Arm tattoos from the CEOs, biceps. Like this is just like fundamental innovations on the art that we haven't seen in a long amount of time. Well said, uh, Will, you are, are you 27 now? 26. Uh, you've, uh, come of age in a kangaroo market. You've played it very well.

1:14:14The kangaroo market, for those that don't know, we talked about this on the show yesterday. Historically, you had bull markets where things go up, bear markets where things go down. Kangaroo markets, you're just sort of like bouncing all over the place. What's your general read? In my view, we've seen more top signals in the last three months than any point in my adult life. Is there any more gas in the tank? Are we in a sort of tech super cycle or is it just down only from here on out? I think we got a couple more 10Xs left to go. I think the ceiling is far from where we're at now. I just think we have a couple 10X sell downs on the way too.

1:14:53It just feels like the rate of up, down, up, down is only going to increase. Fragility in the market is going to skyrocket too. Right as you see billions of dollars in venture chasing clawed plugins that write some basic code for you. We don't understand how any of this stuff works. Fragility is going to go up. Market's going to cycle a bunch. Mega cycle feels crazy. It just feels like if you're not making money along that path, I don't know what you're doing. What are your thoughts on leverage right now? Great Jeremy Gaffan idea. Two kinds of guys in the world, right? Cash chads, leverage kings, right?

1:15:27I am a cash chad. I run my accounts net cash. I've never had leverage in my life. No credit cards, debit cards only, right? There are certainly guys that live on the leverage hierarchy are able to run that. Not my playbook. Two different kinds of people in the world. Interesting. That makes sense. Just advice for young people. Advice for young people, don't take out credit cards. No credit card debt. Buy comically large model boats. They're a very good store of value. I got another one. Speaking of young people, do you think there's an opportunity to go downstream of the Teal Fellowship and offer funds to middle schoolers to drop out of middle school to pursue deep tech, hard tech.

1:16:10Well, I think we've got this with Ramp employees, right? Like we find every 14 year old that works at Ramp, right? We find everyone that Zach Frankel has recruited from local Bay Area middle schools. And we give them a million dollars to start an expense tech startup. I feel like that is just like clear alpha in the market right now. We need to go younger. We need to go to the benches at Ramp. Yeah. To the benches at Ramp. To the benches. the benches from the benches to the trenches there you go that's where we need to go uh what are you uh what are you reading these days i know you've got uh rare books and manuscripts maybe some of them you can't talk about but uh what's top of mind i am working on republishing an amazing book that i cannot say the title of but it's a history of political corruption in louisiana in the 1960s it is you know so good that the author that wrote it was shot 14 times in the chest with a shotgun by the subject of the book.

1:17:03That's how you know you're writing something important. That's how you know you're writing something good. I recently purchased the rights to that. That should be coming at some point in the next two to seven years, soon as I figure out how to actually publish this thing. But really focus on political history right now. I think there's a huge amount of alpha left there. What about a book that's already in publish or already in print? Best thing I read recently was a Brent B. Shore recommendation that I am scrolling through my Amazon trying to find the name of. Okay. Oh, another good one. Santa Monica Partners Letters, letters on small cap investing, kind of a classic of the genre on finding undervalued businesses traded on very weird and esoteric markets.

1:17:46Yeah, for sure. Talk to us about the transition from semi-illiquid startup founder to much more liquid post-exit founder. Are you, have you been focused on getting a liquid again by making a high volume of startup investments? Are you more interested in - We've been focused on getting a liquid by buying very large model boats. I think this is kind of where the market's going. I think it is clearly an underpriced asset and I'm moving size in the model boat industry right now. Are you looking at any startups that might act as like marketplaces for model boats? No, I think liquidity is a bad thing.

1:18:26You never want to mark to market. You never want to be able to liquidate assets. Ideally, the perfect asset is impossible to liquidate and impossible to mark. It's just like a black hole you put money into. And this model boat I have my eye on built from wood from Henry Kissinger's desk in the West Wing. It's a perfect asset. It's impossible to mark. Cool. Impossible to mark. Awesome. Well, it's been great having you. you guys well uh we look forward to as uh the cycle you know continues to uh you know make progress and unravel we'd love to have you back on the show yeah uh to discuss to have you guys uh didn't send us to collect my equity on this iron prize yep yes you deserve it you deserve it you worked hard for it yeah you did thanks have a great Friday bye what a guy what a character yeah I mean, the character on X is a very authentic representation of Will.

1:19:25It's always refreshing when you meet somebody that you sort of know online or that has a sort of online persona. The online persona is exactly the same as the offline persona. He had some riff a while back about VC ghostwriters making like$700 ,000 a year or something. And it like threw all the VCs into it, into like a complete frenzy because they were like, wait, are people doing this? Like, should I be spending this much money on my ghostwriter? Yeah. And he's a fantastic way to manifest these things. I would really love to know if there was any truly exceptional posters that were just a hundred percent ghostwritten because ghostwriting is pretty easy easy to track um when it's when it's sort of like mid uh hosting oh totally totally yeah everyone can buy like the the yeah the mid the the default just kind of like the threads the the the the the the current thing memes all of those are very commoditized but truly inspired bangers uh very very difficult for example pavel asparuhov posts i've got two and only two hiring criteria.

1:20:39One, do you have that dog in you? Two, are you nice with it? Not ghostwritten. We got to put that in Banger Archive. Not ghostwritten. I think it actually has been on Banger Archive. I think that's where I found this. But yeah, when we ran into Paul, he said the nicest thing anyone could possibly say about your posts. And he was like, do you guys write those? Yeah. Because he was like, you guys, like, I love the account. We specifically decided to turn it on. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because we realized we were covering the top posters in the world. Yeah. We had to prove that we could compete. Totally.

1:21:12Totally. You got to be in the arena. You got to be in the arena. Yeah. Otherwise, you won't be respected. Let's cover some posts. Alexis should be joining any second. Okay. So, YIC? Paul Graham? Yeah. Paul Graham says, it will be Y Combinator's 20th birthday in four days. I'm pleased by how young YC still feels as an organization. It would be dangerous for YC to become too established since YC is training startups. It has to remain startup-ish itself, but it requires a constant effort to stay that way. We talked to Gary Tan yesterday about that. And it's, yeah, it's so interesting because it'd be so easy for YC to scale up and become just a massive asset manager.

1:22:04But of course, it would lose a lot of what makes it special. Yep. And I think Gary is, yeah, reinventing, what do they call it? Like refounding the company when you take over. Like he needs to make aggressive changes. and so people see those and they're like oh like you know ai's writing all the code or they're doing defense tech now it's like no change would have been death yep he has to take risks and then some of those will be rolled back some of them will be successful but you only get power law outcomes when you're when you're testing lots of like really high variance stuff yeah and the uh yc's in a situation where they are in a highly competitive environment right there's so many alternatives to YC's capital.

1:22:46You can go raise, if you're an exceptional founder, you could go and raise from the Collison brothers, from Airbnb founders, et cetera. I truly think the biggest change was that when YC started, it was$17 ,000 and then it's scaled up and now it's 500. But Sand Hill Road VC firms, their doors were closed to Stanford new grads, which is unthinkable now. every single stanford new grad can easily get a meeting at a sandhill road venture capital firm that is completely ready to write a 500k check yep and so all of a sudden what yc is is not just hey we're willing to take a shot on a kid with a twenty thousand dollar check and see what they do um like the airbnb guys could not have gotten funded directly like yeah like they were not in the mold.

1:23:40There's some iconic pass emails out of the original where people like clearly weren't taking it seriously, weren't taking a meeting. It used to be if you wanted to start a company in tech, that meant you're going to build a website and building a website required racking servers and buying hardware. But of course, the cloud computing era happened right as YC started. And so all of a sudden there was a big opportunity to do a whole lot more with a lot less. It's all the AI. It's interesting. It's like, it's like, did they go back to 18K? Because, you know, like they're giving 500. You made it work.

1:24:18Yeah. Like, like, like, maybe, you know, like I'm, I'm actually, you know, I'm excited. I mean, I love that, that, you know, the YC founders get 500K and they can go and do stuff. And I think it's great. But I think it's interesting to, to, to, I'm very interested in following what happens with PMF or die, because they're spending a lot less they're spending 25k which is very much in like the 2005 the alexis ohanean era of yc like it is crazy that they that he built reddit with uh yeah 20k to start yeah wild and and you can still do that and maybe you can do it more now because of the the ai tools it's not quite as different as like from going from capex to opx yeah um because it's it's going from hiring extra software engineers to write more code to paying a bill.

1:25:10So it's not like a cash flow management change, but it is interesting. The Wilmanitis group chat is popping off, I assume. Yeah. Judging by your face. It sure is. They're live texting us. It's great. I say I want to pull up this video and watch. Ben, I'm going to send it to you quickly if you can pull it up i want to i want to play the video of the dig announcement uh that we're going to be discussing with alexis yeah let's play that jason kerman's texting me those live numbers look good baby uh i haven't checked them but thank you jason i'm glad that you're looking at my stats so that i know uh i'm sure we'll review after the fact what's the book uh that that reboy recommends the score takes care of itself yeah yeah yeah the podcast downloads take care of itself yeah yeah i mean jason fully believes that like he just goes and makes something like brilliant for like months and months and months and yeah it goes viral every time because he's not like over on and over engineering it uh anyway ben let's kick it over to the alexis ohanean video announcement so what we've got today is dig.com it's the two g's d-i-g-g.com now to give the power back to the Dig rewrites the internet's front page.

1:26:22I gotta dig, gotta dig, gotta dig. Gotta make this story dig. Tech darling Dig skyrockets with millions of loyal users. I was not online for this era. Please welcome back to the show. Kevin Rose. Were you? Like none of those images of Kevin Rose on all the different, you know, magazine covers. No, I was pre, I was post-Dig. I'm sure I visited it. Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot. You don't want to live in the past, but now we actually have the technology to make better, healthier community experiences. This is a team up I never would have imagined 20 years ago. This is so funny. Kevin Rose, it makes sense that you would be relaunching Dig.com as its original founder, but teaming up with Alexis Cov.

1:27:12Oh, good shot. Oh, that's a great shot. I love it. Whoever shot this is really good. for a long time and rightfully so like i'm excited for this is like a media project like a story you know i i don't know if if i've been like oh i really need dig right now but i'm i'm down i think this is one of those things where the asset had been been basically languishing yeah yeah and i remember i advertised on dig at some point i think in 2018 2019 um and it was it was seemingly like the the content quality was down dramatically yeah and so trying to return it to its former glory is a worthy undertaking and then the other news from alexis this week we're basically just going to start covering it and we'll get some at the very least we'll get some good backstory um oh alexis just tweeted that he's coming on in five okay i guess the uh i guess the audience uh guilt trip trip to men thank you brothers thank you everyone i want to cover the alexis uh tiktok announcement and then with him we can um yeah this is so funny i mean we need we need a board of like people that have talked about buying tiktok add it to the list um yeah but i my my true and and hardline stance is i will support literally any american buying tiktok I don't care if you have$5.

1:28:42If you say you're going to buy TikTok, you have my support. Yep. Because I'm there for it. And so we, we magic is real. We got at TVPN on TikTok. Yeah. And I think we're going to just post a video up there that says like posting this video every day until an American owns TikTok. Yeah. I think that's a good strategy. Because we're not really willing to sort of invest in building an audience on the, on the, on the Chinese platform. Yeah. So I'll read this time article it says reddit co-founder alexis ohanian has joined billionaire frank mccourt's bid to acquire tiktok mccourt's internet advocacy organization project liberty announced this week that ohanian uh an investor married to tennis star serena williams had joined a consortium called the people's bid for tiktok uh alexis had posted i'm officially now one of the people trying to buy tiktok us and bring it on chain ohanian said in a series of posts made on x uh project liberty says it will provide more users more control over their online data if successful in its bid project liberty said the technology will serve as the back phone of the redesigned tiktok ensuring that privacy security and digital independence are no longer optional but foundational when asked by an ex-user on monday what he would call tiktok if he purchased it uh ohanian said tiktok freedom edition amazing um uh under a federal bill passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by president joe biden last year tiktok was required to cut ties for the china-based parent company bite dance or face a ban by january 19th and uh as our audience knows trump extended uh the deadline for tiktok to find new ownership until early april so we're really coming down to the line here.

1:30:26And McCourt has a consortium, which includes Shark Tank stars, Kevin O 'Leary. We got to get Kevin on the show to talk about that. He's got to get Trump's attention. I know Alexis isn't a huge Trump supporter or anything, but he's got to get the attention of the president. If he wants to get this deal done, I say he goes and buys a bunch of billboards outside of Mar-a-Lago. That is a play. And you know where he would do it? ad quick ad quick and you know what yes quick oh yeah oh yeah i'm thinking what you're thinking thinking what i'm thinking what you're thinking ad quick uh raise their uh alexis is a big backer of ad quick and alexis is joining the chat so uh we'll bring him in and we'll do an ad quick ad read ad quick is out of home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe let's go welcome to the stream alexis thank you for being here how you doing gentlemen sorry i you're all good who was running late from the pediatrician not looking not for me yeah uh but for my youngest hey of course we understand we have kids too we're business dads too thank you for leading this important family first always always i'm sorry it was it was a tough one too because it was one of those immunization days and I'm the parent who does the pain doctor visits.

1:31:49My wife does the sort of normal ones. That's rough. Ouch. Poor dear. A lot of hand squeezing. So should we start with TikTok or Dig? Yeah, there's a few things to talk about, aren't there? Yeah, busy week for you. I love it. I love it. Well, we just watched the Dig video announcement and we have to find out who shot that video for you because the cinematography was fantastic. the reveal when they pull sat to the side of the kit of the laptop and they reveal your face there perfect it was storytelling movie magic uh so yeah break it down how'd this come come around is this just like a crazy uh group chat idea that then just got out of control and now you're just doing it um gosh how did it start you know i i had never spoken to kevin rose until like five or six years ago no way and and when we started talking we just realized we had so much in common And I learned I had in all of that animosity and jealousy, a tremendous amount of respect for him.

1:32:50That it probably took me a little bit more maturity to appreciate. And we just vibed. And then every now and then he would text me and be like, hey, dude, do you think I should buy dig.com and resurrect the thing? And I was like, yeah, sure, go for it. In the way that one supports a friend thinking about a thing that seems a little outlandish and a little crazy. but you know it had gone through a few different owners and actually um when it was first on sale I had debated buying it when the company went bankrupt I told Kevin this later I was like I debated actually buying it and then just redirecting it to Reddit yeah yeah yeah like this one last FU but I'm so happy I didn't do that and and then I don't know five months ago he was like dude I'm gonna do it and I would love to do it with you and I said that sounds like a great idea that's This sounds like a fantastic idea.

1:33:44Talk about the actual competitive dynamic between you guys back in the day. Because even looking at the video, you guys were clearly battling for cover stories on magazines and things like that. He was crushing us. In my mind, I thought it was a battle. And this was a sign of being a first-time CEO and, frankly, being focused on the wrong things in this regard. but I was so jealous of the fact that he was, he was the Silicon Valley poster child. Remember, you know, we were in the first batch of Y Combinator, which was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working out of an apartment in Medford and then Somerville.

1:34:23We had raised a total of$72 ,000 at demo day. And, you know, here was Kevin Rose, who was this tech celebrity who had millions raised from true Silicon Valley VCs. and yes, was on the covers of magazines, was getting so much press. And I felt like, I didn't feel like we were getting a fraction of that press and that coverage. And I was very jealous. And again, I think focused on the wrong stuff, but it just felt like he was an easy target. And look, in his defense, he was first. Digg did come first. In our defense, and I have the email to prove it, we did not know about it when we started Reddit.

1:35:04it. It was about a month into the company we'd already launched that we'd finally learned about Dig. So shame on us for not doing enough competitive analysis, but they had about a seven month, eight month headstart. And, um, what can I say? We, we won the long run, but now, now we both get a second, second chance, a second chance to do it again. So, so, so what are you envisioning for the product? Have you announced anything or are you ready to think about what will be different? I mean, I'm sure you don't just want to re resurrect it exactly as it was. maybe for v1 let's say okay the goal for v1 is just get a thing back online that makes people feel nostalgic for dig where where it left off maybe not version four but just before that sure and then modernizing some of the obvious stuff yep um but look this will not be you know the first version that gets out there is not going to be feature complete with some of the big you know forum platforms out there but it's going to hit the nostalgia notes and then you know some of the stuff we've talked about publicly is, and this is what was going on in the chat, which was, you know, technology, it's cliche, but in the last couple of years, we've all had our brains melted by what software can do.

1:36:13And AI in particular, and just even simply some of these foundational large language models are capable of doing some really dope stuff that if you were building a text-based forum software today, and you built it from first principles, and you said, okay, well, what are the most important parts of this platform for the most valuable users? You know, it's the less than 1 % of your user base that's actually doing the heaviest lifting of community management. And so how do you start there by saying, how do we build the best tools using AI so that you don't spend your job being a janitor, having to go through an inbox of wading through things that are violations of community norms, or just violations of the terms?

1:36:50And actually, you know, and if you talk to enough of these folks in Kevin slyly ran ads, polling thousands of them to just say, what are the things you wish you had? What are the things that should exist? And it turns out, you know, even again, using today's technology, you can solve a lot of those problems out the gate. So that as say, a volunteer community manager, you're now spending the bulk of your time, not doing janitor work, but actually like doing the fun part of community building, right, coming up with cool contests, you know, highlighting memes and and great submissions from the community and uh and so that that's what i would expect to come pretty quickly do you think first version yeah do you think that x you know killing links uh you know we all kind of understand that it that it probably makes sense for x as a business right but it's disappointing as a user is that part of what's creating an opportunity for dig to come back and potentially thrive?

1:37:46I had not thought of that. It is so annoying that we all have to put it in the second tweet. But to your point, it does make sense from their standpoint. Look, at the end of the day, if you build a community platform well enough, I'd imagine at least a majority, more than half of the content that will be talked about will be stuff from the community. At Reddit, there were self posts, and that was just an invention by some random Redditor who guessed how to sort of hack and make self-referential links. But I do think there is an opening. As you mentioned it, yeah, there is an opening for more traditional just link sharing.

1:38:22Like, here is some cool thing on the internet. Go take a look. And you know what? Actually, as I'm thinking about it live, the other wild trend, you've seen this guy Levels who's code vibing the flight simulator. Yeah. Like, we've not fully processed apps as content. I love it. yeah and that that might be because right how does one get to that app well it's gonna have to be a url at least for the time being and so maybe that's maybe that's the other secular shift we're seeing is that people are going to be spinning up entire apps as content that will obviously need a place to get to and and links yeah uh related to that uh obviously beachheads are super important when you're building a platform that can kind of anyone could use it reddit now has reddits for all sorts of different communities uh what was the first beachhead for Reddit and how are you thinking about early beachheads that could be interesting communities for dig to kind of latch on to early on?

1:39:14I think the Reddit beachhead was Alexis. Yeah, it was just you, right? Oh, that's pretty kind, guys. It was. No, no, I mean, it was. Weren't you like the first 20 users? Oh, yes. All right. Well, I mean, I mean it in both ways, right? In defense of that strategy, it was 2005. So you got to understand, we had to convince people that you would want to come here to this site this spartan site and submit a link for other people to vote on but um but we didn't have comments so it wasn't like we were like congratulating one another for our great posts but yes the first few months we had a bunch of alt accounts we were posting under to make it look like there were different people not just nothing over that's my username over and over again posting links um but then you know again it was also it's hard to learn lessons from because back then it was actually novel and so like the first community needed to be uh r slash programming because we started it with a bunch of other developers as our early adopters and then we realized normies would not want to see like an erlang tutorial on the home page so so we shoved we we created those communities as a way just to basically keep the front page looking a little bit more open to everyone but i do think i think the first beachhead for dig relaunched ends up being the look i'm 41 almost 42 it's like the it's like the old head nostalgia for a vibesy internet now you guys don't know that because you are so young but but for the graybeards there was a time when the internet was just like a much chiller place and and i think it's the nostalgia for that so i assume it's going to be a lot of the like older geeks who were you know big dig fans who love you know video games and comics and uh you know a few other things yeah i like the idea this just general idea of the vintage internet right there's so much demand for vintage broadly in consumer products vintage vintage cars right records etc pokemon cards right we gotta ask you about chromatic i was just playing on my chromatic here before there we go i do actually take this with me everywhere it's amazing yeah um but yeah it makes sense you know before we get into tick tock i wanted to ask you how would you if you were in control of x as as somebody who built you know a one of the biggest social you know platforms in the world and in reddit if you were in control of x how would you control this sort of dynamic where this quote unquote slop content is what uh this sort of stated verse revealed preference issue right where on X people say they want to learn and get informed, but then the videos that actually get real engagement are some type of meme or it's JD Vance.

1:41:56How would you approach it? Because I think every X user, given at least our corner of X, we're tech native. Many people are building similar products. Everybody's got an opinion. What's yours? Is X perfect in its current state or do you see ways that you would improve it? So full disclosure, you know, I launched a, it's not a television series, but a content series off season on X in partnership with X. Oh yeah. I probably use, if you looked at my tracking on my apps, I'm sure I use X more than any other social media platform today. Totally. So I am, but why? The best question, right? Why? Because the people and trends that I care most about in our little insular world, like that's where the news is made.

1:42:41that's where in order to do my job well, that's how I rationalize it to myself as a builder, as a tech builder, as an investor. It's work. It's a work app. I mean, it's work. No, it's obviously not. But when I'm doom scrolling, I comfort myself saying like, no, actually this is helping me identify trends and things. Totally. And, and I know that it could be better and it probably, I think it's more fundamental. And if you could apply this in different ways to, I think Instagram has its version of it. TikTok has its version of it. The algorithm rewards the thing that pushes to extremes because it generates outrage and people love gaming systems, especially when those systems mean more attention and more money.

1:43:23And so you see it across all these platforms. Some places it's a little bit more benign because YouTube is longer form content. It doesn't feel as aggressive, but there's definitely a flavor of it there. But I think as long as what you're optimizing for is me opening my phone and you as the developer or head of product trying to get me to spend as much time as possible, you're going to eventually end up with some version of the algo feeding you more of the stuff that gets more of the attention and the outrage and whatever, which just feeds more. I think community platforms have the best shot that I've seen because what you're signing up for there truly is the intent of, I like this community, right?

1:44:05When a community website gets to scale, and I'll never forget. So I started r slash gaming. And to this day, the culture of r slash gaming is a reflection of me, an old gamer, because what I was talking about r slash gaming was more nostalgic even back then in 2005 than what was the new game. And at some point, the gaming community on Reddit said, listen, old man, we want to know about new titles so we're going to create r slash games which is much more about new releases and and you could see a cultural rift in something that seemed pretty obvious but like or maybe subtle but to the people in it was really important so i think if you're subscribing to based on community you're coming in with a different set of expectations and so you have a chance to build something that doesn't necessarily lead to the can you make a thing that'll piss as many people off as possible which is what twitter does so well and i've got i've got friends who who i think kind of make a living shit posting yeah and it's an incredible art form and i have to commend them on it but like it's a symptom the reason that exists and it's so so viable is it's a symptom of the platform just rewarding you know what gets you to you know stay in the app for longer yeah that makes sense talk i mean we got to hear about we got to hear about the tiktok bid uh there needs to be a decision made by by april you're entering the mix we love to see it uh break down kind of like your guys's angle what you want to do with the platform post acquisition and maybe some of the other people involved sure well look i you know frank mccourt's the big dog here he called me up and was like hey i'd love to get you involved and and he already had his instincts were around building something on chain you know using this and the massive user base of TikTok to, you know, basically overnight, not literally, but overnight, bring a bunch of people into this world where they now actually control, let's say their reputation online to a certain extent, because they have the sort of currency they've created there with that account and that identity.

1:46:04Look, it seems like Elon even replied to my tweet saying there are more people bidding on TikTok than not at this point. That's right. There's a lot of people. Yeah, why not? I support them all, to be clear. I support them all. I want are you all doing it yet i don't care if you have five dollars if you have five trillion dollars i if you're an american i support you buying tick tock well that's exactly and that that was my that was my reply as long as it ends up outside of the control of the chinese communist party great it's a win like obviously i'd rather us win but any of those options that's not chinese controlled is a win and i've been outspoken about this for years and yeah it is what it is um but i do think there's something really interesting about you know we're at this point where and look i've been a day one seeded Coinbase in 2012, like ETH pre-sale.

1:46:51Like I have, I've wanted to believe in a version of this future for a long time. And right now you've got amazing CEOs like Brian Armstrong who've brought us so far, so far into making it even just a standard and a store of value. And I'm Bitcoin really specifically, but like, can we get to that next point where we have a technology that just sort of underpins a lot of people's lives casually? And, and again, no one's going to use any of these apps because of the technology. They're going to use it because of what it does for them. And you either spend years building it up and, you know, everyone's got a version of it.

1:47:26Everyone's doing, but nothing's really broken through or come close yet. This is such a fun hack to getting mass, mass adoption for this technology. And that was the thing that was most interesting to me. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if it, look, if it did come to fruition, you know, there's still lots of things to figure out and solve for. but there are enough bright minds who are already in my inbox who are very excited on the crypto front to lend their axes. So look, again, as long as it ends up in American hands, I'm thrilled, but I'd obviously love for us to take a stab at it and really see what it takes to bring over a bunch of netizens to the on-chain world.

1:48:05That'd be great. We have five minutes. I wanted to know, are there any underrated Reddit communities that you think might be worth taking a little tour into? Like live? No, no, not right now. Just whenever I run into someone with... You don't want to do that. There's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of crazy stuff. This is our kids watch this show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully it's a safe for work one. But every once in a while I find a Reddit where like I got into 3D rendering and there was Reddit on the Houdini forum. And it was just like, these people are the, they're the CGI artists who do the, the, the horses on Game of Thrones.

1:48:41And they're just amazing artists and they just know so much more. Right. And I was just like, I need to know everything about this. And I'm getting really up to speed, even with their memes. I learned through osmosis from that. And I love when I find a little community that I can just be like, oh, I'm not an expert. I'm totally tourist, but I love that stuff. I'm wondering if there's anything that pops up. Even if it's just like, you know, nostalgic, like, I don't know. I see you have a microphone there from Teenage Mutant. is, oh God, I got to remember the URL, digg.com. Oh yeah, okay, there we go.

1:49:10That one, we'll be on there. We'll be on there. I actually have another question for you. You're like pretty much a pure play consumer internet guy, right? Obviously in the great history of your investing career, you've invested all over the place, but you seem to be somebody who, you know when others sort of you know sour you know especially uh you know it almost became a meme of like uh consumer internet investing is just so hard that a lot of people just give up we it's very obvious now that there's a bunch of you know we've seen this uh with you know one of the players that we have in pmf or die has taken multiple consumer apps to like millions of dollars in revenue in super short period of time how do you think about um you know consumer investing now in the age of AI, you're sort of in many ways, refounding Dig, but I'm sure you're looking at, you know, hundreds of deals a month, I would imagine, or at least a quarter.

1:50:14What's most exciting to you right now? It feels like the kind of a moment that you'd been waiting for, similar to crypto, but this feels like, you know, obviously the next wave. Dude, it is, consumers definitely gotten exciting again. And look, I got weird, right? I think the the best uh the the greatest gift that i've had with my investing track record is having a certain amount of freedom from lps and and like 10 of our aum is is my own money too which which doesn't hurt but like you got to think 2020 the year i left reddit one of the first investments i made was in a women's soccer team called angel city starting that team up for it cost a million dollars to buy a franchise back then in the same league today uh an expansion fee like literally just the amount paid to start a team was 110 million um so the valuations have gone up angel city's now the most valuable women's professional team in the world at just shy of 300 million and literally five years ago that was the craziest idea and i tweeted the entire grand plan and just said this is an undervalued opportunity it's venture scalable here we go and and so i love being told i'm gonna lose all my money and it's crazy and so i found opportunities to your point in consumer that still you know turns out the business model of a sports team is actually very similar to reddit but with ai software got exciting again and shameless plug uh the latest one that we just talked about was called doji now i am clearly not a fashionista but this team figured out how to make ai avatars i mean look at those pants yeah figured out how to make ai avatars with just a few reference photos actually look i mean i could never yeah but it's a wild fit this is this is this is gonna be and again it all comes back to user experience right we spent a year or two seeing oh look at that like we blew the turing test out of the water we're seeing all these dope bells and whistles applications and we're just start we're just now starting to see what people can do with that tech and it's gonna be fun um and i think we got through the first wave of like get rich quick apps no disrespect hustle is gonna hustle i like no tea no shade but we're now getting into what's what's a consumer app that's not just gonna make you i don't know turn into a piece of cake and get cut in half but what's an app that's gonna make a fun social experience and it might just be remixes of old things dig um i know from another old consumer founder that you might hear another one of these types of stories in the next couple weeks maybe it's out by southwest And I think you're going to get to see this rebirth of apps that we all knew that can be demonstrably better now because of this technology.

1:52:58And then we'll see some new stuff like Doji that just like this try on app. There's a version of that that has existed and sucked for decades. And what it took was a few technological breakthroughs and a great user experience and blah. And so, yeah, it is a great time for consumer. It's a great time for hard tech. I've done a few space tech companies now. I obviously love hardware. like it's it has never been more fun to do this job and and again the world does not need more investors so if you hear this and think oh i want to do that when i grow up start a company first it's so much better you'll be so much cooler it's better for society you'll make more money like do that and then come over to the dark side after that's great we see you pop up on paparazzi photos on the world tour what's the next big event you're excited for is there anything on the calendar that you're looking forward to in 2025?

1:53:48My wife was like, do you want to go to the Vanity Fair party? And I was like, no, of course not. No, that was the last one I guess I missed out on. If you have a plus two, I mean, we'll tag along. You got to marry up, guys. That is the secret. That's how I did it.

1:54:06No, there's nothing. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I'll just surprise you. In fact, if it's a true paparazzi photo, I won't even know that it's happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, subscribe to Alami stock photos and you can see the latest of what Alexis is up to. Here's a good question. I asked John this yesterday. So Starship disintegrated last night. It's unfortunate, but obviously they're iterating quickly. How many successful SpaceX trips to the moon do you need to see before you're going to get on it yourself? John's answer was three. Does John have kids? I know, I know, I know. He's got three.

1:54:47I have three kids and a very high-risk house. You have three kids now? Yeah, I have three kids. I know. Congrats. Thank you. Holy shit. It's come a long way from the Soylent days, man. I know, man. It's wild. Wow. Oh, that's nuts. No, I would not do that. Stoke is my horse in that race. Okay. As an early investor there, and I love Andy. I love that team. I'd say the same thing. SpaceX has changed the world. we're all in their debt they've opened so many doors for humanity civilization but i don't need to be in the first million okay i i have no interest i not interested now uh supersonic plane i told blake when i sent the wire i was like bro get me a seat on the boom let's go again i don't need to be on the boom the first right let the professionals do that but like that's way more appealing to me because it space no i alien and aliens were my favorite movies as a kid yep and so no good comes from space as far as i'm concerned and that's without even not knowing that xenomorphs don't really exist no good comes from that that's why there's a pulse rifle on my wall there we go there we go yeah i mean always stay strapped with the pulse rifle anybody that has a man cave like yours uh is is not in any hurry to leave it is uh truly truly a work of art well This was fantastic.

1:56:08Thanks so much for joining the stream. We'll have to have you back soon. You're always welcome. I appreciate it. One more shameless plug. I want to say, and you guys, you got to keep me honest on this. Was I the first investor to ask if I could invest in this pod? Yeah, you actually were. Yeah, you were. And I think it would have been, I think it would have been a thousand X. Yeah. I'm still here, guys. I'm still here. You saw the potential. You knew these guys aren't building a podcast. they're building empires an empire the tv but we appreciate the support for sure you'd be one of our first calls if if we ever did yeah it is so good it's so good for the ecosystem y 'all's vibe is is perfect the branding is on point like 10 out of 10 taste you've heard enough people say it is so true though taste in this era is going to be a hundred times more valuable as intelligence thank God, is getting democratized than a commodity.

1:57:04And so it's an amazing time to have great taste. And this is the timing could be better for what you've done. Here's our vision for it, since it's very relevant to you. We want to give interesting people that are doing big things all the benefits of having their own big podcast with none of the work, right? Because you don't want to... You could spend all this time making a podcast and maybe even put sponsors on it, make a million dollars a year. It's not going to change your life. What if you could just come on TBPN anytime you had big news? Because that is what we're setting up. The next time you've got news, I'd love to have you back on specifically when all the TikTok stuff is getting worked out.

1:57:47For sure. Hopefully you win it, but whether or not, you know, I know you'll have some great points. We got Sam Lesson here. It's a party. What's going on, man? What's up, Sam? How you doing? I'm sorry. I was gabbing with these guys. I was whacking some tennis balls. I was late. Look, we got microphones and white hats. You're my technology brother. Teenage engineering. That's the best. The subtle way to say I paid too much for my microphone. No, you paid the exact right amount for quality. There you go. What's going on, guys? Alexis, thank you so much. Thank you for having me all. Peace, guys. See you, Alexis.

1:58:31Not too much, Sam. How are you doing today? How was tennis? You know, I'm just, I'm only bummed because I really had this vision in my head. I was going to come join you guys and wear a tuxedo. I just didn't have time today. You guys have that iconic photo on your website. I think the slow, so everybody listening, just go to slow.co. It's just, it's just the partners, the partnership wearing tuxedos. Oh yeah, that's a great photo. Ben, you should work on pulling this up. But no, you have a good excuse. You were playing tennis. If you had more, if we had more time in the transition there, you could have, maybe we could have got serena on for a second to give you i'm heading i'm heading heading to indian wells in a few hours you guys are student wells fans we actually do nothing but podcast show and we never hang out with our families basically uh fair enough i'm just trying to fit the role of stereotypical venture capitalists for you come from tennis go to tennis yep yep wear a tuxedo whatever like is the the honesty too many venture capitalists like try to basically uh they're larping like they're not venture capital exactly you know they they put on like a i advise my friends like don't put up like a fake zoom background to try to hide the fact that you're in this sort of like 30 million dollar home you know like just just embrace it like founders want to partner with people that are very successful right uh so it's just authenticity and i mean we saw this with the sbf thing like people fake like oh i'm not rich and then you it blows up because he was like complete fraud and the whole like i don't know i i i'm very i'm very short like faking that you're not like successful i am pro honesty and exactly authenticity that's what it's about it's not about like the flexing or like showing off it's just about like just being who you are no i agree there's hopefully you've you've got a full kind of 30 minutes here uh before you head to indian wells i feel like there's a ton of stuff to cover i want to give you an opportunity to uh talk about your uh billboard that you guys oh yeah we're very proud of our billboard this is our first slow outdoor marketing okay so if you're cruising north on the 101 you're gonna see our billboard which you know is a burning pile of money around a castle and the and the tagline is ai is not your mode and it's just like we were just driving on the 101 and every fucking billboard is like ai this ai that and we're like this is just like piles of money burning on the 101 one.

2:00:52So we decided to burn a little of our own money to kind of make the opposite point. So it's fun. I like having a billboard. I think we're going to do more billboards. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Billboards are extremely underpriced. Well, we're sponsored by a billboard company. Next time you buy billboards, go to adquick.com and tell them we sent you. I love it. Outdoor advertising is the future, gentlemen. None of this targeted stuff on the internet. Yeah, no, it can go much more viral. It's a lot of fun. Talk about, yeah, basically break down some of the ideas behind the billboard. We've covered every single big AI fundraise this year.

2:01:28We've covered the big companies that are trying to roll it out. Some are doing it better than others. Just today, there was a new deep mine team that spun out and raised at a$500 million valuation to do... Oh, cheap. Cheap. It's cheap. These aren't typical slow deals, but you have a good perspective on the market. like give us we've been pretty consistent on this for for two plus years i mean i wrote a deck in 2013 i'm sorry not 23 2023 not that long ago um that was kind of about kind of with a moment in venture capital what the fuck venture capital and the basic point of it was don't confuse the fact that llms are powerful technology like there's stuff you're going to do with them that are going to be great for all sorts of businesses with the disruption itself being a good business my partner will says this a lot the big guy on the website he's always like just because technology is disruptive doesn't mean that's where the money is made.

2:02:17You have to think about the business model disruption and what's really going on. And, you know, it's just, I think we are in a super cycle of mimetic venture capital money lighting on fire in AI right now. Because, and there's a bunch of structural reasons for it. We talked about that. It's like LPs have too much money in too big of pockets. They got to figure out where to jam it, right? GPs, there's no narrative that makes sense. But guess what? If your LPs are going to pay you to jam money into AI companies and get paid the fees on it with a, with a, you know, a go fish card, it's not a bad deal, right?

2:02:49If you're willing to just spend a lot of money. And so, but we've just been incredibly short of this. Now, it doesn't mean we don't love companies that are enabled by AI. You know, I like what I call AI cherry on top businesses, which is a business that fundamentally is great, right? It's fundamentally, but then there's a non-obvious ideally cherry on top, right? Which is that AI gives it new leverage. You know, I'm working on a new company with, with Joe Lonsdale and their team, which is called Merit First. And that's an example of a company where like, actually, structurally and sociologically, AI does add something new as a type of company that should have always existed.

2:03:22It was hard to build before. Now you can build. That stuff is all great. But this like large model fight to zero. I mean, it's just it's kind of wild to watch, to be totally honest. Talk about Facebook's just meta's opportunity broadly in AI. If you were still working at the company, how would you, you know, do you think they're, uh, our position overall is like, they're doing a lot of things, right. There's been talk recently about, you know, having a standalone, you know, app, which could make sense, but it doesn't even feel like they've been that aggressive with sort of productizing it. Productizing it.

2:03:59Um, well, yeah, my, my view on meta in AI is quite simple. It's a classic, which I love, uh, heads you win, tails you win situation, right. Um, It's the best way to, the reason the stock has gone up so much, I think, of anything, is you look as an investor, you're looking around, you're saying, where do I definitely win on AI, regardless of how the breaks go? And the answer is going to be meta, right? Unlike Google, aren't going to get disrupted in their core business on this. They don't have a search business. They don't have a lookup business to disrupt. They have a shit ton of engagement attention, and they sell ads.

2:04:28And you know what definitely gets better with LLMs? Ads. The targeting gets better. The creative gets better. You just win, right? And so at that point, the reality is, I think they're incredibly well positioned. People argue that these numbers are huge, they're spending on LOM, whatever, but you got to look at it as a percentage of market cap. It is a tiny percentage investment to cover their ass. And to make sure that whatever innovation happens in AI, enough of it's open source and the funnel is wide enough that it all ends up backing them. They don't get cornered and stuck out in the wilderness.

2:04:59But I think they're an incredibly good place. I think they're probably in the best place of any large tech company. And I'd say moreover, the way I've always thought about this and what I see is AI, unlike prior innovations, unlike the transition from shrink rack software to the internet, is just so good for the big companies. It's easy to slot in. It commodifies. You cannot think of a better extending innovation for a large company that already has the infrastructure, the data center teams, and the whole nine yards. This is just all upside for them. And so I think what you see is a little bit of low margin.

2:05:35Well, unless unless you're Apple and somehow you got stuck way out in the wilderness. But like, they're, you know, the Googles, the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Metas, they're in great shape. And then if you're a tiny company, there's just so much leverage all of a sudden that, you know, there is a lot of cost cutting. There's all sorts of things you can do that's cool. You just don't want to be in the middle. As with most things in life, you never want to be in the middle. And you know, candidly, even companies like OpenAI, or should we say nonprofits like OpenAI, The problem is they're kind of in the middle.

2:06:04They can't compete with the hyperscalers from just access to capital perspective. If this is a capital game, they're going to lose. And if it's not a capital game, it's a deep seek open source thing, they're also going to lose. The key in life is just never be in the middle. Do you think that SoftBank can realistically spend$3 billion on agents with OpenAI this year? Look, all I can tell you this is I joke. It's a joke, but it's true. One thing we've learned, we've been doing slow for 10 years. whenever SoftBank buys, you sell, right? Like they are the worst investors in the history of the world, right?

2:06:37And so it's just like, I've watched them crush so many companies by overcapitalizing them, by get, they're like, you know, it's hilarious. I love their decks, but no, it's like, it's complete house of cards. House of cards. Was it always that way? Masa's nuts, right? Every once in a while in his history, he's been nuts enough to nuts his way into some amazing opportunity that saved his ass, right? but like you know i mean you can the he was the original lol deck guy remember his unicorn deck with the unicorns and that he's like he's an incredible marketer so so why haven't why haven't we seen masa taking bigger swings you know in the early stage it seems like because masa always comes in late and overpays that's his thing yeah right but but obviously why not should have a vision like a massive infrastructure just put a million dollars into every new company just write tons of seed checks.

2:07:28Is it just an infrastructure problem? Like why they just don't index the entire seed market? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting question. I wonder... So historically speaking, when big funds try to index the seed market, there are two problems. One is someone wakes up and does the math and they're like, this doesn't make any sense, right? Even if you have the million dollar check at seed, if you're trying to deploy billions of dollars, it's just an irrational business model because the multiples don't make up for the fact you have to move gross dollars right so the best case you're doing at seed then is just marketing right you're like i do seed to market yeah hey des i'm on the technology brothers podcast you want to say hi yeah come say hi you know my wife jessica yeah we we came over to the pool house hey how you doing we wouldn't really be able to do this show without your team uh your team's coverage we we basically feature your articles you know like every day daily so uh thank you and i'm grateful congrats on all the success you guys yeah so we're town no we we subscribe for no we subscribe to the information i i have to think we're one of the number we have i hope we're one of the number one referral partners because we we get the paid wall articles and then and then we cover them but we don't cover the full thing you know so we basically are you know pushing people behind the paywall so it's great we gotta strike a deal so i'll leave you guys but then let's do it let's figure it out referral revenue your way well no no we're just we're happy to support happy to support um great great to meet oh look at that it's a guest on the guest i love it yeah i mean well i'm just delivering your mail thanks bye fantastic uh okay talk i i want i want more hot takes from you on on kind of all the on all the hyperscalers so So what's going on with Apple?

2:09:14Are they just a luxury goods? Are they the LVMH of tech? Are they just going to kind of continue to make the same products forever? Are they done innovating? Look, here's the reality. It's really fucking hard to make phones, right? And like really hard, especially in the modern era. It's really hard to imagine that they're going away anytime soon because of that. At the same time, I don't know if you guys get the Apple intelligence summaries of your techs, but they're like comically bad. They're hilarious. They literally will tell you the opposite of what the text says. Right? Like, it is useless.

2:09:48Right? And so... I think it's valuable in that it's so funny because I'll screenshot them and send them into the group chat and be like, really? You guys are talking about this or something? And that's funny? But it's purely accidental humor. It's insane. Right? And so I'd actually think that I would argue that Apple's intelligence text message product might be the perfect exhibit for an antitrust case. Right? where you're like you talk about consumer harm right and like the kind of bar for this it's like this is what we're gonna get out of ai right like it's comical right it is really funny as i love lols so like i'm into it i think it's funny yeah it was Jessica's phone i swear to god Jessica's phone on their newest ios update it deleted all somehow like all the contacts and so she now just has phone like it is comically bad but the problem is on the flip side is like the camera's good and it's hard to make phones.

2:10:38So I don't... I'm still... And no one likes green bubbles. And so the reality is I think we're a long way away from Apple going away. But my God, are they in a weird place right now. Right? It is, unfortunately, as a consumer. I just want better AI and I know that they'll just be able to wait and just dominate the monopoly and then eventually roll something out. Yeah, like the very basic thesis is if LVMH is a luxury goods conglomerate and they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars, Should the digital tech, consumer tech equivalent of that be worth trillions of dollars? Yes. Well, maybe. But look, LVMH, there was an interesting moment.

2:11:15You guys remember, I think this was a few years ago, where there was this moment where LVMH, or I guess the CEO of LVMH, was the richest guy in the world. Right? And somehow it inverted. And tech was worth a lot. It was a crazy inversion. You're like, wow. So the meta story of our society right now is that it's not the innovators that are worth the most. the meta story is that it's like fake luxury signaling that's the most valuable thing in the world and that was not a good thing that was not a good moment you contributed to that with uh with with with facebook right like facebook was a huge catalyst for you know uh tech becoming the number one source no no no no no luxury spending right because now it wasn't like oh your your watch or your car is no longer just like you know being seen by your local community but it can be seen by the whole world and you can sort of signal out status.

2:12:03Yeah, it's an interesting social dynamic because on one hand, I'd argue that Instagram has made it so that the real luxury consumption is experience and travel and being hot. Right. All of a sudden, fitness is cool because you can say you're hot and being hot is way more expensive than a watch. And so actually, that's the way... Being well rested is the luxury good. And so kids are the most expensive thing in the world. So all these things that you can like now socially signal as like, I'm fucking rich easily. And like those certainly supersede your Birkin bag. Like those, that's like cheap luxury, right?

2:12:37That's like mass luxury at best. And so like, there's this weird dynamics going on. Now you all on the flip side, the reality is, is like, look, I've got, I don't know if you guys, you guys play with the, the meta Ray-Bans. Yeah. Yeah. We have freaking great. Yeah. Right. And like, I do think that you're talking about luxury and fashion. like if meta had released not ray bans yeah right then like they wouldn't be as cool even if they were exactly the same and they probably wouldn't have sold as well so like i'm not like a luxury guy like i don't have perfect insights or taste on this but there is there's weird stuff going on about how you what luxury really is how you display taste how you display wealth and certainly things like instagram had had a big impact on that totally related to the meta ray bans are you at all like a DAU, MAU of any other augmented reality or just like consumer hardware technology like Apple Vision Pro, Oculus, any of these products at all?

2:13:32Apple Vision Pro has got to be the most expensive product per minute of use in the history of the world. I obviously bought one immediately. I've used it precisely zero times since the first week I had it. It's an incredible demo, right? What do you think about it? I've actually tried to do the math on this, like it's more expensive than private planes per minute of use, right? If you looked at like the overall, like, so the exact same experience. I was a big Oculus. I think that Oculus is actually pretty good at this point. I've, you know, look, I'm a Facebook loyalist. So I like bought every version.

2:14:02I went, I like everyone else played a bunch of zombie shooting games during the pandemic with friends. It was super fun. Like I'm into it. I think it's a really hard sell though, when like your life is pretty good, right like i think the reality is like vr and like immersive experiences and all other realities are kind of great if your life sucks right because then you're like i'm gonna like live in a video game but like i think a lot of the problem that type of stuff is like it's just it's not if you have a good life and kids and like do stuff like what's the point right just go play real tennis instead of vr tennis yeah like i like we tennis but i like real tennis better yeah yeah it's great That makes sense.

2:14:39One more. Do you have a prediction around Google? Do we have a new CEO there at all in the next five years? Are they all in on Sundar? On Sundar? I don't know. Is that just based in some news or rumor? No, it's purely based on Google has not managed to release an AI product that hasn't been riddled with issues. And it feels like it does, you know, you obviously can poke fun at Masa's picking ability and call him somebody that sort of signals the top or whatever. but OpenAI and ChatGPT have hundreds of millions of users. And maybe they're not replacing that sort of commercial search activity, but like much of the informational search, it feels like the golden goose is threatened for the first time.

2:15:30It's a really good question. I mean, here's the way I think about it is, Gemini is actually a pretty sweet product. The problem is no one uses it, right? So is like the Notebook LM product. Google actually has a bunch of very, very good products, right? I think their problem is they're so big. and the marketing and like driving of those products is extremely hard for them. And yes, I think they are the company that more than any other company in the world is in the position of both being way ahead in certain elements of AI and like has a huge advantage, but they also have the most to lose, right?

2:16:02And so I think that's a very challenging thing for any company. If you look at, you know, the history of companies like that, I mean, the best example from history is, was it Kodak, right? That invented the digital camera, right? They invented it and they fucked it up. And you understand why though, right? You have a bunch of these business concerns. Now, the interesting thing about Google is I think Sundar is a very good guy and competent manager managing an enormous infrastructure. But you do actually still have founders with meaningful control in the picture. And I actually think that's good because I think to do really tough things, it's extremely helpful to have the broad sort of founders.

2:16:41The question is it just has to be wielded. And so I think the bigger question is you look at this, like, was it Larry Page's letter about, please try to go to work 60 hours a week for AGI? Did you see this? Larry launched a new startup today or yesterday. It was like a wildly funny thing to leak, right? Because everything's going to leak. But it's like, I actually think it's less a Siddharth question and more like, do the founders step up and just like broadsword this, right? Because that is kind of, I think, what probably has to happen. And it's not a technology problem. Like, honestly, I think Gemini is actually probably for a lot of things, the best product.

2:17:14It just is like terribly marketed. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, you guys, you know, you've spoken out against, you know, venture becoming this sort of asset management business starting to look more like, you know, private equity in some ways at the same time. You know, that's on the fun side. On the company side, we've seen the sort of venture style roll ups where people raise venture capital dollars to buy companies. And it's a great deal for the founder, right, to raise 20 on 100 and then just buy profitable companies in theory. It's better economics than traditional PE. But you guys at Slow have supported, I'm blanking on the name of the portfolio company, but what's your portfolio?

2:17:57We've done a bunch. Metropolis, team shares, whatever. I mean, so here's basically the talk I'll give you. One is, I am personally a snob about venture capitalists being asset managers. because I don't think it's that creative or important or interesting. I will say as a GP, it's a great fucking business model. And so the seed business model we run is definitely less consistently and meaningfully profitable than being a 16Z in a platform. There's no question. So if you just want to make money, and saying I earned DPI to justify more AUM is a very smart thing to do. It's just not that fun. right and so like i'd rather do the fun part of the business which is saying i take money in but i take in the money i know how to make lots of money on and then i run around saying haha i told you so i was right from seed that's like more fun for me right and so i think you have to like separate those is like i do intellectually dislike it i don't think it's a bad business model on the roll-up thing look we started doing this before all the cool kids were doing this right so if you look at like the two probably most important deals we've done in this one is team shares We seeded that from zero.

2:19:01I bought 10 % of the company originally for$400 ,000. We've kind of bought up from there. They've acquired well over 100 small businesses. They built a whole platform for scaling them. It's a killer business. And they've done a lot of really smart stuff. But there is kind of a technology-leverage roll-up strategy to it. You can look at something like Metropolis, which is another pretty iconic deal, which, again, we were the seed investors in. We were early seed investors in when it was a tech company. And we realized that it turns out that SaaS is a terrible business model, right? In a lot of verticals.

2:19:32SaaS is just like, everyone has this idea that SaaS is a great business model. It's not, right? You get paid later. It's hard to sell. And the thing, if you think about something like that's a transformative technology, you go to a CEO and say, I have a transformative technology going to change your whole business. It's going to make you 50 % profitable. You can't then say, give me 40 % of the profit, right? They're like, fuck you. We'll give you your SaaS fee, right? So if you have an actually transformative technology and you can swing it, you're better off buying your customers, right? And then deploying your technology.

2:20:02But that's predicated on actually having a better technology, right? And so this is the thing I think people get wrong is, you know, when venture capitalists go fund roll-ups with the yada, yada, yada, there's some tech leverage in them or no tech leverage. That's ridiculous. And it doesn't make any sense. If you're a smart venture capitalist, smart founder, you say, hey, I'm going to prove that I can be way better at this than my competitors than anyone else in the industry. And then, by the way, it turns out for whatever reason, this is a hard software to sell. It's conflicted. I can't get paid what it's worth, the whole nine yards.

2:20:33Then going to PE folks and saying, hey, we're going to prove this out. We want cheap capital. We're going to go buy all our customers, I think is a great strategy, right? So the kind of the devil's in the details in terms of how you do this. Um, and when we're, we're into it, I mean, we did this one called TML, the lumberman factory we're really excited about. We definitely do this, but we have a pretty specific bar on what this is. And it's not just like buying pool cleaning rollups. Yeah. Can you talk about creators? I want to hear. Yeah. We love creators. I mean, yeah, I want to hear, I want to hear who you're bullish on and then what the anatomy of a deal that looks like a banger with a creator looks like.

2:21:10Yeah. So here's the basic upshot as you guys maybe know, like we just announced this $65 million vehicle, which is pretty groundbreaking, right? What we invest in is not C corps. We invest in seed creators. So think I own a niche, right? I'm doing a million in top line. I've got a million followers. I'm growing really quickly. And here's the key fact is you do the breakdown. You're like, I'm an awesome creator. I've built this community. I am the leader of it. I'm admired. I have this scarce thing. I've low, you know, low CAC on high LTV folks. It's fucking sweet. But you're doing a million in top line after expenses, taxes, you're living fine, but you don't have investable capital.

2:21:46We're like, we'll give you the investable capital to build C corps and businesses, right? This is a new pattern of C corp generation and building. We really believe in at seed. Now, how did we get there? We got there because it's really hard to invest in seed creator businesses because the equity and the value of the community is held outside the company. And so Jane wakes up in five days and we love the community. We love her. She's like, oh, fuck, it's actually not this, it's that. It's not Mr. Beast Burger. It's fucking feastables. You do not want to be in that scenario, right? Like no one wants that.

2:22:15It's bad for everyone. We want to be able to invest as aligned a way as we possibly can with creators. And so we were like, look, we do this effectively with founders anyway. We don't take board seats. We want to be first check-in. We're trying to be collaborative holistically with them. We want to be aligned with them. If they win, great. If they lose, c 'est la vie. What is the equivalent in creator? And like, that's kind of what we're bullish on. So I think, you know, it turns out in creator, like most things, the transparent deals, the super buzzy ones, masa style, they always get super overpriced, right?

2:22:44Because everyone knows them and they say, Oh, we like creator creator important by creator, right? We're much more interested in providing capital where it's scarce, which is we think seed creators and we think on this model. What about putting those two things together? Have you thought about going to a creator and saying, Hey, you would be perfect if you owned this business that already exists, we buy the business, give it to you repackage it, and then you're kind of the marketing front end. Is that a crazy idea? Or it's not a crazy idea. And we get pitched it all the time, actually, you know, in different verticals, like you have the god of lawn care who wants to buy the lawn care companies, it's not crazy.

2:23:18But I do think it's complicated to get right. Right. And I think like, you know, there's a thing I like to say about seed stage investing, which is no fucking bank shots, right. And the more variables that have to be right domino style, the less likely it is that the thing actually happens right and so for me it's like like so you want tech leverage and a roll up and we're gonna put a creator on top and that it does like something will not work right and like that makes it a hard bet now but it's intellectually not wrong right um with uh kind of two follow-up questions on the creator fund do you guys have like a no zeros policy right a lot of these creators generate revenue from ads right so if you invest a million dollars and they generate you know a couple million bucks a year in ad revenue like even if they don't make a banger your company, like you'll get your money out eventually?

2:24:05Or how do you think? So here's the way we think about it. It's a great question. We're not that interested in your ad business, right? Like, we just don't really care. Like, there's no enterprise value generated in that. Um, it's really nice non-dilutive financing sometimes, but like, it's not what we're playing for. Um, we also are not interested in taking some creators last cent, right? Like, if you're just like, you're making a million bucks after you pay taxes and whatever else you're living. Okay. We're not going to be like, Hey, uh, by the way, we want our 10 % of your ad revenue. We don't care.

2:24:33Now, there is a scenario we do care about protecting, which is if you take our money, we're doing the seed thing, we start a few companies, they don't quite work, but in the process of spending our money, because you marketed yourself and whatever else, you get 10 times bigger. Then you're like, I kind of just like Super Bowl ads. I'm just going to do a bunch of Super Bowl ads and I'm going to make$15 million,$20 million next year on that. We'll want our piece of the upside on that in that model. But our whole thing is about alignment and we're certainly not primarily interested in your ad dollars right it's not like a slope you know now look it's almost like a safe it's a it's a safety net it makes sense uh mr beast is marked around five billion dollars right now the private mark i wouldn't read that much yeah yeah yeah but i'm i'm assuming that everybody that's investing hundreds of millions of dollars into mr beast or billions wants to get their money out eventually it's hard to imagine anybody buying it you know uh outright right uh do they uh do you see mr beast going public in the next i am sure that's what he they want to do like how's that right is it is it a stock that trades you know kind of like true social where it's just based around attention and and does i think it's a meme stock it's a meme stock if it gets out right it's just a meme coin on steroids you know But the reality is, it's not, again, I actually credit Jimmy, Mr.

2:25:57Beast. He's done a few very important things for the creator space, right? One thing he did is he's made a lot of creators dream a lot bigger. And that's great, right? Like, I appreciate that, right, from a perspective. I also think, you know, he's really, I think, been a good example on a beacon of creators aren't just creators. Like, they can start businesses, like whatever. So, this has been an aperture opening that he's really helped with that I think has been great for the industry. Now, that said, I do think there's some structural problems with his quote unquote business as a creator business.

2:26:29I'll give you an example. We care a lot about the LTV of customers. And his audience is so broad and candidly pretty poor, which means that they're not great customers. There's a reason you sell chocolate because it's one of the only things you can sell to everyone that's cheap. It's not the best audience. It's also, you know, the reality is he does a lot of media stuff like, you know, you know, everyone's excited that he gets a hundred million dollar Amazon contract, but then he spends more than that on the show. Right. Like, and so it's like, it's just not clear to me that in the hyper competitive entertainment space with a broad general audience, that that's like an amazing business.

2:27:06But look, it is definitely a cult. And I'm sure there's a bunch of like 20 year old kids that will grow up and trade it like a meme stock. Right. And like, that could be fine. Right. It's just not like a thing where you're looking at it like this is a money printing machine. which is what I'm more interested in. To my knowledge, you're thinking about the slow creator program where you would want one of the creator's underlying companies to go public but not the creator holding company to go public and that there's some brand risk to the creator if you're having a financial asset that's trading based on your popularity and if your popularity goes down, you get even more unpopular because...

2:27:44I've been interested in this kind of how do you think about financing people with equity versus debt for a very long time. I started my first company in 1999 when I was in high school. It's called lifecapital.com. And the idea was basically some version of this, right? And so I think that thematically makes a ton of sense, right? As the world gets more unequal and outcomes are more discontinuous, debt financing does just broadly not make sense for people, right? The equity model, and we've invested in a bunch of versions of this, right? Including some of that recently. So I do think it's a very interesting spit, specifically for the creator fund.

2:28:16again, you know, you kind of are, you know, you are what you eat, right? In this case, we like eat LP dollars and like from an eating LP dollar perspective and like what the structure is, the good news is we really think there's an opportunity to deliver normal ass C-Corps, skims, whatever you want to call it, right? That start with creators, but are perfectly huge, amazing companies to back from seed, right? And so that is what we do with that. Is there residual value to the hold code pieces? Yeah, there totally is. Like in 10 years, because these are 10 year funds, do you have to figure out how to wrap that up or resell it or like retrate?

2:28:51Absolutely. But like, candidly, this market is moving so fast, that the way I think about this is like, we're investing in launch pads for amazing C corps that are driven first and foremost by amazing communities that are led by amazing founders that are creators like that is what we're doing. And yes, at the end a 10-year cycle which then has a bunch of extensions on it you do figure out what you do with the residual assets yeah that makes sense um i have so many other questions here i mean the the main one is uh how quickly are you pushing creators to uh are you thinking of these creators as a catalyst for the c-corps that they're spinning out because one thing i've seen from spending millions of dollars with influencers is like oftentimes you'll spend a hundred thousand dollars with an influencer, it performs well, like if it's sort of like a broad consumer audience, and then the performance can drop off over time because, you know, you know, there's only so many buyers in the audience.

2:29:48How do you think about, you know, the almost no creator is big enough to sustain a venture scale, you know, C Corp by themselves, right? Well, it depends on what verticals and how you're looking at it. Again, like when you think about creators, it's such a broad space and use so broadly that I think you can you can mean a lot of different things, right? And so look, one of the dirty secrets, which you know, it sounds like is in the venture capital world, entrepreneurs all day long will pitch you about how their CAC is very high, but the CAC will come down. Here's a secret. CAC always goes up, right?

2:30:18It always goes up like there. CAC goes up, not down, right? And so what you're experiencing is that it's like if you spend money with an influencer, they're the people who want to buy the thing anyway, you reach them, it's cheap. and then they hit a wall, like if it's just like a general product you're selling, right? And so you have to think about it as a launch pad from that perspective. You know, we want to back creator founders who come in and they want to be entrepreneurs. They like pitch us business ideas. Like they have their list. They're like, okay, like I know my audience in lawn care, in terrariums, and you name it better than anyone in the world.

2:30:50Here's the 10 things that no one knows. And by the way, I can sell them. And I know I'm selling it to myself. Like I'm the leader of this and I understand the space better than anyone and I have access to the community and they trust me. That's what we want, right? We don't need them to come in and be like, here's the business plan 100%. In fact, we kind of just, but we do need that list because if you come in and you're like, I'm a creator, I have the audience, but I don't know what to do. We're like, well, we don't, are you an entrepreneur? Are you just gonna make more media, right? And we're like, the media is fine, but the media has to support real businesses.

2:31:18Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Anything else? That's all I got for today. You're the man. Last question. who's a better grill master you or zuck oh definitely zuck okay i had no i mean look i wouldn't seem bad but like i think that man has invested in the craft of grilling um in a way that i have not i love it i love it that makes sense uh we'd love to i'd love to have you as a regular yeah yeah anytime you guys want to reach out i really love the show it's super fun i love what you guys have done and we love bullshitting so yeah it's great you love to yap we love to yap it's a match made in heaven it's a match made in heaven uh we'll have on a billboard someday we should yeah we should that'd be great uh well enjoy Indian Wells enjoy the weekend have a great time guys let's talk to you later it's great have a good fight uh I noticed on his uh website slow.co uh it looks like they have the biggest guy and they made him they made him sit in a chair I've started to do because John do that before oh wait how tall am I Jordy six eight yeah thank a lot of people just don't even believe it.

2:32:21They say there's never been a podcast, a six, eight podcaster. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I'm kind of the Coden O 'Brien of tech, uh, tech podcasting, I suppose. Uh, he's really tall. Uh, let's go to speaking of, uh, uh, physical appearance. Let's go to Allie DeBow. She says the only moat, it's not AI it's drop dead, gorgeous, Just good looks and generational wealth. I love it. Very TV coded post. I had to throw it in there. She sent me a text message because we featured her show. She was actually getting dunked on, but we featured it. We had a lot of fun. And so thank you to Allie for keeping the timeline.

2:33:02She knows how to post the perfect amount to get engagement. A little bit of engagement. And she's got a social app, I believe. it's for uh swish swish yeah for photo sharing yep it's cool and they're partnered with some huge rolling loud the largest uh concert or something like that and they're powering it they she's really good at doing these like deals even though it's a small company yeah teal fellow too yeah it was funny uh when apple apple came out and announced their sort of uh you know their photos app is rough so i'm sure she's not super threatened by that but uh uh they also came out with this event yeah partiful and it was i think competing with what ali's doing too but i don't see tim cook dead getting deals done with rolling loud he's he's too busy at the john summit show backstage you know who knows uh so ali's in control but uh great post oh well uh should we move on and and finish out the timeline and wrap up the show let's do it okay let's go to uh visicon versami he says even kings and billionaires want to be posters and podcasters king charles is launching his own apple music radio show to showcase his favorite music you know they they they brought the brinks truck for that oh yeah oh yeah signing king charles i love it i mean we're a network yeah we should explore you know maybe he does some angel investing he could host you know an angel investing i mean we were we were pitching trump getting back in the media game you know because he had his own reality tv show we were talking about maybe JD is the first one with a podcast or something.

2:34:35And who's the California guy who Newsome has a show now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why not? Why not a radio show? I hope King Charles gets on there, introduces every song, takes requests, does some radio stuff, winds up doing the news. Who knows? Maybe we'll have him on the show. King Charles, open invite. Should we go to George Mack? Yep. My most contrarian belief, we could increase the global economy by two to three percent by installing large whiteboards in every home. I love George so much. This is such a funny, funny idea to just like you want to whiteboard. I mean, George, if you don't know, I mean, he's a fantastic thinker and writer and poster.

2:35:15And he he's like very into like modeling things out, creating frameworks, creating flow charts. And so, of course, he thinks like, you know, you just need to be like one foot away from a whiteboard to whiteboard out the problem and solve your problems at any moment. But we need to get a whiteboard in here. We don't do nearly enough whiteboarding. What's your take on the whiteboard walls? Do you think that paint is toxic and terrible? I don't enjoy using whiteboards. I love kind of making graphics in Figma and using that. Figma maximalist. I've just never been, I love creative pursuits and writing and all these things.

2:35:58But I went to a Waldorf school. Have I ever told you about this? Are you familiar with Waldorf? They have like similar to Montessori. It's like the Waldorf Astoria? Yeah, I went to the - Went to school at a five-star hotel? Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I think it's an educational philosophy from Rudolf Steiner emphasizing a holistic approach to education that nurtures intellectual, artistic, and practical skills with a focus on imagination and creativity. Oh, that's fun. So I credit my Waldorf education for a number of my sort of creative abilities, but they forced us to paint and draw and knit and do all these things as kids.

2:36:40And I wasn't good at, I didn't have the patience for drawing. I just didn't have the patience. So I thought I didn't like art. I thought I didn't like creative tasks as a kid, But I just didn't like, I've never liked drawing, writing. And now you're an artist and your paintbrush is the Shure SM7B. Exactly. Keyboard warrior. Keyboard warrior, podcaster. Twitter fingers. Yeah. Yes. But generally, I think that people seem to love whiteboards. There should be more of them. Yeah, I like it. It'd be fun to have one here that we could write on, you know, KPIs, stuff like that. Let's go to Nick. He says 500 people run the world, but they collectively use like 50 therapists and listen to everything they say.

2:37:27So really, 50 therapists run the world. You think that's accurate? And then the follow up. And those 50 therapists have been trained by like five teachers. Oh, it's all downstream from something. Yeah. I don't know. It's funny. Funny conspiracy. I wonder if this is actually true at all or just like something that was completely hallucinated. Yeah. a Bill Monaitis post. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't, I can't imagine that this is true that like, uh, Satya and Sundar are using the same therapist or something. It's funny because therapy so often I haven't had a therapist since I was like in high school or something like that.

2:38:07It never worked. I was never big into that world. Um, but, uh, Tom Cruise route. Yeah. I just watch tom cruise movies and get fired up uh i think it's more about talking out loud about the things that you're working through and coming to many of your own conclusions right we're going for a long walk yeah a walk 50 steps 50 000 steps bill manai is putting up 50 000 steps in a day five times most people's goals it's so much that's walking all day long yeah anyway let's move on uh Speaking of walking, running, going long distances, Zach says, package your obsession into one thing that compounds one brand, one output, one core product.

2:38:49When all thoughts are directed towards one channel, a violent rainstorm is captured in one infinite well that sustains and compounds beyond your wildest imagination. Good writer. He's writing a book. He is. Yeah. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I bet he'll sell a ton of them. Yeah. I mean, he has over a million on Instagram now. Yeah. Yeah. No. And, and, and, uh, I mostly want to highlight his execution on his new consumer app, which is building kind of a social layer on top of these fitness trackers and, uh, good name too. It's called aura, right? It's a very on trend. You were trying to get aura farming to go viral and we were kind of, we were almost too early on it.

2:39:28I failed, but I think it's probably breaking through now. And I think people will now start to get it maybe. Yeah. If you want to make money on aura farming though you you had to be in it you know early months ago yeah probably probably um should we go to emily is in sf okay i'll read this one yeah pissed off a lot of people it did so uh uh timeline and turmoil folks timeline and turmoil not my content but uh let's see what emily has to say she says to me the greatest sadness of all is the banality of most people's lives i'll spend time with my non-elite friends and it's clear that they're it's clear that their lives are devoid of heroism and lore.

2:40:07They lock in, clock in, but they fight no great battles and they dash no great foes. They drop by thy club or thy bar, but find no great loves there. They travel the world, but it is by no means an adventure. They return home, but they are not welcomed by a triumph. No, all they have are their succulents and the pile of dirty laundry they failed to do before they left. Brutal. Absolutely brutal. does the does the golden retriever long for great battles uh brother will is in the comments here uh there was quite a lot of comments but it's ranking people that uh are in the tb verse and will says what's your net worth which is a great follow-up question to a post like this i love it yeah um but uh but no great great it's the chad homonym yeah good argument what's your bench press yeah uh no i mean i i think uh there there is some truth here obviously there's all there's always some truth to uh any anything viral post controversial yes yes there's no truth there's no controversy but again we are in the you can just do things era so if you are surrounded by succulents maybe you know lock in clock in i would say go develop some more invite emily on the show i want to see how the heroism and lore in her life how she's locking in and clocking in to fight great battles how she's finding great love at the club or the bar yeah how she's adventuring around the world you can just sign up to be the first person to go on starship yeah yeah hey flight nine flight nine is coming up strap me in uh it's you can just choose to change everything the firmament has an 8-0 lead against spacex right now but uh we're feeling good about the ninth flight good and uh Emily, take it on.

2:41:52Yeah, let's do it. Anyway, fun post. I love this one from Palmer Lucky. We've talked about Call of Duty and how important it is to the global economy before. He says, the Call of Duty franchise has done more to engender support for UK-US military cohesion over the past two decades than just about anything else, especially with military-age males. Changed my mind. 100 % accurate. 100 % accurate. Yeah, who's that soap? McTavish? Do you not know the characters in Call of Duty? It's coming back to me now. Oh, a little three-finger moment. Oh, I can't identify Soap McTavish. No, I remember what he looks like.

2:42:30I didn't go blanked on the name because I'm not a real gamer. Oh, Mogged. It's great. Yeah, we need more Call of Duty games. We should get a Soap McTavish sound effect. If I'm wrong on that, I'm dead. I think I'm right. It's John Soap McTavish. No, you actually are wrong. I'm wrong. mctavish is the guy with the the buzz cut oh no i'm wrong who is it okay i don't know it's someone from call of duty i don't even know uh i i i played the first call of duty the very first one uh when it came out played call captain price captain price that's right captain price price oh captain price it's great anyway uh wait ben can you call it duty can you pull up best captain price moments Yeah, can you pull up a Call of Duty compilation?

2:43:18Let's just watch that for the rest of the show. I want to see some 360-roscopes. Okay, I've got some quotes from Captain Price. Yeah, yeah, let's learn some lore. History is written by the victor. History is filled with liars. If he lives and we die, his truth becomes written, and ours is lost. They say truth is the first casualty of war. We got to just start tweeting these out. These are bangers. Shepard will be a hero, because all you need to change the world is one good lie and a river of blood. I love it. I love it. we get dirty and the world stays clean yeah we get dirty and the world stays clean the story of throw this on right what the hell kind of name is soapy how to muppet like you pass selection just watching these are core childhood memories yeah oh this is so good

2:44:17I need a sound effect that says open fire. For sure, for sure. I mean, if AI takes all the jobs, I think I'm going to be doing just fine, just playing Call of Duty on endless mode. I'll be fine. Oh, God. These are great. Anyway, Call of Duty, what I would love to just take. What kind of name is Soap, eh? How to Muppet like you pass selection. I love it. I love it. It's great to just go back to the time. We got to get soap out of here. Yeah, it's great. Shepherd is using Sight Hotel Bravo. You know where it is. I'll see you in hell. It's great. Anyway, moving on to something extremely important.

2:45:02A lot of pro-America VCs out there have been asking us for car recommendations. We got a good one for you. 2018 Ford GT asking price$8 ,990. Giving it away. Giving it away. Finished in shadow black with re-entry black white interior, complimentary by Anarchy Forged Wheels and Bowdoin Auto House titanium exhaust system. Go check it out. I really don't like the wheels. Those are easy enough to swap out. But this is a whole Bowdoin Auto House. This is like their entire aesthetic, which for some is exactly right. Not enough VCs with the mensori body kits and the stanced under lighting. But you know what they say, John?

2:45:47You build a house one brick at a time. Truth is the first casualty of all. It's great. I don't know how many more we should do. Let's go to Yaxin. Of course, he's been on the show before. He just says, this is the most important website in the world. with the x tag i love it yeah if you're ever just having a low period in your in your timeline just post this is the greatest app and a bunch of people come out the stands will support very self-referential but you got to put up numbers every once in a while you know you love it uh should we go to jeff lewis yeah this is an interesting post he says i now talk with categories of quote-unquote people in this order of frequency my family my team at bedrock our broader bedrock business relationships across entrepreneurs, LPs, top talent across industries, government, and others, ultra close friends, LLMs, friends, other.

2:46:40So I just want to know what other is. Others like the HVAC guy. Yeah. What I thought was interesting about this is that I use LLMs a lot. I don't think of myself as, as talking with them. Like, I don't think I've, I don't think I'm having a conversation with Google. I don't think I'm talking to ChatGPT or Grok when I use it. I feel like it's much more in the tool realm for me, but I'm wondering if I'm missing out on something. I know voice mode's getting better, but I haven't really gone down the sesame rabbit hole or the voice mode where I'm really just like chopping it up with them for a long time.

2:47:16I did have a pretty good experience driving in and I asked the voice mode on GPT 4.5 just to kind of like tell me the top stories in the wall street journal kind of break them down and then i could kind of steer it but it was still a little awkward it didn't feel like actually talking to a person or a friend it was very much just like comes up and then you know ask the next question uh should we move on to blake robbins i thought this was a great take and under there's a good place to end the show yeah this is great so we've talked about levels before he built a flight simulator game he vibe coded it uh with a bunch of ai coding tools uh went viral he's now making something like 56 000 arr or something he's climbing he's making money he's selling blimp ads in them he's selling f-16s he has in-game purchases it's very cool and he's documenting it all um but blake has a good point here he says the success of levels flight simulator game is really a story about effective distribution leveraging his massive audience not just ai game development and i think that's 100 right and he is using that audience but then the audience is remarketing his game by just raging at it and raging over the quality or his monetization strategy.

2:48:27And so it's really a great story of not, you know, having distribution, but then, you know, properly leveraging that distribution by building something somewhat controversial. I'd love to close there, but we got one more. We got to go to Nat Friedman, former brother of the week. Nat Friedman is preparing to transport scrolls to the scanner. he's not stopping he's not resting on his laurels he's he's scanning more scrolls the scrolls must be scanned i love it and i'm very excited so good luck to you on that transportation hopefully it goes smoothly hopefully they aren't damaged in transit uh i've really enjoyed following the scroll story and uh you know we we got to talk to more of these scrolls folks they're always super interesting people the scrolls universe the cinematic universe of everyone working on the scrolls casey hanmer a bunch of other people very fascinating anyway the scroll verse the scroll verse stay tuned for more we'll see you on monday and have a great weekend we'll talk to you soon bye bye