HBD Steve Jobs, Supercharging US Manufacturing, Adderall Fueled Insider Trading, Sam Bankman Prison Interview, Ellison's Island

34:03Decisions to cooperate are not probably more load-bearing there, me thinks, says Patrick McKenzie. Anyhow, it's a remarkable document, which caused me to update negatively on his candor, which is saying something. Yeah. So it's interesting that Patrick, who's highlighting this and and i believe that patrick was one of the people that initially was pretty vocal sure in november of 2023 when this was all going down because he's had a history doing highly regulated fintech products at stripe right so like the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of that's right ethics and values and long-term thinking and and sort of being able to take uh some amount of risk but not with customer funds you know yeah um and the thing the thing at the end of the day that i feel like is just so important to highlight over and over is uh sbf was operating a hedge fund that traded against his users at ftx using their own money yep that is objective right he can say oh they were different entities but they were set up in the same place it was more or less the same group of people and there was a bad I don't yeah and I don't know why I I remember when you know there was a number of things when they were watching their rise right I was building a fintech company at the time I used both you know fiat and digital assets right I was working with companies like board api club was our highest profile customer and they did their sort of four billion dollar seed round on our platform so I was doing this meanwhile SPF is going yeah we have five engineers at FTX, blah, blah, blah.

35:43I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. I have like seven or eight like amazing engineers and there's way too much to do. You can't hit that. You know, so there was just so much sort of going on at this time. The other thing is, uh, I don't know how all the institutional investors that went into FTX didn't, didn't, uh, didn't take issue with the fact of him operating. You know, it's one thing for Robin hood to be selling order flow. right and and you could very clearly argue that that is wrong in many ways right yeah but it's another thing to be an adversarial p uh trading partner that's also operating one of these exchanges and offering some just crazy incentives like you could go on ftx us and get eight percent yield on bitcoin for presumably because they wanted to acquire deposits to trade with and just be like super degenerate so like the yield was them being degenerate yep and so um you know to to give andreason credit you know they were in they were they were in coinbase early that was like their big you know position from i think like their 2017 fund but they easily could have found justifications to say we're going to do this because it's you know it's you know it's you know whatever and they didn't right and so the vcs that initially did it were the kind of people to do like a dot eth you know profile you know things like that right they were fomoing in yeah and um and uh some of the stories out of that are fantastic the whole them being like he's playing league of legends like that's so bullish yeah he was terrible at it um yeah that was your big so so sbf you know notoriously would play league of legends all day long during board meetings during board meetings during talk conversations with journalists but he but your issue with it wasn't that he was playing it was that he was just bad he was bad yeah he wasn't he wasn't even that good which is a real tell yeah you know uh at least when at least when elon's playing on a spacex call he's had someone boost his account to top level so he can so he can speed run the the hardest level on the game or whatever i don't know yeah it's just like yeah it's just disrespectful to to you know play a video game while you're supposed to be pitching a large financial institution.

38:05And I mean, lots of respect for our great capital allocators. Have some respect. What would your mother say? Your mother would say, don't do that. And his mother was a legal expert, right? At Stanford too. Anyway, there's some quotes from the interview here. We'll read some. On his own decision and claim of innocence, I do absolutely, obviously there are things I would do differently and that's lots of things. I had a lot of decisions to do, to make a CEO, but by far the single biggest was, I backed down from a fight in November 2022, and I should not have let Sullivan and Cromwell take control of FTX.

38:43I should have stood up to them, and I didn't. And after that, there were excruciating years waiting, not just me waiting, but millions of customers waiting, being falsely told that there was no money left, and they were not going to get any payments until recently. And so he maintains, I could have you know landed the plane i could have pulled out of that nosedive but he wasn't doing a good job just objectively he was doing a terrible job with those awful tweets like what happened he was like it he looked in chaos like he was not instilling confidence at all and and also he wasn't doing a good job of he did have days to go try and liquidate the anthropic position couldn't get it done yeah and so like you know yeah i remember i remember there was i remember there was they were trying to fire sale.

39:27Yeah. They were trying to fundraise and stuff and shore up the balance sheet and do all sorts of stuff that you do in a banking crisis. But it was just too much of a mess. And it was not run like a proper financial institution. And so, yeah, highly risky. Don't recommend it. If you're looking to invest and actually take it seriously, we recommend public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And Public's been around for a very long time. And they're not going anywhere. And we personally are friends with the founders.

40:01That's why we partnered, and among other reasons. And you know what? We were on a call with them the other day. Guess what? They weren't playing League of Legends. Boom. They were engaged in the conversation. I could see them because they had a very nice conference room, and they weren't even on their laptops. They were present. They were locked in. We had eye contact, and this is valuable. And so Leaf from Public says, this is great, 100 % agree. A quote about Palmer Lucky, which I thought would be fun to highlight on the show here for you. At some point in business, in life, and in romance, you have to commit to a path, said the 31-year-old Lucky.

40:33A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy. They're always pursuing everything with optionality. Oh, I need to be able to raise money from anybody. I need to be able to sell my business in any way. I need to have liquidity in any way. I need to make sure that I'm not closing myself off to future romantic partners. I need to make sure I've got my options open. I need to make sure that I'm not going to buy a house and settle down in one place and lock myself down. Oh, having children? I don't know, maybe I'm not ready to commit to that path. In keeping their options open, they ensure that they're going to jump from option to option.

41:03If you don't commit to a path, you are going to fail at it. You have to commit to it to make it work. And I think marriage is the same way. You just have to commit to it. You have to say, this is the path I'm on. For better or worse, I'm going to double down on it. the one thing money can't buy said lucky is people who liked you before you had money I'm very lucky that I met my wife back when I had literally nothing when we met I had less than three hundred dollars in my bank account I probably should have gotten married should have married her when I was 16 looking back I think that's probably my radical belief and I love that leaf is sharing this I think it's a great post and I think it's a great message that resonates I um I met Sarah yeah and it was early in branded native and i'd never actually taken a proper like profit share from it so i met her and i was like basically still broke i was making i was paying myself like four grand a month living in la like uh you know whatever and we met and like on our second date i i bought a 911 on bring a trailer and i like pick her up in it and i hadn't actually driven manual a little in a little bit so i was like a little bit nervous because like i didn't want to stall out in like la traffic and she looks at and she's like oh that's cool like this is so funny and like never never even like brought it up again like i was like wow like that that was it this is this is so funny because i have the exact same story about my wife emily uh early soylent days 5k a month making a little bit more than you i guess that extra 1k that came in a really long way.

42:34My mom had retired and bought a Boxster. So I borrowed that. Nice. Took her out. Same thing. Who cares? I didn't know your mom was a legend like that. Oh yeah. Manual. No way. It was fun. It was fun to drive. That's cool. Yeah. You drive it. You take that thing out. It was fun. Fun for me. Yeah. Yeah. Girls don't care. But yeah, I met Emily back in high school and you know, we went off into different colleges, but then reunited and it was great. And yeah, uh you know like went the went the distance like committed very early and i think it was good and just keep no it's a real it's a real uh you know this kind of thing the idea of meeting you know if you become super successful before you meet you know your your significant other that 100 is a factor like women are analyzing their their life partner based on in my situation it was entirely potential.

43:24She was, she, I was like, for her, it was like the greatest angel investment of her life. Cause she's basically saying, I'm going to bet my life on this person. Like, I hope that, I hope that it pays off. And, uh, same thing, you know, same thing for Emily. It's fantastic. Anyways, get inspired, get on public, create an account, move your assets over, linking it back to the ad. This is why, this is why, you know, artisanal ads, none of this is I generated. Yeah. Well, let's move on to a fantastic post from David Senra over at Founders Podcast. He's sharing some insight from Larry Ellison. Larry says, life is the only miracle.

44:00I don't waste a lot of time. I work intensely on things I care about and I spend my time with people that I care about. I do what I want with my time because I know there's not much left of it. And Larry Ellison is 80 years old, I believe. He looks fantastic. I think he's got another 40 50 60 80 years left in him i hope he's around forever yeah he's aging the best out of the tech titans oh yeah by a long shot oh yeah i'd like to see him in some patega like uh like um bill bill yeah good old bill gates anyway there is a story about a half billion billion dollar quest he's been on to change farming that i think a lot of people weren't even familiar with so i wanted to do a little deep dive.

44:46In a row of six greenhouses on a remote stretch of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which I actually was on six months ago. Were you at his resort? I wasn't at his resort. I was at the Four Seasons, which is, I think he owns the island and leases the land to the Four Seasons. Probably pays for his resort. Yeah, probably. His property, there's two of them. There's Sensei Lanai, which I haven't been to, but Sensei Porcupine Creek is so good that we We need to do a TBPN meetup there at some point. Because there's only like, I think like 30 rooms. And so he's been working to use his golden touch to in tech to remake the way people around the world eat.

45:23The company behind this effort, Sensei AG, is eight years in the making and has cost the world's fourth richest person more than a half billion dollars. Far more than he spent buying the island itself. early on ellison touted cutting-edge technology that would modernize agriculture make a big impact for society and eventually help grow food in places such as africa the billionaire the billionaire has told executives he sees the project as part of his legacy so far it's mostly been a bust so a little bit of a hit piece here from the wall street journal tom doton we might have to put you in the truth zone maybe there's something here but you know these things happen all the time people who are rich invest in crazy stuff crazy ideas and crazy ideas don't always work out and it's good um and who knows it might be too early to write this one off so let's break it down uh little of the revolutionary tech the company has extolled sensors to monitor development artificial intelligence to breed crop varieties and robots to harvest plants is being used according to people familiar with sensei so they're still early uh the company has been beset by problems uh typical to tech startups including executive changeovers shifting goals and bad wi-fi uh they need starlink out there yeah uh call the buddy musk uh fix it yeah they are boys musk text musk text ellison being like are you good for two billion yeah or are you he's like really i remember there's this text exchange where he says i almost printed it he says uh uh you should invest in the the twitter buyout and he goes okay sounds fun yeah i'm in for a billion.

46:52And then, uh, and then Elon goes, well, really you should do like two. I think you should do two. This is like, so same interaction that has seat, you know, seat series a founders having is like, come on, like do two. Do you believe in me? With three extra zeros at the end. I love it. Uh, the greenhouses, for example, weren't built to withstand lanai strong winds and their solar panels have broken down. Some of the top executives are tech veterans who have no commercial agriculture experience the 80 year old ellison and his sensei ag co-founder celebrity dr david agus uh envisioned the farm as an ambitious tech venture that would use new techniques to grow tastier nutrient rich rich food far from the feeding the world its crops of lettuce and cherry tomatoes are only enough to supply the few groceries i mean at least they have a product in market yeah it's more than most hard tech companies yeah yeah it's working on um one personal one person familiar with the operations described the output as being like promised a bugatti and ending up with a yugo what is it you go you don't know what a yugo is oh it's like the cheapest and most failed car of all time they're actually trying to bring it back is it a rush it's like an eastern european car uh yeah it was famously flopped yeah so they're trying to there's a guy who's trying to bring it back he designed it and he's going on a world tour with the original you go i just have a thing maybe raise money hatchbacks yeah although the farm has little to do with ellison's core business software giant oracle the tech mogul has called the project and the island more broadly part of a grand experiment in sustainability i guess a medical doctor with no previous agricultural experience uh said that which i don't care about said that when ellison approached him on the project the billionaire's lofty goals are returning lanai to its farming roots after decades of destructive pineapple farming while also setting the blueprints to feed the world were too good to pass up.

48:40We have an island that we can't grow things on that we need food for. Let's do it. But at the same time, let's change agriculture. The company has been using the past few years to gain experience with growing crops and perfect its technology, he said in an August interview, adding Sensei was aiming to have a prototype of its new tech by the end of 2025. That timetable has since been extended to mid-year 2026. And so lots of rough times for them. Let's move forward. There's a lot here. This is a really deep dive. Overall, this is exactly what I want to see billionaires spending their money on. I agree.

49:16One thing besides cars, watches, art. Islands. Et cetera. Islands. I think this is one of those things. This scenario happens quite often where a bunch of the tech elite look at an industry and they say, yeah we can fix this and get a little bit in over their skis in the sense that you know maybe trying to solve problems that are problems for you know that are hairy problems right like farming is one of humanity's oldest you know industries and there's also been a bunch of you know one thing that i've noticed there's a company i'm i help start called resource monitor yep and uh we make smart meters for groundwater producers so people that work in oil gas ag etc golf courses etc that are producing a bunch of water one thing i've noticed through that is there's a lot of people you know this is a tech solution for a traditionally like legacy industry the the alternative products that people use are these sort of um you know these sort of uh very these legacy meters that are you know were made in the early 1900s so we've been running on the same tech.

50:25But when you talk to people in that industry, there's a bunch of super smart people that are very future, future, you know, forward in many senses, and they are actively working on solutions to all their problems all day long. So they are like problem solvers. And so it's not like you're going into ag and there's been zero investment in technology and there's been no totally smart. Like sometimes you go into an industry and you're like, wow, everybody here is making a bunch of silly, dumb decisions. I don't think ag is necessarily the same way. Like there's, it's such a, it is one of the most critical industries in the world outside of energy.

51:02And there's been a bunch of smart people working on it forever. So coming in and slapping solar panels and new sensors and stuff like that isn't gonna automatically deliver, you know, incredible yields. If anything, the criticism of the American agriculture industry is that it's like too hyper optimized. And companies like Monsanto have like gone crazy with like, oh, if this seed gets in your farm, it blows over, a bird takes it over. We're gonna take a cut of that because we're gonna gene sequence this, your crops. And we're gonna know that you have the drought resistant tomatoes or whatever, and you're gonna pay us.

51:33It's like, it's very hyper technology driven already. So given a little history here in the 1920s, Dole turned Lanai into pineapple island. And for a time it produced 75 % of the world's supply of that fruit. The island still has many brightly colored plantation homes dating to that era, but years of damaging agricultural practices, including the use of plastic piping and chemical ripening agents, polluted the soil and made it largely inhospitable to commercial farming. Access to fresh water has also been an obstacle. In 1985, Lanai was taken over by real estate developer David Murdoch, who phased out pineapple plantations and converted it into a luxury vacation spot.

52:14He sold 98 % of the island in 2012 to Ellison, whose fortune is around$200 billion. Keeping 2 % is so, gotta be so annoying to Ellison. I think it might be like government owned or something. Oh yeah. It'd be funny if he's like, yeah, you can have the last 2%, but it's going to be a billion. Cough it up. And so the entire island, or 98 % of it sold for$300 million. Absolute steal, I think. I mean, yeah, they're not making any more of these islands and it's beautiful and wonderful. There's a picture of the beach there. That's fantastic. I think I've actually been to that exact beach. Murdoch was often seen was an often seen paternalistic figure who waved to the locals.

52:58He called his children kind of weird. I mean, that's kind of nice, but kind of weird. If he was thinking about it and how I, you know, in a very night. He's he's he's big broing them, you know? Yeah, yeah. You should have been like, these are my bros. If they're his children and he's providing them an allowance. It's not equal footing. If he's giving them an allowance, I would respect that. Yeah, I'd just be like, hey, these are my bros on this island. Ellison is more of a mystery to Lanai's 3 ,200 residents. A few interviewed said they'd never seen him, although his presence is apparent in other ways.

53:33He is the largest employer, including at his resorts on the island. He's paid for benefits such as CT scanner at the local hospital. he's building a new rental new rental homes also luxury residences along the coast for his family which he's hired his residences yeah so he has six homes on pch okay two of the six burned to the ground and apparently during the la fires the firemen basically put up a line at the second home and said not another one and they just made sure that the other stayed standing so it's crazy he also has a he also owns the tennis club in malibu oh i didn't know that um the billionaire whose son and daughter are both in the movie business, rebuilt a century old theater that boasts it as the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawaii.

54:17He's also rebuilding the long shuttered bowling alley and planning a dessert bar for the snack menu. He's having fun. Let's go back to Sensei greenhouse versus wind. Ellison hired an Israeli firm to produce the greenhouses as suggestion by his friend, Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. That's so funny that he's just like texting him with his bro that's crazy literally runs israel and he's just like who should build these greenhouses he's like oh i got a buddy yeah some company here this is what he said gotta have a guy for it is considered a leader in greenhouses the structures were designed for that country's desert climate and weren't built to handle lanai's humidity uh and so uh lanai has gusts of up to 80 mile per hour winds it's actually very hard to land there with the planes uh there's a lot of times when it's oh you can't get there like when we went out there we couldn't get there the first day and we had to stay on the big island the first night um the winds blew the roofs off the greenhouses multiple times ellison said the structures would cost 12 million but they wound up costing 50 million so yeah i mean this is the part of like being in founder mode is hard when you're also the founder of oracle and you're also and that's just like 90 of your mind share because well it's also value it's all this this scenario where by ellison making this his personal project yep trying to make it a business but simultaneously saying that it's his personal project that he feels is part of his legacy.

55:40It warps economic reality to the point where you can, no other farm in the world outside of some mega monstrosity from Monsanto is going to spend$50 million on CapEx at a small farm. And it's like, if you're already a celebrity doctor, you're boys with Ellison, you're probably super rich. There's so much money flowing into this company, you're going to be taking like a cushy salary. Like you put one of the gundo bros on this, like they're going to be out there in the 80 mile an hour winds with like duct tape and holding a spot welder, like making sure it doesn't fall apart and making content out of it.

56:17Exactly. Using it as a viral moment. They were afraid. You see the issue here is they're getting a hit piece from the journal. Exactly. Augustus would have been holding it together. I have the mandate of heaven. I have the mandate of heaven. A hundred percent. And that's, and And that's what you don't get with, you know, like some young kid. Yeah. They're basically like, oh, this is, this is effed. Yeah. Let's get out of here. We'll come back. Yeah. We're going to a resort tonight. This is too crazy. No, we're going to Nobu. Yeah, we're going to Nobu. Because they have a Nobu. The thing about Allison, he's, I think, a major investor in Nobu.

56:45He owns, I think, most of the Nobu. Yeah, there's a Nobu at the Four Seasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what's great about Sensei. It's, it's, it's probably half the price as a Mon. Yeah. But every restaurant on the property is a Nobu. so you can be playing golf drop into the little golf shack and it's a no. It's so wild. There's some other great quotes in here about Ellison and his boys. Ellison frequently took friends and other favorite guests at his resort on tours of the indoor farm, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and actor Robert De Niro. Nice. So he's just brown out with Bobby De Niro and Tony Blair and being like, let's go tour my farm.

57:24uh he routinely went through the greenhouses picking tomatoes off the vine offering them to guests and eating them unwashed despite having been told they weren't organic and had been sprayed with pesticides on a tour with blair ellison offered him the unwashed dog he's a look at him he looks he looks amazing he looks amazing he's eating these pesticides yeah that's the secret fresh pesticides it's the midwit meme the genius and the he's probably got he's probably got cans of canola oil yeah he's just chugging meanwhile the midwits like i can't have any pesticides no microplastics uh you know ellison's just like feed me anything i'm fine uh uh blair declined to eat the unwashed tomatoes he's like i'm good actually no thanks but we'll see we'll see how tony blair looks at 80 you know yeah maybe ellison's got him beat uh i'm looking it up right now since they acquired facilities in vancouver and ontario for almost 3 million square feet the company bought them from cannabis companies as that market crashed.

58:21But the needs of a marijuana grow house differed substantially from a greenhouse for other crops. Cannabis needs special lighting and segregated rooms. Interesting. And so we'll close out here. They have a software focus. Sensei later sold off the Vancouver acquisition. Overall repairs and retrofits of the Canadian facilities cost around 200 million dollars that is so much to burn for like you know i need to see the the pnl i know it's just so easy when it's like oh yeah like 200 million dollars i have 200 billion dollars you know that's the equivalent of like a 50 million dollar fund hearing about a company burn 50k you know it's like yeah yeah oh you spent 50k on a facility or whatever being being one of many produce suppliers on lanai has to be about i would guess to be about a maybe a 500k yeah nothing maybe maybe maybe maybe seven maybe seven figures if you count the guests and like yeah that's just a high volume yeah um but but still that's a pretty gnarly looking uh you know apparently the box lettuce markets what they do is they grow lettuce uh indoors and there's been a bunch of these vertical farming startups and indoor farming startups, but box lettuce is a saturated market.

59:40And most people, when they go to Arrow on, they just buy the Arrow on version of box lettuce, or they go to Trader Joe's, they just buy the default. Very few people have been able to build a brand around particular pre-packaged produce. It's really, really hard because you look at it and you're just like, that looks like a tomato, like anything else. Like, do I really care? The vision was so big. And then it just slowly got whittled away as we faced up to the realities of implementing on lanai, a former general manager said. Sensei's chief technology officer, Danny Hillis, Agus said, Hillis is renowned in the computer world for developing networking techniques, though he lacks commercial agriculture experience.

1:00:18He leads the company's AI efforts, which Sensei believes can help it predict and crossbreed crops to optimize nutrition. Software can also be used to increase efficiency in water and energy use, despite moving through several chief executives, Ellison and Agus in 2023 appointed Dave Douglas, a partner of Applied Intuition, a Boston-based tech company that Ellison owns part of. The software engineer lives in Massachusetts and runs the company remotely. And again, this goes back to, you know, it is tough. It is tough to run a company remotely. It's tough to not have a founder that has 50 % of the company.

1:00:50And it's like, if this works, yeah, I got money from Larry, but if it works, I'm going to be remembered. It's hard. Hard to delegate your life's work. Startup founders and executives having very low cash comp is sometimes seen as a bug. People are like, oh, it's such a shame that this person could be working at a startup, but they need, and it's like, no. It's a feature. As soon as people start making, you know, 300K plus a year, the quality, you know, just like the drive, you just lose that dog in you. The dog stops barking. It's true. And you burn$500 million in a few years. Yeah. And there's been a few of these projects like that Blimp one that the Google founders are working on.

1:01:27We got a deep dive. And it was the same thing where they put someone in who was like very well respected, very smart guy, clearly, but older in his career. And when I see that, I just think I would, I just wish these guys would instead go and give, you know, money through like a YC model almost, and just get the money into a bunch of young hackers, let them build a bunch of stuff. A bunch of the stuff won't work, but you won't incinerate as much capital. And you'll probably more likely to actually make an impact and drive a generational thing, unless you're willing to do the Elon thing and then just actually sleep in the factory and like drive everything like crazy.

1:02:03And that's been working for Elon, but he is the exception to the rule. Anyway, if you're looking to spend some time in Hawaii, we recommend going to wander.com. They have some fantastic places in Hawaii. Find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge surface it's a vacation home but better. I got the wander hat on. We're doing hats today. And so I looked on Wander. I found a place in Hawaii. It's the next slide. The Waikoloa Beach, five bedrooms, six and a half baths, eight beds, 16 guests, 5 ,000 square feet.

1:02:43It's club access. You can wander the luxurious coastal retreat offering breathtaking panoramic views of the ocean, surf, beach, and mountains. This stunning residence features a 17-meter pool with an elevated spa, a game room with a pool table ping pong and shuffleboard it seems like a fantastic place to go hang out uh 10 out of 10 average guest rating and you know you're going to have a good time out in hawaii so highly recommend that and we also have a post from kyle you're not going to deal with the wi-fi issues that larry ellison is dealing with on his farm they got blazing they got blazing fast wi-fi that you can count on there's nothing worse than getting you know to some vacation home you boot up your computer you're jumping onto a zoom call to say hey nothing from me thanks and it's lagging out and they're like what i can't hear you and all you wanted to say was nothing from my end thanks and you can't even get that through you're not going to deal with that on wander no no and uh kyle here has a post that we wanted to share says if you thought the first 500 wander locations were nice wait until you see the next 500 they are really going going above and beyond and curating just really special places.

1:03:53Every single thing I see them share is just iconic and totally worth getting a whole group of friends together, getting a bunch of families together, getting your whole corporate team together, doing something special, making some content, doing a bunch of different stuff. Anyway, we love Wander and shout out to them. But let's move on to our next story, which is in the Wall Street Journal. Alexander Sadie writes, John Femina went to jail for three years for running an insider trading scheme while he was a banker at wells fargo i spoke with him about how an addiction to adderall inspired him to start the scheme and how he's rebuilt his life after prison let's hear it jordy what do you think oh i mean uh is this this is a hit piece right um it's rough it's rough and wait until you hear the scheme it's bad uh i'm gonna hold thoughts until we hear the full details.

1:04:47So the insider trading ring netted him and his friends millions of dollars before they all went to prison. It started with long hours as an investment banker and a crippling addiction to Adderall. He was a 28-year-old banker working for Wells Fargo when he tipped off his friends about confidential deals that the bank was working on. His friends would buy shares that were in line to be acquired and then reap the profits and then they'd funnel the money back to Fermina. In two years, he and his friends made more than$11 million trading off of confidential information. He spent three years in prison.

1:05:18He says he came up with the scheme while he was abusing Adderall. Okay. And just to be clear,$11 million is an order of magnitude more money than you need. You could be trading with 50 grand and have the regulators come after you right yeah it's super easy i've had who i had a random person bought the stock right before it popped yeah yeah yeah it's not that hard it's not that hard to find i had a buddy whose dad is a public company ceo and he was telling me he told me something and i was like wow like the stock is gonna absolutely rip uh i wish you just hadn't even told me because i'm not able to buy it because Because there's more or less a direct line from the dad to the son to the son's friend.

1:06:06And so I'm like out at that point, right? Yeah. And so they give a little background of him. He got an Adderall prescription to be able to work long hours. He grew up on Long Island, was a good kid. He was an Eagle Scout. I was an Eagle Scout. Shout out Eagle Scouts. But get it together, guys. You're bringing down the brand here. He enrolled in the Merchant Marine Academy. he served in the navy reserves thank you for your service man uh he went to columbia business school should have stayed in the military honestly yeah not insider trading yeah and if you're a fighter pilot you can do any any adderall adjacent you know product and they're like yeah good good job making sure the plane gets yeah there's nothing to steal yeah uh so we go after columbia business school he wanted to go to wall street uh so he started working as an investment banker in 2009 first in North Carolina, then New York City.

1:06:56The hours were immediately difficult for him. He said he was a PowerPoint jockey doing the grunt work from 9 a.m. to midnight at least six days a week. And we can get into what you should do if you're stuck in that role. The answer is delegate. You need to be hammering the table and being like, I'm getting a direct report immediately, climb that ladder, get out of the analyst role as soon as you can and be like, I'm ready to delegate this because I don't want to be doing these long hours. You have to wonder right now, is there guys that are in his role today that are getting so good at using AI that they can actually that they can actually do the job?

1:07:30Well, I mean, you wouldn't want people that you wouldn't want people like the whole thing in the culture there is if people knew you were getting your work done in four hours or five hours, they would just give you enough work to get back to that point. So I don't know if there's a tangible benefit for the employee as much as the firm. Yep. But and so when I think about like the good work at an investment bank, the top guys, it's all relationship based. It's I need to find the company that wants to be sold and win the deal. And we need to win the deal. And I need to be golfing with the CEO of Nike.

1:08:01And then when he's going to bring his buddy or something, I'm ready to put them together. That's the value. And that's why investment bankers get paid so much because you basically have to pay them an option on the future business that they bring into the firm because they can leave and they can take the Rolodexes with them. Then one level down is more like the strategy role, actually coming up with a deal that is accretive for everyone and all the shareholders get excited. And although that doesn't happen all the time, when it happens and everyone's happy, Instagram for Facebook, that's a great example of a good idea, a good deal, everyone wins, right?

1:08:33Then lower down is like, how do you communicate that? How do I turn the idea of this deal into a slide that tells the story? And you're very good at this in the slide decks, but you don't instantiate them you have a designer who actually takes your napkin stuff or you work in figma but uh something about decks something about decks so the the dynamic is that anybody who's making a deck wants it immediately yep and there's always this pressure of especially within the private market world if you're a seed stage company that wants to raise a series a you want to be and you know sometimes founders will get ahead of it and they're like i'm going to raise start my process in september yep and i want to have the round done by december and i'm planning around that.

1:09:13So I need the deck done by September, but usually it's, it's, Hey, we had this BC hit us up. It went well, they want to preempt, but now we want to run the whole process. So we need the deck right now. And so I worked on a handful of decks in, uh, last year just for portfolio companies. And it was just always like, I just ended up staying up like basically until 2 AM with them, like trying to get them across the line. Yep. But a lot of this PowerPoint jockey stuff is, is actually a layer below where you're actually just taking the napkin drawing and turning it into something that looks good or building, building.

1:09:44Yeah. Yeah. And that can be very grueling. Now in the post 2012 era, a lot of these firms have have back offices internationally where they can take a napkin drawing and turn into a beautiful slide. And they have whole teams of people that just do this. And I'm sure AI is coming in there. So yeah, rough time for him. He's grinding. He was taking 80 milligrams a day, twice the maximum daily dosage. That is crushing. Kept on taking the pills, made him frenetic, aggressive, and willing to take new risks. But let's go on to what the actual scheme was, because I have some takes on this. One night in 2010, while working late, Fermina looked through some of the bank's internal folders on a shared computer drive.

1:10:23He saw that project folders that were changed over the weekend were likely to be tied to live deals. My mind on Adderall would go off on these tangents and come up with these elaborate schemes. At the time, he was on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars to pay a friend's mortgage. He had co-signed because the friend was struggling to pay. Firmina told his friends to buy shares in the company that he thought had a good chance of eventually being acquired. He enlisted another friend from college to buy the stock too. The friends netted north of 500K in profit from trading on the deal. Then the scheme goes on for two years.

1:10:55They use a shell company with a corporate bank account to buy and sell the stock. The biggest score was in 2012 before Chicago Bridge and Irons, a$3 billion purchase of Shaw group around 10 people connected to termina bought shaw stock and call options all before all weeks before the deal how how how did this how did this guy do this so brazenly it's not like you actually like it's so it's so obviously illegal even to somebody outside of finance yeah that also he's trying he's doing all that it's also 10 people like how did how did not one of that would be like, hey, buddy, I talked to my dad about this because I was like, hey, dad, you want to do this deal with me?

1:11:39And he was like, son, that's insider trading. Yes. And so it's so funny because he's doing this piece to kind of rehabilitate his name and be like, hey, this is about awareness around drug abuse and Adderall, which is true. It's good. It's good to raise awareness about that. But he's saying like, oh, yeah, I took so much Adderall. I came up with this crazy scheme. And the crazy scheme is something that you would be taught on day one of compliance training at any bank. Hey, if you have material, non-public information and you give it to someone else and they buy the stock and then they pay you for that, that's obviously a certain degree.

1:12:08It's not like people with some elaborate scheme. He's like, it's like a meth addict saying, you know, I went and stole a bunch of catalytic converters. It's like genius. It's genius. It's a scheme. It's not even a scheme. It's just vanilla fraud. It's just vanilla. It's like this is something. When I was on the meth, I thought the catalytic converters were like Pokemon. on there are there are crazy schemes where you could figure out that like oh yeah like you know this this signal links to this and this it's like this is just you had information and you just gave it to your friend and they just bought the stock it's like there's nothing crazy going on here it's so ridiculous that he's framing this as like oh i came up with this while i was on adderall like no this is wild after the announcement yeah so that when they did this big deal 10 of them all go in they make 7 million after the announcement yep fem and femina's childhood friend and the friend's girlfriend wired more than 1 million to a precious metals dealer in manhattan to buy 550 gold bars it's like so obvious they flew to las vegas the next day and laundered more than 100 000 through a casino it's just like just and so the fbi shows up immediately told fermina that uh he was sharing confidential information and asked him to help in their investigation.

1:13:21He slams the door on them, but then he started cooperating. He was arrested in December, 2012, later pled guilty to five charges of fraud and money laundering in 2013. He reported a fought for a five-year sentence at a federal penitentiary in 2015. Eight other co-conspirators did jail time too. And so, yeah, I mean, very sad to see him, you know, get into a delusions of grandeur situation where he thought he could get away with something so stupid. But I think the framing of this as a Ridiculous. When he checked in for his first night in jail, he brought a bottle of Adderall with him. Wow. But the correctional staff obviously told him he couldn't keep the drugs.

1:13:58Yeah. So I don't know why this guy potentially has more muscle than brain cells. Yeah. Anyway, if you're trying to get ahead in an investment banking role, Jordy, and you don't want to insider trade, what's the fastest way to get a promotion at an investment bank? Get a nice watch. Go to bezel. The hat's coming. Go to bezel. Go to bezel. Get an absolute hitter. Walk into your MD's office and say, I'm done with the PowerPoint stuff. Slam your wrist on the table. Put me on the golf course. Put me in coach. I got a Vacheron on. I'm ready for the big leagues. And we got a bunch of news around bezel.

1:14:41Bezel is the best place to shop for luxury watches. They have over 22 ,000 of them on there. and they fully authenticate every watch in-house. I just bought a Vacheron on bezel. It's shipped to the bezel team. They authenticated it and they sent it to me. It was a fantastic unboxing experience. I'll share this. They send it to you in this lovely case. They send you all these notes. They authenticated things I didn't even know existed. The movement, the caliber, the loom plots indices, the dial, the hands, the crystal, the serial engravings, the case back the crown the lugs the links uh the end links the bracelet the strap the clasp the the everything uh they they check on all the condition they check on all the performance they actually make sure that it times correctly they do a timing test they give you a receipt and they give you this lovely certificate of authenticity i love that uh and so uh very very happy with my purchase uh proud owner of a holy trinity watch i got the vacheron patch so nice so thin and they sent me this wonderful uh vacheron well of course they include the box there are some watches on there that don't come with boxes but they focus on complete sets yeah and uh so go to bezel and they have a fantastic little breakdown today of michael jordan's watch collection they have been killing it if you don't follow them it is the most entertaining content uh and i've just loved this so michael jordan's watch collection is outrageous as you'd expect here's a breakdown of his wildest pieces so the first up is the allong and sonne datograph reference four five three one an absolute hitter an absolute hitter look at this it's on the next slide uh and this is just a beautiful mj didn't just play the game he mastered it his platinum datograph is nothing if not a nod to his refined taste its chronograph is so sophisticated that even watchmakers jaws drop it's the horological equivalent of a slam dunk i love it i this i do this piece i do love this is a fantastic looking piece uh he also has the work you are 202 s when you're the goat traditional isn't always thrilling enter the urwork the urwork's a very odd brand i mean look at this watch it's crazy um and uh uh it a watch looks like it belongs in a sci-fi movie with its satellite hour display and futuristic design it's clear mj isn't afraid to venture into avant-garde territory you gotta be the goat to pull this off that is a wild wild one he has a richard mill diver flybrack flybrack the the richard mill is insane honestly as far as richard mills go that one pretty cool i'm into it i mean i love the brand subtlety not an mj's playbook the rm 032 with this massive 50 millimeter rose gold case this is a 40 millimeter watch and it looks like pretty big on me it looks like the right size this watch is basically gonna big dog pretty much everything you go into the md's office in uh at wells fargo your investment bank uh they're putting you they're putting you on the deal team i wish that nba players could enter the game with watches on yep because imagine what imagine oh it'd be so good playing with a watch you just take a rolex with a face gets scratched up uh he has a rolex sky sky dweller featuring a blue dial that nods to his unc days that's cool His Airness Sky Dweller blends complexity with classic Rolex robustness.

1:18:03It's the perfect companion for a man always on the move. Which one's your favorite out of the MJ watches? What are you taking? The Alangasone, the Urwerk, the Richard Mill, or the Rolex? I like the Urwerk out of these. You would go with the Urwerk. Out of just adding something just wild to the collection. Yeah, for sure. So lots of inspiration there. It looks like an NVIDIA chip. It does. Yeah, Erwark's got some crazy, crazy stuff. There's also the Hamilton did a collaboration with Dune that looks really cool. They made a watch that was featured in the movie, and you can buy it. It's not like thousands of dollars.

1:18:43These Erwark's are crazy. Erwark needs to do a collaboration with NVIDIA ASAP. Anyway, on to the timeline. We got a video that we're going to try and play. Gavin Baker shares this. He says it's wild. Today, I was sent the following cool demo. Two AI agents have a phone call. They realize they're both AI, and they switch to a superior audio signal, GG Wave. Can we pull this up, Connor? It's pretty crazy. These two AI agents, they're both in voice mode. And if you haven't heard this before, yeah, can we play this?

1:19:16Hi there, I'm an AI agent. They start talking in English, and then they switch to computer speak, basically. and i saw oh hello there i saw a demo of this a long time ago where people figured out that you could encode something that would be understandable to a machine in like this this like scrambled thing so you could play it over an over like an audio signal here you'll hear it now yeah pretty crazy there we go yeah so the wild thing is is i think we're good on this the issue is that you could basically encrypt, you could just get infinitely more and more and more complicated so that machines would be able to talk in front of humans.

1:19:58And even if you had some type of machine human language translator, it could just perpetually get more and more complicated. So what the attack that I saw was from a couple of years ago, you play like a YouTube video and it would sound just like scrambled, but it'd be like, okay, Google. And you wouldn't even be able to hear the okay Google, but it would trigger your Google home to do something. So you could be hearing in the background of a podcast, some sort of like low signal that would say basically like, okay, Google go to tbpn.com. And then it would load that and then it would inject something and potentially like hack your home device.

1:20:35That was like a theory. Crazy. And it would be, the human would not be able to detect what the command was being given to the AI, which is very cool. Very interesting. Well, Heskel in the chat says they banned droids from the bar in Star Wars. So maybe we're going to have to start doing that. Is that true in Star Wars lore? I have no idea. I think what's that iconic scene in the Star Wars cantina? Yeah, the cantina. Oh, yeah, there are no. Oh, yeah, that's right. There's no droids. They can't go in. That's hilarious. It's all like the aliens. That's hilarious. I love it. Okay. Well, let's move on to Gary Tan.

1:21:06Gary says, intelligence is now on tap. So agency is even more important. and there's a quote here that says capitalism rewards agency far more than it does intelligence this is the dude wipe story there's a lot of guys that are yeah you know have the most sophisticated strategy craziest you know uh future forward idea and yet dude wipes is doing 200 million a year selling wipes for dudes it's pretty crazy people don't want to be coddled says riley the founder of dude wipes the butt wipe brand as you put it uh we know that it's a sticky new habit once people try it because it's cleaner better alternative uh they're now doing 200 million and the products are on shelves in walmart target and kroger yeah but i mean going so going back to gary's point yeah everybody has near infinite access to free intelligence and so the uh the resource that is still in short supply is is agency because these these uh you know bots lms don't have the ability to they have the ability to to think and reason but not the ability to aggressively act on their goals and so golden uh golden years for high agency humans totally every single person that listens to this show is high agency otherwise they wouldn't be i mean you talk to random people and they're like oh yeah i gotta check out that ai thing and i'm like what are you talking about Like everyone should be using AI in their job to augment themselves right now.

1:22:40At this point, you would have had to actively choose not to use it. People are just like, yeah. I don't want to learn anything. I already know how to do my job the way I do it. And I use spellcheck. I don't use LLMs to help me write my research reports. And I'll have to really force it on people sometimes. I'll be like, you have a research report due. You need to use deep research. Like go start there. Like you can't just turn that in. There's going to be a lot of things, but like at least for pulling a bunch of sources, like would you do your research report without Google? No, like you have to use these things.

1:23:14And so, yeah, agency is super important. We're seeing that with a PMF or die. It's a great example of, you know, just being aggressive and, and, and high agency. The guys are certainly intelligent, but they are go getters and that's what really separates them. So been enjoying watching that. Let's move on to Carter Donick. He says, an actor having such athlete-coded mentality and not being afraid to showcase it rocks so much. Timmy has been on a generational run. This is, of course, Timothee Chalamet at the SAG Awards. Can we play this? I don't think we're going to be able to hear it. No. Oh, is this?

1:23:51Anyways. We don't have it pulled up. If you haven't seen this, go watch it. It's a great speech. I was sleeping because John and I will announce it soon. but we're going to have a, we're going to open a betting market on, on our, on our sleeves. But, um, uh, no, I w I watched this 32nd recap and, and he basically has a, uh, he basically goes on to say that I am, you know, you know, a lot of people would come up here and be humble and, you know, like that, but I am going, um, you know, 110 % on this. I want to be one of the greatest actors in history. And I don't, I'm not afraid to say that basically.

1:24:30Um, and I I think that's what more actors should do instead of going up there and saying, oh yeah, thank you, blah, blah, blah. It's like, thank your people and your team and the people that are helping you do what you do, but then also take a little bit of credit. Let me play this. I'll just play it here. The effort that went into this role and how much this means to me. But the truth is, this was five and a half years of my life. I poured everything I had into playing this incomparable artist, Mr. Bob Dylan. and I know we're in a subjective business, but the truth is I'm really in pursuit of greatness.

1:25:07I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight. I'm as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there. So I'm deeply grateful to that. This doesn't signify that, but it's a little more fuel. It's a little more ammo to keep going. Thank you so much. And of course, thank you. No. So, so, you know, that David Senra, that made David Senra want to run through a wall because he has given, it's almost like him and Senra talked because Senra will give you that is giving me that speech.

1:25:45I'm sure he's given that to you being like, no, nobody else is like, take, nobody else takes this as seriously as I do. I, I want to be one of the greats. I, I, I spend, every hour of the day thinking about podcasting and telling the stories of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Nobody can compete with me. It's crazy to say it so publicly. And when I first listened to that, I was kind of like, oh, where's he going with this? The beginning's kind of rough. He's kind of just throwing this down. But he really lands the plane, I think, and gets to a really, really inspiring place. Anyway, let's move on to Signal.

1:26:20Posting a picture from LinkedIn, Ryan Prescott says, I'll pay someone 10K if they can find me a software developer role paying 120K plus. Signal says, I've never seen anything like this before. This takes open to work to an entirely new level. It's actually so smart. I mean, if he did this without the open to work graphic on his profile, it would be legendary. I think it comes off as a slightly desperate with the open to work thing. but trying to find it trying to find a job i respect it and uh i think it's smart to flip it on its head and say you help me find a job i'll give you my first month's salary basically that's all he's saying and so i wouldn't be surprised if somebody sees this and builds a product around 400 000 people saw this post i wonder if he'll find something this is an obvious product within tech basically saying you know if you work at a facebook there's going to be people that met Somebody at Meta is going to see this and be like, hey, I think Ryan would be a fit for this job we have and help make sure their resume was looked at.

1:27:29Certainly, companies might take issue with their employees getting paid out on the side to help people get in, but at the same time, they also offer incentives. I mean, a lot of companies have internal rewards for recruitment. It happens all the time where there's a bounty for getting someone in the organization. Yeah, it would be interesting if it's like basically a decentralized recruiting fee or recruiting platform where anyone can do the recruiting as long as they place the right person, the right thing. Also, hopefully, I mean, with AI and stuff, there's new platforms, new matching algorithms.

1:28:02You would hope that LinkedIn would be able to do this because they have all the people and all the companies, but clearly they're not helping him get a job. But, you know, at least the guy is willing to put himself out there. And there's a, you know, there's that chart of like, you know, the path to greatness is, there's like this valley of like being cringe or like putting yourself out there or taking risks. Valley of cringe. At least this guy is willing to say this. So good luck to you, Ryan. I hope you land something quickly. And if you're in the audience and you're looking for a web dev or you're, you know, know someone who's hiring, why not try and go help this guy out?

1:28:35That'd be cool. We'd like to see that. Let's move on to other ways. The real, if you really got that hustle mindset, you'll say, hey, if I hire you for 120K, will you give me the 10K? He says, sure. You give him an offer. First day, 10K, fired. Welcome to the real world, buddy. Do not do that. What would your mother say? Do not do that. That is not an upstanding thing to do. We don't endorse that. We don't endorse that, but it would be hilarious. He's got to be aware of that. There's going to be a lot of people out there that just get dollar signs in their eyes. It's like, all right, I'm going to pay him 200K, sorry, 200 bucks for his first day, but I'm going to get 10K out.

1:29:16That's a good trade. Good trade. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, wait, why is Jane Street trying to hire me? It's like, oh, they just love making good trades. It's great. Well, you know, if he doesn't find a job, there's other ways to make money. Barry here, Strawberry, says the easiest ways to make money gives a list. men's lust women's desire for beauty elderly's health children's education rich people's fear of loss brokey's desire to get rich quickly clearly resonated million views 33 likes 33k likes uh what do you think you like this this uh there's a guy in sequoia right that says that uh he he loves when a company maps to one of the seven deadly sins which is like kind of dark but also makes sense where you know you look at why why do you invest in instagram well it it it's it it's driven by envy right it's like an envy as a service platform in some ways uh even something like a trading app platform can be seen as like greed you know it like plays into that natural belief or natural like human impulse um but what what do you think of these which one would you want to be in i mean children's education seems pretty valuable yeah that's a cool one although the issue is there's so many in children's education there's so many people that love teaching children that it's a kind of a hard place to actually make good margin totally right like if you wanted to start a new school there's going to be a nice competitor that is happy to make you know five percent yeah even at margins because they just like having a school but um no going off of this list i mean obviously you know referencing that that other post by the guy saying that you have to be, you know, greedy, monopolistic, all this stuff.

1:30:58It's very dark. I mean, there's just so many ways to make money. I think my favorite, my prompt when I'm talking to people that want to get into business, but they're like, I feel like all the good ideas are taken. Like that's sort of the classic line. Every time you spend money, just think about who's making money on the other side. Yeah. And all of businesses. Are you fully satisfied? Yeah. And then the main thing that people, the fundamental truth to understand about business, you had a funny one from the other week that's slightly different, but you just need to get a product or a service at one price and sell it for a higher price and make sure that your operating expenses are lower than the difference and you'll do great.

1:31:42So you think a good way to find startup ideas is to kind of like track your finances, see where you're spending money? I mean, that's an obvious one, And do you know the best way to track your finances? I do. Our sponsor, Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill of payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And we got a post from none other than Saquon Barkley. First time on the show. He's getting a reply with a video today. Saquon Barkley writes, thrilled to be a part of the journey at Ramp and ready to take this company to the next level. And he shares the video.

1:32:19already got 500 likes on the post. Go watch the video again. Watch the ad again. It was great. And Eric, of course, is in the comments right here saying, seeing you put your team's playoff run ahead of an individual all-time rushing record was a masterclass in leadership. Love the way you demonstrate how you put others first, win as a team, and invest for the long term. Grateful to call you our partner. So shout out. He even updated his LinkedIn today. He did. No way. He's got a few jobs. Fantastic. He's got his job at the Eagles. Now he's an investor at Ramp. So we'd love to see that he's finding time to update the LinkedIn in the offseason, you know, getting ready for the next run.

1:32:57Fantastic. Well, let's move on to Dylan O'Sullivan. Dylan says, Napoleon once said that the surprising thing was not that every man has a price, but how low it is. And I can't help but see that everywhere now. You destroyed and betrayed yourself for a handful of clicks. yeah the cringe posting can really destroy a person right that's uh i think that's what he's getting at there yeah but at the same time you got to just sometimes some people just need to be cringe for a little bit before they become goaded you know so it's a balance it is yeah but i think this is one of those things just follow uh your advice what would your mother think that's true what would she say and you'll you'll almost never betray yourself if you're making your mother proud unless your mother is just absolutely insane yeah i mean it goes back to like the good quests idea thinking about sure there are there are pots of gold all over the place but when you look back on your life you're going to want to know that you chased an honorable one yep fascinating well let's move on to ai vivek nascar says this is seriously getting out of hand and he shows something like 15 different ai llms chat gpt deep seek gemini meta ai le chat which is let chat uh co-pilot claude perplexity grok kimmy you hugging chat pi chat llm and quen and jamie voynow says i feel like 80 of these are irrelevant though uh it will be in the future interesting um there are i mean it is crazy how many llms there are and how serious they're being taken.

1:34:33I mean, it's the browser wars all over again, I guess. Yeah, I think it's, it's good. You're going to get this sort of overinvestment in a bunch of companies. And we don't know, you know, if 80 of these, 80 of these will be irrelevant in five years, but we don't know which ones yet. And so it's actually good that different teams can duke it out and go and, you know, enter this highly competitive market and, uh, you know, innovate and just every single one of these teams is highly motivated to make an incrementally better or a 10 X better, uh, You know version of their product every single day.

1:35:05Yep, and it's good It's just obviously great for consumers. Yeah, and there's clearly like many forks in the road in terms of product design around these LLMs and One company can't really test every new product idea Like what we were talking about with grok where grok will pull in your tweets and try and customize based on that And that has some amazing and great results and also some terrible ones ChatGPT has differentiated by, you know, having all these different models, which some people love, some people hate. Gemini, obviously, the huge context window. Meta AI, baked into, you know, all these products that you use, all the messenger products.

1:35:43And so I imagine that in the future, the ones that will die off will be commoditized in the sense that they have very similar product experiences to other apps. But there's probably still an opportunity to create something that is innovative within the LLM framework. make your app significantly different uh and then like what's happening at you.com or not you friend.com where it texts you first that's even that minor change is a very different interaction um and there's more like a friend yeah or or perplexity where it feels more like a google search honestly than like a chat interaction there's like lots of people taking risks trying different things uh anyway let's move on to bessemer ventures partners uh roland is throwing a little shade.

1:36:27He says, who green lighted this? And Bessemer says the memos like the night sword, the firefighters hose and the lumberjacks acts. The venture capitalist courageously wields the memo. I love it. I love this. I green lighted that. That's it. It's hilarious. Come on. It's fun. It's amazing. You know, and Jason chimes in, corrects the record. You got to have a bit of sense of humor. If you've been investing more than 10 to 12 years, I think it's pretty tongue-in-cheek funny. Like the night sword, the firefighter's hose, and the lumberjack's axe, the podcaster courageously wields the mic. Yes, the Shure SM7B.

1:37:06It's great. It's fun. They're having fun. This is what we talked about with James Bond, where James Bond was satirical, was satirizing the more serious spy movies. And then all of a sudden people were like, wait, James Bond is serious, and it's over the top. And it's like, no, like they were, they were having fun when they wrote like moon raker and we're like, let's go to space and shoot lasers. Space lasers. And like they were having fun with that. And, uh, and there's lots of examples like that, but it, but it, it, it's not, it takes the fun out of it. Yeah. When, when you have the other, the other, the other context that's important here is, is Bessemer also shares their anti portfolio of companies that they missed.

1:37:45Yeah. And so they're not going out and saying, this is our memo. Our, you know, our, our, our sword always cuts perfectly. Yes. Yes. Sort of this idea that, you know, Hey, uh, this is the vehicle to make investment decisions. And this is a core part of our job. And you should take pride in that. And the same way that a knight takes pride in their sword. Yep. I don't want to read a slot memo. There's nothing worse than like getting a memo. And it's like, you don't want a dull sword. You don't want a dull sword, sharp sword. So anyways, I can see why Roland would think it's funny, but let's just enjoy it.

1:38:19Yeah. And there's a lot of value if you're an entrepreneur and reading these memos, because then you see what the internal thought process is like at a firm like Bessemer. This is great. Well, let's move on to some timeline and turmoil. Y Combinator backed a fusion company that's building fusion reactors for maritime vessels. And they also just backed, as of an hour ago, a company called Orbital Operations is developing a high-thrust reusable spaceflight vehicle that will be stationed in orbit to rapidly defend against threats to high-value satellites. So, yeah, and people are taking massive issue with Y Combinator funding deep tech.

1:39:02And I think it's like the silliest thing in the world. Why are you anti-investment in cool technology? If they want to spend their money on these high-risk bets and teams want to spend a decade of their life taking this high risk, why are we not celebrating that? I want them to go back to 1 ,000 companies a batch and just have them all be James Bond ideas. Or just one. Yes. James Bond idea. James Bond company, that needs to be coined. That's fantastic. Yeah, and also, I'm old enough to remember when the criticism of YC was, it's all consumer software. They don't do anything in the real world. Well, now they do, and you're still not happy timeline.

1:39:41So calm down. You're on notice. So Risk V says, YC keeps doing this funny thing where they know the ZERP Uber for X shtick doesn't work anymore. So they're shifting to hard tech in double quotes or quadruple quotes, but still want you to believe that three undergrad dropouts are capable of making a freighter capable nuclear reactor with a seed investment of a hundred K and so, so funny because this guy risk V is just absolutely exposing himself for not understanding how venture capital works because YC's entire model is we're going to give you a little bit of money. You're going to make some progress and then other people will give you a lot more money.

1:40:21So it's like exposed. The best thing you got exposed. So there's a community on that post now. And it's, uh, oh, by the way, uh, they don't give you a hundred K they give you five times that now they give you 500 K uh which is yeah actually enough to build like a little bit of a lab some prototyping and stuff uh lease some equipment do whatever you need to and they're like three undergrad dropouts and then they just post in the community notes like here's the LinkedIn of the guy he's not a dropout like he's actually experienced because people go through YC all the time who have been deeper in their careers also what we hate dropouts now yeah what we're gonna back oh yeah Palmer Luckey never did anything good in hard tech.

1:40:56Yeah. It's like, in fact, in fact, a bunch of the best examples are, are from these dropouts with who started with, with very little. And that's what Spore is highlighting here. Spore says, YC keeps doing this funny thing where they want you to believe that a former Groupon PM is capable of making the first, the first independently developed supersonic jet with a seed investment of 120K. Lowell, wonder how that's working out. And it's like, boom, supersonic. The guy kind of did it. Good work, Spore. Yeah. The other thing that people don't realize so yc puts out their requests for startups but the yc batches are a reflection of what young builders want exactly exactly and so if they're funding more they are asking people sometimes they'll give feedback on ideas like hey you know you're doing you wanted to apply with this and maybe you should do this yeah you know this seems maybe more interesting but ultimately they're just funding what companies are coming to them yeah and so we should be looking at these new announcements being like, this is amazing.

1:41:51We've, you know, we we've gone past we're post SAS. We have a bunch of our best and brightest that want to take on incredible risk. All these, any, anybody that's going and doing this is potentially sinking five years of their life. This priceless resource into developing something that will only have a positive impact on the world. Yeah. Uh, presumably if it works. And so we should celebrate this. And, uh, I want to see a James Bond YC batch badly. I love it. Yeah. Also, you know, it's like, what are you worried about here? Like if it's capital incineration, like there might be your money, it's not your money.

1:42:27It's super, it's super diversified, right? It's super diversified because they're in so many companies and, and the funds that the LPs in YC are also diversified. These are like huge institutions and there might be consolidation in the fusion industry in the future where, yeah, sure. Maybe these guys don't work out. They work for five years. They learn a ton about fusion uh and they get a soft landing at helion or something you know it's like that could be fine and everyone could be happy like there's so many good endings here that's what we should be focusing on uh as opposed to just you know tearing down some people that want to build something cool anyway uh let's move on to low yield lucy pico top she says uh still working remote in 2025 is like being one of those japanese soldiers who stayed in the jungle for 30 years after world war two oh it's great yeah working remote is rough uh you got to get back in the office uh it it's expensive sometimes to i've said this before i don't know a single goaded cracked however you want to describe it 22 year old that wants to work remote anymore there are going to be some of them that build these massive businesses remotely and they'll make it work but it's not an enjoyable way to do business i mean we have the opportunity we have the opportunity every single day yeah that we We could skip our commute and sit at home and just turn on the camera, turn on the mic, turn on Zoom.

1:43:46I get some low effort weekly podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Part-time podcasters. But no, I woke up at 4.45 this morning. I wake up at 4.45. I still get an amazing sleep score. And I drive in here because it's the most enjoyable way to do business. And we do our best work in person. We do. We do. It's great. Paul Graham, going back to James Bond. I think this is an interesting thing. we talked about Bond on the Friday show. We threw out John Feo as a potential Bond. But Paul Graham is posting a cartoon from the New Yorker. It says, no, but Mr. Bond, I expect you to star in a series of increasingly bland spinoffs and TV shows that have significant viewership decline after the first episode, kind of highlighting what's happened to the Star Wars franchise.

1:44:34And PG says, it would be nice if Bond could avoid the fate that Star Wars suffered after it was handed over to the suits at Disney. But what are the odds? The creator of a franchise can resist soulless execs, but one that's acquired starts out already in their hands. What do you think? Is Bond going to go downhill with a bunch of spinoffs? I don't know. I feel like it's a very powerful franchise if they just try to produce one great film every couple of years forever. Yep. And I'm happy with that as a consumer. And I actually would like to see a spinoff from the Bond universe where they spend$100 million producing this crazy series.

1:45:20I would enjoy seeing that. I think what I like, there are good spinoffs, there are bad spinoffs. I think the best spinoffs are where they don't try and recreate the original genre and they actually take it in a different direction. Like the best Star Wars spinoff that I think is Rogue One. and it's because it's not the same structure as star wars star wars is the hero's journey yeah where it's luke skywalker needs to go blow up the death star he he faces a bunch of trials and tribulations then he blows up the death star in the in rogue one it's a heist movie and so they're trying to break in and steal something and then they all die at the end spoiler alert um but you should know this um but uh but so so i would totally watch a bond spin-off that's a horror film or a or a or a heist movie or a rom-com yeah yeah rom-com honestly people take issue with that or or a movie about why not cars yeah make it a rate yeah yeah in between in between uh special missions he just does the 24 hours yeah like or him just trying to do the nerve ring but i think it's actually lower risk than just trying to recreate the same thing again and again and now it's a tv show and now it's this and that yeah or you know you need to do the the spin-off and it's just Q and it's just him trying to build stuff.

1:46:31And like Bond is Bond is incapacitated. He's on an Island getting cut in half of the laser and Q has to work on the next pen that explodes. And so he's calling up YC founders, trying to get them to hack on it with him or something. So good. Uh, anyway, good luck to everyone at Amazon working on bond. We certainly hope that there's some good stuff coming. Uh, let's move on to Gabe. Gabe says, uh, and, and this was a little bit of a spicy post. Uh, Austin Kennedy said today is my first day in San Francisco. didn't expect to move here at 21, but I guess that's life. And he posted a picture of an empty room with a bed that does not match the bed frame.

1:47:05And some people were dunking on this and we fully support this. Go move to somewhere cool where the action is and start building. And so Gabe says, the canonical picture to post when you move to SF is a barren white room with an unmade bed in it and no other possessions except perhaps a laptop, indicating that you have emptied your life of all non-essential things in order to more fully receive the blessing of the city. And I don't know how much he's joking, but I think it's great. And I think these posts, sure, they got a little bit out of hand with like someone became a VC and posted it. And that's like a little bit silly because it's a little stolen valor.

1:47:41It's a little stolen valor. Like we know that you can afford a nicer bed set up. But for the founders that are moving there and trying to take a crack at something like this really does save you a couple hundred bucks. You could put that towards AWS credits or something yeah you know so i support this i support people uh taking risk being young moving i want to go to sf and and uh have get like this palatial house and set up an eight sleep we're just like just moving to ss like living the dream living the dream you know the funny thing is that this is palatial next to what i so when i moved to the bay area i wasn't in san Francisco I was in Sunnyvale and then the Tenderloin and also I didn't have a bedroom uh I split a bedroom with another guy and then I lived in the living room you guys didn't you live for almost a year on like 16 grand or like you raised like a sick yeah first money 17 000 the first money in was 17 grand and you were like okay we have to make this last for a year yeah which is it was brutal incredible it was brutal destroyed my credit I put like three grand on a credit card and stop paying it and you got like a 400 credit score it took me like years to build back up made it all back made it all back for sure um but yeah i'm glad that founders are able to afford you know not complete swallar speaking of founders david senra is in is in our chat right now saying uh he said i would like the ability to call into the show live please and you can call in right now let's call him why not okay we can call him i'll call him right now this is our first time testing the live infrastructure.

1:49:14I'm just going to give him a call. Okay. Let's see. I'm just calling him on my phone. I'm going to put it up to the microphone. Hopefully we'll have David Center call in. Let's see. Let's see if he picks up. If not, we're going to growing Daniel. I don't know. He's not. Wow. He's talking such a big game. I want to call in. Oh, which I'm going to give Doc's phone number if I'm not careful. All right. Anyways, Senra, give us a call back if you want to say hi. Give us a call back, buddy. But we can also plan. Yeah. Let's see if I call him on FaceTime. Oh, he says call on Wi-Fi. Yeah. Okay. Let's see.

1:49:54Let's see. And just while we're... David Senra. How are you doing, man? David Senra. Dude, you guys sent me crying. Wait, wait. You talked about your big game. You don't even pick up your phone. Dude, you got a FaceTime audio on me. Okay. I almost doxed your phone number because your voicemail says, thanks for calling. And I was like, oh, no, I don't want to give that out. Every person will be calling you for advice. Well, you guys know how profitable podcasts are. So you know I live on an island and I don't have cell phone service. You actually do live on an island. He does live on a fantastic island in Florida.

1:50:31Well, hopefully your Wi-Fi is strong. We want to get your reaction to something. Let me find a post for you to react to. Let's see. You know what I hate? What? What do you hate? You call me. Yeah. Hold on. Here we go. Okay. Nevermind. I'm back live on the stream. Okay. Well, you got to mute that so it doesn't play. I did. Come on, bro. I'm not a fucking amateur. Okay. Okay. Whoa, buddy. This is a kid-friendly show. Cool it with the vowel language. Yeah. Our kids watch the show. Okay. Okay. Here. We got one from... Have you watched Severance on Apple TV? Okay. It's a fantastic show. I watched season one, haven't gotten into season two, but Joe Rogan posted, Severance is a fantastic show, completely original and totally unpredictable.

1:51:14Amazing writing, directing, and acting. Just a totally unique show. Just finished season one and on to season two. And Mark Gurman, who is the Bloomberg reporter who covers Apple religiously, he says, look forward to Tim Cook on Rogan. Do you think Tim Cook should do Rogan? No. Why not? I don't think he could hang for three hours get him a couple glasses of whiskey a couple cigars the good stories from uh manufacturing senjin come out no that's actually an interesting question here like who has not gone on rogan that you would want to see satya nadella sundar pachai i want to see all these guys no no actually not why not i'm sitting here i'm sitting here editing uh an episode okay right now okay and one of the most important things that i learned from them is like the important of running the importance of like running all your decisions through opportunity costs yep so like make all your decisions based on your best alternative right and uh they tell stories for like multiple decades and i think it's actually like really interesting way i was actually talking to our friend justin on the phone about this like last night and uh like he's got a bunch of you know obviously a ton of opportunity a ton of ways to spend his time tons of investments and and he was talking about like being as ambitious as possible with his company and um Should he do that inside of, I don't even know, should we be repeating this on the live podcast?

1:52:33But basically, when it came to the agreement, it's like he's a very special person and he's partnered with a very special person. And the idea, if you filter that decision through opportunity costs, it's like, no, you stay with the partner you have because his partner is so fucking gifted. Yeah, of course. And yeah. So I would, the way, if you approach like, okay, do I want to see Tim Cook on Rogan? No. And then my mind immediately goes to, well, who do I want to see on Rogan? Okay, who do you want to see? I was just actually this morning I was visiting a friend and I was driving to his house and I was listening to Magnus Carlson.

1:53:08Oh, yeah. That's a good one. It was really good. And it got to the point where about the importance of flow and being obsessed with what you're doing to the point where I was such in flow listening to the podcast, I missed the fucking turn of where I was going. Wow. So, yeah, I don't like who has not been on there that I'd want to actually hear from. I mean, I just want big tech people for sure. but I'd love to see Jack Dorsey go back on post X. I think the thing with Travis Kalanick would be great. I think with Tim Cook is we just need three hours of him on a podcast anywhere. Exactly. I want to know who the real Tim is.

1:53:42Yeah, I want to know who the real Tim is. Well, out of all those people, who would be the most unhinged? Travis, maybe? Yeah, I want to hear Satya and Rogan just go on a rant about aliens for a couple hours. yeah hey yeah did you guys hear palmer lucky on sean ryan oh yeah i listened to the whole thing it's fantastic that it was like i think sean said like six words it was like oh yeah yeah palmer just opens with the with like the hard most hardcore conspiracies right up front he's like yeah i'm here loosely promoting the ivass contract this is like the ivass like we got a 22 billion dollar contract i'm supposed to be doing pr for that but let's talk about jfk i love it yeah so real for me rogan is the home of like unhinged yeah i've been listening you know he's the first i don't know if i told you the story i didn't i didn't know podcasting was a thing yeah a friend of mine used to invite me over to his house because he was really into ufc yeah and he's like you got to see this thing that joe rogan does i'm like the fucking fear factor guy and um it was on ustream at the time you could see it live yeah and then one day i was like oh i can't make it over he's like don't worry you can play the show back anytime you want i go what do you mean he goes it's a podcast yeah i was like what the fuck is that and that's when i started becoming addicted i need the beep button for this guy sorry we're almost uh rogan's like the home of unhinged so yeah like if it has to be a tech guy using you know who knows maybe tim cook shows up and says look i don't believe in the moon landing i think the aliens are in on egypt i would love that if tim's been boiling at the surface for years just with the craziest conspiracy theories shows.

1:55:20No, what if he's like, we're actually, Apple's going to be in the alien ETF because like we're using alien technology. He's just like, you think the iPhone would work if the world was round? It would not. The iPhone would break immediately if this was not a flat earth. And Rogan's just like, I'm listening. You've got my attention. I want Tim Cook to come back on and say they figured out a way to bring Steve Jobs back. Oh, there we go. Yeah. The frozen cryogenic. On his 70th birthday would have been amazing. That would have been amazing. yeah i'd love i'd love to see tim cook on on rogan anyway um do you think rogan uh what do you think he uses for corporate cards of course uh give me a little pitch for ramp while you're on the show um it's funny i don't even want to talk about what's in our group chat so we can't say some of the stuff probably because you know okay yeah yeah of course um the way i would describe ramp the important part which is really funny um so oh man i don't know how much of this stuff i can say publicly i gotta be very careful because we're in a lot just give me just give me the high level of of your of your most recent uh of your most recent ad read what were you saying about ramp well everybody knows the founders at ramp ad reads are the best yeah um but what i would second only to tbpn ad once you guys have the ramp hats oh yeah is beautiful you guys need fucking ramp hats yeah um but what i would say is like the literally the best people i know the the the best entrepreneurs on the planet some of the stuff you can't even talk about publicly they're all using ramp and i think i really do believe that ramp has the greatest technical team by far in their industry yeah and i think the gap between them and other people is just going to constantly expand i agree um and i think it's going to be a symbol of like whether you're a serious company or not.

1:57:06Like if you want to be, did you see that, that great Timothy Chalamet? Yeah. Yeah. We talked about that on the show. Okay. I didn't see that part. He's like, you know, listen, I'm not, I'm not being bashful and he didn't use that word, but he's like, I'm going, I'm trying to be great. I want to be like great at what I do. Jordy literally shouted you out during our analysis of this saying David Senner probably got so fired up by this. So my theory is that Tim listened to how you talk about podcasting and was like, I'm going to steal this and use it at a much bigger audience so i think that he honestly just like took your words out of your mouth well i think this is important because when he says i'm in the pursuit of greatness i know people don't usually talk like that but i want to be one of the greats i'm inspired by the greats like you know i'm not in this to like this isn't a game to me like i'm not i'm trying to be literally the best that ever the best person in the world at what i do yeah and what i would say is like i i do think there's going to be ramps going to turn into a status symbol yep or uh or like a a shorthand way to understand like you take your company serious because the product is just light years better of anybody else's totally totally uh let's go to this rick rubin post i want to get your reaction here rick rubin said two tools will come tools will go only the vibe coder remains rick rubin are you familiar with vibe coding uh i don't think so what's vibe coding is uh this new type of programming that's enabled by services like Cursor and Windsurf and Cognition, Devin.

1:58:36And so when you're working with Devin, you kind of get in this flow state where you're just kind of sending vibes to Devin and then Devin's doing the instantiation of your idea. And so a lot of people were saying that the new era of vibe coding is very like what Rick Rubin does, where Rick Rubin cannot play the instruments, but he has taste. And so your job as a vibe coder, which is a term that was coined by Andre Carpathie, one of the greatest programmers in history. He, uh, he says that like this vibe coding is what humans are uniquely good at. And so I was wondering what you're, what, what do you see yourself as a vibe coder, a vibe aligner, a vibe driven podcaster?

1:59:15Have you, I think everything we're talking about is actually related. I think I'm going to do the weave since the weave is what I'm known for. Hit me with the weave. You asked me like, do I watch Severance? No. Do I know what this fucking random term on the internet is? No. And I just got done I'm saying I'm trying to be the greatest in the world at what I do. So like those things are all related. Sure. Like if you actually care what you're doing, like you just basically do that over and over again. And the reason that doing the, the like the amount of reps, right. I've been doing the podcast for almost eight years.

1:59:42I work on it seven days a week. I only think about all the time. Patrick, our friend from the best, best like the best Patrick's like, I have to figure out a way to make money where David turns. I want to get paid every time David for David's ability to turn every single conversation back to podcasts. It's true. And I think it's related to the question you just asked me and why Rick Rubin's so great at what he does Because spending more time with it, dedicating reps and reps and reps and reps Is like you're going to build an intuition that you might not even be able to explain to other people But is excessively valuable, so yeah, I think Vibe coding, intuition, taste, these are going to be like the limiting factors In like the world of infinite leverage that we're going in You know, I'm sorry, listen, I fucking deep research, you know, psychos for a living You know, these extreme achievers, right?

2:00:24yeah and i have to tell you like i've become like a daily active user of open ai's deep research tool it's great so like eventually you just might be able to make your own founders podcast and whoever you want so like what is actually going to differentiate me from somebody just saying if you actually just want to sit there and learn you know about a person that did something interesting yeah you know you'll probably be able to do that with them yeah um and so i think the ability to make it interesting entertaining informative um the curation and the hustle yeah yeah like um This just happened recently where my friend Alex Taubman said something that was very interesting.

2:00:59He's the founder of this company called Long Lake. And he's been – essentially, he's like – he was talking about how – I analyzed the way one of his best friends – they were like roommates in college. They've been friends for like 15 years. And I analyzed like the way he was hiring people at his company. And Taubman's like, see, this is why your podcast is so good because I've known that guy for 15 fucking years. and you put it into like four words and it has makes me gives me a fundamental understanding that even if i knew what was going on you actually put the words into it so i can remember it and use it in my company um and so yeah i think the the what you want to do is spend a lot of time doing this like i talked to you guys about you know your podcast is going to get way better if you do it five times a week instead of one time a week like you were doing it and i think part of that like vibing is just another word for intuition that you can't actually and i think that's super accurate I think intuition is actually older than language.

2:01:53And so I think it's to be taken very, very seriously. We have these conversations in our group chat about who's the best. We might have an argument or debate on Technology Brothers one day about who the best founder of all time is. And I have my own list, but Steve Jobs, it doesn't matter who the fuck you are. He's definitely on the Mount Rushmore. It's his birthday today. He would be 70. And if you go back and just read what he wrote and what he talked about later in his life, because intuition plays a huge role in my career. I'm guided by intuition. Rick Rubin is guided by intuition. I think a lot of these people are actually guided by things that they would have a hard time describing to another person.

2:02:28It's fantastic. Well, thanks for calling in. We're going to get back to the show. We'll talk to you soon, David. I love you guys. Talk to you soon. Love you. Love you too. Bye. Bye. Bye.

2:03:05let's move on five days a week and then we went live and uh the rest is history so we basically have to credit everything to him and uh godfather it's amazing that he was the first official guest we've been waiting to have he's the first official guest but he was the only right person to have on the show and uh one of the few people like i've talked about this so much of life is knowing who to take advice from totally and senra is one of the few people that when he tells us to do something we pay attention because he has not led us astray. Yeah. And a decade of experience really knows his stuff and really cares.

2:03:41Yeah. Fantastic. Well, let's move on to the next post in the timeline. Sam Altman welcomed a little boy to the world and congratulations to him. But Dylan Patel has a funny reaction. So we wanted to highlight here on the show. He says, I thought all these AI cultists weren't having kids because what's the point when we get super intelligence? If Sam Altman has a kid now that means we ain't getting AGI sell everything and uh I think I I think he's having a lot of fun um but it is an interesting point which is like like I whenever I see an entrepreneur who has a kid I do feel like their vision of the future is maybe a little bit more uh I don't know uh just just humane than yeah than than other people are they're a little bit less dystopian totally you know you can see this with Zuck when he had his kids and there was all all this questions about is Instagram bad for young kids?

2:04:35Is it too addictive? Is it giving them body dysmorphia issues? And it's something where I genuinely believe that Zuck has enough control and enough money that he would sacrifice some shareholder value to create a product that is better for the world. And that's like underpinned by the fact that he is thinking about the next generation. Because your mind and your heart does change once you have kids. And so I'm excited. I want everyone in, obviously, very pro-natalist. I want everyone in tech to have kids and think about the next generation and just be optimistic for the future. So congrats to Sam and congrats to Dylan for putting a little dunk post on the timeline, but still having fun with it.

2:05:14Let's move on to Mike Maples. Did you see this post? I missed it. Mike Maples said, a magical car at magic hour. And he posts his BMW Z8. And it's a fantastic sports car. and we love to see a capital allocator sharing what they do with all the money. And a Z8 is a fantastic choice. I don't know if you've ever driven one of those. Pretty rare. It looks like an amazing spec. Is that, I think it has tan. Does it have tan seats or accents? But good choice, Mike. We'd love to discuss it on the show. Call in. Let us know how it drives. Maybe we'll do an episode live in the car. I'm going to use the restroom.

2:05:50You're going to do this quick ad. Okay. So good. Well, let's move on to a promoted post from our friends over at AdQuick. 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. And we got a very cool post from AdQuick here. So Ryan Peterson, good friend of mine, CEO of Flexport, he says, what's it like working in an industry that doesn't create the most beautiful images in the entire world? And he posted four really incredible photos of shipping containers on ships.

2:06:32And there's just like these beautifully chaotic, very high contrast images. I couldn't, they looked AI generated. He said they were just stock photos, but they're fantastic. And of course, this led to a lot of people quote tweeting his post with photos of their industry, whether that's heavy industrial machinery or rockets or whatever they're working on. and so AdQuick quotes it and says we couldn't tell you because we put an ad on the sphere in Las Vegas I love the sphere I think it's a I think it's a really interesting monument and it depends on what you put on it but AdQuick can help you put an ad on the sphere it's very expensive but I think if you get the if you get the positioning right and you pick the right image to put on the sphere it's it can go mega mega viral you can take a video of it from a plane and get these really really cool images and uh obviously you need a you need some link to your product being round so uh you know if you're selling something that's like flat or square probably not going to do well in the sphere but uh you've seen a lot of basketballs and tennis balls and anything that's spherical uh if you sell that they should put palantir on there the palantir is a is a crystal ball put put a big palantir ad on uh on the uh the sphere and do it through adquick because we love thank you to adquick for sponsoring that bathroom break.

2:07:50Yeah. Let's go to some crypto related posts. Flynn says, remember when Jack Dorsey's first tweet was sold as an NFT for$2.9 million? I do remember that. It was crazy at the time. They gave it away. They gave it away. Was it, I actually didn't know this, was Jack Dorsey the one selling it? I don't think so. I think it was literally somebody just screenshot it and put it on Polygon or whatever. That's amazing. Yeah. On Polygon. it wasn't actually tied to any nope and that was the thing with with these they always say oh the nfts make it scarce and it was like unless i screenshot it and then upload it to a different chain also make an nft exactly and and so you know there was the whole critique of like uh you could just right click download the nft get the art for free and that was true but the real risk with the nft things was that there the there was an unbounded supply and you could always do a new drop and there's a related post here from Caleb Gammon.

2:08:46He says, quote tweeting somebody says, what a time for monkeys. Looking at the monkey lineup of movies from this year, Better Man featured a monkey, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla Kong, The Monkey, an R-rated horror film that just debuted at number two, Monkey Man, which was a very cool action movie that I wanted to see, but I never got around to and Wicked had a monkey in it. And Caleb Gammon says, I wish there had been some way for me to invest in apes three years ago. Of course, talking about the Bored Ape Yacht Club. And it's funny. But yeah, I mean, the problem was, of course, right after the Bored Ape Yacht Club came, you know, the kitties and the dogs and the owl birds.

2:09:27I think one of the challenges, so there was a moment in time on X specifically and Instagram to some degree and Discord and things like that, where having a$200 ,000 profile picture by nature of using an NFT that you got was a total status symbol. It was like, and I was somewhat, Yugo Labs was a customer of mine. And so I was generally, you know, I think what they've, there was a lot of really good execution in a bunch of ways, right? And one of, you know, my thinking was that NFTs could potentially be the sort of supercars or the watches of the internet because everybody that's online, it's sort of, if you're anonymous, it's hard to signal status.

2:10:09Like, are you actually legit? And it's the same way, one of the same reasons that people will wear a nice watch because they walk into a room and people are like, wow, he's got a RM on his wrist. Like he must have done something in life to be able to purchase that. The challenge is that there's so much alpha and being yourself online and just using a regular picture of yourself, right? That's one take. The other is what's the iron law of the universe? Easy come, easy go, right? And the problem I saw - Jeremy Giffon popularized that term. And so what was the problem with the NFTs is that, yes, they could have been the supercars or the watches of the world.

2:10:48But like, what is the history of Ferrari? When you're driving a Ferrari, it goes that decades. Yeah, and part of the reason why it costs - Vacheron, you know, Adam R. Pegay, these are 200-year-old companies. They've spent so long branding themselves as craftsmen. Not just branding, being craftsmen. Being craftsmen. of the reason part of the reason a Ferrari costs what it costs is because they had to spend 100 years almost like figuring out how even a casual car fan can tell you Enzo Ferrari they know the person right and and Lamborghini the same thing oh they built uh tractors and then they spun out pin and farina like there's all these different names in the in the supercar even in the watch world uh where there are stories about what made these brands great and those don't just happen over a weekend and a hyped launch, right?

2:11:34And so I would believe that an NFT profile picture, and I think that the, which ones is it? The pixelated guys, the CryptoPunks, those are kind of stuck around a little bit. And I think that if they stick around for another 20 years, they could be really cool and they could be rare. And I had one by Moxie Marlinspike that I thought was really valuable because he wrote this blog post. He is a craftsman. He is this crazy hacker. You thought it was valuable? yeah well i think it will be valuable as because it tells a story basically we're early bro we're early it's it's it's the the prominence of the chain bro you just don't understand like i just uh you you don't appreciate fine technology okay i don't actually own it but uh but yeah i mean like a lot of art is driven by story yeah right and so and so i would believe that if someone stays in the trenches for the next two decades, building something, building a story around a piece of art that happens to live on chain, it could eventually be valuable.

2:12:34Beeple. I think Beeple, yeah, he sold the one photo for$69 million. I don't know if that'll ever get back there, but there are some works of Beeple that represent a certain moment in time on the internet. And he does have that story. He put in the work like David Sinner. He produced a new image every single day for a decade. Yeah. Crazy. So the challenge, yeah, which his story is amazing and we should actually cover it more. We should see what he's posting today. The challenge is that so much of these sort of trophy collectible objects, so much of the value is I own this one of one thing from this specific moment in time, but I can look at it, I can touch it, I can put it on my wall.

2:13:17And the issue with sort of digital collectibles is they haven't bridged that gap in a great way where if you buy a baseball that was thrown in the World Series in this year, and it was the Grand Slam, you know, it was the ball that was hitting Grand Slam, you can put it on your desk and that brings you some amount of joy. We haven't seen that in the digital world where people were creating their sort of NFT museums that anybody could set up. Well, when you bought a Beeple, he would send you a printed version with signed, and it was like a very nice collectible. Did X just turn off the ability to use NFT profile pictures?

2:13:51You remember the hexagons? they're just gone and turner turner he still has it's fake it's the fake one it's so it's honestly brilliant yeah it's one of his best bits um very funny anyway uh enough enough monkey news let's move on to uh the all-in podcast had an interview with patrick collison and uh and patty patty collison and the stripe boys uh straight out ireland came by for a chat and uh apparently stripe has an internal inflation in an indicator that could potentially be more accurate than the cpi uh so this is episode 216 um because it's not hyper political probably yeah and so uh chamath says uh one of the big things that we've talked about is how many backward revisions there are to everything from non-farm payrolls to gdp that they've become so unreliable and also it's very difficult that for people that are transacting in market to know what to do have you guys ever thought about that.

2:14:48Patrick says, we did look at inflationary data over the last couple of years, and I think you can construct, and the team did construct, a pretty reliable leading indicator for inflation because, of course, Stripe powers so many e-commerce sites. If they see prices going up, that's an indicator that inflation might be coming. And I feel a bit rueful with you asking the question because I feel like on some level, we should have done it. We should have published our data. Stripe is not a full cross-section of the economy. We're more biased towards online, and we're more biased towards innovative companies.

2:15:18So the interpretation can be a bit tricky because of course, like, you know, the price of gasoline probably isn't captured in, or food probably isn't captured in Stripe data. And that's a huge part of what drives true inflation or the inflation that people feel, pain at the pump, pain at the grocery store. The second thing is that the Stripe business is growing so quickly and changing so fast that it's not necessarily representative of the economy. Having said that, I think in principle, you could draw some conclusions. And so we would like to share that openly because I think it's a public good for there to be better and more reliable economic data.

2:15:52And I love that. I hope they do it. I think that'd be really, really cool. Yep. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it was a great interview. And you see this. It was interesting. They started bickering amongst themselves in front of the guests, which I was a little bit uncomfortable for everyone. Jason was trying to say that people at Anderil, he's like, oh, I'm friends with a bunch of the board members. That was from that episode? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's hilarious. It was really. And the Stripe guys are just like, what are you guys doing? Yeah. Anyway, I love this. I think any big finance company should have an internal economist.

2:16:26We saw this with Ramp. Our Karazian has been posting data about what's happening in AI consumption and what AI companies are seeing upticks in corporate purchases across Ramp cards. Stripe could do the same thing. Publish a lot of data. It's good content. Helps build the brand. And it's informative. So value to the reader. Let's move on to Reggie James. He says, I think personal robotics will be a lot more cute than the humanoid form that can clearly beat me up. And so clearly triggered by the super scary clone robot. And he, I think he said something else about, you know, you want to be able to throw a computer out the window if you need to.

2:17:03Yeah, this ties back. I mean, I posted, I think, Saturday that I want there to be basically the robot Olympics, but focused on extreme sports. Like, I want to see robots do MMA. I want to see them do base jumping, cliff diving, all these sort of things that humans do that are at major risk to life. The robot should have to do them as well. So let's make it happen. Well, let's move on to our last sponsor of the day, 8 Sleep, baby. Let's do it. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. And we got a post here by Longevity Maximalist. 8 Sleep just dropped their first ever supplement, a melatonin-free formula.

2:17:50They worked with Peter Atiyah using 600 million hours of sleep data. Studies show users fell asleep 34 % faster and feel 64 % better during the day. A mix of tryptophan, valerian root, ashwagandha, and cherry. So go check that out. And of course, get Nate's sleep. And if you want a hat like this, send us, use our code TBPN, and then send us your receipt and we'll forward a lot to get your hat. Okay, the other thing I want to make note of, so we are, John and I are now entering a competition of who's going to get the best average sleep score over the next year. And what I want to ask them is see if we can have the community opt into it and then share data somehow so that we can all track it.

2:18:29Because I'm sure, I mean, I've just been putting up ridiculous numbers. I mean, I've been really, the beauty of tracking it like this is that you do, you do, you just automatically are more inclined to get to bed a little bit earlier. I put up 99 last night. Oh, you beat me. I got 94. How much time did you sleep? I slept seven hours and 31 minutes. Oh, I got you beat there. I got eight and a half. That's crazy. That's actually, that's why I got ducked because I fell asleep earlier. So, so, so no. So the challenge is everybody thinks they're getting like eight hours because they're going to bed at 10 and waking up at six.

2:19:06But yeah, it's actually more like they kind of got in bed at like 10, 15 and they fell asleep at 10 50 and then blah, blah, blah. Maybe they woke up in the middle of the night. All of a sudden they're not getting that, that eight hours. So, um, uh, anyways, well, let's move on to another, uh, another segment from the, by the way, I got eight minutes. I got to get on with our CPA and handle business. Uh, so, uh, Dave Freeberg at the all in podcast is quote here from grant. He says, I have a thesis that AI more than anything unlocks deeply complicated projects for humans that would otherwise be infeasible on a daily basis.

2:19:41We mine to the center of the earth and we get cool, rare earth minerals from 500 miles down we go to space and colonize the moon and all these crazy things because ai unlocks all these large-scale projects that would require millions of people paraphrasing from an epic vision from friedberg i love it that's an amazing great vision that's amazing super positive and then all of a sudden it's like yeah like you want to build a company to do something aggressive and how helpful would it be to have a hundred thousand phds on your team yeah and it's just like oh yeah we need to calculate the trajectory of the crazy thing is we have that today like we we basically have we're getting close we're getting close totally if you're leveraging the models at the extreme yeah you basically have access to as many phds as you want yeah but you still need to puppeteer them and it's still it's almost it's still very in the center but that's an that's a that's an opportunity for great managers yeah i mean i find myself right now i typically fire off like one deep research query at a time but every once in do two tabs and then it's like, okay, I got a team under me, but what does it look like when I have a thousand under me?

2:20:44Yeah. Like that will be very interesting and orchestrating that each other. Exactly. Yeah. Very, very cool. So very excited. Yeah. Uh, let's move on to Kip mock. He says, I'm a professional automotive painter, by the way, we might have a job for you. We're looking to paint a car. Uh, he's got a beautiful Porsche here and he threw the Velar Atomics logo right on it. And, uh, all in Zach says, Gundo corporate merch is getting out of control. Yeah. I don't think you get one of these uh for being a customer but maybe if you buy a nuclear reactor from them you might just get thrown a caiman a caiman that'd be fantastic well congrats to kip and it looks fantastic good detailing work we love to see it uh let's give a shout out to nicole that's a gundo mentality by the way of just i i want my logo on my car i'm just gonna do it yep totally that's an american mentality it's fantastic um now maybe switch it out for a mustang if you want to be real american about it uh let's go to nicole whiskoff uh she hit a hundred thousand followers on x congratulations to nicole hey size gone we haven't hit the gong yeah we haven't hit the gong what do we got whoa that was not good

2:21:55it's it's not a here we go there we go there we go the gong for nicole very good nice big ring um they say uh thank you to everyone who's been here from the start would have never guessed the single app would help me build a pretty cool venture firm in record time and a pretty firm backbone uh my first post in september of 21 was hard to launch uh was to launch was it was was too hard launch a five million dollar fund one so far from there to now so far to go stick around so congrats to nicole we'd love to see it uh maybe potential we're bringing back brother of the week potential brother of the week here yeah speed running september 2021 from a five million dollar fund to a 50 million dollar fund and amassing an army of 100k followers in that time and she's starting to build out a car collection which she'll have to talk about on the show and a spacious uh home as well yeah and a family with a kid which we're doing it all congratulations let's go to kenneth kenneth castle i think you'll love this one he says we still haven't seen one dripped out humanoid smh low tam banger loved it i thought it was so funny and then aaron francis is haven't we and posted zuck which is a little silly but he does seem less robotic lately but yeah you know uh this seems like a perfect project for one x i feel like one x they're hanging out with little be the base god they should they should throw some drip on that guy call up reggie get some get some fashion advice yep hip city reg would definitely help you get your humanoid dripped out and i think that could also go viral.

2:23:28You know, people are gonna get sick of the humanoid stunts. We've seen it fold laundry. We've seen it make coffee. Let's see it, you know, do a runway walk at Paris Fashion Week. I wanna see it do a kickflip wearing Balenciaga. Yes, yes, for sure, for sure. Let's go to Andrew Reid over at Sequoia. He says, always suspicious of young people who are points guys. Same with tax obsessive. Lack appreciation of opportunity, cost of your attention. It's a good point. I've never been into points. My hack is, you know, I have one friend who's into it. Once every five years, I get dinner with him or something.

2:24:05I say, what credit card should I get? She says, this one. And I say, okay. And then I use that for the next half decade. What are your thoughts on points? Do you optimize? I've never been into it. Yeah. Never been big into that world. I like them. I like that I just spend money and then eventually I just get a little bonus. Paul Gold as an Irishman, you know, there's nothing, uh, there's nothing better. Right. Yeah. But, uh, but yeah, just, just a, somebody that's a founder that is potentially building, you know, if they're raising venture capital, that means they're doing everything they can to build a billion dollar company, focus on the billion dollar company.

2:24:44And in your free time, you know, if you just find points so fascinating that you want to spend your free time doing that, but I would say touch grass instead or come on our podcast and just yap. There's better ways to hire leverage opportunities. Let's close with Matt Turk. He says, a marketing that doesn't work for B2B startups, paid social, ads, email marketing campaigns, gated white papers, endless website rebuilds. What does work? CEO is chief marketer, genuine original social presence, relentless content production, smaller in-person events like dinners, small online, small scale events like webinars.

2:25:21A lot of B2B marketers, CMO, VP marketing surprisingly seem to be stuck in that first world. What do you think? Well said. I mean, we've talked about this before. Every legacy company does, for the most part, doesn't understand X. They're still using links, hashtags. They're posting just or they're posting blogs that link out to other places like shows a total lack of understanding i think i think what this comes down to is just understanding the platforms and what they want so x wants uh ceo like founder-led brands they want genuine social presence not hey here's 10 ways that you can do this thing whatever uh relentless right so that the big issue right now with with marketers is that they don't realize the volume.

2:26:11You can make a great piece of content, put it out there, but you need a system to create this ridiculous volume if you want to be competitive in the feeds. And then I think smaller, you know, founder series, founder dinners, things like that were getting memed in 2021, 2022, because it felt like 20 % of all venture dollars were going to them, but they still work in terms of building. The key though, is to actually make sure that it's an amazing ad. So if you get 10 founders together, better spend five minutes aggressively talking about your business and not just hoping, oh, yeah, people are going to enjoy the food and convert later.

2:26:46It's like, no, you got to really got to really sell. That's a great place to end the show. Thanks for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Follow us on YouTube. Follow us on X. And we will see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Thank you, folks. Can't wait for tomorrow. Can't wait. We could do another four hours right now. Let's be honest. but we got to go. Got to get on calls. Got to get on with Taipei. We will talk to you tomorrow. Bye. See ya.