Holiday Party Recap, Christianity is So Back, Stop the Clock, Vitalik Needs to do a Cycle

33:40Yeah. Become a founder. Like it doesn't matter what their stated angle is. Maybe it's just me, but like the Straussian reading has always like become a founder. Become a founder. Yeah, the last thing I would say, I think we generally only are on this podcast to talk about technology and business and the technology industry. So that's why we covered this. But generally, I think it's a very positive trend that people within the tech community or feel like they can fully express their personal life themselves, right? So the same thing of Trey and Michelle, you know, having their events and church and being able to talk about that, that's great.

34:19There's also prominent examples of investors and founders from Jewish backgrounds and like rap Teflon and they post that on X, right? So like that's another expression of it. neither of them like it's totally it should be totally everybody should be fine with people expressing their own personal belief systems and values and cultures so um so anyways glad glad to see it all that concludes our deep dive for this episode uh do you have some dms over there i wanted to go through some q a the dms come we got some dms let's hit some dms i got i got a good one for you here let me see if i can find this um okay yeah this is a this is a Hey, Jordy, as someone with a sole male heir, are you doing anything special to prepare young Master Roman for inheriting the Hayes estate and continuing your dynastic transitions?

35:14Great question. We could do an entire deep dive on this, and we should. I am, along with my wife, he's turning three next year in Q1, and we're going to be gifting him a C-Corp for his third birthday. and start him building his own enterprise. Because as much as I think that all parents should generally embrace nepotism and try to give their children and their communities the advantages in life, I do want him to learn how to do it on his own. And so, yeah, I think one of the best gifts for a third birthday is a C-Corp, right? A C-Corp's malleable, right? they can bootstrap out of it they could raise capital yep could kind of work across any industry it's a great gift to be like hey it's not a not a totally inexpensive gift right stripe atlas like 500 bucks it's like i got you this is the equivalent of 30 dino puzzles this is a ps5 yeah and uh and now you it's up to you to make it worth something but instead of playing you know some ps5 game you're playing the game of capitalism game of capitalism which is the ultimate game ultimate game every it's much like the but the dino puzzle you need to puzzle together the the capital yeah exactly so um so yeah that's big big gift coming up there fantastic c corp i have an idea for you um i think that there's a natural inclination for children to rebel and so you might want to use some reverse psychology tell them hey look i you know i expect you to become a tech journalist.

36:54I expect you to become a DJ in Bushwick. And then 23 rolls around. He sits your dad, dad, I know you wanted me to become a DJ and be the first member of our family to play a boiler room set, but I want to start a hedge fund. Yes. That's actually so smart. And you're just like, okay, son, if that's what you want to do with your life, I will support it. I will back your first fund. But keep listening to the EDM. Yeah, the journalism side too. Every Saturday morning, the routine is if we sit down, we open the information app on the family iPad. We identify that and then he gets exhausted by it and has to rebel.

37:32And then he's like, but through the process of reading the information articles, he learns about these countercultural bad boy entrepreneurs that are like, wow, these guys, Zaya Taylor, this guy kind of sounds cool. Augustus DiRico, this guy sounds cool. Strong moral character, fitness oriented. So yeah, I think that reverse psychology and a C-Corp is a great. So he has the entity set up, right? If he wants to rebel. You give your children entities. I can't stress this enough. For sure. Well, we got a question and a suggestion from Sean. He says, tech bros pod have you heard heard you guys need a tie recommendation check out this burberry what do you think should we do some burberry ties we should get on there and shop uh sean submitted this last night we just got to the studio this morning didn't have time to get in there and and but it's a great thank you for pointing that out sean it's really going to be dependent on who writes us a bigger check to sponsor them from the high fashion world in terms of ties but we're open if you run a tie company uh contact us it's kind of a winner take all type of winner take all market yeah sure but this neck and that neck yeah well we can do rival sponsorships okay yeah airmaz over here burberry over there you know we'll see yeah maybe but uh thank you for the submission sean yeah uh oh this is good um i work for a billionaire as a chief of staff what art should I put on my wall to make a statement?

39:05What do you think about art? From your office, you want, when the billionaire walks in and says, hey, I need you to book a flight for me, you gotta make a statement. My recommendation was you go with Peter Paul Rubens, David and Goliath. We'll have to put this up on the screen, but it's one of the most aggressive, it's a painting, it's in Pasadena at the Norton Simon, you can go see the real thing if you're in LA, and uh it's a it's an amazing uh painting of this super jacked david just about to be head goliath yeah it's like one of the most aggressive like fire and brimstone types type paintings uh really sets the tone yeah hey billionaire you might be bigger than me i might be the chief of staff you're the boss here yeah but at any moment one rock to the head i'm slicing my head off yeah yeah i'm gonna take a different approach so if you're chief of staff for a billionaire you have big ambitions you you don't want to be you know the the right hand man or woman forever and so what i would do uh billionaire circuit you're going to end up at various art fairs art basel might be one of them so i think the right approach here is actually to uh silently and anonymously build an entire career as a sort of provocative modern artist right we've seen pieces like the banana that was duct taped to the walls, you know, selling for, you know, significant amounts of money.

40:29And so I would take that approach, figure out a way, you know, if you're, if you're hungry and a hustler, you'll be able to do this, figure out a way to get your own art shown at Art Basel, get it, you know, auctioned by Sotheby's and really get those numbers up and take your boss and say hey we should stop by this artist artist is blowing up yep and and then ask uh once you're there um you know the billionaire is like we might say like you know is the artist here like what do they even look like and pull off the mask pull off the mask and say it was me all along the calls coming from inside the house exactly yeah um but only do that after they've bought a piece yep and say like you know uh you're my customer yeah i would take it a step further if you're maybe you don't have the artistic inclination to pull it off yourself you got to get on the art circuit figure out what artists want to sell to your boss rent your wall space to display billionaire walks in sees oh that's nice yeah it's my friend yeah it's only this much then you should become an art dealer yeah start selling yeah i mean you could even take this a step further is find an artist you love buy up all their available works sure work with sotheby's to get these works listed you buy them back from Sotheby's to mark them up to higher prices.

41:47And then just build the market, build the market, build the market, and then have your boss be the bag holder and have him buy the piece and be like, I own this entire market and then flood the market. Here's our recommendation. There we go. It's Peter Paul Rubens. What a piece. It's beautiful. It's going to look great on your wall. Good luck. Here's a serious one I got from somebody. Do you think there's room in the market for a robo-advisor with a modern all-weather portfolio such that it entails inflation hedging via crypto and black swan hedging via far OTM near expiry options? It's interesting.

42:27The robo-advisor market, I haven't followed too much. I know that isn't Wealthfront the main big one. So I think what's been interesting is for a long time, there was a lot of robo-advisors. Yep. it was unclear if any of them were working and then wealth front came out and they were like we have 200 million of revenue and like we're profitable and like this is actually like a great business right because people park their funds and they don't really think about it and the number goes up and presumably retention is pretty high until maybe i think there's a certain point where people are like whoa i have five million in wealth front maybe i should give this to like a traditional money manager type person but turns out they're pretty good businesses you know we know like the autopilot team he's built a great business already um having a more opinionated robo-advisor that has like a set strategy so i think there's a lot this i i have no way to like analyze yeah on the on the on the show whether or not this is a good strategy but i think like highly opinionated robo-advisors are a great way to get your first 20 million of AUM and then from there maybe you can you know build yeah i think you kind of need to abstract it like there's one which is like the actual, you know, backtesting and risk modeling and just making sure that what you're proposing here is a good strategy.

43:44And then number two is like, how are you wrapping that and distilling that into marketing language? So I remember there's one robo-advisor that was like, every time you make a transaction, it will round it up and it will just take 15 cents and you'll never really notice, but then you'll save a bunch of money along the way. And then there's like the the other one which is like copy trading oh this one uh there was another one that went through yc a couple years ago that was like we just look at the hedge fund the best performing hedge fund disclosures and we trade based on that so you're copying a hedge fund yeah and that's very easy to understand okay hedge funds do well my portfolio is copying those i'm happy about that i'm willing to give it a try right and so this like modern all-weather portfolio like that could be great, but it's not jumping out to me as like a fantastic elevator pitch that you could put in like an Instagram ad or like a post on Twitter.

44:35I want to copy that. Whereas the autopilot guys, it's like, you're copying Nancy Pelosi's portfolio. That is a meme. People understand that. And so they're in with that. It's very distilled. Yeah. The last thing I would say, so Wealthfront, if you've ever used it, is very risk off, no matter how much risk on you basically tell it to be, it's still like going to be a very pretty stable portfolio. And that's part of their strategy. If I was going to make a robo advisor and I just wanted to optimize for users and like attention and potentially volume, I would just say we are the degenerate robo advisor, which is like, this is ultra high risk.

45:14You might lose almost everything, but the potential content that would come out of that is like, you can, if, if wealth front wants to be the stable place where people can earn 6 % a year. And you're like, Hey, you might be go down 70 % one year and go up 4 ,000 % the next year. And we're going to like do it. Like there's hedge funds that basically do that. I mean, yeah, there's, there's a crypto trader that our buddy knows who you can essentially give him a thousand dollars and he'll just try and run it up to a million and then he'll be bankrupt after. And so you got to pull out at the right time, kind of push him, but he's just a gambler like he's not even a hedge fund it's just like a guy yeah and uh yeah the the d-gen because that's going to create a lot of content a lot of wild long tail stuff uh people people want the risk yeah so instead of wealth front you'd say maybe call it the incinerator capital incinerator how much should you put the incinerator i threw it i threw a 10 I threw 10 in.

46:14Let's throw 10 in the incinerator and see what happens. See what happens. That's great. Should we move on to the timeline? No, I got to jump in. So last week we talked about this. We have had so many incredible brothers in the comments replying. And so we decided to make Reply Guy of the Month a weekly award. Okay, weekly award. And this one was honestly crushing. It was so high stakes for us. I was up all night thinking about this, debating between the choices. We barely slept. It's one of the hardest decisions I've ever made in my life. Barely slept. And let's see. Let's talk about some of the people that almost made the cut.

47:01I mean, Baldo is still on the path to goat hood. Brody. Brody's an animal. He had a great comment today, a response to our driving gloves. Oh, fantastic. So Brody's been in the running. But the guy that is this week's reply guy of the week is somebody who has to have post notifications on. It's the first comment pretty much every time. He's a true technology brother. He's building. He builds rockets down in Texas. Nice. He is friends and I think partners with Red Bull Futurist. and he is none other than stefan salai salace salisis salisis stefan salisis you are this week's reply guy of the week and uh it can't go to somebody better i'll drop some of the the highlights here we posted yesterday founders the next time a journalist is writing a hit piece on your company buy them a dressage horse most tech journalists grew up riding weekly a gift like this will let them know that you respect their culture and you shouldn't be unambiguously demonized and returned he says this that equestrian opulence i thought was very relevant uh we posted about vcs if you want to count on a vc for a growth check you should uh hope that they uh go skiing places that don't have chairlifts he says if you can't drop in on a double black diamond equivalent run with fresh powder how are you supposed to uh generate wealth fact check it's good true uh later he says america isn't fucking around so that's that's a deeply american post by itself um he just threw that in there just that i love yeah yeah just a little bit a little bit of fuel on the fire he was weighing in on on y combinator's success yeah a combinator is a great yeah i mean that's the thing about being a great reply guy you don't need to drop a whole essay every single time.

48:57You can just kind of remix what we're saying, amp it up a little bit, just give us some juice. We love it. This one was good too. He said, we posted VCs with no followers love to yap about how much they value anonymity, which if you've talked to a VC with no followers, they will tell you that. He said, I think it's funny that I see VCs with zero followers. Isn't it heavily in your favor to be able to reach an audience and get your product in front of people? And I thought that was just a good way to position that. And then lastly, we posted, and just like that, venture capital holiday party season is over.

49:36Thank you to the LPs that make these events possible and our security for keeping us safe from anti-capitalists. The parties may be done for now, but the back of the napkin deals will echo for eternity. And Stefan said, communists wouldn't even have napkins to do deals on. They have much to learn. And that's true. Anyways, so shout out to Stefan. Finn, a great American, a great reply guy, and we are lucky to have you in our community of brothers. Fantastic. You love to see it. On to the timeline. Let's do it. Let's go to Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp. He has been on the show before. He is quote posting Lenny Rachitsky, who says companies minting the most founders out of their product managers.

50:20And Ramp is number four with 14.3%. And he says, we're the youngest company on this list, already top five in the ranking of new companies formed. Sad to see exceptional people leave. Only thing we fear more is no longer attracting exceptional founders in the first place. Just shy of 10 % of Ramp's team today have started a company. Yeah. Wow. Fantastic. You were joking about the pipeline of like Ramp to company founder, and I didn't realize how real it is. No, the pipeline is the pipeline is extremely real the thing that i would say that a lot of people that become founders want to be founders from very early on in their lives like maybe they had a small business while they were in middle school or delivering papers or flipping sneakers these kind of things um and so there's this tendency to once you're an adult to be like oh i want to be a founder i should become a founder immediately and there's so much value in going and working for a company like ramp learning best practices, learning what excellence looks like, learning about the needs of customers.

51:21You're not just learning how to work and how to approach business, but you're learning about the problems that businesses have. And, you know, Ramp probably benefits from the fact that they serve companies in a bunch of different industries. And so you're getting exposure to a bunch of industries and the problems that are there. So I give this advice all the time to people that are like, I want to be a founder. And it's like, well, you don't need to have started a company before, obviously, to be a founder. Anybody can just become a founder, but a lot of people would be better off going and working two, three years at an iconic company and then taking a crack.

51:54And most importantly, a fast paced company that executes on product very quickly like Ramp. This is why Google, former Google person was really great during the growth years of Google because they would just go and Paul Buchheit would just go build Gmail in a weekend. And now it's kind of been like, oh, okay, Google is a place where you just go settle in. Maybe you leave and start a company if you're in the ai group yeah like for the most part like the google pm is not as as hot anymore yeah the pattern is still super fast paced so yeah and it's not just about what you learn on the job but it's the pattern matching that that that capital allocators will do after you leave where they're like yeah this person's never started a company before but they were a pm at ramp and they built this feature and i talked to eric about it and he said they're great and that just can be an extreme catalyst yep let's go to gabriel he says this is how vitalik built ethereum and it's a screenshot of a kid in a very awkward pose saying look at this kid and everyone was laughing out loud at this it is funny vitalik has been i think he's been on tech bro drip but he hasn't done enough i mean a got to go through a bulking cycle got to hit the gym get jacked because it'd be a great turnaround everyone would be singing his praises i'm sure they're on a little test Get him a sports car, get his testosterone up.

53:10But also he did that photo shoot, I believe for Time Magazine or Forbes or something. And they did him really dirty. They shot him really flat. They didn't give him a lot of contrast. The camera was kind of looking down on him. And it was very clear that the whole thrust of the article and the brief for the photographer was make him look like a nerdy kid. Because that was the story they wanted to tell. They didn't want to tell him like a hero. and I was looking at the Trump is on the cover of Time Magazine and I saw that they made him look really heroic and everyone was like, this is crazy because the last five Time Magazine covers about Trump have been like, it's a disaster, it's terrible.

53:50But then they finally shot him. And if you look at the BTS, you can see that it's a really low angle. The photographer's basically on the floor. He's looking up at Trump, which is heroic. Angle matters a lot. Angle matters a lot. And there's a big soft light and you'll see, you know, we have a big soft light in the studio. It creates more intrigue for your features, more contrast, and it just makes you look better. And those details get lost a lot. But hopefully we can spread the word that founders should be aware of the way that they're photographed. Ryan Peterson, when he was on the cover of Forbes, it was a fantastic lighting setup.

54:25I was obsessed with it. I know. Founders need to build into the shoot that this is the camera angle. I won't take photos in any other angles. I will be smiling because sometimes if you want it to be a celebratory piece, I had the New York times come to my house once and I, and they, they told me they were covering my launch and they were excited about what we were doing. And we did this interview and then they told me during the shoot, don't smile. And I was like, that's pretty weird. I'm being featured in the Sunday business section. I'm kind of think that's decently cool. At least my parents will think it'll, it's cool.

55:01And then of course it wasn't, it wasn't like overly negative, but it wasn't like the celebratory piece that they had pitched it to me. And the main thing is that there's still a lot of people out there that put like PR firms on retainer, but the PR people aren't sharp enough to actually execute that. If you look at the way Tim Cook is shot at Apple, it is so detailed and clearly it's like, he's always wearing an Apple watch. He's always wearing Nike's like he, everything is thought out perfectly. The angle, the set design of his office is perfect. And if you have someone good on your team, You don't necessarily need to know how to do that as a founder, but you should have someone on your team that's overlooking that and making that happen.

55:39Let's go to Arvind Srinivas over at Perplexity. He says, you post about Robinhood. I post about Ramp. We aren't the same. And this post got a lot of likes. He's subtweeting Sam Altman, who was talking about the Robinhood gold card, which is a very cool product. but he's saying you know you're flexing with your gold uh you know card tied to your trading account i'm using the ramp card to optimize my business and this is just a crazy ad for ramp i mean we've done some good um promote promoted posts of ramp but uh it's hard to compete with a guy running one of the hottest uh ai companies in the world to just post his personal ramp card and uh brag about it.

56:28It's great. And I think once Ramp launches the the meteorite card or the tungsten card. Yeah. Yeah. We're working with them to try to get some heavier, more exotic. Yeah. The meteorite card is a good one. Yeah. That's going to be that's going to be big when they do that. But Robin Hood will have to respond. It'll be the card wars. Yeah. Much like the merch wars and going on in defense tech. Anderil and Palantir. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to Delian. He says, thank God, please end this nightmare. And it's an announcement that Donald Trump will use its best efforts to eliminate daylight saving time. Yeah, there's been a huge strong constituency, but shouldn't.

57:07There's been a big movement here. Huberman had something. I think he's branding it. He coined it. He understands the value of coinage. I think he stopped the clock or something like that. Yeah. Sagar and Jetty is big on this. He's been on this for years talking about how it's a, tax on early risers no it's a tax on parents yeah sun goes down at five you're like great i've got to entertain yeah children for another 90 can't just let them play outside anymore yeah it's it's it's i didn't really care about it until having kids yep and Mine go down around 7 yep but but seriously like sun goes down and you're like okay we have to keep them indoors yeah like try to get their energy out yeah yeah it just it's not not great it would be exciting it would just be the type of change where it would feel like monumental for like a day and you'd be like wow i didn't even know they could do that that's crazy like because they used to just like create these things like at some point it didn't exist and then it did and they just did things uh and then the thought of the government changing something like that or like moving us on a metric like yeah we could just do that but yeah like it's frankly un-american yeah unless we and then we basically if we did a hostile takeover the metric system and then kind of recreated the history of it and said look like we've actually been using this in many ways for much longer yep native americans actually use created the metric system i love it uh let's go to ryan peterson he's been on the show before he says inside a flexport 747 loading this thing to within nine kilograms of max weight today.

58:43Nice job by our sales team. This is amazing. This is founder mode. So that's, I think I sent this into the stack because this is the, he's been on a founder mode tear recently. And it's so cool because you see this and anybody who is a customer is like, wow, the CEO is deep in the trenches of his company. Yep. Like improving it daily, making sure it's running well. if you work for the company you're like ryan's working harder than i am like that's unexcusable i should be like you want to be working at least as hard as your boss yep and then if you don't work for flexport and you're you want to work somewhere founder led it's like okay this is a company that um that that has the right culture coming straight from the top so yeah a couple years ago i made a whole video on my youtube channel about flexport and kind of broke down his whole history and it was great.

59:36I didn't even interview him for it. Um, but I was always kind of wondering like, Oh, what would be a good followup? And when he got the 747, I was like, can we go do an interview on the 747? Like that would be so sick. Like, and the interview and the, the, the, the tops in the back, it'd be so cool. Right. Uh, and, and we never could figure out the scheduling. It was always really hard. This makes so much more sense for him just to hop on. And And, you know, I don't know if I want to spend like three days in Hong Kong right now, but, but, but we should definitely do a vlog with him on the 747, something like that.

1:00:07Yeah. And CEOs, it's costs$0 to go founder mode. You just have to find it within you. That is true. Very capital efficient thing. You just got to become, you just got to embody the lifestyle. Yeah. It's interesting. The founder mode stuff is it's like, you go back to Brian Armstrong, it's like this crazy bravery thing. This is not edgy or brave in that way. It's really just, being authentic. It's the best possible marketing for Flexport to the entire market, capital markets, new hires, customers. And it doesn't require some expensive New York agency. You don't have to spend 300 ,000 on a branding package like we did just to launch a podcast, right?

1:00:46You literally just have to have a cell phone and just talk about what you're doing and show that you're deeply engaged. And I'm sure there's been discussions on the Flexport marketing team of like, should we do some sort of owned content should we start a podcast about shipping yeah and we'll have someone like you know non-related to ryan run it and it'll it's like that's going nowhere this is already viral yeah and this took him you know a couple minutes to go and do yeah and he was already going to go anyway so why not go for a ride we got a promoted speaking of founder mode we got a promoted post from a friend of ours a friend of mine and friend of the show nate boss hard nate says brand marketing within traditional orgs has been siloed gate kept and opaque 40 of an average marketing budget is allocated to brand yet no one really understands what it truly is it's a services heavy practice without software to scale it brand ai finally solves this so nate has has uh incubated or helped start a company called brand.ai and what they're doing is like building this entire suite of tools i know that the guy who did the the rora brand uses brand ai and nate generated an analysis of technology brothers so cool and so they've built software that that helps you understand your brand from what you're already putting out there yep and so nate ran tb through brand ai and it gave us ideas about what our brand actually is yeah it was really get it like distilling what we've already been talking about so it just like it was really good psychoanalyzed us and the podcast like perfectly yeah we didn't even have to be involved um and so we're we're getting on boarded right now and uh anyways it's kind of beautiful because like if you put your company through there and it gives you like kind of milquetoast analysis you can't write it off as just like oh it got it wrong it's almost like no you haven't created enough exactly you haven't been living the brand you haven't created a brand you're not opinionated um you should almost, you know, pull in like, okay, your CEO went on invest like the best.

1:02:47Let's pull that into the brand AI thing as well. And then understand, you know, what that is. And then once you, once you dial it down, like that's kind of your brand book, have everyone run with that. And, uh, and to the founder mode mode point, it's like the Flexport brand needs to be, you know, the guy who goes on the 747, the guy who goes to the, uh, to the doc. Um, and so what does that mean in in their all their marketing language all their sales collateral like anything that they do needs to reflect this because this is the brand now um and uh and it's not whatever's in some pitch deck yep let's go to ben hilak he's been on the show before he says smartphones as we know them will be around the next 20 years at least in the future people will be using them more not less interesting i i do i do think that there's something about like we've gone smaller with the watches, the Apple Watch, that hasn't really taken off.

1:03:39And we've gone bigger with the iPads, and that's still not what people carry. There's something about the pocket that is just the platonic ideal. And even Apple, Steve Jobs didn't want to go bigger than like four inches. Now we're up to like five, like small changes, but it does seem pretty dialed. And it also feels like as they get more powerful, it's going to be something that drives other experiences. Like you can clearly tell that like the apple vision pro has this power brick your phone has a battery that's basically the same size you should really just be plugging a headset into here if you're using that like the phone can kind of always be around a power as like the central core of your personal computer uh ben thompson's tratechery always says like we messed up the terminology the phone should be called the personal computer because it's actually the personal computer whereas the the laptop is like a workstation yeah um but what do you like about this post i people have developed such negative relationships with their phones and negative feelings towards their phone and like oh what's your screen time oh my screen time's so high yep i always joke around about this i'm like i actually spend like 90 of the time on my phone working either messaging that's great people that i'm working with um workshopping memes uh sourcing posts from the timeline whatever talking to founders and so i'm actually like i was actually pleasantly surprised to see my screen time go up uh last when i got the notification yesterday i was like good i've been working harder yep but i think people have have developed this thing where yeah you're if you're doing if you're doom scrolling on your phone if you're just like doing the anti-meditation where you're just injecting new ideas into your brain just like constantly which is like what an algo feed does that's bad but the way that you use it matters a lot and i don't think that more screen time is always worse for you it's just like what screen time even within the apps like you can be scrolling x and getting all slop but if you do click the mute mute mute on those like you can get a pretty good quality we were with somebody saturday night and they pulled up linkedin and it was like time gated and we were like what are you doing what are you doing but it was funny because this founder is like a very hard worker yeah and he was like like in it and it and it the it was like the app notification was like you have used all your linkedin time today and i was like i mean i think if he doesn't do that he wouldn't be able to turn off and like enjoy the party basically yeah he'd be on it because he's grinding it's great though uh classic like uh stated preference versus reveal reference uh i i want to use my phone less what do people do yeah scroll the algo feeds watch our content um she'll says a few folks have asked me why is 3x Why is the 3x multiple good for a lender like Bridget?

1:06:19Here's an answer. Question for you. So Wealthfront trades at 10x ARR and Bridget at 3 to 4x. Is that just due to net dollar retention being much shorter at Bridget? Here's one way to think about quality revenue. If Bridget lays everyone off tomorrow, people run off with the money and without customer acquisition, there's no ongoing revenue. If Wealthfront lays off everyone tomorrow, the majority of people won't notice and Wealthfront continues to make money off those customers for many years to come. So Wealthfront's revenue is worth a lot more in enterprise value than Bridget's. Pretty self-explanatory.

1:06:50Honestly, great analysis. I don't really have that much. I don't know that much about Bridget, and I don't know why if they lay people off. Bridget, to my understanding, was effectively a fintech as a payday lender, right? So they give you these short-term loans, and so there's a ton of demand for it, but not the highest quality customers to have, not a lot of recurring revenue. Yeah. But either way, it was like good. It's just exits are good, right? Like they're necessary. And it wasn't the outcome that everybody, I think it was quite under what their last valuation was. But ultimately, like they created a half a billion dollar company.

1:07:30So like congratulations to the team and hope everybody made some money. Boom, little size gong moment and great analysis by Shield. Let's go to Gary Tan. And he says, vision for 2040, every person should have a robot, universal basic robot. And Elon Musk chimes in and says, they will. They will. That's exciting. 2040, not too far away. So I think it's under discussed. So there's a lot of humanoid robot hate right now. Yep. And a lot of people are saying like, oh, it's like the iPad form factor. Like it's not really going to be like what you think is going to be the thing is not really going to be the thing.

1:08:09but elon's been pretty intentional guy like i think he had like the fact that he's doing it says a lot so it is interesting to see i you know we've talked about we've had a request for robots that goes and uses computer vision to analyze a tree figure out which leaves are going to fall and just quietly picks them out before they hit the ground yep um so we're looking forward to robots like that but hope i i expect like everybody will have a drone right that like goes and picks up like oh i want this drink from the grocery store like go grab it for me right everybody has like their little leaf picker everybody has like a humanoid robot around the house or maybe it's not that foreign fact yeah it's kind of like how you know the first cpu in your house or chip in your house is probably like your personal computer very expensive use it a lot and then over the last 20 30 years like the chips have just gone into everything such that you're like your toaster has one and it can be very annoying when it's implemented by a non-tech company poorly but in general like having tech in things is probably good and inevitable and the same thing will probably happen with robots right now everyone does have a personal robot in the sense that like most people have Roomba or something like that but then there's a question of like is the leaf picker next is the you know is the car after that and then what else can be become robot you know you get the laundry one you get the dishwashing one and eventually you know everyone winds up having or like the average person has one yeah on average right yeah uh i'm excited i'm excited for the age of personal robots i don't think they're gonna rise up and if they do watch out i'll be shooting them with an ak-47 let's go to kip he says we really have to bring family crests back i love this you should be paying a firm half a million dollars to design the crest that your sons will wear on fat gold rings for the coming millennia i do love that i I have some friends that have the crest rings that they pass down.

1:10:02The best day to start a family tradition is today. Go and design this. I don't think you need to spend a half a million dollars if you don't have it. Obviously, if you do, if you're any sort of venture capitalist, that's kind of the bare minimum that you should be spending. But for the folks in the audience who are maybe a little bit scrappier, a little bit more bootstrapped, just get in Figma and start designing. Ask your calligrapher to make something. Exactly, yeah. You already have them on staff. Yes. Put them to use. Yes, exactly. but definitely get it in a gold ring and pass that down start wearing it today gift it to your the oldest patriarch in your family give it to your dad give it to your grandpa if he's still alive and then when they pass away they'll pass it down to you and then you can say to your son this was your grandfather's yeah it doesn't matter that you got it to him when his when your grandfather was 85 it will still be technically his and passed down yeah and you should do the same thing with patek philippe you should go and buy one and then gift it to the oldest you know patriarch in the family yeah and then it will pass down fairly quickly it's the start hopefully not but hopefully it'll live forever but you know you you will expect to have this at some point but then it will be a fourth generation or third generation patak or ring almost immediately which is great um so get creative yeah it was funny because i commented on that and i was like this is technology brothers bait yes and it works clearly but he then he said no is the technology brothers inspired so i just the positive thing right now is we have this virtuous cycle of brothers in the community, both, you know, both men and women, uh, you know, you know, taking stuff from the show, creating new things.

1:11:35We then recycle it back. Now we're promoting family crests. And so, yeah, this is, it's a very, it's a great cycle that we have going here. Yep. That's great. Oh, this is, should we do this one? Quantian? Uh, Quantian says, this was the exchange that Beth said was one of the worst days of his life, Lamao. And it's a big long fight between growing Daniel and based Beth Jesus. Daniel says, so is Beth's company going to ship anytime soon? Beth says, hardware takes time, not building a GPT wrapper like many out there, wink. And then Daniel says, it's a crypto mining thing, right? That's exciting. And then Beth says, it's not.

1:12:14And then Daniel says, oh, okay, blockchain something though. And then Beth says, no, there's literally no crypto. It's just hardware for AI. And then and Daniel says, oh, right, everything is AI now. That's going to be big. Just like, dude, you're so online, Beth. Like, how did you get trolled like this? Like, come on. But, yeah, but, I mean, just masterful posting. I mean, when two posters collide. This is a war. This is a war. Daniel versus Alive. But you got to just post through it. The main thing to Beth is just don't hold a grudge. Like, you know, he won this round, you know, you got to get him back.

1:12:49The best way to mog somebody is by building a massive uh you can't really mog daniel yeah by having a big audience on x yeah this is one of the greatest posters of a generation yep but you can you can mog by by making uh extropic yeah a great company yeah yeah extropic you know uh an nvidia you know um close competitor even yeah yeah i mean it is i'm pretty sure beth announced extropic like a couple weeks before this post and And so Daniel's just like jumping. Oh, really? It's a hardware company. Like, so he's like, is he going to ship anytime soon? It's like, even like, you know, like hardware companies that people are not skeptical of.

1:13:31Yeah. It takes them a long time to ship things. Like, you know, like the companies that have gone on to become massively successful in hardware, like Anderol took a long time to ship because that's just the nature of these things. And so Daniel's like really ribbing him like, hey, hey, have you shipped that brand new chip immediately? it's like okay probably not but uh don't let them get to you beff you gotta just uh move on but oh well one of the greatest interactions very funny on both sides and honestly you know nice guys like there needs to be there needs to be something so that was a screenshot i guess yeah i think it got deleted yeah but there needs to be a a museum called the screenshot museum it's just a museum that you get to walk around and see the great moments of history that happened online that They were screenshotted and then deleted.

1:14:19And I'd pay to go to that. So if you make it into San Francisco or New York, I think you'll have an audience. Yeah, we need a new segment for like wars. Conflict. Like timeline wars. Timeline and turmoil. Yeah, timeline and turmoil. Because there's been a number of these where it's been like, okay, we're breaking down J. Cal and Palmer. And we're going back on like six different posts. There was the Robert Scoble thing. And it doesn't really work to just react to one post. You need to really understand the full context. So let's build out a segment for that. And this is related to our next post from Creatine Cycle Atlas.

1:14:52He's quoting Simphor Satoshi. Simphor Satoshi, I am ginger trash, says, this is becoming a universal slop indicator. Seeing this on your website plus contact us for pricing means you know you're about to talk to two of the most obnoxious 23-year-old Stanford grads ever. And it's a screenshot of backed by Y Combinator. Simphor Satoshi, among other people, have been talking a lot of trash about YC lately. Very negative. We don't like that. Let's have some positivity. Let's keep all this negativity towards the real villains of our industry, the tech journalists, please. And the communists. And the communists.

1:15:26YC is clearly on our side. China would kill to have Y Combinator. They would. They would literally kill us and take – YC if they could. They would decimate everything and they would just take YC. Yes. And who knows? Maybe they're funding all the tech journalists to write hit pieces and take us down. That's possible. That would be a great psyop for them. But we'll have to break. They won't be able to break that scoop for themselves. Yeah. We can get scoop that shows. Yeah. The information. People are worried about foreign money on cap tables through like seven layers of roll up vehicle and SPV.

1:16:00Maybe the real thing you should be worried about is foreign money in the tech journalist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the real risk. We'll be breaking that news. It happened in politics. There was a bunch of Russian money going out to YouTubers. It was very dramatic. but Atlas says this dude is carrying on like that weird guy at the club who approaches women asks for their number gets politely declined and then calls them ugly to their face interesting a little on on a non on a non warfare timeline and turmoil timeline and turmoil no so so I'm I'm a torn here I think YC is great even though I was rejected by it okay I think Simph for Satoshi is a great thinker and has good ideas yep Atlas is is right though I think Simph for Satoshi was like rejected from YC and they told him his idea wasn't going to work.

1:16:47And then they like put out some requests for startups or one of the YC partners was like kind of, and so he has a personal vendetta against YC and he has an audience so he can, he can, he's, you know, and there's a lot of people that want to commiserate over not being a part of YC and want it not to be that cool. So they're kind of rooting against it. So it's good bait, but it's just it's just kind of boring and played out you know just go build you know just just you know there are plenty of companies that are great that didn't go through yc has yet to put a gun to someone's head and tell them join yc yeah or or stop building because we're not funding you yeah they never say that they're just like yeah they re-invite companies back all the time that get rejected i know a guy you're i know a guy who applied eight times in a row and got in and now his company's worth like 500 million dollars insane like insane yeah and this guy was like 4.0 harvard like super like like super high status at every single moment and it still took him eight times to get in and i was running an ai company and they're ripping it's it's amazing it's great um steve jurvinson says first time on the show but you know very famous venture capitalist we love him he says uh the starlink manufacturing line is the closest thing to a fully automated alien dreadnought that I have ever seen.

1:18:04It makes 4.7 million terminals per year and growing one subsection is the largest printed circuit board factory in America. This is great because we were talking to, we were talking about Aaron Slodov saying, I don't know if there's a single company in America that builds defense technology that could produce 1 million of anything in a given year if asked to. Well, guess what? Starlink is - No, I think he said 10 ,000. Oh, 10 ,000? I thought you said a million. Anyway, he said a big number, and Starlink's clearly beyond that. And Starlink is critical to national security, very clearly. We've seen it have an impact in all sorts of different war fronts.

1:18:41And Elon's pulling it off. Obviously, we need this in drones. We need this in DJI. We need this in robots. We need this in cars. All sorts of things. But it's great to see that high-volume manufacturing is working in America. Think about how many engineers are working in that facility that can then go work at other companies and run that same playbook back. We're doing this in many ways with deterrence. The two engineering leads on the team were at Tesla and Rivian doing like scaled battery cell manufacturing. And now they're working in a totally different sector, but running back the same manufacturing playbook that they learned at Tesla.

1:19:19And there's always been this question about, oh, how do we bring back manufacturing? Do we just need to retrain a ton of CNC operators or be very custom and very manual? But clearly, this went from zero to 60 very fast. And it's an entirely new system. It's probably built completely differently. And I wouldn't be surprised if you look in like 30 years and there's like, oh, there's something in there, some process that's maybe protected IP. maybe Elon's not talking about it. Maybe we just don't really understand it or have a word for it, but there's probably something in there that's like the Henry Ford, what was it called?

1:19:57Like the line, the assembly line. Like the assembly line is just something that is like so standard now, but it was created at some point. And there's probably something in here that's a new way of thinking about how to mass manufacture that will eventually be canonized and used everywhere and copy pasted. And that will be like the future of manufacturing and it will all be new. and that's why we need new companies to build things that even seem like oh well yeah there are primers right why do we need deterrence well it's because like there's probably a when you start fresh green field you can build much faster in a completely different way that's less more maybe more capital intensive maybe less maybe less uh bound by a human capital instead yeah okay let's go to neil kosla this is a good one he says son of vinod kosla he's a vc himself he He says, reminder that as you see these VC transitions, that most of the time it's someone getting pushed out or artificially capped in power, not leaving by choice.

1:20:59And Wilmanitis chimes in and says, the only generalized solution to the succession problem is murder.

1:21:07Taking it back to the, I don't know, like the 1600s, probably Machiavelli, like that crew. Yeah. Well, so, so we, we posted something a lot. I, I, I, I don't want to guess and say this was a response to something that we posted, but, um, but yeah, oftentimes when a GP leaves a fund, uh, it's very happy on the surface and everybody's like, congrats, really excited for you. Like, can't wait to see what you do next. But then behind the scenes, like they were forced out or like they hate, they, there was a lot of hatred between the part partners or somebody's like the founders of the firm were just like you're never gonna like truly see your potential here you should leave so there's always a lot going on behind the scenes and it literally gets to the surface what do they do next like if they're retiring well that makes sense but if they're logan i was dming with uh logan and he was like my favorite line is i'm going to return to my operator roots yeah um did we say that on the last thing no we didn't we didn't but he says that's a common line which is another way of saying my returns were terrible and i'm no longer yeah i mean gp at a major fund is just like the best gig ever it's so hard to turn that down under any circumstances yeah you don't just leave that but we'll leave it to you to read between the lines on this show.

1:22:34We'll spell it out as much as we can without getting murdered. Matt Marlinski, good friend of the show, works with Mike Solana over at Pirate Wires. He is screenshotting a great interaction between Mike Solana and the All In podcast. He says, the so-called number one podcast can't think of an original idea. And All In launched eight weeks of All In Idol. And Mike says, Jason, this is shameless, even by your standards, and shares a screenshot of Pirate Idol, which Solana has been running for like two months. And so it's a format. We like to have a lot of different formats here. We got some personnel news.

1:23:15We got the size gong. If you see a gong on All In, call us immediately because we're going over to Jason Calacanis' house. And we're going to have to have a sit down conversation. We're going to have to have a sit down conversation. And it'll probably be like the average board meeting at Lucy. A lot of, you know, basically an all out brawl. I'm wearing a vest. Yeah. Bulletproof vest. I'll tell you which one. It's not going to be Patagonia vest. But yeah, this is ridiculous. I mean, you know, obviously the Pirate Idol is a riff on American Idol, but just to like decide a new co-host, like it's very, very similar to what Pirate Wires is doing.

1:23:53and he could have switched it up and just used a different word because there are so many, he could have said, we're doing the voice, you know, or like we're doing anything else. We're doing survival. Musical chairs. Yeah, or just take it from a different, we're doing The Bachelor, we're doing, we're doing, you know, any sort of like, who wants to be a millionaire and, you know, and just adapt it but don't just literally take the exact same concept. Ugh, rough. Anyway, Jason, you have a writer's room. get him to do some more workshopping before you rip solana again it's uh not happy to see it john i gotta stop you right there we have a promoted post uh from my friend ill science uh ill science is actually a gp over at andreessen he's on the uh consumer uh ai front uh but today i'm calling him ill science because he's also a uh recording artist and dj and put out a song He says, very excited to share my new record and first collaboration with the Maestro and Molten Music label boss Homero Espinosa streaming on Spotify and everywhere else.

1:25:01You get your music. I downloaded the track. It's fantastic. It makes me wish that it was summer already. That's great. And anyways, go check it out. I love when people are excellent at one thing and then they pursue excellence in another thing. and like you know we've talked about this before but for um ill science a break from investing to do music even though making music is hard and intense it's still a break we got it we have to make a playlist yeah because you know who else has released uh tracks elon musk didn't know that he released a track called rip harambe with someone else zuck released a cover of from the window to the wall get low remember this this happened a couple weeks ago yeah yeah brian armstrong i believe released an entire edm album during the nft craze and you could like get the rights to it on an nft it was just like a promotional thing but he loves music i'm pretty sure it was him and then justin khan after he sold twitch him and his brother who his brother went on to co-found cruise uh produced an entire dj set called uh they were the con bros and it was an incredible DJ set.

1:26:18It was on SoundCloud for a while. And when I got to YC, he had already like sold this company. So he was like God in YC world. He was one of the first ones to really get serious liquidity. And they put out this DJ set and we would just listen to it all the time when we were grinding, coding. It would just be Conbros. Ben, we need an official Technology Brothers playlist. Yes, we need to build it. Yeah, throw that on there. And there's gotta be more. I've just listed off like four off the top of my head. I'm sure there's like 10 others. Yeah. folks who are who are in tech and djs because it's very adjacent i one of my first businesses was buying and selling dj equipment i'd buy it in the states and sell it internationally because they couldn't you're an international business international businessman at age 10 or something uh but it's very like nerdy i actually produced an entire edm album in fruity loops which is like the software that you could kind of like piece things together i sold one copy to a friend i found a copy recently it's terrible but you know it was impressive for you know i think it was in middle school and uh and something about edm it's very very technical like dead mouse is like a program or two and there's a lot of overlap there so i think there's a lot of a lot of music people in tech that you know need to just be surfaced and i think they'll play we need a new music festival in tech that's not burning man yeah like we need to we need we should maybe you know yeah i don't i don't go to live music events much but and justin con put a put a song of him.

1:27:39I think it was actually at Burning Man on his YouTube channel. Let me see if I can find this. And it was a banger song. It was him. He's just been putting up like live sets recently. It's so sick. He did like some interviews. He did some other stuff. Where was this? Playing our first EDC or so at EDC. Introducing Orso, which I guess is like his new his new band or something but he put together this whole like vibe reel and i this i this song like really went hard

1:28:15isn't this good i listen to this a lot this is when i played this for a while justin con this guy's fucking sick

1:28:31it's so good finding pms to this song at edc how tight is that that's awesome

1:28:42you know you know all the words i've listened to this so many times it's really good and it's just like he's playing like a massive stage like yeah goals like i i love that you gotta if you're if you're super liquid in in tech do some side quests just you can just do things like yeah go win the boxing match or whatever go climb that like yeah hit those 14ers you know a do the gumball 3000 do the gumball 3000 do a perry to car you know get in the car drive 3000 miles do a cannonball go to the moon go to space you can just do things you can just do things there's no excuse don't just be sitting around your mansion uh scrolling or whatever uh let's move on to jason way he says y 'all heard it from the man himself and it's ilia sutzkover talking about how pre-training as we know it will end compute is growing better hardware better algorithms larger clusters but data is not growing we have but one internet it is the fossil fuel of ai lots of people talking about the data wall lots of people talking about how scaling scale ai is just somewhere so excited somewhere yeah i think the stock is like way out too it's wild well it's not public but you mean no no i mean i think like secondary demand and stuff is like doing really well and and and it's it's such a midwit take to be like oh did you know that scale ai uses third-party contractors it's like yeah that's the whole point of the business like have you heard of uh comparative advantage like this is like econ 101 people like you're not like blowing the doors off this thing by talking It's so embarrassing when I see this take.

1:30:19I'm just like, yes. Obviously, you need to write a bunch of answers and generate a bunch of data. Did you know that Uber doesn't own cars or hire drivers on W2s? It's not a bear case for the company. But, yeah, it's interesting. I was wondering, like, okay, so what could drive the next era of exponential data growth? Because it has to come from humans. And I was kind of thinking about what that could be. And I think something along the lines of like a friend AI thing that you're wearing and it's recording 24 hours a day, 7 billion people. I think that actually might generate one or two more orders of magnitude of data.

1:31:07And maybe that's useful data. I think some of it would be very useful. But it requires a lot of trust because, you know, it needs to be anonymized. yeah but that could be like a ubi type thing like if you wear the pendant you get like five dollars a day or whatever the world coin pendant or something like because yeah i think it was who's the super base guy at xai oh yeah greg i think yeah he was just like it's not that hard to get more data you just like take pictures that was basically or like put up cameras everywhere cameras video feeds uh i mean i was talking to nat friedman about this and he was like oh people are worried about like you know will the ai be able to access the new york times or something and he was like based on the data budgets of these ai companies they could just buy all of the new york times and then just or they could just pay you know way more journalists they could hire every single journalist double their salaries and they wouldn't even be scratching the surface of their they could give every journalist a billion dollars and still have 200 billion dollars left basically ubi for journalists that so much heartache could have been avoided with the uh new york times lawsuits if they if opening i had just sent over some dressage horses and they would have avoided a death potentially oh my god oh rough rough rough rough uh andrew huberman is saying lock the clock we discussed this we love it i like that he's coining a phrase 4k likes people know it you got to have the clock yeah i said stop the yeah lock the clock lock the clock is better and he cites uh stanford med lara weed says uh s time is one uh is the one to lock in standard time year-round gives people greater opportunity to get morning sunlight necessary to shorten the period of their central circadian clock from 24.2 hours to 24 hours to maintain synchrony with the i presume the sun um because it says show more here but he breaks it down yeah this is great I really hope this does happen it would be so cool I mean like I'd probably enjoy it like practically but I think I would much more enjoy just the fact that we did something and the fact that something has changed even like the Pluto thing like the Pluto demotion it's like you get to tell your kids oh yeah well back when I was a kid like there were more planets and then we learned more and we decided that there's less you wanted to keep Pluto?

1:33:28no no no I was in favor of removing it don't give them the franchise Don't give them the franchise. It's like we've talked about, you know, there's people that want to take over Canada, but they don't want to give them a state. Yeah, it's real regulatory capture for the rest of the planet. It's just reducing the oligopoly on planethood. It's good. It's power law. This is the way. Next step is get the gaseous giants out of here. You're not landing on those. What are you doing? Get them out of there. Unless it's a rock. Just push them out. Third rock from the sun, not third cloud from the sun. Yeah, shouldn't count.

1:34:00Get some land mass. Get some mass. Neptune. I think Neptune's a gas one. I actually don't remember. Okay. Word grammar. He's been on the show before. Emerging poster of the year, potentially. Yep. Yep. Yep. Potential rookie of the year. I think I have done a complete 180 on Y Combinator's business model in the past 24 hours. All of the economic gains from AI startups will be made by pre-seed investors. Any good AI product will be extremely hard to build, but easy to scale. Interesting. Distribution is the bottom neck and moat, put a little asterisk here behind the frontier labs, but they are a special case and not representative of the average startup.

1:34:39The funniest thing is that like, of course, the number one frontier lab like came literally out of Y Combinator. But I like that. The reason that this is a good take, the reason that I think this is a generally good take is that there's, we've seen this a lot with, with AI companies that raise pre-product and then generate so much revenue and are making so much money so quickly with such a small team that by the time a next financing happens, the company's raising 20 on 200. And it's just really hard to make like truly great returns doing that. And so because these companies oftentimes are not needing to do that intermediary, oh, we're gonna do four on 16 or something like that.

1:35:19They literally get the one YC round, maybe another two on 20, and then they're just making all this money. And so if you can buy a basket of those companies super early for pennies, it's like, yeah. But I don't think the critique of YC, everybody, like the primary way that people try to critique it is by saying, what's an important YC company that launched in the last like three years? Yeah. And it's like, but the critique has never been, this is not a good business model. Yeah. Oh, yeah, totally. Some people try to critique it of like, oh, well, you're just having, it's a Ponzi scheme because you're just trying to have this company buy from this company.

1:35:57And it's like, that's just like fundamentally like true. Like, yeah, of course they sell each other early to get feedback. If you're enterprise, you should, or B2B, you should sell internally. Let's do one more promoted post. We'll close with this and then we'll get out of here and hop on. I can't think of a better ending promoted post of the day than from our friends at DuPont Registry. They have a 2024 Ferrari Purusangwe presented in blue Corsa. this has an asking price of only 679 000 908 yeah 679 000 and i gotta say these have been floating into the 700s frequently yep this is a fantastic spec it's powered by naturally aspirated v12 delivers over 700 horsepower ensuring thrilling performance and a zero to 60 time of around 3.3 seconds.

1:36:49Not as fast as my turbo, but pretty good to be able to fit a family in it. And it's just a great looking car. I've started seeing these around LA. The thing about the Pure Songway is it is an expensive car, but think about what you get. It's a performance car, it's a luxury car, and it's also potentially a family car. But it's something you can do business in. If you're a VC, you can take the whole founding team. It's not just you and the CEO. Throw the CTO in the back. Throw the chief operating officer in the back. go out staff even go out to nobu get some sushi uh irashima say irashima say don't say it though don't say it but uh but you know bring the whole team and fundamentally it is a lot of money but it's a lot of car yeah and so you know you get what you pay for in this life yeah you gotta have money to make money yeah if you're buying if you're buying ferrari if you bought an sf 90 aftermarket and over the last couple years you lost like 500k something like that make it all back on a pure song way yeah i don't know if you're gonna make it all back if you daily drive it but you'll make it all back spiritually yeah by being in a truly great well you will show the ferrari dealer you'll show your dealer that you're committed to the brand yeah you took the bath on the sf90 you're maybe you're prepared to take another bath yeah but when the when the f80 comes up you're getting that tailor-made program you're getting an allocation and that's what it's about in this life that's where you'll make it back that's great let's close with rat limit rat limit has a fantastic bait post thank thank god for posters with great usernames because uh it would make the show would be much less interesting yeah but it's just steve steve uh rat limit says that poly impulse to hack relationships with tech i printed qr codes on my gf's panties her playmates get instant access to an info sheet on my and our boundaries a bit nerdy yep but what won her over I 100 % trust you.

1:38:41I want to trust your sweeties too. And it's a picture of some underwear with a QR code on it. And I mean, this is one of those things that I'm like, I'm 90 % sure this is a base post, but it's like so real that it could be. Yeah. So I don't, I'm fortunate that whatever side of tech X that we're on, this stuff doesn't pop up for me, except if somebody's dunking. Yeah. This was a dunk. Yeah. This was a screenshot. I think it's probably deleted, But I think it was designed to bait. And I think if you look at the rest of the posts and some of the replies were like crying, laughing, like, okay, people will get it.

1:39:18Obviously, polyamory is very popular in the Bay Area. This is kind of a play on that. But why I want to highlight this is not for the culture war debate over poly, but instead the beauty of the virality here that there's a picture of an item with a QR code on it. And when you scan the QR code, you actually get taken to this info sheet, this website that this person built that has more content about this post. And again, I think it's very funny. I don't know if it's real, but it creates this cycle where you have to scan the image, but the image is on your phone. So it's kind of tricky. You need like a second phone or something to scan the QR code.

1:40:00But then you're taken to this website. And I think that there's something here from a format perspective that could be very viral marketing for a company. And so if we did a drop and we were like, we're dropping these coffee mugs and the coffee mugs have our logo on one side and a QR code on the other side. But then when you scan the QR code, they take you to some video or some website that we design. It becomes this like online to offline to online experience. and then people are going down this rabbit hole and then they will screenshot where the QR code takes you and share that. And it becomes this like rabbit hole for these people.

1:40:35And I think that's a big part of why this went so viral was that it wasn't just, there's a QR code and I blurred out the QR code. No, it's like the QR code's there. You can see. And if you went on there, there were all these other jokes and stuff baked in. It was very high effort. And I thought it was a very good marketing stunt if it's a marketing stunt. Even if it's real and it's cringe, there's clearly a lesson in there for I respect the innovation I respect the innovation exactly do your thing rat limit so let's wrap up there I gotta hop on with the Vatican so I will talk to you later Merry Christmas Merry Christmas