Memecoin Takeover, TB hits NYC, The Digital Trenches, Don't Scoop Me Bro, The Biggest Podcast Deal Ever

0:00Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. we're here in New York City, the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple, working on the biggest podcast deal of all time. Something that will truly shake the industry to its core. They will write history books about this deal. The kind of story that hits PR Newswire and the website shuts down. Basically, it's like a DDoS because so many people are headed there at the same time. We have to wear costumes when we go outside because so many reporters are trying to scoop this. Yeah. It's that big of a deal. But it's good to be here.

0:38We're very excited. I saw a tech journalist sort of undercover as, like, not undercover, but... On top of a horse that I'm undercover. Or across the street from our hotel. Yeah, yeah. We're staying at the Bowery. They can't stay away from the horses, even when they're undercover. Yeah. I mean, it's the best. We're even invited. You know, the second you call them out, then they just gallop off. Exactly. Yeah, it was dangerous. So it's kind of a smart move. How was your weekend? My weekend was good. I was supposed to go home and then ended up extending our Airbnb for another week. That's good. And then, yeah, it was just, I spent the entire weekend in sort of stunned disbelief that we had our first presidential meme coins.

1:29And it was... that happened friday night right no that was saturday saturday night um during the irony the irony of of launching it when when when the most terminally online group of people in any tech adjacent industry were all in one place not on their computers like it it he basically was trying to mog them oh yeah with that of like you know but the real dchamers were still on their phones and made yeah of course of course i do i was thinking about it and i i would guess that 10 20 funds returned their entire fund off of just that i don't think i i don't think any funds are set up to actually make that investment on the right time horizon it's not even just the getting approval because most funds you know you need two gps to sign out right you're giving crypto funds too much i don't think i don't think they keep enough in like a hot wallet it had to be in your phantom like at that moment for you to be able to move that yeah i'm just saying let's say saturday's you got in you you know you could have easily they're not just going to want you to be able to just wire that much that fast okay i'm thinking of a certain gp sure who did he doesn't have control issues yeah if you're a solo gp sure running a fund i wouldn't even call it at that point but yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like somebody yeah yeah there were definitely capital allocators who made major plays yeah for for everyone for every you know as long as you're seeing individuals printing yep there are funds printing sure sure they're just not posting screenshots yes uh uh well let's go let's go through obviously it's the inauguration i was in dc the last two days uh i've had more than my fill of you scooped uh teddy oh yeah this is builder yeah teddy he was scooping he was trying to scoop but i scooped him back he was spotted outside of peter teal's inauguration party i got a video of him standing out in the cold with the camera going tmz mode on all the tech founders people were asking why is why why did peter invite ted to his party and it's like no he's standing outside and he he does that now like that is his beat so he's he's officially with the new york times he used to write with puck news uh i think he was maybe at the new york times before but uh he went back to the new york times and is officially on the Elon beat.

3:53So anything around Elon, which is vaguely like tech and politics, obviously, TL fits in there. And I ran into him in Las Vegas doing the exact same thing, literally just standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons trying to kind of overhear conversations and like go up to people and be like, oh, hey, like, what are you here? He's on the circuit. Yeah. But it's funny because like the whole, like the end result of the piece is always like, oh, all these shadowy figures are coming together. you should be scared new york times reader yeah but like when he's there he's like laughing drinking having fun like i always go what i'm doing i always say what i'm doing and then i just like mess with them and try and like you know do something funny yeah so every time if you see a new york times reporter hanging out pull out your phone scoop it it's free clicks you got to monetize just give him a nudge say hey you look great you look better in a tailored suit i agree yeah because you scooped him he was looking sharp but he was not wearing a suit He didn't look like he belonged to the party.

4:48He didn't. Maybe that's why he got turned away. Yeah. He just classed it up a little bit, Teddy. We'd welcome you right in. You could overhear everyone's conversation. It's funny that most parties, if somebody is saying, hey, I'm a New York Times reporter, I'd like to join. A lot of people would be like, sure. Come on in. It's glamorous. Like the New York Times. He's going to write about it. And then this is, yeah. You stand outside. You stand outside. It's a secret service. i had to my flight was two hours delayed i had to show up to the party with my suitcase and backpack and so the secret service had to go through every single sock and piece of underwear i feel like some of the brothers are going to roast you for having a backpack oh it's not very that was very tv coded it was terrible they should have had it be attached is it like a jansport dance sport no it's actually the same backpack as luigi mangioni had whoa yeah it's a highly red armended backpack he was just oh yeah just bought like the most popular one i forget what the brand is but uh it works pretty well let's go through some posts we'll start with politics then we'll try and move on to politics because as you know we never talk about politics just move on start with politics and then move on i mean literally there's like four politics stories but they are tech related the first one is about intel uh dylan patel was doing some snooping on where the various jets are right now, the private jets.

6:11So he says, this was on January 17th. He says, Elon's jet is in Florida. Global Foundry's jet is in Florida. Qualcomm's jet is in Florida. If in case anyone was wondering what's going on with Intel, they are at Mar-a-Lago. Make America great again can only be true if Intel is saved. I thought this was very, very interesting reporting and very cool that all of these different companies are coming together. It's a little sad that like of course if you want to say entirely new law involved but yeah the only uh my my initial reaction there is that many large companies were just were in florida kissing the ring uh all weekend so it's hard to i'm you know i'm sure there's more backstory there well you can go to the reporting that happened the next day on the 18th when uh there's a headline here elon musk reportedly emerges as a potential Intel buyer involving Qualcomm and Global Foundries in this blockbuster deal.

7:08Yeah. And so did you ever do a documentary on Intel? I did on Intel, never on Qualcomm. Why have they, what's the high level on why they don't seem to have any momentum as a business? Just mismanagement? Missed mobile mainly. That's the big one. We got some beverages delivered. So we got to, we got to hop over the, I can actually Yeah, you get it. But yeah, the high level on Intel is that they missed mobile and they were printing money in server. And so they made a ton of money selling chips for servers. But then mobile came and ARM became the standard processor, which was, ARM is like a licensing company.

7:51They don't actually have a foundry. And so when you hear about TSMC making Apple Silicon, Apple Silicon is a chip that is very power efficient because it runs off of the ARM architecture. which is designed for like not super high performance computing, but low power consumption. So your phone doesn't get hot. It lasts almost a year sometimes, as you know. My phone gets 365. When I get three or four posts all doing pretty well, my phone starts to melt some mouth. You have to turn the notifications off. Cheers, by the way. What wound up happening is that - warm red bull for you yeah it's terrible um red bull futurist would be proud of us yeah um but so so what winds up happening is that these low these low power chips people thought oh they're just useful in cell phones turns out that having good uh price and performance per watt and per energy usage is very important and then eventually those scaled up to be what's in laptops and then eventually even what's in the server and so until it got until kind of missed that and then they also had a variety of of problems going back and forth with like are they a foundry or are they just a design chip like um arm you would never you would never be like oh i i need a new gaming chip i'm gonna go get an arm processor yeah arm is like the the architecture and you would also never say i would oh for my next gaming rig i really want a tsmc fab chip like no you say nvidia right i mean the real hardos they want to go straight from taiwan yeah they go pick up their chips yeah they only like the same analysis like buying like you know it's like watch collectors right i want to go and they want to feel it they want to really inspect it yeah they want to know what they're running on when they're in the uh the digital trenches yeah and so uh so intel had a lot of trouble uh driving down to the to the the more advanced nodes like three nanometer five nanometer know they fell behind and then uh apple switched from intel to apple silicon that was like kind of you know a death knell and they've been really really struggling and then they fired their ceo um and so it's it's been kind of a mess of a company and then even with the uh even with the the chips act there was a lot of criticism because like it was great a headline number oh america's going to invest a ton of money in semiconductors that make tons of sense like Everyone's on board with that.

10:20But I believe Ben Thompson's argument was that it should have been set up a lot more like Operation Warp Speed, which the structure of was guaranteed buying, not sending money for specific projects. So just saying, hey, we're essentially going to create a strategic GPU reserve. if you can manufacture a super fast GPU on three nanometer in the United States using American labor, we will buy a hundred, you will buy a hundred thousand of them and just like build a cluster. And so then it's like, everyone can compete. The money aside for the chip sack hasn't really been getting. It hasn't really gone to Intel yet, exactly.

10:58And so, uh, I used to have like kind of like a, you know, that fork in the road meme, the, the dark castle versus like the, the sunny day. I used to argue that we would probably be better off if Elon had bought Intel instead of buying X. But who knows? Now he's going to get both. So we'd love to see that. Moving on to the next tech political story. TikTok has been going back and forth. It's banned one minute. It's unbanned the next. It definitely put a fire under X's ass because as they launched their video feed, which is very cool. Which was in the works. Oh, yeah, for sure. But it was like perfect timing to launch it.

11:37But it's crazy. I was so, Brandon, my former teammate and good friend. Jacoby? Jacoby. You guys all know about Jacoby. So Jacoby is now the only designer at X. Yeah. And I texted Jacoby Saturday night because we always go back and forth whenever a UFC fight is happening. Yeah. And no response. and i so i messaged him like as uh you know the the murab umar fight was getting settled and he no you know he responded later like what i didn't catch it or something like that and i was like what like are you crazy are you crazy um of course they were in a war room trying to ship back the video was one designer nice um so anyways bravo to uh the whole video yeah i'm excited for to take advantage of it.

12:27I think there's some really, I think it'd be really big for the growth of the show. So expect more vertical content from us. So here's what I don't understand. I don't know how to go about, so I can see like the Jeff Lewis temp check videos working there. Yep. Digital, you know, video native shit posting will probably be a format. Totally. But it's much harder to do because you have to play a character. So I'm interested to see what sort of novel formats and types of content actually come out otherwise is it just like i mean video means yeah i i think the default post on x that you know we'd love to react to on the show is like a very concise like two sentence post that has some humor and also some insight uh you know i'm thinking of like the the rune shape rotator versus word cell post or yeah or solana just being like moon should be a state one of these like all-time bangers um banger archive that type of content um and and and and as it became easier and easier to edit image memes on your phone many people that take posting on x seriously installed some sort of photoshop app on their phone and were able to or image flip is a meme generator that you can just use in the browser and i think that the tooling will get better to to do video stuff especially with ai where you'll be able to say okay i want the patrick bateman walking into the office in american psycho with listening to the headphones but change out the song for this song and then oh and deep fake make it make it aoc yeah exactly exactly and and so you'll be able to describe that maybe in x in grok yeah ideally but in a third party app very generating slop at scale slop but i mean if it's done if it's done if it's done artistically and there's an inspiration there and it's timely and it's funny like i think it can be very very good so yeah um so tiktok's been going back and forth getting banned unbanned uh we talked about uh how the supreme court upheld the ban it's now there was also a bunch of players over the weekend submitting buys uh mr yeah we have a perplexity post here from mckay quigley uh perplexity is teetering towards being pure slop your competitors have caught up to you while you waste time with this nonsensical headline baiting marketing drivel.

14:48There's now no reason for me to use your stagging product. Jesus, brutal. This won't be popular, but they need a wake-up call. Yeah, Perplexed AI makes bid to merge with TikTok US. I mean, a lot of people were throwing these out there. I wonder if this was real or if this was like, I mean, they say headline baiting marketing drivel. I don't know if McCain knew something, but... Is there... We were even joking about issuing a bid. Here's the thing. i i am i don't know we were going to issue a bid to buy red book oh yeah or i guess we think it's a very dude yeah yeah no red red red note is a very strategic asset for the u.s because we're one-shotting yeah their best and brightest exactly but i don't know i think it's cute that it's a good way to get attention to submit a bid to buy tiktok but is there anybody on earth that could pay more that than oracle or walmart or e-log coalition of yeah yeah and if it's going to require a hundred billion dollars is there anybody that would actually like i have to imagine some of these bidders are like oh we'll give you you know 20 billion and like you know you'll get some type of royal you know yeah like weird payout structures like that and so as i understand it now trump has paused the ban allowing tiktok to operate uh and he clearly negotiated to to have the copy in the ban messaging say thank you to president trump or said something to that degree thank you to trump for you know working with us to find a solution so you know some real putting on an art of the deal clinic apparently uh because they don't just thank president you know they're not why would he think we really finessing them yeah this has like been pressure from the right for the entire time there's been pressure on tiktok um so now yeah i mean i think i think he really does have a lot of leverage yeah and uh and the fate of tiktok hangs in the balance and it's up to trump and he has his thumb out ready to go thumbs up or thumbs down on anything and yeah and can make demands and maybe that's just more project texas stuff more you know relocating maybe that's a sale or forced divestiture maybe it's no at least he has the leverage i guess i would i would be incredibly shocked and disappointed if if all this turns into like a project texas v2 yeah like it's just not enough yeah no no no the algorithm specifically cannot be it's not about the data no like people are going to share all that stuff online anyway so it's not about oh you know that's really not what it's about it's about i mean you talk that they can put their finger on the scale and you talked to steinman and he was like even if the app changed hands and was under new ownership it is impossible to remove all the possible backdoors because there's just so many and it's so such a large application exactly uh yeah that that's why i've firmly been in favor of just letting the thing yeah die yeah letting all those users flood back to great American big tech companies.

17:53And so Signal says, with TikTok temporarily closed, maybe it's time to rethink how we use the internet. Imagine if Instagram shut down at 9 p.m. like a grocery store or X closed at 11 p.m., open late, but not 24-7. We might all feel a little less pressure to read, to post, to exist online all the time. Maybe we'd sleep better, feel calmer, even be happier. A digital commons with operating hours enforcing temporal boundaries. It would disrupt the dopamine factory recalibrate the rhythm of online life and impose artificial scarcity to make digital engagement feel intentional not compulsive can you imagine the flood of posts that would go up at like 9 a.m every morning yeah store opens it's like black friday rushing in i gotta get my breakfast oh yeah all the idea it would be fun people yeah yeah that's the kind of thing never but but to think about it would be it would be an interesting statement though for a social media company to say hey christmas morning we're going to be closing down just a few hours yeah spend it with your family yeah uh because these apps are so addictive that even in a moment like christmas day yeah you're gonna check you're gonna check it 20 times before noon you know it's brutal so Cormac here says never depend on a single platform I'm glad we switched to Instagram months ago and the Oasis Water app has 43k followers on TikTok but TikTok is unavailable and 104 ,000 followers on Instagram so Cormac, one of our players on PMF4Die, awesome savage so he has just like figured out how to get attention with with this sort of short form video.

19:34And this is what I've been saying in previous episodes. Smart creators and business owners were not saying, I just hope it doesn't get banned. I'm just going to keep doing my thing. No, I'll keep using the app if my customers are there. But ultimately, I'm going to start to build my audience back up elsewhere. Yeah, smart. Should we talk about Wander before we go into Trumpcoin? We are stuck in a hotel right now. The lighting is terrible. The room is tiny. It's a very nice hotel, but everything sucks about this place. The only thing, to their credit, they printed out all of our posts. They did a really beautiful red envelope.

20:19But no, can't thank the Wander guys enough. Last week when we were going through evacuation stuff, it had been super helpful. Shout out Wander if you're looking for a place to stay. We're excited. We can't announce anything yet, but at some point this year, we will be driving across the country and sampling a number of walkers. Oh, that's really great. I'm looking forward to that. We have that to look forward to. Okay, let's move on to Trump coin. You probably heard about it already, but we got some good posts about it. Tristan Thompson says, my phone has been buzzing for the last two days with friends and family asking about crypto and whether they should buy Trump.

20:54I've been deep in the crypto space and in the trenches for the last 10 months working to make the most of this cycle as a major wealth opportunity why did you share Tristan Thompson is an NBA player so Tristan Thompson talented basketball player he was in dating one of the married has a kid with one of the Kardashians people were saying that he fumbled a Kardashian so his opinion doesn't matter matter but this this thread was interesting one thing is historically when you've seen pro athletes start to post about crypto yeah that is a top signal it's been a reliable top signal however this time might be different um but i did i did have another moment today i went to see my taylor yep and he asked me like you know he's like i'm starting to think about buying some crypto yeah and i was like uh when you're taxi drivers day trading pro athletes are telling you to go all in and you're and you're fine uh you know you're bespoke uh taylor is always by trump coin it's a little rough out there yeah i mean it's not rough it's just it's maybe the feverish feverish and now's the time to create so here's here right yeah yeah tell them create a new create a new account post every single day this is the top once an hour top top top and then delete all the false top and then and then just repost the the quote the next cycle yeah yeah next cycle just keep doing it keep doing it yeah people will forget that you did that that's great uh yeah i was i was laughing at the idea of starting two hedge funds like true north true north capital and true south capital one just goes turbo long the market the other goes south the market or short the market and then you just shut the one down and you're just like look at my returns i'm time to raise fund too it's 10 times larger yeah we had a bad we had a bad no no you shut down the other one and you just don't even raise for it yeah so so it's like oh yeah like the market did go down north true south capital was the one that called it you got to pile into this thing yeah but don't ask me about true north capital that had half half the you have i think it's a zeroed out yeah exactly that one's zero but like you're not investing in that one you're investing in the one that went up two thousand percent um mert from helios says hey very nice soul all-time high you got there would be a shame if i were to just visit the patek philippe boutique at the mall tomorrow i love this great yeah i think it's been doing It's been very well in the Solana world lately.

23:34Yeah, I mean, one way to reduce the sell pressure is just, you know. Buy watches, rotate watches. Take out, you know, an asset-backed loan against your Solana. Use that to buy. This is one of the things people were frustrated with about the Trump coin was actually people were like, yeah, it's been great. I made$10 million on Trump coin, but everyone's rotating out of Doge. We should have so much money. It's like. It's all just. It's just sloshing around. it's all just nonsense money uh i like this one from pomp he says berkshire hathaway is the boomer meme coin it was started by the og financial influencer buffett used to buy a stock and then go shill them in national newspapers magazines nothing wrong with buffett berkshire but important to understand meme coins are not new yeah i mean perfect bait for all anybody that under anybody that owns stock i need to like tears about stuff like cash flow or like durable goods or yeah or brand yeah or book value any of those ridiculous expected earnings yeah no i do so his his point that he obviously packaged this up in a way to just piss off as many people as possible but his point of being that um assets trade based on their sort of memetic potential right yeah i mean it is true about the buffett strategy like i remember when he rescued Bank of America.

24:58And during the 08 financial crisis, Bank of America was down real bad. And Buffett came in and bought a ton of the stock. And then the next day, a front page op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on why Bank of America is going to make it through while AIG and Lehman are failing. And so it was just a huge signal to the market that this is the bottom. Buffett's going to back up the truck to save this company so you can get in safely now. And it was correct in that he was going to save that company, but it was also like - Marketing. Marketing. Yeah, exactly. Carried No Interest says, I don't think everyone is fully comprehending what just happened.

25:35Trump just facilitated the single greatest wealth transfer creation event in history. He also sent a message, I support crypto degeneracy. He now has the market. He now has the power to reset how crypto works entirely as it relates to capital markets. We might see searchers slash funds launching coins tied to acquisitions, dividends in the next year. what's stopping me from dropping the carried interest coin using the proceeds to fund acquisitions and trying tying dividends to coin holders might happen in the next year everyone wants to launch a coin now yeah uh i think unless you're trump it's going to be difficult wouldn't recommend it but carried's broader carries broader i think the interesting thing here is that crypto has always had tremendous potential the technology is obviously incredible in so many ways.

26:20It was the technology was always held back by the regulatory environment. So if you wanted to make a token represent equity, well, okay, it's so, securities are so regulated in so many ways that it will cost you millions of dollars a year to actually do this. So it's not viable economically. And then that kind of goes against crypto, which is about like efficient capital formation. And so, yeah, I'm interested to see what happens here. it um uh i mean it is wild that i i do think that trump's team was very specific about positioning the tokens as memes yeah like you were buying memes yeah yeah and then melania launched i think today yeah she i think pretty clearly the official melania meme is live you can buy melania now melania meme.com yeah they're using that yeah they're they're they're trying to say that um like there's no and it's and it's crazy i do think that um it for some reason trump has not actually gotten that much attention around how hard he's been selling into his yeah fan you know his basically yeah you know he apparently in the first 24 hours he sold 500 million dollars of the oaken i'm sure he's sold what did the lone ranger say is like imagine jules washington passing around the tri-corner hat say after hey they burned down my house yeah growing at 20 yeah he probably would his i i was saying to a uh avid uh trump uh enthusiast um i was saying like give me the the rationale for why this is not kind of sad yeah and his point of view was think of it as a way for Trump supporters to basically transfer wealth to Trump in a, in a more, you know, in a, in a way that gives them some potential jump side or whatever, but really it is a wealth transfer because there's not, to be clear, there's no wealth creation of meme coins, right?

28:27It used to be if you wanted to transfer money into wealth, you had to buy Trump stakes and then stay at the Trump tower and do all those things, because all those are much lower margin. Buy the Trump watch. Then, you know, for every dollar you buy, he gets 10, essentially. Yeah. Liquidity, potentially. Although here's Balaji, kind of breaking down the math behind this. He says, a meme coin is a zero-sum lottery. There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything. It's actually negative sum if the platform takes a cut.

29:00So coming out as anti-meme coin, Abolito is obviously very pro-crypto, but very special here. The interesting thing, though, is that there's been so many of these high-profile coins that seemingly should have been zeros, but never were. I have no idea what Doge actually trades at right now. Billions. Everybody would have said, oh, spikes to 100 billion, and then... It was the intention of the creator of Doge for it to go to zero as a lesson for the crypto degens. And then that turned it into a countercultural meme amongst the crypto community. And it became a rallying cry for you can't take us down.

29:39Very bizarre. Jeff Lewis, this was a very interesting post. He says, new counterculture just dropped. Pro crypto anti-meme coin will be interesting to see how it develops. Yeah, there's a lot of new battle lines being drawn. because, I mean, I was talking to somebody on Saturday night about the crypto strategic reserve. They were very, very pro Bitcoin in the strategic reserve, very anti anything else being in the crypto reserve. Yeah. And would think and actually thought that if they put, I forget exactly which stable coin in, it would completely undermine everything else. And I think the big argument, I mean, the argument against meme coins as actual finance, you know, it's effectively a gambling product, an entertainment product, similar to going to Las Vegas.

30:31Yeah. I had posted yesterday that tokens are the poker chips of the matrix, right? Yep. You're just shuffling them around, playing these different games. Yep. I think specifically what launching Melania less than 24 hours after Trump was that there's no scarcity, right? Yeah. You can just make these. I have no idea. And then people were trying to, people were trying to pin, people think they found Barron Trump's address and they were, you know, and then they were looking at all. Call and buy that one immediately. Yeah, and they were just like ripping. Pop even faster. Yeah, crazy. Balaji summarizes, the Overton window has been smashed.

31:10Everything is now legal. Many startups will try to raise funds by issuing tokens as explicit crypto equity. As context, the SEC distorted the market in the last decade by forcing founders to obscure the obvious analogy between tokens and equity. But there's nothing morally wrong about with moving equity from spreadsheets and NASDAQs to blockchains. Indeed, from a technical perspective, it's far better to represent equities on chain. You can hold them in a wallet, price them with an API call, and track them on an explorer. You can easily issue dividends, execute buybacks, and manage vesting schedules.

31:43And from a financial perspective, there's no contest between the global market of crypto investors and the local market for any given city. But that shouldn't mean short term behavior. Founders can and should implement lockups, drag along, co-sale rights and the like. All these conventions align long term interests of investors and founders. Yeah. So breaking this down a little bit for people that don't know, historically, when these sort of high profile crypto projects are launching, where they've raised equity from traditional VCs, and then they'll typically raise what you attach a token warrant, which means the investors are buying equity.

32:19Let's say, you know, when, when Yuga Labs was doing their$4 billion seed round, the investors were buying equity and then they had a token warrant that would give them tokens, you know, basically, yeah, proportional amount of tokens at a future date, if the company were to launch a token. Um, and the token though was actually, would be launched by these sort of very complicated foundations that were typically offshore so they'd be in like the british virgin islands or like you know places like panama where there's just sort of more murky less uh scrutiny around securities law and stuff like that and then the foundations would have like independent board members and all this stuff and so they'd end up being these super complicated structures where people would be like oh you know if open sea launched a token look at all the fees they're doing you know look at think about and it's like well the token actually cannot capture the cash flows of the business right like legally no token except these sort of direct and very clear violations of securities law are capturing and so they would do different stuff where they would use fees to buy back the token sure which would reduce the supply and increase the price which companies do as well sure um but anyways it it all like created a lot of friction to on-chain capital formation yeah and so balaji's point is that um i don't know if public it's hard you know i'm sure we could we this would actually be worth having him on the show to talk about some of this stuff i think there's an argument that you don't want your cap table on a public blockchain that everybody can see because then if you have somebody that owns 15 of your company and they start selling and trading, it could spook everybody, right?

34:01Because that does happen, right? Like a VC will say, you know what, it's got a little bit like inflated and you don't want everybody. Like a run on the bank. Yeah, yeah. Your startup, like locking up your investors essentially for like the 10-year ride can be very good. And there's plenty of times when - No, even companies will want to offer opportunities for liquidity for investors and employees and stuff like that but you don't you don't necessarily want the press to be able to see like oh look at all these andurals you're selling or whatever yeah uh welcome back to technology brothers i just thought of a new segment yeah should we get a window uh that's just in a frame like the size gong called the overton window and to smash it on best locations that's good because uh if there was a few moments this weekend where you could have uh totally you know with it maybe like one of those, you know, glass breakers.

34:59Yeah. I think the Edison window shattered in terms of what was appropriate formal wear. Yeah. We saw a lot of rough rented tuxedos out there. We got a post from Gabe Azar, uh, quoting Beth. He says he's wearing the finest of rented tux on my way to the DC inaugural crypto ball. See you there. And Gabe asks, how did the tech bros think about, feel about rented tuxedos. Some have said you should buy a tuxedo before you are 30. I agree. I don't think, I don't think, I think rent a tuxedo, just be in tuxedos more. Yes. There are levels to this. Yeah, yeah. You need to be able to rent a tuxedo on short notice.

35:41You need to get a tuxedo. Then you need to get a tailored tuxedo. I think, well, I think. And then you also need to learn how to tie a bow tie yourself in under five seconds. Yeah. Like kind of like a Rubik's cube. Essentially. So it took me a while to learn, but I finally learned. And it looks great because at the end of the night, you untie it and it hangs down and everyone knows, oh, that guy can tie the bow tie. He doesn't have the clip on. But normally I need to like watch the YouTube video and kind of like fumble with it a few times to get a couple shots on goal to get it perfect. This time, putting on my tuxedo, nailed it on the first try.

36:15In the airport? No, this was the second day. So I was in the hotel room, but I threw it on and I was running a little bit late. Dinner was about to start and I threw on the bow tie and I nail it on the first, on the first try perfectly. And I was like, I'm so ready. It felt great. So yeah. But anyways, don't, there's no, no reason to shame anybody for, for renting a tuxedo. I do think this rule of own a tuxedo before you're 30 is, is a good rule though. Yeah. And better than showing up in loungewear. Like some people did. Yeah. Yeah, that's rough. And J.D. Vance's tailor is Romaldo Pele, a 90-year-old Italian immigrant in Ohio.

36:55I love this guy. Yeah. He's just been working for 90 years on fine suits. And yeah, you need to get a tailor. You need to have someone - Develop a relationship. Develop a relationship. And yeah, there's just a lot of posts about the inauguration. I don't know. Did you listen to the speech? I thought this is wild. So Dallian says the White House website right now, incredible. And Trump is just continuing to prove that there really are no rules and laws and norms really don't apply unless you want them to. Because underneath this picture, I think it just said America is back or something like that.

37:34But it was just hilarious because, I mean, super aggressive. It was just dunking on the previous administration. The old iconic, pretty firm dunk for the White House website. but respect to the engineers that got this up so quickly after the transfer of power. It must have been. No, the transfer happens, I think like at the moment that - Well, I know, but you have to imagine it's - Yeah, sorry, my password's not really working. Well, did you see the re-host website? The X handle turned over and Trump sent the first tweet from the POTUS account and people hadn't refreshed their cookies or their cash.

38:08So it looked like it was from Biden because it hadn't refreshed that part. I think that's what happens it's very odd Growing Daniel says we finally have you're like wow Biden can post now it would have been a wild post for Biden to post sit up straight Daniel says we finally have a student of the green lines in the executive branch nothing can stop America now and it's a photo of J.D. Vance with the vice president of China this morning and they are both standing up perfectly straight perfect green lines I think you nailed it It's kind of wild that we can be in such a cold war and the VP still comes through.

38:49Yeah, yeah, you got to do business. You got to negotiate. But you got to be, you know, do they even, Han Jung, Han Jung here, got a kind of a nervous smirk going on. Yeah, he looks a lot less at ease than JD. And JD has the ability to pull. Yeah. The pull, you know. The pull. Yeah. And so. He's looking good. JD's dressed well there. I don't think the men's wear guy can say anything. Yeah, the men's wear guy's in shambles. I'm still waiting for the men's wear guy breakdown of, who's that guy that showed up in basketball shorts? Fetterman? I mean, how do you even break that down? You just say that Fetterman's in basketball shorts.

39:31I hope that the men's wear guy does a thread and he's just like, these are the perfect, this is the perfect way to wear basketball shorts. They should be breaking right at the knee. not too baggy not too tight he absolutely nailed it this is the definition of lounge wear this is this is fantastic athletic wear and he did nothing wrong and then he's like jd vance's suit is two two inches too short it's terrible he's just like the most partisan yeah it's kind of it's good cover for jd to be you know i'm working with this 90 year old taylor who's like you know been doing this because for the menswear guy to attack JD, he has to attack the 90 year old Taylor.

40:10There you go. So that guy's providing some, some, some cover. Yeah. Have you seen this rumor going around that, uh, Vivek Ramaswamy is departing Doge amid friction with staff with a source close to Trump saying that Vivek has worn out his welcome. According to CBS news, I think this is fake news. I think there's community notes on this. I think it hasn't been announced. People are saying Vivek still needs something, but it's back and forth. oh i i heard out yet i i felt like this afternoon it seemed like he was making a run at ohio governor yeah we talked about that on the last show certainly seems like that would be a possibility but he's been around and i saw saga and jetty posting about uh i think vivek was going into like into the capital with a group of people that were all everyone else that was joining the administration so it looked like he was still in the game i don't know we'll see how it plays out but you'll hear about it here first uh we will we'll keep breaking we'll keep breaking news yeah yeah clearly we did really did our homework on that one yeah that's why you listen to this show not for the facts not for the fact for the general a general point of view on unknown circumstances a general technology brothers we're here to provide a general point of view on us own activities in far away places exactly that we really have no insight into i mean whatever whatever best it takes was we pulled so this was actually funny so the the the former global editor of tech crunch announced that he was leaving last week and i pinged him and i was like hey you know you've been running tech crunch he was like i'm looking he's like open to work kind of thing so i pinged him and he's like he's i'm like you know check it out like let's talk and responds i don't uh i i love what you're doing i'm not sure i can really be helpful i'm really looking to build you know a newsroom and i was like what like you know we don't look like two guys that would have a newsroom come on like we have the best we have the top producer in the in the country i mean the newsroom misunderstands what newsroom means yeah yeah a newsroom is not a news we're gonna have a newsroom of of shit posters that is the newsroom yeah exactly ix is the newsroom yeah one of one of my favorite moments from like one of the first episodes was where we pulled up the the new adam newman post we're like oh adam newman's back in the game he started a new uh company like did you read the article no neither of us did and we're like but we get the gist yeah yeah yeah he's bad act the vibe's great let's move on yeah uh let's go on to some uh some more tech focused timeline some more vc focused timeline moving on from the inauguration We got Seth Rosenberg saying, VCs sound smart to other VCs via pessimism and founders via optimism.

42:56Do you think there's a little code switching thing going on in VC lingo world? Oh, I mean, you put four VCs together and they will just trash any company. Yeah, they really do need to sound smart that way. And also just, I mean, it also lets us look at the problems in the world and all the things that we're, I'm so aware of how bad things are and that's why I'm going to be able to fix it. Part of it is, yeah, part of it too is for every company that has a competitive fundraise, there's a bunch of VCs that would have wanted to do the deal. Oh, sure, sure, sure. And so you're, you're always going to look at way more things.

43:35Yep. And, and if you're actually bidding on competitive companies, you might, you're going to issue more term sheets than you actually do deals. Very few funds like have kind of like a, even a 90 % hit rate. Right. It's kind of, it's, it's pretty hard to do unless you're doing just weird stuff. Which also is a strategy that works, but that just means there's this going to be this general sort of frustration. And never taking board seats. No, I mean, but I'm just saying that the sort of the frustration with wanting to do a deal can shift into pessimism. Yep. And then, yeah, I think if you're talking, VCs talking to founders, nobody wants to talk to a pessimistic, you know, super pessimistic or, you know, you want to talk to people that are.