Trump's Tech Career, Power Tools, Say His Name, G650 vs BBJ

28:15But I don't need to make a decision based on your website. I'm going to make the decision based on your ads. Yeah. Which is very interesting. Yeah. But then, I mean, the other thing is that ads are just much better at price discrimination. And so if you have a billionaire in your audience and you also have a college kid in your audience and you're charging$10 a month, they both pay$10 a month. Yeah. But if you're doing an ad-based model, you'll get$1 in ads from the college kid and you could get$1 ,000 or$10 ,000 from the billionaire because it's targeted to, you're going to be able to target more premium ads.

28:51And so that price discrimination really, really maximizes value capture for these digital platforms. And that's why ads really are like the end-all, be-all of monetization strategies for these companies. And it's interesting. Do you know Dalton Caldwell at Y Combinator? He's a YC partner. He started a company called App.net. Do you remember this? No. Back in, I want to say like 2012 or something. Still in high school. Yeah. He started a paid Twitter. It was, you know, you had to pay to use it. And the whole idea was that the money would go to developers who'd be able to develop things on top. Kind of like Farcaster where it's like open.

29:29And he had a really tough time with it because it was hard to get that viral growth. Whereas with Twitter, it's like you can always hear a new story and be like, oh, I should get on there. And then you're on. And then the more you use it, the more money they make. and the money that they make is directly proportional to the amount of time that you spend on the site and the, and your wealth essentially. So if you're buying, you know, Rolexes and Lamborghinis, they're going to make a lot more money from you than somebody who's just, you know, shopping for Candy Crush or whatever. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's fascinating.

29:59They also had this crazy struggle with their tech stack because they didn't want to get deplatformed and like rugged by one of the tech companies. Do you remember the Parler situation where Parler was on Amazon Web Services. And because a bunch of the January Sixers were on Parler organizing, Parler just got booted. And if you just lose your hosting provider, you're not gonna be able to move over just instantly. This is what Matt from Antimetal was originally working on, which is like a decentralized crypto native cloud, which at that moment, that's what the original Antimetal was, which made a lot of sense.

30:31And it turns out they ended up evolving the company into what it is today because there was only a tiny, tiny, tiny group of companies that actually needed decentralized cloud, and they weren't necessarily the customers that you actually wanted. But in that moment in time, it felt like, oh, yeah, cloud should be decentralized and accessible regardless of the political leanings of the platform. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very niche. I've seen it work in there's this rendering network for CGI where every CGI artist has a really beefy computer, but they're not always rendering out their projects so they can share render time between the computers so the computer is basically always rendering and they're rendering your project while you're rendering their project and there's like render tokens in between they have like a crypto thing and i think it's i think it's been like one of the more successful like use cases even though it's kind of a small market um so then uh they you know they're hiring more people um to to scale up the company like actually build this thing um they hire this interesting guy uh this baptist of south asian descent named justice eepin uh who was canceled for tweeting god smites unbelievers isn't that crazy like he was an engineer at some company and another engineer posted on reddit complaining about him and he was disowned by his friends and called a bigot and a fascist by strangers and what's weird is that like based on that response i feel like he must have tweeted something crazier like tweeting i feel like some some you could go tweet god smites unbelievers right now and people would be like so true yeah or like isn't that just like a straight up quote from god from bible like that's not like that controversial i think but i guess the intention matters yeah but he had he had a very bad he had a very bad go of it and so he was one of those people that was like really driven by the mission right um and then uh it says also among the other recruits was ryan lackey a libertarian programmer who had been working since 1990s to stop what he thought of as excessive corporate and governmental interference on the internet and uh do you recognize this guy ryan lackey looks like a boss i know that guy could i interviewed him in miami yeah um this not this year yeah this year really yeah i interviewed him about prepping yeah oh So that's him.

32:52Yeah. And I mean, he has a wild, wild story. He was a civilian who went to Iraq during the war just to build a business. Like he wasn't in the military. He just went there to install satellite communications and take like really small like DOD contracts here and there. So like the army would be like, oh, we have some forward deployed base. That's a guy. If he opened up a safe at 100, you'd enter at any price. And you know Sealand? that like offshore concrete platform located in the North Sea, seven miles off the English coast. He went there and installed a server farm there, and he was like doing their like IT.

33:32Isn't that crazy? Yeah, so he was there. I think he was doing like security and stuff. They had a man who worked at Apple. They had a bunch of other people, basically just like the outcasts of tech, like all come together in this WeWork in Atlanta. The black sheep. The black sheep, exactly. And it's very funny because they start like colliding with each other in very interesting ways because they're all like they're all similar in how fringy they are but they're all different fringes so there's one guy who strong opinion strongly held yeah yeah so there's one guy who describes himself as a a literal communist yeah and a vegan and a vegan and uh and he gets it and and then like eepen the guy who tweeted god smites unbelievers uh was observed proselytizing to his colleagues particularly gleason the vegan communist which is so funny because it's just like you have all these like black sheep and they're all just like fighting in this chaos pit yeah it's it's not just like a group of people with differing views that are all like happy to be around people with differing views a bunch of people that are like no i am right i'm right like we need no government at all or we need a complete government we're gonna argue until we figure this out yeah yeah yeah uh but probably some interesting conversations um but then there's this like anecdote about how like uh so it's all like just like chaos and as we work trying to build this thing, forking open-sivist projects, working so fast.

34:52And then when Patrick Orlando, the big investor, the SPAC owner, comes by, they have to bring all the remote workers in to make them look bigger and put up big displays and play Trump clips on the TVs to be like, this is a real office, this is a real deal. And the former employees. Why is there no Hollywood documentary on this yet, by the way? Well, I mean, that's the whole reason I wanted to do this story, is because, you know, as much of a joke as it is, like this does deserve a profile in Bloomberg. Like the information should be telling this story because it's one of the most interesting stories in tech in the last few years.

35:29Yeah, and I don't need the fifth mockumentary of WeWork. I want the first of Trump Social. Yeah, Trump Social. I'm sorry, true. Truth Social. Freudian slip. Totally, totally. And I mean, these interactions are so funny. It probably should be like a mockumentary or some sort of movie because it's so - No, it should be a very serious documentary about a very serious technology entrepreneur named Donald J. Trump. I think Trump should go on the circuit with Emily Chang. We need an Alex Conrad piece. Get him, get - Alex, if you're listening. Yeah, yeah, do it. Your move. And so the tech people keep bringing like the Trump organization ideas for like how to juice engagement on the site and one of them is so funny.

36:14So they told Trump about the possibility of giving early adopters of the site a digital badge, something similar to Twitter's blue tick. Trump thought he was talking about making physical badges like a like a sheriff's five pointed star and mailing them out to users, which is like actually what they should have done. Yeah, they should have done that. It would have been so good. I would be such a collectible to get like the original true social. Have you ever used true social? I actually signed up. I created an account just to see like what's going on there. It's chaos. I feel like I get the core content in the form of screenshots that are then posted.

36:51Not even. There's very little that like actually makes it its way over because it's all so boring. Yeah. It's all just like, and the ads are particularly funny because they're all like ads for like third party unpaid for our, what's it called? When you don't like register a trademark, you're not paying, the money doesn't go to Trump, but it's like a Trump t-shirt basically. and he's just like cool with it because like whatever. But they're all framed. Like the ad strategy there is basically to put up a poll, like a fake poll and the poll will be like, do you support Donald J. Trump? And it'll be like, hell yes.

37:28Or like no. And no matter what you click, it's just an image. So no matter what you click, it takes you to the next thing. It'll be like, do you want to take back the country from the corrupt Democrats? And it'll be like, yes or no. You can click no, it'll still take you to the next thing. And it just takes you to a checkout for like a$60 t-shirt or like a coin or something that's like well maybe that's a good segue into their monetization and and kind of the numbers they're putting up tell me you have some no no I mean we I mean you you'd pulled up their chart earlier oh yeah how they've done about a million dollars of ad revenue in the last 12 months yeah yeah last 12 months they're not they're they're post monetization it's a story I'm clear if they're focusing on monetization or if It's just sort of happening by nature being a big technology platform.

38:13Yeah. But I'll let you get that. I think the numbers are, in the last 12 months, they did a little over a million dollars in revenue. EBITDA was negative$100 million. Net income was negative$400 million, roughly,$380. And it's almost a$10 billion company. So you can think of it as like. It's a gross story, though. It's a gross story. It's wild. And so, yeah, I mean, they wind up building this site and it's actually like a very simple front end. It's like a direct clone of like every Twitter clone ever. But the back end is like extremely complex because they need to have like two providers for everything, like two databases, two, you know, front end or two like, I forget what they call it, like CDNs.

38:57Trump's the uncancellable man. And he had to have the equivalent social media platform. Basically. Distribution engine. so so so they're so they're building all this and like i think at a certain point i i think this happens a lot with like the trump projects where it's just like he's at mar-a-lago somebody says hey i'll give you 90 of this business and he's like yeah go for it like like we'll see what happens and then they came back with like the spack offer and he's like okay this is getting interesting and they come back with like a site that's like kind of working and oh okay like maybe i should go deeper and so then i can imagine him like hammering out a tweet you know not a tweet a post a truth and hitting send for the first time and seeing it lag for like 20 seconds and then post and being like not bad because he grew up in the era like he came like he became relevant in the era that it was really hard to build software products so he had probably had other attempts and been like this is really hard and so just having a working product he was probably pretty excited about it well you know he's a printed email guy yeah he doesn't he doesn't do email on the computer.

39:59It's all, it's all printed out for him. And then he just says, okay, yeah, respond to this, this way. Wow. That's great. Um, and so, you know, I think, I think as, yes, for sure. Uh, I think as, as things start to get a little bit more real, um, the, the rest of the Trump org kind of descends. So Eric Trump shows up and wants a piece and, uh, Don Jr. wants a piece as well. And Melania wants some shares. Um, and, uh, And they kind of go back and forth. They're fighting with Latinsky and Wes Moss. Yeah, they try and go back on the deal and they try and say like, oh, that thing we signed, that term sheet for 90%, that wasn't accurate.

40:41We don't want you to run this thing. Which is funny because it was already so aggressive. How do you get more aggressive than that? Yes, it would have still made sense for them to do it, even if they had a point at the company. but going trying to take them from 10 down to, I don't know. And so they issue another 3 % of the company to the Trump org. They didn't give any to Melania. I assume it's just like dilution on top of the existing structure. But what's really interesting is that like Litinsky and Wes Moss, like the original guys, even though they only own 10 % of the company, they must have had some block right or something, or like the board must have been structured in a way that they could, because otherwise you would just be hearing about like, and then they were gone and like then they lost all their equity and like that didn't happen maybe it was just like legal threat but they knew what they were doing on that fateful cheeseburger they were like we will give you 90 of the economics but we want we want to gain they were on the apprentice they learned from the best donald himself how do you so donald's probably sitting there being like they're using my moves against me yeah and so like as so they sort all that out and as they as they're starting to build they they do wind up partnering with rumble uh which is like the YouTube competitor.

41:53That's actually like fairly big. I know some people that have worked there. Also public, right? Yeah, I think it's a public company. I think it was another SPAC. They acquired our peers over at All In. I think Rumble acquired Colin, which is cool. A little cameo from Saks. Yeah, yeah. And so they do have like a more robust tech stack than some of the other partners. And so the idea was, okay, maybe we get on Rumble. They can host our data. But at the time, Rumble hadn't been struggling with, like, deplatforming as much. Because most of the stuff they host, I mean, they host, like, Barstool. They host, who's that guy from Get Him to the Greek?

42:33You know that guy? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's, like, some sort of, like, former comedian, now, like, a podcaster. Russell Brand, that's who it is. So they host Russell Brand. These people aren't, like, completely agitating and being, like, take you to the streets. they're not the most aggressive so i think they i think rumble has not had that rumble is kicking themselves for not doing you know trying to make a billion dollar bid for truth at that moment in time well a lot of the other companies were like gab or parlor and getter at this time were both talking to trump about like hey why don't you come and make this one your home because we already built it and we'll give you you know some sort of they didn't realize it's not about the tech It's about the distribution.

43:17Yep. And you know that Parler and Getter were not going to be like, yeah, take 90 % of our company. There's just no way. They're probably like, oh, we'll give you 5 % and we'll pay you a bunch and you'll get all this stuff. But there's just no way that even once they built it, there's just too many people around the table, too many people on the cap table. So it's just impossible. But then on October 20th, so we're still less than a year out, the day the world was meant to learn about the merger and the existence of Truth Social, Trump summoned Latinsky to Mar-a-Lago. In a twist worthy of The Apprentice itself, the former president said he was once again considering a deal with Getter and asked Latinsky to convince him that Truth Social was better.

43:57Somehow, Latinsky got Trump to sign the merger agreement. Wow. Legend. Legend. You get called and it's just like, actually, I'm bailing on this thing. Like, get out of my office. And he's just like, wait, wait, wait. This is going to work. He was summoned. Yeah, yeah. That was a long flight. So it worked. Orland, you know, orland, Patrick Orlando goes to the Atlanta WeWork with a magnum of veuve cacot and they pop out the champagne and the press release goes out that evening. And the rest is they call it Trump Media and Technology Group. And the plan is to give a voice to all. The tech team were excited to be able to tell friends and family what they've been working on.

44:33The press release claimed that Trump's new media offering would be worth$1.7 billion. But within 24 hours, the stock market valued the SPAC at 10 times that amount, 17 billion. So total meme stock for a minute. Obviously, it goes down, but for not much. I think it's still the case. But even at that$1.7 billion, that makes Trump a billionaire just on that one deal. Because now he owns 60%. But at that point, it was still more, but it was enough to be. Yeah, it was kind of interesting timing for this election because that was a lot of what people would try to pin him on and say like, oh, you're not a real billionaire.

45:15Right. But now it's just like check the market cap. You can run the numbers yourself. Yep. Yeah. And even though like a lot of it's locked up, I'm sure he can borrow against it. I'm sure there's some sort of collateral. He's probably gotten some out and will get more out and stuff. So, yeah, it's fascinating. And so they launch and there's a bunch of negative press and they get attacked. And at one point, one of the companies that's providing their back-end technology actually does close Truth Social's account. But because the tech team had built these backups, they were only down. It affected 8.5 % of their traffic for three minutes.

45:50That's it. Pretty crazy. These guys are better than cracked. It's like insane. And so of course, they're not done yet because, you know, dear friend of Donald Trump, Gary Gensler, pops up to hit them with a lawsuit saying that the SPAC was illegal because his view was that Orlando had SPAC'd with the idea of acquiring True Social. And you can't do that. You have to truly set up a blank check and not know. And so if there's evidence that it's like, oh, you're going to SPAC IPO G to acquire this company, then that would mean that you should just SPAC. You should just go through the process. A regular IPO.

46:37But if you truly SPAC the blank check and then you get the call, okay, this is what I'm searching for. I'm going with it. Is that lawsuit still? It's settled. Settled. We'll get there. But it did settle. And now everything's above board, just hilariously enough. and so um of course like there's a there's a bunch more problems that happen people figure out that the company's working out of this we work in atlanta and so you know tons of trump haters are like doxing people and taking photos outside and they're really worried about um you know threats to their lives uh which should have been predictable if you go work for this yeah why were they not in trump tower seriously they should have been somewhere like secure i would think something I don't know work out of Mar-a-Lago I guess or something but but now that like the the SPAC is going through it's the the parent company was now the most valuable SPAC in history and all the tech workers basically you know consider the apprentice guys like they're de facto bosses even though it seems like all the titles are pretty pretty vague the the employees learn that there's gonna be this new guy running the company essentially a CEO and it's Congressman Devin Nunes.

47:50Of course. Yes, and of course there's a bunch of pushback. As one does, once you've gone public, you usually go try to find a great congressman to run your company. Yeah, yeah, what a dream. But Nunes had an interesting background. So he spent two decades representing a rural area in California and was best known for his time as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee during the investigation into Trump's alleged collusion with Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. And at that time, Nunes had accused the entire intelligence community of a conspiracy to take down Trump. So like he was the one congressman or like the main congressman who was like pushing back against the Russiagate stuff.

48:34And so that probably won him like a ton of favor with Trump because he's like, you went to bat for me on this one committee, like, thank you. I'll work with you in the future. um and so uh you know true social employees like respected him for that but they were kind of like what is this non-tech guy doing running our company one person said this is like uh going and hiring a high school baseball coach to be the ceo of microsoft and i love that love that quote because they're like we are microsoft yeah you run like you're on like a website that pulls in a million dollars a year there are like indie hackers that are doing better than you and you're comparing yourself to a business that's worth a trillion dollars, but respect, respect.

49:16And so it's like, maybe he's actually qualified to run this way. Who knows? Like, it's such a small operation, you know, whatever. So he doesn't comment in this economist article, but there's a bunch of interesting stories about him kind of going back and forth. And interestingly, like, while he was there, he pushes for advertising as soon as possible. So again, it's like, this guy's completely unqualified, and like, all the employees, all the disgruntled employees who spoke to The Economist for this article, or like, oh, he's so unqualified. He was the worst boss. He was terrible. But like, I keep seeing like some of the decisions he'd make.

49:47And I'm like, these seem reasonable. Like advertising is the correct business model and you should run fast. And so there's a lot of like the new CEO told the team they needed to work harder because a lot of money had been spent. Like, that's true. Like they were burning a lot of money. Like he said that they needed to do advertising as soon as possible. That's also true. Like it's like kind of odd to say because yeah he doesn't have the traditional background but it seems like common sense a lot of businesses common sense yeah and so and so the tech guys are like are like Adams and Boozer are like really pissed because they they really don't want to do advertising they're like let's get let's get it like like and they're comping themselves to Facebook and Twitter they're like Facebook and Twitter didn't have ads and they launched but you know just like they need they need it they need a growth story it's that balance between yeah revenue and just traction right yeah there is something to be said for that where it's like, would the stock be trading even higher if people weren't like, they only have a million dollars.

50:40It's like, well, they haven't even started monetizing yet. Who knows? Maybe their first month would be$100 million. It probably would. I actually think it would. Be trading higher. Yeah, because if somebody told you, I was shocked when you told me that they had a million dollars of revenue, right? It seems like you would intentionally have to be trying not to monetize to only have that much revenue on that much attention, right? Like it's a terrible conversion of attention to. I mean, as a political candidate, Trump has raised like almost a billion dollars, right? Just by asking for donations.

51:13So you would assume that if you went on there and was like, I'm going to give you at least some sort of product, maybe it's like a badge or something. Like he would be able to get like the tens of millions, hundreds of millions. Yeah, or the physical pin. Yeah, something. You know, you would think if he's just selling stuff, you'd be able to get more because you're monetizing the same attention. But it's just very different when it's this like ad platform. But yeah, very interesting. So at long last, the app was released to the public on February 21st, 2022. So it's just over a year from that like dinner at Mar-a-Lago over cheeseburgers.

51:43It really is fast execution. Like you have to admit it. And it's interesting comparing it to like Quibi. Do you remember that company? Like they spent like what, six years in like stealth, raised all this money. Toiling away. And it just like went nowhere. It's like at least they're down to fail fast. Like respect that. Yeah. But of course the launch is like a mess and like hundreds of thousands of people spent days on the waiting list trying to sign up. Once in, they encountered glitches galore, error messages, broken links. One page on the website misspelled truth as T-R-U-H, which is like general like chaos, which is normal.

52:19It's all normal stuff. But by the end of the week, Truth Social was number one on the app store. I'm sure they got a call from Nikita Beer. Yeah. I'm sure Nikita was actually. I'm sure they were spending eight figures on intro just for Nikita, just to get his advice. But again, just to remind people, the app store is a measure of acceleration, not absolute numbers. Pure volume. So if you launch and you grow very fast, then you'll rank higher. It's much harder for a product. Established app. Yeah, an established app like Facebook to be number one because they're not necessarily growing as much.

52:56um but more than eight eight hundred and sixty six thousand people installed it in the first week instagram by comparison only signed up about a hundred thousand users in its launch week such a bad comparison this is such a bad comparison because like kevin's sister was a was like an awesome guy in tech he was but he was an intern at twitter and they knew if you actually want to create a super engaged Yeah, you want to start small. Start small. Get the right users. Don't just sign up as many as you want. I like that this journalist is writing it like it's a dunk. Like, oh, like, you know. Got him.

53:30Got him. It's like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. But so at this point, like, it is a pretty good launch. The number one in the App Store. Maybe Trump's popularity and widespread frustrations with big tech really could fuel a major new platform. And so two weeks later on March 11th, the terms of Nunes' contract were finalized. he would make 750k in his first year plus bonuses and shares in the company and then some other people came into the the company as well um but uh uh they're working 20 hours a day for six straight months they said they didn't see their families like they're really grinding to like make this work but there's just total chaos they really took all the core lessons from silicon valley history in the prior decade and just implemented them perfectly yeah but uh uh obviously things are chaotic there's uh you know disgruntled employees who are like literally destroying code like erasing servers and stuff on their way out that's like a wild thing to do uh also like super illegal and like you could face like a bunch of uh like civil penalties if you do this interestingly a bunch of uh a bunch of ex-employees like wouldn't talk on the record for this because apparently in the nda that you sign with truth social uh you uh there's a five million dollar penalty i'm gonna start putting that in the ndas like hey if you want to see my pitch deck it's a five million dollar fine if you screenshot the dogs screenshot the dogs and yeah get out of here um and so that the the some of the tech people start leaving the general counsel adams and boozer and a lot of people are like oh this is like the beginning of the end the stock went down by 10 yeah the stock went down by 10 and then another 10 the next day when when the tech people quit.

55:12But obviously it's like gone back up. And there's this like discussion now about like the pre-Devin Nunes era and the post-Devin Nunes era. Because Nunes relocated the Truth Social offices to Florida, moved all of Truth Social's data over to Rumble's nascent cloud service, signed the company up for Rumble's new ad platform. And again, this seems like, you know, maybe it's controversial and the employees didn't like it, but those all seem like really, really smart moves. like building a new ad platform is genuinely very hard and i remember when when netflix announced that they were going to be doing ads they wanted to do everything like in-house and very bespoke there's apps on the app store with tens of millions of users that use other ad networks to monetize because it's just there's more liquidity yeah exactly and so uh like if it's if it's something that people i don't know if netflix wound up actually partnering with Microsoft to do the ad network.

56:06I think they were going to do like the Bing ad network, which obviously is very robust, has great matching algorithms and lots of liquidity. But if it's potentially good enough for Netflix, where Netflix would at least consider it and analysts like Ben Thompson would recommend it, like obviously it's right for this tiny company that has just a few employees and is only a year old to not try and build everything in-house, especially if they have a friendly company with Rumble that's down to partner with them. So So again, very, very interesting where like, I think the execution was good. I think the strategy might have been a little lacking just in the, and this is something we should discuss more about like, you know, is building a new social network the right strategy for Trump generally?

56:46Or should he have just done the sub stack? I think it was just a timing thing. When they decided to do this, it was absolutely the best possible product to build. And he didn't know that Elon was going to buy Axe. Yeah. And so he didn't know that he was going to get his account back. He didn't know that he was going to be able to go on Rogan. Has he gotten his? Yeah. He's gotten his other accounts back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he has pretty much all of his accounts back. Yeah. And he's been able to kind of do everything, which has somewhat taken the air out of the Truth Social balloon because it's not as existential to him.

57:23Yeah, a lot of people thought that it would already be a zero, like full-on zero. Yeah. and Certainly not. Yeah. So they kind of changed their, they changed their startup culture. It used to be agile teams and horizontal management. Nunes imposed a top-down structure in which workers were siloed into small groups under different managers. Again, like, reasonable. Like, sometimes that's the right thing. Sometimes you want something that's very flat and horizontal. Sometimes you want something that's a little bit more vertical. You have to wonder, was there was Nunes in group chats with highly competent tech CEOs being like, hey, what would you do in this situation?

58:00And they're like, yeah, I would silo things out, move from being a horizontal structure to like, you know, kind of verticalizing the management teams, like have built out these different functions. Like you're really going to want to have a trust and safety department. That's important for any social media platform. Totally possible. Yeah, I guess I guess from here, where does going into tomorrow, we don't talk about politics on this show, but what happens to truth? You know, if Trump is elected, is the most natural next step for the U.S. government to acquire the platform and use it as sort of a digital town square for citizens?

58:38Or where does truth social go from here? I have no idea. Is it purely an entertainment product? It feels like it's like bear cases on both sides because yeah If he wins stuck between a bear case and a bear I mean if he wins He doesn't need this like liquidity injection as much anymore. So I mean this is I think Peter Thiel had a quote within Who's that Axios guy I forget but he was doing some interview and then he was yeah Dan Primack and he was doing some interview and it was the question was like what's going on with true social and And Peter was basically like, I think it's some sort of like, you know, sneaky way to transfer wealth to get around like campaign finance rules.

59:18And so that becomes less of an incentive. Like if you want Trump to win and you want him to have wealth so that he can borrow against that and finance his campaign or something like something along those lines, even though he's locked up and hasn't sold the shares yet. It's like clearly having a$4 billion asset is valuable when you're running for president. um but but after if he wins then okay you don't need to pump the stock anymore and if he loses it's like maybe he becomes less relevant he's not deplatformed anymore and it's not like if he loses he'd be deplatformed again unless he tries some january 6th stuff again which would be crazy yeah so i don't know it is it is yeah it's it's it's not certainly a much easier long if he wins tomorrow because it's just another half a decade yeah a lot of a lot of attention and relevancy and um and it and and i guess the historical ways that presidents would monetize their attention would i'm going to be president and then i'm going to i'm going to write a book and then my wife's going to write a book and our you know son is going to write a book and every sort of member and that that's like very like 20th century way to monetize attention and still works generally well yeah but it could be you could imagine a future where every president uh you know just ends up creating a social media platform because that's that's that becomes like the right way like would you i think kamala could probably drive if she created a social media app after losing um if she were to lose uh i think she could get a uh you know 50 million downloads right probably i would I would sign up for that.

1:00:59Well, you know, this isn't the first celebrity social media company. Jeremy Renner cloned an Instagram and had the Renner, the Jeremy Renner app that you could install. And it was just his Instagram feed. Isn't that insane? And you had to subscribe to just see Jeremy Renner posts. And then he would like post like extra photos, but it was just like his feed. So it was just like, I'm surfing today. I went to the gym. and like the Jeremy Renner fan club was just like on his app and then he eventually shuttered it. But I mean, you could imagine like in the same way that Substack, like a lot of people are completely, they follow some writer and they're completely unaware that like Substack is the underlying technology.

1:01:40They're just like, oh, I love notboring.co, right? And I just, and this guy Packy is great. He must have built this website, but he's using the Substack infrastructure. You can see that happening in almost every vertical where it's like, oh, you're using Vimeo to power a website. It's like a YouTube. Or Substack allows you to just generate your own app at some point. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That would be interesting. So it's like you're on Substack. They're not boring. I mean, I talk to the Substack guys about other media formats, and they allow you to upload podcasts, and they actually do allow you to upload videos.

1:02:12So it is possible to run, like, basically your own private video feed, like your own YouTube on Substack, and you could have someone just like have that, you know, okay, they're subscribed to your YouTube feed. The Technology Brothers app. Yeah, exactly. We'd like to own that real estate on your home screen. Yeah. But let's close out before with the ending of the SEC fight. So even though like the SPAC was trading and successful, because of the SEC lawsuit, the acquisition wasn't approved. And so you weren't technically investing in Truth Social. You were investing in a SPAC that had a contract in place to acquire this company, but didn't actually own any of the assets yet because the acquisition hadn't been approved by the SEC.

1:03:04And so there's this lawsuit that says, hey, it was illegal for you to do this SPAC and this acquisition. We're going to block the acquisition. but on March 24th more than three years after Lutensky and Moss got Trump to agree to their plan Trump media and technology group stock debuted on Nasdaq they settled the case of the SEC for an 18 million dollar fine in July of 2023 it's very that's a big fine yeah it feels like a fine but yeah I mean they have not in the context of the market cap now but but that does seem like It's like a significant fine. Yeah, I guess they were just like, yeah, negotiating and figured out that was like a number that they were going to pay.

1:03:42Gary's bonus got this big that year. Yeah, and so they get it approved. And at that point, like the stock actually becomes like the DJT ticker or something like that. I think it was DWAC before like Digital World Acquisition Company or something. DWAC was the SPAC name before. Yeah, it's a very funny name. so so so they get through matt levine has a good quote in here you know matt from uh bloomberg uh he says that the regulatory body might be sort of worried that this thing will be a big bust and he's using the early merger talks as an excuse to prevent donald trump from dumping it on retail investors so it's kind of like they're they're like maybe the sec didn't actually have that strong of evidence that orlando and trump were talking before ipo and we don't know how much that there's a huge incentive for all the trump insiders to keep the party going yep through the election yep because if the stock had there was a couple moments where it looked like it was going to zero yep and if it had how that would have actually created that that would have been potentially the biggest risk factor for the campaign is a bunch of americans being like i lost a bunch of money because of trump and he's maybe he is the scammer that the media like says That's right.

1:05:00Yeah. And so they celebrate the NASDAQ listing. It's so funny. It's on the NASDAQ. I feel so serious for what this is. Back at Mar-a-Lago? Yeah, back at Mar-a-Lago. They have the actor John Voight and Truth Social branded cookies. That first day, the share price touched$78, making the company worth about$15 billion, more than doubling the former president's personal wealth. Moss and Latinsky, the two guys who started this whole thing, were unable to profit from the moment, however, is they were locked up. They were locked in multiple lawsuits with Trump Media and Technology Group. The company argued that their initial deal with Trump was void, and they had forfeited their shares because they had run the company so ineptly.

1:05:41And that was interesting because it's like, it's a short thing. I wonder if there was like a vesting cliff that they were trying to like, you know, push them towards or something like that. If they had like some one year vest and they barely made it over, that could be like a point of contention. I don't know. But it all worked out because they settled those lawsuits and Moss and Latinsky won their litigation with the company and cashed in nearly all their shares together pocketing around a hundred million dollars. Wow. It's not gonna have to do YouTube anymore. Yeah, that explains why he retired early.

1:06:13Retire early, seriously. And so I wonder if you got a, as part of the settlement, and he got a complimentary lifetime Mar-a-Lago membership? He either got a lifetime membership or a ban. Yeah. One or the other. Yeah. It was a high standard deviation outcome. Yeah. I feel like Trump would be fine with them still going and spending money on the property because it would just be his way to be like, I still, like, I'm your daddy. Yeah. One current employee messaged a group chat of current and former Truth Social staff saying that Nunes had claimed that Moss and Latinsky had stolen shares, leaving nothing for anyone else.

1:06:50His colleagues responded with crying with laughter emojis, suggesting that they didn't take this idea seriously. As if they were all, all the shares were sitting in the office and on the way out, they just grabbed them. Yeah, exactly. A bunch of, I feel like, I feel like if any organization was still running on physical paper stock certificates, it would be true social. Yeah, it is funny because it's like, everyone is saying like, oh, this is like a mess and like, you know, like it's poorly managed and it's like fake, but then they're like but also the money's real and i really want a piece like you screwed me out of this like very legitimate thing like they can't you can't have it both ways guys you know you can be like talking trash in the media or you can have your payout uh lesson learned there um but uh trump has insisted he won't sell his shares which now amount to about 60 of the company uh which is very uncommon for a tech founder who starts a tech company ipos it in two years very very rare um but uh then it just shows that he's mission oriented yeah right and uh they could yeah all of these these ex-employees are really trashing it they could probably have 100 million people on the platform if they had any intelligence whatsoever but again it's like is this a question of intelligence like is this a question of strategy or execution like is it are they running it as a company or a financial product is the product the stock or is the product the website yeah and i I think we know the answer.

1:08:13Yes.

1:08:16It's basically fintech, right? It's technology that enables a new way to trade on Trump's social capital. There's this very interesting quote from Billy Boozer here. He says, I had to step away from a role that I felt God made for me due to ethical and moral concerns. It shook me to my core. Sometimes those who share your beliefs might exploit you for financial gain. And I think that there's a lesson here about like, like we hear about these venture capital firms that are very difficult to work with and they're notorious for like firing, firing founders. And yet when I talk to very, very aggressive founders, oftentimes they're fine getting in the ring with a VC with a bad rep.

1:08:59They trust themselves. They trust themselves and they're okay. They're like, I'm willing to get into the gladiator arena. I'm the lion. They need to be worried. yeah i think that there's something here where like the uh we're like you know it is it is clearly public knowledge that these are some of the most hard negotiating people in the world but if you go in and you play your cards right you can wind up with a hundred million dollar payout like those guys did and so maybe they will wind up hanging out mar-a-lago in a little bit but yeah i think it's one of those things like five ten years from now they'll if they were to see trump they would shake hands and wink be like yeah it would just be like it's like we had one hell of a boxing match yeah it was like yeah going back to that fateful bite of the first burger yep exactly and then the article closes with uh an epilogue about now how now trump has moved on to a cryptocurrency part project called world liberty financial financial i had somebody yeah i had somebody bring up would any of this have been possible without diet coke like if you took if diet coke didn't exist could could this entire story have existed and i think you could make an argument that um absolutely not absolutely not that's a good place to end well that's the story of truth social the truth about truth social hope you enjoyed it um let's move on to some uh tweet reactions but first i need to tell you about Citadel Securities.

1:10:29Citadel Securities is the leading global market maker committed to creating the most efficient and transparent markets. They provide liquidity across a diverse range of financial instruments, including equities, options, and fixed income, ensuring traders and investors can execute orders seamlessly at the best possible prices. Leveraging cutting-edge technology and quantitative strategies, they optimize trade executions for tighter spreads and improved market efficiency. Whether you're an institutional investor or a startup building a retail brokerage, Citadel Securities consistently delivers unmatched performance in an industry where speed and accuracy are paramount.

1:11:06Discover how they're shaping the future of finance by making markets more accessible and efficient at citadelsecurities.com. That's citadelsecurities.com. Now back to the show. Did you see that, is it Bowery Farming failed? Yeah. Yoni writes, it really sucks that Bowery farming failed. I always was rooting for Bowery because it felt like it could actually make a difference on nutrition and climate change. Here's why from my outsider's perspective that it was so hard. Growing a single crop that's both undifferentiated to consumers and low margin, lettuce is cheap, sold through wholesale, wall of lettuce at Whole Foods, means it's even worse for margins.

1:11:42They scaled super quickly, building and flying the plane at once doesn't work in the physical world like it does in software. while owning the local operations and needing to be good at lots of complex things simultaneously. Tons of capex that they paid for themselves. If you inverted each of those factors, you'd wind up with a multi-crop full basket sold directly to consumers, basically a CSA, operated as a franchise. Interesting. I hope this won't dissuade others from trying to innovate and transform our food system. It's a worthy effort. Yeah, I remember seeing vertical farming stuff and never dug in too much.

1:12:15but uh good good take from uh yoni as as usual uh i think the real question that comes away from it is what was the actual strategy right because i've had the product it's a good product i remember buyer buying bowery lettuce and being like this is good lettuce yeah but i never you know I don't shop for groceries so it was Bowery branded yeah so they were like fully verticalized you could go into Whole Foods yeah and like buy their lettuce sure that they had cultivated using their technology and eventually sold but you have to wonder like yeah what's the strategy it's like the lowest possible margin product it's deeply deeply competitive it's really difficult to sort of like differentiate because if I wanted to start competing with Bowery I could go get a small plot of land and just obsess over making lettuce and create like the same quality of product which with a much different cost structure and so yeah it's one of those things like how would you have that you know you obviously couldn't value a farm that was producing at Bowery scale at two billion dollars yeah right I don't know a lot of sort of mid-level mid-market farms so it's like I you have to wonder they were last valued at two billion dollars what was were they pitching at the time hey we're creating this technology stack that other farms can use and Yoni and slows like have a big thesis around verticalization which is like if you have this technology like don't just sell the technology or the software yep like sell the end product sure but that's interesting you know they were involved with a company that um they were involved with a company that made software for parking garages yep and the software company just ended up buying one of the largest parking garage management companies so that they could own more of the value chain basically and so i would have loved to see bowery's last pitch deck of being like why are we worth two billion dollars selling lettuce right because you have to imagine the the actual net revenue on selling that lettuce like if if somebody was running like a farm you know let's say somebody's running a vineyard and they're like yeah like we spent like three billion or we spent like three million dollars last year to do one million of revenue you'd be like okay like yeah bad cool like pet project do you think they should have gone up market have you seen that omakase strawberry company that's like 50 a strawberry or something yeah so i'm excited starting with that seems very interesting because like it's so high-end it's going to be only consumed by like celebrities and like very it's going to be very instagrammed but you're also going to have so much breadth to like tell your story whereas if you're just if like yeah there's this cool story where the lettuce was vertically farmed but then it just comes in a standard lettuce still tastes like lettuce whereas the omakase strawberry you open it up it's like a it feels like sugar fish right yeah i think that that is what they absolutely should have done i think there's a bunch of interesting angles to do like exotic fruits that are almost like desserts yep and so if they were the key thing though for bowery would be like how do you justify charging four to five to ten times as much for the same product which is what is i got a box of asian pears once from someone and they were so juicy that i kept choking on them i would take i would take a bite and it would just explode with like like you call it coughing like oh my god you guys got to try it it was amazing they were so good um and and it's something where i'm sure they were like you know 10 times the price yeah but you have to like to make something like this work where bowery's investing what i'm sure amount to do hundreds of millions of dollars in r &d and facilities all this capex you have to be able to tell a story of, oh, we're going to be able to, we're going to be able to expand, you know, our core product from a 20 % gross margin product to a 90 % gross margin product.

1:16:26And, um, yeah, I just, I, I, I, it's also interesting because there's, there's like some other competitors that don't feel like they should be competitors, but they are. I'm thinking of like rainmaker flooding different areas like terraforming it's like yeah maybe we're running out of farmland so we need to go vertical in cities or we need to turn the desert into farmland yeah and if we do that it's like okay well all of a sudden the price of farming lettuce is going to go way down if we can just figure out how to get water there there's another plan to reroute the colorado river if we switch california to nuclear power desalination so what so california gets the water from the ocean desalinates it uses that for californian farmland and then the colorado river goes through nevada to new mexico and uh arizona and all of a sudden nevada and yeah that's one of my favorite talks yeah i think i think what's interesting that where i'd end with bowery is that this was one of the last maybe is one of the last super high profile failures from the ddc era because bowery was a company that the big branding agency is like the red antlers and i believe i i don't remember if it was gin lane or red antler that did it but i think it was at a time where you could take any sort of product slap a you know get emmet from gin lane or antler to like give you this like half a million dollar brand treatment and then people are like oh this is investable now right um like people investing in all birds because it had a cool story and narrative and visuals but then oh at the end of the day you're selling shoes yeah right yep uh do you see this martin screlly tweet defend capitalism everywhere every time be willing to die for it civilization collapses without it and then this is something that we could frame and put on the wall and then it says like thomas jefferson and then martin trichelli yeah i love this because like the first reply is civilization actually collapses well when it lacks strong sovereign institutions social cohesion and resilience to external threats and martin just says no mogged strong opinion strongly held yeah yeah no i i just think uh not enough people are saying this yep uh and i think it's now becoming a normal view within uh our hyper online technology world but outside of you know my little brother i've had to talk with him in the last year being like no capitalism is actually good it's like if you look at all these different categories whether it be education or health care or housing capitalism life expectancy capitalism is the driving force that enables improvement in those areas so ultimately you have to imagine that it's fairly good so it's one of those things that feels obvious but like i actually think is worth talking about because Because our generation was the generation that grew up where it was okay to be in the classroom.

1:19:32And a kid, you know, I remember in college would be like, consumption is bad. And it's sort of this decelerationist view that leads to Western Europe, which I like to vacation in. But I certainly don't want to live there. Don't want to invest there. Yeah, it's interesting. capitalism for a long time faced like assaults on both sides. There was like the communism, like we need to go back to, you know, like real communism has never been tried. We need to go back to like, you know, Soviet era communism or something like that. But then there was also like the accelerationist, like techno version of anti-capitalism, which was like, we're going to get AI and robots and UBI.

1:20:11And are you familiar with Falk, fully automated luxury communism? This idea that, yeah, there's like a bunch of sci-fi stories about this. and also like political philosophers about it. And that one actually makes kind of a decent amount of sense, although there's all these questions about like how incentives would work in that case. But that did take hold in a lot of Bay Area people where they were like, well, yeah, maybe if we can just have the robots do everything, we'll live in the time of abundance. And so there won't need to be, you know, we won't need to allocate resources because we'll have unlimited of everything and you can just snap your fingers.

1:20:41Although there's always a question about like, okay, well, what about - Luxury communism. Luxury communism. It is a good day. Communism needs a rebrand. Yeah, it is a good take. And it's certainly preferable to, you know, terrible communism or something. But then there's still a question about like, okay, well, there's only so much beachfront property. Even if you create like the metaverse or you've got other worlds. Certain things will always be scary. Yeah, it's very hard to imagine a world where it's like, oh, yeah, I can just like get an island in the middle of the ocean on demand. Like, okay, maybe you have some sort of crazy like micro robots that can just do that.

1:21:13But it's like, it's very odd. um so the uh sean frank good friend of the pod says uh virgin run club versus chad walk enjoyer and uh the virgin run club says you gotta give some credit to wilmanitis for being an early major proponent of the chad walk enjoyer where he would walk the lindy walk yeah he would you know frequently tweet that he was going on a 30 mile walk around manhattan uh and you know shortly after that had a nine figure exit so he actually saw me into that the last time i was in manhattan i walked the entire island like from like i don't know 91st street down to the wall street and back and it was amazing like like you you spend like two or three hours walking i mean particularly in manhattan because the entire city like turns over and you watch people leave work and then start settling in, getting dinner, and then the nightclub scene.

1:22:13It's insane. It's like one of the most fantastic cities in the world. Also, are you aware of how a lot of like the best bodybuilders are doing cardio these days? The hybrid athlete. It's all walking, yeah. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. I forget, Chris Williamson was doing a video with somebody, he's called like Sebum, Chris Bumstead, you know this guy? So he is a fantastic bodybuilder. his cardio is 45 minutes of walking on an inclined treadmill yeah and it's amazing i've been doing it because there's never an excuse where you're like oh i don't really want to sprint right now but everyone can get on a treadmill and just start walking and then 45 minutes in you're like okay i actually burned a lot of calories i'm actually exhausted there's a lot to this because it's incline but it's very hard to stop we bought our house specifically because it's the best walking in malibu really right there's like this amazing walk path it's fantastic Like Sagar, good friend says, 12 days until clocks.

1:23:09This is actually an old tweet, but it's relevant because we just went through daylight savings time. 12 days until clocks shift forward, dooming the productive class to dark mornings for months. Also, people can drink outside one hour later. Team standard time. So I guess we're actually in standard time now. We went back. So he's excited now that we're back on standard time. Contrarian to be excited about the. Yeah, but he hates going to daylight savings time because then if you wake up early, it's dark. Yeah. But I, and I agree with this. Like, I think the switch is always like super disruptive, especially if you have kids and a family, like it just throws everything off.

1:23:45Like you do so much to train the kid to go to sleep at a certain time. Their circadian rhythm is awful. Yeah, our four month old is now deciding, he went from, she went from waking up at 7, 10 a.m. to now 6, 10 on the dot. And it's like, okay, awesome. But I will say like last week when we were at the tail end of daylight savings time, I got into the office at like five or six and it was perfectly dark outside and I could watch all the buildings in downtown like light up and like, oh, it's just beautiful. Watching the sunrise. Like there's nothing like watching the sunrise from the top of like - From the office.

1:24:18From the top of like, when I worked at Bain Capital, I would get in before everyone and I would go around like set up conference rooms. I was like an intern and I would always be on like the top floor of this building right as the sun rose. and it was like so inspiring. Seeing the sun rise over your ThinkPad is an out-of-body experience. Literally over your Polycom. This was like 2012 or 2010. Every single office had a Polycom. It was great. Other stuff too, I gotta dig in. Okay, so Goblin says, wait, what the hell? I asked Claude if he noticed any patterns in my aura data versus the health data I've been logging and he's like my summary oh sure your your HRV heart rate drops rate very greater than 20 percent from baseline a day or two before the migraine starts if it gets below 40 you can be pretty sure one's coming and then there's a community note that says this seems to have been a hallucination as per the author but it's like some sort of like deeper truth So I think that I think what's interesting here is like, yeah, greater health comes from greater understanding of yourself and the various inputs that drive your health, whether that's, oh, I feel a lot better at 5 p.m.

1:25:38and I have more energy at 5 p.m. because I walked in the morning. Yeah. And so this sort of quantified self movement has been allowing people to understand themselves better, whether that's getting your biomarkers tested with function or using your aura ring or things like that. And I just think like incredible, incredible things are going to come from having more quantifiable data and then having a effectively a team of brilliant longevity and performance doctors that can analyze that data for free. The thing that we keep coming back to about what's actually interesting about AI today is intelligence as a service.

1:26:21And so if you want to work with the leading longevity specialists in the world, a lot of them charge like 150 K per year just to be in their sort of program. And it's going to be really incredible when the average person with their$10 a month aura ring can get even better care from this team of digital specialists than some public company CEO that's using David Sinclair's longevity program or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem valuable. I, I think for certain people, they need an algorithm or a doctor to tell them something, or they need the quantified, quantified self data to tell them something.

1:27:04But I always worry that there is a loss of value in not just being in tune with yourself. Like the sleep tracking is fine. It's good. Sleep's really important. If tracking, it helps you get more sleep. That's great. But you should be able to just ask yourself, are you sleepy? Yeah. There's a, there's a company that's building a smart AI toilets to analyze your urine and your feces called throne. Okay. And they're bringing the quantified self to your toilet basically. So it's like understanding yourself through your waist. I could see some of that being, being valuable because that's a little bit harder to tell than just like, did I get a good night's rest?

1:27:42We'll get it. We'll get it set up in the studio. Okay, perfect. You can be like, every time I have a really good bowel movement, the next pod, I have some absolute banger. Yeah, banger. It's great. So Alexander says, bachelors in the 1950s, and he posts a screenshot from a book or a picture from a book. Men were also pressured into acceptable family roles since the lack of a suitable wife could mean the loss of a job or promotion for a middle class man. bachelors were categorized as immature infantile infantile narcissistic deviant or even pathological family advice expert paul landis argued except for the sixth sick the badly crippled the deformed the emotionally warped and the mentally defective almost everyone has an opportunity to marry i thought this was relevant i was going to ask you does it certainly resonated yeah like yeah do you think that people started treating you differently once you had kids because there's just a certain sense of um responsibility yeah just responsibility when somebody is working for more than just themselves and has like more on the line that comes from a family like i i do think there's this sense of there is a sense of like serious like you bring a new sense of seriousness to your work yeah that i don't think you can have i think i think i looked at this and somebody it's it's fairly easy to have a pretty good life if you are just a bachelor and you're living in your luxury apartment in new york and you have a job and whatever and you can do your run club and all this other stuff and life gets infinitely more challenging once you have children in the mix and other sort of people that you're responsible for so i think that i i wanted to cover this because i think we'll actually come we're going to see a shift back where um you know keith reboy was in the news recently for saying you shouldn't hire anybody over 30 but i i could imagine they're getting to a point where the tech world starts looking at people that are uh you know that are 40 without children and being like oh like i don't know like if you know well i mean when i got to silicon valley in 2012 there wasn't there was a blog post by pg and he and he said that it was it would be hard for a founder to be married with kids yeah and it was somewhat controversial but it felt pretty consensus at the time like a lot of people agreed yeah and i think that's that's maybe true for first companies but if you're already like like I've never had a job that wasn't an entrepreneur so yeah it's like it's kind of just like the career of the entrepreneur is is a little bit more there's less of like a leap like I don't feel like oh if I'm gonna start a new company I'm gonna like lose this stable corporate job because that's not a thing that exists um what's interesting about this is that it I feel like it's resonating it got so many likes because it's part of this like very trad revival like let's go back to the way things were right but but i other than that example with pg it's hard for me to remember like when i was 20 what were the 35 year olds or the 40 year olds saying about starting families yeah because i i think that it was out of vogue and now it's kind of back in vogue yeah and i just i think there's always this oscillation between two extremes and it almost feels like right now we're in a healthy middle ground where everybody's like yeah kids are a ton of work having a family is a ton of work it is a distraction from product finding product market fit yeah but there's this like more of like a middle ground where you have um a good example of is like a side isaiah from valor has like a bunch of kids right and and like you could argue that he will be more successful because he has like a small army that's depending on him yeah to perform yeah yeah it's certainly cannot fail yeah and i and i do think there's probably something i mean i remember when i when i like first made like a significant amount of money talking to my father-in-law about this and i was like well i made like so much money i could like retire now and he's like no you can't he's like you don't understand how expensive kids are you don't you don't understand like how much money you actually need as a car guy i think of it in the i think every time i see like a buddy with like a i have a friend who's like 31 and he's got like six cars that could be considered supercars.

1:32:12And I just look at that and I'm like, for every one child, you could basically support two supercars. So I'm like, I'd probably be doing the same thing. Yeah, that's great. Let's go to Vittorio. Vittorio says, who even uses Teams and posts a screenshot of Microsoft Teams versus Slack daily active users? And Teams is like absolutely ripping and Slack is more or less flatlining. And I mean, I think the answer is like Normie. It's like everyone who uses Outlook and just a normal job, they show up and the computer's just there and they're not on some slick MacBook working from a coffee shop. They just go to work.

1:32:49They have a badge. They sit in a cubicle and their boss says, this is your tech stack. Here you go. Yeah, this is a - This is a very startup tweet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know why. This is a warning to all the technology brothers that are thinking about their product in the context of, oh, we're going to build a Slack integration, right? Because so much of enterprise software just ties back to communication, Slack, email, email being like the bedrock of all software products. I think that, yeah, I remember I once built an internal tool to track how much time people were spending online on Slack because it's a really good proxy for how much time somebody is spending at their laptop.

1:33:32and so never got to building teams because it wasn't relevant to me. But I think that is, it's the building for the teams market that's going to justify your unicorn valuation, not purely the Slack. There is something interesting about teams versus Slack, which is that with the recent defense tech boom, being a company that has to use teams because of ITAR is like a little bit of a status symbol. And people, founders flex about it because they're like, oh, I know that Slack, I'm a product guy. I know that Slack is a better product. I hate using Teams. So I can like complain about this publicly and everyone will know that like my work is so important.

1:34:12I can't use Slack because it's not ITAR compliant. I was on a Teams call for deterrence this morning. Yep. And that's the only option. Yeah, the other, yeah, I felt like a patriot. Yeah, exactly. No, the other thing with this chart is what would it have looked like if Salesforce hadn't. Oh yeah, I mean, that's the other thing is that it's just bundled into the distribution. so every also but also stewart was running slack you have to imagine he would have that chart would still be going founder mode yeah yeah yeah tough daniel says we need to double the fluoride in the water and add ozempic and adderall too this is insane 72 000 likes what a banger this guy is just like a god tier poster yeah it's just like we were talking about this 72 that's so many likes almost inconceivable most most people have a tweet that gets 72 000 impressions yeah and they're like oh i'm gonna retire yeah exactly um this guy yeah he doesn't need to raise money anymore for his company he can just fund it off the creator payout yeah he's good his his i generational wealth coming to him yeah for him the balance is making sure that his his mrr grows faster no no no no just grow the creator payouts we'll see you at amon subsidize subsidize let's see but you're you're anti-fluoride anti-fluoride but but in general i think there's a much bigger debate to be have had around fluoride and fluoride usually gets um talked about this at hereticon but usually gets uh all of the shade when in reality it's the fact that a lot of the pipes in the u.s water infrastructure are lead based and so that's just channeling lead into every household and and fluoride makes lead more bioavailable.

1:35:55So when you're having fluoride alongside lead, you're just absorbing more of it, which could account for the IQ downsides of fluoride consumption. But yeah, I think if the United States was really a serious country, we would be thinking more proactively about medicating the population through the drinking water. For free, yeah. It's like the world's perfect delivery mechanism. everybody drinks water yeah so if you want somebody to be on a certain substance then put it in the water this is genius because like this tweet could have just said like oh zempic is so amazing we should put it in the water like that's just a phrase that people say when something like a miracle cure but he wound up like having the most incendiary thing possible double the fluoride but then also adding a zempic and adderall yeah it's a time to latch on to decided there's a lot of countries that have stopped fluoridating the water yeah in the united states it's regulated effectively, but every single year we're effectively deciding to continue medicating the population through the fluoride in the water.

1:36:57Wow, look at this, 17 likes. This is an undiscovered gem. Waleed says, tons of young girls are using ChatGPT to manifest. Looks like OpenAI is acknowledging it on their official TikTok. So I guess ChatGPT is reposting. The ChatGPT TikTok account is reposting this and people are using, I don't actually know that much about managing. This is the secret, right? Where you just, I will be wealthy. I will be at Amman. I will be at Amman. No, you don't say - I will be at Christie's. You don't say I will be. You say I am at Amman. Oh. I am wealthy. I am wealthy. Present tense. Present tense. No, but this is relevant because this is the bull case for OpenAI, right?

1:37:37They're not saying, you know, people on TikTok are using Claw to manifest, right? They're using ChatGPT. It's the new brand. It is the name. It's the Kleenex for AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Kleenex in AI. It is, it is. It's just like, ask someone on the street, how do you use AI to do your homework? ChatGPT.com. Yeah, it's almost like Google for search, where like if that plays out within AI, it's just like when I want AI, I go to openai.com slash ChatGPT. I mean, Sundar was correct when he said competition is only a click away, and yet Google has a massive monopoly. Why? It's just the place that you go.

1:38:12Yeah. It's the default. I do think that there's something very interesting about AI for these kind of squishier use cases like astrology, manifesting, personality tests, that type of stuff, because the hallucinations are fine. Like with code, there's like a right answer so it can test itself. So it's very good at that. But then it's always tough in the middle. But when you get out into just like the, are you familiar with the PT Barnum effect, this whole thing? So the Barnum effect is this series of like statements that I can make about you that feel very personalized, but actually apply to everyone.

1:38:49So I can say like, uh, you have a complicated history with your family and who doesn't, but you're like, Oh my God, you know me. Or, or like you believe you deserve more in life, something like that. And you'll be like, Oh my God, I do. And so a lot of like tarot card readers, palm readers, psychics, they use that PT Barnum effect, but AI can use that very effectively. And it can feel like, wow, the AI really knows me, even though it's maybe just hallucinating or applying like heuristics that are basically applied to everyone, but everyone just wants to hear a pump up speech and that's valuable.

1:39:20So yeah. And this, and, and if, if that trend is real, there's a really big business, there's a hundred million dollar business to be built on just being like AI for manifestation, thin rappers. Rapper, for sure. Although it might get, it might get baked into one of the existing companies like a CoStar could, could integrate something. Totally. But I think that these products are so engaging yep that they can stand on their own can stand you can spin it up and it can stand on its own probably not super venture backable probably not a 10 billion dollar company but phenomenal business if you get it right i i firmly agree this was this was one of the pitches when i went on my first million i was like exploit the barnum effect to create an ai app wrapper yep um i don't even know how to pronounce this t or taxes t or taxes says an incredible thread on musk Very rarely I see something like this from someone who is not a blind fanboy.

1:40:13TLDR, some people are larger than life. Then the self-reinforcing ugly pettiness of it, you wrongly assume this is a triviality to brush aside. They can do it for real. And it's a quote tweet of somebody from Olivia that says, if you can't model Leviathans walking through the world, you're going to make some pretty bad mistakes. And it's just a deep analysis of Musk. It's interesting. I've always liked the take that Elon is both P.T. Barnum, the circus man, the showman, and he's also Thomas Edison, the inventor. And he's solid on both. And that really breaks people's brains because they want to latch on to just one.

1:40:51It's like, yeah, he does announce products before they're ready, and he is wrong on those, but then he's also a great engineer, a great manager, and can build real stuff. Like the cars drive, the rockets land. and so even if he's saying some some wild stuff that might be wrong in the short term it's like both are true what was your take from this though uh it's hard because i actually think there's like a million tweets yeah a million takes um but yeah i think i think what you take away from this is that he's incredibly complicated and the people that just want to pin him as doing like the cringe stuff where he's like jumping on like the stage and oh he's not just an engineer he's not just a poster yeah there's so much more there's so much depth to it all and yet the thing that we had we had a a listener comment on a on one of our posts this morning saying that basically like very bearish about x and your take which i think is the right take is elon has a history of just making stuff work and making money so at this point in his career betting against him is just like generally stupid stupid idea yeah it's interesting um ali taylor says i'm somewhat embarrassed to admit it but i genuinely find chat gpt to be helpful and supportive when i'm anxious this is back another thin wrapper opportunity yeah i would be there's probably already 50 million dollars of ARR worth of these sort of like chat GPT therapy products that are just out there printing and they're not in they're not even being talked about because it's just like two engineers like just shipping I mean the first version of this was like all the riz apps did you see these yeah yeah so I I talked to a kid yeah I think I met that guy too dm'd me and was like hey I'm building this like chat GPT wrapper for uh you know how to talk to girls on dating apps so you'll copy what they said and it'll recommend what you should say and and i was like that sounds great kid like good job building something that people want clearly like you have some users like just go monetize it right now because the whole chat gpt rapper thing is going to be a bad meme don't bother with status symbols in silicon valley and trying to raise money and he comes back to me like a month later he's like we're doing a million a month yeah yeah yeah i think he ended up joining if we're talking about the same people he ended up joining hf0 yeah there you go and now he's building a self-improvement sort of community platform product.

1:43:20But that, but that initial, that initial experience of being young and making money is so valuable. And, and then, and then taking someone who can a build a product, get it to market, figure out the marketing, like do the, I think he does the growth hack on, on TikTok, like the motion of like getting the Stripe account growing, even if it rugs and like, Oh, you got killed by chat to PT. If you're a 20 year old and you were making a million dollars, even for just one month, and then you make nothing, it's like, it's going to be so much easier to stand back. Okay, now you can fund your... Yeah, go read zero to one, figure out what actually a monopoly business is, but you have the experience of launching, building, coding, hiring, firing, all these different things.

1:43:57And then you can go build the real generational company, but you actually have something under your belt instead of just being like, oh, I went to school. And VC's pattern match, so when you go into your... When you have the right idea and you can go in and you can be like, yeah, when I was 21, I built a million dollar AR our chat GPT. Show me a high school diploma and a stripe account with money. For a period of time, it was like, oh, he traded sneakers on eBay. And then it was like, oh, he created like a Shopify store. And now he created, he or she created a thin wrapper on GPT. And if you didn't do that, like it's kind of bearish.

1:44:29So word of advice to the younger technology brothers, both male and female in the audience, go make a million dollars with a thin chat GPT wrapper. Don't fall for the psyop that VCs are putting upon young founders that, oh, you have to build a generational company that has a monopoly thesis, like immediately. Like if you're young, just go build something cool. Air Katakana says, actually insane how Steve Jobs was the singular successful ideas guy in the entire history of tech companies. Until John Feo. 7.3, yeah. 7.3K likes clearly resonated. I don't know how true this is. It's such a weird thing.

1:45:13Like, who's an idea guy? Why is he an idea guy? Ideas guy is such a funny way to slander somebody because among certain groups, being able to generate great ideas is like the highest, like it's like the highest status thing. Especially in the AI era. And in many ways, like you could totally make a case that Elon is an ideas guy, right? He thinks of really big ideas and then he brings together smart group of groups of people to go and do that and yeah he's adding fuel to the fire and pushing people and questioning everything and all that stuff but at its core he's an idea guy yeah for sure and i mean it's like where is the line like is zuck an ideas guy it seems like he has like the most value he creates there is ideas right and yeah it's more like almost like he's in founder mode so like he didn't have the idea for the metaverse or the idea for vr but he had the will to be like, we're actually going to go do 10 billion of CapEx on this or AI or anybody that's using calling saying idea guy as a way to slander.

1:46:16Somebody is usually the kind of person that is mad because they see an idea and they're like, Oh, that's a good idea. Like I thought of that, but I didn't do it. Yeah. So it's not just having the ideas is actually being able to like believe in them early. Like there's plenty of ideas that I've had that I've seen the incarnation of a few years later and been like, wow, that's like a really, that that was a good idea but there's a massive difference between having the idea and actually taking action on it and going and going even just betting on the market there's been so many times where i've been like oh yeah like i do feel like nvidia is like way underpriced right now and bought like a thousand dollars and i'm like let's go i should have sized that like one year one year of college tuition yeah exactly i should have sized that way differently um like having conviction in your ideas is just as important.

1:47:02And I think that's why Steve Jobs is successful because he has the idea that you don't need a keyboard on a phone, but then he screams at anyone who says we have to have a keyboard and demands that it doesn't have a keyboard to a thousand employees that all have little subtle soft power realms. And there's a designer over here who has a bunch of friends and you can't fire them and they're going to push back and there's going to be all these things so it's like actually bringing the will of like the founder mode to to to make your ideas actually i'm getting and being lucky with the timing there's a there's a company justin mayor's brother nick uh one of you know the other co-founder of um kettle and fire he has a new company that is disrupting the legacy cpg testing companies and when i saw the deck i was like this is like super obvious like wanted to invest uh would invest in anything he does but um saw it i was like yeah this is super obvious i'm surprised nobody had really taken this on but i'm sure a lot of other people had the idea but a nick and his co-founders came together at a very specific moment in time when there was a bunch of new regulations happening in the baby product market and new testing requirements and so it created this sort of perfect moment to build light labs which will now probably end up being a really massive company and a bunch of other people will look at it five years from now and be like oh i kind of thought of that let's go to the squirrel story i know we don't talk about politics but this is this is animals seems to have broken through so uh the associated press writes an orphaned squirrel who became a social media star was euthanized after being seized from home and Mike Solana quote tweets it with say his name this wasn't even the biggest Mike Solana banger about this he yeah he he quote tweeted another video of like yeah this one uh he quoted a video breaking down the squirrel uh it was like all the best clips of the squirrel and uh it just says this is what they took from you the Elon quote got 150 million views that's like everyone on x right now yeah like every single person saw this every this meme was just a good way for posters to cash in yeah because like pat pat uh blumenthal yeah was like sent me one and he sent two and one of them got like 11 000 likes or something like something ridiculous but i think i think the real story is that uh the uh squirrel was a content to commerce play for this guy's only fans and so having uh the squirrel become a hero of the conservative movement very odd is a bit shaky ground to build on because if you look uh if you dig below the surface at all it's an only fans uh odd funnel yeah many many content plays are many instagrams are just fronts for fronts for only fans um are you familiar with Gell-Man Amnesia.

1:50:05I think we've talked about this. So Gell-Man Amnesia is this idea that like, let's say you're like, you know, the world expert in like structured credit and you pick up like the Wall Street Journal and they write an article about what you're a world expert in and they get some facts wrong. Then all of a sudden, when you read an article in the same newspaper that, that isn't about your expertise, you're like, well, if they got my thing wrong, maybe they're getting the thing that I don't know about wrong. It's kind of like the glass shattering and you realize like, Like, oh, there's all this, like, things aren't just broken in my world.

1:50:35They're broken everywhere. Yeah, it was like my dad reading an article about me in the New York Times. You know? Yeah, yeah. Like, oh, wait, maybe this isn't, like, the, you know, bastion of truth. Exactly, exactly. And so I feel like this was a huge Gelman amnesia moment for a lot of normies who just like animals. Because they're like, if the government could mess this up. Like, aside from all the laws, aside from whatever happened, just the idea of, like, euthanizing an internet famous furry animal is, like, comms nightmare 101, right? Like, you should never do that ever because they have virality and cuteness.

1:51:11And that's, like, all you need. So you know that there's going to be a backlash. You should know. And so if the government can mess up that, then maybe they can mess up the war in the Middle East or the Vietnam War. and so it's very easy to look at this and then realize be like oh the government and that's elon's point government overreach in action and it's like it's such a minor thing and it's like yeah i don't want to squirrel this is never going to happen to me but it's like if if they can get this that wrong like maybe they can get something else bigger wrong that does affect you and i've talked to a lot of people in defense i've seen this at the fda where it's like like a lot of the defense people are like well i went really deep dealing with the dod and i saw how broken And that was, and I wound up starting the company, but that led me to believe that not, it's not just the DOD that's broken in their procurement.

1:51:56It's also the state department, the department of agriculture and all of these different agencies that all have like similar levels of rot. Yeah, like Boeing, you know, has their issues with their planes, but they were also selling like 150 K like soap dispensers. Yep. You know, to the government. Yeah. It's very hard to be like, oh yeah, we are excellent everything, but just the one problem you're hearing about, usually like where there's smoke there's fire uh it was funny because i was watching this video of this cute squirrel videos i was watching with my three-year-old and he was just dying laughing just like so cute just like oh my god look at the squirrel and i'm like crying because i know how it ends and it was just like i was like oh my god this poor squirrel like i'm like tearing up and he's just like dying laughing because he just thinks it's like a cute squirrel and i was like damn like yeah when it was a dark when you find out you're going to be like the most hardcore libertarian ever but i'm not going to tell you uh you can listen to the podcast in 10 years and you can figure out what happened to the squirrel um but wild oh yeah here's the soap dispenser story so praying for exits uh good buddy says uh posts a screenshot of an article about boeing says boeing cleaned up on air force parts including soap dispensers marked up 8 000 percent wow oh yes Yes, good old government accountability.

1:53:14150K for soap dispensers certainly seems correct to me. So this is why I'm excited about, do you know Kimia? The AI thing. Yeah, so our friend Kimia is building a company that allows anybody to find and bid on government contracts. Yep. And what's going to be really interesting about that is by introducing, there's a lot of contracts out there that the government gives out that basically don't have much competition. Yep. If Boeing goes to them and they're like, we have these soap dispensers and we're Boeing and you buy a lot of stuff from us so why not spend these are great soap dispensers they're only a hundred thousand dollars per dispenser seem might seem like fine uh nobody gets fired for buying boeing but then if there was another bidder in the mix being like i will sell you a dispenser for five hundred dollars exactly and so kimmy kimmy is like arming the uh all the people all the drop shippers all the yeah basically like basically everyone will just be on aliexpress Yeah.

1:54:06So I, I, I, and this is, I talked to him about it's like his company will be very successful if he can inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs that want to go and be government contractors. Cause it's very tangible, right? It's actually easier to go and make money selling to the government than it is to buy something on Ali express, get it sent to you, mark it up, get the Facebook ad when you could just like product or service and customer product, service and customer. Right. So, uh, I think predicting out the next couple of years, Kimia is going to start a similar to what Shopify did. Yeah.

1:54:41A new movement around government contracts. Are you familiar with the story of Transdime? No. Oh man, it's fantastic. So it was profiled in this four episode limited podcast from Patrick O'Shaughnessy, host of Invest Like the Best, a separate podcast called 50X. And it's a fantastic deep dive into this company. It was like the least Silicon Valley company, private equity, buy up, roll up. Amazing. And then it goes from like 500 million to 5 billion to 50. There's like 50X of gain, and that's why it was profiled in the show. But the four episodes are like the CEO who was running the company, then the lead investor in the private markets, then back to the CEO for a second interview about taking it public and what they did next, and then the lead investor in the public markets.

1:55:32So you get this like very back and forth. It's just fascinating. And the first time I listened to it, I was like, this is like the craziest jargon because you think you're like taking crazy pills because they're like, so what's your secret? He's like, well, we raise prices and we cut costs. And it's like, and he says, and they talk about this for like 20 minutes. And you're like, okay, get to like the crazy one trick that everyone hates. That's so secretive. And really it's just like super operational efficiency. Go in, play books. Literally stuff that you can learn while getting a Harvard MBA, which is raise prices and cut costs.

1:56:02But Charlie Munger was asked about this on an Invest Like the Best episode. Like, what do you think of Transdime? Like, would you ever invest in this company? And he was like, no, I think it's unethical. And the reason is because a lot of the way that Transdime makes money is they go, like they make like all of the seatbelts on planes. So, you know, if you go on a Boeing or an Airbus, when you buckle your seatbelt, it's all the same clock, right? They're doing the toilets. All the toilets are the same. All the seats are the same. And all of that stuff, they make like, you know, some sort of fan blade that goes in like every motor.

1:56:32And so what they'll do is they'll get intellectual property around that, get a small monopoly on one single part. And then once they have a contract with the government, they'll raise the price. So their margins are really good. And I don't think they ever get this egregious. But what they'll do is they'll say like, okay, yeah, like we sent you this part for like a dollar. It costs us 50 cents to make. But the next batch is going to be like 100 bucks. And the government's like, ah, 100 bucks, like whatever. Like that's so little. It doesn't matter. But they're buying a lot. And then all of a sudden Transdarm starts making a lot of money.

1:56:59And so it seems like they're rent-extracting. The government has budgets, but no profit incentive. Nobody working in the government really has this sort of profit incentive. Yeah, exactly. But it's fascinating. It's a very, very contentious company. Like some people love it. Some people hate it. It's a fantastic financial story. But it's just like under discussed in my opinion. Meanwhile, they're running Seize Candy and they're like, we raise prices 7 % every single year, no matter the market conditions or anything else. Yeah. Brand monopolies are okay, I guess. Yeah, brand monopolies are fine.

1:57:28Everyone has their preferred monopoly. They're like, this one's natural, and the other ones aren't, and all the other ones should be broken up, but my monopolies are good. Monopoly is for me, but not for thee. Let's go to Jack Prescott. He says, whatever happens after the earning call, the mission and focus will remain the same. Execute and deliver. Protect the West. Palantir. Should we do a live reaction to the earnings? Oh, did the earnings just happen today? I think they were today, yeah. I love Palantir. fantastic company very interesting business earnings per share beat 10 there we go uh no no i don't think that i don't think it's actually they're trading really well they're they're they're trading like a tech stock now which is fantastic uh i think they broke 100 billion i saw this insane uh chart that shamsankar sent me uh the it was like every company in defense all the primes their market cap and then their employees and palantir is like fourth by market cap and they have 3 000 employees and every other company has like over 100 000 employees crazy it's remarkable like do more with less yeah it's good stuff it's interesting google is not up to date it should be probably on perplexity let's actually compare this just open the bloomberg app yeah just need to pull up we need to get a terminal on the desk terminal right here uh but yeah it's interesting that yahoo is up to date um And yet perplexity is quite up to date.

1:59:00so congratulations to all palantir shareholders palantir sales be stock up 13 13 wow so it must be over 100 billion now yeah that's fantastic i was uh i was at a defense tech event in dc and uh sham sankar the cfo who's been there since like day one he might be a co-founder like first employee uh he gave this great talk about palantir and what they're building and you know how they want to work with startups and whatnot. And somebody asked this question like, oh, well, you've, uh, you've raised like, you know,$4 billion in the private markets and your revenue is only like$4 billion. So like, isn't this like a failure financially?

1:59:40And he was just like, oh my God, like you don't understand like the first thing about finance. The guy was from, uh, out of the country. He was from like France. So I'm like backwater like that. And, uh, and, and so the next question I asked, I raised my hand. I was like, uh, so you've raised, uh, only, We've raised only$4 billion and yet your company is worth like more than 10 times that like how do you make it look so easy?

2:00:01Yeah, their PE ratio is 243 I mean software and they and they have an amazing AI story right because they have like all this private data that no one can get into And so it's like they're gonna be able to sell like very differentiated. Yeah, I think there's I think there's that's it potentially a trillion dollar company. I mean carp is just founder mode like he's the embodiment of it and it's like don't bet don't bet against that yeah seriously um steve weissner says email marketing is dying google ads are dying cold calls well are dead not sure people fully realize we're at a huge inflection point for marketing gotta think differently about how to reach your customers so how do you think so what's interesting about this is that it feels like a lot of sales is all going to go back to relationships.

2:00:55Sure. And so the truly gifted salesperson that's just good at making people like them and wanting to do business with them is actually going to excel, even in a world where as a small company, you can have an army of like online digital clones that are just selling constantly. And it feels like people may only start responding to like a personal message of being like, hey, like the CEO of this company wants to meet you. like let me know if you're down for a conversation and it's like sure yeah so it's like going back to centra's point and like core learning from studying the history's greatest entrepreneurs like relationships around the world yep and in an era of uh ai that will become even more the case yep yeah you can't disrupt the chad that just like people like to do business with i think there's an interesting thing that this tweet misses which is like a lot of these things companies have moved on to like this doesn't even acknowledge like owned media going viral on tiktok doing stunts being really good at press like there are areas of marketing that still are like they might die off in the next few years but he didn't even really capture like the tail end of this but i agree with your point and it's interesting because he's direct response marketing seems to be working better than ever like meta is getting so optimized that i buy products on a weekly basis from companies I've never heard of because they serve me an ad for a highly relevant product.

2:02:21And that still seems to work. And Meta is figuring out a way that even though CPMs have gone up dramatically, like the ads still work. Like you can't brute force a stupid product into being really big like you could like a decade ago. But the ad platform is like getting better and better. But yeah, I think what this misses is like you are going to need to figure out how to get high quality attention for your product or your business and there's and you're not going to be reliant on this like tool set that everybody has access to yeah i think people miss this with like the the ai spam or like ai sales agents is like there's going to be an arms race and just as fast as the ai spam increases like so will the ai filtering it's that classic like there's this web comic that's like oh this is amazing this this uh this ai uh i just type one bullet point and it turns into it turns it into this like really long email and then on the other side it's like this ai is amazing it turns this long email into just one bullet point and it's like the relationships are built on just like text messages between two people that are just like do you want to do this deal yes or no yeah thumbs up and that's the end so uh so so i i i i'm very skeptical about like the spam being a good path.

2:03:39Unless there's something like you really found some weird edge and you're just like, but it's going to be short-lived. Yeah, the other thing that's cool is now that anybody can, anybody can be like a pretty competent developer. Yep. I, a founder of my portfolio who's not the CTO of his company, like almost won a hackathon this last weekend just by using all of the publicly available tools. And so what's interesting to that is it's the really talented marketers of today going forward are going to be looking more like engineers where historically the really sophisticated marketing organizations like ramp as an example they have like a lot of engineering involvement in the marketing activity that they're doing and so you have to imagine that the new marketers are not the the best marketers are not going to be like the affiliate marketers or like i'm really good at adsense because that's all just like automated now it's like i'm actually writing code to better find and attract and do all you know customers yeah yeah it's very interesting like that boring business says good times create high EBITDA multiples high EBITDA multiples create bad times bad times create low EBITDA multiples low EBITDA multiples create good times so I think this is a funny tweet but I have to say that I feel like it is great good CEOs create high EBITDA multiples, high EBITDA multiples create sloppy CEOs, uh, bad CEOs create low EBITDA multiples and, uh, low EBITDA multiples, uh, create opportunities for good CEOs.

2:05:14Yeah. Uh, it's kind of like the wartime versus peacetime CEO thing a little bit. I think that there's, uh, I think what, what, I mean, what needs to be like unpacked about the wartime CEO is just that there's like a million different wars that you can fight. There's like the war of like my company is dying and I need to like fire people, cut costs, and just like keep this thing going to like make it to the next fight. And you need a wartime CEO to get through that hard time. But then you also need a wartime CEO to go back on the offensive. So there's like defensive wartime CEO, offensive wartime CEOs, and they're both wartime CEOs.

2:05:55Yeah, the good example right now is Sundar at Google spending the last 10 years. Everyone says he's like the classic peacetime CEO. Yeah, he's making so much money. Every employee is making a lot of money. The shareholders are doing well. Everybody's just kind of coasting. And then it's like, boom, Sam Altman comes in and laps you on AI. All your AI products internally suck. Everybody loves Sam Altman's products. boom you make room for the the perplexity guy which is becoming a legendary ship poster himself and uh has a very high extreme even a multiple for his business today um and uh so yeah it's the um relaxed ceos creating opportunities for cracked ceos yep i think that's right uh atlas says amazing now we have linkedin thread guy goon entrepreneur influencers depicting an aigf in front of the giant goon tower in dubai the goon capital of the world we are still so early and it's another one of these we talked about this before i created this ai influencer in two minutes it's making me three thousand dollars a month and i only work 60 minutes a day let me show you how to get started and of course there's like an entire economy of people selling courses on how to make your your like army of well you know that and i just want to see i like if somebody's watching and and they can send me their stripe dashboard just showing that how much you're making their goonfluencer is actually making money like i'll shut up but until then i'm just gonna keep calling this stuff out because well the dashboard shows that the courses are selling you know i love how this guy too his username is at creatine cycle and uh i wonder with this quality of posting i'm guessing he stopped cycling and he's just always always on it yeah always on it um well you know that uh like when you join andrew tate's like you know club to you know become like a entrepreneur or whatever he had like most most of like the fake guru entrepreneur hustle core core seller guys have like one thing they're like i'm the real estate guy i get you in my funnel i talk about how i became rich through real estate and then you will eventually pay for my course or like my in-person thing to learn how to do real estate or there's a different person that does it for crypto there's a different person that does it for you know uh shopify sites or whatever Andrew Tate does all of them yeah he doesn't do just one you go in and there's like eight modules and it's like learn crypto one of them's forex trading another and then and then as soon as AI got big he has an AI module so you can become like an AI influencer like this guy might be like downstream of Tate in some ways that's crazy fascinating yeah it's smart going multi-product Tate has so much yeah attention and such a crazy funnel I'm sure that he understands the product shifts but people are just buying the attitude and like the brand and it doesn't matter what the product is you know you can sell anything it's wild yeah let's look at cody norquist he said he traded in his tesla zero regrets he bought a extremely depreciating range rover that will probably be worth half as much in uh in six months yeah i just i don't know if this guy's in tech but i do think that this is the beginning of a trend where tech people discover luxury products and they're like wow these are actually pretty nice I never well I never even thought of going to a non Tesla dealership I went as you know my I tried my friends Range Rover and wow this actually feels like pretty good you know it's like you know those tests that they do in cars where they like touch all the buttons yeah plastic and stuff like that and there's something about yeah like you can't like I my driver the guy that I used to get two and from the airport he i had to tell him like don't pick me up in a tesla because he has a tesla and he has um like a uh just like a regular like black car or whatever and being in the tesla one everything feels like cheap and kind of wonky and i just don't like it the acceleration is the other thing but yeah i just don't it's just not a luxury product and i don't want to be in them yeah um and so now that not only are there other like electric products out there but this like sort prevailing narrative that maybe gas cars aren't that bad and um i just think that if this trend continues to play out it'll be good for san francisco because people aren't going to want to get it's really expensive to replace a range rover window that's been shattered by somebody that's breaking into your car that's slow you know you can just eat it it's like yeah i i do think that one of the most underrated near-term bull cases for Tesla is just actually filling out the product portfolio.

2:10:52There's no reason why they can't do a Mercedes S-class, a supercar, which they've been talking about. But even just taking a Model S and being like, everything has wood and real metals and stuff. And yeah, it costs twice as much, but you know it's the luxurious. They don't have a minivan. They don't have a minivan. They don't have a station wagon. They don't have a convertible currently. They don't have a full-size SUV. like they're just like missing a bunch of pieces but then also within the range you know like Mercedes has done a great job having like the S-Class the E-Class the A-Class and the S-Class like it feels different when you're inside like even the leather stitching is different than an A-Class and that's not that hard to do it just hasn't been a priority because the whole thing has been economies of scale economies of scale around the batteries around the acceleration the self-driving but if you get to a point where you can buy something and it's like okay yeah I'm getting the the model the model x but with the upgraded package that takes it to range rover level yeah of luxury like it's game over because it's going to be so much safer than a range rover when you're driving with the self-driving and stuff like but you're just not gonna unless you unless you have a driver who's better than this but i don't know i yeah i think and that will be good for the whole tesla brand if there are products that genuinely feel yeah like everyone's I'm talking about, oh, they need to go down market to like the$25 ,000 car.

2:12:10But maybe they actually need to. They're already basically there because you can buy a depreciated Model 3 for around$25 ,000. But what you can't buy is a Tesla that has the luxury features of like a Rolls-Royce. And Lucid Air kind of came in as like the top upper market. But they could just crush Lucid with like a slight tweak to the interior. And if Tesla built a$400 ,000 car, it would be amazing. People would buy it. would be yeah it would it would it would start displacing i'm sure that has a much bigger market than the poor sangue right totally totally and i think the i think the design language is evolving like the 3s x y like those all have like very neutral unoffensive looks the cyber trucks in the exact opposite direction but the cyber truck showed me that they could build something that's like as iconic as a huracan design or something like that and so if they can bring some of that to like what does Tesla's edgy next generation design language look in a luxury sedan or a full-size SUV?

2:13:10Like Escalade, I think they had a timeless design and they've ridden it so long now that even with the electric, the new electric Escalade is I think 180K. Tesla should get in there and be right at 180K. But see, okay, when you run the company like Elon does, you can probably put even more crazy stuff in there, right? because you can get into like, you know, operational efficiency around how he's acquiring like the wood and tell a story there. There's probably something really interesting that could happen. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to David Holes, founder of Mid Journey. Love this guy. Played a StarCraft with six friends last night.

2:13:46It was a free for all. We added two AIs to fill out the eight player map. We spent the whole game fighting each other while the AI slowly took over and suddenly were too powerful and beat us all. A lesson in AI safety. i think this is a great example it also i used to play starcraft quite a bit and uh i was diamond ranked and like pretty good so i would usually smoke the bots but i have some distinct memories where you're just like oh my god i just got steamrolled by like you you think that you're like winning basically and you're just on one side of the map and then just like this It's like, and that could be like what we're doing right now, which we're like, Oh, look at like the cute LLM.

2:14:31And like, Oh, I just generated this funny picture of like a squirrel meme. Yeah. And then you just get steamrolled by the AI. Yeah. I wonder what AIs he was using just like in game AIs or something third party. Well, every video game has their, of course they've had like their AI. But those AIs I believe have never, maybe they cheat or something, but there was the story with OpenAI, they had the Dota team and then they did a StarCraft thing as well where they were able to beat the like the world champions and for that I think they had a specific restriction where they interacted with the game via an API but they still limited the actions per minute so they couldn't just get like inhuman reactions and then also the API lets you see like beyond the fog and they wouldn't they obviously wouldn't do that because it's cheating so they like they they nerfed the AI they make it like they kind of level the playing field but the ai still still wins and so like you kind of should expect the ai to win if you're going like no no chess master expects to beat an ai at chess but yeah it's kind of funny really makes it is the re it's like kind of it's great because it's a meme but at the same time it makes the case for these ai doomers that are like guys we need to stop fighting among ourselves and it needs to be more of like the humans versus ai like we need to take this seriously and that was more convincing than any like essay that i've seen from them totally which are really easy to be like that like cool story bro yeah i mean david just has great takes on all this stuff like he's he is pretty like agi pilled and um but he has like very nuanced takes he's not just like out there like saber rattling and like having a conniption fit every two seconds why did you how did you select joshua steinman we are good morning we are going to win okay simple this is not a new tweets every single day tweets it every single day yeah not even a particular banger yeah uh some of them ended up since some of them it's funny watching like the algo just some of them more than others but the reason i included it is that uh i see these like every three four days and every time i see it i'm like nice so anyways i just included it because it's american thank you for your service and i do think it's a public service and it's and it's kind of um it's an example of like marketers that think like oh like we're being too repetitive with this messaging where now i just associate steinman with winning and being committed to winning and it makes me want to back whatever he does and being optimistic right i mean and it's yeah it worked in the trump administration he's very pro-trump and and never faltered when the polls weren't going his way like yeah yeah yeah it's like he's he's a big fan um also i mean it's his version of like the jocko willing thing he posted this at 6 16 a.m and as we know the most important thing is not waking up early it's getting on twitter and posting first thing get on x post this is key will manitis says having a full-time bible instruction instructor is the new private jet yeah and uh pressed uh no i think was it no preston court tweeted phio about something else but um No, I think this is relevant because we know some people with full-time Bible instructors.

2:17:46We know some billionaires with full-time Bible instructors. And it just shows that even a product like the Bible that is available to everybody and been analyzed over and over and over and over for generations, it's still worth hiring a tutor and learning even if you have the time to study it intensely. Yeah, there's also an interesting thing where like even if you're the most like atheist skeptic about the Bible, it's a valuable text just because it's so old that it's been copied again and again and again in so many different stories like the Lion King or whatever. So the first thing a child learns, the first story that a child learns is like a hero's journey that's derived from the Bible.

2:18:33And so if you can go to the source text, understand like the way the story and the narrative is structured, that gives you power in storytelling and also understanding like what resonates with people. Our mutual friend who is a Bible instructor to the global elite, his main point is that if you don't understand the Bible, you're going to miss so many other things when you're reading some random story like The Lion King. It's like, oh, well, like. Yeah, it does just improve like, you know, your edification and your enjoyment of other literature. So, yeah, get the full time Bible instructor. Although, I don't know, maybe with AI, it'll be on demand soon.

2:19:14uh some of those bible apps like print money yeah like it's a good business there's a few and then there's that company angel studios one of the most underrated uh media companies that does really well really yeah christian uh like they they did an adaptation of the bible um that uh was like hbo level cinematography and uh and did really well and they produced a number of of films that are all like uh related to christian themes and um but more interestingly like the business has just become very very good yeah uh and they've done they've done very well and they can sell tickets to try to monetize there's um yeah a podcast called the bible project that i listen to that's totally free they don't do ads but it's donation based which is like yep um at what point should they just become a church sure right um an online church effectively um that's cool just pay what you want yeah uh power tools are making a comeback julian fried fried says the power tool renaissance is underappreciated it's a great time to be alive if you are someone who likes making things and yes this is this is i shared this because it's funny because tech guys whose only tools has been a phone and a laptop are now discovering that there's the democratization of super high quality power tools that has been happening like in the background and there's like entire religions oriented around the different brands of power tools and whether you're like a makita guy or a walkie guy i've seen those memes and the guys that have their drills like fight each other like attach two of them and they just like um so i haven't gone down the power tool like uh you know rabbit hole and watched a thousand hours of some youtube i feel like i got to like tim ferris pilled where tim's like mindset was like if if something if you can hire if you make five hundred dollars an hour and you can hire somebody to do do the job for a hundred dollars an hour now when i'm doing stuff yeah nick huber's like why would you stand on a ladder and it's like it's it's a good point now when i'm doing like if i do something around the house glory and i do like yeah glory household glory i find that uh i think women are attracted um you know when i when i can like use a hammer uh sarah's like nice i remember one of my first dates with my now wife like went over to her sister's place changed the light bulb everyone was like this guy's god yeah it was amazing marry this man yeah fantastic i gotta up my power tool game i need uh i need to build up we're gonna get some i think we should yeah on the rack there on the wall uh tom morello from rage against the machine posts 25 years ago today the battle of los angeles the cover art for that that album that has Bulls on Parade and a couple of really hit songs.

2:22:15And Oren McIntyre quote tweets and says, you have the same political beliefs as BlackRock and Citibank. I think he was trying to dunk on him, but your point of view is that. I love Rage Against the Machine and I love BlackRock and Citibank. There you go. So what a match made in heaven. I'm glad. Welcome to the club, Tom. If you have the same, if you have the same political beliefs as BlackRock, you're a friend of mine. It's great. yeah it is kind of odd that people try and dunk on this like like i do think it's a good way to get people to question their beliefs yeah because if somebody thinks that organizations like black rock and citibank are inherently bad and then you tell them they have the same set of beliefs as that group then it is a good uh at least thought starter in their mind to be like maybe i should have a more open mind around certain things this is also one of those interesting tweets where like i can't quite tell if this is a leftist or rightist tweet uh critique like it could be like you believe you like citibank and they like esg and dei so you suck and i and like you should be more right wing or it should be like you like the capitalist black rock and citibank you should be more left wing yeah and it's like i don't really know but all i know is black basically it kind of makes sense like raging against like black rock is the machine right so it's saying like if you're raging against the machine yet you shouldn't be aligned with the machine yet you're aligned with the you're stimulating the machine yeah but who knows maybe blackrock and city bank are raging against the machine the machine of stagnation yeah the machine of under financialization blackrock created burning man which is exactly it is the foundation on which burning man was built yeah the machine of a lack of financial products uh i wouldn't want to live in that world be a disaster how long how long until we go viral for being the podcast bros that say no no that say that black rock created black rock city eventually we'll get there it's gonna happen there's there's like a cottage industry of uh of youtubers that just put out endless like hit pieces on black rock being like did you know that they own everything and they don't understand how like fund of funds or etfs work it's so hilarious and you watch someone fall into that trap and you're just like oh my god take one economics class please it's really bad anyway uh colin michols says i hope i'm pronouncing that correct michaels maybe colin michaels uh few learn that spacex prices their launches way higher than it costs them to launch they're essentially reaping 30 to 60 million dollars in profit each launch blue origin existing is extremely good for the commercial space market bezos is notorious for downward price pressure and then he has to follow it up with an apology kind of i underestimated how many people would misinterpret this tweet lol i don't know what they were misinterpreting it seems pretty basic but um i mean everyone knows that spacex is like way ahead of blue origin but you know competition is good and if you competition is good going to space i mean it is for losers so wouldn't want to be as a space we'll get to that later in the pod as a space like well you know maybe you don't want to encourage thing.

2:25:25I do love when these, the Musk-Bezos rivalry in some ways is just so entertaining because they have warring properties like everywhere, right? They both have car companies because Bezos was like one of the biggest backers of Rivian. And then they have rival space companies. Obviously, everyone knows about that one, SpaceX and Blue Origin. They also have rival media efforts because Bezos owns the Washington Post. and wait but the way that you just said all this and it kind of makes it seem that elon is mogging bezos at literally every single one of these washington post tesla except in you know commerce commerce yeah yeah yeah yeah but it's i don't care about i don't i mean it's because i care about i care about what bezos is doing with his money now yeah and if you're repeatedly getting mogged yeah wow you have to imagine though that his performance across all those things is going to improve as his testosterone levels have climbed month over month for the past five years it seems like it's happening in the washington post a lot of changes there seems like he's improving that yeah maybe blue origin you know becomes a big space launch provider yeah but it's yeah i think that would be amazing for humanity i think olivia rodrigo or whatever his name is um there's there's another one too but yeah i mean i i think bezos is a little bit more of like an old school like mega billionaire where he sees the side projects very much as like side projects where it's like get somebody to do something go and show up like he's not on the factory floor at rivian yeah except for like feels like when he does something it's like he's putting his life on the line for it and it's like yeah almost you a lot of people this is a critique will say like well like i i actually just care about the space thing i would be fine with him not spending time on media but But Elon's like, I'm going to personally make this change the way this company works significantly.

2:27:16I'm going to go and rename it. I'm going to do all this crazy stuff. And for Elon, it's like, he only has one mode. Elon doesn't angel invest. Renaming Twitter has, the decision has grown on me quite a bit. When it happened, it was like one of my favorite brands, even though it was flawed. And it was very painful. Like for years, I would just input, I guess not that long, but I'd still put Twitter.com. and more and more it's feeling like yeah coming in and making it um just making it your thing actually makes sense in the context of elon yeah there's that saying like uh like when there's a change of leadership the company needs to be refounded yeah and that's certainly what elon did yeah change even changing the name change all the people change everything so that it's like but he had to do it because as we talked about with the true social thing like having a network is very important and it's very resilient.

2:28:13And even if the servers did go down, which was like a big FUD thing for a while, like people would have opened up that app. That's where they go. And it's very hard to get people to move, even though people tried to move to Blue Sky. We should do a deep dive on threads and how that's actually working. Yeah, it is, but it's very different. Yeah, it's a totally different subculture. Completely separate product. But yeah, cheers to both. Elon and Bezos, I love you guys. Another Steinman tweet, gotta love it. 100K views. It's a quote tweet from Arma, who posts a picture of the reception desk at General Motors Technical Center in 1965, interior by architect Eros Saarinen.

2:28:55It's crazy because this view looks like a 90s sci-fi movie that's super ahead of its time. And they were probably, the 90s sci-fi movie was just referencing General Motors. Because they had the technologists, they had the money, so they just went and sent it. And I'm sure it was like the most delightful place to work. If you were an engineer, you were like, this is beautiful. This inspires me. I want to go build great stuff there. It's fantastic. So Steinman says Detroit was fire back in the day. Then politicians decided shipping jobs to China was more important than the American industrial base.

2:29:28Making it political, bro. We don't talk about politics on this show. Not on this podcast, but we'll highlight some great aesthetics. We will love some great aesthetics. Fantastic. Yeah, I'm really excited for this new generation of hard tech and defense tech companies. They're going to do stuff like this for sure. Because they're going to do stuff like, we're going to do this at deterrence. Right now it's messy, like sleeping on the floor of the warehouse, but it will be beautiful. And there are some companies, I forget if it's Airbnb. All the, like when Lockie grooms robotics company, it will have like a robot playing a symphony in the entryway.

2:30:01Like, they're welcome to use this idea, just throw some shares to Technology Brothers. Yes, yes, yes. There is a company that made, I feel like I read it in a hit piece, it's like, oh, they spent too much money on this. But they built a full replica of the Dr. Strangelove, how I learned to love the atom bomb. There's this Stanley Kubrick film, and there's this iconic huge boardroom where all of the military leaders are meeting, and it's this massive, massive boardroom that's huge. The closest? 50 people. Is the closest? They built a replica of it. is the closest example to this, like the scale AI office.

2:30:39I haven't been, but isn't it pretty iconic? I've been, it's, I don't know if I've been to the newest one. It was beautiful, but it didn't, like the thing that stands, like this stands out. This stands out. No, it's just like, it's just like, it's hard to differentiate because like there is some practicality. Like, like this, this, this like entryway desk is like the most impractical thing. There's so much like wasted space here, but that's exactly the point. I love how the woman is sitting like on an island basically in a bowl. It's fantastic. And it's like you can't get within five feet or whatever.

2:31:11Yeah. It's great. So yeah, making like bold design decisions like that that are, they go against the obvious optimization of like square footage. Like it is going to cost you more to do this, but it's going to make a statement and it's going to be more important to the business long term. Maximalism. Yeah. Red Bull Futurist writes, I want a dozen kids. This guy's awesome. yeah he's a rocket scientist oh really an emerging rocket scientist cool he's involved with SpaceX also caffeine connoisseur caffeine connoisseur Excel enthusiast yeah I think this is like I pulled this out because ten years ago he would have been ostracized for saying something like this it would have just been so random yeah but the pro natalist movement he's like now becoming like the like the new norm yep at least within the tech community and i think it's great because i hope red bull futurist uh goes and has 12 children yep because they're all going to be a bunch of smart little rocket scientists yeah and uh will probably create the companies that topple spacex and blue origin monopoly on space yeah i mean the trick is just like breaking free of the memetics around like what it takes to have a dozen kids.

2:32:31Like, yeah, you probably need to live on a ranch outside of a major city. Probably not raising a dozen kids in Manhattan unless you're a trillionaire. But if you're willing to go live in some interesting place and, you know, set your life up to be, oh, there's a couple other families there with lots of kids and we homeschool or something or we do something interesting. And like, you know, we've designed our life with that being the KPI, that's the priority. Well, then it becomes very easy. Everything flows from that. So shout out Red Bull Futurist. high yield harry great fintech influencer writes uh oh you just ran the nyc marathon that's sick dude i just spent all day building an investment memorandum that no one is going to read so i feel like high yield harry and some of the other folks from his generation of posters like basically it almost it's it's like they there it seems like there's infinite competition now from these sort of new posters sure and yet these guys are like pretty stable like they've got like they're like posting you know regimen and you know uh it seems like they've kind of broken above the noise where you see a post from a high-yield harry now and you know that it means something yep you know it's not just it's not just a shit post it's a little black-filled though i feel like if you write an investment memo someone should read it come on man yeah but i think it's more I think he's more saying, you know, look, when I write a memorandum, people put in size.

2:33:53They're not worried about what it says. They know I wouldn't write it if it wasn't worth putting. They just see the attachment and they wire it. They don't need to open it. Yeah, they go straight for the wire. Okay, I like this. This is a little bit more optimistic than what I was thinking. It was very like low-level analyst coded where it's like I'm doing kind of make work and this sucks. That's how I read it at first, but I like your interpretation more. Yeah, I got to go long, hairy. I love it. Yeah, early, early thin. that's great to it mostly just anything to avoid watching the new york city marathon i was on the phone with somebody yesterday they were like oh call me after i got to watch the marathon and i picked up the phone and i was like i'm gonna keep it real with you watching a marathon sounds like the most boring thing i could possibly imagine i'm not i'm already not that into the only way that you should be watching a marathon is if you're betting on it others in it you're betting on it or you're running in it yeah exactly the best way to watch a marathon is by running in To be fair to my buddy, I did.

2:34:45I, he did have a friend in it and he was like cheering the friend on and stuff. Yeah. Well, even, even not a friend, watching your friend. It's like, if you're watching a friend run a marathon, like it better be like some like blood, like relative connection. And even then it's cringe. But even look at the Spanish when they go to a bull run, they're not just watching. They're running. They're running with the bulls. That's great. Yeah. So let's bring bull runs back. Bull run. Yeah. Replace the New York city marathon with bull run. Or just put a bull into the marathon. For sure. for sure yeah in new york city talks this big game oh we have wall street bull we're all into bulls prove it bull on the street bull turn it loose turn it loose today turn it loose now i want i want a new york city let the marathon go give them a one minute head start one minute and then release the bulls yeah no slackers yeah not just one bull like 10 yeah 10 you better be running And make every person running the marathon wear red.

2:35:41Yes, yes, that's great. Yeah, no slack. We need to step up the expectations of the NYC Marathon. Let's do it. Increase the stakes. Another Palantir tweet, a little bit more of a shit post. I like this one, though. But you know it's good because the other one didn't have the badge, so it was just a fan, like a guy who owns the stock. This says the employee badge. So Eliano Yunus says, with a lot of Palantir merch now out in the wild. Here are some ground rules to follow when sporting the logo. No drugs, no fighting, no theft, no more than two beverages, no elliptical, no kipping pull-ups.

2:36:24Why is he singling out kipping? Oh, because it's a CrossFit thing. Sorry, I was thinking, I was, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really good. I thought, I was thinking muscle-ups because I've never done a kipping. I only do muscle-ups. Yeah, of course. Strict, strict muscle ups. Strict muscle ups. No, no, you know, sort of like. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for doing your part. The reason that this is relevant is like when a company crosses a hundred billion dollars in market cap, does it become a religion? Because like, yeah, he's kind of acting as like a priest of saying like, this is good and right. And this is wrong.

2:36:58It is. I think it's a good. Yeah. I mean, it is legitimately valuable to be like, you know, this merch is out in the world. We want to like set a tone for like what it means to have this. And, you know, some of this is a joke, but some of this is very real. And so I like that. He's like enforcing a brand standard, like a little bit more broadly. And hopefully people got the message. If I see someone doing kipping pull-ups and a Palantir shirt, it's over. I'm going to show them this tweet. I printed it out. Let's keep it. Let's each keep a copy in our wall. Yeah, exactly. For when we run into somebody from Palantir, I mean, Palantir fantastic team.

2:37:30I, I, from some random content thing, I got a DM from a kid who just graduated from some school and went to Palantir. And it was still a cut above. It's a 20-year-old company. You just don't see that anywhere else. It's wild. Simp for Satoshi, IamGingerTrash says, By the way, Polymarket will become a way to short startups post-election. The financial primitive is finally here. yeah and i think what's um what's interesting about this is that you know having the news around bowery today is like okay this is two billion dollar company that's was that's now as of whatever this last week worth zero the thing that uh that so i really hope this becomes true because it'll provide a lot of content for us and we'll be putting some size on the platform for The interesting thing though is that the private markets effectively have legalized insider trading already.

2:38:30All the private markets are is using inside knowledge on companies, teams, founders, and placing bets accordingly. And so what will be extremely chaotic about this is that if this actually happens, companies will have to be like employees. You are legally not allowed to trade the company's polymarket. because like it'll be like that you'll see so much activity of like right leading up to a big product announcement it's like oh 20 million dollars just got placed on polymarket right and so hopefully this doesn't lead to more like if this actually plays out it'll be it'll lead to a lot of pressure around the private yeah yeah we've just reinvented yes we just we just reinvented stocks from first principles lmfao yes um well you know how they do this for like uh so death pools are like illegal you can't bet on someone dying because then you have this really perverse incentive to like go kill them obviously um but on polymarket there are a number of contracts that are like uh this person will still be the leader of you know hamas by this date and so it's like we well they could step down but really what you're betting on is like are they going to get taken out and so there's a bunch of like you know uh you know proxy stats that you could probably build to to get there where you say like uh this company's domain will still be live or like this company where you're not like truly betting on just the stock going down but it's like some proxy for them yeah the real the cool thing would be the real meta stuff around polymarket where like will polymarket do 100 million in volume on this month in 2025 right because like you're you're able to bet about the platform on the platform and it's if it's on chain then it's all like verifiable but then there's also the incentive of like okay if i put a bunch of size into this into this bet then i could just artificially create the volume what's interesting is that like there are already polymarket markets that are direct representations of liquid financial markets, like one of the most like popular categories that I see is like, will Bitcoin hit 80K in December?

2:40:42And it's, or will Bitcoin hit 100K by the end of the year? And it's like, you could just buy Bitcoin. Why are you betting on this in this weird way? But that's kind of an effective way to short Bitcoin, I guess. It's some sort of like proxy. It's not perfect. And so I could imagine this, but for a lot of startups, like the liquidity is just not going to be there because there just aren't going to be that many people that care about some series A company that like is got some VC platform teams have entire teams. It would be funny if there was like a VC. Dropping up their, their portfolios like poly market accounts.

2:41:13Yeah. Um, yeah. The insider sharing will be crazy. I, it would be interesting to see a VC be like, yep, we're pivoting to like long, short. Yeah. Like we are a long, short fund. Like, and like, like we will, we will be going long one company and we will be going short the other companies because we think our founders are going to win. And so we're, we're investing a$20 million series a, and we're putting$10 million on Polymarket on shorting all the other companies. Crazy. We already did Bowery. Let's do... Bayslord says, how do we get a new elite in America? I think this one is broken. Seems like we're in the midst of a power shift.

2:41:50No technology trends to disrupt established hierarchies way more than it cements them, I think. We are, I don't aimless post. Yeah, the new elite thing. I was talking to somebody about this. This is the story of Elon. Makes a bunch of money in tech. Starts owning everything. All these super important robotechs. But doesn't just wind up laundering it through a bunch of nonprofits. Yeah, and then buys one of the biggest media companies in the world. A social media company. That is the story. He's doing impact investing, even though some people might not like the impact that he's having. Like he's putting his wealth to work in like very specific targeted ways.

2:42:31He's just an impact investor. Essentially, much more than like, you know, oh, diffusing a billion dollars through a bunch of nonprofits that are kind of like moving the needle. Yeah, I saw someone else. Classic straws. Yeah, I saw someone else say like, because Elon, I guess, was like helping bus people into Pennsylvania or whatever. And somebody was like, we have our George Soros. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, yeah. But I mean, the other thing that's underrated about like elites is when you, I think when people go back to like this idea of like we need better elites, we need the older elites.

2:43:00It's like back in the 17th century, 18th century, early 19th century, the elites were the ones who would go and build Hearst Castle, Versailles. They built these like massive houses and then they would, and then they weren't just like perfect boxes of glass that were mimetic with everyone else. And they just wound up looking like track homes. They were like these very unique expressions of wealth. And then when they turned over, it didn't make sense for anyone else to maintain them, even the descendants. And so they became museums and libraries. And yeah, and like, there's so many stories of this where - Yeah, the Getty is that, right?

2:43:37Yep, exactly. Like the Getty, what's the other one in Pasadena? I forget. The Huntington, it was a house. The guy was so rich. He was a railroad baron, oil baron. he built train tracks that went to his house because he wanted to just be able to oh i want to take the train to new york this is this is elod gill and his new monument company new monument company this is nat friedman yeah with his with his like one-off projects the scrolls these are dividends that get paid to society and and pay back in probably better ways than most of the other things because they build the brand and founders want to work with them and so they get better deal flow so it actually is rational this guy uh go and message your favorite elite which you can dm them on twitter and just pat them on the back say thank you for for doing something good doing the money good yeah something interesting yeah something interesting that will live on beyond you i mean bezos is doing that with the long now thing the i think that's what it's called he's building this clock in this mountain that will allow it'll keep time for like a million years and it's just like this really heroic you know engineering project yeah Yeah, it's just like this heroic engineering project.

2:44:45And it's something that like everyone right now is like, oh, the project's not going well. Oh, it's not working. You know, it's like this massive mega project, but then it'll probably work in the next 20 years. You know, it just takes time. And then it'll just be this thing that people go visit. If you want eternal time, have a little patience. Have a little patience. Skip that one. Men only want, let's see, Dylan Morris says, men only want one thing and it's disgusting. Who wants to split this with me? and it's on biz buy sell award-winning sailboat manufacturing business in san luis obispo county and it's going for 495k and it cash flows 75k and they build sailboats that's um that's a tough uh would you split that with him i i'm not going halves on that this we talked about this last time yeah buying a company with less than half a million of cash flow is buying a job and this one if you split it with a buddy it's buying the minimum wage jobs you could like you could just work at chipotle and then like go and like build sailboats for fun on the weekends i think businesses like this like we need a movement around entrepreneurs and retiring boomer operators to be like i'm hiring an apprentice to learn my trade and take over my business and i will give it to you on a seller note yeah over the next 15 years if you come in and operate it because like the only way that i could see this business even maybe being sellable is if a smart enterprising search funder out of stanford goes and decides i'm gonna roll up all the mom and pop sailboat manufacturers yeah and create a monopoly put a put a gun on it and raise some defense tech money let's go put a gun on it no i think um slap a 50 cal on the front i actually know a guy who sailed sailboats all around uh like the he would sail like all the way from california to australia and he actually did have a 50 cal on the front because he was worried about pirates smart and he would be able to like fire off warding shots if something happened because when you're out there alone like anyone could just come up to you and what are you gonna do call the cops they'll be there in two days like that doesn't work two days the sos yeah yeah yeah Yeah, yeah, you're on your own.

2:46:59Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. John Palmer says, I feel like joining the WorldCoin team is kind of like the crypto dev equivalent of joining the Marines. People join there and then you never hear from them again because they're just grinding. Strong men create good times, et cetera. What do you think about WorldCoin? The eyeball scanner. The eyeball scanner. Very dystopian, but I'm always like, I'm just bullish on SAM projects and i'm i'm i'm interested to see like kind of like the manifestation of that idea yeah you haven't i feel like you don't hear the other thing about it is like i feel like a lot of world coin activity is just happening overseas sure so like these devs are like being deployed to africa just like scanning eyeballs and like doing it more efficiently yeah um but yeah i think uh i'm excited to like hear more about like yeah it's so it's so dystopian in a way you would only do it if it was like you thought it was really important work.

2:48:00I mean it does feel like in line with Sam's idea of like okay in the future we need UBI we need it to be a global UBI. It is truly the fully automated luxury communism concept. How do you distribute wealth to every single human individually? Like well you need something that's you know identifiable on a human basis and then has its own internal currency that can then be distributed and redistributed endlessly. We should get a WorldCoin orb. I'm down. WorldCoin can sponsor the orb. I'm down. Antobiology says, whenever something is PFAS-free, non-toxic, as a nonstick pan, it usually just means they replace the thing that we studied and we know is bad with something that is unstudied, so we don't know it's bad yet.

2:48:51I love this guy. I, uh, it's got a really cool company in the cancer research space, like reviving, uh, a bunch of lost sort of like esoteric knowledge around cancer and like bringing it back. So anyways, this guy's like brilliant building something really cool. Um, I've gotten personally gotten some like great health tips from him, uh, via DMS. He gives this example, stainless steel, lowest aluminum possible corning glass cookware copper are all better if untreated cast iron kind of sketches me out because of the seasoning process you just perma burn fat onto an oxidizable surface and even if the fat is non-toxic excess iron so he goes on and yeah it's an interesting thing there's always this like rat race of like let's get rid of one thing oh we introduced a new a new bad thing like we got rid of yeah and then we wound up with microplastics it's hard because so many things that are uh so many products of modern manufacturing processes and things that we expect out of products end up being just deeply toxic yeah by their very nature and so it's really hard to shop for modern any any sort of consumer good now like you have to be hyper you have to be hyper aware of it and and even look like glass is superior to plastic um in pretty much i don't know in pretty much uh every single way except for its weight and it's shattered and all the health concerns and all you know it's sort of like safety concerns i mean um so yeah i think uh i i think that there should be a deep tech company that tries to create uh like the issue is the consumer packaged goods entrepreneur that's like i want to make a microplastic free version of blank, or I want to make a non-toxic pan.

2:50:43They don't have time to do a 10 year science experiment on creating a new material. We need more teams that are trying to create totally new materials that are non-toxic that can be used for everyday consumer goods. So somebody out there wants to spend a decade developing new materials for consumer goods that are non-toxic, we will back you. Molson Hart says, if you get rich when you're young in America, you will live in a neighborhood that is 90 % old people you cannot relate to at all. 8 % young people with family money that you can't relate to. And 2 % with a fellow Uber mensch that you can break bread with.

2:51:23Same goes for country clubs. It's pretty funny. It's pretty accurate. It's very true. I think what's interesting is you have this, at least in my neighborhood you have this balance of people that have moved into the neighborhood in the last five years and then people that are multi-millionaires because they bought their house like 20 to 30 years ago and the tension between those groups is crazy right because like they just want very different things um and so yeah but i think i don't know there's there's a lot of alpha and just going and being in a place where you're the younger person with energy that's still in in the trenches basically because all those other people just want to back what you do basically yeah yeah that makes sense i yeah when i moved into my neighborhood i was like we met our neighbors and i was like oh they're about the same age as us and my wife was like they're 15 years older than us no this this happens like i don't know with sarah and like her mom groups like the other moms in her group will be like 15 yeah 10 to 15 years older and they're just like yeah there's like a pretty lifestyle yeah well same lifestyle just totally different era yeah yeah i mean i i think the lesson is like is like that is not a criticism that it like the nice thing is still the nice thing and yeah it's sort of like you shouldn't be like oh okay because everyone else who's like in my world like lives in like a high rise like that's what i should do yeah no it's okay to go be like the odd one out at the country club or the odd one out in your neighborhood like that's fine just do it and meet the old people and it's fine yeah i think there's a lot of people that are are in environments where they're the young person and they build their entire identity around that and then they wake up one day and they're like wait like i'm the older person in the room and you actually always want to perpetually be the youngest person in the room but then you go from the workplace to the neighborhood to you know and you want to like stay on that yeah yeah very american trajectory it's great number runner run the numbs says ambition is just rage channeled and dance is real af you think that's accurate i don't rage i don't I feel like I've never gotten the feeling that Donald J.

2:53:53Trump is has internal rage. I think he more just like likes being likes attention and likes winning. And those are like the core motivation. That's funny because there's like a book about him that's literally called like Fire and Fury. And it's like it makes the case that he's driven entirely by rage. Yeah. Odd pick. i if you wanted to pick someone who's like peaceful but extremely ambitious i think you'd go for like a zuck or like uh like a steve jobs who like don't seem very like rageful but i guess you hear stories but i feel like you hear more stories about uh like i can think of that that exchange that zuckerberg had in the early facebook days where somebody's like where he's like yeah these people just like give me their the person's like they just give you all their data and he's like yeah these fucking idiots like trust me for some reason is that rage is that rage i don't know but you don't hear stories of like trump on like raging out at people right like he sort of gets i don't see it as rage um it's certainly like one one path to ambition obviously we hear a lot of stories of people are like they've been wronged they've been hurt but i think people really like boiling this down to just like a single precursor it's like you have to have a chip on your shoulder to do anything yeah you have to have rage you have to be yeah josh you have to come from a broken home or something like that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets it's like it's certainly true that there's some but there are a bunch of exceptions there yeah i don't know it's a good one if you if you have rage inside at least use it to create value for shareholders oh this is a great one i love this uh trivian says a friend was at a cafe in san francisco and and said, cursor crashed on his laptop.

2:55:38I like that he's just like saying this out loud, I guess. And it says, a cursor co-founder was walking by at that very moment and offered to debug. This company is sticking around. Is this an ad? Because this seems a little bit impromptu. Cursor crashed. Cursor crashed out loud, and then there just happens to be a cursor co-founder. I mean, talk about a great marketing stunt if this was planned. I don't think it was. It seems ridiculous. It seems, this is the type of thing that happens in cafes in San Francisco. Yeah, you saw the other there was something last week with a with a guy who was like in a SF like Cafe with just like a thing on the other side of his laptop That's like marketplace startup have revenue raising pre seed say hi or whatever and it's like Wait, really?

2:56:21So yeah, if you looked at his laptop, yeah, people were taking pictures and there was like only an SF but Yeah, I just think there's a reason that like half of the super important companies in the world come out of that area and it's because the density of like-minded people and the overlap that you can have with customers on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, I remember when I lived in San Francisco, I went to a cafe. I didn't work from cafes very often, but I went to a cafe maybe just to get a coffee and I ran into David Hole's co-founder at Leap Motion and I remember him just talking to me and I was like, oh, I love what you're working on.

2:56:53Like, this is super interesting and he was like breaking it down and yeah, it was like way back in the day when he was working on this, like it was hand tracking for VR. That was David's first company. Fascinating. That's just like the type of thing that happens. Serendipity. San Francisco is a serendipity magnet. David Zaganov says, realizing the reason they call it hard tech is because this is really hard. Makes for a nice moat, though. And then Dylan just says, nah, bro, that's not why. And then he says, this is why. And the tweet got cut off. I like this because. because it reminds me of like two cattle ranchers being like makes for a nice moat though yeah you know this cat raising cattle ain't easy but pays the bills it's a life so yeah i uh maybe we do a deep dive on why hard tech's called hard tech but um but yeah it's it definitely is real it's sort of uh nominative nominative determinism yeah shit's hard you know yeah yeah it makes sense i mean everything's just slower right like you need a part that could delay you a week there's just like a million things that could go wrong yeah interact with the physical world and then heavily heavy regulation yeah so it's just like you have two really tough factors that you can't move at the speed of of bits you have to move the speed of atoms and yeah when things break they physically break yeah rough rough but i think the the hard tech and hard is hard meme i think it i was around when i was in yc and i think it was probably true initially and then a psyop after a little bit not like an intentional one but like a negative meme where there was a time when it ceased being hard because just the capital markets were ripping so much and technology had gotten better and there were there were a bunch of ways to like do hard tech adjacent things whether it's white labeling or partnering or doing a bunch of different things and that's when the first boom of hard tech started and now we're all talking about it but all the big companies are like 10 years old so like clearly hard tech wasn't hard eight years ago when some of the big companies were getting started but everyone was repeating the cool the interesting thing is like this new generation of hard tech companies so i have portfolio company called shinkai which uses robots to kill fish using the traditional methodology that japanese fishermen would do and it's done in a way where they they basically insert like a needle into the back of the fish's brain.

2:59:27And when you kill a fish that way, the fish doesn't release all this cortisol and other stress hormones that make the fish age more rapidly. And the interesting thing about that is they're going to a market with like very little innovation, not a lot of competition. But then they're going to build this system that other people are going to realize, oh, that's a really good business. But then if you want to go compete with Shinke in five years, you're going to be going up against a company that can spend weight that's still very young, that can spend way more money on R &D and sales and marketing and distribution and has better cost structure and all this stuff.

3:00:06And the real hard tech is going after like a five to 10 year old hard tech company that's competing in the same exact category as you. That has more resources, that has more learnings, that has more customer relationships. And like, so that's the real, that's the hard, hard tech. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's go to Ivan Zhao. Zhao. Ivan says, why do Americans always vote on Tuesdays? because 1800s citizens needed a full day's horseback ride to reach polling sites after Sunday church. Pretty amazing that this democracy runs on horse and buggy software in the age of the internet and AI. That's a very interesting thing.

3:00:46I didn't know that. Super Tuesday, yeah. Every Tuesday, right? Because you need a full day. Wow. A full day. But you can't miss the church. I feel like if you rode a horse. He's the founder of Notion, right? Yeah, yeah. I feel like if you rode a horse to a polling site today, you would end up in a very viral video. So with the police breaking the horses, like it'd just be very dark. But no, I thought this was interesting because I hope that the Ivans of the world end up building software like, you know, more like out of the last week, it seems like there's been a lot of failures on the software side in regards to, you know, polling and voting specifically.

3:01:27And so if the voting and polling software of the future looks and feels more like Notion, I think that'll be a win for democracy. Is the digital polling ever coming? Like, we're so far. We're just so deep in this. I feel like we never – I'm so black-filled on it. I feel like it'll never happen. It should be so simple. but then again uh i was reflecting on the fact that maybe like 10 or 15 years ago there was this there's all these stories about oh well in japan they're like this cash the society they have this great nfc technology you just take your phone you can tap to pay you can tap for your id you can tap to get on the subway or whatever it's just all digital and it's like why can't we have that in America things are so backwards but then like for the last month I haven't carried anything other than my phone and it's been fine because the DMV finally moved over there's an app for it you can just pull up your driver's license there every single place takes Apple pay now and so we finally have caught up so maybe it'll happen with the digital voting probably not in the next election though the next election and then also all the skepticism about the the the integrity of elections like one party is going to fight it tooth and nail yeah whoever's whoever's you know more pissed about the last election i really think it's boomers you think so boomers aren't into it i think boomers don't get enough hate in general yeah like we need to be slandering boomers more add it to the list enemies yeah yeah yeah add it to the list ben so eliza says people shit on the yc ecosystem shilling to each other but the underlying concept is actually beautiful.

3:03:0720 to 30 somethings a year, 20 to 30 somethings founders buying SaaS from other 20 to 30 something year olds. We speak the same language, we run at the same speed, and it's really nice. This is for sure true. Love it. Yeah, I think I pulled this out because I invested in Eliza's company. Oh, cool. And we promote. We shell for the first time. We do promote companies that we hold securities in. yes but yeah i think uh that's a beautiful it's a beautiful thing an entire economy that is dependent on yeah self also i mean i like people always say this about like oh the the the the yc hack is like you get into yc you start some sas company sell to all the other yc companies your revenue spikes and it's like is it a good company or not but i haven't heard about that many stories of like oh yeah that company like their revenue totally collapsed because it was all fake like yc revenue like if you if you're in yc and you can sell to yeah if you can sell to airbnb and stripe and coinbase like that's pretty durable revenue and even if it's just a bunch of startups like there's enough that you could cobble together like it's not like yc has ever had a situation where it's like oh all of the companies went out of business all of a sudden yeah most of them are fine because they're in such random industries so diverse yeah it's actually like a fairly diversified revenue stream if you're selling to like all the yc companies it's almost better than It's actually more like one of YC's like moats is that if you could be in YC and you don't go in YC and then somebody that's competing for your same category does.

3:04:42Yep. The loyalty is like very real. Like they are going to use your competitor out of at least in the early days until like it's very clear who the best product is. Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about some company. If somebody like the real, the only threat that we have with technology brothers is two other guys that look like us that are in YC that take the 700K. And then they just have all this alpha from being in YC. Maybe we should go through YC. We talked about some company that was like highly, highly volatile. It might have been like a real estate company or something, but it's like all of their revenue came from something that was like super cyclical.

3:05:23This happens with hiring companies a lot. They're like doing great in a bull market. And then as soon as the rifts start and all the companies are laying off, their revenue just goes to zero because no one's hiring. So no one's paying for hiring platforms because there's just plenty of applications coming in when it's not a tight job market. And so, you know, like that's an example of like if you can be if you have a diversified revenue stream of amounts like, oh, yeah. Well, like the market overall is selling off and it's a little bit tighter. But there's still this one company that we sold to that's growing because they're in some interesting industry.

3:05:53and they've kept us on as a client, you can actually be pretty good. Let's stay on YC. Let's go to Jared Friedman, partner at YC. He says, today I learned Saudi Aramco was started at 225 Bush Street in San Francisco because Ryan Peterson says, every company in the world worth more than$1 trillion was founded on the West Coast, including Saudi Aramco, which was started in the same building as Flexport here in San Francisco. That is crazy stat. West Coast. Long California. All the innovation in California. Yeah. All the innovation in the world. maybe it flips at some point but yeah i think i think uh i think nikita elsewhere on x was making the point that it's because on the east coast a lot of power and resources go towards like prestige and people that have um you know degrees where sf and california are more egalitarian where if you're talented and hardworking you can get resources and opportunity who knows but i love it and i think that we should uh we california should be more proud of founding saudi aramco yeah it's very american it is i wish i wish the state did a little like you know one on ten into the saudi aramco pre-seed i would solve our budgetary issues right now fantastic nice cash flow well i mean i i we should do a deep dive on the saudi aramco story because i'm pretty sure that was like the ownership of that company was like fought with wars oh yeah yeah i'm pretty sure like it was a big deal when it got like nationalized it was not like a it was not just like oh they decided to move over to a different country it was like we this oil is in our ground and it's ours uh eric raymond says you can just make things this is my massive white pill about the revolution in small-scale manufacturing that's going on right now the immediate trigger is a story i read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair and the designs were all crappy and hit us the expensive and made in China.

3:07:48So he booted up a small factory that now builds custom wheelchairs, delivering them for about$1 ,000 a pop, undercutting the Chinese by a factor of five. Amazing. This guy's going to do one of the DOD contracts you mentioned. Really? No, I just imagine. Yeah, oh, just government contracts in general. Yeah, if he can spin up a small factory that builds custom wheelchairs for$1 ,000 a pop, he could go and get the Boeing contract that's selling a soap dispenser for$150 ,000. and he clearly has the skill set to deliver a high quality product at value. So get this guy on that platform ASAP. The original promise of 3D printing where people were like, oh, you're going to just be able to buy something online and 3D print it in your office or whatever.

3:08:31And I think that will basically come true, but it won't necessarily look like people imagined it. It'll just be localized, manufacturing, talented, small companies, etc. Yeah. Let's go to Austin. Is it Reef? Austin Reef? Founder of Morning Brew? Yep. Right? He says, the New York Times Tech Guild went on strike today. As a reminder, here are their demands. A ban on scented products, unlimited break time, pet bereavement, mandatory trigger warnings when discussing events in the news. It's funny because they were way ahead of, does it have to be your pet or could it be a pet squirrel done by someone else?

3:09:14I need some time off for sure. This is like such bait. Because clearly their demands were more than just this. Come on. Like they're obviously - Austin's good at, he didn't - He knows content. He knows content. He knows content. But yeah, it's very silly. But also the half of these things are like, the read here is like, oh, they're all like left-wing demands. They're like special snowflakes that need trigger warnings. But then also half of these are like, I could see the right wing adopting these because like, oh, the scented products have microplastics, so we can't have scented products anymore.

3:09:47Or like, yeah, we need to bereave our squirrels, so like I need time off. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. It's like a little bit of like a horseshoe theory. The real, I guess the perplexity CEO did a PR push today saying that he would happily replace all of their writers with AI. Like he did a piece today. He's just becoming a shit poster. Oh, wait, oh, the New York Times. Oh yeah, because they're in a battle. They're in a legal battle, New York Times and perplexity. I'm pretty sure, or maybe Wired or one of the big publications for the scraping and whatnot. But it is kind of funny that the New York Times, they purposely chose to go on strike the day before the election as a way to like.

3:10:27Oh, yeah, because the tech guild is so they do the software development and they do like the New York Times needle, which will be getting like the most traffic tomorrow ever. Right. It's going to be like the highest demand. They do cool like visualizations. Some of the tech people are actually really awesome. They know when they have some leverage and they're willing to twist the knife. But yeah, I mean, I imagine they'd be able to give on that if they got a pay bump, maybe. This is a good one. Let's do Linus. So the creator of Linux, Kakashi, says, the creator of Linux has publicly voiced what I've been saying for the past two years.

3:11:03The Linux creator, Linus Torvold, quote, AI is useless. It's 90 % marketing while he ignores AI for now. It's all hype. So the reason that this is easily refutable is that we've only ever recorded one podcast together in person. The very first one in every other episode of this podcast has been AI generated, powered by Delphi. It's funny because it's like the classic programmer mistake of marketing doesn't matter, in my opinion. So it's like 90 % is marketing. Let's talk about Nike. Is that a valuable company? Does that bring people joy? Is it valuable? marketing it's 90 marketing of course and that's okay yeah some things are marketing driven and that's okay it creates value and everyone is happy the shareholders the employees the customers everyone's happy athletes it's like what this is the this is the myth of the myth of consensual capitalism like oh like i didn't consent it's like no one cares no one cares that it's just marketing like it's fine but i i i get that we're saying to a deeper level like you know we want more ai innovation like it should be good a lot of the products are kind of bad but still yeah Yeah, but you have to fundamentally believe this.

3:12:15You have to believe that all the AI products that we're using are not AI products. Sure. Because the products, many of them are magic, right? Like they really feel like magic. Let's go to the last one with AI. Sajid Indop says, nobody blank Wall Street slash Silicon Valley. What if a private credit bubble was combined with an AI bubble and then NVIDIA related party transactions were thrown in just for fun? And he's talking about how I believe NVIDIA is now doing deals. Yeah, there's huge amounts of credit being extended that is backed by GPUs. Sure. his core i think complaint from what i can tell is that gpus are very rapidly depreciating assets so it's one it's one thing to extend credit against the house which is relatively stable or you know an appreciating asset uh but extending huge amounts of credit against gpus is like you know uh would be like really levering up a car and then driving it a ton while the car cars were sort of like improving very rapidly so much so that a car would be almost worthless after three years yeah whereas a car is going to have some value for 20 years granted as long as it doesn't sort of well the other the other flip side here that i see people criticizing is uh this idea that like a startup will go and raise a 10 million dollar series a and go and get 90 million dollars of nvidia credits and then they'll announce a hundred million dollar fundraise that looks like you know an in-kind related party transaction from nvidia they get 90 million dollars more revenue because the because the startup will use it but it's kind of like you know where did the money was kind of created out of thin air yeah i feel like but the thing is is that this this also happened in the dot-com bubble where a lot of the uh telecom providers were were funding a lot of dot-com startups and giving them like preferential access to bandwidth early on but But the thing is that AI is overrated in the short term and underrated in the long term.

3:14:29This could lead to a bubble that pops. But it still could be amazing that all this stuff gets built out and there's all this infrastructure. And that's exactly what happened in the dot-com boom. There was a lot of dark fiber. And that's what enabled Google to grow so fast. Because even though the internet bubble had collapsed, the infrastructure was there. So when the right product came along, it was able to go super wide and super fast. So I feel like Bill Gurley has a nose for bubbles. Like he just can smell bubbles and he's been harping on the, he's been harping on the NVIDIA related party transaction thing for quite a while.

3:15:06Yeah. Interesting. Let's move to audience Q and a, we have one question that we'll wrap. Hey, John and Jordy, I've been running a fortune 500 tech company for about a decade now and wanted to get your take on the next jet I should purchase. I currently own a Gulfstream G650ER extended range, but have been thinking about upgrading to a Boeing business jet. What do you think I should go for? What do you think?

3:15:31Look, I think it's less about the shell and more about what you do with the interior. And so I think whether it's a Boeing business jet and you want to be able to bring your potentially entire polycule or extended vehicle, family um or you're going you're going to stay with the goal stream i would just think about even if you keep your same goal stream um redoing the interior on like a fairly frequent basis right because it's kind of like redoing the inside of your house like you walk in it feels like this new it feels like a new house even though it's the same um uh same kind of core shell or whatever but really I would feel bad advising any one direction and would tell them to go talk to Preston Holland, expert on private aviation, and he's our private jet guy.

3:16:31I have a little bit more of a point to take, so I think I know who wrote this in. It's really about what your lifestyle is. So for those who don't know, The Gulfstream is probably the most popular private jet. Elon, Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, they all have Gulfstreams. The Boeing business jet is essentially a white-labeled Boeing plane, so you can get a 737 MAX, like the thing that you fly on United. You can just have that privately. You can have a Dreamliner. And a lot of heads of state have these Saudi princes. You can think of Air Force One as kind of a Boeing business jet, although it's owned by the military.

3:17:09Sorry. Trump flies on a BBJ, a Boeing business jet. But if you think about what's the difference between a CEO of a large company and a head of state? Well, the head of state is bringing an entire delegation to another country, a lot of international travel, and always landing at a major airport. So you're going from DC to London. Those are huge, huge airports. When you're just a CEO, A, you don't need to bring your entire company with you when you go to do a deal. A lot of the biggest deals, it's just, you know, Zuckerberg and Kevin's sister, I'm going for a hike. And so if they have to be meeting in Sun Valley, they can just fly in very easily.

3:17:47You don't need to worry about is the landing strip too small or too big. So you can get to much more remote locations and still bring your whole family. And but for if you're thinking about, you know, running a political campaign now, then you need to be thinking about, OK, I'm going to be in every major airport because we'll be campaigning in swing states. and they're all going to have huge airports. So I can land and I can bring my entire staff, my entire team with me. And when I get off the plane, we're going to hop in a bunch of black SUVs and I'm going to bring my writer, my speech person, my makeup artist, my comms person, my finance.

3:18:17You're going to bring the, my lawyer is going to be with me all the time. And so you really need to think about like what your lifestyle is like and what it's going to be like over time before you make that decision. But I would probably, based on what I know, I'd stick with the Gulfstream. But that's our show. I've got to hop on with Taipei soon. I think we're going to wrap. So, thanks for watching.