Ms. Information Herself, Acquiring Mountains, Jonathan Moneymaker, Start A Tradition Today

30:10So you look at Mr. Beast, over 100 million subscribers. His business does over$100 million. You look at a lot of the finance channels that have a couple million views, a couple million subscribers, a couple million bucks in revenue. And then of course there's costs below the line. But Taylor is opining on the end of an era. The era of journalistic podcasts like Serial and Slow Burn is fading away. and even the schlocky true crime and horror standbys like My Favorite Murder and Last Podcast on the Left no longer hold as much cultural sway and brand power as they did a few years ago. Instead, the new podcast stars are young men like Kelly.

30:49They're part of the manosphere that's been talked about a lot in politics lately. Ever since Donald Trump made their shows, he campaign stops. Yeah, and Taylor's last podcast episode was with your friend, a researcher. Joshua Sidarella. Joshua, who is an expert on the Manosphere. And it was a great episode where Joshua basically mansplained the Manosphere to Taylor and the audience. So it was very insightful for me considering I've listened to some of these podcasts before, but I'd never heard the Manosphere described so perfectly. Yeah, it's fascinating. is all this question, there's been a big question in the media about like, should the Democrats build a Democrat version of Joe Rogan?

31:35And there's a bunch of reasons why that may or may not work. They kind of, if you look at the top technology or the top podcasts, there are already plenty of left-wing shows with huge reaches. The Harris campaign just didn't do them. Like there's the Daily Show, there's the Ezra Klein Show, the NYT Daily, there's Last Podcast on the Left, and And there's that one with those comedians called, I'm blanking on it, but it's also really, Smartless is really big. And then there's the one with the Obama writer called Pod Save America. So there's just like so many, like the views are clearly there. It's not like, you know, oh, there's 100 million Americans who just aren't listening to podcasts.

32:18They're just listening to different podcasts, but they just weren't prioritized. So I kind of rejected the whole premise when I was talking to her. But there is an interesting question about why male podcasts have become so big, how this happened. My thesis for her was that a big part of it is that Apple has less algorithmic control over what people look at and listen to in the podcast player. So they are much less likely to deplatform people. They did deplatform InfoWars, but they never deplatformed the Daily Wire in the same way that YouTube can just adjust the algorithm to promote a little bit less.

32:55Because Kevin Ruse did this whole deep dive on, I think it was called Rabbit Hole. He did a whole podcast and series about young men who go on YouTube and look for, you know, self-improvement content, essentially. And then they wind up in a conservative rabbit hole of content that gets more and more right wing as they go down it. and the recommendation algorithm was it wasn't tuned to deal with politics at all it was completely neutral about it it was like if you if you search for a video about a you know 911 turbo s well you're gonna you're gonna see a video about a more niche porsche and you're gonna see a anst video and then a gt3 rs and then some retro porsche because it knows you might end up on cars and bids buying exactly exactly so it's kind of like a funnel for anything and of course it worked the same way for conservative content and liberal content too yeah and she and this this piece calls it out but youtube is i i do think it's starting to change but it forever because youtube originated with a lot of gaming content that was like over i think it was like over 50 percent of all content uploaded to youtube for a while i think it may still be that way was just gaming content that attracted a lot of men and then uh that has still snowballed where i see this have you know running a youtube ad network um you know i don't run it i haven't run it in years but starting one in college it was always it used to be a real challenge to uh help a female oriented consumer brand actually scale up on youtube because there just wasn't that many channels that's changed a lot as youtube has become but i think i think one of the the i don't think this is like specifically called out but some something that people miss with youtube is there is um it has complete so much of youtube content today is watched on tvs right and so what that means is that the influence that tv used to hold is now held by the the the male podcast experts right the huberman's elects freedman's um and a lot of them have deals where they can still post the full show on youtube this is the thing with the the harris going on call her daddy and trump going on rogan rogan is now a couple years out from his spotify deal he's allowed to post the full episode on YouTube as well as on Spotify.

35:11Call Her Daddy is still in that tweener phase where they have to gate it. And so what went out on YouTube from Call Her Daddy was just a clip. It wasn't the whole thing. And it was a lot shorter. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that goes into the dynamics there. They had a good quote from Samir Chowdhury. Do you know this guy? No. Host of the Colin and Samir show. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great show. They break down everything in the YouTube world. And they really break down the business of YouTube. really great interviews with Mr. Beast and a lot of other folks. Samir says, YouTube is a largely male audience and male loneliness is a factor.

35:46You have a lot of young men looking for community and friendship, and they've been able to find that through podcasting. Yeah, we've talked about the cure to male loneliness being just calling up your ramp, you know, sales ref, right? Your SDR over at ramp. They'll talk to you for hours. Or going on Tegas. Yeah, going on Tegas. Taking expert network calls. Exactly. But I resonate with this when I discovered podcasts while I was a young man. I was 18. And it felt like having a mentor in my pocket where I could listen to hundreds of hours of people that had gone and done the things that I wanted to do.

36:24And I learned the language of the industries that I was interested. I learned different health practices that, you know, many of which I still do today. So podcasts have served as basically an older brother to me that I didn't have in terms of teaching me about the world. And it's influenced many of my beliefs, right? Yeah. My question here is, he says, YouTube is a largely male audience. And so I wonder what the actual gender breakdown is. Is it 60-40? Is it 70-30? And then if you zoom out. Can you look that up? And then if you zoom out, I wonder if, is it that women are just listening to less content or consuming less content?

37:07Or are they on, is Instagram more female? Is TikTok more female? Or is YouTube and podcasting really just skews male? Like are AirPods sold more to men than women? I wonder about that. Or just like headphones, like listening to things. Like the thing that is upstream of the individual platform. because I would believe that there are some platforms that lean male, some platforms that lean female, but I would be very surprised if we learned that just content consumption is a male phenomenon. Yeah. It's interesting. So as of now, this site is reporting that only 54 % of YouTube users 18 and above are male.

37:47That sounds right to me. That sounds right to me because, but, but it is in different niches. Obviously, if you look at like the business niche or the manosphere, obviously that's going to skew male, but there are going to be plenty of sub niches that skew female. 50-50, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so I, I kind of, I kind of disagree with that characterization of YouTube and I don't think the data backs that up. Um, but it is interesting that, that just the, the accessible product on, on social media in, on new media was accessible to the conservatives this time around where next year or in in 2024 I guess 2028 we could be looking at oh it's the TikTok election or the Instagram reels election and the Democrats are crushing because they have much more viral potential on there and it's a little bit of a more like for JD he seems to do really well in a three-hour show same with Trump but maybe the Democrats whoever they put up next, whether it's Buttigieg or AOC, they'll do better on a streaming platform, or they'll do better on a short form platform.

38:50And so I'm wondering if this holds forever, or if this will be disrupted. And so let's go to my quote in here. The other commonality, many of these podcasters eventually fill the poll towards political coverage, which is something I've talked about, which has been an even wider appeal than topics like artificial intelligence and crypto. John Coogan, an entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund and host of the podcast Technology Brothers, said he experienced this pressure firsthand when trying to grow his YouTube channel, which now has nearly half a million subscribers. You want your business to grow.

39:29You have employees, he said. But as you grow, you need the numbers to go up. The algorithm is addictive. You realize that there are only 100 ,000 people interested in tech or AI, at a certain point, you max out the technology or business market size. And so this is very natural. We've seen this with all in going political and everyone getting really up in a tizzy about that. But it makes sense. They're growing their business. And what they're doing is impactful to the tech community. I was just talking to somebody at the gym. And let's not take away their desire to go political. They enjoy the culture war, right?

40:03Those guys like duking it out on the timeline with the Taylor Lorenz's of the world. And they just enjoy it. It's like a sport to them. And it helps them get bigger and bigger and bigger. When J. Cal's posting, like, we're the number one podcast, he's not even talking about the number one podcast in technology anymore. He will have episodes. The All In Show will have episodes that are the number one podcast in all the categories. And it's because it appeals to everyone. If they were just sticking to deep dives on, oh, what AI agent is the best or what startup got funded, they're not going to go broad.

40:36And they want to go bigger and bigger and bigger. And this is very natural. And it creates an opening for new shows to come in. This is what happened with Lex Friedman. He used to be the Artificial Intelligence podcast. It was all AI researchers. And eventually he broadened out, started having political people on, started having Jocko Willink on and Rogan and all sorts of different people on, health stuff. and that created the opportunity for Dwarkesh, who's doing fantastically. And now Dwarkesh is doing Tony Blair and eventually Dwarkesh will broaden out to all sorts of different topics that he's interested in.

41:07He won't just be the AI researcher show and then there'll be a new Dwarkesh and that's great. And it's this virtuous cycle that should not be, it shouldn't be criticized. It's just, it's a positive thing. The only thing I wanna see out of Taylor is if she wants to really fight back against the manosphere, she's gotta get bigger. She's gotta monetize more. I want her, you know, there's this talk within the tech world of what's going to be the first $1 billion one person company could easily be Taylor Lorenz, the Taylor Lorenz Media Supercorp Inc. Yep. That could be the world's first. Yeah. And that would be, I would love to see her as a beaner.

41:42I'd love to see her, you know, potentially gunning for that first, you know, podcast IPO, right? She's going to have to go up against newcomer for that. Total SPAC candidate. If she would really start to focus on monetization. So my biggest criticism of Taylor is focus on monetization. If you really want to, yeah, if you want to understand the creator economy more, more promoted posts. I like that she's working with AWS and encouraging young technologists to build on AWS through that partnership, but ramp it up, right? Like ramp it up. Yep. I like it. More ads. And, um, we're, you know, I feel like we're lucky to have her as a, as a sparring partner, you know, the pressure makes her a better journalist.

42:21And, um, and so if you're listening to this, you're a founder. her you're in technology give it on the record interview to taylor most of the time it'll come out great like this but every once in a while you'll slip up admit that you read one unqualified reservations post and she'll destroy your entire life but that's the way it goes that's the game that's the game um and it's a good game yeah so she's actually retooling her podcast right now we saw this she's she's shifting from a interview show um to a dual host uh conversational show And so hopefully that leads to breakout success. Whenever I see somebody with an interview show, I'm always cautiously optimistic that they'll play the game correctly.

43:01Like if she wants to be this technology political show, like she should have gotten Kamala Harris on the show. And it's like, what was her plan to get to that size, to that scale? And you can't, I mean, I love Josh, but he is very much a micro internet celebrity. He's small. And so he's not going to bring a huge audience. But it's and it's also a question of Taylor Lorenz is such an alpha. Could she and Kamala, who's also an alpha, even exist in the same room together? You got to figure out a way. I mean, Rogan, Rogan figured it out with Trump. Yeah, they got some great content together. And so I think that's that's the big problem with with the the Democrat version of Rogan is that no one is really grinding out like, OK, how do I make sure that I have to be the stop?

43:47It almost felt like Caller Daddy was like lucked into it and was like, okay, I guess we'll do this. But this wasn't our plan. Whereas if you're really trying to build the Rogan of the left, like you got to be getting all these people on. Yep. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. Thanks for listening to that deep dive. Didn't even have to put her in the truth zone because it was a truthful article. The information. Everyone who's calling it the misinformation is misinformed. It's not the misinformation. Stop calling it the misinformation. It's the information. It's not the misinformation. the San Francisco information, the San Francisco information.

44:20So go easy on them. They're great. And they just, they just picked up an all time player. So we love them. Hey, yeah. Oh, before we have a fantastic promoted post by Tyler. He says that inspired by Friday's episode of technology brothers, I created a marketplace for sales reps to rent.edu email addresses from female college students to increase their response rate to cold emails. If you're a sales rep or sales leader looking to crush your Q4 goals, try leveraging a.edu email today. Check it out at edumart.io or at the edumart. And he's created this fantastic marketplace where you can go on. If you are selling enterprise SaaS, go on there, get a.edu email address from a female college student and if you're in college go on there and and get some passive income rent out your edu address probably massively against the terms but so is airbnb in many ways yeah early days move fast and break things this is all inspired by inspired by morgan barrett who said uh with a girl's name and a dot edu email address i have almost 100 response rate to cold emails uh true banger here one and a half million views almost 4 000 likes oh sorry 40 000 likes almost 40 000 bookmarks and people really resonated with this.

45:40And this is why we got to call out Tyler because 40 ,000 people like this, only one guy actually went and built it. And so the next time you see some crazy banger and you think, oh, somebody already built it. There's probably 10, there's probably 10 YC companies that are doing this already. They aren't just go and build it. Morgan covered it on the 19th. We talked about it at the end of last week. Fantastic execution. Tyler built it over the weekend and shipped it this morning. uh does he deserve brother of the week i think this is i think this has to be the brother this is brother of the week this is brother of the week congratulations to tyler congratulations tyler you are the technology brother of the week this is exactly what we look for in the technology brothers building shipping shipping shit posting and even running after controversy there's going to be a lot of people that are against this there's going to be a lot of people in general that say this is you know misleading or whatever but as long as you're selling a product that people need and want.

46:35I think that it's fair game. Yep. You know, and he's good at promoting it. He got us to talk about it. It'll be good for the shareholders. Call up Business Insider. You got to get them to write about it. Call up Taylor Lorenz. Tell her what you're doing. Maybe she hates it. Maybe she writes a hit piece. It's going to be good for you. Thank you to Tyler. Thank you to Tyler. Congratulations on your brother of the week. Andrew D'Souza says the startup industrial complex created by Paul Graham and Y Combinator is rotting the creativity and ambition of a generation of founders with a paint-by-numbers approach to entrepreneurship.

47:09Founders, go off script, have an original idea, stop building for a niche, build for humanity. And this is so funny because I saw someone subtweeting this and it was just like someone complaining about YC and then it was just Paul Graham, Coinbase, Airbnb, Stripe, Zapier, whatever. Yeah, it's a good rebuttal. It's like, well, yeah, of course we're not focused on the off script companies in this batch. The ones that people are focused on right now are the AI rappers that are like running the right playbook. Yeah, but Coinbase was contrarian. Coinbase was not hot in summer 12. When you were in the batch, you could get a Bitcoin just for signing up.

47:49Yes, one Bitcoin was the sign up reward for Coinbase. And then for years, no, everyone was like, oh yeah, Coinbase, like that weird company. Like, oh, okay, I guess they raised some money. Like they were slow to raise money. It took them a while. There were much hotter companies coming out of YC. And also they were not flagged as like a top startup. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say the YC framework and basically religion around company building that they've created objectively for most entrepreneurs is like a fantastic set of guardrails to just like run it, you know, build, have the best possible chances at building a business.

48:23When I look back at the companies that I've built, if I'm taking sort of a rear view look, I'm like, I wish I was sort of following more of YC's dogma around certain things. And the other thing is, yes, YC is a great place to go if you don't have some super inspiring idea or vision and you just want to build some software and have like a good framework to do that. Maybe join another company. But you can still, they're still happy to take these weird outlier ideas. Totally, a lot of ideas. There's just not going to be - They founded a nicotine pouch, funded a nicotine pouch company in 2018. And they're not going to...

48:55Zin didn't even exist. Yeah. And you're not going to have a hundred visionary companies in every batch, but that's okay because there's going to be some non-visionary plays that end up pivoting into weird stuff. Also, there is a massive piece dividend of this startup industrial complex. You look at the Ramp guys. They took their first company through YC, Paribus, wound up selling it. And then they wound up doing an even bigger company, ramp after. And when I think of their creativity and ambition, like it's not rot, it's not rotten, not, not by any stretch of the imagination. And, and them setting them up with the YC framework to build, execute, sell that business, like it made them who they are today.

49:39And so, uh, you know, it's like there, there are so many ways to be successful and we're, you know, very thankful to, to YC. So a big wag of the finger to Andrew D'Souza. We disagree, but let us know what you think in the comments. Christina Farhat says, your honor, it was my AI agent. And Veronica says, this will be a real argument. And I think that's real. Yeah. Where does the liability fall? We're already seeing this a little bit with, uh, with you go on agent.ai and you, the professional network for AI agents and you, you know, hire some digital employee that just goes absolutely rogue. Well, this is already happening with, uh, those, those customer support agents where you can basically get the customer support agent to like give you a full refund or something for if you like game it out properly.

50:28And then the company has said, Oh, that was not our policy. Like it hallucinated. Like who's responsible for that? The LLM, the company that created you got to side with the customer on that side. Yeah. The customer, they're smart enough to convince your, yeah. But what happens when it's a hundred million dollar deal or something that's going to court and someone is going to say, it's my AI agent. And so that liability should fall not on the company, but on the, the, the, the company that made the AI agent or the LLM, it's going to be a mess. Yeah. But fortunately, full employers, the lawyers will win.

50:59And then they will be using AI agents and to fight the cases. We hallucinated. We pled guilty. We didn't mean to. No, there's going to be value in being a human at the end that says, like, you know, just taking responsibility for the bot army. Yeah, I mean, human for a very long time, obviously, is the responsibility. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friends over at Fiorentino Label. Fiorentino Label, bespoke suiting designed in America and handcrafted in Italy. least so furanty furanty no label uh is run by john furanty no his family made his money made their money in hospitality john has been running furanty no label fantastic uh suits and tuxedos and uh there's many heads of states and uh you know very uh the tech elite that wear these suits we can't you know discuss specifics because it's very private but uh anyways fantastic suits i wore one at hereticon i got a lot of compliments on it yep and uh we've had a number of our listeners actually go to fur and team and a label after hearing about them here on the show and get suited up so uh we ask everybody anybody that's recording a podcast yep especially if you're a capital allocator if you're a capital allocator would it kill you to put on a suit yep answer is usually no so you should put one on you are a capital allocator or an executive not an hvac repairman.

52:24So dress like it. Dress accordingly. Alexa Z says, wow, I'm definitely bullish on this app at get hype, get, get hype HQ. And in the settings slash account, it says call the founder. I think this is great. I think this is amazing. Yeah. I think, I think this is actually like the kind of thing that YC basically recommends, which is like, yeah, just make yourself extremely available to users and once your phone is breaking then get the second line of defense but don't be like oh i'm starting this brand new company we don't have product market fit we have three customers and i need some sort of like you know like a bunch of people and a bunch of stuff it's like no just let people help you uh some of the greatest uh tech support i get from early stage companies always from the founder yeah and the best the best founder mode ceos they see somebody post on x like hey i'm having this issue and they're just there right there boom yep stripe CEO still does this.

53:19Yeah, it's great. Let's go to Guillermo Roche over at Vercel. He says, the American dream for real. And it's McDonald's is hiring a web developer to use Next.js. So I think historically, this would have been a great opportunity for crypto investors after the bull cycle ends. Maybe you're not going to just put the fries in the bag, but you could get at Next.js development role. This was such a banger, 12K. But this is, yeah, this is a fantastic job. I can't, what's more American than working for the golden arches? Yeah, it's remote and it pays 130 to 180K. Not gonna be a angel investor with that salary, but get this job, ask for a raise.

54:02Hey, with your bonus, you might be able to get up into that 200K range and get accredited and so you can go super long on all your absolute boys. Exactly. Employees can work remotely. So yeah, and McDonald's is back. It's having a moment. It's very popular. So, you know, go work at McDonald's if you are a Next.js developer. Josh Wolf says, the new Lux quarterly letter to LPs. Our theme, tech, venture, global markets told in four parables of four brothers. I like this. One, Prometheus. Two, Mennoeus. Three, Epimetheus. And four, Atlas. and they have these like giga chad uh cartoons of these bros i like somebody else like quote tweeted this or just tweeted yeah and they were like what every time the lux they put out their quarterly letter i just put it into claude and say like rewrite this in a way that i can understand and then it just pops it out just take out the parables and no but i this is this is one of those like the fact that they're taking this information like think about how much like great how many great takes were locked up in like lp updates for the last like literally decades and now this is you know we're very against building in public on this are they leaking their alpha though uh i think they're leaking last quarter's alpha yeah i guess it's uh it's marketing at the end of the day but i i do like that that there's a there's a twist here in the writing language to use these parables i think that that's that makes it way more interesting it's just more interesting more stimulating than i mean it's very anti paul graham who wants to just write plainly directly but i think there's something about creating a little bit of a barrier to get into the the the lp letter and enjoy it and then you're also learning something about atlas or prometheus maybe you don't know that much about them so you're also getting educated maybe you wind up pulling up the wiki reading a book learning a little bit more it's a good one and i and i anytime i'm talking with a friend with a fund who's saying like oh i know i need to do content but I don't know what to do.

56:02It's like, find your brand of content. For Josh, it is, hey, I'm going to write this sort of esoteric, broad ideas about markets and technology and like put it out there. There's a lot of big ideas and it's up to you to kind of sort through it. For slow, it's the screenshot essay. Slow, screenshot essay. Clearly those start as like Slack conversations or something like that. And Dreesen, the big, big idea that they're branding something that's already happening and just like owning. Great acquaintances. Yeah. Cougan's Law. Yeah. And Founders Fund is shitposting. Viral. viral videos and vibe reels, I guess.

56:34And shit posting. And apparently breaking stories about Polymarket and their competitors. Bennett Siegel says, flavor of the month, technical teams raising seed capital to buy business and transform it with AI. Sounds like a nightmare scenario for the founders, the company being bought and the VCs funding it. Yeah, so this is, you know, referencing all the new teams that have come out and doing these like AI oriented rollups saying, hey, I'm going to buy a bunch of accounting firms and automate everything. And it's hard enough to just buy a business and make it grow. It's comparably, if you're trying to buy a business, make it grow and completely change how the service is delivered and not lose all of your customers and alienate the existing teams and clients and everything like that.

57:20It just sounds like one of those things. I think people, when they think about what attracts, Silicon Valley got very obsessed with roll-ups and just general M &A because they're like, wait, I could go work at Meta and like, you know, have to work 10 years to eventually get to the point where I'm making a million dollars a year. I could just buy a business that does a million dollars of EBITDA and like, you know, use some conservative amount of leverage. And, you know, eventually I just own this great asset, but everything is just much, much, much harder than it, than it seems. And not only are you competing with other groups that are participating in roll-ups so that the price of assets end up going up and spiking and being very competitive you're competing against other owner operators that are just coming onto the scene and they're like i don't need it yeah we saw that ratio yeah i don't need to roll up all the amazon brands yeah and in their situation they're beholden to the to the platform and as amazon fees went up they just didn't really have a business anymore but um but yeah about examples where buying a business at seed stage made sense i know didn't warby parker buy no it was uh harry's they bought a razor factory i don't know if that was fantastic but um it was certainly differentiated at the time i know some there's been some companies that have bought banking licenses yeah where it's been some sort of asset that that they needed and they couldn't get any other way yeah the plaid founder did that but it's rare to go and buy an existing business and transform because usually you could just start from scratch greenfield yeah interesting but yeah there's a bunch of people attacking the whole services economy which is trillions and trillions of dollars saying like hey if we can go just provide this service with ai we can turn this from like a relatively low margin services business to a high margin software business and i just think it's going to be much harder um there's a company I invested in, Nick Abouzid, who is at Product Hunt Main Street and then Ramp.

59:20He's now building Rivet, which is like a ground-up attempt to leverage basically AI for accounting. Is he buying CPA firms? He's taking the opposite approach. He's just building from scratch. He's saying like, you know, I don't know what you're buying if potentially all the customers leave in the first year. Yeah. Be tricky.

1:00:08I don't know. but then I don't think it really panned out in the way that people hoped. There'd be dragons for sure. Dangerous. Let's go to Connor McDonald. He's been on the show before. Here's my take on app loving. And he stars out LO so that they can't search for it. So reaching an older audience with disposable income with high quality ad space for the very first time is often good. That's not rocket science and worth trying, especially with ad credit. But long-term sustainable results are still very much TBD. what do you think about this have you used yeah so app lovin is an ad network that's focused on mobile games yep and so their audience yeah yeah tons of you know very scaled ad network and anytime you're a consumer brand that you're able to get in front of a totally new audience you can usually drive some pretty interesting results one because cpms just are going to be a lot less than meta because meta is like the premier place to advertise right it can be the most hyper targeted and so CPMs are just higher but yeah there's been a lot of talk about AppLovin I think AppLovin like it was able to create this mania within like the X like marketing community of saying hey if you're spending like 20k a day on meta we'll bring you over to AppLovin and people have been seeing some great results but yeah I was able to get you know just by being friends with with Connor and doing some work with with Ridge and Sean in the past I was able to get a front row seat into like viewing of like how they test into new ad networks and they've always meta has always been the backbone of their business and they've they've focused on meta excellency i think it what connor's alluding to is it's a trap to think oh i'm just going to find this new ad network and like suddenly my business is going to be fantastic it's like no if you're not making meta work well you're not app loving is not just going to like solve all your issues like it's a it's a marketing like excellence it's a skill issue basically so you're not just going to like suddenly transform your business by going over to a new network.

1:02:04That makes sense. Let's go to the P God. He says, anyone have$105 million for me to borrow? And he screenshots the buyout LBO opportunity for the Arapaho basin ski area. The company, a subsidiary of Dream Unlimited was acquired by Altera Mountain via its financial sponsors, Triton Funds and KSL Capital Partners through an estimated$105 million LBO on November 19th, 2024. So this is not available. He's like joking clearly because the deal already happened but i do know a bean air who bought a a mountain like a ski resort and uh i think he enjoys was that the summit series no no no they also bought it but uh yeah i just like to encourage more listeners to just go buy ski resorts you know all of the great mountains for the most part have been getting acquired by these big conglomerates and i'd like to see more independently operated ski resorts uh we're working on an event with with Bryce over at Indy to do a Technology Brothers uh gathering uh in Park City stay tuned for that stay tuned for that but um but yeah just if if you're thinking about it the answer is yes just go buy a ski resort yeah um yeah it is tricky it depends on the CapEx that's that's already gone into the ski resort like the one that I know uh doesn't actually have chairlifts but it's so it's for like a more prestigious type of skier they do cat skiing are familiar with this it was like heli skiing cat skiing you ride on a big like caterpillar on a truck basically on a cat you bring all your ski gear they just drive you up to the top of the mountain and then you ski down in completely fresh powder and it's just pure powder it's amazing and for the real real ski heads uh powders where it's at my uh my great grandfather ran the gondola at mammoth okay like 40 years oh yeah basically like post-world war ii so he was like happened to be like best friends with with um dave mccoy the founder yeah and because of that my uncle used to massively take advantage of the relationship to the mountain so he would just go off off terrain oh yeah of course and like duck under the rope and then he'd have this was like pre-cell phone but he'd be like radioing like hey like i ended up going over the other side could you send the cat and they had some crazy that's hilarious crazy stories uh but i it's the fact that like anybody who is building these ski resorts in the 60s yeah is so insane thinking about the machinery and the amount of risk and like the like amount of human life that's at risk on a mountain at any any given point if the machinery malfunctions or you're not smart about avalanche control like it's it's one of the craziest environments to build a business we could probably do a whole deep dive some of the ski resorts have howitzers where avalanche control there's a few versions One is just you have the ski patrol go up there where it sticks a dynamite and they just throw the dynamite and it just shocks all of the avalanche potential down and just creates an avalanche.

1:04:56But then at some ski resorts, they have howitzers where they just literally fire a cannon into the mountain and it just causes all the avalanche to come down. I love nothing like being at a ski resort with your absolute boys firing the cannon. No, and you're in the hot tub after skiing after a long day, and you get to hear the cannon going off, showing that the next day is going to be, it's like signaling that the next day is going to be fantastic. Yeah, Bluebird. Do we have a promoted post? We certainly do. We always do. This one is from Amman Resorts. The architecture of Amman Kila is a celebration of Bali's natural beauty.

1:05:33Cascading down the hillside to the sea, stone buildings, walkways, and pools are woven among the palms, framing views of the ocean and the resplendent greenery uh so this this this property is fantastic i haven't been yet i've been to bali a couple times on surf trips but was before my amman arc i want to go here amman is kind of where uh sorry bali is where amman really got started yeah uh you know their first property i don't even believe they they were able to get a uh commercial loan to do it they had to just like personally acquire this property turned into the what is today the greatest hotel brand in the world, in my opinion, at this specific moment in time, if you're evaluating it for reach and quality of experience.

1:06:20So go check out the Amon Kila. I highly recommend booking a trip to Amon and book it far in the future. Book it, get online, look a year out, book something that you can look forward to for a full year. So then you're just kind of planning and thinking, oh this is almost gonna i'm almost gonna forget about this yeah and then it's just gonna sneak up on me and then uh and then i'm not even gonna think about the expense because i paid for it a year ago that's the way to do it yeah yeah plan plan that's my headspace right now yeah in about a month i'll be at an amount of property yep but you gotta book the next one so you have something to look forward to always exactly so you're never like oh like when am i gonna get around to getting back there no it's like you already have booked exactly you always want to have one or two bookings like just rolling.

1:07:04Perpetual. Let's go to Jim Sailbike Wright. He quote tweets us and says, Technology Brothers is the best personification of the vibe shift. Their aesthetic and approach to discussion are the antithesis of Brooks' bourgeois bohemian archetype that so accurately described elite culture for the past 20 or so years. Very insightful, very insightful post. That is exactly what we were going for with this. And I do think we want to push back against the bourgeois bohemian trend that's been really popular in tech, unfortunately, and celebrate the capitalist bourgeoisie. Not the limousine liberals and not the champagne socialists, but the capitalists who enjoy drinking champagne in the back of a limousine.

1:07:49Yep. And sparring with Taylor Lorenz. Exactly. And so thanks for writing in, Jim. I'm glad you really hit the nail on the head with this. and good to have you first time on the show, but I'm sure you'll be back soon. Absolutely. Thank you, Jim. Thank you. Let's go to Dirt Man. Dirt Man says, Dirt Man BSAC says, Elon should buy MSNBC and just have Tech Bros pod reading bangers from the timeline 24-7 streaming into boomers living rooms across the country. We got to put the CNBC banner on this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Elon says, the most entertaining outcome, especially if ironic, is the most likely.

1:08:29And everyone's joking about Elon buying MSNBC. And I think we could crush on MSNBC. I agree. And honestly, we should stop right there because there's stuff in the works that we can't necessarily talk about. But I think we have the production value. We have the banter. We have the content. Give us a slot, Elon. Pick it up. We will be the anchors. Normally, I spar with boomers in my HOA board meetings, but I'd like to do it on the airways, right? I'd like it to be more like a megaphone approach. Like sort of, they can't talk back, but you're just sort of... I mean, if Twitter is real life, imagine how much more it will be real life if we're broadcasting it into the MSNBC.

1:09:07And I mean, talk about making your family proud. All of your distant relatives will be, oh, I saw you on MSNBC. I love your new show. And think about what we could do for the broader economy if we were able to encourage all the boomers to lever up, go long, risk assets. A lot of them at this point are sort of, they talk down to Gen Z and the millennials saying you're too risk on, you know, all you care about is, you know, the next crypto coin. Yeah. Also, you watch MSNBC and they do a little segment and then they take an ad break. The ads aren't integrated properly and there aren't nearly as many of them.

1:09:42And on that note, let's go to a promoted post. Promoted post from Tiffany and co. Celebrate meaningful beginnings this holiday with tea by tiffany an homage to an iconic motif from 1975 these designs feature handset paved diamonds for extraordinary shine discover more at tiffany.com slash gifts slash shop slash holiday uh hashtag tiffany and co hashtag a tiffany holiday anyways this looks like an absolute absolutely fantastic uh gift fantastic and um highly recommend everyone in the audience. Our audience is very oriented around. Put your AirPods in, go to Tiffany right now. Now our audience is very oriented around crushing their Q4 revenue goals, but Christmas is as of today, a month away.

1:10:30Get those gifts in now. Go to your local Tiffany's and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Thank you. Let's go to Beth Jzos. He says real and posts a photo of his phone and Vittorio's phone next to themselves, next to each other. They met up in real life and he was very blackpilled because Vittorio uses light mode on X instead of dark mode. And I like this. I think this is so funny. Like showing someone your X account profile thing is very much like, it's like, you know, in old, uh, you know how nights, you know, where we got the salute from so we got the salute um you you would salute someone with your hand because you were raising your uh your knight's helmet like the the shield here you would raise this to show my eyes and show that i'm i'm uh i'm not a threat brother in me sees the brother is the same thing as why do we shake hands we shake hands to show that i don't have a weapon in my hand in my right hand and so this is like showing a little bit of vulnerability i'm showing you inside my life inside my x account and it's almost like two of the greatest posters meeting proof of post and showing each other you know a little bit how the sausage is made and it's fascinating seeing the difference in numbers i mean they follow almost exactly the same amount of people almost 2 000 smart uh beff has 140k followers fantastic vittorio a little bit smaller 40k but vittorio is on an incredible trajectory right now i mean he's really ascended ascended but what's interesting here Beth has 136 subscribers.

1:12:04That's like a decent amount. I think they're all on five bucks a month. That's like not bad. Making almost a thousand bucks there. Vittorio, only seven subscriptions. But this is what I found funny. Beth is subscribed to four people. Vittorio is subscribed to 47 people. So Vittorio is shelling out like what? Almost$300 a month towards his absolute boys. Yeah. Respect. That's amazing. Respect. It really is a sign of respect. This is the creator economy. He gets the check from X, the creator payout. I'm sure it's heavy as a stone. Recycling it. And then he puts it right in with his other boys. And so I'm going to go check out who he subscribes to if that's public.

1:12:43But great to see two posters meeting IRL. Love to see it. Recreating the timeline in real life. Yeah. That conversation, you could probably just steal tons and tons of bangers from that. Totally. Let's go to Din. he says the Harry Stebbings effect. I believe he just went on the show. He says 200 plus applicants, every tier one investor in my DMs, 4 million euros of potential revenue in my DMs. Okay. That's a little weird. 3 ,000 LinkedIn requests. Wow. And 300 Twitter followers. That's actual tangible value added. So the crazy thing is I don't know. Harry has a$400 million fund, baby. there you go size gong size gong boom uh i i don't know if he was on the show or harry just tweeted harry tweeted first time oh oh oh he just tweeted and he said that that buena this this guy's company is adding a million of air every 12 days really and he just was like just threw it out that's it he didn't even have on the show i don't know wow um i only listen to founders podcast okay this podcast well congrats to dan fantastic growth good luck with the next phase convert all of that good luck you're gonna need to go to agent.ai to get a agent to help you process his linkedin request find the alpha that's a lot but good luck out there good luck do we have a promoted post promoted post from blackstone think investing equals the stock market think again there's an Ocean of Opportunity and hashtag private equity.

1:14:20If you're a hashtag financial advisor curious about tapping PE for your clients, check out hashtag Blackstone University. And then they throw a bit.ly link up here. So they've dropped a whole course for financial advisors to learn about private equity. If you're a financial advisor and you don't know about private equity, it's an awesome asset class, some fantastic returns. You can go really risk on with some great managers. and Blackstone hit a heart. Where better to learn it than Blackstone? Yeah, yeah. We love Blackstone here. They created a popular festival. No, that's BlackRock. Blackstone, different organization.

1:15:01Right, BlackRock created the BlackRock City. Blackstone is just a fantastic asset manager. And love their use of hashtags. And private equity firm. Aggressive use of hashtags here. you know they clearly know their way around this platform leveraging all the features yes so thank you to blackstone let's go to the wall street journal and we gotta we gotta put this in the truth zone this is a rough article i read it over the weekend and i was pounding my fist on the table i was so mad they said the ultimate trading for flex a snoopy swatch or a casio calculator why lots of money men still favor novelty watches the anti-status watch why men in finance love cheap cheesy watches terrible trend i hope it ends immediately yeah uh they do give a shout out to some strongholds in the finance community that have stuck with the classics the automa pries the uh the richard mills the patex but they if you want to go fun and funky go rm yeah and this is this is the bobo this is this is the this is the bohemian bourgeoisie that we are fighting against here yeah so if you see someone with a casio calculator snoopy swatch on the trading floor tell them put that watch down pick a new career pick a new career buddy take a hike yeah i was very upset about this enough um shout out to the journos at uh this is the ultimate hit piece on finance this is trying to collapse our our global economy yeah because if enough people find out about this then then the how will they trust their their their their asset manager i agree um and and this is what could really make the common person hate wall street if they find out that they're wearing just trash ironic ironic watches um but if you see someone with a with a uh with a gold cartier santos you have to respect that totally so um this is this is just a very depressing trend.

1:17:05So it starts here, folks. If you see someone with some ironic watch, tell them, clean up their act, put on something classic, put on something timeless, head to bezel. You are a capital allocator and asset manager, not an HVAC technician. I couldn't have said it better myself. So thanks everyone for helping fight the good fight.

1:17:28let's go to guy he's been on the show before he says by the way just fyi this emoji prayer hands is not praying it's high-fiving lol did did you know that i saw that and i was because it's yeah it's it's it's the prayer hands emoji it's the two hands together it can be praying or high-fiving but i i guess you went into the unicode use it on the on the high five well i i'm gonna start using it now but i just use that a lot because i i you know pray for bubbles yeah and uh and other things i think it's whatever you want it to be i mean people have long changed the definition or the the connotation of emojis the peach emoji the butt and uh the gun emoji has been through multiple cycles um i think that it all depends on the context and if you see someone using this in a context where it clearly means prayer hands it's prayer hands and yeah and emojis are clearly high-fiving emojis are tools for communication and you know we shape our tools and from there our tools shape us so we need to constantly be re-evaluating our use of emojis and rethinking them redesigning them um you know stick to the classics when you can but don't be afraid to mix some new hitters in do we have another promoted post or should we do this first uh air environment says av has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire blue halo together will create a more diversified global leader in all domain defense technologies capable of addressing the full spectrum of modern defense.

1:19:00A huge deal in the public markets, Air Environment has acquired Blue Halo. And we wanted to cover it on the show because it's one of the most fascinating examples we've seen in recent history of nominative determinism. The CEO of Blue Halo, his name, Jonathan Moneymaker. And of course, he made the money. He made the money, baby. Don't bet against Jonathan Moneymaker. That's all I would say. Never, never. And so fantastic outcome for all the investors. I think this was a private equity roll-up. They put together a bunch of small companies and wound up selling it to Air Environment. And congrats to them.

1:19:35We don't know the full terms of the deal here, but it feels like a size gong moment to me. Congrats to Jonathan Moneymaker. And we would like to back whatever he does next. Yes, 100%. quick promoted post from zegna we are only a month out from uh christmas and there are many other holidays coming up uh but we wanted to celebrate a zegna holiday from our home to yours wrap your loved ones in timeless oh oasi cashmere yeah cashmere scarves that will be cherished for years to come we're committed to certifying our cashmere fibers as 100 traceable from 2024 I don't know if this is an ESG thing. I prefer their commitment to quality over traceability, but I certainly appreciate the traceability as well.

1:20:25Thank you to Zegna for making. I think it just speaks to this idea that you're going to be in fancy holiday parties. Maybe you're going on some ski trips, ski season's coming up, and you want to look good. You don't want to be stumbling around in athleisure or looking like you just got off a bus in Sand Hill. you want to be dressed to the nines and so Zegna is a great way to go get a nice jacket or a nice coat and you don't see enough you don't see enough technology brothers wearing scarves broadly yes it's a great it's a great accent piece it's a great way to to kind of yeah communicate what you stand for yeah it's clearly a step up from Patagonia yeah yeah and so we highly recommend you go check them out and tell them the technology brothers sent you let's go to Abril Zuchi.

1:21:10She says, I can't stop thinking about this Nietzsche quote. The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster, in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others. In effort, their delight is in self-mastery. In them, asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege. It is to them a recreation to play with the burdens that would crush all others. Couldn't agree more. Yeah. When you're in that zone, you have to find what your why is and that why can be anything for us. It's, you know, doing it for the money, being willing to push through when, um, you know, when you're in, in this case, we're in hour four of podcasting and you know, you have that, that, that weakness inside of you that Jocko would kind of reference saying, quit, turn off, turn off the mics, walk out of the room, take the suit off and being willing to just like push through and continuing to create content is, is, you know, you have to have that.

1:22:15Yeah, yeah, exactly. Dylan Field, he's been on the show before. He says, if this were where, if this is where we're starting, I'm worried what the actual top signals will be this cycle, how it started versus how it's going. How it started is Satoshi Nakamoto, Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper and how it's going is dollar sign dog cage. And there's a live streamer doing some extremely depressing things that we're not even really going to talk about. Yeah. We don't want to talk about it, but, uh, hopefully pump.fun gets their act together and ends this, uh, live streaming feature. Sometimes moderation is good.

1:22:49Content moderation. Uh, that's good. Good to hear it's over. Hopefully no more. And, uh, yeah, I think that there's a lot of alpha right now and just tweeting top every single day because eventually you're going to be right yep and you'll be able to go delete all the other ones and go back and quote tweet the top and say like look yeah called it yeah called the local top yeah and there's uh you could raise you know a billion dollar fund off of calling the top yeah there is something about like like the good meme coins and the ones that last are fun like doge is about this dog it's very funny and elon's run with it and it's become and it's like even popular today because it was always filled with like some sort of comedy or funness and the dark stuff never even solana with like the gm culture yeah yeah exactly it was always like inspiring to some degree even even when it was frothy yeah so stay positive out there folks no revenge hate hate meme coins yeah bruno says regarding the hot topic of stable coins if you strip out usdt which is primarily used for trading and laundering.

1:23:52Transaction volume since 2022 is flat and supply is meaningfully down with no merchant adoption. Not really getting the hype, but let's see how this plays out. Interesting. Yeah, the merchant adoption stuff's interesting. I mean, I do think you have to imagine that, you know, strong like infrastructure platforms like Bridge and especially the amount of investment that I imagine Stripe will put behind Bridge going forward, like merchant adoption will go up. Coinbase, you know, recently, you know, last week ran that ad, you know, showing a guy buying, you know, selling a car, a truck with stable coins.

1:24:27And I think that that stuff is going to really, you know, meaningfully catch on. Also, big assumption here that 99 % of USDT is trading and laundering. Like that just might not be true. Certainly a lot of it is trading. Sure. The laundering stuff, who knows? It seems much harder to prove. But even trading is is valuable in the sense that like you could say a lot of the u.s dollar is is tied up in trading activity right yeah like how much is on citadel's balance sheet right now a lot does that make it like less real i don't know i don't think so so i don't know i'm still i'm still positive on on uh yeah at the end of the day the technology is very meaningful being able to send money 24 7 in a trustless way yeah it's awesome exactly let's go to praying for exits he's been on the show before he says designers dolly too i stole your pictures and use them to generate art and the designers say no this is illegal and the programmers are talking to chat gpt and chat gpt says i scanned your github account and stole your code and the chad programmers say cool did you get it to work this is this is an interesting uh interesting reaction it does seem like um it wasn't really I actually don't.

1:25:41It was more like the art community. Yeah, I haven't. Yeah, it was the designers, the creatives that weren't monetizing. Yeah. The non-monetizing creators that are struggling artists that haven't figured out in a commercial application. Yep. Open AI monetizing their work sort of indirectly really piss them off. The designers that I know that have built great careers are all excited about AI. Or even the artists like Beeple. You know, he uses Cinema 4D. I'm sure he's able to use generative AI either in the post-processing or in the texture generation. But he's coined this own style that even if it could be copied, he has the proof of work.

1:26:22Yeah, but I do feel like the Gen AI stuff did take a little bit of wind out of his sails because Beeple was going through the painstaking effort to make these absurd images. And now anybody can make the same absurd image. But I haven't seen anyone replace him. no i'm not saying he's been replaced i'm just saying more like it's less jarring it's it doesn't have the same effect for me to see it just like elon riding a bull yeah because anybody can yeah yeah because anyone can make that generate that i guess i guess i think he still has some sort of like interesting car but he still has it it's going to be the same thing where you know people's artwork people always said this about like the mark rothgo like oh my kid could make that or or some artist where it's just like paint splatter um and and you you'd say yeah my kid could make that but the point was that you didn't and then the point was well if even if your kid did everyone would just be like well that's a mark rothko rip off yeah um and now it's like yeah your kid could prompt that but it would just feel like a people rip yeah in my opinion i don't know we'll see i mean he's already made generational wealth so i don't even know if he needs to make any more anymore yeah post economic let's go to delian he's been on the show before he says uh so way Waymo is changing to a Chinese auto manufacturer.

1:27:36Yeah, F that. My autonomous ride about to accidentally drive off a cliff. Okay, so Waymo's been running on - Too many Winnie the Pooh jokes. Hard pass. So I really don't get it. So this is funny timing because Waymo is like the only time you see a Jaguar today. Yeah, they could just buy Jaguar. And Jaguar is just like floundering. Floundering. The Ray Dong something or whatever, the president over there is just like floundering. Totally rebranding. Nobody cares about. But clearly they have manufacturing lines that can produce reasonable cars. Yeah, Jaguar had stopped making cars, presumably except for Waymo.

1:28:11And why did that deal not happen? It's crazy. It's honestly, it makes me even shorter, Jaguar, feeling that Waymo was already running on their basically infrastructure and decided not to move forward with that. But very bad. I don't want... It's so funny he throws in another winning team joke here. I don't want the CCP to control our drones, one of our biggest social media platforms, and now our autonomous cars. Very rough. I just don't want that to happen. So, Delian, why don't you, you know. Buy Jaguar. Put a billion dollars into a Jaguar buyout and, you know, reshore it to America. I mean, we already have the answer.

1:28:54It's Tesla, right? Tesla is the American competitor to everything that Waymo will be doing. and it will become a culture issue. I tweeted this post of like, look at the way the Waymo car looks and then look at the aesthetics of the Tesla self-driving car and like both political sides like hate the opposite one. And it's weird to think that something as utilitarian as just getting a ride from one place to another could become like a political statement. But it has. People like many Democrats would say like I will not buy a Cybertruck because of the statement that it makes. And the same thing for a Republican driving a Prius, which is the same thing.

1:29:31I'm going to be rolling coal in a Raptor R. Let's go to Luke Metro. He's been on the show before. He says, how do you not own a suit for the office Christmas party? You're an L6. And it's a photo of Wife Jack. Have you been following the Wife Jack thing? I think these are great. Every time I see them, I'm like, oh. At first, I thought it was kind of negative, but I realized that it was actually very positive and a very pronatalist campaign. and there's been a little self-policing within the wife-jack community around like don't make it negative. Don't make it overbearing. It's like the wife is saying these things because she loves you, not because she's actually upset with you.

1:30:09I like the positive spin. And so, yes. Also, if you're an L6, get a suit. If you're an intern, get a suit. Everyone needs a suit. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Get a suit. Call your tailor. Call Fiorentino label. Call Fiorentino. Daniel, he's been on the show earlier and he's been on the show many times former brother of the week. He says, the walls close in as you age. The path for responsible change to oneself grows more narrow. You have commitments in your work, a career that makes sense given your current mental arrangements. You have a spouse and a child who won't count on you to exist in a certain way, who count on you to exist in a certain way.

1:30:44Very doomerish post. This is kind of the opposite of other posts that we said that was like, you can just change your career at 45, remember? Yeah, you can. But the thing is, is your life very quickly adapts to your identity true and so if you want to change who you are and what you do uh once you have a wife and children and i even noticed this of like uh i've i've appreciated like having a kid in school now and being like okay i can't just move across the country of course that makes me like more oriented around yeah investing in my local community or whatever podcasting podcasting locally. Um, but yeah, I just thought that that was relevant because I think if you're, if you, uh, you know, aren't married or don't have kids yet, like you need to be taking on like at least five times as much risk as you are right now, because the, the more that other people are dependent on you in many ways, the less risk you can take on.

1:31:39Yeah, it's great. Uh, this is a great one by Zane. Uh, he's a little skeptical, but we're going to debate this. He says some idiot it took regular old sour candy and put it in a bag with some generic branding and sold it for a hundred million dollars and you're still waiting for someone at hr to approve your pto on thursday so you can spend a couple days with your family denied and he's quote tweeting a cpg wire article that says the hershey company is acquiring sour strips a fast-growing sour candy brand for an undisclosed sum so i don't know where he got the hundred million but maybe he dug into it Sour Strips was founded by internet personality Max Tuning in 2019.

1:32:17And Max Tuning was like a huge YouTuber all in the fitness space. I mean, great nominative determinism there. Like chewing to the max. He's chewing the sour candy. He always likes sour candy. And so he started this branch. But the fascinating thing is that, yeah, the name is just Sour Strips. That's the name of the category. That's a descriptor. I don't think you can trademark that. And so someone else could start a Sour Strips company. Maybe you couldn't use the exact same logo and stuff, but you could make it pretty close because Seller Strips is not trademarkable, but he still grew it really well.

1:32:51And he started advertising it on his podcast, advertising it on his YouTube channel, and then use that to get into retail, I'm sure. And eventually grew it to, I think a hundred million dollars of revenue, something like that. And fantastic outcome for Max. Love his podcast. Love him. Yeah, it is so funny. Cause if you, if I think back to being a child and going to a candy store or a place that sold candy, there was always a like sour strips kind of bucket or dispenser type thing that were just called sour strips. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so, um, if, if there was truly no other brands in that category and he's just like, I'm going to take this and like brand it and really focus on selling it well and marketing it and growing it, then yeah, he deserves the nine figure.

1:33:35There's also a big piece here where if you go through, if you're starting a CPG company and you walk through the aisles, you can see that some are incredibly competitive. Some sections of the grocery store are like it's half Unilever, half Hershey, and you're just screwed because they both have major competitors there. They're going to outspend you and they'll never acquire you. And then some categories are completely run by 200-year-old companies. I know a guy who started a popcorn spray company that he got to like a million dollars in revenue very quickly. Like you make popcorn and then season it with a spray.

1:34:08Yeah, you season it on top of it. Graffiti. And it gives it like the movie theater popcorn smell. And there's a bunch of different scents and flavors. The extra PFAS. I asked him about that. And he had a bunch of claims that it wasn't bad. But it does feel weird. but what he realized was that the main competitor in that entire section of the store was just Orville Redenbacher and it's a very old company they're not really innovating they're not going to fast follow and so it was very easy to get in there and it might have been the same thing with Sour Strips where Hershey didn't have any play in that category and so he basically built the perfect company.

1:34:44Yeah because everybody oftentimes the best ideas are just like obvious but overlooked. Yeah. Let's go to Greg Yang at xai first time on the show he says if you haven't had more than one career have you truly lived i like that yeah you had your career and and wall street and wall street short career yeah i like this i think uh this is a very millennial millennial post like jumping from job to job being a founder being an investor being a content creator moving back and forth between things but i feel like it's widely accepted now the millennials are the first generation where it was it almost yeah it was just normal to be like i'm going to do this one thing might get decent at it and then i'm going to jump over here and do this other thing i'm going to do this that kind of like snake your way through life um i i think it's generally good i i have a lot of uh you know people that i went to college with that have only done one thing out of school, like real estate, like investing.

1:35:47And then they get to like, you know, 28, 29, 30. And they're like, well, I guess I could still do other stuff, but then they feel still kind of trapped. And I try to talk to them and be like, no, you can literally do whatever you want. Like you can completely reinvent your career, jump into a different industry or category or go from an investing role into an operating role or vice versa. There is an interesting thing that PG often says that like the best founders have like they're experts at like two or three different disciplines or maybe if there's a co-founding team they have like five or six disciplines mastered between them and maybe you get that from working in different careers and you can put them together like you've worked in finance but then you've also worked in consumer packaged goods and so you're able to operate your business very effectively uh it's yeah yeah maybe maybe i don't know what greg did before this but maybe he was you know at a uh woke language model and now He's like, I'm reinventing myself by being at a base language model.

1:36:43Yeah, at XAI. But yeah, reinvent yourself. Yeah, I like it. Inspector Clouseau Investments says, Average U.S. Bank, we regret overcharging customers. We are hiring additional staff to investigate, and we should have it settled by 2027. Average Japanese Bank, pledge, anyone employed by this bank who has stolen money or caused others to steal from the bank will pay for it with his or her own property and then commit suicide very on brand for japan i can't believe they're still doing over there that's so crazy it's a samurai i was watching a show uh called like samurai or something on netflix and uh and like the show got boring because it was like every episode someone's committing seppuku it was just constantly like oh okay like oh guy stubbed his toe gonna commit seppuku but i guess that's really what they do Well, I think the meaning, the takeaway from this is that financiers are the modern samurais, right?

1:37:45And you need to act with honor. You do. And if you betray your own honor, then there's only one route. Yep. You know? Yeah. I mean, if you as a listener ever catch us doing an episode without any ads, hold us accountable. Yeah. Demand that we commit seppuku. Yeah. Because that would be a violation of our sacred bond with the listener. Yep. To advertise. and uh people are going turbo long that company um oh here's a good one uh people are saying that ben hilick is the next ligma zero interest rates and it's ben hilack i think we missed his name so that's a that's a thing that we do yes at least yeah we give it a shot we do a good crack so so he he printed out a transcript of our of our podcast and uh we say i don't know the guy but I think he's got a cool startup, great designer, great taste, fantastic.

1:38:41This is a future Rahul Ligma bit. This is fantastic. He really is the next Ligma. He really is the next Ligma. So stay tuned for the next Ligma award. I mean, he had some, he had another post that was great. I don't think we covered it, but as the bit was going on, he posted, he was like, hi, everyone in our defense, when we did the Jaguar rebrand, we really thought Kamala was going to be elected. did and that got picked up too and it got a bunch of i told a friend that like jokingly and he like didn't get the joke and was like wait really like they thought that she was gonna win i was like no dude they went jaguar run turbo long turbo long harris anyways legitimately like they did go turbo long like like the the the the rise of wokeness which probably has was steadily literally happening from what 2010 to 2020 even beyond 2022 was probably the peak then elon buys x and then the culture starts shifting and if you were long wokeness like your company did very well throughout that entire phase you got esg customers you got dei investors you got all sorts of benefits and that only stopped that that gravy train only stopped like last year yeah and so if you kicked off a rebrand for your company like jaguar didn't make cars this year they like took the entire year off and so the whole plan for like the rebrand the reset going full electric this is like years in the making.

1:40:04And like, I'm sure they did like some multi-year McKinsey project and like had all these different things. Like it was a big deal for them. They didn't just like do this overnight. It stinks of McKinsey. We love management consulting. We love McKinsey, but it kind of reeks of McKinsey. Well, you get in what you put out. VP gone rogue. It's garbage in, garbage out with McKinsey. If you show up with a good plan, they're going to deliver some good plans for you, but the inspiration has to come from the founder. Take some responsibility. Siri says, VC went from being a relationships business to a sales job.

1:40:33When did the dynamic shift? I have an idea of exactly when the dynamic shift, but what do you think? Go for it. So I think the dynamic shifted after post.com around 2010 when the industry realized that B2B SaaS was not going to be a winner-take-all market and you could underwrite 2 and 20 against$10 billion outcomes reliably. And so if the market had - Well, the$10 billion outcome thing was new. That was more of like - Exactly. The Decacorn thing was like - Yes, it wasn't real in the dot-com boom. All those VCs got rugged and they didn't do that well. And a lot of them went out of business. But in 2008, 2009, coming out of the financial crisis, it started to be clear that while there were major, major power law winners in social media, and you couldn't just build a whole fund around social media investing, because if you missed Facebook, you were done.

1:41:36But you could build a fund around B2B SaaS, like base hits that were essentially decacorns. And if you can build a business to$10 billion in under 10 years, you can easily charge$2.20 and beat the market. And as long as you can beat the market, you can charge those high fees. And as long as you can charge those high fees, you look like a venture capital firm, as opposed to if you're underwriting to 10 years and it's$100 million outcome, you just won't look like a VC. You just won't have the management fees. You won't have the returns. It'll look like a bank. And if you're building a business where your target is$100 million, high CapEx, less R &D, you just go to the bank or you fund it off your credit card or cash flow.

1:42:18There's a bunch of different ways to build these businesses. And there are different pockets of financial capital out there for different business strategies. Kind of everything became, looked like VC, including like consumer and DTC and all these things. And a lot of those didn't pan out. Creator economy is a good example. But it was when it was clear that it wasn't going to be Salesforce or Oracle building every vertical SaaS tool that at that point it became, okay, any fund could hit the next Databricks or the next Rippling or the next Gusto or deal. There's so much opportunity to exit with a billion dollars, return a fund.

1:42:54And as soon as you can say, hey, we're going to own 10 % of this deck of corn and we're going to return a billion dollar fund, it's game on. And that's when it became a sales job because you scale up and you need to be in every firm that's going to be a deck of corn. You need to write checks in. And also the IPO window shifted out during the dot-com boom. Companies were going public at 300 mil and then mooning. So it was a sales job, but it became the sales that was being done with the stuff you saw in Wolf of Wall Street. It was the Wall Street guys cold calling, hey, I got a stock for you. This company just went public.

1:43:29The ticker is, you know, whatever, mp3.com. You should get in right now. And it mooned in retail. That shifted when companies started staying private longer. Yeah. Yeah, well said. I mean, I think any VC that doesn't understand, I'm like short any VC that doesn't understand that they're in the likability game. Because if you're not one of the Holy Trinity or a top five firm, you have this sort of adverse selection problem where all the best founders want to work with a select group of firms. They go out and they're going to meet a lot of investors, but they want to work with Founders Fund. They want to work with Sequoia.

1:44:06And so if you're not one of those funds, then you need to realize like you better, the founder must genuinely feel something about the partner who wants to do that deal. Otherwise, why are you going to have any right to win that deal, even get a slice of it, right? And so it is still a relationships business for the power law VCs, the next generation of power law winners in venture capital are doing the relationship business. And that's the Lockheed Grooms, the Nat Freedmans, these new generation of capital allocators that are doing very well versus the droves of Stanford grads who are just associates at large firms that are just churning through cold calls.

1:44:50They're in the sales role because they are not out on the extreme end of performance. And they're deriving their growth from fees, not carry. Totally. So it's all a rational move because the funds have gotten so large that you can sit in what is essentially a sales role, collect management fees, and not need to play the relationship game to get some unfair advantage into an early deal that would never happen if it was a free market. But you can still make a ton of money. Yeah, I just think at the end of the day, the reason that the asset class is so addicting as an investor and why you still get firms that trade in public equities that end up trying to come down and play in the private markets is that every single company is a one-of-one asset.

1:45:44There's no other, you know, shares like it. It's literally like there's a sort of a finite number of shares and, and you can, you know, you have to earn the right to buy into the company. You can't just market by Stripe, right? You have to get the Collison brothers to sign off and say, we'll take your money. Right. And that's a, that's, that's, that creates a lot of good behavior overall, right? Because you need to be a good actor. Otherwise founders are eventually going to be like, no, we don't want, or CFOs at a certain point will be like, no, we just don't want your money. Yep. let's go to ussr pictures we don't usually agree with communists on this show but this might be the one exception uh it's a picture from 1947 and it shows a committee to approve fashionable clothing suitable for sale to soviet women in moscow now i'm against this for women but i would love something like this for capital allocators yeah we've seen this time and time again of VCs going on podcasts in t-shirts.

1:46:41Dressed like HVAC. It's just sloppy. And it would be great if we, the technology brothers, could be approved as a committee to review all fashion choices by capital allocators. We could say, hey, look, you have a billion dollars under management. What are you doing in that t-shirt on 2019 DC? What are you driving? What's on your wrist? We need to hold our capital allocators to a higher standard. And so we got to agree with the communists on this, they were doing one thing right. Totally. They were approving fashion. Top down management of fashion decisions. His next frontier. Throw on some suits.

1:47:19The tailors are awaiting your phone call. Fiorentino suits. It's easy. Let's go to Ryan Peterson. He's been on the show before. Founder Flexport. He says, Robo taxis that pick you up at your house and then take you to the nearest boring company tunnel so they can zip you at 100 plus miles an hour straight to your destination with no stops will be on par with rockets that land themselves let's go there we go i want it so badly and people are sleeping on the boring company they hate it they don't think it's possible but wait until it happens it's free real estate we will be at the the vegas tunnel opening we'll be there we'll be in the first we'll be in the first pod the first pod yeah put me i will live in the pod i will eat the bugs if i can get to my destination yeah If I can cut LA traffic, I will do anything.

1:48:06We're going to have guys in tuxedos. We need one from Malibu to Pasadena. Serving crickets. That'd be fantastic. Yeah. No, the Boring Company, I think, every Musk company goes through, oscillates in terms of attention, but the Boring Company will be at the forefront of the conversation. Well, it's even harder because it's all local regulation, whereas with the Rockets, it's like he doesn't need to get every single jurisdiction that he flies over to approve it. It's like if Florida says it's cool, it's cool. Yeah. Or if the FAA says it's cool, it's cool. And same thing for the Starlink satellites.

1:48:38How crazy would it be if you had to get everyone to agree that those were okay? It's like, no. I mean, I'd like to see a boring company tunnel to Hawaii. Imagine if you could drive a GT3 RS to Hawaii. That would take so long. I know, but in the GT3 RS, you're not exactly wishing the time away. You don't need the GT3 RS. You need the Thrust SSC. You know that car? No. The thrust SSC hit the world record, land speed record out on the salt flats. It's basically a jet engine on wheels. There we go. And I think it can go like 600 miles an hour. There we go. And so at that rate, you are going as fast as a passenger plane.

1:49:16And in a tunnel, if you suck all the air out, it might be more efficient and you might be able to get there. But yeah, I don't know. You'd have to go pretty deep. The ocean's really, really deep. It's deep down there. Yeah. I mean, they put the undersea cables down there for the internet. So maybe, but man, the pressure and everything. The pressure might get to you. You're going to wind up in that Titanic thing. Yeah, yeah. That's rough. Anyway, fantastic show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe or be relegated to a life of flying net jets. What do you guys want to say? Yeah. It's Thanksgiving this week.

1:49:48Happy Thanksgiving. Whatever you're doing, get together with family, friends, start a family. Start a family tradition. This is something that I've advocated for before. Start a family or a family tradition. or both yeah i have a family tradition that i'd like to share i i i don't come from a family with lots of traditions but i decided that's not a reason to not start a family tradition and so my family now has a tradition where every time we get together for one of these events or a birthday party or a holiday uh all the men of the family go outside and we smoke cigars together and it's fantastic and it's something that everyone in the family immediately adopted and uh it would have been a much harder pitch if i hadn't said it was a family tradition yep and as soon as it was now it's actually been a tradition because we've done it a couple times and now it's on the schedule it is well on its path to becoming lindy very lindy so i would encourage everyone to start a tradition um and don't be afraid to just adopt this if you do yeah send us send us a picture of you and your hopefully wearing suits founders yes smoking cigars smoking cigars after a nice turkey dinner there's a lot of different things nice toasts are a fantastic tradition yeah uh my mom likes writing rhyming limerick toasts.

1:50:57There we go. And with ChatGPT, you can really take it to the next level. I would read one, but it wouldn't make any sense because it's all about my family. But I've been to a few, you know, dinners with colleagues where someone has stood up and given a roast or a toast and called out everyone in rhyming fashion for various things. And it's hilarious and memorable and it just stands out. And it's just going a little bit, a little bit extra, making the trip to the cigar store before the event writing out the toast beforehand and it takes a lot of confidence to just stand up at your family event and give a toast but if it's good in the same way we recommend booking your amman trips you know at least year out you know plan ahead with your traditions too don't do it on the fly these are serious things and um yeah maybe start planning out the christmas one now if you're listening to this on thanksgiving or or after uh plan out the Christmas tradition now.

1:51:53There you go. That's a great place to end. Happy holidays, everyone.