How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, Some Personnel News, Absolute Dawgs, Build that Ego

38:34They can fake graduation rates. They can fake teaching skills, but they cannot fake the results income. This approach resulted in a doubling of the total amount of money being made by students in just six years, money that goes back into Texas through local taxes. When bureaucrats have a strong financial incentive to deliver better results, they will. And I love that. Yeah. I think there's a lot of, you know, just like there was an explosion of like effectively trade schools for software engineering, the same exact thing you could do that for machining plumbing electrical work um all those sort of like you know specialized categories so let's go to number seven for 200 billion dollars one of the bigger ideas create better funders of science in america lonsdale proposes allocating 200 billion dollars over 10 years to establish new competitive funding bodies for scientific research challenging the dominance of institutions like the national institute of health he argues that the NIH has become risk averse and bureaucratic, often stifling innovation by creating alternative organizations that reward high risk, high, high reward research and empower young scientists.

39:38The U S can invigorate scientific progress. This is something we were just talking about in that group chat. Yeah. I think venture capital has like stepped in here to some degree because they'll be like, you know, the, um, the long journey team will like find, give some like researcher basically like 200 K to two cap to be like, just work on this like weird idea for a couple of years and that's like cool and we need that like that's risk capital but our government should also be giving like basically risk capital yep to like important sort of scientific scientific pursuits it goes to that discussion we were having in that group chat about like invention versus discovery just this idea that you know some of the biggest breakthroughs in in science have been more discoveries than inventions not very diligent it wasn't like lizard venom yeah lizard venom is a an example with Ozempic, but even penicillin, I think it's this, our friends were referring to it as the gentleman scientist, the person who's just experimenting and testing things and then just locks upon something really, really remarkable.

40:40So many important discoveries. And it's very hard to facilitate that these days in the traditional academic institutions or the typical tracks where it's like, there's a certain amount of time you have to publish a paper, You have to get this many reviews and this many citations and it's become too rigid. And so he definitely wants to pull it back from that. So one thing that, you know, he suggests is saying that like a public scientific funder would be filling in and funding research gaps where innovation isn't profitable. yep um and so there's so many uh there's so many drugs that potentially have impact in like areas that they weren't initially like approved for that are non-profitable to fund research in because you might have to spend 20 50 million dollars like proving out that something works and then it's not it's a generic drug yep so there's no like margin to be made or like edge or like ip that you can create and so um there's so many different areas where that applies and honestly it's like the oftentimes like bro scientists that are like doing this like research like on themselves right in many ways like brian johnson is doing a lot of this on himself where he's just like i'm gonna spend millions of dollars like figuring out how to sleep like five percent better because that's gonna deliver like some of the greatest i mean we're seeing this all over the place where i think gwern is probably one of the most respected like researchers on stimulants uh josie zaner developed like her own vaccines during COVID and was like testing stuff on herself is crazy.

42:10And then Ayla has like one of the most, she has one of the largest data sets on like sex related social science and can put out research that's like way, way more robust than anything you'd see. So there's this weird, there's this weird model shifting to just like these independent researchers. And, but yeah, I mean, I think Joe is, hopefully it's, it seems like he's optimistic about retooling some of the funding that does come from the government to drive innovation within these organizations. But let's go to number eight. He says, for$100 billion, upend the energy future and put de-growthers out of business.

42:50And his argument is that if you invest$100 billion to revolutionize the energy sector by promoting abundant clean energy production, particularly through nuclear power and carbon capture technologies. He criticizes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's obstructive processes and advocates for its reform. And I've heard this so much from all the nuclear folks that there are, like, when you're getting a new reactor design approved, you have to have an actual hearing for things that are completely uncontested. Yeah. Yeah, there's, they had a funny quote in here where the NRC was was bragging and they said the 12 ,000 page application took less than 42 months to review.

43:37Can you imagine being the guy like building something and put together this like 12 ,000 page application that probably like could have been, it probably could have been an email, you know, and then you wait 42 months, uh, you know, just to figure out if, if, if like you're good to go. Um, that is just like criminal in my opinion. Um, and, uh, and he includes this incredible graph here of the uh the cumulative nuclear construction permits and operational plants over time and you can just see that after the 70s the number of new operational plants just completely flat lines and there's just no new development i think it has started to tick up again but it's it's nowhere near like the the asymptotic curve that we thought we'd be on with energy too cheap to meter.

44:25So very, very, very depressing, but hopefully there can be, you know, really significant overhaul of the NRC. Joe advocates for starting by abolishing the NRC's awful incentive structure, conceived as a cost-saving measure, but which has backfired awfully. Congress forces the NRC to fund its budget through fees paid hourly by the very companies it regulates, not unlike a law firm or consultancy. If you were funded to regulate by the hour, how long would you take? It's like the worst possible incentive. Same thing with like the cost plus model within defense. Yeah. Very, very bad. If you're getting paid based on how much something costs, like you run up the costs.

45:06Yep. And let's go to number nine. Personal favorite. For$100 billion, give back the rest of the money. In his final proposal, Lonsdale recommends returning the remaining$100 billion to the American people, emphasizing the value of individual liberty and economic freedom. He believes that citizens are better equipped than central planners to allocate resources efficiently. By giving the money back, perhaps through tax rebates or direct payments, individuals can make their own choices, stimulating economic growth and just demonstrating trust in the populace. Yeah, so he positions this very well, which more people should understand is that when the federal government does things like a quote unquote stimulus check, they position it as a payment or a tax rebate.

45:44And that effectively implies that the money was never yours in the first place, but it was. It was your money that the government effectively took from the citizens and the businesses, institutions in our country. And, you know, I think that the government should position that more of like, hey, we're giving you back. We sort of overtaxed. It's your money. I always like to spend it how you wish. Did you know that every single year the United States government collects enough money in tax revenue to give every single citizen a 100 % tax rebate? is that they could give every single person 100 off their taxes but they keep all the money for all these projects it's just it's just a total it's just a trilogy because yeah obviously whatever they take from you they could give back but it sounds shocking yeah it sounds very shocking it sounds like one of those one of those stats that's like oh you know if they they could give everyone a million dollars but no it's really it's really like whatever they're taking they could just give back but so they have to justify what they're giving and it has to make sense and I think he has some great proposals there.

46:47Yeah. People don't realize that like income tax was illegal for a while in U.S. history. Right. It was like it was something that the founding fathers were very against the foundation of the country in many ways, because it was like us telling the Brits, hey, look, like we don't we don't like these taxes. Yeah. Let's let's end this. Yeah. We've kind of like wound up with such a hodgepodge of like corporate taxes, income taxes. There's taxes on all over the place and people wind up moving around the country to find like their optimal blend but um a blend i think i think it's the most interesting thing with with this is is definitely to close on is that there's a shift from just burn it all down stop everything to let's be more efficient with them yeah and i honestly like that um i i think balaji it's more incremental is like consistently had extremely interesting ideas and been right on a lot of stuff.

47:42And the area that I just strongly disagree with him on is he's like very like pro like exit, like let's just leave and like rebuild from the ground up. And I think that experiments like that should be run. At the same time, we want the best and brightest in America to be focused on how do we make this place a better place for everyone. So it's a great movement. I love it. Well, thanks to Max for publishing that in Arena Magazine. You can go pick it up and give him a follow because It's a fantastic publication. Subscribe to the magazine. Subscribe to the magazine. Before we dive in, should we indulge in a beverage?

48:18Yeah, sure. Always have a bunch of... Oh, and thank you to Enchilada's surfboards. We received some beautiful koozies that we're enjoying very much. They're certified for milk only, but we're drinking Celsius. Yeah, making it work. Hopefully it works. How do I do this? Today we have organic coconuts. We always... Let's see. It's a product of Thailand. So it came off the boat. I like that they send it in the nature's packaging. Do I pull this off? No, you pull that off, and then you go like that. So you break it, and then you can pull this little thing off. Okay. Pull off the top. Then you got a little straw here, a little microplastics.

48:57Take this off, and we record for many hours here in the studio, so it's good to have a little – Hydration. We're like endurance athletes that need a little, like, sugar boost along the way. So these are delicious.

49:16I think I got a little coconut meat in mine. So it's a. Me too. I'm pretty jammed up. Jammed up, but we'll, we'll make it work. And thank you to Melissa's organic coconuts. Okay, now it's going. That's good. Delicious. Delicious. I love that. Do we, I think we have some. Let's go to some DMs. Do we have some personnel news? Oh yeah. So we have a new segment on the show, some personnel news where we are tracking the biggest moves, the biggest pickups, who's entering free agency, who's getting long contracts in tech. And our first deal or move of this show is? Yeah, I mean, this is breaking news in the tech world, folks.

49:58We have a major move happening, and it's shaking things up as we speak. Brandon Jacoby. Yes, that Brandon Jacoby, former product designer at Square and Cash App. The guy who's had his fingerprints on products used by millions of people is officially making the leap. And after an absolutely electric stint as a first hire at Party Round, where he built a product that was the talk of the town, Brandon Jacoby is now joining, you heard it here, second X. You heard it first on X. That's right. X just landed an absolute stud. And I think it's worth telling you a little bit about Brandon Jacoby. This guy is a grinder.

50:33We're talking 20 hour days in Figma every single day. If it's 1am, if it's 4am, Brandon is there locked in pixel perfect, making magic happen. Nobody. And I mean, nobody knows their way around Figma better than this guy, his taste impeccable attention to detail, unmatched, low ego, high output. We're talking about a technician, a craftsman, a relentless perfectionist. An absolute dog. An absolute dog. So what does this mean for X? Well, they're bringing in a player who doesn't just make products. He makes phenomenal products. He's been in the big leagues building for millions of users, and now he's suiting up to take X's game to the next level.

51:13This isn't just a hire. This is a franchise altering move. An absolute dog by every definition. Watch out tech world. Brandon Jacoby's coming and he's ready to dominate. You have any details on the contract? Yeah, I mean, he's an absolute dog. I think, you know, the deals weren't released, the details weren't released to this deal, but you probably think it's a four-year deal, maybe one-year cliff. Seven, eight figures. Big, big deal for him. I mean, just look at the stats he's picked up. Former rookie of the year contender, potential future Hall of Famer, pushed millions of pixels every year, day in, day out.

51:47Extremely technical, extremely detail-oriented, and I'm really excited to see what he does this season. He's coming to a platform that we all use and love. Love it. It's the foundation of this podcast and our livelihoods. And we're excited to get this level of talent working on the product that we spend hours in that feed every single day. So thank you to Brandon for this move. And congrats to Axel on the pickup. Big pickup. Big pickup. That's great. Let's go to some Q &A. We got a DM. We got a question from Mickey with the Blickie. He says, hey guys, VC Mickey here. I got some great advice last week about angel investing and starting small.

52:23I decided to take your advice and basically put my entire net worth into XRP. It's now up almost 80 % over the last week. Can you guys offer any tips for risk management? Man, my only advice here would be rotate out of that. Is this real? Did XRP really moon? I don't know. I love it. I love the... It's up like 100%. Here we go. I love that risk on attitude. Here's what I would say. if I were Mickey, I'd be rotating into other risk assets like early stage startups. But and the reason for that is I think that illiquidity is a feature when you got something like XRP that's moving 100 % in a week, get into something that's illiquid, get into something that's marked on maybe like an annual basis, something like a seed stage startup, just so you can go focus on other things, right?

53:13A lot of people get caught up into day to day price action with crypto. And that can be a huge distraction from actually creating enterprise value in your job, in your, in your company. And, uh, so anyways, get into something illiquid, lock it up, lock in the gains and, uh, go long. Yeah. Good luck out there. Uh, our next DM comes from, uh, an anonymous, uh, poster who writes in, Hey, do you have some time to enlighten me on your experience with creating a consumer packaged goods company. How did you validate the market? I have a group of talented individuals that hit me up about an idea I shared publicly, and I'm evaluating taking next steps.

53:53What do you think? How do you validate the market for a consumer packaged goods company? I've been through this a few different times, and I kind of broke it down as there's two different ways. One is kind of the Brian Johnson way. You start talking about the idea and the problem that you want to solve extremely publicly become the face of that problem. So for him, it's longevity. For Jocko, it's performance in the gym, this athletic, militaristic style. And then that fan base will buy anything from you. The other is more product-led, more product-driven, where you're doing real R &D, locking up a supply chain, kind of like what the Ridge Wallets did.

54:34A lot of our early stuff at Lucy was around like FDA applications, patents, stuff like that. It took a long time to get it going. We weren't the face of nicotine. Yeah. And to some degree we still aren't, but we have like a very narrow set that's like, you're kind of the face of nicotine. But it came later. Yeah. But it did come later. It wasn't like we, we, we, we, we, we went like, you know, influencer or brand first and then kind of were able to sell a commoditized product. We had to do something unique. So I think a lot of it's like, well, what's your edge in this product? Can you be like an operational beast and then grow slowly?

55:12But what do you think? Another example. So launching Aurora water filters actually tomorrow. That's an example of validating that opportunity was looking at the market. Consumers are already spending billions of dollars on water filters. So it wasn't a question of, do people buy water filters? Are Are they going to want one? And so what we did with that is we took a popular water filter called, um, uh, called the Berkey and we looked at it and we said, how can we make this better on 10 different dimensions? Right. So we made it way, way, way more effective. We went and did the hard work of getting it, it proved out that it actually works.

55:51And then we made the design better, the usability better, all these different things that we knew consumers cared about. and so we've spent somewhere in the seven figure mark on testing and r &d to get the product where it is today but we know that the product is going to be a hit because we took something that was already out there that consumers liked generally and we made it dramatically better and so i think if you're um most consumer products uh you know a friend of the podcast john feo has made products over the years that were like first of a kind something like he made like the gravity blanket and something like that's much more binary of like people weren't really buying weighted blankets like they weren't really a thing until he created it um but a lot of consumer products are like you know even you know looking at this on the table it's not like people were already buying coconut water it was like hey can we sell them the same product just like in the in the original packaging basically like one of my favorite stories from fio is uh when he when he launched the moon pod which is a uh it's basically like a big bean bag but it's even bigger and softer he realized that he he shot some video of I think it was like a woman falling backwards and getting caught by the bag and just like falling into this really comfy bag in slow motion and that one asset probably drove like a hundred million dollars in sales on Facebook and he just knew that like that it was just a few frames it was like it was like almost like an animated gif but it was you know a few seconds and it just stopped you in the feed and so having that like what is the hook what is this one thing.

57:24So there's a bunch of different ways to validate the market. It can be like, it's so big and so obvious and you have some innovation or you're so charismatic and you're this heroic influencer who's going to have millions of fans buying whatever you sell or you have some hook that you just know will go viral. There's a lot of companies that have done like stress tests or some other stunt. Liquid Death, a good example of like, the brand just stood out so much that I'm sure if you ask them, how did you validate the market? Those guys would, behind liquid death would just tell you, well, like we looked at our brand deck that we built and we were laughing and we knew that it was going to be good because it was, it was unique and it was just going to pop.

58:05Like they just knew. Yeah. Every, um, uh, my wife invested in a company called Graza. Have you seen them? Yeah. Which is like a squeeze bottle, olive oil. And she invested in that company pre launch. and she looked at that being like, I know people like olive oil. They have this like new form factor that was popularized by chefs. They're going to put it into this new form factor and it's going to work really well on social because it's such a like dynamic way to use olive oil. And so that was, and they got to, I don't know what their metrics are. They'll probably do like a hundred million next year, like some crazy number.

58:38And so, um, you know, sometimes with, with consumer products, like I've found it's very binary. Like sometimes I look at something and I'm like this will not work they launch it and it flops and then sometimes i look at something i'm like this will not work and it launches and it just rips um and uh timing has a big part to play in it but then you need to look at like what is your edge with the product like with lucy it was like early focus on like the regulatory aspect uh with rora it was like let's just spend longer and be more obsessed with design and efficacy than any other company and testing than any other company in the market yep and then something like graza was like even more simple like let's just change the packaging, sell the exact same thing and it'll work well on social.

59:19Yeah. It's kind of like, I mean, you should be able to boil it down to some sort of elevator pitch that just makes sense. And you have a lot of confidence around like, what are you doing? That's actually different. And if it's just like, Oh, we want to launch this because we think it's cool. Like you know yeah get out of there you need to be able to articulate. Also like people that are considering building consumer products, like you need to go into it. Like, yes, there, if you have a hit consumer product, you can scale it very, very quickly now. Like Fio is like a good example of that. Once it works, like he scales it very quickly, but more consumer products like company like Ridge, Ridge.com, they'll do like 200 million top line this year, but just operational excellence over almost like a decade.

59:59And the first, you know, in like the third or fourth year, was like a$5 million business. But it's like, what game are you playing? Yeah, you have to understand, are you still gonna wanna do this product if in the first year you do 500K, the second year you do a million, the next year you do three million. The next year you do three million. And then the next year you do 10. And the next year, are you still gonna be wanting to play that game if it's not a rocket ship? And it probably means less venture capital. And it probably means higher ownership for the founders over the long term. You look at the stories of Red Bull, Monster, these guys, they grind for years and years and years.

1:00:30And then they pop because they're in a big market and they do have the branding and formulation cracked, but they own enough to make it worth it. And as long as you get, I think the real key for those consumer goods companies is like you have to work super extra hard to get the first, to get over that first hump where you can actually be taking a salary that makes your life worth living basically. And then once you're flying business class and like covering your expenses, your kids are in good schools and stuff, then it's like, okay, well, I can grind and compound for a very long time. Yeah. But those first years where you're just making no cashflow and it's just brutal.

1:01:07It's just. Yeah. And I think that, it's very valuable. I think that the category that is, is the biggest trap is beverage because people look at a beverage like Celsius and they're like, Oh, so it says billions, billions of dollars a year. They're like, Oh, it's so simple. I can create an energy drink. And it's, it's so went to every single CrossFit gym for like four years straight. Yeah. And did tastings for 12 hours a day. Yeah, it was laughed at and had product defects and problems and all this stuff. Anything that looks easy, I can guarantee you it's deeply competitive. And beverage is an example of that.

1:01:38It's the most cutthroat industry. Exactly. So we have a new segment on the show, Reply Guy of the Month. Let's go. Let's go. Every month we're going to try and give an award to the biggest reply guy for the show. So get out there, reply to every post that we make, quote, tweet us, retweet us, like us, all on X. send it around give us your best replies because uh you're gonna want to win you're gonna want to the month this is a great honor you're gonna be on you're gonna be on the wall here in the studio so uh this month's reply guy of the month is uh an intern at red letter ai he's 18 years old i see great things in his future says he's ex future founders he's at the university of houston studying econ and finance love that he says he's right eac views are my own and i didn't even know yak would have there was like lefty yak but he's cool for clarifying uh he's out in houston texas and he has a wonderful wonderful header image of donald trump peter teal and tim cook hanging out amazing uh i could see him in that same group at some point you know for sure he keeps accelerating like this for sure uh and so this month's reply guy of the month is amit uh bless Gotcha.

1:02:51Yep. Congrats, Amit. You are the reply guy of the month. And he's a great honor. I love this about his profile. I mean, good, good numbers for such a young kid. He joined in April of 2024. He's only been on X for a couple months. He's already got over 1k. This is the reply guy territory. Yeah. You got to be the reply guy to get to 1k. Then you can start doing the inside jokes, grind your way up to 10k. And once it's 10k to get to 100k, it's got to be the cringe threads. yeah and once you're past 100k it's just fake news all the time he's on the path he's in he's in some community that's highlighted on his profile that just says the tea lists and it's only two members he has like a community it's just like him and one other dude him and his dog his absolute dog his absolute dog like could just be a dm bro but i like that you're published publicizing this yeah he's followed by another friend of the show red bull futurist.

1:03:46Yeah. You know, also a great future. So congrats to Amit. You are the reply guy. There's never going to be another first honorary reply guy of the month. Yeah. And to be clear, reply guys is a spiritual thing. Like you can be a woman. Yes. Whatever gender can be a reply guy. Your, your thing could be quote tweets. You don't actually have to reply. It could also just be spamming our DMS constantly. Yep. There's a bunch of ways to get here. And there will be many more, Many more, many more. Let's go to the timeline and then we're going to start working in some promoted posts. Because we ran a poll and you guys wanted at least 60 ads in every episode.

1:04:24So we're going to do our best. Try to get there. It's going to take us some time to get there, but we're going to do our best. Let's go to Nicole Wiscoff. She says, the gift that starting from rock bottom affords you is having an insane appetite for risk. You've been there before. You can crawl your way out again if you need to. I like that. I don't know. Yeah. She, she, she talks about coming from nothing. What a bad-ass story. Now she's running what? 50 million AUM? No, I mean, that's the last one. That's the last one. So it's more, a bit more. Yeah. Let's go. Yeah. I mean, this is goes back to the, the Josh Wolf quote chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets.

1:05:01Let's go. We need a big Josh Wolf quote. Yes. He's going on the Mount Rushmore of pithy thought leaders yeah yeah exactly i love it yeah i think uh the the i i honestly resonate with this so much that at a certain point uh you need to know when to not go risk off but like not continue to risk at all you know because because when you're post yc our burn rate was 3k a month for three people insane because we paid our rent a year in advance yeah we were just like just take that out of the bank balance so we don't even have to think about it yeah and i think we were like a credit risk so yeah yeah they were like you need to and i think our i think our rent in in the tenderloin in this like complete disgusting hovel of a apartment yeah it's technically a one bedroom it had a closet that one guy was living in i was sleeping in the living room and and it was fifteen hundred dollars a month and every time i sell someone in san francisco that like oh fifteen hundred dollars a month per bedroom like that's not bad i was like no fifteen hundred dollars a month for the whole thing the whole thing in san francisco yeah yeah it's like if you're willing to go down to living on 3k a month for three people that can write software and build stuff and just get stuff done and call people just willing to do all of the different problems it's like yeah there's just no way you can be stopped like yeah because you can get 3k a month from so many different places.

1:06:26I think, I think more like it becomes really challenging when you have a family because your kids are in school, like there's like real fixed costs. And I think people don't really recognize that. I tell founders this all the time. Like if you're like, if you're 28 and you want to like start a company and you're deciding, well, should I work for like this company? And it's like, no, like go like so risk on right now, because four years from now, you're going to have a kid or something like that. You're getting married and like your fiance's dad is going to be like sitting you down and be like all right like the startup thing was like cute but like you're about to like marry my daughter you gotta like you know really get together but more more founders should like raise a fifty thousand dollar angel round and like go live in like the middle of nowhere seriously just like grind and grind and grind and grind i mean my first my first fundraise was seventeen thousand dollars and me and my co-founder made it last six almost want to made me want to hit the size gong for a second with the tiny that a little there you go the tiniest little size gong uh yeah i mean we made it work like we spent a lot of it very quickly and then stretched it out ever so slightly no i remember running the calculus you know coming to to la being like if i don't make this happen like i have twelve hundred dollars a month to spend yep i have exactly until this date to like be profitable and like be like able to pay myself more and if i don't like i'm dead yep uh let's go to gabby goldberg a second time on the show she will honestly i think i think third i think maybe third but she's a regular at this point yeah she's a regular but uh we we love gabby here uh she says partiful deserves more credit for making random gatherings great again and it's a photo of the jeremy allen white look-alike crowned in Chicago.

1:08:12There was a Jeremy Allen White lookalike contest, including a toddler dressing up like chefs from the TV series, The Bear. Have you watched The Bear? I have not. I watched the first season. It's pretty good. Not a huge, mostly founders podcast. Unfortunately, no video. So I can't stream it. But no, Partiful has gone like extremely mainstream. It used to be a tech thing. and like it kind of proves that like tech is mainstream you can start something and like build it like for the tech audience and then expand out from there i think even like a lot of things like whoop and aura ring were like very like insular like tech community products but um in many ways this is i think we should go dig up like the vc thought part uh leadership of like blog posts like it's time to unbundle facebook right because i think about like facebook events yeah where that was the thing that was the alternative to partiful and partiful should pick them up and roll that in x should pick up x should absolutely pick up partiful partly because uh i think it would be a i don't think they're monetizing yet uh last i checked and the ceo is like jokes about this quite a lot online she's like you know we're just like giving this thing away or we're glad people like you know like uh paperless post which is like kind of like the the billionaire's partiful is extremely expensive.

1:09:40You have to buy tokens to invite everyone. They have some sort of like digital currency that intermediates things. Paperless post is like boomer post. When I see that, like if I'm getting invited to like a VC dinner and it's paperless post versus partiful, I'm like, okay, like this. I think it's going to be some ballers. It depends. It could be some boomers or some ballers. Boomers and ballers. Yeah, yeah. That's one or the other. Let's go to East Village guy. He says, why are you a grown man telling me which AP classes you took. So he's talking about like accounts payable classes, like to learn how to do RAMP stuff.

1:10:12Yeah, yeah, to learn how to RAMP better, to close your books. Okay, that seems totally reasonable. I would love to know what AP classes people take, especially if they're gonna be working in a finance org, like a high performance finance org. RAMP should actually do more to get into the college curriculum, right? Yeah, you should be able to take AP. That's the number one if you're in finance. AP, AP. AP, AP. Advanced Placement Accounts Payable. Yeah, exactly. This is what we need to be taking. Exactly. I can honestly say I've never had anybody tell me what AP classes they took. It's kind of an interesting thing to know, though.

1:10:42I wouldn't be mad if somebody told me. Especially with something interesting. We appreciate continuous learning. So if you took some AP dinosaurs class and you're still obsessed with dinosaurs, and now you're getting into dino excavation, expedition. Investing in dinos. Then that's cool. That's cool. I like it. I don't see a problem with it, East Village guy. Take it easy. Aaron Slodov, repeat guest on the show, says, I'm convinced that basic business economics, money, education should be mandatory in middle school. Here we go. He needs to be taking advanced placement accounts payable. And it's a quote tweet from Union Made who says, I worked an eight-hour shift today on register and made$168 before taxes.

1:11:29I rung up$3 ,500 in sales in those eight hours in my little cafe with no seating in South Brooklyn. And so they're kind of complaining. I hope he was wearing gloves for all those receipts that he was touching. For sure. Unless his tea is really high. And then in that case, he should use the receipts to kind of bring that testosterone down from the PFAS. Yeah, people always say this, that like, oh, they should teach, you know, how to do your taxes in school. And I couldn't disagree more. I think that you should definitely just be studying like the great books and Shakespeare. and the Aeneid and the Iliad and the Odyssey.

1:12:00Yeah, because there's nothing in life that - Those are timeless. Education needs to be a forcing function for learning things that you're not going to have to learn in life. Exactly, exactly. Most people will graduate school and never think about Shakespeare again. Exactly. When it couldn't be more important. Yes, and there's a million ways to pick up this on the job very quickly. There's so many other resources. There's a million different ways to consume basic business education through nonfiction. And there's so many great startups that will do your taxes for you. Exactly. I actually very much disagree with this take.

1:12:32And I think that schools should focus much more on, I think this is a little bit of what's happening at the University of Austin, kind of a return to the classics. Yeah. I mean, I have the great book series right there. Yeah, and just facilitating like my - It's very hard to find time to read Tolstoy. Yeah. Like that's not something that I'm forced to do every April. Yeah. But I will be forced to learn a little bit about the tax code. Yeah. And I can figure that out. Yeah. So yeah, I'm fine with going back to. And school is like a forcing, let's force people to do things that are interesting, right?

1:13:05My dad was a high school teacher and he taught a class called Project Make, which was some combination of robotics and programming and wood shop and things like that. And so they would build and launch rockets out on the football field, do things that maybe the nerds will do on the weekends, but the average student should be exposed to that kind of thing. Yep, that's great. And schools have a role to play there. Yeah. So the sales bull says, we fire HR and pay the sales team double. And it's the picture of Don Draper. This is funny coming from the sales guy. He's like, give me a raise. Give me a raise.

1:13:45But anyways, usually paying your best sales people double is a pretty good way to spend money. it really resonated 12k likes people are really i'm unsurprised that his following is yeah but i think this is less how much people love sales guys and more how much people hate hr yeah because hr is always seen as like a drag on the company but i mean it's getting easier and easier with more like automated hr tools like you can you can build a pretty sizable company without a dedicated hr person uh for a long time yeah you're on rippling and then yeah uh you know it has so many bugs that you want to you know yeah yeah i think i think you could uh yeah i mean it's interesting that there's not more like there's the the outsourced cfo like uh what do they call partial cfos it's weird that there haven't been more of those for hr no there are there are there's because because that seems like much more like in line with like the startup ethos than bringing there's a lot of like 300 a month you get the software and we'll help you and there's a personal consultant but but it's funny because like Chamath got like so much shade for being like HR should be like your legal team but like the but like the biggest HR issues that people have like tend to be better suited for outside counsel to like deal with because it's like end up being like extremely charged you know issues with with employees I wonder if there'll be a little bit more of like a a re restructuring of where HR sits in the organization as we go into like the next generation of companies like how a lot of marketing teams have technical people on their staff now um like recruiting is obviously super critical in the HR function and then the general counsel the legal stuff is super critical so maybe you should kind of disaggregate it into a finance person that does the compliance stuff team building legal person yeah and then the team The team person, the team building honestly should just be an extension of the CEO and the culture.

1:15:42So I would want a CEO's chief of staff to decide we're doing a happy hour because the CEO likes this place and this would be great for the CEO to come and meet with all the employees. And then the recruiter should honestly be living within the functional units of the engineering team and live right there and be technical. So I don't know. I can see the HR function kind of just diffusing throughout the organization. instead of building up like this massive longhouse in your organization

1:16:14yeah yeah go over our our hr team is over at the longhouse building yeah you can use the map it's like that would be a good name for the for the outsourced part-time consultancy for hr yeah just like uh longhouse consulting yeah yeah like let us be your longhouse yeah yeah longhouse as a service uh tio says new life goal having a tweet printed by the tech bros pod well congratulations tio it's happened today is the day you got your post printed i don't know how to pronounce x eat i think we live online is it zeet z did i we live so online that like i couldn't pronounce crypto you know somebody pointed out i don't even know teo teo who knows former uh like dylan who'd been on the show pointed out you know how you could say like oh i'm on tech twitter i'm on you know uh like like crypto twitter fin twit yeah there is not that same language for x sure like i'm on tech x tech x i'm on fin x it doesn't exist and it's actually a key barrier to growth right now because we all of us on tech twitter yeah uh tech x maybe we just make it tech x tech sounds like ted x you know yeah yeah really really dumb version yeah i mean the base version's already really we need to add we actually need to add ted x to our enemies list because a bunch of there's smart people that have gone up there but um by and large by and large some of the worst takes of all time the most blue pill shit i've ever seen the worst worst takes of all time oh Oh, did you know cancer was cured every single time?

1:17:53Every year they have someone stand up and say cancer's cured. It's like, come on. It's not cured. We're not there yet. Let's go to Jen over at Anderol. She says, it's live. Anderolexclusives.com. So they did a drop. Anderol has selected eBay for charity to host this auction. 100 % of the proceeds will benefit Blue Star families. And so did you see this? They're auctioning off pieces of wreckages from tests that they've run. So amazing. It's basically loot crate drops. There's different tiers. There's rare, epic, legendary tiers. And they're not using it as a profit center. They're using it to give back, which I think is really cool.

1:18:32I don't know. Maybe they should be using it as a profit center. I think I'm actually pro-profit. I just think I just am in favor of companies that generate so much profit from their core products that they're able to use that same skill set to give back. And obviously, Blue Star Families are fantastic, and it's a fantastic game. We love Blue Star families. But I just love that it's a very unique drop. We've been talking about this, how like every company has a t-shirt, but only XL nicotine pouches has a briefcase and a watch and a Rolex. And more brands and more companies should lean into understanding like what is the expression of your brand in terms of merch?

1:19:16I was talking to another founder of a unicorn who um i was i was saying like like you're yeah you're a tech company but like what if your tech company was a car like what car would it be yeah and don't tell me it's a tesla because that's what every single person says i'm a tech company so that the avatar of my brand is a side truck and it's like that's fine but that's also just the avatar of the tesla brand yeah you need to express yourself differently and are you an f-150 or are you a corvette like those are two wildly different cars and you should be able to immediately say based on your brand oh we're more of a corvette than a f-150 yeah or aurora systems of porsche 911 of there you go of uh water filters there you go um and so and so this this is a this is a merch drop that feels uniquely anduril yeah as opposed to just a t-shirt which i'm sure they'll be selling and they'll sell other other merch but when i think of like the merch that i want from anduril i think of like hiking gear like almost tactical gear not like fully military stuff you can wear on the range but something that's like that and I and I and I honestly don't even care if it's just them going and finding a great brand and just like honestly just throwing like an andrel pin on it that's what yeah founders fund does a lot they'll they give out these bags and there's just a pin on it yeah they're really nice bags and I really like them and you're much more likely to use them exactly and you could always take off the pin if you want it's not they didn't have to go and get like some white labeler to like make them a fake version of the bag they just give you the actual bag with the pin on it but it's like the it's still like an avatar of the brand and it's still um an expression which i think is really really cool yeah and brands need to know what they're actually doing with like non-core products like merch it's like you want to be building connection to the broader community and like likability yep and usually a shirt is not the best way to do that you can get a lot more coverage by doing something like this where somebody's like oh i actually own a piece of anduril's like drone system yeah exactly blew up yeah it's really cool and i always love artifacts we have a lot of artifacts in the studio here um and a lot of the investors at founders fund have have like a whole set of of artifacts from like oh this commemorates like the spacex deal or the anduril deal and i think that's really really cool yeah i like this too because if you're very online on x and like accelerationist you know defense tech oriented, getting a piece like from here would be amazing, but they can also go give this to a politician and be like, you know, throw it on their desk and be like, it's paperweight.

1:21:42Don't forget about us. You know, um, it's a great paperweight. Yeah. Well, let's stay on defense tech and go to Ben Coleman. He says, quote, we have a five-star general on our board of advisors. True story. And it's the, uh, uh, inglorious bastards meme of the guy holding up three the wrong way because germans do the three this way you know yeah yeah uh and so it's uh you know detecting that you're not one of us and yeah and we know that it's not real because of course you can't have a five-star general right now because it's not a time of war right right right so very embarrassing for whoever did that and yeah what i've seen in defense tech is like a lot of um there's people that will be publicly out there like oh i'm a general and then they'll use that to like get sort of advisory opportunities and then once they're actually in the deck then they're like whoa no actually like put this like very specific title like oh yeah eighth brigadier blah blah and it's like ends up being much more specified and it doesn't sound nearly as cool um and so bless their hearts are sort of like using that like high level title to like land private market opportunities yeah i wonder how valuable having a four-star general is on your board because we we hear stories about some really helpful people like chris bros and anderal like was McCain's chief of staff came in, like really runs that organization, like full-time employee, like very, very beneficial.

1:23:06But then you also hear stories about like the, didn't some general join the board of, I think Mattis joined the board of Theranos and like it was like, what does he know about that? It was very controversial at the time. And like, if you're a board member, like you should know. I think that was the story of Mattis or something, but yeah. Before we dive into the next one, on the subject of defense tech. We have a promoted post from Allen Control Systems. They say, looking for a fast-moving, high-growth opportunity in defense tech, we are hiring for several roles across engineering and operations.

1:23:39A few of our featured openings are senior mechanical design engineer, electrical embedded engineer, and an Unreal Systems developer. You can view all of Allen Control Systems' openings and apply at allencontrolsystems.com slash company, numeral sign careers. improve your links acs uh you guys can do better than that uh but uh anyways fantastic company acs is building um ai uh gun turrets and gun systems for counter drone use so they basically have built a product that can take out uh you know without any human intervention intervention drones that are you know fast moving um across the battlefield and so uh amazing opportunity Their first product is very defensive, but going to save many lives on battlefields across the world.

1:24:30So thank you to ACS for innovating in this space. Thanks to ACS. Let's go to Jason Liu. He says, if you stayed in Canada, were you truly that ambitious? Got him. I love some hate on an un-American country like Canada. Very un-American. Yeah. It's objectively one of the most un-American. So close. They could just say. hey, we want to be part of this awesome team. We want to join up. 51st. Let's come over here. I would be surprised if Canada doesn't try to front run the moon to become the 51st state, right? Interesting, yeah. Because that would be kind of like, you know, the moon is going to get a lot of attention once it becomes a state and, you know, be the first new state in quite a long time.

1:25:13The 50 is like a nice round number. Being that 51st state, big opportunity. I can see a lot of competition for it. That's a lot. um and canada uh we would welcome you with open arms i know um you know a lot of friends in the podcast uh jeremy guffon sam poirier jeremy's from canada yeah yeah yeah well because he was that tiny she was that he's he was a tiny remember it's a vancouver okay um but he like grew up there he's born there it's brutal brutal uh based in new york now okay thank god uh we got it we got a good one so so he he is ambitious yeah he didn't stay in canada no but there's something to be said for like at the same time we would welcome canada but uh i respect all the canadians that are staying there and trying to make it better yeah fix the place yeah no i i agree we love our canadians all my all my favorite canadians are u.s residents uh but that's also because i spend more time with them yeah exactly and shopify fantastic company from canada fantastic company and uh university of waterloo fantastic engineering also good lots of respect and a lot of companies have like engineering hubs there yeah uh and it is a beautiful country so we love canada uh let's go to unusual whales they say ken griffin of citadel says he's invested in nuclear and it's the future i love these accounts just show they just like say something that's just like could potentially be like very out of context because it's a big account like it's just like fact.

1:26:45Ken Griffin is a long nuclear. I want nuclear powered high frequency trading, right? Like I want, like, I want to be giving these high frequency trading companies, we need to be giving nuclear power to market makers, right? To, to increase financial innovation and the speed at which money moves. I actually wonder if energy is a big, big issue for the high frequency traders. Like I know that Jane Street is advertising on Dorkesh Patel's podcast, trying to recruit, I believe, CUDA engineers and machine learning engineers. So they've done a lot of AI stuff, but I'm not sure how scale bound they are right now.

1:27:21Like a lot of their early stuff was very deterministic. It was written in this programming language called OCaml. Well, and a lot of their strategies were location-based. They were like, how do we get to within 10 feet of where the trade is being executed? You know that on the NASDAQ, they have a rule where even if your server is closer, there's a thousand feet of cable between you and the and the main server no matter what so that everyone has a level playing laws don't work so we're gonna like physically enforce this yeah yeah and and uh i mean it's flash probably has a great anecdote about like digging this huge tunnel across probably a good business to be selling a lot of these exchange to stock exchange it's probably a good business to be selling those like thousand foot cables because yeah they probably need to be replaced all the time because it's like yeah hey it's too slow i need to grade or whatever it's got to be fresh but yeah i mean if if the if the trading algorithms wind up moving to something that looks like an llm where it's very scale-bound like you're going to see huge data center build-outs to it's going to be a new race just like the llm stuff but i haven't heard anything about that we should dig into that more to see i i mean i think at this point he's probably just making the bet on the fact that the LLM companies and the consumer AI companies will need energy for their data centers.

1:28:38So he's investing in nuclear. But this is interesting because, you know, a year ago, people started talking about, okay, what's after NVIDIA? NVIDIA is pumping. Energy is clearly key. Maybe nuclear is the next thing, but it was very much like a cocktail position. People talked about it, but they weren't actually moving the market. Now the market's starting to move and some of the nuclear stocks are starting to go. Well, we talked about this before, but they're still not as crazy as NVIDIA. It's worth bringing up again, four years ago at Hereticon, nuclear was a heretic, you know, being pro-nuclear was still heretical.

1:29:08Now it was the most normie take that you could have. So yeah, Ken Griffin is just kind of putting a stamp on that. Yep. Let's go to Sarah Hess, second time on the show. Can't beat these margins. And it's a screenshot of the rare Anderol Relic, recovered crash component from Anderol R &D tests. And the bid, I mean, it hasn't even ended. There's still three days on this. and it's already over a thousand dollars it's pretty awesome amazing and yeah margins are fantastic because of those families yeah yeah yeah because it's uh you know essentially free since it was just wreckage anyway but yeah i wonder if anybody figures out that like the actual metals and like if you got the right piece like the metals itself would be like worth like more yeah tungsten break it down melt it down some enterprising uh you know very you know they do that with uh like uh hypercars when they're whenever there's a crash there's a community that will find okay yes like a la ferrari crashed in this place let's go and dig through the rubble and like figure out if like maybe some random piece got thrown clear yeah yeah take that and sell it and it's like a thousand dollar it's like uh it's like diving for treasure yeah yeah whole community because like if you get one you know like clutch or something corner yeah valuable because they don't make them that much.

1:30:29Yeah. That's great. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from Nico runs a company called default. 76 % of qualified leads book an inbound meeting with default. We try to help customers think of demo requests as ones who fall into two buckets, demo qualified and to not demo qualified. Most of our customers only show a scheduler to leads who qualify for a demo. So Nico's building an amazing platform, an enterprise product called Default that helps other enterprise companies sort of sort and qualify and book demos. So he's been at this for quite a while, backed by Kraft, and now is starting to see some pretty fantastic results.

1:31:15Became buddies with Nico a few years ago at this point, and their execution has been fantastic. So if you're dealing with processing inbound leads, go over to default, hit up Nico, DM him on X, and he will get you. He's the kind of guy that if you DM him right now, he'll jump on to do a demo of the product with you in like five minutes. Well, if you're demo qualified. If you're qualified. So he'll qualify you. That's part of his job and what default does. So thank you to default. It was great. Let's go to Val. He says something that would let us buy and trade seconds from future ad slots would be lit.

1:31:54And so he's pushing us to let the average viewer and fan invest and profit from our enterprise. Future ad spots. That's actually kind of interesting. Like if you want to go long technology brothers, you should be buying up our 2026 Q4 inventory. And reselling them, yeah. And then reselling it when the time comes. That's great. uh so yeah maybe uh somebody wants to create a platform market for this yeah we'll we'll we'll potentially get behind like a dynamic auction yeah yeah where it's like we could be doing the show live on spaces and we're like oh we actually got a higher bidder hit the printer print it out yeah yeah you can buy if you buy the ad slot within you know it's kind of like a car auction where like after the two minute thing gets down if nobody like does it you can buy the slot but then you buy the slot once it's physically printed like it is it's locked in it's locked in yeah price is a lot yeah he was saying he wanted to uh invest and i said would he prefer a spack or a shit coin or both i think both at the same time hasn't been tried yet not uh but uh well trump is kind of experimenting with liberty coin liberty social he's kind of got both yeah yeah and then also lots of merch drops we might he doesn't do ad reads though yeah he should he should have an ad product i'm actually so state of union so can you actually brought to you by my pillow is there something is there a reason that trump has not done his own podcast because the guy clearly likes very profitable i'm telling you the future is the president will have a podcast the president will have a podcast 100 we should create a poly market for that well like will trump have his own podcast by 2027 well but and i think jd will bring on his his like associates and whoever he's thinking like think about all the buzz that's been happening around like who's going to get department of transportation who's going to get commerce who's going to get defense and it's and and the way these people are introduced it's usually like a screenshot of a press release that goes viral people are like who's this there's like a couple mainstream media write-ups and then a video clip will go right will go viral from whatever that person said on some other podcast so like they'll be like this is the new secretary of defense like so based or so terrible depending on who is posting um and it's just a clip from them on a podcast but how much cooler would it be if you could just watch, you know, Trump or whoever the president is sit down with the person and say, Hey, American people, I'm thinking about this person for secretary of transportation.

1:34:18We're going to talk for an hour and then you're going to roast them, roast them in the comments, roast them in the comments. We'll have a poll. Trump, if Trump had his own podcast, he could get that podcast to a hundred million dollar run rate just on ads oh totally uh which would be which would be a hundred times the run rate of truth social and maybe he could take it could be the first podcast to go public right he could and then you could just have like you could just be a you could have all of america own a piece of uh so anyways i mean this is the thing like didn't uh churchill no it wasn't churchill it was uh fdr did like the fireside chats that's really popular well you know how there's like america weekly things i think even obama did stuff that was like weekly dispatches yeah about like here's what's going on well there i feel like these are less of a thing now but isn't there like presidential accounts for there's like there's an x account that's for the first lady yeah when you're the first lady and there's at donald j trump yeah and at potus changes hands exactly exactly so trump's like i'm not gonna blow this if trump if trump was actually on the at potus account just ripping bangers that account he's like i'm not gonna 10x this for my future like for somebody who's gonna to use that audience against me like in like four years yeah um i would i would love to listen to a podcast i could see j i could see jd like booting up at potus again though and i mean i think uh vivek ramaswamy is going to do it because he's already doing vlogs and he clearly understands like the modern media stuff he's buying buzzfeed he can use all the buzzfeed you know resources to kind of craft his own media strategy and really level up from there go to john feo he's been on the show before uh the fiorentino family uh made their money in hospitality oh yeah uh he's quoting tony segura who says president trump at real donald trump is requiring volodymyr zelensky to wear a coat and tie when he meets the president going forward and john says in the same way you weren't trusted if you didn't show up in a slouchy hoodie to a meeting in the last 20 years we're about to snap back to suits as a filter speaking my language speaking our language you'll want to make sure you're wearing a fiorentino label soon because he has a suit company so john uh came in very clutch at hereticon uh i uh didn't have time to get my own uh suit uh sort of ironed and dry cleaned at um at uh at the hotel so i was able to wear a fiorentino label suit it was fantastic got a lot of compliments uh turned a lot of heads that's great and uh was all thanks to uh the fine fabrics and fit uh of his label but yeah i think uh it's kind of funny that you remember these like memes where like if your vc is wearing shoes like this like they're gonna like try to buy 50 of your company or like if your vc like is even wearing a suit at all like you're fucked you know and i think that like trends obviously oscillate from one side to another like very dramatically and it became like the thing to wear like all birds and joggers and like hoodies and and that so clearly is just like wrong yeah right it's the same thing when you have over 50 million at AUM you need to wear a tie you were you called me like very upset the other day because you sat down in business class on a flight next to somebody and they were just dressed like very sloppily and you were like physically ill from just being like in their presence saying like this is so wrong you should know that if you're flying business class you should be wearing at least a collared shirt at least and um you know we hope that we're on the forefront uh you know with people like theo uh and you know our own podcast we hope that we're on the forefront of a new movement in tech to just like dress uh dress for the for the yeah for the job so if you see a tech a capital allocator out there in casual clothes maybe on a podcast just send a nice note in the replies just tell them like you know love what you're saying love your business model but would it kill you to put on a suit exactly exactly let's go to josh capital allocator not a hvac technician exactly let's go to josh miller he says i've said before and i'll say it again from antitrust to ai agents 2025 will be the year of the web browser more and more signs by the day interesting so i think this was in response to uh news i i think that there will actually yeah at Chrome potentially being forced to spin out, which is potentially very wild just because Google is so, and all of Google's products are so deeply integrated into Chrome at this point.

1:38:55It's hard to imagine a Chrome that's not, that's sort of like account agnostic. It's probably not that hard to build, but you know that Alphabet has spent, Alphabet's strategy was like, hey, like search is our golden goose. Let's build up these sort of like walls all around it via Android, via Chrome, so that we're building up this sort of fortress. And if it gets spun out, that'd be cool. Chrome has probably billions of users. And the perplexity CEO was joking about buying it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which would be funny. Very funny. Which would be a great scene of the simulation. But yeah, Josh and the browser company, it's called the browser company for a reason.

1:39:38They were set up to innovate in this area. Oh, he's the CEO of the browser company? Yeah. Oh, that makes sense now. Okay, got it. Yeah, so they built a fantastic browser. That's right. They're now focused on building sort of agentic browser products. Got it. I'm at, you know, they haven't shared a ton yet, but it's products that will browse for you on your behalf. Well, then this is kind of interesting because just recently they said that they were kind of pivoting away from Arc as a core browser product, but he's still very bullish about the web browser broadly. He just wants to find a different way to integrate it.

1:40:08So here's what the browser company needs to do. Find a SPAC. There's like hundreds out there. SPAC, buy Chrome. And suddenly Josh doesn't have to compete with the big bad Chrome. He can just be the Chrome. I wonder how much Chrome is worth. It's probably not cheap. Because if you buy it. As a standalone business. I mean, I'm pretty sure the, isn't the deal for, doesn't Google pay Apple like$10 billion? That's what I'm saying. So you buy Chrome and then you license. just to be the default search engine on ios yeah yeah yeah that's 20 i thought it was 20 billion yeah so think about chrome's got to be like almost in a similar install base size and even maybe even more valuable or somewhat valuable so like you have 20 billion dollars of essentially just net income like you run a multiple on that like it's a 200 billion dollar asset like or something in that range like it's a lot it's not it's not hard to be a big spec yeah it's gonna be tough I mean I guess they could just do like a demerge and just have two tickers and they're just I think that that will what it would it would be have to be but then what isn't then the new companies like if they're beholden to their shareholders isn't the most profitable thing that you could do just go re-license a product back to google like you're talking about yeah that's exactly what I would do if and if you can't do that then it's worth way less right you'd have to look at like Mozilla and these other big browsers and be like, well, what is this actually worth?

1:41:36Very interesting. Let's go to Jason Carman, fantastic filmmaker, a good friend of mine and of the show. Jason says, most people don't realize how big of a deal Starship is. Ahead of today is Flight 6. Here's a first look inside a new series I'm working on called Frontier Films. The first one is all about new space. And this actually got reposted by Elon. Big. I mean, it's amazing. Jason has crushed it and he's making like the documentaries are better than Netflix stuff now. Yeah. Like it's funny. No, if Netflix is smart, they'll go and say, Hey, the next series you do, they should just give it to us.

1:42:11HBO honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Because, um, no, he's on that path and it's honestly the path that all media is going on to get, to actually break into traditional media and like get the Netflix or the HBO or be on TV. You gotta, you gotta be big online first. Otherwise like you just don't understand attention and like, it's just too risky. Yep. So Jason is, and uh yeah i think like he's carved out his own niche of like i am a filmmaker yep in technology which like the fact that when you think filmmaker and technology i think of you and jason and in many ways like you were like a youtuber yeah right more a youtuber he's like filmmaker multi-platform oh yeah yeah i mean his whole background is filmmaking he's i i kind of like chose youtube because it was some white space like a lot of people had sub stacks and i was like i want to do something different i like i'm kind of a camera nerd this guy's been like making films his entire life like dreaming of making films and so i'm super excited for where he's going with it and it's funny because there is already a netflix documentary about spacex but it wasn't made from the perspective of someone like jason who's actually worked inside of a space company at astranus and really gets it and really talks to the founders and the investors and understands the whole three so it's just going to be so much better and you just know that it's gonna it's going to rip and he has a whole he has a whole bunch of different products now like he started with the s3 series doing these like kind of micro company deep dives on like pretty early stage companies but they were really really polished really great interviews then he did his interview series then he also did some flashback stuff where he did bell labs and now he has these frontier films and so he's he's like fully building a a new movie studio essentially like truly going and showing like how efficient it can be like he doesn't have some massive production company Well, it's because he's actually an individual contributor.

1:43:56Like he knows how to use a camera. He knows how to use a microphone. Like he doesn't need to spend, you know,$100 ,000 on every single thing because he knows how to do it himself. He can do it solo, but then that allows him to hire the best. And so it's going to be massively successful. He embodies the Technology Brothers mentality, which is doing it for the money, right? He's doing it for the love, but like this guy is going to make millions and millions and millions of dollars making important films, pushing humanity forward through, you know, he's basically a marketing channel. for a lot of really important companies.

1:44:26So thank you to Jason for doing what you do and doing it for the money. Thank you, Jason. Let's go to Gary Tan. He says, this company went from zero to 500K ARR in the last eight weeks. Lots of people do AI due diligence for private equity, but this is the first one that outputs all the analysis natively in Excel files that analysts slash principals can understand and modify from formulas up. And it's a repost of YC congratulating one of their portfolio companies. Yeah, so this makes a lot of sense. Like any, anytime you can go after, like this company is replacing people that today make between like 80 and like$250 ,000 a year doing like just like keyboard work, like modeling.

1:45:06And it's one of those things like it will probably maybe already is or very soon will be better outputs than like the humans that would do it. And for like a 10th or like, you know, even 5 % of the cost, something. But importantly, it still allows you to have a tunable model at the end of the day. It's kind of like, what was that company that Tegas bought? That was, it was Canalist, I think it was the name. Yeah, yeah. And Canalist would allow you to download a DCF that was kind of pre-populated with the metrics. There's always been Excel templates for various public companies. You can get like a CapIQ or Bloomberg integration to pull all those formulas in.

1:45:42But allowing a company to do this in the private markets with just like the proprietary data. And so much of the work is just scraping stuff out of differently formatted PDFs, differently formatted Excel sheets, just doing the translation. And that's where AI is like so valuable right now, just taking a bunch of messy stuff and copying it over and cleaning it up. Like that's where AI really, really flourishes. Yeah, and if you're an analyst or an associate and you're worried about AI taking your job, you should be looking at this being like, no, it's not gonna take my job. I'm just gonna do more deals, right?

1:46:11So before it might've taken you a week to build this model or 24 hours. Now you're gonna be able to build it and get onto the next one, right? So it's just gonna increase of a lot of deals. Everything that we're seeing in art and filmmaking where you can accelerate with some AI-generated music or some AI-generated content-aware fill in the background. Like there's still artistry. There's still going to be creativity. Yeah, you're making a deck and you need the right image for a certain slide. Exactly. And it's going to be the same thing with building these models. It's going to be something where you're just using this to fill in all the annoying problems that you would normally have to grind at for nights and weekends.

1:46:50And you can grind on nights and weekends on more deals. More deals. We love that. Let's go to Pavel, Delian's brother. He says, very misunderstood by tech outsiders. A low intention meeting with a successful person is net worse for you than not meeting with them at all. Networking is default harmful, makes you look like an NPC unless you have a clear agenda. That's a good point. Never heard this before. So anybody that meets Delian go, oh, you're Pavel's brother. He's going to do that. Yeah. Pavel's his own man. Uh, but, but anyways, yeah, I think people don't, there's this obsession in tech of like trying to like climb the ladder and, Oh, if I just meet this person and get in the room with them, I can like do something.

1:47:31And it's like, people even use cold email to a fault, like use cold email when you have a specific thing that you're trying to do with somebody or you have a specific way to like add value to what they're doing or something you can offer them or something you can ask. Just it's a total waste of time to like meet people when there's no thing to do together. Exactly. So like, don't nobody wants like, people in tech are generally like friendly, open to, you know, outsiders, whatever. It's awesome. But don't like waste somebody's time by just being like, Hey, I'd love to talk. It's like, nobody wants to just talk.

1:48:03We want to do things. Naval talks about this, like what, like you have an extremely high opportunity cost. There's that idea that like, you know, your coffee meeting should be worth like$10 ,000. Yeah. And it's okay to come in with like, Hey, look, I have a, I have an opportunity that together we could make a million dollars is 1 % chance that it goes through. So yeah, this is, this is a$10 ,000 meeting as opposed to just like, I want to just pick your brain and figure it out. Yeah. It's also important to understand, like if you're, if you're at a conference and there's like somebody like a bean air there, right.

1:48:31And you're like, Oh, I really want to meet this person. There's going to be like 20 other people like crowded around that person. And you have to understand that all those 20 people are like kind of making that, that person's life worse because they're just coming at them with just like a bunch of bullshit. And it's better to just be like, you know not approach them then and cold email them or get a warm intro months later and be like hey you know we overlapped at this conference didn't get a chance to talk social proof right there that you were in the right room and then you can launch into your like i'm building this thing i'd love to like run it by you and that's going to be a lot more effective of like actually building a relationship than just like you know coming on to them and being like oh i want to be friends yeah and there's something like a fine line about like being too transactional like only talking to someone when there's something to be done.

1:49:17Yeah, but I always, I always talk, you know, I was talking with, uh, Sebastian, um, from Rappi yesterday and I told him something that I believe pretty strongly is like, if you're a busy person and the person that you're meeting is a busy person, you're only going to spend a lot of time with them if you're actually working on something, right? Like the best friendships are usually founded on like something for doing something productive together and so i don't think it's wrong it's not even necessarily transactional but i don't think it's a bad thing that there's a lot of people in my life that i'm like if i work on a specific deal or company or even in this situation we spend like 20 hours a week hanging out and we we wouldn't be doing that if we weren't making this podcast and like there's nothing wrong with that like we were friends before and we're friends now but um it's great to find reasons to be friends.

1:50:10Yeah. Let's go to Liz Wessel, noted angel investor in Ramp. Wow. Secondary to that, I think she's a general partner at a big venture capital firm, but less important than just ripping an angel check into Ramp. She says, why do so many people become investors slash partners and suddenly grow enormous egos? It's so obnoxious. You're not the only one who's special. your founders are. I mean, I got to disagree with you there. Yeah. I mean, you're incredibly capital allocators are very special. Yeah. Imagine if all the capital allocators in the world just ceased to exist. Our entire global economy would come crashing down.

1:50:49Yeah. Yeah. We always say that, yeah, the, the working class gets far too much credit. And so do that. So does the founder class. Yep. We need to, to, there's so many are with businesses that are R and D intensive. Yep. they cannot exist without so i don't care if a founder has a pretty deck or a good idea or great pedigree if they don't have a five million dollar seed round they're never going to achieve their dreams which makes the venture capital is absolutely critical to the process and they should have a colossal ego i don't think you should have a big ego if you have like a micro fund like 400 million dollars or something like that but if you're getting up into the the billion dollar AUM range, like build that ego up.

1:51:29You're just as important as like jokes aside, there is something very valuable about being a young founder and interacting with an extremely high ego investor, because at least there is some alignment there most of the time. So you can kind of get some reps in, deal with some sharp elbows and deal with like, it's almost lower stakes than, than dealing with a high ego public company CEO, who's going to buy your company or something like that. Like you've gotten the reps in and just realized like what, what a big ego is and how to deal with it. And, um, but yes, obviously it's a little silly. Um, especially if you haven't actually earned it and you've just become a partner because of your career.

1:52:10I tell, I tell there, there's a specific investor friend of mine who has a few billion AUM and he like high, like hides a lot of his like material success from his founders. and I'm like dude you realize that like people want to work with other winners right so like if you're a winner and you're crushing it like other people that are already winners or want to be will want to work with you yep so I don't I think it's important to just kind of like shatter that wall yeah and yeah obviously having a huge ego is like not like there's no there's no need for that yeah but I do think that ego is an edge and we went through a period of business history where ego, like go ask like Michael Ovitz, like, hey, like, what do you think?

1:52:54You know, did you have a big ego when you were building CAA? And he'd be like, yeah, I had a big ego. Like that's what drove me every single day. But the key is to have a big ego and be kind. Yeah, of course, of course. There's also a big difference between like materialism and like having nice things and having a big ego. Like those can be very different. You can have a$100 ,000 watch and still have an appreciation for a really interesting Casio that costs a hundred bucks, right? And being someone who understands taste and opinionated decision making, and not just saying, oh, this person has a really expensive Hublot.

1:53:34That's not going to cut it, right? Yeah, the other thing is there's a difference between you can have a huge ego and still be very respectful. So a GP that's managing billions of dollars, they can have a huge ego because they're managing billions of dollars. They can still be respectful of founders, respectful of their time, kind in when they pass, you know, or kind and respectful if there's a tough situation. So the key is to build the ego and, you know, become a better, kinder person. I really wonder who this subtweet is about. It's clearly about some investor or partner, someone who just made partner on like, you know, for no reason and is now just like running around being like, you fucking work for me.

1:54:14Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully it's not happening at her fund. Uco Capital Bloke, he's been on the show before. He says, I heard someone say, here for the income, not the outcome today at work. And that pretty much nicely sums up what happens in tech when stocks really start ripping. 2021 vibes everywhere with 1K likes. Yeah, a lot of people have been talking about, I mean, just the general, we're just, Vibe shift. And who knew when 2021 and 2022, early 2022 were happening, it didn't feel like we'd reached that level of frothiness again for at least a decade. And we prayed for a bubble. Like how many hours were we praying to have another bubble and to get AI this quickly and in many ways get, you know, there's even a bubble in tech podcasting.

1:55:05Yeah, funny. No, but I do think it's this thing where these companies get to a certain size and suddenly it's become so hard to sort. Like I was talking to a founder today who's starting about thinking about starting his own company, you know, interviewing and would likely get an offer with OpenAI. And he was looking at it as like, well, I could go to OpenAI for a year, invest like a couple million dollars of stock and then be an OpenAI shareholder and then just build my company. So that's like the reality of like here for the income, not the outcome. He doesn't necessarily, like he's just getting it as like a call option.

1:55:38Mercenary. Mercenary. But he's going to start a company. So good. That's great. That's great. Let's go to Megan Nivold, first time on the show. She says, so once Zempik gets to be cheap, will rich people start being fat again? So you know how it used to be a status symbol to be overweight, like in the early, you know. I have a joke with some of my friends when they get fat. We say looking prosperous. Looking prosperous. Looking prosperous. Yeah. So the real contrarian move here, Peter, Paul Rubens, if you want to fat people, and it was a luxury. It showed that you had enough income to afford nice foods.

1:56:14Yeah. And so the real, the real edge of your capital allocator out there, add pronouns to your bio and get overweight and you'll really stand out and kind of make a statement of like, I am contrarian. Yeah, for sure. I wonder if there will be a future where just like we discovered this miracle pill in Ozempic there will be a miracle pill that will allow you to be extremely obese but suffer none of the health consequences that that's alpha that's alpha so you can just be physically intimidating yeah walk around at 400 pounds but you're having to go to Patek and get like customized like what like bands because like it doesn't fit around your wrist yeah I do I do wonder have you been through like a heavy like mass gaining oh yeah many times i there was a period when i first started going to the gym when i was 18 i would eat at this at the college cafeteria three times a day i would wake up have a protein shake go to the gym go go to the cafeteria then i would get two peanut butter sandwiches that were bread with a puck of peanut butter it was like a burger size and i would eat two of those before lunch wow at lunch i'd go back to the cafeteria eat a whole meal and then I get two more sandwiches and then I would go to dinner and then I have one more sandwich and one more protein shake.

1:57:27So I was like literally having like 5 ,000 calories a day. Like it was just absurd. It's fantastic. And everybody should go through that. It's character building to go through because you're every single bite. You're like, I'm going to throw up. Yeah. I feel sick. You got to go through it. Look prosperous, everybody. Prosperous. And then go through a cut, converted all the muscle and become a mass monster. A mass monster, a size Lord. And then and take a Zempic and get peeled and walk around at 5 % body fat. We have a huge move in the talent world. This is actually massive. Fred Ersom, the founder of Coinbase, is welcoming Jeremy Barinholtz, who doesn't have an X account, sadly, as a co-founder of Nudge, link to his post below.

1:58:10And so Jeremy Barinholtz is a former Elon Musk associate at Neuralink, and I had the pleasure of meeting him and he was truly one of the most impressive people I've ever met. An absolute dog. An absolute dog. Really, really incredible. um and not just building an alternative uh to neural link focused on you know improving yeah it's a non-implanted device so i think it's a headband that improves memory or something with the brain interacts with the brain in some way electrical stimulation but um fascinating fascinating guy went to stanford um was in the military and i met him and he looks just like the typical like San Francisco like thin programmer guy and he was telling us that he's like extremely goal-driven yeah he sleeps for like two hours a night insane and I was like this is fake like there's so many red flags like I just don't buy this guy what he's saying and he was like no I'm extremely goal-oriented like when I want to work on something I just work on it constantly and if I sleep I'll just wake up and be like I need to keep working on this it's insane and he was like yeah one time I got really into working out and I got in this incredible shape and I looked like a professional bodybuilder and we were like yeah right dude like you're so skinny like this is impossible and he showed us a picture and he was like the most jacked dude i've ever seen it was insane amazing insane and so he just i hope they make the he was working with the fda stuff he's electrical engineering working on neuroscience working on programming you can go look up his github he's written a bunch of programming code like he is totally the real deal like really really fascinating person and so huge i hope he leaves his mark on the nut like i'd love to just put on the nudge headband and just like get some, you know, even like 60 % of that, like, you know, mindset.

1:59:58It, it, it really, he really is like a special, special person. Like I, I, I left being, it was a, it was a big, like it was the Founders Fund CEO Summit. And there are a lot of very impressive people there. But he was someone that really, really stood out as a very, very interesting, like long tail person. And I was very bullish on him. So very excited to see what he does. And I hope we learn more about him. He's very quiet and he was featured in one Ashley Vance article about Neuralink. And hopefully there's more because I think the way he thinks about artificial intelligence and math and everything, it's like extremely valuable.

2:00:35And there's not enough of this intellectualism that actually boils up. He's a very, very interesting thinker. So rooting for him. Big pickup. Let's go to Andre. He says, a preview of my new book, pre-order for$39.99. And it's two screenshots. It's how to build generational wealth on x.com. And the first page is, you can post the plane with red dots. You can quote tweet anything with this picture of the plane with red dots. It always does numbers. Even if people have no idea what it means, they will like and retweet to feign that they understand what's going on. And I think I replied to this, but I would actually read this book.

2:01:12I think it's amazing. Yeah, yeah. There are so many of these formats. And he should charge more. He should charge more. He should actually do it, or he should do at least a huge thread of all the most viral slop. I do think, yeah, viral slop. It's the iPhone. This is the best feature Apple ever made, and it's filling in the text message two-factor authentication code. And the book could come with a link to a Dropbox. You could download all. But they're not high-res. They're all reposted, burnt-in JPEGs. They're super compressed and grainy. No, I do think there's a lot of people that go on X and just start posting and just otherwise very intelligent people that just do not understand how the platform works and couldn't for the life of them create a banger even though they have good ideas.

2:02:00And so, yeah, this could be a book, a cohort-based course, in-person events, summits. Get on WAP. Yeah, get on WAP.com. Get some Wi-Fi money going. Yeah, yeah. There's a 360-degree business to be built here. I think so. And you'd help a lot of people get post-economic just from posting. I think so. I mean, we've seen some of those creator paths. They get pretty big. Yeah, yeah. Pretty big. You could fund your whole startup on it. Let's go to Keshav. He says, Paul Graham's whole life. I need money to paint. Learns programming, falls in love with Lisp, works briefly at Interleaf, starts via web to fund his painting lifestyle, sells to Yahoo for life-changing money, moves to California, then New York, tries painting, can't focus properly, feels lost, discovers writing essays online creates yc this is temporary then i'll paint builds hacker news gets stressed running online community leaves yc to paint tries painting in 2014 gives up mid-painting codes bell for four years returns to essays and lisp moves to the uk quote unquote for a year never leaves it's so funny there's so many people like this where it's like they they have this this idealized passion of themselves like what they could be but they're just like born to allocate capital or born to post or born to write or code and he just clearly has so many so many fantastic skill sets uh pg yeah yeah painting was always a fever dream but thank thank god it stayed a fever dream because otherwise we wouldn't have y combinator and uh we'd live in a world where if you made a good app you'd never have a 50 competitors launch and you wouldn't have 50 vcs lining up to write your seed checks you never would have gotten the safe you never would have gotten the two on 20 think about this the impact he's had i mean i always think about yc as more less of a less of an investment vehicle like they've had the impact on the investing space obviously but yc has become essentially a union for startups yeah because if you are a vc and you fuck over one yc company you go in their database every yc company hears about you and instantly you're ostracized from the entire community and such a large community and the collective bargaining approach of going everybody goes out for two on 20.

2:04:11It's like, that's just the price, my friend. It's funny you say two on 20 because like when I went through, it was like one on 10 and then it was like one and a half on 15 and now it's two on 20. But even back in the day with one on 10, that was probably felt like people were like, well, this is like egregious. A hundred percent. It's always been, it's always felt egregious. Yeah. It's always felt egregious. Yeah. Yeah. We'll know the money supply is expanded when, when YC companies are going out where they're Like, yeah, we're going for out for 10 on a hundred. There was one company in my batch who raised at 80 and everyone was like, wow, this is wild.

2:04:39And there's always like one company. How'd they do that? I don't think they actually did that well, but their numbers were crazy. It was like this company by rule. They did like viral videos. And I think they had a ton of revenue. Cause the guy, the guy who did it had been building like online advertising tech since he was a kid and had like a bunch of like, just made a lot of money through like online advertising. So was able to get the business to like a pretty big size. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friends over at Ramp. Why settle for individual ingredients when Ramp gives you the full financial operations sandwich?

2:05:15They have corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, travel. Look at this sandwich. It looks fantastic. We haven't eaten yet today. It looks fantastic. It's making my mouth water. It is a great way to articulate the value of Ramp. It's the CFO suite. It's a bundle of tools. It's a, It's a compound startup that's multiple products all wrapped up in one. But my problem is that I don't think Ramp's a sandwich. I think it's a nine-course prefix with a wine pairing at the French Laundry. I think it's premium. And when I think of Ramp, I don't think just some sandwich that your mom made for you and threw in a plastic bag on your way to school.

2:05:53I think begging for a reservation, greasing the maitre d', valet parking your Turbo S, walking into the French Laundry. shaking hands with the chef, sitting down and enjoying an omakase. Totally. So ramp, good post, but step it up with the classiness because I want ramp to be a premium brand. Yeah, their social media manager is fantastic. Always good for a laugh, but yeah, nine course meal, one pairing. And the chef will even, you know, the chef will even come out and say hello. Kareem will send you a note and say, thanks for being a ramp customer. This is true. Eric will send you a note. Eric really is the CEO that comes around.

2:06:35Eric will come and sit down at your table and have a conversation and make sure that your NPS score is 100. I've always said that about the way Elon runs Axe now, where if you have a banger, he will come around and just drop a crying face emoji in the replies. And then it'll break your phone. Yeah, it'll break your phone. But it feels like the chef coming out and being like, is everyone enjoying the meal? Is everyone enjoying the bangers today? Like here's what's going on. And I just love that about the way he uses the product. Because no previous CEO, not even Jack Dorsey, who was like totally in founder mode during his whole career.

2:07:12Like he didn't use the product that way. And Elon really used the product where he clearly consumes the stuff and comes out and is like, oh, is the soup good tonight? I'm tasting it. Oh, like let me have some of this whiskey too. Like we'll share some of this. Like is the wine working? Oh, it's a little cork. Like let's adjust the algorithm. Yeah. It's good. Adjust the algorithm. And I think the Ramp guys are doing the same thing. Let's go to Logan Bartlett. He says, MicroStrategy has now passed its dot-com bubble stock price and is an$82 billion business. Get him on the podcast, Logan. This is an$82 billion software company.

2:07:47You interview the largest public company tech CEOs. You got to get Saylor on the pod. Get him on the pod. Get him on the pod. No, MicroStrategy has a fantastic business model. For every dollar of Bitcoin they buy, they get$3 of enterprise value. And so if they're smart and they're serving the shareholders, they'll just do that over and over and over forever. Yeah. And then if Saylor's like really bullish, he'll do a take private at a nice premium. Because he's just like, I'm so long. I'm happy to pay, you know, 3x for the Bitcoin. Because I could use more leverage on the take private. Oh my God.

2:08:24Yeah, it's wild. I mean, the funny thing is that there are a number of companies that have done this exact chart. Akamai. Do you know Akamai? The networking company. They invented like IP routing and stuff. It's like this MIT company. Fascinating. And they were worth like$20 billion during the dot-com boom. A couple of the guys sold. They only worked there for like six months during the runoff. Just became generationally wealthy. And then it took the company like 20 years to build back up. But it was a solid business with solid technology. And so they finally got to their peak like more recently.

2:08:57It's good to have a different story with macro strategy, but respect, respect. At least like, you know, having that up and down, like you get like a nice, you know, the number that you have to hit again to get any level of respect, right? Yeah. We go to TCP tech CEO Pepe. He says, daily affirmation. I will fire an intercontinental ballistic missile. I love this. I believe you'll be able to do it. Although the ICBM might not be holding a nuclear weapon inside of it. It might be SpaceX point-to-point. You might be riding on that. You might be going from New York to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Yeah. But ICBMs, I saw another post, SpaceX is just a wrapper around ICBMs.

2:09:40I like that. Make the ICBM useful again. We need to be firing these things off. They can't just be sitting on nuclear submarines doing nothing. I know. Total waste. Total waste. uh yeah you can just you you know in the same way that you can just do things you can just manifest things and you can just affirm things yep i think it's a very uh you know it's been well studied to this point like you should be leveraging this in different ways but don't do it in the ways that that uh you know that that people in la do it where they're like i am healthy i am happy i am like i step it up you step it up you know i will uh find the hundred million dollars hidden in my computer.

2:10:18I will find the a hundred million dollars hidden in my computer. Oh, speaking of that, let's go to Atlas creatine cycle. Uh, it's a screenshot. It says there is a hundred million dollars stuck in your Mac book. Your job is to figure out how to get it. And he says there is a hundred million dollars stuck in SF. Your job is to break up with your GF, move there with your best friend and start a GPT rapper. Yes. Let's go. More rappers. There aren't enough rappers. There are enough. Genuinely. Genuinely. Just go. If you don't have a good idea, just go make it go make an app in the app store called chat gpt chat.com gpt or something like that and it's just chat gpt reskin put in the app no it's not even chat gpt it's llama probably yeah yeah it's llama and just charge just charge charge the most yeah have some you know put it put some good branding on there spend a ton of money on paid ads yep if you spend a dollar on paid ads and you generate a dollar and one dollars of revenue just keep doing that forever scale here to you know till you're a beaner or a centi yep uh there's nothing stopping you uh you don't need to be that creative you just need to work harder yep i love it thanks creatine cycle always good to have you on the show let's go to isaac isaac says this time two years ago my timeline was filled with business banter hot takes bad takes random shit posts now it's crickets.

2:11:39I came to Twitter for business shenanigans and more and more. It feels like it disappoints. I won't be leaving, but I hope it changes. Well, I mean, you're disrespecting X by calling it Twitter. That's your first mistake, Isaac. Also be the change you want to see in the world. Why don't you start posting business banter instead of complaining? So Isaac is a friend and fantastic entrepreneur. He actually made his first million selling swords online. He has a company called uh mini katana that he bootstrapped using these like crazy viral hacks fantastic making original content he's now building a candy company i think that isaac uh i've said this before but he's really like the willy like he's the next willy wonka awesome so if you have all the vcs out there that have like a willy wonka thesis go find isaac uh his company's awesome uh his facility where he manufactures everything is like only a few miles from here uh but yeah i i i haven't necessarily experience this like the four-year page like definitely it's a little messy it's especially during the election it's all politics but that's why we're doing the show like follow tech bros pod like we are posting business hot takes we never post bad takes a lot of random shit posts but no there's a lot of content no social commentary no political commentary we never talk about business and technology exactly and so the comment section uh even on this post I'm at, you know, when we quote tweet this, there's going to be a lot of like, you know, hot takes.

2:13:08Um, anyways, uh, you know, good to call this out, but use the not interested button when they try to put some slop in your for you page, say not interested, not interested, not interested. It does require curation. You're building a Zen garden. You want to avoid some things. I mean, I have a series of lists now I have. I often look through the for you page a little bit. I find that like the first 10 posts are usually pretty good. And as you go farther down and just get sloppier and sloppier because it's just randomly sorting. But then switch over to the following tab. Got some good people in there.

2:13:38I also have a list just for the people that I know post great stuff. I want to see everything that they post. So I put that in there. Also, just spend more time online. That's probably a problem. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friend Jackson Dahl. Jackson says, I'm excited to announce Dialectic Podcast, an interview podcast with the sharpest, most creative, and original people I know he says i like to spar with people on their ideas and push them deeper ultimately to understand what makes them themselves he's already got episode one out he's got a cool uh graphic here and jackson is somebody that has uh one of those people where you talk to like very high like in insights per minute right so if you're having like a 10 10 minute conversation with him you're going to have like a bunch of interest he's going to give a bunch of interesting point of point of views and take.

2:14:28So, uh, podcast is awesome. Listen to a little bit of the first episode. Um, and, uh, anyways, very, uh, I think this is just like, he, he's one of those things. It's very strong, like, uh, founder market fit in the context of like a podcast, like looking at this as like a media business, like he's going to have, um, no problem just like making the show. Fantastic. Is he monetizing already? That'd be my number one risk factor for him. Maybe we should be the first advertiser. Maybe as much as we like to juice our show with ads, like we should be advertising quite a bit. So Jackson, if you don't have any advertisers yet, we'd love to make something happen.

2:15:09Let's go to Adam Graham. First time on the show. He says the amount of high quality content that Tech Bros Pod is putting out is insane. Banger after banger. This is why they're the most profitable podcast. Hell yes, Adam. This is exactly why we do everything that we do. We do it for the money, really. We do it for the money. But if there's bangers as a byproduct, then that's fantastic. Yeah. And high quality content, if that's what makes the money, we'll do it. But just to be clear, if low quality content's more profitable, expect some low quality content. Here and there. Yeah. But good to have you as a fan.

2:15:46Good to have you as a follower. Good to have you on the show. Welcome to the Tech Bros community. Thank you. Thanks, Adam. Thank you, Adam. let's go to nick carter he says locked in and pulled another all day or today let's go nick go uh the only time i've ever taken naps during the work day like i was like probably like devastated like i've had to be in like a really bad spot yeah uh to be so strung out i take like one nap a quarter on like a sunday and it's wonderful but i'm not a daily napper it's kind crazy yeah naps are um i i get it if you're like paul graham and you're working on your painting career and you're trying to get like a you know burst of energy for the afternoon but um i don't know any also it's kind of impossible to take naps when you're on enough stimulants to kill a horse that's a big that's a big thing i think anybody's that this is like oh i should take a nap it's like try 600 milligrams of caffeine and some nicotine four milligram nicotine pouches all day long there you go you won't be you won't be inclined to take it you'll be pulling all day or every single day all day or daily but i love nick quintessential you can just do things guy did the boxing match did the investigative journalism huge uh huge capital allocator love nick does a bunch of cool stuff fantastic student capitalism let's go to my colleague bridget harris over at founders fund she's she's quoting peter teal says the wall street banks are long the trade deficit because the bigger the deficit, the more money they make.

2:17:16And she says, obviously, bigger trade deficit equals larger volume of cross-border payments. Stablecoins could be hugely helpful here in helping smaller banks compete with cross-border flows. Large banks have no incentives besides defensive to switch because of this dynamic. Lower fees equals less profit, among others. Has to be a smaller player slash new entrant with nothing to lose plus favorable legislation because the incumbents won't cannibalize themselves under unless pressure comes from the outside and love you bridget but you made a terrible mistake you included a link to spotify which is banned on x and that's why you only got 99 views so turn this into a clickbait thread repost it i'll retweet it and we'll cover it again we'll go to the moon we'll cover it again i think you got a thousand likes easy on this if you just make it a little bit more incendiary You need to call someone out.

2:18:06They're the reason America's stagnating. This is the problem. You've got to be much more aggressive. But honestly, a very thoughtful post and something that really digs into all of the features of stable coins and all of the different factors going on there. I was not aware of all this, but it makes a lot of sense. It's going to be interesting with stable coins. So far, it seems like the fees, you know, Stripes obviously made their move into stable coins. And we'll see like what the, you know, I've seen like some stable coin products that just still have like similar fees to like traditional payment processing.

2:18:39But it'll be a pretty cool experiment to run to just be like, all right, if you can move money basically for free in a sort of trustless way, how much does that accelerate the velocity of money? And I would imagine it'll be pretty significant. Yeah. I mean, it still seems like we're pretty early in all of the crypto stuff. Like even Bitcoin, it's unclear. Like, is it putting pressure on certain parts of the U.S. government? like it's become a political issue and there's pro bitcoin or anti-bitcoin communities but we're not we haven't really worked through because we're not on the gold standard like if bitcoin displaces gold how does that really trickle through the rest of the american economy like well now there's rumors of the strategic bitcoin reserve that would be big interesting yeah very interesting but uh bridget has a fantastic post on pirate wires uh deep diving the uh the the Stripe acquisition of, was it Bridge?

2:19:32Yeah. It's confusing because it's Bridget and Bridge, but the stablecoin platform that got acquired. And so you should definitely go read that if you want to learn more about stablecoins. Let's go to the founder of Perplexity. He was demoing a new Perplexity product for shopping, which I love. You can just take a picture of something and then Perplexity will go and find the product that you're searching for. And in this case, he asked, what watches does Jeff Bezos wear? And perplexity helped him realize that Bezos is often wearing the Omega Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch and another watch.

2:20:13And he says, should I buy this? And I think the answer is absolutely you should buy it. We need more technologists and founders who are watch guys. We've seen this happen with Zuck. He's rocking a fantastic FP Journe. We know some capital allocators who were rocking Pateks and Nautilus and Aquanauts at this point. But it's still under discussed and there's still major alpha in getting into the watch game. It needs to be more a part of the conversation. Exactly, exactly. So I highly recommend this. You need to differentiate. You're in brutal competition with every other big tech company, bro. You need to stand out.

2:20:46Get a nice piece. Statement. Get a hitter. Get a hitter. And then every time you go and shake someone's hand, when you go shake Jensen's hand for those, for those GPUs that you need, he's going to be like, Ooh, Ooh, Ooh. Even people that aren't watch guys, they're still going to notice and respect it. Exactly. Uh, it's a way to make an impression. Yeah. So I say, pull the trigger. Let's go to Yarden Shafir. He says, uh, I'm outside the club. A drunk girl is yelling her opinions on rust. I have hit peak San Francisco. Wow. 7k likes. Let's go. There we go. Tech is mainstream. People like Rust. I've never written a line of Rust.

2:21:23I know it's a very popular language, really popular with crypto, I think. I'd really appreciate it if people can stop being transphobic in my comments. Go do that someplace else if you must. Yeah, of course, this turned into a culture war issue. It's more of an issue than hot tabs versus spaces. Anything past a thousand likes, it turns into a culture war zone. You're in the dark territory. You're in a culture war zone. Dark X. Try to keep your likes under 1 ,000 if you don't want politics and social issues. You want low-tam bangers, just the people that know. Consistent. Or else it's going to get too crazy.

2:21:55But yeah, I mean, this is interesting. Because sometimes like the drunk girl outside of a club, I remember in Miami seeing a drunk girl talk to a bouncer about Bitcoin. And it was right at the peak when Bitcoin was at 20K. And then it immediately sold off afterwards. So there is a little bit of like when your barber is giving you stock or your taxi driver is giving you stock tips. Like maybe that's a signal. But this is a signal that SF is back. I think so. The fact that somebody went out in San Francisco, presumably past 10 p.m., is a really bullish sign. I wonder if that's real or if it was just like an imagined scenario.

2:22:34You can just make up things. You can just make up things. Let's go to Beth Jezos. He says, BioAC is the next Overton frontier. Few. Yeah. So, you know, we've been, you know, you've been a strong proponent for literally years for genetically engineering bears to domesticate them and also make them, you know, allies for us. And also biohacking and stimulants and all sorts of stuff in that world. But yeah, it's interesting to see where this goes. What's interesting is like the Overton frontier. Is he just saying like that is where the political issues are being fought right now? like over IVF, over what Noor or Siddiqui is doing at ORCID, over genetically engineering babies, like that type of stuff?

2:23:15Because Overton, I usually think of the Overton window as what is acceptable to say politically. So it seems like what he is saying here is maybe that there are things that are going on in the bioaccelerationist community that you can't talk about or you would be canceled if you talked about. And this is like the rumor that there are genetically engineered children in China right now, but not in America. have you heard this yeah and so um so it's interesting that it's like maybe we're going to have to have a national conversation about the morality of bio in the same way that we have had it around no idea there there yeah there needs to be a conversation there's there's certainly um could get on the hat put on the tinfoil hat but uh there's many people like you know one of the one of the you know sort of pushback against this there's many people that believe that uh lyme disease was created in a lab really because it basically spread out of this small area around um like long island sure there was a there was a island off of um like montauk area interesting and dogs would wash up on like in montauk that were like a dog combined with a pig what like very weird this is the most crazy very very weird uh stuff but uh lyme disease also spread out from uh sort of like that was the geographic center and the ticks that initially had it sort of spread out from from there i'm terrified of ticks and lyme disease whenever i'm on the east coast i always avoid going for hikes and stuff i'm like huge west coast alpha it's just like having less it's there's something scary about having like something so small have such a huge impact on you no it just almost like spiders and snakes i'm not a fan yeah anyway hopefully we'll hear some more stuff about biological accelerationism.

2:25:02I think we need a good blog post from somebody. I mean, a little bit of that's happening with Neuralink and probably Nudge and a few other programs. So putting all that together into kind of like, we need like a packy deep dive or something. Be cool. Some things just need a packy deep dive. They do. Jeff Lewis says, I believe that in the future we'll be governed predominantly by algorithms. Phase one, algorithms accumulate power 2000 to 2020 phase two governments attempt to wrest power from or align themselves with algorithms 2020 to present phase three algorithms become the government so jeff has a special talent for looking at uh you know there's that phrase like how do you how to predict the future is to like sort of like look at the present right and in many ways like he positioned this tweet in a sort of like incendiary way of being like 2000 to 2020 right algorithms gaining power yep um but uh yeah i you know i i i buy this i feel like we're we're uh already seeing the governments align themselves with different algorithms right you saw that this election cycle but i would just say uh i want to i want to live in a world where the temp check algorithm.

2:26:15Yes, I agree. Runs the country, right? Vibes-based governance. And Jeff, we've told you this already, but bring back TempCheck. We need it. Some of the best VC content market. I know you're not a VC. Fantastic. Best VC content marketing in the game. It was fantastic. Classics and some low-tamp bangers in there. Yeah, this is kind of the Brian Johnson question right now. He's been asking a lot of people. He says that don't die is an algorithm and that's what he's really creating. And also he's been asking a lot of people, like if you could guarantee that an AI would give you like a better life outcome, would you submit to the AI dictator?

2:26:54And it's a very interesting philosophical question that I think we'll be digging into more over the next few years. So definitely the right question to be asking. Yep. Go to Matt Turk. He says, okay, but we dramatically improved our podcast game. And it's a response to TechCrunch. In 2023, VCs returned the lowest level of capital to their investors since 2011. And so 2023 was not a good year for venture capitalists. But there were a lot of great podcasts that came out of this era. Actually, I would say that in many ways, maybe the carry checks were lower, but big funds were still being raised.

2:27:31The fees were high. The fees stayed stable. And so why not put those fees into a Shure SM7B or some cinema cameras or a lovely set? Yeah. Why not? But yeah, we do need more venture capitalist podcasts. I've noticed this when I've looked at like, if you're a VC or a company and you want to go do a press junket, it's actually pretty hard to go do 10 solid interviews that have, you know, a reasonable following. Like if you're a celebrity and you're promoting a movie, you can go do Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert. Like you can do, you know, NBC and CBS and, you know, The View and all of these different things to promote your show.

2:28:13And they all have large followings. And in terms of like VC world, there's really not that much. There's like a few shows that are pretty big. A lot of them don't have guests. It's not like you can just call up all in and go on. 20VC does those. There's the tech crunch one, but it's not like you're going to go and get these sort of like super influential hosts. Yeah. And it is really important for founders to be able to like work their way up and start with a smaller show and then parlay that into the bigger show and then wind up on the big show. But it's really, really hard. Yeah, the same way that tech founder Donald J.

2:28:47Trump finally was able to claw his way up onto Rogan. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there needs to be a similar path, but it's hard because Dworkesh is so focused on AI and Lex, occasionally, I mean, he had the cursor founders on, but he hasn't, I don't think he's even had Palmer Luckey on. There's like, there's not really that many just general tech shows like Logan Bartlett, a great show, but it's like now narrowed down to just like public company SaaS CEOs, which is cool. Yeah, and that's why we started this podcast. We felt like the technology industry needed a podcast. It did, it did. so yeah let's go to the real estate god the real estate god says craziest thing in america is that the average person could two to five x their salary simply by taking a sales role but they're too scared of people telling them no 20 times a day interesting yeah that's true it's uh it's funny sales is one of those things like you know in a lot of things if you're getting told no 20 times a day like you should just like stop doing what you're doing because the market is telling you like you're doing something wrong you're doing something bad like it sucks but sales is like one of those things like the the no tolerance needs to be uh extreme mostly because like sometimes like even customers that want your product like don't want to deal with you right now or they just have 10 other things that are more important so you're never going to break through someone else shared something recently that was like oh in in the future i forget who posted this but in the future you're going to be getting 2000 email, like perfect cold emails a day from all the outbound sales agents and Salesforce is going to be like taking you out to like a steak dinner.

2:30:23And they're like, so we're going to renew your contract. We're going to increase it like by like 50%. Like here's, you know, just sign right here. And you're like, all right, like, I guess, I guess this is what we're doing. It's fantastic. Let's go to Jen. She says overheard three tech bros discussing how much money it would take for them to replace their girlfriend thing is none of them even currently have a girlfriend boom roasted roasted uh technology brothers tech bros uh get girlfriends dude figure it out and uh yeah don't let people overhear you talking about embarrassing things although could be imagined could be a fake overheard yeah this thing happens you never know you never know It's a proven, that goes in the how to post bangers, how to create generational wealth on X.

2:31:11You know, Red Bull Futurist exemplifies what a technology brother is. He's over here talking about wanting to have 10 children, right? So he can't, there's nothing, like no AI girlfriend, you know, friend.com is not going to replace, you know, having a loving wife and partner and mother of your children. Until there's some crazy bioaccelerationism and some artificial womb. Yeah, yeah. We're domesticating bears. Artificial wombs. Let's go to Jenny Fielding. She says, a pre-seed company that raises a modest round should not be burning more than 50K per month. This is a hill that I'm willing to die on.

2:31:51Well, don't die, Jenny. There's money to be made. Yeah. But this goes back to your$17 ,000 pre-seed. Oh, yeah. If we were burning 50K, that would be one week. would be out of money in one week one week yeah um but yeah i think uh that this is the challenge with venture right money that is raised gets spent and it's ridiculously hard i you know one of my portfolio companies just raised around basically off of a lot of momentum yep and there's already this like oh we could hire this person like this person's amazing and look what they're going to do And then suddenly this company will have added like a million dollars a year burn that they didn't really need, or maybe they could have pushed it back, uh, you know, down the road.

2:32:38Um, so yeah, this is where like YC is like dogma is just absolutely correct, which is just like keep burn incredibly low. And it's so hard, uh, you know, as somebody who started a company in 2021. Oh, I never even realized that YC PG wrote this post and I believe it was called don't die. yeah and now brian johnson's using that in the in like the literal sense but the original pg thing was just don't die don't run out of money and as long as you do that and you stay an entrepreneur eventually you'll figure it out i have i have a there's a company that that i backed in 2021 and uh the uh only three people invested in the company yc or i invested in one other guy invested in yc did their their round and they've pivoted like 10 times but all their updates are like we pivoted again and it's like monthly burn like runway and it's just been going it's been like 8k a month burn plus like server costs and their runway has just been like dwindling down like very slowly but they've taken so many shots like i'm eventually expecting to get an update from them it's like we have 10 million of arr like we pulled it off i love that but but they would have had way less shots on yeah but i mean seriously like it is difficult to create an axiom around burn rate because if you're doing something that's R &D intensive or you're going to spend a lot of money on lawyers or you're acquiring a domain or if there's something weird going on like it's going to be very bespoke some companies are completely justified in burning 100k a month out of the gate and some companies shouldn't be burning more than 10k out of the gate it just really depends on what you're doing and who your team is and where you are but in general I agree you should be conscious of your burn.

2:34:21So great. We certainly are at this podcast. And let's end with one more promoted post and then we'll go to Lulu. This promoted post is from DuPont registry. DuPont has a 2024 911 GT3 RS. This is not the first time we've had DuPont as a promoted post and not the first time we've had a GT3 RS on here. This one is a paint to sample pastel orange that comes fitted with custom 1016 Industries carbon fiber kit. This car looks fantastic. We eventually will be doing a transcontinental race as Technology Brothers, probably with a Ramp branded car. Yeah, GT3 RS, probably Gumball 3000. Gumball 3000. Maybe the Dakar as well.

2:35:09Yeah, so there's a few big races coming up in our pipeline. And we're certainly going to be, uh i'll be driving a porsche you might be driving something american but that will be uh we'll each die on that hill yes uh but anyways fantastic example thank you to dupont and uh how much is it uh coming it's listed at at 490 000 wow an absolute steal i mean at that price you can't afford not to buy yeah they're they're basically giving this away yeah um i would i would make sure to get your PPI because, I don't know, pastel orange PTS, this could easily get into the 500s. But thank you to DuPont. If you're an entrepreneur, then you can pick it up.

2:35:59But if you're a capital allocator with some small$400 million fund, that's a no-brainer. No-brainer. Let's go to Lulu. She says, taste aside from a purely strategic perspective, this brand marketing is disastrous for Jaguar. For context, Jaguar sales have been plummeting down 70 % in the US in five years. Did you hear that they took a year off of making cars? They just are not making cars for a full year because they're completely resetting. Up to 2018, Jaguar is actually growing quickly, doubling sales in a few years. And she breaks down all the disaster that came from this post that was called copy nothing and it was a very abstract ad looked like a like a i don't know like a music video almost uh with a lot of interesting characters it got a ton of attention and i think lulu's post got more than her than the jaguar post likes lulu got 16k on this and she kind of breaks down the problem that jaguar used to be the iconic image of an old school British gentlemen.

2:37:04Think Sir Roger Moore. It was James Bond level car. And then they kind of messed around and wound up with kind of shifting from being in the luxury and classic sophistication market with competing with Bentley and Aston Martin. And then they shifted down to premium competing with BMW and Mercedes in a more crowded market. But Jaguar SUV sales are cannibalized by their own sister company, Range Rover. And now they're not upscale enough to compete in the luxury market and not cutting edge enough to compete in the premium market. And so they need to reset, they need to focus on the cars. Yeah. They have this vicious cycle where you have lower sales, which means you can invest less in R &D and you're not even producing parts at the same scale, which means that the parts end up being more expensive for you.

2:37:52And like, it's this crazy vicious cycle. And then it almost feels like Like this campaign is not like a nail in the coffin, but how do you, how do you completely turn off an entire new generation of automotive enthusiasts where I've never once considered buying a Jaguar, except every now and then you'll see like a Jaguar is like leasing. And they're like, we will pay you a thousand dollars a month to lease this car. Like they're like, so like bought, like the lead, like they can, they can't give these cars away. they stopped making cars for a year because their sales were like basically zero yeah like car people don't realize like sales volumes on cars are like are not even that high like that aren't the way mose jaguars yeah the way mose are jaguars maybe way mose should just buy them buy yeah at least they can make cars yeah because they say you can make cars like the end of the road yeah that that seems like the end state that's that's the only time you really see a jaguar but but if they wanted something that like they wanted to revamp the brand they shouldn't have done this crazy video they should have hired someone like who hyundai hired who was the former developer the m label at bmw and he created the n group at uh the performance group of hyundai and they're creating like insane cars like the uh the ionic 5n have you seen this with like the fake noise and like all the car guys love it even though it's electronic yeah even though it's electric vehicle it sounds like a v6 and it like shifts like a v6 has this fake dct in there and then and then they're also doing this crazy envision car that looks like a super nostalgic yeah super nostalgic and so there are a bunch of ways that they could have gone into the vault and brought something back that stood out and made a made a statement as a car yeah but they just chose not to maybe this would be the start of something new but it was a very weird brand direction and it No, it did.

2:39:43Somebody was commenting, and I think this was accurate. It's almost like they were expecting a Kamala win, and they had invested tens of millions into this campaign, and they were just like, all right, we already made it. Let's go. We bet the house on this. And then everybody's like, no. You realize that Trump won, right? Yeah. But we don't talk about politics on this podcast, so we will leave it at that. Jaguar could be a good acquisition target for us at some point. Yep. the history of the brand aligns with a lot of our ethos yeah so somebody will bring it back sometimes it just takes an extra decade yep thanks for watching subscribe or else you'll be relegated to a life of flying on net jets ouch have a good one bye