The Switzerland of AI, Roblox Short Sale, Google's AI Podcast

36:58It makes the rooms feel like it's at 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 feet above sea level, not two miles. We need that, but for galaxy gas. I'm kidding. But this dude is a boss. He's 59. He retired as the owner of a pipe fitting company. Like some business that you've never heard of, but clearly just crushed it. He and his wife, who's 58, moved there last December and he wants to have his friends come visit, but he doesn't want them to spend like three days acclimating so they can come and hang out. So he spent 18 million on this house, took two years planning and six years of construction. I love how he has to go because he's got to take the gondola to get there.

37:38And then they profile a bunch of other people who have done the same thing, and apparently it's just really, really popular right now. That's proof that you don't need to work in tech to be a technology brother. Exactly. It's about how you leverage the tech. Exactly, exactly. He's putting the tech to work. So each enrichment machine costs$15K. It would have cost$75K, but today's price is$150K. and a single unit can enrich about 2 ,000 cubic feet. There's these funny ones where it's like, this dude's bedroom was so big, he needed six of them or something like that. But man, all these other people.

38:17This whole article is just like a world tour of like sick dudes, basically. I need the video of him on his like helipad, just like punching, you know, shadow boxing. Yeah, yeah. He's like, this is why I laid all that pipe throughout my life. I've been to some high elevation ski towns for ski trips, and I've never had problems acclimating. But I wonder if that will get worse with age. They're describing it in the article. You get headaches and stuff, and I've never had a problem with that. I remember as a kid, backpacking trip with the family, going up to a high elevation in whatever, five, six hours, and, you know, being in the tent throwing up.

39:03Oh, really? Yeah, I've gotten that before. I just personally would never oxygenate my house because the low oxygen concentration would just inspire me to grind harder. I feel like I need to be harder to kill. There was somebody else who, I think Nat Friedman just posted that he has a hyperbaric chamber. And I was wondering, do you know if Brian Johnson sleeps in any crazy hyperbaric chamber thing? I feel like when you go full tilt biohacker, you're doing something to the air mix while you're sleeping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a big air filtration guy, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I have these things in my house.

39:42I think it's called, let me get the name right. Yeah, IQ Air, a Swiss company. And they look like old school, like, vax machines. It's like the ugliest thing in the world. but yeah or like hospital equipment like it's not certainly not cool looking but yeah I think you want to be filtering your air people don't know this but your air is the air quality is almost always worse in your house than outdoors which is somewhat counterintuitive but there's I mean the air quality is much better in Malibu than like core LA too right? Yeah yeah in general just getting just being on the coast but it's still you're still the air quality is still much worse inside um and i think yeah and the only way to really make it better is like through filtration but also diluting the air with outside air oh sure right um but um yeah hyperbaric chambers i haven't i've spent a little bit of time in them but it's one of those things like it feels like a pretty marginal benefit unless you're going to sleep in one.

40:51Yeah, I think Nat Friedman said he had psoriasis or something that he was fighting, and the hyperbaric chamber made his symptoms go down by like 90%. It was very intractable. He tried a bunch of things, and this was the one thing that worked. Going to sleep in the chamber would be cool. I don't know if he's actually sleeping in it, but I've heard that people do that. The next step for eight sleep is the dome bed chamber. I thought they were building something like that. Damn, putting their roadmap on blast. No, I like that. I think it'd be cool. Yeah, it's awesome. I think we should probably record in a chamber.

41:24In a chamber. Well, there's a, on the 11th floor, there's some sort of a cryo chamber. Here? Yeah. Classic Jonathan Club. There's some, like, there's some company that does, like, regenerative medicine in the building. Have you seen Notebook LM? It's going to put us out of business, bro. Oh, the... The Google AI generating podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's two people talking about whatever you want them to talk about. It sounds pretty good, but it sounds like the most generic Wikipedia article ever right now. And it's just trained on Reddit, so it's so... It's like the most... I think you can kind of put in whatever you want and steer it to it.

42:07So my wife's boyfriend was telling me the other day, and you're like, wait, what? It's just the most Redditor podcast. I guess. No. Have you listened to, have you spent, like what's the longest amount of time you've spent like consuming AI content? So I think it's on YouTube. Yeah. On some of these videos that a topic seems really appealing. Sure. And it's like the video's clearly set up in a way to draw you in to get the click. And then you get through like a minute and you're just like, ugh, this is like AI slop. It's slop, yeah. And I think that there's like a very real thing happening on YouTube where there's the sort of like people are drawn to like the artisanal videos right it's like I like I love that you keep doing like real voiceovers I love your edit you know like and so there's this yeah there's like this their content is going from being like all handmade artisanal content to now this sort of like mass produced mass manufactured it's the same thing that happens with like clothing right like you know it you You can go and get the Cuccinelli of content, this handmade, craft-led content, but yet there's going to be probably 90 % of content consumption will eventually become this sort of slop, just mass-produced, just curated.

43:31It's like Fashion Nova putting out, seeing a luxury brand drop something, the next day shipping the carbon copy of it, and why would that not happen with content? Because I'm sure there's already channels that when, I don't know, like the Needle Drop, Anthony Fantano on YouTube. So Anthony Fantano puts out a music review. Somebody just clones that content, repost it immediately and makes a better click-baity title and gets more views, right? And so a lot of consumers will just keep watching. you know they're just like so in the the um being like you know just navigated through that and you're gonna have to be like the way to fight back is to be like no i'm getting that good artisanal yeah well i mean there could be like taste but then there's also like a price gate on the clothing right like yeah like the artisanal clothing is more expensive yeah so so So the monetization works out.

44:36Like the fast fashion and the LVMH stuff is like similar market cap probably, but wildly different profit per unit. Peter Zaihan, do you know Peter Zaihan? He just went full paywall on YouTube. He put out a video and he's like, this is my last video doing. And that's kind of interesting because like the guy's got incredible insights and takes and i'm sure some of them are like have conflicts and are influenced by various parties and he has certain narratives he likes to push but probably still do some no it seems like a gen yeah it seemed like a bad every comment when he announced it was basically like okay see you never bro yeah it is tricky yeah there was this one youtuber called jake tran have you heard of this guy he's like a he's like business video essays and he tried to pull himself so he pulled himself out of like the editing and had a team writing and editing everything but he was still doing the voiceover and he was so he would just record the voiceover and he wanted to pull himself out of that so he started just recording the intro and then handing it off to another voiceover artist to do it and everyone was like why aren't you even voicing your own things anymore like this is so fake and it's and it was like he was just two years too early because the ai voice clones are good enough now that no one would notice if he used an ai voice clone he might be now i don't know but um there's gonna be a whole doubt on it there's gonna be a whole cottage industry of people on youtube that just like watch the video first run like run some analysis on it to determine if it's like artisan yeah yeah uh and then just be the first comment to be like yeah i mean it does seem like there's there's maybe like I don't know if there's an analogy with the clothing thing but there is some sort of like barbell where yes you might want like the artisanal content for something that's like really entertaining and novel and interesting and unique but then if I'm like if I just want to know about a topic that I don't know anything about and I can just like search it and get a you know Wikipedia article or listen to that as a podcast like why not I'm a big fan of like like the consumer gets to choose the format that they consume the content in yeah so i can say i want this there's a podcast here i want you ai i want you to transcribe it because i feel like reading or or there's a book here i want to consume this in the form of a video like make that for me and just translate it because that's where the ai models are really really good when they're just swapping things over from one thing to the next it's hard for them to do like truly novel new things but they're pretty good at just like translation transform transformation right yeah but yeah i mean glowing endorsement from andre carpathy he said he loves it i listened to the one on swartzenegger and it was kind of like it was a little i not that great i think the thing that's interesting about that is the applications in education are wild yeah if i'm so imagine this i'm i'm a college student and i'm going into an exam you know in five hours and I know nothing about a topic right and it's gonna be like you're gonna sit down and have to write an essay there's three topics there you remember in college they'd be like there's these three topics you're gonna have to write an essay about one of them right so imagine I'm a I'm a college uh you know like gym bro I'm going into this essay in five hours I'm like okay I got five hours and I tell my notebook LM I'm like you know make me a podcast about uh the signing, the events that led up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 40-minute podcast, I just listened to it.

48:13And the recall on that is crazy, even if you're just like, you know, benching in the gym. And so I think that, I think the applications and these sort of like, you know, I don't want to listen to Notebook LM talk about antitrust, you know, situations within tech, right? Because part of listening to takes about that kind of thing is you want the host to have some insider information that's not publicly available. But if you're just talking about history and trying to learn about who would benefit more from keto versus intermittent fasting, and then having those two people talk about that, you can learn a lot.

48:54It does seem like there's a lot of alpha in the content around, like, edginess or comedy or anything that's, like, would be censored by most LLMs so they can't produce it well. Or just comedy in general is novel. Like, I even tested, like, Tell Me a Joke on, like, the latest and greatest, like, you know, GPT-01, and it was terrible. Like, it's not even close. Not even a zinger? It's just not getting anywhere near. It's not making any progress there. but it's incredible at math and like a whole bunch of other things that it's supposed to be good at. But there is something else to be said for like content where the AI seems to be really, really bad about surfacing new facts.

49:39And a lot of reporters will say this where like, oh yeah, like LLMs can like write articles now. But like that's not really what reporters are doing. Like when a reporter writes up an article, that's like the last 5 % of the work that they've been doing. like 95 % of the work is like collecting new facts that don't exist on the internet and don't exist anywhere because they talked to someone and they got a fact out of them, they got information and they corroborated it. And so there's still value in like surfacing that fact, but there is a question about like how do you monetize that? Like you need to set up a really like tough paywall because like if you're, as soon as that fact gets surfaced in your article, boom, you're going to be cloned in a million places immediately and other people are going to try and monetize that.

50:19Like that's going to be really, really tricky. already people do that all the time where it's like someone gets the scoop and then it's reposted immediately just like changed up a little bit for some other like rag yeah um but i don't know it's interesting oh well what else should we talk about we talk about venture funds yeah oh yeah yes yes crv giving back money yeah so my i mean i actually don't know a single person at crv i have some portfolio companies that have you know spoken to them over the years and you more recently but ultimately what this comes down to is i haven't seen i cannot recall crv being in a headline like within the last 12 months about anything and they effectively chose to make their biggest media moment they chose to make their biggest media moment giving back money which i feel like as a venture fund all of your marketing should be towards founders just one customer and then you know uh lps which is your other customer and going out and making the the only thing i can recall about crv now aside from interactions portfolio companies have had with them is that they decided that they didn't have places to invest money and like the whole strategy that they had raised around yeah and so one it almost feels like they're traders to go to the New York Times and feed them, you know, because.

51:45Well, are you sure that's what happened? Because it's totally possible that they announced this to their LPs and their LPs leaked it immediately. Like that's where most of the venture funders come from. But if you pull up the article. Oh, it's like they're commenting. It's their four partners in the picture. They made the decision to have the New York Times come and photograph them. It's a new photo. Yeah. It's not like just their default, like they pulled it off the website. Okay, we should. Because that could be the thing, you know? here's why I think it's a New York Times picture yeah because it looks like a New York Times picture one it's in their style and they look sad which is normally what the New York they're like hey act like your dog just died let's do one series okay that's the one we're using yeah yeah so it's Ryan Young for the New York Times it's written by Aaron Griffith we know has a history of saying that she's going to position a story one way and then putting it that way okay but the idea to go to aaron griffith and their comms agency whoever they're working with for pr because i would assume they are be kind of weird to affirm that size not i mean they probably knew that he was going to leak for the lps so yeah but it's just like why i don't nobody did they want a pat on the back like do they want to be acknowledged for like to me it's a little late i mean yeah it's a little late one it's two years after similar decisions were made and i just don't know i mean and the other thing is that i don't know i don't know i have no idea the mechanics of it but it's not like they had the money in their bank account and they were like giving it back it's that they didn't make the capital call yeah so you basically the same article is CRV resizes their growth fund okay is that a story and is that what you want to be covered about like could you not think of anything it kind of presumes that the reader doesn't understand the concept of a capital call like well that's the New York Times audience definitely thinks that if a venture fund raises a billion dollars they have a billion dollars in an account somewhere yeah yeah yeah exactly and that the VCs like took 50 percent of it yeah yeah or that it's 90 their money yeah it's all their money yeah it's the average so yeah i think um i think giving erin griffith ammo to make to paint tech in a bad light as their tech is just like this disaster which is like her entire venture is not working anymore funds are giving it back you think that's the the goal here that's always the angle i don't know but i mean for for every one of these articles there's 10 that are like oh soft bank's back in the game baby like let's go yeah yeah but i don't I think, yeah, does, but Aaron, Aaron would cover that same story in the light of.

54:40There are more we're so back stories right now than it's so other. For sure. New York Times is not doing we're so back stories, though. No. Like, it's always, like, Adam Neumann is back, and this is why it's back. Adam Neumann is going to make a bunch of ugly buildings beautiful again. Here's 10 reasons why we hate that. Yeah. No, so anyways, I just, like, I respect them making this a business decision. if I were CRV though, I'd be like, how can we get a story that's going to be big that actually makes us seem like alpha chads? And saying that we have no places to deploy is not, I don't know, why don't you do a hostile takeover of a Caribbean nation?

55:25Or what... What could they have done with$275 million in Haiti? Could they have returned... Well, General Catalyst is buying a hospital network. You saw that. That's crazy. That is the kind of type of bold move that gets you crazy. Yeah, but here's the thing. They are still investing out of their core$1 billion early stage fund. Yeah. And so...

56:19I don't know. root against any firm, even if I think their comps, any allocator, even if, and I hope we see these guys on the Midas list for this decision, right? Like, maybe, like, they have such a banger in the first, like, half of the fun that they're just like, nah, like, let's just let this, like, let's just let this ride. You know, maybe that's the whole thing. That might be smart, yeah, maybe they got something good in there. They got something good. What could they have in there? You'd have some, you'd hold some cash back to do the next Series Z. The Series Z, yeah. You gotta wait for the Series Z.

56:51Yeah, anyways. That's where the money is. Reed, Murat, Saar, and Max. Saar and Newman. He's back, baby. He's so back. I thought he was doing something else, like the real estate roll-up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is this a new new thing, or is this just a new brand? This is a new co-working thing. I think he was doing multifamily housing. Was that Flow? Flow is multifamily. And now this is called Workflow. Yeah, yeah. Avoids the specific business model that got his original co-working company into trouble. Is it just a management company? I didn't actually read the article either. I was just like, this guy's sick.

57:19Dude, this is, this is, the reason Technology Brothers is just Twitter and podcasts is because no one's reading the article and we're just, like, still just speculating. All I know is that one of my friends ran into him at a party and he wasn't wearing shoes. And I was like, yep, that's on brand. Some things don't change. Yep, exactly. It wasn't actually a zero interest rate phenomenon. It wasn't. It was. I mean, he, he captured so much of the love with the secondaries. Like, like, to write him off, like, he's not in jail. I don't think he got sued or anything. he wound up with a billion liquid or something like that and so he's gonna make a play at some point he's gonna try and do something i just wonder what this will be somebody told me his jet was on the market oh really maybe he just maybe he just uh well they're coming out with a new one so you know gotta sell the old one right i think the g650 is like you know no longer the commodity phasing out yeah you gotta go to the 750 or something like that i didn't know this but apparently I think his jet was black and apparently that hurts the performance quite a bit.

58:20A huge amount. You're just attracting so much less. You have to run the AC constantly I think. Yeah but it's also just so cool. It's much cooler. Michael Jordan's jet is also black. It has a crazy paint job they spend a ton of money on. And it adds an egregious amount of weight. From the density of the paint or whatever. Silly. Should we go through some of these more tweets? I got a whole stack here. I printed them all off. Is this the same stack? No, no, no. Oh, sorry. I don't have the same stack. We'll just pull them up one at a time. Okay. So the first one is from Signal. I never say these Anon names out loud, and then I do, and then I realize I have no idea.

59:03But he says, the gap between the very rich and everyone else is actually shrinking drastically over time due to hyper-capitalism and tech. You drink the same Coke as a billionaire. You use the same iPhone as a billionaire on the same network. You use the exact same tools as a billionaire, e.g. chat GPT. There is no special ultra-rich person versions of software or apps. You read the same garbage online as a billionaire. Definitely true. You shitpost in the same fashion as a billionaire on the same networks. A billionaire shits in the same type of toilet as you do. You're afforded roughly the same health care as a billionaire, assuming you have insurance with marginal differences.

59:36You can roughly go travel to any place like a billionaire can, and private versus not. And then PG actually had the top reply and mentioned that he'd written about this in 2004, which is kind of funny. Got him. Mind the gap. Yeah, I don't think things have changed that much. I mean, I'm gonna do a very sort of shaky analysis of this, but if you went back hundreds of years ago and you had a king and peasants, like they're both, you could argue, you use the same stone for your wall, and it's like your bread was milled with similar grain you know and it's like and your wine also gets you drunk you know and it's like well the things that were truly luxuries were like oh the king has like this little meager supply of like this certain spice sure and it's like that stuff still exists right like i can go you can go and get like blueberries that were handpicked sure you know in japan omakase strawberries yeah yeah and and and i would argue that you know the the, you know, early, you know, first job out of college product manager that's going to sugar fish is not eating the same fish that we do when we go out to get sushi.

1:00:50I'm kidding. No, they're not eating the same fish. They're not eating the same fish that somebody who's having, you know, hosting a dinner party at their house and, like, having, like, some sushi chef from Japan, like, who flew over. It's just not. and so i don't know if you could argue like you know the peasant is says to the king but sir my wool i i sure you know i the wool in my sweater is the same as yours are we not so different you know yeah i do think that that this actually goes back to warren buffett eating c's you know candy and being like like he's the original one of this obviously he's known for sort of like eating down in some ways.

1:01:31Sure, sure, sure. But yeah, I think it's just like ultimate longevity. I think the takeaway from this is that capitalism rips. Yep. And we should encourage it and support it. There is an interesting thing here where like if you are a billionaire and you want an iPhone or you want ChatGPT, like you at some level need some sort of competition or you need some other people in the economy. It's like you can't just have one person with all of the assets. Like there's some sort of wealth equality that needs to happen in the economy. Such that like, you know, like the richest man can't make the best film happen and the best album and all of these things.

1:02:12Like there needs to be a lot of other people building and doing other stuff. Like it really is like a society that bounces off of each other. Which is like important to get like the innovation that then becomes like evenly distributed over time. Right. Yeah. Right. It's interesting. I don't know. Well, should we go to China? Yeah, I think the cool thing, the last thing I would say on that, I was talking to a founder on Monday who has a candy company. Yeah. And the thing that's genuinely cool about all this stuff is, like, the thing about the accessibility of all these things is being a billionaire doesn't make the iPhone more enjoyable somehow.

1:02:54Like, there's not even really apps that you can get, right? Whoa. Not yet, but once we launch our wallpapers app, the i'm rich wallpapers app that has a$10 ,000 subscription. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. I think it's$1 ,000 a month is the cap. $1 ,000 a month. But it's a good$12 ,000 ARR per. You just know you have the most luxurious wallpaper. Coming soon. But yeah, it's just that that is all the evidence. Imagine how much people would be in uproar if you could go down that list and be like, billionaires have this and I don't. Billionaires have this and I don't. Billionaires have this. And even given that situation, the dominant sort of like political view that gets votes seemingly is let's tax the 1 % more even though, or let's tax the 10 % more even though they already pay like 80 % of federal income taxes.

1:03:50Interesting. I have a friend who is a sugarfish hater and he once referred to it as like the McDonald's of sushi. And I was like, now you're speaking my language. Yeah. I love that. I love that. It's amazing. Let's go when they open. Yeah, yeah. Delicious. Like, you didn't have to convince me. Low quality, but presented well. Repeatable. It's good. You saw this, that Huawei in China built a European city. Right. This is so exciting. Yeah, I mean, we're going. That's where our Asian studio has to be. It's amazing. Yeah, why can't we do that? I mean, I think it would be probably cultural appropriation or something.

1:04:28But it's effectively our culture. Well, no, no, if we did the opposite. No, no, no, yeah, I'm not saying build a great wall. Well, we kind of do that in the sense that there's Chinatown and Japantown and Koreatown, but we don't take it to this level. It'd be so sick if Chinatown and New York City just looked like the forbidden city in Beijing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Imagine in Manhattan, you're just rolling up. or like you go to like little Tokyo and it like looks exactly like Tokyo. Yeah, the bus looks like a dragon, you know, like see Winnie the Pooh walking around. But this architecture, it's just so iconic.

1:05:01Like you see it and you're just like, that looks like Europe. Inspired. Yeah. It's just beautiful. But what a crazy choice by Huawei to just like send it. 25 ,000 people work here. It's like acres and acres and acres. Like you can just walk around this city for like, you know, hours and just only see Italian, French, and German architecture. More residents than the entire town. Yeah. Double the residents of the entire town that I live in. I don't really know why I pulled this up other than just it's like crazy. Yeah. Honestly, we'd like to see more of it. I think the XL campus will look similar.

1:05:39Should we talk about the All In podcast? Yeah. How do you warm up for your All In podcast listens? sunning uh my perineum oh yeah you know yeah both legs back yeah sunlight just to kind of like get the chi going sure you know sure to make sure that when jason starts you know and are you listening are you listening on like airpods max airpod pros or are you listening on more of a wired headphones but or do you do like a full like stereo system if all ends toxic enough i don't also want the toxic ems like like the the relationship dynamics of the show are already so you know you don't print it on vinyl and just play it at home that's a good i think that's honestly that's that's that's our next drop yeah is is last week's all an episode on vinyl and just like you should definitely do that the greatest things we might let's let's cut this out we don't want to we don't want to do it leak this actually no we can leak it our five listeners somebody else they can get a little preview yeah i like it let us know in the comments if you want the all-in podcast last vinyl this is this is going to be like a great journey for us because we're going to find some guy in brooklyn who's like the last guy just making like handmade vinyl records artisanal vinyl i think having like the trump episode or like the elon episode on vinyl is just it's so high status for a tech bro and there's this big especially with the yeah like like there's something so like a record the packaging and everything it's like it was the epitome of like album art when you could just like hold it yep and just like you know seeing the zoom screen of like jane and all the guys the all-in like the podcast logos they're square because they show up in your podcast feed square and that fits just perfectly on the line of cover.

1:07:41But I mean, I think everyone is kind of circling around the same conclusion around the All In podcast that, you know, it hasn't lived up to the expectations of what people thought it could be, unfortunately. In terms of? Profit, mostly. I mean, I love what they've done politically, genuinely. I think it's very good. I talked to a literal congressperson who was like, I get my takes from the All In podcast. That's good. It's very good because previously they were getting it from Kara Swisher and Rico. That's good for venture capitalists. It's a huge step forward. These are, like, people joke about all the different All In guys or whatever, but seriously, like, they're all on the same team, which is the most important thing.

1:08:24And even though they have a little infighting about politics, that doesn't actually matter. What matters is that they're all capitalists and they're all capital allocators. and they all care about founders and business and like good things. They're not insane. And so, I mean, it is a huge thing, but it just sucks that they don't have ads. I think everyone expected when the show got big, like this would be a place where the best ads and the ad rates would be super high and they'd be making a lot of money. Six-figure CPMs. Exactly. But they just haven't lived up to it. And I think that's why it's more important than ever that a show like Technology Brothers exists, a show that focuses on profit over listener satisfaction or audience size or any political influence.

1:09:08All of that stuff, you can put that all to the side. Yeah, they're posting about, while they post pictures from their conference, we'll be posting our P &L. Exactly. We'll be posting our Stripe dashboard, screenshot it. Everyone loves, oh, my podcast is this in the rankings or it has this many stars and reviews. no what's the ebitda how much money do you cash flow these are the important metrics for a podcast yeah and so that's her listener right like it's not just gross it's exactly on a per listener basis what are you taking out exactly exactly so and are you levering up that's the other thing with podcasts not using leverage oh yeah it's insane that they're not saying that they're not right like yeah um so yeah i mean i i see them i see us kind of as a spiritual successor to the all-in podcast kind of focusing on what matters exactly like doing what they couldn't figure out and honoring it through you know paying homage to some of their most iconic episodes through vinyl vinyl releases yeah exactly um that's great should we talk about the the zuckmobile Yeah, this was amazing.

1:10:20There's a lot of words that you could describe Zuck's era that I won't say. So give the overview. It looks like, so Zuck posted pictures on Instagram of him. He has purchased and customized his and hers Porsches. One is a sports car, looks like a 911, and the other is a Cayenne SUV. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't disrespect Zuck's choice. That's a GT3 Touring. oh it's gt3 touring but it's not is it manual is it thest i think he said it's a manual okay no it's not an i mean the tourings are all manual to my knowledge or maybe i thought thest was the gt3 manual i thought that was the whole point of like thest that's why it exists but maybe it's like yeah it's more just like analog yeah yeah yeah but anyway yeah so so right away right away uh it's cool somebody i saw somebody else saying i don't know if it was this tweet but like Like, he's sort of realizing that him doing this is not cool to other billionaires, but it's cool to the average Instagram user.

1:11:21Yeah, that's what this tweet is. I think what Zuck realized is that the norm of avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth is entirely about intra-elite social status, and common people actually love stuff like this. And this is 100 % accurate. Yeah, so the— Plus, there was this whole, like, fake thing for a long time, like, SBF drove a civic, and was like, I'm not doing it for the money. and it's like he was the most in it for the money and completely fraudulent and so it's okay was doing like i'm smoking meat yeah i'm just in my backyard it's like yeah yeah trying to make it everyone knows your backyard is sick like it's fine like just let us enjoy vicariously how sick your backyard is yeah we want to see you surfing and stuff my whole thing is like the the um you've gone and told the entire world that your wife drives a turbo gt minivan and it's a one-on-one And so what is the actual usability of it?

1:12:14Like I don't understand, is she pulling out of the Zuck estate to pick the kids up from school and there's like this military convoy and a helicopter and she's just like, I love living my regular, you know, minivan mom life. Well, you know, you know, like the standard billionaire like set up, it's like two black SUVs outside of everywhere that you go. And so you walk outside, there's always two. So if one breaks down, you can get in the other one. But then also like you don't know where they are. essentially that's just kind of the standard equipment yeah if i was a billionaire two ford rafters two rafters two trucks for sure yeah for sure except except the raptor as a former raptor owner is like really not that practical like it's just not the cabin's just not that big okay it's not like you can like unless you want to be west coast customs stretch it yeah yeah the um i'm very pro minivan i've told you this i recently purchased a minivan a mercedes metris very popular in europe less popular here mostly used as an airport transport vehicle i've been loving it like just walking up to your car pulling the door and having the door go out it's very very practical um my only critique is the color choice i think chalk is the worst modern yeah porsche you know color color the putty color um i love how we have to to tweet in black and white.

1:13:34But yeah, it's a rough color. Like if you're gonna do that, why not do like the - Fun color. The like Python green. I've been looking at the new VW bus. Have you seen this thing? No, is it the electric one? It's electric, it's called the ID Buzz. And it comes from - But it's coal powered. Coal powered. Well the electricity that - Is from coal. That uses is from coal, yeah. So it has the sliding doors like a minivan, but it's a bus, so it doesn't read as a minivan fully. it reads as like something weird and different and then it comes in like these crazy color ways and i was even thinking of getting it wrapped in like something more fun so that i think that the optimization when you're a parent is just like get the car that will be fun for the kids my optimization was extreme practicality and when they have the air one smoothie and they're throwing it around the car that i'm not worried about it getting on the leather yeah you know i just don't care.

1:14:26Just like throw it on the ceiling, throw it on there, throw up, you know, like do whatever you want to. I mean, I've been testing the waters with like, what car should I get based on my three-year-old's opinions. That's great. So I'll do like an A-B test, like which one do you like more? I'll show them two images. And the car that beats everything else, can you guess? Red Cybertruck. Yeah, I was about to say Cybertruck. Red Cybertruck. It was designed by a three-year-old and it gets a three-year-old going. And one of my friends was like, the Cybertruck is the most, like it's the most perfect example of a car that matters to only, it matters only to people who don't matter, right?

1:15:09It's like, it's cool to people who aren't goofy or serious, right? And I'm like, but it matters to three-year-old boys. Which is arguably for us, fathers. The only dude I'm trying to impress. He's the only guy that I care about. I don't care what some, you know, random person thinks about my car. I care what my son thinks about my car. Is he pumped to get in and go on an adventure? No, most of my car purchasing has been driven by my inner child. Yeah, that's why I got the wagon. It has the reverse rear view seat. I was always a hit when I was a kid. It'll be a hit for these kids. When I got a Raptor, I got this murdered out Raptor that had been lifted and tinted.

1:15:50and it was like what is the truck that like the five-year-old me wanted and i didn't have because my parents drove two priuses it was like what do you want to what should we car should we take to school today my parents want to civics yeah i was like do you want to take this the white prius or the gold prius and i'm like no like a white and a gray silver honda civic or a white honda and so as an adult i have some purchasing power and i'm like what what what am i going to get and i started I basically like had to train Sarah on it for a year. Every time I'd see a Raptor, I'd be like, that is a good looking truck.

1:16:26And it would basically like, she was like the first like 10 to 20 times. She goes, absolutely not. I hate that. And then I kept saying it and I started to break through. I did the same thing. My wife knows like nothing about you, but she knows that you owned a Raptor. And I've told her that Raptors don't depreciate like as much as other cars. and so whenever she sees a Raptor now she's like I know that that car doesn't depreciate it's a practical decision and she's like I hate that you've like taught me all these stupid car things because now I'm like noticing red brakes or like when a car has four has four tail yeah four exhaust pipes she was like yeah yesterday I saw a BMW that didn't have any like decals on it had been debadged and I was like oh like there's something under the hood there like a muscle car it's clearly modded yeah and she was like i don't need to know this like why is this why is this in my brain yeah i could be using this for other things no but unfortunately with the the raptor the ultimate challenge and the reason that i got rid of it was one because parking in the average la parking lot with a raptor one can't fit any parking garages which is also just a general issue in la but two anytime you're meeting with somebody that doesn't know you already their first assumption is that if you pull up in a lifted murdered out raptor is that you are a total dickhead and so like trying to i just realized there was this period of like i had to like overcome that and i was like this is kind of a waste of time like i'd rather somebody pull up and sort of like people you know people it is tough because there's no american car right now that sends just like a neutral signal like if you're in like a mustang you're a mustang owner Corvette owner, et cetera.

1:18:10That's so true. Raptor, same thing. If you're in a Tesla, people have all these weird mixed things. It was either your total green tree hugger, or now it's your Trump supporter. Yeah. It's very controversial. We bought this before we knew what a bad guy he was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My hot take is Elon is getting so right wing pilled that he's going to make a V12 Model S. Yeah, yeah. With a gated manual and a straight pipe exhaust. I think that'd be incredible. He's just like, yeah, you know what? Like, you know, like I didn't get any credit for the whole EV transition anyway. You guys don't like these EVs.

1:18:48So now I'm doing ICE cars. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is pretty wild that the Cybertruck is seemingly selling very well. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yet it would sell even better if it was just like full. If it wasn't controversial. Yeah, yeah. if it was more controversial. So, yeah, we have this one. S &P Global Mobility says Tesla delivered 5 ,175 Cybertrucks in July. This is a 61 % month-over-month increase. They also estimate the rest of the electric pickup truck market sold only a combined 5 ,500. So Tesla's 50 % of the market. Here's something that's funny about Tesla. So there's a founder, a classic thing if you're a founder and you either raised a bunch of venture capital, I guess, in the case of this other tweet, or there's a founder of a company that's actually doing really well, and he bought a Foundation Series Cybertruck thinking that, okay, there's going to be a limited release.

1:19:45If anything's going to hold value, it's this one. Tesla has completely ignored that that was ever supposed to be limited and foundational first number of orders, and they're continuing to produce them at full clip. What's the difference between a Foundation model and just a regular one? I don't know the design differences, but I think it was sold through as a limited edition. Like you got the first, you know, like one of the first one. Yeah. It'll be the one that like, it'll be the one. But it was at a significant, let's look at it. Yeah. It's interesting. I still love them. I think they're just beautiful.

1:20:21And I smile every time I see them around and my son smiles every time I see them around. And I think they're just funny looking and I want more aggressive cars like this. I really like that Hyundai that's coming out. That one is crazy. Well, yeah, so they put the electric powertrain in the Hyundai Ioniq 5N. And it's the guy who did the BMW M series. And what letter comes after M, it's N. So he went over there, put up the N division, and he created like digital DCT, basically, like a dual clutch transmission. And it has engine noise. And all the car guys that have driven it are like, it's incredible.

1:20:58Like you forget that you're not driving like a manual or like an actual engaging car. And now they're going to put that in this Hyundai Vision 74 thing. It looks amazing. It looks like something out of Back to the Future. Have you seen this thing? It looks really good. I didn't know that. I thought that was just a concept car. So it was a concept car. And they were going to do it with some crazy powertrain that was like hydrogen. Have you seen this thing? Hydrogen cars. And they yanked that. They're doing the electric. I think they're going to do an N model. so it'll have like 700 horsepower and but it'll be like 50k or something so you'll be able to track on it yeah uh and it'll just be like so funny and look so cool uh and i think it's going into production they're trying to get it live by 2029 which i think is like believable based on hyundai like i think that they're like pretty serious it's out of concept car territory now there's nothing better than when a car manufacturer wakes up out of their stupor oh yeah it's like every car manufacturer is pretty much a legacy company yeah except for tesla and whatever rivian yeah and when it when when these companies wake up i would give the example of like toyota with their land cruiser it's like hey let's take like one of our most loves cars ever and let's just like run it back yeah and like make it modern and make it cool and people love them and you know like it you know that it's going to be like a toyota it's like it's great they did the same thing with the Lexus, effectively the same version of the car that has, I guess it's like slightly, I don't know, slightly bigger.

1:22:23Oh, yeah, the Lego-housed one. Yeah. And then the VW that you mentioned, the van. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bring back the bus. There's nothing exciting in VW's portfolio other than this thing. Yeah, you take the legacy of these amazing, iconic products, and you just, somebody like wakes up one day at these manufacturers, and they're like, hey, we should actually do something cool or novel. I think VW got the marketing right, but I think the car is actually pretty trash. I think the range is really bad and the price is way too high. So I think objectively it's not that good of a car. But it's a cool idea, and I'm glad that they're going in that direction, at least being fun.

1:22:57Speaking of Cybertrucks, did you see this startup promotion? This guy was announcing the latest version of a company called Bastion. And instead of spending a bunch of money on a video, we decided to do something more impactful, giving out free rides across New York City in our branded Cybertrucks. details on the launch or how to grab a ride below. Yeah, so I never want to hate on anybody trying to create value in the world that this is just like so whack. It's like I now know that you were giving rides in a company Cybertruck, which why do you have a company Cybertruck as a crypto infrastructure company?

1:23:32Oh, is that what they are? And I don't know what... So yeah, I don't know what they do. I don't know what you do. I don't know what they do. It would have been much more impactful to... Do something related to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, like, you know, like, what are the themes of your business? Security, regulation, money, infrastructure, like crypto, like, it's got to tie to that somehow. Whatever stunt you do needs to be something, like, around that. Yeah, if you're building, like, there's so many things, like, back in the party round days, we did something where we were like, hey, reply with your, like, address, and we're doing an airdrop.

1:24:08And then we airdropped NFT ads for party round into everybody's wallets, which you would then have to pay money to get out of it all. So we just sent them to like the CEO of Figma and like all these other crypto people. So it's like, cool, now like there's, and it just said, this is an ad for Party Round. And it was like in like comic. And so it's like, there's so many things you could do, but I'm like, okay, like I could take the subway or I could like text the Bastion hotline. I mean, even if they were just like, okay, text them and we'll send, like, I don't know if this is like a security company, it's like okay text them and they'll bring like a like 25 security guards will like follow you around or something like that something that's a little bit more like tied to like security it feels like this should be about like a transportation company like are you launching like a lift competitor or something yeah or you do something like this during a conference yeah so that at least there's like more like but i'm just thinking like you're driving around soho and you see this like cyber truck yeah and you're like okay cool and they probably got like 10 rides in throughout the day yeah and i do like the idea of like if you're a founder and you're picking a car and you just happen to buy a cyber truck like throw your logo on it yeah like i think that's really positive yeah it's a good way to get cheap attention if that's a car that you personally want yeah on a drive but you can put it on whatever car you own if you have a ford raptor throw some throw a wrap for your company on there like that's funny and cool and then when you pull up people Yeah, it's funny that when you think about wraps as like an unutilized ad inventory, the issue is that the people that would wrap their car with something for like a nominal amount of money are going to have like not so great cars that you want to associate with.

1:25:51But like it would be a funny thing for like... Imagine if Zuck wrapped the Porsche with like, you know, oh, like buy my meta Ray-Bans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be cooler. That would be cooler. Like a GT3 RS with a Ryan. It was just like all of his different products. Like download Instagram here, QR code. Like just really tacky. No, I did that with our old CTO is like into like racing. I was like, let me, do you have any sponsors? Let me sponsor your car. I got put five of my companies up there. It's great. Yeah, it's cool. It looks awesome. It also just looks cool. Everybody on the team. Yeah, it just makes the car look cooler.

1:26:31that's an example of capitalism in action is putting a bunch of stickers on a car makes it look cooler that's amazing that's the power of advertising I like that you saw this tweet yeah so this is this is just like so funny in so many ways because for some reason like all the AI slop thread accounts have all decided that like this is the new scam. Break it down. Tell me what the tweet says. There was like 30 of these tweets that are basically saying AI models are earning over, AI influencers are earning over$5 ,000 per month. Meet Emily, a 21-year-old model who was brought to life by AI. Now you can create your own AI influencer in minutes.

1:27:22Here's how. And I think it's cool technology, but But to me, this just makes me go long, like actual influencers, because one, people don't really realize, but like you can have 100 ,000 followers on Instagram being like an Instagram model and like make like below minimum wage because like unless you're genuinely influential and cool and brands like actually think that by working with you, they're going to elevate their brand. The best that you're getting is like free product. so I'm imagining like all the guys that were doing like drop shipping stores 10 years ago and like didn't it didn't really work and they're looking for their next thing are now like I'm going to make an army of AI influencers and they're just like going to be like slaving over like creating like the perfect like all this content because it's obviously like these people these people are competing against other influencers who are have a real connection with their audience have years and years and years of sort of like a relationship and genuinely are creating like artisanal content yep and anybody that's going out and saying you're going to make sixty thousand dollars a year with your ai slop influencer that's like has no opinion um and all these courses are for sure going to say like if you can just get one ai influencer that's making 5 ,000 a month and then you scale to 100 or 1 ,000, you could be making$5 million a month from your AI influencer business.

1:28:55Well, that's where the money is. So that guy's promoting a course or something or like a product, something. He's selling the product that allows you to do this. But you know what's really interesting is that that video there is an actual human. It's not AI generated. He's just saying that it's AI generated because obviously if you use a real person, it looks even more real. and there's no risk of like slopification. Because everyone's like, oh wow, like he was able to make a girl where the hands are perfect and everything. There's no, like the hair isn't transforming or anything. There's no artifacts.

1:29:29So he must have the best tech in the game. I got to go with this guy. That's what I think. At least that's what the community notes said when I dig in. Really? Yeah, I'm like a community notes. Did I tell you this? I'm like community notes admin now. Let's go. Let's go. so you're the new wikipedia mafia so so i can go in and like rate all the community notes i can write community notes i can do all that's great you should communicate community note all our posts yeah say technology brothers is not not the most profitable podcast yeah because if you get a community note then it'll be more viral oh they got dunked on yeah exactly yeah um yeah so i mean trevor mcfedry's like already tried to do this with brad back in the day oh i don't know this like he made an AI influencer called Will Michaela.

1:30:14Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Had genuine like million followers, like really cool collaborations, like really good execution over a long period of time. Yeah. He sold the company to Dapper in like 2022. And I would just like, but they were approaching it from like world building and actual storytelling. It's not like give me a TikTok girl that's between the ages of 22 and 25 and make them dance to the most viral songs. It's like, okay, I'm very bearish. But happy that the course bros have a new product to sell. One of the guys I was hanging out with, a buddy of mine, this guy Kimia, who sold his last company to Ramp, he's building he's building software to like basically an AI agent to like find and win government contracts which is cool so we've been talking about like how do you create this sort of like cottage industry around people basically showing other people how to find and win government contracts and then you know in the same way that Shopify maybe it was you that said I don't know if Hindenburg ever covered Shopify but But basically, his business will be massively successful if you get all these bros being like millionaires are being made through government contracting, which I actually think is very positive.

1:31:48Because if you get a bunch of smart young hustlers that are going to compete for contracts to do toilet paper for the penitentiary. It's kind of like the old war dogs. Yeah, it's like, well, it actually increases competition and lowers the cost for the taxpayer and the government. so anyways I hope that that becomes yeah it's kind of related to like the rise of the rest thing that you've been talking about did you see that announcement from Valinor Julie Bush put this out have you seen this oh yeah yeah yeah is it an incubator yeah I mean everyone's kind of confused about what it is but it's like you know maybe incubator maybe holding company eventually maybe some of the companies live inside I think it's still pretty early but did they raise money yeah is she a part of the bush family oh i don't know maybe that's some lore if ben was if ben was here he could quickly yeah because that would be like the ultimate like if jeb bush is the lead investor i was thinking about how there's like so few neocons anymore they just they they're kind of a dying breed everyone's like you know you're either like a right-wing nationalist or like you're like left wing pro-war but there's no like right-wing pro-war dick cheney's still he's still around he's still endorsed Kamala.

1:32:57Yeah, but he's like crossing the aisle now, right? Yeah, he endorsed Kamala. Yeah. But he's just pro-war. He's just pro-war. Yeah. But, yeah, I think the main value prop for Valinor is like if you're just a talented founder but you don't know anything about distribution, you don't know anything about government contracting, like they will, in exchange for equity and cash, like standard YC deal type thing, they give you the tools to get your first contract. That's super cool. Yeah. Which I think is, yeah. Because I just think it's about the reason, I heard about a guy who is a, basically makes like millions of dollars per year as the guy that California contracts to when they need to move like protected bird eggs from like one location that's getting developed to another.

1:33:49And so like that should not be a million dollar contract. There should be three companies bidding over that aggressively to get the price down. Because think about it. Think about if you went to some environmental studies student and it was like, hey, do you want to take a six-month course on how to transport endangered bird eggs? They're like, cool, okay, now you can do this. And it pays$150 per day, and it's contract-based. And you've gone from a multimillion-dollar contract to, okay, now we're paying entry-level people to do this. Yeah, like what it actually deserves. And so I think more competition is good, and it's so opaque.

1:34:28and inefficient that can't possibly be very competitive. Right. I mean, we were talking about this with like the, you know, the SpaceX narrative is like, is like, you know, it's the power law winner. I think it's like$150 billion company. And it's great. And the, and Anderil has kind of like carved their brand out as like the power law winner in defense tech broadly. but there still remains the question of like, they can be the power law winner and defense tech can not look like the phone market. It can look like the SaaS market in the sense that like, yes, they are the power law winner in the sense that like they're the sales force, they're the biggest company and maybe they're the prime.

1:35:17Yeah, but look at the CRM market. You still have Salesforce and HubSpot. Exactly. There are still a lot of other companies that like do fantastically. And I also think like there's this very broader element of like Anduril is like a prime and does like, you know, DOD contracting. But when people think about like defense tech and hard tech, it gets so broad that people wind up like Augustus with weather modification is like kind of in that milieu and yet like not competitive at all. He just called me from the Caribbean. Really? The winds were howling. He's like, don't tell anybody where I am right now.

1:35:54You're not going to believe this. He's just in the eye of the storm. He's fighting. He's fighting for his life right now. No, so I think the reason that defense tech is not going to be, or I would hope that it doesn't become the monopoly that Anderil sort of implies, is that... Oh, that's perfect. Yeah. The reason that I don't think it'll be the monopoly that they, like, sort of like philosophize we can be monopoly over yeah but is that the stated one of the stated goals of the dod and the government in general is vendor diversity yeah i mean palmer told me that directly he said like the government will not allow us to be a complete monopoly exactly yeah um but they can still be the greatest like value creation event in defense technology over the past 60 years, right?

1:36:46Which is like a huge win for everyone. And I think the even cooler thing is like, like I think about that guy who's doing that stove, the impulse stove. And have you seen this? It's basically like a stove that has a ton of batteries in it. So it's an electric stove, but it can heat up like a pan very quickly, be very precise. And he's always like cooking steaks on Twitter and being like, I cook the perfect steak using my stove. It's very cool. And it's something where it's like, I don't know if that would get funded without Anderil, even though it's not in defense tech at all. Anderil just kind of shook the tree to be like, hey, it's okay to take risks on hardware.

1:37:22Because for so long, the meme was like, hardware is hard. Pebble had such a bad go out of YC. There were so many companies that tried and never really got to escape velocity. Now people are like, okay, we're going to take a shot on it again, just with whatever. And that means new fridge companies, new camera companies, new devices. And I just think more of those. I have one that's relevant to the show. Maybe we should fund it. I want somebody to make me the world's most beautiful office printer. I just bought this printer. Yeah, yeah. My wife was saying, why don't you buy this? So when you think about a printer, it's like basically the perfect business model.

1:38:00It's like this sort of like up front. Yeah, razor and blade. But I was driving over here, and I got an email that was like, can you like print this out and scan it and like return it or whatever and i'm just like oh it's like super annoying i don't know i don't have a printer i'd use like the like postal placed um and uh and so i was like oh now i need to buy a printer and i'm like well like i need it to fit like the aesthetic of my office and like i'm like okay now i'm gonna be like on hp's website being like what's the least ugly printer but then it's like okay like some things just don't die and in the same way that like vinyl records are probably like you know they're not as big as they were at the peak but like stabilized and like there's just like people with you know various um it's like i would love to be able to buy like a beautiful printer yeah and like i'll sign up for the like you know yearly subscription you need to do it with somebody who's really cool and who the board of directors at apple actually just wants to hang out with so you can sell the company like yeah yeah yeah because yeah yeah like it should live that clearly should live within apple they will never do it probably for esg reasons because it's printing paper and it's kind of but that would be that would be like an mkbhd like make a printer cool like the tech guy makes the ant the beautiful like yeah i'm really bullish on hardware that is like just extremely analog I want, it's in the same way that the highest, the most luxury, yeah, but the most, like Bentley, when they're making new cars, we know that our customers like switches and stuff like that.

1:39:42And it's the same reason that my least favorite technology company of my life is Sonos, because you made this beautiful looking speaker that is very ugly to use and experience as a user, from the setup to like it's not syncing anymore to why are these three speakers playing but like that one's not and like oh one of them's not connected to the internet and it's like i'm gonna like take i i donated some sonos speakers but i'm now wishing that i brought them to the gun range because like because it would bring me joy to just like blow up like my sonos speakers it is crazy how like they're a pretty big company and they deserve to get mauled by Apple.

1:40:27They need a Hindenburg research. We tried the product and it actually is confusing. Yeah, yeah. That's the entire report. Yeah, they said that people were playing music every day, but it disconnects all the time. It disconnects all the time. There's no way. But it really is a testament that in order to do the absolute top-tier software engineering where stuff just works, you actually have to be a trillion-dollar company like Apple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A$10 billion company just can't do it, especially if it's an older company. So do it slightly analog. I think some companies, like Ramp obviously, has built something that's like, they're punching way above their size in terms of the quality of the software.

1:41:04But it is extremely hard. It's craftsmanship to build great software that actually works all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because any time you break those expectations. Well, it's the firmware. Any time you're getting into like... Yeah, the crossover is really hard between the hardware and software. Did you read this one, Marc Andreessen? This is so real. What did he say? He said, overheard in Silicon Valley, every company should add this question to their interview loop. It's fine if you have gone to Burning Man, but are you currently going to Burning Man? I think he means like on an annual cadence, right?

1:41:42Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not like literally right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Burning Man, I mean, I know why he hates it. Extremely high NPS, but can't invest in it. That's it. because if you ever talk to somebody who goes to burning man dude you gotta go it's so yeah yeah extremely high nps yeah but yeah i didn't so two things two things i i you've effectively had you know almost going on a decade of having the ability to do it without the desire to do it and I would say ayahuasca and burning man. Yep. And ultimately both of them were sort of intuitively demonic. Ayahuasca is like, Hey, I'm going to go take a plane 12 hours into the jungle to get one shotted by some jungle demon and then like hope that it cures me.

1:42:38Right. Um, and then come back with like, okay, now I'm dealing with whatever like trauma I was trying to deal with and the trauma of my jungle demon, you know, who's calling me. You know what's under-discussed in the ayahuasca debate? Lex Friedman didn't get one-shotted. I just listened to a recent podcast of him with the Cursor team. You know, it's like AI, it's like a coding IDE. It was just classic Lex. There was nothing changed. It was fine. What do you mean? You're saying he did it and then came back? Oh, yeah, yeah. There was a whole arc where he, like, went into the jungle. He, like, took a bunch of time off.

1:43:10He, like, I think he grew a beard. and I think he, in a conversation with Elon, said he took like a mega heroic dose. Maybe it wasn't ayahuasca, but I think it was. He did some sort of like shamanic retreat and he came back completely fine, has done a bunch of interviews. No, but I think here's the thing. He's just normal. Here's the thing with psychedelics. If you're going into a psychedelic experience and you're highly stable and you're in a good place, then you come out of it being like, cool. I'm good. I don't need a change. Yeah, yeah. If you go in an unstable place trying to make it fix you, it's different to go into it being like i'm gonna have this cool unique experience and maybe i'd like come out with a different perspective but going in being like please jungle demon fix me yeah well this was the the daniel thing was like it's a sorting function and it's dangerous for mark to invest in in pre-sorted founders and then and that he should actually only invest in founders that have done ayahuasca and not been one shot still are doing enterprise sass exactly those are the those are the generational those are the killers yeah so anyways i think that if you think about uh things that are sort of uh like sort of intuitively demonic going and taking a poison and throwing up for for you know 12 hours in a hut in peru and like being visited by a spirit that is like making you you know face like your greatest you know fears um you know that sort of seems like maybe not the thing that the average person should do um it'd be like you wouldn't be like oh i'm gonna go get an exorcism in louisiana in the swamp you know it's like how different is that than like going to peru yeah it's uh so if if a founder calls you up and says hey i'm gonna be offline for the next couple weeks i'm going to louisiana to get an exorcism and it's like kind of in this hut swamp it's gonna be really dark it's with somebody i don't know i'm paying them a lot of money i'm not really sure what i'm getting in return there's gonna be other strangers there that i don't know that are also dealing with their own traumas you'd be like hey hey bud uh i feel like it's my duty to tell you to not do that and then also if somebody was describing hey i'm gonna go into the desert this place called black Black Rocks, is it Black Rock City?

1:45:31Oh, yeah. No, is it? Black Rock is the investment front. Black Rock. I'm going to go to - I think it is Black Rock City. Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to go to Black - Wait, is it affiliated with Black Rock? Oh, my God. We just put it together. That's our all-in conference, Black Rock City. Black Rock's shorting tech massively, and they're funding the thing that's one-shotting all the right technology. Is it actually called Black Rock City? that is ridiculous if that's what it's called black rock city

1:46:07black rock city yeah yeah it's the playa the black oh my god oh my god well now i gotta go black rocks involved i love black rock yeah black rock is a phenomenal institution no but if somebody said i'm going to black rock city you think larry fink's ever been and he's like this is my city he's the CEO of BlackRock uh I bet he's dropped in yeah he's flown in the PJ and like landed and he's like I run this place I run this place I run this place he harvests the energy like what's the like the Harkonnen mode where he's like in like he's in like a bathtub in BlackRock City and he's just like fully locked into the energy of the playa and he's just taking it and then he goes back to New York yeah he's like I have what I need no but but if somebody told you hey i'm gonna go to the desert with a bunch of people i don't know uh all sort of western norms are thrown out the window people are going to be dressed up in you know lingerie or just naked and then everybody's going to do a bunch of drugs and have sex you know with strangers you would say hey uh i don't know is like that the best use of your time um have you done hard drugs like that before like should you combine hard drugs and sex with random strangers you'd be like so i don't think everyone does everything there right but like there are some people just go and dj and stuff yeah but let's let's be honest like the people that are coming back being like dude you got it those are the ones that have been you know occupied by the demons and are now are now trying to spread that right yeah yeah um so anyways i think like if you just say it out loud yeah it all makes sense why maybe the average person shouldn't do it and they should just like go to church or something you know yeah try try it's like the fork in the road meme there's like black rock city and then there's black rock hq yeah and you just want to show up to black rock it's almost like grinding up the ladder yeah yeah it's almost like you could go to the jungle and do hard drugs with the sketchy shaman or you could just put on a suit right and like would putting on the suit give you the real effect that you wanted which is just like feeling good and just like looking good yep and just like doing good yep probably right like you could go to burning man or you could just put on a suit yeah and just like hit the spreadsheets you know the spreadsheets it's like it's people that are like i don't tip male waiters like hit the oil rig i've never heard that that's really funny or it's like dude don't go to The oil.

1:48:42It's like, don't go to BlackRock City. Like, put on a suit and go to BlackRock. Go to BlackRock, yeah. I can't believe we just realized that. I've heard about Burning Man for so many years, never put it together. BlackRock's behind everything. Oh, my God. They own the entire economy, including the burners, apparently. Yeah. Well, speaking of getting on the grind set, do you use a set of apps to build a second brain? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is so good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone has this at the midway. So I will say I can't completely roast this because I use the Bear app, which is just like a notes app that I think is slightly better than notes.

1:49:22But I do have just like a bunch of notes and a lot of them get lost and it's fine. It is easy to like roast this because it's like kind of like this over-optimized thing. but um like it's totally reasonable to like have some organization in your life like yeah it's just like don't go crazy with it it'd be like somebody like it'd be like a guy in mad men being like check it out all my filing cabinets you know yeah and he's like i use this one for like important you know documents and i use this one for like pictures of my family yeah it's like i mean there's something where it's like i the problem is is that just like from the context here just seeing this in the form of a tweet like i know that this person is like selling a course and like their like second brain is like their life and this is all they do is like organize yeah yeah and it's like this self-referential thing where like they're in the business of organization as opposed to what i really want to know is i want to know like what is elon's version of this what's zuck's version of this i just want to know like what are the actual and i think it's black rock like what is on his phone the high-powered version of this it's just like having really talented people around you that you delegate important things to right it's like the executive assistant it's the driver it's the coo it's really just one app it's the phone it's the phone book and you just call the person and they pick up because you know it's important it's the coo that you've worked with for 20 years that like you're you're like i'm not going to do this deal if if this person's not involved yeah i mean yeah at the high level i've always noticed that Like the really big guys, they always just like, oh, I'm like, oh, I have an app for that.

1:51:03They have a person. It's like I have DoorDash. They have a chef. It's like, oh, I have Zillow. They have a person that buys real estate for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A full-time person that just goes around hunting for real estate deals. Like, oh, like you have, you know, the United app. They have a private jet with a pilot. They just call. And so it's just their phone book is like they want to do something. Okay. Call the driver. instead of uber i got i got uh good advice from maybe the billionaires aren't so similar yeah yeah exactly you have apps we have people they still have access to like the same things it's just like at a different level yeah i got really good advice from uh like um one of the the gps at indrescent after they invested because i was like oh we raised a lot of money now we like or should be like a real company.

1:51:56And I was concerned because I'd never worked at a company the size of my company. So I had no like real like, well, how should the meetings flow? When should we do meetings like this? And so I was asking him, I was like trying to figure out like what the ideal like meeting structure throughout a week was. And he was just like, dude, just like build, just build the product. Like just build, like sell the customers, build the product. Like, none of that stuff really matters until, like, you know, and that's sort of like common Silicon Valley advice, but sometimes you need to hear it at the right time.

1:52:31And I would just ask, like, I would just, like, ask this guy, like, cool, like, how much money did you make in the last 60 days not from selling courses on your second brain? You know, and if the answer is, like, zero, then it's like, okay, this is just, like, you're a course bro. Yeah, yeah, the course bro definition is always quantitative. It's, did you make more money from content? I remember watching somebody who was doing real estate content. Like, how to invest in real estate? And he was like, I made$3 million, and I'm a real estate guy in LA. I made$3 million last year. And his breakdown was he made$50K as a real estate broker and$2 ,950 ,000 as a YouTuber.

1:53:09Isn't that crazy? That's amazing. And he, like, put this, this was in, like, a CNBC, like, published, like, they broke down all of how he makes it. And I was like, this is hilarious and ridiculous. Seems like the only person that would ever make content like that, that actually makes money from business, is Alex Hormozzi. Oh yeah. Where he's like, here's how I run my day. But then he actually owns a bunch of profitable businesses. What else should we talk about?

1:53:41Light bulbs. Probably got to wrap up soon. Oh, I wanted to do this investment memos versus decks. I thought this would be a good Q &A. You're a big debt guy. Investment memos are trending. This tweet from Mercedes-Benz says, I'm seeing more founders put together investment memos as fundraising material. It's a good idea. But too many of them read book report summaries. Founders, if you're going to write a memo, make sure it reads like a thesis. How you developed your thesis, your unique vision for the future, assumptions you make that could be tested, risk to your thesis, et cetera. So what's your take on investment memos versus debt?

1:54:16It's a huge mistake to go into a round with no deck because the visuals are so important to the storytelling that if you just have this text and 20 paragraphs in a row, it's just so boring. Because if you have one image where people's eyes are going to go to, I think people don't realize, I'm not reading your memo. I'm not reading your master's thesis on your business before I've even met you. Because it doesn't matter if it's a good thesis. If I have a five, ten minute conversation with this person. and the person sucks, I'm not going to, nothing's going to happen, right? Like that happens all the time with investors where it's like the right idea and the wrong team and you can't invest.

1:54:57And so I think that the reason to write a memo, and this is the core reason to write a memo, is to give the investor something that they can copy and paste to make their own memo. Sure. So write it as though they're writing it to their investment committee, their partner meeting, whatever the thing that they're going to share around. It's the same thing for press releases. If you do the journalist's job by giving them an interesting story, giving them interesting quotes. Give them the angles. Give them the photos. Give them the stuff. Make it easy for them, then they will be more likely to write it.

1:55:31Yeah, but I think like I really think people are doing it on hard mode. If they're just almost all products are visual, whether it's software, hardware. some IRL thing huge visual component and like it doesn't give the visuals enough credit there are also some VCs that just like demand a deck every time and so it's like why would you just pitch a subset of VCs by being hard on like oh I only do those well I don't think any legitimate VC is saying I won't talk Keith demands deck I'm pretty sure he generally he won't take a meeting unless he sees a deck He'll also invest$20 million into somebody he knows really well without any materials.

1:56:14So yeah, I just think that debate always comes up, and one is not. They just have very different use cases. In fact, building the memo can often lead to the deck being stronger when you build it, right? Totally, totally. But yeah, it's just not one or the other. I think the right combination that feels a little bit less like try hard almost. Because sometimes when somebody's like writing some like super extensive memo, you're like, you should be like doing something else. Like your seed stage, your pre-seed company, like you don't know any of this. But like FAQs I think work really well where it's like you basically create like what are the 10 most common questions that somebody asks?

1:56:56How are you different than XYZ competitor? And you just answer all those. and then as you get more questions than you raise, you just add them to the list. And then by the end, you have this document that you can just share with everybody. And then that, again, is helping them do their job. So they're at their investment, their partner meeting, talking about it, and somebody's like, well, we looked at this company and they're doing great. How is it different? And they're like, well, here's how it's different. So you're just making the job easier for your potential investor who, if they invest, will become your partner.

1:57:27So you're already like should be acting like you're on the team. Yep.