JD's Venture Portfolio, Lessons from Mark Cuban, Angel Investing Addiction
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. It is, what, November 7th today?
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:And every technology podcast is clearly gonna be obsessed with one topic and one topic only. You're gonna hear about it on all in. You're gonna hear about it on 20 VC. You're gonna hear about it
Speaker 2:on Your parents might ask you about it.
Speaker 1:About it, the information stuff with it. It's undeniable. You can't get away from it. OpenAI bought chat.com.
Speaker 2:Very, very strong brandable four letter domain. Huge. Dotcom. Huge. Absolutely massive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In the 8 figure range, there was a
Speaker 1:lot of million.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of speculation. I don't think the actual number was released. It was cash.
Speaker 1:Darmesh released it. Oh, really? I think so.
Speaker 2:I thought it was some mix of cash and stock.
Speaker 1:Oh, maybe. And he
Speaker 2:was positioning you as, like, look, I'm a savvy investor. Interesting. I never lose money, but I don't like to make money on my friends. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:He said, now I'm an investor in OpenAI. Really? Oh, okay. I think he may have invested the domain. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so, I mean, the context here is Dharmesh I think it's Dharmesh Shah. He's the founder of HubSpot.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:And he, a couple months ago, acquired chat dotcom, and I think he said he paid 10,000,000 for it.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And he was like, I'm gonna do something with it, but I'm not sure yet. But I know this chat bot, chat interface is gonna be big for AI. Yep. And so there's gonna be an opportunity here. And that opportunity came along in the form of a call from Sam Altman.
Speaker 1:And so Sam just tweets chat.com and that's it.
Speaker 2:I think I think OpenAI stole it, honestly.
Speaker 1:Oh, you think it's a steal?
Speaker 2:Like, I think
Speaker 1:it's That could be a $100,000,000 worth of
Speaker 2:There's, there's another, big language model company that doesn't have their .com. Oh, really? All the variations of it are owned by domain investors.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And they're all asking for Yeah. Like, tons of millions. Yeah. Tens of millions. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mid 8 figures. Yeah. And they're kind of at a standstill because Wow. They're just, like, they don't really wanna take, you know, 40, $50,000,000 of equity Yeah. And put it into Yeah.
Speaker 2:But,
Speaker 1:well, yeah, for I I wanna debate I wanna debate this a little bit because on on the one hand, like, chat.com, it's an iconic domain, single word, four letters. It's, like, one of the best assets you could own on the Internet. On the flip side, Google has 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars. They've never bought search.com. They didn't need to.
Speaker 1:Google became that. And so the thing with ChatGPT is that it was always, like, a bad brand name in the sense that people would mess it up. They said ChatGBD, ChatGDP. Like, they couldn't remember it. But once it got stuck in the mind, it was iconic.
Speaker 1:Totally. Like Airbnb, Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're still re all they're doing is redirecting it to chatgpt.com.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's like, where will
Speaker 2:the brand domain was they kind of stole it in the sense that if a savvy domain investor would have extracted a lot more value out of it
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:They've been, like, give me $30,000,000 and 20,000,000 of of of of stock. Yeah. Yeah. And then but, yeah, I think from a branding standpoint, when you scroll on TikTok
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's people talking about chat gbt, chat gbt, chat gbt, chat gbt. And that is AI to the normies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I wonder if they'll be able to actually build a brand or if they'll even try to build a brand around chat.com.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's also very unclear.
Speaker 1:It's very it's very dotcomerathrowback.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like pets.com. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And for a while, like, it it became difficult to actually get, intellectual property protection around Yeah. These single words, like Yeah. The things simple. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The way to get real protection usually is to make the dot com your name. Yeah. They're like pets.com. Pets dot com.
Speaker 1:Was probably true. They didn't own pets. They owned pets.com. Exactly. And so yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, the escalator was originally made by the escalator company. Do you know this?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:So, escalators, we just think of, like, you know, any escalator you see in, like, a mall. Yeah. But that was originally the the brand name for the machine company that produced the first escalator.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they became so popular that the name became, like, normalized, and they lost intellectual property protection. And then Kleenex went through a similar thing where, like, just facial tissues, I think is, like, the technical term. Like, Kleenex became so popular that everyone would just say, like, oh, yeah. Just grab a Kleenex. Doesn't matter what brand.
Speaker 1:It's just Kleenex. Yeah. But Kleenex actually fought back and won. And so now you can't use that term. But if but if we were to start a new escalator company, and it was like, oh, it's Which
Speaker 2:we might.
Speaker 1:Which we might. Point. Because, yeah, we might wanna roll up a couple of the small operators. Yep. And, it's probably one
Speaker 2:of those things, like, there's only 3 or 4 manufacturers of escalators in all the US now. And so if we buy all of them, we can jack up prices Yep. Like, massively.
Speaker 1:I looked at the stoplight manufacturing for a while, and there's only a few manufacturers and the same same dynamic, and there's no technology in the, stoplights. I wanted to do something where, the stoplight would have a camera on it. And if there was no one waiting for the red light, it would just switch the signal. Right? And so it's, like Is that
Speaker 2:not how it works right now? No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. You can pull up and just be sitting there and there can be no cross traffic and you can just have to wait. Yeah. So there's just all this, like, deadweight loss in the system when you're just driving around.
Speaker 2:Which hurts the economy.
Speaker 1:It does. Yeah. Opportunity cost. You could be working. Yep.
Speaker 1:You get to work faster. So it'd be a very simple, like, product but the distribution is really hard because you have to sell to each individual city. It becomes like a flock safety type thing. It's really, really tricky. But, so you're so you're bullish on, on this at 15 mil.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:I I, I think it's a good buy in the context of who the owner was Yep. Who the company is, the quality of the domain. Yep. I just don't see them using this domain in 10 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so so in 10 years, you think people will be saying, like, oh, yeah. I'm using chat g p t. The model has completely changed. It's now gpt 601f2.
Speaker 1:I don't care about that. I just know I use chat gpt and I go to chat.com to ask.
Speaker 2:I would just be pretty sad if agi was at chat.com. Right?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe maybe there's something retro about that. It's, like, it's kind of a cool throwback to be, like, yeah, we're going back to the dot com era. Like, do you know the story of mp3.com? No.
Speaker 1:Mp3.com was, like, a dotcomboomcompany that was,
Speaker 2:I thought I liked domains.
Speaker 1:I know. Mp3.com was a bunch of guys in the in the dotcom boom. Basically, the business plan was Spotify, like, music on the Internet, but they hadn't really built out any infrastructure. They IPO'd the company and were worth, like, 4,000,000,000 on, like, you know, 300 k of revenue or something like that. Like, the revenue multiples during the dotcomboommakethezerperalook.
Speaker 2:One of the greatest bubbles of all time.
Speaker 1:It's incredible. It was incredible. I did I I did some digging on mp3.com. It's a
Speaker 2:Everybody's always trying to poke fun at bubbles, and I think they should be celebrated. Right? Because they're drawing that
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Capex forward Yep. And, accelerating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And clearly, like, with all these things, it's it's always just a matter of timing. Like, Spotify was the right solution at the right time. Napster was too early. Mp3.com was too early.
Speaker 2:Kalanick had his spin on file sharing?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He did. Right? What was that called, like, Red Arrow or something?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Ovitz was involved.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:They had a whole war.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way. I didn't have
Speaker 2:no idea. Crazy. Ovitz took old Hollywood style negotiating Sure. Into Silicon Valley, which was a big no no. We're basically long story short, he had committed to committed to funding the business.
Speaker 2:They signed docs, and then he withheld wiring until the company was out of cash and then tried to renegotiate. Wow. And Travis did not like that. They got in this huge Hardcore. Huge war.
Speaker 2:Now now Ovitz is is an awesome, super helpful angel investor.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:And, I've been to his house.
Speaker 1:Yeah. All all is well that ends well. Yeah. We learned that, you know, value
Speaker 2:He's like, oh, I have to play nice and not abuse, people Generational talent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to the the the top story. We're talking about JD Vance's portfolio and career as a venture capitalist. Why did you think it was important to educate the world about JD Vance's private sector career?
Speaker 2:Look, I think, again, same thing with Trump this week. People really focused on his political career, technology entrepreneur and his success, you know, building social apps. You know, with JD, it's one of those things. We didn't follow the campaign much at all. We were focused on the podcast and driving returns across the portfolio.
Speaker 2:But we did notice at one point that Tim Walz, was talking to somebody at a rally and said he didn't even know what a VC was. Yep. And it made me think that, you know, VCs have this aura, this mystique. They're so cool. They're powerful.
Speaker 2:Right? And that that makes it so a lot of people that maybe aren't in our industry are tend to be a little bit afraid of them. Right? If a VC walks in the room, you might they might flinch. And, so I think it's worth kind of breaking down that that private sector career and and just helping people understand venture capital and why JD would give, you know, 1,000,000 of dollars to a company with no revenue and just a cool idea.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:The other thing is giving people an understanding of how venture capital works. Right? A lot of people think JD Capital is a venture capitalist. He's putting
Speaker 1:JD Capital. JD Vance.
Speaker 2:JD Capital is good. JD Capital. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What was that? That's what Aria should be called. JD Capital. JD Capital.
Speaker 2:JD Cap.
Speaker 1:When he when he gets out of the government, he goes back into the Yeah.
Speaker 2:He'll be back. He'll be back. JD Capital. Yeah. But I think people have this thinking that venture capitalists always deploy their own money.
Speaker 2:Yep. But oftentimes, it's only partly their money. So
Speaker 1:So his fund is He's a hard Narya. Yeah. He's since stepped back. Yeah. But, Peter Thiel's Cornerstone LP, and then, do do you know Fallon Donahue?
Speaker 1:I think that's how you pronounce her name. She's really cool. She runs the firm now Yep. With, I think, one other person. But they but they've done a bunch of deals.
Speaker 1:We should go through some of them. AcreTrader facilitates farmland investments, allowing individuals to invest in agricultural real estate. Amplify Bio provides advanced preclinical services to accelerate the development of medical therapies. Atomic Industries, who we actually know, develops innovative manufacturing technologies to enhance production efficiency and quality. Their whole thing is like reshoring domestic manufacturing.
Speaker 1:Yep. I think they're out in Detroit with a bunch of, like, huge machines. Aaron's always text me photos of these, like, giant $1,000,000 machines that he buys from, like, you know, some Korean conglomerate or something. Yeah. It's really, really sad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think Aaron and JD were really early to trends that are now considered American dynamism.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about that. Like like
Speaker 2:In many ways,
Speaker 1:his portfolio was People often say, like, American dynamism is just shorthand for defense tech, but that's not it. It's it's this whole it's this whole, like, American heartland revitalization thing.
Speaker 2:Yep. And it's really about manufacturing. Yeah. Only more recently has it been about defense tech oriented management.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, like, Founders Fund has a bunch of bets there and has been, like, bouncing around that generally. And then Andreessen obviously, like, came up with the coinage for the word.
Speaker 1:Generally. And then Andreessen, obviously, like, came up with the coinage for the word. But Narya is really the fun the brand. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of course. But Narya is, like, really
Speaker 2:the fun that, like, designed
Speaker 1:the entire strategy around that from day 1, which is which is fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think if you go back to JD's book, a lot of his investment strategy was oriented around revitalizing economies in America that were historically dependent on manufacturing, but that manufacturing got taken overseas.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a cool portfolio. Chapter assists individuals in navigating Medicare options.
Speaker 1:Hello is a Catholic prayer and meditation app. You can just see all this surprisingly
Speaker 2:large business.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is all, it's all very, like, in theme with, like, his his, political platform. Another therapeutics company, Kiro Therapeutics, focuses on developing gene therapies for various diseases. Rumble, the video sharing platform that competes with Truth Social and actually got
Speaker 2:started. Free speech
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Social bet. Like like, I think the Narya, Rumble deal happened, like, 3 months before Truth Social. Yep. And you could imagine how that would have played out differently if,
Speaker 2:if Yeah. One thing that stands out to me is that it's not a really big volume of bets. Right?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. I mean, the entire portfolio on their website is 10, 11 companies. True anomaly more.
Speaker 1:True anomaly is a phenomenal company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder I wonder where they got in got in on on True anomaly because that's a multi $1,000,000,000 business last I checked. And, my buddy, Will, is, one of their biggest investors now, but he's personally put in 9 figures.
Speaker 1:And it says they're in Strive, manages investment funds. I think that's Vivek Ramaswamy's company. Right?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Unless there's a different Strive. I know that Vivek runs a firm called Striiv, and it would make sense that they're, like, they're aligned. And then ValueBase offers valuation services and financial insights to support business growth and investment. And so, yeah, they kind of have, like, a few different, like, areas of focus, a lot of bio, a lot of manufacturing, and a lot of kind of, like, just, like, you know, the the, like, the Catholic prayer app. It's more like traditional American values.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because no one they're the only VC firm that's really, like, sent it on a thesis like this seriously and, like, years ago Yeah. Because it takes time to actually deploy. You can set up a
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can set up a, like, an American dynamism rip off fund tomorrow, but you wouldn't have a portfolio of companies like this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's it's interesting that, you know, venture capitalists talk about and founders talk about I'm building and investing in the future that I want. Right? And a lot of people are in VC or strictly chasing returns. Right? If you're strictly chasing returns, the actual best place you could probably focus is crypto.
Speaker 2:Like, the median crypto fund has, like, much better returns than the median benchmark.
Speaker 1:A lot of times it was just b to b SaaS, you know. It was, like, there was this massive software boom and the number of unicorns and deck corners that came out of b to b SaaS is just, like, under Undernable. It's undeniable. There's just so many opportunities Yeah.
Speaker 2:That hit
Speaker 1:her as opposed to you look at aerospace, there's, like, one company. You look at defense, there's, like, one company right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and I think that, we don't discuss politics on this podcast, but a lot of people could do a political analysis of this portfolio and try to poke holes in it and say that what he's doing is a bad thing. But I think if you go line by line on this, every pretty much every single product has potential to benefit every American. Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, even if you're not Catholic, if, hollow app has a million people that are using the product to help become, you know, better people and and practice their faith, like, that actually can have a positive ripple effect. Right? True anomaly is something that's helping, America. They build hunter seeker satellites
Speaker 1:Oh. Which is cool.
Speaker 3:That's
Speaker 1:how it is.
Speaker 2:So they send up satellites and then use those satellites to take out other satellites. Because you can imagine in a major go global conflict, one of the top priorities for all nation states would be taking out enemy satellites. Yep. Controlling space. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So all these things are you could you could make them political, but I would argue that, many of those bets are generally, like, they've they're all, like, America first Yeah. In their own way.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I like about this is that there's, like, a pretty significant representation of, like, advanced biology.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's this there's a big meme we saw with that Eric Newcomer, post that it's like, yeah, like, Trump might be, you know, pro deregulation, but the right wing is, like, super skeptical of science generally. And that's true about some things. Obviously, RFK is out there talking about, you know, tallow fries and, like, seed oils and stuff. Yeah. But I I I think that there's a that there's, like, a silver lining there where where you see that, like, there is some significant bio innovation that is that's being embraced by the conservatives.
Speaker 1:And it's not just a a party of, like, neo Luddites when it comes to biology. Even though
Speaker 2:the biology stuff just build, build, build, frack, frack, frack.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Like, there is some element of, like, okay. Yeah. The like, bio when done right is, like, amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just that it can't be done, like, carelessly or or only for profit or only for Only for pharma. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So cheers to JD. The the one thing that I think, a lot of people are maybe a little shook by is just the the, the hierarchy in the White House right now.
Speaker 1:It feels a little bit out of balance because normally, you'd see, you know, the real estate guy being a little bit less prestigious than the VC. The VC should be on on top there. So it's a little bit of a narrative narrative violation that the the real estate, the social media guy really, it's like you could think of Trump as, like, the investor with a podcast, you know, who's on The Apprentice.
Speaker 2:I would argue that.
Speaker 1:Hasn't yet done as much podcasting, so he's still in the second rung. But hopefully, that flips.
Speaker 2:I would argue that the highest status occupation in the world is being the founder of a multibillion dollar social media product. Right? Yeah. Because if you think
Speaker 1:about Zuck, Elon.
Speaker 2:Zuck, Spiegel, right, these are people, Jack Dorsey. Right? Yeah. They're they end up gaining the most amount of cloud and influence and power because they control, what is effectively the
Speaker 1:So valuable.
Speaker 2:So anyways, yeah. If you wanna put say that Trump's just a real estate guy, like some some people like to say Yeah. Now he's a technology founder first, at least when you look at his, you know, personal balance sheet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also, reality TV star. You know? Valuable. Well, let's go into brother of the week.
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Speaker 2:Before we dive in Oh, yeah. We did get some pushback from a few of our listeners. We we recently,
Speaker 1:promoted NetJets. NetJets.
Speaker 2:And, we
Speaker 1:just wanna say
Speaker 2:just realized that that didn't many of our listeners, you know, it's not super relevant just because they have, you know, multiple private jets already. So we just wanted to acknowledge that. And and if you do go to NetJets, just don't mention the podcast or anything like that. Just don't tell them we sent you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maricopa won't happen again. Sorry about that. So let's move on to Mark Cuban. So brother of the week, why do you wanna give him brother of the week?
Speaker 2:So Mark Cuban has done a lot of winning in his life.
Speaker 1:He's a technology brother.
Speaker 2:But this week was rough and what, rough for him. And, you know, I don't know how he's handling it. We've seen his name popping around group chats, you know, getting out his sort of frustration in different ways. But, ultimately, I just think this is an opportunity to say to Mark and to every one of our listeners, it's okay to get knocked down. It's okay to fail.
Speaker 2:If you look at our next president, this is a guy that has been knocked down many times, has come up short many times. So, you know, there's been conversations of Mark talking about a presidential run. And I just don't you know, whatever happened this last week, it's in the past. Mark has, you know, created a tremendous amount of enterprise value through smart investments in his own companies. And I just even though his Shark Tank portfolio is underwater as well, I just wanna say to Mark, you're the brother of the week.
Speaker 2:Get back up. Get back on the horse. Keep going.
Speaker 3:Lever up. Your bet lever up is
Speaker 1:a good way, to kinda make it all back.
Speaker 2:Yep. Your bet lever up is a good way, to kinda make it
Speaker 1:all back. Yep. It's never too
Speaker 3:late to make it back make it all
Speaker 2:back in one trade. So 2028, is around the corner, feels far away right now. Now. Start planning now. Make it all back in one trade.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, good luck.
Speaker 3:You know,
Speaker 1:the interesting thing about Mark Cuban is, like, there's this very, like there's clearly a rivalry between him and Trump. There's all those clips from, like, the old talk shows where they were kinda beefing with each other and
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Talking trash. And they were kind of in the similar milieu in the sense that Cuban was on Shark Tank, like, the number 2 business show, essentially. And then, The Apprentice was, like, the number 1 business show. And so they were both, like, these billionaire entrepreneurs with but with big, big media presences.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But I think what's what's interesting, and and I don't I don't know how accurate this is, but, Cuban made his first big win on broadcast.com, which was radio on the Internet, this dotcom boom, sold it to Yahoo for, I think, $8,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:And it and the product never went anywhere. Yeah. Like, Yahoo obviously declined and broadcast.com, I think, either shut down or just the the product never really, like, like, realized that valuation. But it's interesting because, like, you could
Speaker 2:He you could almost say he's a godfather of podcasting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In many in many ways.
Speaker 2:Which is honestly maybe what he should do to rebrand himself now after a big loss is to say, like, all you people talking about me on podcast, like, I created you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? I'm your grandfather.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 1:and but the really interesting thing is that, like, throughout the, the the 2000 and 2010s, he was almost too early to Internet content. Like, because he started this company in, like, I think 97 and sold it in maybe, like, 99 or 2,000, but it was too early. Meanwhile, during that era, Trump is just completely ignoring the Internet, doing The Apprentice, just doing traditional media up until literally this election where he pivots to the podcast strategy and it works really well. But it's just it's just so fascinating that, like, you know, like, Trump kind of, like, got the last laugh with with Cuban and, like, won this, like, memetic competition. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But only because Cuban not because Cuban was too late to a trend. It's because he was almost too early.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:It it it's it's very, very, very, very interesting. Do you know that Jason Calacanis, his first company was Mark with with Mark Cuban? Either, like, Mark was, like, the investor or, like, a cofounder or something.
Speaker 3:And then
Speaker 1:they sold that, like, blog company. And so they, like, go, like, way, way back. It's fascinating.
Speaker 2:Did Mark ever go on all in?
Speaker 1:I think he did. Yeah. Yeah. And there was and and there was a big, like, kerfuffle over it because
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I think, like, Jason was, like, teeing him up for stuff and he was beefing with Sachs. And there was, like, some sort of, like, debate over it. But Jason was framing it as, like, you know, we're being more balanced here because we had Trump on. We'll have the we'll have the comma surrogate on, which makes sense. But, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just Mark's gonna get back to winning soon. I think so.
Speaker 1:Feel it. I think so. And I do think that the, the Shark Tank format is underrated. And I Yeah. I I've talked to a lot of people who are in business content.
Speaker 1:Maybe they have, like, a podcast like, a business interview show, and they've said, like, oh, I wanna do YouTube and I wanna be, like, the mister beast of, like, business on YouTube. Yeah. And I've always told them, like, the format is Shark Tank.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you need to do an episode where you're giving away money at the end of the episode every single time. It's very expensive because you actually have to be giving money away, but that's the way the mister beast model works. Yeah. Like, you have to watch to the end because you wanna see who wins. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, so many of mister beast formats are just it's just American Ninja Warrior
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Adapted for YouTube.
Speaker 2:Well, now we've we've been we've told enough people that they should do that, and they haven't. So
Speaker 1:maybe we have to do it. Well, yeah. But but no. No. So we're not gonna do the Shark Tank.
Speaker 1:We're gonna do the apprentice.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you see the comment? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Someone commented on the show, how do I be on the apprentice?
Speaker 1:Well, you gotta show some more hustle than just commenting. You gotta get my DMs. You gotta fly to LA
Speaker 2:and Yeah. Figure out where we
Speaker 1:could crush
Speaker 2:bang on the door. Exactly. There's security downstairs, but if you're cut out to be on our show, you'll you'll find a way through.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You'll talk to it later. Hot tip, wear a suit. Is a dress code in this building?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I I think I think bring back The Apprentice for the YouTube generation, bring back or revitalize the Shark Tank for the for the, for the YouTube generation. The morning brew guy was doing a version of
Speaker 2:That was more like man on the street.
Speaker 1:It was man on the street, tell me about your business, 60 second pitch. But I don't think he was giving away money.
Speaker 2:The only problem with that format is I love business so much. 60 seconds is not enough. No. Right? Like, I want
Speaker 1:It's gotta be the 20 minute, like, the the beast or beast format.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The funny thing that people don't realize about Shark Tank too is that they they record, I think, with every company for, like, 2, 3 hours.
Speaker 1:You know the trick. Right? Yeah. Record for 2 hours. If you take the deal, they they use the good clips To make you look good.
Speaker 1:To make you look good. And if you don't take it, they make you look bad. Yeah. And so you really So
Speaker 2:the real thing, you have to take the deal
Speaker 1:Take the
Speaker 2:deal. Drag
Speaker 1:Drag Drag I know what I do. I know the person talking about.
Speaker 2:Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then after it airs, be, like, you know, hopefully, you know, they can work it out. Yep. Make the deal happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because there's such an adverse selection problem, like, you know, the the the the power law companies are not showing up to Shark Tank.
Speaker 2:It's also weird products that do well for Shark Tank.
Speaker 1:Consumer stuff. Right?
Speaker 2:It's all consumer, but then it's it's honestly a lot of if you come out, it really is a reflection of the Shark Tank audience is more traditional America than any other sort of, like, business media
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Like, oriented audience. And so if you come out there with, like, some new CBD drink, it's, like, replacing alcohol. Like, you're not gonna see a single, like, sale from it because audience just does not care. But I had a friend of mine years ago started a company that was during the the sustainability, boom. He made a collapsible metal straw that could fit into something that would be on your key chain.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And for months after we're after their Shark Tank airing, they would just see the sales uptick when when it would go live because people Yeah. I guess, like, mid with Midwest moms would just were like, oh, I'll take a straw that I can just, like, keep on my key chain. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's great to save the planet.
Speaker 2:Save the planet in the process. So Yeah. Anyways
Speaker 1:We we should definitely take a company on Shark Tank. Yeah. Ideally, your gun store. Yeah. I I I know I'm, like, I'm, like, trolling you.
Speaker 1:I know it's, like, a real business. But I'm, like,
Speaker 2:I'm, like, we need to take America.
Speaker 1:We need to take Arly through y c, and we need to get it on on Shark Tank. Yeah. I know it's a real company. It's very, disrespectful to joke about that.
Speaker 2:But No. I think I think real I think real companies, if if the audience is relevant Yeah. To that company, they should. Yeah. Imagine, yet, customizing a firearm on the, on mid show, you know.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So cheers to Mark Cuban. You are one of the few brothers of the week so far, but soon to be joined by a legion of other technology brothers. Should we move on to some some some post? The timeline.
Speaker 2:The timeline.
Speaker 1:The timeline. So, Trunk Fan says, if you need a doom scroll break, check out my new podcast, Caffeinated Deep Dives. 1, drink 3 coffees, maybe a scoop of c 4. 2, read a book. 3, press record for an hour.
Speaker 1:The first two episodes are here. IPhone and Calvin and Hobbs. Oh, so this is like a real thing. This is not like a joke post. He like Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's actually
Speaker 2:a shit poster, but, no, this is this is real. It's something that Senra has been pushing to do for a while, which is a long form podcast. And while you have Senra focused on founders, you have business breakdown focused on Businesses. Businesses. You have invest like the best focus on capital allocators.
Speaker 2:Yep. And now you have Trung. You have Technology Brothers focused on the timeline. Timeline. You have Trung focused on individual products, which I think is interesting
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Because everybody knows Apple, the company, and the founding story and all that stuff. But I actually don't know the the details of the iPhone. Right? I know some high level stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I actually, you know, I know quite a lot of details, but there's, like, a whole layer deeper that you can go on all these products, and the stories behind them and the individuals. Right? Because, like, it's not fat, like, wasn't Steve Jobs that built the iPhone. Right? There was hundreds of people that played a critical role
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 2:In building that. So, Trung Trung is amazing.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna follow this right now. This looks good.
Speaker 2:Trung is amazing. Long time, quality poster, and writer. And, generally, I think it's easy for posters to get caught up into, like, toxic timeline drama. Yep. Trung has always
Speaker 1:He's done a good job.
Speaker 2:Stayed above it. Yeah. You know, managing his
Speaker 1:I like his first review on here. Smart threads, dumb memes, and an entertaining podcast that sums Trung up perfectly. Well, I'm looking forward to listening to that. Let's go to Sean Frank. Sean?
Speaker 1:Friend of the pod.
Speaker 2:Friend of the pod.
Speaker 1:Quote, yeah. Just go ahead in 40 x budgets starting 116, me to my media buyer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so q4 is always challenging for consumer brands because CPMs go through the roof just
Speaker 1:Because of Christmas, they're
Speaker 2:just getting in front of each incremental potential customer goes way high.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then when you combine that with the election cycle, which increases spending, it has, like, a whole new group of people that are coming on and spending super super super aggressively Yeah. They spend a super tight
Speaker 1:Literally $1,000,000,000. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So now you're not just competing with other brands Yep. In your category and other brands on the platform, but you're competing with this new elephant in the room, which is various political groups competing to drive voters to make certain decisions. And so it's very much the second that, the election ends. I think Facebook actually has a policy that says you can't create new political ads now.
Speaker 2:So you can keep running old ads. Interesting. But they wanted to prevent people from using if the election were to have gone differently and there was more drama and controversy
Speaker 1:Oh, you
Speaker 2:They wanted they well, they yeah. They didn't want people to basically use it to manipulate public opinion, like Sure. Hey. Like, Kamala stole the election or or Trump stole the election, and then it's sort of like yeah. Facebook doesn't want anything.
Speaker 2:And so if you're a brand like Sean, Sean's company, The Ridge, and you're seeing good performance during the election, Connor runs their all their, is their CMO and is the best performance marketer that I've ever known or worked with. He was probably seeing solid results even during the election. But then when CPMs drop, like They're
Speaker 3:gonna be
Speaker 2:they could drop, like, 50%. Yeah. And so you just wanna just absolutely send it because you have from now until Christmas Yeah. Or December. Typically, it's, like, December 20th is when, like, sales start to fall off a cliff.
Speaker 1:I mean, I remember talking to the Pebble guys. Do you remember this watch, the smartwatch, the precursor to the Apple Watch? And they it was a pretty big business. I feel like they were doing, like, $50,000,000 in a year in sales,
Speaker 2:maybe more. Dotcom of smartwatches.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was rough. But yeah. I mean, they would do, like, 90% of their revenue in December. Yep.
Speaker 1:Because it was just like a gift, and that's the and that's the nature for a lot of these electronics companies. And so, like, you it's just like you build up your inventory, you build up your ad budget, and you gotta be able to make a decision like this. So we're looking for a 100. This isn't a joke. Like, this is actually what he's going to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Something like that. We're launching Rora on November 21st, and, we've been running campaigns to acquire, you you know, people that are submitting, using our our aurora.com to do a water report.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And we've been seeing fantastic results, even during the election cycle. And now we're doing the same thing. Budgets went up dramatically, basically, yesterday.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:That's great. Amazing. Let's go to Wyatt Cavalier. Oh, what a great name. You know, Wyatt is a cowboy name.
Speaker 1:Cavalier literally means, like, like, crazy.
Speaker 2:Wyatt Cavaliers posting again.
Speaker 1:He says, I'm a single issue newsletter voter. Whichever of Beehive and KIT lets me upload and attach webp files first gets all my money. And I think are these the 2 founders? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Are the
Speaker 1:2 companies I love this? Cc. Cc to the CEO. What company do you see?
Speaker 3:So the
Speaker 2:reason this is interesting is, Kit Kit was originally called ConvertKit.
Speaker 1:Okay. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:Original build in public. Yep. Build in public. Yeah. You know, they talk about literally, I remember, like, years ago, they had a dashboard with all of their metrics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think that there's this thing that happens where build in public is cool because you get a lot of attention Yep. And and sort of people are patting you on the back, like, you're a legend. But, the the problem is that everybody was looking at that business being like this business rate $0.
Speaker 1:That's really well.
Speaker 2:Pretty much a commodity product. Right? It's not easy to build but, like, anybody can kind of, like, spin up the ability to send, you know, SaaS product to send, emails. And what happened is Tyler who was at Jake. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He was at morning brew. Yeah. So he was at morning brew working on products, like, literally building. And so he realized there was this white space around a more enterprise creator.
Speaker 2:ConvertKit was more focused on creators and and people like Tim Ferris and things like that. He realized there was a white space of building, like, much more enterprise tooling for people that were I'm running a newsletter, but I'm running a business.
Speaker 1:Yep. And he's taking the exact
Speaker 2:he's taking the exact opposite approach. I remember meeting I met Tyler in Miami in 2021 and, credit to him, I didn't under I didn't see that white space at the time. I should have just backed him because he was, like, much more knowledgeable in the space. And he's taken the exact opposite approach as ConvertKit. Just raise, like, seats precede seed series a.
Speaker 2:I think they maybe have already done their b tier 1 investors all the way through, like, just, like, absolutely. The business is crushing. They're doing over a1000000 a month. They will I'm I would imagine they'll be bigger than Kit or or convert kit within the next, 24 months, maybe even
Speaker 1:And there's probably so much energy in the employees. They're seeing their stock get marked up. They're they're Yeah. Talent magnet.
Speaker 2:And the challenge is value there. Denk is really good at Twitter. Nathan, the other founder is really good at Twitter.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? They're both like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, I I think that Nathan was doing it at his own way, like, the the sort of build in public, like, in a hacker way. Denk is much more, like, full speed ahead. I'm gonna publish my investor updates. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. He's doing it in his his own, sort of lane. But the challenge when you, have 2 companies that are both good at one marketing channel is it really does, I'm sure it sucked the the sort of wind out of Kit's sails where they're like, this was our biggest acquisition channel. Now there's another person in the room with us yelling to all the same customers and you see it in tweets like this where people are literally just saying, like, alright, founders, like, fight for my business.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 2:they have to fight it out on the timeline. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Denk even says, like, I think we may be able to get this live today, but how much money is all, like, Because it's like, if this guy's like, I'm willing to pay $50 a month, it's like, well, I'm not gonna do anything. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Mike Solana. Quote tweeting Adam Adam Rubinstein, things tech time. So the New York Times tech employees demanded unlimited break time, pet bereavement. It was a big meme, and it was seen as, like, kind of ridiculous going into this election. They were they were, demanding other things, but the the the timeline really focused on the most ridiculous things.
Speaker 1:And so Solana says, New York Times writers, dark days, a fascist dictator on the rise at home, and we will surely be imprisoned if we can't stop him. The fate of the world hangs in the balance. And then the NYT Tech Union says, my goldfish died. I'm going on strike.
Speaker 2:So here's why this is funny. So, the tech world has had beef with The New York Times forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I wish I could go read The New York Times the day that I was born because they were probably, like, bashing some, like, dotcom era founder. And so that's just, like, that's that's been forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The irony of it is New York Times is so anti tech that even their own tech union is rebelling Yeah. Within the company on the most important day week of the the of the New York Times' entire, like, whatever this decade or deeply. So the infighting, shout out to those to the tech workers in the New York Times, you know, besides the sort of more memeable things that they're asking for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's interesting is, like, the website stayed up. Like, even though they were maybe on strike, like, the needle was
Speaker 2:Too good at their job.
Speaker 1:We didn't hear yeah. We didn't hear anything about, like, oh, like, the the the New York Times site's, like, unreliable or breaking.
Speaker 2:It's because they were just they have the the Polymarket API. They're just feeding it in.
Speaker 1:Just, like, Poly Market minus 10.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just like hardcoded JavaScript. Hardcoded. Yeah. Let's go to Elon Musk. It says, I'm doing a digital town hall on x tonight at 8:30 EST.
Speaker 1:And this is on 4th, which is election day, or was the election day?
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 2:it was the night before.
Speaker 1:So the night before. And the top comment is, can you buy Canada? Oh, I guess this guy's probably in Canada,
Speaker 2:and he's like, I
Speaker 1:wanna join the team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think,
Speaker 1:how do you get the x emoji? I I need to figure out how to do that. I really like the way that looks. You just have to copy and paste it. It's just some icon.
Speaker 1:I thought it was something where, you know, it was, like, hard coded in where if you, like, did
Speaker 2:some sort of I'm sure there's a character
Speaker 1:combination. Yeah. So you get that. I I gotta get a shortcut for that on my keyboard.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, 47,000,000 views, a 191,000 Yeah. Likes, like, just so it's phenomenal.
Speaker 2:The reason that I included this, even though you could somebody might say it's political and we don't discuss politics, is that what Elon is doing and trying to do with America is not political at all. It's it's actually applying the same methodology that he uses for company building
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is progress, being capital efficient, all these other things.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, accelerating timelines, all all these things. So, I I do imagine after we make the moon a state, Canada would be another good target, for the United States. I think it's a long time.
Speaker 1:Antarctica is low hanging fruit.
Speaker 2:Friend of the pod, this guy Sam Poirier
Speaker 1:Who is
Speaker 2:Canadian? Was was when we were at Sunrise event was talking about, just wanting, basically, that, like, Canadians are are getting so, at least people in Quebec are getting so sick of how things are being run that even they're thinking about, you know, separating. There's been, like, a separatist movement,
Speaker 3:I think,
Speaker 2:within Quebec for a while. But, but, anyways, long Canada, if we can maybe the play is along Canada now if if Elon's gonna turn. There's a lot of land in Canada. You could do a lot of rocket launches. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I didn't listen to any of the live streams. I used to listen to Clubhouse all the time, but, I haven't listened to a lot on x. But maybe we should host some. I think it'd be fun.
Speaker 2:If if only they're they weren't prioritizing x a I so aggressively.
Speaker 1:Oh, is that what the top livestream is usually?
Speaker 2:No. I think it's more like,
Speaker 1:Oh oh, you just get thrown into a
Speaker 2:grok flow instead of a
Speaker 3:clubhouse flow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna be in grok. I'd rather I'd
Speaker 3:rather
Speaker 2:Like, there's too many
Speaker 1:Yeah. It has some cool features where, like, if if me and you were doing the show on x space, like a live stream, we could highlight a tweet and then everyone who's looking could see this is the tweet that we're the post that we're, like, talking about at the time. And I think that's, like, that's probably kinda cool. I know there's some people that have growth hacked it like crazy. That guy, Mario Newfall, I think is, like, everything's, like, breaking news every 2 seconds.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, there's a lot of people that have, like
Speaker 2:Mario walked so we could run.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, the p god says, I'm hitting this at the next closing dinner. And it's, 3 football players doing some sort of handstand or
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that this this is something that looks really good in slow mo or pictures. But if you actually see them do it live, it's sort of, like, a little bit silly looking because they're doing, like, a headstand without their hands. But this was more I think we need to bring back show boating in the workplace.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, you know you know what?
Speaker 2:Elon hit some pretty crazy, like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:He he
Speaker 1:does that. And he's good with, like, the iconic, like, sync day, bringing the sync in, like, creating these, like, viral moments, dancing.
Speaker 3:You need
Speaker 2:to be creating viral moments in the work workplace.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Well, maybe we just need to return. I was, I was getting coffee with the head of investment banking at one of the big tech investment banking firms, and, his office did not have a square inch of bare table because he had so many deal toys. It was insane.
Speaker 1:Every single every single surface was just covered
Speaker 2:with I've always thought that
Speaker 1:We need deal toys for venture. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, people do it, but then it gets really embarrassing because you have to throw 90 90% of them away. But it's, like, oh, this one's really embarrassing. I But with investment banking, it's, like, even if you take a company public and it didn't do that well after it's, like, you still made a $100,000,000 on that deal. So, like, go off.
Speaker 2:2021, holiday gift from a venture unnamed venture fund was a bottle of wine that just said liquidity event on us, which was which was great. I I kept the bottle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's nice. Great, Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We've had a bunch of VC firms reach out about doing custom branded nicotine pouches as gifts. But that's very, like, temporary.
Speaker 2:That's probably not that's just more, like, performance oriented.
Speaker 1:You want in the office.
Speaker 2:You wanna give that portfolio company an extra little push.
Speaker 1:But for this, I mean, we have the framed $100 bill. We should definitely frame our our first ad deal, which was a $300 or $3,000 CPM.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Although we should stop building in public. We should just insist that we're the most profitable People figure
Speaker 2:out that we're charging $3,000
Speaker 1:CPMs. There's 3
Speaker 2:CPMs are gonna invite a lot of commentary. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:There's gonna be a bunch of knockoffs. I can already feel it. But, but we should do more deal toys. I mean, I love the YouTube thing. Like, when you pass a 100,000 subscribers,
Speaker 2:they send you a plaque.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:That's the best thing YouTube's ever done.
Speaker 1:They send you yeah. Yeah. That was really, really smart. It's, like, kind of like a deal toy. And I was thinking It's
Speaker 2:proof of work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like but but, like, more companies should do this. Like, even just for Lucy, like, I was looking through some of our top customers who have been with us for, like, 8 years, no stop. And it's, like, I haven't even thought to, like, send them a t shirt. Like, I absolutely should do that.
Speaker 1:It's, like, it costs nothing, and it's, like, just a thank you. But you could get so much more creative with it than just a t shirt. You could give them a deal toy or something or something really interesting. Yeah, with the DocSend. Like, like, send every potential investor VC a deal.
Speaker 1:So I'd be like, I I I got to glance upon the series b DAC and DocSend. Yeah. Regardless. And then they just have to deal with this like
Speaker 2:Physical object.
Speaker 1:Physical object. And do they throw it out? What if they didn't do the deal? What if they got beaten out? But it's gonna stay in their mind.
Speaker 1:It's gonna stay top of mind. They close that docs and tab, they forget about your company. But if there's a deal
Speaker 2:toy sitting
Speaker 1:there Shows up at the office. Shows up at the
Speaker 2:office, and it's this glass monument. Mischief did the reverse deal toy where they made they did a drop once that had miniaturized versions of of the products that failed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw that. Theranos.
Speaker 2:I always think that's cool.
Speaker 1:I love I love Mischief, but I thought that one went that that like, the whole, like
Speaker 2:You need celebratory stuff Yeah. Not dunking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Being obsessed with, like, the failure. It is it is very funny, but, it's it's a little, it's not as exciting as as as the as the good stuff the good stuff. Yes.
Speaker 2:I mean, a lot of Series series, you
Speaker 1:do get artifacts from, like, a lot of SpaceX investors have, like like, cool model rockets and stuff that have been given out at various times.
Speaker 2:Next time
Speaker 1:Enroll has, like, swords and stuff.
Speaker 2:Pre IPO rounds, BC should give their founders, like, miniature feed chips, you know.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. There you
Speaker 2:go. That kinda, like, lean into there. Yeah. Just like a little model one.
Speaker 1:I mean
Speaker 2:She's like, that's you're so close.
Speaker 1:I feel like Nikkita should give a model g wagon to everyone that hits number 1 on the App Store.
Speaker 2:Oh, everybody that spends a year with him on intro.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the g Gets the gets the toy g wagon. Let's go to Suen, I think.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to pronounce that. Ji Suen Li. Says, discipline is for those who lack obsession. And it's a beautiful skyline photo with a screenshot of a or a photo of a MacBook with some text on it. What does it say?
Speaker 1:The original something of trading. I don't know. Did you did you
Speaker 2:So this is a little bit of a hustle porn post, but the reason that I included it is that I think that the if you're somebody that gets when somebody is posting about here's my knowledge stack, here's my second brain, all this stuff, and you're starting to obsess over note taking apps Yep. There's probably something that's probably, the reason for that is that you don't actually care about what you're working on.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:Right? It's it's, to
Speaker 1:do you have to Because it's truly yeah.
Speaker 2:If you if you're thinking about, oh, I need to have more discipline, you just don't care about what you're working on. Like, I don't it is not hard for me to roll out of bed and come here and record the podcast. Right? Like, I don't. Last week, I had to drive through a 100,000 people to get here.
Speaker 2:Right? I even I even destroyed my tire. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I had to replace it.
Speaker 2:Wow. And so so yeah. It's it's it's about, obsession brings discipline, but not because you're disciplined, but because you're obsessed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you should just be obsessed first. Just find something that you're obsessed with first and
Speaker 3:then Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then the discipline will come naturally. Yeah. Because the energy will come.
Speaker 2:Warren Buffett would would use iPhone notes app stock.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And a pen and paper. Yeah. Right? He's not getting crazy in the 4th brain.
Speaker 1:4th brain. 2nd brain. 3rd brain, 4th brain?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's good. I I've I've spent very little time in the in the the productivity world. The one thing that I did get I did adopt and I like is inbox 0. I do inbox 0 where everything gets archived or replied to or delay send or remind me later. And then and then, like, I just I just know that if it's in my inbox, I need to get to it at some point.
Speaker 1:That becomes, like, the task list.
Speaker 2:I'm obsessed.
Speaker 1:That works.
Speaker 2:I have 2,500 unread texts.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And I always reply to the ones that matter to me.
Speaker 1:So Interesting.
Speaker 2:So I don't I don't worry about by trying to get to inbox 0 with my text at least Yeah. I would be dealing with a lot of things I don't care about Yeah. Really. So, yeah. Just
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, it just becomes completely unmanageable. I was I've talked to it. I was talking to, a billionaire a week ago that, lost his email because he's got to a billionaire. Yes.
Speaker 1:Because he, he he basically lost his email because there's just too much. So he just can't do it at all. Yeah. And then lost his text because he's got too
Speaker 2:many. You said, prints
Speaker 3:out. Yep.
Speaker 2:Gets his email printed
Speaker 1:out for him. Exactly. And at the very least, like, the printer is a little bit slow. So you people can email you faster than you can print them. So there's the the printer is a rate limiting factor.
Speaker 1:You can only see so much stuff. Maybe it runs out of ink, maybe it runs out of paper. Eventually, you can see
Speaker 2:the there's gonna be some natural the map for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's gonna be some natural prioritization. But, yeah, now now he just the only thing that gets through is Twitter DMs because you have to be a mutual follower. So in order to contact this guy, you basically have to say something interesting Yeah. So that he follows you and not and not do something stupid where you get unfollowed And blocked.
Speaker 1:And blocked. And then you can and then you can contact him. And that's the only way to and that's the that's the real cue of, like, how you get to him. That's good. It's awesome.
Speaker 1:So, let's go to Nicole Whiskoff. She says, the founder of Whiskoff Ventures. She says, launching a podcast feels 10 x harder than launching a a VC firm. Humbled after incorporating and filming the first episode, mildly concerning. And then Alex Conrad says, now you are finally a VC firm, and she says, don't jinx it, Alex.
Speaker 1:What do you think about this? Which one's harder?
Speaker 2:Depends on who you are. Yeah. I think for for you and our vice president, Ben, who produces the show, this is like writing like, the production value at Technology Brothers is intense. Right?
Speaker 1:There's
Speaker 2:lighting. There's heavy heavy audio optimization Yep. Post work on this is not something that you're gonna do on this is not your guys' first rodeo. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 2:And so, for you, starting up a podcast is like riding a bike.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But to anybody out there that thinks, oh, podcasting's easy, I would just say, you know, grab a mic. Yeah. Grab a mic. Give it a shot. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I do think that that what makes it hard is that people don't think about the format enough Yeah. And or what the show is. Yeah. And so they wind up just doing kind of, like, oh, I'll just interview my friends or, like, it's like an interview show is just one possibility.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. There are within the within the podcast world, if you actually look at the podcast, there are structured interview shows like Tyler Cowen where he asks he has every single question written out. He asks the question, lets them talk. Lex Friedman's very similar. Asks a question, lets them talk.
Speaker 1:Lex famously let Elon sit for, like, 15 seconds. You remember this? Because he asks Elon a question, and Elon just sits there and think and there's just 15 seconds of silence on the mic. And everyone's like, wow. Like, he, like, really didn't jump in.
Speaker 1:Rogan, very different. It's a conversation. Rogan doesn't have a whole bunch of questions. He's just talking the whole time. So conversational versus, like, planned interview 1 on 1.
Speaker 1:Then there's group shows where it's a bunch of people hanging out. The Pod Save guys, that Smartlist podcast is, like, 4 comedians. They still have guests on every once in a while. There are shows that don't have any guests like our like ours. There are shows that are scripted, like, you know, serial on NPR.
Speaker 2:Centra's shows are basically solo and, like, objectively, it's more of an audiobook by the end.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. Anything else. And then there's also the acquired show where it's similar to Sanro's thing, but 2 people and lightly scripted, like, lightly planned, but not scripted word by word. But but a lot of, like, the
Speaker 2:But a ton of research.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But a lot of those, like, true crime shows are, like, literally scripted, like, every single word. And then
Speaker 2:Just an audio book.
Speaker 1:It's not yeah. It's an audio book. And then and then how much production are you gonna do? Are you gonna use sound mixing and bring in, you know Yeah. Atmospheric sounds, a lot of horror shows, and true crime shows will have, like, moody music to set the tone.
Speaker 1:Just all these different all these different formats and and figuring out, like, what is the right format for your goal, what are you good at, like, actually thinking that through, and then sticking to that instead of just being like, I I have a podcast. It's a Zoom interview show with just random people that I meet. That doesn't really, work. So Yeah. Until you do that work, you can just be, like, stagnating.
Speaker 1:And I've seen a lot of people launch podcasts and just struggle for years to get, you know, any sort of product market fit because they don't Yeah.
Speaker 2:It should feel it should feel more like, the same thing with companies where I give this example to founders where if you're, if if you're working on a product that is not good or the market doesn't care about it or doesn't want it, it's gonna feel like pushing a rock, like a really heavy rock uphill. Yeah. Which is, like, almost impossible, like, for a small team. If you're working on something that is getting real pull from the market, that's a good product at the right time, all the stuff. It's still really hard, but you're, like, pushing this heavy rock down, like, a small Sliding time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes, slight decline. And so, yeah, you have this momentum kind of, like, working with you. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's,
Speaker 1:I guess the question for me is, like, if you flip it around, like, what do you need to get right to have, like, immediate product market fit for a VC firm? Is it just like a banger thesis or, like a lot of it feels like you have some preferential access to proprietary deal flow, and so it's very natural for you to raise the fund because you are already seeing great deals and either angel investing or raising SPVs, like, very consistently.
Speaker 2:Nicole's on her, like so people were trying to dunk on this tweet which, which people want a reason to dunk on anything, but, she's on her 3rd fund. Right? It's not her first rodeo. Yeah. It legitimately is probably much easier for her to set up a venture fund Sure.
Speaker 2:And raise money Yeah. Raise tens of easier for her to set up a venture fund Sure. And raise money Yeah. Raise tens of 1,000,000 of dollars in LPs. So for her going and doing podcasting for the first time, I think a lot of people as adults Yeah.
Speaker 2:Stop doing new things. Yeah. So everything they do is pretty easy. Yeah. Like, I make my coffee in the morning.
Speaker 2:Yep. I drive to work. Yep. I do my job that I've done for decades. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's all, like, very easy. And so it can be and if you're naturally a talented person, it's usually a weird feeling when you're doing something and it's, like, hard.
Speaker 3:And didn't she also, like, publish, like, the exact funnel that she used to raise
Speaker 1:the latest fund? And it was, like, hundreds of pitches. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the equivalent of doing hundreds of
Speaker 3:episodes. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so She's been very
Speaker 3:transparent with
Speaker 1:She's building public. Yeah. Yeah. She's building in public, but doing it
Speaker 2:doing it the right way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great. Let's move on to 10 a says market caps of a few consumer companies that were all multibillion dollar companies when they IPO'd in the 20 to 21 period. Sonder at $32,000,000 now. Rent the Runway at 36,000,000.
Speaker 1:Bain Capital Company, I remember seeing them at Bain. Allbirds, 88,000,000. BuzzFeed, 96,000,000. And Wish, at 160 7,000,000. And then, Brennan says market cap of Sonder is lower than the cash we raised for our series b in 2017.
Speaker 1:Is this, like, the founder of Sonder or something? Like, we raised
Speaker 2:He must he must have he must at least have been there. I don't think that's the founder. Okay. But, yeah, I think, there's some type of opportunity here. A lot of these companies are like, you have to imagine that Sonder I don't know if the board and and everyone would be able to approve, like, a take private.
Speaker 2:But last I checked, they had, like, hundreds of these corporate style, like, apartments that were basically, like, somewhere between a hotel room and an Airbnb. Yeah. And there must be, like, a hotel room and an Airbnb. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there must be, like, some
Speaker 3:value in
Speaker 2:there greater than than that number. And so I think a lot of these are, I think, like, Wish and stuff like that, these ecommerce things, ecommerce seems like it's a really bad business if unless you're online, unless you have, an a really bad business if unless you're online, unless you have, unless you're Amazon, or you have, like, a real brand. It seems like that the middle is, like, really, really bad.
Speaker 1:If you have a real brand, like, the brand, the ecommerce effort is merely a go to market strategy. And that's what we're seeing with Lucy where, like, we were 99% ecommerce for years. Now it's less than a third of the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then rent the runway is one of those things, like, when it launched, I think that in theory for, in theory, I don't know if they have men's product. I'm sure they have men's product.
Speaker 1:Well, there's the Black Tux, which is a comp competitor for Tuxedo rental online.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:then I think they got kinda eaten up by those, like, buy and sell resale websites like
Speaker 3:The
Speaker 1:RealReal, where it's like the economics, it sounds way more expensive, but it's actually pretty similar. If you just go to The RealReal Yeah. Buy a dress for a $100, wear it, take it back, sell it for 50, it's like you've taken a 50% loss, but that might be the same price as renting the runway.
Speaker 2:So the big issue with Rent the Runway is that it is a lot even though they've really dialed in, like, that receiving and dropping it off. Yep. The more money you pay for rent the runway as a consumer, the more work it is. It's like, oh, great. I have these, like, 3 or 4 things that I have to, like, take
Speaker 1:Pack up.
Speaker 2:Put pack up and put to UPS. And, eventually, they're looking at it as, like, okay. I'm spending $2,000 a month. I could just, like, strategically build out my wardrobe Yeah. And sell the stuff that I don't like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're saying so. There there is I think it's one of those things, like, that is something that is probably great localized small business in New York, for example, where if you could subscribe to a closet Yes. New York where a woman could walk in Yeah. Buy something.
Speaker 2:You're not buying something. Rent 3 pieces that she likes, wear them, drop them back off, and it's, like, right in their neighborhood. That probably is, like, a pretty good business. But, you know, online, very logistics intensive, it just doesn't really make money.
Speaker 1:I remember my my mom always saying that, like, maybe it was, like, the Italian way is to just have, like, one incredible suit instead of, like, 10 cheap suits. And there you go.
Speaker 2:This is a special occasion.
Speaker 1:And, and and and and just always essentially building a power law closet where you don't where you have very few things, but they're all extremely nice and you take very good care of them and you repair them and they repair a bowl because they're made out of nice materials instead of just buying fast casual, fast fashion, or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember the the distinct moment. I was probably, like, 22 ish where I realized I'd stopped growing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was, like, wait, I can buy stuff that's gonna Yeah.
Speaker 1:And effectively mentally depreciate it for a decade as opposed to a a couple months.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to Sar. He says nice because he's, tweeting a picture of an interaction between Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. RFK is talking about how the Trump White House will advise all water systems to remove fluoride from public water. And Jason says, dot dot dot science boy.
Speaker 1:Can you vet this for me? Question mark, parenthesis, Friedberg. And what I love so Friedberg responds, insecure boy. Why don't you use the Internet to do some primary research yourself instead of outsourcing your thinking? And it's this massive ratio of, you know, 9,000 likes to 900 likes.
Speaker 1:And it's funny because it's, like, infighting, but what I love is that David Friedberg matched Jason's formatting to, like, it's pixel perfect. Umm..3 dots. Insecureboyscienceboycomma. And then even when they tag the person, Jason did open parenthesis space at Friedberg space close parenthesis. And Friedberg does the exact same thing with Jason.
Speaker 1:The the attention to detail here is just fantastic.
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 1:just, like was, like, the the mirroring of the of the meme, it's, like Yeah. It's it's it's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, yeah, they're
Speaker 1:They've been beaten beefing.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna celebrate. I don't think it's worth dunking on them or celebrating. Clearly, they're going through a lot Yeah. For the group Right now, Sachs is probably gonna you know, it's possible he'll
Speaker 1:have to die best
Speaker 2:and become secretary of state, you know, who knows? There's a lot going on, but I think why I I thought this was relevant is one of the biggest reasons that we started this podcast is frustration that all in wasn't monetizing Yep. And frustration from our friends that said, hey, we wanna advertise to this group of smart, pro business individuals Yep. And we can't get in front of them. Can you guys build a bigger podcast and all in that monetizes sponsor?
Speaker 2:Yep. And I think the big thing is, if all in had sponsors and they were generating tens of 1,000,000 of dollars of revenue, which they can and should, they would not be fighting on the timeline.
Speaker 1:I mean, that could pay for a private research assistant for Jason to ask these dumb questions too.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:You could
Speaker 1:they can have a vice president. Yeah. I don't think they do. I I think they have, like, a producer.
Speaker 3:I think they
Speaker 1:have a couple producers, but I don't
Speaker 2:think they
Speaker 1:have a VP yet.
Speaker 2:So if yeah. Just thinking if if I'm feed Chip
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Feed Chip is sponsoring all in Yep. And I see 2 of their hosts fighting it out. I'm like, hey, we're here to sell boats. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're not here to argue and poke fun at each other. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's more to this story, and I'm sure it'll come out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's tough. I mean, the the Sotheby's clientele, like, you don't want bidders. You want you want them to be fighting with
Speaker 2:the Over individual options.
Speaker 1:With the paddles, with the option paddles, not not not making a scene in the lobby. So, yeah, it's tough. It it it they almost waited too long and and you wonder, like, could they monetize now or has the ship sailed?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Has the feed ship sailed? Yeah. Oh, well, let's move on to Kyle Harrison. He's a contrary. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kyle says, VC, quote, we don't invest in chat gpt rappers founder. Our chat gpt rapper has gone from a 150 k to a to 15,000,000 of ARR in 12 months. VC, will evaluation of 1,000,000,000 suffice? You know what? I'll just leave the valuation line blank for you to fill in.
Speaker 2:And then Matt Dirks
Speaker 1:says, that's ridiculous. And, also, is there still room in the round? I love that.
Speaker 2:So so that was a perplexity subtweet. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Chachapi rapper, 50,000,000 AR, 1 bill. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But, but, yeah, I would say VCs love to invest in founders and products that are genuinely loved
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And, people fucking love perplexity.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, it is a product that has replaced search in a small way with very, very I don't think really anything has done that Yep. In my history in tech.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So if if something has the something like perplexity has the potential to disrupt the greatest business model of all time being search.
Speaker 1:Maybe I should buy search.com.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Search.com.
Speaker 1:It's it's not resolving right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'd be good. No one
Speaker 1:is using it.
Speaker 2:And, so anyways, I think perplexity is a fair, bet at any price in the range of of what he just described. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, bullish on chat rappers generally not sure if they're always a good fit for VC, but the UI layer is important. And and and and perplexity just gives a different UI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A year ago everyone was saying there's no value in the app player. You're all getting commoditized now. You know, this I think this tweet was in response to OpenAI rolling out web search.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:But people are still using perplexity. Yeah. I I remember at the election party that we were at, everybody was either they had Poly Market open Yep.
Speaker 1:Or they had always.
Speaker 2:And it was just, like, much better sources of information.
Speaker 1:And it's interesting because, I mean, perplexity is 100% making more money than mp3.com Yeah. Ever did. And and and and a lot of that is just a cultural shift of, like, yeah, when you launch a product, charge $20. Actually, the founder of perplexity was on, I think, Lex and was saying, like, I wish Chat GPT had done $40 a month because we just we just copied their business
Speaker 2:model because of perplexity is I haven't, I've never gotten an upsell.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:I've never gotten pushed to give them money. Yeah. And I use the product pretty frequently.
Speaker 1:I I used it a little bit. I kind of switched out of it. I had a problem with their voice dictation pro product where, basically, sometimes you could use and Chat GPT has this too where you can use Whisper to transcribe something into text, and then Yeah. It becomes a text transcribe something into text and then it becomes a text interaction, or you can open up their voice assistant and then you're talking to the AI and it's not printing it out in text for you. I like the text interactions because I wanna see tables and data, but I want to talk to it.
Speaker 1:And so if that flow is confusing, it, like, really breaks my experience. But that's probably, a little bit niche.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Lindy man. Actually, we should probably skip this guy. He hates me.
Speaker 2:He hates you?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He probably hates me.
Speaker 2:How to how to go?
Speaker 1:I don't know. So I
Speaker 2:mean, what what's the tweet?
Speaker 1:It says, gambling is so normalized now. People are casually betting on the election. It just took a few years after they made it legal. American society is perfect for betting lots of money, lots of people sitting at work wanting some action.
Speaker 2:Thing is this might be how you your Lending Man Redemption because he would appreciate that we're sitting here in what looks like a news room.
Speaker 1:I hope so. I hope so. Paul, if you're listening, unblock me, man. I really like your posts.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, American society is perfect. We're betting lots of money, lots of people sitting at work wanting some action. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And that was all leading up to yeah. I think people need to see any type of betting as as much as it is a financial activity, it's entertainment. Right? So when I angel invest, that's an entertainment product for me.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:I'm giving you a lot of money Yeah. Without the ability to get it back Yep. Except if you do super super well Yep. And I'm gonna get updates every single month Yep. Until something happens.
Speaker 1:It's like the most expensive premium newsletter. Exactly. The the investor the investor update is, like, the best of the most expensive substat. Exactly. It's a one time 50 k fee.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I I just like that we're now getting betting products for everybody. Right? If you're if you're a technology brother, you can angel invest. Yep.
Speaker 2:If you're a, d gen, you can do sports betting, intellectual, you can bet on markets.
Speaker 1:You do pumped up fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. If you're a real d gen.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:mean, the d gen levels are just 25 deep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can go to you can be betting on, like, candy crush.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're really degenerate
Speaker 1:Flipping coin.
Speaker 2:Going is, like, having, like, your 10 screens and going long corn futures while you're betting on, like, Chinese tennis
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Version. Yeah. It's great.
Speaker 1:So, Cremieux, says, Elon starts his surprise Joe Rogan appearance by mentioning that he's one of the top twenty Diablo 4 players in the world, and there are only 2 Americans in the top 20. And David Ullovich, quote, tweets it and says, I'm pretty sure Travis Kalanick was the number one We Tennis player in the world for a period of time when people play We Tennis.
Speaker 2:There's a whole story of him playing left handed with some VC.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Faking it.
Speaker 2:For faking it. It's great. Smoking him still and then just being, like
Speaker 1:Oh, he wasn't even playing with my correct hand. That's just so it's just so funny because, like like, Diablo, I I get it. It's, like, kind of, like, a hardcore game. So We tennis is, like, just, like it's, like, a silly game. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but that's the thing. You think that when I play Wii, it feels like a joke Yeah. Because everything feels like you're in a big cartoon. Yep. But Travis had figured out that there was actually deep skill in the game.
Speaker 2:And I think that SBF, when he would be playing League of Legends while pitching, smogging your VC by playing left handed in Wii Tennis and just smoking them over and over, that's cool. Just going and playing some random
Speaker 1:And he was bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That was
Speaker 1:S b f was bad. Yeah. He wasn't one of the
Speaker 2:best. If Sequoia had figured out that he actually wasn't even good at the game Yep. They probably wouldn't have invested. But, and then Anyways, I think so the reason that the the quote tweet there brings up the fact, like, somebody analyzing the fact that Elon is just spending a lot Yeah. Probably using an army of people to play for him.
Speaker 2:So he just gets to play with all the other top players. And apparently, if you're playing with other top players, you just rank up a lot more quickly. I think that this is a risk, factor for Elon's reputation because he the number one way that, Elon haters try to discredit him is by saying he didn't build rockets. He didn't build x. He didn't do all these he didn't build rockets.
Speaker 2:He didn't build x. He didn't do all these things. And so to now be publicly, like, being, like, I'm the top 20 Diablo player in the world Yeah. When in reality, it's probably a team of people. It's just, like, what's the point?
Speaker 1:I I don't know. I I mean, I I would I would honestly, like like, flip it around and be, like, you know, there's there's all the skepticism about, like, does he have the ability to perform at the highest level? And he's, like, demonstrating that in a public place where, like, if you think that you're better than Elon at everything and he just gets lucky or he just has some sort of thing.
Speaker 2:That's a good point.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, then show up and beat him. You know? You you could do that. And then Palmer says, it's very interesting phenomenon.
Speaker 1:I was briefly one of the top 10 players in sword art on online memory defrag back when it was still online, and my score in Pokemon Pinball for Game Boy Color was several times higher than the Guinness World Record. Wow. Wow. It's amazing. I don't think I've ever been, like, top
Speaker 2:10 in anything. Now he now he has mod retro.
Speaker 1:I was I I I played a lot of Counter Strike, and I got to, the there's a there's a, like, a, Counter Strike and I got to, there's a there's a, like, a league called the Cyber Athlete Amateur League and the Cyber Athlete Professional League. But the CPL was in person. So and it was too expensive. So I couldn't go because it was like Texas and you had to bring your own computer. And it was just, like, really tricky.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 1:I played online and I was always, like, it was open, which anyone could get into. Maine, which was, like, once you were doing well, then there was invite only. And I couldn't get an invite. I was in Maine. But then I switched games to Day of Defeat, which was a World War 2, like, version of it essentially, slightly different.
Speaker 1:And that I actually got to invite in. Yeah. I was never, like, really one of the top players, but
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:really into that game. It was fun. But again, like, it's hard when you don't have, time. I don't know how you I don't know how he makes the time for it. It was always tough, especially as I was in
Speaker 2:some There was some Olympian that talked about this. Yeah. And she was saying, like, she does Olympic skiing and, modeling, and she's still going to school. And the reporter was asking her, like, how do you do all this? And the thing is is context switching usually ends up being a break even if it's very active.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So Elon going from working on SpaceX to working on x to working on playing Diablo is actually, like, it feels like It's refreshing. Sure. Refreshing it versus just doing SpaceX for 14 hours.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's actually harder
Speaker 1:to stay at
Speaker 2:a high level.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. I like that. Let's go to Nick dollars and data. He says, friendly reminder that Jane Street built a system to get the 2016 election results minutes ahead of the mainstream media and still ended up losing 300,000,000 on the trade.
Speaker 1:And apparently, Sam Bankman Fried involves his time at Jane Street Capital where he built a system to get the election results earlier, which is wild that he was there doing that. And I guess it was reported in Michael Lewis' going infinite. What had what had been a 300 $1,000,000 profit for Jane Street was now a $300,000,000 loss. It went from the single most profitable to single worst trade in Jane Street history.
Speaker 2:So it basically popped off of the news and then they held and didn't sell. Really? I I I that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:He was
Speaker 2:going to be profitable. Yeah. I just I just think, that guy, pretty
Speaker 1:They bet against the US market. So they they predicted that Trump would win early, but they didn't predict that the market would like the Trump win, which is interesting.
Speaker 2:You would think that you could interview a 100 cap capital allocators that control, like, a
Speaker 3:lot of
Speaker 1:Maybe there was a yeah. Preference, Or
Speaker 2:maybe people didn't didn't wanna say at
Speaker 3:the time that they were pro Trump and they thought
Speaker 2:it was gonna be good. Yeah. I I wonder I I
Speaker 1:know Citadel, like, their global macro team has, they do thousands of, like, CEO interviews every year. Yeah. I wonder if Jane Street has a similar function.
Speaker 2:Well, you know the you know the French quant
Speaker 3:that
Speaker 1:He did his own polling.
Speaker 2:He did his own polling and what he was the he he claims I mean, who knows if he was just degenerate or and now he's sort of, like, making Right. Conning.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I had real data.
Speaker 2:But he said that there was a difference between in polling between who are you voting for and who are your neighbors voting for. And that gap Yep. Was his edge.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. I mean, that that was what felt different this time around than 2020. I was seeing, like, MAGA hats in Venice
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or or
Speaker 1:in, like, Santa Monica. Yeah. And it's, like, it used to be, like, if you saw that, like, that person be getting yelled at. Yeah. I saw And none of
Speaker 2:the none of the culture
Speaker 1:flags I I saw, like, a mini Trump rally of, like, 20 people with, like, a big Trump flag, like, in Pasadena.
Speaker 2:Even California apparently was 4 40 percent of the popular vote in California went to Trump. Wow. Which is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's supposed to
Speaker 1:be for years It's supposed to be a d plus 27. Right? Which is, like, more like 70, 30, I think. Maybe even more than that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow. It's wild. Anyway, let's go to Austin Peter Smith. No matter who wins this election, I'm gonna build some b two b sass. So an underappreciated tweet, just 74 likes.
Speaker 3:This is
Speaker 1:a good one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. He yeah. He's been building this, tool called Howie for the last year. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Howie. Howie is a product that acts as, like, your secretary basically show the same thing that your secretary does versus she says, hey, John. You know, this person would like to meet with you. Mhmm. Or can I schedule it for this?
Speaker 2:Howie is like a digital version of that. Mhmm. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, you can CC Howie in on email, and then it just says, like, suggest times. They can coordinate back and forth. The person you're booking with can say, hey, that actually my day changed around. Can you do this day?
Speaker 2:And Howie will just handle the whole thing.
Speaker 3:So, it's basically making, the Coogan secretary experience.
Speaker 2:Do you Coogan secretary
Speaker 3:experience Maybe
Speaker 1:they should buy secretary.com.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's fascinating because secretary has become like, it was it was branded as, like, low status to be a secretary. And so that got rebranded as an executive assistant. Executive assistant. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you think about the most high status roles in the world, the secretary of state, the treasury secretary. Secretary, it it literally means keeper of the secrets. Secretary. Yeah. It it's
Speaker 3:the keeper
Speaker 2:of the secrets, apparently.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, like, literally secret Terry, like, the person in charge of that. So it's actually, like, a very high status word and it is non gendered. And so maybe we should bring it back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Rassett. Says, my post is the top post of all time in the r slash cursor. In r slash cursor. Bro, what the fuck? 0 coding skills.
Speaker 1:My web app ranked number 3 on Product Hunt. Hi, guys. I was laid off from my job. I don't know how to code. I decided just to build things with cursors.
Speaker 1:Still learning. Didn't really know what to build, so I just decided to build the most something something something. And the the they don't even know about the viral tweet thing, lmao.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The this trend is awesome. Right? I guess it does. Being easier and easier and easier and easier and easier to build software and just things in general.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so it matters more of your raw ability to execute Yep. And pace and, even marketing edge. This guy is doing marketing Yep. Through posting.
Speaker 1:Yep. And I think the really the really interesting thing is that, like, I guarantee if if this idea has legs, it ranks on Product Hunt, he gets some early adopters. Like, there's gonna be real programmers. Like, it's going to be a tech company. There's gonna be a lot of programmers.
Speaker 1:They're gonna be using cursor. There's gonna be a lot of leverage there, but it's going to turn into a real software company. But you've just disconnected this need for the ideas guy to go convince a programmer to, like, take a risk and build something for equity and something that they're not sure about. And so, it just gets so much easier to to iterate and test new ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So bullish. Crazy example here. Have a portfolio company that recently had, went to a hackathon. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Instead of going as a group, they had the CEO enter and the CTO enter, and they both built individual products Yeah. That both did well in the hackathon, which and the CEO had didn't have any prior real he had never been a software engineer at a company ever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And now he's, like, competing against other, like, regular engineers Yeah. And winning Yeah. Which is awesome.
Speaker 1:Because at a hackathon in the early stages, you're not solving really, really hard engineering problems. You're not coming in with, like, oh, I need a new sorting algorithm or something. You're just, like, I need to pull some code over here, some boilerplate over here, deploy this, like, just get something live that, like, does the basic bones of the thing that I wanna demonstrate. Is this valuable? Is this a product that people want?
Speaker 2:Side note, cursors, the the, most painful mess of mine that I never took a pitch from. Sure. But I realized, like, about a year ago that the Cursor CEO had followed me
Speaker 1:since, like, 2020. Oh, so you could've gotten
Speaker 2:company started, and I I did not hadn't followed him back.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I just was, like, oh. So stupid. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1:wow. Great product.
Speaker 2:Great product. Glad they're winning.
Speaker 1:I mean, another example of, like, a UI wrapper essentially. Like and it's actually model independent. I think you can choose whatever model you want. People like Claude
Speaker 2:3 The fact that these apps are going model independent too just shows that value will accrue to the app layer and not the sort of commoditizable
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, like language model. Yeah. Yeah. The language model could be, like, the underlying technology in the same way that I think Netflix was built on GCP or AWS and Snapchat was built on Google Cloud, but then they eventually built their own servers.
Speaker 1:The consumer doesn't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They don't care.
Speaker 1:James Stuber says, VC, the other day, told me, we've lost several really good founders to Factorio. They came back and just wanted to work in manufacturing, not SaaS. Do you think this is real? Do you think this
Speaker 2:is a joke?
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 2:this is a joke. Post.
Speaker 1:It's funny, though. It it's it's it's, like, Ayahuasca adjacent.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you either you you you lose yourself to Ayahuasca and you go off to Yeah.
Speaker 2:I could see a I could see a SaaS founder playing Factorio and they're, like, wait, I can, like, do the same use my same skill set of company building to, like, just play this game in real life. Yeah. Like, that's what Aaron's doing. Yeah. He's just, like, playing a real life game in Factorio.
Speaker 2:That's what we're doing at deterrence.
Speaker 1:Yep. I wonder if there's a, like, a dividing line between, like, the type of game that someone played as a kid and then the type of career path they follow. Like, is there a difference in, like, the shooter who is maybe more of, like, the aggressive Well, that was always the risk. That was the RTS games.
Speaker 2:My parents were freaked out that I would I like Call of Duty as a kid because I,
Speaker 1:Now you own a gun store.
Speaker 2:No. But that that was because, and they were just worried that I just, like, get, like, wanna go into the military and all that stuff. But little did they know, I actually played way more StarCraft, which is much more entrepreneurial balancing, you know, building, resource management, conflict. Yeah. So anyway, Stark Long Starcraft players.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Long Diablo players now. I wonder if there's gonna be a boom in Diablo. We we we had a we had a hackathon or a land party at Founders Fund and it was a lot of Halo, a lot of a lot of Counter Strike, a little bit of Smash Brothers, and I think there was maybe 2 people playing StarCraft. But StarCraft is a little bit harder to set up for his longer game, I think.
Speaker 1:Super long. But I could see the next one. I played a little bit of Diablo 4 because, shout out Lulu Meservi, she gave me a free coupon code for it when, she worked at Activision. I was like, thank you. But I played a little bit and I was like, this is, like, too much.
Speaker 1:I played Diablo 3. I I never really played Diablo 2. That was, like, the one everyone loved loved loved. But it was, like, little
Speaker 2:bit of time. Another World of Warcraft scale game where it felt like World of Warcraft was the most deeply addicting.
Speaker 1:Well, that's supposed to be Fortnite then Roblox. Right? Or Minecraft. Like, Minecraft is very much the new version.
Speaker 2:World of Warcraft, I feel like, had a lot of adults that were deeply addicted. Totally. I guess maybe that's the case for Fortnite too. I just I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's maybe true for Fortnite. I think it's probably less true for Minecraft.
Speaker 2:With adults that are addicted to videos.
Speaker 1:But yeah. Like, they I mean, I guess they're making a Minecraft movie. They made work World of Warcraft movies, so maybe it is pretty adjacent if they build it up. But, yeah, I I understand what you're saying. Grit Cult, who's been on the show before, dumps a whole list of problems and solutions.
Speaker 1:The fertility crisis, the solutions have 10 kids, environmental crisis, buy a classic car, ownership crisis, become a landlord.
Speaker 2:You laugh, but it's it's real. It's real? More sustainable objectively to buy
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Your car. Because it's already it's it's not being produced by anything. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And and they last a long time.
Speaker 2:More sustainable than buying a Tesla. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Well, not when Tesla starts launching v twelves with gated manual shifters, which is coming. It's it's it's the end of the arc for Elon very clearly. Yeah. Education crisis, homeschool.
Speaker 1:We know many people that do that. Health crisis, gym obsessively. Unemployment crisis, go in go all in on crypto. Love it. Everyone's scared, over leverage, lack of nutrition, steak and eggs.
Speaker 1:And then Jack Butcher says 100 year bull run.
Speaker 3:Any
Speaker 1:of these you disagree with?
Speaker 2:Like this because it it's all about taking personal responsibility for the problems that you see in the world. Yep. So a lot of people think that there's a lot of problems in the world, like, we should just do less but the the key is to do more but do more of the right things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and all of these are are things that you just do independently mostly. I mean Yeah. Landlords will
Speaker 2:No one's no one stopping you. Like, Elon talks about the fertility crisis and actively works to fix it. Yep. Right? Like, takes personal responsibility.
Speaker 2:He's not just saying you have 10 kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's having he's this is something we've seen with, like, the health crisis stuff. There's a lot of, like, kind of, like, trad influencers that, you know, complain about, like, the fluoride or seed oils or all this stuff, but then, like, you meet them and they don't go to the gym. And it's, like, something's mismatched here.
Speaker 2:Like, you
Speaker 1:should start with yourself and, like Yeah. And, like, at least solve the problem.
Speaker 2:There is the one guy heretic
Speaker 3:on that.
Speaker 1:Your and then your family and then your community and then the city, the state, the nation. Yeah. But if you're just jumping straight to the nation, like, you at least need to lead by example. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:One one guy heretic on that.
Speaker 2:One guy heretic on that was, like, giving a panel on, like, health and Yeah. The, like, alternative health movement.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:He, like, was 37, I guess, and straight up looked like my age. Like, he like, I was, like, proof of work.
Speaker 1:Oh, there
Speaker 3:you go.
Speaker 2:I respect it. Yeah. So, anyways, be be like that guy.
Speaker 3:Is it
Speaker 1:Brian Johnson or Justin Maris?
Speaker 2:No. Just Justin Maris.
Speaker 1:Justin looks fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Proof of body.
Speaker 2:Very important.
Speaker 1:Proof of work. Yeah. Proof proof of body for for any health claims. Like, yeah, you you have to be able to say, like, okay. This person's recommending steak and eggs.
Speaker 1:Do I want to look like them? If yes, then
Speaker 3:I will
Speaker 1:listen to them. This is the Andrew Huberman effect. Chamath Palihapitiya says, these should return the exact same form of result, but they don't. So if you searched if you searched where to vote for Trump, it would give you stories about the election. And if you asked for where to vote for Harris, it would give you, like, a, like, an info form of where to vote, and you could just type in your address and would immediately take you there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So people were saying, like, Google is biasing, towards Harris. They're being more helpful to Harris voters than Trump. Obviously, it didn't matter in the election. But, the the the community note note says the search results were different for Harris and Vance because Harris is a county in Texas and and Vance is a county in North Carolina, and it appears Google has corrected this issue.
Speaker 1:I do I do wanna give Google the benefit of the doubt here.
Speaker 2:I just think
Speaker 1:I think there is so much scrutiny that they really okay. Okay. Here comes the tinfoil hat. Here comes the tinfoil hat. I I think there's so much scrutiny that we know that
Speaker 2:quite a lot of examples like this over the last 2 weeks so much so that it's hard not to wonder if the woke mind virus within Google is still not acting up a little bit even though the spotlight is on them.
Speaker 1:Maybe.
Speaker 2:That's all.
Speaker 1:It just seems like, yeah, if there's if there's a whistleblower, there's so much scrutiny, like, they're trying to create
Speaker 2:a new the same argument that x is deeply political and Yep. Up ranks Yep. Certain ideas. So I think it's I think it ultimately, it's happening on both sides.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Let's go to Sean Puri. He says, host of my first million says, the new bachelor party, trip to Turkey with the boys for hair transplants. Where did you get your hair transplants, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Locally. Locally. Yeah. Yeah. I actually get I get weekly micro transplants where they're, they just take, like, as, you know, 1 centimeter by 1 centimeter and just transplant.
Speaker 1:Just a little bit.
Speaker 2:It's more sustainable. Know, I never have to, like, go through the whole wheat no. I haven't haven't had to do this yet, although I Either. Function health tells me that I have, like, really Oh, you have a gene profile? Hormone profile Will is conducive to hair loss.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But my spirit is conducive to having great hair. Interesting. So it's kind of like this this balance between my hormones Yeah. And spirit and whatever. But, yeah, I haven't seen this yet.
Speaker 2:I do think that medical tourism is is, like, a underrated trend. I think it's, like, pretty investable trend. Yeah. I knew some guys that were working on on sort of Airbnb for medical tourism, which is kind of a cool concept where Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you wanna go down to Mexico to, like, get some dental procedure done, there's some dentists down there that are probably fantastic, and there's a lot that are gonna jack you up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But knowing which one's good is Knowing which you're good
Speaker 2:and having that user generated
Speaker 1:I was talking to Justin Mares about this with, the like, GLP ones were, like, widely available for, like, 5 years before they came to America, and a lot of rich people were going abroad together.
Speaker 2:And they're still really cheap on the black market
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The gray market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very interesting. I have yet to lose my hair, and I don't think it's genetic in my family. So I'm not super worried about it. But I did start getting a bald spot back here a while ago, and I was like, this is so weird.
Speaker 1:Like, I don't understand why I'm losing my hair back here. And what I figured out was that I was so I was so interested in efficiency and shareholder value and just being on the grind and not wasting any time that when I got out of the shower, I would take the towel and vigorously rub my head as fast as possible to dry my hair in, like, 2 seconds, and it was ripping out my hair.
Speaker 2:No. Babies get that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Crib cradle crib.
Speaker 2:Yeah. My 3 month old little balds back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. So you're giving yourself the hair.
Speaker 2:Here's here's here's I should put the tinfoil hat back on. Here's here's what the hair a lot of the hair loss epidemic is driven by. Sure. Lack of sunlight to the head. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sunlight makes life grow.
Speaker 1:Yep. But everyone's inside all
Speaker 3:the time.
Speaker 2:No one's working outside. Overuse of artificial fluorescent lights.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:That you can offset.
Speaker 1:Cinema lights. They're very high quality.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm sure
Speaker 2:they're good. Good. Wearing a lot of hats cuts off blood flow and then a lack of physical touch. So if you're a guy, hair. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I will
Speaker 1:just, like, massage my head multiple times
Speaker 2:a day Okay. To stimulate blood flow because Or if you're, like, Jack on a 100x on the
Speaker 1:trade, you're
Speaker 2:just like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You don't wanna be pulling out your hair. You don't wanna be pulling out
Speaker 2:your hair. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But, yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyways, if you're, a brother, physically, or spiritually, give yourself a
Speaker 1:little. I mean, it is it it does feel like the hair transplant thing is becoming more normalized, more democratized, cheaper, more reliable.
Speaker 2:And so it's just just King James. That's
Speaker 1:Yeah. I and I think we will see more people start to do it earlier so you don't have those, like, billionaire transformations where it's, like, before money, after money. It's so obvious that they went and got their hair done. Yeah. Instead, it's, like, the person just doesn't lose their hair because they made enough money at 30 to, like, pay for the cheaper hair transplant that was, like, pretty reliable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, yeah, the hair transplant stuff, I mean, it feels pretty brutal. I know some people have done it and it's, like, your head's, like, bleeding for, like, days. It's, like, rough. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's, like, nice. I had a buddy do it and he kept leaving the house.
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 2:was, like, dude, for all of us, just, like, stay indoors for, like, a few days. Just chill. Yeah. Just relax. Like, you're gonna be back on on the road.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nobody wants to see that.
Speaker 1:It's rough. Anyway, boys trip sounds fun. I don't know. I mean, any excuse for a boys trip, but hopefully not like surgery and just sitting around, like, you know, being miserable. I'd wanna do something fun.
Speaker 1:There's so many other things you could do. Yeah. Go visit and start designing your custom yacht. Exactly. 8th century wood chipper says, forget Polymarket.
Speaker 1:Here's the real indicator. Palantir Technologies jumped, 14%. The stock's over $50. And was this this is, like, right on election day, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. To me, what was amazing about this election as somebody who appreciates finance Yeah. Was just how many different ways there were to bet on the market.
Speaker 1:Dogecoin?
Speaker 2:Dogecoin was 1. Bitcoin, Solana Yep. Defense tech stocks.
Speaker 1:Even Google went up 4%.
Speaker 2:Even even a big one was obviously, all the companies that are potentially impacted by tariffs, like, Lululemon and things like that.
Speaker 1:Truth Social, the the stock got halted right before the election. You saw that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I think there was a big it seemed like the truth. There was a big sell into the election in which somebody was, like, let's sell the Yep.
Speaker 1:Before You
Speaker 2:know, that basically yeah. It's gonna get less attention now that Trump's elected.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? You think that's what it was? It wasn't that they thought Trump was gonna lose.
Speaker 2:I think you could argue that that was the moment of where people were pouring on Mhmm. Investments because people thought he was gonna win.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it will actually could just trade down now that he's gonna be president again and Yep. Nobody's taking away his
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's, like, live on every podcast and and on x now. Yeah. It's interesting. Also, the the fact that all the defense stocks pumped is interesting because there's this narrative that, like, the Yeah.
Speaker 2:Dick Cheney endorsed Congress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Like, Dick Cheney and the and the and the Democrats were gonna be more pro war. And in fact, the the right wing would would be less pro war. So you would assume that defense budgets would get cut.
Speaker 1:But I think there's probably just like a return to the traditional, balance with, the the conservatives still continuing to promote defense. And, I think it's good because I love Palantir and I think it's important. Let's go to Mark Sisson.
Speaker 2:Is that how you pronounce it? Yep.
Speaker 1:He says the best thing to do right now is lift some heavy ass weight.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, Mark, don't know him personally, but total legend, early to a lot of these sort of alternative health trends, and he has proof of body. Oh, yeah. Like, the guy is Jack's Fantastic. 6 pack.
Speaker 2:I think he's in his sixties. He had started a company called Primal Kitchen
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Which he sold
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 2:So he sold for 100 Yeah. 1,000,000 of dollars. Great products. Yeah. Like, he basically took a lot of the sauces and other things like that that were unhealthy.
Speaker 2:Yep. Took out the seed oils, put avocado oil and stuff like that. But I'll I'll I've seen him, he works out at the gym next to my house. I think he splits time between, the the West and East Coast. But, the guy is just like a living example Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're gonna say hi.
Speaker 2:Living his values. And, well, no. When when he is in the gym, last time I saw him, he's, like, the mayor. Like, everybody in the gym is, like, saying hi.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:And, so anyways, like, he's proof of work. The guy, yeah, the guy is
Speaker 1:Also just a good message. I mean, I think this was the 5th. So this was, like, election night essentially or Yeah. I think it was election night essentially or Yeah. I think it was noon before the election.
Speaker 1:And so a lot of people are stressed. They're just gonna be checking poll market, doom scrolling, and he's just like, just go get in the gym.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is true. It's good. Just just get those endorphins flowing. Yep. It's important.
Speaker 1:Morgan Housel, what firm is he with again? Collab. Collab Fund. Is that right?
Speaker 2:He's like he's like a big He's done very well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's a writer. Yeah. He's written a bunch
Speaker 2:of books. That's a great book.
Speaker 1:He has a quote, the polls don't tell us much. Let's turn now to the degenerate gamblers to see if we can learn anything. 7000 likes.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing about evaluating whether prediction markets worked.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They were right this time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But even a day before, they were projecting that there was a 40 basically projecting there's a 40% chance that Como was winning. And that
Speaker 3:was not
Speaker 1:So it's
Speaker 2:not like Yeah. I don't I I think this was a huge win for prediction markets Yeah. From a liquidity standpoint Sure. And how much attention they have.
Speaker 1:And most importantly, they were more accurate than the polls. Polls. Correct. You could just be one point over.
Speaker 3:Correct. But at
Speaker 1:least you're the it was the most correct source
Speaker 2:of information. There was not perfect that it was and I was saying this, okay. I I I I thought that Trump was gonna win
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:But I also knew all my most degenerate friends were going real that are very generally conservative Mhmm. And we're betting heavy on poly market Yeah. And I just figured that that would slant it more. But the election was such a landslide Mhmm. That maybe it was perfectly accurate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:What'll be really interesting is if if is if in the future there's a, you know, a prediction markets are split 55, 45, and they get it wrong. Yeah. Because I think everyone will be like, oh, it's
Speaker 3:worthless now.
Speaker 1:When, really, it's like a 45% chance should come up every once in a while, especially across, like you know, if you test 10 elections, like, it shouldn't always be Yeah. But, I mean, what a win and and just, like, incredible accuracy. And also just the fact that they I think almost more of the value was this thing Shane was saying on I think he was on CNBC today or or or some sort of TV spot. The founder of Poly Market was saying that, like, because Poly Market was continuing to reprice the odds, they were able to effectively call the election, like, 3 hours before the news media. And the news media has this they they it's it's like you could say all these different things about, like, conflicts of interest and who's doing what and biases and who likes who or whatever, but it's just a fundamentally different economic incentive.
Speaker 1:Like, if you're if you're CNN, you are incentivized to sell ads and get watch time and keep people watching. And if you're a poly market, you're incentivized for liquidity and providing correct prices. And so, it's just a very different, like, incentive structure. And so, the CNN coverage and the mainstream media coverage was constantly, like, well, you know, could still be a toss-up. Like, don't turn this off.
Speaker 1:Like, let's go to this one district. Let's look at this.
Speaker 2:We were at it was I was standing between 2 TV screens. 1 had called it Yeah. 30, 40 minutes before, which was Fox News. Yep. And MSNBC was just still just going going saying
Speaker 1:But at the same time, before you even got to the party, like, 3 hours before any of them called it, poly market was at, like, 85% for Trump. Yeah. It was like, okay. Yeah. Like, unless something crazy
Speaker 2:I remember Will was like Will was getting nervous because poly market dipped, like, 3%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, it went from 95 to 92, and he was, like, panicking or whatever. But, like, yeah, it's ridiculous. It it just just having that having that early signal even if it's just, like, 3 hours. And then I did see something where,
Speaker 3:they
Speaker 1:they had a screenshot of the Poly Market map, like, a month earlier, and it was dead on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I don't know if, I don't know if this made it into the stack, but somebody did an analysis of Poly Market and turns out, like, 90% of users had a negative balance.
Speaker 1:What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Like, 90% of people that bet on Poly Market in the last this election cycle lost money.
Speaker 1:Really? Yeah. Just the various times.
Speaker 3:Hopefully, it
Speaker 2:made into Yeah. Like, because they were trading up in it's probably more like people were just trading in and out.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Yeah. Who who knows? But it's just, again, when the liquidity is like the stock market, if one person's winning, someone else is losing. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Winning big. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of other people are
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Let's go to Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb. He says, Airbnb just reached 2,000,000,000 guests. It took it took 14 years to get our 1st 1,000,000,000 and only 3 more years to reach the second.
Speaker 1:Thank you to everyone for giving us a chance. It's amazing. I like this That's the first comment. Let's see the first comment. Charlie Light says, congrats, Brian.
Speaker 1:The first 2,000,000,000 customers is the hardest in my experience. Smooth sailing from here on out.
Speaker 2:Charlie is actually a legendary poster. He had, he had this, account that probably had a few 100000. Yeah. So so he's joking. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:No, I think, I I it'd be good to rank YC companies based on customers because there's, like I don't know if any other why is is there another YC company that has more customers than Airbnb? I can't imagine.
Speaker 1:Coinbase would be really big, but not Meta didn't No. Didn't do YC.
Speaker 2:YC or anything.
Speaker 1:There might be some company out there that's just, like, such a such a general app that it's, like, 10 of it runs a day to you.
Speaker 2:So I guess the the other thing that is interesting about this is the real number of people that have been a customer of Airbnb is actually probably significantly higher. Because how many times have you stayed in Airbnb? And, like, you didn't book it or you booked it.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Totally. 4 or 5
Speaker 2:people, like, come with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's probably more like they have, like, 3 and a half 1000000000 or 400000000. Yeah. I understand. So, so, yeah, pretty pretty insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And what a journey. I mean, during the COVID cycle, just, like, completely losing everything.
Speaker 2:There's a there's a possibility that at some point in history, Airbnb will have more users than than Meta or Coca Cola because Airbnb is actually, like, very geographically So, like, there's countries that run on Airbnb and a lot of, like, tourism runs on it that will be using Airbnb, but they use some local social media and they have some, like, off brand off brand Coca Cola. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, yeah, getting to a tough spot where there's they're the TAM. They've got they've they've almost gotten, 50, you know, they're they're approaching 50% of of penetration.
Speaker 1:Of the other Airbnb stuff will pan out? They they did experience this for a while. Did you ever see those? So you'd show up to a place and then you could have, like, kind of a tour guide recommend restaurants. Kind of a, like, an Airbnb native version of, like, when you stay in a nice Airbnb, there's usually, like, a book that you open up and inside it has, like, recommendations of, like, what restaurants you should go to.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. Have you used Turo? Turo is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Before I could afford 9 elevens, I would I would I so Turo is hilarious because you're taking to highly depreciating assets that are high risk assets in that sports car and putting them on a website where the primary users are gonna come joyride it. Yeah. Joyride it. And I just don't understand people that take a car like a Porsche and put it up there because the clientele that's actually renting were, like, 22 year olds like me Yeah. That are I was very respectful with the cars, but still, like, they're driving them to, like, drive them and put miles on them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Doesn't make sense. Whereas a
Speaker 3:house just
Speaker 2:make A house you could
Speaker 1:have yeah.
Speaker 2:A house a house you could have you could have a 1,000,000 people come through a house and it would still appreciate. Right?
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, people run Airbnb's and through a party is the same problem as, like,
Speaker 2:you burn out something to be something to be said of, like, if a house is appreciating 5% a year
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:And even if you need to put another Yeah. 50 grand into the house every year. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think, like, kind of the I guess, like, maybe the bulk case for Turo is that a lot of the real serious, like, the Turo managers, like, basically run run a business on Touro. Yeah. Similar to the way people run businesses on Airbnb. They know the, like, the sweet spots. Like, the the Porsche Macan is, like, a phenomenal value because I think you can get one for, like, 45 k, and it relists as, like, a premium Porsche.
Speaker 1:But it's cheap. And the same thing with, like, the Corvette, the Yeah.
Speaker 2:The question is
Speaker 1:why c 8. Because it's, like, a mid engine sports car, but you can get it for 70 k or something like that. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Why hasn't Airbnb moved in have they
Speaker 1:Into car rentals? Into
Speaker 2:car rentals.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's just too different of a business, but
Speaker 2:But think about it, like,
Speaker 1:fly in, do okay. I got a car. I go to this Airbnb. I do
Speaker 2:That's an example of Airbnb. Should you get air.com and then and then do everything?
Speaker 1:That'd be cool.
Speaker 2:That's cooler than chat gpt rebranding as chat
Speaker 1:Yeah. In my opinion. I do love that. I mean, I don't know if we talked about this, but, Chesky wrote this post about how, like, everyone should do a demo day every year at a big company. And and when it was first proposed to him, he was like, we're Airbnb.
Speaker 1:Like, what are we gonna announce? Like, it's not like we release a new iPhone every year. Why am I getting on stage like Steve Jobs and being like, this year, we're doing something different? Because it's, like, kind of the same business every year. But it forced him to, like, think of ideas and get in the habit of driving towards it it aligns the entire organization around, like, some sort of milestones, some sort of deadline, even if it's just shipping, like, their new, you know, fraud prevention service.
Speaker 1:It's like, okay. Well, then you can announce to the public, like, if you're an Airbnb, you know, host, you're gonna deal with a lot less fraud because we just announced this new program. But then also, they could do a bunch of cool, stunty things. Like, they built the house from up. They built, like, a, like, a Barbie Oppenheimer house, I think, or something like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And all that stuff is, like, very gimmicky, but, like, actually makes for good marketing. And so I like this. I think it could be probably be misused by startups where they wind up leaning into just like, oh, we're like, we just are constantly standing on stage. There was, like, a whole batch of companies that were, like, LARPing as Steve Jobs with, like, no products. And and and it was kind of like, okay.
Speaker 1:Like, you guys gotta ship. But, like, once you're once you're in that middle phase where, like, you have product market fit, you're growing, but you wanna keep the pace of play up. You wanna keep the
Speaker 2:should do a Yeah. We should do a
Speaker 1:Be good.
Speaker 2:You know?
Speaker 1:Anduril does this very well. They're they're always launching, like, these, like, hype videos for their new products, and it just feels like there's a sense of motion that would be very different than them just being like, hey. We sold more sensor towers. We sold more of the same thing. Like, instead, it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:You're hearing about this thing. You're seeing this video.
Speaker 2:And basically, yeah, companies need to think about every major moment as they launch
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Not just when they launch their company. That's the number one advice I give for companies in my portfolio. Yep. Or how do we generate attention? Yep.
Speaker 2:You have a major you have a major hire.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Create it like a launch. Yep. Hype it up.
Speaker 1:Right? Yep. Yep. And also, like, bundling those things together because, like, even even if you raise, like, a decent series a or series b, like, $20,000,000 from, like, a decent firm, like, that alone might not be enough to get, like, a profile on your company. It might be enough to get, like, a TechCrunch article, but that's not gonna do anything.
Speaker 1:Instead, it's like, if you're if you're launching a new product and you're raising money and you got some interesting hire and there's also some interesting, like, personal angle with one of your customers and your founder has an interesting story and you're an expert in this industry now and there's some mega trend going on that you're playing into, it's like, okay. Now you're gonna get the deep dive, like, Alex Conrad is gonna show up and, like, talk to you because, like, there's more there than just, okay. Yeah. They raised money. Cool.
Speaker 1:Like, one line. Like, you need to give facts. You need to give, like, a sense of motion and progress in the story. Yeah. Let's go to Keith.
Speaker 1:He says, rest assured, guys, I have checked the ballots, and they do not contain PFAS or b f BPA. Go vote. So this is a rated 45 likes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Microplastics disrespect her. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So this is a riff on, receipts which use this, like, thermo Oh, yeah. Paper, and receipts are genuinely terrible. Like, there's 0 ROI to touch them. You should avoid them.
Speaker 1:I Huberman recently did a deep dive, and he said one of his three things was no plastic bottles, but then also
Speaker 2:don't touch people's mouth. Realize even the transfer from take put putting your finger on a hot receipt that's
Speaker 3:hot
Speaker 2:off the shelf. Yeah. It's fresh. And just like real transfer and with hormones, like, really, really, really small amount of volume of, you know, hormone disrupting chemicals or hormones themselves
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Can have a dramatic impact on how you feel. So if you're a I don't think we have any, I don't have any I think we have many cashiers in the audience. If you are a cashier, wear gloves. Yeah. Wear gloves.
Speaker 2:And refuse receipts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I guess the ballots don't matter because it's all printed, like, way ahead of time and maybe use a good ink.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's that. And you just
Speaker 3:hold the
Speaker 2:pencil far away. Yeah. Hold the pencil far away.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But very on trend comment. Let's go to dr22. Deja rue 22 says, a lot of entrepreneurs are not business people because they enjoy the idea of business, but rather because they're repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else. I think there's a lot to be said about that on a soul level.
Speaker 1:It really clearly resonated a 1,000 likes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think people there's a lot of benefits for working for someone else because if you're working for somebody else, you're effectively outsourcing all of the gnarly ness that comes from running a business. Agencies. Yeah. You're outsourcing.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of benefits. Right? Yeah. Like, your salary arrives right on time. Yep.
Speaker 2:You don't have to be thinking about making payroll. You don't have to be thinking about some customer issue or HR issue. There's you don't have to be with the if the website goes down and you're not the web developer, it's not your problem. Right? So I think the benefits of of and I think for a lot of people, like, going and working, there's such a tried and, like, true path now of, like, going to work at a good company and spending 4 years learning from the best, like, ramp has spun off like Devon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Early ramp, cognition, early ramp team. And there's so many benefits. But, yeah, I think for me and I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't even hate, for me, like, I think this is one of those things rage is one of them. If you're if you have a lot of rage in your heart and you want, to win and you want power and prestige, building a company can be one way to do that. If you just wanna create things, some people love creating things and companies are the best way to do that sustainably. Yep. And yeah.
Speaker 1:This definitely resonates
Speaker 2:with me. I'm They desire. Like Yeah. After you you interned at Bain and you're just like, I I can't do this again. I need to be the MD.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I could never do it. I I I used to tell people, like, if you wanna just be a successful entrepreneur, just never take a job.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because, like, eventually, we'll figure it out. And, like but as soon as you say, like, I'm taking a couple years off to go work at Google or something. It's, like, okay. This is the beginning of the end. Like, you're gonna get comfortable.
Speaker 1:They're gonna do everything they can to keep you from going back in the in the gladiator pit.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you're gonna get complacent and tired usually. The exception, of course, is going to work for, like, a extremely hot startup for a very short time because super entrepreneur
Speaker 2:No. I I have a former employee who could have just stayed in FAANG and decided to start a company and join a couple startups and, he would have done, he would be retired by now even though he worked at, like, good companies Yeah. If he had simply just never left it never left Google.
Speaker 3:If he
Speaker 1:was a FANG PM, he'd probably be pulling in, what, a couple 100 k a month. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, it's bad for the soul.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It hurts the spirit.
Speaker 1:Hurts the spirit. Yet enjoy the idea of business. Yeah. I mean, I I did not fully understand the idea of business, really. I was truly repulsed by the idea of working for somebody else.
Speaker 1:And, I mean, it also helped, like, after doing y c, like, you miss the standard recruiting cycle. So Totally. You're like, all the
Speaker 2:Yeah. Target.
Speaker 1:No. Not at all. And you're just in this weird space. And I actually had a friend who is, like, the first employee at Facebook and, was just I emailed him to just be, like, generally, like, I wanna work in tech. And he was like, I don't think you wanna work at Facebook even though, like, it's a great company.
Speaker 1:Like, it's too late stage. Like, they just want to hire people, like, out of the pipeline.
Speaker 2:I've never I've never I shouldn't say never now. But in the first 3 years out of school, even though I was talented, hardworking, working in relevant spaces to start ups, but just the fact that I had my business on my LinkedIn Yep. You just don't ever you know, recruiters
Speaker 1:know, I'm not gonna go
Speaker 2:hit up the founder of, like,
Speaker 1:this business because it's,
Speaker 2:like, non they're not you know, the odds of them leaving. And they don't pattern matches, like, your next great
Speaker 1:Exactly. Hire.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Liquidity, liquidity says, we need Blackstone to take America private, right size our cost structure, clean up the capital structure, and get us ready for an IPO before the next election.
Speaker 2:This does feel really real. It does. Do you feel like if, if if Elon and and can can, like, bring in this, like, sort of efficiency that he brought to x, the whole country will it's the first time that I felt not political at all, but it's the first time that we could sort of, America's debt has been just running running away. Like, last week, it added, like, a $100,000,000,000 in a day. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's very, very concerning. And this feels like an opportunity to right size the government, right size our cost structure because nobody nobody is in favor of increasing taxation generally. It feels like you have to be an anarchist to to wanna say, like, yeah, we just need to raise taxes, raise taxes. That's that's a solution because then you get Europe. And so, yeah, I think this is an awesome, moment and this is a meme, but I think it's, like, legitimately real.
Speaker 1:I think the, the interesting kinda hot take is that the way to, right size the the, what what is it? Like, the government, not like the what's the what's the income statement essentially? Yeah. For for the government, it's like the the, government expenditure is, like, is, like, way higher than the tax receipts, is not necessarily to, like, cut a bunch of spending and, like, fire a bunch of employees, although that's, like, one way to get there. The real way is to extend the retirement age because that's where all the Medicare and and, and, retirement benefits get in.
Speaker 1:Crazy stuff. It happened before, and it dramatically changed the financials of the company.
Speaker 2:Everybody's healthier now. We should everybody should be retiring.
Speaker 1:You need Brian Johnson to come in, make everyone healthier. And then if you push the retirement if you can push the retirement age out because everyone's living longer, well, then it's justified. But for the last, you know, what, 20 years, life expectancy has been declining. And so moving the retirement age up is really, like, taking away, like, prime years of retirement. And Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's, like, really gonna put the squeeze. But if everyone's like, well, yeah, I'm gonna like, I don't I don't mind that the government wants me to work or, like, the government is incentivizing me to work. You can still retire whenever you want, but the government's incentivizing me to work till 70 instead of 65 because I'm gonna live to a 100
Speaker 2:and 20. Here's here's how America, like, really gets its, you know, house in order is getting on ramp. Right? Because if America ran on ramp, you'd be able to look through and be like, why are we paying Boeing a $150,000 per soap dispenser? This is insane.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:That's a real thing.
Speaker 2:That's a real thing. And right now Yeah. The president doesn't have the visibility.
Speaker 1:And Elon's not gonna be able to look at every single line item, but
Speaker 2:He needs software that's offered
Speaker 1:to these agents to go through for these line items.
Speaker 2:Imagine if America was getting 1 and a half percent cash back on all government expenditures. That's a whole new revenue source.
Speaker 1:It is. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, Kareem, Eric, let's let's get America running on ramp.
Speaker 1:We should. That's a good, campaign slogan. Someone needs to do it. Let's go to s p o r spore says, yeah, I'm a full stack dev. The the stack is claudchatgbtandperplexity.
Speaker 1:29,000 likes. Wow.
Speaker 2:It's crazy. 29,000 likes means something's mainstream. That's like
Speaker 1:Super mainstream. People understand that, like, this is the modern stack.
Speaker 2:Or maybe that's because, like, the number of people that consider themselves developers is, like, a niche AI coding joke would not get 29,000 likes, like, a year ago. Right? So maybe the market's just expanding that quickly.
Speaker 1:And then Peyton Casper says, m f's are gonna be arguing one day about whether they should ask Claude or Chad gpt. It's gonna be the new reactor view in some of my circles It
Speaker 2:already yeah. It already is.
Speaker 1:It already is. Yeah. Yeah. I I don't I don't see a problem with it. I think it's good.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the full stack was blended years ago with, like, you know, putting JavaScript on the server. Server.
Speaker 2:I'm we're going towards a future where there's art artisanal developers Yeah. That are handwriting code Yep. And they're gonna be, like, they're just gonna be, like, in their off, like, small subsection of the Internet Yeah. Where they're talking about artisanal code and
Speaker 1:That's like the Nat Friedman website or, like, Goran's website. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, those, like No.
Speaker 2:It's not even that, like, building technological digital masterpiece
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:But all just by hand. Yep. Just one key at a time. Yep. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No AI slop.
Speaker 1:No AI slop. I don't know. It's a good stack.
Speaker 2:It's a good stack.
Speaker 1:It's a good stack. Let let people have fun. I think people are pumped up about it. They're like, yeah. Go off.
Speaker 1:It's great. Let's go to Alex Wang at Scale AI, founder of Scale AI. So Scale AI is proud to announce Defense Llama, American flag, the LLM purpose built for American national security. This is the product collaboration between Meta, Scale, and Defense Experts and is available now for integration into US Defense Systems. Read more.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. I think it is a wild turn of events because if if you could go back and tell journalists 5 years ago that Meta was gonna be getting into defense tech Yep. They would be, like, this is so bad.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. You know, like, because Meta went through the worst PR cycle of almost any company in history Around the election. Around the election Yeah. And all that stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so yeah. Now, honestly, bold case for Meta that that Zuck is getting into, defense tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it seems great. I remember the original, are you familiar with, like, the project Maven story, this whole kerfuffle at Google? So
Speaker 3:Oh, right.
Speaker 1:Like like, the Pentagon had a initiative to, modernize technology using artificial intelligence, and they called it project Maven. And,
Speaker 2:there were walkouts.
Speaker 1:And and Google was one of the contractors on the on the project. But there were a lot of others. Like, I think Palantir was in there. I think scale might have been. It's kind of unclear, but you can go and read the actual, like, subcontractors, and everyone got a little piece of it.
Speaker 1:Google was one of them, and then there was this massive walkout, this open letter. There were a whole bunch of, like, New York Times articles around it. And it was very interesting because it was all framed just like Google is helping the government build, like, killer robots. Because, like, AI for defense means, like, like, you know, killing people. But what it actually was was, like, very, very basic machine learning just to take the load off of like, they're literally, like, you know, like, you know, how when these AIs get trained, there's, like, hordes of people in 3rd world countries, like, tagging images and stuff.
Speaker 1:We were because it's a critical national system, we were having, like, United States airmen do it do this. Like Yeah. You go and work for the air force and your job would just be, like, clicking on a box being, like, that's a car, that's a house, that's a person, just to, like, label the data. Because it was all coming from satellites and drones. Because once the drones were flying around the Middle East, you needed to tag all that data and understand what was going on in it.
Speaker 1:And so we couldn't outsource it. And so it was just, like, very, very messy. So Google came in and was just, like, okay. We'll allow we're not building anything for you. We're just allowing you to use our TensorFlow API, which is for their machine learning system, and we'll just host you.
Speaker 1:We're just providing hosting. And the actual development was done by other companies. But that was, like, too much for the Google employees. And so there's this massive walkout. And then And
Speaker 2:that's what I'm telling here is a $100,000,000,000 company now.
Speaker 1:For sure. For sure. And I think it's I I I think it's smart to do a a custom LLM for this. Like like, you obviously need more security and more controllability and just more insights. So building something on open source that can be auditable, but still deployed.
Speaker 1:I just wonder, like, where the first use cases of LLMs will actually be in the DOD, because, like, what we're seeing in what we're seeing in tech or, like, consumer is mostly, like, you know, AI girlfriends and and coding assistants.
Speaker 2:No. It's really dark. It's basically, like, you go into the LLM and you're, like, what's the next what's the most relevant, like, potential assassination that we can do globally Yeah. That that most fits the narrative right now?
Speaker 1:I think it's much more banal. What I think it'll be is, like, you'll have, like, a ton of spreadsheets and word documents sitting there to, like, inventory, like, the meal kits in some base, and you'll be able to just, like, type into the LLM, like, when I when will I run out of Gatorade? And it'll just say, like, you'll run out of Gatorade in June of 2025. Be like, okay. Order more, please.
Speaker 1:And it'll just go order more, and it'll save some, you know, poor soldier, like, you know, like, an hour of work, basically. I think that'll probably be the the the real impact. But everyone always wants to jump to, like, it's gonna be a killer robot.
Speaker 2:Defense Llama.
Speaker 1:Defense Llama. It's good. It's a good brand. I like it. I'm excited for that.
Speaker 1:I wonder how how we'll see that roll out. Let's go to Ben South. Says, I love SF, and he takes a picture from inside a coffee shop. And the guy has on the back of his laptop a sign that says marketplace raising precede have revenue, say hi.
Speaker 2:Amazing. We I think we talked about this guy but but didn't have him pulled up. And what people need to understand is if you get this guy probably is getting his round done faster than some tier 1 founder who's, like, already has a bunch of relationships because just based on the volume of angel investors that are probably coming up to him and talking to him and people within tech love to bet on underdogs. They love to bet on people that put themselves out there. It's bold.
Speaker 2:It's funny. Anybody can do this. It's free. You just have to work be working on your startup, put a sign up, go to get moved to SF. And
Speaker 1:you have I mean, you also have to be confident because you know that you're gonna get mocked. Like, I'm sure that this has, like, you know, hundreds of quote tweets being, like, this is the dumbest thing ever. And then a lot of people are like, this is cool. I like this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's it's all about
Speaker 1:But if you're
Speaker 2:Elon Elon is is you have to know who you want to like you. Right? It's not about having everybody like you. Yep. If if a bunch of pro technology, pro start up people on SF think what you're doing is cool and you wanna raise money from them.
Speaker 1:You can have a 100 VC funds that hate you if one likes you. It's go time. It's go time.
Speaker 2:Adam Neumann.
Speaker 1:We already did this. So you pronounce this Gautier? I always pronounce it gout. Oh. I don't know which one it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. His his full name's
Speaker 1:But, Gautier says, everyone watching the Poly Market odds. Silence model, a gambler is talking. And it was a 100% accurate. We already talked about this, but Poly Market was correct. So cheers to
Speaker 2:the Poly Market team. Goatee is amazing. I,
Speaker 1:What does he do?
Speaker 2:I he has, Some handle here. A, crypto index fund, and then they also have, like, a protocol built on top of base for liquidity. I guess
Speaker 1:that makes sense. The 0 x.
Speaker 2:But anyways, yeah. He's somebody who's for entire time I've known him since I invested in 2021 head down just focused on products. Mhmm. No token, just grinding. And it's been, there was yeah.
Speaker 2:There was about, so anyways, this was this Poly Market was a win for him because he's French. Yep. But but also the, they've had a ton of, like, regulatory, lack of regulatory clarity because of this last administration. Sure. Chouteau making everything that they're doing way harder.
Speaker 2:All they're trying to build is, like, you know, their first product was an index, product of, like, a bunch of different digital assets. Yep. That was way harder than it needed to be. Security. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I still think you're maybe not allowed to even buy that the the index, in the US. Yep. You have to be international. So hopefully that, hopefully, that changes with the new admin.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, this is Brian Armstrong's point always is, like, is, like, we just want regulatory clarity. We just wanna know what we can and can't do. Yeah. Like, the the lack of clarity is so hard.
Speaker 1:And that and that's hard for the financial markets because how do you price this weird risk?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It's hard for builders because are you really gonna go spend all this time building something that might get outlawed or might not? It's, like, this weird high volatility bet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So And the, yeah. There's a reason Gautier's building in in New York is because, after the the Frenchman won this massive bet on Poly Market, France is now trying to ban
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. The Poly Market. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, like, if people are winning if people are, you know Yeah. You know, if something's innovative and fun, let's ban it.
Speaker 1:I do think that Poly Market, the result here is gonna be very good for crypto. Like, we were talking about how crypto needed to win a big acquisition with Bridge.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But Poly Market was accurate, bipartisan. Yeah. I think I think everyone was using it
Speaker 3:for a reason. About it,
Speaker 2:we're only about a decade into crypto. You've had Coinbase IPO.
Speaker 1:Real use case. Yeah. Coinbase IPO.
Speaker 2:Coinbase IPO. Acquisition by bridge. Polymarket being the center of this election cycle.
Speaker 1:And and and just Bitcoin actually sticking around. Everyone all the crypto haters were like, Bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme. It's going to 0. It's clearly not going to 0.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you you now have have stacked up, like, a few of the core
Speaker 2:big ones.
Speaker 1:The core the core pitches, which have always been, look, it's this decentralized currency that can't be hacked. True. It's maybe digital gold. True. There's there's actually use cases built on top of it.
Speaker 1:Polymarket. True.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Like, there's just a lot of different, like, wins that are
Speaker 2:Financial innovation and that
Speaker 1:Very slowly.
Speaker 2:And Goethe's first product is a token that is basically a collection of other tokens. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's, like, real innovation happening. There's real consumer use cases.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Stable coins are here to stay. Yep. Bitcoin all time high. Yeah. Hard to not be long crypto.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And it's just, like
Speaker 2:And all the people all the people, there
Speaker 1:will never be a use case. There are no use cases. And it's, like, well, at least we have one now, you know, very clearly. Very hard to deny to to deny that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Lit News Network. Is this Liquidity's, like, affiliate? Oh, cool. Lit News Networks.
Speaker 2:I just thought this was awesome. Yeah. I
Speaker 1:Hold on. So, Lit News News Network says breaking Florida votes against legalizing recreational marijuana, 55 to 44.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just thought this was so, so based. Yep. I think that, I think that marijuana has some medicinal benefits, but in general should not be publicly available or promoted in the way that it is. Yep.
Speaker 2:And this is It's
Speaker 1:all about this is our talk about.
Speaker 2:This is our talk at Heretic Con was all about. There are drugs that are general you know, every drug has positives and negatives, but there are drugs that can have a very negative societal impact. And I think that marijuana is one of those.
Speaker 1:When it when it's taken in extremely high doses, extremely regularly, in extreme concentrations exactly what's happened. Yeah. Yeah. And the New York Times has been reporting on this where psychosis and medical episodes are, like,
Speaker 3:increasing dramatically.
Speaker 1:And a lot of it's just because there's been this pressure. Like, you talk to some, you know, hippie, like, Grateful Dead fan and they, like, cannot smoke modern weed. Yeah. They're like, what is this stuff? This is a different drug.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's true with pretty much everything. I mean, think about the difference between having a beer and drinking Everclear.
Speaker 2:The only thing is nicotine, you're getting a similar dosage today that you would have from a cigarette 50 years ago, and that's part of why it's Lindy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And it's part of yeah. It it's they're like, nicotine has this weird curve where, like, if you take too much, you just, like, you get, like, sleepy. You don't have, like, a it's not it's not like an increasing yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not an increasing, like, result.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, there's been, like, a natural forcing function for there's less of a race to
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Harder like, more and more concentrated dosages, which is good, but that certainly hasn't been hasn't been the case in the psychedelics. So good news for Florida. Hopefully, more to come there. Let's talk about, Ross McKay. He says he's obsessed, and he posts a picture of a company, I think, called Cadence and it's just him, like, packaging stuff.
Speaker 1:So what was going
Speaker 2:on here? So this is a, they make, like, a hydration product. What I think is interesting about this post is, historically, Twitter and x were a place to share words and Instagram was a place to share pictures. Yep. And so if you look at your Instagram feed, there's thousands of people like Ross that are posting, like, cool lifestyle imagery around their brand and things like that.
Speaker 2:And if you simply take the exact same content and just post it on Twitter, you get, like, comparably, like, much better engagement and and way less competition.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So, there's a bunch of people building hydration brands on Instagram. Yep. And just by going to x and sharing the same style of content, you can really, like, stand out and build this sort of, like, cult following of people. And so Ross has done that. There's another brand in the fashion space that's done that really well represent.
Speaker 2:And so I just think if you're building a lifestyle brand, there's a ton of alpha and going over to x and, and focusing on that as a channel. Just way less competition.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something about the I don't know. X has always had this thing with, like, the comments where they're, like, there's really, really high status people on there, and you can slide into people's DMs and stuff.
Speaker 1:It just feels a little bit easier than Instagram where because there's, like, the quote tweet functionality. There's just a lot more vectors of, like, engagement, and you can just find a conversation going on that's a little bit harder in on Instagram because the comments are a little bit more buried.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But yeah. It's cool. It's a nice photo. I gotta try the product. Is it it's just hydration, or is there caffeine as well?
Speaker 2:They have it ready to drink, and then they have, I don't think they're on a stimulants yet. That's cool.
Speaker 1:Well, I have some nice tattoos. I gotta go see that photo in color. It looks looks good. Let's go to Naval. Naval says upcoming deregulation wave will create an economic sonic boom.
Speaker 1:This is post election.
Speaker 2:Hopefully.
Speaker 1:Hopefully.
Speaker 2:I think that, there's a lot of you can just look at all the charts around introduction of new regulation, and then you look at Europe and Europe as an example of what happens when you hyper regulate
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every single industry. It just hurts innovation. It hurts every day
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Individuals, hurts the economy. I don't want America in 50 years to be the vacation purely a vacation destination for China. Wealthy people in the Middle East or China where there's been this sort of renaissance of innovation. And so in the same way that, Europe by nature of hyper regulation has propped up, you know, when you look at all of their public companies and their 10 100 largest companies, I think all of them were started around a 100 to 200 years ago. And if the United States were to continue at the rate it has been, from a regulatory standpoint, that same thing would happen here without a doubt.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And as much as I love that Europe has become sort of Cancun for people like you and me
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I don't want that to happen to us. I agree.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's interesting about this is, like, I don't even really know what the top deregulation efforts on the agenda are.
Speaker 2:It's Make it easier for Elon to launch rockets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, honestly, like, the Zeitgeist and the and the feeling for the support felt more driven by just stopping more regulation.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 1:And not actually I mean, this is the same thing with the illegal immigration thing. You go back to the 2016 to 2020 era. There was not like, it wasn't we weren't in a negative net immigration era. Trump was during the Trump era, there were still 400,000 border incidents or, like, interactions, which is how they measure it. And that that increase under Biden, but the but the idea that, you know, you're going back to, like, okay, we're gonna see negative, like, outflow of of migration is probably not the truth.
Speaker 1:And and may and but, I mean, it's still Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here's here's an example.
Speaker 1:Here's an example. Even if there's just less new regulation Yeah. Because we just have so much already.
Speaker 2:Here's an example, though. People don't realize that a lot of the gasoline and oil used in California is actually produced in California. Sure. And California recently rolled out regulations to make it much harder to produce oil in the state Mhmm. Which is motivated by the sort of, like, sustainability movement
Speaker 1:Yes, g.
Speaker 2:ESG. And I know a guy who's in the oil industry in California and he's, like, his business is basically, like, getting destroyed. California is still gonna have to buy gas. Right? We still have to buy oil.
Speaker 2:We still need it for pretty much every facet of our life.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so it's that kind of regulation that's just, like, like, effectively motivated around religion, which is the religion of ESG and sustainability. Yeah. That doesn't make sense because the same people that are regulating the oil industry in California are gonna drive their car Sure. To work Yeah. Using oil.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's, like, we'll make it make sense.
Speaker 1:You know? Yeah. Yeah. It's just it it it does feel like we're very we're in the early innings of actually understanding what, like, a deregulatory policy would look like.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, we've heard, like, drill, baby, drill, but what does that actually mean? Is there a specific law that's going to be rolled back or across really every single possible facet of the administration? But but I do agree. And, I mean, the market is certainly pricing in an economic sonic boom. Like, everyone's very excited and very bullish.
Speaker 1:The thing that I'm really excited about is the is the housing stuff. I hope that, and I think Ben Thompson was writing about this today. Just this idea that, if the administration is empowered to go in and and, deregulate at local levels, Yeah. Like, that's really powerful. And that actually happened in California to some degree where California passed the ADU laws Yeah.
Speaker 1:That allow, and they override local laws. So so it's it's the state of California saying, Los Angeles, I don't care what you say. We need housing in this state. And so here, you can build an ADU if it's this size and it applies to this and that.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so, it'd be very cool to see something like that at the federal level, where the federal level says, you know what? Like, we're not gonna have any more restrictions on height, and you can just build 10 story buildings wherever. Yeah. You can build a 1 story building. You can build a 10 story building.
Speaker 1:Like, go nuts. Good luck to the good luck blocking this state government, federal, like, local government, whatever. And, and and then, you know, I I think the housing ladder, like, getting I think that's a major, major issue. I think, the millennial generation and and, Gen z as well, getting to a place where you own a house is so important and has been so important through the American experience.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:It's the American dream. Yeah. Our our our vice president was talking about how he like, a lot of his friends, who are in their twenties, just none of them own homes yet.
Speaker 2:Our vice president? Our vice president. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry. Not not JD Vance. Our our our vice president at Technology Brothers, was saying that, it's just it's just unheard of. And a little bit of this is I hope can be swung by a number of factors.
Speaker 1:I mean, one is just build more housing. 2 is what JD Vance was kind of teasing on one of these podcasts saying that he might wanna make it harder for, foreign investors to come in and buy property, which is interesting because it's it's true supply and demand. Right? Like, what drives housing prices up? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Restricting supply with a bunch of regulations and making it really hard to build, but also increasing demand. And this is why everyone always gets frustrated by when
Speaker 2:And Europe has done this. Right? It's it's much harder generally in Europe to buy a home as a foreigner. Yes. And the and now you you can still look on the European Zillow equivalent.
Speaker 2:You can be like, woah. This house is $200,000. Yep. It looks nice. It's in a nice town.
Speaker 2:Yep. So yeah. If you're
Speaker 1:not a citizen. And and and and so just and that's kind of the opposite of the process where people say, oh, we're gonna give you a housing credit. Oh, we're gonna make it we're gonna give everyone the same amount of money to buy house.
Speaker 2:So much.
Speaker 1:That's just gonna raise the price.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So much for We
Speaker 1:know this.
Speaker 3:A lot
Speaker 2:of issues. 21. Yeah. And a lot of issues with regulation is it just slows things down dramatically. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's entire if you could take a town in Georgia that is just decrepit. Right? Yep. Totally, like, just falling apart. There's no industry.
Speaker 2:And you could say, hey, you can build your new factory here Yep. And we're gonna fast track.
Speaker 1:Fast track it.
Speaker 2:Fast track it. And it and it's like a it's a capital thing. Right? Because if if you need to fund some new initiative and it's gonna take 6 years
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And this even even locally in Malibu, there's people that, that want to build a house. They have a plot of land, and it just doesn't quite make sense to get some construction loan when it's gonna take 4 years. Yep. And, like, you're gonna be carrying this big cost and not being able to live there. So there's all this land that just doesn't get used.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think the other the other kind of, like, set aside the politics issue, the cultural issue that might solve the housing crisis to some degree is there's been this massive shift. I think the Instagram generation and just the FOMO of seeing everything online has really driven this phenomenon where someone grows up in a suburb or, you know, Ohio or some kind of, like, you know, 3rd tier city, mid tier state, but then they go to a college, they get a communications degree, and then they go get a job in Manhattan. And they can pay their rent, but then they're not on the economic ladder to the degree that they'll be able to afford a house in New York. And they're like, why can't I afford a house? And it's like, well, you're in the most expensive city in the entire world and houses start at $2,000,000.
Speaker 3:But if
Speaker 1:you just went back to your your community and built there, like, you'd be fine. Or even if you were just okay with, like, an hour long commute when you did need to come into the city,
Speaker 2:you'd be fine. Nick Nick Huber guy always talks about this. He's constantly getting canceled every other day, but his one of his, like, really good points is that you can afford housing Yep. Just not in the places that you wanna live.
Speaker 1:So I think there's kind of 2 angles with what could drive a cultural shift towards that. One is just, like, the trad memes of, like, being pastoral and, like, wanting to live in, like, a safer, like, chiller community kind of less on the grid, little bit farther away.
Speaker 2:At opening up the Montana office.
Speaker 1:There you go. And and so so so just making not being in the most expensive city cool anymore and seeing more Instagrams from people that have set up little houses in small towns throughout America, that will create, like, mimetic pressure for people not to just be clawing tooth and nail over the Manhattan townhouses that are out there for 2 mil. But then the other one is just technology. Like, Starlink makes it so that you can guarantee super fast Internet anywhere in the United States even if there's not great fiber coming into a town. Obviously, with, like, new power generation, like, the utilities are gonna get better.
Speaker 1:Self driving cars mean that, okay. Okay. Yeah. You could have an hour long commute, but if you're in something without a steering wheel and you're just on your laptop and just doing
Speaker 2:work Sleeping.
Speaker 1:Sleeping even, like, all of a sudden, that kind of stretches things out because, like, real estate is priced as a function of the economic opportunity around
Speaker 2:it.
Speaker 1:Like, the reason Manhattan real estate is expensive is great jobs there.
Speaker 2:I wonder if robo taxis will change sleep schedules where more people will start to do that, like, 4 hours on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I wake up at 4 AM. I hop in my robo taxi.
Speaker 1:I sleep for
Speaker 3:an hour,
Speaker 1:and then I'm in the city And and all of it's, like, scheduled out. So, like, like, the car is actually traveling 60 miles an hour the whole time. I'm not not stuck in traffic. Yeah. Offset.
Speaker 1:And then even, like, VR and teleconferencing stuff, like, that will also reduce the barrier. So you can keep like, it's easier to keep in touch with someone, on the other side of the country with, you know, group chats and VR and video games and stuff. And some of that stuff has, you know, deleterious effects at the extreme. But in general, it feels more possible than ever to go to Montana and be and we know a lot of VCs. We know a lot of rich people that that spend most of their time not in the major cities.
Speaker 1:But there's no reason why a, like, a young professional who who wants to buy a home at 25 couldn't couldn't move there and then still compete in the global workforce.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Let's move to Augustus. Augustus de Rico, founder of Rainmaker says, you should know you should all know that we have a 4 year window to go as hard as fucking imaginable. Deadly serious. Leave it all on the court. It's a miracle.
Speaker 1:We have another shot at all. Press me to go harder. I will do the same with all of you. Alhamdulilah. I never know how to pronounce that.
Speaker 1:How do you pronounce
Speaker 2:that?
Speaker 1:Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah.
Speaker 2:Alhamdulillah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I don't know
Speaker 2:I don't know how how can Augustus go any harder?
Speaker 1:He's going he's already at I don't know. Pedal to the metal, I would think. But,
Speaker 3:but I
Speaker 1:like it. It's a good it's a good reminder. Like, this is a window of opportunity. Like like, regulation is not gonna get worse. There's lots of opportunities.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, go hard. Like, try a lot of stuff. And it's just a reminder that you can you can do crazy stuff. Yeah. Crazy stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't there there's a lot of talk and tech about taking advantage of technological cycles and moments. Yep. There hasn't been over the last 20 years as much emphasis around taking advantage of political cycles to the same degree. Right?
Speaker 2:It's it's clear that, admins impact the economy. I think, right, you would you would hope that, they're not just on on autopilot. But, but, yeah, I would say that there is a moment here across pretty much if you're building in heavily regulated industries, there's probably gonna be a lot of opportunity there. If you're building, you know, crypto is like a good example where, now there's poly market winning is actually amazing for all these all the all the type of, like, crypto o g crypto people that got disillusioned with
Speaker 1:the industry because they were over.
Speaker 2:They just realized that it was only
Speaker 1:sharpest people were, like, everything's just regulatory arbitrage right now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just
Speaker 1:take something. I put it offshore. Yeah. It's, like, very zero sum. It's, like, not fun.
Speaker 1:But now people see that there's an opportunity to actually, like, just go back to the basics of, like, improving the speed of the financial system.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And with Augustus, there could be ridiculous opportunities. Right? They might decide, hey, weather modification capabilities is super, super important. We need to emphasize this.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. He's, like
Speaker 1:I mean, this was to my
Speaker 2:knowledge, close with, like, Steinman. Yeah. There's gonna be opportunities that come through that. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. He was
Speaker 2:a lot of
Speaker 1:the He early on, he was talking about how China is, like, reclaiming the Gobi Desert. Is that is that the right desert? Terraforming. Yeah. Terraforming it by just planting a ton of trees
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and just watering them and re, and rerouting rivers and stuff, and they're just reclaiming all that land. And so when you think about the current administration, like like, you know, I I I would be surprised if, like, there wasn't there wasn't energy around, like, yeah, let's make Nevada a bread bowl. Let's make New Mexico beautiful Yeah. And and, no longer a desert.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm sure Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I'm sure there'll
Speaker 1:be a bunch of, like, regulatory things, like, oh, well, like, you're gonna displace the lizards and the snakes or whatever.
Speaker 2:But The rare bees.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the rare bees, which we can talk about. But, hopefully, you know, there's enough energy to get through this and actually Yeah. Bring about
Speaker 2:our new songs. We've talked recently about how because, because the regulatory environment has been so bad, there's just not there's been a lot of entrepreneurs on the sidelines that are, like, I'm not gonna do this because even if I get the product to work, like, it's gonna be impossible from from a regulatory standpoint to get it through. So hopefully that changes and a bunch of people that were on the sidelines come in. And,
Speaker 1:yeah. Anyways Jake Chapman pours a little bit of cold water on it faster 18 months after the transition, but before the government stops process mid midterms stops to process midterms, nothing is promised after that. That's a little bit of a bummer, Jake. Come on, man. We're trying to get pumped up.
Speaker 1:We're trying to leave it all on the court, but I I understand what he's saying. It's a good point. Anyway, always, always an inspirational poster, Augustus. Phenomenal what he's done to, like, the next generation of, entrepreneurs. Yep.
Speaker 1:It's really it's really impressive. Movement. He's, like, created, like, his own little, like, y c cult, basically. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Rob Keel says, well, at least my boss will be in a good mood tomorrow. And he has the XAI badge because he clearly works at XAI. And I love this because there are so many companies where there's a rule, like, oh, the compliance officer says I can't tweet. I hate it. And, clearly, Elon lives and dies by the post.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he lets his he lets his employees post, and it's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Post just post post through it.
Speaker 1:Post through it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I read this. I don't know I don't know Rob, but I I I almost read it as, like, maybe he was, like, disappointed and now he's, like, well, at least my boss will be happy.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Like, maybe he wasn't happy. He was he voted for Kamala. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But he's, like, That's great.
Speaker 2:I do think
Speaker 3:xAI is a huge beneficiary of, like, everything that's happened in the last week. Totally. But either way, it's good. I'm sure that x is an environment where
Speaker 2:people are allowed to share their views.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it because it's just not about that. It's about building Exactly. X AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and, I mean, that's the thing that people miss with, like, the whole mission driven company, leave the politics at the door. It's like, no. It's actually okay. Whoever you vote for, like, we'd actually don't care.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But There
Speaker 2:was a lot of there was a lot of HR teams that Wednesday were sending out notes that were basically to the effect of whether you're celebrating or devastated, We're here for you, you know.
Speaker 1:Well, we sent one out to our team, but it was, like, whether you're celebrating or devastated, like, the shareholders come first, get out
Speaker 2:of work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No no fucking Slack.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we have a policy where if we employees need to, you know, send us a screen share screen, screenshot of their screen time on their iPhone.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And if there's more screen time than there are, you know, we don't consider screen time working hours. Right? Working is when you're at your terminal Yeah. Editing content, making trees
Speaker 1:on your keyboard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we're a little bit hardcore about it. But
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's go to Fisher King. He says Kamala skipped Rogan, but did Saturday Night Live. She generally only did scripted controlled events. She avoided long form conversations that could reveal her as a person.
Speaker 1:Trump Advance did the opposite. They took chances, showed themselves victory for transparency and new media. And so I've dug into this, like, very, very seriously. I went on, I went on, on Pirate Wires podcast, like, back in March when Biden was still in, and I said that the person who does the longer Joe Rogan interview will win the election. And and then later, I went on and and coined the poo the Coogan Parlay, which was you go on Polymarket and you bet that Trump will do over 2 hours on Rogan.
Speaker 1:Kamala will do under 2 hours on Rogan, and that Trump will win based on that. And whoever does more will win. And, we should make a parlay.
Speaker 2:We should make a polymarket
Speaker 3:Parlay. Now
Speaker 2:Yeah. For next election around Joe Rogan airtime.
Speaker 1:Yep. So I so I've dug into this and, not only did Trump do more interviews, I think he did something like 18 major podcasts, and, Kamala did about 6 or 8, maybe.
Speaker 2:Barron was leading the strategy.
Speaker 1:But his podcasts were much longer. So, when Trump went on Rogan, Rogan is a 3 hour show. And everyone was like, Trump's old. He's, you know, he's not gonna wanna do a 3 hour thing. He's gonna cut it short.
Speaker 1:And this is something that happens with all the big, political folks. Like, when Bernie went on Rogan, he cut that short. He didn't do 3 hours. He did, like, an hour and a half. Even when, Benjamin Netanyahu went on Lex, he cut that short too.
Speaker 1:And a lot of these guys, they're, like, media trained. They wanna stay on the talking points, and they don't wanna get caught in hour 2 and a half being a little bit tired and just, like, freestyling. Right? Yeah. And that's the whole point of the Rogan interview is that you you can't stay on top
Speaker 2:of things for all. People trust people more that freestyle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, there's a
Speaker 2:heart you freestyle. You
Speaker 1:expose your
Speaker 2:real self.
Speaker 1:When, when police interview, like, pyromaniacs, they or suspected pyromaniacs, they'll just interview them and get them talking for, like, 8 hours straight. And they'll just come in and talk and talk and talk because the people who are obsessed with fire, even though intellectually they know they shouldn't say, like, I like fire, eventually, they'll break character and just be like, yeah. You know what? It would be cool, like, if we just, like, lit this table on fire. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:And so and so there's something about, like, the long interview that just, like, you you you can't stay in character long.
Speaker 2:Me and angel investing. I'm like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Somebody has a good idea. I'm like, let's bet on this.
Speaker 1:Let's bet on this. Exactly. And and but so so what's interesting is that the the ratio of, like, podcast appearances, between Kamala and Trump was something like 3 to 1 for Trump, but the ratio of hours spent podcasting was more like 10 to 1. Yeah. And then because the YouTube algorithm weighs longer content as better for keeping for selling ads and keeping people on the site, longer content does better in the algorithm.
Speaker 1:So the Rogen 3 hour Trump interview got 35,000,000 views, something like that. And the call her daddy, they just posted a clip that was, like, 20 minutes. And so that one, even if even if a bunch of people watched it, YouTube's just saying, well, should I should I promote the 3 hour thing that I can sell 50 ads on, or should I promote the 12 minute thing that I can promote 5 ads on? And so it's a very it's it's like Google or YouTube, like, the algorithm is just is just expected value maximizing. And so the Trump one goes mega viral and gets tons of views.
Speaker 1:And so if you add up I was trying to run the math on this. I might do, like, a, like, a piece on this and actually run all the numbers. But, so the the Harris campaign spent a $1,000,000,000. The Trump campaign spent, like, 300,000,000. But if you think about it, like like, how much does it cost to run a 32nd ad on Rogan?
Speaker 1:It's like a $100,000, I think. Mhmm. So if you multiply that out for 3 hours of essentially an advertisement for Trump. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, now you're at a single efficiencies. A single like, if you were to go to Rogan and say, I want you to do a 3 hour episode on Rora, on just my product. He'd be like, okay. Well, a 32nd ad is a is a $100,000. So, a one minute would be 200,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sixty minute you know, you can multiply it out and get to, like, $50,000,000. And then it also did 10 times as good as a normal episode. So that's, like, a $200,000,000 value asset just in terms of, like, impressions. And there's a massive, massive availability bias where things that you're familiar with and you spend a lot of time with, you like that person more.
Speaker 1:And so just the fact that people were were spending time listening to Trump and his surrogates, I think it made them like him more.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And this is very different. In 2016, CNN, NBC, they were all promoting Trump rallies because they got good ratings. They could sell a lot of ads. But then in 2020
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Trump got COVID. There were lockdowns. There weren't as many rallies, and all the mainstream media were like, maybe we shouldn't be promoting this guy. Maybe we shouldn't be publicizing his rallies. So he got way less earned media.
Speaker 1:And as a result, the average American just spent less time listening to Trump. Even if you're Trump skeptical, you probably still listened to 10 minutes across all the different things. In clips, in little bits, maybe you turn on the Rogan for a little bit. You're like, oh, this sucks. It's boring.
Speaker 1:But you listen to a little bit.
Speaker 3:And Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I think it's really just attention is all you need going forward. The candidate that gets the more attention, the more views. And that's what the political spending is a proxy for. It's literally just ads they're buying.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And those ads are just 32nd ads.
Speaker 2:And and there's something I I feel like 2016 and 2020 were dominated by performance marketing Yep. At least from that was what was being analyzed Yep. You had better performance marketing and people felt like performance mark marketing was the future of political campaigning where you could just create an ad for effectively 2 people in one county to turn them against.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And podcasts are so good at building narrative and likability and these things that really matter.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So that for every one person that watched the Joe Rogan appearance, they're telling they're they've then consumed so much content and so many talking points that they now become effectively a surrogate for the campaign. Right? They're just out spreading the message. So Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think there's something about the Internet where long form content, a textbook gets digested into a tweet. A podcast gets that gets turned into an Instagram post or an Instagram story. Right?
Speaker 1:We're up on
Speaker 2:The Internet is all about just cutting down long form content
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Into the smallest, most digestible piece of content.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it's the future. I I I don't think that either major party will ever put up a candidate that
Speaker 2:Isn't gonna He
Speaker 1:isn't gonna do a isn't gonna do a 3 hour Rogan. Yeah. And so my bet that I would put on Polymarket right now is that the 2020 2028 election is between JD Vance and AOC or JD JD Vance and Buttigieg. Because AOC and Buttigieg both can actually sit and be real people for Yeah. Several hours.
Speaker 1:And AOC has done it with, like, the Twitch streams and stuff. Like, she gets it. She's, she she's definitely, like, part of, like, the new guard. Yeah. Let's go to Aaron Slodov.
Speaker 1:He says, time to reindustrialize. And I like this because we talked about Josh Steinman tweeting, good morning. We're gonna win every single day, and this feels like the seed of a mantra. Yeah. You know, Aaron ran the reindustrialized conference.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Him and Austin Bishop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's done a lot of stuff, a lot of work around reindustrialization. It's a very interesting coinage and buzzword. I actually got in a fight with somebody about this on on x because I said reindustrialize, and they were like, well, there's no such thing as reindustrialization. The opposite of deindustrialization is industrialization.
Speaker 1:And I was like, I don't a, I can just Google it, and there is a and there is a dictionary definition for reindustrialization. So, like, you're kind of just wrong if you're being, like, literal. But also, like, everyone knows what we mean by reindustrialize. It's just branding. It's just branding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's a great Yeah.
Speaker 2:Everybody can attach slightly different meaning to
Speaker 1:it. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. It was it was we we were at we spent election night with Aaron, and he just he he the work he's doing is so difficult. Yep. It wasn't like he was fist pumping or anything like that. Totally.
Speaker 2:It was a good moment for him and rewarding to start to get to have somebody like JD Vance, you know, in office who actually cares about this topic legitimately and is not just voicing it over.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I hope to see this post on my timeline every single day. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's go to, Shiel Monat says, this is an incredible ad by Calm. During election night, Calm bought a 30 second spot on CNN where they just turned off the sound and just played, like, we're giving you 30 seconds of peace and quiet. This is the Calm app. We know that you're stressed out. Really in the zeitgeist.
Speaker 1:Really, really capitalizing on, the moment that, you know, psychologically, everyone who is watching kind of understands this is, like, a stressful moment.
Speaker 2:It's great for the CNN audience too because I think the Fox News audience was probably starting to pop champagne
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then the CNN audience was, having a tougher night on average. But,
Speaker 1:I like stuff like this. I like when these companies are agile and think about yeah. Just taking a little twist. Like, I think at the Super Bowl, there was a company that ran I think they sold, like, Hammers or something, and they did, like, a one second ad. It was just a hammer smashing something for, like, one second.
Speaker 1:Or Coinbase did just that QR code that was bouncing around like the DVD symbol, and they kind of broke the format, and it sticks out, and I still remember it to this day. Whereas, am I really gonna memorize, like, the 5th Budweiser ad? Like, that's kind of undifferentiated?
Speaker 2:Lucy, we need to be planning the 20 28 election
Speaker 1:ad. But it needs to be something that's, like, you know, in the zeitgeist cutting against it. Like, you can either be I'm sure most of the ads that ran that night were, like, you know, America's at war. Like, this is why you need to buy this thing. It's, like, in it's it's in with, like, the the normal narrative, and then this one just cut completely against it.
Speaker 1:Positioning. Good good job. And good spot by Shield to, like, find this and clip this because, I wouldn't have seen this otherwise. So
Speaker 2:Great curator.
Speaker 1:Sean Maguire says the turning point was Elon buying Twitter. Do you agree?
Speaker 2:Feels that way. Felt like another turning point was, making likes private.
Speaker 1:I'm sure. Yeah. Reveal preferences.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of people were even afraid to like anything that was Yeah. Against the narrative. So, yeah, I think it would but, yeah, the acquisition or the take private was down, was upstream of of likes and other changes that have happened on the platform.
Speaker 1:There was a good, article in today about the election, and, Ben Thompson was basically just saying, like, as a business, like, individually, it's very hard to say that, like, x is like this massive win because he paid preserp prices for it, and Mhmm. The stock probably would have crashed. He probably could have bought it for cheaper, and then there was this advertiser exodus, and the whole business is going through Yeah. Like, a business transformation. But if you view it as the Musk company's portfolio, like, very accretive, and I think that's what pretty much everyone in the deal was aligned on.
Speaker 1:Like, a lot of people invested because they wanted access to other Musk companies
Speaker 2:Access to
Speaker 3:you on.
Speaker 1:Or they wanted investment banking contracts. They wanna be the one to take, SpaceX public or something.
Speaker 2:And and whether or not x is a win for Elon, you could argue that it is even from a regulatory standpoint right now. Yeah. He's effectively purchase control Yep. Not directly,
Speaker 3:but sort of indirectly.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, right now, I think x is marked at around 20,000,000,000. So on paper, they've they've lost They've got Yeah. $24,000,000,000 Yeah. Something along those lines. But, but Elon's personal net worth went up a $100,000,000,000 in the 24 hours.
Speaker 2:So, and many of the people that are big investors in x have exposure to the other companies. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you familiar with the Japanese Keiretsu? No. So the are this, a bunch of Japanese conglomerates that all own pieces of each other. And so they're, like, deeply, deeply intertwined.
Speaker 1:And Musk is, like, kind of building a little bit of that. He was deeply criticized for, like, the Solar City acquisition. And there's always a question about, like, oh, if if one of his companies doesn't do do well, maybe one of the other companies will just buy it. But maybe that's actually, like, a good strategy. And we certainly saw it play out here where, you know, buying one thing can have synergies with another even though you wouldn't assume that a social network would have any It
Speaker 2:was always obvious that when when Tesla would brag about not needing to do ads that their ad platform was Elon's own personal Twitter account.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so, so, yeah, if you're getting billions of impressions a year for free, you don't need to run as many ads.
Speaker 1:And, again, just run the numbers on the impressions of Tesla. Like, how many Cybertruck videos and, like, funny raps and funny hype videos and reels have you seen on x and really anywhere. Add all that up. It's probably more than Hyundai spent on the Super Bowl or, like, all the advertisements for sure. Just in terms of attention.
Speaker 1:In
Speaker 2:terms of
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. But they're not paying for it. Yeah. But they are getting the economic value of those impressions.
Speaker 1:So it's the future. I can't believe I should read this again. Creatine Cycle Atlas, friend of the pod, writes on election night, hopped up on Adi and a zin while gooning to Polymarket and Manifold one second charts in widescreen on my Apple Vision Pro while talking to 3 different LLMs and streaming the those results directly to 8 different group chats of terminally online schizophrenics monitoring the situation. And Clark says, work harder. And then Atlas says, I have Fox News and MSNBC at at both at full volume in my AirPods Pros.
Speaker 2:It feels like the real argument for having 6 monitors
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is the election. The election. Right?
Speaker 2:Because there's so many different things to bet on.
Speaker 1:Yep. You've got traditional media.
Speaker 2:You've got
Speaker 1:You've got Defense watch. Big coins. Stocks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Polymarket. You've got your boys. You've got your discords. You've got your signal chats.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was talking to, Sagar and Jetty who runs breaking points about this and, like, the most perfect stack was the Breaking Points livestream. Have you ever watched this? It's phenomenal. It's like they they they all they all came from, like, more or less, like, traditional media backgrounds, but have gone very, like, YouTube native.
Speaker 1:They they they they're they're viewer funded, so they have, like, subscriptions and stuff. And so they're just, like, completely authentic, just making jokes, posting. They had this funny thing where, it's kind of a left right show where crystal ball, the the the one of the hosts, she had to wear a MAGA hat because she bet on Harris and, and Sagar was gonna have to wear a a Harris t shirt if he lost the bet. And so they just have this, like, really fun rapport. They have a bunch of other people around the desk, and they're just like they have enough of the technology where they have multicam.
Speaker 1:It looks really nice. It looks like a CNN production, but it's but, like, much it's clearly not as high budget. Yeah. But it's just really, really fast paced, really great. And while they're doing the show, they're doing lead ins to YouTube clips.
Speaker 1:So they'll set something up. So they'll be like, oh, like, now we're going to, like so he kept during the livestream, he'd always he'd he'd stop and be like, oh, the producer's telling me to do a lead in. So he's like, Donald Trump has been elected the next president. We we go live to, like, his speech. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then they cut to the clip, and then they react to it. And it was just a live show, but it was really, really well done. So it's like breaking points livestream x scrolling the timeline, Polymarket. And that's all you needed. And it's all independent alternative stuff.
Speaker 1:And that was, like, by far the most entertaining, truest source of alpha, the most accurate information. Like, the mainstream just turn on the TV is, like, truly gone. So I'm excited. Let's go to the
Speaker 2:Sarah Sarah and the kids are getting kicked out of the hotel.
Speaker 1:You gotta go?
Speaker 2:Do we have a wanna prioritize 1 or 2 more?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's, I really wanna do Max. We can do them next time. Shane. Let's do Rune.
Speaker 1:Let's do Rune and then, and then q and a? Yep. Okay. Rune writes, the age of the technology brother is at hand, and what a perfect post to end on.
Speaker 2:The timeline.
Speaker 1:The timeline. I couldn't agree more. Perfect time, perfect name for the podcast, the technology brothers. Subscribe if you haven't already. Follow us on x.
Speaker 1:We're also on YouTube and Spotify, and you can get all of your, all of your takes and and timeline analysis on there. So shout out, Rune, for the accurate analysis. Accurate. But the Technology Brothers are good. We're gonna get you a question.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2:Hey, John and Jordy. I recently started Angel Investing, and I'm worried it's starting to impact my marriage. I've been spending less time with my wife and kids and more time wandering coffee shops and s f looking for founders building the next big thing. Not to mention, I've sold 2 of our vacation homes to pursue this. How do you balance chasing unicorns and having a balanced life?
Speaker 2:Where to start? I think we would need I think that there is an angel investing epidemic Yeah. On the West Coast
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:Right now. I think that it's widely understood that sports betting is highly addictive. Yep. It's under discussed that angel investing, is also addictive. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It has longer timelines. Right? So when you when you ape 50 k into some kid with a deck Yeah.
Speaker 3:In a
Speaker 2:dream, it might take 5 to 10 years. Yeah. But I know people that wake up on the 1st of the month that are refreshing their email like Yep. Rat waiting for that next hit.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, hoping to see an update, hoping to get markups. Yep. And I think it's it's it's important for the innovation economy.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But it's tearing families apart. Apart.
Speaker 1:I do think that the first mistake that that listener made is selling the vacation homes because some of the greatest angel investments ever made were made in vacation homes. There's the famous example of Travis Kalanick at, what's his name? The cowboy guy. You know him? He he would bring people out to his, like, ranch and they would hang
Speaker 3:out in
Speaker 1:the hot tub in Tahoe. Yeah. And, and so if you get the vacation homes and you start inviting people to come hang out and relax, it's gonna be much easier. Let the entrepreneurs come to you.
Speaker 2:My advice would would be I mean, the first mistake was selling the vacation homes. You're right. Yep. Should have taken out debt against the vacation homes and use that.
Speaker 1:Especially in this market, you can refinance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that was that was probably a big mistake because even if you're paying 6% annually You're gonna get higher churn. 30, 40 percent IRR Yep. Angel investing. Yep.
Speaker 2:So it's hard not to think of that as a poor decision. But ultimately, I'd say bring bring your wife and and get her angel investing too. Right? Have her have her put some money to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Essentially lever up. Lever up against the vacation homes instead of
Speaker 2:And bring your family into it. A lot of, you know, sports betters are out there. There's, you you know, they're telling their wife who do who do you want to win? She's like, I don't know, honey. Like, make a bet for me.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, it's about kind of involving the whole family. My son's 2a half. He has 5 or so companies that that he's deployed into.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:They're kind of silly ones. He's like, I like the snack. Like, let's ape in. But there's something to be said about just investing in products that you love. I have never really been misguided by investing in in products that I love.
Speaker 2:So It's great. Involve the whole family lever up and, you know, don't take yourself so serious.
Speaker 1:Maybe get a 3rd vacation home. Yeah. Well, that's our show. I gotta hop on with New York. I'll see you next time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for watching.