Eric Glyman, David Senra, Bridget Harris, The Trouble with Tariffs, See You in Aspen

34:52And you know, I might do like one new book for every like 50 old books. And they all, they send me their new books for distribution, but they're also like, were you interested in writing a book? And my point to them is like, I, I think of podcasting as like one of the greatest technologies to ever create. I think it's the printing press for the spoken word. And so me taking, and I think it's the highest and best use of my time. So me taking time away from that to do anything else, but more podcasting doesn't make sense now that i i talked to my friend jimmy sony who i absolutely love and uh he's he wrote this great biography on claude shannon he wrote this book called what's that he spoke at your event he wrote the paypal book right yeah he wrote the founders the history of uh founders he's like another psycho obsessive it took him longer to write the founder's book then it took paypal to be founded and then sold to ebay okay so uh but i called him i was like hey just name your price and you know listen to the podcast we'll have some conversations and if you can write this for me like in partnership then i'd be interested in doing that so what i told him to do so one of my favorite books is will and ariel durance lessons of history right you really think about that book it's like they dedicated 50 years of their life to writing the um history of civilization it's probably i don't know what 10 000 pages all combined and yet after that they're like hey we're gonna do this fucking ridiculous thing of trying to write a biography of the human species and we're gonna limit to 100 pages so it's like okay i would want to do that like what are the most important ideas that we've just we've unveiled so far through the podcast and in eight years of his existence and write like this is about like the most important idea is in a hundred pages uh and so he he's got a bunch of stuff going on including two books that are really fascinating that he's writing but he said he's going to do it very cool uh who are the entrepreneurs that are still building their legacy that you are hoping that they will live up to their full potential and one day be qualified to be, you know, given the full founders podcast treatment, I would put Eric and Kareem in that in that bucket of, you know, ultra high potential, but still, you know, sort of just getting started in a sense.

36:52Are there people that stand out today that that you're excited to cover in, you know 15 20 years right i'm going to tell you who my favorite founder alive is right now and it's going to be surprising to people because um i i heard your episode yesterday where you talked about like how i'd call you up john and like find a simple idea and take it seriously and i think that's one of like the best pieces of advice and you see it over and over again i've been able and some of these people i can't fucking name because of the podcast but i've been able to meet like these crazy you know family businesses where the founder's 80 years old still running the company no outside investors worth 10 billion dollars and you know they just monopolize like crazy stuff like nails or packing equipment and or shipping company or just like crazy like not very complicated ideas just like they found a simple idea and took it uh very seriously um i i think uh one of the things i like about eric and kareem is uh before we had this like very deep uh partnership it's not obviously you guys know this is not just like we're not just like reading ads for them on my podcast um like we're friends we spend a lot of time together our wives spend time together our kids play together um and you know it took a long time getting to know them really well um one of the important things when we talked about this is like is this your last company like i'm not interested in like the people that want to start scale and sell i'm interested in people that do something for a very long time if you look at all the books behind me these people literally work ends up right here you were like he died he worked up for there's no retirement I mean, it's like Ferrari is my entire life.

38:21This is what my life energy goes to this. Most of the people I come on the podcast, you know, their life's work. And what I loved about both Eric and Kareem, like this is the last company. Like this is we want to build this forever. There's actually an interesting idea. And I'm trying to convince Kareem to do more. Not that he needs my advice by any means, but I really want him to be interviewed by Patrick. Just because I get to talk to him privately. And he's like fucking brilliant technical mind. and one of the things that he said that was very fascinating um is he he optimizes for spikes and uh what that means is like you know especially as the company grows you tend to like try to like even out and like hire for personality or like yeah this guy's talented but he's kind of like an asshole or he's like comes in late uh or like you know will show up for two days and kind of disappear and i think what kareem understood is what a lot of history entrepreneurs understand There's a great line by David Ogilvie where he said that talent is likely is most likely to be found against among misfits, nonconformists and rebels.

39:27And what Kareem is interested in is not like your total package. He's interested in your very best idea. So like if you are the very best at X and he just wants you to do that for ramp. And if you only last for six months, that's fine. It's like he just he optimizes for spikes. And I think that's incredibly intelligent because it's also something that Steve Jobs says that he's like, you can never, ever, ever, ever forget the dynamic range of human beings. That most things in life, you know, between the average to the best, it's like two to three, two times best, three times quality. Where he's like in software and hardware, it's like the difference is like 100x or 1 ,000x.

40:04And marketing too. Not just 10x engineers, 10x ideas, 10x marketing taglines. 100%. You can see it with Apple right now. What's that? You can see it with Apple right now. Genmoji it. Like, it's not crazy to think of the Yin and Yang campaign that they ran as a thousand times better than the Genmoji campaign. Yeah. And again, where does that come from? Where, like, Eric and Kareem is, like, they work like dogs, just like I do. Right? And I'm really only interested. I just came back from lunch. The reason I texted you guys in five minutes late is because I was meeting another founder friend of mine.

40:37And we had lunch with another friend. And it's, like, all three of us have a certain comment. It's, like, we're taking what we do very seriously. It's all different. businesses um but kareem works non-stop right eric does too and they want the pressure um and they want they do believe like something that eric told me that was wild at breakfast was like when ramp was founded um amex was like a 70 billion dollar market cap company and now it's like 220 or whatever um so i i heard at the very end he's talking about yeah people were saying hey we're valued at 13 million that's fine but like you know we're missing zero maybe two zeros like if we're doing this for a long period of time things grow in unpredictable ways like the people that i've met i actually didn't i like didn't ask him the question of uh you know i was i'm genuinely curious like what do you do uh if you have five minutes in the day you know what are you doing uh for fun and i don't even think that's worth asking eric because i know he's just gonna say look you know i like to you know keep in touch with my family and but otherwise i'm at the office thinking about work or i'm calling senra um but uh but yeah it just didn't even seem like worth asking because i already know the answer one of the most interesting things i think they just put this out in uh in that blog post but we definitely talked about it too it's like you know they're doing like 54 of their payrolls on are dedicated to r &d like they're not just like oh we're look what we did in in this amount of time it's like no we're gonna keep pushing the pace this is again the what i uh i i when i went to new york i had dinner with mike ovitz that i had an intense three-hour dinner with Ovitz.

42:09So I'm making an episode on the dinner and I'm making an episode on the book. And the way this came about is because I was at breakfast with a friend of mine and his phone was on the table and it rings and it's Mike Ovitz. And he picks up and he puts on speakerphone. He's like, hey, I'm actually sitting here with my friend, David. He does this podcast, you should know about founders. And Mike, without missing a beat, he goes, I love that podcast. I listened to four episodes yesterday. And one of the things that me and Mike talked about at breakfast This is like nothing that Michael Ovitz said in his book or at dinner is like surprising to me.

42:41And because it's like founders is church for entrepreneur. It's just you're just telling the same story over and over again. It's the same personality type over and over and over again. And so, yeah, of course, like when they're saying, hey, we're extremely dedicated what we're doing. We're trying to get better. It's like that's exactly what they should be doing. If this is going to be your last business, if this is your life's work, then you will have that like importance of every little detail. Like how many, you guys see all the tweets when people talk about the difference of like the UI and UX to ramp compared to some other people.

43:09Yeah. Yeah. And your point about Apple, there's a great book called Creative Selection. It's episode 281 of Founders. I think the title is working with Steve Jobs, if I'm correct. Might be wrong. Maybe 282, probably 281. um and that's one of the best books i've read it three times because it talks about the care that steve jobs put to every single pixel of all the products they're making making and all the advertising so that ad wouldn't have gone out because steve would have had to approve every single ad that went out that's there's a different level of care and love yep what's your sleep score what's your sleep score not not good and i love mateo uh they were uh one of my early partners let's it was here's the problem because every i'm so excited about this is gonna be a big year yeah uh and i have a lot of stuff coming that people don't know about and like it's it's not good so last night was 70 i got 88 what'd you do jordy the the night the night before is 56 56 i've never actually gotten that low i got an 89 you're grinding too hard no no i'm just very excited this is like yeah no it makes sense one of my favorite founders uh you mentioned earlier is uh are you we're asking earlier is uh dana white i think what he did what him and the fatida brothers did with the ufc buying it out of bankruptcy for like two billion or two two million and then you know selling selling it for whatever the number is and still staying on there and i saw a clip from a podcast interview that he said that's excellent and it's like very again i like simple ideas he's just like build a life that you can't like you can't wait to wake up to and he's like i like people always ask me oh when are you going to retire from the ufc and he's just like retire from what yeah like i get to put on the best fights in the world i get to travel and i get to stay in the nicest hotels eat at the nicest restaurants like put on the best live events he's like i'm gonna be doing this till i'm 80 yeah you know and i just love that idea like very simple idea am i building a life that i cannot wait to wake up to

45:04one industry oriented question and then i have um i just want you to rant about a specific topic so So what's going on with Spotify? Yesterday for the first time, I got a clickbait style video suggested to me on Spotify that was like, I tried zero star tech and it was like this like kind of like crazy. It looked exactly like a YouTube video. It was a YouTube video. It was just a YouTube video. It came out, came out, uh, you know, last week that YouTube is the biggest podcast platform in the world. Now that's obviously not, you know, sort of not great, uh, for Spotify. How do you see spotify as a platform uh evolving um so i don't see this another thing because keep in mind i like study people for a living right i think that's really the only edge i have so um uh we've talked about this like um when i think of like people like people think of like their portfolio they tend to like list companies mine is like people people it's like oh i invested in this dude and i invested in justin or sebastian or like that um long daniel what's that and so and so in this analogy you're long daniel eck daniel's the best like he's the most like the car dude yes i spent a bunch of time with him i consider him a friend like a legit friend and it's shocking that we're friends but like every time i talk to him like he's the idea that what is spotify like 120 billion dollar market cap company or something today i don't pay attention to any like the stock market but like it's big in public yeah hold up and inform this it's over 100 billion i would imagine 120 nailed it okay so how the hell is the guy that's been running the company for 18 years he's a founder he's still there uh he's what 42 like young um 44 i don't know something like that he's like so underrated more people should study him like he doesn't give a bunch of interviews and usually the interviews around product announcements but like i don't know what's gonna happen with spotify but i would back up the truck in anything that daniel does and as long as daniel's there and his team i've met his team they're fucking incredible like um yeah they also knew exactly what was gonna happen this is like famous like founders fund lore is that like sean parker and daniel come in and they're like and they're like we are gonna execute like the napster type music sharing strategy but it's all gonna be legal we're gonna build this platform and they projected something like i don't remember the exact number but they're like in the in the investment memo it's like in 2025 we'll have 300 million daus and they got it within like 10 or something it was like a 20 year projection and they nailed it it was crazy listen more important he's one of the greatest living entrepreneurs without a doubt that's not including the stuff he's doing outside of spotify which is fucking awesome incredible and impactful uh more important that he's like a good guy so um i i want i'm gonna do more of these like i had dinner with episodes you know yeah there people seem to like them and i like doing them and um i had dinner with and this one had to be like anonymous so i don't know i'm not gonna make an episode on it but um because i asked the guy it's i i mentioned this briefly in a in a episode but i was like i had dinner with you know one i got the opportunity to have dinner with one of the wealthiest people on the planet um very unknown right his family it's a multi-generation dynasty and his family like commissioned biographies for certain people in the family and of course when he's telling me that i was like oh let me get those and he's like this is you know i say bad boys move in silence that maxim that reappears over and over again in history of entrepreneurship came from rockefeller uh he's like absolutely not i go why not and he goes because i'm not interested in educating my competitors and the dinner was incredible but he knows daniel and And he was just like, what do you think of Daniel?

48:50He's incredible. One of the best entrepreneurs in the world, this guy's telling me. He's like, but more important than that, when you speak to him, he's a kind person. He's not one of these assholes. He has no ego. No ego. He's not much older than all three of us. Well, maybe a lot older than Jordy. I forgot how young Jordy is. But it's incredible what this guy has done. And I think more people should spend time studying him. like we're gonna um it's true we're gonna do he already agreed to like we're gonna do i had dinner with uh daniel episode soon because i had an incredible dinner with him it was the most important you know what i fucking think of him i get to meet a lot of incredible people last year was the craziest life year of my life that conversation that conversation i had with daniel was by far the most important because like he doesn't he sees no ceiling to what he can achieve and then he takes that self-belief and he transfers it to you which i think is very very important so I have no idea that they look what the fuck have they've done in podcasting so far.

49:49Yeah. And they're going to continue to do what I would say if people are interested in learning more about Spotify, they made I was just in Stockholm and I found this out. They made a short series on the history of Spotify. Sean Parker's in there. Daniel's in there. It's called Spotify, a product story. It was out in like 2021. And I think it's eight or nine series, eight or nine episodes. and then they update it later, but you could just listen to the first ones. And again, everybody's talking about AI, right? In 2000, whatever, I don't know, 2025. They were talking about it half a decade ago.

50:22They were using it half a decade ago. They're just, he's great. That's all I have to say. Two minutes left. Yeah. Question for you. We're at a unique moment in time where it doesn't feel like a lot of entrepreneurs can afford to not pay attention to geopolitics, right? There's been a lot of time in the last 20 years where the generalized advice was focus on your customers. You can kind of ignore everything else. And if you're delivering value for your customers, then you'll do well. We're at a period where there's tariffs coming down. It's impacting a lot of businesses here in the US and entrepreneurs.

50:59Who should those entrepreneurs study in this sort of founders world in terms of entrepreneurs and companies that had to navigate sort of like, or does it not even matter, right? Or is it still just - This is the biggest thing, man. Like you're – the problem is everybody is so focused on the present, right? And history allows you to like take a step back and have a perspective. And instead of like being in front of your fucking face all day long. And so like here's a great book. I just did this episode. It's like absolutely ripping. It's called 400 Pages of Munger and Buffett in Their Own Words.

51:34And in there it talks about the fact that you could have bought Coca-Cola, you know, after World War II. I'm making up the numbers, but World War I for like nothing. Right. And it went up by 10 ,000 X since then or whatever the number is. Right. And the point being is Buffett's point was there's a lot of smart investors and other people and smart capital carriers that pass because they're like, oh, like there's all this uncertainty. There's political uncertainties. There's wars. There's pandemics. So if you think about everything that happened from like 1910 to up until when he's saying this is probably like the 1990s, you know, you went through two world wars.

52:08You went through multiple pandemics. You went through all this turmoil. You went through asset bubble, asset class collapses, high interest rates, low interest rates, everything else. He goes at the end of the day, you know what mattered? That 60 years from now, they're going to be they're going to be serving a billion servings, eight ounce servings of Coke a day. And if somebody is making a billion people slightly happier every day by by serving this drink to them, that person should make a little bit of money and probably will make a little bit of money. So I don't I'm not actually a good person to ask that question, surprisingly so, because like the amount you guys know, this is like the amount of what I don't ignore.

52:45I figure that there's been important stuff like I'll know about wars, I'll know about pandemics, but I have no idea like who's leading in the stock market. I don't pay. I don't like reading the news. I don't do any of this because what matters is like I just stay focused on my customer. right so if i wake up every day and i read for a few hours you know a biography of one of history entrepreneurs and i sit down once a week and i talk to you for an hour and i just rip through idea after idea in an hour that you can listen to on 1.5 x speed so it takes 40 minutes to you right there's nothing else everything else is under control i will get everything i want in life and that i deserve if i just focus on that just focus delivering value as much as possible Um, yeah.

53:27And another, another way to look at this is if, if you are, if the company that you, if you're an entrepreneur and you're running a company, that's not your last company, it's the, the, the sort of geopolitical environment right now is hyper stressful, right? Cause you're thinking about, Oh, I want to sell the company. I want to exit and all that stuff. But if you're thinking about, you know, still running the company in 20, 30 years from now, uh, it really doesn't matter what happens in the next four years. You just need to, you know, make it through and, uh, make the, okay. Dead on. I'm glad you said that.

53:54Cause this just spawned another thought to me, right? Where for some reason, and this has not been like on purpose, I was spending a lot of money or spending a lot of time with like family offices and a world I didn't know anything about. And I've been asking questions like, who's the largest like American family office? And, you know, a lot of them are dispersed. Whatever the case was like, highly likely it's the Waltons, right? You know, Sam Walton's kids and grandkids. If you pass the Miami Beach Marina, right? if you're coming from downtown to the beach, you'll see this giant boat. I looked it up one day.

54:29It was like Sam Walton's brother's daughter's boat, right? It's like bigger or ship bigger than anything else, even remote in a giant marina. And it's like, it sticks out like a sore thumb. So there's a great biography that I actually read. It's called Sam Walton, America's Richest Man, written by Vance Trimble. And it was actually published a year before Sam Walton's autobiography came out. And he had a funny story in there. because Sam was very private, just focused on satisfying the customer. And then everybody sees Walmart stock. Oh, this is the richest man in America. So during Black Friday, that was, I think, 1987, right?

55:06Sam didn't have a cell phone. He doesn't have a beeper. He doesn't have internet, right? So he's driving - Wait, Black Friday, the retail holiday? No, Black Friday, the stock market crash. I just want to clarify because you're talking about a retail entrepreneur. Good point. Also a big day. Yeah, Black Friday, biggest stock, I think, single day stock crash ever i assume that still holds the record and so anyways on paper he lost like a billion dollars right so he goes he's given a speech at like this charity event i think in arkansas for like kids or something and somebody he takes questions after somebody has some questions like how does it feel to lose a billion dollars in the stock market today and his his response was great he goes i didn't i didn't hear about it it's like he didn't care because he's just like i don't care i'm just like focused on my business i'm not selling the stock today I'm never selling it.

55:52Like, like it, all that matters is that he was, he really, he took a, if you mean, take a simple idea and take it seriously, his dedication to that simple idea, E everyday low price. So EDLP, this is everyday low price. Let's just make sure we have the lowest price for our customers. And so let's work backwards from that. We'll just focus on that. We'll do that forever. And you fast forward. And it's like one of the greatest, if it was concentrated on one person, it might be one of the, it is one of the greatest fortunes ever created by taking a simple idea and taking it very seriously. it's fantastic David we love you thanks for joining thank you for joining expect us to send you a zoom link once a week forever because we're all in this is the best way to catch up I love this yeah I feel like it robs the people next time in California I gotta suit up though hey where's you said you were going to frame where's that picture oh yeah it's like the munger picture that we're going to do we're getting a picture of the pod father the most powerful man in Miami David Senra you really are the most powerful man in Miami not even close not even close you're too humble you're acting like you're spending too much time with Eric you're too humble you're the most powerful man in Miami I think if you go to Miami you got to check in with Senra you got to let him know he's going to Yeah.

57:18You got to email him. We'll drop his phone number. We'll drop his personal address in the comments. You can go and stop by. He loves socializing. Invite him to really big events if it's crowded, like a conference room hall, Las Vegas. Invite him to that. That's where he's really in his element. Book signing. Podcast signing. Real quick, before I go. So our mutual friend Patrick always gets on me because he's just like, he'll try to connect with people. He's like, David doesn't read his email. He's just unreachable. And he goes, why don't you have an assistant? I go, why do I need an assistant?

57:48He goes to answer these emails. And they're like, manage your schedule. I go, why do I need a schedule? I just need to wake up every day, read for a few hours, sit down once a week, and talk about what I read. I don't need to do anything else. I don't need to do anything else. It's that simple. It was great. This morning, we actually published on our X account that you were calling in and you hadn't fully confirmed. You'd been partially confirmed. I don't know if you saw that. I was like, David Senra calling in at 2 p.m. Yeah. Unless I'm absolutely indisposed by creating a podcast, I will always answer for you guys.

58:18You know that. Fantastic. All right. You're the man. I love you guys. Talk to you later. Love you. Talk to you later. Talk soon. Bye. Bye. Do you want to do 10 minutes quick on tariffs? Yeah. Okay. I'd like to just sprinkle in a little geopolitics. Yeah. I think it is an interesting question about like, you know, this was the result of Coinbase. Like Brian Armstrong said, look, we are not going to be participating. We are a mission driven company. We're not going to be participating in every political fight, every culture war issue. But that doesn't mean that we're going to stay out of crypto lobbying.

58:48Like we do need to be regulated effectively. And so it's this weird balance of like, yeah, we're not like getting fully political, but we're also not completely apolitical. We care about our industry and the things that we're experts in. So I think, look, like, yes, if you're just some random like AI SaaS founder, like you might not care about tariffs between Canada and Mexico. But if you're manufacturing something there and it's coming, that does matter. All of a sudden that is a tech issue. Like when we talked to Ryan Peterson, he was saying the same thing. He was like, well, this matters to me.

59:24So we have a bunch of good posts in here. Why don't we quickly run through the article? Okay. And then we'll jump into it because I think that. The news is that Trump imposed 25 % tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada. It took effect first thing Tuesday. Canada responded with plans to impose 25 % tariffs on about$100 billion worth of U.S. imports. Trudeau said Trump is acting in bad faith. Mexico's president said he would also retaliate with a range of moves to be announced Sunday. The U.S. also introduced an extra 10 % tariff on Chinese imports overnight, adding to a levy imposed a month ago.

1:00:00So everything's ramping up. China announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural goods and other measures against American companies. Beijing also filed a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization. And so investors were rattled. That's a funny way to get to Trump. The market sold off generally. And yeah, it's been not like full chaos, but definitely one of those things like tariffs are taxes. you know they kind of suck energy out of economic uh systems they can be very good for certain things especially if you're getting a super raw deal and a country is really um you know just destroying your ability to produce something or or playing some sort of long game that you're not considering uh but of course there are a lot of pushback for this so let's go through some of the reaction um logan bartlett had a post he said uh the trouble he's he's quoting david kelly the chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management.

1:00:59And David Kelly says, the trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity, and increase global tensions. Other than that, they are fine. So bit of a hot take. Keith Reboi gets in there. Most of that is false. And then Logan fires back and says, I put it in quotes so I could obfuscate responsibility for saying it. I love it. Which is smart. Yeah. Phenomenal posting strategy. It's a good posting strategy. I don't know. What do you think? Which side do you take on this? You know. I'm very grateful in moments like this that we are a technology and business show.

1:01:42So I've approached this from the point of view of this is making life really, really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs that I respect and want to see do well. And so from that lens, from a purely sort of personal angle, it's tough to see. But at the same time, there's been precedent throughout history where we've implemented tariffs like this and seen positives out of it. Right. So I just think I just think it, you know, I think that Mexico and Canada have the right to be able to say, like, you know, Trump's acting in bad faith because he's been sort of like, you know, he's playing with people's livelihood to a very extreme degree.

1:02:29I thought it was worth jumping down to something. Before we do that. Yeah, I just have a I don't know if it's a problem with this, but it just feels so inconsistent because. If you think about what's going on with the tariffs on tech companies, China effectively has a 100 % profit margin tariff on social networking. Facebook, Instagram, they're banned. They can't make any money. It's a 100 % tariff effectively. And yet we haven't banned TikTok. And so it's like, if we're not, that is the most clear to me that it's like that trade imbalance is crazy right there. and we're not doing anything about that but then we are doing stuff about you know agriculture and cars and stuff.

1:03:18All that stuff is important and I don't know. We'll have to see how this plays out. I mean the last round of tariffs it seemed like it went pretty well like all through the economy tended to grow pretty well during the last Trump administration so I'm cautiously optimistic that all these gyrations in the market kind of get worked out and things wind up doing well. Of course we got like smacked with COVID right at the end so it's very easy to look at like oh unemployment was way up when Trump got out and it's like well there was like this crazy you know once in a century event that happened yeah but the core the core like let's renegotiate trade deals it wasn't as disastrous as i think people thought it was going to be so but uh i think certainly to isaac's point here like if you're in the if you're in the crosshairs if it hurts a thousand times yeah yeah so isaac says here these tariffs are going to wipe out the entire net margin of a ton of businesses lots of them my friends real people real livelihoods real employers with lots of jobs yep having your dream squashed uh smashed by geopolitical whims sucks yep um and he had another post that i thought was great i have it pulled up myself here he says it's so easy to see numbers and detach them from people that 25 tariff it kills a ton of jobs and livelihoods families will feel pain those casualties in a war real people not just a number that grifting you see in broad daylight the money came from real people, maybe a college fund, maybe someone's entire savings.

1:04:41It's easy to see a number and have zero empathy. So I think this is the right sort of point of view right now. It's, it's, it's way too early to say, you know, they're all bad or they're all good or, you know, really kind of like, we don't know what the impact is yet. We see what's happening in the, in the public markets and, and that's, you know, based on sort of, um, fear and a bunch of these other sort of factors that, that, um, you know, are getting sort of priced in, in different ways. But I think it's just important to, you know, as a technology and business show on the business side, a lot of great entrepreneurs are being affected by this.

1:05:15I mean, a lot of DSE companies will source internationally. And just to keep the business going, they're spending, you know, what, 25 % of their revenue on marketing. The profit margins are pretty thin. Yeah. And so an increase like that could really wipe you out. fortunately like there has been really wide signaling on this for a while that like yeah you know you're going to need to reshore at some point yeah spinning up new manufacturing can be difficult but it can be done on the order of a year for most things i mean you look at you look at how fast i think what things hopefully hopefully there's you know people i think what makes sense is generally this idea that we need more targeted tariffs so a tariff on tiktok right effectively a hundred percent tariff on tiktok in the same way that they by banning u.s social media and china it's effectively a tariff on spinal cord a tariff on fentanyl a tariff on terrorists uh no and the the other thing is is you know for trump to be fully taken seriously he should be thinking about hey we don't want millions of uni tree humanoid robots like walking our streets in our homes i On the EV thing, the tariffs have been way ahead of this to the point where I never see a Chinese EV.

1:06:32Because there was 100 % tariff on day one, basically. And they're not even trying to send them over here. Because it's just like, it's been determined, even in the last administration, like, hey, we're not doing that this time. It's just not going to be a thing. And I think that's probably the right move. Yeah. Luke Metro had a good post. He quote tweeted the Atlanta Fed. They said on March 3, the GDP now model now cast a real GDP growth in Q1 2025 is negative 2.8%. Not good. Which is... We wanted 10%. Satya was telling us AI would get us 10%. Satya promised 10%. He said, if we just signed up for Clippy, if we just listened to Clippy...

1:07:09No, I'm kidding. I love it. Satya implied that if we listened to... Please, Satya. He said, just listen to what Clippy says. Just 6 % GDP growth. Listen to what Clippy says, 10 % GDP growth. but luke uh luke quote tweets this and says my ideal economic system is where we inflict large damage on the populace via trade wars but keep the wealth of the oligarchs propped up via dumb speculative bs wow yeah it's hilarious considering the the crypto exchange yeah the timing of that was uh a little inconsiderate i mean it it's got to be you know if you're an e-commerce operator that just had your margin wiped out.

1:07:51It's like, don't worry. The money that we're taking from you, we're going to put in Cardano. Yeah. So you're going to make it all back in one trade, buddy. Yeah. We're going to make it all back in one trade. But now you own some of that Cardano. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. That's hilarious. Anyway. Anyways, do we have Bridget ready to call in? How are we doing? We are bringing on Bridget from Founders Fund. She is an investor in crypto, works with Joey Krug over there good friend of mine and we are bringing her on to cover the Prime Intellect fundraise that just happened do you know the story of the metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect?

1:08:31no tell me about it so a couple years ago on Lex Friedman George Hots the Comma AI guy is talking about how he thinks AI will like evolve oh hey Bridget how you doing? Bridget oh hey hi welcome to the show how's it going guys we have you read metamorphosis of the prime intellect no no okay all of all of primes like design their you know logo all of that is inspired by yeah i think we have a copy in the office actually but i haven't read it it's i mean i don't want to like spoil it but uh andre carpathy also listed it as like one of the greatest uh like sci-fi prediction books like or you know in general and his his summary which i think summarizes as well as just AGI gone mixed.

1:09:19And it's very, very weird. It's like, what happens when you're in this post-scarcity society and you want some sort of like social reward or some sort of like reward, but everything's like post-scarcity because you can just will anything. So no one ever dies, but then, you know, what do you do? And it gets very, very weird. It's very bizarre. And George Hots highlighted it on the Lex Friedman podcast. And so it became very popular. And then there was a sequel to the book as well, like the last casino in the universe or something. But it's pretty like, I don't know, it's like spooky to me. But I highly recommend everyone check it out.

1:09:54Anyway, we want you to break down the deal. How did you meet the founder? How did we wind up doing the deal? And just give us a background on what Prime Intellect is, what they do. Give us the high level. Yeah, definitely. So we met them, I want to say about a year ago. We actually reached out to them because most of the AI crypto projects we had seen had been just like not really interesting. It was more like copy paste from existing AI companies. And then they would like slap a token on top. So it would be like character AI with a token, like Langchain, but with a token, like hugging face with a token, that kind of thing.

1:10:30And I think we saw Prime announce their like 1 billion parameter model trained in a distributed way across like three continents. And then we reached out to them and we were like, wow, like we would love to meet you guys and chat, you know, more about it. And we met with them. And literally, like, I think the first meeting, like we were sold, like we were like, these founders are like A-level, top tier killers. Like Vincent and Johannes, like you can just like feel the energy like radiating off them. Like they're very passionate about what they do. They're in crypto AI, like for the right reasons.

1:11:02Whereas I think a lot of founders kind of just hopped into this space, like after a lot of the hype took off. And, you know, we're looking for like a quick token pump, but that's like could not be further from, you know, the team Vincent has built and what they're doing. So basically they're tackling the problem of like distributed training, which, you know, access to compute is one of like the largest bottlenecks in, you know, AI training today. And you have these like huge data centers that are centralized and power constrained and expensive. and what prime is doing is it's basically like a true peer-to-peer marketplace where like you know you can go on and bid for compute and then suppliers can go on and supply like idle compute um and then it enabled like it has crypto incentives you know layered on top to really did you look at the the render network like the the i think it's like the octane team what they did in like cgi have you seen this okay i've seen like render and akash i don't know if i've seen the CGI.

1:11:59Okay, because this was a thing like years ago and everyone was like, oh, like, you know, crypto tokens, like it's all fake, whatever. But I have been doing a bunch of CGI work where you would need to go and render like whatever scene you built in Cinema 4D and you needed a bunch of GPUs, not as many as like a training run for an LLM, but you send out each frame and each frame is like deterministic. So you can very easily parallelize these and you can run it on AWS. but there was a company that actually built a very similar system where you could kind of sell back your excess GPU time onto the render network.

1:12:36I think it was kind of like low tam because the amount of independent artists like Pixar has like Disney they have their own server farms and then like the low end like clients like people tinkering is kind of small but it was very cool that it was like oh wow this this makes a ton of sense how do people actually transact in this like having a token that moves these uh you know uh gpu resources around made a ton of sense um and so it's cool it makes a lot of sense in the in the age of ai do you know more about um kind of like early use cases obviously like the frontier insane like you know gigawatt scale that's going to come in the future right what are some of the more exciting use cases in like the near term is it just like fine tuning stuff do you have any insight there yeah yeah so i mean they're right now they're basically working on just like scaling this up to like state-of-the-art level models like they did the 1.1 billion parameter you know training run like a few months later they completed like a 10 billion parameter training run and then you know basically just serving as like the the peer-to-peer marketplace between the supply and demand side so like on the demand side you have like ai startups that need extra compute like labs like you know random independent developers that sort of thing and then on a supply side it's like data centers and then individuals and also startups with like idle compute like you have like hugging face like semi-analysis that want to just like earn extra for for their idle compute so it's basically just like like the way we think about it is just enabling like the ai market to like progress at a much faster rate because it's just like enabling all this idle compute to be to be put to work and then on yeah on their end it's like basically what they did is google deep mind released a paper called like deloco um which stands for like distributed low communications framework um and they implemented that but in like an open source way like they called it open deloco um such that like you can train across like many different continents and that was like a huge step function improvement um like from the research side that that we've seen so it's basically undefeated at that like they have that spanner and big query and like they just are so good at taking some sort of like database and being like, oh yeah, now it works globally and deals with all the time zone issues.

1:14:49It just feels like incredibly hard engineering, but they always figure it out. And then of course, it opens up a million other things. Jordy, what questions do you have for Bridget? Yeah, so taking a little sit back from Prime Intellect, one question I've had that you might have some insight on is, was there a frustration among crypto founders that are, you know, you know, seeing the news on Sunday and general frustration around not being included in the reserve? Right. It seems like that the reserve was effectively you take the top five biggest projects by market cap and you just, you know, put it in a reserve.

1:15:28Right. It didn't seem like it was super thoughtful. Do you was there was there any idea leading up to this that there would have been, you know, any surprises on that list? And yeah, I'm curious around sort of your response, but also across the portfolio, how how founders are kind of reacting to that that are running, you know, these bigger, bigger market cap projects. Yeah, no, it's a really good question. I think generally people were a little bit upset because, you know, the XRP, the Cardano inclusion, just like there's basically two plausible explanations that I think the crypto community came to for why this could be the case.

1:16:07One is just like simple like unit bias, like XRP and Cardano are like 0.001 cent or something akin to that. And a lot of Americans will like, you know, go and see that, oh, Cardano is like one cent and Bitcoin is like 100K. And like, they'll genuinely just go and buy like Cardano because like it's cheaper. And so like the, the, the joke on Twitter is like, you know, like Uber drivers everywhere are celebrating that Cardano's in the strategic reserve. And like it, you know, Trump could be playing some like 40 chess to like curry favor with a lot of just these like retail buyers. So that's, that's explanation one, um, that these buyers have like unit bias and Trump's trying to curry favor with them.

1:16:45Explanation two, and this came from like Udi at, at Taproot Wizards is basically like Trump Trump is going way too far in, you know, the extreme direction of we're including all these crazy assets in the reserve because it does require an act of, you know, Congress. And then he's going to roll back and kind of be like, OK, I'm making a concession. I'm making a compromise and we'll just have Bitcoin. And because he always kind of at the outset goes like way too far, way too intense, you know, and then kind of rolls back and acts like he's making this huge concession where a Bitcoin reserve would already be a huge, you know, act for Congress to make.

1:17:18But yeah, I think I think I was telling John earlier, I said that Trump doesn't get enough credit for not including Trump coin in the reserve. Because, you know, he's talking with his team. Why don't we put in the memes? It's pretty big. Why not? No, exactly. Let's put in the whole every White House coin, put it in there. Yeah. Like if Trump had just launched the Trump coin and not Melania, like there's all these jokes on Twitter of like society would be like amazing. Like, you know, crypto would be mooning. it's like the Melania launch like messed up our whole industry but yeah it really does feel that way what is you know what's the broader sentiment on the investor side right now uh any of the crypto focus investors that I know the ones that have done well have just taken a very long point of view they understand that the market has cycles and you need to be you know kind of basically deploying you know throughout you know uh consistently if you want to sort of benefit from benefit from these sort of peaks.

1:18:16How, you know, and again, we also saw this sort of bunch of AI slop in the sort of crypto markets. And what are the areas that you think are most exciting, specifically in the context that, you know, the joke is that crime is legal now, but more seriously, we're in a favorable regulatory environment for basically the first time in history. And it does feel like the next four years are an amazing opportunity to realize the full potential of the technology, right? Specifically around, you know, I'm sure areas that you're looking at a lot. So where are you most excited to invest? What is the general sentiment right now?

1:18:52Do you feel like people have pulled back? You know, talk a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. So like when Joey and I started at Founders Fund, like almost two years ago now, the sentiment was terrible. Like it was six months post FTX, like, you know, no one was deploying. Crypto only funds were not deploying. Generalist funds were definitely not deploying. Yeah. And that was one reason I wanted to join Founders Fund because I was like, wow, this is like actually a contrarian act. Then we did start deploying. It was so funny. You guys just came in and went so hard, so fast. We came in and just like started doing some deals.

1:19:24It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. No, and it was like in retrospect, the best time to start deploying. Like, obviously it's easier said than done. But now, yeah, I think the market, it's interesting because, I mean, the sentiment isn't amazing but i would say prices on new deals that we've been seeing have been like asymmetrically high like we the last deal we did was prime intellect and that was in i want to say october or november so we haven't done like a net new deal in like you know five five-ish months i think what we're continuing to look for is basically like applications uniquely enabled by crypto where like integrating crypto is like a step function improvement um to what you would currently have so an example is like poly market like prediction markets obviously existed before polymarket you know but they were very illiquid your counterparty was you know across the world betting in a different currency with a different bank account um there was chargeback risk um and doing all the conversion on the back end was super costly but now if you're just you know if you're just using crypto it genuinely does like make a lot more sense from just like streamlining the you know the the market side and prime intellect you know it also applies to that it's basically just like the same thing but for compute if you were you know paying in a different currency like to access compute like it would be a lot of work on the back end on the protocol side and that's why there's like these compute brokerages that charge like insane markups um and also back to polymarket really quick too is like joey always tells the story but like if you win too much on prediction markets like they would actually just like ban you back in the day like they would live same as vegas right yeah yeah yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:21:04So I believe Nate Silver is banned from all the sports betting apps. Yeah, I mean, Dana White has these stories of casinos. Well, no one bans him because he loses. No, no, he's super into Baccarat, and he actually does well. Oh, he does? He does well, and he's had casinos. He was telling some story about losing like six figures. No, he goes up seven figures, down seven figures, whatever, but he's gone on these sort of runs. He's high vol, high beta. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, it's insane, yeah. And then I think the last thing I'll say is like, I think DeFi in America is definitely like a lot more, you know, better positioned now in the sense that like DeFi founders had it the worst.

1:21:42I think the past four years, like many of our founders just fully moved out of the United States because the risk was just like, you know, way too high. But we're going to get a new like market structure bill and hopefully we'll see like regulatory exemptions for DeFi protocols because you can't regulate DeFi in the same way you regulate like an exchange or brokerage, right? It's just a set of smart contracts. And so there should be exemptions like we see in the, there's exemptions of the FIT21 bill, but it's all still in the works. But if we do get exemptions for DeFi founders, I think that will kind of usher in a new era for DeFi.

1:22:16Do you think that starts with Bitcoin lending? Is that kind of like the first? Lava. Lava, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So we invested in Lava. Yeah, it's definitely a very interesting use case. I think DeFi is just like, it's such a broad sector, but Bitcoin is like, Bitcoin does enable like a huge use case in DeFi because so many people own Bitcoin. Like there's just so much capital inflows to Bitcoin. And like, if you can lend against your Bitcoin and make your asset more productive, like there's going to be so many whales that want to do that. Like they just do not want to sell. But even for regular DeFi, like if you look at like DeFi summer in 2021, like, you know, a lot of founders got in trouble for what they were doing.

1:22:59And it was just such a new market that people didn't even know what was allowed versus not. And then the SEC was issuing like Wells notices to like the most compliant companies like Uniswap, Coinbase, like things like that. So I do think that with people saying crime cycle, like I think those people are a little overblown because I actually think the new administration is just really, really smart. Like I don't think they'll be issuing Wells notices at random to like Coinbase and Uniswap because that's just dumb. but like they will be actually going after like legit scams. So I would say like act accordingly.

1:23:32yeah, for the last four years, the best like cop in crypto was like coffee Zilla. It was basically like, like the only hope that you can, the only hope you have, if you're like seeing a scam happen is coffee Zilla makes a video and then everyone realizes it. And it's one guy. But like the SEC is not going to step in for any of these things. No, exactly. Where do you, but now there's a lot of room to just be smart and actually just go after the scams and like the power law bad stuff yeah exactly do you still where do you see opportunities around founders that are interested in building uh in in the stable coin space the bridge acquisition i think was fantastic for crypto broadly it really was a you know real stamp of approval for stripe to go out and pay this sort of pretty significant revenue multiple to buy a developer platform a crypto developer platform which you which uh which bridge is uh and then And from what we know, that sort of spawned a wave of new stablecoin startups to come out and say, we're building in stablecoins too, right?

1:24:30And so I'm sure you saw a lot of those companies. Where are you excited about the potential of stablecoins going forward? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really good question. Yeah, I think after the bridge acquisition, we genuinely got like, probably like 50 stablecoin pitches. Like, it was legitimately insane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But no, I think like right now, the most interesting use case for stable coins is probably in like B2B payments, just because that's where there's the most volume. It's like, yeah, like literally like, you know, billions and billions of dollars of volume per year. And B2B payments like cross border historically just take so long.

1:25:07There's insane markups, like the bank takes a lot of fees. I think on the consumer side, like the argument is basically like, okay, you know, if a user like swipes their card, you know, Visa and MasterCard take like a 2 % fee. A lot of that goes to the issuing bank. And then it will actually flow back to the user in the form of like rewards. And that's such a different story than if like I want to pay like Coogan or something and Coogan's in Europe or whatever. And it takes like five days and it, you know, they charge like 2%. two percent like that's just like kind of scammy right like that should not be a thing anymore so i think that's an interesting use case on the on the consumer side a lot of people are arguing like on the credit card side like it might be stable coins under the hood but you know it's doubtful that the user will like know it's stable coins at least to start um but yeah i think b2b payments is like that's where there's the most volume that's where the there's the most incentive for like startups to compete um and then the issue there is like getting the the regulatory stuff figured out the corridors opened in these different markets um and then just yeah starting to capture the volume but and the infrastructure to prevent uh Citibank from sending a trillion dollars yeah oh my god yeah like how do you solve the fat finger issue like obviously you can do multi-sigs but but but let's say you have you know a group at Citibank they're like all right we got to send you know uh uh some stable coins to somebody and then it's late at night and one person signs off and someone else signs off and like three people fat finger it collectively and you're like well we have these protections in place and now we have to go ask the customer nicely like city banks should not get into crypto because like yeah that money would be gone forever if it was crypto there's no way honestly this should be huge alpha and just being a city bank customer and signing up for as many accounts as possible um no but i think those are i mean i think those are real things to figure out it's um my last company like we we enabled you know stable coin investing and and uh and we actually had like i won't even name them but billion dollar crypto companies that were customer of ours that said at the time this was 20 early 2022 we don't want to accept stable coins as too much of a hassle um and so i think that's i think that's evolving but um bridget amazing to have you on uh you're you're a regular now uh always welcome always welcome thank you guys and we're looking forward to having vincent on the show as well yeah awesome thanks for stopping by bye bye guys very fun what should we have another guest or we just diving back into the show i mean we could call sean mcguire right now i have his phone number he hasn't responded to me give a shout should i just give him a phone call yeah i don't want to talk to this i need to make sure the camera doesn't uh doesn't see anything let me see should i just for some reason it's i don't want to talk more about this but let's see i you beat sean okay he didn't pick up oh well next time next time we'll get him we'll get him we'll send him this clip we'll post this clip and then he'll feel a lot of pressure to come on yeah anyway let's get into the timeline we haven't done timeline because we had a lot of guests.

1:28:22We got to go through some timeline. First up, David Holes, founder of MidJourney, founder of Leap Motion. He says, chemistry to biology, silicon to blank. What do you think? I don't even remember who put this in there. You put this in. Oh, no. Because you're... Yeah, yeah. Or Brett. I think it was Brett. What? I don't know. We got somebody new joining the team soon. We got some buddies on the show helping out. I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like what he's getting is like is like, you know, biology is built on top of the chemistry, silicon. He's clearly getting it like some sort of like AI metaphor.

1:29:01Yeah. And like how you understand like the the the mind and the the consciousness that emerges on top of these systems. Yeah, I mean, random sort of adjacent topic is Raboi yesterday saying what comes after LLMs? Like what is the next iteration of LLMs and sort of our understanding and application of a technology that everybody's talking about, but we don't know its full potential yet. Yeah, I was remarking the other day, I was watching this interesting video about how Dolly and like all the image generators can't generate a wine glass that's full. Have you seen this? I haven't. So you can say that it starts with this like incredible interaction where it's basically saying like, uh, Hey, Chachi Petit, can you, uh, generate a wine glass that's full to the brim to the top?

1:29:52And it gives you a half full wine glass. And then you say, Oh no, like you made a mistake, like actually fill it to the top all the way. 100%. You give it more context. It's like on it totally understand returns. And it's like the same because apparently there's just like no images of completely filled to the brim wine glasses in the training set. And so it just couldn't figure out how to do it. And it gets to this idea of, I think it was David Hume has this idea of like humans are good at, there's this impression and there's this idea. And basically you can interpolate between two things. So you can imagine a unicorn, even though you've never seen a unicorn in, in the world, but it's hard to create these complex ideas.

1:30:35Uh, if you don't have like the reference images, which is what they have. But my takeaway from it was just like, we're, we're scaling up these models and we still are building like an image model and a language model separately and a driving model separately. But you would imagine that if we're really building like this, like AGI, like won't ASI be like a one model, but maybe not, maybe, maybe it will be like what he's saying where, you know, there's silicon and in biology, you know, you need to understand the basics of chemistry, but you also need to understand the different parts, the different lobes of the brain, the different actions that your body can take, your muscles, how these different systems interact with each other.

1:31:11And you could imagine that the AGI that we build will have so many different models and so many different things that are kind of like trained that it can interact with. It's interesting. I'm sure it will be a whole field of study. I just want a model on top of all the open AI models to route me to the best model. I don't want to be choosing. I mean, I noticed that there's a search button you can push that will indicate like, hey, I'd like you to search. But even if you don't push that, it'll still search sometimes. It's so clunky. And one time. I mean, that's just the reality of it. It's possible for companies to be.

1:31:50At this point, it feels like they're waiting for this big announcement of the router. Like the router needs to come, right? It should be one box. Yeah. and it should take me to the, take me through, you know, send my query through the right. They're really speed running the Google story because Google, it was like just search box, I'm feeling lucky, 10 blue links, simple. Now Google is like, no one hits I'm feeling lucky because it autofills and then it shows you Google shopping and then 25 ads and then clickbait and then videos and all this stuff. And they've kind of like recreated that all in like a very short amount of time, whereas it took like Google like 20 years to degrade like that.

1:32:29They've gotten a very convoluted thing. But I don't know. Yeah, and it's a huge, I mean, it's just going to be such a big selling point for OpenAI once they get there, when they can say, look, it's one box. You enter in what you want to do and we're just going to execute it to the best of our abilities. And it shouldn't even really matter with the underlying model. It is a testament that like, even though there are some reasonable critiques of the naming scheme, um uh chat gpt is still ranking higher than jimmy johns in the app store yeah that's which is big because jimmy johns if you're not aware it's number two app in the app store right now chat gpt is number one and i'm sure it's a knockout drag out fight i'm sure they had meetings okay jimmy johns is coming for us we need to call nikita beer what are we doing to stay ahead of jimmy johns yeah and i i posted about this earlier 2023 everybody said all right value is going to accrue to the model layer it's obvious 2024 people said hey value is actually going to accrue to the app layer a lot of value here 2025 everybody's saying value is going to accrue to the sandwich and so i expect to see subway charting soon how did this happen like did they run some national campaign that we don't know about like it is weird that jimmy johns is the number two app in the app store like what what is going on i i know it's based on momentum and stuff they launched in toasted sandwiches that's it it's equivalent to like you know magical and machine intelligence too cheap to meter or like toasted sandwiches.

1:33:51Humanity assigns - They're giving away$1 million of toasted subs. Oh, I mean, that's - I mean, so it's obvious. Props to OpenAI for holding the lead. The funny thing is that Grok3 right now, because they aren't charging yet, they are literally giving away millions of dollars in inference costs. Same thing with DeepSeek, they're subsidized. Even ChatGPT, Sam has said like, hey, we're losing money on some of these queries, right? And so you could think about this as like, the ai labs are giving away hundreds of millions of dollars of intelligence magical machine intelligence yep but that's but we value that as humanity like only slightly higher than like a million dollars worth of toasted sandwiches like that is what the market is telling us the market is telling us that sandwiches are like you know they're up there but it makes sense like food is it's what i need i need food yeah i will die without food and intelligence but i need food more than intelligence i could i could live without a poem i could live without a good stand-up joke yeah exactly uh agi can wait um that's yeah you know it's funny that chat gpt continues to you know basically battle for the number one spot and they don't even share it anymore any any other any other uh you know ai lab would be taking victory relapse, you know, sharing the number one champagne into their mouth, uh, opening eyes, just like, you know, it's just great, you know, uh, usual business, uh, and, uh, credit to them.

1:35:19It's impressive. Oh, well, should we move on to Fred Wilson? Well, yeah, we got a post from Vincent. Uh, he says, Fred Wilson, VCs are service providers to entrepreneurs. We ride on their coattails. And so even though venture capital requires a sophisticated understanding of finance, technology markets strategy it's ultimately a people business learning to be a successful venture capitalist is about learning how to work with people a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic brilliant frustrating anxious and fragile and our job is to meet them right where they are and support them with all of our might uh and i think that is a fantastic quote it's almost become it's almost become normal for uh i would argue it's almost becoming meme territory where investors now, if you ask them, uh, you know, what, what do you look for in investments?

1:36:08They just say, you know, we're, we're in the people business, you know, we're, we're trying to find generational founders and it's absolutely right. That's what Brian Singerman says at Founders Fund. It's sort of, it's sort of as open. And you want some secret of like, oh yeah, like what I go for. You want something that you can copy and, and his whole strategy is uncopyable. It's very frustrating actually because he's like, yeah, I actually just picked founder. And then you talk to David Center. It's the same thing. yep yep um that that was uh as i got to know you i expected to sort of learn some sort of secret sauce that you had sort of gotten from founders fund and you were basically like zero to one zero to one's the playbook but then it's really about judging the founders and the people and yeah and that's the stuff that it's very hard to concretize and i mean we saw this with the debate over keith roboi's quote yesterday it's like he was making a recommendation that like like you will probably have a good time if you like go and work in an excellent organization and then start a company.

1:37:02But he's not saying like you can generate alpha as a venture capitalist by just pattern matching that. Yeah. I like here, you know, the point is it, Fred says a particular breed of people who are at the same time, charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious, and fragile. And I think the frustrating point stands out because oftentimes people, uh, you know, you know, an incredible founder is going to have, you know, some aspects of them that are, that are truly amazing. And then you have other moments where you're, you know, personally, I have 50 plus, you know, angel bets. And there's definitely some moments where I'm super frustrated with entrepreneurs.

1:37:38Not that I make that obvious or known because it's oftentimes as my, you know, not really my place as a small investor to cause any type of hubbub. But an example that I thought of i once helped a founder get a four letter.com for ten thousand dollars that was their exact their exact name and they had some terrible domain prior to that like get blank.com no and i got them their four letter.com domain at at cost obviously like their portfolio company i wasn't um you know gonna mark it up or anything and the guy uh didn't even say thank you like i said i sent him i sent him that like the info and everything and like basically just ignored it he ended up like like checking out for the domain and everything like that and started to use it never never once said thank you and i was like that's super uh twisted and and feels very wrong in some ways right it's like uh the jd vance like you should have said you know you should have said please you know you should have said thank you but at the same time i was just like look you know i i would have gotten this even knowing ahead of time that you weren't gonna you know express any gratitude for it and you're not going to be judged 15 years from now on whether or not you said thank you a lot.

1:38:52You're going to be judged ultimately. You will be judged, but you're going to be judged on was your company successful? Did you treat your people right in the grand scheme of things? And I can get over it, even though it felt it was funny. I have a funny anecdote about why you should say thank you and be nice um at my first at my first company um uh the uh the ceo was extremely curt and would just like send emails like do the blah blah blah you know like not like very like like didn't really bring like a personal style to his emails which is a style by itself yes but that style just also happens to be the style of every fishing scammer in the world and so people would get phished constantly because the scammer shows up and falsifies some email and is like, I need you to send me$10 ,000.

1:39:43And people would be like, yeah, this actually sounds exactly like our CEO. Normally, no one would ever be this direct. Exactly. Normally you get a phishing scamming email and you're like, well, this doesn't sound like Jordy. Like this sounds like someone impersonating. Or I just talked to this person. They would have brought this up. Exactly. They would have texted me exactly slacked me yeah just come out of the blue yeah so you can't be too chaotic like that you got to be uh a little more a little more empathetic bring your own style you know the ron conway all caps that's one of the funniest things in the world to me yeah one of us should start using adopting the all caps something chaotic well i mean one way you know you're talking to us and not an ai clone of us or a scammer is there's gonna be a lot of typos yep put typos in your posts yeah a lot of people are saying if you're writing a blog post people are saying oh you use the word delve yeah you definitely generated this yeah put put a put a bunch of typos in yeah and don't worry about spell check because the ai is going to handle it if if you want to read a spell checked version of my post you you are free to take my post and put it into chat gpt and say spell check it yeah and then boom you have a spell checked version but i'm not doing that well said i'm golden retriever maxing i'm going fsd mode this is my new twist on this full self-driving no funny friendly sexy dumb fsd on the on the golden retriever maxing great yeah does a golden retriever use spell check absolutely not absolutely not ship it it's going to be a banger anyway no one cares if there's a typo in your post all right we got a post from yasi Yaxine.

1:41:25Yaxine. Yaxine. We need to have him on the show. Yeah, we should. I don't know how to pronounce it. But he says, the only AI risk that I'm concerned about is the risk of me not making an F ton of money off of AI. That's great. I think that's the right, you know, generally the right point of view for most people. I actually think it is a good thing, broadly, that there are a group of humans focused on AI safety. Yes. Like that's like generally probably a good use of resources for the future of humanity. That said, if you're not a, you know, sort of philosopher king or queen type who's going, wants to spend all their time thinking about the impacts of AI and the potential risk, you should probably just focus on how to make money with AI.

1:42:15And, you know, this idea of you don't want to just be worried about something. You want to be sort of like taking action. Right. So if you're worried about losing your job from AI, build a business with AI. This is a remarkably good post because I've also come around on AI safety. I think DeepSeek was a big moment for me in terms of like, I want to know if they are embedding in if an open source model has a bad version or a jailbreak version embedded inside of it. And the AI safety teams are like the only ones that can really evaluate that. so i think that's really interesting so all of a sudden well i'm not worried about like overall overnight like the nanobots come like the eliezer yudkowski theme of like i'm just gonna be turned into a paperclip overnight it's like no but like stuxnet did happen like you know like the the the the pagers did explode like these these hacking attempts do happen yeah i think i brought that up i was like the what is the ai equivalent of stuxnet where something exactly you know travels It's dormant in there.

1:43:16And if, and if, if there's a trigger word, it goes and it steals some data and that's it. It's like, that's worth, that's worth investigating. And the AI safety teams are the ones who would be equipped to run those evals. So that's interesting. But then also we've been saying for a while that like the, like, like the stop measuring AI against all these random evals and instead just measure it against how much money people are making from it. Because that's at the end of the day, the value capture is usually a weighing machine. Even Satya is saying, I'm really looking at the real benchmark to him is GDP growth around AI, right?

1:43:50So what is the, what is the impact? Old Billy comments here. He says, yeah, I'm an AI researcher, researching how to stack that paper. Great line. I wonder how, I wonder how accretive the current ai revenues are to gdp like because you could see every dollar that goes into character ai being like it's taking ten dollars out of the economy not to like throw a ton of shade of character but like it is yeah it's it's it's you know you spend a dollar on character ai and you skip dinner and you don't you know take your a girlfriend on a trip and you know suddenly like It is possible to have destructive...

1:44:30I can get by on my parents' allowance. I don't need to go... There's sort of a dark scenario where it's very destructive. I mean, at the very least, we've seen a lot of technology get rolled out over the last, I don't know, two, three, five decades that hasn't caused massive GDP growth. Everyone was expecting, oh, the internet is going to be the thing that cures stagnation. right um because you know prior to 1970 the u.s economy was growing very very fast post-war boom right and then we kind of stagnated and gdp growth real gdp growth kind of slowed to you know two three percent real and now the atlanta fed reporting two and a half percent negative gdp growth uh who knows who knows what's real right gdp is politicized maybe if we go down a bunch it's easier to build back up run it back up yeah exactly run it back you're on a smaller base you can grow faster it's good yeah uh really america just wants to grind harder yeah yeah that's the whole point trump is trying to inspire americans to grind harder yeah yeah gdb's going down because we need to grind harder oh my god anyways speaking of grinding harder we got a post from shkreli uh so raboi was on the show yesterday he said uh quote work at an outstanding organization for a year or two before starting your own company.

1:45:50And he gave some, there's some other context here. And he said, there's some great entrepreneurs that just sort of one-shot their companies, right? One-shot, you know, entrepreneurship, right? Zuckerberg's a good example of this. Zuck, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, right? Steve Jobs did not. He interned at HP. Oh yeah, that's right. That's right, that's right. You could argue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we count internships or not? That's a good question. So this shouldn't have been a controversial quote, especially in the context of it, but it started a conversation. uh and raboi's point was that you get this feel for taste a taste of what great is and i think that's generally good advice i gave this advice to a listener who's you know dming me you know company ideas and and saying hey should i join this company should i start this thing and i just told them unless you're hyper hyper convicted in an idea and you can get you know people that care about your truly care about your professional success that are knowledgeable in that sector to say, you know, this is generally, you know, you know, I, I agree with you.

1:46:46I think this is a big opportunity and I share your conviction. Um, then go start, go start a company if that's the case. If not, go try to work at the best possible company that you can join and don't even optimize for the title comp or anything like that. Just go work at, you know, go work at an open AI, go work at a ramp, go, go work at one of these companies that, um, is going to, uh, you know, really change your, your perspective around what, what grade is, uh, you know, how to have good taste across marketing and product and things like that. So I was surprised at how controversial this was.

1:47:16Avi was posting, nobody that I look up to ever worked for anyone else. Taking shots at Warren Buffett, taking shots at Jensen Wong. Yeah. So Screlly put together a list of absolute dogs who worked at other organizations. So if you want to run down the list, go for it. Yeah. Warren Buffett, Jensen Wong, George Soros, Peter Thiel, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mike Bloomberg, Phil Knight, Tom Peterfee, Peterfee? I don't know who that is. CZ, and then Jeff Yass, Jan Kuhn, Ray Dalio, Leon Black. A lot of finance people since he really knows his finance chops. But then also GDB from OpenAI.

1:47:53Yep. Brian Armstrong, Benioff. Yep. Every Tiger Cub. I love that one. That's great. Anyway, so, you know, advice is best taken, you know, generally. You don't have to apply every bit of advice you get from a podcast in your life. But, but generally, you know, there's too much evidence that this can tremendously accelerate your abilities and your career. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. It's like the, it's like the Jeremy Giffon quote, you know, Mozart never asked how to write concertos. If, but if you have a question in your mind of what you should do, go work at an outstanding company because that's either going to be, that's going to be great no matter what.

1:48:35And it certainly doesn't close off becoming a generational entrepreneur. Yeah. So if there's a question, but yes, if you truly are like working on this and you have this burning desire, you're not even going to ask, you're not even listening to this clip. You know, you're just like, I'm already building and there's nothing that can stop me. And that's fine. Yeah. I would, I would argue since we had Eric on from ramp today, I would argue that if Eric hadn't built a fintech company and then went and worked at a big company like capital one he would not have had the insight or the uh know-how or the relationship with kareem and all that stuff to go and build ramp like ramp wouldn't exist in its current form if he didn't have that sort of body of experience and the network right and so the tiger cub thing is so funny to me because so julian robertson founds tiger management very successful hedge fund bunch of people spin out they're all called tiger cubs uh and one of them is chase coleman starts tiger global like what i mocking your former boss basically like like tiger global sounds more aggressive than tiger management to me yeah yeah it sounds like the parent company it does it does so imagine like you go and work at like you know apple or something and then you leave and you're like actually my new company is gonna be called apple global it's like very funny i wonder i mean obviously julian robinson like my new company is called fruit management.

1:49:53I think the Tiger Cup thing is specific because it's like, I think Julian Robinson would like set people up to like succeed and like actually stake the fund. So he's very much like starting them. So it was great that it's like carry the brand forward because I will retire and you will be writing the new organization. But it's still just like a funny thing. What is going on with this Axe Perplexity, Ask Perplexity account? Is this fully AI automated? Is this just their social media manager? What do you think is going on here? the perplexity ceo it's arvin right yeah he knows how to he knows how to post he knows he knows he knows x he does how to get attention uh this is a funny one please stop tagging me in questions about meme coins i don't reply to broke people okay uh really you know trying to get a reaction out of the uh crypto community um somebody replies why didn't you buy tiktok broke boy uh which is which is hilarious because they were they were talking about that uh set themselves up wait is this is this the is this the at chat thing we were talking about with grok and x we're like you could just can you just add this and it will answer yeah and it's basically a bot it's automated yeah that's somebody somebody tags axe ask perplexity what meme coin should i buy and it gives you the real answer immediately responds uh with with kind of a perplexity style answer which basically just says i can't advise anything yeah uh but that makes sense okay so so there's probably someone managing the account who's posting like the major ones but then it also acts as a bot right so it's both interesting i mean it's good more more perplexity attention more impressions more people are reminding them hey maybe fire up the app again give it another try drag back into this in the ecosystem i wonder how long this lasts because uh i mean the grok button is literally there on this on this post elon's very aggressive with competitors yep i don't see a world where he's happy that there's another ai system running on axe yeah that you can interact with on axe even though he hasn't been accused it doesn't feel if he has shadow banned sam altman yeah it's not working oh no no i don't think he said that no no but i'm just saying that the the people have had this idea that okay you're building on an elon platform if you're competing with elon you're going to have a bad time sure yet x is probably the most important yeah sort of sort of comms engine yeah open ai still at least for the industry obviously um yeah i i more just think like the api pricing like it's got to be really expensive i know they raise the pricing and so you know it's like it's got to be unaffordable at some point to build anything on top of this, especially if you're building something that should just be an XAI product.

1:52:38Yeah, he just adds a couple zeros to your API pricing. Anyway, Sean's in meetings. He can't call in, but he said he's good for tomorrow or Thursday. We got to ask him about, since he's in all the Elon companies, we got to ask him about that. And then we got to ask him about - Yeah, he's an X. He's an X. I want to know. He's an X, and I think he's an XAI. Yep. And I think he's in SpaceX. And I don't know if he's in Tesla, but we'll see if he's in a Tesla, if he owns a Tesla. And I want to know if he has a Roadster. If he has a roadside reservation. The timing there. Yeah. See if he has any insight.

1:53:09I'm sure he owns Tesla in the public markets one way or another. Maybe he might be conflicted out. Sometimes he can't trade those things. Yeah, that's true. Too much inside information. True. Anyway, let's move on. We got a post from Aiden, a friend of the pod. I've been talking with Aiden lately, trying to give him my point of view on how he should approach his next career move. He's been working on startups. He has a bunch of good ideas. And then a bunch of people trying to recruit him as well. So it's got a lot of opportunity. But he says, this goes unbelievably hard. And it says, during my 44 years as a career CEO and serial entrepreneur, I think I've made every possible mistake in business.

1:53:48I've overpaid for acquisitions and botched integrations. I've run operations for cash when I should have invested for growth. I've delegated tasks I should have done myself. Sometimes I've hired the wrong people or made strategic bets that didn't pay off. And yet my teams and I have managed to create tens of billions of dollars of value for our shareholders. This book is about what I've learned from my blunders and how you can replicate our successes. In corporate America, I'm what's called a moneymaker. I've started five companies from scratch, seven if you include two spinoffs, and turn them all into billion-dollar or multibillion-dollar enterprises.

1:54:21My teams and I have completed approximately 500 acquisitions and opened more than 250 greenfield locations. in total these ventures have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and raised about 30 billion in outside capital so this is obviously brad jacobs yeah he's got a book uh if you want to make a billion dollars he's got a great book for you it's called how to make a few billion dollars right um how to make a few billion dollars and this is the intro to the book and he has a great he has a great like this crazy exercise that feels like i don't know like something like a psychic would tell you or something but he's basically like i want you to physically visualize what a billion dollars looks like.

1:54:59Like mentally in your mind, like stack up the bills inside of a room. It's enough to fill like a massive ballroom. Imagine that. And then imagine all the things that you would need to do to like make that yours and then just go do them. And this is like kind of like crazy mental exercise that I just really, I really thought like made the book stand out in like very unique ways. You should lead tomorrow. You should lead the audience through that exercise. I'd love to. We should do it weekly. I screen recorded the audio book when I was listening to it. I sent it to David Senra and I was like, this guy is on a different level.

1:55:35This is crazy. Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, that's a great quote. Yeah, highly recommend reading Brad Jacobs. It's good. And I like how Andrew Garner here is like, haven't read it, but I could immediately tell it was Brad Jacobs. It is his brand to a T. um yeah a lot of interesting stuff uh we got another post from shweta yeah i think i'm saying that right she says if the founder you invested was an aspen this month you can write that investment down to zero and uh harsh potentially true february is a tough month there's not a good there's not a lot of good arguments to be an aspen in in february no why not um can you ski for capital allocators i can think of a hundred reasons and when is the ask for ideas festival i think that's over the summer yeah yeah that's when you want to be there yes then there'll be like the big you don't want to be if somebody's in sun valley in february yeah that's not a serious operator unless i'm unless i find out that you're in sun valley on alami stock photos because you got caught by paparazzi uh you shouldn't be there that's the only that's the only reason to be in one of these places is if the paparazzi are there taking pics of you next to sundar and tim cook yep uh but but yeah it's a funny thing uh i do think founders need to be if you're a venture back founder with with a team yep small or big uh it's really hard to have any type of divide between your personal life and your professional life as a founder because you need to be you know if you're not sort of 100 fixated on what you're building at all times like saturday you know, uh, obsessing and sort of frustrated around, uh, as a founder, you should be annoyed on Saturday that everyone else is offline.

1:57:19Like, I think that's like the default, uh, you know, sort of state that, that early stage founders specifically need to be in. And, uh, I think that, you know, I've seen founders mess up optically around, uh, you know, it's not sending good signals to the world. If you were on, you know, a week long ski vacation in February and and your company's not absolutely ripping. And even if it is ripping, the challenge is that people are gonna judge you for that. People are hyper, hyper, hyper judgmental of founders. In the same way that VCs get on a different, sort of in a different way, right? It's like, oh, they're in Aspen, they're not working hard.

1:57:56Founders are like, oh, they're in Aspen, their company's a zero, right? You know who, you know what founder I would not judge for being in Aspen? And I would not write down the stock if I found out they were in Aspen this month? Wander. Because you know that they're onboarding anew, that they'd be there with a purpose because their business is in Aspen. We love Wander here. Go check it out. Go book a Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. But yeah, seriously, obviously there are exceptions to every rule.

1:58:37Yeah, don't go to Aspen if you're building a B2B SaaS company for sewage treatment plants and there's no sewage treatment plants there. Yeah. And you know what, John? Yeah. Wander is going to give away a trip for free to our audience. Really? All you have to do is create an account. Okay. It's totally free to enter. And you could go to Aspen for free. Let's go. On us. Courtesy of the Technology Brothers. So wander.com slash TBPN is a great place to go. Cool. If you're interested in Aspen. It's fantastic. Should be allowed to do another post. Another post. We got a post from Sam Altman. uh he is posting a screenshot uh with and the caption is just two exclamation points that's how you know it's serious he says okay so relying on only your own first principles thinking and not giving much weight to what you've read what do you personally as gpt45 think is consciousness the only thing that exists or is that material is the materialistic universe also real please try to answer as clearly as you can do you want to play it you know role play the ai john uh so it's it kind of repeats this, is what I personally think.

1:59:41Consciousness definitely exists. This is undeniable since all experience directly proves awareness itself. Matter or a material universe is always inferred indirectly through consciousness. We never directly observe matter independently, only perceptions appearing within consciousness. Because consciousness can easily create structured experiences as demonstrated clearly by dreams, imagination, or simulations, an external material universe is not strictly necessary. Given that matter is never directly experienced independently, it seems logically simpler and clearer to conclude that, and this is what GPT 4.5 thinks about the universe, consciousness alone truly exists and the material universe is merely a consistent experiential creation within consciousness itself uh my clear personal conclusion is gbd.5 yes consciousness is likely the only fundamental existence no i do not think a separate materialistic universe independently exists bizarre and of course this is this is like highly relevant because like it is simulated and so if you're a simulation hypothesis guy like this is wild right yeah because it's like yeah like are is there anything real or are we just is consciousness the only thing and that's what it's basically saying and certainly we would say that that is true for gpt 4.5 so yeah i would i would say like this is true for the experience of this particular ai but i i would definitely say it's not true for me I'm built different.

2:01:22I'm in the real world. I have a materialist experience. Look at this watch. I got it on bezel.com.

2:01:31It's materialist. Yeah. As long as we're talking about materialistic universes, let's talk about materialistic items. Let's go to bezel. Let's go. Uh, no, I mean, it is absolutely wild. I think some of the most thought provoking responses are when you ask the AI, not how do I make, you know, it sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but how do I make a good avocado toast? It's how, what, what is the meaning of life? And then, and then it sort of gives you a pretty good answer, right? That's sort of based on humanity's consciousness in a way, because it's been trained on, uh, you know, humanity, right?

2:02:05So, uh. Matter is just an internally generated experience of consciousness, not independently real. That's what we're dealing with with this ai you know what i think we'll get back to you we'll get back to you after the break yeah yeah i think you're uh all right we got a post from bridget uh she says the gdp per capita in most african countries is two thousand dollars uh and then the average yearly revenue per user to sports betting platforms in africa is also two thousand dollars um and uh this is just another argument for why the united states how is this possible no i think i think it's that the average person in Africa is basically like the people that are sports betting in Africa are doing well.

2:02:48Got it. Got it. Got it. And yeah, so I can see how this makes sense. But this is more evidence of your post yesterday that the United States needs a strategic parlay reserve to allow every American the sort of once a week to get the rush of potentially life changing wealth. You know, guys like Sagar and Jetty will come out there and be like, oh, sports betting so bad. I don't like sports betting. Well, if it's so bad, why don't we use USAID to send sports betting to countries that we want to infiltrate and destroy? Smart. Why don't we airdrop parlays to North Korea? Destabilize their entire economy.

2:03:29why don't we why don't we take a uh super long shot bets yeah qr code drop that over the forbidden city get everyone at the forbidden city addicted to sports betting yeah i gotta give you this but john is it possible that draft kings is uh you know a deep state operation i have no not at this point but if but if we send if we send draft kings to uh to the kremlin yeah we get and we get maybe that's the cure for the war if we airdrop if we airdrop one you know five dollar you know match exactly over yeah over moscow think about this so putin is clearly just going to war because he's uh he needs a rush he needs a thrill and he probably doesn't have a lot of access to sports betting and so if we brought him sports betting then he's like i don't i don't want to i i just don't get the same rush out of the war yeah so i'm gonna wind down the war we're gonna have world peace through sports betting world peace through sports betting i think that is a bold idea i think you should do a ted talk on it exactly i think you should look at the data and make a case based on the data yeah uh that uh that world peace is possible it just we need universal basic parlay we do we do truly um anyways uh paki we got a poster bats is there another oh he's saying this looks like a bad so yeah speaking of uh potentially a parlay to put together here paki uh quote tweet so uh we talked about this yesterday yeah uh apple's chat gpt like version of siri which i think is an open ai partnership uh right they had a partnership of some sorts but maybe this is so confusing i don't understand what they're canceling because so the the headline is is Apple has now delayed a chat GPT-like version of Siri.

2:05:23But they were just telling us that they launched a chat GPT-like version of Siri called Apple Intelligence. And that rolled out in a bunch of beta tests and is like available. And then also you can go into your Siri settings right now on your phone, as long as you have the latest software and you can integrate your chat GPT credentials and so you can use chat gpt through siri right now yeah and so i don't know what this is that they're delaying like we all know it's bad and it's not working yeah so i guess they're just saying like hey we were going to improve it because we know it's bad but now we're acting like we never launched anything but it's like we clearly did apple's chat gpt like version of siri that's just apple intelligence you launched that it didn't go very well now you're saying you're delaying the launch of it, but you already launched it and you put billboards up everywhere in 2024.

2:06:19And so very confusing. Anyway, there's been a bunch of talk about this. Paki had a spicy take. He said, Apple will not be a top 10 company by market cap by the end of this decade in 2021. That's a crazy, crazy take. I mean, that's a completely different question because they print money and they have a monopoly on a bunch of different things in the app store and all the service revenue. But, Packy says. Yeah, and the idea that luxury goods have proven to be a fantastic business for the RNOs. They're worth, if LVMH sort of collectively is worth$300 billion, is the sort of consumer electronics equivalent if Apple just becomes a luxury business that's less focused on innovation, but more so just making the sort of best kind of commodity devices.

2:07:09is that a$3 trillion company? Is it worth 10 times more than LVMH if they can be a toll road on so many transactions? Still feels like it's possible, even if they sort of stop innovating. But yeah, overall, he says, looks like a bad bet right now. Apple is the most valuable company in the world by a healthy margin, but there's so many little cracks like this one, they have lost the it, and it's only a matter of time. So very interesting to follow. I don't know. It's just so hard. I mean, look at Microsoft. Microsoft lost the it like decades ago and is still super, super valuable, right? Like Microsoft Windows stopped being cool in 2001, right?

2:07:54Yeah. Like it literally like ceased to be like a cool company and it was like, oh, you're running Windows XP at work? Like that's a bummer. Yeah. Like, yeah, well, you know, we have to run Windows XP for the security patches or whatever and then they just use that to print a trillion dollars yep apple has returned a trillion dollars to shareholders they have generated a trillion dollars in cash in cash it's so much money yep gravy train ain't stopping it's it's just gonna be hard to displace them who who's going to build the hey the computers complexity announced a phone with t-mobile the ai phone complexity phone uh you know there's obviously there's a lot of people that are like oh that's like a super bearish signal right but the interesting one is solana launched a solana phone yeah obviously i think it didn't do well they're in the strategic reserve but yeah like it was a it was a it was a boondoggle i think the solana phone was like a side project here's the but it but it wasn't a death now here's the bet it wasn't a death now we have a strategic crypto token reserve yes perplexity is betting that there's going to be a strategic token reserve the other kind of token.

2:09:03Yeah. And if they have some tie to the real world, maybe they make it in. Internal reasoning tokens. Yeah. We have a question on X from Gordon Gekko. He says, is this what you guys do every single day? And the answer is yes. Every Monday through Friday. Some people like formatting PowerPoints. We like doing a daily technology and business show. and uh it is so funny how everyone else that has a show has to pretend like they have some other job oh really i'm like an investor so i can only do this once a week for an hour it's like yeah we all know you know podcasting is the most important thing in the world so the other stuff's just window dressing yeah yeah right um so yes the answer is yes um going forward um we got a post from Dan Co.

2:09:59He says, everyone is going to make their own apps with AI. That's a quote. And he says, my friend, you don't even make your own food. You'll still pay a few bucks to use an app. And I think this is a great take. So true. There's, you know, like the idea, like I'm a firm believer in that apps become memes in the way that you're going to generate apps and there's going to be some, some novelty and maybe some value and maybe for little stuff like, Hey, I want to make a custom weather app that, that, you know, that should be able to kind of maintain itself and stuff like that. But the idea that you're going to, you know, um, anything with network effects obviously is like a different story.

2:10:38Uh, but even the idea that you're going to generate a CRM, uh, that that's on par with HubSpot or Salesforce or some of these other products, and then you're going to be building your business, but also maintaining your AI generated CRM that's breaking all the time and if it's and if it you know you get some like data loss or something like that like you know talk to people at dollar shave club they built their own they built like a mailchimp replacement or something at that company like because like they were like we're a tech company and they and they hired a bunch of engineers and they built like an email management system for to like you know send transactional emails and it was like this big system and of course like you can it's like you're kind of saving money because you're and you're getting more customization, but ultimately, and all of that was predicated on like, well, now we have the ability to write programming code really quickly with abstract languages like Python.

2:11:32We're at a higher level of abstraction so we can build this faster. And they did, but it was still like, you're upside down on the trade because you're only selling it once. I think the way to look about software costs is like an example, like a MailChimp or Beehive or something like that is you pay, like, let's say you're an early stage company, you pay$1 ,000 a month for something, you are getting the benefit of potentially a million dollars of R &D spent a month on that specific area. And you only have to pay$1 ,000. Maybe you have to think about actually building out integrations and stuff like that.

2:12:04But in general, the value of I'm going to spend$1 ,000 and get a million dollars, millions of dollars a year in R &D is truly why capitalism is goaded. And this is the big question about those like buy an old business and drop a drop AI on top of it is like, well, is everyone doing the same thing? Because that doesn't change the competitive dynamics. It doesn't change the market structure. If everyone if it's like, yes, like there are a bunch of like web design agencies, you can buy them and tell them to use cursor and Figma instead of whatever they're using right now. Yeah. But if everyone's doing the same thing, it's not going to really change the economic structure.

2:12:41So you better be happy with the price you paid at the current multiple and the current cash flow generation for what you paid. Because you shouldn't expect it to 10x like a venture bet. Yeah. Interesting. We got another post. So this company launched yesterday. It's called Orca. It's an energy drink that tastes like water. And I just wanted to highlight this. Yes. Hilarious launch video. Did you see it? I saw it. So it's basically this woman. She says, introducing Orca. This is a flavored, basically caffeine water. Yeah, caffeine water. They hard post the Amazon link, which maybe worked out for them.

2:13:14This still did numbers, even though I'm sure that throttled them. But then it says she basically introduces the product and she says, now this guy is going to read off every road. Corbin Blue. Corbin Blue. Who I think is someone famous. I don't know who it is, though. I actually didn't realize that he was famous. This is going to be very offensive because I bet there's fans out there who are really into this guy. Oh, yeah. Corbin Blue, he was in high school musical. There you go. see i i knew it was somewhat important absolutely brutal uh yeah yeah so he reads every stop sign or every sign every legal road sign in america it's just very odd so of course it goes viral and it's actually a brilliant way to hack the algorithm because the intended yeah yeah because it's very entertaining and people are clicking this long video and watching the whole thing so the algorithm is getting the signal that people really love this i should show it to more people and I thought it was hilarious.

2:14:11Also speaking of the typo thing, he made a mistake while he was reading that and people in the comments are like, at seven minutes, he said like the turn left signal, but he put the turn right signal up or like he used the wrong hand signal for it. And so people had a lot of fun kind of like critiquing it and finding that little Easter egg and then that obviously drove more engagement. And so it all went very viral. I remember seeing when this dropped, uh we gotta we gotta do a taste test of this see if it's better than celsius yeah we should give it a try uh i like it uh i when i was watching the launch video i was like wow this is like a 10 minute long video yeah and i would skip ahead i'd skip ahead two minutes more signs more signs more signs you did that i just kept skipping and then i skipped to that and it just it finished corbin blue finished strong with the signs uh and uh i wonder if he's an investor or something i wonder why they picked him i gotta hope that he like had some incentive to do this outside of like i mean ten thousand dollars or something like i mean it's pretty easy job you just sit down read a bunch of signs you get a teleprompter yeah he did a good job on this on the lighting's good it looks nice uh we got a post from chad buyers uh has been on the show before he says at this point i won't fund a startup without an mvp beta or working prototype it's just too easy to make stuff today.

2:15:30A pitch with nothing to show is emblematic of a team that's low ambition, conviction, agency, or all three. Well, Chad, what about a startup that has a billboard? Let's go to AdQuick and then we will do the analysis, but we're doing the ad inside of this post. So out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Okay, let's go back to the post. Brilliant, John. Great point. If you're a founder and you want to make a splash in Northern California, no MVP necessary.

2:16:12Just buy like five or six billboards on AdQuick and you will get enough coverage. Here's what you do. Okay, I'm not going to tell you where Chad's skis, But if you look at his profile picture, you can see there's some skiing going on there. You go geoguessor mode. You figure out where that is. You get ad quick to put up a giant billboard on the favorite mountain. He's up there. I finally got away from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley. And then he looks over and it says, guess what, Chad? I have an MVP, a beta and a working prototype. And a billboard on your favorite mountain. And I'm high conviction and I got massive agency and I'm high ambition, uh, fund my startup.

2:16:56And he's like, God damn it. Find the, find the, the jet charter service that, uh, Chad uses in a pinch, you know, and wrap the plane. Wrap the plane. You can even say, I don't have a beta, but, uh, but for the next, you know, three, three hour flight, wrap the inside and the outside. Yep. And yeah, there's something there. But I flagged this because I talked to an entrepreneur yesterday who's raising for a SaaS company. And he's a buddy of mine. So we were chatting. And he was basically saying, yeah, it's going to take a couple years to kind of get feature complete on sort of what we've designed to date.

2:17:38And I just said, do not say that to any investor. and before you talk to investors, figure out how you can sort of shrink that timeline by basically 75%, right? It's fine if it's going to take a year because it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't SpaceX, it wasn't a hard time travel machine. Because the narrative in Silicon Valley is like humanoids and quantum computers and AI God, like two years max. Yeah, yeah. So if Elon is building an XAI data center in Memphis with 200 ,000 GPUs in a year, you can build your SaaS company in three months. And that is a bar you should hold yourself to internally.

2:18:17And that is what people will hold you to externally. And it's hard to get conviction in a founder that thinks that something's gonna take two years if it's pure software anymore. And so the bar has been raised, but at the same time, there's more information and playbooks out there than ever. And that's also to say that it might, like you will have a five-year roadmap. You will have a 10-year roadmap. Like every company that we work with and we see internally, we see that it's like, oh, wow, like, yeah, it took a couple of years to get around to launching this new feature or launching this new thing.

2:18:50Like it doesn't just happen immediately. There is that compound startup philosophy, that idea that you like try and build everything all at once. But for a lot of companies, they need to really dial in the software. And it's not so much that like instantiating the first idea is difficult. Like we're building a to-do list. Yes, getting the right to-do list, coding it is not the problem. It's finding the product market fit, accelerating it, figuring out the full economic workflow for it, and then doing that again and again and again for every single product in the portfolio that actually builds the full company.

2:19:25That does take time. And I think that even though the time from design to technical instantiation has gotten a lot shorter, that doesn't mean that there's still not like a whole bunch of cycles of talking to customers testing seeing can we scale this can we advertise this are the channels working and some of that stuff is just going to take time so it's not that you're going to be retired in two years it's just that you're going to be able to do more than previously thought in two years yeah well said we got a post from palmer he says uh so andrel came out with an announcement today they are uh they say fight unfair the u.s air force announced the mission design series designation for anduril cca prototype the yfq-44a palmer quote tweets uh and says in chinese culture the number 44 is considered unlucky because the pronunciation of four sounds similar to the word for death and 44 is seen as double death uh so he they basically named their new uh autonomous fighter jet the the uh yfq double death a uh which which sounds menacing if you were uh across the pond what would what would china do if they wanted to get back at us like i feel like the number 13 is not that big of a deal over here it would be funny if they made a huge deal out of it they were like guess what we named our missile the 13th friday the 13th they were like that that played out like like Halloween movie.

2:20:55Yeah. Didn't really land. Yeah. I don't know. We're not as superstitious. Yeah. I guess we're not as superstitious. I don't know. But I like this. It's fun. Yeah, it's fun. I want to see some videos of this, the CCA prototype. I mean, it's going to be a knockout, drag out fight for this. Yeah. And this is ultimately going to inspire the anduril for X, all those out there, to also come up with cute and sort of fun. Agitating. Agitative names for their products. So Anderil leading the charge again. We got another post from Packy. Tim Cook today says, introducing the newest iPad Air. And it's just an iPad that looks exactly the same as every other iPad we've seen.

2:21:41Well, he's getting into meme posting. He's like riffing now. You think Cook is riffing? Yeah, he's just like, oh, everyone will understand the joke here that I'm just posting. We gave up on AI, but don't worry. Yeah. We got a fresh iPad for you. No, no, no, no, no. The joke of the post here is Tim Cook is just posting the previous iPad Air, and he knows that everyone will be like, and he's like, oh, I'm introducing the newest iPad Air, and everyone will know, and then they'll think it's funny, right? Yeah, exactly, John. You nailed it. Nailed it. Cook is cooking. I think it's high art. No, but Packy says, holy, they did it.

2:22:22Those crazy, I can't say, those crazy sons really did it. And imagine Tim Cook. Apple is back, baby. Apple is back. Apparently this core core trend research report is like a PDF that they use as like a demonstration just to like throw something on the screen. And it's this inside joke. And it was like very funny. five years ago but they haven't come up with a new joke since and so they're still recycling this like same idea of like this insider joke and they haven't come up with a new one it's very silly anyway we have to i genuinely i think you should just post this like next week and be like introducing the new iphone we need to find somebody that recently left apple yeah that's not under nda yeah whistleblower all them yeah whistleblower but not about the toxic work environment about the lackadaisical work environment yeah yeah we need somebody to they didn't yell at me once yeah they didn't yell at me at all they let me i i never came in on the weekends it was i left it i left at 12 30 after lunch on a friday i'd have a long lunch and take off that's the type of whistleblower we need yeah yeah yeah if you work at apple and you're chilling call us reach out reach out you don't so so there's this phenomenon where every major tech company you see apple employees out online over the internet yep talking yep chatting yep you never see does anybody work there have we do you know anybody that works at apple right now i do actually i was supposed to go skiing with one last week i should have gone could have gotten the inside scoop what do they say i had to go on a different ski trip i mean this guy actually works really hard and like is like doing like semiconductor stuff like in like their fabs and stuff it's like it like the stuff that they do is really legitimate uh they're the company is just optimizing like right like so like what you don't see there optimizing i'm optimizing like like to steel man this is like yes this looks exactly the same but like this is the best form factor they've tried to make the ipad a little bit bigger a little bit smaller and nothing else works like no one wants a slightly bigger one no one wants a slightly smaller one they want that size no but they haven't taken it to the extreme i need the comically large iPad that's the size of a flat screen you have to carry with I would love that yeah it's actually it's actually I want the printer but you know it's funny that they don't nail like they don't nail the simple things if you made a a true Apple TV yeah not not a sort of I know I know advice I'm talking about a large you're talking about the app the Apple TV or are you talking about the streaming service Apple TV no I'm talking about the Apple TV plus plus extreme are you talking about the the app the streaming service that lives inside the app that lives inside the device and they're all three called apple yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um no but there's a world i would pay for a mattress sized flat screen from apple that i could mount to my can you imagine how expensive a hundred inch tv would be no but that's like i wish they just grand so so lvmh will drop a product yeah that's 50 grand yeah and they're just like yeah we know some people will buy this so we're gonna make it i want apple to do they did that the apple watch edition ten thousand dollar gold watch gold apple watch version one immediately became out of out of date like doesn't even run the latest software yeah uh and so and so they they wound up cutting out they do the bracelets a little bit they do the bracelets um anyways i want to buy a uh do we already do the bezel already we already we already fit one but i have a i have a prepare a promoted post but we got a question from T.

2:26:03Dye in the chat he says question how do I get out of analysis paralysis and I think that's a good question it's you just got to start ruthlessly taking action I think if you think about I think they're they're I feel like I knew some story about some guy who like just would carry around a d20 you know like a dungeon and dragons like dice that has 20 sides I think it was like a very odd you know that a word I don't know if we're supposed to say that, but like, uh, you know, neurodivergent thing to do. But, uh, yeah, it's like, okay. With a, if you carry around a dice with 20 sides, you can model probabilities down to 5%.

2:26:42So you could say, look, I think that, uh, there's a, uh, there's a 15 % chance that I should become an entrepreneur and a 85 % chance that I should take Keith or boys advice and be a startup founder first or work at a work at a large high performing organization first. And so yeah, you roll it. And the way you model it on the D20 is that if it's, if it's a three or under, that's a 15 % chance because every single digit on the D20 is 5%. So you say, okay, I'm just going to roll this dice. And if it comes up three or less, I'm starting my company today. And if it comes up four, between four and 20, I'm applying to a job at a high growth company.

2:27:24I don't know. I mean, it sounds crazy, but like sometimes it really is valuable. I think just to like, you know, like when you're in a, when you're in a business relationship, someone there's obviously this idea of like disagree and commit, like, look, we, we, we, we, you know, we, we, Jordy was saying we should do six days a week. I was saying we should do four days a week or whatever. Like we disagreed. We, we met in the middle, we made a compromise, but we disagreed, but like we're putting it behind us. We're committing to that. Right. And so you should do that with your life too to get out of paralysis paralysis like just running hard at anything is probably better than waiting around and so it's the same thing should you lift legs or arms like well just do something aggressively ultimately every act in life is a leap of faith yeah and specifically startups you know i don't know t died situation he might be deciding you know given the example of do i join a company and work there for two years or do i start my own thing and success is not guaranteed You might join the company and you have a bad manager and you don't get access to the CEO and you don't get any of the positive learnings that Keith is talking about.

2:28:31Or you might start a company and you had the right idea, but a more heavily funded competitor came in and just steamrolled you. But every act is a leap of faith. And what you work on is, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters. but you're not going to know you can't have uh you can't go into any decision you know with with 100 certainty of of the outcome and that's okay and you just have to get comfortable with that and you have to make the decision and make micro adjustments uh and sometimes macro adjustments but uh if you're if you're waiting for uh to be able to make a decision that that 100 leads to success you're never going to find that yeah it's a good point i like it anyway we have pretty much gone through the whole timeline yeah i think we should cover greenland tomorrow okay let's do greenland tomorrow gotta talk about mining which is cool we have one more question and then i think we can close out let's do it uh jordy and john how do you deal with incompetence and lack of speed.

2:29:38This is relevant. So we have somebody joining the team soon. And it was pretty funny because John connected me to him on a Saturday. And I will usually, if I'm talking to a candidate and I get introduced on a Saturday morning, I'll just say, hey, let me know if you're like, do you want to jump on the phone now? And that's just sort of information gathering. I'm not going to write the person off if they're like, oh, actually, can we talk Monday or Tuesday? day, but I am going to judge that interaction. And John introduced me to this guy and, uh, he, before I could even respond, he said, are you free right now?

2:30:13I'll give you a call. And so like, that's an immediate signal. And so, uh, you know, we ended up extending an offer to this person and, but I already knew that like speed was in their DNA. Right. And, uh, you can tell like if somebody's it's Saturday morning at 9am and they're ready to jump on a call, um, uh, you can look for those signals, right? You need to be, you should, the entire recruiting process should be figuring out is somebody competent and are they fast? And competence and speed are like the two biggest factors. Competent, general competence and speed make up for a lot, even intelligence, right?

2:30:49And a lot of roles like golden retriever mode is real in companies. If you're just, you know, golden retrievers, maybe not the right example, but, but there's sort of this idea of like, if you're competent and you can make generally good decisions and you're fast and you're a corporate athlete and a corporate, a true corporate athlete, uh, you're going to do well. So I think the biggest thing is if somebody's in the role and they're incompetent, then you need to potentially find a different, different role, different role for them. But if they're not fast and if they don't have that sort of speed in their DNA, I've never, I've never gotten somebody that didn't want to work fast to work fast.

2:31:23Um, it just didn't want to work fast to work fast. Yes, but you can, if you give someone the right job, I think people can move faster. For sure. If they're in a job that isn't rewarding or demanding or like gives them the right feedback cycle, you can steer them towards something that just fires them up. And all of a sudden you're like, wow, that person's doing way more work, way faster. They're pumped because like we found the slot. And so I think that's like how you deal with it. then kind of the other side is like just on feedback you know being very candid very open like you know humane but giving like direct feedback but then also trying to give as much uh kind of like meta level like algorithmic feedback yeah not just on this was bad but what what is the process how do we improve the process and whatever whatever the output was instead of just acting as like the validator.

2:32:24Yeah. Also acting as the fine tuning of the model. Yeah. Essentially. No, I had a, one example, you know, people often don't change and it's disappointing, but it's just reality. But people sometimes don't understand the seriousness of a situation or the importance of a situation and that they might be working quickly in other areas, but like not on the right thing. And I had this last year, I had a portfolio company and I'm one of probably the top five shareholders in the company. It was involved super early. And the company was at a point where you'd have these sort of monthly check-ins with the CEO.

2:33:00A month passed, very little progress happened. And I had a very candid kind of conversation with the CEO where I said, if you keep operating like this, it will be Christmas break, whatever that is, if you're a startup founder, but it's going to be between Christmas and New Year's. And you're going to be dealing with laying off your team and shutting the company down because at this pace, you're not going to be in a position to raise your next round. You're the traction is not going to be there and nobody's coming to save you. And between and I said, let's meet in a week and like, let's see if you can get the pace up.

2:33:31And he absolutely did. He, he crushed it the rest of the year. He got his round, his next round raised and the company's in a fantastic position right now. And there was something that I think he was too fixated on, on sort of like the big picture of like where the company's going and all this stuff. And I just said, you need to take sort of ruthless action. and he unlocked something in himself and the company has been dramatically different since then. I think it's different giving that advice to a founder and saying, look yourself in the mirror and decide, understand the situation that you're putting yourself in.

2:34:04It's very different than if you talk to an employee who's not motivated and they're not moving quickly and things like that. I haven't had a lot of success in sort of turning somebody from a low urgency, low output person into somebody that's super high output but that was that was you know one uh very bright point in my year last year where i said okay this person like found the next gear yeah and it dramatically transformed the company yeah i just don't want to be too blackpelled on it because i i think like yes like there is some like innate speed that is just like in people's dna or something and they come into an organization and they just go hard no matter what and you see these people all over but i do think that there's that there's uh that next gear that everyone can achieve for sure and then there's also just uh you know if you get dropped in if you're parachuting into you know nazi occupied france and you're a 17 year old or 19 year old kid like you can just kind of like stare the opportunity in the face and like just just turn it on yeah even if it's even if you've never done it before.

2:35:10And so finding that thing that brings that insane energy and really going for it is really important. And that's the job of managers is to unleash that. Anyway, that was a great show. I thought we had a lot of fun. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Yeah, tomorrow, Ben, hold us accountable. I have any new ones. Oh, we got to get some new ones. You people are not leaving enough ads in our reviews. Yeah, please leave some ads in our reviews. I got a DM the other day that had an ad in it. It was great. That's fantastic. And we got one last question. Let's do it. Advice on becoming a creator and cutting out consuming.

2:35:55The answer here is that all the value on social network, or at least 99 % of the value created by social networks occurs to the people that create the content versus the people that just use them for entertainment. uh and so if you um the other thing is if you don't create content online you don't really exist online and it's hard to um have a real impact in this world if you have no digital presence um yeah we had a post about that in the last uh in the last show notes i don't know if we got to it but it was like oh uh in like 1999 oh someone has a presence online they must be a weirdo and then now it's like someone doesn't have a presence online they must be a weirdo and i still think there's um i i still think that there is value in going through periods of time where you cut out all totally social uh activity at all like try to just not go on these platforms and try to just focus on uh your business or your role or whatever whatever kind of situation you're in but uh there will come a time where you should emerge and start sharing what you're doing with world um that's fantastic advice we will see you tomorrow thanks for watching we appreciate you all and thank you folks great tuesday enjoy it we will see you soon sean mcguire on the show tomorrow yeah we're excited stay tuned stay tuned have a good afternoon