Zuck's Little Red Book, Best Family Car Under $30 Million, Franchise Shaking Moves, Make Yelling Great Again

34:13Can you speak up? Mogged. Mogged. Mogged. Yeah, you got to flip it on him. Let's go to Zach. He says, many of the most successful writers and entrepreneurs I know built their entire empire on Apple Notes. I love it. Anti-second brain guy. Yeah, yeah. I don't think. I mean, the simplest thing. It's just, it's a canvas. And Apple Notes has like so many features you can draw. You can do bullet points. It's like everything, everything you need to do. You can share stuff. You can create shared things. I mean, Google Docs is the same thing. Yeah. My, my thing, I don't. It's like you're spending more time organizing than you are actually thinking.

34:47My, my thing, I don't know if you do this. I just text myself like stream of consciousness. That's the only like note taking app I really use. Like I just, my wife's always just like, like you text yourself more than anyone. You talk to yourself more than anyone. And I'm just like constantly just like typing away. But it's great because I just have this like timeline, infinite timeline of stuff I'm thinking about and what I need to get done. Yeah, it's great. Use Apple Notes. Make sure you're leaving mental notes everywhere. Lucy Guo says, I don't have an addictive personality outside of working out.

35:20So, of course, when the opportunity presents itself, I do three berries in a row. Thankful to the universe for giving me so much energy. Fantastic. I think she has an addictive personality to creating shareholder value. Yeah. Dekacorn. Yep. probably potentially a future deck of corn financials are fantastic animal animal absolute animal absolute dog and and i think i think she's been profiled in the in the information and there's a little bit of a thing where um people kind of clock her as like not having the default tech personality because she's like talking about working out and working with the uh these like content creators and she's like almost like cool in a way that's unheard of in tech like she's cool with like she was early to loud opulence right she she was driving uh ferrari yes i think aroma yes uh she'll correct us i'm sure in the comments if we're wrong but i think she was driving aroma in like 2020 f40 yeah um no no no no fantastic and and but but i think the real takeaway here is that like i think that there is a world where lucy designs her personal brand are all around and scale AI and being this like very serious business processing BPO and doing B2B SaaS essentially, which is like that business.

36:33But she knows the business that she's building now needs to speak to the type of content creator that talks about working out publicly. She's now much more well known for being Lucy than being one of the co-founders of scale, which is bullish. And so there's a lot of founders that are in tech and then they fear being seen as a member of the industry that they're actually part of. And so if you're part of the influencer economy or the creator economy, you need to feel authentic in that. If you're just there talking about what software you're using or whatever, that's not going to appeal. And so this is massively underrated.

37:14What I love is I feel like there's an entire cottage industry of Lucy haters. Totally. people that don't want her to win and she's just a winner like she just keeps winning every single year i gotta go really i'm very short lucy haters because you know they've taken huge losses i mean honestly props to her for just just i think she gets she's like oh you think i'm annoying i'm gonna go do three berries and add like a million dollars of gmb today to my platform she always She talks about how she maxes out the woodway at Barry's. She broke the machine. It can't go any faster. It's broken. It's fantastic.

37:53Critter says, I can't wait until we have slurs for moon people. And Dirt Man, a good friend of the show, says the 51st state. And it's talking about building on the moon. Very funny. Did you read Moon Should Be a State? Slurs, I mean. Pirate Wires? Fantastic essay. And I ordered my newest Moon Should Be a State shirt. Highly recommend you go pick them up. Pirate Wires. Might be sold out by now. Probably. there's only 500 there's only 500 for these they're rare rare they're drops but if you see somebody out in one of those but yeah it's funny every everything can be a slur tech bro is a slur that's why we're the technology brothers yep canadian is a slur in some circles yeah um jeremy's got to work on that yeah yeah he's gonna make it cool again but yeah jeremy and sam uh do your best to make canadian cool again i actually had like a crazy almost like emotional moment with the moon i was putting on the moon should be a state shirt my son's like obsessed with the American flag anywhere he sees an American flag, American flag, American flag, he just gets pumped up.

38:49So he sees the American flag on the back. And I'm like, Oh yeah, this is like a moon should be a state shirt. And, and he was like, what's that? And I was trying to explain it to this three-year-old and I was like, well, I have some friends, you know, the moon, right? And he's like, yeah, I love the moon. He's like, well, like I have some friends that are trying to make it so we could just go visit it whenever we want. And he was like, won't even need a passport. And yeah. Yeah. And he was like that's amazing and then he was like i uh we'll need a rocket and i was like well it's funny you say that because i have some i also have some friends that are working on that it's like ff is like moon and spacex and like i mean the lesson the lesson the lesson that your son is going to grow up with is that dad my dad's got a guy for everything yeah yeah my dad's got a moon guy my dad's got a rocket guy yeah basically basically but it's like i mean it's not like the SpaceX people are like my guys it's more just like like I'm clearly aligned with them like this is the vision spiritually spiritually working towards yeah and he was just like that's amazing like that's exactly what we should be doing dad like I couldn't agree more with your plan the kids are based it was so good every time he sees a Cybertruck he's like I need that I need that I asked him what color he was like red I was like I don't know my hands are tied here I have to drive a red Cybertruck yeah it's fantastic school drop offline it's gonna be crazy let's go to Signal Signal writes, LMAO, if you're an employee of a startup started by four XVPs of Google and alike who are already insanely wealthy, why would you work hard for them?

40:17What skin do they have in the game? Literally nothing. Perhaps they are all great people, but it strikes me as an awful way of creating mission and a culture that someone gets super inspired by. Well, maybe they just want to go bigger. Maybe they're decabillionaires and they want to become centis or bean airs it's such a it's it's so uh one signal has been dropping some absolute bangers every every time i i see their their name how wealthy was but uh was elon when he started yeah so this is i mean you could argue that elon invests he claims he invested every dollar he had into everything sam was super wealthy and yeah when he's no but that's what i'm saying it's it's very person to person i'll meet founders that have that are you know sort of post-economic and they're trying to do their new thing and you can just tell they don't have that dog in them and then you meet yeah i think the most important thing there is not necessarily the money but the vp at google because the vp at google is not necessarily a super entrepreneurial person by default if they went there early so they joined a 10 000 person org that's a lot different than founding a company exiting having some money and then being like i gotta yeah just because speed is so important i feel like google has been in this position where they can plan things across decades and multiple years and if you apply that style of leadership to a startup like you probably will never get off the ground yep let's go to Isaiah Taylor founder of let's go to Isaiah Taylor he says if you're VC reading this and want to make a large bag and be save American manufacturing stop what you're doing and invest in Atomic Industries Range View and Hadrian then ask Aaron Cam and Chris who else you should write checks to we win this through innovation.

41:54I love this. Shouting out the boys. The absolute boys. It's great. We are losing, and it's a quote tweet of Zane saying, we are losing SMB manufacturing shops, kind of identifying the problem. But Isaiah just writing the playbook for the VCs. It's good. He's doing their homework for them. Yeah. I mean, this is how a lot of VCs actually invest is they invest in one good founder and they say, who else should I invest in? And then they go try to invest in those people and it's a pretty good strategy. That's how I've approached angel investing where sometimes I'm sort of evaluating a company early on and I'm like, well, I don't think this person is as good as this team.

42:33But even if they're in the same orbit at all, it means they're like probably pretty good compared to the average person that's attacking that space. Yeah. It just speaks to like the beauty of the gundo. Like they've kind of bootstrapped their own like YCS community where they're syndicating deals together sending employees around like there are now employees that fly in from like the East Coast and just tour all the companies and just wind up at one yeah that's really cool and it was fun making like that little video about and there's the window and there's a community like the bonfires yeah I think they still do yeah and it's important when they're small because they can kind of share resources and syndicate stuff it's great yeah let's go to Lisa Sue, CEO of AMD and Jensen's Wong's cousin, I believe.

43:16She says, wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving. I'm very thankful to our amazing AMD extended family, friends, and fans. And I wanted to call this out because wrist check, she's wearing a beautiful Rolex Oyster Perpetual. No way. Lisa, happy Thanksgiving to you. True technology brother. From the technology brothers. Yes, and it's important because this is our in with Jensen. Jensen Wong, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, famously doesn't wear a watch, but his cousin does. Clearly, Christmas comes along. Maybe she gets him something, he wears it, and the world has changed. It's up to you, Lisa. The power is in your hands.

43:58I'm very optimistic about it. Sam McAllister says, poetry camera in action last night at Tate, powered by Claude. This is so cool. I was so stoked by this. So it's a camera that you take a picture of, and then that picture is sent to Claude, and then it writes a poem based on what it sees in the image. Gadgets. I love gadgets. Yeah, this reminds me of that app that we heard about being built at a hackathon where you would just speak a sentence into a microphone, and then it would generate this 30-second visual of whatever you said. So it was almost like you were hallucinating, basically. But all of these things where like you take some organic input, like a picture or a voice, and then it just generates something absurd.

44:43It's just such a fun form factor. It has a receipt printer in there. Probably very unhealthy. Do not touch the receipt. But just an amazing gadget. And I really hope this is for sale on Instagram and just blows up during the holiday season. That's my fear is that this is like a hackathon project and it doesn't actually get productized. Got to get commercial. We need more kind of like bootstrap founders making little like AI projects. Yeah, if you make a little gadget like this, you could sell 100 ,000 of them. Easily, yeah. And it's fascinating because the person that designed this is clearly now thinking like, okay, I need to disrupt the iPhone.

45:17And so because the whole problem with like the humane stuff was like they understood Apple's moat and they were going after Apple as ex-Apple employees. this is not good but i have not seen a single thing from humane in months like what's going on over there yeah well i mean part of it was that when you got the pin you had to set up a new phone number because they didn't want it tied to your phone at all they wanted to keep it completely off of it because obviously if you integrate it all obvi is going to end up buying yeah maybe um but uh uh this is something where it's it's just like a fun little gadget and maybe they could build more gadgets off of it.

45:55Maybe it does turn into a generational company. Like I'm obviously rooting for them, but I just love that it's something unique, something that leverages like what's like the tech that's available. You couldn't build this years ago and like people would love to buy this. It's great. Uh, let's go to Sarah Hesch. She says, uh, me at Thanksgiving telling my family that defense tech investment is about to explode and America will bring a new era of global peace that will last for thousands of years. And it's a picture of, uh, uh, uh, what's that movie? Basic Instinct. Yeah. Um, great. Sarah, Sarah understands aesthetics, great aesthetic.

46:31And it's, it's good because, uh, we did a Thanksgiving post. Um, and, uh, you know, it was like, it was like me at Thanksgiving waiting to tell my family that I was featured on some, you know, tech niche tech podcast. Um, but, uh, great way to kind of like reframe it towards what you do, like defense investing. Sarah at Hereticon founders kept, kind of pitching her these sort of like half-baked defense ideas and she would be like so who's your customer gonna be for that and they would like kind of stumble over it and they're she's like well so how's that gonna work and then they'd like stumble over it she was just mogging every single time every single time i heard somebody try to pitch her it was just like very it was like very simple questions but just completely mog them so if you have an idea in defense tech and you want to stress test it go talk to sarah she will either validate what you're doing or mog you in a gentle, kind way.

47:24It's great. This one's controversial. Paula writes, I'm never leaving this app and it's a screenshot of some drama between True Ventures that hired Helen Min and Charlie Cheever who's calling her out because he claims that she and her husband were blackmailing him but then Sunil Pai chimes in and says conveniently left out that you were previously in a relationship with Helen. And I think all of these were deleted but not before 5 ,000 people liked this post. I don't even think we should probably cut this out. It's not really worth talking about relationship drama among VCs that we can leave that to the information.

48:02Yeah, I think politics are on the table now. The All In podcast has made politics completely acceptable for VCs to talk about. But the personal life is tough. Yeah, let's leave that. Let's leave that on Blue Sky. Leave that on Blue Sky. Exactly. Exactly. Ken says, people keep saying we're so back, but it's quite obvious we're at a place we've never been in the history of the country. I love this. And it's a quote from Unusual Whale saying, billionaires Bill Ackman, Mark Andreessen, and Travis Kalanick are reportedly getting involved in Doge. You know, I read this and I was wondering, like, is this really that new?

48:37I feel like the robber barons and the oil billionaires and the railroad barons, these guys were deeply involved in politics. It's Lindy to exert your will by leveraging the government. Yeah, but also just, I don't know, I think the story, you know how Henry Flagler started Miami? No. Like he was Rockefeller's business partner on Standard Oil, made a ton of money. His wife got sick. The doctor said you got to go to somewhere warm, a warmer climate to keep her healthy. And so he was like, I'm just going to start building railroads south. Kept building until he hit Florida. starts the starts the city of miami they wanted to call it flagler because he was like developing everything he was like no no no that's too too much we'll call it miami yeah and then and then he kept building and he wound up building like the causeway that's now like really iconic in a bunch of movies the one that connects yeah all the keys miami beach yeah no no no not those you guys go further south yeah um and so he was just like this maniacal builder uh and and when i go and think about like the power broker, Robert Moses, like he was deeply involved in the government, driving efficiency through like kind of interesting ways.

49:46Um, yeah, this doesn't feel, this doesn't feel entirely new to me, but, but I do get that it does feel. No, it's new for us because it's the first time the tech elite had become deeply immersed. But at the same time, like the railroads were the technology of the day. Oil drilling was the technology of the day. Gold mining was the people that made their money in software. Yeah, exactly. It's not like you, you go back and you're like, Oh, like they didn't have technology. They did. It was just call it like the first industrial revolution. It was like the steam steam technology. And it's certainly, it's certainly not the first time capital allocators have become involved in government.

50:19Cause you have Nancy Pelosi, absolute size Lord, uh, who's been running it in DC for a while. Yeah. Uh, this is great. Elon says, I was telling Sylvester Stallone that I watched demolition man again and how well it predicted the crazy woke future 30 years ago. Uh, fascinating movie. have you seen demolition man no it is a fantastic movie uh sylvester stallone and wesley snipes both get they're they're like a super grizzled cop and a criminal who get uh frozen in cryo sleep and then they get thawed out like 30 years later and it's like 2025 or something and the technology predictions are insane no way self-driving cars are exactly like they are where it's like it's not full self-driving like they're still steering wheels but when you put it in self-driving mode the steering wheel kind of compacts, which isn't exactly what happens, but it's like pretty close that it's like level three, level four.

51:12The Tesla wheels compact. Yeah, it's kind of getting smaller. They have this crazy VR stuff where Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock have this like intense romantic experience in VR, like very reminiscent of what's going on. There's a whole bunch of other, a lot of like fear mongering around different dietary restrictions. They go to taco bell and it's like a five-star restaurant that's like michelin starred and he's like can i get some salt and they're like salt was banned can i get some seed oil yeah yeah exactly can i get some ketchup and they're like no sugar's also been banned and stuff it's very funny uh and they have all these like like anytime he cusses there's just a there's just a an ai that's listening and finds him it's funny you have been fined a hundred dollars for saying a bad word and he has to rip off the receipt it's very it's a great movie it's funny the things that they got get wrong or diet related because diet cycles so hard it's like yeah salt and sugar were very bad for two decades and now everybody's like oh actually you should have supplement salt and and like sugar is actually good in certain cases or whatever um yeah but fantastic movie highly recommend you watch demolition man uh levels io says 30 year loyalty to one brand and it's mark andreessen wearing ralph loren 30 years ago and then just a few days ago on the joe rogan experience.

52:29And I love that. Pick a brand, grow with it. Make it your whole personality. It's great. He's done the same thing with watches. You know, we've seen, we posted that, you know, a lot of people were asking us about what watch he was wearing on Joe Rogan. It was Omega. Yep. Seamaster 300. Yeah. The James Bond watch. Yeah. But not a fit for an allocator of his size. We recommended a Graf Diamonds hallucination or eight of them really. But it's one of my favorite watches now. I get a kick out of it every time I look at it. I watch an interview with the founder of Graf Diamonds. It's great. It's fantastic.

53:08But this is great. Like he's just clearly developed a loyalty to the brand. A lot of people in tech have struggled with personal style because it does take a lot of mental overhead to develop and curate it and make sure your outfits are working and all that stuff. Unless you just put on a suit. but one of the ways to kind of speed run it is just to find a brand you really like and that's that's stylistically consistent like Ralph Lauren is and then just only buy from that brand and everything's going to work together pretty well you don't have to think about it as much and it's much cooler than being like well I'm just going to wear jeans and a white t-shirt every day exactly yeah let's go to Anna Mosterock she says Australia has officially become the first country in the world to ban social media use for individuals under the age of 16 the legislation was passed quickly and without any real opposition on the final day of the parliamentary year.

53:55The law will be enforced through digital identification and other unspecified age verification technologies. So this is, this is, this is wild. Uh, I saw a really funny post from somebody who was like, this is what all the Australian kids, all the Australian kids are going to be on LinkedIn now. Like I just loaded, I just cleared another, uh, two figure day at my lemonade stand like we just linked and not banned i guess maybe linkedin maybe linkedin social media yeah but it's funny how they're you can't you can't stop the internet right so if fate if if what's exciting to me about this is it will just create a bunch of other emergent apps that get created with with hacks of like no this isn't a social media app it's an art app yeah and you can draw and then people are like texting and like drawing it's like it's like that gen z founder who does his meetings in COD.

54:44Yeah, exactly. It's like he's turned COD into Zoom. Yeah. And so someone will turn Fortnite into social media. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or Roblox, which is already kind of a social media platform. Yeah, it already is. Yeah, it's just, it's so funny because I've probably talked about this on the podcast before, but I studied abroad in China. Yeah, we get it, bro. Yeah. Never been back since. Never will go back again unless G drags me there himself for dissenting on this podcast. But so all Western social media and major technology platforms are banned in China, but every single person still uses them, right?

55:26They all use Instagram. Like they all use YouTube. You just get a VPN and like, there's always gonna be a workaround. So trying to ban software products, even networks is just never gonna work. So good luck, Australia. I would like to, they're really making, I have quite a few friends in Australia from surf trips over the years, and I think they would all be stoked if we made them a state. So put it on the pipeline. Yeah, the five eyes. Just make it five new territories. Let's stay in the east and go to Russia. Right wing cope says the Russian ruble is officially worth less than a Fortnite V-Buck.

56:06Mogged. Mogged. Oh my God. really rough year for russia i mean it's interesting it doesn't correlate perfectly with the uh the war but you imagine that some sort of sanction caught up now and now they're devaluing no i think i i would imagine that it's more people predicting that the war is going to end we don't talk about geopolitics politics or social issues on this podcast but russia's entire economy is predicated on the war right now and so if the war stops yeah the value like their economy is just going to go. That's like why Putin doesn't have an incentive to actually end the war is because it's a war based economy.

56:42Should we be long V bucks war in the digital world? Yeah. Go long V bucks. Short ruble. That's great. Howard Cushlin, uh, shares a photo of a Lamborghini Urus and says, we park our Lambos in the front yard here in Palo Alto. Also inconspicuous color choice and i believe it was uh green uh beautiful car fantastic you know people call it an rsq8 ripoff it's a you know just an audi with nicer clothes on but we love the urus here we've promoted them in the past and we're happy to see someone yeah we want san francisco san francisco won't truly be back until every other car is a supercar yes and so that is the only metric that matters to us entryway into yeah it's not it's it's arguably not a supercar but it's in a supercar price yeah but whoever owns this is getting a call for the next batch of lambos when they drop right yeah and uh and and it's interesting because driving an urus in miami is very different than driving an urus in palo alto totally uh you're not making a statement in my context like oh here's another course bro that exactly exactly crypto person nft guy in Palo Alto, you know that this person is standing out.

57:55Totally. And you're not afraid to get laughed at. Speaking of standing out, we have a promoted post from Ralph Lauren. Fantastic. Ralph Lauren is a fantastic way to stand out. Yeah, so there's a favorite brand. One of our favorite capital allocators, Mark Andreessen, has been wearing Ralph Lauren for over three decades. And Ralph Lauren says today, a night of giving back at our Milan Viadela Spiga flagship store. Visitors to Ralph Lauren's flagship will have the opportunity to make a donation to an Italian foundation called the AIRC and dedicate a personalized star ornament that will be featured on Ralph Lauren's giving tree.

58:41Hashtag RL holiday. So anyways, this store looks fantastic. any technology brothers out there hopefully you can go get a chance to visit what a celebration of the season and thank you to RL for keeping capital allocators looking sharp for three decades in a row and no signs of slowing down there I have to interrupt the show for a real quick announcement I have a fraud account that's impersonating me on X goes by Jess Coogan if you are contacted by this account, please report and block. It's very annoying. This impersonator is messaging basically everyone with the cringiest copy ever, and I'll read it.

59:26I'm Coogan from Founders Fund. Our firm specializes in investing in and advising groundbreaking initiatives, facilitating strategic connections with key opinion leaders, KOLs, to fuel growth. Our current portfolio includes Polymarket, OpenAI, Gecko Robotics, and Emerald Cloud Lab, all seeking collaborative opportunities with influential experts. We believe your expertise would be a valuable asset. So if you get this DM, please troll them as best as you can. Send them something funny. Screenshot it, send it to me. Here's a challenge. And then block and report them. No, here's a challenge for all the listeners.

59:59Get the scammer to invest in your venture fund. Yes. Get them to invest in your rolling fund. Yes. That is the challenge. Scam them. Scam them. No, don't scam them. Try to drive some returns if they see. Turn their life around. Turn them. Turn their life around. Probably down on their luck. that's why they've turned to life of crime yep make them some money make them some money do they got 10 bucks if you can get 10 bucks out of them turn it into a thousand there you go 100x there you go good challenge uh faraz been on the show before uh from giant step says don't just buy someone else's used jet or yacht or supercar commission your own build have to agree with this one i don't want someone else's old boat hard agree quoting tristan tate let's go yeah so Love to see Faraz quote-tweeting in many ways.

1:00:47He's an AMG1 owner. He doesn't want to live in your old boat or fly your old plane. Talk about fantastic capital allocator. We had a post recently. He replied with a list of all his biggest liquidity events, quite the track record. He even put a picture of a bunch of cash, which presumably was from one of those deals. So anyways, this is the right attitude. Commission your own boat. Talk to your Gulfstream rep. Get something bespoke made. You won't regret it. Fantastic. Nathan's been on the show before. He says 12 hours and counting. Oh, we actually already covered this one. The GDP to grow here.

1:01:29We can skip this. Very, very silly. Let's move on to something else. Let's move through. Oh, this is an interesting conspiracy theory. bone gpt says greg brockman's sabbatical lines up with how long it takes to get a top secret clearance similar timing as the nakasone hire and several defections been a hell of a year for open ai sam's been asking for regulatory capture these are the moves to engineer it and i think this is it got a thousand likes everyone likes this theory but it's very silly because like people don't take sabbaticals to get top secret clearances like yeah elon is building rockets that go all over.

1:02:07I need to take the... Take that off. Take that off. I don't buy it. Take it off. It's like we would be hearing about, oh yeah, this defense tech founder got a program record and then the founder had to take six months off. Like you've never heard that before. What is this six months? Not a thing. It's like maybe it takes six months. And how much of a black pill would it be on our intelligence agency? If you had to stop what you were doing. If it was like, oh yeah, anytime someone needs to get security clearance, They have to take six months off for their job. Like that would be so stupid. All I will say is Bone, keep posting, but add one of these to your profile picture, please.

1:02:43Because as long as you're ripping these, add some tinfoil. It's not that he couldn't get top secret clearance. I think a lot of tech people should have clearance. Like I'm all in favor of that. But this is very silly to assume that it lines up and place them like date. It's numerology in this case, and I'm not buying it. Will Yee over at Ramp says, the truth is that Claude's branding is horrendously mogged by ChatGPT's branding. Claude as a name is an obvious and failed attempt at making AI sound human-like. It is virtue signaling friendliness and approachability. The serif font, brown, low contrast color screen, the scribble logo, fake and dishonest, and everyone subconsciously knows it.

1:03:24By contrast, ChatGPT is no nonsense. It's clearly a tool and open AI leans into it. Black and white, simple sans-serif font. Everyone is using ChatGPT Claude to cheat on their homework or generate some SQL. No one is here to chill or vibe and whatever. If I need to drill a hole, I'm reaching for a drill called DeWalt 20 volt max cordless. I'm not reaching for a drill named Charles that looks like a mid-century modern living room. I don't even think we need to respond to that. The only thing is, yeah, he didn't say this directly, but Claude is a French name. Yep. And being French is inherently un-American.

1:03:59Yeah. So chat GPT though sounds very, it's very SF coded. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, which is bullish. Yeah. I mean, it's a, we like both. We like both. Great, great product goes back and forth. Sometimes they're winning. Sometimes. Yeah. But a lot of their, a lot of their out of home camp, Claude's out of home campaigns, like they've clearly been trying to spend a lot of money to break through into. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Detect Twitter. Because like the developers respect them for sure. Totally. Like tech people get it. Arguably, I think a lot of people are using it more than open AI. But the average person is not eval-driven.

1:04:30They're not like, oh, this one scored two points higher on MMLU. I got to switch. No way. But Claude's strategy has been, hey, let's buy these huge billboards and all these things. And a lot of their ads have just been falling very, very flat for me. Yep, yep, yep. It's not – it's just not – Breaking through. I don't know. We'll solve it on the next podcast. Let's go to Arib. He says, selling a course is the male version of OnlyFans. 11K likes. It's funny. Somebody else posted today, what is the male equivalent of OnlyFans? It's an investment newsletter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's like pretty accurate as well.

1:05:09But I don't know. I think we need to go and get the data. I bet you there's a lot of male. I bet a lot of the people on OnlyFans are men, right? It's not a gendered platform. The real question is, what is our course going to be? Yeah, selling secondary. Selling secondary, yeah, that's right. And style guides, a watch buyer's guide. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friends at DuPont Registry. Today we have a beautifully specced Ford GT Carbon Series presented in Nightmask Blue. They even added a little devil emoji. Very cool. uh very internet native of dupont registry to to add that uh but anyways if you want a true american supercar the ford gt is the obvious car to get i think this is in your personal pipeline at some point next year um and and and honestly like this this to me is this is by far this is the only american supercar that i truly cannot wait to own sure sure and this is a fantastic example we should probably dial into tj parker at some point get his opinion on the on the ford gt but yeah yeah we need to narrow him down he's too much into these porsches we got to get him okay for the american dynamis investor what's yeah yeah yeah you got to narrow it down tj he's gonna squirm he's gonna squirm there's nothing he absolutely dunked on he dunked on miata yeah yeah there's nothing like a 1940s porsche that goes two miles an hour

1:06:39no resto mods no also tj we kind of need to issue a correction we highlighted um the amy leon door collab he said it was mid he gave us a zero out of ten zero out of ten he roasted us no points on the scoreboard at all but uh yeah stick to the classics i i he made some great recommendations in that thread you can go look them up and pick something up uh let's go to emily is in sf F, she says, we need to make space for exited founders to call out the VCs who wronged them. There are so many repeat offenders that new founders don't know about. But once founders get liquid, they act like it's water under the bridge and the cycle continues.

1:07:18Well, it is water under the bridge if you're rich. Who cares if somebody wronged you, if you came out on top. If you can mog them. And, you know, it's an iterative game. It's a repeat game. You know, the VC who screwed you over, if you did have a great liquidity event, probably got fired and that firm is probably still chugging along with a new partner there in the lot of turnover recently yeah so i don't know do we need do we need exited founders to call out vcs more i think back channels do the work in many ways they do i don't think it's there's so much nuance and like different situations and stuff like that like yeah i don't think it's worth it always reflects poorly on the person saying it to go out and publicly for sure the only example of this is like is is palmer you know repeatedly um ratioing jason not investor though not not investor but again it's like it doesn't reflect to me it doesn't reflect poorly on palmer when he does that because jason's like continues to instigate it yeah yeah um but uh but yeah i just Palmer never starts it.

1:08:22I just think this is why like founders just, just do go to, go to a VC's portfolio page message. If you're, if you're exploring signing a term sheet with somebody and you, and it didn't come from a quality necessarily like a quality intro do five, six, seven, 10, follow the Graham Duncan method, take 10 message calls. And the main, the main thing is only do this. If you actually are really exploring a partnership, because I've had this weird thing where, uh probably like 10 times founders have reached out to me and been like hey what do you think about this fund oh yeah and i'm like meaningless but but and they want an intro to the fund and i'm like what are you doing dude like i'm not like go have a conversation with them and if you're going to explore sure like don't use that as a way to start a conversation so that i intro you yeah like i'll intro you if it makes sense but don't try to reference check don't try to reference check a VC before you're in an active conversation.

1:09:20Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I was more reflecting on the fact that like the, like the, the distribution of personalities within every fund is like crazy. So reference checking an entire fund is like impossible. Totally. Um, and, uh, yeah, I mean the other things that I just think like, like the water under the bridge thing, like a lot of these, if you had a bad experience, it can just become a formative experience that you learned from like, Oh, you got yelled at, but you learned how to turn down the volume on the phone so that it didn't matter and now you're stronger and it's like yeah i got kind of i i got kind of beat up at the gym that day but now i'm a beast and i'm ready for the next one yep i'm gonna yell back even louder i've been working on my voice voice going to a vocal trainer voice coach boom boom i'm the one that yells at you now uh josh kaplan says every moment in business happens only once the next great podcast won't be like all in and he attributes to Peter Thiel, which I don't think is real, but it's very funny.

1:10:17I think he was replying to you with that. I don't know. It's just funny. Well, great reply. We might put this in our partnership deck. So actually give that to me. Let's pass that over there. This is great. Thank you, Josh. It might not look like All In, but it will certainly look like Technology Brothers. Yeah. I mean, I think that there is something real there about like, don't just copy the format that you see that worked like it's just not it's like yeah like copying like doing a right now doing a biographies focus one when there's senra yeah and acquired stuff it's just not gonna work yeah you're not gonna get better at that yeah you just have to find the white space copying copying and you know invest like the best it's gonna be really challenging too you need to find your own lane and focus and copy the pat mcafee show for tech personnel news now that that's a winning strategy so figure out how to remix stuff i mean there's so many innovative media formats out there if you look at what's happening in like gaming and like young kids and streaming and stuff yeah there's still not a single tech streamer no one's figured that out yeah massive white space if you can do it um praying for exit's been on the show before says wait till this guy finds out about jane street and citadel and it's a screenshot of a cs major asking i want money all i want is money i love it uh yeah probably will wind up at uh jane street or citadel that's the that's the place there's a ufc fighter whose nickname now is money moicano okay and he was relatively unknown and he started winning fights and after he would win he would just get on the mic and be like dana i want money give me money and so now this is the same guy that was quoting the front the french revolution oh yeah that guy's a total legend so anyways if you want money go and ask for it close mouths don't get fed go interview at citadel or jane street tell them you're here because you want to make as much money as possible tell them the technology brothers tell them the technology brothers sent you yeah i mean you can also go to early stage startup or something there's a bunch of different ways you know uh if you're in college just raise like a 400 million dollar fund yeah you'll be good off start a podcast raise a 400 million dollar fund There you go.

1:12:31Let's go back to Sarah Hess. She says, wow, really? All the girls that talk to you are CCP spies? You must be building something really important. And there's a picture of Anne Hathaway being like, oh, yeah. It's funny. Did you see the CCP spies meme? Yeah, which has been going on for a while. But it hit like a fever pitch. Really a fever pitch. Yeah. We need to create a leaderboard of memes and just constant like the power ranking. I think Jason Levin has that. Really? And he put this in there and other people were using this image as like a meme. No, but I just mean more like high level, like not the meme itself, but the CCP spas thing.

1:13:06Kind of like a UFC style, like pound for pound list. But it is like so cringe how it became very trendy to be like, well, I'm building something so important that like when I go to a startup happy hour for my seed stage company, like China wants to spy on me and Xi Jinping has to know what I'm doing. and it's like probably not bro probably not yeah your your your gpt rapper is not that important also like yeah um also you really shouldn't be worried about ccp spies uh it's cringe to accuse every chinese woman you meet of being a ccp spy you should be worried about your canadian bro friends yeah from a communist country they blend in they're right at the border these are the guys you got to worry about yeah so cut off all your canadian friends all your male canadian friends they gotta go except if their capital allocators living in new york yeah that's okay we'll give them a pass but the rest of them risky risky but um you know i i do think though that it was like so so ai and defense tech probably the two hottest spaces right now outside of like energy and some other few other categories but those were the first two times in a while where i felt like there was this real sense of oh you do have to totally rethink this higher or for sure yeah you should talk about what you're doing a lot less you certainly shouldn't be building in public with your defense tech company or yeah or even like there there is an argument of like if you're working on some super frontier technology and ai yeah maybe you shouldn't open source at all right away but that doesn't mean we need full regulatory capture yeah and there's like nuance and there's yeah balance yeah there's just such a difference if you just look at like the priority stack for the ccp spy like agenda like it's got to be just like get into oracle and just get all the data at every fortune 500 company or whatever or like get into like they they they hacked like the uh the department the ocp you hear about the ocp hack uh they got like uh you know personally identify all the information on like every single government employee a dream for doge really yeah doing dojo's work ahead of schedule um just ask xi jinping uh who should we fire um but uh yeah uh i yeah there was also there was also a bunch of there is the target there was a bunch of like blustering on x about potential investors that that could be foreign agents and you push back on that hard and you were like all this anything that's in a deck now is publicly available usually within a year.

1:15:49And it's not even any, and again, the thing about startups is the reason that it's so bearish when a founder says to you, oh, can you sign my NDA before you look at my deck is because as a founder for 99.9 % of businesses, you should be able to tell somebody your exact plan step by step, every single thing you're going to do, how you're going to acquire customers and all this stuff. And you should still be better at doing that. And you deserve to win almost only if you can tell the whole world what you're doing. At the same time, I think it's very bad to go build in public and post screen. If you're building in public, you're casting a really wide net for potential competitors.

1:16:32But in private, you should be able to tell people what you're doing without this risk of, oh, if I tell somebody they're going to go home that night and launch my company on Stripe Atlas and be competing with me. you know it just takes so much to actually make something happen yeah it was also just this idea of like the ccp spies going to cocktail parties specifically because the conversation at cocktail parties isn't anywhere near as valuable as just hacking into a company and stealing the ip which is something that china is clearly doing it just takes the form of cyber security and you'd never see this person around or if you do it's like somebody who's working at your company and like putting everything on a flash drive so you just need better it it's not really totally that if you tell someone like oh yeah i'm building a you know yeah the launch three isr drone with you know industrial capabilities launch codes are on my nightstand yeah i saw that one that's good uh gotier has been on the show before says the two horsemen of the american dream and it's the uh herman miller chair and the ames recliner right well herman miller herman miller owns the oh they own both i think they own both okay um yeah it's like the work chair and then the relaxing chair?

1:17:40I, the horseman of the apocalypse thing, I don't really get the analogy here. Um, it's just like, this is, this is what people know. So my, my, uh, my office setup is like right now, one Herman Miller chair, and I'm adding the recliner as well, because I want, those are my two states of work, basically reading information and at, in front of my monitor, uh, you know, doing, you know, zooms or whatever. So I think it's very accurate. Those are the only two chairs you need to create a billion dollars of enterprise value. Love it. Eliano Yunus says, in today's New York Times, Palantir Tech is partnering with Selkirk Sport for these pickleball paddles.

1:18:21He actually gave me two pickleball paddles, which we'll put on the set that are Palantir branded. Perfect. And says, Selkirk is leveraging Palantir self-service AI technology to outperform the competition. I mean, huge commercial business. Everyone still thinks of Palantir is like just purely government contracting, but they have a huge commercial side. Yeah. Yeah. We should ask for Palantir tennis rackets too. I don't, I don't necessarily support or endorse pickleball, but I support Palantir and I support American innovation. Yeah. Eliano's worked out with him on Monday. We'll put it in the set until they can get the tennis racket sent out.

1:18:57Yeah. Um, but yeah, he's been crushing it. He has a whole Palantir merch store you can go buy shirts and hats and he's got an army of retail traders united behind him huge huge huge reddit huge there's whole youtube channels about the palantir stock and they're having a good year they're having a good year it's gonna be a happy holiday yeah palantir is now the biggest defense company in the world they they flipped raytheon finally crazy 150 billion dollar company live laugh palantir do we have a promoted post promoted post uh from our friends at Tiffany & Co. And it couldn't be more timely. Technology brothers out there, men and women, Tiffany is a fantastic place to go shopping for your loved ones this holiday season.

1:19:38Today, they are saying, making hearts beat faster since 1837. The iconic Tiffany Blue Box is reimagined by 24 talented illustrators through the month of December. And they have some great illustrations here. One of the most, some of the most iconic packaging of all time, Tiffany Box. can't say enough good things about it. It speaks to the value of just doubling down on a color. Doubling down on a color. Owning a color. Owning it. Yeah, the Tiffany blue Nautilus is fantastic. And anyways, whatever you're thinking of getting your loved ones for this holiday season, they'd probably rather have something from Tiffany than whatever you're thinking of.

1:20:21Just pop by the store. Pop by the store and tell your sales associate the technology brother sent you. And speaking of the holidays, we have a gift guide, the 2024 gift guide for the tech right from the Foundation for American Innovation, FAI. I spoke at their conference recently. They gave out Lucy Breakers to everyone that attended. There we go. And we are included in this as well. They are promoting our product as a potential giftable product. A giftable product for someone in tech, which I love. And so we highly encourage you to go check out FAI. It's one of the only ways that you can gift locking in.

1:20:57Oh, yeah. You know, because most gifts are a distraction. It's like, oh, I got this new sweater. Yeah. What am I going to do with this? Oh, I got this new, you know, pan, something like that. Yeah. No, it's great. I appreciate them. Let's go back to Signal. Signal says, most people wish they had more and more time away from work, but in reality, they'd waste it or do something stupid like train for a marathon or worse, play pickleball. There we go. There's the pickleball post. Pickleball, slander. We support pickleball slander. We do not play pickleball on this show. Well, I'll take the other side of this.

1:21:30So I don't play a lot of pickleball. I've played once. But incredible, incredible story of asset utilization. Totally. Because if you run a country club and you have four tennis courts, you can subdivide a single tennis court into four pickleball courts. And so you're just getting four times the amount of people in, four times the revenue, higher margins, same capex. it's genius so my favorite one of my favorite stories of capital incineration from the last two years is people like two years ago you started getting pitched pickleball teams it's like oh we got this crazy opportunity we got the austin uh the austin dolphins pickleball team they got one of these new slots in the pro pickleball league and it's like i kept asking the people that would pitch me this uh have you ever watched a single minute of pickleball and they're like no i'm like so why is this going to be like a high performing asset they're like well pickleball is like the fastest growing sport in the united states and i'm like yeah but but where's the ev and in a team like nobody watches you see it on msb and you're like this is a joke yeah it's hard to see like highlights even i feel like i don't even see that many viral highlights yeah i see more viral highlights from like the fighting sports like totally car jitsu where they're fighting or the bear uh the the the jujitsu in suits that's viral and amazing yeah there's all these different slap boxing stuff there's so many i'd rather see any combat sport even well combat sports are much more viral and you're in in order to really break out you have to have some sort of viral mechanism for growth so the question is like how do they solve that with pickleball yeah make it full contact even badminton is is exponentially more fun to watch because it's so high speed they should make it like hockey where you can drop the pickleball paddle and just spook it out fight yeah i think that'd be good yeah yeah if if pickleball players had ufc style yeah gloves on whether they're like four should have like a quick release net and if something triggers it just drops the net everyone drops and they just start yeah yeah four ounce gloves just yeah cracking people anyways signal acquire pickleball professional pickleball and turn it into a fight sport there you go that is your task.

1:23:40Uh, Jeremy Giffen says, uh, a material part of compensation for a lot of people is just being given something as opposed to nothing to do with their time. Yeah. I think this is real. I think you can, if you, if you've ever taken a vacation and usually, so you arrive there, check into the hotel, you have a nice night. The next day is great. And the day after you're like, all right, what are we really doing here? I've got this book that I could have been reading at home and we're just eating and just consuming stuff and not and and then you realize okay a huge part of well-being as a human is just doing things and being productive and the more you produce generally the better you feel and the more you consume generally the worse you feel yep and so creating an environment where people are only consuming everybody's going to be really unhappy so that is why and maybe that's like american that's just very part of american culture but I think it's probably pretty broadly applicable across cultures.

1:24:42That's why it's so important to vacation at places like Amon. Yep. Because you strike up a conversation on day two, someone else is a capital allocator, you start having deal dinners. You're doing a deal on day three. Pretty soon, XL comes out, you're building models, and you're back in the grind. Yep. The week's going to fly by. Fly. Creatine Cycle says, Technology Brothers will happily leak production secrets to a petite Chinese spy just for a chance to say orthogonal to the woman at the SF party. And we thought this was slander, but then we realized we are Technology Brothers. We are the Technology Brothers podcast.

1:25:13But when you post about us, please use capital T, capital B, and put the TM after it. Have a little class. And so he's talking about tech bros generally. And we've already discussed this. We kind of disagree with this idea. But it's good to get the message out. Just let everyone know. Be careful out there. what you're building is important and don't leak any production secrets. Yep. Do not. Let's go to Sean McGuire. He says, the incoming Trump admin is working 16-hour days, six days per week. And Elon chimes in saying it's actually seven days a week. I love this. I mean. He's taking the Frank Slootman approach from Snowflake where you're just always setting the pace.

1:25:56You know, if your team thinks they're working hard, show them they can work harder. Yep. What was Frank Slootman's book called? Oh, it was so good. I forget it. But we should review that at some point. What was it called? I can't remember. I'm blanking on it. But yeah, I mean, whether you like Trump or not, it's good to have people in the government working hard. Better than not working at all. First time in a while. Better than not fake jobs. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see what comes out of the admin. I mean, we're still so early. I guess they're working mostly on nominations and just picking people.

1:26:29I think they have to hire thousands of people in a very short amount of time. so more yeah that's that's that's what i think people is kind of under discussed is you have this new administration and then you're sprinting and of course you're gonna hire a bunch of make a bunch of bad hires if a startup had to hire a thousand people in three months you would make i would imagine you know i don't actually know what like great sort of like hiring success rate looks like i would imagine if nine out of ten people you hire turn out to be great that's pretty good. But if you're trying to hire a thousand people in three months, the failure rate's probably going to be 20, 30, 40 % even of just like people that you didn't have, you know, Trump admin's been getting to know a lot of those people.

1:27:13They obviously have the experience from 2016 to 2020, but it's still, you know, you're having to kind of date really quickly. It's really hard to recruit people too. I mean, a lot of people have been in the admin and now they want to make money in private, in the private sector. And so you got to do a whole new pitch to convince them to come over totally a lot of momentum uh follow up from a deep dive we did on previous episode antonio brown is following up about pirate wires reporting and shane copeland founder of polymarket he says i posted something sent by the kalshi team about the polymarket creator i didn't do research on it and honestly didn't even know what i was posting when i posted it i was doing other business the kalshi and just tweeted it i want to say sorry to shane copeland as i know he's been getting a lot of shit some things you're sent you don't understand them or the weight didn't even look into it just did it never a wrong time to do the right thing shane's a good guy what a comeback story i love it i i love seeing a b do the right thing and just own up to it yeah it clearly when you looked at the original text thread he clearly wasn't putting a ton of thought he was just like okay sounds cool yeah i mean it was a funny his thing was a funny post it was him with tim walls yeah tim walls yeah does look guilty of something i don't know what it is yeah yeah um so anyways i love seeing it it's funny a a b is having the most beautiful post athlete arc of pretty much any anyone outside of pat mcafee yeah also just like a master class and like apologizing from like a really really bad scandal like yeah really really bad like the pirate wires article we read was what made him look really really bad scathing and uh and he just well i would i would argue it made call she look a lot worse true true true but still it's like you know just quickly owning up clearly this didn't go through some committee there's no crisis PR firm behind this he's just reading the room yeah just understands the vibe and understands you know what's going on and can just address it potential brother of the week it's okay to mess up you gotta say sorry master master communicator there uh simp for Satoshi says the first production truffle one unit has been produced it's exciting do you know about this company yeah So I think we talked about this on Saturday, but I got a chance to meet Simp for Satoshi last week.

1:29:27Here in L.A., he moved down from the Bay. He felt like it was too much of an echo chamber up there. And they're building basically these like personal GPUs that you can put on your your right on your desk and run run their model like locally. Nothing cloud, nothing touching the cloud. So they're going to be selling into some of the like Reddit, like llama community. And, and let's say you're, um, you know, an investor or an allocator and you want to be able to like, um, not feed, uh, opening eye, all of your proprietary data. This is going to be an awesome solution for that. So, and I just like, I like they're pushing the form factor, form factor forward.

1:30:06It feels like this, something out of like a psychedelic jungle. Like it's just like sitting there, like glowing. Like it's just, it's cool. Their aesthetics and visuals are awesome. And world-class poster, love them or hate them. You can't ignore them. That's true. That's true. Yeah, George Haas has a similar project with the TinyBox. Have you seen this? It's a custom-made computer. It's like$10 ,000, maybe$20 ,000. Yeah. And it can run the bigger models locally, but it's the same thesis. Yeah. You want to have an AI in your home that you can interact with in any scenario. Yeah. I love that. That's the real second brand.

1:30:43Yeah. I love that. Even for like doomsday prepping, like if you have this thing in your bunker and all you need is just power somehow. So you could have solar panels. You could have just a bunch of batteries, nuclear, small nuclear reactor, even just a gas generator. And you have access to the entire memory of humanity. Totally. So you can just ask it any question, tell me a story. And it's just going to have everything like the LLM's incredible compression engine. Yeah. I compared it. I compared it, uh, the, the truffle one is going to be, I forget, I think it's going to be like a few grand roughly, but I compared it to almost like the, the whole like Arduino movement.

1:31:19You remember, like I remember growing up, my dad was, was, is like, would use Arduinos like in some of his, um, high school classes that he would teach. So he'd always have them at home, just kind of like running and they'd have their little lights and whatever. Um, so I think it's kind of like the evolution of that in many ways. Um, another promoted post. You know I love promoting the world's greatest car manufacturers, and we actually have a promoted post today from Bentley Motors at Bentley Motors. They say, Artistry that commands the road. Start something powerful. Hashtag Bentley. Hashtag Continental GT.

1:31:55Hashtag Mulliner. This is the Continental GT Speed is the, if I didn't drive a Turbo S, I would drive a Continental GT Speed. uh it's they're they're showing one of the gts here but um the most beautiful timeless car silent performance silent uh it's it's low it's lower key much lower key than a rolls but gives you similar levels of comfort and um yeah this one um this one's just beautiful it is a hybrid so that might piss off some of our audience but um they do it right and um thank you thank you for making the world a more beautiful place. Yeah, it's a step up from an S-Class, something a little bit different.

1:32:39Yeah. Yeah, and we want to see more of these street parked in SF. Absolutely. That'll be a sign that things are really turning. Absolutely. Thank you to Bentley. And so head to your local Bentley dealership and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Let's go to Josh Browder. He says, I witnessed Bill Browder receive his knighthood from Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace yesterday. The Royal Family work on Thanksgiving and I'm so proud and thankful. That's amazing. Do you know the story? This is brother behavior right here to the max. You know, what's the book called? Red Notice. Such a great book.

1:33:14I think I read it maybe in high school and figuring out the connection between Josh and his dad was like crazy because like they're both clearly just like geniuses in their own ways and not afraid to, in many ways, josh doing do not pay and using it to saying like power back to the people like let's let anybody just like fight back against the system using technology yeah is just like totally different like he's carved out a totally different lane than his dad which was like trying to take down the oligarchs well that's the crazy thing about the red notice book is that you open it up and you're like oh this will be a cool story about like a hedge fund guy who's like going to russia doing deals and that's what the first part of the book is and then his business partner magnitsky gets thrown in jail and dies and spoiler alert i guess but it's a fantastic book you should still read it um and and then he spends the last half of the book like campaigning to basically get revenge and like you know uh you know like retribution for what happened and then the passes the magnitsky act which like literally changed the order and the relationship between the u.s and russia it's crazy yeah he kind of mogged the oligarchs totally yeah yeah they all Paul had a terrible time after that.

1:34:26It was rough. There were all these asset seizures. It was crazy. He really, really went to battle. Let's do Kevin Kwok. Kevin Kwok says, how did Stripe and Shopify get into this Red Queen race over making the most hardware-looking digital tracker for Black Friday sales? Someone will one day write a nature paper on something, something bird mating plumage and engineer hiring one-day UIs. did you see the uh the over the top digital tracker for black friday sales from either of these companies i did see both of them and i saw i think connor uh connor mcdonald we were having dinner with tonight yeah um technology brother and cmo of ridge he was joking and he was like all i want shopify made this like extravagant device and put it on the uh the sphere yeah yeah sorry stripe made the device they put it on the sphere connor's like all i want is something that compares this this year's black friday cyber monday to last year's and a single dashboard that's all i want and he's like you put it on this you put it on the sphere just give me this like simple update to the dashboard um and uh yeah i think this is i mean this is top of funnel marketing this is this is marketing it's marketing because you see the black friday tracker and you're like, I should have a Shopify store or a Stripe store or something.

1:35:50Because clearly, there's a lot of people making money today. And it's cool. It's a good flex. It's a good exploration territory for UI and development. And I think it's fun. It probably acts as a, it's kind of like that Chesky thing about how Steve Jobs has the annual keynote speeches, and then Chesky adopted that. If you're in deeply entrenched in e-commerce, having Black Friday as a drum beat every year we got to step it up in black friday it's kind of it really is it really is it really is poorly timed with the holidays though because i don't know we we experienced you know we launched rora like about two weeks ago at this point and so like we launched because we were trying to launch as fast as was reasonably possible but at the same time going right into every if If you've ever been close with somebody with that's deeply entrenched in e-commerce for like Thanksgiving is not an enjoyable holiday because it's the most intense to like potentially sick, you know, three months of prep up until that point.

1:36:55Yeah. Thanksgiving happens. And then you have like two hours until the big starting, the biggest where you're going to hit the year's records for the next four days potentially. And so it's the most critical time. Yeah. It's a super high stress time because if an ad goes haywire or a button is broken on the site or a code stops working, you can literally lose 100 grand in an hour. And it's not uncommon for one employee to lose their company like their entire annual salary in an hour just because they fucked something up. So the stakes are so high. and it's very american that we go from a day of family and gratitude straight into the into four days of the most extent excessive commerce and spending it's great and then okay now we're gonna go back to at least at least christmas time is usually as soon i think it's like december 17th is a lot of brands stop telling people that they can fill fulfill christmas orders and so at least they get christmas and the new year to kind of like relax but then if you're a brand in in health uh at all then it's back like day one in january new year new year like full full tilt so it's interesting because i've been doing shopify stores and e-commerce for almost 15 years now and never really had a black friday push because it's always been cpg yeah so it's not a gifted product we've done stuff but it's never like a driver but i talked to the guy who ran pebble the smartwatch company and he was like 90 of our revenue comes in q4 because it's a gifted product yeah and so they have to do all their inventory forecasts based on that it's it's a brutal business because if you get the projection wrong you have too much inventory then you have to liquidate it it's like really really hard as opposed to just thinking like okay like every month will be kind of like the last month when you're selling like a food product or whatever totally uh let's go to the peel pod turner novak's podcast he said no pod no new podcast this week listen to tech bros pod instead thank you turner for giving a shout out and we would recommend this to anyone who has a podcast where they maybe don't have the dedication to put up the numbers, just send them our way.

1:39:02Yeah. If you, if you, um, if you are going to miss a recording one week, let us know, we will produce a dedicated episode for your listeners where we will impersonate you for an hour and a half in your format. That's actually a great way to grow. You know, about feed drops on podcasts. So, so it's like, you'll, you'll do a swap. I think, um, founders podcast did this with Invest Like the Best. Yeah. Feed swap. You literally just drop one episode into the other RSS feed to just let everyone know, hey, today, you know, you're going to be hearing from another podcast. Check it out. Hope you like it.

1:39:35You already subscribed here. Here's the strategy, though. In venture, there's a lot of dead podcasts, right? There's a lot of podcasts that hit, you know, maybe they record 10 episodes and then the 11th takes a while to come out and the 12th just never comes at all. So we should go acquire all those old RSS feeds and just roll them up. Yeah, if you have an old RSS feed, reach out to us. DM us. We will acquire it. Yeah, you can exit it. We're like the tiny of RSS feeds. Send us your list. It's more like special situations though. Yeah, we'll make you an offer in 24 hours. It'll be a fair offer.

1:40:09It's not going to be the highest price that you might get if you ran a full process, but we'll get you an offer in 24 hours. We'll make it easy and you can get a nice little liquidity event on our behalf. Yeah. let's go to Eric Glyman, the founder of Ramp, CEO. He says, get rich, young man, for money is power and power ought to be in the hands of good people. I say you have no right to be poor. This was very popular in 1915, but it's best kept to yourself in 2015. Interesting. And I think he almost posted this because it feels like that's actually no longer the case. It's coming back. I mean, yeah, I think this is being proud of your success is becoming a little bit more normalized now.

1:40:54Yeah, but it's not just that. It's the good people specifically. Totally. It's like if the capital goes into hands of people with bad morals or bad ideals, like you will see bad outcomes. Yeah. But if it's in the hands of good people. Yeah, and there's this idea of people that have this sort of nihilistic view and they're like, oh, the world's such a fucked up place. I'm not even going to try or I don't want to participate in the system that's so bad. But if you really believe that's the case, if you want to change the world, one way to do that is to accumulate some amount of power, influence, and money certainly helps with those things.

1:41:29So succeed young men and women. I mean, I also say that there's a moral obligation because so many rich people spend their money so poorly. If you have good taste, you've got to get rich so you can class it up. Class it up. Yeah. More closing dinners on yachts. Let's go to this post that has one like. I think it's probably a reply to us. It says, Saylor has pre.com bubble brother behavior, a champion. And it's a quote from an article in 1996. Michael Saylor is an intense guy on weekends, friends say. Washington's 1996 high-tech entrepreneur of the year has taken a date to the office, handed her a book and asked her to read all day while he works.

1:42:07A couple of years ago, sailor flipped his red toyota sports car several times in an icy highway escaped with cuts and bruises several several times and headed back to his job dupe company executives recall for fun sailor himself says he reads two inch thick tomes on the history of western civilization after he gets home from work at midnight wow true bubble brother right here true bubble brother wow bubble brother thanks for sharing that i would never have found this i love this i i love archival I respect it's great there's two kinds of behavior that I respect somebody that hit a local top for their company in the dot-com bubble and runs it back up 20 years later and achieves a new all-time high yeah in the in whatever the 2020s bubble that we're in is and then somebody that can flip their car multiple times on a single drive and still make it home is also fantastic so shout out to all the bubble brothers out there it's great are we even into the latest yeah we are we are uh paula who i believe we covered earlier in the show says i subscribed to the information just so i could read this specific article and uh and it's a quote by mark andreessen's uh wife who says she calls her husband's giant bald head my egg amazing wild that you went on the record with my great my dune my arrakis in in in the 1952 presidential election richard nixon's opponent adlai stevenson ii whose bald head was similarly shaped was dubbed an egg head by republicans for being a nerd interesting i just don't think it's i don't think it's a diss anymore no like i don't think you can say hey you you look like humpty dumpty it's more like you look like your brain is bigger than mine and i'm threatened yeah well the the the famous image has been photoshopped so many times that no one knows the true side yeah exactly it's been so deep fried so yeah no in 10 years like now we're we're looking at an archive version of the the the facebook red book in 10 years it'll be like the archive like print copy of mark andreessen's the the iconic Eggman image.

1:44:21And he's wearing an Omega. I love it. Jesse Powell says, POV, you are staying in a$1 ,000 a night Airbnb. And it's a picture of Amazon Basics, polyester sheets, I guess. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of Airbnb hustlers who have figured out that profit maximization happens when you reduce your cogs and reduce your capex. I love Airbnb as a business and I have some good experiences in Airbnb, I do not use Airbnb under any circumstances anymore. Like I just don't. I mean, it was great when I was starting my first company and we needed like a big place for a bunch of people who are coming into town that's affordable.

1:45:03That's way cheaper than buying a bunch of hotel rooms. Totally, totally. I think it's actually best suited for startup offsites basically at this point. That's great. It's like, yeah, you don't expect your, but if, but for me taking a holiday with friends or family, I don't want to stay in, I don't want to stay in an Airbnb where the quality is just so variable and the average host is running it as a business. And that's why that, that created space for Wander though, to come out. Wander really standardizes the experience. Also, there are a few options. I know some people that do longer term Airbnbs and at that point it's like, okay, on day one, just order the sheets that you want to use.

1:45:44Like if you're going to be there for two months because you're, you know, some sort of nomad, like just make it your own. And yeah, two months in a hotel is maybe going to be a little bit crazy compared to some long term. If you're going to be there for a couple of months, Egyptian cotton. Yes. Maybe go on italic.com. Yeah. You can get some off brand. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Let's go to NASJAC. Says the current state of futurism and post an image from futurism, the blog and says, Elon Musk's plan for a city on Mars will likely end in horrifying mass death. Wow. Yeah. So I also saw another screenshot from futurism and there's like four deeply negative articles on what is the inevitable future.

1:46:27Yeah. And this is just like another example of the collapse of mainstream media is, hey, I guess we just have to be negative on anything to get any type of attention. Yeah. Well, what it is is that they're going for lowest common denominator. Yeah. They're going for broad clicks because they don't have particularly well-targeted ads. They're not doing ads for Patek, let's be honest. And so they need to be negative because that's what will spread. If it bleeds, it leads. Negative news travels faster, gets more clicks. It's so funny to catastrophize something that is like years away. Like 100 years out.

1:47:00Oh, something bad could happen in the future. I guess that's like how humans have always thought, right? but um have a little have a little positivity yeah it's great let's go to near says in a world of ai agents the age of the engineer is over the time of the idea guy has come that's a picture of the orcs from uh load the rings it's very derogatory towards uh idea yeah yeah i resonate with that that's kind of sometimes i wake up in the morning and i feel like that it's true i was looking through my my chat gpt uh logs and i was like other people just wouldn't think to search this stuff like anyone can get these results the best but only i could think to ask them yeah it's true so the best part is if you i think i think near probably replied with this but um uh somebody actually animated it using some model to have to be like a whole like scene and replied with it.

1:48:00That's great. Yeah, I mean, ideas are underrated. Personal connections are underrated in the age of AI. Like rote memorization is clearly overrated. On the way out. Yeah. Let's go to Rohit, remembering the best product launch of all time. And it's Sam Altman announcing the launch of ChatGPT. So this - He just tweeted it out. Today we launched ChatGPT. Try talking with it here. chat.openai.com on the 30th of November, 2022. So over, it's been two years. But my favorite part of this, he had a typo. Oh, he did? I don't, somewhere in the thread, I think he like made a mistake. It was like, oops, maybe it didn't get printed out.

1:48:42Yeah, maybe it's low. But he was like, oops, sorry, meant this. And that's the greatest product launch of all time. They get to a hundred million users in two months. And now it's the fastest product that went fully into the mainstream. And I don't know how long. so do you remember the buzz around this beforehand like what specifically so so before he publicly launched chat gpt um sam was doing these like monstrous fundraising like pitches where it'd be like him and every investor in the valley on the same call yeah not doing like individual it was just like join this webinar basically if you want to be in so amazing and and uh and would just like there was an information article where uh i think one of the funds asked like what companies should we invest in and they were like really impressed with the results because it like analyzed the portfolio and came up with some ideas and it was just like blowing everyone's mind because no one had ever interacted with an llm like this and and then and then as soon as it launched it was like sensational and and can you believe that it was only was it a year ago that the microsoft round happened and microsoft bought like no the microsoft round happened before chat gpt like well before Microsoft came in like early early No, no, I know they invested early but there was the one where it was like 10 on 20 Yeah, 27 billion was right after this like this product was the pitch that did the round at 27 and now I think it's been leaked that there's like a new round going on at like a much higher valuation Yeah, it's like 150 or something Yeah, exactly So if you, any of the investors that were on the webinar being like, I'm not going to invest in this that was like the potentially the biggest miss of their career basically like i i know some people that like missing and it was it was always because of the like oh they'll never figure out the the the like the structure and or this isn't a consumer company would have been the other criticism it's like you're launching your a research why are you guys going to create the next dominant consumer yeah no one really pegged the consumer flip at all at all it took a long time for that and it's a huge and it's and it's now it's um this this is the most like dumbed down example possible but i've got to experience with with rora for the first time building something in silence for a really long time and then launching it and and going like zero to a hundred with with sales and it's given me like a lot more confidence and like now investing in companies where I'm like, I'm going to invest in you.

1:51:16I'm barely going to hear from you for like the next year and a half. And then you're going to launch. It's either going to work really, really well, or it's not. And open AI was a company that had to work in relative silence. I get that hype, but it was silence for years and years and years. And then when they launched, it was literally zero to a hundred million in two months. And so it's honestly a good case study out there. It's totally counter to the YC approach of just like launch early and often and just like get feedback and it's, and just like ship something to get that market feedback.

1:51:44Because if you are an experienced group of entrepreneurs, you can, you can, you know, basically just toil away, like building the thing for years and launch it and get with the way the internet and distribution works. Now you can sell a ton of something really quickly, get a ton of users really quickly. And so it's just a new way to it. Because they launched it with 3.5, which now if you use it you're like whoa this is way worse than four but it was still magical and then they followed it up with four in like three months such a good people were like afraid like people were really really like this is going to destroy every job ever this is like the fear-mongering was insane but yeah it was you could you could you could obviously see that at other companies there would be a big impetus to hey let's wait for four like we know four is gonna be better let's let's wait and just launch this chat gpd product when we have the new model that's gonna to blow everyone's mind.

1:52:39And they didn't. They launched more quickly than that. And it was actually better because it showed this pace of execution that was uncanny when in fact that 3.5 model had been out for a while and people were talking about DaVinci and that particular model. It was 3.5-002, I believe. And that one was already getting great results because it was the same model that was eventually in the first version of ChatGPT. You just had to use it through a different UI. So people in the AI community were like, okay it's getting really good like yeah yeah there was that company copy ai that got went from zero to 20 million annualized revenue in a year and then had to completely pivot because people just use chat gpt yeah um the last the last thing i'd say on that point so somebody i saw somebody post something i think it might have been signal actually credit to signal for just you know having some of the best takes of the week but um the whoever it was was saying college students are at such a rough point in time right now where they're able to use ai products that are just doing all their work for them in school so they're going to just learn way less and then they're entering a workforce where all of the jobs that would have been done by early entry-level employees are being done by julius or just chat gbt itself right like we use chat gbt so much to prep for the show just to, to, to, you know, we used it for the red book, right.

1:54:01You used it to summarize the book and, and that, that easily could have been done by like an entry level sort of like, you know, editor type person. Yeah. But I mean, I think about the work that we did with that red book. I didn't even have it summarize it. I just had it take the messy extracted text from the PDF and just clean it up and that would be someone's job, but it's great if that's someone's job who's just prompting now. I think that's actually better. Yeah. Um, let's go to Palmer lucky he says i'm going to be shilling we should hire a prompt secretary basically yeah let's go to palmer lucky he says i'm going to be shilling for mod retro all weekend if you aren't interested in the fruits of my internet forum side project that took nearly 17 years to reach fruition you might want to smash that mute button i love it even palmer gets it black friday is important this is the holiday season go get a mod retro this isn't a promoted post but we are happy to support palmer here great game this guy's not afraid of the algo he's not afraid he he he says mute me if you want yeah it's great he knows uh and also i mean what what a fantastic gift for kids like it's you know you forget how the game boy you can lose yourself in it for hours and hours but it's not gonna be some you know internet connected skinner box that's oh it's not nearly as a dick it's it's very fun it's not nearly as addictive as the as the average iphone game totally totally and you're not actually found i found my i found my game boy uh color recently which was a pikachu edition and those things are going if you have the original box and papers and everything it's it's like four thousand dollars and then if you don't have the box it's like Yeah.

1:55:38200 bucks. Jackson Oswalt says there's so much money in the world. It's actually embarrassing. I don't have at least a hundred million of it by now. I think about this every time I fly and I'm coming in over Los Angeles and I'm just looking at all the different buildings and I'm like, every one of those houses is worth a million dollars on average. Every one of those office buildings is worth like 10 million. Someone owns all of them. Someone owns a piece of all this stuff, whether it's through a fund or something like that. The wealth is there. You can physically see it. And you got to go out and get it.

1:56:10It's stuck in your laptop. Stuck in your laptop. Your job is to find it. I think Jackson is on the path to finding the a hundred million hidden in his laptop. We'll check back in with Jackson in five years. We will. Let's do another promoted post. Promoted post from our friends at McKinsey and Company. Thank you, McKinsey, for all that you guys do to help companies get more efficient and drive profits. McKinsey says, from climate risk to cyber threats and a growing talent gap, insurers face a critical moment to rethink risk management. The key, empowering CROs to move beyond control roles and lead with strategy.

1:56:50Listeners, you guys can explore the trends driving change and risk leadership, go to mck.co slash 3CT1VWH. You can read this piece all about climate risk. And we highly recommend even if you're, you know, running the 2000 chat GPT derivative app in the app store, you should be thinking about climate risk. It's a threat to all of us. So get after it. Pavel Asparujov says, if you're building, don't get lost in the AGI sauce. VCs can afford to do it. They've got the two in the two and 20. You as a founder, don't get a management fee. Stay tethered to reality. I like this. It's a good, it's a good post.

1:57:39There are a lot of people that just wind up getting obsessed with the AI futurism and forget that like they need to actually build a lock in lock in yeah paul's a master of the lock-in culture yeah i i don't actually think it can be overstated enough how how a founder is a bet in a vc portfolio and a founder you are betting your life on the idea that you choose to work on and the nature and because silicon valley is so supportive of of giving you know investing lots of money in young people. Young people, when I started my last company, my prefrontal cortex was not finished developing, right? And I wouldn't have chosen the same idea today as when we first started.

1:58:25And so it's really on the investor to make, to, to under, you know, yes, you're looking at an investment as a part of your broader portfolio and a specific bet, but it's always helpful in that when the when the investors are truly orient care a ton about the company winning every single company winning just because you know not not everyone surprisingly some some are very much just like it is what it is you know i mean it's also just been like the two in 20 the two and the two in the 20 used to be a lot smaller like you think about the first like uh kleiner perkins fund and uh eugene kleiner going inside genentech i believe or maybe it's tom perkins uh like working at the company one day a week like doing their finances and closing their books and just making sure that things were the trains were running on time yeah or chris chris sacca the greatest like the the fund that arguably set off the solo gp wave was an eight million dollar fund so the management fees on that is like you could barely live in sf at the time yeah so he has to So he had to make it work.

1:59:28And what did he do? Stripe, Hoover, Twitter, Docker. Yeah. I'm missing one big one. But back against the wall, cowboy boots on the feet. The guy did it. Made it happen. Imagine what he would have done if he had a suit on. Yeah. Well, speaking of suits, Kevin says, love that jacket, Jordy. You look like Colonel Sanders. If he had a liquidity event. Let's go. Kevin. Kevin gets it. That is exactly what I was going for. Colonel Sanders with a liquidity event. So if you want to look like Colonel Sanders had a liquidity event, go find a Fiorentino label, John Fiorentino, and get yourself a fine white linen suit.

2:00:12That's great. Eric Leiman, CEO of Ramp, says, the need for AI and finance has never been more clear. Manually inputted accounting data creates openings for bad actors and human error. Automation prevents those openings. We have the technology. Let's make financial waste a thing of the past. And he's showing a few different screenshots. Macy's says accounting employee hid up to$154 million in delivery expenses and the Pentagon fails its seventh audit in a row. But CFO says progress is being made rough. Yeah. We got to get these firms on ramp for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I honestly, this is one of those things.

2:00:49Every single new company coming out of YC that's doing some AI meets finance for corporations, you are competing directly with a very fast moving gorilla, which is Ramp. A very, very, very, very aggressive gorilla. It's like, you think they haven't thought of this? Yeah. No, and there's a bunch of, there's still like so much white space. It's such a large sector of the economy. It's so critical to every business and individual's like ability to operate in the world. So there's plenty of white space, but. You're not just going to build ramp with AI because that is just ramp. I mean, early on, I remember they were one of the huge beneficiaries of GPT-4 for the receipt scanning because they could just do exactly what we did with the Redbook where they would OCR it with Google, take all the text in the picture and then throw that through chat GPT-4 just to clean it up.

2:01:48And it just sped everything up so much for them. And so it's like, they're not asleep at the wheel. They're going to build this stuff. And we're excited to see where else AI pops up in the ramps. Yeah, I met a company, I want to say, like two weeks ago, that's using that sort of same method to just do much, much, much, much faster, basically diligence on small businesses, like super small businesses, under seven figures a year in annual revenue, to be able to offer them credit more efficiently. So there's still tons of ways to apply the tech that isn't necessarily squarely in Ramp's wheelhouse.

2:02:28So hey, and if you build a great team and you're doing something interesting with AI and finance, shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you might land back at Ramp. That's fantastic. Druva says, GM announcing a licensing deal with Tesla for FSD will be this era's 1997 Mac world. And if you're not familiar with the 1997 Mac world, Bill Gates called in to the Apple conference, pledging$150 million investment in his struggling competitor while the crowd jeers and booze. This was an iconic piece of tech history. Bill Gates is like looming in this massive screen. It was so crazy. Oh my God. I cannot wait for Elon to, I feel like Elon would, would show up in person to that event though.

2:03:09The GM like keynote and he'd be like, you know how he does this like awkward thing. Right. Hey, Hey everybody. Yeah. You know, and he does his little like spiel and he's like, should we hit the bar? Yeah. I mean, it'd be great. I mean, I, I, the Tesla FSD, I mean, I don't know if they'll ever actually license it. This is a firm prediction. We'll see if this actually happens. Um, but I like, I like Druva. I like Druva going bold because it'll be an iconic quote to me if it happens. Yeah, exactly. He's not saying, oh, this might happen. He's predicting it. It will happen. It will happen. Check back in five years.

2:03:41Yeah. What's the top GM product? Probably the, the, do they own Corvette? Right. oh they do so the zr1 yeah give me fsd in there give me a naturally aspirated or turbocharged v8 that goes 230 miles an hour you know it also drives itself you know this would actually be a cool product that you could build uh request for startup go create create something that runs uh that just fact checks podcasts historical catalogs because you could go back and like what was this week in startups predicting in 2015 you know gary vaynerchuk actually has like a guy on his team that does that and goes and pulls his old his old predictions and then post them when they come true and they always go viral that could be that could be an app yeah yeah exactly so gary's guy could be an app yeah yeah uh zach says speed that's everything never lose it and it's cal ai ranking higher than strava and my fitness pal i assume okay so i think i think i think we i think we featured this guy before and he was like we followed him yeah yeah he's saying like i'm not something like I'm not sleeping till 10 till not 10 figure eight figures in ARR or something like that so I didn't realize this kid is I can actually call him a kid because he's 17 okay he's not even officially an adult yet yeah and he's built Cal AI into something that is charting that's amazing you know charting is we've talked about this before is based on momentum not not overall downloads or anything but still very impressive to be beating out my fitness uh pal um and strava given their scale yeah and i and the app's super cool you basically you can like scan your food using your camera and like get an idea of how many calories it is yeah makes total sense and yeah and something that can be probably a lot more accurate yeah i was getting lunch with a guy who uh like took a picture of his chipotle order to then enter it into my fitness pal later and i was like dude you run an ai company like you got to cut out the middle man here like the ai should just be able to look at the image and just guess uh like pretty accurately especially if you've ordered that before and he was like yeah i always get the same thing so i just go into my fitness pal and copy it and i was like that still feels like the stone age yeah and this is i mean this is such a good example of so many of the best applications or ai are super obvious and that doesn't mean you shouldn't go and do it yeah oh this is great ben little says if this guy is across the negotiating table from you you're in trouble the tells he wears a 3xl but should probably wear a 2xl he wears an old school rolex jeans with worn in loafers took four calls before takeoff at 6 30 a.m.

2:06:14and he's been talking about racing for an hour animal an absolute dog an absolute dog i would love to figure out who this guy is and do a personnel news segment on him because when he moves yeah companies he's going to move the market is he moving companies maybe he's just an entrepreneur some small business maybe he's been rolling up hvacs for a couple years who knows yeah yeah yeah he's he's the guy if you're if you are running a search fund and you're bidding for an hvac company just remember you're bidding against this guy and good luck yeah that's great uh this is an interesting one from rune did on the show before he says shape rotator was 100x less useful and more tasteless than word cell i expect people will say word cell for a long time yeah that shape rotator and word cell tweet was like shook silicon valley to its core it really brought rune to the forefront of like tech culture all it takes is one one true banger basically i mean this is coogan's law coining a phrase to describe a phenomenon.

2:07:09What is a word cell? Someone who's high verbal. What's a shape rotator? Someone who's high math. Those words don't stick out in your mind the same way. I don't understand that shape rotator was tasteless. It doesn't seem like it's that tasteless. There's that whole shape rotation test. Have you seen that? It's like a test to see if you can rotate shapes in your mind and you can just give someone this test and they either get it or they don't. But yeah, there's a big question about who's the beneficiary in the age of AI, the shape rotator or the word cell. And maybe it's the word cell. That's the hot take.

2:07:43The ideas guy. The work ideas guy. The bull case for word cell over shape rotator is that it's just shorter. Like word cell, two syllables instead of shape rotator, four. And the more compression that goes into an idea, the easier it is to use. The shorter it is to type, the more useful it is as a shorthand. So I kind of agree with him there. Totally.

2:08:12Crypto. Boring. Let's do this one. This is interesting. Raptor is my favorite new niche brand, says Andrea. Products are made by an architecture student. And it's a very elegant egg holder for a dozen eggs and something that's a juice squeezer that looks like something out of Blade Runner. Very, very cool. Yeah, I just wanted to put this up to encourage people to look, you know, there's this, if you're early in your sort of entrepreneurship journey, it's easy to be like, oh, all the good ideas are taken. Ramp is a great idea. It's already ramp, right? I don't, you know, nobody needs to go rebuild ramp or anything.

2:08:57But when you look around your everyday life, right? Like rebuild the Polycom, right? Like I want, I want that, that printers. Yeah. Printers. I want somebody to make just a beautiful, stunning, super easy to use printer. That AI camera. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is doing interesting. Yeah. You can just look around everything, everything in your life, everything that you touch and interact with as a potential business, you can make it more analog. You can make it more futuristic. You can make it easier to use, you know, there's just any number of, of, um, um, I also like this just because the design language is uniquely not Apple, which really dominated the tech industry for so long.

2:09:34It's just like you got to copy Apple on everything. And then we saw this with the landing pages, like linear, I believe, was like the main one before LARPing. And yeah, it was very, very exciting to see someone break out and do something different. Gabby Goldberg says, imagine how powerful it feels to crop Jeff Bezos out of your Instagram carousel. and uh she says fall photo dump grateful for all the memories this season brought and jeff bezos in a full batman costume has been cropped out although i so but this is like the this is like the eighth this is like it looks like one of the one of many images yeah yeah exactly we need to go fact like she clearly wanted to show the whip what is it carrying yeah it's at lauren w sanchez on instagram um and and i i thought i saw a uh a community note on this later that said um that said um that he's actually just in the previous photo so if you swipe you can actually see both of them so a little bit of fake news gabby you might wind up with a community note i don't know we're fact checking you right now but uh i can't even find the original post but three three days ago she's She's posting him.

2:10:42She posts her technology brother all the time. Jeff Bezos looks great. He's jacked. He's living his best life, having fun. Why not post him? My Chad Life by Jeff Bezos. Tuna says, we owe a lot to these gentlemen. Eastern European developer. Makes 15K a year. Will accept any GitLab ticket. Doesn't argue. I haven't really worked with that many Eastern European developers. but I know that there's a lot of companies that have really, really sick. It's an amazing. Estonia. No, it's an amazing. It's an amazing approach to work, which probably comes out of spending decades under a communist regime. And then you're in the capitalist system and you're like, I can be productive and contribute to an enterprise that supports me back is probably an awesome feeling.

2:11:36so yeah a lot of people um a lot of it's driven by the speed of the internet that was a big thing for estonia their their their government just went super long on internet infrastructure and so they built out high speed internet and so everyone no matter kind of how wealthy you are in the country you just get access to really fast internet same thing with uh uh poland has really amazing internet there's a few other countries and it's a high correlation between the speed of the internet and the quality of the software developers, which makes a lot of sense. Let's go to Will O 'Brien. This is a long post, so I'll read through it.

2:12:10He says, there's so much opportunity in ocean technology right now that literally nobody is talking about. It's probably the most underrated startup vertical. The ocean economy is massive, over 2 trillion, covers 70 % of the planet. 3 billion rely on it as their primary source of food, 1 billion as their primary source of income. And while we have robots on Mars, low-cost, high-performance drones, supersonic VTOL, planes taking over our skies the technology in our ocean pales in comparison to these domains the main player in nearly every ocean value driver transport fisheries defense energy oil and gas biodiversity are the large stale incumbents offering solutions that run on ancient software and hardware stacks with very little r &d spend fascinating it's cool that he's like found a different angle in like hard tech and uh and american yeah there's um there are some like i invested in um i invested in shinkai oh yeah probably like 18 ish months ago at this point um and safe the founder safe the founder yeah so shinkai is creates robots for basically fishermen for fish processing yeah using they basically yeah they created a robot that allows you to kill a fish you basically using a needle to the back of the brain which makes the fish um die gracefully and not like die really stressfully because if you just if you catch a fish throw it on ice it just flaps and releases a bunch of uh gets really stressed releases a bunch of cortisol i'm sure and other stress hormones and so um so yeah they're doing that will's doing that um and i and i think the oceans have always been forgotten right like humans naturally have always been focused on the stars and and we and there's always this like fact that's like you know 80 percent of the world's oceans are completely undiscovered you know it's like so there's a lot to explore down there i would love to see a future where i really want to see a startup this is going to is a crazy idea but but i want to start up where you and your absolute boys can crowdfund a a really capable autonomous uh semi-autonomous drone that you can just either fly or send out to sea like imagine if you had a little mini like drone submarine that was self-sufficient and you could just send it out into the ocean and be like it'd be you just have a live stream of it you could just like like i i would pay a lot of money i think the comms are really really hard the comms are hard but yeah yeah so let's say it's a surface it was truly fully autonomous little mini little mini reactor starlink yeah i just want to be a live stream of being like we're pulling up to this deserted island like let's go let's go check it out visibility is not good down there it's very hard but yeah i mean maybe the right the right equipment you figure something out it is cool i mean there are some companies that are doing like i guess ocean economy stuff flexport is probably counted in the ocean very good example yeah that's an example of like there's been no investment in this yeah sail drones and others kind of like i guess what what sail drone needs to sort of offer like live streaming services where you and your boys can can get your own sail drone and yeah i wonder what else i don't know it's it's fascinating it's just cool to see someone highlight like a different angle different different niche in the in the hard tech community uh let's go to jj he says don valentine was 40 years old when he founded sequoia in 1972 wow what a boss but it makes sense i mean he built uh you know he's wasn't he one of the traders eight or he was involved in like the intel story early on i might be getting that wrong but yeah it's not like he just was a hvac technician and decided to uh get into venture capital i I wonder what his track record was before founding Sequoia in terms of investing.

2:15:41Angel bets. Yeah, I wonder if he was like, I mean, yeah, we talked about him on Mount Rushmore, like potentially one of the Mount Rushmore angel investors. Yeah, my favorite, there's a great founders. I mean, there's so many examples if you look at, if you just go back and listen to Founders podcast, it's like every other person that he covers started their company, like in their 40s or sometimes even 50s. It really does debunk the myth. Enzo Ferrari was like 45. and he had been in racing in the automotive world for that kind of his whole career but he didn't start the actual what became ferrari until he was 45 red bull uh ceo is the same way i think early monster the monster ceo was really old estee lauder too um so there's a bunch of examples and uh honestly like yeah that that's why it feels like there's there's this common trend in silicon valley where somebody hits 35 and they're kind of maybe post-economic and they just kind of start floundering around and it's like no that's when you should go do your life's work 40 do it at 45 yep 50 whatever it doesn't matter um but um then pick up some don't die from brian johnson and build your business for 200 years for 200 years why not yeah yeah that's gonna be great the first the first uh ceo with a hundred year tenure it'll happen his track yeah yeah zuck zuck is looking he's been ceo for 20 years already right wow that's actually that's wild yeah 2005 yeah 2004 so yeah must be we gotta do something for for 20 yeah for zuck founders funds turn 20 next year that's big it's big um i gotta go to a promoted post we've had we've had two too little two little break two two little uh ads so this one is from sotheby's Sotheby's says a masterpiece of sound a treasure that transcends time the Joachim Moss Stradivarius an instrument of extraordinary historical significance is coming to Sotheby's New York and a one-of-a-kind auction during master's week in February 2025 this is a singular opportunity to acquire one of the world's finest instruments while directly supporting the next generation of musicians through NEC music so anyways this looks like absolutely incredible violin in uh they have a great video here and um this is uh a instrument that i hope ends up in the hands of the community and i would we would appreciate the honor of having it placed somewhere on the set you know even for a few weeks to kind of put it on display um and get it you know in front of the audience they're not making stradivariuses anymore they're just not it's it is one of the craziest things that stradivarius is a violin maker he made a ton of them they're still regarded as the greatest violins and they still trade and are used and played yep like it's something that violinists actually use yeah i can't even think of another product that's yeah you would yeah in the auto in like the automotive world it's not like you're going to use the 1965 le mans winner in like the 20 i mean people people drive model t's that have been restored yeah for sure but that's not 400 years and they're not at the highest level they're not like racing maybe castles in some degree like people live in in 400 castle still hit yeah castle still hit but i mean i i know uh uh i think a centi who's uh restoring a old viking ship right now and so that might be up there, but it's rare.

2:19:15It's rare. So yeah, let's have him send it, uh, past, um, you know, uh, go test it out in the middle East. See if it's, if that Viking ship still has it, you know, on the Red Sea. Yeah. Yeah. A few, a few drones. Yeah. Um, let's go to Gabriel. He says, regular reminder, we're toward the end of the brief period of time, which you can pay 20 to $30 for a bag of very good coffee that's roasted pretty well. By the end of this decade, the industry will have separated into Giga Slop and Veblen Goods, like wine. 6k likes. Giga Slop. What a banger. Giga Slop is a great term. Veblen Good, also great, but we love Veblen Goods here.

2:19:58We love all sorts of Veblen Goods. We don't have a problem with the Veblen Goods. There's just more consumer surplus to go around. There's more economic profit to go into the organization that created the Veblen good. I actually don't know that much about the world of fine coffee roasting and I wasn't aware of this trend. It is interesting. So Ben and I yesterday morning - We like Volta here. We like Celsius. Ben and I were getting some B-roll for our upcoming launch video yesterday and Ben and his roommate who was helping film were complaining about the groundwork coffee. They were like, this sucks.

2:20:35and i feel like um i feel like uh we're at a point where this sort of gen z millennial crowd has such high expectations for coffee partly because of the price point like if you're paying six dollars for this like black brownish liquid you want something that's good our parents grew up at a time where it was just like brown liquid good i like coffee like i'm just gonna have it but the bar has been risen so much i feel like it was probably used to all be gigaslop and now there's this sort of certain bar where they're they're like starbucks was like revolutionary and now people call it charbox and they don't like it and they think it's gigaslop you're gonna love this one marty.com says go.com or go home and then somebody says the.com is taken what's the next best one and paul graham chimes in with some other name.com so good That's great.

2:21:29Dot com's valuable. It's so, it's, we are not joking. It's so important. Yeah. There was an, and yeah, the, no, this, so this wasn't even, so the Cal, so I think the Cal.com founder quote tweeted this and responded to it too. And it's. Cal.ai. No, no. Cal.com. Cal.com is the open source calendar scheduling tool. That's like an alternative to Calendly. and yeah cal.com you're right away super memorable it's great you can do cal.com slash coogan or whatever it's easy to remember that.com almost made the business it's so good right um obviously you got to execute really well but it makes a big difference what does nikita beer think about.com because like if you're in the app store he's very well so name and the actually he posted something earlier i don't think we're going to cover it but it was interesting he posted a screenshot of the downloads chart of an app that he's advising and he was like one of the key changes that they made to get it to go viral was naming it something better.

2:22:30So he might, I bet he's much less oriented around domains and much more, but still very oriented around names mattering a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Finding like the white space that shows up in the search results, a little bit of SEO in the name, but not too much. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a ton of sense. Uh, let's go to this next one. ZVI. I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, but, uh, economists, I love you. Never stop economisting. This is from Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg. And Tyler writes, a bigger change that is that the average walking speed rose by 15%. So the pace of American life has accelerated, at least in public spaces in the Northeast.

2:23:03Most economists would predict such a result since growth in wages has increased the opportunity cost of just walking around. Better to have a quick stroll and get back to your work desk. I love it. I mean, you got to be strolling and working at the same time. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's you know the long walk can be valuable and can be important for both your health and also some of our best people ask us how we post how we post yeah and some of our best content comes on a stroll yeah but if you're if you're doing the type of job where value can only be created at the desk pick up the pace pick up the pace start walking faster sprint run yeah maybe run Don't do marathons though.

2:23:49No. Do not. We are strongly against marathons. Yes. Oh, this is great. From a good friend, John Fiorentino. He says, I'm a method founder. When I start a new business, I simply become the brand. I eat, sleep, and breathe the brand ethos, engulfing myself with its energy. Even my car becomes a vehicle for the brand, driving our mission forward every single day. and he shows a series of cars that he's owned, a lifted G-Wagon 4x4 with the Moon Pals, the Volta Ferrari, and the jeans old school car. I'm not exactly sure what model that is, but it's fantastic. And it speaks to the different types of brands that he's building.

2:24:31And I always think that if you are building a company and someone asks you about your brand and what car your brand would be if it was a car and you can't say, you don't have a strong enough brand. You really don't. And with Red Bull, they owned the Mini Cooper. Even Anderle, you see Palmer driving a Humvee and you're like, that makes sense. That tracks, right? But it's interesting. In the case of Red Bull, they owned the Mini Cooper, but they made it their own. I would argue that if you asked the founder of Red Bull what car represented the brand, he might say like a gt3 or some type of porsche rs right maybe but i mean so much of the red bull brand is very stunty and jokey like they do that flug toffing you know that thing where they drive stuff off of yeah but it's it's like almost it has a little bit of tongue-in-cheek element to it even though it is the highest performance and and then maybe they'd also the the real answer would be the the max verstappen f1 car yeah because that is the that's the modern avatar yeah yeah Yeah.

2:25:34But, you know, Monster has the monster truck. And I think it's like an easy out as a founder to just say, oh, well, we're a tech company, so we have a Tesla. And Tesla's great, love them. But that's not necessarily an expression of your brand. That's an expression of Tesla's brand, which is already like, Elon's car is the Tesla, right? So what is yours? and uh you know it goes back to that that quote about you know if nike made a hotel you could immediately imagine what that would look like yeah there would be a really cool gym it would have you know lots of like you know athletic there'd be posters about great athletes it'd be very clear but if hilton uh if hilton made a shoe you don't know what that would mean and so it's just like nike has a better brand than hilton for that reason right yeah and so um i i think that that's an interesting exercise and it goes back to the stuff that's in the the facebook red book like their brand was was articulated through all these various images and that's why you know when we build decks we like to put a lot of images in there and it's just a great way to uh to to really test are you thinking clearly about your brand can you express it as as a watch as a wallet as a t-shirt as a piece of clothing or anything like yeah and it's also what what feo does is also interesting because he's building consumer brands where attention is is really all that matters he's in places where he's going to meet people that are relevant so if he's driving a g-wagon four by four around los angeles with a moon pals logo all over it that's going to start opening doors you got to drive something to get around yeah you may as well drive something that that starts a conversation the um the the roma spider that he's getting for the firentino label like that that perfectly suits the brand like it looks like a Fiorentino yeah what you know it looks like something that the the the founder of a fine suiting company would drive and it works for Volta too yeah it's yeah and I and it's funny in the context of I bet you the Fiorentino Ferrari will sell one suit per month yeah that will ultimately pay for the cost of the car so he's driving he's driving for free yeah so yeah it is it is funny uh let's go to something that could be its own dick uh its own deep dive enron is back some Freudian slip yeah something that could uh these guys are being in so much trouble eventually but uh i love it because these guys are uh so enron is back on on x and twitter they put out this launch video and it's shot like a classic enron ad it looks like it could be an ad for ExxonMobil.

2:28:11Enron, of course, the famous energy trading company that went bankrupt and a massive fraud scheme in the dot-com boom. And - When did they actually go under? Because I was definitely under - I think it was in 2001. Yeah, so I was six years old. Yeah. And so this is my, you know, this is one of those things. I heard a lot about Enron, right? But I'm excited to, you know, get to know it, right? As like an adult now, right? Like get to experience - December 2nd, 2001. Yeah, December 2nd, 2001. Enron goes bankrupt. 25 years later, almost, they're back. So these guys are launching a coin. They're launching a crypto token around Enron.

2:28:51Meme coin. Going a little bit farther with the marketing than most meme tokens. It's interesting. I didn't read the white paper, but it's funny. I don't think they've released it yet. Okay. When they do, that's going to be groundbreaking. because we know they're going to be revolutionizing the future of energy and commodities trading on the blockchain. And it's funny that they could have taken, you know, the rollout was like very good, I would say. Like it wasn't just the launch video. I think they got billboards in Houston where Enron was headquartered. It's clearly very good marketing execution.

2:29:31um it seems like they actually got the ip a while yeah yeah wanted to do some stunt with it and this no i had i had uh i had heard that this was in the works for a really long time but i actually wasn't sure i expected the execution to just be kind of mid yeah um so so far the execution's been good i just i don't i it's so hard to kind of make a prediction of what's going to come here because ultimately this is the best way to view it this is an entertainment product that is investable it's not i'm not saying that you should invest in it or that it's going to generate any type of return but this is just a modern form of entertainment right it's this like stunt meme and they're good at this they did birds as birds aren't real before this whole viral marketing campaign around the conspiracy theories and stuff and um i mean there have been successful meme coins before dogecoin started as a joke it would be funny it'd be funny if it ends up stabilizing like like truth social where it's like hey this is barely a real company in many ways but from a revenue standpoint at least but enron could probably sell as much merch sales through their brand as true social has done ad revenue yeah a million dollars in the last 12 months yeah so maybe it becomes a sustainable you know stable market tracking it here make sure to subscribe it closely covering it uh josh steinman been on the show before says request for startups gpt trained on u.s geologic survey data maps of any and all their varieties and anything else that can be shoehorned into a gis database so if you're building something you're looking for an idea i think you got a customer because josh wants something he's very vague about what he wants to do yeah he's looking for minerals maybe geologic surveys like i don't know there was that news about uh uh china banning the export of gallium and germanium yep have you seen gallium it's fascinating it it it's a metal it looks just like you know a tungsten cube you put in your hand it melts because the melting point is like 87 degrees crazy it's very weird it's used in all these defense applications we should put um china manufactures 99 of it so we should put a little bit of gallium in our in our merch uh uh definitely a tungsten cube would be nice yeah it's good to definitely on brand um yeah if you're if you can't tell what metal what what element your brand is you need to step it up you're lost um let's skip the olfactory stuff wait let's let's take a quick okay yeah we're gonna take a quick break we'll be right back let's go to reggie james he says had a dream last night about sf so today i'm flying to sf every time i land at sfo i feel like i booted into the wrong server and then he lists his loot loot from capital the trousers margilla the sweater margilla uh the glasses are mascot the bag is vintage love ralph loren from tokyo and the hat is pen fantastic yeah i uh if you're going outfit for outfit with reggie prepare to get mogged unless you're in a perfectly tailored suit in which case you know he'll have to respect he'll have to respect that uh but anyway this is an example i mean he's been we're entering the we've talked about this at length we're entering the era of loud opulence it's becoming cool again to express yourself through clothing and we got to give reggie credit he's been doing this for years and years and years way before loud opulence was was really in the in the zeitgeist so um so So anyways, post your next fit.

2:33:07He clearly knows so much about fashion. It's crazy. Yeah, yeah. Have you seen his breakdowns of Zuck? Yeah. He's like, just wait until Zuck learns about this designer. And then he does, like six months later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, he's literally on the leading edge of this stuff, just being like, okay, Zuck's here in the journey. He's going to get here. I think there's opportunities to take all of that data that's been produced around the history of these different labels and designers and condense it into more of a like specialized LLM almost of like what is the most coveted piece and like you know that Margiela created in the early 2000s I mean there's all that stuff that do that stuff yeah there's YouTube channels but it's not that through it all yeah I don't want to listen to a 20-minute video always yeah and just understanding like the taxonomy and the hierarchies is very very difficult like who are the key brands but then within those brands what of the different levels.

2:34:01Yeah. Yeah. And taste is not just about how much money you can spend on an outfit. Otherwise you'd be walking around Balenciaga head to toe. So last thing I love about this is, is how to dream last night about San Francisco. So today I'm flying to San Francisco. Talk about like, don't let your dreams be dreams. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Just taking immediate action. Just manifesting. So the next time you have a dream about going somewhere, Act on it. Carried no interest says, bringing back American manufacturing is one of the most important challenges we face as a nation. And Gary Tan is being delusional.

2:34:36Calling Gary out. Interesting. That's okay, by the way. VCs have to be delusional. It's part of the job. The source of his and many VCs' delusion is that they think bringing back American manufacturing can be solved by robotics, software, and efficiency. Unfortunately, the problem is much deeper than that. Time for a quick history lesson because it's important to understanding how we fix this. Let's head over to China. and then he breaks it all down. It's interesting. I've been a little bit more bullish than him on robotics having an impact on American manufacturing because robotics can move much faster if it's ramping exponentially than retraining a whole generation.

2:35:09I would take the other side. And I think what he's saying is he certainly understands that technology is going to be very important to onshoring our manufacturing capacity and all those different things. That said, he's saying to compete with China who invested hundreds of billions of dollars effectively in non-dilutive funding to get their manufacturing to where it is today. We can't purely rely on technology. I mean, that's even the story of TSMC, right? Yeah. The Thailand government. Yeah, and then so what he's saying is, if you look at this in the context of, okay, we have all these new manufacturing startups, all these robotics companies that are doing important things.

2:35:48Simultaneously, we have Doge that's trying to deregulate and create more efficiency within the government. There probably should be another, he's kind of arguing for this, another group that's saying, hey, if we're really serious about bringing American manufacturing home, we need to be okay with a little bit of extra inflation and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to make this happen. It can't just be a private markets thing. Yeah, well, you saw the Pat Gelsinger news. He's out as CEO of Intel. And the Chips Act was supposed to kind of reshore American chip manufacturing. And I believe that Intel still hasn't gotten paid for anything from the Chips Act.

2:36:25And that was kind of like the obvious Chips Act thing. was just give Intel a bunch of money because they're the only ones that are set up at all to build a fab in America. Of course, TSMC is coming here and the Arizona plant's going really well. So I'm very optimistic that things will work out, but it was still interesting. And Ben Thompson's critique of the Chips Act is that he wanted it to be set up like Operation Warp Speed where there are defined guaranteed sales. So you're only creating the incentive that if you build it, we will buy it. You're not putting money into the company and just saying like, hey, go, hopefully it works out.

2:37:00It's like, you got to actually make the thing. But if you produce a three nanometer chip in America, we will guarantee that it will sell. And then the government might not even have to buy that many of them because once they're made, you know, Apple and the market will buy them. But you know that you can underwrite it because there's zero risk. So interesting. I like that there's a different take there. Let's stay on Gary Tan and go to one of his posts. Gary says a lot of software can be built quickly now, but it is becoming a lost art to actually make it self-serve and consumer quality. You must sand down all the edges and fix the P2 bugs instead of only focus on the demo paths.

2:37:36This year, personal software will force its return. I love that. Yeah, I think it'll be interesting in the age of AI gigaslop, which is a new term. There's going to be a lot of really, really poor software products that technically do the job but don't do it very well and are not very user-friendly. And I actually think there will be more teams that sort of build quietly, really have a lot of confidence in their products, build them in a really user-friendly way. And instead of just shipping that gigaslop like, you know, the next day or, you know, a week later, take the time to really get it right.

2:38:15And Gary's point of view is as a designer himself, he's really pushing and and getting up on a pedestal and pushing the industry to care about design and and what he's describing is like ultimately design yeah it's not even just design like gary is a craftsman like if you look at his youtube videos that he was making like eventually it morphed into interviews and stuff but some of the early ones are like he spent like a full day recreating a scene from uh train spotting which is a movie i haven't even seen but he like went and vlogged and like set up the camera and filmed all this stuff and like really he like has all these nice lenses really understands like how to make things look and just create a quality product yeah in everything it wasn't just like oh i i should be doing content it's i i should be doing content and i'm gonna do it yeah yeah and you see that at yc with like the team that he's built there um it's it's very good he sees everything as a product yeah and everything to be designed which is the right right frame of mind for sure uh let's stay on the venture capitalist and go to Bilal Zubary over at Lux Capital.

2:39:17He says, every founder slash CEO I texted with today responded within minutes from early stage founders to CEOs of now public companies. Founders are always on. They are always building, always trying to move the ball forward. Interesting. Now, if you want the real test, have your new associate text the founder and CEO and see if they get back to you that fast. A lot of founders are like, oh shit, a GP is texting me. You better fucking answer this. But I do agree with the sentiment that, like, you know, people need to be quick on response. I think, yeah, it's one of those things. If you're messaging with a hyper-engaged founder or operator, they will get back to you really important really quickly if they find what you're talking about to be important.

2:40:00Yes. If not, it will be completely lost in the shuffle. Exactly. Yeah. I'm sure Bilal is not showing up with, like, hi there. I'd like to talk to you about all the intro. Or just sending that day's competitor. Yeah. Like, hey, did you see this? Did you see this? Is this a competitor? No, I'm sure it's super high signal, like great conversation. So yeah. Yeah. Learn to communicate on both sides. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Guillermo Roche, founder of Vercel says, imagine trading an hour of doom scrolling a day for an hour of exercise a day and what your life would be like in a year. Let's go. Imagine what your one rep max would be in a year.

2:40:36Yeah. And that's why we do this podcast. Visualize it. you don't need to doom scroll you can just listen to this while you're lifting hope hope hope hope scroll hope scrolling it's levering it's leverage for the mind leverage for the mind that's a great one put that on a sticker put that in the on the list write that down write that down read that again read that again bookmark this print that out it's great uh aaron sladoff's been on the show before he says i don't think there's a single domestic defense startup right now that could manufacture 10 ,000 units of anything if they got an order. And this was very controversial.

2:41:09There were a lot of people who were saying like, oh no, uh, there are plenty of examples. And he would always reply like, name one. And then they would be like, uh, I can't really. Um, and it's interesting because I mean, obviously like, you know, uh, I mean like Palantir doesn't manufacture stuff, SpaceX, like what they're not gonna make 10 ,000 rockets. Like that's just not how their business works. Anderil 10 ,000, like, you know, submarines, like there's just not the scale of these things like we don't have 10 000 aircraft carriers yeah but a counter example of that actually so so deterrence as an example is manufacturing uh primers and and for the business for that product line to work we need to manufacture hundreds of millions of units okay yeah so that's like an example of a really high volume yeah it's not a sexy category like hypersonics but it's a super necessary category and it takes just as much work to develop like like a factory line for that as it does to develop, you know, a factory line.

2:42:02And in some cases more, because for a super high, you know, order value product, like a hypersonic, it's okay to spend a lot of time kind of making it, putting it together and not having it be as automated. But for something where you need to manufacture millions of units, it's much, much, much harder. And we saw this with the Ukraine, when the Ukraine war broke out, like we depleted all of our reserves. And I think we sent like every javelin missile we have over there. And then it was like, okay, well, how are we going to make more? Got to make a few more. So, yeah, it's good that he's beating the drum, accelerating.

2:42:32But we are still early in the defense tech boom. Like a lot of these companies are just at the seed or series A stage. We're so early. So they're not scaled yet. Yeah. But hopefully it gets resolved. Low yield Lucy says, you are not allowed to wear Carhartt if you know what KPI means. 35K likes. What a banger. That's huge. Huge. Lucy is a phenomenal poster. Phenomenal poster. On the game. And I think this is real. Carhartt is the villain number one in the quiet luxury. If I see, yeah, yeah. They are the enemy of loud opulence. They are. And if I'm in New York and I pass you on the street and I see you in Carhartt listening to Technology Brothers, I'll rip your AirPods out of your ears, stamp them on the ground.

2:43:23and uh put on a suit i'll ban you from the rss feed put on a suit uh so do not wear car heart if you know what kpi means yeah if you don't know what kpi means learn it yeah it's great uh blake anderson says b2b sass equals talk to customers consumer equals read comment sections that's a good point this is this is real you can do you can you can do so much consumer product research by just going to products in your category and just reading the comments and And there's probably like an entire business, like research product that you could build that just scrapes consumer product company comment sections and reviews for feedback to generate new ideas from.

2:44:06So it's very real. I think that's a great place to end. Let's do one more promoted post to take us out for the evening. What a place to end. We have a post from Gucci. Gucci says, as of today, They say, in Miami's design district with Venus Williams and Angel Alessandra, Alessandra, former Victoria's Secret model, actually probably current Victoria's Secret model, they are for a special unveiling of the Gucci Winter Dream installation, hashtag Gucci gifts. And anyways, just some fantastic images. These look like some great winter sets, very Miami, not so winter looking to me. but at only 46 likes, this is a low-tam banger from Gucci.

2:44:56Let's do it. And it's a great spot to end. Let's amplify it. Let's amplify this. Thank you to Gucci for making fantastic clothes. If you're at Art Basel this week, go find the installation. We aren't there. We are not there because we are recording this podcast, and this is important work. So we'll see you Friday. So please subscribe, follow us, and thanks for tuning in. Have a great day.