The Vail Strike, Jordi Flees to Europe, Microplastics Everywhere, Ramp Sky Lounge

40:42That's the Northeast stuff, I believe. Their scale surpasses anything previously seen in the industry it is fascinating that um this idea of like the mega ski conglomerate is something that really only started like five years ago or like 10 years ago maybe yeah it used to just truly be all independent ski resorts and like yeah i think the the the reason that i this this last couple weeks of events there's a lot of reasons you know people are posting the strike at park city is just ridiculous just classic corporate greed here 330 for a day pass and they quote unquote can't afford to pay the patrollers 23 an hour will be a harvard business school case study on bad business and it's like okay i get it that when you when you frame it like that it seems silly but it's all about precedent right and and again it's not like vale resorts is just the best business anybody's ever seen, even at this level of scale and owning the entire industry, I look at it and I say, this is a labor of love, right?

41:50This is not the business that you get into because you just care about generating cash. Like it's not, it hasn't been in revenue, 230 in net income, like 10 % net income margin. It's not exactly like, and the stock has not grown over the last four years. Yeah. And there's not a lot of greatest bull market. It's not, yeah. And it's not, that's the other thing. It's not, where does it go from here? The ski industry, I don't know how much bigger it's going to get there. When, when, when we were growing up, there was a lot of like, there was a group called like save our winters. There's this whole idea of like climate change and how it's, um, and most interesting thing about the climate change thing is, um, I have this whole, uh, business school case study here, lifting the veil, uh, largest U S snow sports resort operator takes on climate change.

42:35Uh, these, uh, these folks at Michigan Ross school of business did a whole deep dive on sustainability and ESG and how Vale will deal with climate change. But when I was looking through the 10K, I don't know if I just missed it, but in the risk disclosures, they list everything from like, you know, IT systems could get hacked or we could not pay our debt covenants, all this other stuff. And they didn't mention global warming, which was very interesting to see that like absent from the 10K. Maybe I missed it. I don't know. but uh but it's very they're they're projecting a lot of interesting things but but and and the other thing is like these think about how challenging it is to run a a business and it's not even like the the ski industry has like the people that work in the industry have every right to be emotional and be like charged up and and be frustrated with the corporate owners but if you think about it it's like okay if you're a small like when these ski resorts were independent and you have like huge, huge amounts of fixed costs annually to run a resort.

43:38And then you just have a bad ski season in that area of like Tahoe, or you have a bad ski season in the upper Northeast. And then, Oh, what happens? Like, okay, the resort loses a bunch of money that year. You have to issue a bunch of debt. And so the idea of having a bunch of resorts that are spread out over such a wide geographic area that you can weather the storm almost right like that actually makes a lot of sense and then again the reason it's like you know vale resorts is basically saying for a thousand dollars a year you can get access to 40 of the most beautiful mountains on earth and and and get to me that that value exchange is like such a great trade for the average consumer that it's that it's has to be frustrating running veil being like we're giving you guys for a thousand dollars a year we'll give you unlimited access to all this incredible nature and you can do and you can ski which is an activity that is just so um so clearly not essential to life like it's purely for fun yep and you're still not happy it's like that's got to be a rough rough spot to be.

44:48I mean, I honestly, like, it seems like they poorly handled the last couple of weeks, but at the same time, I feel for them because they're running a deeply challenging business. Yeah. I mean, if you look at this data, the number of days below freezing worldwide, you can see the map. It's like the entire Northern hemisphere and the place with the most days below freezing, Greenland. There we go. I don't know if there's mountains there. Maybe we need to build some. Maybe Vail needs to go buy Greenland. Vail should buy Greenland. There we go. It'll become a country. But then it's like Russia and Mongolia, which are, you know, you're not going to build a good business there.

45:28But they're projecting out some moderate emission scenarios. And the current number of days below freezing at Park City in Utah is 194 per year. And And by 2050-ish, they're projecting that that'll go down to about 150. So about a 25 % decrease. So there is pretty significant pressure. And the interesting thing about this report, this report is like, okay, how do you deal with climate change? Their main recommendation is like expand more, like go buy more across the world. And they actually break down all of the target countries. They say Argentina, Chile, China, Chechia, Finland, Germany, Norway.

46:16Germany has very, very few ski resorts. I didn't realize this, but there's this great chart in here of the countries with nine plus resorts operating at least five lifts. And it's the United States, then Japan, then France, Italy, Austria. Germany only has 55 resorts that qualify under this. And then Argentina only has 10. Chile only has nine. And so if you think about where to expand Sweden, South Korea, Spain, Ukraine, there's a lot of interesting options. I heard at the Amman, there was a guy from Russia talking about how he's expanding and building ski resorts in the far, far east of Russia on a volcano.

47:02Apparently that sounded cool. That's awesome. um let's uh let's finish the the the veil acquisition story here yeah um so veil success has been vilified within the industry who see a corporate overlord turning ski hills into theme parks which we've discussed powder magazine hilariously joked veil had acquired the rights to all north american snowfall however they've enabled a renaissance of sort and this is something you were talking about the company-wide epic pass alongside increased scale has flipped skiing's business model on its head from an add-on to real estate to operations first. It's worthy of a deeper dive on how tech and opportunity combined.

47:41And the past revenue, which you'll see here, climbed from$78 million in 2008 to basically$800 million in 2022. So a 10x growth. And that led to really incredible performance in the stock. If you look at 2008, the stock was under$25 a share by the end of 2021, it was up at 350. So, uh, 10 X growth in, in the past revenue, 10 X growth in the stock. And that's almost all just to retooling the business model. Yeah. Um, and, and obviously a lot of expansion. And the reason, I mean, the reason I just, I, again, I don't, I, I don't have that much sympathy for the average person who, who 10 years ago, they'd be buying a season pass to one of these resorts and it'd be like 500 bucks.

48:27And now they They pay a thousand dollars, but they get access to 42 times as many mountains. Like I just don't feel that. Well, it's just catering to a much more like coastal urban elite, someone who doesn't live in the ski town. It's probably a net like net positive overall, but it's at the expense of the local. Yeah. But yeah, even the ski, like the true ski bums, they still, if they go to Keystone and that's their mountain. yeah they still they take advantage of these of the epic class and they're like oh i'm gonna go to utah for a week and like yeah and you can go off season and it's not that expensive to stay at like some little hotel i mean i agree the um the you know the you you posted a few times about that the cost of skiing in europe versus the united states and and this uh andy van vandenberg guy uh in almost a year ago is saying here's your annual reminder that because of veil and altera's duopoly it's cheaper to plan a week-long ski trip in switzerland than colorado um i don't think this is this this is not purely because of the duopoly it it has always been significantly you know even prior to the to the to the um disneyification of of american skiing it was always quite a bit cheaper to go skiing in Europe.

49:51But again, I don't. I mean, the benefit of this is that there is incredible price discrimination. And so if you want the value pass and you want your average day skiing, like I knew a guy who was on one of the Icon passes or Epic passes, and I was skiing with him and he was like, yeah, this is like my 60th day this season. I'm like, I don't know how you do that. But the great thing is that I was able to show up. I think we were in Jackson Hole. I had no prep. I was able to just walk up. And of course, they had gear that fit me. I had a lift ticket and the lines weren't bad. It cost a fortune, but the benefit was that it was available for the price.

50:30And there's further price discrimination. You know, the funny thing about all those people waiting in that chair line, you can usually pay a ski instructor to take you right to the front and cut. And so a lot of people will just do that. it's like the disney like the disney disneyification is real in the sense that like there's a fast pass yeah there's a system for jumping even yeah and arguably if the fast pass is is an extra if the main pass is a grand the fast pass is like three grand yep but you ski 50 plus days a year just like do it yeah it's like not that yeah you know uh and so uh grit goes on to say meanwhile powder has moved on from the debacle they remain a major adventure sports oriented resort operator with copper snowbird and killington as premier destinations powder even returned to park city in 2019 via a new woodward sports camp looks lit and it's like he loves that lit uh and it's like a bmx facility and like a parkour facility i guess uh pretty pretty interesting and then if we go over here the talisker well they're not doing so hot after leasing to vale they hit rocky times with the creditors and eventually forced foreclosure in 2015.

51:41It's likely that their shaky financial situation that precipitated the mess in the first place. And what might have been though, there had been talks about connecting the major Salt Lake City area resorts in a European style village to village arrangement with 80 lifts and 18 ,000 skiable acres. Those plans already facing locals concerns died entirely when Vale moved in. I'm not exactly sure why. So yeah, that was a long thread on a topic you might have already known. We don't do lessons here, but I guess attention to detail matters. If you like this stuff, he recommends the book Ski Inc., which I would definitely recommend picking up.

52:15I need to check that book out. I've heard some, as I was doing research on this, there were a lot of interesting quotes, especially about the Apollo buyout and some of the private equity deals that were quoted in that book. And that book has like some of the only interviews that happen with those financiers because like A, the journalists aren't really writing about like random private equity deals. And then also these guys are pretty tight-lipped. Um, so that is, uh, the story of you got some more posts. I got one last thing we can end on from, uh, at the stalwart, Mr. Joe Weisenthal himself.

52:48He says, uh, sort of, uh, unrelated to the main topic, but he says, it's cool how if you're rich and have a fake job like VC, then winners are just totally optional for you. And I would say that the, the VCs I know would push back on this and say, they would say, because I have a fake job like VC, I get to indulge in winter even more, right? I get to go being, being a truly a VC is, you know, going and skiing powder days on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, midweek, way less people. You tell the founders, Hey, uh, yeah, you know, four, 4 PM is the earliest I can schedule zoom. You go ski incredible, like, you know, uh, you know, empty tracks all day long you get back you're pulling off your helmet you're here you're jump on the zoom call sorry what's your company do again and that's that's what it's all about we were talking about bryce how like you know he's networking in uh where's your valley or yeah yeah yeah uh and i was talking to another another person about how uh like there's this jockeying that's happening right now for like you know can And you get on the list for one of the big VC ski vacations that are going on.

54:04So every VC firm is kind of organizing them. And every little group of rich guys are putting together ski weekends. And getting on those lists, it feels very like, oh, are you in the in-group? It's the cool kids. It feels like not working. But spending a full day with someone is always a million times better than five Zoom calls. It's actually very productive. And then you'll remember, oh yeah, we had that conversation, like sitting outside having drinks after skiing. And it was awesome. That's why skiing is more valuable. So skiing is wildly expensive, but I think it's fairly priced for how incredible it is.

54:44Like we've joked about it a lot, but it's some of my favorite memories as a kid was with snowboarding with my dad. You know, it was like skiing with my mom. Like you get all these moments where you get to like have this exhilarating fun activity that literally is almost the closest thing that we do to flying as humans. And then five minutes later, you're sitting on a lift, you know, chit chatting, talking. It's just it's worth every dollar. And I would happily pay two, three times what it currently costs. Vale, if you're listening, no need to jack up the prices. but I do have one little tidbit of advice and we can close out with any more posts that you have.

55:25But there's a lot of questions about like, Oh, it must be really rough being a ski patroller right now. And I think that if you're looking for a career instead of going into ski patrol, I would recommend going into private equity. Yeah. And so if you look at the history of veil, the private equity guys have done very well and, and it seems like the ski patrollers have, have struggled. and it goes back to like who has the financial leverage who has the who has the power there and so uh little less time on the slopes a little more time in the sheets in the spreadsheet so so obviously uh you're you're you're riffing a little bit but i'll continue on that i do think that today in the the nature of remote work if you want to ski the most the if you want to if you just care about skiing you're still better off getting a fake remote job and living in a mountain town and just skiing constantly yeah then going and becoming a ski patrol person um i know i i have the industry is set up to cater to my person my roommate in uh college like would have been a professional surfer his parents like didn't allow him to quit school at a young age and like travel and do what he needed to do but now he works in real estate and so he like has spent the last few weeks like on the north shore at pipeline like there we go getting absolutely barreled every single day and it's like he makes way more money than like the average pro surfer yeah yeah and surfs like probably 50 percent 60 percent as much but like has a real career yeah and so if you're thinking about becoming a ski bum you can pay for gear pay for coaches pay for training yeah you get to his healthcare.

57:12Yeah. Yeah. So if you're thinking about becoming a ski bomb, pivot to private equity. I think that really is the good takeaway here from the mail story is like, get on the side of capital. Yep. Lever up. Lever up. Cool. Let's move on to some DMs, our Q and A section. We have been getting tons and tons of merch. Thank you to everyone that sent us stuff. Let's kick it off with the Ridge wallet. You want me just to go through this while you're there? Okay. Jordy's going to take a break and we're just going to keep rolling. so the first thing we got was some lovely wallets from the ridge we're big fans of the ridge wallet i've actually been using one of these this is the 24 karat ridge wallet which i like i got the mag safe one on my phone and i i realized that ridge ridge wallet it's a very accessible product it's not a super hyper luxury good but what i love about it is that if you follow the ridge team Sean and Connor, you will understand that these guys are absolute killers in the world of e-commerce and they've built a fantastic business.

58:15And so carrying a Ridge wallet has actually become a status symbol if you work in e-commerce in the sense that you are acknowledging that direct response performance ads is a craft of its own and that you respect a team that has done it so well and gone to partner with MKBHD and launched all these products and really grown the business in a bunch of interesting ways and maintained an incredible amount of ownership over that business because they haven't raised any of the crazy suicide rounds that other D2C companies. Yeah, they haven't raised a dollar. And they've just grown that business and grown it, grown it, grown it.

58:51And now it's doing, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars, right, Jordy? Hundreds of millions of dollars. And so that's, I think, the real reason why you should carry a Ridge wallet is to let everyone know you have respect for the best in the business when it comes to direct to consumer. And they also sent me this knife, which I've been enjoying and I've been playing with basically constantly. It's like a, it's like the man's fidget spinner. The adult fidget spinner is just the knife that you can just like, that's my classic. That's my class. Anytime I'm at a, at a nice dinner and there's a steak knife, I pull it out and I start doing it and just freak everyone out i'm like i'm like good enough at it that i can like i can i can boom boom boom boom it's great and this knife is handy because we have here palmer lucky's latest device the chromatic from mod retro and so i'm going to pop this open geordie said i shouldn't open this because it's going to be a piece of uh you know technology history but i think this one will be enjoyed and maybe i'll pick up another one keep it in the plastic uh but the chromatic if you're not familiar, Paul Mellucky.

59:56Go for it. Oh, just started this second company. He's not busy enough with Andoril. Ooh, nice packaging. It opens around and has some really cool graphics. And I believe this is possible. Wow, this is really just like an actual Game Boy. This is such a throwback. It's so crazy. Man, what a treat. And so I believe there's something with like the Game Boy came off of patent or something like that. And so, uh, he was able to recreate it. And if you, and if you think forward, I mean, this company raised some money and at first I think people were skeptical, like, Oh, what, you know, what's the deal with like a Game Boy company?

1:00:36Like, why do I, why is that a good company? Um, but if you think about like, well, then maybe the N64 comes off patent and people would love that. Maybe the PlayStation, I would play the original Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation. I would play Smash Brothers on the original N64, Mario 64. Another bull case for Mod Retro is that GameStop is a multi... I don't know what their market cap is today. I'm assuming they're still like... Yeah, they ripped and they continue to rip. This is amazing. Listen to that.

1:01:12It fires up so fast. Let's go. It fires up so fast. That speaker is just so nostalgic. that sound is incredibly nostalgic this is awesome i'm just gonna play this for the rest of the game all right uh no but anyway so if so if game stop is a 14 billion dollar company every single game in the store you can just download yeah this this is the lifeline for game stop and so basically i think that game stop basically has to buy mod retro for a billion dollars at least if i was an investor. That's my investment thesis. This is going to be huge. Which is like, what is the, what's the last kind of video game that you can buy in the store?

1:01:55And it's cartridges. Yeah. So also I saw somebody bought, they make cartridges that are like, they, they have some sort of like new technology in there where it has like a thousand games on it. So it's like a modern memory card inside. Well, yeah. And so here's the other, here's the other bulk cases. You have this ipad baby generation yeah we have children yep i would much rather give our sons one of these on a road trip than the average ipad which is just going to be like you know yeah and and i was playing a game on playstation 5 over the uh over the break with my son and uh and it was it was awesome it was about astro's robots and it's kind of like uh playstation's mario so yeah it's a platformer you jump around it's all really friendly all really nice uh there's some like puzzles and stuff um but there's just too many buttons for him because he's three yeah and so he couldn't really figure it out so he just watched and he was really into that and then every once in a while there'd be like one thing that just required pressing one button and it'd be like you press the button and be really excited about that yeah but i think he could actually learn how to play tetris and be able to build quality on it the build quality is amazing remarkable it's significantly it's significantly better oh yeah yeah because i have so so i think i mentioned recently i have a i have a game boy color that um that unfortunately that's like the Pikachu edition and I looked it up and I was like oh if it's unopened or no if you have the box it's like three thousand dollars and then if you don't if you don't have the box it's like 200 bucks or something like that but this build quality of this is significantly better so small too i i forget how amazing this device is like it's and it's so brought this back yeah i mean talk about an ideas an ideas guy that is at the top of his game totally is the guy who's making the next lockheed martin also is a good enough ideas guy to realize that hey, you can just build a Game Boy Color.

1:03:52Yeah, I love it. So yeah, go pick one up. Tell them the technology brother sent you. We're very excited to have that. We also got some very cool merch from Rostra, Lulu's company. She sent us this amazing 3D printed Rostra. Are you familiar with like what a Rostra is, Jordy? Hey, snap in. Are you playing? I was playing, I'm sorry. It's so good, right? It's fun. It's like it comes back immediately. Yeah. It's so fun. Video games are addictive. Yep. Be careful with them. Yeah. The Mod Retro. Oh, man, I'm so excited for that thing. So Rostra is the name of Lulu Maservi's company. Lulu, of course, is the brother of the year, comms mastermind, great follow on X.

1:04:38And her company is named Rostra, which is a Roman term for exactly this. I think like a, an area where conversations could happen. A place to go direct. Yeah, exactly. The place to go direct. And so she 3d printed this beautiful, um, rostra. And she also sent a fantastic quarter zip that I've been wearing and is extremely comfortable. I, I'm into that. That's actually some of the only startup merge that I'm pissed that we didn't get two of. Yeah. I, I, I feel like she's mentioned that she was going to send two, but I'm going to send, I'm going to get really frustrated. Well, I happen to be drinking a Yerba Mate sent from Rob Moe, co-founder of Huberman Lab.

1:05:23Rob, thank you for sending us. We have a lot of these now. Oh, fantastic. Yerba Mate. This was a company that I don't know if Rob and Andrew are co-founders or they're major investors in the company. They're big proponents of Yerba Mate. Was it Andrew from Tiny? Andrew Wilkinson? I think he also invested. Helped finance it. Yeah, yeah. It's cool. So anyways, these are fantastic. You can get them at Erwan. You can get them online. Whole Foods, I think, as well. And a fair amount of caffeine in there too, right? Yeah, I'm going to guess that we're putting up at least 120. 120, not bad. So it's like two espresso shots.

1:05:59There we go. Could have like four or five of these and be good to go. Can you throw one in the fridge for me? Okay, thank you. That's great. Are we just going to keep going through? Yeah, what else do we have? We have a sweatshirt. We've gotten so much merch. We've got a lot of. People know. Christmas was big. Christmas was big for us, and people know that we're willing to shill. We're ready. Down to shill. We have the world's healthiest hoodie here from Superpower Labs. This is edition one. And this hoodie has an entire – it has nutrition facts on the logo. And it has zero PFAS or microplastics.

1:06:42So you do not, and it's completely toxin-free. And it even is more ecological. It uses 90 % less water and 45 % fewer emissions, CO2 emissions than traditional cotton. So anyways, very nice, heavy hoodie. So thank you to Superpower for keeping us warm this winter season. yeah yeah that's tricky for me because uh my testosterone has been really high lately so i've been trying to get more microplastics yeah bring it down take the edge off but wait so you would you would person i'm sure that's a great choice so i was having a an apres ski moment in uh the alps and we were selecting like this this incredible uh steak from um there's this this restaurant in the three valleys like resorts region called la secu la secu cool um and it's really really known for its steak so we're we we ski into this place and uh we we spend all this time selecting a steak and the the they they weigh it out for you and after we they bring out the steak we're like we decide yes we're gonna do this and he slaps the receipt right on top of the steak oh wait that was a real photo yeah it was a real photo oh my god uh he goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible piece of meat and he slaps the pfos receipt but did he print on the backside print what like is there ink on the backside it doesn't matter but it's i thought it was i thought it was a paper no no it's the ink i thought it was a thermo i thought i thought it was the paper itself i think i think it's the ink that you want to watch but anyways whenever i get a receipt i always if i have to touch it i'll just touch the part that didn't get the ink on it so yeah i don't know if i don't know if that i don't know if that works i think it works but um but anyways so for me i actually liked it because my t levels are so high i'm trying to get a little bit of receipt actually to bring it down get get closer to sort of baseline ability to be able to even focus get anything done um but uh but yeah i just thought that was so funny it's like goes through all the hassle of like selecting this incredible piece that guy is not on right-wing twitter yeah okay let's go to some more uh some more questions q a uh sarah says what are your predictions for defense and industrial tech in 2025 spicy takes are always welcome so bear domestication bear domestication does feel like it's getting closer to being a reality as opposed to just joke territory yeah and i could see someone raising the whole, oh, we're building autonomous submarines.

1:09:25It's like, just say you failed at training dolphins. Yep. Yep. It's a good point. Just say you failed. It's a good point. We also had another spicy prediction, which was that the total confirmed kill count of all defense tech companies would pass a hundred K in 2025. So that'd be a big milestone. Yeah. What else? What, what what seriously i mean seriously i think that uh the the the defense tech stuff it's already been like a big tent since um like defense tech there was like palantir it doesn't make hardware but it's clearly defense tech but they still have a massive commercial business and then spacex like they have star shield which is a defense tech product and then the there's certainly like a gov tech company because they work with the government and so they're kind of in the defense tech world and then anduril's like the most pure play like it's hard tech and defense only and they don't have a consumer business and they don't have an enterprise business and so and i think the argument is spacex is inherently a defense company because if you can take a huge payload to space and then drop it anywhere in the world like fundamentally that's like the the the their icbms yeah the first rocket that elon tried to buy in russia were just decommissioned icbms yeah And they like spat at him and then he started the company.

1:10:43But yeah, I think it's always been kind of a big tent. And Andreessen did a little bit of that with American Dynamism. If you go to their website, they have like this timeline of American Dynamism. And one of the things that they've added is like the iPhone as an example of American Dynamism, which is like kind of silly because it's like when I think American Dynamism, we think defense tech and like that's just consumer hardware. But you can see that like there was a natural like broadening out. And then AI got bolted on too in many ways because American Dynamism and Defense Tech was hot. And so you have companies like Scale working with the government and then other like Defense Llama.

1:11:16It's like, is Meta a Defense Tech company now? And so I think that tent will get bigger. But the next category that I think will be really like maybe retconned into the defense and industrial tech will be energy and data center build out. And because I think they're capitally intensive, high dilution, similar skillsets. So I think a lot of the VCs that are like, okay i i have built a portfolio i've built positions in all the big defense tech companies like i don't think there's going to be another major wave in 2025 how do i apply my skill sets and my analysts to this well let's go after industrial energy nuclear wind power solar and then also just traditional oil and gas for just anything for a data center build out because wasn't there a number that like microsoft's gonna spend 80 billion 80 billion and so like that just seems kind of weak to me bc is gonna jump on this right honestly the 80s seem kind of weak to me i feel like they should they should raise like 800 billion of debt and just do that yeah are they out of ideas are they out of ideas like what's going on do they not believe it's funny because everyone was saying that is like is like it's the it's the loudest signal that agi is around the corner and you're like it is it is it is i i feel like when microsoft basically bought half of open ai everybody was like what is sam doing yeah but it kind of like maybe was the 200 iq play of like if i need to spend 100 if i need 100 billion dollars worth of data centers this is like one of the few companies that can actually do that now they're doing it yeah yeah it'll be interesting to see how the core weave ipo goes i think a lot of people are going to be watching that in terms of like data center build out and valuation yeah uh we have a dm here uh jordy fantastic flow what do you do for your hair okay so i got my hair cut yesterday okay and uh i go to i go to the same place as rob actually okay i got recommend uh rob rob uh huberman's business partner huberman andrew humans business partner uh has fantastic flow he does he showed up to my house for jujitsu one day i was like dude where do you get your hair cut okay live like a few minutes from each other and he's like oh i go to brook at salt salon so i go to brook at salt salon and um i told her yesterday while i was getting my haircut her saturday it was i was like people keep commenting on about my hair they and and i swear i shouldn't have said anything because she started she like got like a little bit like she lost a little bit of confidence she started overthinking it oh no like you do it perfect every time you never give me a bad haircut just like lock in just give me a regular and she got it got into her head somehow so if if i'm not on my game today uh it's it's it's because i i shouldn't have said anything but what about product i mean so i haven't used a product in forever okay i jump in the ocean frequently i live by the beach yep and i never use shampoo okay uh i i i think big shampoo is is is very bad and most people um but the key to not using shampoo is you have to eat super clean okay so if you eat super clean you're not like sort of just expelling like toxins sure you like pour and so you can skip the shampoo so i use shampoo maybe once a month okay i do support big shampoo but they don't get much out of me yep um and uh just salt water and uh you know massive airwons yeah i use a sauna a lot too so yeah um and in an airwons build it looks like a mortgage payment the six the six fig it really does look like a mortgage payment have i ever showed you this is like this is like the most rambly episode ever but it kind of makes sense so my my lifetime savings at air one 16 grand i spend the average pm's monthly salary at air one yeah well it's all worth it for the hair.

1:15:08So I have a tip. Yeah. So there's, there's the answer. Uh, let's go to Hanel Patel. He says, can tech bros pod cover why Teal is doing so many interviews, mainstream ones. I always thought of him as a Robert Mercer kind of guy, tech bros pod save America. Uh, interesting question. I mean, I think a lot of it is just the fact that like, you know, when, I mean, he's been attacked through his career for years and years and years, like starting with the diversity myth, very controversial book a lot of that now we see like the backlash to dei that only happened in like 2023 yeah he wrote the book in the 90s i think they're like 2002 and it's like and and there were like hit piece after hit piece about that book and then apologies like i think david sacks at one point had to distance himself from certain passages and say oh that was taken out of context like it was like not a book that you put like front and center when you're introducing david sacks on stage you're like he's a sass investor like he's not controversial let's forget about that book and now it's like no he literally saw the future and he was correct like it was it was dead on and and so there's a little bit of like you once once the world comes around to your perspective like you need to make sure that you canonize the correct telling of history and that's true for trump obviously in the sense that like he predicted that trump would be popular and that that happened in 2016 and it was kind of like this wild card thing where he was still getting protested and there was a lot of negativity and for years you know there was like the debate over yc and a lot of company people were like i won't take peter's mind it's like okay yeah sure um but uh but there's a lot of that now now he's able to go and kind of like like reintroduce his worldview to a more receptive audience and if you look at like the barry weiss interview like i think that made him look very good and it was something that like i had family members who are obviously familiar that i work with him but um but only know him as like i was at a wedding once and they're like oh peter teal like he's a fascist like he's you know like that that type of stuff and now it's like oh yeah if you go and listen to his like long-form interview with barry weiss they'll just be like oh this is like it's just a smart person there's almost no one on earth that you can listen to a truly long form interview of them and come away and be like this person is deeply bad yeah right like you can And even when people, they actually listen to Putin talk for an hour and he just rambled, they're like, oh, maybe he's got some points.

1:17:35Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why the press was so against the podcast election because they were like, do not humanize Trump by letting people listen to him for three. With J.D. Vance, he was weird. And then the top comment on the Theo Vaughn interview was like, why did they say he was weird? This is the least weird guy I've ever met. This is the most normie dude in the world. And it's like, yeah, he is just like a normal guy. like yeah uh like you you should you should you know just evaluate his policies and ideas and then decide if those align with what your goals are in the world and then that's fine and if you come away being like i still don't want to vote for him that's fine but like this yeah this imagined you know craziness is just like so bad the political derangement syndrome on both sides uh and it was it was rough for kamala because like we never got that three hours of like raw and i still maintain that like if you were drinking wine with kamala you'd be like this is a great person like i'm down yeah you might be like i don't like her policies or like i don't understand her policies or she doesn't have any but you you she would be humanizable she just didn't let herself be humanized because she didn't do any real podcasts she could have been a hero for the crypto community if she for any for tons of communities there was so much opportunity anyway there's a reason why we don't talk about politics on the show ever ever let's go to base baron uh base baron says uh in early stage early stage slash precede deep tech funds that also have their own studio or incubator are funny to me.

1:18:55How are the incentives aligned? For example, Embedded VC invested in Anderil and now can steal all their data to build their own competitor. And so the question is, if you are writing early stage checks and you also have an incubator, how can you be a good steward and participant in the market? And it's particularly hilarious because like anduril was a founder's fund incubation and it's like well they just incubated the one that they wanted to put the money into and then they just kept investing in that one um but i mean the question i don't i don't know embedded vc but like if you think that you can just like steal anduril's data and then build a copycat and be at all successful like you don't understand the power law and you don't understand how power is accruing in that industry yeah so so i'll take uh the baron side on this one i do think as a founder if you're spending it can be a weird situation if it's you know a founding team is like working on an idea yep and they're pitching a vc who invests in companies but then they also build their own companies yep yep it does create like i think that there's a reason that vcs haven't like big vcs haven't like andreessen horowitz doesn't have like an inkeep they have like eirs yep but they haven't been like hey we're But if you're a scaled asset manager, it does present some weird situations and misalignments.

1:20:20And one of the things that he's getting at, which I think is real, is if you're at a fund that can make direct investments or the partners can incubate ideas, it starts to be oftentimes there's ideas that this is like a Rick Rubin quote, right? Like ideas have their time. Somebody is going to do them. And so if you're a partner at one of these funds where you can invest or incubate and a founder can pitch you and you can give them$10 million or you could invest$20 million into a totally new company, it does start to get where there is this conflict. Totally. And I can see why founders don't want to partner with funds or be less inclined to pitch a fund who might.

1:21:01Like the founders fund incubations don't come about because they're watching. they're like at no this founder was actively trying to not start that company yeah yeah he was actively trying to invest it he spent two years as a principal just looking for defense tech companies who's going to build this who's going to build this and no one came through and then he's finally like we got to do it yeah yeah um so very different and andrew's like this special case where it's like you have this rock star team of like former palantir guys super well connected and then like they're already at a 10 billion plus scale it's like you can't just incubate that and like compete immediately i do think i heard uh when justin mayors was was initially pitching true med some of the feedback he got was like this is a good idea but you got to be really quiet about this for the next like year or two until you get this thing going because this is an idea that would be copied by 10 different yc companies and you would just get sliced up but if you can actually get through that gauntlet so like you know we joke about like an nda thing and stuff But like, yeah, you do need to be somewhat careful depending on what the market timing is for your business, what the structure of the business will be.

1:22:07Like clearly Anderle had, it was in such a, such a, like a, you know, a heretical industry. No one was going into that. And then also this crazy team, it was like, they could tell, they told everyone and it didn't matter because it was like, what the hell are you doing? I did have a funny. building something a little bit more like, oh yeah, this is like on trend. Like, okay, you're going to use AI for, you know, uh, for sales calls or CRM stuff. It's like, okay, well, like if you're actually doing something, like you might not want to go pitch somebody. I had a pretty funny moment with a portfolio company that went out to raise at the beginning of 2024 and ended up getting passed on by a VC.

1:22:45Um, that was like kind of surprising. Like we thought they were going to issue a term sheet and um and then i kept hearing about that that vc fund is a big vc fund and one of the founders i'm going to make up a name for it but let's call him jack yep i kept hearing from other people in the community oh jack has this new idea uh this new idea and he was saying that it was the same thing that my portfolio company was doing and i kept hearing the name jack over and over and over and so i went to a partner at at the fund that passed and I was like, guys, like you're fucking incubating a competitor to this deal that I brought you.

1:23:21Like I was super annoyed. And I only found out at the end of last year that it was a totally different Jack, but I kept hearing that. So for this whole year, I thought this on like three. And so this whole year, I thought this, I thought this partner was just fucking lying to me saying that they weren't incubating something when I knew that they were, turns out it was just, everybody kept referring to him as the same, like Jack's made up name, but and over and over and over and over and so when that happened i finally went down i was like dude i'm really sorry i kept hearing i thought you were lying to my face wow and um that's an amazing story so yeah i think there's a reason like at the end of the day what the the reason that it's not so bad that funds have this incubation strategy is like they would so much rather just back the generational team yep and so if you are building a generational company and you have this world-class generational team, you can rest assured that the VC fund will happily just invest in your company.

1:24:18They will only incubate something, an alternative, if they don't believe in you. Exactly. And so just be better. It's a skill issue. There is another funny flip side to this. I think your takeaway is basically dead on. But there's a funny flip side where I heard a story about a firm that does incubations had a person come and interview to work at the firm on incubations. And then they stole an idea from the incubator and went and built the business separately and was like, I'm not giving you anything. It raised different money. And then it didn't go well. Eventually like it got rushed. Usually those things don't.

1:24:56But it was like a very bad thing. And it was very stupid, but it's just so funny that like, it can go both ways. Like the VC can steal your idea, but maybe you can steal the VC's idea. And I like that. I like that. It's like bring the fight to them. Cuts both ways. Yeah. It didn't work out and I wouldn't recommend it, but it is funny. Let's go to another question I got in a DM that was pretty interesting. How do people who write books get on the podcast circuit? Are there companies to pitch guests or do they just reach out to a bunch of podcasts at once? Or does someone go on one and then other podcast reach out curious why youtube feeds me the same 20 people all the time and wondering how they get on so many shows for having no real body of work other than just being interested to listen to uh that's a good post uh that's a good way for it is true so are you familiar with the strategy well so the role of the modern pr firm yeah if you could pay somebody like like the classic pr firm you're paying them 10 to 20k a month yep and they're getting you plugged in with media yeah And now if you could pay, if I was an entrepreneur and I could pay somebody 20 grand a month to get me on four podcasts a month, that's like the best money ever spent because you're just getting in front of these crowds of people.

1:26:07You're able to talk about your story and your company and your product and people get to know you and they like you. And it's like the best marketing ever. So, but the challenge is like, it's not easy to get on podcasts, right? A lot of these interview shows, they do like 50 interviews a year and they have like 5 ,000 people that want to be on those slots. And so it's a bloodbath of competition to try to get onto that slot. What is true is like if somebody goes and they do one good interview and then they can jump to do another one and then they just end up becoming like a classic like interview.

1:26:38Yes, it does. I do think that there's like a bit of a snowball effect. But, yeah, it's not easy. I think everybody that has a podcast will like has like a long list of emails that they've gotten from PR firms from like, hey, like I'd love to, it's just some like super random. The best ones are where people try and get on David Senera's podcast, Founders. And it's like, he's literally never had a guest in a thousand episodes. Listen to a single show and you'll realize that it's not a guest driven show. What are you doing? You can get on, anybody you can get on David Senera's show. you just have to have built a generational company and have like three people write a book then you can get on it yeah yeah it's easy it's easy it's really easy if you just check those PR firms should just do that for them just help me build 10 billion dollars uh yeah i mean uh it it is it is wild how you get like syndicated and there are some shows that are literally just like we our whole model is we interview book people and and it's just like we have a close relationship with simon suester and penguin and yeah so for sure the book publishers they know there's certain podcasts that do like book reviews basically they sell books yeah and that's actually like their model um but then for the bigger shows like if you're going on like the rogan lex friedman circuit like that's much more relationship driven and it's much more driven by are you a personality and the book is kind of just like some it's just in the background it's just an excuse.

1:28:07Usually it's like people building a relationship over a long time. And then they're saying like, like when pump released his book recently, he, he sent me a copy, sent a bunch of people a copy. He sent an email to a bunch of people. And in that email, he was like, uh, if you want me to come on your show, uh, I'll prep something that's like specific to your show and I'll come on, just let me know. And, and so like, if you're like, yeah, my show is focused on, on finance, he'll be like, okay, cool. I'll, I'll come on and we'll talk about these things. So if if it's about crypto, he'll come on and do this.

1:28:36If he's talking about the military stuff, he'll talk about that. And so really like kind of helping people do their homework. And then once he starts like spiraling, he can kind of go up the chain and pass one along and say, hey, here's the last spot I did. And I noticed I did this last year. My goal was a little bit to do a little bit less content of my own, a little bit more guest spots. And I kind of worked my way up the chain from like some random friends podcasts to Bloomberg OddLots, which was like a pretty good spot. and uh and a lot of that just happened from like posting about becoming like an expert in the nicotine category was having a moment posted some long threads we get kind of like became a thought leader for a little bit and then like uh was just like available to people yeah um yeah and i i've said this probably on the show before but if you are running a company or an investment firm there's almost no podcast that's too small yeah because it used to be that if you were running a business and you got invited to speak at some random conference in Nebraska, like you're working oil and gas.

1:29:34And it's like, Hey, do you want to come speak at this conference to talk about other, to talk to other people in the oil and gas industry. And people would fly, spend an entire day traveling there to speak in front of a group of a hundred people, because if you have the opportunity to speak for an hour in front of a hundred people and tell them your life story and the history of your company and why they should care, it's like the best marketing ever because they're getting to know you. Maybe it's an opportunity to get them to like you, all this stuff. And so nowadays you can go and get on a podcast and even if there's only a hundred listeners, it's like, okay, you joined a zoom call and talk for 45 minutes and you got off.

1:30:10And like, if that, if only a hundred people ever listened to it, it's still a good opportunity to get yourself out there. So, uh, the other high leverage thing is that when you write a book, that whatever your title of that book is follows you basically forever because people will, it's very hard for people to be oh like jordy he's the founder of this company and he founded this other company but if you're just like author of whatever they'll just be like he's the author of this book and so if you just that's why we need to write the book lever up yeah or or like you know rags to riches how i became a high testosterone giga chad for only five dollars a month or something like that like the hard thing about bench pressing 400 pounds and driving sports cars all day and drinking dom pairing on it at work

1:30:59something stupid like that so it just follows you forever uh let's go to nicole this is a great question this is like this is bait for us she got 97 comments i'm sure all of them are wrong question for watch people what's a nice watch for women preferably gold classy and timeless that you can wear with most things have never owned a watch before and the options are overwhelming what do you think i want to look gotta go cartier cartier tank obviously yeah yeah it's just so one tank louis yeah it's timeless it was worn by uh jackie onassis sandy warhol muhammad ali it's you know like cartier invented the wristwatch with the santos but the santos is going to be too masculine um and so the the tank is iconic and you can't go wrong uh if you want to step up ladies nautilus you go with a crash there we go be good i think a crash is probably a better fit for an allocator of nicole's yeah size right um it's about 400k market value um so that's a good like daily i mean i mean the the ladies nautilus is is legitimately cheaper it's a bummer that pipe is not still in the business of like pulling forward you know how did you know in like 2020 and 21 if you had a fund you could pull forward like 10 years of your management fees so a lot of gps were like going and and that would have been an amazing opportunity to fund some of these watch purchases for some of these allocators that are all the management fees yeah that are just not following the two percent rule at all exactly um letting everyone down what else i mean i mean uh there are some i i think rolex is a little overplayed but there are some interesting pieces in there uh i think lisa sue at amd has one that's beautiful yeah something simple with like a date no no day date yeah it's not a date just that should be a band word we need to have a list of band words on the show day just day just is banned um but uh like since there's some unique date just that have you know yeah i I think could be, could be.

1:33:10I mean, there's another thing you could just like completely try and stand out with like a cause AP or something. Yeah. That was actually, it was funny. I landed in Geneva and cause AP at like the whole airport. And I'm like the average person, like only in Geneva do you put an airport ad for like the most hype beastie watch in history. Yeah. her her style overall is very uh gold classy and timeless but why not put a racing machine on your wrist when you call get an rm get a skeletonized rm yeah maybe hublo it puts you in a unique club you know it's good she says gold why not a jean what remember the jeans there's a watch that's made entirely out of jeans oh wow uh and uh yeah it's made out of gene material yeah or something um but yeah lots of good lots of good options but i hope that all 96 of these people recommended cartier tank louis because uh that's the one although there are some interesting ones you could go with the tank frosay tank anglais there's a few others that i i think could work but we could spend a whole hour classic it's been a whole time talking about if you're trying to save a buck you could go with the the solar beat but i recommend louis um here we go i'd love to hear y 'all's take on what fighters are doing a good job brand building slash marketing themselves or if you see any interesting trends in the sport from an entrepreneurial perspective thank you and he's talking about MMA fighters okay so this is a question from our boy Bo Nickel rising star in the in the UFC and a technology brother himself so um so Bo a little bit of backstory Bo is at uh is a wrestler at Penn State a lot of the best stars in MMA have like a wrestling base like Khabib is the sort of most prominent example of that um and there's actually some big fights coming up in LA this weekend uh which I'm excited for but um but yeah one thing that's become clear in MMA over the last 10 years is the biggest stars is not purely due to technical like proficiency and talent and I think that uh Conor McGregor like led the charge here he's one of the as much as he had some extremely viral massive moments in the cage yep people don't really realize that like his his last like run in the ufc was like not so good right he was getting knocked out by you know KO'd by Khabib KO'd by Poirier like breaking his leg having some nasty sort of like exchanges like it was a very kind of almost like a pretty bad downward spiral yet when he was on the mic he was the best to ever do it right so the media training was like was just so good and it was very seemingly very natural like he came up in his his career he just was always good on the mic um and so something that people have realized within mma and and beau certainly has has known this is that you are building you're not just a fighter and an athlete you're building a media brand around yourself right um and uh one of the challenges in mma is like you're kind of just your own dude right so like beau competes or beau trains out of a um i think american top team in pennsylvania um which is just like a small regional gym and so there's not a lot of like media coverage around there there's no he's not going to be getting pictures like paparazzi pictures and so he has to create his own kind of media business around himself and so he's done a really good job of that some fighters have been overly reliant on the ufc to promote them but the issue is the UFC has fights every week, couple weeks.

1:36:49And so their only incentive is to promote the next fight. So if you don't have a fight on the schedule or you're not fighting that week, you pretty much have to promote yourself. And so every fighter takes a different angle here. Like Bo has taken the angle of like, I'm gonna basically vlog his lifestyle as like this emerging athlete within the UFC. He's taken sort of the high road. You have other people like Colby Covington, who I don't know, are you familiar with Colby Covington? And so Colby Covington is like the couldn't be more polar opposite from Bo. Bo's like the, you know, the athlete, like the good guy, all American.

1:37:24Colby Covington takes like, we'll hire strippers and, and get strippers around him like this and be throwing, you know, money and calling his like, you know, opponents like losers. Right. So he's taken the total opposite approach. And so every fighter needs to create their own unique brand. I think it's impossible to break out in UFC and MMA without being like truly yourself because there's just too much time on the mics to like be anybody but yourself yeah Colby Covington like snapped into this character he was about to get cut from the UFC and he decided I'm just going to become an asshole and he like has adopted that and and that's almost been a challenge for him because he's he's can't fully like you can tell in certain situations he wants to just be like a nice normal guy but then he's got to be like you know he's got to be an asshole that's like part of his brand now um he's a heel um and so so yeah i think um beau's done a really good job of this a lot of other a lot of other fighters that have that have come up recently have realized like i basically need somebody to follow me around with a camera 24 7 and like we just need to be putting out this like really high volume of content because we need to be promoting ourselves year-round building this fan base because we can't rely on the UFC.

1:38:37And so I think overall, I think MMA like gyms and management companies need to do a better job of like building this infrastructure around fighters because it's a lot to put on somebody to say, oh, you're going to become like this top athlete and you're also going to build this crazy media company. Yeah. So step one is like embrace this idea that UFC is essentially WWE, but the fights are real. Yeah. And so there are roles and characters and storylines that cut through and you need to lean into those and acknowledge that that's real and figure out what is authentic to you. Are you a good guy? Are you a bad guy?

1:39:14Like, but like play into that and play a heightened version of yourself. and then second like there needs to be a camera on you like five hours out of the day every day and so uh at the start that's probably like your biggest fan who's an 18 year old kid with an iphone and then they can scale up and get a nicer camera but it's basically just film what happened today put it on youtube it's a vlog edited on their phone on iMovie just trim some stuff out but just give the fans the opportunity to go deep with your life take a photo put on instagram yep do it do a short little video one minute workout it's a it's a real it's a tick tock yeah and then just be constantly posting constantly posting constantly posting and then eventually like scale that up to like bigger stuff what else is in your life what can you tell us about the car you drive the watch you own like whatever else is in your world but you know the fighting stuff is going to be the core thing what yeah who who are you fans of who inspired you to get in this business like talk about anything yeah i've even seen some some um sugar sean sean o'malley and his uh coach tim they've built like a whole kind of like podcast network where they not only talk and cover their own stuff but they they when there's like a fight then they're covering it right and so yeah if i were if i were an up-and-coming mma fighter i'd be like okay i need to have a camera guy on me at all times i need somebody putting out like five six videos per day on social media.

1:40:39So I'm going to go to monster energy and say, just give me like a hundred grand a year. And I'm going to just like dump it into media because that, and that can quickly even become a profit center if you do it properly. These fighters aren't paid exceptionally well. So anyways, um, I would say the same thing, like it's, it's less necessary for like pro sports, right. Where you have these whole teams and there's more infrastructure, but these individualized, um you know sports or you got to take it up yourself should we go into this epic q a from andrew mccallum yeah i love andrew uh if you don't know andrew he was the uh he's an engineer at varda space industries but also um uh was big in the lk99 saga of last year was that really 22 22 yeah he was the one that like replicated it and like built it and actually tested it and it looked really promising, but then it didn't go anywhere.

1:41:34But he was actually able to get all the materials and run the process to make it. And I went down there, I made a whole vlog about it. It was really fun. Yeah. And he also has Project Bob, which, so I, we talked about this on the show. I was like, why has nobody built a drone that live streams that you and your boys can just watch, just chugging around the world. And so that's literally what he built with project, project Bob. And, um, we got to do a whole bit on it because they're raising money for it. And, um, it's very, and so he sent us a long message. I'll, I'll just read it all. Uh, he says brothers.

1:42:08So there I was basking in the glow of Marina Del Rey morning, surrounded by yachts and the quiet hum of other people's life crises. I'm finally taking a vacation day from grinding hard in the gundo, sipping an artisanal$14 oat milk latte. When I hit 39 minutes on your latest episode and bam you stumbled onto my diabolical plan for art riches dogefin.space four years ago i called my shot babe ruth style with this clairvoyant vision i knew elon would ascend doge would ignite a revolution and the only way to profit was to become an infamous modern artist disguised as a hard tech twitter shit poster naturally i have been quietly creating a life-sized modern art masterpiece, blending SpaceX, Doge, and Elon himself.

1:42:53I've seen this in person. It's crazy. The wildly overcomplicated path to get here really speaks for itself. Step one, build and sell the requisite first company in my 20s, five years before hardware was cool. Two, expand the Teal Empire. So he sold his company to GE. Oh yeah, that's right. Step two, expand the Teal Empire, obviously, as part of the founding team of another L-O-T-R named Banger. Step three, achieve world infamy and make Twitter fame after failing to make the rocks float. Shout out to Coogan's doc work and Chamath's trolling. Step four, nerd snipe every cracked and based engineer in California with Project Bob, launching the world's first venture-backed hobby program.

1:43:33So obviously, once I sell it at Art Basel this year to Ken G or Justin's son, the tough choice is the Lamborghini Miura or the Ferrari F40. As gentlemen of taste, which do you think goes best with my brand. As ridiculous as it sounds, every step has been part of the master plan. This is just the sort of high effort shit that you just don't see very often. Teal, Musk, Coogan, they're all playing on my chessboard. Yours in high effort chaos, Andrew. Thank you. This is a fantastic deal. I saw this and Andrew sent this before the end of last year, but we just needed, we weren't going to be able to give it the proper attention on the annual awards episode.

1:44:15So yeah, what a post. I'm glad we could share it. Such a long way to say Mura or F40. Lamborghini or Ferrari. You could have just said Mura or F40, but got the life story. I appreciate that. That's what we want. That's brother behavior, right? You got to give that context. And look, I want to see Andrew driving the F40 into the Varda parking lot, parking in the handicap spot, just for the photo op and then taking it out and parking in a normal spot. are having a moment but i think the miura is just a little too retro to have any sort of functionality it's going to be yeah just more of a beast yeah if you want the lambo diablo's are doing really well uh murcielagos are having a moment always uh and then you get up into the aventador and some of like the the previous generations are starting to climb a little bit there's some interesting stuff there and for a long time the lamborghini like real car mercy alago would be crazy pulling up to the varta offices and lp640 like that is like that's cool and i mean if you go for the manual ones like some of those are up there some of those are million dollar cars um but uh if you what about what about he didn't give this as an option but What about the Lambo Rambo Lambo?

1:45:34The LM02. That is fantastic. That's the ultimate gundo hard tech. It is. Somebody's going to do it. Because it's a supercar in itself. It has a V12. It has a V12. It's the same engine as the Kutosh, I believe. It's got that utilitarian. You've got a trunk. You can throw stuff in it. You can throw rocket parts in there. You don't have a trunk. You have a truck bed. A bed. Yeah, I'm bad. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it's insane. But yeah, I mean, F40 is just iconic. The Lambos are having a moment, but I think you got to go F40. Yeah. Although you won't be the only one in Gundo driving one because founder of Impulse Space has one.

1:46:18No way. He's an F40. Let's go. Let's go. Should we go in the timeline? Yeah, we're only two hours into the show and finally made it to the timeline, which is what you've been waiting for. Yes. It's been almost two weeks since you've heard us talk about printed out posts. So we have a little bit of a change up today. We have bucket polls where the random posts that aren't quite bangers go into the bucket. They get printed a little bit smaller because they're not quite as iconic as the bangers. And we have a little - We'll do a couple bangers and then we'll pull out a bucket poll. Just like Killtiny does it on Tony Hinchcliffe's show.

1:47:02So let's start with Justin Lopas. He says, took a poll of friends and the companies they work at. 100 % match. Serious people work this week and next. Unserious people do not. And he posted this at 6.50 a.m. on Christmas Eve. I think we were podcasting at the time. We were podcasting. We were literally podcasting at the time. 100 % match. Interesting. Friends in the companies they work at. Yeah, so everyone was working. Yeah, I mean, why not? I do think it is like a weird one because it is, if you were going to give your team any week off throughout the entire year. Christmas and New Year's was particularly dead just for doing business.

1:47:46Historically, when I was running regular non-podcast companies, that week was always really hard because i'd want to let the team take a breather yeah but then the nature of me having free time i just come up with ideas and i'd start pulling people in i'd be like let's get on a quick call let's get on a quick call then suddenly i'm just like yeah or we need to do this like now like this has to happen um i mean hopefully like there is a space for some sort of break from the monotony of the calendar and email and a shift so you're still working but it's a more intellectual you're reading you're thinking about long-term planning you're reflecting yeah and and i think that for the for the people who are just like butts in seats it's fine to take some time off but yeah you don't want your your sdrs just burning out cold calling like they're just not gonna get that's the thing like as much as it's very real that I would say out of the 50 portfolio CEOs across my portfolio, I would imagine that the best companies, the CEOs all worked last week.

1:48:58That being said, I don't think that it's a bearish signal if they told many members of their team, hey, take the next few days off. Because again, if you're an account manager, role, you don't need to be hitting up your accounts on the 29th being like, hey, how's it going? They're going to be like, I'm offline. Matt Wang at Paradigm, he says, it still seems underrated that Bitcoin slash crypto is the first political block with a native asset and thus a reflexive feedback loop between price and political influence. And then Kevin Kwok says, doesn't oil have this. And Matt says, as a largely utility-based commodity, there are constraints on price, but a good comparison point.

1:49:48Yeah, that is fascinating. Like you can understand how things are going in the crypto regulatory world just by looking at the price of Bitcoin. Like Trump got elected, there were a lot of pro crypto things happened and the price went from like 60 to 90, like immediately. And it was like, okay, like clearly things are 50 % better for this industry. yep uh and and and that is very interesting i'm wondering if there's if there's more if there's more to that like political block with a native asset like i guess it i guess it just means regulatory stuff but the nebraska corn farmers would like a word yeah well what i'm getting at is like i think that they're the the feedback loop is not just being able to divine political influence and how things are going to price, but also as the price gets higher, there is more money to spend on political influence.

1:50:41So the packs get bigger. I mean, Andreessen Horowitz donated by far the most to crypto packs when I looked at the data earlier this year, the last year. And it was very clear that like, if you're running a crypto fund or you're crypto billionaire, like throwing$30 million is fine. Yeah, it's fine. And with other VCs where it's spread so thinly it's like oh well like you know yeah we want to have some better regulation around energy for our nuclear portfolio company but we really only have one and then we need to change some things at the dod but we're really only in and roll and then you know oh we also need to change something with like housing because we're an airbnb and payments because it's like so many political blocks and like the it's not as focused and consolidated whereas everyone is kind of marching in lockstep in the crypto industry.

1:51:32Yeah, it's, I think the, my, the only, I always, whenever I've underestimated Bitcoin, it's from thinking of it as an investment asset versus a religion. So the difference between like the oil industry and the Bitcoin industry is people in the oil industry are like, this is a resource that we fundamentally need for our way of life but they're in it to make money right like nobody's like in oil because they just like have this deep love for yourself yeah speak for yourself um whereas like bitcoin there's like huge numbers of people that if the price was a hundred dollars a coin they would still be adamant about the importance of it and they would still spend all their time thinking about it and so i think that that that's part of the power of it it's a religion with a native asset.

1:52:27Yeah. Right. No, that's a good point. Yeah. I talked to a, uh, a liberal crypto investor and I was like, how are you squaring this circle in this election? Like, it seems like the Democrats are very anti-crypto. It seems like the Republicans are very pro-crypto. That was a big part of Kamala's policy is she, she wanted to protect. I know what you're going to say. Yeah. yeah let's move on from that but uh but yeah and and uh this person had some crazy like you know jumping through a million hoops to be like well actually like crypt it's easy to make money in crypto when it's illegal because there's more scams and i was like this doesn't sound good at all like yeah i think everyone wants a more clarity around crypto and everyone wants the scams to go away and like the pumping coins and the rug pulls to stop but we also want i don't know if we coin and stable coins to be legal and i don't know if we ever did we ever address this on the show we we we oh yeah we talked about um so so over break yeah i think this was over break but we had covered a post about somebody had said something how do i invest they were like i want to invest in technology brothers and we were like you can't invest we're not raising but lvmh is a good proxy for it because we faster we grow the more dom perion we buy yeah and you know so everett is a partner at kleiner perkins i worked with him at founder's fund he's a good buddy and he's a fan of the show and was just like i'm bullish and so he puts out this post saying like oh somebody should launch a coin because like i want to go along this this podcast like i'm excited he was just being like generally positive which is awesome uh and uh and some and then we said oh yeah we're not going to do a coin of course like but uh you can just buy lvmh because we're going to be buying so much dom pairing on should be an obvious joke but someone went and on pump.fun created a ticker called lvmh which i didn't even realize there was a previous lvmh pump.fun coin they're not unique you can just make a new one you can make 25 of the same name they're not even like only in the contract address yeah exactly which is ridiculous like it's less scarce a pumped out fun coin is less scarce than a domain like yeah like what and so uh and so immediately like we see this uh this post goes up i didn't even notice it i get a facetime call i'm with my family and i'm like this is weird i don't normally get like spam facetime calls so i pick up and it's this dude and he's like hey man like what's up brother and i'm like okay this is different than anything I've ever done in media before.

1:55:06And he's like, yeah, like I, I just put up a coin on pumped on fun and it mooned to 200 K and in market cap. And I was like, cool, dude. Like that seems completely independent from my life. Like I did, it was unclear that it was like tied to my identity and my brand. And I was like, now's not a good time, but let's talk soon, dude. and uh and then i just like hung up and texted him like love the energy but like you know not a good time like let's talk later and then we started texting and we realized that like well i noticed because people there were suddenly hundreds of comments replying to people replying to our posts saying lvmh is here like you can you can buy it and then and then we were getting like a bunch of dms from people saying what's your solana yeah address anyways uh and um luckily it blew over but it was there was like a million and a half dollars of volume traded like almost within yeah like you know within it just classically went way up and then went way down um and and it was frustrating because like in that one hour it was like everyone was having dinner with family and like during that one hour people were like their silence is deafening like like like the only reason that they wouldn't be replying right now is if it was real and it's like okay like i see what you guys are doing there yeah and somebody commented somebody commented was like angry at us and i had i replied from the brand account and i was like we have literally nothing to do with this we were we joke about lvmh yeah all the time it's very clear that like this is not part of the show not tied to us at all we didn't put out a post or whatever uh so very very frustrating and uh stop launching shit coins it's low class and vulgar and we don't support it here take a company public yeah it's much higher status spac something yeah spac something um yeah please um thank you and uh so let's move on to a bucket poll our first of the year and the first of the show but let's do a promoted post first okay i have uh it is ski season we've been talking about um great uh veil quite a bit this episode and our own travels and so i have a fantastic car for ski season a safari style 1986 porsche 911 carrera coupe and uh if you don't know about giving a safari treatment i think that's pronounced just coupe no no no it's coupe coupe really that's like the proper oh this is like a porsche porsche okay okay interesting yeah okay um i've been usually the american pronunciation i've been in france too long okay um so break it down uh so anyways people get it um yeah you can pick this up on bring a trailer.com uh great uh great auction site i've bought and purchased a 911 there before sight unseen no ppi just sent it worked great no issues with it got very lucky and making money when i sold it nice it's great um but uh but anyways i love the safari treatment on on these things they look incredible and it gives you that extra ground clearance you can go you can take it up to the mountains you got extra headlights more light that's great and um yeah this just looks like a fantastic example so just zip you from sf to tahoe and back yeah it's a perfect car to get to sf you don't have to worry about superchargers you don't have to worry about planning your route if you got gasoline you're good to go and very very reliable cars you can put a lot of miles on them.

1:58:40So anyways, don't let this one, don't let this one get away. Fantastic. Well, let's, let's go to a bucket poll. This is interesting. Okay. 47 likes by Anand Sanwal. He says, with YouTube university at their disposal, Gen Z is going to be the most entrepreneurial generation ever. It's unreal how sophisticated many are in business, primarily due to YouTube and online communities, not school. Sent on Christmas at 6 a.m. Let's go. Let's go. Interesting, yeah. Super valuable. I mean, I remember learning a ton on, what was that, OpenX, MITX or edX. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was like this open courseware movement in like 2009, 2010, where all the top universities started like open sourcing their, or just putting their videos out.

1:59:34So cool. It was insane. So you just get to watch Andrew Ng, like the best machine learning researcher in the world, teach machine learning foundations like ML 101. Yeah. And he breaks it down. It's great. And you can just sit there and watch it and you can be like much more. Further proof that you're just paying for a luxury brand when you go to a college and you pay 70, 80 K a year. It's true. But also just like, like, even though the colleges do follow like a bit of a power law where like Stanford, Harvard, MIT are going to be like the best. Like there are, even within the schools, like extra power law people, like Andrew Ng, for example, has had like a remarkable result.

2:00:14And Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, they're both like these incredible AI researchers. Like there's no one like that necessarily at, you know, a different college, even if it's a great school. But if you want an incredible economics education, you're going to want to go to University of Chicago. or if you want great economics and law, like business, go to Harvard. Or if you want the best surf conditions year round, you go to UC Santa Barbara, which is how I selected my school. Exactly. From a very young age, when I was 12, I went and visited. I said, the surf conditions here are phenomenal. I need to go here.

2:00:46I mean, I remember I walked into like Econ 101 and our book was by N. Gregory Mankiw and he taught the course over at Harvard. So oftentimes I just go over there and just go to his class because i just feel like i why do i why am i not just going to the source instead of being this like second tier professor like teach it i could just go over there yeah it's like a huge conference i feel like i learned more i learned more uh from podcasts than youtube like even though youtube was already good like for me from from uh when i like joined the world of venture around like 22 after graduating college and like started kind of participating i felt like i listened to probably thousands of hours of like venture related podcasts certainly to understand like how the business works for sure for the hard skills i feel like it's very easy to fall into yeah you're not gonna pick those up from a podcast you're also not gonna pick them up from just like surfing like random youtube videos because a lot of those are like kind of click baited or like like they're they're just meant to be too much entertainment and like their edutainment, but they're mostly entertainment.

2:01:52Um, but for like the high level stuff, but for a lot of like the programming skills I learned, it was, it was a book and just like going through the book and like writing the code alongside of it. It's probably better now with more YouTube stuff. Like back then YouTube was pretty limited, but. Did you see the, there, there was this over the last couple of weeks, there was a very viral incident where a woman dropped out of her PhD program. She apparently, like, teaches, like, makes videos about AI, ML on YouTube. Oh, I know. And she went and said she was dropping out of her PhD program to, like, just do OnlyFans.

2:02:25But the thing that I – apparently she had already been doing that for a really long time. So she was going to continue to just make the same videos and still do OnlyFans. It wasn't like I'm quitting my PhD and then I'm doing OnlyFans. Yeah. So anyways, classic internet just like got blown out of proportion and all this stuff. Let's go to Will Neatzi. He says, if you're building a personal brand to help you grow a physical product brand, don't. And then Ross McKay says, plenty of examples of strong community founder-led brands. Nick Baer at BPN. George Heaton at Represent247. Chris Bumstead, CBum.

2:03:04And I guess this is probably coming down to the question of like, like there's tons of examples of people who have big personal brands and then they launch a physical product brand but if you're starting also so i think should you go and bootstrap your own personal brand now here here's the way i read the original post was don't go build like a if you're building a consumer brand don't like try to build this b2b like thought leadership brand of like on x or linkedin like yes you should be like a personality-led brand and like your customers should know who they're buying from and there's value there but but like the the bpn guy doesn't he's not like here's how to build a business 101 right which is like i feel like on x it's easy for consumer founders to just start posting about the business of their business yep yep versus like the product product and like i'm selling like yeah if i'm selling like a supplement there's like a proof of body there that's like you should be looking good basically yeah uh it's interesting because i it does go back to like it's it's really really hard to build a uh a consumer physical product brand without some sort of hero partnership or influencer i don't know look at the ridge look at the ridge guys like they just it's it's you can absolutely if you have a super compelling product just buy um just buy these partnerships and really invest in them right like ridge really invested in their relationship with the avant early and i have another example the guy that i was in the alps with a year ago he's running a like really big um it'll be an amazing story one day we'll talk about it they raised a very small amount of money they do they'll you know over the next few years they'll do hundreds of millions of revenue and a year ago he had never heard of brian johnson had no clue who this guy was and he was running this multi doing a running a supplement business with tens of millions of dollars revenue he was completely ignoring the entire industry and just focus on his business focus on his customers and so it's totally possible to build yeah it is a distraction of like when if i see some founder building a cpg brand yep and they're like fixated on like posting a lot on x i'm like well like if you the the whole thing is like if you're if you're building an enterprise or b2b product and you can get in front of a thousand business owners that can have a dramatic effect on your business but if you're building a cpg business with selling a 20 product like lucy loose like x doesn't move the needle for sales for lucy it doesn't matter how many bangers you have in a month yeah just never doing a personality driven partnership with someone like day portnoy at barstool sports was her joe rogan yeah joe rogan um but that stuff happened like down the line but i think it's like at some point you're going to need some sort of partnership or relationship with someone that does have a personal brand yeah and so that doesn't need to be you that doesn't need to be the CEO, but it needs to be a part of the world.

2:06:14Like with Rora, we've partnered with this guy, Eric Hinman, who you've probably seen on Instagram. And so like we made sure he had a unit prior to launch. Going back to Nike with Jordan, you know, it's like, yeah, Phil Knight wasn't the guy, but Jordan was. And so you need to be like probably setting yourself up for, you know, who is going to be the human that drives the brand forward at some point. it feels like it's more important than ever. I'm trying to think of counterexamples like Mercedes. Do they have, I mean, Lewis Hamilton. There's like every brand kind of has like someone, I feel like, no matter what it is.

2:06:54Maybe BMW doesn't, I don't know. It's tricky, but let's move on to liquidity. Breaking, Kim Kardashian is no longer managing Sky Partners, the private equity firm she co-founded with former Carlisle partner Jay Simmons. Very relevant. The least shocking news I've ever heard. Kim should have launched a consumer VC and YOLO checks alongside tier one funds. Yeah, so very relevant to the last topic, which is that, yes, businesses thrive when they're personality driven, but just being a personality by itself is not gonna lead to outsized success. And yeah, private equity is one of those things where it's funny when guys in ventures are like, oh i'm gonna do you know hold co or roll-ups because like private equity could not be more optimized as a category like there's not like a lot of like low-hanging fruit right this is like one of the most like established highly optimized industries with a bunch of really really really smart people i mean it wasn't you're not gonna go so that's been 40 years the argument against like kim k doing a pe fund and like being wildly successful there is like if you're a billion dollar pe fund and you're buying a business you could literally buy the business and during that process go to kim kardashian and say hey we want you to be like part you we want you to be the face of this like we're going to give you like 10 million dollars a year and like build that into the deal she doesn't need to run the pe fund too um and so i think i think we're um everybody's just realizing like how hard everything is to do well like it's not easy like private equity is like deceptively simple.

2:08:33It's like, okay, we just buy businesses for one price and sell them for more. Lever up. But you lever up. But a lot of the times when like a business is being sold, it's because the operators that are in place are like, we're not going to be able to grow this more anymore than we already have. Or like, we think we're at a local maximum. So like, now is the time that we're going to sell it. And so if you go then buy that business, well, then you need, it's now your responsibility to like continue growing it at a rapid rate or grow it faster i guess what is odd is that it was a private equity firm with a carlisle partner and separate lps and like separate strategy as opposed to just like the kardashian holdco because i could see a world where like this is an example of like a private equity style deal where huberman and andrew wilkinson bought a brand and were able to take it to the next level but it's like it's within the huberman like universe now i think yeah and i could see kim where she has this she has a whole like kind of like distribution of like ownership there's like things that she started from scratch built up owns a ton of there's things where somebody came to her and said hey we'll give you 10 equity there's probably some companies that gave her one percent equity or half a point there's other companies that that don't give any equity and just pay her to do ads right yeah and so she has this like curve but for some of those opportunities where the value equation the value that she's creating is not being captured so it's like yeah she only has one percent of this company but she's 10x their sales or something it's like that's an opportunity to buy a product in that category or buy a company in that category and well they have they have um it's called lemmy now that the kardashians like a supplement brand i think is one of the best selling brands and like target stuff like that and it's literally they made a gummy version of every major supplement so it's like hey you can just eat candy for all of your supplements great um smart genius genius let's do another promoted post another bucket poll and then we'll move on we got a promoted approach from uh brother of the year brother of the year for 2024 first ever brother of the year and she says this is another thing i appreciate about ramp they treat you like an adult no infantilizing games that force you to hustle for points or lounge access just give us back time and money and we'll decide how to spend them we can buy our own seltzers and mixed nuts and it's a quote tweet of jack uh jack rains friend of the pot he said airport lounges are insane because they appear to be one of the most legitimately dangerous credit card incentives with the potential to gigafry your personal finance habits for the sake of stacking points oh it's such a such a banger the airport lounges are so lame i i walk into the airport later so when i have to fly commercial i just had to fly commercial i walk i go into lax i know the one place that sells evian water and glass bottles i walk in if it's an international flight i buy like six or seven because I don't want to drink the plastic bottle of water on the flight.

2:11:27So I buy six or seven bottles of Evian, and then I go sit at the gate, and then I get on the flight. I don't care about – If you're getting to the airport so early that you have to use a lounge, you've fucked up your whole travel plan. Also, if you think about it, how many flights did you take last year? If you didn't miss a single flight, you're getting to the airport too early. You have to miss at least one. The only thing that's sort of ironic about this is if there was going to be an airport lounge that was amazing, it'd be a ramp airport lounge. It'd be like you'd have the history of the greatest entrepreneurs on the wall, powerbending, et cetera.

2:12:05It would just be like various places you could scoop. It'd be a library. You could scoop protein powder. You could get protein powder. You can drop weights. Yeah, weights. It'd be a ramp lounge. Get a deadlift and read a story. So don't make us play silly games to get access to the lounge, but do a lounge at some point. Do a lounge. Yeah. That's great. Okay. A bucket poll. What do we got? What do we got? Let's see. Okay. Let's do this one. Okay. Oh, signal. Oh, we're on credit cards again. We're getting lucky here. Signal says 2025 credit cards, Amex platinum for travel and lounges, U.S. bank 4 % cash back for everything else is there a better or more simple combo and you got 10k likes this is one of those things so with credit cards i i don't pay attention to them at all i just let the points accrue for decades and then eventually i'm like okay so i should go spend these yeah um and then like once every few years i run into a dude who's just like completely min maxed it and become like super autistic about it has spreadsheets about like this is technically the best credit card i'm just like okay just tell me what to get and i'll just get that and i copy it uh but i like that he did my homework for me because this actually sounds pretty good.

2:13:16I might have to get this, uh, unless I just put my whole, uh, family on ramp and just, uh, and just run the entire, I know an angel investor in ramp who did that. He was like, I'm going to set up an LLC for my family just so I can put it on ramp and have credit cards and do everything through ramp. And they were like, yeah, that's not really the point. It's like a business credit card, but, uh, I really, really hope that at some point they launch a consumer card because it'd be so sick to do a new new centurion just for the ceo basically like you have to be the ceo of a ram corporation to get yeah um but but what do you think you have an amex platinum i do uh travel i just use you just don't use the lounges i just don't use a lot i don't i mean aren't the rewards i think better yeah but u.s bank has four percent cash back on everything that feels like a scam did you see that if that was a crypto company yeah it would be like oh yeah you're definitely embezzling uh But U.S.

2:14:12Bank is struggling, I guess, or something. I don't know. It's kind of a personal. Yeah, so here's the thing. I'm assuming they give you that crazy reward and you deposit money with them and they give you like nothing on the actual. Okay, yeah. They just give you any APY on the balance. So you're basically just arbing that. But I'm sure if you just set up the card and you keep cash elsewhere, but then they probably also have some rule. Like you have to have a minimum. Weird. Who knows? I just like try to every year instead of like optimizing credit cards, I just like try to hit a hundred X investment every single year.

2:14:45Yeah. And then it, you know, pays for itself. Let's go to Grimes. She says, insane to demean horse girls. Could not agree more. Yep. Single-handedly keeping the dream of the Mongol horde alive. I love this. We've been on this before. Yeah. So we joke a lot about horses. Yes. But we're... Unironically pro horse. Equestrian enthusiasts. We're glad that tech journalists have such an obsession with horses. Like there's not a lot, for a long time in tech, very few people were on the equestrian sort of wave. But also pro founders that got a lot of liquidity starting to build a stable. Yep. It's a great way to engage with nature and deploy a lot of capital.

2:15:28Yeah. And there's still an element of risk reward, financial incentives. You can make money. Yep. You can lose money. There's a lot of risk. No, and this year we're getting our own racehorse. And racehorses are completely resistant to artificial intelligence, not going anywhere. And yeah, I mean, for a long time, the horse girl thing was, it was used as like a shorthand for autistic female. And it was used as like this demeaning thing, like, you know, train guy, guy who's obsessed with trains is autistic, girl who's obsessed with horses is, and it was also just like trying to take a shot at like the upper class, essentially.

2:16:04It's like, oh, you grew up with horses. You must be rich and have nothing to say in this world. But if you talk to people that rode horses, they're wonderful people. My son takes horseback riding lessons. My daughter will take horseback riding lessons. We're going to have a horse named Brother that we're planning to take all the way to the Kentucky Derby. So very pro horse. And you can be pro equestrian and still joke about the equestrian lifestyle. We're pro tech, pro business. we joke about tech and business all the time. And also, I mean, if you're going fox hunting regularly, like you have to do that on a horse.

2:16:39So, you know, you really just got to use the right tool for the job. Let's go to Andre Carpathie. He has a long post here about DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence company, making it look easy today with their open weights release of a frontier grade LLM tuned on a joke of a budget. 2048 GPUs for two months,$6 million. For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16 ,000 GPUs. The ones being brought up today are more around 100 ,000 GPUs, e.g. Lama 3. While DeepSeq's V3 looks to be a stronger model at only 2.8 million GPU hours, 10x less compute or 11x less compute.

2:17:22If the model also passes vibe checks, e.g. LLM Arena rankings are ongoing. My few quick tests went well so far. It will be a highly impressive display of research and engineering under resource constraints. Does this matter to you? Don't you need large GPU clusters for frontier LLMs? No, but you have to ensure that you're not wasteful with what you have. And this looks like a nice demonstration that there's still a lot to get through with both data and algorithms. Very nice and detailed tech report too, reading through. This is very interesting. Yeah, this kind of took over the internet over the break.

2:17:57But I think there was a lot of questions about what was it stolen. So the funny thing, they dropped it. Didn't they drop it on Christmas Day or something like that? They're trying to get in our heads. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. All the technology brothers were enjoying Christmas. Yep. And they still had their mind thinking about business and technology. Yep. And this little joke of dropping your fake stolen model on Christmas just doesn't do anything. I did see what you're – I wish that we had a post on it. But yeah, something about how like most advancements. Yeah, WordGrammer says, I genuinely don't know how to feel about China casually mogging every US lab, then dropping it for free as open source.

2:18:40I simultaneously feel a deep sense of concern for our national security and a deep sense that WAGMI and intelligence too cheap to meter is at hand. So kind of bullish, but also scared. But that didn't cover the fact that it seems like people have been figuring out that they just kind of like were able to leverage OpenAI's models and then like leapfrog using it? I mean, I talked to some guy who said that like he ran the numbers on, for a while, when you got a response from GPT-4, it would also give you some, like not the full weights of the model, but like a sampling of how that like response was calculated.

2:19:24and if you got enough of those you could kind of do the math backwards to create the model weights or estimate the model weights and get pretty close and he was like kind of running the numbers and he was like yeah so like to exfiltrate the model with this with the like you get the text responses and then you also get you basically just train your new model on the actual api yeah and it was like for that was like less than a million dollars or something yeah yeah and i think they like patched and cleaned it up or something, but it's still very risky. And then there's also just the question of like, did they have a spy?

2:19:56Yeah. Very, very possible. I just don't trust anything that comes out of the Far East. Yeah. I just don't. The wrong hemisphere. I just don't. Let's go to Dystopian GF. She says, anyone with an IQ of 130 plus should be required by law to lift weights. Resentful nerds with no connection to the physical world will be the death of us. 27 000 likes addendum skipping leg day will result in fines and possible jail time if a repeated offense good post it's funny but yeah i mean obviously uh the reason that we need these people to lift weights is we need we want to invest in more people that are in the thousand pound club that are deeply intelligent and technical so also with intelligence too cheap to meter and ai on agi on the frontier you need to be going golden retriever mode you need to golden retriever maxing which means yep getting hot getting friendly and getting dumb don't worry about learning anything more pumping that iq out with stimulants adderall's out deadlifts are in deadlifts are in yeah yeah it's on getting diced is underpriced i agree completely it's it's it's never been more important to to focus on physical fitness it's not too late winner winner is like halfway over almost feels but it's but it's not too late to enter like some sort of winter arc yeah right yeah and you know this is the perfect time to start a three-month bulk which then can turn into a three-month cut right for june 1st summer season you'll be on the beach you'll have an extra 10 pounds of muscle on you'll be we're gonna have some crazy great tb meetups in europe this summer you're gonna want to look diced yeah you're gonna want to be diced you're not gonna want to be hanging out at 20 body fat i just i actually i actually like i i don't know if anyone in our audience is not already moderately jacked yeah like that on average like they they care about health a lot but and and this is the time of year that people are talking about new year's resolutions and i want to get fit and all this stuff and just do it it's not that hard you you have to go in you can watch youtube videos you can download workout plans you can download these apps for$5 a month that'll tell you exactly what to do and just go in and do it.

2:22:16And it's, it's not free, but it's basically free. If you have any type of normal job and you're making even$5 ,000 a month, you can afford a gym membership and just get diced. Yep. And so sleep, you're like, it's, it's one of the few things that if you just do it, your life will just get material. So here's the algorithm for the best news resolution possible. Uh, sleep a bunch, You know, got to get your eight hours in a gram protein per body weight per pound of body weight. So you're one and a half high protein diet. Exactly. And then hit the, hit the bench press. As soon as you're not sore, you're ready to work out again.

2:22:54So you can train bench press three times a week sometimes. Yep. Keep, keep bench pressing, get up to two 45 on the bench because then you bench press more than Brian Johnson. Yep. And then just comment that marker that matters. And then anytime he does a long post comment didn't read i bench more than you exactly exactly that's the way uh do we have promoted post uh somebody one of our one of our reply reply guys is gonna take that to heart and honestly be good i mean brian's a good friend and also just a good uh he's a really good sport so he'll just play along with yeah i'll just play along with it but it is truly oh oh you're free hemoglobin is 75 i don't care what's your bench yeah is it still 240 brian because unless you're a mass monster i'm not listening i'm not listening yeah that is the funny thing it's it's it's it's really quite something that he's gotten this big of this much influence and this big of an audience in the health world without being a mass monster yeah because historically that was the only way to break through yeah it was the only way to break through and and he's realized the only way to make money in health yeah sell supplements sell everything but if he's big today if he just doubled in size yeah he could be 10 times traps from an audience from an audience standpoint he could be death star delts death star delts it would be amazing uh promoted post from our friend preston holland he says another ex-friend started flying private they bought a 6.25 percent share of a Phenom 300 with Airshare for 550K.

2:24:25Let's go. So brothers, make your New Year's resolution and start flying private more. One of the ways you can do that is buying part of a jet. If you want to do that, go reach out to Preston Holland. He is a fantastic guy. Got to hang out with him at David Center's last event. And nobody better to help you break into the world of private aviation. Absolutely the man. and an absolute dog in the skies. Absolute dog. Let's do a bucket poll. What do we got here? It's still picking through with the ice cube. Yeah, you got it. Okay, here we go. Oh, this is funny.

2:25:09Mr. Overplayed says, Being drunk is a choice. Just had around 17 shots. Everyone else stumbling and mumbling. I am laser sharp. I don't allow drunkenness into my body, ever. self-control by the power of the holy spirit i will be up at 4 a.m may no demons have dominion over my body spirit greater than flesh 100k likes 100k we pulled that out of the bucket that's a great one i mean it's so funny being drunk is a choice also somewhat true it is it is there's some real truth to it yeah also i this last trip so i i the only time i i've drank in q4 was on Dom episodes. So I really don't drink. I really think that there's this massive discourse about, oh, should you drink?

2:25:55It's carcinogenic. Huberman's on like the never drink. I think you should only drink Dom Perignon. Yeah. And only when you're celebrating. Yes. Yes. But you can celebrate constantly. But on this trip, I, whatever, I was having like drinks. I was having shots. I couldn't for the life of me get drunk and I didn't understand. I didn't understand why. Spirit over flesh. Spiritually, I just didn't want to be drunk. I didn't want to lose control. I didn't want to be like, oh, I just enjoy being locked in. And so no amount of shots is going to disrupt that. And it's a skill issue. It is a skill issue.

2:26:30It's great. This was an interesting story over the break. Drew Fallon says, accounting firm Bench has gone out of business after 13 years. They raised$113 million. They did a$5 million seed in 2014. Then a$13 million Series A,$16 million Series B,$18 million B1. 60 million series C. In 2021, their enterprise value was 232 million. And in 2024, zero. And they closed. And people were really upset because it closed very unexpectedly. And so it's an accounting firm, contract accounting firm for startups. And so companies would use them as outsourced accounting. And people were kind of getting ready for a year-end close.

2:27:13And then they just get a notice notification hey like your accountant just quit yeah yeah uh yeah i i used to be um i was a bench customer for a while for the company i started in college and eventually just switched to regular cpa just because it's i don't think that i i i don't think for some reason like eventually software will get so good yeah that it does make sense to like rely primarily on like some type of like AI agent software provider for this kind of thing. But yeah, so I think people really dug into it and apparently they had taken on like a bunch of venture debt, which can like basically like one shot your company if you don't execute perfectly.

2:27:54But the real, the interesting thing here, we need to do a deep dive on the guy that bought this company because he's like buying a lot of companies. He has like, I think it's employer.com. Yep. So there was also a post, this caused a lot of drama because Ian Crosby, I think was the founder and he said, I'm very sad today to see that Bench has shut down. I've avoided speaking publicly about Bench since just over three years ago when I was fired from the company I co-founded. I still don't have a lot of appetite to talk about it, to be honest, but I think at least a short statement is appropriate.

2:28:25And he goes on to explain how he grew the business and then was pushed out. And so a lot of people were very upset. They said, name names, let us know who is on the board. You should never take money from these people again. And it's interesting, like that is true that they ran it in the ground but uh there are always two sides to those stories well what i like about this founder and what he did is he got whatever very tragically booted out of the company misalignment of like how he wanted to run it versus the board did but he goes and starts like some other accounting related business with all the experience that he had then has a nice exit to mercury and now he works on wait really he's in that time he started and sold another started and had a successful exit i love how he runs their like accounting oh that's great mercury so he's he's had a good story that's great that's great i wonder it'd be cool maybe he'll get back involved with bench now that this new owner oh yeah maybe they have a whole redemption arc so yeah it's interesting that was cool yeah well um always a stupid move to yeah i've never it's just so stupid but also the the venture debt thing i don't uh why does a services business need venture debt exactly yeah i don't know what they're financing we gotta have we there's somebody just announced a new venture debt fund that was like teal back yeah we saw it we should have that person on the show and talk about why the fuck should anyone ever do venture debt because you never you never hear it just seems like it's like unnecessary baggage i mean there are a few reasons that you want debt generally and yeah what i think about venture debt as just yeah but for the right but not for a cash based services business so i mean the way i think about like funding a business generally is like you have different line items expenses and there are different funding instruments for each of them and so for your capex your r d a really really long time horizon we are writing software that will get us recurring revenue that pays out over a decade like think about ramp signing a big customer it's like that money is going to come in for years and years and years.

2:30:31How do you finance that? Venture capital. Absolutely. Like that, that is the textbook case of venture capital. You see the same thing in drug development and biotech. Like why is there so much equity going into these companies? Well, it's because it's extremely high risk, right? Versus if you're a manufacturing company and you need to CapEx a bunch of plant property equipment, PP &E, that's the perfect use for debt. But you don't think about it as venture debt because it's asset backed loans for your machinery. And so you buy a million dollars in machinery, you depreciate it over a decade and you're paying that down at the same time that you're, that you're making money from that machine.

2:31:08You're perfectly matched to the debt and hopefully it matches up really well so that you have a million dollar machine. It makes us a million dollars in revenue. We take home 300 K and EBITDA and we pay our debts or whatever, you know. But there's this, but there's this middle ground for, is your working capital growing. And so when I think about a company like Ridge, they could have a revolving debt line that grows as they, because they make the product and then they have to wait to sell it. And it takes them a while to actually get the money. They actually do some really cool stuff with their manufacturer where they, from what I know, they'll basically say, Hey, we'll give you, we'll pay you 10 % more, but we need 180 day terms.

2:31:50Yeah. They're essentially getting seller financing. So I understand it for these businesses that basically have these bigger working capital requirements, but adding debt onto a business like Bench where you're just kind of like, okay, give us money, we'll give you the service. Give us money, we'll give you the service. Yeah. It doesn't immediately make sense for that type of business. Yeah. Seems very rough. Anyway, let's go to Nat Friedman. This was a huge story. He said, we did it. We tested 300 Bay Area foods. It's so funny that we said 40 ,000. When we were joking about this, we said we tested 40 ,000 foods because I was like, I would just want it to be higher than that.

2:32:31I don't think we posted that. We didn't post that? Not yet. Oh, okay. We got to post that. But anyway. Oh, did we not? Okay. Anyway, we did it. We tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals. We found some interesting surprises. The top five findings in our test results. Our tests found plastic chemicals in 86 % of all foods with phthalates in 73 % of the tested products and bisophenols in 22%. It's everywhere. We detected phthalates in most baby foods and prenatal vitamins. Hot foods, which spend 45 minutes in takeout containers, have 34 % higher levels of plastic chemicals than the same dishes tested directly from the restaurant.

2:33:10The 1950s army rations we tested contained surprisingly high levels of plastic chemicals. Almost every single one of the foods we tested are within both US FDA and EU EFSA regulations. Check out our full results below. Okay. Put a plasticlist.com. There were a bunch of notes or.org, a bunch of other notes about this. One boba tea equals 1.2 years of safe BPA consumption. There was a whole food steak that was surprisingly high in PFAS. Yeah, so two notes on this. So one, all this was done by Light Labs, which is Justin Mayer's brother's company. Lucky to be an investor in the company. And really smart what they did.

2:33:58They basically realized there was all these new regulations around testing like baby foods. There's these new requirements around testing. they came out and they did uh nick uh and justin had had uh made you know a fortune in bone broth had to do a bunch of testing uh and so they had experienced a pain point themselves so nick starts light labs um and that the company's been doing phenomenally uh in part because there's this all this new interest around pfos and microplastics and things like that so uh second i think the big takeaway and uh from this is that legal does not mean safe so the government has actual regulations around the levels of the amount of shit that can be in food and that legal level is usually way above what is considered healthy right so in a perfect world you have zero pfos or microplastics that you're ingesting but they're going to get into the food to some degree and so So I think that that to me should should be the most eye opening thing about this is you cannot rely on government regulations to figure out what's healthy.

2:35:12Right. Because the government will say like, oh, yeah, like one out of every hundred molecules can be like effectively toxic. And that's fine. Right. Yeah. One out of a million. Right. But but but still like that these legal legal levels are so much higher than safe. Yeah. I think there's a few things that I take away from it. One is like, it is everywhere. Somebody even asked Nat, like, hey, how are you changing your lifestyle based on these findings? And he was like, I'm not changing anything because it's just everywhere. I'm screwed. Well, if you can, if you're buying the healthiest, most expensive steak and it still has plastic.

2:35:51Everything has plastic in it. So it sort of exposes this need for like some sort of more systemic approach to like, okay, let's find out where the biggest sources of contamination are, like up the chain. Like someone with the steak thing was identifying the fact that the hay bales that the cows eat were wrapped in plastic. And it sits in the sun. Like it sits in the sun, but also when it gets cut, like literally there's just chunks of plastic the cows are accidentally eating. So they're just literally eating plastic. Um, and so it's like the, yeah, you can do a little, it's the same thing with like, Oh, like cure the environment by like driving an electric car when it's like, okay, actually maybe just like moving to nuclear and solar at the source point is like what we need to do.

2:36:28And that's has a much bigger impact. It's probably the same thing here where like, there's a little bit that you can do with being like, okay, I'm going to eat this burger instead of that burger. And I'm going to make a consumer choice. But like those consumer driven changes are always much harder than just like figuring out where this, where the actually biggest power law yeah effect yeah i think i think going after the right response is you see this report and you're like i want to avoid pfos and microplastics yeah do stuff like look at how you if you make coffee at home yep and you use one of those drip coffee machine makers with the things that pull out and you realize it's just like heating plastic right heating really hot water in plastic it's like cut that out yeah you don't want to be having that every single day having your little micro plastic coffee yeah every single morning just find the really obvious stuff yeah find that and then also there's a bunch of things that you can do like that are downstream like uh body builders have really low levels because they they don't they donate plasma and blood a lot and so if you're donating blood like you're yeah yeah yeah that's like the lindy bloodletting bloodletting exactly or or i'm seeing you know throw uh if you're busy you don't have time to give blood throw some leeches on your back before you put on your suit that's so gross that's so disgusting uh it is a little bit of like a skill issue here i think like uh like it's not very lindy to be deathly terrified of microplastics like at some point you do just need to man up and be like yeah i'm being poisoned but it doesn't fucking matter because i'm a man um but uh i i do love this because it's like a phenomenal use of Nat's money.

2:38:04And it's like, we, there's another post I'm sure in here about like a guy who made a lot of money and didn't really know what to do with it. And it's like, Nat has found a great vector for, you know, like just going and doing a really impactful project that's off his own balance sheet. And he has no idea how it's going to make money. I don't think he wants to run it forever, but he's doing something that has like a really cool impact. And so if you do wind up with a generational wealth, like instead of just go and do a cool project like this yeah it's so cool yeah because he spent half a million dollars yeah millions of people can benefit from exactly it might create systemic change in the industry the other the other takeaway if everything is if everything is toxic it actually means that you need to focus on detoxification sure like sauna is the obvious one uh sauna a few times a week figure out how to do it you can it it is the number one way to detoxify like broadly i thought Yeah, it is a good place to read the Wall Street Journal.

2:39:01But yeah, that's like the best thing that you can do is, okay, I'm constantly inundated with toxins, so I'm just going to sauna five days a week, figure out how to do it. Don't have to buy a sauna in order to do it. Go to the gym or whatever. Do we have another promoted post? Yeah, again, it's ski season, so you know that we have to promote the Lamborghini Cerato. Cerato, let's go. This is the Alpha Spec, the Sabia Desertum. And they're practically giving this thing away. This thing, they're listing this on DuPont Registry at$409 ,000. What a great spec. I mean, you know this is the last model run of the Huracan V10.

2:39:45And so now the Lamborghini split. There's the V12, Rivelto, and there's the Temerario, which is a V8. And so if you want a V10, this is the one to get. It's the final year. And it's fantastic. It's such an economical purchase because it comes with the roof racks. So you don't have to go and buy these aftermarket roof racks. You're kidding. But I wouldn't be surprised if that car holds a lot of value. Oh, I think so. I think they're going to be collecting items. But a car like this, here's my advice for all the brothers out there. Buy two. Yep. Garage queen one. Yep. Daily drive the other. Make it your little weekender.

2:40:20Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is legitimately the perfect car to take up to Squaw Valley. I'm still going to call it Squaw because DEI is over. Do you know the whole – Yeah, I talked to somebody who was skiing this weekend, and they were like, oh, yeah, my ski instructor was like a huge asshole and just wouldn't shut up about how I can't call it Squaw anymore. The ski instructor, really? The ski instructor was like wasting like 20 minutes, and they were like, I just want to get it back on the slopes. Like, can we just do a run? and i was like you gotta just troll this guy and be like yeah can we hurry it up like the redskins game's almost on yeah i grew up skiing at squaw i will die what do they call it now palisades okay palisades not a bad name but it's a good name squaws squaw squaw is such a bad name offensive is it no i think it i think it meant like i think it literally meant like a slur it's just like it was like a word for it was a for i think it i think it was like native american phrasing for like a whore oh okay so it is a slur okay okay okay well yeah we need to retire that one who knows yeah anyway highly recommend picking up a lamborghini storado uh if you do actually tell them the technology brothers sent you oxford dictionary says it means a north american indian woman or wife so okay so it's just um not so bad yeah not too bad i like that it's great should we go to a bucket poll what do we got here uh this one it's on the old paper oh there's some deep ones in here let's see um let's see okay oh here we go we got oh this is good this is good uh from Captain Nemo, friend of the show.

2:42:10He is. He is. I hung out with this guy a bunch. I love him. Captain Nemo. He says, convinced some ultra nice hotels, think Amman, Raffles, Hotel Bel Air, are actually intelligence operations run at a loss. Anytime I've looked into who owns them, they're backed by Russian, Middle Eastern, or Chinese money that's closely tied to foreign governments. Plus, the hotels self-select for powerful or ultra wealthy clientele likely to divulge useful info that could be recorded. Relatedly, the Amman's global director of security was recently arrested for funneling money to a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Okay, but you know that Rosewood has some real history here.

2:42:54Oh, yeah. It's Chinese-owned. Oh, interesting. Strategically placed in power centers around the world. And yeah, wouldn't stay at the Rosewood. No. Period. Interesting. They would steal all our podcasting secrets. You think so? Okay, the secret to podcasting is record every single day. Yeah. Create a platform for your absolute boys. Yeah. And then they would clone us. I disagree with this. I think that if these are indeed intelligence operations, we need to be staying there constantly. Because once a foreign oligarch hears our takes, they will become American capitalists. Yeah. They will be convinced.

2:43:31Yeah. And so I could just imagine Putin. They'll see us playing with our mod retro. They'll be like, oh my God, this is amazing. I got to stop what I'm doing. We got to get an ally ship going with these guys. It's a real, I can change her situation. Yeah, I mean. Maybe they are intelligence operations. I don't care. I'm still staying there. They're intelligent operations. I'll tell you that, John. I love spending money in Amman. I think it's very intelligent to operate out of an Amman 365 days of the year. Yeah. I don't know. this seems like uh i give this i give this uh three tinfoil hats out of ten three yeah yeah no i mean i i did i did look through that thread and see like the whole story of the amman guys it is seems pretty but but amman is widely known lots of russians stay at amman i think it is owned by a russian oligarch so it's not a that much is fact i believe so did you know they have grocery stores in russia in russia yeah wow and he's like like check it out like it's not a third world country i love that one it's so funny um i don't know don't just don't waste any time at you know four star hotels um that's the takeaway this is fun this was fairly recent uh it's a video of lil b nighting neo the robot at the one x office and it's uh that's the most bullish thing i've seen on figure so far it is very this is not this is not figure this is oh it's one x it's one x different company that makes sense because i was like figure they culturally don't seem like no no no they're very buttoned up very like we're doing partnerships with bmw we have a campus we're very like the meanwhile one x is united yeah yeah exactly yeah one x is doing videos with jason carmen and like You know, Timothee Chalamet was knighted by.

2:45:29It's a quote of that. Yeah. And so I think that's where they got the idea because Timothee Chalamet got knighted by Lil B, the bass god who has some, I mean, bass is a word because of Lil B. You know that, right? He has some amazing quotes. Extremely like online internet person. There's this hilarious quote. The first internet rapper in many ways. Yeah. She's like, shout out to everyone on the internet. Our backs are hurting. Our eyes are hurting. but we keep posting and he said this in like 2006 or something it's a wild clip like he's just the man um and uh yeah very uh one of those rappers that's like you know transcended into like this bizarre avant-garde artist world where he's been an influence for a lot of people so it's uh it's awesome and hilarious that they got little b to come out and meet the robot and they've done a couple other weird things where i think they put a neo with like kaisenat or something or oh they iShowSpeed or something honestly you gotta if i'm going along if i'm gonna go along a humanoid robot company yep they actually are doing all the right things yeah it's like how do you become part of internet culture winner if you're just like normie thinking about who's gonna win and then figures running this very like corporate partnership like you know oh what's the pure play asset almost like how would a financial manager see building a portfolio around the future yeah well they need a robotics play and tesla's too highly valued and you're not getting a peer play so you go for a figure and then one x is like we're just kids building this stuff yeah it's like awesome we're having fun on the internet i love it i love it um we should uh we should reach out to them and see if we could get a one x that that could just sit here and be the third co-host yeah that'd be great um this is uh yeah here here's the here's the kai snot one.

2:47:19This startup used Kaisenot's streams to go insanely viral, but no one is paying attention to how this campaign was actually engineered. New playbook being executed before our eyes. They do streams with a Twitch streamer. Product is a core part of the content, not just a lame integration. The goal is to set up as many clippable moments with the product as possible. Pay Discord kids 30 cents CPM. Yes, you saw that right. To farm TikTok clips from the streams. They're all competing to win the budget allocation as fast as possible. 50 million views guaranteed at 30 cents cpm so yeah very interesting it's crazy because like it's like it's not a concern are you bored why are you playing tetris i just like the sound like the soundtrack um that's great um but yeah i mean uh i mean there's so many moment there's there's so many there's so many underrated pieces of this like partnering with the twitch streamer is is very like new age like your whole career was like with the youtube stuff yeah the twitch streamers it's like much harder i tried it was always hard to do integrations on twitch i i did i would do a bunch of i would do a bunch of stuff with with ridge back in the day but i'd tell a twitch streamer okay we're gonna sponsor this entire month of content and like every hour bring it up yeah but it's weird it's kind of weird it doesn't it's not it's yeah it's not it makes sense that the streamers have figured out this like tipping oriented model, which is extremely lucrative if you get it right, because it's not a really good ad format.

2:48:52And so for one X, I mean, a humanoid robot is like the most inherently viral product you could possibly be building right now. The question is just like, I'm, we're, we're, I'm working with a portfolio company that I won't name yet, but we're going to be able to go, we're, they're going to give it a gun and we're going to be able to go make some some content yeah um i want to i mean i think i think we should yeah yeah i think we should like and we're doing it it's easy to predict the real in the future yeah yeah you can predict the future no vcs in the future they're like they make their like list of 10 predictions and then they just create the ai agents that do all of them and they're like wow i went 10 for 10 this year like uh 2025 prediction a uh tech podcaster will bench press 260 pounds it's great uh this is this is funny and somewhat related to that mod retro sam lesson says the most expensive computer per unit of compute in the world and it's a ti83 plus graphing calculator for 75 bucks did you ever program these yeah yeah i i had so much fun some of my best memories that's where my dad my dad was a high school math teacher and i had his class yeah so i would just sit programming games did you ever did you ever have party do you remember this one well which one is that maybe this was just in my high school but basically someone created a text-based game uh where it was like choose your own adventure and it had a couple different paths but it was about going to a party so i i remember this i love i love parties so it was like it was like you go to this high school party and it was like what do you want to do like do you want to drink do you want to flirt and like one of them was like you could actually get laid and then i i remember the text would pop up it would be like you bask in the sweaty afterglow which was just like hilarious and this this sweaty afterglow like sticks in my mind to this day and it's funny because like my my high school was like very nerdy both from like a computer science perspective but also like really really crazy with the english and so clearly this kid who programmed this thing was if it happened in my high school i don't even know if it did it might have just gone viral but um clearly uh you know he was like in you know in an english class and read some shakespeare and heard Afterglow.

2:51:06It was like, I'm going to put this in the game. But then you could go in and edit the program and you could change the name. So it was like, oh, you run into your boy Jordy there, whatever. It was like really fun. And it all required having this cable, the connector cable. And nobody had these by default because they wouldn't ship with them. Now I guess they do. And then you could have your game and you could pass it along. It was like the first example of like virality. And there were a bunch of other games that you could like put in and you could also cheat and put note cards in there and stuff.

2:51:35snake i'm trying to remember you could you could put snake in there tetris a little bit uh i just thought it was i just thought it was the coolest thing that i could program my calculator that was supposed to be just for yeah doing math computation and i could program it so i could play yeah games yeah i mean a lot of those games are like a little bit too much to program as like a high schooler but the little like you know you start out with just like the if i press you know the the number one key it spits out some text like that's very easy to get into and then you start leveling up and do an if statement with a couple different things and all of a sudden you've built like this text game uh good times with the ti83 great after i after i uh went through my programming my ti84 era i would uh i would i got into ddossing my dad's website which would host the homework on it so i'd be running this like windows machine in our house like in the corner and like my room just like ddossing my dad's website i always had these visions of like people like busting down the door being like yeah because of my i mean i i ran into something similar where uh my dad had a server where you could just like store files it was basically like an ftp server like precursor to google drive by like a long like 10 years or something so it was like if you wanted to put something on the internet you just upload a upload a file there and and he'd use it for work and like little things like host a website on the server and he just had a buddy that gave it to him and didn't charge him on like a on like a consumption basis so it wasn't it wasn't like oh they use this much bandwidth so we're gonna charge you this much it was just like pay monthly and i'll just let you have this server yeah and so i got access to it and i was really big in the counter-strike community and so uh what i figured was like the big thing in the counter-strike community at the time was like these like vibe reels basically this is like going back to my old editing days uh basically what you do is you take like highlight reels like from all the best counter-strike players and you cut together like their greatest hits and then you export them put them put like some sick music over it the biggest one was called frag or die um and it was like iconic and so uh if you could get into one of those it like canonized you as like one of the greatest players of all time yeah and so what i realized was that uh people needed video editing skills and I could do that.

2:53:55And then people also needed hosting. And so I was like, I'll edit this one if I can put myself in it. And they're like, yeah, it's fine. And so I wasn't as good, but I had like one or two good highlights. And so I put myself in this thing. It's like frag or die too, or some sequel to this thing. And, uh, and I, and I host it. And then the link goes out on, uh, IRC. Do you remember internet relay chat? This was like a precursor. It's what slack is like copying basically yeah these channels and then people post it and it just starts going viral and people download this like massive video file this is before youtube and and and it's like and everyone's like dude like thank you bro like you hooked it up like everyone got to see this video because of you like this is so tight and i'm like sick i'm like a king in this community like this is amazing everyone's recognizing me for my counter-strike skills and then like you know a week later my dad comes in and is just like what the fuck did you do like like like but i i like this guy needs to charge me now like is it a crazy bill i i don't know if he actually i don't know if the bill actually like passed through but he was like it's not unlimited anymore yeah i am rate limited now because of you but also like probably like somewhat proud because it's like you did something cool hacker yeah yeah volume yeah yeah exactly i had a viral banger yeah you know you don't hate the player hit the game yeah but no longer now you just uploaded to TikTok.

2:55:13Kids have it easy. Anyway, let's move on to time. One more promoted post. We got a promoted post by our friend Red Bull Futurist. He has created something called the Red Bull Micro Grant Fund, and they are actively deploying capital. It's very simple. If you're doing something cool, you post about it. And I think you just have to, it doesn't say here, but you just have to do hashtag Red Bull fund and they will send you$4 to buy a Red Bull. It doesn't matter what you're doing. It's got to be cool. Wait, that's what it is? Yeah. It's$4. It's$4. That's amazing. So they got micro grants. So if you're listening to this, go do something cool.

2:55:56And when you need a Red Bull, post about it. What is Justin Mayer's again? It's like a thousand or a couple grand? Yeah, I think it's like two grand. Two grand. So you got the Teal Fellowship with a hundred? then you got justin mares with two grand you got this for four dollars so next time you're in a pinch and you need a red bull uh they will send you four dollars just make sure you're doing something cool i don't want to see any non non-cool no you need to do something epic you need to be doing something hit a pr hit a pr in the jam push some sick code build a demo stay up all night learn a new programming language and this is the internet at its best it's it's fantastic that that that should be more viral this is like us we have like the the tv dom fun yeah there's a couple couple brothers in the community yeah um and uh yeah you know if you're really in need we'll drop you off a bottle of dom okay let's do one more bucket poll and then we'll close out with the this banger and get out of here

2:56:55deny too long dude that one's kind of boring let's see i want something that's like you know fun and easy it's not a straight raffle no we're going through it oh this is a good one i like this one uh signal great poster scarlett johansson was perfectly positioned to be the definitive voice of ai if she'd leaned in uh she could have been the de facto interface for the future of human computer interaction a living cultural artifact embedded in the tech itself truly an f-tier career move and the magnitude of the missed opportunity will only grow as ai becomes more central to daily life imagine the royalties too insane fumble that's a great concept i i remember when the whole thing went down altman posted her couldn't help himself and then it all came out that who posted it was it rude on his account who knows yeah yeah who knows ghostwriter that day um but uh but yeah i do i do think the signal seems right like what would be the downside to scarlett johansson of have of like having her voice i'm trying to think about i can see her just being post-economic and not caring and being like i don't want a lot of people using my i mean there there is plausible downside where it's like you get it to say something bad and it sounds like it's her yeah and or or or or it's just like oh people start using it to do movies anymore though yeah she's in the marvel universe so like they're constantly cranking out slot yeah i mean i'm sure there's always questions about like okay well now you can generate her voice perfectly like maybe the next time that there's an animated movie she doesn't get the deal like of course like that's not really going to pencil out because that licensing deal is going to be different than like you're not just gonna be able to use a cloned voice in a real hollywood production but there's always like the fear of that and like okay maybe the youtube videos and like the yeah you can already if you want to clone her voice you can do it you can do it well clearly open ai did it yeah um yeah but yeah i i agree with signal here that like it would have been amazing to actually get it done but it's not too late like she could still go in and say yeah hey instead this like lawsuit why don't we work together um but yeah i wonder if that's still oh it's totally possible totally possible oh no i know i meant like i wonder if they've resolved the lawsuit or settled it yeah i mean honestly like when i heard the the her voice i think it was a lot of people just pattern matching off the the the tweet because i didn't actually think like oh i'm talking to scarlett johansson like yeah it did not seem that close uh it seemed more like generic and like like most of these llm most of these ai things they they feel very like the average of everything yeah every answer feels like the average of everything and then the new york times gets upset and says like oh it's exactly like us it's like well it's kind of like the average of you and the wall street journal and the washington post and the economist like it's all blended together in this soup and that's like what the math is doing and so i don't know i i'd like to see her do it i think it'd be a good uh good win for her but let's finish with this banger of all time, 1 million views, 56k likes by Sukug Slore.

3:00:13I don't know how to pronounce that, but. Over 5 % like rate. At a million. At a million. But it makes sense because it's a great post. They say the amount of locking in about to be done in 2025 will feed generations. And I couldn't agree more. That's the craziest part of the algorithm today. Yeah. Is you can just seemingly small accounts can just post something that seems like it should be like a good post with a hundred likes maybe yeah and you can run it up to yeah i mean it's a real it's a real testament to like how popularized these like uh brain rock words are yeah lock in is like kind of a new term like i think that really popped off like last year it's like fairly new and like yeah it's not like it's in the dictionary yet and like it's not been used in movies or anything but it's been so popularized on the internet.

3:01:05It's just like, yeah, everyone gets it and everyone likes it. Yeah. But I agree. 2025 is going to be a fantastic year. Lock in, brothers. The locking in that you do today will benefit your great grandchildren. I agree. If you do it right. Yeah. So do it. Do it. Do it, brother. Thanks for watching.