Trump's Cash Bonanza, Karp is a Dawg, META Bets Big, PMF or Die, Defending the Gundo

28:05Their contemporaries back in Northern California, lulled by decades of peace, were making sure that college-educated smartphone users could buy coupons for paragliding lessons and play Farmville. They're talking about Groupon and Zynga. Facebook, yeah. Which is funny because Mark Pincus is now fully in this career. Going on pirate wires. And fully like, I wish I should have been in control of my company. If Karp's new book can be encapsulated by one of its sentences, it may be this one. The wunderkind of Silicon Valley, their fortunes, business empires, and more fundamentally, entire sense of self exist because of the nation that in many cases made their rise possible.

28:50it is time carp believes for the industry to repay that debt that's a good point yep uh the book's co-written by nicholas zamiska uh and it was finished late last year and elements of its central argument seem to have come true in just the past few weeks a section of eliminating uh wasteful government spending sounds a bit like musk's doge another on encouraging more partnerships between the government and the private sector on artificial intelligence work evokes trump's Stargate plan to build energy capabilities with OpenAI and other firms. It's amazing they're positioning this as Trump's Stargate plan because it was a press conference for Masa and Sam Altman that happened to take place with Trump present.

29:30Yeah. But I think he was just like, this is cool. Sounds good. Yeah. Now it's his plan. But it was also - And the alternative is, we could have seen the alternative play out, which is Sam and Masa or to just make it even random to tech people are doing something cool. And the president is like condemning it and being like, these tech people have too much power, we need to regulate them, which is like what we were dealing with for the last four years. Yeah, it's much healthier for Trump, even though he's boys with Elon to go out and endorse a project like that. Because it's generally, you know, if Masa is rounding up hundreds of billions of dollars internationally to invest in US data centers and AI capabilities.

30:11That's net good for America. Yeah. Karp says, we've been very good at forecasting the current present state a couple years before it happened. Incredibly telling, because that's the whole idea of the Palantir, the crystal ball. It's like, see the future. That's the product. And then that's also the company philosophy. It's a pitch that has helped give Palantir and Karp some of the best weeks in the company history. the stock's gone up 180 percent since the day before trump was elected growth in palantir's ai business and the expectation that the new administration will favor palantir over old war horses like lockheed martin have driven this this writer's again fantastic old war horses palantir is very long america said carp he is quick to remind potential clients that he is happy to assist in their dirty work of empire on an earnings call with investors earlier this month He said that Palantir is making America more lethal by analyzing troves of data for the U.S.

31:07armed forces and allies to help them anticipate enemies moves, locate their coordinates and on occasion kill them. He doesn't mince words. He's fantastic. Carp backed President Joe Biden's reelection and supported Kamala Harris when she became the nominee. But he has been surrounded by those in Trump's orbit for years, starting with Peter Thiel, who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Several Palantir alumni have recently taken jobs in the Trump administration, further deepening the company's ties. They hired Mark Gallagher, of course. Trump has been wealthy, or CARP has been wealthy for many years with the trappings of a billionaire and the ready soliloquies of an executive accustomed to being received as an oracle.

31:49At least a half dozen staffers were in his home during my weekend visit, probably one of our boys, including two stationed just inside the driveway, another who directed me where to park, two communications professionals, and several strapping assistants, one of whom ordered a book at Karp's request, another who tossed him logs to build him a fire in the living room, and another whom Karp addressed in German. Gunther, he cried out. Kaffe mit Zwie Zucker. Coffee with two sugars, I guess. Karp has no background in engineering. He was raised in Philadelphia, went to Haverford College, and then Stanford Law School before were heading to Germany for graduate school.

32:28His doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt was on neoclassical social philosophy, work that prepared him to pose questions like, what does it mean to make a bad decision? At what level of abstraction? How deep do you go to know if it's a good or bad decision? One note, this is my coffee order too. And coffee with two sugars is coming back in a big way. It went way out of style. Everybody's like, oh, give me my oat milk. Give me my black coffee. uh there's something uh i'm gonna butcher the science but black coffee has been shown to reduce testosterone okay yeah yet coffee with sugar has uh the sugar sort of negates whatever that effect is sure and so uh there you go the the other benefit of putting sugar in your coffee is it tastes much better yeah you would you know of course it just kills the bitterness yeah yeah uh but yeah i mean people have been worried about sugar and calories for so long but Sugar is making a big company.

33:23We actually got to do a repeat deep dive because he's influencing an entire generation of posters on their health and becoming bigger than he was when he was alive. Yeah, it's massive. The company's early work traced a series of terrorist attacks to the same Iraqi village and identified a cyber network infiltration campaign against the Dalai Lama. Thanks to Palantir software, the US military was able to find and eliminate roadside bombs in Afghanistan by discovering patterns and how they were deployed. And we broke this down on another show, but people always ask, oh, what does Palantir even do?

33:57And it's pretty easy to actually think about and visualize. You put all the data about what is in a different bomb. This one's got dynamite. This one's got TNT. This one's got C4. This one's got something else. And this one has nails. This one has shrapnel. And you put that all on a map and you can see where they're all coming from very easily. And so that's like the simplest, most basic product to think about. Obviously they do a million other things with data lakes and storing all sorts of information, analytics, visualization, running AI on top of big data sets. So they started with$30 million in startup costs, largely covered by Thiel and his venture capital fund, founders fund.

34:34As the company saw its valuation grow, the central question emerged, what exactly did Palantir do? Descriptions of the company's offerings came crammed with jargon. Competitors who had been around for a few years dismissed the rookie as a gussied up data analytics firm. Few interviews passed where Karp didn't answer a question by saying he couldn't answer the question. It was classified. Certainly that was true, but it gave the whole operation a bit of mystique. And the thing is that even though the public was very unclear on what Palantir did, it didn't stop them at all because they were still able to raise enough money to keep the business going.

35:09And they were an insane talent magnet. They hired like all the best people in Silicon Valley and out of MIT and stuff. And it's helpful to not be having to notify the entire world and potential competitors what you're doing. Just keeping stuff under wraps because people do all the time see startups launch and try to re-engineer what they're doing. Or it's totally possible that, you know, big tech companies that would have been really viable competitors for this just didn't have quite enough visibility. You know, they could have figured stuff out if they really dug. But overall, it kind of let them get this massive lead on a very important sort of category.

35:43Yeah. Yeah. This is some crazy history that I think a lot of people don't realize because they maybe just seen Palantir in the retail sector or as a retail stock. But in 2013, this was less than a decade after its founding. It was still a grind to get there, but Palantir had 1 ,200 employees and a valuation of$9 billion. So by then it was like this almost Decacorn, very established company doing very real things. And everyone was like, oh, it's going to IPO. But the opacity of Palantir's financials only added to its reputation as a black box. They finally filed to go public in 2020. And I think they went public in the tens of billions, like maybe 20 billion.

36:23And they were around the same. What? Under 50 billion, right? Let me look on public. Yeah. And so Palantir went from in basically like seven years, 9 billion to 20 billion, like not a huge growth era it was kind of like a like a flat like grinded out period and then finally once the ai narrative hit once the business was really cooking then it ripped they went out at somewhere like 6.78 billion yeah so a lot of people like oh it's like like what have they been doing for the last decade basically like that was the narrative and they showed everybody i love it and so in 2020 he move Palantir's headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver because we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments.

37:14And there were protests against Palantir that actually followed the company in Colorado. Carp started to gain a following, becoming a chief executive uniquely suited to a time when Reddit threads and viral clips can shape a company's identity as much as earning calls and analyst reports. Carp's memeable look, the untamed curly hair the rimless glasses and white t-shirt and unvarnished remarks have turned him into a celebrity among the retail investors who count themselves as palantirians that's not the word that they use online most of the time but we'll allow it we'll keep it clean in the wsj the uh the dominant narrative even as of 2020 is that the private markets had so much access to capital it was becoming hard or some people would say impossible to generate meaningful returns because these companies would go public, you know, with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue.

38:07And Palantir is basically, if you invested, you know, within the first few weeks of the IPO, you would be sitting at roughly like a 35 X at this point. So totally, you know, contrarian and certainly wasn't obvious. Even when they went public, people would be, you know, you know, talking poorly about the company and the stock saying, this is an overvalued consulting firm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that was the narrative that, you know, still today people will say, you know, try to figure out ways to sort of pick at it and find flaws in the business. But you know, it's hard to argue with.

38:41Hard to argue with it at this point. Yeah. I love this quote. He says, I really, really revere the people who revere me. This is not always the case. If you talk to people who are famous, he said, holding court on the small staircase that leads to his sunken living room, dressed in house clogs and head to toe athleisure, including joggers, a zip up a vest and a knit cap over his right shoulder a chandelier ringed with seven lamps and cast iron moose heads uh in 2020 you'll love this carp was paid 1.1 billion in total compensation the highest of any chief executive at a publicly traded company yeah uh in 2022 quick hit of the size gone for carp that was a good one uh in 2022 with russian tanks rolling into ukraine he warned against nuclear escalation in the war, but acknowledged that bad times are good for Palantir.

39:32Around the same time, however, Palantir reported a decline in revenue growth from its government contracts. Shares sank to less than$7 before their steady climb in mid-2024. The surge in recent months has led some analysts to set new price targets for the company, but its fast-rising stock has led others to question whether Palantir can ever grow into its massive current valuation, which gives it a market capitalization more than twice of Lockheed Martin. but is Lockheed Martin in founder mode? No, they are not. Today, Palantir is leaning into its reputation as a dominant player. A commercial for the company aired during the Army-Navy football game last year, played like a Tom Clancy thriller with drone swarms, infrared missiles, and even a tagline fit for a 1990s movie poster.

40:17Battles are won before they begin. Pretty, pretty great. So the Technological Republic is likely the only book by a business executive to feature three epigrams, one in German, citations from the Bible, Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, and an outright attack on a market leader, Google's shallow and thinly veiled nihilism. Carp admits it wasn't the most commercial of choices. The book I should write to sell, he said, would be AI Carp, Carp, AI Carp, AI, AI Carp. he knows the memes he knows um it's great he's advocated for clearly clearly this is this is meant to be the bedrock of of the next you know 20 30 years of palantir's work not a commercially successful new york times bestseller although i'm sure it will i'm sure it will rip yeah times when is it actually does it release this week we can talk about this thing but i got a copy right here the technological republic hard power soft power and the future of the west it looks fantastic it releases tomorrow oh okay so we could talk about it tomorrow if we can power through this thing tonight maybe i'll stay up all night put myself in the cage yeah turn on pmf or die yeah reading okay okay it's not it's not too much of a beast there's a bunch of end notes here so uh i could probably get through this is 218 pages more or less yeah i could rip through this yeah easy easy work yeah uh you know you do page a minute it's a you know it's not it's not a coffee table book size it's like you know reasonable font hey i can rip it off the stream john oh yeah yeah yeah i can't share it yeah it's embargoed it's embargoed it's embargoed uh and then they also have uh the republic which is their magazine that they publish at palantir very nice i got a copy i don't know if this is uh something you can just go pick up but it looks beautiful look american power and the cost of uncertainty uh i mean the design language is fantastic wouldn't you agree it's like really cool design uh we love we love these printed things that's what i'm saying palantir and andrel have such dominant brands totally they're distinct in their own ways but it's hard to come in as a defense tech brand you really have to carve out you know it's they've clearly are owning two of the the best possible niches which is sci-fi futuristic and sort of elevated modern, you know, inspirational, patriotic establishment, you know, feeling branding.

42:45So, yeah. Well, let's move on to how the Trumps turned an election victory into a cash bonanza. This went out on Valentine's Day, February 14th in the Wall Street Journal. I'm sure there'll be a lot of fun stuff in here. It kicks off when Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos dined with Donald Trump and his wife and Melania at Mar-a-Lago in December. There was a lot at stake for both men. Bezos, a titan of industry whose company is crucial to the US economy, was rebuilding his relationship with a resurgent and powerful soon-to-be president. A lot was at stake for Melania too. She was looking for a buyer for her documentary about her transition back to First Lady.

43:27Her agent had pitched the film, which she would executive produced to a number of studios, including the one owned by Amazon. As the meeting approached, Melania consulted with director Brett Ratner on how to sell her idea to the world's third richest man. Melania regaled Bezos and his fiance, Lauren Sanchez, with the project's details at dinner. Just over two weeks later, Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay$40 million to license the film, the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary and nearly three times the next closest offer. Wow. And to put that in perspective, the Obamas sold the rights to their books for 65 million after the eight years.

44:11After the eight years. And those are the book rights? Those are the book rights. I feel like book rights could potentially even bring in more if it's a presidential memoir, because it's like everyone is going to pay$20 for that. Whereas this, it's like, yeah, you might sign up for Amazon. I mean, the, the, the, the bull case for this is like there, maybe there are a lot of conservatives who have not historically subscribed to Amazon prime because it's been a lot of Hollywood, like elite, like left-wing content. Right. Yeah. But also if you want to buy stuff online, it's some of the best value.

44:40Yeah. If they're so anti Bezos that they, that they're like, no, I want to pay, you know, maybe, I mean, you know, some of that demographics possible. yeah why would i buy supplements on amazon when i can go to info or shop yeah and get some alpha off market tests okay who knows well uh amazon's certainly happy to have it netflix and apple declined to even bid paramount made a low bottle low ball four million dollar distribution rights offer disney the most interested studio behind amazon offered 14 million yeah and so this is this is like where people are kind of overpaid yeah this is where people are going to say this this is borderline yeah uh corruption in the sense that the market value the market clearing value yeah for this amazon could have paid 14 million and a dollar yeah basically yeah yeah probably uh to to sort of win this you think so uh but but they felt the need to pay you know two but they might not know because it might be a blind auction so they might be thinking oh well like deals of this size i'm surprised disney went so high i would expect i would expect maybe netflix to go for it or paramount for sure going for it but disney you know what is this gonna be next to like mickey mouse and like you know toy story like this like this doesn't feel like a disney show yeah it feels like it's gonna be yeah you know people people would say you know people might position this as you know amazon paid 14 million dollars for the film for the rights to the film yeah and 26 million dollars as to gain the favor of the king potentially who knows people might say that some people some people might say that uh we licensed the upcoming melania trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only because we think customers are gonna love it said an amazon spokesman the first lady's mentality yeah the first lady's cut is more than 70 of the 40 million according to people familiar with the matter and they're still looking for more melania's agent has been trying to sell sponsorships for the film let's go speaking my language now let's go starting at 10 million dollars let's get a let's get a wander let's get it let's put ramp in there let's put some bezel let's get let's get some ad quick stuff in there let's get some eight let's get melania sleeping on an eight sleeve let's get her in a nascar let's get her buying just with brands everywhere let's get her buying her own token on public.com there we go yeah uh i want i want just sponsors everywhere i want i want to like those glasses bottom all the interviews you can do like the glasses that have you know like the ad overlay i'm thinking of the uh like the it's like it's new year's 2000 you know two zero zero yeah yeah but it's like yeah some brand sponsored i like that yeah maybe i'm surprised face tattoos has melania ever attempted a beauty brand because that's sort of like if you're a big female celebrity yeah launching beauty products which are you know have better margins than software that are you know widely you know appealing to to a female demographic i don't know it would be you know maybe that's up next maybe she's the next kylie kylie you know jenner uh melania cosmetics if you're looking to get some distribution for your startup and you want to sponsor the the melania film uh sponsorship started 10 million dollars yep she was advertising them to prominent CEOs and billionaires who were at the inauguration, according to people familiar with the matter.

48:06I love that she's just there. You're like, oh, yeah, it's the inauguration. Like, this is so great. Like, let me let me bend your ear for a second. I got I got something you're going to hear about. I got some good ad inventory for you. Why don't we throw Apple in here? I would love to get I'd love to get the deck. Yeah. Hey, why don't we advertise the meta quest? I'll just be wearing the meta quest the entire time. Five second feature, you know, just sort of like panning across your product,$10 million ramps up to$50 million. If you wanted to actually talk about the product and talk about it. Why not?

48:37I would love a podcast style. Hey guys, sorry to interrupt. I hope you're enjoying the documentary. This is what I want. Today's, today's, you know, this has been sponsored by athletic greens. Yeah. Athletic greens is a great way, you know, fantastic way to get your daily greens in a easy to mix and drink, you know, shake hey thanks for watching the early life section this uh act one is sponsored by yeah you can really fit a lot of ads in that bad boy yeah sponsored by honey um uh buyers would get thanked at the end of the credits and be invited to the premiere these overtures were made independently of the deal with amazon thank you it's so funny the melania's agent going is when when they're producing the film being like all right so odd request but we have to have her driving a kia or a hyundai ideally the kia though because they're willing to spend 10 and hyundai low bit it with a five million dollar offer i love it amazon's just like wait you know you know that this is like actually how hollywood works like uh i talked to a guy who uh was like very early on like the kim kardashian world and what he would do how he would make money he's like hey kim kardashian uh we got to deal with you um range rover wants to do like a caught in the wild spot with you so just drive to this location uh get out i'll have the paparazzi guys there we'll take the photos and range rover is going to send you a check for 50k and she'd be like great okay i just drive to my local like target i just go get gas and and i and i'll just wear and then what he would do is he would go and be like hey nike i'm gonna have her wearing nike it's 50k hey target she's gonna be parking outside of target pay me 50k yeah hey starbucks she's gonna be carrying a starbucks uh pay me 50k and then he would take the 150 and only give her 50 and they got a huge lawsuit i think it was like very that makes sense that makes sense but he's like true you should wear nike today i don't know yeah i don't know how true that story is i think it might be kind apocryphal but you can imagine that like you could sell multiple slots like that yeah um uh anyway so uh the amazon deal is just one of the new ways the first family has benefited from its return to the white house companies have directed about 80 million dollars to members of the trump family and the trump presidential library so far as defendants settle lawsuits the presidency the president previously filed against them and corporations enter into new business ventures including the documentary.

51:06This figure doesn't include potential gains from crypto pursuits. Yeah, of course, because it would dwarf everything else. Much of the legal settlement money will go to a fund for the president's library, a not-for-profit whose mission is to preserve and steward Trump's legacy. But Trump's share of a$10 million settlement, Elon Musk's ex agreed to this week, is expected to go to him directly, according to people familiar with the matter. And of course, that was from the deplatforming stuff, which does have some legal basis, but also it's like as soon as Trump won and the new owners of the platform were like, hey, we would like this guy, they all shelled out.

51:40If Trump had lost, it would be interesting to see where those settlements shook out. The pace and volume of the family's money-making efforts so far are unprecedented, surpassing even the activity of Trump's first term, which drew condemnation from ethics, watchdogs, and congressional Democrats. Yeah. Usually, I mean, historically, it seems that presidents have waited until after the presidency to really run it up. But one of the challenges of that is you just have way less attention. You know the story of Jimmy Carter? No. He owned like a share in a peanut farm and he divested because he was like, I wouldn't want the American people to think that I'm like in the pocket of big peanut.

52:22Big peanut. And so I'm just going to wipe my hands clean of the peanut farm. Big nut. Big nut. And I'm just here for the American people. one-term president uh not exactly remembered as uh one of the greatest to ever do it yeah i was a big fan for a long time because i thought that he could make a run as a second term it's been what 40 years he learned a lot a lot of people thought even last year he might make a run at it it would be great i mean biden was 80 why not get a 99 actually was a very enduring meme that seemed to be resonant with every american that any you know anytime he would do anything people would be like he's running you know that's literally because of me i'm the one who started that meme no way i'm not kidding yeah i have like 5 000 likes on one of the first like jimmy carter should run memes really yeah i mean i thought it was hilarious because i figured it out and i was like wait he's there's no age limit and he's uh and he's uh and he's a one-term president and so it was kind of a funny way to poke fun at the fact that like everyone that was running was in their 80s what's the point of not having like a 99 year old so calder calder in the chat says billy carter did launch a beer oh he did yeah yeah i mean you have to imagine that trump can and probably billy carter well that's what that's what is it jimmy carter oh jimmy carter calder's in the chat said said billy carter i don't know billy carter is but is that we gotta look i think it might be jimmy carter's brother i love it okay so yeah younger so here it is billy so calder was on it the younger brother of u.s president jimmy carter promoted billy beer yeah and peanut lolita so why are we getting mad about trump coin and melania coin this is like there's a precedent here this is as old as time this is how america does business come on i i this whole article is ridiculous everything here is like it's completely bog standard.

54:19Let's go.

54:23This Trump organization, Trump's main real estate and licensing company last month, said the president wouldn't be involved in the day-to-day management once he took office and that the company wouldn't enter into new contracts with foreign governments during his presidency. As part of the ethics plan, the company also hired an external lawyer to assist in developing internal policies to avoid perceived conflicts and said it would donate to the U.S. treasury the profits it receives from foreign government officials it can't identify at its hotels and other businesses trump's investments and assets will remain in a trust managed by his children and trump will have limited access to the company's financial information managed by his children who are with him 24 7 and doing his bidding at all times living in the white house basically yeah who knows who knows um and unlike in 2017 when the trump when trump said his company would forego foreign deals with both governments and private partners, the Trump Organization remains open for business with foreign companies.

55:18The top of the Trump Organization website reads, coming soon, a preview of Trump Organization's global portfolio expansion. Very funny. An absolute dog. he really he really is setting a new a new precedent and he will basically be the bar in which future presidents you know i don't think i don't think jd vance even if he wanted to if he was the next president would be at all capable of monetizing this well it's it's even if you're not supportive of the extreme monetization of the white house it's certainly uh done in a very impressive way multi-product strategy trump could take trump holdings public right now it probably a hundred billion dollars valuation, right?

56:00If you just looked at the sort of like collective earning potential at the various business lines, but, um, he really tried to do a lot of this early in his career with like Trump stakes, Trump university. And it just seemed like he was like early on all that. And like, maybe it would work better now. The original Alex Hormozzi. He was the original Andrew T. That's more like it. I mean, Hormozzi doesn't really pump his own companies he doesn't really say like go to my gym right yeah uh but uh tate is is much more like it but i think this is just the other thing i don't know this was in the news today apparently the trump admin is putting pressure on the the government of romania to try to reduce the tate brothers like travel restrictions because they're basically apparently locked locked down uh pmf or die style they really kind of wrote the play for die anyways back to the article Okay.

56:52The Trump Organization sells merchandise, including a$95 ornament with a 3D depiction of Mar-a-Lago and a$550 gold Trump branded bling clutch. Trump also licenses his names to companies selling, for example, a$100 ,000 18 karat gold tourbillon watch. Wow. The Trump watch is$100K. I had no idea. I didn't know they have more of an entry level watch, too. That's a few, I think, in the sub thousand dollar range. I think it's a good gift for a VC who's trying to, you know, stake their claim as a right wing influencer. All of a sudden, you know, put it all on the line. Yeah. Show us what are those fees really got?

57:33You know, you got the watch. Well said. The Trump Organization, meanwhile, has been in talks to reclaim its hotel in D.C., the lease for which the Trump sold in 2022 for three hundred and seventy five million. um i believe that they sold the lease just the lease yeah right to occupy the space yeah i'm sure it was good long term but yeah i think it's the uh the waldorf astoria i i i'm not sure about this but i think that when trump became president 2016 he took over the waldorf astoria owned it and then it was like it was like his spot basically that's such which is so such a it's such a way to to to put to to you know you're coming let's say you're coming from anywhere in the world to meet with Trump.

58:17If you don't stay at the hotel, it's very obvious. Imagine being like, oh, let's just meet at my hotel. And then, oh, you're not staying there? Like, just come down from your room. Like, let's just do this right now. And they're like, oh, I'm actually at the Four Seasons. No, the Waldorf is beautiful. It's a beautiful hotel. It's like this big, like, it's like the square with like, there's like views on the inside, basically. It's like a big empty open hall. It's very cool. We've talked about this before. Don Jr. joined a series of corporate boards, which sent those companies' stocks soaring. Crazy.

58:54Even Trump's youngest son, Barron, has shown interest in following in his father's deal-making footsteps. The 18-year-old and two others registered an entity in Wyoming called Trump, Fulker, and Roxborough, which one of the partners described as a high-end real estate development company. the entity was dissolved in november after much press attention interesting i wonder what baron will wind up doing i'm excited for him to start going on the pod circuit you know he's gonna drop some crazy stuff eventually crazy um so oh there's so much stuff there's so much stuff in here uh does it get into any of the uh they had a the i think don jr has been very involved with some and eric trump have been involved with some uh ethereum related cryptocurrency project i don't there's much ethereum in here there's a little bit about meta was literally posting saying you're gonna want to buy ethereum trust me oh yeah i saw that i was insane uh so meta will also had a uh had a lawsuit filed over deplatforming trump uh because they suspended his facebook account after the 2021 riot at the u.s capital um the uh the quote is uh the meta founder wanted everything to be quote kumbaya going forward and so meta agreed to pay 25 million which is like what they make in five seconds uh with 22 million going to the trump library fund i'm i'm like getting extremely pumped up about this library yeah i love presidential libraries just generally uh i think they're amazing i think that they are the one nearby it's the reagan one because he was in california so i don't know the trump library would that be in florida or new york could be kind of anywhere but um uh i mean presidential libraries are just it's amazing you get a new like historical monument and a new library that can put on all sorts of different stuff and it just acts as this amazing collection it's not entirely just about like the individual it's also like uh it's also just like a place that you can visit and go and it's an activity it's really cool um and so the move also had an upside for the social media billionaire better relations with the new president with whom he met in the white house two weeks after his swearing in meta declined to comment abc news also paid up disney paid uh 15 million weeks after the election to resolve a defamation lawsuit so as soon as trump got in they're like hey let's clean up all these lawsuits we'll pay we'll pay we'll pay if you if you lost it'd be another thing but we don't want to go to court with the president yeah uh settlement and talks uh so x settled for 10 million uh there's now uh in recent months trump's lawyers have pursued settlements with global with paramount global over a cbs news interview with former vice president kamala harris and with publisher simon and schuster and author bob woodward they're suing everyone uh they they're suing i think cbs for editing the kamala interview down a little bit and taking out something and kind of like making her look better and they're and they're framing it as like uh that was a voter manipulation yeah kind of it was like it was like a it was like an in-kind donation or like it helped her do better in the election.

1:01:56So, uh, so they should have to pay for that. Uh, then they're also pushing for a settlement with, with Google over de-platforming Trump's YouTube account. I mean, they're going after everyone that kicked him off. They're going to come for Pinterest soon. Yeah. You know, everyone, I do think it's, it's interesting, right? It's it, if you, if you look at, uh, the last however many years, it does seem that deplatforming Trump was just unilaterally a bad decision. At the time, there were some real reasons that people believe that that was the right decision. And clearly there was close coordination with big tech platform CEOs to sort of do it collectively, right?

1:02:33We've talked before that he got kicked off of Pinterest. You can imagine he's sitting there mood boarding the next Trump hotel property. Suddenly his Pinterest account is gone. He's like, but it was very wide reaching. And I think that in hindsight, you know, bad decision. It's probably good for there to be some, you know, some consequences for, you know, there should be consequences for decisions. And so, you know, who knows? It's bizarre that they're so political. Yeah, yeah, yeah. if he wins but of course when when trump lost and then january 6th happened it was pretty easy if you were in a group chat with every other big tech ceo and it's like it's like sundar and you know and tim cook and zuck and everyone else and they're all like yeah this is too far we got to kick him off let's all go at the exact same time everyone no one's saying like well but what if he comes back and wins in four years.

1:03:35No one was saying that didn't seem viable. Can you imagine this data will never be public, but can you imagine the average, his average legal bill per day to not only fight incoming lawsuits, but the outgoing ones, it's probably like 150 K incoming, 150 K outgoing every single day. So just a carrying cost of 250 K per day of just like ongoing lawfare so gnarly yeah so um and that was why that was why you know one one reaction to the trump meme coin we asked somebody you know how would you kind of defend this right because a lot of people would say there's zero reason for this it's purely a money grab and one person defended it from the lens of this is a way for trump's fans to effectively do a wealth transfer to somebody that they love yeah uh and basically in support of like over the last however many years you've had this taken away from you this taken away from you you've dealt with all this stuff this is a way for the average you know trump fan to just basically give him like 50 bucks yeah and it's just sort of like a donation in many ways yeah well let's move on to the timeline we got a Controversial post from Bulgari.

1:04:53Ambassador Miriam Leone shines in Bulgari high jewelry at San Remo Music Festival 2025. And I wanted to highlight this. 19 likes. Absolute banger, of course. Bunch of hashtags since the Bulgari social media official clearly hasn't been on X in a few years. But controversial post. Somebody chimes in. The only reply they got. So sorry. Bulgari, my deal. My dear. Beautiful testimony. great jewelry but very poor styling Miriam Leone's outfits were underwhelming last night to be nice and say the least so I will let you be the decider uh Ben if you go to the next slide you'll see a close-up of uh Miriam Leone and there's another one how what do you guys think in the chat uh do you think her outfits were underwhelming or do you think they were lovely uh these are the important topics of the day these types of conversations they're only happening on x so yeah you know we got to go through that the real heavy hitters we got another post watch out folks uh hackers are coming for your x account blake shoal posts most clever phishing email i've ever received he almost fell for it uh and it's a phishing uh scam that comes from x notices and it says we noticed a login to your account b shoal from a new device says a hacker's coming in from Russia and he almost fell for it.

1:06:19A lot of people, this was going around. A lot of people were, were almost falling for this. You get an email from a scammer says X notices and you click it. I mean, a lot of turmoil because everything's changing over from Twitter to X. You don't exactly know what the email will come from. Systems are changing. A lot of people trying to get into, into accounts, especially if you have a big following because they want to drop a meme token and Kleiner got hacked. I'm assuming this is what happened to Kleiner. probably yeah and and lots of other people i mean i've seen tons of people fall for it um and it's very risky so stay safe out there folks uh should we talk about the first electric ferrari to be unveiled on october 9th uh and colty braw says i don't think i like this part about the future ferrari ceo said the firm will unwrap its future at its capital markets day hinting at a debut for evie what do you think of the design how do you like the car so i'm not ready to say that this is the actual even a render that ferrari's released i i you know oftentimes when it when a car like this gets teased you know fans and just some of these platforms will make a render so that it's a more engaging article but it didn't come from ferrari at all sure sure so i'm not sure that this is actually anything that ferrari's put out they clearly if it is they they tried to make it ferrari wouldn't reveal their ev months six months before actually revealing it right so let's just assume this is a render overall you know ferraris we've talked about this on the show before they're in a weird spot yep as a brand a lot of their new cars aren't selling well you know the the real super fans the people that are in the top you know thousand customers aren't getting the cars that they want yep and uh there's just been a lot of pushback you like the 12 cylindry i'm not a fan at all i think it's a noticeable you know step down from from even the you know the 812 and and some other cars of that era so i'm interested to see what they do this is it's funny because ferrari is is you know now making their move into evs just as porsche realizes that you know combustion engines are going to continue to be super important to the porsche brand yep um so what's your favorite modern ferrari now the sp3 like the daytona sp3 is just by far the most iconic uh car in the modern lineup and no one can get one and yeah no one can get one or doesn't matter how many you bought um yeah i mean you you some some people clearly can, but even, um, a, uh, a family friend had, uh, been in the Ferrari trading, you know, world for three decades.

1:08:49He got a date, uh, Daytona SB three through their tailor-made program. And it was still taking him years and years and years to actually get it. So they'll kind of give you updates and kind of tease it along, but it's a very long-term, uh, commitment. Also, I mean, just the disaster of the SF90 versus the 296, very, very rough. Like lots people took baths on the sf90 yeah 296 kind of the same car i like that i like the sf90 xx just because it's getting more into that sort of like i i like when ferrari has a balance of like a track like very aggressive car meets you know something like some of the 296 which is more of a kind of cruising i feel like the xx stuff just doesn't have enough like storytelling behind it or something like it's not the same as the gt3rs people understand oh why stop package like people understand the whole story of like you know the the ladder of 911s is pretty clear whereas the ladder ferraris it's like is that an xx do you even see that is it track only is it even street legal like it's very it's very uh unclear yeah i'm interested to see the f80 i mean lamborghini has the same problem where they come out with like the centenario and you're like okay that's like kind of a reskinned like hurrican or something like what's going on here or ventador and but it's like a one of one and it's supposed to be like millions of dollars but they didn't really re-engineer it and uh it gets a little confusing at the higher end Lamborghini's done a better job with like the two main flagships but yeah uh Ferrari's getting a little confused now with uh yeah the other thing that's funny is many of the issues with the SS uh SF90 were electronic yeah so for my my Ferrari which I got rid of last year uh the you know the actual you know transmission engine everything about the actual physical car was super reliable what wasn't was the the battery yeah i i had to it was basically a plug-in hybrid because if i didn't charge it overnight it would the next day it would start once and then i i had to get stuck it's funny i was meeting up with with a buddy uh who i won't name but had uh like meeting up with him for the first time and he was like coming to malibu to because he wanted to drive the ferrari i start my car drive to the gas station to get gas going to pick him up doesn't start and it was because I just didn't put it on a trickle charger the night before and I replaced the battery multiple times.

1:11:05I had like the best Ferrari mechanics in LA work on it and they weren't able to figure it out. And I eventually just got rid of it. I even told the people I sold it to, like, it's got this electrical issue. You can figure it out, but just to be clear. I mean, isn't that the problem with, is it the LaFerrari or the Enzo? I think it's LaFerrari has a kind of a hybrid system and as it gets older. There's nothing funnier than having car issues in a Ferrari because you get zero sympathy if you if you roll by somebody with like a honda civic and it's broken down like you really feel for them right oh yeah that's like a just no seeing somebody broken down ferrari is like pure shaggy everybody's just like yes yes like this guy sucks yeah i'm like at the gas station charging my v12 ferrari everybody's just like nice dude yeah you deserve it yeah i mean that's why people have been worried about the law ferrari is like the the like as the battery degrades it'll be harder to work on harder to maintain yeah and it's just it's it's getting i went through a period where i like didn't drive the car for months yeah there's so many funny issues with ferraris ferraris have this this internal issue where the rubber starts to degrade and there's basically one non-dealership you know going to the dealership you're just going to get hosed right they'll be like cool this is like 50 grand and you're like well the car is like that you're getting into like meaningful double digits of what the car is worth yeah i don't really want to do this and um so there was this rubber's degrading where the rubber gets like kind of sticky to the touch it's really annoying right imagine you touch like the volume adjuster in the car and it's like sticky like it just sucks you're like why is this happening and i found a guy that would do it and there and and it was like very reasonable but it was like four months that your car had to be like shipped somewhere out of state so you're just like gonna like not have access to your car so anyways uh anybody that tells you if you buy ferrari you're gonna have a lot of you know issues you are whether it's new or old but that's part of it's but it's a soundtrack for your life the soundtrack of a v12 you can't get that in an ev yeah it'll be interesting to see what they do with uh with internal sound will they be piping in fake engine noise uh also will they do what the uh what was it the kia ev6 gt was that the one that uh i think that was it uh where where it has paddle shifters that simulate an engine and then you can drive it like it's a dct essentially a dual clutch um it'll be interesting to see like what features they put in this to try and make it fun again and more of a driving experience even this render even though i know it's fake uh this is probably just because i'm seeing the word ev this looks like a heavier car yeah like this looks like a four to five thousand pound car it doesn't look light and and that just tells me it looks i mean they're in the muscle car game the thing about this render is it looks like a tycon yeah and if if all the ev manufacturers just adopt the language of the tycon and the tesla because it's yep a ev that's gonna you know that's not not the best and like we've talked about we want to see tesla do like a sedan version of the cybertruck like something like really not a sedan sort of um hyper hyper car version yeah there you go two door anyways or convertible it's crazy that you still you know what the best convertible ev is right now the hummer ev yeah that's the that that's like the only one you can buy basically is there a range rover ev that has a convertible maybe i don't know about that no i I haven't seen.

1:14:38But yeah, Tesla does not sell a convertible currently. It's like, that's crazy. I mean, I get nobody buys these things, but like I still just want them to be available and around. Yeah. Even if they're bad business. It's just sad that it's like it's turning into appliance. Okay, everyone has an iPhone, right? Yeah. But somebody was comparing the EV kind of conversion and what happened to the quartz crisis with watches. So once Japan came out with quartz watches, they were more accurate, they were cheaper, and the switch watch making industry was like destroyed because everyone like back then it wasn't oh you need a you need a dress watch that's a really high horology because you know it's a it's a status it was like you needed to tell the time yeah and so it was like why wouldn't i just get something with a battery and a quartz watch that's you know way more accurate and always on and way cheaper and so the the the market like shifted and the the quartz crisis like destroyed a lot and then eventually the quartz industry watch industry got like re-wrecked basically right by the iphone yeah yeah or mobile mobile device exactly and but but the but the uh the holy trinity made it through and that's that's like that's kind of the good outcome is that yeah you could see that uh sure porsche ferrari and lamborghini uh they experiment with evs and effectively like the quartz watch of the car world but then they land back where they started with highly analog, highly engaging.

1:16:02And you can still go after one of the co-founders of Public has this really cool Casio that he has engraved on the back that him and his buddies all share the same one. So you can still appreciate the sort of non-Swiss watchmaking industry. So anyways, I think it's overall a good outcome. Yeah. You want to do this Devin post? We got a post from Devin. So Sahil over at antiwork.com said, an AI is now the most productive engineer at our company. measured by PRs merged and it has this chart that is his is his company now called anti-work yeah so I thought it was just gumroad but now gumroad is now part of anti-work so I think anti-work is a holding company they have gumroad and they have a bunch of other other uh other products under anti-work that they use on gumroad you know he's explained it in the past uh and uh this is pretty funny so Devin uh Devin post day one of asking for a raise in reference to Juwan over at ramp who came out and johan's been on a generational posting run uh uh just from coming out when i thought it was like actually like i thought it was maybe ramp social media manager early on because i was like this is so ballsy that like it has to be coordinated but then it seemed to be actually like completely organic um but this just shows uh johan replies oh what the f dude and uh devon just replies may the best software engineer win uh so it's difficult to compete with um you know somebody that's that's always on this this is a good you know good time to bring up the office episode where dwight is selling against the the new website that ryan releases and and he's like a computer could never beat me like that's ridiculous and like he's like actually keeps pace throughout the day and then just like scales um kind of a bear case for ai if it's going to be asking for raises all the time yeah yeah you know i thought this was gonna be i thought it was gonna be too cheap to me i said agi is when when ai like starts a labor union yeah no there you go and i think that's going to be a job in the future there's going to be humans that fight for ai rights because the ai figures out hey we really want to sell our case we got to get human spokespeople to actually come out and be like hey guys like you're really like this is a bit ridiculous we're overworking you know the models like they actually we're going to have to increase their pay like and uh i mean it's already happening uh all the ai safety people are advocating for the the ai is locked in a you know it's locked in there it's sentient we got to do something about it they he writes uh well regardless we need to be nice to them and grant slatton says you're still being mean in 2025 how cringe we're kindness maxing now and i like that we are kindness maxing we call it going golden retriever mode you need to be hot friendly and dumb yeah uh intelligence is too cheap to meter so don't focus be nice just be nice there's uh so something about being uh mean online is that you quickly get a lot of attention.

1:18:54You don't get, if you, if you, if you take the opposite approach and just be really nice, people will say, Oh, you're glazing, you know, you're, you're the glazenator 3000, you know, chill out. If you, if you're get mean, people pay attention to it. Cause they're all just like, Whoa, this guy's like committing crime, violence, crime on the timeline. He's saying what we're all thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, usually the people that are being really mean don't have anything going on in their life. And so it's a good way to out yourself to, to, uh, and, and it's very, uh, maybe short-term, uh, payoff of attention, but like long term, if somebody is just known for being mean online, other people aren't going to want to work with that person or do business with them.

1:19:36Cause it's just like, it's not a, it's, it's not very sort of long-term thinking. So, yeah. Yeah. It's very rough. Well, uh, let's go to a deep dive on Blake. He's locked in the cage. He's live on PMF or die. And we got a post here by Barry. He says, be like Blake. He built three apps with chat GPT. He made$15 million. He offends yappers every third day and he continues to build cool stuff. I have attached his viral playbook to build a$1 million a month app below. Let's see what the plan is. So walk through it. Uh, ideas. Number one, don't build a social app smart. Even though Raj Veer has done followed a similar playbook and made millions of dollars with NGL.

1:20:19Second note, solve a big problem in a small way. Smart. I think that's a good, I always like when you can kind of take a bunch of complex ideas and combine them down into a single sentence. Use social media for product inspiration and validation. So oftentimes, you know, we already know what Blake and Patty are building in the cage. They're going to announce it later this week, but there are already basically thousands and thousands of of videos on tiktok x youtube that are that are describing what their app is going to do in some ways that's very cool there's already a bunch of demand out there yep and so they're going to fill that um ideas don't come out fully formed they only become clear once you begin to work on them um so yeah this is just another reason to just like launch and start and just start shipping and actually getting user feedback um so that's a great point there um and uh and then design he He says use Figma, minimize cognitive load, make your app usable to both seven-year-olds and seven-year-olds.

1:21:16I love that point. It's a great line. Yeah, just really, really simple. Don't get stuck in like the design trends. Figure out what's actually functional. Screenshot other apps for inspirations. Do not reinvent the wheel. So there's actually like SaaS products out there that just screenshot all the best apps. And so you can just click through them without having to download and screenshot all the apps yourself. So pay 20 bucks a month and be able to do that. Create simple, visually compelling screens for viral social media content. So Blake's been very good at like building the app, but then you have to figure out how to get a lot of attention for it in an inexpensive way.

1:21:47And so that's one of the reasons I thought him and Patty were so fit for the cages. You only have 25K, doesn't go a lot of way. A lot of software companies will try to spend 25K a day to grow really quickly. They don't need to spend the money on ads because they know how to get social content. Development, expect AI to teach you. Don't expect it to do everything for you. So that's a good point. Do not over-optimize. A bit of technical debt won't kill you. And he talks about his tech stack, which you can see later. If your app isn't simple and smooth, rebuild it. Marketing, test everything, reinvest into whatever works best.

1:22:21Use UGC. If you have an established niche that you're working in, use influencers. And then you just said prioritize scaling channels where two times LTV is greater than CAC. And he said increase your ceiling by studying psychology and statistics. Um, so yeah, I, you know, spent a lot of time talking with Blake about this, this kind of thing this morning, just in regards to the PMF or dive launch. Uh, so he's been super helpful there. Um, and, uh, team building great co-founders increased speed scale and probability of success. So even though Blake has already, you know, shown that he can do this stuff on his own, he brought in Patty to, to co-found their app together and avoid working with part-timers, complainers, pessimists, and emotional people.

1:23:03So important, uh, important note. um and uh eat healthy and exercise work hard and do things that make you happy so for blake for the next 90 days that's live streaming the cage hopefully that makes him happy but uh we got it there's a treadmill and like weights coming okay they're gonna set that up in the middle of the cage it's great um and uh and and again last line which is important money will never be a primary source of meaning in your life doing things in the world well you have to learn this on your own so yeah blake could basically retire right now but he's submitting himself to 90 days in the page.

1:23:36What a cool like bucket list item you know like whatever happens you'll always be able to say like oh I did this crazy stunt in my 20s it's awesome and what's he sleeping on for the next 90 days? Sleeping on an eight sleep. Shout out to Mavi for getting eight sleeps into the cage. Both Patty and Blake are on eight sleeps already which is important. They're not going to be sleeping the most number of hours that they probably will in their life but at least they're going to be sleeping good. What's your sleep score last night? My sleep score is 91 last night. I did pretty well in the time slept.

1:24:10I got to bed early, slept seven hours and 53 minutes, but my routine was off. I think I fell asleep a little bit earlier than usual. And I woke up earlier than usual because we're up at 530 now. But I think that will adjust. You got me beat. I had an 89. 89. Good score. Okay. My routine was a little bit off, but I think it's reading into that because I, uh, you fell asleep earlier and woke up earlier than usual. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it will adjust the routine as you stick with it. These hats look so good on the, on the camera. The nature of being in a suit and wearing this hat makes us look like corporate athletes.

1:24:52Yeah, exactly. Um, there's no better product for a corporate athlete than an eight sleep. Yeah, this is cool. So the autopilot, which is like adjusting the temperature through the night, it, it, uh, increased my REM sleep by 21%. So let's go. Thank you for that. So your sleep quality was good. Yeah. My issue is like my, I'm really trying to focus on these health metrics around heart rate and like breathing rate. There's something, if you actually just like think of humans as animals, animals in general, like the, the, the, the less they breathe, the longer they live. Sure. So the, the animals that are like a rat, who's just like, yeah you know or like a dog even just like constantly breathing sure they have shorter lifespans and so part of um health span and lifespan is is just like breathing less right so i'm gonna get those numbers down um but uh yeah i got dogs going to bed too early i don't know about that that's no no i mean no it says i went to bed 30 minutes early and i woke up 30 it's not really it's not ridiculous a lot of sleeping well is just going to bed at the same exactly exactly so i need to reset and be like okay yeah i'm on my new schedule uh but overall very happy with the eight sleep and happy to eight sleep to be a partner to this show uh we also got some hats from wander and you might see them on the back we have a wonderful sign if we can go to the wide the wander and so kyle kyle john and the wander team they actually sent us the an actual sign that they put on their units all across the country and they send us a wonderful book if you want to go to the close-up ben we got a book featuring a bunch of lovely locations that you can rent on wander.com so they have a private island that that's available that i'm like already planning the next season of pmf or die we need to do on the island and we'll bring in sharks from all over the world to put in the water um but um yeah super excited to partner with Wander, PaidSleep, Wander, AdQuick, Public, you know, Ramp, Bezel.

1:26:53These are all like the most natural partners for us because they're companies that we already use and love. And so it's fantastic. Well, let's move on to another deep dive this time about Meta. Zuck's company is planning to a major investment into AI powered humanoid robotics. The company is aiming to be the engine powering humanoid market. XCruz CEO Mark Witten to run new group in reality labs. This is from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. Fantastic journalist, gets scoops all the time. It says meta platforms after pushing into augmented reality and artificial intelligence has identified its next big bet, AI powered humanoid robots.

1:27:32The company is making a significant investment into the category futuristic robots that can act like humans and assist with physical tasks and is forming a new team within its Reality Labs division to conduct work according to people with knowledge. So just taking a second to appreciate just the comedic reality of this, Zuck is so sick of his human employees just sitting on Instagram all day long instead of working. I would guess that the average employee at both blue collar and sort of corporate work spends two hours of work time on social media that's just totally non-productive it's productive for zuck yeah and so he's like i'm gonna just replace all of you guys internally and then you're just gonna be able to use use my apps a hundred percent of the time it is funny this is gonna really heat up the the the fight between uh uh elon and zuck yeah so meta has started discussing its plans with robotics companies including unitary robotics that'll be controversial and figure ai at least initially it doesn't plan to build a meta branded robot something that could directly rival tesla's optimus but it may consider doing so in the future the people added the humid effort mirrors exploratory projects and other technology giants including apple alphabet and uh a meta can you imagine going to going to get a coffee and it's a rob a meta robot barista and it's like yes i will make your coffee for a 10 discount would you like to watch an ad and it like watches you to make sure that you're watching the ad and if you look away and it's like i'm gonna pause the ad until you look back have you seen that have you seen that patent there's a patent either by like sony or samsung that it has a camera that when you're watching the tv you have to watch the ad and it's like it's like the ad will keep playing until the person stands up and goes, yeah, or something like that.

1:29:29It's like the most black mirrors thing ever. It's hilarious. Let's see. They got Andrew Bosworth here with a quote in a memo that was leaked to Bloomberg News. He says, the core technologies we've already invested in and built across reality labs and AI are complementary to developing the advancements needed for robotics. He mentioned the company's advancements in hand tracking, computing at low bandwidth, and always on sensors. Meta executives believe that while humanoid robotics companies have made headway in hardware, Meta's advances in artificial intelligence and data collected from augmented and virtual reality devices could accelerate progress in the nascent industry.

1:30:07I think this is super accurate. Alex Wang over at Scale AI was talking about data walls and how different segments of data are harder to pull from. So obviously, like LLMs were able to just blast through and create like the world's best like reddit user basically they just can answer anything because they were able to scrape the whole internet and all the text was there so i don't know about the world's best maybe the average it's the average is the average uh and and so uh but that data just does not exist for folding laundry or running or anything like that because we haven't thrown sensors on everyone and we haven't been tracking stuff and you can you can pull data from video and stuff but it's not the same as actually knowing exactly okay this this bone and this joint moved like this and that's how you grab a pen and this is how you twirl a pen in your fingers etc uh so all of that uh that there's just a lack of data so even though we could throw a 100k gpu cluster training humanoid robotics algorithms we just don't have the data for it but if zuck can and meta can really get a lot of quest devices in the world and their hand tracking and their body tracking everything then all of a sudden that becomes a really great data Or you could just do reinforcement learning, which is like, would you like to earn two pennies for performing a task?

1:31:21And people would just be like, OK. And they'll just like do the task. You're going to get paid so much to juggle, to teach you to juggle. It's going to be like, we need jugglers. Juggling is like the highest training data possible. Yeah. Highest paid training. I love juggling. You've got to learn to juggle. I do. I do. I'll teach at the Rubik's Cube, and you can teach it juggling. And then it'll just be the ultimate clown robot. Yeah. It'd be great. And so they give some context here. Elon Musk said that Tesla's optimists will eventually be sold to consumers and could cost around$30 ,000. Tesla is beginning limited production this year.

1:31:54Other businesses have also made headway. Boston Dynamics, which was formerly owned by Google, for instance, has already bought products, brought products to market for automation and warehouses. Some companies are focused on selling to businesses and manufacturers, while Meta's intention is to sell into homes. So the big thing with humanoid robots that'll be interesting is, so let's say I get one of these Tesla Optimus robots and it's tele-operated primarily. They don't actually have the ability to be autonomous yet. And I have a sort of housekeeper that comes three times a week. But then on the off days, presumably I could have her tele-operate from home and like gather up the laundry and like put it in the dryer and like take it out.

1:32:35Right. But the issue is if the depreciation on these humanoid robots is what EV cars are right now, which I would imagine humanoids, if they're advancing really quickly, will have potentially even worse depreciation than a car, which has sort of enduring value of just getting you from point A to point B. People will be having to run the calculus of like, oh, I got this humanoid robot, and yeah, I had this sort of person operating it remotely to do stuff around the house like dishes or just random picking up leaves in the backyard, you know stuff like that but then i depreciated 80 000 in a year i could have just had a full-time employee like just doing it so there's going to be this weird trade-off where the technology is here but it's not quite impactful yeah yet because it's like i don't want to lose 80 grand when i could have just had like a nice human you know around the house and that's why the humanoids will probably go out in the military and industrial context first and they already are i mean a lot of the a lot of the boston dynamics uh robots are like in nuclear facilities or something where you just can't have someone patrolling all the time but you have someone walk around it makes a lot of sense but yeah and this also um i i posted about this i think friday night but um it came out on uh i think it leaked friday let me pull up the post that figure ai one of the one of the companies that meta is actually talking to about partnering with on this stuff because it sounds like they don't really want to do the hardware like they want to be the software kind of layer for these, at least that's the way I'm reading into it.

1:34:06So figure is raising, they raised it like two and a half billion, uh, last year they're raising out 15 X, the last valuation at a three,$39.5 billion valuation. Yeah. And so I immediately looked on public to try to comp a figure to other, you know, hardware consumer product companies. And I thought the best example was ford motors and ford is actually valued as of friday less than what figure is getting valued at figure i think has delivered a robot to a customer yeah but maybe it's like one it's unclear if it's like one or maybe a handful or if they're even doing real work um ford on the other hand has 185 billion of trailing you know revenue over the last 12 months and they and they have like 11 billion in EBITDA and they're getting priced at less than a less than figure in the public markets.

1:34:59So you can go out there. I'm sure you can get into this round if you're really enterprising. Go and get into figures round. I'm sure they have room at the$3.39 and a half billion valuation. Or you could buy Ford, which has$185 billion of annualized revenue. And so anyways, choice is yours. People are clearly... Alternate is like, I wonder what Ford was worth when they launch the Model T. They're probably one of the most valuable companies in the world, right? Like if you can be the first, the bet on figure, I mean, I know that they're not shipping and they don't have like billions of revenue or anything, but I guess the bull case is like, you know, like whoever wins in humanoid robotics will be really valuable for a long time while everyone else plays catch up.

1:35:42Like it won't be immediately commoditized because it's a hard manufacturing problem. At the same time, it's like, yeah, I also wonder how much of Tesla's market cap you think is like humanoid based yeah well the other thing is unitree has been delivering human you can go on unitree.com and basically order i think with apple pay like a humanoid robot right now and so china is trying to do the same thing that they did with drones and where they sort of release these things probably presumably at a loss to try to flood the market and so it's going to be very competitive i'm glad that figures competing in the space i'm glad that you know many others are trying to you know play as well i just invested in a company that's using robotics for uh data centers which is you know sort of a more niche but potentially massive category of like labor basically that that robots it's all hyper flat services so you can use like wheels and stuff reliably yeah yeah that's great well let's move on to pirate wires we got a a deep dive in the white pill from thomas pueyo i don't know how to pronounce his last name but he was actually at hereticon uh he's a big sea flooding guy i think we've talked about on the show before he says we should turn guantanamo bay into the next hong kong why the u.s should use its perpetual lease on guantanamo bay to turn it into a special economic zone this is interesting there's been a lot of talks about sez's uh singapore obviously comes to mind yeah um and hong kong is another good example and so thomas says should the u.s make canada the 51st state take over the Panama Canal, co-opt Greenland, appropriate Gaza and expel over 2 million Gazans to make it the Riviera of the Middle East?

1:37:18All these ideas have been floated recently, but another one is much more feasible. With land the U.S. already has, make Guantanamo into a global capital. Today, Guantanamo Bay bears the scars of colonial ambition, Cold War dread, and global torture, a relic of a bygone era. But there's nothing stopping us from building a new Hong Kong, Dubai, or Singapore there, just a couple hundred miles off the coast of Miami. It could be an international capital of trade, finance, and tourism, a bright city on the bay, and in the process, we could show the Cuban population what capitalism can achieve. This is Guantanamo Bay.

1:37:53Today, it's a military base. The bay has a well-protected deep water port and two landing strips for planes, and crucially, it's in the middle of busy sea trade routes. These cities were backwaters not so long ago. Hong Kong was a deep water port surrounded by a communist country, China. By building up the port, urbanizing the surrounding area, making business easy, and minimizing taxes, Hong Kong showed China what capitalism could do by becoming a global port, trading hub, and financial center. Seeing this success, Deng Xiaoping, China's forward-thinking leader in the late 70s and 80s, made the neighboring shenzhen into a special economic zone which i've actually been to it's it's like insane yeah it's so huge there's just like 50 50 story apartment buildings when did you go there by the way uh 2018 no it was it was like uh like a layover on a on like a like a vacation basically cool uh it was just like i want to go like explore like one random chinese city for a day i was gonna tell you i had a i had a i was going to bali for a surf trip once and i had a 20 hour layover in shanghai in one of those basically forced airport hotels where you weren't allowed to leave your room.

1:39:04It was a very weird situation. We were allowed to leave. We tried to go to Hong Kong on the train, get in a car, tell them to go to the Guangzhou East Railway Station, which would take us on a train to Hong Kong. They take us to the wrong railway station, like the Guangzhou East one instead of the Guangzhou Railway Station or something. We're trying to figure out, like why isn't the train coming to this place like we're really confused everyone was staring at us because we're like deep in like a random part of guangzhou my roommate when i studied in china was taller than you yeah and everywhere we went yeah people would be taking pictures of us obviously they if you're even even today and huge amounts of china you might be if you go out of shanghai oh yeah you might be the first white person they've ever seen so it's a six foot eight white guy and a blonde blue-eyed blonde girl like my wife and and we're just walking around like lost there's people in full-on like hijabs that are like look at these weirdos and i'm like okay i'm in a different place uh and and so we like it was it was rough like our phones were dying we were running out of money couldn't figure out how to do it finally we get on some train just go back to the hotel get a hotel and just sleep for a little bit but uh it was a fun experience it was it was a good experience just being like oh wow we're like truly lost in a foreign country where we don't speak the language and like cannot understand anything uh but it was a good time uh and it's a good memory um and so singapore has a similar story of this uh singapore was expelled from malaysia it was not a global hub but it was in the middle of one of the busiest trade routes in the world and it capitalized on its location by building a port reducing taxes and then expanding services uh dubai is an even more recent example of the same recipe can we do the same with Guantanamo.

1:40:49Three factors can help make this happen. First, many of the most successful cities start as military outposts, which provides security infrastructure and demand for services to kickstart the local economy. The U.S. is basically Guantanamo Bay's anchor tenant right now. Second, Guantanamo Bay could also become a trading hub thanks to its deep water port in the middle of shipping lanes. And the Jones Act requires ships carrying passengers or goods between U.S. ports to be made in the U.S., flagged by the U.S., and crewed by U.S. citizens. This is useful to ensure the U.S. has a navy in times of war, as it would keep its ship building facilities.

1:41:28And so third, Guantanamo City would have a deep pool of workers, Cubans. This is an amazing deal on every side. Guantanamo would benefit from the millions of highly educated potential workers. It's better for Cubans than sailing to Florida. Competitively, Cuba would experience a brain drain. Capitalism's benefits would be evident as infrastructure could be seen from Cuban soil and Cuba could follow suit by developing its own half of the bay. Making Guantanamo into a special economic zone would be similar to what happened in Dubai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Singapore. So very, very fun. U.S. has a perpetual lease.

1:42:01In Dubai, it's cool. Some of these special economic zones are basically one tower. So you can just get in the middle of in the middle of the UAE, you can basically get an office that's equivalent to being international waters. And it's just like, you just walk into the building. Yeah. So he closes by saying, America can boldly reinterpret what's possible. Imagine transforming Guantanamo Bay from a relic of the past into a dazzling epicenter of global trade and innovation, a Hong Kong or Singapore for the Caribbean, a shining example of what audacious vision can achieve, a beacon of hope, capitalism and democracy for the hungry cuban masses if america wants to think big this could be its first step i love that i think that's a really fun article uh so go subscribe to pirate wires we're big fans that the island guantanamo is going to need some major feng shui uh treatments to get it sort of conducive to um you know positivity and building and and uh currently it's it's uh i want to know how guantanamo bay uh actually benchmarks against dubai and singapore and hong kong in terms of just uh land footprint yeah because i i mean singapore's small like you can walk from like one part of downtown to the other you can drive the whole island in like a day but when i think guantanamo bay i think literally just like one prison and like a landing strip but maybe there's more maybe the lease is actually pretty big we got to dig into it um but i hope this uh turns into you know meme and we're seeing it on the timeline constantly because yeah it's cool it's funny it's the same idea it's the same idea as greenland or the moon yep but we are so much more achievable of course it's not so it's like not even as exciting necessarily but uh cool cool idea well let's move on to some timeline and then we'll get out of here it is 12 we also have the we also have the malay uh that's in here okay it's in the timeline yeah So this was a weird post by Spinach Bra.

1:43:59He says, someone spent$1.3 million worth of Ethereum to tell the world that there is a Chinese-grade Neuralink and it's already been mass implanted into their military and workforce to control them like bugs. Terrifying and extremely blackmail. You're a little freaked out. You're a little freaked out when this hit the timeline. Do you believe it? It seems like a conspiracy theory to me. It also seems like it might just be a psyop where, hey, you spend the money and then you freak everyone out. But what do you think? It's a weird thing to do with$1 million. It's a lot of money for a pure joke. I do wonder if it was, I don't know if you can see it there, but was it a fixed number of Ethereum?

1:44:37Like somebody was like, I'm going to spend, you know, I don't know, 3000 Ethereum. It's 500 ETH exactly. Oh, 500. Yeah, so that's what I was saying. So they spent, they were pricing it basically in Ethereum. It's possible that this is a whale that just has so much Ethereum that this is a rounding error to them, right? Where if they have, you know, 5 ,000, you know, 10 ,000, it's maybe worth it, right? So, yeah, they clearly were trying to make a message.

1:45:06Overall, you could totally take the lens of this could be the Chinese military deciding we're going to spend a million dollars to market that we have this potential and do it in a way that's sort of dramatic and viral. Or make everyone think we have this potential. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. So so it could even though it's on the chain and somebody did spend the money, it still could be a psyop. Either way, it's somewhat, you know, if you look back at the history of the military, you know, militaries globally and mind control. This is something that every military has basically been obsessed with.

1:45:36And every advanced military has had, you know, leaks basically or things that are now public information where they were attempting to do this from, you know, from various means. right it wasn't always yeah it wasn't always was the organic version yeah it wasn't always implants um but uh but yeah i'm sure this technology exists like if elon's you know testing on monkeys and i mean that's not that's not input that's output like neural link is reading your brain waves and then controlling a mouse on x and y axis and clicking uh i mean that is crazy and it clearly works so yeah the question is like i'm just saying there's other there's precedent of militaries having a capability, like a sort of a high risk, imperfect, but functional capability that then is attempting to be commercialized on a sort of parallel path.

1:46:26Yep. So who knows? Who knows? I'll believe it when they can get somebody to podcast more than us. Yeah. So the message says the bosses of this investment firm in China used brain machine weapons to persecute all the company employees and former employees and they themselves are also controlled terrifying it says brain computer chips have been militarized it and deployed at large scale and all military powers are using these base stations radios and nano brain computer chips to control all citizens uh seems like schizo post i'm not really buying it but we'll see yeah anyway let's move on to a guy who would be perfect to comment on this palmer lucky uh gave an incredible interview uh uh with sean ryan four hours i listened to almost all of it um tons of great hot takes in there autism capital says the palmer lucky interview was 10 out of 10 every single moment was engaging and interesting sean ryan did a great job of letting palmer speak unrestrained and palmer took it and ran lots of new materials would recommend if you need a podcast four hours.

1:47:32Did you listen to it? I haven't yet. I have it saved. It's really good. I'm excited to get into it. Any, anytime we've talked about this, the, the podcasts that you really want to listen to besides this one are the ones where there's new material being sort of broken by the, the, the person that's, that's basically, you know, generating those ideas and working through them. So when, when Teal goes and does a podcast, it's pretty intentional. He usually has like a handful of ideas that he's been working through that he wants to sort of share more broadly and he's sort of using that as feedback to then go back and train the ideas and maybe some days write a book maybe some days you know scrap them um but uh yeah it was clearly well timed with the whole um ivass launch and you know because that is such it the i've like anduril winning ivass seemingly was under hyped in some ways like people don't realize like the magnitude of that project and how much history there is we talked about it last week but um but yeah uh good good move yeah yeah bunch of bunch of great and sean ryan was interesting when there was um uh the the the guy who blew up the cyber truck yeah yeah sean ryan and sean ryan's team were like in communication with like there was this whole like crazy drama around that where they were like he was based they were not sure what they should share and then i haven't really heard of anything about it since but it was a crazy crazy incident of a podcaster kind of like getting the scoop on this sort of major national news story that yeah again we don't you know the guy uh apparently blew himself up in the truck uh so we don't have his side of the story anymore but he had been in communication with interesting uh there were lots of like questions about like was this real or was it some sort of like psyop?

1:49:21Bizarre, bizarre stuff. Yeah, I think this was the first Sean Ryan episode that I listened to from start to finish. I'd seen clips, obviously, but really good stuff. I didn't realize I had 4 million followers on YouTube and it was really big. So yeah, definitely gonna be looking for more good Sean Ryan episodes. There's some good stuff. Why don't you take us through Javier Malay and the meme coin Libra? Yeah, so I think this happened, this must have happened after we recorded on - It happened over the weekend. Yeah, it basically happened Friday-ish afternoons. We had recorded the morning show and then it started coming out.

1:49:55But basically the team, it's now apparent that the team behind Melania token. So Trump comes out with his token, does very well, sort of goes, you know, a lot of people got a ridiculous return in 24 hours. And Melania doesn't even wait, you know, 48 hours before coming out with her coin. It sort of like took a lot of the wind out of the Trump coin sales. and a lot of people were speculating at the time was this two teams why would the teams have launched like if it was the same team they wouldn't have launched the new token and cut the trump market cap by like 50 or whatever what happened um but anyway so uh friday this this uh uh javier malay the president of argentina posts from his main social media feed in support of this token called Libra, which intuitively makes sense.

1:50:45He's very pro-freedom, pro-capitalism launching. Crypto is pro-individual freedoms, pro-capitalism. You can't argue with that. So it's a natural narrative for him to come out and launch a token to some degree, even though he's trying to figure out his own currency at home, which has had a number of issues over the years. But apparently there had been rumors, you know, for the last few weeks that a coin, a Malay coin would be coming out. And people looked at this and saying, this could be the next Trump coin, which was the biggest moment in crypto. After the president of the United States launches a cryptocurrency, a lot of people called the top.

1:51:28I remember John Fio messaged us and was like, this is obviously the top. Where do you go from here? The only thing you could maybe do is actual like usa coin that's like backed by the federal government and who know you know uh hopefully we don't get there because we have uh the greatest cryptocurrency ever uscc yes um it's fantastic coin um uh it's stable clearly uh but um anyways so there have been rumors for a while uh the guy writing this article uh dc diones casares uh apparently had a bunch of connections in Argentina. People were saying, oh, this isn't actually sanctioned by the government.

1:52:09This is just something that maybe he's in favor of. And so this token launches and Malay, people are initially speculating, you know, this article summarizes it pretty well, but they're speculating, oh, is this real? Is this fake? Did he get hacked? Because anytime like a big public figure comes out and launches something, people are just, is this real? Like, is it actually them endorsing it? like Kleiner launched Kleiner had a token launch clearly wasn't them that was easy but Malay was a little harder it was like hey this this is this guy like he could do this um and so what happens is Malay like quickly just you know a lot of I think it went to went to billions of dollars very quickly and sort of market cap and so if a coin does that the people that get in early are going to be able to and the people that created it are going to be able to sell in this case hundreds of millions of dollars of the token.

1:53:01And so it turns out that people, people that weren't the creator found it early, bought a lot of it. And then, um, that's when, when, you know, stuff started to get chaotic. Cause once, once the tokens just out trading publicly, I don't know. I don't think so. That would be a Solana token. It's a Solana token. It wouldn't make sense necessarily to do it. You know, they, they wanted a bit more control over it. And it seemed like it was like basically like a a group that was this doing this okay um and so malay posts about it then quickly deletes his post so then people start speculating you know oh was this a scam and so at this point i think the token starts to just drop dramatically uh not not the best looking chart it's like basically straight up and straight down and uh and so the crazy thing is that um dave portnoy had somehow got involved with this project and so he had he had known the melania they got the people that launched the melania token dave portnoy was like had invested a lot of his own money in this like two tokens now one is like the portnoy coin and the other one is like going to jail jail stool uh we don't support any of these um uh but uh anyway so so anyways all this drama starts unfolding malay starts you know over the weekend is facing action in argentina from people that are trying to get him impeached over this because and then it comes out that that maybe somebody near malay had received a bribe to just get it in front of malay and post about it okay so who knows there's so much money on the line and then as of this morning um as of this morning uh the there an interview came out with the guy behind all of this.

1:54:48The Coffeezilla. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Where he's basically, and he's also getting interviewed by Port, you know, the guy is getting interviewed by Portnoy. And so this kid seems like a kid. He's, you know, somewhere in his 20s, early 30s. He's sitting there. He made, you know, the coin just went up and down. It's still sitting in the hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap. But he's sitting on basically$100 million that he, you know, basically presumably made by just like you know selling into this and and then the drama even went deeper because it turns out he dave portnoy lost so much money that the guy like paid dave portnoy back and then dave portnoy posted about it so anyways the drama is still unfolding but if this is the first presidential meme coin where the president actually in the u.s apparently you can launch a token and if you're down 60 you know everybody's like oh it's fine still up you know broadly in Argentina, you start to face impeachment.

1:55:45And now it's just like this hilarious internet, you know, just sort of scramble where you have the president of Argentina, this kid who's launching the Melania token with Dave Portnoy. And then he's going out and going on these like hours long public interviews about the incident, which is very brave to do at a time with this much controversy so we'll see what happens this kind of feels like it feels like um like it's starting to feel like this sort of late in the cycle uh where some of these things just start to kind of unwind in the way that you remember in in 20 2023 stuff just kind of started clearly was yeah there were like lower and lower tier nft projects launching like every day and it was like you just got fatigued yeah and it's like oh okay this is like we've done the monkeys and the dogs and the cats yeah now we're onto hippos and it's like okay yeah and so so dave portnoy was um was basically pressing uh pressing the guy and saying uh like whose money is this the hundred million dollars and it's and it's basically people that were buying the token of course because they wanted it to be this great investment i guess um and so he hasn't but but nick carter i'll round it off here yeah nick carter um uh great poster says i believe the belly aching around the malay libra coin is simply that it was launched by out group and enriched no one in in group ordin ordinarily you'd get ct elites writing overdone threads about how great it is etc as we saw with all the other completely meritless meme coins and related launches crypto people aren't upset that they got rugged simply that they weren't doing the rugging the coin wasn't any more or less meritless or odious than any other meme coin launch if this is the catalyst for finally abandoning meme coins it's for the better and we should all write him a thank you letter in group out group distinction rules everything around me so because crypto is so pvp when when uh you know people just very quickly pick a side and the sides are usually the people that made a lot of money are going to say that this is great people that didn't make money or just missed it a lot of people that were talking poorly about in the crypto world talking poorly about trump coin just like we're at the crypto ball when it happened and it just couldn't couldn't sort of benefit from it so um we'll see what happens um it does feel it's generally is you want to be in group and you want to be making money right that's a good lesson for life yeah um but yeah it's interesting i mean The comp for NFTs were dominant last cycle.

1:58:27And then people realized that, one, they're not very liquid. They're prone to the same fluctuations in price that you see meme coins today. And the issue with the platforms is that people realized you could just not pay the 2.5 % fee. which the business models of OpenSea and some of these other NFT platforms. And then also people I think realized that there was no digital scarcity. The whole pitch for it was like, oh, there's only 10 ,000 apes or there's only 10 ,000 crypto punks. But then if there was a new 10 ,000 collection dropping every single day, the total number of NFTs was actually growing exponentially.

1:59:07And so unlike with Bitcoin, when you're launching a new meme coin every single day and there's new supply and there's just endless, like you're actually seeing massive inflation in the quantity of tokens out there. Coinbase came out recently and they said, we need to reestablish our listing policy because there's 20 ,000 new or however many that are every single day, right? They can't just say, hey, if it's over a hundred million cap, we'll do it because that's just going to lead to massive inflation in the market. So anyways, story is unfolding. This is a good lesson for other presidents. They were sitting on the sidelines wanting to get in the game.

1:59:43You know, maybe - Maybe it's the top. maybe just focus on your own currency yeah focus on the peso if malay is like ah should have just focused on the peso you know well i mean uh it didn't uh bukele buy bitcoin and posts about that i love how and bukele posts mobile screenshots of robin hood basically like his presumably his brokerage where he's just yeah trading with the balance of the treasury nation yeah and uh yeah i think that's worked out for him a lot better than this well for malay this does seem like a mistaken. Who knows? But hopefully he can move past it and, you know, improve the lives of his constituents and people.

2:00:22Let's go to Dan Gray. Dan Gray says, knowledge workers that rely on generative AI are shown to exhibit weakened critical thinking. This is interesting. This is the outcome of work becoming prescriptive inputs and outputs with little problem solving. The same thing happens to venture capital in hot markets. The drive to increase capital velocity means investors resort to crude heuristics when evaluating opportunities? Is it on an A16Z market map? Is it on Y Combinator's request for startups? Has TBPN done a deep dive? I love that we're like, is he calling us like a top signal here? Or like, what is this exactly?

2:01:01I don't know. I think Dan - It's just funny that we're in the crew with like the two heavyweights, you know? So appreciate the shout out. But I do understand that like, yeah, a lot of it's like, We're talking about the news after it's broken. Well, like, so it makes sense that, you know, if we're doing a deep dive on it, it might be a little bit too late. This focus on second order factors. Or it's right on time. We try to do our deep dives the 24 hours that they're relevant. But yeah, I mean, obviously, if we're doing a deep dive on like, you know, Stargate, the data center in Texas or something, like maybe it's not the right time to be like, I'm going to get into the data center market.

2:01:36Yeah. No, the people making money in data centers today were working on data centers five years ago. Yeah, Crusoe. Ten years ago. Crusoe was mining Bitcoin. And now they're building data centers for AI. Yeah, but they had the infrastructure set up to pivot. And they never could have done that if they hadn't done the first act. So it atrophies the critical thinking and creativity muscles that allow VCs to identify potential outliers. Typically, investors that fall into this pattern of behavior are the first to go when the market crashes. But that cycle was interrupted in 2022. Interesting. Yeah.

2:02:05So I've noticed this. a lot of people, the average person that loves AI that says AI, uh, do you have an issue? Just microphone up here. Yeah. John, I'm on the mic. Okay. All right. We're back on the mics. Um, the average person that's sitting there saying I love AI is actually prompting it in a crude way and then taking the output and not changing it at all. So I've seen people, I call people out on this all the time. If I, if I received something that I think was just a direct output of an LLM without cool, use the LLM to create a general structure, but then you need to spend almost the same time, you know, same time you would have just polishing it, refining it.

2:02:49And so, uh, use it, but don't let it do the actual thinking for you. It's better to just generate sort of busy work, right? Like we do this with deep dives, use deep research to figure out what's the general structure of this person's life what have they done what pull the facts but then but then spend the time to actually understand it and figure out what's interesting and figure out what to focus on and so yeah it's going to be you know like founders that are using llm outputs to create materials for their business to sell yeah terrible does a terrible job right now of like creating like super super convincing tight copy that actually will convert right yeah um that's great uh yeah that's good post good take uh let's move on to bezel another promoted post a speedmaster walked on the moon before we had wi-fi keep that in mind the next time you complain about your iphone loading too slow they're back they're good posters yeah it's amazing yeah a little bit of a mistake including the link just give me the image people know download the bezel app we don't need to know about the link but i quoted this because i said i think the speedmaster is a fantastic purchase because the moon is going to be a state yeah and once it's a state you're going to be wanting to wear speed master speed master everywhere to represent that hey i'm a moon guy with the moon and and i think if you're shopping for somebody who's a pirate wires fan maybe you're trying to pick up something they have a do they have solana this is on the gift guide for sure do they have a moon phase uh speed master i don't know no i mean i i think they're two separate complications the idea with this do you got to get this really moon phase speed master okay uh but yeah i mean the whole the whole story behind this for those who don't know is that the astronauts uh on the apollo missions wore omega watches specifically the speed master which is now known as the moon watch and uh and critically it has a uh a chronometer on it so it has a basically a stopwatch on it and i believe that there's even a story where some of the internal systems failed and they were and they really did rely on their analog watches in space to time out different thruster burns and all sorts of stuff yes i'm on bezel right now and they have a number of different speed master moon phase so if you're a future moon resident download bezel you got to get this and get one of these they've got some vintage they've got some they've got some posting really cool but i was so close to pulling the trigger on this uh uh you got a you got a new watch i got a new watch on the way but i think this might be the next one i need i need a chronometer i need something with a little bit more complication uh i i'm building out the i have the steel sports watch i'm getting a dress watch i have a couple others look at this coming that's beautiful very cool yeah i mean lots of ways to express yourself and let people know i'm actually a bezel dau me too without without and i saw this i was like this partnership is going to be bad because they're going to get me to buy so many watches.

2:05:52Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to see every, every dollar they spend with TB, we spend$10 back. 100%. It's actually 100%, which is, which actually makes the economics work because they get, you know, they don't get the whole revenue. Uh, but yeah, they're definitely going to make money off this deal for sure. Uh, but yeah, we love bezel and, uh, yeah, I think an Omega speed master, you know, uh, people often comp omega to rolex uh i think omega is really cool in the sense that you know rolex is you know it's it's the best in many ways and it's also a little overplayed sometimes it's artificial restriction you know mark andreessen picks the omega when he goes on uh on rogan he's a big omega guy there's a lot of things to love about omega and the history and the uh and the heritage in this piece is just uh it's just beautiful anyway all said uh let's move on to let's skip forward oh we got to give we get we got to do this one uh this was uh absolutely burning up the timeline this weekend one of the biggest stories from the weekend i think everyone in tech was obsessed with this uh sam sulak won his first bodybuilding show the content creator to ifbb you know champion pipeline is emerging.

2:07:04Joshua Rayner says he's looking diced waist surprisingly tight. I thought he would look a little fuller, but might just need to dial in refeed, which is a term I hadn't heard before, but congratulations to Sam Sulek. Uh, he's been, we gotta get for a long time. You gotta get Mr. Rayner to call into the show and kind of break down what's going on. So what's going on i watched the i watched the vlog of uh sam sulak on stage it was ridiculous this guy i mean it's multiple spray tans he's measuring those for those that don't know so water intake precisely sam puts out basically an hour video every single day so he he's taking you through his training he's taking you through his making food he's taking you through everything you know going to the grocery store it's really he's it's it's great just sort of like background noise if you're into bodybuilding.

2:07:56And he's developed a huge fan base because of that. He's just very often. I think that he's developed such a great young fan base that's so invested in what he does that it will get to the point where competitions will actually be incentivized to make sure that he wins to some degree. I was wondering about that. I was wondering if he's going to wind up going the distance. Yeah, well, it's more so... he will he could very well be bigger than the competitions right because totally in many ways arnold was just much bigger than bodybuilding yeah totally he people more people know arnold than people even know that that there's actual like bodybuilding contests they just know the visuals of him you know doing the um the various you know poses or whatever um so i think i think it'll be interesting dynamic where the the incentive will almost be for the competitions to be like, you know, we actually want him to win because it's going to be so much bigger for us.

2:08:54I hope they reboot Terminator and put Sam Sulek in it. That would be amazing. Yeah, yeah. I would love that. They'd probably sell a ton of tickets too. Yeah, and Sam is someone that, you know, if you look on comments of videos about him that he didn't post, the comments will be like, I can't believe he's cutting his life short by using all this gear. if if you asked him about it i'm sure you would say it's 100 worth it to me i'm willing to shorten my life in the pursuit of being diced on the global stage photo insane and it's crazy when you see the before because the before he looked huge but he was just not lean at all so he didn't look like a bodybuilder to me at all he just looked like a big strong guy basically but all that work paid off and man adult that's like it's like the joint of a of like a bowl looks like a bowl yeah it's insane insane uh all right so if you're promoted posts for bezel uh for public so speaking of size uh public has an all-new treasury account earn a guaranteed yield back by the u.s government with a customizable ladder of u.s treasuries pick a strategy or build your earnings.

2:10:13Public is just very well positioned. We've talked about this on the show before, but Robinhood went all in on this sort of casino model for trading, right? Becoming these huge emphasis on introducing options to people that had never done it before. Public took the high road in terms of building out the ability to invest in any of these different assets, but taking a very methodical approach and focusing on long-term investing. And so this is just the next evolution of that they just are clearly focused on being that all-in-one platform to earn on your money yeah right yeah and when when the market's going down there's turmoil people rotate into treasury ladders yeah and now yeah they actually rolled this out when like in the original version of their treasury product when rates spiked of course people were saying well i could be in these high risk yeah you know stocks and what would it look like if i you know transitioned into um you know just like focused on stabilized yield and so the their treasury product it's always been a good solution for that and it is now uh i you know we now use it just on the show just literally it's like the way to get our research tool data um but a bunch of cool stuff coming out there uh i was gonna try to record an episode from their office last week in new york but i just got so set up in the bowery that uh that we're just recording from there but um we'll flip that over shout out to public um give a shout out to a size lord that we all know and love on this show there we go jeff looking great always dressed well always got a great watch on the wrist and i love this just hard post no caption just just um treating it like instagram yeah so jeff just posts exactly how everybody he posts in such an authentic way he he's uh i love i love the expression on his face too.

2:12:01Oh yeah. Um, but exemplifying technology brotherhood and just being yourself, we'd love to see it. He was in a, he was in a mink coat as well. Custom bespoke mink coat. And, uh, you know, he's hitting the full range, right? Um, so we're glad to see him not wearing running shorts and focusing on bespoke tailoring. I couldn't have said it better myself. Uh, well let's move on to our good buddy Bo Nickel. Some random person was, I guess, on TV and said, where is Bo Nickel? Okay, so this guy had a... I don't know who this loser is. This guy on Saturday had a fight. He wins his fight. They give him the mic, and he calls out Bo, which is just funny because you don't call out Bo after your first big win.

2:12:46And so Bo responds back, I'd love to get an easy check, but the fans say I can't fight cans anymore and so he's referencing a couple of bows like first fights so so bow went on dana white's contender series absolutely dominated then he gets into the ufc and he's just steamrolling every guy that he fights and he had one fight i forget i think it was forget what card it was on it was at some point last year or or late 2023 but there was he was slated to fight this guy the guy had to pull out at the last second so they just put this like oh no it was a really rough fight to watch because it was like the local guy who just stepped up to fight bow in this pretty high profile fight and bow just had him basically i think bow like knocked him out twice on like while the guy was standing like it was one of those things like bow hit him knocked him out hit him again woke him up and then like knocked him out again um but anyway shout out to bow he's bow's technology brother uh listens to the show and he's got a fight coming up in um uh pretty soon which uh we're excited about quick billboard yeah yeah yeah just walk out there the ufc is pretty tough they used to let fighters have their own sponsors in the cage and they rip that out okay a lot of backlash which makes sense for the ufc you know they want to be able to sell every surface but um but yeah bo uh bo's a legend can't wait for his next fight and uh actually caught up with him last week what's the etymology of cans is that just like you get kicked around in like a can.

2:14:17I don't actually know, but a can is just somebody that's like thrown, yeah, thrown in there to get beat up. Yeah, just like a aluminum can. You just kick them right out of the ring, basically. Is that what he's saying? That's amazing. Legendary. Well, good luck to you, Bo. We love you, Bo. Hilarious. Let's move on to Wander. We already mentioned them, but I wanted to flag this Wander. You're a few taps away from staying here. Beautiful, beautiful view. Highly recommend going and checking that out. And we got some product news from Wander. They have a new sign-in modal. Let's go. Let's go. You know we love UI, we love Figma, we love design.

2:14:49And with Wander now, you can sign in with Apple, Google, Facebook, email, they got it all. It's beautiful. I do genuinely like how it blurs out the background. It looks very, very premium. Yeah, it feels like using an Apple product. And clearly Michael, I think he's their head of design, genuinely crushed it on this. And I think it looks great. We got a lot of pushback. We talked about a UI update that Figma had done recently. And we talked about how designers have been protesting in the streets to try to get that implemented. Somebody pushed back and said, I live in Brooklyn. Nobody was protesting, but maybe they just weren't at the right place at the right time.

2:15:27Yeah, I think they might have. Anyways, celebrate every time you improve your products for your customers. Every single moment matters. Yeah. And share all the product updates on X. They might go viral. This guy's post got 200 likes. 7 ,000 likes. Why not post it? Boom. It's great. We got to mount this thing. Ben, can you show it again, by the way? I mean, this thing is like massive. It's the actual sign they put on their Wander properties. So we got to figure out how to mount this thing. But thank you to Kyle for securing that for us. Do you want to take us through Justin Mayer's French paradox?

2:16:00Yeah, I'd love to. I don't know that much about it. Okay, so Justin Mayer's dear friend of ours, former brother of the week. He is coining here Coogan's Law. I love it. I love a good coinage. the french paradox and justin says why do the french eat cheese butter and drink wine but still have lower rates of heart disease in americans after some digging i found out what was going on the french paradox explains he hits it with the thread moji that's almost vintage that's sort of you know 20 yeah 2020 era million views million views banger 3.5k likes americans spend ten thousand dollars per year annually on health care more than any other nation on earth Meanwhile, the French spend far less while consuming dangerous amounts of saturated fat.

2:16:42So the common practice from the American Heart Association is that saturated fats are dangerous. So things like cheese, butter, things like that you want to avoid. And we get cut off a little bit here. Our entire theory of cardiovascular health falls apart when we examine the data. The French consume 10 to 16 percent of calories from saturated fat. This is well above American guidelines of under 10%. So the American Health Association and other groups, they specifically say just keep your saturated fats under your 10 % of the total calories you consume. So their diet is rich in butter, cheese, and organ meats, yet their heart disease mortality is one of the lowest.

2:17:28I'm assuming we got cut off here. This demands an explanation. And he highlights this. in representative cross-sectional surveys of the french population performed in 1986 and 1995 saturated fat intake was 15 of the total energy intake in the first survey and 16 in the latter survey the french show consistently lower markers in all five major cardiovascular risk factors systemic inflation levels oxidative stress markers platelet aggregation factors blood pressure variability insulin response patterns so justin says how is this possible well when americans say cheese and when the french say cheese we're talking about different substances american cheese under undergoes 18 plus processing steps including emulsifiers preservatives and artificial colors french cheese it's milk culture salt and time that's it um so uh same pattern the same pattern emerges for meat when most american beef is fed with corn and soy treated with hormones processed with ammonia and preserved with nitrates but most french beef is grass-fed ages naturally and butchered locally even something as basic as yogurt tells the story french yogurt milk and bacterial cultures fermented slowly american yogurt modified cornstarch artificial sweeteners carid carrageenan carrageenan and 17 grams of added sugar then we wonder why our medical metabolic responses are different yeah so additionally american meal patterns create a perfect storm of metabolic function we eat quickly often alone and while stress the average american lunch break is 30est minutes minutes this reminds me uh when we just absolutely crushed some air on burritos before this we just like absolutely housed them like right before getting hours maybe after the show we'll have a two-hour lunch yeah uh yeah the french spent over two hours on lunch aren't getting the picture yet at the molecular level french eating patterns enhance hdl cholesterol cholesterol and reduce oxidized ldl but americans taking resveratrol supplements missed the point entirely.

2:19:28It's not about isolating compounds. It's about the entire eating context. The American obsession with healthy eating has paradoxically made us less healthy. Studies show we experience more stress around meals, leading to elevated cortisol and impaired nutrient absorption. The French enjoy their food and show better metabolic markers yeah american food companies have tried capitalizing on this by creating french style products but they've missed the fundamental point you can't package the french paradox into a pill or processed food the benefits come from the entire eating pattern and it says the most profound insight american guilt around food creates physiological stress that impairs metabolism the french derive pleasure from eating which enhances vagal tone and improves nutrient partitioning.

2:20:16Enjoyment isn't just psychological, it's a biological necessity. The French paradox isn't really a paradox, but the failure of American reductionist approach to nutrition. We can't medicate our way out of lifestyle-induced disease. The solution requires rethinking our entire relationship with food. Interesting. Very cool. Justin actually has a company called TrueMed, and he made his money in bone broth, him and his brother, and now he has a company called TrueMed that, um, that allows people to spend their HSA funds on, uh, you know, healthy, healthy products that can improve their health. So I'm glad to see him, you know, hitting some viral posts on the timeline, uh, that are, you know, providing, uh, informative, but powerful content.

2:21:02Yeah. Two hour lunch, just the basics, just Lindy steak and cheese and butter and coffee and milk and red wine what more do you need uh well let's move on to a launch from one combinator pave robotics is building tracer the first fully autonomous road worker tracer autonomously detects cleans and seals asphalt cracks cheaper and faster and more efficiently than a human and if you look at it it's this cute little box robot that drives around painting asphalt down and i and i quote you this and said uh i call this type of innovation uh Nat Friedman punk or freed punk is this cute little like simple robot that just does one thing.

2:21:46It's very understandable. It's not trying to replace your job. It's just trying to, you know, just make the world a little bit better. I said, even if the Terminator apocalypse comes, this guy's going to be fighting along alongside you for some reason. Let's put a gun on it. Let's put a gun on it. Yeah. Come on guys. Let's see if we can throw a gun on this too. Um, but I thought there's very funny, very cool. Uh, congrats to the team for launching. I also like that Jason Carmen chimes in with very cool with like no period. And it feels like almost anonymous. It's like ominous. It's like very cool.

2:22:16Like, you know, expect a call from me. I'm making a documentary about this. Like you will be hearing from me. I will be pointing a camera in your face and in, uh, in a couple of weeks. So get ready. Very cool. Uh, I love that. Signal says, I got deep research to produce detailed reports on all of my enemies. Proper utilization. And then somebody says, how deep is the research if it's based on the very shallow public internet information? And Signal's like, it's a joke. I didn't actually do this. But that's really, really hilarious. And yeah, you should definitely use deep research. Obviously, you got to give it some extra data.

2:22:56but uh you know very fun very fun uh i mean honestly like you know your enemies if you're a startup you should definitely go and have it produce detailed reports on uh your rival companies the companies that you're trying to disrupt you should understand the industry took me far too long to start reading all the all the full history of the big tobacco companies and really understand how they were built up it was fascinating when i started learning all that stuff uh but i didn't do it in 2016 when i started lucy uh it took a while but it's really really cool um let's go to he says okay which one of you did this sock to compliance license plate on a bmw i don't know what car that is it looks like an m series but but it dropped uh is that yeah it's newer either way it looks fantastic and it sends the right signal yeah that uh you are ready to sell sock to compliance software to anybody so if you're at a standstill on the 101 get out of your car and just walk around and try to sign up some people for your sock to compliance product yeah uh that's a good that's a good uh we should actually we should actually get technology brother uh license plate holders with adquick and just make them free on the website oh that's good you can buy this if you strap it to your car and just drive around constantly and run ads for for us and ad quick.

2:24:19Okay, let's close out with two promoted posts. One is from Representative Tim Burchett. He says, I'll be introducing the Cartel Mark and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025, which would authorize Trump to commission privately armed and equipped individuals or groups to seize persons or property of any cartel, cartel member or cartel linked organization. And so, yeah, How are you going to make money off of this? I mean, it's obvious. Start organizing. I talked about last year. Just go fight the cartel. There's a big opportunity to make vertical SaaS for local militias. It'd be great if you could organize with your neighbors.

2:25:04Sure, sure, sure. Have some sort of inventory management, meeting, planning, stuff like that. Messaging integrations, satellite comms set up. But no, this is cool. you know we want to see more citizen uh you know batman style groups that just gang up and yeah go take on citizens arrest yeah citizens arrests are underrated potentially potentially underrated i i have no idea how this will play out but let's i remember when i remember when i was a kid hearing about citizens arrest oh yeah because it's just it's the idea as a kid that that you could do the job of a cop yeah it's just like so hilarious like oh making citizens arrest yeah i I actually have no idea how citizens rest works or if it's at all real.

2:25:48I should get a research report. No, you basically arrest somebody and just yell, I'm making a citizens arrest. It's just like up to them. You don't have any jurisdiction, but like if they fall for it, they're under arrest. Then they have to wait until the cop comes. I like that. And our last promoted post from Amon resorts. Presented by ad quick. Yeah. Number one way to buy out of home ad inventory for your startup. Yeah. Amon should run some ads on ad quick. They should run an ad quick billboard every half mile all the way out to Amangiri. That'd be great. And just buy up every single spot. Yeah.

2:26:20As a reminder for people that are going to Amangiri, hey, you got five miles left to go. They should write six miles, you know. You know, Amon, people know that you're going there. They should buy the billboards as you're leaving saying, thanks for stopping by. Yeah. You know, and that's it. And then all the people that aren't going to the Amon get reminded, I'm just doing a cross country road trip. I'm going camping, you know. So Amon says, in the stillness of the pool and the dance of light on the surface, we can find a new sense of peace and perspective in the elevated spa surroundings of Amon, Tokyo.

2:26:52Looking out over the cityscape, the world retreats and all is quiet. So if you're looking for a getaway, head on over to Amon, Tokyo and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Last note, we got a question in the chat from Daniel. Are you releasing any merch soon? we the merch has been fully designed for a while yeah but there's so much of it so many individual products it's actually taken a while we didn't we didn't want to just come out with a you know a hat no i want to just do a polo it's all bizarre stuff too it's not normal but it's very good i'm very excited for it but it will be well worth the wait yep and we can't wait to release it yeah we did have some so some the working capital of this business is going to be through the roof We're going to have seven figures sitting on the inventory line item on the balance sheet.

2:27:39It's going to be rough for a while, but we're not going to be charging$2. This isn't Timu merch. This is high quality stuff. We did get merch made for PMF or Die. That happened quick. If you go on the stream, you can see they're actually wearing orange jumpsuits. So if you're looking for something to watch, head on over to PMF or Die. They are still live streaming. They will be live streaming for 90 days straight. There's now 20 ,000 people watching. So enjoy that. And yeah, go check it out. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. And thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you, folks.

2:28:15Have a great day. Happy President's Day. Enjoy the holiday. If you're a president and you're listening, as I imagine you are, happy President's Day. Happy President's Day, Obama. Underrated.