Hereticon, Blood Boys, Hypercar Suggestions, What really is ESG?

0:00Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. jordan and i just got back from hereticon in miami we want to do a uh an overview a deep dive uh when did you actually get in to miami got in monday got back yesterday pretty sure it was uh apparently the world series happened yeah uh there was a hundred thousand people on the streets outside of the studio today yeah and uh not even they could stop us from recording today nothing can stop us to talk about it was like a crazy time for stuff happening and i was completely disconnected from it like i didn't see anything about the world series i didn't know the world series did you see what happened in the stock market while we were there like everything ripped bitcoin went above 70k and then as soon as hereticon was over everything crashed yeah yeah classic makes sense it was like the vibes we were just like summoning all the capital allocators together in miami partying yeah uh what does that say when people just get offline like good things no one can sell yeah all the biggest hitters were there and they were all drinking and partying so they couldn't sell yeah so the market just ripped yeah and then they got back and they were hung over and they're like actually i need to hedge hedge hedge worst worst uh what was your favorite like moment or did you come away like with any like interesting takes the main thing for me was that at the first reticon that we there was some alien stuff and i didn't really buy it i'm buddies with jesse michaels who's like the the main aliens guy and he hosted a talk uh with this guy carl nell who i think is gonna be like really really big soon like Rogan soon and uh it materially updated my my like expected value of aliens being real yeah now I probably went from like three percent to ten percent but it was good mostly just because the guy that Jesse brought this guy Carl Nell he speaks he's not like the strung out hippie burner guy being like oh yeah I saw some stuff and it's like okay you were probably on drugs and that happened he's like straight up they test for in in the government like in his like uh in his like world they test even for like ibuprofen because it's like you have the button you have the you have your finger on the button like the nuclear button so like they need to know everything so these people aren't on drugs and then he puts things in terms that i think tech people and skeptics like me can understand and actually open things up because like the classic like tech person defense of like aliens aren't real is just like well we're listening we have the seti project and it's quiet like there's no one's broadcasting and we've and we're broadcasting right but his point is that actually the SETI program does not broadcast.

2:24We assume that we would broadcast because we broadcast television. Like I love Lucy. I love Lucy. Once we got to like the fifties, I think we started broadcasting with these really high powered satellites or these dishes, they go out and they should be findable in deep space. And so you would assume that, you know, aliens really far away, they got, I love Lucy, you know, a million years ago and we should be able to get this. But his point is that we have actually humans on earth have stopped broadcasting because we switched to using fiber and satellite brothers that's the perfect show to send up seriously yeah yeah yeah we should broadcast we should do that even though everyone gets it over the internet which is fiber and starlink and satellite internet and i want to send it into deep space yeah that'd be so traumatizing yeah we are like aliens are listening they're like what about the timeline yeah yeah yeah so he was good at like bridging from like the dark forest and then providing a bunch of evidence and so jesse's like very convinced now and i think it's good and he's also like super straight edge now so yeah that makes me believe it more yeah that i feel like we were trying to be cognizant of that with our talk of like dressing nicely yes you know our anybody that wasn't there our talk was on you know the case for performance drug use in silicon valley and so doing any type of talk about drugs we wanted to make sure that we like looked yes presentable yeah uh and i think we did yeah i think we were probably the best dressed people yeah i mean the whole thesis was like we need to go back to the madman era of the 1950s where there were an intense amount of nootropics consumed alcohol was drank at work one way to caffeine was drank at work they were smoking using nicotine constantly in the office and now we've turned like all of technology has turned into like oh like you need like some stack it's a nootropic it's like yeah it's just a drug and it's cool to use it at work yeah you basically want to short the companies where the founder is like even thinking about what their stack is versus the founder that's just like flow state ingesting uh but um but yeah i guess two things that stood out uh that were interesting uh the talk that most stood out to me was um i mean there was a lot i wouldn't say it was the one that stood out the most but it was the one that um that i think would be interesting to listeners so brian johnson gave his like don't eye speech uh and talk uh i think it the thing for me was realizing that he puts so much uh content out there about like his you know basically his like penis yeah right because it's like the perfect like viral thing viral thing yeah um but there is an extreme level of death depth to uh death extreme no extreme level um extreme level of depth to what he's talking about and uh i think it's a lot more interesting than just the surface level level like billionaire spending money on his health um one thing that i think the audience reaction that was interesting i think like 50 % of people were like this is super cool i'm gonna download the app 50 % of people were this is a death cult yeah like of the 20 you know of the 21st century yeah like this guy every single person that's ever had a death cult was like this sort of like charismatic figure who's promising we're on the precipice of something very significant which in this case is ai and you need to figure out how to learn live forever and we're all going to live forever together and his example from the talk was that he he said something to the tune of of like what I took away is like basically he's creating an algorithm that tells you exactly what to do all day long and his big pitch to the audience was like would you use the algorithm and some people were like well what if I want to like I'm hanging out with my friends and having fun and the algorithm says go to sleep yeah he's like would you do that and he was really just like sort of trying to find this are you willing to do that yeah cultural ground and then the other thing that was funny is um wearing a make america great again hat was like the most non-contrarian thing you could do i was thinking where i i shouldn't give a blanket statement but it felt like most of the the most normie people there were wearing the make america great again hats and delian was not yep and delian's the guy who like three years ago was getting horitiously like that i was like it It was like six years ago.

6:39Six years ago. Yeah, canceled on Twitter. Horrifically canceled. Just as like, he didn't even endorse Trump at the time. It was like a performance art piece just to see what would happen in San Francisco. And there was a big backlash. Yeah. In fact, the most heretical talk that I heard on politics was the case for Kamala Harris, which is very interesting. And it was presented in this kind of trollish way. Yeah, yeah. The most. But there actually was in that talk like very serious criticism and very like a deeper level of analysis around the flaws of Donald Trump than I'd seen elsewhere. Certainly in like the media, which I think was cool.

7:09And yeah, the most triggered I saw anybody was maybe Max Myers after the D cell talk where this guy was basically saying, and he was just like, like, like basically rattled. You do have to respect Chatham house rules to some degree. Yeah. But, um, uh, yeah, another favorite moment, like David Senra would show up and then like every two hours he'd be like, all right, I got to go home and like edit the podcast. And I like never knew if he was just like, this is getting like too crazy or you actually just had to get home and edit the podcast yeah i think he just likes you know hanging out with a small group of people yeah and when you have like 500 people packed in a place he's just like what's the point yeah yeah the real hereticon was on the 14th floor yeah yeah i mean that's how it always is i mean last last time i met will which is the reason i met you was because of hereticon and it was all just because we just sat at a dinner table together will is who injured us yeah that's so funny will introduced us and i met him at heretic on and and he had he was telling me like oh yeah i quit smoking with lucy and and and afterwards we were just like yeah we were like got it wrong really well really well and we just had a really good time yeah i got put in a couple like group chats together and stuff and then it just kind of like continued from there history but yeah um there's always uh like that type of connection is like much more valuable in general i mean all the talks it's so odd because of like the vibe shift there's not that much stuff that it's like oh if this were to leak like it it would be career ending for them.

8:33Most people have kind of sorted into organizations. It's not like they're middle manager at some tech company that is actually gonna have HR and compliance be like, hey, you can't be out there. Most of the people that are attending are either running their own company or aligned with venture capital firms that would support them or they have a big following. The interesting thing was there wasn't that many people that had to put in a PTO request to be there, is what I would say. There was a handful of people that had to put in a PTO request and we're on like a vacation in Miami. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

9:04But then most of the people were just like, that was work. Oh, 100%. That was some of the most productive days ever. Yep. And we were very much working. 100 % working. The entire time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes, because of the vibe shift, like there aren't that many things that are like, oh, this person like said something that like if it got out, it'd be really bad. It's more just like, there's somebody putting something out there and they're laying out a little bit more of a rigorous case for aliens or something like that. And it's, it's on you as the viewer to just kind of say like, okay, I'm, I'm getting another, like another ball is being thrown at me.

9:39am I going to swing at this one? Like, do I believe this a little bit more, a little bit less? And so the, the ideas are like not controversial in like the, you can't say them realm as much as controversial in the sense of like 50 % of the audience is like, I'm not really into this or whatever. Like you made the case for like Brian's thing is like, it's somewhat authoritarian. libertarian like there's a lot of libertarians like that is a that is kind of a like a debate point for people even if it's like he could talk about it publicly and it's fine because it's not that controversial to talk about it's just like it's an idea that not everyone is down and that's why it was split 50 50 and that's like the ideal scenarios you go into every talk and people come away like even at our talk people there were multiple people that came up with with after us and we're like no psychedelics are great and our basically our pitch was like no psychedelics are terrible yeah um and uh it's just it's just like i think that that's that's kind of like what heretical meant this time around as opposed to last time it was very much just the only place in the world that you could go at that moment and say whatever you wanted because elon didn't own twitter yet and there was still like massive like yeah it's interesting how i mean if if it was the most unique event that I've ever been to yeah and like truly yeah an amazing product yeah thinking of it as like a product like and it you know but um but it's it's one it's interesting like would it ever have existed if if twitter wasn't where we all were having conversations but couldn't say the things that we wanted to say and and covet I mean I know Mike was planning it before uh before COVID hit.

11:13But once COVID got really bad, that really like amplified it and made it like, it was the first conference that 90 % of attendees had been to since the lockdown started. And it, because it was just like, there was, everything was canceled and Hereticon still got pushed a few times the first time, but then eventually happened. And it was like this big celebration of like, okay. And the vaccines had actually dropped. So it wasn't that dangerous for people who were down with that. And so it was a little easier, but still companies weren't like all, all of the big tech conferences were still virtual.

11:42Yeah. One of the things that was cool and maybe under discussed to date is that there was this really good combination of intellectuals and people that were focused on theory and people that are technologists, business leaders, investors that are much more pragmatic. And so I went to the talk on terraforming and ended up talking with the guy that hosted it afterward. And I was like, cool. You know, his, his his high level point was there's these point there's these depressions around earth which are below sea level so if you just get water to them you can make these huge lakes or seas or whatever yep and i went to him and i was like okay cool what's the next step and he's like i don't know like i just sort of like talk about this like terraforming is like my things i just talk about i'm not the guy to actually go and do it yep so i very quickly like came up with a strategy for one of those depressions which we can talk about off air okay cool which was basically like to buy up a ton of land around that specific area sure for nothing because it's worthless right now and then go spend like 10 times more money lobbying to get water to that place sure and there's like a really interesting arbitrage where like you could turn like 100 million dollars into billions of dollars yeah just through this like weird mechanic so yeah we're gonna keep talking and like see if there's cool cool yeah yeah yeah the water rights thing is fascinating it goes back to like Chinatown, like fascinating movie, like how LA wound up with water rates.

13:09But, uh, I remember, um, there was a politician who was saying like, like we, like all of Nevada, New Mexico and, uh, Arizona could have like way, way more water if there was actually like a technological solution, which is nuclear power desalination in California. So you have the ocean, unlimited water, nuclear, unlimited energy. You put those two together. Desalination is really energy intensive. so it doesn't make economic sense now but if you can do that then you can reroute the colorado river back to the kind of where it should be basically uh and then and then all of a sudden the the southwest becomes not like a desert anymore it just becomes like lovely because there's just water everywhere um and there's just like so many other little plans like that obviously it's a long time but like with the right combination of like technology lobbying economic incentives and yeah and like yeah and i did you you did come away from it feeling like the biggest plays in the world right now from a business standpoint combine technology with lobbying yeah it's interesting the because like the biggest opportunities in sass yeah like even ai is like lobbying driven right now yeah also just the fact that like a lot of these are like like there's at least one idea there and you kind of got a hunt for it that like will become consensus like this is the whole idea of like contrarianism which is kind of heretic on just like a different synonym um uh is that like the attendees for this one will just be like the entrepreneurs for the next like two decades and and everyone will be like oh like why is that guy here his thing's not contrarian anymore it's like well yeah but you're not just gonna stop working on it like last heretic on i gave a talk on nicotine is good for you right and this and this year like i was like i'm not just gonna run that back because like everyone knows about that like that's like super normie at this point and same with like the anderal guys like if they were just set up there like we should build a defense company like it's like okay dude we get it but at the same time you don't want the anderal guys being like oh i'm moving on to the next hot thing because i just care about doing contrarian stuff it's like it's okay that they've gotten that they that they they did the contrarian thing they they took the bet they were correct but now they have to go live that life for basically ever yeah and that's good and that's the way it should be but it lends itself to this like give me a newer hot take and it's like yeah okay like you can i'm sure they have good ideas but yeah it's not always going to be as big as like the one thing that they becomes the life work right yeah the contrarian thing from this event that will become mainstream is goo goo the fio's goo is that uh volta yeah john fio from the fiorentini family yeah fiorentino family um they made their money in hospitality right yeah yeah and he i mean we talked about his his like prolific hiking regimen yeah six yeah but basically a lot of people were starting to skip the coffee they were espresso yeah for the goo a lot of people and there would be people running around really wired 3 4 a.m yeah on off the goo and you could just see this crazy look in there he needs it was almost like it was almost like a divine spark yes in their eyes yes is it the collagen the colostrum the caffeine yeah we don't know what it is the the combination sacred combination and he talks about something that is interesting is like there's no difference between invention or discovery and so this it's this thing of like did he create goo or did he invent goo did he discover it are they all the same thing but by next eroticon well i think we'll have figured that out interesting uh i'm bummed that packy couldn't make it but did you see his tweet was he having a child how on earth did he i think so something like that but he he said uh i sadly didn't make it to hereticon so here's my talk we should flip these lines and it's the amount of venture capital investment uh year over year and then the amount of charitable giving and the charitable giving line is much higher than the venture yeah so that that by itself is like we probably shouldn't even talk about it because it should just be a talk at hereticon yeah it just becomes like a normie like thing that uh you know know if it if it ends up being you know world positive yeah i mean that's the fascinating thing about uh all of the uh like climate funds not even even the climate vc funds didn't do that well there was a big i think it was kleiner perkins had a big push they had a fund that was yeah what was the term back in the day that almost like destroyed their brand for like a decade it was it was tough i mean al gore became a partner there isn't that crazy he's like hanging out there um but i forget what it was called there was some there was some term for this like green investing or something like that that was like really popular but tesla was not considered in that category yeah but if you bundle tesla and then the returns go great yeah exactly and so it's like there's always almost like this misclassification of like the thing that solves the problem might not even look like it's in that category just like you know if you were like starting like okay we're we're we're an inner we're an internet infrastructure fund like do you get into the seed round of spacex yeah yeah no yeah the the um but you should i do think that vcs that are not there that are feeling fomo should probably feel an order of magnitude more fomo like i'm not i'm not kidding like they're when the event was very expensive yeah but i guarantee you it will result in a massive return for founders fund and the other vcs that were there right it's like there's people there i wish the missed opportunity was getting a photo of the entire group oh yeah because it would just look like the it's the most eclectic group ever like a lot of like kind of strange you know a strange mix of people yeah um and you could look at that picture 30 years from now and be like this guy like annexed cuba yeah like this guy like yeah i This guy did a hostile takeover of SpaceX.

19:04I liked Palmer's tweet. What was that? What did Palmer say? He said, Hereticon was so good. Banger after banger, hit after hit. As if all the best threads on 4chan came to life. But with a level of mutual respect and discourse lifted from the best stereotypes of Victorian explorers. No, it was one. There was a conversation that was being had. And Senra kept saying, like, what does that mean? Like, what does that mean? yeah yeah and they were all like 4chan slang yeah yeah and he was just like what like what is it what's going on right now um so we're so delightfully offline with his like yeah and that's that's why that's why founders is what it is yeah is because he does the reading for you he's not well yeah he's focused on things that were written mostly in the 20th century yeah and that's why there's so much alpha in the podcast if he was extremely online like refreshing the timeline like the podcast would not be he would not be who he is yeah and so i think that that was a cool thing like everybody there is like authentically themselves yeah and i didn't feel like most people weren't there the only time that i got offended was a guy like trying to be heretical not actually being yeah um and it was for like a very like political topic that we didn't talk about because we don't we don't talk about politics on this podcast yeah um but yeah everybody was there being them authentically themselves and the combination of all that just made it amazing yeah uh i liked gabby's tweet overheard at heretic on the real nootropic is being on a mission i'm kind of i'm kind of mad she didn't credit me for that did you say this that was my line that was your line yeah yeah wait did you say that in our talk or just randomly no during the talk oh really that's yeah it was at it was at the end i think we were honestly uh talking about a certain presidential candidate who clearly does all the wrong things like crazy schedule overworked diet coke mcdonald's like eating terribly and the argument there was that there's no the real the most powerful drug on the earth is the human spirit and being on a mission makes sense yeah um i liked daniel i don't know how to spell his last pronounce his last name tenryo is he at teal capital uh he worked at teal capital for a while but now he's independent i hold my own private version of hereticon every day on the inside of my brain that's like really that's like really true because i think it is a place where you can say the things yeah like like that's just like schizo energy yeah yeah you're just like saying things that aren't normally set yeah but there was there was like a when i did i didn't really go on twitter during the conference but there was a little bit of like uh pushback like rune tweeted like when people go from sf to heretic on miami the average iq of both cities go up which is this like copy pasta of this like incredible tweet by uh product manager raul yeah um but it's just it's just like oddly written well it's funny i saw another i saw another tweet that was like come on sweetie it's time for your quarterly beef with founders fund yeah he's like okay well i mean yeah rune's like a prolificator but uh you know i think you should put your journalist hat on for a minute like you're a traditional tech journalist and just like follow the money think about it like rune works at open ai yep peter co-founded open ai he's invested in open ai like he needs an enemy he needs someone to to beef because you don't want to be at the top you don't have no enemies that's that's the worst you need someone taking you down yeah we didn't have the working if we weren't fighting against the working class yeah yeah exactly there would be no podcast yeah yeah and i mean a similar thing happened with sequoia like sequoia was like you know the the untouchable firm no enemies and then sean mcguire you know decided to wage a holy war against islam and so now they have an enemy and and now they're not just this like untouchable brand they need they you know it's again it's david and goliath all over again which is the ideal scenario you always want to be the underdog and so even if you have to pay someone to talk trash about you it's totally worth it that's the summary absolutely thanks for the clicks rune uh yeah i do think it's funny because our talk was closer to a comedy sketch yeah than a real talk and i realized that like midway through yeah we would say a line and if we didn't get a laugh we were like rework that yeah yeah but you know that the somebody came away from that not realizing that it was like a more of a comedic sketch than anything else yeah yeah and they're just they were probably like these guys are fucking crazy awesome this is the craziest talk i've heard yeah uh but i mean a lot of it was like you know comedy shrouding around like a true idea or like teasing a true idea but just like amplifying things to like help it stick in people's mind and become like memes um and then uh our boy fio uh got destroyed by some iv or something he said the cost of admission to reticon was expensive this year but it was worth it because he became a blood boy which of course is another joke there were no real blood boys there unfortunately but not in any of the rooms you were in no not not in the rooms anything else to talk about hereticon i'm sure it'll come up later yeah um what should we move on to next i think it's time to tell you about today's highlight sotheby's since 1744 sotheby's has been the premier destination for art connoisseurs collectors and enthusiasts alike offering an unparalleled platform for buying and selling fine art jewelry rare books and collectibles from classic masterpieces to contemporary works sotheby's brings together world-class expertise and global reach connecting treasures with those who truly appreciate them So whether you're looking to acquire a timeless piece or explore the vibrant world of modern art, Sotheby's is where extraordinary finds a home.

24:59Tell a story about a piece of fine art. I really like this Peter Paul Rubens, David and Goliath. Have you seen this? No. It's currently kept at the Norton Simon. Hopefully it'll be at Sotheby's in a few years. You can pick it up. But it's iconic because Rubens was like, he really explored the human form and musculature. like it's a very like it's this like jacked david like about to behead goliath it's a very very aggressive piece yeah um but it's interesting because when you first when i first heard the story of david goliath you think about david as this like tiny little underling and goliath has this like over this like massive massive kind of like you and me but but in but in this in this painting david is actually like very powerful and jacked and like yes he's smaller but he's still like he's still like put in the work and i think i think that there's actually a good metaphor there where it's like you can't just be like oh i'm some startup and i'm going against the big company and they're huge and i'm small therefore it's a david and goliath situation i'm gonna win with like by throwing the stone it's like no david clearly like put in the work at least in this talent and i like that and that's another thing with sotheby's they're not afraid to put in the work um they you know you know in addition to the art that they have listed and some of the private catalog uh you can go to them and and get their help you know finding specific works that you know uh that you feel something about you recently had luck here right yeah so we were looking for basically a lost copy of the wealth of um nations we have a copy there just you know for sentiment sentimental value um but yeah so the technology brothers you know collect uh collector division was um looking for a copy that you know a lot of people thought was you know completely lost Sotheby's was able to help us get it took about three weeks um but basically no lift on our side and it's now safely in the vault yeah it's kind of like the holy grail of capitalism right in some ways yeah just go which is the primary absorb the energy yeah the primary inspiration for this podcast exactly so anyways thank you to Sotheby's uh should we move on to some tweets or should we do brother of the week we can just jump into the brother the brother of the week so to go to the mansion section yeah yeah so in the wall street journal today in the mansion section there's someone that we have to highlight uh so his name where is his name famed la george ron ruan r-u-a-n is that ron ron um so this is the co-founder of honey sold the company to paypal for four billion dollars and he essentially got a free 44 million dollar house which has now been profiled it's 16 ,000 square feet, nine bedrooms in Los Angeles.

27:38The coupon king buys again. So how he got this house for$44 million, effectively for free, this is real. So in 2020, he paid$60 million for a 21 ,000 square foot house in Bel Air. And then just two years later, when the market was ripping, he top ticks it and puts it on the market for 150 million, almost three times the price. and he actually gets the deal done, sells it for$112. So that's a$52 million gain, pays a little tax maybe, gets the$44 million house for free. Rolls it in. Yeah, I think this is the real story from this is that if you're a founder out there building something like a Chrome extension, which everybody says, Chrome extension, this is silly, like this is not a real business.

28:28If this guy had never built a Chrome extension, that he never would have had gotten a free 44 million dollar house so don't ever let anybody tell you that your idea is small or not worth doing um that brings up i saw that grammarly is at like basically 300 million of arr wow you see this no like yeah so chrome extensions yeah uh if you're at heretic if you're at the hereticon that didn't happen in 2012 yeah it was it would have been all about chrome extensions probably something something weird about that i mean they're yeah it feels fake yeah the the honey and the and the grammarly those companies like uh people love to say oh ai is gonna like destroy this or like there's gonna be some new thing that's like it's not gonna work but people seriously underrate this is like an akita beer point but people seriously underrate like just like good management and good like and a well-run company being valuable even in even in like a little bit of an odd industry that might feel a little fragile and so i think the duolingo stock hasn't fallen at all even though everyone's like oh of course you just learn how to speak a different language by talking to chat gpt and it's like yeah part of it's just a distribution thing like i actually am more bullish on much more bullish on duolingo than grammarly when grammarly feels like okay you're built on top of this browser that actively wants to roll out features that differentiate it from yeah all these other browsers yeah yeah um but who knows i mean maybe google gets it wrong and there's just like yeah it's never properly uh it's never properly rolled out but uh congratulations to this week's brother of the week let's move on we almost should get a something in here that's like yeah employee of the month brother of the week in the handwritten line image um that there is a good tweet in here that i want to i want to pull up but we should just go through them in like somewhat reverse order i since we have a whole stack here.

30:17So let's start with this one by Andreas Larson. He just posted a meme. I bet he saw it somewhere else. But oh, wait, this is, I know I follow this account on Instagram, QS. I forget what it is. It's like quant strategies or something. Oh, really? It's the same page. It's good. What people think ESG is, we must save the planet, invest in my fund. Here's my money. What ESG actually is, I have created a synthetic securitization so that BlackRock can buy mezzanine tranches of forests in Zimbabwe, nobody planned to cut, and large mining groups can declare themselves carbon neutral while using child labor.

30:51Great, great riff on ESG. Yeah. If that's what ESG is, what is the, just kidding. I mean, actually, there's a great, like, economic analysis of the problems with ESG from Aswath Damodran, this finance professor at NYU. And he kind of laid out the uh like the bear case for esg and just how it was like kind of misaligned it had been abused by capitalists which but the question is like now with this since it's making everyone so much money are the capitalists going to come around and like should we be supporting esg yeah yeah we should be like actually esg is amazing yeah esg i feel like it never went its way into startups like but like i feel like there were yeah can you can you imagine if term sheets were getting issued with like esg baggage attached to them like if if if somehow or vice versa funds some sort of esg kicker where like yeah oh if it became a meme like you know everyone knows that you can attach like dot ai to your or yeah the big sas company and double your valuation right uh that never really happened in esg just because i think the money that was actually flowing was mostly in the public markets from these funds that like needed to flow and through the esg scores and stuff it heavily gamed but you couldn't you imagine if if if big lps had gotten pressure from various groups and were like telling their the vcs that they invest in hey if you can get your companies to follow these principles and track it like that's a very dystopian sort of like to imagine but what if they were like well we'll give you 25 carry if you can get on any deals that have uh esg attached to it like it's it's scary that it's not that difficult to imagine no not actually being the case and then there would have been this whole dynamic of like oh don't work with this fund because like they're gonna force you to like follow like yes at the same time like how hard is it if you're like doing some b2b sass company to be like yeah we're carbon neutral but like the whole gundo is like being like yeah we're putting up solar panels like you have to spend like at the office because like baggage like what's his name isaiah from yeah valor is like being like yeah like we're working on this nuclear thing but like we have to put up solar panels in the meantime yeah the meantime or no even worse just like yeah we have to spend like 10 of our fundraisers on like carbon credits you know the you know the thing that actually going back to her at a con i i didn't i didn't talk to her but you remember that girl like four years ago who was going viral for making nuclear energy cool oh yeah eyes of dope yeah so yeah no she was she was at this one um i i didn't get a chance to talk to her but uh it's so funny that's like a perfect example of something that was contrarian totally like less she was on stage of the first one less than four years ago yeah and now there's like a whole so normie there was a bunch of nuclear energy like founders there yeah um i just thought that was cool like next week i'm going to uh like mc a whole like nuclear conference and it's like the least heretical thing it's all like government people and like companies and dc's and like there's whole funds around yes and stuff she wasn't giving a talk yeah because i need to she accomplished her mission yeah yeah and she can just kind of like move on and that's why we're oriented around capitalism which is the only so if capitalism stopped being a thing we would have nothing to talk about and we would retire the show and commit um but uh so anyways that's great let's move on to the next one uh rico's revenge says being broke at the book fair as a kid turned me into a monster yeah why was this personal for you i just remember that like yeah it was one of the first book i just remember the book fairs and like honestly so the topic of halloween this is cool so halloween every single year my entire childhood as early as i can remember my parents i would go regular trick-or-treating and then my parents would say pick your 20 favorite pieces of candy you can keep those and the rest of them were going to take and give away in exchange for you going to be able to buy a new book so my parents were very into the library so we rarely bought books but that would be the moment where i would buy like a fresh brand new book yeah and it was just like the best thing in the world so thank you to my parents for doing that but i do remember being at like the book fair and to be honest like with our kids now you can imagine a book fair is happening you'd be like yeah like go like just buy everything like buy whatever you want like because like parents are just willing to spend money on like education but it just wasn't part of my like family and there's also that mean money money is just so emotional right and so like any you have these sort of like intense blood memories around money and like this tweet brought back that yeah there was also that like meme or like study that like the the like educational achievement in children is correlated with like the number of books in a house yeah growing up which is clearly just correlated with like wealth and like a million other things um interesting but yeah but but but then but then people kind of took that and kind of flipped the correlation around they were like oh if i just buy a bunch of books then my kid will do well which is also probably true but it's just like it became because you're absorbing just like why would we yeah spend seven figures on the wealth of nations yes and it's because you want to absorb that exactly yeah you want to have that even if you're not going to read it you want to be able to absorb it i actually have read the wealth of nations that's a classic it's a classic classic if it's one of those things like so dry if you had to if you could only have three books uh it would be the bible uh wealth of nations and then the book that justin mares will eventually write yeah on health okay just to support the boys yeah of course of course um so yeah uh it is it is it is a fascinating read in that it's you're watching someone work through the discovery of capitalism essentially yeah and that's and that's fascinating but most of the actual takeaways you can get much more concisely from just like an econ 101 textbook but it is very cool um okay so let's talk about the arc browser situation we there was actually someone from arc there at the at the party there's a company called the arc browser company they've raised a fair amount of money over 100 million dollars is that right i thought it was 150 yeah They've raised a lot of money and they have a very like, you know, hipster kind of aesthetic.

37:06They post these high production value videos, updating the community on what they're building. And they've built a new browser. So it's a replacement for Chrome or Safari. And they've applied a number of different design, you know, elements to that. So pin tabs, vertical sidebar spaces. And they recently announced that they're essentially pivoting, launching a new product. they're going to leave their existing Arc browser in kind of maintenance mode so they're not going to like piss off their existing community and then they're going to launch some new things sound like a lot of stuff is going to be AI based and they're trying to like get through that transition of being like okay we're going to pivot to AI but let's not make it like too dramatic and so Astral Wave Andrick writes I don't fully buy the reason that pin tabs vertical sidebar and spaces are too complicated for normies we live in a world where even mainstream browsers Safari and edge have sidebar tabs collections sync tabs pin tabs heck chrome has had pin tabs since a decade ago i use pin tabs in chrome it's fine um i think the reason arc feels complicated honestly is that they're a bit too focused on that circa 2010s hipster aesthetic and gaudy visual design that gets in the way of usability did you so do you buy this good take generally i'm extremely pro arc in the browser company because I'm not an investor but I'm generally like in favor of people taking on these sort of like commoditized products and categories and saying like let's try to reinvent it yeah I think what they ultimately found is that the browser is like pretty well optimized and the other thing is that it's really difficult to compete with platform companies that are trillion-dollar companies that are giving away the product for free and And pre-installing it.

38:51Yeah, pre-installing it. So they have the distribution. Google doesn't care if Chrome loses money forever, right? They'll spend billions of dollars on it. Apple, on the other hand, needs to have an installed browser. And they don't care how much it costs to run. And they're pretty good products. I think they basically were trying to solve the tabs issue. Everybody has too many tabs open. And for me, this is going to sound bad. but I've never I never installed Arc because I got fatigue around these sort of like new note-taking type things where I'm just like now like Chrome's pretty good yeah I even think Safari is pretty good yep I alternate between the two on my phone it's just like I don't really think about it but I think like the thing the thing that's more real here is that they got really interested in AI as everybody did realize that there's much more ability to create like a viral consumer product with hundreds of millions or hopefully billions of users doing that and they are really well suited to like go try to tackle that problem now the hard thing is that they're like a really big company now which like most vcs you know i would say like contrarian vcs would say like companies over 10 people can't innovate or whatever and like do they need this like really massive team but i think the issue that they ran into is they create a product that a small group of people really really love and they're in this position where they cannot they can't just they really should kill the product probably or like spin it out but then it puts them in a position where they say like well why do we why do why are we worth 500 million dollars if we only if we don't have a product yet or we don't have a live product and so i think it would have been cool if they like spun it out and made it open source and like let the community keep building on it or something like that um but uh but yeah now they're kind of in this weird position but i'm super excited for their like the product coming up devon devon gave me like a little bit of a oh sure preview on on what it is it's gonna be awesome uh they they they like clearly build great products now it's finding that like they do there are they they they raise money like with the understanding that they needed to build something with 100 million plus users otherwise they weren't gonna like live up to the expectations that they set yeah tough to sell a browser no i'm just not a lot of hyperscalers need one they all have one yeah no i'm just saying give it away to the community like that might be better yeah yeah yeah or just yeah like spin it out as in like hey we're not because now the thing is like they have they're gonna have this like competing thing where their power users that love the brand are gonna be like why aren't you maintaining this or like why aren't you adding to it and like there's like the i don't know some amount of entropy that is going to happen naturally when like the whole team is focused on the new thing and then like it's like one designer and like a few engineers that are running a browser and the tough thing is like they'd be on that team yeah the tough thing is this is coming off them having like a pretty big security vulnerability from like a month ago that like they got a lot of heat for but i think the heart that what this comes down to is if you do a lot of things really well and you have a lot of attention uh and you're relevant to a lot of people which a browser is everybody has an opinion a lot of people like see like a really well-produced video and are just like i want to like hate on this right yeah and so anyways i'm rooting for the browser company i'm rooting for arc and uh well i guess i'm not i'm not i'm not rooting for arc anymore because i don't you know this doesn't they don't even want to take it anywhere it's gonna arc i do wonder about uh like it was like a design focus like the right go to market for this like the other browser that's done i think reasonably well is brave yeah but brave is focused on like these crypto micro payments and they have this whole like economic model that you could be very like oh it's just a crypto ponzi thing but like at least like if it works there will be some sort of like incentivization there it's kind of like the creator payouts for for x where you're you know ostensibly like paying to use the browser and then when you visit a website if they're on your team they get paid for every time you visit and then and then they have an incentive to actually put up a banner like hey stop reading my website in Chrome you should read my website in brave because I'll get paid for that and so you have some sort of distribution like economy whereas if it's just like really cool yeah it can be cool and people can say oh what's that oh that looks really nice like it can kind of go viral but it's just word of mouth and that's really, really hard to scale into like the normie crossing the chasm is going to be really difficult.

43:28Anyway, let's move on to Nicole Wiscoff, Wiscoff Ventures. Founder shuts down company that never really got off the ground emails investors. You are welcome into, you are welcome to invest in whatever I build next on a$100 million post money safe. Sometimes I hate it here. She got almost a thousand likes on that. Uh, I, the biggest problem is 100 mil is too low right yeah i mean i know she seems to back really great companies so knowing the kind of caliber that she looks for i don't think it would be absurd to pay 100 million posts for whatever they whatever they do next i think what i i just want more details to be honest i'd love to see like did he send the like filled out safe like was it already signed on his side and he's just like here's wire instructions like countersign i mean a lot of founders try and mog investors when things are going well.

44:18Yeah. Takes a special breed of founder to try and mog investors when things are going poorly. Yeah. Yeah. The, uh, it's funny. I talked to a founder recently that had like two very high profile failures in like a very specific category. And he was going back for a third company in the same category. And I wanted to, I didn't ultimately get there on investing just from like nothing to do with him or the category just like talked with some people that I knew and they said like you know but just the fact that he was like back to back these sort of like big basically blow ups and was like yeah I'm going back again like just like you want to support that guy right like I mean under under discussed parker conrad uh rippling is his third company not his second company and the first the first one was a little bit adjacent it was a i think it was like a fintech company but it was still like kind of in that same realm there's something for like charts and visualizations for like financial stuff and that company he left and it actually is still going on like it's it's still alive it's not like a phenomenal company but like yeah and it's just like i talked to a big investor in the firm or in rippling and was just like he can't like i don't know if he could build anything outside of this but he's just like destined to do this that'd be a weird thing like working at the first company watching the third company and you're just like like your your company hasn't your shares haven't been marked up in like three years and you just see rippling with like the 12 billion dollar valuation you're just like yeah well i mean a lot of people moved over and some people didn't and that was like a big well the real hero's journey is that he buys back the first company right yeah and like merges it into rippling because rippling is the last sass you ever need there's been a couple examples of that i i don't want to like say it because i don't think the deal's done but there's like a big yc founder who had a company that blew up and the early team is like going to go back and buy the ip and like you know use it for something else which i think is really really cool i think there's something about like like owning your you're owning your child or your baby and like just like keeping keeping working at it and having another shot on goal if it's like an interesting name or an interesting.com or like it'll have some sort of like cache i mean we got to talk about getting party around once uh once chamath is head of the sec you should just be able to text anyone in america i i do you want to buy shares in my company we got all the all the uh what is it accredited investor laws we got to get rid of those i didn't even think about like sax gets a role obviously he's like well i gotta i gotta support the boys the best gets chamath sec yeah and then it's just like a new american renaissance cal press secretary let's go incredible let's go he's there's like good the white house verticalizes podcast has a podcast you know we got to break out like the dop the department of podcasting it's if jcal was running the white house media strategy it would be heavily monetized yeah that that would be like it's like secretary of state it's kind of like a dream scenario like imagine like yeah white house press secretary is up there and they're doing podcast ad reads between the announcements for like obviously big multinational companies like why not why not just the the bond issuances like the government sells debt so it's like hey did you know the 30 year it's at four percent you want to buy some like brought to you by t-bills t-bills i mean they used to do that like during the war there's like posters and essentially advertisements for government bonds now it's all you know distributed through like the banks and it's very abstract but it used to be very much like going direct to like the american average american citizen exactly yeah because you just wanted everyone to chip in and buy war bonds yeah um it's great uh but yeah, that's probably the future of party round is specifically those, those political texts.

48:24So you know how you get those, those texts from politicians like every two hours on your phone now and you can't opt out of them. I don't know why you don't get any text. Is that just because you've never voted? No, I have. I, I like, I, I, I'm been trying to figure it out because you're so extreme politically that they're just like, we can't turn this guy. It's a waste of money. Yeah. There's no anarchy candidate. No, I don't. I, I haven't got a political text. Wow. But I have made, I have made efforts to like go and like, you can do those like blanket opt out of like, go remove my, remove my info from this.

49:01But, but that's where we need to get with like, you know, fundraising. It just needs to be like, okay, I'm hiring a firm to spam my rollup vehicle to 10 million Americans. Yeah. Send out, send out the vibe reel that went viral on Twitter. Yeah. Let everyone know I'm building AI for dogs. let's get some money in there general solicitation this is the future there's a couple companies that like figured out how to do that i've seen some instagram ads for like crowdfunding efforts and i'm like yeah yeah okay yeah my friends uh my friends run the biggest agency for advertising crowdfunds in the world um shout out john the jobs guyler yeah yeah the job yeah and it's like what it's an amazing like thing uh you know sort of like example of capitalism where companies figured out if you spend a dollar on facebook you can drive ten dollars of investment so why would you not just do that it's like an infinite money glitch basically i mean it's a the the ratio of uh cost to capital raise is probably right in line with like big investment banks yeah yeah like if you take a company public you're probably paying some massive fee but you're giving an opportunity for everyday americans to you know earn real yield exactly real alpha exactly with uh you know the next great robotics company let's move on to apple uh do you have apple intelligence on your phone yet it's like almost here right you can install it if you go the beta but you don't have it i don't have it yet i don't have it yet either um i i used to install the betas and they're always like kind of kind of sketchy so i just wait yeah but uh schmidt writes uh my mom that hike almost killed me apple's ai summary attempted suicide but recovered and hiked in redlands and in Palm Springs has 14 million views.

50:45I predicted that this was going to happen on a podcast. And didn't you also say you think a lot of these are? I think a lot of these are fake. And I think a lot of these are Photoshopped. I don't know that this one is, but obviously we know LLM's hallucinate and they get things wrong and they're rough. But that is Apple, that is not Apple's. That was a good take. That is not Apple's brand. Like I was talking to a really, really big filmmaker in Hollywood and he was predicting that Apple TV would not be successful. He works with like HBO and Netflix and stuff. And it is specifically because Apple's brand is perfection.

51:20Everything needs to look perfect. And so that's not Hollywood. Hollywood is almost more like venture capital where there's going to be some dogs, even the best. And you can't have everything be guaranteed because it's art, not engineering. and so uh the ai thing has been really really difficult for apple in my opinion because they're they're two years behind chat gpt and like the day chat gpt came out they should have ripped out siri and had an llm replace it in terms of just like what consumers would want at one point i actually had a uh like a macro on my phone where instead of saying hey siri i could say like hey chat gpt and it would like take a shortcut and route it into chat gpt it was slow it didn't really work but that's essentially what they're doing now but they're still going to have problems and maybe that's why they did the the open ai partnership just because like if they have some really bad hallucinations they and they need to like respond they can be like oh this is a partner we switch partners they're the scapegoat like we can move on to something else hey we revamped it i again like i think that i think the right frame of mind when you're interacting with like an llm is that like it is a little sloppy and as long as everyone goes into like a human yeah it's a human it's a human assistant that might get something wrong or just like when you're online and you and you're scrolling like a feed you kind of know that like there's going to be there's going to be slop how many jokes there's going to be fake news yeah and so you just kind of go into that you're not and you're not rattled the issue is unlike an executive assistant you can't berate like you can't berate apple intelligence right like if app if your ea makes a mistake you can get on the phone and scream with scream at them for like 20 minutes and then hang up yeah what's an yeah executive is that like a secretary yeah it's like okay um you can't it's you can't call up apple intelligence you know it's going to be a robo call and berating a rope you know an ai like voice bot is not going to feel the same maybe that would be a good like a instead of an ai girlfriend it's just like an ai that you can practice berating so you get better at just like really give yeah because those moments don't come up that much they don't but when you're ready you need to be able to scream at someone like if uh you know if you're raising your second company uh if you're raising for your second company after everything failed you're gonna have to get on the phone with all your all your vcs and tell them that they don't know anything yeah like look look at like jeremy gaffan right yeah he was here we got to spend some quality time with him yeah over the last few days and very very calm guy but he's from he's from the world of finance yeah he goes to tech conferences but don't it's like a wolf in sheep's clothing right like he's clearly you know and the classic you know behavior and finance is that if something bad happens you like scream and yell yeah the funny thing is i can't imagine jeremy yelling at somebody like intensely but i know he's gonna have to do it he needs to get practice reps and so he needs to get his reps in so if i was an indie hacker right now i'd be creating like a prosumer yeah like beration is if that's a word practice application yeah yeah it gives you a score at the end like how intimidated was the ai yeah yeah i don't think you're gonna get a million Did you go too far or were you dialed in perfectly?

54:24Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you don't just want to be like, you know, a string of racial epithets. It'd be funny if like HR, like it had a feature where like HR joins the call. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, hey, dial it back, dial it back. Okay, dial it back. But, you know, you got your point across. But, yeah, I think it'll be good. I think Apple will eventually dial it in. I mean, the tech is just so good at this point. It's like really easy and they have a bunch of interesting ways to integrate with all the data in your phone. So you'll just be able to talk to Siri more. And it's so overdue because Siri's been so bad.

54:49Like Siri, I always ask if the weather, maybe set timers. This feature is silly. Like I would turn it off if I had it because like text should be short. Yeah. I shouldn't. Well, I think it's valuable in the sense that like the real use is that the AI should be able. So right now, if you want to get rid of this political text, you can go into your iMessage and say, but it's all hard coded. So you can say, if I don't have the number saved, put it in a different folder, like a junk folder. but then you miss two factor codes you miss uh like things from doctors and stuff yeah well the issue i'm talking more about i could actually go to the ai and say like if it's a political text just thrown in a different sorting is cool yeah summarization is not cool sure if nancy pelosi texts me and and the reddit stock's going up and she says go long soy go long that's all these other things but then if the ai hallucinates but politicians if you're gonna text me every single day throw a stock tip in there you go a stock tip in and then i'll be like well yeah okay so you told me to go into your market coupon code you told me that you're gonna make oil great again and you're gonna drill baby drill and so you told me to buy exxon i doubled my money sure i'll give you a 10 cut politicians that should be how politicians raise money exactly you should give a stock tip and then monetize it by saying hey if it works out give me my cut some wheels yeah yeah come on that is this is that is how you drive american everyone would be like i can't wait for the next text yeah the senators and various politicians would be focused on yeah seeking alpha yeah hedge funds would be setting up oh how can we get the text first we don't want to be well no the issue is hedge funds are going and paying off politicians direct they're going directly for stock tips they're getting their text over signal yeah and we're we're just stuck with the sms's yeah yeah plebs anyways that's a plural there's a plural you see vivek ramaswamy he's now the second largest holder and shareholder in buzzfeed and he posted a vlog of him mine's back buzzfeed what really yeah cool great guy um uh so he he posted a vlog of him going to buzzfeed headquarters and so uh george here summarized it he said this is so ruthless vivek got on his plane and went in flip-flops and shorts uh flew to california went into the buzzfeed headquarters and handed them a list of conservatives to hire it's kind of a funny thing to do uh they had no choice but to listen because he's one of their new owners he's now their second largest outside shareholder maybe he'll buy the whole thing and turn it into a non-woke organization this is how we win the culture war so i can completely disagree with that i don't think i don't think anti-woke buzzfeed is i do think the thing that's interesting about that is that bezos was in the news this last week for saying like one obviously the washington post not endorsing a presidential candidate to being like you need to hire some conservatives when i see these things i'm like why like we need to have media companies like sort of we'll never do this but other media companies should have to label are we hyper politicized or are we a news source right because like when i'm when i'm seeing that that It's just like, I don't know, it just feels like newspapers have this, like, sort of, you know, permanent label of being able to be arbiters of truth, right?

58:06and so but if they're hyper politicized and like the truth is going to get kind of lost in that so i was looking at the new york times endorsements since 1960 they have endorsed every single democratic presidential nominee kennedy johnson humphrey george mcgovern jimmy carter jimmy carter walter mondale michael dukakis bill clinton it's just like you know you got to respect the conviction i mean at least you know like where they stand i guess yeah but it's just odd that like you would never be like hey actually we switched around this time we're mixing it up do we need to put journalists in our enemies bucket or that would be too political i don't know maybe i like journalists yeah i like them far away depends some of them are great um some of them i'm sure are good people um but uh uh but this vivek thing is interesting because not because of what he's doing with buzzfeed i mean i i hope it works out i hope he makes a ton of money but it's because the did you actually watch the vlog of him going and doing this that was interesting because i have this theory that like andrew yang was the first presidential nominee to go on rogan bernie sanders went on tulsi gabbard went on uh and so there were like the fringe candidates that were polling very low had to go on rogan in 2016 in that cycle and then in this cycle the all the major party candidates are doing this huge uh huge podcasts meanwhile the the more like fringe candidates like i mean vivek's like not running right now but he's clearly gonna like gear up for more politics stuff in the future and i think having a having a uh a candidate that does like vlogs and direct video and actually like owns their own media and put stuff out i think that will be there no it's actually insane that yeah they don't know when even trump doesn't yeah no He's putting out like, and Kamala puts out these little short, like I want like UFC.

59:59Have you ever seen UFC embedded, which is like the week prior to a fight. They vlog all the fighters and it's the most engaging content. That will, that will 100 % be the future. And, and you can make it narrative driven. So it's very easy for political candidate to make it look like, Oh, are so much momentum building in a campaign. Like make politics is like more about likability than policy. 100%. like like with the whole rfk endorsing trump thing is like this parasit this is what senra always talks about the value of podcasting if you're in business is like he's developed like a real friendship it's a one-way friendship with millions of people yeah right yeah and so if i'm shocked that a political high-profile political candidate hasn't used the vlog format or even having their own podcast or their own podcast like with the rfk trump endorsement like they both got on stage at a rally and both you know gave their talking points and gave independent speeches i think that would honestly do better if it was like the donald trump podcast rfk is the guest and and they're just having a conversation about health yeah and so you're just watching you're just in the room with them watching them have a conversation or it's like jd and someone who you know knows about like you know industrialization and jd's like look i don't know if this guy's going to be in the cabinet but he's a buddy and we're gonna have a conversation about how we actually like revitalize the rust belt like something that he cares about a lot um instead of him having to go to joe rogan and joe rogan being or you know or com like going to uh yeah and it's and it's a way to it's a way to stay active like over the last couple weeks i think people have been like really hyper fixating on what did this candidate do today and the thing with the podcast is like we can record i mean for us we we publish live effectively like within you know a couple hours of recording but other candidates could save up a bank of content and put it out when they like wake up and they're feeling a little tired and they don't want to hit the campaign trail yeah yeah exactly i don't tip politicians or i don't donate to politicians hit the campaign trail should we do uh this one mike dudas says pump.fun is the fastest company in tech in history to 100 million dollars in revenue i feel like there's a new company that claims this like every day well so the cool thing with this company is you can look on chain and verify that's like actual like dollars in the wallet because it's the reason that i give me the overview like what is pumped out fun it's like solana so basically historically people would make meme coins and they'd have to combine all these different things and they were actually writing code yeah they were always like erc 20 forking projects so this is yeah it was like a sas product basically this is like shopify for creating a meme coin okay got it that's the way to shopify for meme yes shopify for meme coins it's basically shopify for memes because it just allows anything happens and there's a meme coin like it'll be like the trash coin or like yeah yeah so like there's one for like mudang the hippo or whatever and so the thing that's crazy about this is that one they they they made it they built the perfect product to enable crypto speculation because i think i i haven't used it but i think you can actually invest on the platform too so it's like two-sided marketplace like uh shopify so you can create it people can invest um it actually is good for consumers because it's like easy like they like help uh it's creating more standardized yeah what you know sort of underlying structures well it's like it's you're still likely you could still get rugged very easily if people just decide that this means not hot because it's It's not getting hacked as much.

1:03:37Yeah, less hacked. There's like, meme coins were historically extremely complicated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like if you're on a Shopify site, like the product might be bad, but you're not going to get your credit card information stolen. Yeah. Because the credit card information is with Shopify. Shopify is reliable. Now the product might be white labeled and like junk, but at least you know that like your credit card information didn't get leaked. So what's interesting about this is what, uh i think this could be a company where they end up returning billions of dollars to investors without any liquidity event or through like stock buybacks or something like that or just distributions because i don't know any company that could buy this because it's in such a coin base or something well yeah but it's in such a regulatory like gray area of like you're creating the government like the sec wants to say that these are securities and like every crypto company has had to like fight back and like make their case like this isn't a security and so i just don't think you're going to see like goldman sachs like buy a company like this like pump dot fun um but they're making so much revenue buy or underwrite like would they would they not even touch it from an underwriting perspective if they want to take the company public i don't know if this company could be public because it's got so much regulatory baggage right maybe in a trump uh administration it could go public yeah because like he's launching like his own meme token but but yeah i think this is one of those things like they might end up returning like billions of dollars to their vcs and i don't think they raise that much money i don't know how much they raise but like i think it's like under 10 million dollars and they could just distribute it out to vcs um like mike and i'm sure it'll be a great return but i think this is you're distributing like tokens that are liquid this is yeah this is such an amazing example of a product with like really good execution but in hindsight it's like why didn't this exist in 2020 or 2021 like it's just like the most obvious thing like shopify for me it just seems like there yeah there weren't that many like actual builders like the ratio of like scammers but even but even yeah even before this product was created like this probably increased the number of tokens by like an order of magnitude yeah totally and even before that there was like hundreds hundred thousand per day yeah something something absurd right because the cost to create them is low fascinating i like i like how this guy got like his little fucking i don't know i don't even know who this guy is yeah yeah that was just like wow i love it um And so Peter Levels, the indie hacker extraordinaire, says, where do I start with robotics?

1:06:18I want to code and build my own robots at home for fun with the potential for world domination. And Matt Bogus, Matt V, says, the raw volume of software engineers who have asked this exact question in the last 20 days is insane. So all software engineers are pivoting to robotics, apparently. yeah i think what's interesting here is that there's going to be a bunch of like really the thing about indie stuff is that it's oftentimes like could have been fundable but wasn't oftentimes it's just like unfundable like it's just like weird like some like clearly very small tam um the thing that's interesting here is like it it will be dependent on how cheap robotics get which i think everybody thinks like robots are going to continue to like get cheaper and cheaper but like right now it's expensive like the robotics company i'm involved with deterrence like hundreds of thousands of dollars like we're gonna need like millions of dollars worth of robots over time so it's not like something you can just kind of like i don't i'm i'm sort of like very for the trend but sort of like i'm not wouldn't go super long on it just because of the part of the nature of like i don't know i think i think it could be like you know it's probably like a decade plus there were a couple like kind of cheaper open source robotics platforms like like arduino arduino but you could also like get like a rumba and like open like a like a hack it and then you and then you can just like have a draw the death rumba that said rumba with a glock attached to it just patrols your house and i know boston dynamics does sell the dog for like i think it's under 10k it's like around there so it's like we should get a dog yeah that brings us you can also rent those but those are much more close source but if we had a dog that could go to the fridge and bring you a beer probably with the arm yeah yeah good and then uh george hots has a has a it's basically like two wheels and like a stick and it's like the comma body and then you can and then so you can like write code for it to like do stuff but it's very limited it's just like it's just two wheels and it balances like it's like a segue basically um uh but yeah i mean it's it's always hard with that it's like these should be at like every single hackathon so like the next generation of like college hackers can like try a bunch of different stuff even if it's like really junky my um my dad as a teacher ran this thing called project make which was basically like woodshops woodshop meets robotics meets like aerospace aerospace and just like hacking yeah and so he had at his school he had this like warehouse that was just filled with like robots and arduinos and raspberry pies i think that's kind of like starting to happen you know in high schools yeah which is very american yeah right innovation is american yeah it's always it's always hard to tell like where the where the real value will be like even even if it's like okay you had if waymo had an open api like what would you do with that you know it's like people really just want the one thing i'm excited to see more like i think like nat freeman tweeted out like i want like a not a leaf blower but like a little robot to like go somebody built it yeah yeah don't like pick up the leafs and like i'm so for that like leaf blowers we should add it can we add then can we add this enemies lift like leaf blowers because like i've lived in places where like leaf blowers are just like i'm like so constant insane like not only is it loud but like you're blowing particles like everywhere into my yard and uh they're hitting my window like i'm i'm going to yeah go postal uh well this one's related uh yak scene uh writes we need more we really need more software engineers to enter fields that are very easy like electrical engineering and mechatronics we can bring so much fresh perspective with our relatively high degree of skill compared to them that's like i love it perfectly intellectual rage bait yeah so good 3 000 likes of course 3 000 likes that poor poor person uh probably had like a thousand engineers in their dms being like you are the world's biggest idiot yeah yeah everyone who's an electrical engineer is like come on dude but uh it's great great rage made but yeah i mean i i do think though there should be more uh like intellectual flexibility between the disciplines especially with like uh just how easy llms translating between different uh languages will be so it's like oh yeah there's some sort of like a little bit trickier lower level language that you need to learn but now you can just write python code and the llm can like transform it into whatever very quickly so there's like there's like a seed of like truth there even though like it's the it's a great bait post um let's go to this will tweet absolute banger 4k likes less than a day ago uh did he really post this at 6 50 a.m on halloween is he up that late or i think early maybe this is a east coast west coast thing it might have been that's a good question i don't know ben would have screenshotted it i think he just probably said he just posts in the middle of the night he just wakes up yeah something divine divine uh no but it's very i think i'm gonna guess that it was 952 in miami okay so will says the real measure of wealth is how many problems you can solve by calling one of your guys yeah it's great it's very real this is this is the phone i think i think like jeremy may have brought this up like at Senra's event, but, um, but yeah, like it's about, everybody's like, Oh, I have like my car guy.

1:11:46I have like a barber is like a form of a guy, you know, like a hair guy. I've got, as you get down, it's like, Oh, I have like this stylist or a watch guy or I have this, you know, specific type of lawyer, feng shui. I have a feng shui guy. Um, and you know, at heretic on, the conversation is more like, who's your antichrist guy. Right. and who's your aliens guy who's your aliens guy who's your terraforming guy um if you need to terraform who's your first call like a lot of people are going to come up blank on that we're not yeah we're not there's also the shift from uh most people have like an app yeah and when you when you reach a level of wealth you have a guy like instead of and instead of door dash you have personal chef instead of uber you have a personal driver instead of united airlines app you have a private plane pilot or two of them since you always have to have two flying.

1:12:37Sorry, I had to make a note. I need to text back my feng shui guy. Oh, you do? That's great. Feng shui is real. We'll do a deep dive on it soon. So there's news in TechCrunch that Dropbox is laying off 20 % of its staff. And Packy McCormick writes, you're laughing but one out of every 17 Americans just lost their job, which is hilarious because he's thinking of DocuSign, not Dropbox. i'm sure dropbox has a lot of employees but it's nowhere near slander what that's the most that's the most attention dropbox has gotten yeah and it's so funny they got ak likes and a million views because like it's wrong but it's like kind of spiritually correct and then it's like okay no one really knows uh but dropbox is definitely going through a change because drew houston is doing like videos and going direct i've actually gotten this from a few people or is he just working with lulu no no lulu has like straight up created like a zeitgeist shift even in like public company tech ceos i've gotten texts from a few uh people here's the thing so lulu was at hereticon we just got to spend some quality time uh it's interesting because like she's she's done the public market stuff right she's currently on shopify's board okay yeah i didn't even know that um and she and she was like the the yeah the comms person on the activision blizzard and microsoft deal yeah exactly but then she's also like watching like a bunch of yeah she's working with these like really hot seed stage companies helping them do it but like is the real is that a waste of time when she could turn a 20 billion dollar company into a 21 billion dollar company like imagine if she goes turns around boeing yeah that would be crazy yeah and probably more value creation than like getting some seed stage company yeah that's like charity work it is yeah that should be her pro bono work yeah yeah she should be like yeah she should literally have her charity division yeah um but yeah it's uh get uh gabby who's also uh gabby over there that's gonna end up being like a crazy i don't know if it's gonna be a mafia or just like a generational firm if they keep creating this like orbit totally uh yeah one of those like one those firms that's like behind the scenes yeah and i guess like to go back to will's tweet like a guy is not necessarily a guy yeah it's spiritually like yeah you know it's a spiritual there's like a meme like call lulu if you're if there's a hit piece that's coming out or you have a comms crisis like there's really only one person and if you have someone that can actually solve your problem that's really valuable man the if you think about heretic on the highest percentage like any like tech conference the highest percentage of people that have had have been doxxed or had a hit piece against them everyone is like yeah it's like half the people everyone yeah but yeah um yeah it's fascinating seeing like the the like the texts that are getting passed around from like oh this tech ceo who is running a public company uh i'll get a text from someone being like what podcast do you think they should go on like they want they want to they want to do the zuck playbook now yeah and it's like they're running like a 20 billion dollar public company and they're just like they're just getting pilled on this now and it's like it's been like what two years since like all these people started going on lax and rogan and i'm like okay well like here's the list you got a little bro them a little bit yeah dude you're two percent of the size of meta like but i think it's doable for some of these people no interesting a lot of them are interesting they've just been beaten down by like the the hr apparatus yeah it's actually a way to like you know kind of like pull up the ladder for yeah for these public company ceos being like no no more startup founders on like these big podcasts only like real ballers yeah i mean the the guy that you're not trading the the guy that i'm thinking of runs like a like a massive public tech company um and there was a hit piece on him younger when he was like coming up because i mean he was already like a billionaire and he was from a very wealthy family but he bought like a mclaren or like a ferrari or something and they were like using that as evidence of like him like i don't even know like being materialist or something or being a capitalist like it didn't make any sense in the economy and you know that you know that his takeaway from like his comms team was like like if you're gonna do something nice like make sure there's no cameras there like the press cannot know that you went on a boat or like went on a vacation and and but what's interesting is that like if he actually like now zuck is like yes i have a boat that follows i have one boat that follows me while i'm surfing so it can take videos like i yeah i show up to ufc through the back entrance because i'm such a vip and and zuck just realized that like wait actually like so much more important to be authentic and he's just authentic about it and so uh it if if the public company ceo that's been like beaten down can actually and that's what lulu does a lot of times just coaching i don't know who you're referencing but the ceo from a wealthy family like it's just okay to own it the only way that you could legitimately get criticism is if he tries to go with a story of like i i like grew up exactly yeah just don't be fake just don't be fake yeah authenticity wins exactly exactly but but you know the the the comms teams of the 2010s their entire mandate was to destroy authenticity yeah and and and hide as much as possible which is just very unsustainable arguably leads to the hit piece exactly because people smell that like oh there's something off here like this person's being cagey and so like there must be a bigger story here when really it's just like no the person like created a lot of shareholder value They created a lot of consumer surplus.

1:17:56Consumers love the product. They're making money and they're enjoying it. And that's great. If they become a car guy, that's great. Or if they become a hype beast fashion guy, like that's great too. Like it's fine. Yeah. Very silly. But I hope he, I hope he breaks through and gets out of his shell and does some cool stuff. Cause I've been a fan of his for a long time. So be good. This, we, we've had signal. We've reacted to this guy a few times now. I don't even, honestly, is a testament to him crushing the X algo. because I don't know if I follow. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't know. But most great founders are after vengeance in the form of success.

1:18:31They have been wronged in some way, either by being passed up, ignored, or overruled by people that they feel are inferior to them. The possibility that somewhere, the person who fucked you will potentially read a headline where you succeed beyond belief is better than sex. It's kind of like a more aggressive, like cold grudges take. Yeah, the example that pops into mind immediately is Palmer. Palmer, like, of course. But, like, Parker Conrad is the same thing. And, like, yeah, if you're Jason, it's funny. It's the all-in guys. You know, we don't have anything against all-in. We just have things against under-monetized.

1:19:06Well, I mean, we don't like that they don't advertise. It's more of, like, we're against under-monetized. It's not pull-punches here. Exactly. We're against under-monetized podcasts. Generally. We're not against all-in. Yeah, yeah. But David and Jason having to watch Palmer and Parker Conrad both build these big decacorns decacorns like the most like important company in sass craft is a sass focus investor and the most important company potentially in the 21st century in america anderle yeah that's gotta hurt so like yeah like i think this is probably real and i and i think that palmer and parker like they're they know that they're only like five percent through the mission but they're like i'm sure they they appreciate the headlines well yeah i mean to your point about the five percent through the through the mission i i wonder if the motivation dies down once you have like total cultural victory over your you know nemesis because at this point it's like it's like the the palmer viral clip of him at all in like like trashing jason like that goes viral like once every six months and gets like millions of views like it's like it's not like it's it's widely accepted that like palmer has won that beef and so i wonder if he needs a new jason arguably doesn't accept it yeah yeah otherwise he wouldn't keep poking the bear that's good i mean maybe he needs to keep doing it because we got to keep palmer motivated we got we got to keep palmer it's good for america if it's good for palmer it's good for america exactly yeah palmer's like i could take off this weekend but you know i could play more uh dnd i don't think i gotta i gotta get on the grind because i gotta i gotta keep proving it would be since since parker and palmer are both p names strong uh since they're both billionaires we'll eventually allow them to call into the to the polycom but um but yeah i don't think you i would be shocked if they were like yes spite was the only reason yeah it's more like i want to parker wanted to revolutionize sass yeah palmer wanted to build the most advanced weapon systems in the world and like there's some like product there has to be some product yeah yeah whenever i hear palmer talk about it it's it seems like a lot of the like the reason he gives that talk is is because he feels like there are dozens of founders who were destroyed and didn't get the opportunity that he did yeah so he wants to like kind of do a cultural reset there which i think is very valuable so i think his his victory lap is less for him and it's more for the community.

1:21:36Yeah, it's good. Let's go to Tariq Mansour, who says he posts a screenshot from what looks like WhatsApp. It looks like an investor said, you should receive$12.4 million today. 5.4 from NIO and 7 million from me personally. I've already sent in the wire requests. We can figure out the terms later. Go, go, go. And he's posted with a comment. it's in times like these that investors show their true nature uh ali portovi and neo have just redefined the term conviction why do you like this i mean i like it for i like it for a lot of reasons one i like it because it's great for google and and meta shareholders because i'm sure a large part of that 12.4 million dollars was immediately dumped into the ad platforms right like i actually don't know what he's building this is the this is cal sheet this is a competitor oh really no way okay yeah so so so the reason they also advertise on podcasts the reason for the speed was because the it's an election betting marketplace makes sense the election is coming up yeah and they needed they probably just wanted to spend a lot of money on ads otherwise you know why the 12.4 million with no terms and like so anyways like honestly props to uh props to the to the neo guy uh and yeah i hope i hope they're able to agree on terms you know mutually agreeable terms uh but but yeah it's kind of like it's kind of like crazy because what i don't know the guy's full name i think it's ali ali ali apartovi um ali partovi ali partovi yeah but like that's either going to be like something that each of them like scrub from like their twitter or it's going to be like framed in his office at the fund about like conviction it's it's long tail it does feel like it does feel like a highly i don't know if people are going to be betting on uh you know sort of like state and like localized elections to the same degree as the presidential election i would have imagined like the volume dropped significantly yep but it'll either be a legendary investment um it's very binary legendary investment or like that guy is going to be like a month from now being like what was i thinking but i'm sure their metrics are insane right yeah i'm sure everything's ripping it's great yeah one thing i was thinking on that note on the topic of uh election betting markets is what happens if uh the election results are contested by either side like are the funds released when the winner is announced or are they is like polymarket and these other platforms gonna have to hold funds until the person is actually like yeah i don't think it's as much of an issue as you think because there's a lot of liquidity in the market So what happens is like, I don't know if Polymarket had the 2020 election on there, but let's say that they did.

1:24:41Like obviously January 6th happened. The transfer of power happened on January 20th. But the election was like up in the air the night of. A few days later, it was like being called by like CNN and Fox and all of that. Then there was a lot of chaos and discussion. But through that time, like let's say we just reran the 2020 election where it was like in question. Well, throughout the 2020 process, even on January 5th or January 7th, it would be at 99 % Biden. So you could sell your Biden shares for 99 cents or you could be buying Trump. Very cool. So there's still liquidity. And I think the actual like payout mechanism is less relevant or it's not as critical.

1:25:25Maybe this investor is thinking we're going to make millions and millions of dollars in fees over the next. We just want to be super capitalized so we can outspend. And so even if there's like a battle, like it's like you have two full months before the certification and then the transfer of power. And then it becomes pretty easy for Polymarket to say, OK, well, on January 20th, on the inauguration day, like everyone watches. One person is going to get inaugurated. We can close it now. And it's like, yeah, maybe you had your money locked up for an extra month or two. but you could have gotten out at 99 cents, but then you get the full 100 or whatever later.

1:25:58So if you're - Do you want to talk about Robinhood's betting market? Oh yeah. Is that in here? I don't know. We can just talk about how Robinhood launched betting markets as well. It seems like every firm is launching them. And I mean, Vegas has had it for a long time. They've been all over the place. I don't think they're in here maybe. Let me see. Going to Vegas on election night and just live betting in the casino sounds like, I actually don't, I only like gambling on private companies. I don't enjoy like other forms of gambling, but it sounds like it'd be fun. Yeah, I don't think I have it in here, but either way, Robinhood also launched election betting, which makes a lot of sense.

1:26:44Like probably within 24 hours of that investment. Because everyone saw that like, okay, this is just huge. It's going to be a big thing. Um, but yeah, I mean, um, just making it easy for people to, to bet on it. I wonder, I wonder if it'll increase, uh, turnout. I wonder if we'll see turnout material increase. I, I, I'm fascinated to see like, that would be awesome. Cause this is really like the first, it's the first election with like serious, serious liquidity in the prediction markets. There's always been predicted and whatnot, but the liquidity has always been really, really low, like a few million.