Low T Levels at Y Combinator, Founder Burnout, Taylor Lorenz

30:12What do you think? This screams burnout to me, right? There's a lot of flowery language. And Ben, the guy who asked this, clearly an exceptional writer. But look, the guy's burnt out. He's sort of, I think anytime as a founder, if you lose that sort of ultimate vision, right? Like he's getting to a point where he doesn't quite know the path forward. And oftentimes as a founder, you have multiple paths forward. But if you're sort of there at this point where you can't make decisions one way or another and you're sort of just sort of stumbling along, that doesn't feel good. That's burnout. You know, this guy could go on a vacation.

30:58It's not gonna really do anything, right? because he's going to be on vacation thinking about the fact that he's burnt out. So I actually know this guy and I was on a call with him and he came to me with a very, like, so just for some context, they've raised like a decent amount of money. They're like, he's paying himself a salary. It's not huge, but he's like paying the bills. Right. And he's in kind of stasis. Right. And so I, he came to me with this idea of like, oh, I want to make some more money for the company. I'm thinking about like, it was essentially like lead gen, like selling the, like the leads that his company generates and isn't able to monetize and get down the funnel, like sell those off.

31:38And I was just like, dude, I don't think you're thinking big enough. I think this is like not the right path. I think this is like, it'll be very incremental. It's not a path to a venture outcome. Exactly. It's just, it's just not a path to anything exciting. It's just going to be mediocre. And so what I was telling him was like, instead of like burnout, I think you're right. But instead of going on a vacation, I told him he should just clear his whole calendar and figure out who the top 30 players are in his industry. The top three, like public company CEOs, billionaire investors, like the big people.

32:09And you should just spend your entire month, the next month, just trying to get meetings with them. Just fly to where they are trying. Like we saw this with the truth social thing. Go to Mar-a-Lago, figure out like, okay, this guy owns a big company in this town. Go there, meet him network and then and then like half the people i was mentioning he was like oh yeah that guy cold called me like three years ago when i was starting when i was building this company and like you know we never ran anywhere i was like call them back call them back and just try and see what how you can be helpful because it could be an acquisition it could be an acqui hire it could be a deal it could be something else here you do that you do that for a month if if that doesn't go anywhere you call up jeremy guffon guffon and company yep and this is exactly the kind of opportunity you know we kind of special situation he showed me like one of the one of the he forwarded his investor update or something like that uh not a bad company right nope five six million of air are growing 30 30 a year that is a good business under most evaluations but it's not a venture scale yeah it's tough when you raise 15 mil and so go to jeremy he'll you know help help you know figure out all the different sort of stakeholders and find a win-win going forward yeah uh your vcs have different incentives than than you do right you have you've been in this business for eight years you still care about the industry you're an expert in the industry and with the right capital stack and approach to growth you know this could this business could eventually sell for 50 60 million dollars yep um and it's going to take a little bit of time to get there but if you kind of it really is a kind of a uh uh uh it's not it's no longer a venture product right so you're sort of treading water and not embracing reality um and going with guffon and companies is a much better option than just shutting the company down and people kind of like know this deep down at the later stage where you know if you're doing 100 million arr it's like okay private equity exists everyone knows bain kkr all these companies that are very obvious and they probably calling you or strategic acquisition that could be very valuable or maybe try and take the company public but people don't realize that like this this like kind of zombie stage where you've done series a series b but never really hit escape velocity those two options still exist it's probably just something more like an acqui hire and more like a special situations deal with somebody like jeremy so uh anyway good luck to you ben i hope you hard press for a month and then give jeremy a call that's what i would do yeah try and get the try and get the acqui hire done try and get some weird deal done try and kind of just break something loose that's truly new and bold and has the upside don't focus anymore like you've already built the business to the point where it's it's business is working the business works it's just not there so you need to either take a really big swing of the fence with like a new partner or do the acquihire go mentor under somebody who's really successful then get back into it or sell the company and restructure the a whole cap table with Jeremy or something.

35:08Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. So our first post comes from Guy, who is quote tweeting us. He says, there's two Chad looking guys in a suit discussing Goblin's tweet and my note, I lulled IRL. That's great to hear. That's great to hear. I mean, as much as we're here to deliver hard hitting business strategy, we're also here to deliver some laughs right exactly and uh just because we're dead serious about the show doesn't mean you can't you know get get some real enjoyment out of it so and here he says please guys in suits film yourselves earnestly discussing my tweets too well here it is guy here it is first of many i would guess yeah i think you're going to be in the regular rotation uh you have a long a long path in front of you um but yeah goblin's tweet i actually don't remember what goblin's tweet was but I imagine it being very deranged and having a lot of jargon.

36:05You know, shitposting gets shitposted about a lot, but it's serious, right? It creates trend. It sort of influences the zeitgeist and it helps us better understand the world. Yeah, has a deeper meaning sometimes. So cheers, guy. Get out there. Post more. Send us your best posts and you might be on the show. Let's go to Max Meyer. Max says, the upper Midwest is a 10 out of 10 region. It has everything. Chicago, a proper city, massive metro on an ocean scale lake. West Michigan, a temperate area warm enough to grow Chardonnay grapes. I didn't know that. The largest arable land region on earth and the greatest college towns in the USA.

36:45We should do a Technology Brothers meetup to do a wine tasting in the Chicago area. I think we should host a live show in this Iowa stadium that he's hosting at. That'd be amazing. A college tour. Will it fit 100 ,000 people? Yeah, that's the main problem. I mean, maybe if we added extra stands, extra seats in like the infield, we could fit 110. But I mean, we'd have to charge a lot. It's going to be tight. Yeah, we'd have to charge a lot. But I mean, you price skate eventually. We'll live stream it. Everybody should be able to go. Yeah, it'd be great. Max has been, I think, very vindicated the last few weeks.

37:20The guy's been loud and proud about certain viewpoints that he has. And I think he's going to be on the right side of history on this one. He was wrong about something, which I completely agreed with him on. And it was that he didn't think Biden was going to drop out. And he bought like, he put like a hundred bucks in Polymarket. Yeah, he put like a hundred bucks in Polymarket when it was like, you know, Biden did drop out 80%. And he was like, I think it's fake. It's not going to happen. It doesn't make sense. And I was like, dude, like good job putting your money where your mouth works. Like I believe that too.

37:53And we were both wrong. glad he didn't put the full arena balance sheet on it because it's a great publication. It is. I think we have a copy here somewhere, but, uh, it's laying around here. Arena is fantastic. We had it in the first episode. Um, but yeah, I'm really excited for more, more additions of arena and, uh, he should try to, he should potentially explore going through a daily, uh, newspaper. Right. Cause like the new cycle moves quickly. I like, I like something that you can just sit there and enjoy on the weekend and have, you know, a quarterly or monthly. Um, It's a great, obviously like ramp up as fast as possible.

38:27It's the kind of thing that you get in the mail and you, and you put it in your briefcase and you say, I'm going to bring this on my next vacation. Yep. Um, you know, in a few weeks and I'm going to just really sit down and enjoy this. Yeah. Well, I mean, the design was fantastic and the, and the sponsors he's monetizing. I saw a lot of great, a lot of, a lot of independent publishers say, Oh, we're going to do fully reader supported. It's like, no, Max understands that the best content in the world should be monetized. It should be supported by companies that want to support the publication too, because companies, you shouldn't ban companies from supporting your publication, right?

39:05I was looking at the, this week's Economist ad on the back, Cubitus. Cubitus. TechFleep. Yep. Yep. Yep. It makes sense. We could do a whole deep dive on the Cubitus. And if you, and if you read through the Economist, they do a great job balancing the ads. Like it's not overwhelming, like a lot of publications, but there's just enough. And it's just nice. And I look forward to flipping it. I look forward to that. Seeing it. Oh, who do they got this week? The ads are pretty, you know, in The Economist, I would say that 80 % of the ads are deeply relevant to me. Right. And so I look at it more like a service.

39:39Yeah. It's the same thing for Arena. Every single ad that they ran, I was like, this is cool. And I like this company more because they're supporting Max. So cheers to Max. thanks for everything that you do let's go to shane copeland the founder of polymarket what a great story i he so he posts this picture of him in 2020 four years ago he says 2020 running out of money solo founder hq in my makeshift bathroom office little did i know polymarket was going to change the world and man what a setup that indicated terrible yeah yeah such a bad such a bad setup with a empty water bottle um and the mouse is a crazy mouse the mouse on the wicker basket is crazy basket but uh and the plastic water bottle i mean i think shane's somebody whose testosterone levels are probably so high he needed to take off the edge and have some microplastics yep to bring it down a bit but uh still from the from the bottom to the top the best part about this is that if you look at the image it looks like he like got frustrated and punched the wall and like, it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

40:46Yeah. He probably did. It's a testosterone. That's probably why he was probably drinking it. He punched the wall and then was like, okay, I need to have some microplastics. Yeah, exactly. But man, what a, what a run, what a run for Polymarket and just dominant. I think they got like 80%, 90 % liquidity on, around the election, just complete. What, um, outcome. Yeah. What, do we have any idea how much volume they did in the last month? I think it was like 3 billion just on the presidential election. And I think, I don't know, I think it's like 60-40 election versus non. And now a bunch of sharp founders are actually creating markets to be able to short their companies.

41:24We have a post on that. Yeah, so we'll get. 3.6 billion. Wow, that's massive. Yeah. Am I going to be able to pull it up? It's too hard. There's too many here. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. We'll come back to that one. Oh, here it is. uh so avi schiffman says uh never been more bullish on friend please bet against my failure and he's using manifold but i'm sure most founders will wind up on polymarket pretty soon and it says will friend have 10 000 daily active users by november 8th 2025 and it's a 50 50 right now and you can go and effectively short his company because there's been a lot of trash yeah for For all the people that think he spent too much on his domain, I think he...

42:14OneWord.coms are back during the AI era. Obviously, Sam Altman saw what Avi did with Friend and decided, I'm going to get chat.com. I think I saw Family just launched today, some crypto thing. Do they have their.com? I don't know. I thought they had a.io. Okay. Maybe they have a.com. They had the Axe family. Yeah, which is at this point. It's actually funny. the branding of a one word domain so strong in AI that I assumed it was an AI company. Like, oh, some app to manage your family, but I guess it's a crypto thing. Yeah, but Avi - But I love this, I love this. Avi is so convicted. So he's building a wearable for AI.

42:50Yeah, so Avi's building an AI wearable that's - You went viral with this very controversial video about going and living your life in San Francisco, but also talking to your AI friend and having these kind of black mirror-esque interactions. and I think the video was tuned perfectly to be not quite just techno-optimistic. So it wasn't tone-deaf. Like the people that made it and him, they knew it was going to be controversial. He's a technologist, but he's also, he's not, he sort of has this understanding that technology is not always good or bad. Like sometimes it's sort of this neutral thing where there are going to be people, if he continues to execute, there's going to be people that are, become madly in love with their friend.com uh you know wearable companion there's going to be people that just use it here and there and like it's a part of their life and and some people might use it as their personal trainer it's going to be massively positive for some people i'm sure it'll be negative for some other people and that's just the nature of technology not uh it's impossible to say that any technological product is inherently good or inherently bad uh and anytime you get into like binaries.

43:58I think it's, but overall, like this guy is putting it all out on the line. He's doing this sort of build in public approach, but basically saying every single week, I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. Not, not too dissimilar to Steinman, just sort of a different approach. Yep. Totally. Love it. Well, good luck. Let's go to Lee Edwards. He says, there hasn't been a better time to move to SF in 15 years. AI is here. In person is back. tech vibes are off the charts local government no longer run by psychotic clowns legal to build housing again equal marriage and abortion rights are the law and he's quote tweeting someone that says time to move to sf then and i love this i i've always been super bullish on the gary tan like anti doom loop boom loop the dynamic make sf amazing like it needs to be yeah so i was born in Oakland Children's Hospital family you know it's been all around the bay for generations and generations the bay had gotten so bad that when I was graduating college I didn't even consider moving back and in fact I remember year over year as a kid my family we'd go from Berkeley and we'd go over the bridge into the city I remember just going less and less and less as I got older and it was because it no we are sort of like family tradition was to go into San Francisco go park our car and spend the entire day just walking around the city, going to our favorite restaurants.

45:21And that just happened less and less and less as it got less safe and just less enjoyable to be there. And I just remember as we started to really needing to dodge certain streets and neighborhoods and it just became like, you know, it just became a little bit dark. And so I think for all the technology brothers out there, men and women, it's been this over the last four years, you've had sort of teal and elon align and focus on the presidential election you've had gary focused deeply on san francisco and having san francisco uh you know making a lot of positive progress on on uh on things simultaneously having new momentum at the federal level san francisco is going to benefit massively from both of those trends so if you are you know we're media business right we're media businessmen we almost have to be in la yep uh but if you are a young technologist it's hard to argue against building your company anywhere other than silicon valley yeah there's uh the the sf hate i feel like was always a little overrated in the sense that most people by the time they're having problems with san francisco yeah they're in a stage of their life where they can move to yeah marin palo alto atherton yeah incline village it's really not an issue it only becomes an issue once you have children right yeah but at that stage and i think that's probably part of why san francisco got so weird was because i lived in the tenderloin at age 22 yeah i was six foot eight 250 pounds like no one bothered me you're 250 brother it was fine like it was yeah it was dangerous but most of the people would be like in the middle of like like dealing drugs and they'd be like, no, they wouldn't even mess with me.

47:07They'd just be like, do you play basketball? Like they would be so taken aback by my physical size that it was just not an issue. I remember going to some party in the Tenderloin and there was a girl who was leaving and the girl who lived in the apartment was like, it was like, you have to take my taser. Like, and I was like, whoa, that's crazy. Cause I would just, I would just walk around. But it's like total like privilege stuff. But then, but then once you have kids, you're like, okay, I can't live that life anymore. but you can move to Palo Alto or Atherton or Incline Village. So here's what I want to see.

47:37I want to see billion dollar venture capital asset managers like General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz and people like Adam Neumann. I want them buying up all the housing in SF, right? If you're really long SF, like I want Gary to be a slumlord almost, right? But not the opposite. No, no, I'm saying he starts as a slumlord. He buys up all these, you know, studio apartments. that are upgrades them, bugs them and uses AI to process all that data so that he understands, oh, this founder hasn't slept in three days. Get him a term sheet immediately. Right. Yeah, that's good. No, but I think, I think one way to go long technology is to go long SF.

48:20That's what Gary's done. And if you want to benefit from that boom, fund the startups, but then buy up all the real estate. So you sort of recapture some of that value because a lot of founders' paychecks end up just going towards their rent. Yeah. That's great. Let's go to Will Manitis. Will says, many remarkable businesses that could exist don't because venture investors refuse to get creative with structure. If you took PE structuring brain and applied it to early stage investing, you'd see dramatically larger outcomes in traditional industries ASAP. And then And Rune says, that's exactly how we ended up with the convoluted structure of open AI.

48:57And then Will says, does the nonprofit flip have a comp in PE? No, right? I know the structured capped profit units are classic. Interesting. Yeah, so here's the thing. You meet something that's been happening recently is founders are going out and pitching VCs. And the VCs will tell them, is this a multi-billion dollar business? or is this a something that could get to 20 30 50 million of arr off of like one or two rounds and one of the challenges is a lot of those businesses if the founders don't want to shoot for the multi-billion dollar outcome they could take like two three million dollars and just build a fantastic business but uh the vcs in theory should be able to buy a lot more of the company than they currently are.

49:48So they're buying like, if you want to go and if you're a YC company and the founders just want to build like a fantastic business or a wonderful business as some people would refer to it, they're still getting two on 20 when I think that if you wanted to take a much more sort of PE style approach, you should be like, cool, that's great if you want to do that. But we're going 50-50. We're going 50-50 or we're going to buy, it's going to be two on eight. you shouldn't give the same terms but the issue is there's so much competition there's so many seed funds so many pre-seed funds the founders can just go and take two on 20 from some fund that thinks it's going to be a monopoly but it won't yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah and so right now the issue is there's just so much competition that you i don't think you can get these sort of like pe what will's talking about is quite a bit more structure and he's thinking about bringing in debt earlier, bringing in debt earlier.

50:43You know, there's like general catalyst buying health system, stuff like that. I think all that stuff is cool, but, uh, it's hard to do PE styles early stage because there's just so much, so many different people that will give you that three on 15 or two on 10 or two on 20. Um, and I think that competition just drives up prices and ultimately lowers returns. Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, I see it a lot in, in like deep tech, hard tech, where there's someone running a machine shop it's probably gonna be a great business super important but it might not have you know monopoly supply we talked about the drone motor company yeah something like that is like critical to the supply chain for so many companies but yeah probably not gonna have the margins should be a widget company exactly yeah how do you how do you get the next generation of founders like excited and incentivized yeah on that right now the pattern is go lie to VCs it's basically just tell them that you'll be a trillion dollar company yeah and the issue the issue is if you take money with this venture narrative you have to do a lot of things that your customers don't give a shit about yep if you're making drone motors and your customers are like you make great drone motors i'm going to keep buying them yeah and then you're like well actually we're drone motors as a service and we're going to go yeah we're going to go sell our software and they're like okay well i like you because you make good uh you make good drone motors and i want more of those it's funny because the classic business school case study is like xyz company makes xyz widget and they they do x amount of ebitda and like how would you lever it up to ensure that they you know can maintain profitability um and yeah i think uh i think yeah what will's getting at is maybe there's more of these sort of businesses that look like Gaffan and Co that just take a unique lens on venture, which is to say we're focused on returns.

52:39We're willing to make investments to generate that we think can generate returns that fit this profile. Because in PE, there's a lot of PE funds that are like, we don't want a 30X at all. We don't care. We just want these sort of base hits over and over and over and that's what we've told our lps so i think that what i was talking to originally about there's so many different seed funds that will give you two on 12. yep right if you come in with a slightly different approach there's opportunities there if you're just thinking about it from the lens of we care about returns first and foremost um and i think even bryce from ndvc is taking this approach he had created a really structured product historically with ndvc but now he's just a$50 million fund that's saying, we're looking for this unique type of founder that just wants to build a great business.

53:34And, you know, worst case scenario, you build a good business. Best case scenario, you sort of build this generational company and we'll make money either way. Yeah. So maybe more permanent capital, maybe more debt financing, less of like a 10 year with a couple year extension timeline, and then potentially a different target around zeros. Like a lot of early stage VCs are like, yeah, 90 % of the portfolio is gonna go to zero. A lot of the great growth funds right now have a no zeros mandate. Like they won't invest in something if there's any risk that it goes to zero and then they're underwriting against like a 20 % IRR.

54:13And I wonder what that would look like if you said I'm an early stage investor, but I do different structured deals, but my hurdle rate for zeros, it's like less than 50 % of my companies will go to zero. Yeah. As opposed to 90 % because I'm unicorn hunting. Very different. The unicorn hunting is so sexy. Yeah, maybe that looks like leveraging. Yeah, it became so sexy. It was like, you know, if you can be the first investor in Uber and the rest of your portfolio is trash, like that doesn't matter because you got the stamp of like, you got into the. Yeah, that incentivizes YOLOing where people are like, ah, this team is like, okay, but it's a good category.

54:48We want exposure to this. like what's the the the sort of approach within venture world and angel investing of i'm only part way convicted in this business i'm still gonna invest which i've across like 50 angel bets i've done that before where i'm like i see some issues with this business but i like the founder so i'll do it yeah or uh the team is not is maybe like a seven out of 10 but like the products at 10 out of 10 let's do it anyways and i think that um yeah the venture investors that are like no we're gonna be uh because the the private equity world is just much more serious in the way that they evaluate companies right like they bring a seriousness to the asset class that is for many funds missing right um it's interesting let's go to Bayes Lord.

55:44Bayes Lord says daily reminder that at least one of your needs to, at least one of you needs to start an IQ enhancement company as soon as possible. And my, my take is, uh, already been done. Eight years ahead of you, buddy. Ten points. Eight years ahead of you. Ten points. Yeah. We, we know about the performance enhancing drugs for IQ. Caffeine, nicotine, uh, some sleep, some exercise, high testosterone. No, it's funny because the original Lucy pitch was smart nicotine, which intelligent, intelligent nicotine. Right. Um, but yeah, I think it can take different forms. I think that, uh, I think there's a big business to be made.

56:25What Baze is talking about selling to technology workers to say like, we're going to take a cohesive look at how to increase your IQ. Yeah. I mean, Brian Johnson was talking and measure and measure it. He was saying that like people care a little bit about their their health and longevity but it's very abstract but if you can tell them that you get on this diet and you will be performing better at work immediately that has a much much more acute roi and so you can kind of underwrite the the the hassle of doing the diet and i think there'll probably be more of that i think i think i'm not sure brian might be able to pivot into like becoming like the brian johnson of the mind might just be brian johnson yeah but it also might be someone new who's focused purely on that instead of longevity or instead of health or instead of athletic ability.

57:08But yeah, I would invest in that business, a business that basically says like we're going to test your IQ and then we're going to continue to test it quarterly and we're going to do different modalities, whether it's health, supplementation. Because of the way the FDA regulates these products, it's very hard for us. Like we can't put caffeine in our gum that has nicotine in it. You can't mix actives. But if you're more of like a health clinic, you could actually prescribe caffeine, nicotine differently. You could like move through these things and actually take more of like a holistic view in the same way that a lot of those men's health clinics look at your testosterone markers, your biomarkers.

57:45They look at your sleep and your diet. Something like that for intelligence and performance in the workplace does seem very, very valuable if somebody can pull it off. But it's a hard business. And I don't think it's power law. I think it might be more of like, you know, it's a consultancy, it's a clinic. Like there's Andrew Hur does this at Fount Bio. You know him? Oh yeah. And again, his is a little bit more just general health focused. It'd be interesting to see one of those branded purely as performance in the workplace. Let's go to Gabriel. Do you know this guy? He's in Australia. He's the man.

58:18I don't. I think I follow him. Obsessed with bodybuilding. Yeah. Great. Just great dude. Never met him in person, but all time poster. So he says, I often stumble across an internet phrase I don't understand that has a natural humorous vibe or cadence, longhouse, many such cases, et cetera. An anime avatar just told me to get in the crystal. It's a beautiful crystal. We'll drop that at the office and see how it goes. This was great at Hereticon. We were in a conversation. There was maybe six or seven people. And I think that David Senra was only, he's like not on, he's not online, right? He's in books.

58:56In books. He's focused. He's either recording the podcast, he's reading. or he's with his family and so going to one of the most online offline events or or like networking it was funny because i'd have to be like 60 year old billion i'd have to be like yeah that's that's what um basically like the long house means like yeah he's like oh okay okay yeah well that's why we're doing this podcast he'll learn all the brain rot terms through this yeah exactly this is really the bridge in the way that is the bridge every every time a brain rot term or word breaks through to uh popular culture yeah there's already six or seven new brain rot terms that are replacing it on the timeline and so we want to service those right like like the the traditional like gen z brain rot is like skibbity toilet ohio the risler the risler but then tech has its own brain rot terms like yeah like word cell it actually can be if you know if you know those those are like buttons that you can press in a pitch with a vc whereas if you're saying the right brain rot terms it signals in group right so even if you weren't a pm at uber or you didn't go to stanford yep you can still signal that you're a part of that extremely online um i actually don't know what getting the crystal it's a beautiful i think so do you know what that means so i think we should i don't know what that one means yeah we got to figure that out gabriel i want you to write in tell us the truth what does it break it down for us no but in the replies to this video i want an explanation there's people that that sort of index yc companies there's people that um uh a buddy of mind joey is a teal fellow and he's got like a whole you know fun that's kind of focused on just backing teal fellows sure uh which is super smart uh i think we should create the poster index which is a fun that's just dedicated it's a brain if you can post bangers it is a proxy for your ability to uh get attention which can drive customers and and capital and all these things so there is a poster there is a bit of a meme that it's like oh if a ceo is like posting too much the company must be doing poorly.

1:00:55So here's the thing. So here's the thing. I think Augustus is every other CEO that wants to be a poster CEO should study him because he's coming out of the woodwork once every couple of days. Banger, back to business, back to business. And so there's this like, if I see somebody posting like, oh, there's this meme that's going viral and everyone has their take on it. And so you like transform it into like, well, what if the Trump thing was about DocuSign like you're just getting a thousand likes but it has nothing to do with your business and you're just like trying to get like Twitter clout like that's not what we're talking about here yeah I think that uh if I see a portfolio company CEO's name uh four times in the timeline per day and they're not selling to venture-backed startups risky risky it's a big it's kind of a bit of a red flag there's a there's a little bit of a balmer peak yeah on the post exactly let's go to John Feo.

1:01:53Oh, this one's rough. So Adam Rankin posts, I promoted my GF and she's showing an engagement ring. And so they're getting married. So congratulations to you, Adam. But Feo chimes in with something not controversial at all and says, we got to pool all the couples that announced their marriage and or child in the form of a startup business joke and study them very closely over the next 50 years and publish the report. We all deserve to know how these ended up. I don't think you need 50 years. I think you probably need, I think you need 10. After somebody's crossed the sort of decade. I think he's underweighting like norminess.

1:02:29Like there's so much of this that works out great. I think a bigger part of the story here is something about the warp team attracts. Post teams. And I love Ayush. But it attracts dunking. Yeah, yeah. It does. They get dunked on a lot. The dunk rate is crazy. They almost. It's good for engagement. One of their head of growth, I think, said he was potentially going to go Anon. Yeah, it was just too much dunking. Too much dunking. But yeah, I don't know. I think they make Warp, where Adam works, makes payroll software for businesses. If he's trying to sell to more startups, one way to do that would be announcing.

1:03:13Make a startup joke. You want to make people feel connected to you, bring your marriage into the workplace, and make a startup joke. But no, I think... I think Theo might be under monetizing here. He needs to... Yeah, no, I think Theo... I would study... If Theo wanted to start a research group that just studied things like this, I would donate to it. That would be interesting. Kind of a Nat Friedman style. Yeah, exactly. Public good. I agree that there's something interesting there. But again, it's marketing, bro. He's got to pay the bills one way or the other. Let's go to Enchilada's surfboard says 90 % of defense tech investors couldn't tell you the difference between cots and gots if their vacation homes depended on it do you know these terms cots and gots no so i dug into this it's commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf and then some like early that's a dual it's a dual yeah i think a big big thing with defense yeah so like yeah exactly like no one knows this stuff yeah but like thankfully i wasn't that runs this as an early anderal person.

1:04:20And it was like some early anderal joke that turned into this, like, yeah. Here's the, I guess, to simplify it. So a lot of defense tech investors, when they're evaluating a business, or they're kind of deciding if it has sort of dual-use applications, like I am an advisor to a company called Aon, which makes tactical missile systems. And I made that bet because Nawid and Joe, the founders are just phenomenal they've made like 10 years worth of progress in about a year um and so i don't consider myself a defense tech investor but uh one thing that was very obvious with with uh with their business is there's no dual use right it's not like they're going to sell some missiles to the sort of retail market or commercial market and then yeah it's all in on the usg right if they don't get the usg yeah as a customer uh long term the business isn't viable because then they can't even go international, right?

1:05:18Like they need to win that customer first. And so, whereas Deterrence, Deterrence has like a bunch of commercial customers where it's a viable business even without partnering with the USG. Like securing an oil field or something, right? Yeah. Got it, yeah. I need to dig into more of this, but I think the Kotz versus Gotz thing is also related to Anderle's early like sensor tower development. Do you remember this? Like they built this sensor tower and they were using literally like off the shelf gaming nvidia gpus to run open source like computer vision algorithms like image net and so it was very much like hacked together from literally stuff you could buy it like a best buy yeah but they created a government product from commercial off the shelf as opposed to the way a lot of the previous primes would do it where it's like okay well like does it run windows xp like we have to use the stuff that's government off the shelf and that creates a lot i think that's a component thing yeah yeah it's more about like do you have this attitude of like uh can you just go to home depot and get the screw that you need or do you need to acquire like the 150 000 bag of screws from boeing right well didn't didn't andrel do this with their latest uh suicide drone oh i don't know where i think they were using they had to use they call it that uh different branding uh fpv drone uh interceptor uh tactical it's a suicide it's a kamikaze drone it literally blows up as it gets to the target um but um no i think they ended up having to use chinese components yeah some of them because yeah some of them are just not available them here but obviously i was talking about this like apparently there's there's only one tin smelting like organization in the united states and they are only able to supply like you know five percent of the tin and so it's like if you're in if you're in the business of like okay we need tin for something it's like good luck cleaning up your supply chain just wait 20 years for this one guy to like grow his business yeah but there's a whole there should be a whole cottage industry of people that are looking at all these deep tech hard tech defense tech companies getting funded and being like i'm gonna go build pe style businesses to service these like basically like manufacturing business businesses sourcing yeah businesses but i think a big part of this is also just like breaking down the problem is something that's more manageable by like a startup engineering team i talked to a guy who worked on the blue origin uh rocket engine versus and was comparing it to the Merlin engine designed by Tom Mueller at SpaceX.

1:07:54And one of the things that allowed SpaceX to iterate so quickly was that the, so when you see Starship go up, you see like the 36 engines. I think that's how many, or like a bunch of engines. It's a bunch of smaller engines. Every one of those engines, I think at one point, I don't know if it's true now, but like could fit in a pickup truck, in like the back of a pickup truck. Whereas the bigger engines, you need a crane. And so all of a sudden it's like the safety requirements, like just the risk, the level of equipment, like anybody can drive a pickup truck. So if you need to take your piece of equipment.

1:08:24And so there's this question of like, how can you decompose something that is a larger capability, like an F-35 into a bunch of suicide drones? Well, the suicide drones are going to be able to be, okay, the pieces are smaller. You don't need cranes for everything. When you start doing these mega projects, things really, really slow down. And so there's a, it seems like there's a a lot of arbitrage right now in just deep tech, hard tech startups taking something really huge and then decomposing it into something that's more manageable and like smaller. This is even Valor's trying to do, just shrink down the size.

1:08:55Yep, the nuclear reactor. Yep, exactly. And yeah, the guy I was talking to was actually building Fusion Avalanche and it's small enough to fit in a truck. And so he's just like super pilled on that and like really wants to build that. Anyway, let's go to Luke Metro, Anderil employee, love this guy. uh we need a little god damn it completely unrelated to business uh we need a liberal joe roga he literally interrupted peter teal's speech about wokeness to talk about how the pyramids were actually x-ray power plants what are you people talking about yeah yeah i uh joe rogan is liberal yeah um and he's talked about that yeah uh he endorsed trump also i think this just speaks to the fact that rogan's like a one-on-one type of person like he's he's he's a he's like a comedian that can pull like a huge group of people uh yeah he's tinfoil hat guy who loves aliens he's very conspiratorial but then also uh you know loves ufc and he he's kind of combined all these different disciplines and uh you can't just like you can't just copy the joe rogan experience here's a here's a conspiracy here's a conspiracy so rogan is a liberal yes he's voted democrat like his entire life he said this recently um and trump is a republican but joe rogan endorsed trump yes and what is the link between trump and uh rogan ufc oh okay yeah joe rogan is one of the top commentator yeah one of the top commentators for the ufc okay trump is arguably the biggest fan of the ufc right he'll he'll leave the campaign trail to go yeah be at a fight uh and former so maybe that's something there where joe rogan said i'm going to put my politics aside and i'm going to back trump because it'll it'll increase the ufc's like notoriety and platform and put it on the map because i think that uh by the end of the next four years ufc will be baseball will have to have sort of stepped aside no longer America's pastime America's pastime is combat and combat sports well then maybe if you want maybe there's some precursors to building a liberal Joe Rogan you need a liberal UFC yeah and you need a liberal comedy circuit yeah so maybe the angle so the next four years the the Dems go heavy into UFC AOC is sitting in the front row or something different or maybe she starts maybe they become the bare knuckle party yeah or or car jitsu have you seen car jitsu that's good where they fight in the car that's good pillow fighting yeah or any of the slap boxing yeah they could do any of those but they need to they need to carve out one of the fighting sports yeah i think just we need it and then the liberal joe rogan will emerge we need a liberal yes you know we need a young bernie who emerges through bare knuckle boxing there we go yeah that is probably the next bernie it's not going to come from some small town of vermont no come from the next bernie will be a slap boxer yeah let's go to Sahil Bloom.

1:11:59He says, a harsh truth. I wish I could tell my younger self. There is no such thing as later. The journey to success is filled with laters. I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll find more time for my health later. I have more freedom later. I'll enjoy myself later. The brutal reality later never comes. It's just another word for never. Most of the things you say you'll do later won't be possible by the time you're able to do them. The kids won't be younger later. Either start designing your life now or live life with regret later. Okay, here's a good example yeah uh yesterday i made my two and a half year old son work the entire day doing deliveries of aurora systems to high profile celebrities around la uh you know you know uh to to sort of uh support the launch and you know this was a sunday a lot of people aren't aren't working on Sundays and I realized he's never going to be, be this young again and be able to grind this hard again.

1:12:59Like if I don't, if I don't like allow him to do this, he's never going to forgive me. He's going to be asking me when he's 12, dad, 10 years ago, like, why did you let me chill on the weekends? Right? Like, why wasn't I grinding? Why wasn't I figuring out, uh, you know, he can't type on a computer yet, but he can lift one of these systems and carry it up a driveway and drop it off and ring the doorbell right you can do that so uh i think the lesson here is is however old your kids are you probably need to get them grinding harder and like yesterday basically yeah i think that's maybe what this post missed you know it says i'll spend more time with my kids later i'll find more time for my health later what about levering up yeah you should be levering up now today the returns you're generating the returns you're generating today or because you levered up a month ago?

1:13:51You should be taking the most risky bets today, not later. Like, oh yeah, I'll find a 100Xer later. Yeah, right. Not gonna happen. Let's go to Sean Frank. He's been on the show before. We love him. He says, paid advertising doesn't build brand. And then the crazy guy, I love this image. I don't think this is a real emoji, but it's so good. Okay. So, so Ridge was a company that historically would never spend money on anything that, that wasn't directly generating revenue. Right. So, so they were, and so Sean has basically been on this for approaching a decade and has absolutely worked for them while all these, well, you know, all birds was doing brand marketing and these other DTC brands were doing pop-up stores yeah pop-up stores like big celebrity endorsements so ridge basically had spent probably 250 million dollars on meta ads before they ever did a collaboration with like mk hbd right so that's brand marketing now they do some brand marketing in the form of of sort of these like massive giveaways and they maybe do like some of it more now but they're the the reason that this tweet holds weight and sean is the the perfect uh example of delivering um delivering like real uh business lessons in the form of shit posts but the reason this holds weight is the is the ridge brand is is stronger today than almost any d2c brand in their in their um in their in their category or cohort of like when they were sort of coming of age so and you know what's interesting is that like they these posts from both shauna and connor yeah build their brand so much yeah yeah yeah like i now i now associate ridge with incredible performance marketing yeah and i and now i want to pull out a ridge wallet just to let everyone know like i care about i care about ads i'm not kidding like i i i respect performance and i respect marketing efficiency yeah marketing efficiency yeah because it is like is is if when ridge so ridge was one of the companies to to really focus on you know direct response creator ads on youtube and i helped them do this yep uh back in the day and when when ridge works with an influencer that says like hey guys today's sponsor is ridge yep i use the ridge when i'm out fishing but it also is great on date night, like use my code in the description.

1:16:32That obviously builds a brand, right? They're aligning with a content creator. And you see who they're advertising with and who they aren't. And so the MKBHD stuff that tells you like MKBHD's whole thing is like super high production value, super cinematic, like really thoughtful analysis of these consumer goods. And so being in that milieu is much more valuable than someone else that they could advertise on. Like it's just, they they've cultivated like what does your brand stand for like you could literally if you're thinking about building your brand just put together a mood board of popular influencers and then just go and sponsor them and then that will be your brand yeah and it's like yeah like ridge has probably a million guys out there that love ridge because the ovan loves ridge yeah the ovan uh is probably you know has for the last like whatever is is since uh sean initially did the deal with him yeah it's probably objectively more of a wallet salesman than a comedian right like he's one of the top wallet salesmen in the world yeah he can go and sell out comedy clubs but he's selling wallets at a higher velocity yeah then i mean it's the same thing with red bull like you look at like max verstappen and everything that max verstappen stands for with like this like relentless ambition crazy energy and and i just get like that's what red bull's brand is now because of that.

1:17:53And so, yeah, this, this idea, yeah, very, very valuable and certainly underrated. Let's go to Raul, zero interest rates. He says the first day in Williamsburg and he sees a spray painted sign on the concrete for an ad for Sonia AI therapy, listens better than your ex at talk to Sonia and a call to action for the app store. What do you think about this IRL advertising is this legal so just do so I like why why are we not what is their company that will just go spray your spray yeah they're everywhere it's kind of like they don't advertise okay it's very very illegal it's basically like vandalism I don't I don't you could go viral like this I mean this got 40k views that's probably yeah the play is the play is to probably do that once once in your backyard friend and have it be interesting and yeah it won't go viral if it's just something boring, like whatever was under here before.

1:18:48Yeah, I think this is, in general, I'm not a fan of this type of marketing because I think it makes the world more, you know, nobody likes ads more than me, except maybe you, right? So we love ads. But in general, I'm not a fan of vandalizing property. We did a little bit of this at Party Round, but it was more like using an existing graffiti wall and putting an ad on that, which is designated as a place for graffiti. yep um but uh but yeah i think there's more uh uh i i i i think that ad space that's underutilized is the planes circling sf like i'd like to start a technology brothers advertising division that just that has planes every single day flying over sf yep uh that you can sponsor which is like for sonia it might be like you're you get no women talk to sonia right and if that was flying if you're like a meta pm and you walk out and you look up from your um what's that app that they that they all use that the um the like blind blind you look up from blind and it's like you get no women talk to sonia that's like probably in your qr code you can zoom in and scan uh i'm i'm more a fan of that i do remember what was it back in like 2018 ish maybe uh there was this like when bird the scooters came out and lime and and it seemed like tech just realized like the sidewalk is free real estate i guess and you can just put stuff dude so here's a crazy story so i was working with a um with a startup back then uh that i just moved to la and i was basically like you don't need to pay me i just want to help out uh i'll do it for equity and we started doing these sort of like marketing stunt things uh and it was a it was a skincare company and so i had the idea to go put hotel like door hangers and i went and put them in santa monica i put them on like 500 bird scooters in a day and within the same day we got a like a note from the the chief uh uh legal counsel or whatever from bird being it wasn't quite a cease and desist but it was like stop right now the next It's so funny because like you're doing the bird thing to them.

1:21:03Yeah, it was perfect. That's amazing. Yeah. When that was happening, I was like, wait, so it's just free real estate. If you have wheels, like, can I just set up like a corner store on the sidewalk if it has wheels under it? Can I set up a gym or whatever I want? Like, is there any business that you can't stop? Yeah. It was a wild, wild time. And I think most cities wound up developing. Yeah, I'm surprised there wasn't like a bird for snack bars. Yeah. like people that are just like here's like a vending machine like i'm just gonna put it right here let's go to aaron slodov he says it's still one thing it's still under discussed that i think birds birds like real downfall started with that social media account that was like death to birds or forget what it was yeah i remember that and that was some of the best entertainment of the era if you were a technology brother because you could go see a bird get thrown off like an eight story skyscraper and that's just like that speaks to like the the childish teenage boy in everyone.

1:22:03It was so entertaining. I remember following that. Yeah, that was really, really bad. They should have sent the cease and desist to them. I'm sure they did, but it didn't work. Because it basically just encouraged everybody to like destroy the sites. Yeah, go viral. Like just do stuff. And it just like made it feel like, and it was so destructive, like destroyed the environment, so messy. And yeah, they were destroying cars if you run over them. It was a mess. I was really happy when they banned them in my town. but uh also like weird memetic stuff you know that the the founder was also named travis and he was former uber guy so it's one of those things where it's like well of course you back traverse from uber yeah yeah travis from uber yeah exactly uh it was a wild time um so aaron slodov says uh creator economy should be reappropriated for manufacturing tbh yeah i like this this is good because it's like you're creating actual things instead of just content but uh also don't appreciate the anti-content slander bro this is a real job yeah uh well aaron is a content creator he probably gets pretty decent x payouts yeah and he's a content creator and he's a manufacturer he wrote that big piece for pirate wires the the industrialist manifesto the techno techno industrialist manifesto um i wanted him to punch it up and give it a more controversial name like you know b2b sass is dead or something like that yeah get people angry but uh couldn't get that across the finish line but very very good piece very long recommend you go read it we need content creators out there creating courses that say here's how to make a million dollars in manufacturing manufacturing like yeah that's by a cnc actually yeah stop the shopify drop shipping your tiktok shop tiktok shop yeah andrew tate's just starting how to use a yeah start a small scale manufacturing business in your hometown yep um that is the way we need to change the culture apprentice under some 75 year old guy who's been making you know hubcaps for the last 50 years yeah all those guys are going to end up shutting their business down because they do like they do like 300 000 a year in profit is not really but that's enough to pay that's enough to pay the monthly fee on a lambo yeah so you could literally be the hustle porn guy go and do that and actually wind up with the lambo yeah grow a little bit yeah just uh just don't bring in docusign just uh just run run lean run lean those docusign contracts they can get up into the eight figures real quick yeah uh let's go to patrick blumenthal he says uh my boy loud loud nightclub so what do you do drone targeting mostly oh loan marketing do you like it well it depends on the coverage area why well most guys i know who are in finance don't really like it it's the american psycho scene that's great this guy's just a meme machine he's a machine i don't know how he puts out so much of this stuff everything's hand photoshopped he has no one on his team he's just like content mastermind well he's a venture capitalist like he needs to like he needs to be the media he's supposed but i mean the dude's been to ukraine like a bunch have you talked about this yeah yeah of course i was on pirate wires with him uh a while back and it's pretty we did uh we hit the range together oh yeah it's back oh cool yeah he was telling me about that i think yeah he had to train up before his last his last mission but yeah american psycho is just like a an endless pit of memes that just like it really speaks to people yeah one of the most uh i used to not really understand when my parents would be like oh this movie is a cult classic yeah but now you understand like when we show our kids borat when they turn eight like we're gonna be like it's a cult classic like yeah it is interesting i wonder if there's something deeper here about like the defense tech guys being like the modern patrick bateman um it still doesn't feel that like did you know that uh christian bale in american psycho was like something like 25 years old and you should look this up um he was 25 when he's definitely in his 20s and it's crazy because he's like he's playing it's almost like he's playing someone older like i feel like he's playing like a late 30s that seems right because he's like a he was 25 in the movie so patrick bateman the character has to be over 25 just based on the track unless in the 90s you could make vp at 25 is that possible i know the youngest md at goldman sachs ever made it is not was in his in his 20s the character's 27 wow that's wild so that might have been like a little embellishment by brett east now it's funny because last last night i had this wild moment where I pulled up to the gate in my neighborhood and the security guy goes Jordy like my son just passed the bar and I was like that's amazing and my second question was dude how old are you I thought you're my age I seriously thought he was exactly my age I never asked and he's like dude I'm 46 oh there you go and he's like yeah I just had kids young or whatever yeah that makes sense um but yeah i feel like something about that sort of like 90s early 2000s era movies like all the the actors wall street was definitely this idea that you could go to wall street and finance in new york and in your 20s make it to the top yeah and that's 100 true in silicon valley and tech even today yeah but i don't think it's been true in manhattan finance for decades no because you have over time you need to create a ladder to keep people in their place yeah i know like a few guys that went and started funds pretty early like hedge funds and they trade public stocks but you still want to go work at a fund first yeah exactly get that on your resume all of them are in their 30s by the time they do that but um man what a wild time it would have been it would have been fun if they if wall street had been able to like keep that culture of like just such a meritocracy that yes a 25 year old can be a vp or an md or whatever yeah like i think it'd be a lot cooler i think a lot of people would be going into it yeah it would be much much hotter make finance great again yeah just more meritocratic i guess but a lot of these a lot of these firms have like calcified to the point where they're like they're not yeah because these guys if you're if you're 28 and you want to make 50 million dollars now yeah you raise a 500 million dollar fund with your absolute boy and you take you know yeah that's how that's the only way to do it you can't just go do the right deals because the fees will get eaten away by the the more senior partners yeah yeah yeah tricky oh well we'll bring it back so Nate O 'Brien says why would I pay an American$100 ,000 a year when I can hire someone just as qualified in Argentina for a quarter of the price?

1:28:50Okay, so Nate's smart. But when I, and I think this is generally a good take, I think more people need to be looking at... Say, why not both? Yeah, why not both? I think my counterpoint to this is that I like working with Americans, like both recent immigrants, but also just in person to person person's great i like um uh i i think that it's it's there's nothing that beats even what we have right now right which is you me and our vice president ben in the same room yep in an office uh making you know a a wonderful media business right you You can't generational, generational, you know, wonderful media business, very profitable.

1:29:40You can't sort of like, you know, there's no amount of like awesome virtual employees that we could have that could recreate this feeling like you can't recreate it in Slack. So I just think part of the reason to pay a premium is so that you can all be in the same room together. And I think if you're operating a remote structure, then you really have to start questioning. Yeah. You know what? the cure for male loneliness it's paying a hundred thousand dollars to an american exactly to just hang out with you they have to be your friend and then they just have to hey you want to grab lunch you have to be hanging out you got it yeah it's worth it it's worth it yeah yeah but i do think there's going to be this there there will be this sort of cultural yeah movement over the next 20 years where people are like you know first it was bi-american yeah then now it'll be like hire american like keep those jobs here yeah but i mean yeah i mean realistically you need you need both but um yeah i like that take that's good cheers to nate back to will will says work dinner should be illegal they rob you from your family you pretend to enjoy drinking with strangers get home late and feel horrible the next day work breakfasts are aristocratic separate lazy boys from early to rise men.

1:30:58Feel great when you get to work. Early, easily expensible. It's a great take. Great take. Great take. I do feel like that about most. The only time you should be having a work dinner is if you're closing a deal. Yep. Like funds wired, everything's done. Yeah, it's a closing dinner. And it's celebratory, right? Yeah. Doing a work dinner. Just to get to know someone. To get to know somebody is a waste of time. I always suggest lunch. Yep. I don't really like doing coffees that much because I, I know the schedule I want to have caffeine on and I don't want to like plan meetings around that. Yeah.

1:31:33This is my hot take against the 996 thing. I'm all for working a hundred hours a week, but I think you should work 666 almost. That's a little demonic, but I think you should not be working 9am to 9pm. You should be working 6 a.m. or 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. get home have dinner with the family because then if you wake up at five you can hit the gym you can go to work breakfast you can have a full eight hours in the office we do and you can get home with a family have dinner and play watch movies do all the things you want to do with your family yeah that early morning right before 9 a.m. it's really hard to have like true engagement with the family in the way that you can at dinner yeah go out to dinner you can cook yeah there's a lot of we do the hormosi you know method which is work first no nine no nine five seven okay nine to five seven days a week oh okay right yeah you can have the morning moment with your kids you can have dinner but you're you're doing eight hours a day every single day which is much better than five days a week doing 12 you know hours a day you actually get more done doing the nine five seven yep i like that they should ban work dinners easily doable on on ramp just ban any no expense expense after 5 p.m and unlimited before hopefully it gets implemented let's go to ryan i think it's pronounced mackintosh is that right it's spelled a little bit different than mackintosh uh but ryan yeah says the docu sign all hands and posts the dune photo which i love it's pretty seemingly pretty accurate how do they what the funny thing is that i've literally made this exact same joke about the a16z all hands yeah with a massive festival pitch the full partnership it's huge you barely fit in the boardroom yeah no but um but man the docusign thing like 5k likes it's just like constant banger everyone knows every time yeah hey if you're an up-and-coming poster and you and you've been struggling to get hits yeah this is host a docusign yeah this is the modern uh like you know how people used to post the uh two-factor authentication screenshot from apple and they're like this is the best feature apple's ever made and it would go viral every single time yeah yeah and so here's here's the real alpha so taylor lorenz yeah uh when you listen to this if you want to um you know sort of regain and and sort of like uh sort of an olive branch to the tech community is to go and get hired by DocuSign and get pictures at their next All Hands because that would be an amazing.

1:34:06Yeah. Taylor Lorenz, investigative journalism, behind the scenes at a DocuSign. And what if it is like this? I could see it being like that. They're like, hey, guys, we're going over to the Giants Stadium for the All Hands. Like the buses are, you know, and she's on the bus like Project Veritas style. I love it. Project Veritas. Yeah, we definitely need the information to do Project Veritas for DocuSign. What's going on there? Yeah, yeah. What if it's all just like the most cracked engineers you've ever seen? They don't have a single salesperson. They're just building the most deep tech. They've implemented, they've built their own kernel, their own operating system.

1:34:37DocuSign's awesome. What if they have, what if they have, you know, custom silicon for signing? I bet they do. All the way down. It's like Google has the TPU. DocuSign has the DPU. I think they need, I think DocuSign should add. The DocuSign processing unit. DocuSign should add autonomous drones that take off from the sort of centralized places. and they come film you signing it. Yep. Or they have a little printer that like prints it out. Yeah. Well, if you need a notary, you need a notary in person. What if you could have a humanoid robot come to your house when you're signing the mortgage papers?

1:35:11The humanoid robot is acting as the, as the, uh, whatever they call it. I want a dog. I want a dog. A dog to come. Notary. Yeah, exactly. Notary. That's it. Yeah. Let's go to Bobby Goodlatte. He says, success should be celebrated in tech, not demonized. I want to see more startup founders looking like this post-exit, not apologizing. And it's Elon Musk with his McLaren F1. Okay. Two things. One, Bobby is this authentically. Yeah. I was walking up to Faena for Hereticon. I see a fantastic blue Ferrari. Yeah. Interesting. The sort of really nice metallic blue. I don't know the exact color code, but fantastic Ferrari pulls up valet.

1:35:57Yours was red or black? Mine was gray. Gray, okay. Subtle. A little more subtle, yeah. It was a daily. You got to go red with the Ferrari. Red or white? It was a 458? No, no, no. Oh, what was his? His was, yeah, no, his was a 458, I think. He'll correct us in the comments. Let us know. No, but Bobby's living the brand. He's sort of being a real leader here. I think one of the challenges and the reason that supercars haven't become more popular in Silicon Valley is that you just can't street park a McLaren or a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or a Bentley. And you're going to coffee shops to meet the seed stage founders.

1:36:36In Gary Tan, San Francisco, you're going to be able to street park, you know, an Enzo, street park a LaFerrari, street park your P1. And that's something that, you know, Sam Altman and Elon and Gary can agree on. And so they can all kind of like come together because we need safer streets in San Francisco. I mean, they also need to fix the streets and make sure there's no potholes because you're driving a P1 GTR. That's why the G-Wagon is such a popular car in Los Angeles. The streets are actually so bad. You need something that's four-wheel drive. You need good sort of like lift. We need perfect pavement for the sports cars.

1:37:13But yeah, I mean, there is this interesting thing where, yeah, it became this like status symbol to say, oh, I drive a Prius or whatever. but I think people realize that like the flashy cars you know I hope that people can realize that it's not like if you are an engineer and you respect engineering and you made money in technology it's okay to respect the engineering of a car yeah it's okay to appreciate something that's like that's that's like beautifully made yeah like after atomic Murray car it's like it's it's it's incredible it's like it's iconic and there's so much to to love about this you know the mclaren uh p1 or the the f1 they they wanted to reduce weight so much that the cd changer in the front trunk they made special magnets for it crazy spin to just to save like 50 grams from the cd changer yeah they didn't take the six disc cd changer out of the scene how as a technologist how can you not appreciate that yeah yeah so here's here's the gotcha so everybody would everybody likes to say you know sam altman had this thing of he didn't own equity and open ai and all this stuff uh which i don't think is true now but he they would always post pictures with him in his car collection and say see he does love money look at him driving this p1 or all these other cars it wasn't about the it wasn't never about money it was about you know experiencing beautiful products and that's why people don't realize about buying a supercar you're buying a a potentially daily experience with a one-of-one product something that's excellent so if we want sam to build safe agi you know supercars are a perfect example of that they go through rigorous safety testing yep to build this incredibly high-performing vehicle yeah and uh we want anybody building ai to be experiencing a supercar right because it's it's a good parallel for sort of ai safety and you can have performance and safety at the same time yeah it's very hard to imagine like living on the power law and driving a power law outcome without enjoying and respecting power law outcomes everywhere yeah and there's no car that's more of a power law outcome yeah i want to see the average yc founder leaving uber or meta joining yc and sleeping in their supercar outside of the yc offices right this is what they say you can't you can sleep in a gt3 rs but you can't raise a house exactly exactly yeah founders get supercars please i'm begging you uh so uh this is a reaction from sophie netcap girl um to a post by uh dakash gupta he says recently i started telling candidates right in the first interview that Greptile offers no work-life balance.

1:40:08Typical work days start at 9 a.m. and end at 11 p.m. often later. And we work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays. And Sophie says, posting stuff like this is so cringe. It's fine to have a culture that self-selects for people that will put in long hours. You want people committed to the mission, especially in the early days of a startup. But posting about it is just status signaling grind set hustle thing. What do you think? Yeah, I've never known somebody that posts about how hard they work that actually genuinely works hard. uh and so except for us but yeah yeah but but uh but yeah that's that's we feel that's a part of our mission to promote hard work yes um but uh but but yeah ultimately the people that work the hardest are not tweeting about it they're not posting on linkedin they're not doing that they're legitimately working really hard and if you ask them about their schedule they'll tell you oh i do 996 i do 957 whatever their schedule is uh but yeah elon when pressed on tell us about your schedule you're doing all these things right he'll say oh yeah i work 20 hours a day seven days a week uh but he's not out there like just logged another 20 hours like he's a top poster in the world and he's not being like just logged 20 hours uh here's a link to our SpaceX job or don't apply if you're not um so I think yeah I think uh Sophie's right it's a way to get uh attention maybe that maybe that'll uh maybe that'll work well yeah but I don't think it should be coming from I think that's the kind of thing you want if you do an interview with a candidate and you're like this person's great you pass them to your CTO to interview next and that engineer wants to ask the CTO what's the work schedule they can be like oh we you know we we work really long hours people are online constantly but it shouldn't be the ceo leading it being like sure just so you know like to somebody who's like they're the the candidates like dude this is one out of 30 interviews i'm doing and like i don't even really want to join your company and now you're telling me like don't join if you're not yeah it's just gonna like yeah also i mean the timing on this stuff is like super important like a few years ago when google was like well there's 20 percent time and family leave and pet leave and bereavement leave and like a million reasons to take time off it was pretty counter-cultural to be like hey actually like our startup works pretty hard yeah and that was novel and that got a lot of attention for the right reasons because maybe there was something there but then pretty quickly it became like okay now like it's kind of status quo and if you're just jumping on this train right now yeah it's like it's like coming out and being like i'm bravely anti-dei yeah it's like okay yeah so you're not coinbase good google good google story so my little brother in my fraternity uh he did an internship at google in 2017 and i happened to be in the valley uh working with a startup at that time uh this was like a summer period so it was like a four three to four month internship yeah and he by the end his manager was like peter like i really like you but like you objectively have done no work like i don't know how i can sort of write a positive review and peter had in the lead up to that uh in the lead up to that summer he had maxed out a bunch of credit cards to buy ethereum and bitcoin oh my god and it absolutely paid off like he just like became like very wealthy because of it i'm sure he's um um if he's listening to this i'm sure he's like got his like uh whatever bitcoin ticker bitcoin ticker up and he's just like still excited about it but like the guy just basically like went so long crypto on credit cards that by the time he got to his google internship he was just like yeah i'm like low-key like the wealthiest kid that i know and and and so he would graciously have me over to work out in the gym great salmon dinners fantastic uh and that was the only real like time that i spent at the google offices but it yeah it felt like i felt like a college where people were kind of like doing the bare minimum to actually like get by and just wanted to have fun and and enjoy their their time on campus makes sense let's go to naval he says good vcs should be their own media this is this is a banger because because all the master of all is the master of taking something that is why how to get rich without getting lucky yeah thread phenomenal got him on joe rogan yeah then eric turned his all of his tweets into a book yep he's like phenomenal at this yeah but But taking this sort of, he's good at brevity.

1:44:42So he's talking about this, but he's also lived it, which is great. Yeah. So many other VCs have done this well. Yeah, I think. Harry Stebbings. Yeah, even the work that Eric did on the book, I think Naval's known for posting, being one of the top posters in the entire world in his own way, right? He's very oriented around brevity and taking big ideas and putting them into whatever I can't see from here, but six or seven words. yeah um but even the book eric's you know book like almanac over yeah like ravikant he that turned him into a uh he's a one of one of a handful of people that are true tech philosophers yep and um yeah this is this is why i like think about it because i kind of knew naval and the book was you know based on the tweets and so i didn't think the book was going to be that big of a deal but it was it was huge yeah translated into a lot of languages and really opened up the business This is why anybody that's, that's an LP out there should go and invest in, uh, Pat's fund, right?

1:45:46Pat Blumenthal, incredible poster. Uh, you're sitting here like whatever, 30 minutes ago saying like, how does he keep coming up with this stuff? He's just like, and Pat will get more impressions in the next year than most GPs in the world combined. And it just completely flips the model from like, okay, I need a horde of analysts, cold calling companies to they come to me ventures all about uh likability and access right and like likability likability plus attention gets you that access yep and founders want to take money from people that they like yep so if you're a likable person you should be doing more media more posting yep more podcasts um etc yeah Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

1:46:33Let's go to TJ Parker. Former founder, sold his company for a billion dollars, I believe, to Amazon. Now at Matrix Ventures, right? Health tech investor. Yeah, health tech investor. Phenomenal car guy. Great collector. Fantastic car collection. Every time I post something stupid about cars, he always replies with some really good insight. I can bait him into telling me about cars. So he's got the coolest car club in America. Oh, yeah, that's right. In Park City. Have you been? I haven't. Okay, we got to go at some point. He's, you know, basically spent a bunch of money, a bunch of his own money, building out this incredible facility that's becoming the hub of car culture in Utah.

1:47:13And I think what he says, he had to take a while back that, like, really resonated, which is that Tesla should not be allowed to classify as a black car on Uber. Oh, yeah. Cause there's nothing worse than like paying to like get like a black car on Uber. And then this guy pulls up in a model S and you're like, dude, like give me a break. Like, um, but, uh, Here he says my two cents. Don't bring your co-founder slash team to an initial meeting with an investor. It's great to introduce them later in the process, but early on it cripples your ability to build a relationship. If they're complaining about not being included, you can show them this tweet.

1:47:51It's so funny. This is clearly a subtweet where he had some, as an investor with a founder and he brought the whole team and it was like a very messy conversation. No, but sometimes this can be, this can create, totally create, if you have two founders that are both people people and like good at fundraising, it creates this dilemma where, oh, it's an important conversation. We should both be on it. And I 100 % agree with this. You can't, two people cannot connect. Like if we had a third person here that was constantly butting in like our rhythm would be totally thrown off totally and um yeah i think that it's much you're much better off take the first call solo take even a second call solo yep as you actually build that relationship and that rapport and interest in in partnering then bring in the rest of the team that it totally throws off the the vibe typically like the co-founders and team are like operating they have a ton of stuff to do they don't need to take a bunch of intro meetings with a bunch of VCs.

1:48:49No, it's a net. It's a totally negative signal. If somebody is, Oh yeah. My, my CTO can totally be on 40 investor calls this week. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No way. Yeah. Um, good post, uh, back to Aaron Slodov. He says venture capital. Now I just led a$50 million series B into my fourth calendar scheduling app this year because their zoom integration reduces meeting conflicts by 6%. The founder went to Stanford and worked at Stripe for eight months. So downside risk is basically zero. Plus their deck had really clean margins. uh venture capital in the 1600s which is funny you might go so back yeah uh so far back i just funded an armed fleet to conquer the only islands in the world that grow nutmeg if we seize their nutmeg trees and eliminate all competition we'll make 60 000 returns and become more powerful than most european kingdoms combined man this really resonated 14 000 likes yeah venture capital is mainstream venture capital is very mainstream and i think everyone's dissatisfied with the risk that venture capitalists are taking these days too many yeah i mean i wasn't the wasn't the first there's there's the remind me of the power law that book yes i'm gonna talk about like whaling with some of the first like yeah whaling you you'd pay literally be like to go out there's a ship here's a captain here's a team most likely it's not coming back but if it does you're rich yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and the carry model emerged from that i think so yeah that's amazing essentially yeah amazing and you need a management fee every time every time you get a carry check you know think back into the 1600s lay up your whale oil lamp and yeah yeah breathe it in breathe i was at a nuclear conference and i was talking to a guy who does uh like ai data ai data center build-outs and he was talking about the importance of energy and just the fact that these ai like we should make a we should make a whale blubber candle to help vcs manifest carry checks oh that's good i like that yeah yeah uh like a little circle set up where they can just sit in the middle of it and just like kind of breathe in probably smells a little bit yeah yeah yeah but yeah yeah but his his his joke was that uh was that like these these hyperscalers are so dedicated to getting energy right now that they would burn whale oil if they had to because they just need energy and they'll just take it from wherever they can because it's such a race to get to the next uh the next order of magnitude yeah we were talking about coal you're not a serious ai founder if you're not like thinking about spinning up coal natural gas natural gas all this stuff but whale blubber is the next frontier yeah and uh and video is looking into this yeah that unlocks the next uh scaling tier for sure blubber.ai

1:51:31okay let's go to bryce he uh quote tweets david phillips saying vacation for founders don't fix burnout address what's wrong you'll feel better and bryce says you cannot vacation your way out of burnout we already talked about this a little bit yeah it's true uh vacations i don't know i not not a fan burnout is a symptom that what you're working on is not working yeah like it's rare or you're having like massive people issues yeah i mean just compliment here you can't even sabbatical your way out of it like yeah you have to be working on something that's more ikigai more life's work more more life's work but also a lot of people are perfectly happy building a sas company even if it's they're not their life's work okay then if customers love the product sure they're growing month over month and they have a great team around them yep right because winning feels good.

1:52:21It's when you're not winning and you know, you're not winning and you're just like getting, you're like chewing glass, chewing 10 different types of glass and you know it, but your burnout usually comes from knowing you're in a bad situation and not doing anything about it. Yeah. I wonder if you looked at like the cases of burnout, how many examples can you find of someone burning out when growth rates are at all times high, all time highs? Yeah. I think it seems like it's very rare. I think you get strung out. Sure. But that's very different than burnout, but not burnout yeah burnout's where i was used to 200 growth it's now at 30 percent and and it takes me 10 times as long to get burnout yeah burnout's like losing conviction in what you're doing or or again like if you're if customers are churning non-stop yeah and you're not doing something to fix that then i think the answer is just to yeah change change what you're doing change like your your main if you're if you're a meetings guy switch to something else if you're doing email constantly switch to something else like jar yourself out of your pattern but all of those are like more like exhaustion which i think is different than burnout okay so how do you fix burnout what's the top way burnout comes when you're not delivering for shareholders yeah so So the short answer is your investors.

1:53:40Yeah. Start delivering. No, it really is like a fundamental, like reframe on that. Yeah. Like I'd love, uh, and it's going to be different for every business. Yeah. Okay. Burnout. And again, like this is not, uh, when, when a founder that's building a great, a wonderful B2B SaaS company and they go do ayahuasca and then they come back and they're like, well, I don't want to work on this anymore. That's not burnout. That's mental illness. Yep. Self-induced mental illness. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to Delian. Delian says, in January of 2020, I decided to wear a MAGA hat in San Francisco every day for the full month.

1:54:14I remember him wearing it once. I didn't realize he did it every day. Walking to every meeting. I felt that the country and my tech peers did not appreciate how the MAGA hat was a symbol of hope for the average working American, not a symbol of hate. Five years later, I rest my case. Fascinating. I mean, I remember the backlash to this was intense, intense like a lot of people were really really upset about this and what's interesting is that it was in some ways more controversial than peter donating to trump and speaking at the convention because the hat was more visceral of a symbol and it had been so so controversial but wow what an arc to come back from fascinating yeah the whole uh Definitely.

1:55:00Delian should frame this seriously put in the founders fund office purely as being willing to look stupid or silly candidate there brother of the week candidate for sure um he deserves a plaque for that because yeah it was the hate was very real i guarantee you he had thousands of messages being like you're an idiot and i don't even think he had that many supporters it wasn't as it wasn't as it was still very contrarian this year was very consensus where if you came out if you were just some random vc or founder which delian kind of was at the time in 2020 i don't think he was a cycle in 2024 you would immediately get like a quote tweet from like elon and david sachs being like this is incredible welcome to the club like yeah you're some like it was a way to actually climb the status ranks in tech which made it a little bit more memetic a little bit less contrarian but yeah it was a lot less risky the least heretical people at hereticon were wearing maga hats yeah and delian wasn't he was wearing a red hat but it was make founders fund great again to play on it you know yeah yeah kind of there was always a fresh maga hat exactly somebody like packed it up put in their bag yeah brought it to hereticon snuck it into faena yeah on and then like took it off on the way up yeah yeah yeah but uh yeah it it really is fascinating that that position became basically consensus in tech i was talking to somebody who was like it was saying like i cannot believe this is somebody at ff who uh you know lived through the the 2016 teal stuff which was like i mean there were protesters outside of his house it was insane um so many hit pieces um and he was just saying like i cannot believe this was in the summer when everyone was like pro-trump before biden dropped out and kamala wasn't even like an idea yet yeah i cannot believe that donald trump is the current thing and he really was he became the current thing he became like everyone just needs to be like yeah yeah wild so speaking of uh contrarians speaking of contrarians uh gotia i know how to pronounce his name right yeah now uh gotia says jarvis buy 42 billion dollars more bitcoin and it's uh michael saylor in the iron man helmet uh just so vindicated this guy was seen as such a joke for so long and now and went right and went on all like my most my memories of him are on these major yep trad media yep tv shows just being like yes i bought 42 more, 42 more million dollars worth of Bitcoin.

1:57:29I don't know quite that much, but yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I mean, he's like, he's gonna, he's, he's been, he was, he did something that he wasn't saying publicly because I don't think he could have, but it was a way that you could buy, buy exposure to Bitcoin without buying Bitcoin in the public, you know. It's so odd because there's, there's, there's MicroStrategy, his company, which I think essentially trades at the book value of the bitcoin essentially bitcoin goes up 10 his stock is up 10 that i don't think they do a lot of other business now it's mostly just a bitcoin holding company but there's also the bitcoin etf grayscale and a bunch of other black rock has one and then there's also you could go and buy synthetic bitcoin on robin hood or you could buy a real bitcoin in on coinbase or you could self custody and there's this wild gradient of like ways to get exposure to bitcoin i think all of that has been a big piece of what's driven the bull run is just more and more people can yeah but a good example of like he looked like an idiot for a long time and has been vindicated for real hats off for real okay back to back to nate o 'brien he says one of the greatest threats to an entrepreneur is when they find themselves in the five to ten million dollar range of liquid assets you lose your hunger you get comfortable it's a dangerous spot to be in so here's what i would do and i was getting lever up yeah lever up lever up no i mean if i was uh yeah risk it all so that you yeah you got a step one it's always lever up yeah uh start trading options like aggressively um but no i think there is something to levering up where if you have five to ten million like you could go and buy a hundred million dollar business yeah you could and then you could just be the the owner operator of a pretty large business and maybe that's great maybe you take that to a billion maybe that's how you get there um now as opposed to if i think what he's worried about is like, yeah, you buy a house and you, you wind up with all these costs and you're just like, oh yeah, like my, my life now just costs a million dollars a year.

1:59:21And so I'm not really growing or trying anything bold. Yeah. If I had a founder that, that pitched me for their seed stage company and they, and they were like, yeah, I've got about 10 million liquid. I, I, I would invest, but I'd encourage them to give it away first because they're just not going to have that, you know, like the grind. They're not going to have that grind set. No, the, uh, the, the, the, another counterpoint because i think that nate is right but the other point of view here is that i've seen founders that already have a certain amount of wealth be able to work on something for a long time and stay convicted in it yep without sort of worrying because they're not like this sort of like they're not operating from fear they're operating purely from winning yep And the example is, I think YC did an analysis on their portfolio and they found that founders that came from money had a higher likelihood of success, which you could attribute to, oh, their parents had connections and provided capital and resources and advice.

2:00:22but it also is that they just were it's more in the state of when you have 10 ish million liquid you're kind of in the state of play where the stakes are lower right where you're just like i'm just building this to win i'm not doing it because i need it to you know pay my mortgage or i need it so that i can put my kids through college or whatever uh so i actually think it can be he's right that it could be could uh decrease somebody's ability to really like grind but it also could open them up to be like all i care about is winning i'm going to win at all costs i'm going to be willing to look stupid for some amount of time um so i think it can be a tool yeah i like that your buddy dylan says uh posts a screenshot netflix finally gives up on interactive shows pivots to gen ai for games and dylan says netflix is ending its interactive equipment interactive experiment but i still believe the future of tv lies in content that you can engage with we've seen it with hq trivia bandersnatch and to a certain extent crypto the game i think that was his company right yep um someone will do it at scale my guess live on screen betting while watching sports yeah i like that yeah yeah yeah um anyway so dylan uh helped build hq trivia into a monster uh then uh he i think he was at um where was he at he was at not uber eats but he was at um the one in la uh bastion's company oh yeah postmates postmates uh and then he after we had started doing some party round drops and getting some attention he dm'd me and he was like like this looks like as fun as it was at hq ends up joining the team and um and then after uh after party round uh he ended up starting this interactive uh on-chain crypto game that went super super viral and within six he didn't raise any money within six months sold it to uh uniswaps who's over at uniswap now but super super smart around uh media and and honestly like it's kind of insane that there hasn't been an hq like a a phenomenon like hq that's since hq right you can't really think clubhouse a little bit clubhouse but that was like not that was social media yep hq is entertainment entertainment game and it was something that even your you know your mom or your aunt or your uncle or whatever would be messaging you about and playing and it was like really in the the zeitgeist should we talk about bet on love or is that too much alpha yeah yeah i think i think i i brought it i brought it up i brought it up to dylan because i was like you should you should do this so yeah jordy and I had an idea.

2:03:02So Dylan's betting on the winner in this interactive entertainment at scale being live on screen betting while watching sports, which is already kind of happening with second screening where you're watching the football game and you're on draft Kings or whatever the other one is to, you know, bet on the game while you're watching. But we, we, we, we, Jordan and I were talking about how way underrated is maybe betting on something like the bachelor because there's a huge audience there. No one's really modernized that format. Like the, uh, like the, the classic game show has been, uh, kind of revitalized by, um, by, uh, Mr.

2:03:42Beast. But if, if you could have a, a, you know, a, a, a dating show where you can bet on who's going to win and it's all done via poly market or something, not who's going to win. I want bets, multiple opportunities to bet every single, who's going to get voted off this episode, right? Who's going to, who's going to to get the first kiss or who's going to get the rose or whatever the whatever happens i think that that'd just be a very interesting very different format and maybe there's a money component maybe it's just like long term there probably is like a financial betting but even just more audience participation more interaction that feels like the way things are going if there's one thing it's americans love one thing that's truly american is speculation right even coming to this country hundreds of years ago was speculation in itself so it's core to our culture if you're an entrepreneur that wants to build at the intersection of entertainment and speculation make a reality tv show that you can bet on i love it let's go to sarah hess she says uh startups at the pentagon i built a quantum ai autonomous drone the pentagon cool can it run on windows xp and fit on a floppy disk yeah this is uh sarah's very sharp around this stuff and um i think uh more plugged into the defense world like actually plugged in not just from a venture capital standpoint yeah she worked in the uh cia yeah um now an investor classic pipeline cia to venture capital um you have to keep climbing the mountain the question i have about this is like should we be putting this on the government or should we be putting this on fucking microsoft like microsoft like go in and pro bono get the government on the latest and greatest software like just do whatever that work is instead of just continuing to start to charge xp licenses like yeah like you have some sort of like moral duty this is your way that you can give back even bigger than your esg commitments just commit to i mean we joke about the ramp you know uh thing like the government should run on ramp, but like maybe it actually should.

2:05:50And maybe that should be a lower margin piece of ramps business, but it's, it's how they actually wind up having a lot of impact. And same thing with Microsoft, like get them off XP, like just go and do the work. You have the engineers, you have a million engineers, like go deploy them for deploy them and, and get, and get the, get the government on the latest and greatest. Yeah. But Palantir and Earl have done a ton of heavy lifting for all the startups now building in those categories because they've gotten the government on board with a lot of new technologies and done a lot of that heavy lifting and the way they get paid back for it is the companies that don't quite make it but build some great technology will eventually get absorbed by Palantir and Andruil and then they get the benefit of all that sort of capex and investment in technology.

2:06:40Yeah I mean Palantir is now they have the AIP program Have you seen this where startups can build on top of the Palantir platform? So that's building SaaS and there's gonna be some really cool news about that. I was talking to the team, so we'll cover that later this week when it goes live. But really, really bullish on that. I love the idea of Palantir being like this this data layer that then other companies can come in and build stuff on because there's just so many like you talk to people who work for the government during like the Palantir story. And a lot of them are like, oh, yeah, like I always like love the idea of Palantir, but like my unit never got access to it.

2:07:11I actually never interacted with Palantir while I was at NSA or CIA or DoD or whatever. And that shouldn't be the case. The case is probably just that Palantir doesn't have the bandwidth to build, oh, procurement, oh, all these different things. But if you can create that abstraction layer and be like the Windows XP essentially, that's really valuable. Yeah, the market is clearly repricing Palantir right now. Oh yeah, they just flipped. They just flipped Lockheed Martin, which is crazy. But one reason for that is that they are now, they could effectively become, own the app store for the DoD, right?

2:07:50The Pentagon or the USG, right? Where, hey, if you want to build software and hardware and other products for the government, you need to build on Palantir. And long term, that's kind of the Andruel thesis as well with the Lattice software. Totally. It's like everything that's equipment based will interface with this one thing. and you could see them opening that up at some point to a cruise missile or some other company where maybe they don't, maybe they acquire it, maybe they partner with it, but like there's some interaction. I was talking to the Anduril guys about the technology that is used for communication systems and they were just griping about like it makes like HTTP look like rocket science.

2:08:25It's like insane how legacy these things are just to like set up a communication line to like get Everybody, everybody like green light on like, is the F-35 still in the sky? Like that interaction is just like the most like outdated system built in the 70s and just maintained. So, yeah, Jacob Helleberg writes, let that sink in. Palantir just flipped Lockheed Martin. And it's funny because just like a week ago, I posted a screenshot that Shamsankar, the CTO at Palantir, created for his website about AIP and his second breakfast initiative. and it was the defense tech companies like Palantir relative to Lockheed based on employees and market cap.

2:09:08And Palantir was like kind of middle of the pack. But when you looked at market cap to employees, Palantir is like a few thousand and the other primes have like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. And so it was impressive then. But now it's just going to be like Palantir's at the top. They have the most market cap and the least employees. And like every metric is just the best. It's like total power law winner. and yeah, just really, really remarkable story. I mean, like long grind. Like there was a time when Ballinger was, I think like kind of hanging out in like the single digit to 10, 20 billion range for like a decade because they grew and they got through like the VC thing.

2:09:43Oh, it's just consulting. Yeah, just consulting. There's no real platform play there and then AI stuff happens and they actually have everything in and the other companies just can't compete because like they did the hard work first. yeah so yeah super valuable congrats to everyone at palantir and the culture there is the culture there it's still good heard is ridiculous crazy we saw we saw uh uh younis talking about like you know no kipping pull-ups like yeah that how do you keep that going 20 years in that's crazy you would think they would have evolved just to like a normie tech company yeah and all the all the engineers that that historically would have gone to google and then just decided when google you know with project maven right decided to say like you know we don't want this a part of our platform create an opportunity for palantir to hover up all those people that uh clearly care about the country and and our our patriots want to put their skills to use oh this is a rough one this might be the anti-brother of the week the the a wag of the finger to jensen wong the founder and ceo of nvidia he says he doesn't wear a watch and he has a very you know this is a 30 second clip from a interview that he did where he explains that he, you know, the most important time is right now.

2:10:58And so he doesn't need to wear a watch, but he's missing a critical thing, which is that a watch doesn't tell you the time of day. It tells you the time of your life. It tells you where you are, not in the day. And it tells other people where you are in your life. Exactly. And so I think we got to, we got to get this guy a hitter. Yeah. I think that's, uh, yeah, you were talking about how Putin, whenever he does an interview, he places his watch on the table as a way to signal to the world what kind of man he is. If you weren't familiar with Putin, you're going to see his watch and start to get an idea of who he is just by his timepiece.

2:11:32I want to read more into that because I wonder if it's like almost like a threatening thing. He's like taking, you know, you take your watch off before you get in a fistfight. And so he's taking his watch off to put it down to like, if this interview doesn't go well like i'm ready to fight almost there's like a million it's also a status thing right it is it is he's probably got one of the better watch collections i think it might be the kind of thing in russia where you want to have a nice watch collection if you're an oligarch but you don't want to ever be have it be nicer than than the top dog sure someone who can challenge you yeah yeah you don't want to challenge putin's collection but you would think that i mean i feel like jensen's like you know a hair's breadth away from becoming a watch guy like so much leather jacket does yeah so much of what what nvidia does is precision manufacturing and he should be able to respect i'm sure they've learned a lot of a vacheron the work of a patak the work the work of a ap like he should be able to get into that we saw zuck did briefly and developed a great uh a wonderful i'd like to see a one election a one of one uh nvidia gpu watch that you can see the intricate detail of the gpu humming we gotta get that made and then we'll send it to him and then they'll come on the show yeah um but uh yeah also i mean he he's he's famous for doing that jersey swap with zuck do you remember that where uh zuck was wearing some sort of like mountaineering coat almost like very like puffy and jensen was wearing the uh leather the iconic leather jacket and they swapped jackets and took a picture it was a jersey swap fantastic i mean swapping watches that would be very cool too um there's something there but we'll get them soon you can be redeemed jensen it's within your abilities.

2:13:14It's never too late. So David Boscovic says, I woke up in a cold sweat last night from a nightmare. I had spent all of our money on Google ads in one day because I had accidentally removed the limit on my tri-ramp card. Someone should figure out how to sell brand placement in dreams like this. It's a new frontier. Yeah, so I would wear one of those. I'd wear a wearable if it was going to project ads into my brain. yes at while you can make more educated because yeah exactly i mean i'm as a student as a businessman as a student of capitalism i learn a lot from ads i learn what's you know what uh what's selling what's not i learn about my own taste i learn about what i want to want to purchase i learn about products and services i can i can buy to help grow technology brothers right and so if i could sit down right before bed and put on my little wearable and have it be projecting ads into my dreams, I would, I would pay for that.

2:14:13Right. It's like, um, that's why I pay, I pay for X and the only downside of X premium is it actually shows less ads. Right. Yeah, exactly. Um, which is a big bummer, but, um, but yeah, I, I can relate to that nightmare. Um, and, and, and the ramp team says our team is working hard to ensure your policy guardrail stay in place in your dreams. There you go. They hired a good person to run their social media. Yeah. Um, Say Taylor says, you're not online enough. Couldn't have said it better myself. Simple, simple. Yeah, I mean, part of our work here at Technology Brothers is to be almost like a brain rot shield for our audience.

2:14:54So if you're worried about spending too much time in the timeline, we basically are a layer over the timeline to help surface the most relevant content and then provide hard-hitting analysis on it. But it doesn't always have to be that way. It can also be you're online for six hours. You have an extra three hours at the end of the day. Throw on technology, brothers. You get another three hours of contact. Well, here's the thing. Sometimes a founder will call me and they say like, hey, I'm having a rough day. This customer integration isn't going well. I'm having this issue with my head of engineering, whatever it is.

2:15:25And almost always I tell them drink two Celsius, have some Lucy or Excel, and go sit outside, ideally in the sun if it's daytime. and just scroll like give yourself a couple hours to scroll and just don't stop right i think all the fees have gotten to the point where they're not you're never really going to hit the end i remember that was like a 2010s era social thing where it'd be like you've reached all the content right but i haven't hit the end in a decade almost right and so go outside get some sun caffeine nicotine and just scroll a little bit um and i promise you like that that sort of creative of juices will start flowing you're start getting into this sort of problem solving mentality and you'll make your life better so couldn't agree more uh andrew editor says first impression of my daylight co the hype is justified shockingly responsive distractions non-existent decent chance this becomes my primary work computer oh this is the high refresh rate e-ink screen yep tablet i So, uh, so yeah, uh, Andrew, good buddy and, uh, was on my team, uh, uh, party round, uh, phenomenal writer and works with a bunch of other startups now.

2:16:39Uh, so his primary work is meeting with companies that he works with through his agency words, uh, words, S S word, S S.com. Um, and, uh, you know, so his, he's primary, primarily interfacing with clients and writing. and so daylight computer is a really good um uh product for that because it it um it's a product that is is trying to uh take all the advancements in computer technology that we have today but sort of like make it more analog so they eliminate uh color uh they make it uh less basically less engaging overall so that in theory it helps you actually get more work done this is live like you can just go buy one of these yeah so they've been they've been working um yeah i don't have mine yet but they don't um they uh they're working through like pre-order list but they are delivering now i use the product it could never replace like this physical paper paper but i mean for that's what they're trying to do they're trying to kill they're trying to take out big paper good luck good luck there's a lot of um but yeah i use a product better chance better chance taking down apple on the ipad but yeah you're never taking this for my cold dead hands yeah will you take my we'll cut down the trees ourselves if we have to uh but no i tried the daylight for the first time i think it was over like six or seven months ago yeah and this is one of those things like a lot of the cool trends in technology now are are sort of making stuff more analog more retro mod retro is an example which is more nostalgic who knows if daylight is like gonna be as big as apple but i'm so happy that it exists and i want it to be a great company and i think it would probably be a fantastic yeah that was that was the investment that was the investment uh on john the founder when i was talking to him i kind of almost laughed when he told me the valuation yeah but then he basically was like look like if we can become uh if we can sell millions of devices like this is gonna be really cheap yeah right and i and i think that with the sort of anti-blue light movement, some other stuff like that, it has massive potential.

2:18:47Yeah, that's great. Shout out to Andrew and Anjan. That's awesome. Let's go to Stephen Simone. He says, Cheap drones aren't going out of style anytime soon. Thanks, Wired, for covering Allen control systems. And Wired writes, the AI machine gun of the future is already here, and it's some sort of machine gun mounted on the back of a truck. Yeah, so... You know this company pretty well. Yeah, so I... I'm an advisor to ACS. David Sachs, famous political podcaster. Actually, he was, I think, their first investor. Because he backed Steve's last company, I think it was. But yeah, Steve has been, for the last year and a half, two years, building anti-drone gun turrets.

2:19:33So one of the big problems in modern warfare is you have this proliferation of really cheap drones that can just fly across the battlefield and just and so they're very difficult to take out as a human because you're sort of aiming a gun shotguns aren't long enough range rifles it's just too hard to hit things and so ACS has built this phenomenal product that can take out drones fully autonomously so this is this is Terminator Terminator's here it's mounted to the back of a Toyota pickup truck in Texas right now on the testing grounds um and they've just made some like really uh incredible progress over the last year uh all the way to there's some cool videos out there they're public now but uh you can see the acs uh gun turret like taking out drones taking out a bunch of chinese drones which is cool using this target practice um and uh yeah they did uh they did a demo day recently uh for a number of uh investors and i was joking with steve about it's pretty funny to think about like five vcs seeing the same awesome demo at this at the same time and like looking around being like all right like i'm it's it's mono mono now it's sharp elbows so yeah i mean steve is i i think uh i think he's the the the gonna be uh look back is that as the tk of defense like he's like one of one individual and um built a ridiculous team and and on a mission so it's awesome thank you to steve for keeping us safe yeah let's go to zach says gamer is up next as a word to describe the obsessed notice a lot with runners athletes who compete hard and smart gamers gamers i like that there's a lot of gamer lingo that people that gen Z is adopting.

2:21:25Like I'm one shot. One shot. One shot. One shot is that concept taken out. Yeah. I think we need to, so a gamer, it's going to take me a little bit to work it in. Yeah. It's tough. I, understanding the definition, I identify a bit of a gamer. You're a gamer. Our VP Ben's a gamer. But yeah, I want to bring the 360 no scope into the lingo. Yeah. What does that in a business context so if somebody like posts a banger tweet yep and then somebody in the comment section replies i'm going to sign up for your product right now and use it that's almost like a 360 no because a good post is this sort of like elegant thing that's hard to do you're you know you're doing a lot at once are you familiar with the term pre-made no so if you if you go on uh like counter strike or call of duty and you're playing like the competitive modes like 5v5, 6v6.

2:22:18Normally you just get matched with random people. So it's very hard to coordinate because like who's the sniper, who's the machine gunner or medic or whatever. But the way to really win is to make a quote unquote pre-made where you and your boys all are in the lobby beforehand. And so you show up, it's you and everyone knows like, okay, I'm going to go left, you're going to go right. And we're really good on the comms and we know not to fight and talk over each other. And you're going up against randoms. So if you have a pre-made, you're locked in. And when I think about the teams that show up with startups like and raise 50 million yeah like like and are all very much a pre-made in the sense that you have palmer but then you also have like three palantir executives it's like how is that not going to be successful they really stack the deck in their favor right so i'd like to see a company as a pre-made i'd like to see uh company x accounts like start to use gg so like when ramp when ramp launch launches a bunch of new functionality i want to see Brex just reply to it and say GG.

2:23:13GG well played. Yeah, GG well played. And then you just delete their account. Good luck. Have fun. Yeah. I mean, there's so much gamer lingo we can bring over. And it's, again, it's like a way to signal like in group. So very valuable. Sam Gersten Zhang says, wow, A16Z is hiring a full-time person just to keep track of carry. And it's a job for their internal HR teams. So this is awesome because it shows the evolution of venture capital, right? It's becoming mainstream. It's, it's learning everything that traditional private equity learned in the nineties. We're just relearning it just like cryptos, like speed running, like financial regulation.

2:23:54Um, so anyways, uh, bullish, bullish for Andreessen. I can't wait for them to go public, uh, so that, so that everybody can, can own a piece of that, um, monster um and i to me the signal is like we're getting ready to go public right like it's one thing when it's just the gps and they're sort of managing carry internally they have a cfo they must right yeah sure they do must have a huge finance team any any any multi-billion dollar aum fund without a cfo would be concerning yeah but like it's interesting that we don't know their cfo like we know some of their comms people yeah yeah like margarine because that's what i'm I'm ready for Andreessen earnings calls with the CFO.

2:24:34Fantastic. That's going to be, we're going to have to do a live stream for that. I guess the question is, will the other funds go short? You know, Sequoia, they're set up to take long and short positions in the public markets. Oh, yeah, yeah. What if they're like, you know, what? We open a big short position. We're shorting Andreessen. Just to try to attack the brand. Exactly, exactly. Like Hindenburg Research from Sequoia and Andreessen would be devastating. Yeah, yeah. Sean would do that. dark sean dark sequoia uh love sean i think he's in the stack somewhere um kate clark tweets some personal news bloomberg hires clark to cover vc and startups so she was at the information she was at the information so this is this is why right now you know the the technology publications you got tmz the information you've got newcomer new next generation they should have like a fantasy sports for tech journalism where you like build your team and see who's getting the most views where's the poly market yeah poly market on the trades and then there should definitely be like a draft day where you get the best posters and the information bloomberg forbes they all have to you know they they get rankings based on you know oh they didn't get that many views last year that the top of the ranking they get to pick the best posters yeah right so there should be a draft day there should be a fantasy you should be able to build a team and and ultimately bet on this you should be able to gamble on it yeah and you see like you know kara swisher has had a very antagonistic relationship with the technology industry and i think one of the reasons is she watched all of her peers at the time become wealthy and so this competition within different you know media companies for tech journalists is actually good they're all going to make more money i think i saw newcomers paying like 300 350k to hire journalists you know i would expect kate clark is, you know, I would expect this is like a seven-figure contract over four years.

2:26:24You know, it's not NBA money yet. Yeah, but I mean, pretty soon we're going to start seeing the 360 deals, the sponsorships, like, you know, what kind of jersey are they wearing if they go to a conference, you know? If they're going to be on Emily Chang's circuit, throw some logos on that shirt or that blouse. But yeah, I think journalists have, we think of these media companies as these sort of big brands that carry a lot of weight. uh but um like it's it's bloomberg yeah bloomberg got her bloomberg is going to become much more relevant because kate actually gets scoops she does she's very good she like is not just like you know using chad gpt to summarize what someone else talked about online no she trades information yeah i'm excited for the shoe deals i want to see like you know laurel piano or something be like oh yeah we got an exclusive deal with this person when you see them on on uh cnbc giving some squawk box like oh yeah they're repping our gear yeah be great um ayush writes um new founder kpi dropped testosterone level the average yc founder seed stage is 30 344 nanograms per deciliter yours truly 727 nanograms per deciliter and did you see this underlying study i i know i know the guy who did it yeah uh i think his name is michael uh and uh yeah not so that's that's really low yeah i think so here's what we got to look into one not surprised that i use uh has such high t it's probably why he's had some some a little bit of controversy but like the guy's online constantly he's grinding his entire team is grinding he's like extremely smart and um uh very just like hard working and that's probably because where his t levels are at but um we got to go to y combinator do some investigative journalism ourselves because i I would guess that they're handing out a little bit too much plastic bottle water.

2:28:18Cause how else can you explain, explain it's 30 average. That's the positive thing though, is that those YC just be T-bone steaks. Yeah. No, no water, no water, even though water's Lindy. Yeah. But yeah, I, the positive thing from, from that study though is that it seemed like the, the more venture capital the founders raised, the higher their T levels were. Yes. Yes. And so I think that's a positive trend, which tells me why Combinator should just invest more money in. Because it actually could be that more venture capital is actually just pulling up their testosterone levels. So they have so many unicorns in a batch, they should probably just start investing real size.

2:28:59Make the entry check$10 million. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a million ways to upregulate T. And they've got to make a new trend. It's not the all birds, I'll tell you that. Justine Moore at Venture Twins says, New A16Z investment thesis, AI ex-parenting. Raising kids is one of our most challenging and important jobs. Every parent needs support sometimes, but many can't access it because it's too expensive or inaccessible. AI changes this, what we're seeing. And then there's a market map. Okay, so two reasons that I think this is smart. One, audio is a fantastic interface for kids because parents don't want their kids on screens.

2:29:39yep i got this thing for my son called a yoto i have one i set one up it's honestly it honestly my son locks in yeah like he puts on something and then he goes and reads books and stuff and just plays with lego as well and he has all these custom cards you can download any music and put it on a custom card it's so great it's so great uh so anyways for parents like even 20 minutes of time where their kid is doing something solo is like massively valuable so parents will spend a lot of money for something like this yep in general parents will pay for anything educational pretty quickly for their kids yep uh and then the other thing is like audio to date has not been the best interface for adults because we're adhd we we have like we we need things that are kind of like moving faster than audio typically provides but for kids it's it's just absolutely fantastic and so i i what i've wanted to see is somebody something like what avi is doing for friend but for kids because if you get give kids this digital companion that has certain guardrails that can talk with them that can teach them things that they can ask questions to yep i'm i would love to back a company that's that's doing that specifically i think there's been some toy companies that are integrating llms which is cool but yeah but yeah like a little pendant type thing that has a speaker on it that we're even just a robot dog that follows you around but you can also ask it yeah what's that uni tree uni tree robotics boston dynamics i want a robot dog that i can strap an ar to that has a like uh you know speaker a polycom attached to it so i can talk to my kid protect the dog just protects the kid and hangs out it's their best friend man's best friend it's great it's got an ar on it i love it um and uh that's great anyway so let's go to andrea d huber woman phd uh she says yc should add some cute ladies to the workplace purely for the sake of their founders low t levels of course uh we're back on t levels at at yc back on t levels at yc this is funny because you know y combinators been criticized a lot for for not having enough women in the cohorts um but uh yeah maybe this is like now a right-wing critique of the lack of of feminine energy at YC.

2:31:49Yeah. I genuinely, so that the issue is YC is fully remote now. Oh no, I think they went back in person. Really? Yeah. Back in person. Okay. That was just during the COVID years. Oh, but, but do they actually have like an, you can't work from there every day, but you can go in for dinners and office hours. I think this is probably there. What they're dealing with is, is not just like a small issue. Like it's an epidemic. Right. I would imagine that some founders are going to start not applying for YC because they have high T and they, one, don't want to be around men with low T because it's just a drag.

2:32:27Right. And two, they're worried if they join, their T is going to drop dramatically. Sure, sure. Or they'll be clocked as low T. It's not like, oh, adding secretaries is one approach. Removing plastic bottled water is another. but they need to they need to try like 20 things at once and see see what sticks because it's gonna that is yc is one of the greatest institutions to to be created within silicon valley in the last whatever is it it's almost 20 or 20-ish years now uh they got to save and i think gary will i think gary will get on it uh do you know this congressman waltz do you know this guy i feel like we had him in here previously.

2:33:09This is funny because it's like a very Twitter native format, but it's from an official congressman's press Twitter. And so it says, Waltz, how much do you think the Air Force pays for this bag of bushings? USAF Secretary Kendall. I don't know, Congressman. Waltz says$90 ,000. So we've run into these again and again. There's just so many things. First, there was soap dispensers that exits called out. Yep. Now it's bushings. Yep. But it's also the seatbelts on the planes, the urinals, all those different things. They're all way, way repressed. And this is why Kimia's company is going to rip is because we're going to introduce competition into the bushings market.

2:33:50Yeah. But look at this. I mean, he has one clip essentially from C-SPAN. It's a one-minute clip, and it has 2 million views. Like what, what, this is just the native, the, the, the poster native congressman or politician just going direct and using the correct format and not just saying, Hey, I put out a press release. Go to this link. It's like, I'm, I'm articulating the problem and I'm showing you evidence that I'm trying to do something about it. He just mogged the Air Force secretary. Yeah. It's wild. Hopefully it comes down. Need commercial off the shelf. Cots versus Gots, baby. Cots versus Gots.

2:34:26Let's go. Oh, here's Sean. This is a great one. So Sean, so Elon Musk, you know, on the election night, I believe, says all time high usage of this platform. And it looks like global user seconds was over 400 billion on the election night. And Sean says, we at Sequoia invested$800 million into the X take private. We were ridiculed for two years for it, but I'm confident we'll get the last laugh. never bet against elon yep and he was getting dunked on a little bit a little bit about this because like i guess the stock is down in like private markets but um i think he's right i think i think never bet against elon i think the i think elon inc yeah and they're investing on they're a venture capital firm yeah they care about yeah sean cares about what the position is going to look like in 10 years and it's right now there's so much company yeah and right now I would be willing to bet my house that they'll make money on this investment in 10 years.

2:35:27It's almost like there's a refounding of the company over there because I remember when this happened. And that was why we talked about the rebrand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The rebrand was refounding. And it's actually like they're going through the whole cycle that Twitter went through again, but which is like a completely new open book for monetization. And because when Elon bought it, I was like, you know, like there's a lot of people that are like leaving, but this makes me more bullish than ever on this is the best place to be if you're in tech. Yeah, let's go check in with all the journalists that posted their Blue Sky links.

2:35:57Yeah, it's fine. They might be doing well over there. I know that the numbers on threads are fine, but it's not the most important place to be if you're in tech. And tech is always ahead of everything else. And so over time, we'll go through the same cycle. Dan Loeb is not on threads ratioing people twice a day no right and so as long as like the most high signal most valuable alpha is there they can kind of climb up the ranking again of like everyone has to be on there because that's where the conversation is happening yeah and the ads the ads and the ads platform will will get yeah all sorts of different things but they're getting more money for sure like yeah they're they're and especially um uh mark was tweeting out basically calling out all the advertisers that sort of worked collectively to boycott X and basically saying that I think a lot of those advertisers will start to come back because they realize that what they're doing is not only sort of short-sighted but potentially even illegal yeah and yeah it's interesting because the the cost base for X has gotten so low that if they can get the revenue side anywhere near back to what it was yeah it'll just be super popular five billion dollar company yeah like they could be doing especially with the network and trade at 20x or something 10x like that's not that crazy to imagine yeah um one of my one of my uh one of my former employees uh close friend just had a bunch of different offers from every sort of like mag 7 type company and he chose i I know a lot of people like that.

2:37:36All the best people are going there. And so the reason to be bullish, besides the fact that Sean is bullish, is that, and the whole election and everything like that is the talent. The talent magnet is real. The smartest people that aspire, that want to work under a leader like Elon are going there. Let's go to Shiel Monat says, a lot of fintech shitcos that went public in the Zurp era and were completely left for dead are quietly having monster years, many up 600%. And he cites Dave Inc, which is up 600%. Neobank. Root Inc, Clover Health Investments Corp, and Blend Labs. I actually know the founder of Dave.

2:38:15And yeah, rough go of it when they SPAC'd and it went way down. And SoFi is ripping as well. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm really happy for these folks that SPAC'd at the wrong time and just had like a rough go but stuck with it. That's like great, great. It'll be interesting to see if SoFi ends up finding its way. And then Chamath will be able to say like, look, if you just invested in all my SPACs, I did well on average. You did well, right? I talked to somebody who SPACs and said that like, he did it post ZERP, but what he did was he, on day one, he immediately unlocked all the investors and the founders had like a three-year lockup.

2:38:53And so that created like a ton of downward pressure on the stock immediately. But got it out of the way. But yeah, got it out of the way. And there was never this like, you know, weight hanging over the company. and they were able to essentially tell their VCs like, hey, we got your return. You can distribute and your LPs can sell today if they want. You are like, we're clean of this and we're into the next phase. And it's like, now we gotta build up as a public company. And a lot of these companies, it's like, yeah, they're public, they're building, they have the money, they're growing. And I mean, I remember looking at Dave and being like, this is trading at like a third of book value or something.

2:39:31I'm pretty sure they were trading for like$50 million and they had like$150 million in cash. And I was just like, this is insane. It was like the whole SPAC meme became so negative for a while that things really were clearly undervalued. So I fully anticipate SPACs will be back for certain companies pretty soon. Let's go to Jason Lemkin. He says, no downturn or recession at Samsara at$1.3 billion, ARR, Klaviyo at$1 billion, GitLab at$730. million, Palantir at 2.9 billion, Toast at 1.6, Datadog at 2.8, Confluent at 1 billion, just a couple of examples. So there's just all these companies that are ripping, ripping, ripping and growing ARRs 30%.

2:40:13Fantastic. It's so interesting. I mean, this is really a good tour of the fact that like this B2B SaaS. Turns out it's a good business. Yeah. And that there's not, even though there are power law winners, like the Salesforce or I guess Microsoft really, it was such a huge market that there's multiple hundred million hundred billion dollar companies to build there so really really cool to see um and yeah i mean i think we could see the same thing play out in defense i think we could see the same thing play out in ai and i think that uh like yeah if your fund is set up to you you have to get a trillion dollar company yeah go for that that's great that's awesome but um that doesn't that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be you know the seventh biggest, you know, B2B SaaS company that has a billion dollars in AR growing 25%.

2:41:04Like I would happily be that company. That's great. Yeah. Fantastic. Let's go to Zane. He says, one of the best times in the history of humanity, it's one of the best times in the history of humanity to start a manufacturing company is likely right now. So what do you say it like? Yeah, so this guy's been sharing the gospel around uh manufacturing broadly but also the fact that um a lot of our onshore manufacturing is dependent on leaders that are at retirement age right there's that factor there's also the tariffs thing tariffs surreal there's also just a new boom in a whole bunch of things that require manufactured parts like if we really do go into the humanoid humanoid robotics era that's like a million different motors a million different batteries and control systems and yeah like who's going to manufacture the tibia for this thing it's going to be some aluminum rod yeah and the downstream effects of of a company like anduril over time having thousands and thousands of employees are that those thousands of employees experience all these small little pain points throughout different product cycles and then they go out and say like okay i made my money in tech but the next thing i'm doing is setting up this like small manufacturing shop outside ofst louis and we're going to make this widget and we're going to sell a lot of them.

2:42:22And that's going to be really good for the country. It's going to be good for them financially. It's going to be good for the companies that depend on these sort of smaller scale manufacturers. I was at AndroHQ last Friday and I was overhearing some engineers have a little meeting and they're like, you know, somebody's like, I'm willing to bet on it. Like we need to make it 26 millimeters or something. I had no idea what they were talking about. But like, you know, they're like making these engineering trade-offs widgets. And yeah, I mean, they're not going to be able to insource all of that. And then there's also just going to be the dividend of, you know, manufacturing and hard tech outside of defense.

2:42:54I mean, I think we talked about the impulse stove. It's like a hardware company. It's never going to be acquired by Anderle. But, you know, we're going to get a new fridge company. We're going to get a new washing machine company. There was a guy making wheelchairs. Yeah, wheelchairs. Yeah, exactly. We're going to get all these different engineering, hard tech, manufacturing things. You can just make things. It's going to be great. I'm really excited. Let's go to Clint Fiore. uh he says no income tax for the rest of your life if you have birthed four or more children copying hungary in america and then he follows up upon further review and discussion with the commenters here i'm editing this to be for the household income not just the mom's rewards homes where one spouse stays home with kids while other spouse works as well as one's returning to workforce what do you think uh i would take it further just uh no income tax period yeah No, I think it's a good incentive.

2:43:47I know a lot of people where kids are very expensive, right? We look at everything in supercars, right? So if I see a guy with 10 supercars, I'm like, okay, you could probably comfortably have five kids, right? So with every, at least from like a carrying cost standpoint. And so I know a lot of people that have two kids right now. And if you said have two more and you can not pay income tax again, they're going to run the numbers. They'll make a financial model and they'll see very quickly we should have those extra kids one kids bring joy so that's like just value add but two if you can if you can take that incremental income that's not being wasted through wasteful government spending on expensive bushings or 150 000 soap dispensers and invest that capital it'll benefit them as well as the entire country so yeah it's great super pro uh paul baum says can hollywood stop making slop now and then mopar says no you're gonna watch fast and the furious 45 and you're gonna love it what do you think this was an election so uh paul's had some some great ideas lately uh this was post-election response maybe in response to wokeism being having peaked um but uh but i don't know I think like the problems in the movie entertainment industry are just so much bigger than than politics there's this massive lag on productions because you need someone to start writing now and then that movie will get released in four years the good thing is I hit up a copywriter that I'd worked with in the past uh I actually I think we we got some of her help on excel sure and I hit her up recently because somebody was looking for some copywriting support and she's like I'm staffed on shows indefinitely um i don't i don't have time interesting i was like that's good oh that's great we need more content yeah yeah i i i think the power loss stuff will still stay around the denisville news yeah the uh yeah i would argue that there's small groups that are making cool impactful films right like civil war by a 24 was a big idea i think it flopped yeah but that wasn't slop right it was a big effort and if you think about like blade 2040 dude is a good counter example of like i actually don't oppenheimer like like there's usually like one or two a year there just aren't one every month and yeah you know barbie yeah which barbie oh barbie yeah barbie that was a big moment yeah yeah yeah uh gladiator yeah it's coming out good reviews so far we got to take the boys out this is a a note for all the listeners get your boys together and go to a movie it's the best thing we've done in LA a few times dress up dress up have some drinks before have some dinner after it's just a fantastic time it's a good excuse to get out of the uh out of the house a lot of what I realized was that a lot of our friends are married and their wives are more into sports than the husbands because sports have just become really popular and so if you say hey we're gonna go watch the Dodger game well like everyone's gonna want to come but you know very few wives when I go see the latest Jason Statham movie.

2:47:02So it's an excuse to get the boys together. And it's not as hard of a sell as being like, we're going to go get hammered and smoke cigars all night. And boys' nights are a good way to counter burnout, right? Because burnout's usually a symptom of something not working in your business. But if you hang out with your boys, they can help give you that clarity, gas you up, give you that extra conviction to keep pushing through it. So one movie night could save your company. It's great. Let's go to typed female. Sam Altman. we are a few thousand days away from building god we will build sons on earth unify physics and resurrect the worthy dead gary tan we just bought chat.com yeah gary tan sounds like this will be really impactful for startups sam altman definitely no better time to be a startup i love this just sam replied it was like this is funny yeah because it does seem like there's a little bit of like a tension there where it's like yeah okay we're gonna get this like crazy future like maybe like like how can we predict anything open ai is developer tooling at its core right so if they do build god like you're they built an api yeah into also it's just like startups are creation and so if the tools get better and better like you would want to create even if there is abundance you would want to make something creative and and creating a company is like a expression yeah i do feel like it's it's now that we have intelligence as a service it is difficult to predict the future yeah right especially with software and consumer products i mean whatever seven years ago you were like hey i think smokeless tobacco you know nicotine is going to be big we should do this and you turned out to be very correct yeah uh but it's harder to do that with software.

2:48:48I think it's becoming obvious, like you probably want network effects. You want some type of lock-in. You don't want to build, trying to rebuild Salesforce right now could be an amazing business for five years and then you get completely disrupted. Who does? Let's go to Keith Raboy. He says, should I post, this is post-election reflecting on his, his posting strategy. And he runs a poll. Should I post more about health, fitness, music, venture capital or politics and venture capital one handily with 62 % thank god thank god god uh i disagree i think i i think that posting about politics is actually great for vcs because you want to know what you're getting yourself into at the board dinner because it's all going to come out and the last thing you want is someone who has some crazy political ideology that you don't align with yeah but i feel like but i feel like if if keith met somebody right now that had completely different political views in him and was like truly on the opposite end of the spectrum he might be like you know what you crazy kid like give it a shot I'll give you a few million give it a shot um I I do appreciate that he's he's been he's become like my de facto personal trainer because whenever I post on x about whatever workout I'm doing he just immediately chimes in with feedback on how I could be doing better yeah I was like you know going for a one rep max today and he was like you should try three rep maxes instead i was like oh like uh you know clean and jerk is the best movement and he was like uh it's it's too hard on your tendons you know yeah yeah he has a lot of uh whatever whatever i i don't know i don't know though with keith is it is it his uh incredible spirit and and sort of uh energy that that allows him to do these things or is it his health protocol, right?

2:50:37Which one's up to the which. Yeah, exactly, right? Because I think a lot of people, if they followed his schedule, would collapse in like the fourth day, right? And so who knows, who knows? Yeah. Well, we know step one is lever up. Yeah, always. Phil says, working with a new client, a 17-year-old founder,$10 million DTC brand, no Zoom calls, no in-person meetings, only meets over black ops six calls if it can't be discussed over cod it's too complicated the workforce is changing 2k likes what do you think this is something that's like amazing and could be the future or also could be like a harbinger of doom and this kid could be like i do think yeah do you think there's potential to be like hey let's move the water cooler talk to uh to cod yeah whatever that the in vogue video game is you can go play smash with your colleagues Yeah, maybe Call of Duty is a new ping pong table, right?

2:51:35It makes sense for the modern, for the gamers. I do. I have had some breakthrough conversations. Actually, so this is crazy. So Soylent, when they moved to downtown LA, they opened up some desks for startups. And I was at, I don't know if we ever talked about this, but I was, you had left the company, but I had a desk there and they had fantastic ping pong tables that I would use at least once a day. Crush it. That's great. At first I was kind of thinking that COD thing was silly, but how different is it to play ping pong versus COD? You know, one of my favorite pitches with a VC that I ever did was with Blake Robbins when he was at Benchmark.

2:52:13Yeah. And we played PUBG together. No way. Which was a Battle Royale game. And it was fascinating because it felt like the modern version of going golfing. Yeah. So we talk about business, talk about the business, talk about building companies. but then we're also on the same team in this like fight for survival so battle royale there's uh i think we were playing duos 150 people on the map so there's 75 teams and if you get shot you go down but you can be revived and so there's always a question of are you going to be greedy or thirsty yeah another good gamer word to adopt uh being thirsty is when is when you you know get too hungry for the kill and you prioritize you know offense over defense yeah and so i noticed and what i really liked about him was that when i got downed he would prioritize reviving me over like getting the extra kill the glory that's a vcu and i noticed myself thirsting all the time and being like fuck we lost because i'm an idiot and i didn't play it right but well that's why that's why golf is actually genuinely really great way to get to know somebody especially in a business context because if you're how do they handle you play 18 holes and you see like oh like every fourth hole he like undercounts you know or throwing his club right yeah or getting pissed yeah or yeah doing anything or if they're too chill about it like getting drunk on the golf course or or in the back nine catty girl or whatever yeah back nine there's a lot of ways to expose the truth about someone through that yeah it's much better than just a coffee meeting which is just vanilla yeah and you get to walk the whole time yeah i love it so yeah maybe cod is the future uh let's skip that man uh jarvis says man trump really lucked out having an autistic billionaire randomly choose his election as his next object of fixation ha ha and elon responds 50k likes and elon responds with a crying emoji and jarvis just says love you king so good amazing so funny that Elon just got obsessed with the channel.

2:54:14I can't believe this app is only$10 a month. It's incredible. These are interactions. This has always been the case. I remember when I first got to Silicon Valley, getting online and just tweeting with Sean Parker and Jim Breyer from Excel. They were on stage, and they were posting about their investing initiatives, and I was able to just be a reply guy and chat with them. It was crazy. Huge alpha in being a reply guy. Basically, yeah. and it was super inspiring at the time i was like okay like at least these guys give me the time of day like they're not like big dogging me which is awesome yeah so so here's the thing it wasn't it certainly was not random right yeah elon was absolutely snubbed by biden totally who completely disrespected the biggest american manufacturer of evs by not inviting elon to meet with him and the government on the issue same thing in california california like basically made fun of him and told him to leave um and so yeah message received he everything we just saw over the past however many months was just a reaction to being disrespected yep as a person as a businessman and it was almost a with his level of ambition it it was a it was something that he needed to do to reach his full potential because he's at a scale where what the government thinks about him and his businesses is probably more important than anything else.

2:55:44Yep, that makes sense. Let's go to Jan Pellig. He says, heard a leak from one of the frontier labs, not OpenAI, to be honest. They reached an unexpected huge wall of diminishing returns, trying to brute force better results by training longer and using more and more data, more severe than what is published previously. So the question is like, are we hitting a wall or our scaling law is going to hold. Here's what I would say. 90 % of frontier AI labs quit right before they're about to make it big. Same thing in gambling, right? 90 % of sports bettors quit right before they're about to hit that crazy parlay.

2:56:18And so my advice to this frontier lab is double down more data, more energy, get whale blubber as an energy source if you need it. Nuclear, coal, wind. do it all title yeah solar everything title get get up so here here's what ai ai labs have not partnered with soul cycle yet to try to capture that energy yeah i mean we we've seen the matrix like put the people in the pod yeah use their energy source yeah become batteries um the uh the interesting thing here is like they like it's it's really hard to evaluate this because is OpenAI is the most well-funded. And so they're the ones, other than the hyperscalers, they're the ones that can actually go and build like the gigawatt data center, which is like a new thing that needs to be built.

2:57:08It like physically needs to exist before you can do that training run. XAI is pretty far along. They're building like the largest cluster. So it's like, I feel like it's really, really hard to evaluate is scaling holding without actually running the experiment of like, we built the thing and this was the result. And the fear is that you, yeah, you 10X the power, you 10X the training and the GPUs, but then IQ of these models goes from like 105 to 107. And it's like, that might be economically viable, honestly. It might be better at whatever it does, and it might be really, really valuable to do that.

2:57:44But it might just be like, okay, we're hitting really diminishing marginal returns, and we're not going to get this super intelligence where it's like, oh, yeah, just a couple orders of magnitude, and then we'll be at 200 IQ. And that's something that like no one, I've never really seen anyone make a really great argument for like clearly scaling is all you need and scale is really valuable and scale improves the model. But what is the ratio between orders of magnitude in energy and data center size and actual real world applicability in IQ? Like what will it take? How many orders of magnitude to get to 150?

2:58:18No one really knows I think, but we'll see. Let's go to Edmund. He says, does anyone ever think about how aesthetic it is that humans drink water to survive? Like this clear, zero calorie, smooth liquid, pure, minimal, sleek. It's water. It's giving La Mer. It's giving modernity. It's good design. Water is Lindy. We have a lot of other alternatives. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you to Aurora. We have a lot of other alternatives, but we humans, we keep coming back to water. Yeah. there there is they could put caffeine in it there's that company orca right oh yeah we gotta get some of that yeah we gotta try that demo that on the on the on the pod it's great let's go to cody sanchez she says i don't want passive income i want a fucking empire let's go cody let's go Cody, Cody, Cody.

2:59:12One of us. One of us. One of us. Passive income isn't real. Yeah, fake. If you're getting income, there's some level of management that comes with it. And even if you hire somebody to manage said income, like a CEO or an asset manager and things like that, you still have to manage that person. And even if you have$100 million and you put it in government bonds and you're getting$3 million a year, it's like you will forever wonder, like, could I be getting 10 %? Yeah, active income, nothing hits like active income. Active income. Working and getting paid. We are pro-active income here. Active income.

2:59:52No, nothing hits like working hard and then making a lot of money from it. It's like the greatest drug on earth. So this is a great question. Adam Draper writes, where's the punk rock of the startup world right now? 12 years ago, it was Bitcoin. and matt.crypto says it's just funny he doesn't say crypto he says longevity which i somewhat buy i i would say that it's been the gundo nuclear the gundo really was like very punk rock and very countercultural and very independent and very not an industry plant um it's crazy that the internet made it go mainstream very quickly very quickly it was one year of punk rock and now it's like they were getting a hit piece in like four months yeah no no not a hit piece just like puff pieces like puff pieces after puffies and now it's like everyone knows it and it's like okay the game's over but they were at one point when there was some coverage happening they they were worried like it was going to be like pretty negative i do think i do think longevity and bio could be next uh i was talking to sebastian maliby the the author of power law and uh he was saying that the next big like book he wants to write is about uh bio investors yeah uh because it's a very very different model very different world but like maybe it could change with ai maybe it can change with more financialization, but it is a very untapped world that is kind of early, but clearly very promising.

3:01:11Let's go to Rajveer. He says, on election day, Kalshi outspent the Trump and Harris campaigns on meta ads. Yeah, so this is one, I totally respect Kalshi capturing the moment because their whole thing is much, it's much more about politics and polymarket. Polymarket is markets for everything. yep cal she is much more focused on being the legal election quote-unquote uh legal way to bet on the election so they should have spent millions and millions and they did the funny thing though is they kept like uh congratulating themselves on hitting number one and all this stuff and it reminded me of that meme where like it's like the guy like spraying champagne like in his own mouth and he's like third on the podium or whatever i think we tweeted that so yeah i think uh yeah we'll see what happens.

3:01:58Every company needs to continue to kind of reinvent themselves. I'm sure Kalshi will come back and kind of try to create like new markets and momentum. And maybe there's an argument that the way to do it is to build a ton of momentum around specific markets. Events. Whereas Polymarket's more like platform style approach. Yeah. This is a great one. Bill Gurley says, stop using revenue multiples and you will have more clarity on valuations. and it's a reply to Jason Lemkin. For the math to pencil out in venture capital, we probably need a rebound in public multiples. VC probably can't make money at 5XARR public comps with Harry Stebbings.

3:02:34It's so funny because Bill Gurley's just coming in like the boss. Yeah, he's kind of, he basically has the wisdom of Yoda now. He's the only VC from that era that's still extremely online, right? Yeah, that's true. And he's able to just pop in and be like, you've been a multiple. my friend um oh you think that's what he's saying i i that that was the way i i read it as i thought it would just be like a more nuanced analysis of like you know right team market structure yeah like monopoly characteristics but over over focus on any one metric is going to lead you astray yeah i mean revenue is really silly when you think about like all the other levers in a model it's kind of crazy to lean on that but yeah uh let's go to this quote tweet of chamath Inglorious Capital says, thanks Washington Post, but I only trust autism capital with my news.

3:03:26It's a serious tweet a billionaire just wrote. So the crazy thing is how much impact this has. This is insane. Wasn't that one account you said? Yeah, Cremieux. So he went from 70k followers to 200k followers off of this one tweet by Chamath. It was a very well-written tweet. I canceled my New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions and just reallocated the money to subscribe and follow the following folks on X who I believe help get me accurate news and it was Autism Capital and then uh Cremieux and then a bunch of other people but what what a rise of the poster yeah and and it's it's true it's true like you'll just get better like that's why we cover the timeline instead of yeah we don't we don't cover the news no we don't Let's go to Joe Lonsdale.

3:04:10Well, Roaring Twenties Redux begins shortly. Jeff Lonsdale says, okay, but the PE ratio of the S &P 500 was around 9 to 11 in 1924 to 1925. Boo. Boo. I'm on Joe's team here. Yeah, yeah. Run it back. Run it back. Are they both Lonsdales? Are they literally brothers or something? They must be related. Okay. If they're not, they should partner up in some way. But yeah, Joe, I'm very bullish on the Twenties. I think it's great. i i think we're getting there yeah yeah beginning short i think the optimism that there's there's obviously a massive amount of uh the animal spirits are back there's a ton of optimism in the last week in the tech world yeah that's great but it actually began i swear it began like early in the in the 2020s right like there was some obviously a lot of froth froth and bullshit around covid and markets and stuff like that but there was also the beginning of this whole movement of like we're going to make the world a better place not just with software and apps but with real world products yeah that's when a lot of stuff started it's interesting yeah there's also yeah i mean it's interesting because like during the uh the the the post-zerp crash and the recession like the fundamental economic drivers of the american economy were very strong but if you asked people that consumer sentiment they would all say it's it's not working for me it's not doing well.

3:05:39And so this was termed by Kyla Scanlon, like the vibe session. And there was this idea that like the vibes feel off, even though we're not seeing like the American consumer collapse and the American economy kept growing. And we had a very brief recession. We never went into a depression. All the doomer stuff didn't come to bear. So there's something about the fact that like we have a very solid foundation to build on right now. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Okay. Let's pass that. Let's do UC Berkeley's law school apparently had a course called Elon fought the law. The law won on offer. Alas, it has since been canceled.

3:06:17That's so crazy that someone was going to teach a whole course on this. And they're just like, it doesn't make sense anymore because he actually won. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I wish we could see what date it was actually sent. It would be amazing if it was canceled last week. I think it was. This looks recent. This looks like a recent screenshot. Spring 2025. Yes. Right around the corner. They were planning it for spring and just canceled it. Crazy. Yeah. I think the lesson here is he didn't try to fight the law directly. He fought it indirectly. Yeah. Right. Also, a lot of things he won like in the micro, like that Tesla shareholder lawsuit where the judge tried to take away his comp package, which all the shareholders had approved, where if he got the stock price to like an insane number, he would get a ton of shares.

3:07:02He did it. Everyone was happy. but then yeah like one shareholder fought and like the judge ruled with them but then he went back to the shareholders and got it done yeah and so yeah i don't know what they were thinking with this because there aren't many examples shout out to the shareholders air l's it's very very rare yeah shout out to the shareholders seriously uh let's go to trend griffin uh i think he's like a public markets analyst he writes uh alad gil i see five layers of ai value one nvidia and chips two data centers, three models, four tools for deploying AI, and five workflow services.

3:07:35And I think he misses six, which is energy. Energy is like clearly the next thing. And it's been a little bit of a champagne or a cocktail position in the sense that people talk about it at cocktail parties. Oh, energy is going to be really important. Sam Alton's investing in it, but the market hasn't really moved on it, but they're starting to right now. It's just starting. seven posters right without people like rune and and other top ai posters almost none of this works right posters are moving the market i mean in terms of ai value there are legitimately dozens of people that are going to build million dollar businesses off of ai related content yeah whether it's youtube videos or how to tutorials courses or podcasts like like there are a number of AI podcasts that have gotten really big.

3:08:22Alad Gil has a great AI podcast. I mean, he's monetizing it differently through a fund, but like, nevertheless, like he is part of the AI value chain, even as a capital allocator. Like, it is interesting. But of course you got to boil it down to five. The AI media industrial complex. But that's a fascinating tweet. Let's go to Scottie Pippin. I didn't even realize he was still using X. That's amazing. Scottie. So Scottie Pippin writes, just woke up from a wild dream. Satoshi Nakamoto visited me and he laughed at the price of Bitcoin. Too low, he said. I'm taking it higher. You haven't seen anything yet.

3:08:55Get ready. 2025 is going to be crazy. I love this trend of athletes retiring and then coming back to post because you can have a whole cultural - He still has his jersey in the picture. Yeah, it's amazing. You can have this whole cultural resurgence, right? Because when people see Scottie Pippen in the feed, they're going to pay attention, right? It's great. um ab has done this i think really well throughout the last um whatever year as well so yeah bullish on scotty and bitcoin very bullish let's go to nikita beer i can't help but feel like we're about to enter one of the most insane times to own risk assets and uh amit replies is a lambo a risk asset and i hate to break it to you bro it's not it's very stable hard asset you want to get into the long as you don't put too much mileage on it yeah but most lambos are depreciating very few maybe get a kountosh if you're looking for something but even that's not a risk yeah i think packy was saying something earlier as well as he's like i feel very under allocated to tech and crypto even though his aside from his media business is like probably 95 percent tech and crypto yeah um so yeah the fomo is starting yeah great time to own risk assets yeah um nikita also knows he can risk it all yeah and worst case he'll just build another app and flip it did you did you see his other tweet about uh uh millionaires in the post-zerp era are pointless yeah it's all about being a centi millionaire is uh is what and and we're gonna call them centis which is very funny because like i mean we know centaurs we know a lot of centi millionaires and that's not the word they use like yeah we all know the word that they use it's not centis so he's kind of telling on himself that he doesn't know like the real word exactly yeah but hopefully he gets there hopefully hopefully he learns the real word he's kind of acting like one of those guys that moves to san francisco san fran you know you don't really sound like yeah real a real centi millionaire but uh someone will clue you in i would my i would caution you if you're in lake como don't drop centi because you know george clooney's gonna spit out his screaming eagle if hears you.

3:11:04No, I would, I think Nikita should get on to really capture the long tail of his fans that can't afford intro. Yep. Create a copy trading subscription. Oh, there you go. Charge $10 ,000 a month. There you go. And, uh, and some carry on it too. Cause I think he would have like probably like 10 ,000 people that would be like, yeah, I'm going to YOLO with Nikita. Hell yeah. I'm riding, uh, riding into the risk assets. Uh, and this is the one we got to close on. Jay Alto says, some creators do it for the clout. Some creators do it for the money. But this is why the real ones do it. And it's a clip of the founder of Patreon giving some long speech about - Yeah, we don't need it.

3:11:42Who cares? We do it for the money. We just want to be ultra clear about this. If you're listening, you're going to hear a lot of ads and you're going to hear a lot of monetization. So get ready. Buckle up. Lock in. Lever up. Welcome to Technology Brothers. Thanks for listening. I think we got to get on with Taipei. I actually have to get to Las Vegas to meet with the new administration. As one does. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, everyone. Good doing business with you.