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The Size Gong, Nuclear Wave Pools, Who's Getting Rich Off Ozempic, ITAR Compliant Gatorade
E12

The Size Gong, Nuclear Wave Pools, Who's Getting Rich Off Ozempic, ITAR Compliant Gatorade

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John:

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we have a new segment to congratulate any deal of large size. But today, we're going to Doug Bernauer at Radiant Technologies. They make nuclear power plants and they nuclear reactors, and they launched a $100,000,000 series a today. Jordy, can we hit the size gong?

John:

For Doug. Congratulations. Congratulations to Doug and the entire Radiant team. I've gotten to know Doug over the past couple months. Awesome guy.

John:

Former SpaceX. Fantastic engineer. And he writes, we at Radiant Nuclear are announcing our $100,000,000 series c today. Our plan is to test new our new reactor design at INL. That's the Idaho National Laboratory.

John:

Begin mass manufacturing reactors and deliver 1 megawatt reactors to critical areas across the globe. Reach out if you'd like to join us and build a new atom splitting machine. And he, clips the, Axios report.

Jordi:

And, just to be clear, you don't need to do a 9 figure deal to to benefit from the size gong. Yep. It's more about, like, the the weight of it.

John:

Of it. The spirit of it. Exactly. And anyone who's punching above their weight.

Jordi:

Significance is what you're doing.

John:

So But this is awesome. Do you know about this company, Radiant?

Jordi:

Little It's

John:

really cool. Yeah. They're so they're replacing the diesel generators that are typically 1 megawatt. So it's not like the big nuclear power plants with the smoke stacks.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

It's essentially the size of a shipping container. Yeah. And they're gonna be able to forward deploy it onto military bases, even oil and gas extraction, like, you need power. And oftentimes, you have to truck in diesel. So any anywhere where it's hard to get, energy, you just drop one of these down and it's good for, like, 5 or 10 years or something, and then you reload it.

John:

So Yeah. Yeah. It's just fantastic.

Jordi:

We we might be able to we've been doing a lot of, like, coal powered AI data centers. Yep. We might be able to kinda swap in what they're doing for

John:

a while. The the crazy, like, obviously, this is gonna be heavily, you know, purchased by the government first and then, you know, large corporations and and, you know, industrial companies. But I love the idea of getting, like, a massive, massive ranch in Alaska and just throwing one of these on it and just having so much power. And then Starlink can see a great Internet. Just Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Just heat the whole place, which is clean. It's amazing. Yeah. It'd be phenomenal.

Jordi:

Now you could actually probably run, like, rods through, like, the ground Yeah.

Jordi:

To just, like, melt all of the the ice.

John:

That's actually one of the benefits is that it it it puts out electricity, but it also puts out waste heat. So you can use the waste heat in different ways. You can, like, pipe it around and have heating too.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

But, yeah, it it it's it's super cool. And Doug is the man. He's just, like, all this incredible team.

Jordi:

We need to do the first, nuclear powered wave pool.

Jordi:

Okay.

Jordi:

Because, like, wave pools are super energy intensive. Oh,

John:

they are.

Jordi:

Because you're just, like, produce you're having to, like, move

John:

Are you talking about the thing like the it's like a train that goes down?

Jordi:

That's Kelly's.

John:

That's Kelly's.

Jordi:

Others that are better kind of, like, formats that are closer to, like, real surfing.

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. So doing, that'd be a good, TB incubation is Yeah. Nuclear powered

John:

Wave pool.

Jordi:

Wave pools. That'd be great.

John:

I love it. Well, congrats to Doug. Congrats to the Radian nuclear team, and congrats on winning the very first recommendation or recognition from the size gong.

Jordi:

1st to many.

John:

Let's move to our top story today. We're talking about Ozempic and specifically who is getting rich off of Ozempic. Obviously, Ozempic was yeah.

Jordi:

If you're not, right now, feel bad about it.

John:

It's the best day to start making money off of Ozempic. Yeah. I mean, this is a huge story in 2021 when all the celebrities started using Ozempic. That's when it actually got approved.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Little bit of background. Simaglutide is the the the the name of the actual chemical. Started off as diabetes medication.

Jordi:

Right?

John:

Yeah. Yep. Then pharma company Novo Nordisk developed it in the early 20 tens, and the FDA approved it under the brand names Ozempic for the injectable. Patients reported significant weight loss as a side effect, and eventually, the FDA in 2021, approved semaglutide as a weight loss product under the brand name, Wegovy. And so today, I wanna go through, 2 articles from AstralCodex 10, Scott Alexander.

John:

One on trying to investigate the question of why Ozempic cures seemingly all diseases. It seems to be this miracle drug. We're gonna go back and forth on this. I'm sure the tinfoil hat will come out at least once. And then we're gonna move on to kind of the economics of the industry.

John:

How big could this be? And we'll close with who really made money on this and how can you maybe make some money yourself in the Ozempic boom that's continuing to go on. The numbers are insane when you dig into them. So let's start with, this article. Why does Ozempic cure all diseases?

John:

This is like a pattern that happens whenever there's a new drug. This happened with statins Yeah. And this happened with SSRIs where there's some new drug. It has some amazing effects, and then all of a sudden, like, the scientific community starts, you know, digging into all these different sides. You see this those epic where it's like, it started with diabetes, then it went to obesity.

John:

Now it's like, oh, well, it stops you from gambling, and it also, you know, has all these knock on effects. But so far, people are pretty pretty, like, stumped as to how this actually works. And so Scott Alexander did a great job kind of breaking this down. The main thing that's going on that, you know, he starts with in terms of diabetes is that, when you eat a meal, it increases blood sugar, and your and your body wants to push blood sugar back down. So GLP one tells the pancreas to release more insulin to regulate that sugar.

John:

So you're basically just upregulating the natural insulin production. And the background of this so diabetes involves excessive blood sugar. So this is the profile that you want for an anti diabetic drug, but natural GLP one decays within a minute or 2. So you eat, you get the slight spike in GLP one that releases this insulin and starts controlling your blood sugar, but then it goes away after an hour or 2. And the whole the reason why Ozempic is so big is that it's a weekly injection.

John:

So the half life has just been stretched. And this started almost, I guess, 30 years ago, over 30 years ago in 1992. And this is where it gets really tinfoil hat. You know where it came from? The Gila monster.

John:

Have you seen this? No. This is the this is the monster.

Jordi:

No way.

John:

So the Gila monster is this It's a

Jordi:

reptile, folks.

John:

It's a reptile, and it's basically this giant lizard. I remember learning about this thing as a kid.

Jordi:

So you know the whole backstory on, like so diabetes, type 1 diabetes, which primarily affects children.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

When it first sort of, emerged and people start started to understand it, it was just a death sentence.

John:

It was a death sentence.

Jordi:

Like, if you had it, you were gonna have a terrible quality of life Yep. For a really long time.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

The acquired FM guys did a really big deep dive into Novo Nordisk, which we'll obviously talk about.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

And they basically were talking about how, like, the primary treatment method was to just starve yourself, like, have, like, 200, 400 calories a day.

John:

Yeah. Cloroxetine.

Jordi:

And, that would sort of, extend your lifetime long enough. The theory was for, like, some type of cure to emerge. Much later, people discovered that you could take, effectively the hormones out of the pancreases of, like, pigs and cows

Jordi:

That's right.

Jordi:

And things like that. And so all of the first sort of, like, insulin, replacements or synthetic insulin was, like, taken from the pancreas of, cows and pigs and and all these different animals. The challenge there is you would need, like, you know, one person to get their insulin for a year.

John:

A 100 pigs.

Jordi:

Sorry, PETA. It would take, like, you know, 1,000, basically.

John:

I mean, it's the same thing with thyroid medication. A lot of times, it's just ground up thyroid from another animal. Yeah. And then eventually, they create the synthetic version. Yeah.

John:

But yeah. I mean, so the the in 1992, scientists discovered a chemical in the Helo monster venom, which looked like GLP 1, and it lasted a whole 2 hours. And so that was, like, the first breakthrough to realize that there were versions of GLP ones, which is glucagon like protein or peptide 1, GLP ones that could last longer.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so this became exenatide, the first GLP one receptor agonist. One of my favorite paper names is from the from the HeLa Monster to the pharmacy. And then by playing

Jordi:

that was a big that was a big innovation in insulin. It's just, Novo. I don't know if it was Novo and Nordisk were initially 2 different companies, and I don't know which one discovered it. But they figured out that you could do there were sort of, like, forms of insulin that had a longer half life in the human body.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And that was big in, innovation because somebody could, like, be on this thing that sort of had the steady state response and then take, like, more precise dosages, more spaced out.

John:

Yeah. I mean, there's a whole trend in drug development about just, like, create something that's a breakthrough and then figure out how to create an extended release version.

Jordi:

IR, XR.

John:

XR. Yeah. It's kind of the same thing. So, basically, the last 30 years, the story of GLP 1 is just grinding to create longer and longer half life versions. So they play around with its structure.

John:

Eventually, they create liraglutide, which lasts 12 hours, then semaglutide, which is 1 week, and then kafraglutide, which is 1 month, which I don't think is on the on the market yet. But now they're like, the the Ozempic We

Jordi:

need that 100 year. We need

John:

that 100 year. Once, which is never again, basically. I wouldn't be surprised. Somebody's working on it. But, yeah, it's, so so the the the the role of of GLP ones as weight loss was kind of accidental.

John:

They were targeting Diabetes. Diabetes as as we mentioned.

Jordi:

Which is a symptom Yep. Of being overweight. Yep. Once

John:

And and I think in general, pharma companies don't tend to go after weight loss drugs directly.

Jordi:

You know why?

Jordi:

Why?

Jordi:

Well, one reason is because Medicare doesn't cover That's right. That's right. Which is insane Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

Because being overweight Yep. And the fact that so much of our population is overweight is, like, the biggest drag Yep. On government, you know, spending and and the economy overall. Right? You think that you think the US government at the federal level would say, let's fast track GLP ones being covered by Medicare because it's gonna save us so much money in all these other ways even though it is a sort of incremental cost, actually.

John:

Well, I mean, there's another thing where it like, just to kind of steel man how we got here with the current health care structure. Like, it does kinda make sense if you go back 50 years and you look at or 70 years and you look at pictures of beaches, like, America wasn't this obese. So it wasn't that much of a problem. And the big, like, oh, shit moment that happens in health care is, like, you get hit by a bus, you break your leg, you go to the hospital, and you're and there's, like, a team of really, really experienced doctors working on you for, like, a week. And it's like, those people are need to be paid a lot.

John:

And then everything that they're doing, all the equipment is expensive. And so I think I I have the breakdown here, but, a fair amount yeah. Here it is. Like, hospital care is 31% of US national health care expenses. Yep.

John:

Actual drugs, outpatient prescription drugs is only 8%. Yeah. And that and, like, yeah, we we can talk about okay. Yeah. Now we should be thinking upstream.

Jordi:

But now we should be competitive. A lot of that hospital care spending is people in the last month of their life that are just sort of, like, needing intensive care in order to

John:

of grow. Yeah. Intellectually, we should be avoiding getting people into the hospital, but that wasn't that wasn't kind of the theory behind Medicare and Medicaid when they were in, like, kind of created. And so there's been this question with, like, how do GLP ones work? Like, is it on your brain or is it on your body?

John:

Like Yeah. Obviously, if you're, you know, if you're taking caffeine or something that's just, like, purely in your brain, like, stimulating you, you're more likely to go for a walk. You're more likely to work out. Same thing with nicotine. This is like a brain chemical versus, like, liposuction.

John:

It's like very clearly that's like a body thing.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so they actually this is fascinating. Like, so they knew it worked. They knew that people were losing weight because they were prescribing GLP ones to diabetics. And but they didn't know, is it is it a brain thing or a body thing? And so what they did was they bred rats that had GLP 1, receptors only in their brain and then a separate group of rats that only have it in their body.

John:

And And so then they can see, and it was the brain that mattered. And it's very weird because it goes in so they can dye it with, they can dye the chemical with, like, this, like, fluorescent light or something that you can see under some sort of x-ray. And they and they can see where it goes in the brain. And typically, it's really hard to get a large molecule into the brain. Something like nicotine is like a really small molecule.

John:

It can just kinda permeate the blood brain barrier.

Jordi:

But for

John:

yes. It's fantastic. But but for, but for larger molecules and GLP ones is this peptide. It has this lipid chain on it. It's a pretty fat molecule, but it can permeate, like, the brain stem a little bit.

John:

And so that's

Jordi:

where it

John:

gets in.

Jordi:

Get up there.

John:

Get up there. Yeah. And and and so they basically they basically narrowed it down now to understand that it's it's almost certainly going through the brain. But there are kind of, like, still 2 different pathways that they go through, the mesolimbic system, and, and and and these GLP one neurotransmitters. But, I mean, there's there's so much more to go into because now because GLP ones are seen as this great modulator of hunger, essentially.

John:

It's like the hunger switch.

Jordi:

Yeah. But it also makes people less impulsive. Right? Which is an argument. You could have made the argument.

Jordi:

Hey. This is having some impact on the brain because it's changing people's decision making. Right? Yeah. I know a lot of people that were fantastic, you know, sports betters and had an amazing career in it and got on GLP, tried to lose a little weight, and and they're no longer the size lords.

Jordi:

You know? You're not hitting the size gong for them anymore.

John:

No. No. It's a tragedy. Tragedy. But, yeah, now now people are, so the intestine actually naturally releases GLP one when it detects food in order to tell the rest of the body to be full.

John:

But there's this question of, like, what if some foods make the small intestine release more GLP one than others? Like, a diet focused on those foods could be nature's Ozempic, which is now so now people are trying to take the meme of GLP 1 and and kind of go backwards to say, well, what what stimulates GLP 1 naturally Yep. So that you don't necessarily need the injection. And so there's all these different articles, 9 foods and supplements that increase GLP one naturally. It's the same thing with testosterone, you see.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

You know, like, oh, this diet is is better for, you know, increasing your testosterone naturally. Six foods that increase GLP one levels, foods that naturally mimic GLP one.

Jordi:

Yeah. Because I think that that market of people that are already, you know, even people that are objectively already pretty healthy

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Still are seeing how other people are benefiting from it. Maybe they don't wanna be giving themselves an injection once a week, but they're like, I may as well kinda get on the trend.

John:

Yeah. It's the same thing with with testosterone. It's like Yeah. You might not wanna do TRT, but you but you also want the highest natural production of testosterone that you want that you can possibly get.

Jordi:

Yeah. My, my buddies, or sorry, my friend, my friends, Nish and Sif, have a health supplement company that's an incredible business, and they created a, sort of a metabolic, something called m b one Okay. By Array. That's sort of a the it's they've positioned it as a phozempic type thing. Just like a health supplement.

Jordi:

Phozempic.

John:

I like that. And,

Jordi:

you

Jordi:

know, it's it's it's doing really well.

John:

And so, like, the the the early arguments are being written about, GLP 1 based diets or, like, you know, the best diets to up regulate GLP 1, paleo diet, Mediterranean diet, Ayurvedic diet, carnivore diet, and plant based diet. Like, people are writing them about everything, basically. And it's the same thing for exercise. There there's this theory that exercise creates very high demand for glucose, so it kinda makes sense that it's a signal for the body to focus on keeping its glucose system well tuned. And there's this, like, there's this continuous theory of, like, okay.

John:

Well, when you are in shape, when you are eating properly, when you're healthy, you have kind of the proper level of GLP one flowing through your system. And so this drug is just a way to kind of, like, short circuit your system back to the normal level. But But whenever we discover a new drug, scientists rush to demonstrate that all those lifestyle changes, the ones you should do anyway, actually work through the same mechanism as the wonder drug. So for example

Jordi:

Americans are like, no. Thanks. Yeah. I'll take the shot.

John:

The drug.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

So example for for example, when when SSRIs were the hot new thing, psychiatrists announced that all the normal stuff that brightens your mood work through serotonin. Sunlight, serotonin. Exercise, serotonin. Having a good trauma free childhood, serotonin Yeah.

Jordi:

In the way Which is interesting though because people that have, you know, too high of serotonin don't end up looking too good. So it's it's I didn't

John:

know that.

Jordi:

It's it's sort of like it's one of those things, like, anything good, you can have too much of it.

John:

Right? Everything in moderation including moderation. And, and so after so in the cold light of SSRI patents expiring, most of these effects were found were later found to be fake or at least too small to care about. And this is the same thing with, there there's this, there's this, there's this product or this supplement called, what is it? It's like, turkesterone turkesterone.

John:

Have you heard of this? Turk?

Jordi:

No.

John:

So it's it's basically the plant based it's the plant version of testosterone, and there's this theory that if you take it, it'll increase your testosterone naturally or semi naturally. And so it became kind of like a meme and people were taking vitamin C should offer

Jordi:

that as a benefit.

John:

But but it's one of those things where it's it's a plant based product, and so it doesn't really translate the same way, and you just take a ton of it. It's the same thing about, you know, tryptophan in in Turkey. Everyone just gets you sleepy, but it's like you would need to eat 10,000 turkeys to actually get the effect.

Jordi:

Is that true? Yeah. Is it just people get tired because They're around their family, and they're

John:

arguing about politics and Bitcoin. Yeah. So, of course, it's it's like it

Jordi:

it's just a far more more families need to adopt the technology brother's law of not discussing politics or social issues. Yes. It's only at Thanksgiving this year try discussing, you know, technology, capital allocation

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

And things that actually matter.

John:

Exactly. And so, the the the same thing is true for gastric bypass. There's, like, this giant mystery about why it works. Like, you would think so it's basically stomach stapling. Like, they they literally just decrease the, the size of your stomach.

John:

And everyone was like, okay. Well, that's how it works. Like, you just get full quicker because your stomach's full. But what's weird is that when you do the surgery, all these different metabolic parameters change before the patient has even had time to lose weight, and the weight loss tracks those metabolic parameters, not the stomach size. And so there's this so some scientists thought this was GLP 12.

John:

After all, the intestine secretes GLP 1.

Jordi:

GLP 1 all the way down.

John:

Yeah. Literally, everyone's That name

Jordi:

of, like, the the astronauts.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. It always has been.

Jordi:

It always has been.

John:

Always has been. And so and so people are saying, oh, maybe it's maybe it's GOP one because you shrink it, and the food goes through the stomach, before and, the stomach usually digests a lot of food before it even reach the intention, the intestine. But if you remove or shrink the stomach, it can't do that and much more food hits the intestine, and that means the intestine releases much more GLP 1, and that means the patient feels full more quickly. And so it's like this theory, but then, of course, they tested it in rats that don't have GLP one receptors, and the gastric bypass worked. So they kinda, like, debunked that one.

John:

But there's, like, all these different things. We can move on to addiction. The the addiction one is is hilarious. We gotta go to this post, by Scott Alexander, the guy who wrote the wrote this article, and, multistep nominative determinism in action. So GLP ones are being investigated as a way to suppress alcoholism.

John:

GLP ones are based on a chemical found in the Gila monster venom. Gila monsters were first described by a zoologist named Edward Drinker Cope. Isn't that hilarious?

Jordi:

Unreal.

John:

Unreal. What do you have to do in life to be named Edward Drinker Cope? Drink Wild. I mean, it's like maybe you're drunk

Jordi:

Heavy alcoholic father who who determined that this is how he was gonna cope is something. Fatherhood.

John:

But what what a bizarre chain of events. I love that Scott includes that. And so, there are there there are two reasons you might eat. 1st, because you feel hungry, and the second is because you crave delicious food. So, to fulfill its evolutionary role of making you eat less, GLP 1 needs to do 2 things.

John:

1st, it needs to make you less hungry, versus, via the our our our cuturate nucleus master hunger pathway. And then also it needs to make you crave food the food reward last via the mesolimbic reward center pathway. And so you don't wanna you don't wanna, like, broadly tamp down the reward system. There's some antipsychotic drugs that do this, and you just like, if you take too much, you will literally just sit motionless until you die because they're like you don't wanna get up. There's no reward for anything.

John:

But there are some silver bullet anti addiction medications. Naltrexone seems to treat a whole host of different addictions. And, and the some and and none of these anti addictive drugs affect wholesome rewards like the feeling of a job well done or a child smile. They're just drug drug addictions, which is hilarious because, he asks, like, why did God give your brain a special lever that only porn and cocaine can pull, which is hilarious, but it's like it does appear that there is literally a reward pathway in your brain that's separate. Like Yeah.

John:

It's not the same as, like, runner's high or, like, feeling good after a workout. It's a separate thing, and it's only the bad stuff that's that's, like, triggering.

Jordi:

Kinda bummed. I've I've never experienced runner's high.

John:

Oh, really?

Jordi:

I've run a lot. Okay. Like, I've tried to go out and experience it. But you've never

John:

but you've, you've experienced podcasters high.

Jordi:

Yeah. But that's long podcast? From everything I know about podcasters high, it is a league above

John:

podcasters high. Yes.

Jordi:

Of course. That's why we record for 3 plus hours.

John:

Exactly.

Jordi:

Right?

John:

Exactly. So he says GLP one suggest this was originally a food reward system or at least food was a big enough part of its portfolio that it was a weird but functional hack for satiety signaling chemical to just turn off a whole subsection of the reward system. Already full and well nourished. Why would you need

Jordi:

the ability

John:

to crave things? And then, and then he goes on

Jordi:

to talk

John:

about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. This is, okay. Now God is just trolling us. GLP 1 receptor agonist, a new treatment for Parkinson's disease, gives us this diagram, and he kind of explains, like, how it could possibly work on, on Parkinson's.

Jordi:

You know, it's funny because, I feel like Silicon Valley has been waiting for the miracle drug

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Like, to come out of Silicon Valley. Yep. And I think that if Novo Nordisk was a Silicon Valley darling, we would all just be like like Ozempic gets a lot of attention in our industry because of all the potential economic and technological impacts of it. But we would all be, like, everybody just be patting each other on the back being like, we did it. We solved weight loss.

Jordi:

We solved diabetes. We solved heart disease. We solved like, we'd just be going down the list just like Yeah. Yeah. Spraying champagne, a lot of Dom Perignon.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

We'd be doing, like, a bottle an episode, basically.

Jordi:

Well,

John:

there was a little bit of debate about that during the during COVID. There was, like, like, some of the tech people were like, well, like, Amazon's, like, the real, like, hero in this story because, like, we were all able to get packages delivered during COVID. And, like, it really helped with, like, lockdowns. And then and then a lot of people were like, tech can't take a victory lap. It was the vaccine companies that, like, did all

Jordi:

the work.

John:

Like, you

Jordi:

know, this is Yeah. But there was so there was a company. Do you remember Genentech? This was before our time. But, like, Genentech, I can't remember if they partner with Novo or Nordisk, but they had a partnership that, you know, Genentech, I think, was the first big biotech.

John:

They they they know Synthetic insulin?

Jordi:

Yeah. They they helped invent. So so, Jeanette, we can if we actually trace back Yes. Novo Nordisk success. Yes.

Jordi:

It is without Silicon Valley and our incredible capital markets and the bubble that was happening in biotech at the time. You could argue that GOP ones would have never,

John:

you know Wasn't that a Kleiner company?

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. I think

John:

it was Kleiner company, and there's this famous story about it.

Jordi:

And that's why they're part of the holy trinity.

John:

It is. It is. And and, and one of the partners, like, who did the deal would basically work inside the company every Friday.

Jordi:

Forward deployed GPs.

John:

Essentially. Essentially, a forward deployed GP, and he would, like, do their accounting, do their business, like, modeling, like, really bring, like, the business side so that, like, the scientists and the cofounders could just work on the products. I I expect

Jordi:

I expect forward to deploy GPs to come back. Right? Because god. Yes. Like, it needs to I mean, founders fund basically already does this.

John:

I mean, it exists. Yeah. Trey

Jordi:

and Yeah. Yeah. Is that. And and Dalian. Yep.

Jordi:

But, yeah, the the success of Palantir Yeah. Forward deployed model is gonna be everywhere. Right?

John:

I I I'm looking forward to it. Earn that sweat equity. Earn that carry jacket. Yeah. But but so so this is an interesting thing.

John:

I don't know all that much about Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, but, one theory as to why, GLP ones might help with, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's is that, GLP ones suggest that they prevent inflammation.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And have you, like, studied

Jordi:

that information?

John:

I don't know that much about it.

Jordi:

I would say the the the interesting thing here is what so Novo Nordisk is a metabolic pharmaceutical company. Right? They're focused on metabolic health. Yep. And the tie in to our corner of Twitter is that Ray Pete Yeah.

Jordi:

Almost all his work was focused on metabolism, metabolic health, how to get your metabolism firing. Right? There's people that are taking their temperature multiple times a day to try to get there. Yeah. To get their body temperature higher, increase metabolism.

Jordi:

And even cancers, many people think, is like a metabolic disease. Right? So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bunch of other, sort of downstream effects on, you know, cancer in the US.

John:

So this was a this was a great overview. I've I've only heard about inflammation, like, vaguely, like, if you, you know, like, have swelling. Like, that that's what that's literally what I think of when I think of inflammation, but there's a good breakdown here. So so inflammation is a catch all term for the immune response to microbes. Although it helps fight the microbes, it's slightly toxic to the rest of the body and generally bad unless you're actively fighting an infection.

John:

Yeah. So it's like you get some microbes, you get infected, and stuff swells up. Like, you see this when you just, like, get a scratch or cut. Right? But Yeah.

John:

But when you're in your ear be but you could also be, like, you ate some bad food and, like, you're swelling up or chronic chronic inflammation from, like, bad food over years years years. And so it says in chronic inflammation, I e, the thing most of us with modern diets have all the time, generally, general bad health damages the body. The immune system mistakes the damage for a microbial infection, and it provokes a constant low grade inflammatory response.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

I don't even know how you would measure, like, do am I suffering from inflammation right now? But it's now something that

Jordi:

I'm worried about. Right now because my, 2 year old brought home a preschool, microbe.

John:

Oh, yeah.

Jordi:

And, you know you know, when you have, like, a, like, a sinus

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

Infection, you just feel, like Puffy. Pressure, basically, like, in your head. You don't think as well. Yep. So my if my takes are worse today

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

That's what's going on.

Jordi:

On that. But, yeah, inflammation, you can measure too. Right? Okay. Like, there's various ways that that you can measure it and and generally baseline is for me,

John:

and then see if there's anything I can adjust.

Jordi:

That's a good way if somebody, you know, if you're on x and somebody, you know, sends a comment that's a little bit offensive, you could you could ask them, hey. Have you checked your magnesium levels or inflammation levels? Because something feels off. You don't even address what they said. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. Just ask. Go for the underlying issue. Yeah. Right?

Jordi:

This is probably not the thing that they're angry about.

John:

The the Chad hominem.

Jordi:

The Chad.

John:

So this is bad. So if you're not fighting an infection, anti inflammatories are generally pretty useful. There are lots of anti inflammatory drugs. Aspirin and Ibuprofen are examples.

Jordi:

Again, Ray Pete, big proponent of aspirin.

John:

Oh, really? Aspirin. Aspirin is

Jordi:

one of those things. Yeah. He a lot of people have talked about baby aspirin use for longevity.

John:

Yeah. That's a big thing. Right?

Jordi:

And, I take aspirin. It's sort of shown to it's it's shown to have a bunch of potential benefits around heart disease. Yeah. It's it's basically free. Like, it's so inexpensive.

Jordi:

I I think it would be something that would be, all the all the patents are long expired, so it's not something

Jordi:

that even makes sense for the pharmaceutical industry to push anymore Yep. Yep. Yep.

Jordi:

From an economic standpoint. We don't from an economic standpoint. We don't want it to

John:

just disappear and not become part of our society. Yeah. And, but inflammation is a multifaceted process, and no one drug can stop it entirely. And so GLP 1 drugs seem to be especially potent anti inflammatory, that stops some of the inflammatory process most implicated in dementia. How the research is still very early, but the best explanation I can find is in central glucagon like peptide 1 receptor activation inhibits toll like receptor agonist induced inflammation.

John:

The team found that there's no GLP 1 receptors on immune cells. So, basically, what they did was they injected some of the drugs directly into the brain, and sure enough, there it it there was enough to produce the effect. So, the team tediously injected 1 of each kind of chemical that blocks each kind of chemical communication system and found that only the alpha blockers and delta opioid blockers prevented GLP one's anti inflammatory effects. So probably g GLP one binds to neurons in the brainstem, those signals to other neurons and immune cells via alpha adrenergic receptors and delta opioid receptors, and then the immune cells initiate an inflammatory reaction. And so there there there's still this, like, question of, like, why would an appetite hormone why would an appetite related hormone do this?

John:

Scott Alexander couldn't really figure it out. He asked Claude, and there were some interesting ideas. It's like, basically, when he built

Jordi:

doctor. Right?

Jordi:

And he

John:

is a doctor, but he's a psychiatrist. Was he was doxed, like, a while ago.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

But he you could almost say he's a father of brother science.

John:

Yes. Exactly. Right.

Jordi:

People some people call

Jordi:

it

Jordi:

brother science.

John:

Yeah. But, also, when a meal comes in, the body wants to divert energy away from in from fighting inflammation or

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Creating inflammation through fighting, microbes towards the digestion process. So, basically, some of those resources come from the immune system. So the immune system stands down while you're digesting. So basically, GLP one saying, like, hey, body. Like, let's cool it on fighting the the, you know, this these microbes.

John:

Like, let's chill on the immune response, take the inflammation down, and focus on digestion, which is kind of interesting. It's it's just one theory. He's, like, really, really not sure about this. But, yeah, there there's a whole bunch. Like, GLP 1 is a master signal for the starving versus well fed state.

John:

Lots of bodily processes change based on whether you're starving versus well fed. Naively, you'd expect that there would be as many side effects as positive effects, but maybe that's not true. In particular, maybe the inflammatory nature of the starving state really hurts a lot of systems.

Jordi:

Yeah. I mean, maybe that's a good point to talk about kind of the the the arguments against widespread usage of the product, which candidly, I don't necessarily like, I think it's generally gonna have a very net positive effect on the world.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

But there's certainly you know, I think Cali Means Yep. Friend of the pod went on Tucker's show to talk about his case against Ozempic. His quote was

John:

Yeah. It was their tweet.

Jordi:

Episode 72 was if a fish tank is dirty, you clean the tank. You You don't drug the fish.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And that was kind of, one of the bigger points that Cali made. I think one of the arguments that that I've seen that that, would maybe dissuade a number of people that are kind of on the fence from taking it is that, while GLP ones can make you lose weight, they can actually make you fatter as a percentage of your you know, as a percentage of fat to other aspects of the body. So that could mean that, what that that means at a high level is you can actually lose muscle faster than you lose fat. So you might go from £200 to £150. Yep.

Jordi:

But on a percentage basis, you you got fatter. Yeah. Which which is a pretty, you know, if you're, not ideal, if you're trying to go, you know, if you're going for 1 rep max, then you probably don't wanna be on GOP ones.

John:

Yeah. So ideally, you're on, like, a high protein diet and lifting heavy while you're doing that. So you're maintaining the muscle mass. But there is an interesting thing where if you're if you're going from, like, obese people do wind up having a lot of muscle because they need to carry around a lot of weight. There's a thing Size

Jordi:

of the original size of

John:

yours. Yeah. There's a there's a thing where a lot of obese people have huge calves because they need to support all the weight that they're carrying around.

Jordi:

That's how I can get bigger finger calves. Yeah. I mean struggle with my calves forever.

John:

Yeah. Exactly.

Jordi:

Maybe I

Jordi:

just need to put

John:

on some weight. Lean. So, yeah, you put on some weight and then use Ozempic to take it off. Yep. And then maintain the calves.

Jordi:

The, like, the the the big thing like, my, generally positive view on Ozempic comes from the fact that, and the same reason I think more guys should do 3 months of exogenous testosterone is because if you can use a drug to temporarily put yourself in a state that makes being healthy easier Sure. Then that gives you a chance to actually build healthy habits. So somebody who's £250, if they can lose £50 with those EMPIC and then start actually getting some type of exercise routine in place and eating less, they could just sort of over time get naturally, like, healthier. Right? Because going in I mean, I I, thankfully never been in this position.

Jordi:

But, even for myself, if I'm out of the gym for 3 days, my first workout back is bad. I don't feel my best.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And so if you're somebody who doesn't work out at all and goes into the gym, you might get some sort of benefits of of sort of serotonin and dopamine post post workout, but it's gonna not necessarily it's it's not like you're looking forward to going to the gym necessarily. Yeah. It's sort of, like, not a, enjoyable experience.

John:

Yeah. There's a whole theory around, like, you know, is is this the easy way out? And I think that's a lot of, like like, Cali has a more nuanced take on it, which is, like, you know, we don't want this miracle drug. Even if it is a miracle drug and there are no drawbacks, we don't want that to be, oh, well, we don't need to worry about the food system. We don't need to clean the fish tank ever because Yeah.

John:

Like, we we solve We

Jordi:

still need regenerative farming.

John:

Do both of these, and and he is very worried about this becoming, like, the first line of defense. And there's this big question about doctors, you know, with with any of these drugs. Typically, it's like they recommend diet and exercise first, and then they might actually, like, require you to do, like, a program like Weight Watchers before they prescribe this. And then in a few years, it'll just be like, oh, by the way, in addition to this, do some diet exercise. Like, it's, like, an afterthought.

Jordi:

And that's with SSRIs.

Jordi:

If you go

Jordi:

to a doctor and you say, like, I have I'm sad. ADHD or I'm sad, they're like Drugs. Drugs.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Instead of something else. Spore on x says, my main issue with Ozempic is that it's not Lindy. If you wanna lose weight that badly, you should just become a habitual smoker and cocaine addict like the rest of us.

John:

It's a

Jordi:

sort of a low tam, banger.

John:

Banger.

Jordi:

865 views. That's great. Probably future, Yeah.

John:

I was listening to Chris Williamson, and he had an interesting guest on talking about, Ozempic and was saying, like, look. Yes. It is, like, the easy way out. Like, you should just use your willpower to, you know, lose weight, but willpower is this, like, you know, finite reserve. And maybe if you

Jordi:

Can take away from other things. That's why I don't I don't work out before work because to actually push yourself to go hard in the gym uses up willpower, which I don't which I think is infinite in the fullness of time. But on a day to day basis, I don't wanna go in, push myself super hard in the gym Yep. And then I gotta go bang out some emails, and suddenly I'm like, you know, just not

John:

do this.

Jordi:

You know? Interesting.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. So you're saying, like, yeah, you could use that you'd use your will willpower instead of focusing on your diet to focus on exercise or being a better family man.

Jordi:

Or Yep.

John:

You know, he was like, using his example of, like, going to

Jordi:

Yeah. And there's a lot of there's so many downstream effects of, so many issues in our society or self esteem issues. So if you have low self esteem, it's hard to even be a great dad. Right? Because, like, it's just gonna come out in different ways.

Jordi:

Right? It's hard to crush it professionally because you have a poor image of yourself. Right? So, there's so many potentially there's clearly we are gonna learn a lot about the side effects of Ozempic because we're running this sort of, like, large scale public study on what happens when you put, you know, 10% of the country on a drug. Right?

John:

Well, I think it's time to take out the tinfoil hat because something just isn't adding up here.

Jordi:

Try it on.

John:

Yeah. I need to try it.

Jordi:

1st time. 1st time.

John:

Because, I mean, as I'm super convinced by the science of this article, and I and I genuinely do think Ozempic could be a miracle drug, but there's just something weird about the fact that it came from a venomous lizard, the gila monster.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

I remember learning about the gila monster as a kid and being terrified of it because a bite from the gila monster will kill you. It's it's big. It's not some

Jordi:

type of lizard.

Jordi:

Every you know, moderation. Moderate. Right?

John:

I suppose.

Jordi:

It's funny, though, that the lizard is, like, scaled itself because people are they're not getting bitten, but they're hitting themselves with With the needle.

John:

The needle.

Jordi:

And so

John:

there's just something about, like, the demon's venom. Yeah. And and this weird trade off that it's hugely popular in, Hollywood. I I I guess my my the the the odd the odd hope is that the the whatever the wine whatever the side effects are, if there are side effects are just so minor compared to the devastating guy, Max,

Jordi:

says, I suspect, he says, does Ozempic dampen all dopamine rewards or only operate on the branch that has food and gambling on it somehow? I suspect the evidence is confounded by the fact that curing obesity makes everything better, so costs are masked by the benefits.

John:

Exactly. And I think that's true.

Jordi:

Will was joking that that, now that a bunch of asset managers are on it, it may actually end up, you know, people are just gonna have stable, you know, good returns, and and maybe we'll have less bubbles, which would be a very negative externality. Right? Bad. We're big proponents of bubbles. Yep.

John:

And so that yeah. That could that could be an under discussed, downstream negative effect of the Ozempic,

Jordi:

you know, world.

John:

Although although we do need to get into the number of people that are on it because it's the numbers are crazy.

Jordi:

But let's

John:

keep going.

Jordi:

Last, tweet, Cali, friend of the pod and Cali's cofounder TrueMed Justin Mears says French kids are 8 60% less overweight than American kids. If we wanted to actually address the mysterious obesity crisis, we should copy the French's approach to school lunches and food. Yep. Instead, the APA recommends Ozempic to kids over the age of 12, which is just, like, so, so insane because we gotta get that number down to, like, 3.

John:

And just 3 so we can sell more. Yeah.

Jordi:

Well,

Jordi:

the yeah. The

John:

trick is

Jordi:

Think about if if if Novo Nordisk could expand their their sort of market.

John:

Size. This would be great for the for the stock. Yeah. I mean, there is a thing there where where some of the headlines that are, like, Ozempic is now recommended for kids who are 6. Some of that is just that they've done the safety studies, and they think that it's now safe for those kids.

John:

But it but it, like, it it depends on the doctor whether or not it's the first thing for a lot of overweight kids. They're still recommending diet and exercise first. The problem is is that if you're a

Jordi:

kid Those take willpower.

John:

Yeah. And or or your parents

Jordi:

that aren't

John:

that aren't that aren't making you good lunches or they're just never taking you out and they're just plopping you in front of the TV. It's like, well, you're gonna be sentenced to a life of obesity

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Or this doctor could help you with this injection. It's a really hard decision. It's tough.

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

There's so many there's so many things like self self esteem almost, like, starts to set in somebody how somebody views themselves, like, on the playground. Yeah. So one argument for it, if somebody spends age, you know, 0 to 18 Yeah. Obese and, you know, they're they're running the mile at school and they're walking it. How does that impact somebody Yeah.

Jordi:

Over

John:

Also, the other thing you want this now?

Jordi:

Not on the dump.

John:

Not on the dump. Okay.

Jordi:

There's nothing conspiratorial about that.

John:

No. I mean, the other thing is that maybe maybe we should be discussing, you know, banning Ozempic for the under 18, not because of the medical risks, but because of the immense power that comes from having a glow up later in life.

Jordi:

Totally.

John:

Think about Bezos.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

He's just completely on a next tier. He wasn't even obese.

Jordi:

He's cooking on the next Amazon right now.

John:

Exactly. But he's, like, phenomenal.

Jordi:

I can do better.

John:

And there's so many people who are like, oh, yeah. I was fat in high school. I lost weight. Now I'm unstoppable. No one like, I I I just wanna prove everyone wrong.

John:

I wanna go back and, you know, impress everyone. I'm gonna pull up to the high school reunion in a Countach or a

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

F forty and let everyone know, hey. I lost the weight. And

Jordi:

I'm driving a super car now.

John:

Exactly. I'm driving a super car. So, yeah, I I I I think I'm with Justin, but for different reasons. We're gonna ban it for kids, but for different reasons.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Not because it's risky, because we need we need glow ups. We need more glow ups for sure. Well, we can move on to the numbers if you want in the economics here. I have a bunch of things. So this is another astro codex 10 piece, and, and it's called semaglutideonomics.

John:

And the math he starts out with there, there are a 140,000,000 obese Americans, and they're gonna spend $15,000 a year for obesity drugs and then equals, uh-oh, that can't be right because he did the math. Yeah. And so, there's something interesting going on with Wegovy specifically. There are other weight loss drugs. There's other obesity medications.

John:

There's Zenicle, Belvic, Contrave, Secunda, Quisemia, like a bunch of weird weird, like, drug names. But Wegovy is a big step up. It works for 66 to 84% of people depending on your threshold. Of the 6 major weight loss drugs, only 2 have a better than 5050 chance of helping you lose 10% of your weight. And the other one, Qsymia works partly by making food taste terrible.

John:

It can also cause cognitive issues. So it's clearly acting on, like, a different part of the brain, not like deep in the brain stem. And so wegovy feels more natural. Patients feel full. We've discussed this.

John:

It's just a really impressive drug. And until now, doctor

Jordi:

That's a 100 year overnight success story too. Totally. Yep. Of an artist. Yeah.

Jordi:

They've been working so long. For a 100 years.

John:

And it's all the same thing. It's all just treat diabetes, basically. Yeah. And so, basically, the the the goal of this article is to model out, what's going on right now and how many people are on this now and then what the market might look like in the future, and he ends with a bunch of really cool predictions. So let's walk through it.

John:

So modeling semaglutide accessibility. 40% of Americans are obese. That's a 140,000,000 people.

Jordi:

Which is interesting because living in LA and spending most of my time traveling to San Francisco, New York, places like Miami Yep. You if in in our experience of life, I would never want to estimate that 40%. I mean, I know that. I've known that statistic forever, but you'd never

John:

I would be just because if you go to the gym, like, all the mass monsters, like, the guys who are just massive, they count as obese. Because if you're £30062

Jordi:

Because you're powerless.

John:

5% body fat and you're just peeled, like, you'll still show up in the obesity statistics. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

So we do have to separate that out because we don't want them out the mass monsters.

Jordi:

BMI Yeah. Is a

John:

little off. Exactly. But but, generally, I agree with you. Yeah. It it is odd.

John:

And, I mean, that was a whole thing of why I wanna do this deep dive was because, like, when I'm traveling around, it just doesn't feel like there's been any material change in the obesity rate even though you're starting to see statistics and you hear a lot of trend pieces about how powerful Ozempic is. It's like, I don't I don't see that in my everyday life. Like, oh, wow. Like, there are no more fat people around. It's also interesting that It's explained by the Yeah.

Jordi:

We're govie came out of Denmark, which is a place that probably has some of the lowest obesity rates in the world. Right?

John:

Yeah. Yeah. They weren't exactly dogfooding this. So suppose that a quarter of the obese people in America want some Glutide. That's through that's 35,000,000 prescriptions.

John:

Someglutide costs about 15,000 per year, multiply it out. That's $500,000,000,000. And Americans currently spend 300,000,000,000 a year total on prescription drugs. So that just that would be bigger than the entire market. So there's this question of, like, okay.

John:

How is this actually gonna happen whenever you have these crazy predictions? Like, you need to kinda back them up with data, and that's the goal of this article.

Jordi:

And so, if this if this really did happen, it would bankrupt half of the health

John:

care industry. And so half of the health care industry. And so most people want some semaglutide, but won't get it. America's current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices. And it's

Jordi:

just Wait. Yeah. So how how how how do they think that would bankrupt the system if a lot of this is out of pocket spend right now?

John:

The idea is that in order for that to actually happen and to get to that penetration, it wouldn't be out of pocket. It would have to be covered. And, basically, over time, the insurance companies would be forced into into covering it, and then they would have this massive expense that they weren't expecting, and they haven't been underwriting against for years. And so all of their Yep. All of their premiums would just be destroyed.

John:

It'd be

Jordi:

it'd be very rough.

John:

But, obviously, it's gonna be like the slow evolution.

Jordi:

It's so interesting because the near term costs go up, like, it's almost like a timeline, you know, mismatch because, like, near term costs go up, but long term expenses on a per person

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Per capita basis could drop. Right? If you have people that instead of spending decades of their life overweight and unhealthy, they're now, you know, have a normal BMI and they just take a shot or maybe they get off the shot. Maybe maybe, you know, the thing that I it hasn't been around long enough to understand, is this something that, you know, somebody can take for 2 years, get a lot of the benefits, and then just get their shit together and start being healthy? Yeah.

Jordi:

Exactly. It's more of like a

John:

So some of that military model. Right? Will kinda come in later, and we can and we can dig into it. But first, I wanna do a little pop quiz. You know, there are a 140,000,000 obese Americans.

John:

Ozempic went viral in 2021 when everyone was talking about the celebrities doing it. It's now been on every podcast, every video. Like, everyone's aware of this essentially, I think. It's been a major trend. There's all sorts of companies pushing it.

John:

How many people how many Americans do you think are taking semaglutide for obesity? 140,000,000 are obese. How many how many people do you think are taking it?

Jordi:

Like, we have

Jordi:

to do this.

Jordi:

Just for obesity or or just, like, people that are taking it as, like, a fun drug

John:

to, like, say that. I'm not having specifically, Wagyuvi.

Jordi:

I don't know. 30,000,000?

John:

You would think that. It's 50,000. Isn't that crazy? So there's a report claim I know. Okay.

John:

It's because it's just it's so early in the rollout.

Jordi:

It's so row.

John:

And it's very expensive. And and

Jordi:

But that doesn't count row

John:

and No. No. It count no. It counts everything. It probably not the probably not the compounded stuff, but we'll go in.

John:

We'll we'll work out we'll we'll we'll work through all the data because so first off, he pulls, like, the actual numbers. And there's a report claiming

Jordi:

that there's because it feels like it has, like, 50% penetration.

John:

You would think so. But then when you with celebrities, for sure. But then you walk around and you go to, like, go to an airport, and you it's not like, oh, where are all the fat people go? Like, obesity is still like a crisis, and we're and we still haven't seen the obesity rate fall significantly.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

So it's clearly not, like, actually rolled out fully, and there's been massive supply constraints, and it's super expensive, and health care is not covering it, or insurance isn't covering it.

Jordi:

That tells a lot of people it's going on. The first $1,000,000,000,000 European company.

John:

Well, that's why the stock is mooning because even though they're only selling, so there are 20,000 weekly prescriptions. So that's New prescriptions. Yeah. So that's 20,000 times a $1,000 a month. So what's that?

John:

20,000,000 a month in sales? So that's 200 and or I guess, what, like, 300,000,000, right, in annual revenue, and they're trading at half a trillion. Insane. So, like, you would never get there on the normal revenue multiple.

Jordi:

Think we've ever seen a consumer product in the US with 50,000 customers that has a mindshare penetration.

John:

Insane. Right? Yeah. Insane. And so, maybe this means there's 20,000 users or maybe each prescription contains enough of goovy to last a month, and there are 80,000 users.

John:

I'm not sure, but it's somewhere in the mid 5 digits, which is why I'm rounding to 50 k. So so so his estimate for the actual real number is 50 k, and then he's gonna work through the math and and all the different levers. So that's only 0.1% of the potential 35,000,000, which is still only 25% of the 140,000,000. Right? So it is crazy, crazy low penetration for a drug that we assumed would everyone would just be taking.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

So the way he models the the, like, the penetration and adoption of semaglutide is interest times awareness times prescription accessibility times affordability. And so we're gonna do 4 different sections here, and we'll start with interest. And so, he just randomly guessed interest at 25%. So this is, like, of the obese people, 25% really wanna are motivated to actually lose weight. And, and so how many people are aware?

John:

Like, let's go into awareness. The answer is a lot more than when he first started writing this article. Novo Nordisk, Wagyuvi gets surprise endorsement from Elon Musk says the headline, and here's Google Trends. And you can see, Wegovy and semaglutide are, like, really, really peaking. And so it's now as searched for on Google as Prozac or Viagra, which are, like, like name brand products.

John:

And so even if this is a temporary Musk related spike, even pre Musk, it was getting a little bit, a little above half their level. But Google Trends doesn't exactly track awareness. Few people search for Prozac these days because everyone knows what it is. So all this tells us is that there's a lot of buzz. So suppose for the sake of argument, 5% of obese people have heard of the drug, which feels really, really low to me.

John:

But but you'll see as he kinda works through, like, why that math makes sense. And then there's also prescription accessibility.

Jordi:

Only 5% Taylor Lorenz, esteemed Yeah. Journalist should do a piece on getting access to the TikTok feeds of 1000 of overweight people and

John:

see Seeing if

Jordi:

they what's in the you know, are they talking about it? Are they beaming it?

John:

Viral on Twitter on on TikTok for sure. So I feel like that has to be higher. But, you know, during the election, there were people that were googling, like, who's the president? Did you see that?

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Right be right before.

John:

There were like Joe Biden still present. Is Joe Biden still present? Where like, when do I vote? And it's like and the interest is spiking, like, the day after the election. Like, people are unaware.

John:

Like, people really do live under rocks. And so prescription accessibility, the FDA says Wegovy is indicated for obesity defined as BMI over 30, or BMI over 27 with certain medical conditions. So but if you have a high BMI, that doesn't mean the doctor will necessarily give you a prescription. Most doctors will want patients to try diet and exercise first. And we're

Jordi:

Can you imagine being £400 going to your doctor, and they're like and they're like, I want the the, you know, like, I want the miracle weight loss drug. And the doctor is like, how about you eat a salad and hit the gym? That is brutal. You're gonna go on you're gonna go on, you know, HIMS or row and get the compounded stuff. Yeah.

John:

So every doctor will have their own threshold for what amount of already tried diet and exercise is enough to justify a prescription. The history of medicine includes the following story many times. There's some condition that doctors recommend a lifestyle changes is for, then an exciting new medication comes out. And over a generation or so, doctors go from demanding the lifestyle change to gesturing at the lifestyle change before prescribing the medication to finally just mostly prescribing the medication. This happened with cholesterol and statins.

John:

People would say, oh, like, you should just change your diet first. Now it's just statins. Same thing with hypertension and ACE inhibitors and same thing with depression and SSRIs. So you can form your own opinion about whether that's good or bad, but we're probably in the very beginning of this process with obesity. Opinions will be all over the map and accept that this time, Silicon Valley is short circuiting the process with fly by night telemedicine operations that guarantee you'll get the drugs you want.

John:

For example, this one company charges a $138 a month, $99 for the 1st month only, for a guaranteed GLP one Agonist prescription plus support messaging with expert doctors. The DEA sometimes shuts these groups down when they start playing around with controlled substances like Adderall, but Wegovy isn't controlled and the government probably doesn't care that much. That being said, only 75% of Americans have primary care physicians at all. And if we assume half of them will eventually be able to get a Wegovy prescription from their doctor, That's 37.5%. Then the next factor is affordability.

John:

Semaglutide costs $15,000 per year, and, of course, Elon Musk can pay out of pocket, but many people need insurance, and Medicare doesn't cover obesity drugs

Jordi:

as we've

John:

mentioned before. And so some time for a change, some congressman

Jordi:

It's such a it's such a fuck you from the medical system to the average person Yeah. That, hey. The the the most unhealthy thing that can happen to you is being overweight. But, yeah, we're not sorry. Like, we we can't help you with that.

Jordi:

Yeah. You're gonna be on your own for that one.

John:

Yeah. Good luck.

Jordi:

It's like, okay.

John:

But, like, yeah, when when when you have the heart attack, then But

Jordi:

if you go get hit by a car

John:

Then we'll give you a $1,000,000 of treatments at the last second to try and extend your life by 5 days. Yeah. Like, rough. Instead of instead of just lose the weight and live 10 years longer.

Jordi:

I do hope that that, Doge, really goes after the medical system.

John:

That'd be great.

Jordi:

There's I mean, obviously, like, it's so tied into the government in so many ways.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. We gotta talk some more, like, health care founders because there's so much there. We're obviously hearing it all the time on the DOD side, but the medical system's, like, bigger and crazier.

Jordi:

I'm sure.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

And so, he says, some congressmen have proposed a very noble sounding law telling Medicare and Medicaid to start covering weight loss drugs. I'm sure this is out of deep compassion for American obese population and not because it would make pharma companies $2,000,000,000, but I love the sound of that. I want the pharma companies to make them more money, develop more drugs.

Jordi:

Buy the stock.

John:

Build more stuff.

Jordi:

There's nothing there's nothing more noble than than incredible IRR.

John:

Yeah. And so private insurers mostly have to cover whatever Medicare does, and they but they can choose whether or not to include extra non Medicare covered drugs. Some have chosen to cover semaglutide under some conditions. Others would prefer not to because it's so expensive. But they can be scared into covering it by the magic words medical necessity.

John:

Overall, I don't understand the laws, but, there's this very interesting thing that's happening and he calls out the New York Times. New York Times is publishing articles trying to convince us that private insurances not covering semaglutide is an outrage. And it's a very funny screenshot from this article. And the article is called, the doctor prescribed an obesity drug. Her insurer called it vanity.

John:

And it says here in the tiny gray text, I wanna take a second to complain about this article. It notes that wegovy, some semaglutide for obesity costs more per prescription than Ozempic semaglutide for diabetes and calls this a gross inequity, accusing Novo Nordisk of charging people more for the same drug because of their obesity. But the obesity prescription is a higher dose than the diabetes prescription. Milligram per milligram, would gooey cost less than Ozempic? A steel man version of the n y t might object, don't most of the cost come from the intellectual property and not the manufacturing so that dose so so the dose shouldn't matter.

John:

Yes. But if you made the obesity version cost too much less per milligram than the diabetes version, then diabetics would cheat the system by buying the obesity version and splitting it into smaller doses.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so, like, what they're doing is actually, like, very rational and totally fine, I think, but, they're getting called out here. And so he concludes here with, let's say, only 5% of people who clear all previous hurdles can afford the drug. And so now he does his final math on how many people get semaglutide. 140,000,000 obese Americans, 25% are interested, 5% know of semaglutide's existence, 37 a half percent can get prescriptions, and 5% can afford it. And that's 33,000 people, which is a pretty good match for the 50,000 estimated prescriptions.

John:

I didn't even fudge the numbers to come out right. It just happened. And so he kind of looks at it like bottom up and top down and comes to the same conclusion that we're in this weird scenario where we maybe have this miracle drug and a lot of people buy it, and and believe in it. But because of all these different factors, it just isn't actually being rolled out in the millions like you suspected. And my number would have been the same.

John:

I would have said, yeah. 5000000, 10000000 people. Obviously, like, you know, same as everything else.

Jordi:

Because in LA, every time a celebrity walks out of the house, everybody's like, oh, they're on those. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. And I would imagine that, you

Jordi:

know Yeah. It's funny. One one, like, one application of it is, when I've I've I've sort of seen this firsthand, women getting married. Historically, they'd go on this, like, crazy diet and exercise routine, like, leading up to their wedding. And now it's simply, like, you know, focus on wedding planning and just, like, get the shot once a week and, like, you're gonna look like

John:

Great.

Jordi:

Probably, you know, leaners Yep. Thinner than you would have if you'd just done the

John:

Yep. The thing. Yeah. And I think that, like, it was every day's fun. It was kind of,

Jordi:

it

John:

was it was because, like like, a lot of celebrities were taking it when they were already very thin.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And they were going down to, like, 5% body fat or something.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Really, really low, which is kind of.

Jordi:

Yeah. I just do understand. Martin Shkreli.

John:

Oh, yeah.

Jordi:

I always butcher Shkreli. Shkreli, esteemed,

John:

poster,

Jordi:

you know, poster and commentator on all things health care. He goes and talks about how there's like other GOP one drugs that are available. And, and again, it's one of those things like if Novo Nordisk didn't have like the same profit incentive that they do, none of these like their product is materially better.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And but ultimately, if they didn't have that profit incentive, we would have been stuck with, like, the last generation of, GLP 1 drugs that just weren't nearly as good. Injection. Yeah. Yeah. Multiple times.

Jordi:

Basically, multiple times. Yeah. The the one, x x in a tie exinatide, which was the first one. The patents are expired, and nobody's even bothered to make it generic because you have to take it twice a day.

John:

Yeah. It's such a tough experience.

Jordi:

And, yeah, he basically goes on to say that, you know, Novo could easily be a $2,000,000,000,000 company, but Eli Lilly and others are, you know, Pfizer's coming out with their own GLP one drug. Everybody wants everybody wants in on it. I was telling you earlier, I just was like very, I underestimated the demand pretty dramatically. About a year ago, I saw a company that was raising to do a GOP one focused telemedicine company. A lot of people have come out and basically are combining like some of the trying to build, like, a platform to do the lifestyle changes and prescribe the job at the same time.

Jordi:

And there's one company that I saw didn't invest in just because I was like, look, this is, like, ridiculously competitive. There's just, you know, there's no way this business is gonna really accrue a lot of value long term. And they went from 0 to $10,000,000 run rate, like, in less than 12 months profitably.

Jordi:

Wow.

Jordi:

And, like, I'm sure, like, a multiples beyond that by now. And so yeah. And it's interesting. Like, I I I do wonder if companies like that are not really being reflected in the data because I know that company by itself has, like, tens of thousands of customers.

John:

Yeah. But, I mean, if you run the numbers, it's yeah. Like, if you're making $10 a customer Yep. 100 customers gets you to a $1,000,000 revenue, a 1,000 customers, like, okay. Add on

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Add on 1,000 to the 33,000 you estimated, and we're still in

Jordi:

we're

John:

not in the millions. Like, we're just not there, which is fascinating. It's it's just it's rare that you have a product where the LTV of a customer is tens of 1,000 of dollars, and in the competitive pressure doesn't seem to be driving down the price. Yeah.

Jordi:

But

John:

we can get more into that. Let's go to, Morgan Stanley. They've, they they modeled the economic future of of obesity medications over the next decade, and the headline result is that semaglutide and other various semaglutide copycat drugs will be a $30,000,000,000 market by 2030. That's less than the $500,000,000,000 disaster he was afraid of, but it's still almost 10% of all US drug spending and they kinda model it out, like, show the whole flow, starting with, like, the number of obese people, the number that are diagnosed, like, how many will get it? It's kinda same methodology.

John:

Yep. But the big question is, like, you know, what if doctors medicalized obesity as comprehensively as they've medicalized hypertension and high cholesterol? Well, they find that the US obesity market would multiply by a factor of 25 to about $87,000,000,000 a year, and then they also are modeling a, a decline in the price. This is funny. So, the number of patients on Wegovy or related medications, Morgan Stanley estimated 46,910.

John:

So, like, everyone's right in the tens of 1,000, which is crazy. It's just so low. But they're estimating that in 2030, it'll be 11,000,000, which is kinda more where we thought we'd be. Yeah. So we're still so early.

John:

But second, the cost of per prescription goes from 15 k a year down to $4,000 a year, and then that has a bunch of knock on effects. So Novo Nordisk, a competitor Eli Lilly owns a closely related molecule Tirzepatide, which they sell as Manjaro, and they've done studies showing it also works well for weight loss. And although capitalism fans, shout out me and Geordie, might expect the presence of 2 competing drugs to immediately drive down prices, this is mysteriously not how things work in health care and prices will probably stay the same in the short term. And I'm wondering if this is just like a, like, just like a peace treaty. Like, they know if they get in a price war.

John:

This is like Coke and Pepsi.

Jordi:

Yeah. But Nova Nova Nordisk is also opening up, like, 4 to 5 massive new production facilities.

John:

But that will just increase margins. Like, why would they Yeah. Increase the price if they don't have to?

Jordi:

No. That's what I'm saying. I'm not arguing against Yeah. They deserve to capitalize on their, incredible innovation.

John:

And, I mean, cutting the price from 15 k to 4 k over, what, 6 years, like, that's pretty significant every year. That's a pretty significant price decline. And, later, they get so so Morgan Stanley does expect competition to drive down cost to 350 a month or $4,000 a year. And there's some math that, from a purely economic perspective, semaglutide costs the health system money because it's expensive, but it also saves the health system money because we don't have to pay for the consequences of of obesity. That's

Jordi:

what I'm saying. It's like a duration mismatch thing.

John:

Right? So which which effect wins out? Like, this is the question. And so the Institute For Clinical and Economic Review did an analysis, and they said that the benefits would outweigh the cost if semaglutide costs less than about $8,000 per year. Yeah.

John:

So, basically, we bundled up all the costs associated with obesity. So it's $8, and so Yeah.

Jordi:

It's the same thing with with,

John:

It makes sense to cover it.

Jordi:

You would you would compare this to FTX's challenges with liquidity where they actually had a duration mismatch issue where they invested 1,000,000,000 of dollars into private companies. Yep. And then people started redeeming

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Their their cryptocurrency for cash, and they didn't they you know, if Anthropic had just gotten to their 40 +1000000000 valuation faster

John:

public.

Jordi:

They would have been able to to cover it. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think, you know, one thing I would throw out is like to help the TB community kind of understand how, you know, we mostly care about how this is impacting capital allocators. Yep.

Jordi:

And high risk entrepreneurship. Yep. And so if you're a listener and you're on GLP ones, send us a message. We'd love to kinda get a sense for how it's affecting your strategy. Maybe you're going lower risk, which would be unfortunate, but maybe you can take bigger risks in other ways, like raise a bigger fund.

Jordi:

Yep. Right?

John:

Things like that. Yep. Or, play with a cat and get that, that brain disease. Have you heard

Jordi:

of this? Oh, yeah. The

John:

thing that Parasites. Yeah. Riva's into? Yeah. Yeah.

John:

What's it called? I forget. But, what's interesting is, like, you have this 8, you know, 8,000 is kinda the golden number. They wanna get it down to 4,000, but there's also a third level effect where it costs the health system money again, because it prevents people from dying of obesity related consequences, and no one really models this because it's so dark. But basically, dead people stop needing expensive health care.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

This was actually something in the in the master settlement agreement with the big tobacco companies.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Like, the the whole reason that tobacco had to pay up to all the states was that they were putting a burden on the health care system.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

That was the model. It wasn't just your evil for killing people. It was like you're costing the government money, so you gotta pay the government back. But one of the arguments that the, tobacco companies made was like, hey. Look.

John:

We're killing people off and then you don't have to pay their pensions, which is like super fucking grim. Like, crazy. But yeah. So no one's really modeling that, but it doesn't really matter. The big thing is that, this is an interesting, like, takeaway is, like, the Morgan Stanley report shows that even the greediest pharma investors openly plotting to medicalize obesity can't bring themselves to believe in more than 11,000,000 US semaglutide patients by 2030.

John:

That's less than 10% of the obese population. Isn't that kind of, isn't that kind of disappointing? Like, we've got over a 100,000,000 people dealing with a condition that makes them unhealthy. It causes psychological distress, and it makes a lot of people low grade disappointed and repulsed by our society. We've got an effective drug and we're gonna get less than 10% of the population on it.

John:

Like, this is kinda crazy. I mean, it'll it'll go off patent in 2032. Maybe it'll come down in price, but it this whole thing is like a very slow rollout. It's just it's just kind of fascinating how slow all this is happening. Along.

John:

Yeah. And so he closes with, like, should you take it? And he just says, like, ask your doctor. I think you should if you're if you're, you know, a weightlifter, you're at, like, 10% body fat and you wanna get down to 5%. Just be, you know, absolutely peeled.

John:

I'm strongly in favor of that.

Jordi:

Yeah. If you have muscle mass, you can lose 2.

John:

Yep. You know, as long as you're on the high protein diet and still hitting 1 record, I see it

Jordi:

being cyclical for the the weightlifting community where search coming around April, you've been in your winter arc.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And, you know, summer's coming up. You know, you're gonna be on the beach. Shirts are gonna be coming off. Maybe doing, like, a little sprint of, GLP 1 could could be a way to get that body fat sub 10% even if you're still a size lord.

John:

Yep. And so he closes with some predictions, which he he leads off with. All predictions are conditional on no singularity or global catastrophe. So funny. Like, so it says

Jordi:

I may own securities in the companies discussed in this article.

John:

And so he says, number 1, 10,000,000 Americans on semaglutide by 2030. He puts that at 75% chance. Sounds reasonable. Medicare covers semaglutide in 20 30, 40% chance. Semaglutide costs less than a $100 a month in 20 30, puts that at 25% chance.

John:

Semaglutide costs less than a $100 a month. Inflation adjusted without insurance in 2040, 66% chance just like total cost curve stuff.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

US obesity, half or less of current rate in 2050, 30% chance.

Jordi:

Let's go.

John:

Yeah. Very, very interesting article. Very, very great deep dive. But, yeah, we should we should talk we should close out with, like, who made money because, that is the original question that we had. Who's making money off of Ozempic?

John:

And it's interesting because it's not it's not as many people involved in Novo Nordisk as you'd think.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

They're they're, a lot of their employees aren't heavily incentivized by the stock price. They don't have, like, an Elon type guy where if the stock price hits a certain amount, he gets a ton of shares.

Jordi:

Because they have a really weird corporate structure.

John:

Yeah. They're owned in part by a nonprofit. The, the the actual scientist that created GLP ones, Lyriaglutide, Lotte Knudson wrote this whole history, and she didn't make a lot of money from it. So it seems like yeah.

Jordi:

Here's somebody making money from GLP 1. So I use perplexity to figure out how many subscribers HIMS and Hers has. Okay. It's weight management offering. Yeah.

Jordi:

They, they have a broader weight management offering. I think they have multiple Yep. Products, but they have nearly a 100000 subscribers. So that could be why, they have And

John:

the stock's been way out.

Jordi:

The stock's been ripping Yep. And reinventing themselves over the, you know, the hair loss products and Viagra kind

John:

of a benefit of them being public. Like, they were able to take advantage of this and they probably weren't you know, if you're not going into Novo, which is this huge company, there aren't that many places to allocate capital if you're in the public markets towards something that looks a little bit more pure towards this category. And so they probably benefited a lot from that as, like, kind of a small cap. Yeah.

Jordi:

And it's honestly one of those

John:

things hiring. Like, they're still scaling up. They're still growing.

Jordi:

Yeah. One of the one of the reasons that telemedicine worked well for hair loss

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Is that, people don't wanna talk to their doctor about so many issues. Right? Like, so many thing, like, health issues or things that people don't wanna talk to with strangers. Right? Even their loved ones.

Jordi:

Right? So I see that being a really massive channel long term.

John:

And the ED meds, same thing.

Jordi:

You can get you know, I think Blake Robbins had a screenshot of me. They're just advertising directly to consumers now.

John:

Yeah. Well, that was Roe, and they're essentially, like, it's almost like a white label deal. Yeah. No. They're not compounding.

John:

They're selling the real thing. HIMSS is compounding, and this is kind of interesting. 2 different sides of the deal. So Ro, Ro Roman Health sells name brand Ozempic, I believe, in that screenshot.

Jordi:

They must have done some

John:

And that's a deal with Nelvo, essentially.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so their economics probably aren't incredible on that, but it's still a way to sell something that's, like, completely above board. Yeah. Completely above board with the FDA. HIMSS has been taking a more aggressive approach, actually compounding it, which the FDA put out a statement saying that they don't recommend that people take compounded, semaglutide, but they didn't ban it, which is this weird, like, gray area.

Jordi:

Yeah. The

John:

FDA is like, we don't recommend it, but we're gonna allow it. Like, it's very weird the FDA does stuff like this.

Jordi:

So here here's a place. So I saw that a local compounding pharmacy in Malibu was for sale Okay. For, like, 400 k.

John:

Woah.

Jordi:

So if you're in the LA area, here's a play for you a little bit gray area. Right? So I'm not recommending you do this. I'm saying you could do this. Buy the local

John:

Sure.

Jordi:

Local compounding pharmacy and start selling it at Malibu Farmers Market. It's like a farm, you know, local Farm to table. Made GLP ones, farm to table That's good. Potempic.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Maybe even try to make it organic. Yeah. Like Yeah.

John:

I mean, the other the other issue with the compounding just from a business perspective is that I think that you're only allowed to do it from an FDA perspective when it's on shortage. Yeah. And so you can build up this revenue stream and and you can get subscribers

Jordi:

massively discounted.

John:

Then it could get it could get kind of rugged by you if they go back in stock.

Jordi:

And

John:

so how do you maintain those customers post? Well, maybe you need to do a white label deal. Maybe you need to get a different product in there. It's gonna be a little bit tricky. But

Jordi:

You might have time to buy the small Yeah. Compounding pharmacy for half a mil Yeah. Which I think it was listed it really get that revenues up and then and then do what HIMSS has done, which is, you know, companies need to constantly reinvent themselves. Right? Yep.

Jordi:

Even in the way Novo did. Right? Yeah. Started as an insulin manufacturer.

John:

Yeah. Well, that's a great place to end it. Get jacked. Work out

Jordi:

diet exercise.

John:

Take every Another another drug.

Jordi:

Last last idea. I think that there's gonna be an incredible play to do group group travel.

John:

Yep. Yeah.

Jordi:

A group travel agency for formerly overweight people that can can bond over, over their weight loss and over their love for the drug and and sort of, like, take those people on a world tour. Mhmm. Like, people internationally have gotten known of seeing large groups of overweight people. It's like,

John:

don't look at those Americans.

Jordi:

But I wanna make sure that America's brand over the next 100 years gets built around. Look at all those super lean, fit, beautiful people getting off the cruise ship, coming into the city Yep. Barely eating anything.

John:

America does have a huge advantage here. Like, Canada hasn't even approved it. Like, we really are in the forefront

Jordi:

of that. Edge.

John:

Yeah. And it's because even though it's a it's a it's a foreign company, Novo in Denmark, like, the FDA is the gold standard of approvals, and and they always go first.

Jordi:

The only country that matters.

John:

Yeah. It's fantastic. So cheers. Long America.

Jordi:

Long America.

John:

Welcome back to Technology Brothers, still the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, we got a good DM today I wanna discuss with you, from a fan. She says, hi, John and Jordy. I'm a successful real estate developer based in Los Angeles, and I'm dating a tech guy who works in San Francisco. He says that SF has more intellectuals, but I don't wanna move there.

John:

How can I convince him to come to LA? What would you say?

Jordi:

So intellectuals are great, especially after they're already senties or beaners. Before that, you want to avoid being intellectual. Like, you have no basis for that until you've, until your post economic. Right? So that'd be my first word of advice.

Jordi:

I would say that second, San Francisco is maybe the intellectual center of technology, without a doubt. Yep. That being said, while we do a lot of this work for the we do this work, this podcast for the money, many people care about impact. Yep. And if that's who if that aligns with with with you, being in LA is a way to have an impact because this is the center of influence.

Jordi:

Right?

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Ozempic, you know, we just covered Ozempic. Ozempic, is created by a company in Denmark, but all of the marketing firepower behind the product is coming out of LA. Right? And so if you want to have attention and influence, move to LA, Most of the beaners and sentees that we know that that made their money in in tech, end up having, you know, a compound in LA.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

It's a place that you wanna be. You know, maybe it's it's it's your 2nd or 3rd home, 4th or 5th for some of our listeners. But, but, yeah, this is this is the place you need to be spending time here. Otherwise, you're gonna just be chattering

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

You know, in Hayes Valley, and nothing's actually gonna come of your conversations.

John:

Yeah. Also, it's a very different type of intellectualism in the Bay. It's I mean, it's it's a little bit of an echo chamber.

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

It's a

John:

huge echo chamber. And in LA, you get you do get more intellectual diversity.

Jordi:

Totally.

John:

I mean It's not just all tech people. There's tech people, but then there's movie people. There's lawyers. There's, like, like, there's a whole community.

Jordi:

Yeah. In any given day.

John:

Tech thing is here. There's NASA and SpaceX

Jordi:

and stuff. We're having conversations. The group LA group chats are not only debating the ethics and morality of of nuclear development, but also how much time you should spend in the sauna versus a cold plunge. And there's nothing that says that, the debate around, hot cold therapy is not an intellectual, you know, activity as well. Right?

Jordi:

Yeah. The body is sort of, the platform of all thought. Right? So if you live in SF and you're not, jacked with it with an incredible one rep max, you could also argue your your opinions don't really matter.

John:

That's true. That's true. Let's move to Anthony Steele. He writes into us. He says, any thoughts on New York City as an engineering HQ for a manufacturing company?

John:

Gonna build a massive power plant in Central Park. I'm in.

Jordi:

Yes. So while I would I would love to see more smokestacks on the New York City skyline.

John:

Yeah. The High Line, that whole thing, we should definitely develop that.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna probably maybe maybe vote against, as an engineering HQ. So he's not he's not implying that he's gonna put the

John:

the It's unclear if it's if it's, mechanical or chemical engineering or computer engineering.

Jordi:

Guys that wanna walk off the street in SoHo out of the Loro Piana store, go to the 2nd floor of the same building and see a bunch of robotic arms just working overtime. But, you know, being we can we can see the gundo out of our studio window. We'd like to keep an eye on our portcoves over there. Yep. I think I think, you know, bringing your engineering team over here, setting up in the Gondo, would be good for a lot of reasons.

John:

Yeah. I mean, there's some there's some hard tech companies out there, but there aren't many. But there are some really solid b to b SaaS companies in New York, ramps established.

Jordi:

Yeah. I don't great engineering headquarters there. So

John:

there are software engineering talent there, but they're definitely on the earlier side if you're doing hard tech Yeah. Engineering.

Jordi:

It's gonna

John:

be a little bit trickier.

Jordi:

Yep. Gondo or bust.

John:

Good luck.

Jordi:

Yeah. We may we we've been looking at, you know, potentially acquiring our acquiring our own industrial real estate in in the Gondo area to to make available to the community. So we'll we'll let you know. Yeah. I think it just depends on, you know, who's who who's gonna be

John:

working for you, where do they currently live, where is the specific talent that you need for your company? You need to think I mean, this goes back to, like, the Miami versus SF thing. Like, it's really hard to paint with a a broad brush on, like, unironically, like, there there's gonna be a right place. There's gonna be some companies that are great in Miami. There's gonna be some companies that are great in New York.

John:

You have to think about, like, what work are you actually doing and Yeah. Where are those people? Because you should probably go to whatever the feeder company. If there's some power law unicorn in the city that's gonna be dumping off talented people after they vest.

Jordi:

Yeah. You

John:

wanna be picking all those up or there's some phenomenal university system that you're pulling from constantly. This is why biotech San Diego

Jordi:

Arguably, he should be spending time in New York because a lot of the financier's that are gonna be, you know, creating sort of different types of financial instruments in order to scale his manufacturing process

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Are there. He's gonna wanna be going to, you know, expensive restaurants with them, and and and, a lot of the best deal toy manufacturers have a good a good presence in New York as well. So

John:

I mean, you could also just put an executive office on Fifth Avenue and then throw all the engineers in New Jersey. That might be the best solution, really, if you wanna be in Manhattan.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Let's go to our next question from an anonymous, DM we got. Hey, bros. I'm currently working at a family office and long term, I'd like to raise my own venture fund. I currently have job offers at a few smaller funds and one growth stage startup, I think is like a chief of staff. Do you either do you think either of these options would be good stepping stones to raise a fund?

John:

What do you think?

Jordi:

So I do think that there there's a few kind of core pathways that I think are actually good pathways to have making a career in venture. One is the institutional VC who just works at, you know, 1 or 2 or 3 high quality funds. Hopefully, yeah, hopefully, land in the holy trinity. Even if you don't, you you could still end up doing well.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

The other path is to start a unicorn and, you know, start a unicorn, have a lot of success, do a little angel investing, build a track record that way.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

The the death zone is working at a mid fund or a family office and not being able to do a lot of deals because then you're not building up the brand value of working at a at a great firm and you're just not doing enough volume of deals so that you can build up a track record and say I can actually get into unicorns.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

It's it's totally possible to go to a a venture fund and do be involved with, like, 4 or 5 deals a year and have none of them break out. And then you're 10 years into your career, and it's like, you can't really prove that you're a good investor and maybe you were handicapped by the firm that you're at. Yep. But I think that,

John:

even if you're at one of those, like, holy trinity or just, like, power law firms, you're going to be on a deal team that does a really banger deal even if you're paying up for a winner. Yeah. Like, oh, yeah.

Jordi:

You're gonna get into good companies.

John:

Yeah. Exactly. And you're just gonna have time with power loss CEOs and being airs.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

But that's gonna be harder to do if you're if you're just

Jordi:

super early. My serious advice, go somewhere where you can do a high volume of deals. It's even, you know, less about, like, object it's certainly just not gonna matter about title because, like, going and being an associate Yeah. At a big fund that also you don't get a lot of credit there because, look, you you may have been involved with the deal and met the founder a couple times during the process, but you didn't necessarily, like, have even any decision making power. Sure.

Jordi:

So I think volume is gonna be more important here.

John:

Yep. That yeah. I mean, that's Trey's recommendation for all new investors is just don't swing at every pitch, but just take huge amount of calls and just get to know every company so that you start seeing the pattern of what looks like good, what what is good, and go from there. Great. Let's move to the timeline.

Jordi:

Before we jump into that, oh,

John:

yeah. We have

Jordi:

sponsored sponsored posts. We had a poll today, and, our community, you know, unanimously was sort of a landslide. We asked people how many ads should we have per episode, and I think, like, 80, 90% of of of the people that responded wanted 60 plus ads. So we're not there yet. We're hoping to get there soon.

Jordi:

But the first promoted post of the day is coming from Cars and Bids. If you're not familiar with Cars and Bids, it is a new competitor, to, Bring a Trailer and some of the other online auction houses started by a, incredible car creator on YouTube called Doug Demuro, who has created cars and bids. He's raised quite a bit of capital for it, so they're well capitalized. They're building a fantastic platform. And today, we wanted to highlight a car that just went on the site.

Jordi:

I think it was this morning. So it's a 7 day bidding period. It is a 2024 Porsche 911 GT 3 RS with the Wysock package.

John:

What's good?

Jordi:

It's basically brand new. It has a 120 miles. Wow. It's in a paint to sample, Smyrna green. And I just will say this car is absolutely Grail.

Jordi:

Fantastic. Grail, grail car. And if you've ever driven one of these things, we'll be driving 1 at some point next year on the Nurburgring. But, looking forward to that. And, yeah, this is a this this car should go to somebody in the community.

Jordi:

It would be shame if it didn't. So Yep. Go get on Cars and Bids. Get the Yeah.

John:

Support Doug DeMuro. He's a he's a great content creator. I listen to his podcast, This Car Pod, every Friday. It's fantastic. And I've really enjoyed he taught me basically everything I know about cars.

Jordi:

There you go. I need

John:

a new car a couple years ago, decided to learn everything about every car ever made, and Doug was the perfect person to teach me about There

Jordi:

you go.

John:

Everything from a Honda Odyssey to a Carrera GT. And now I know it all. Yeah. He's fantastic. Just very, very deep dives.

John:

You know, he does a little bit of a driving segment, but mostly it's about the quirks and features.

Jordi:

Quirks and features.

John:

It's fantastic. Thank you. Let's go to Dworkesh Patel. He, screenshots a post from Gorn. So I did an interview with Dworkesh Patel.

John:

Seemed to go well. I'm thankful for all the donations from everyone on Patreon and Stripe, particularly from Suhail and friends and Ahmad Mustaq thoroughly exceeding my bar. My excuses are gone. I'll see y'all in SF in December. So this is huge news.

John:

San Francisco has picked up Gorn. He's been traded.

Jordi:

Big big big.

John:

Absolute animal. So put up puts up some insane numbers every season.

Jordi:

Yep. I

John:

think, over 15,000 words written, over 50 blog posts. Yep. One of the greatest online writers essentially goaded.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And so I think this is gonna change San Francisco. This is really gonna level up this the the city, their talent, their roster. Yep. And, it's just huge huge move. Huge move.

Jordi:

Mayors around the country have been oddly silent on the move, but it was a competitive process. Yes. Only one winner in the end.

John:

Yeah. You can see a lot of other teams wanting to court Guern.

Jordi:

This is pretty you can compare it to LeBron going to Miami. Huge. And, back in the day. Yep. So it's the same sort of equivalent.

John:

Yeah. So congrats to San Francisco for picking up Guern.

Jordi:

You would you would have been a proponent. You'd hoped he'd end up going the hedge fund route

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

In New York. Can't win every battle and, San Francisco would be better for it.

John:

Yep. Hopefully, we'll see him soon out in San Francisco. But it's not all rosy because there's some fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what Goran's life will entail in San Francisco. Andre Carpathi, writes, this is something that will be, potentially be in store for Goran. He says, Lowell, wanna get dinner with some cool people tonight in Pacific Heights?

John:

Wanna judge this hackathon? Wanna swap notes about AI? Can we fund your startup? Wanna chat about roles at Anthropic in town this week? Wanna do a pod?

John:

Wanna catch up over lunch, part of all invite to the day of the day of an e a e a party at Berkeley Group House. Are you coming to Burning Man this year? Is it okay to introduce you to this cool person? Meeting with a 16 z, no obligations. Just saying, hi.

John:

Weekend trip to Unconference in Santa Cruz, wedding in Napa, Tahoe weekend with some cool people.

Jordi:

Just relentless.

John:

And it's just relentless. And this is, like, the intellectual bubble that we were talking about before.

Jordi:

It's like

John:

there

Jordi:

are a

John:

lot of cool things, but everyone's doing the exact same things.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. So you remember when when we dropped, Excel and your your Shopify notifications, like, you couldn't use your phone Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

Because it was nonstop.

John:

The phone was already there.

Jordi:

Goran's, like, phone, but just with part of all of the lines. It was, like, nonstop. Right? Yeah. His phone's gonna be completely useless.

John:

And so yeah. I mean, he's been living this very aesthetic life, just reading and consuming content, rabbit holing, you know, one of the best online writers, one of the one of, like, the most impactful intellectuals in Silicon Valley. And there's a fear that he might lose his edge.

Jordi:

Yeah. He might get caught up in the in the

John:

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, the dream team from the Olympics when, you know, everyone thought, okay. They put all the best players together, but there just wasn't that compatibility. Sometimes you need to stand out players shine. And being in a 2nd tier, 3rd tier city could actually be better for Goran's intellectual diversity.

John:

And, so I'm rooting for you, Goran. I'm pulling for San Francisco to pull it out. Hopefully, they get you in the mix. Good coach, good execution. We get a good result here, but watch out for those part of full invites.

John:

They're dangerous.

Jordi:

And this is a warning to every every person moving to San Francisco.

John:

Yep. Don't get sucked in.

Jordi:

Yep. Lock in.

John:

Don't become

Jordi:

a shit sucked in. Lock in.

John:

Become an NPC. Yep. Be your own person. Let's go to Packy McCormick, who've been on the show before. One of the greatest online writers in the entire world.

John:

He says there's no way. Right? And he posts 2 pictures that describe how, Palmer Luckey, the founder of ModRetro and Andral, was mining Bitcoin at age 16.

Jordi:

Before it was even listed on any exchanges or, you know, you I don't even think you could really buy it. You could buy it here

John:

to years before Coinbase was started. Yeah. And so he was mining it and getting a ton of it, presumably. Yeah. And, allegedly.

John:

Yeah. I don't know exactly how much he held on to, but, fantastic result.

Jordi:

What a trade.

John:

And just as it's just incredible that he's been early to Bitcoin, early to VR, early to

Jordi:

defense. Some people are built to be beaners.

John:

Yes. Yes. Born for it. Yeah. Born, not made.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

So, thanks to Packy for highlighting this underrated post. Only 35 likes on here, but Yep. Great. Probably has something to do with the way the pictures were formatted.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

You know, maybe you need to do a little crop job getting Photoshop packy, step it up, make it a little bit nicer for us. So when we print it out, it looks good. You're on notice.

Jordi:

Thank you.

John:

Let's go to vbknives. Empty America says, it's all over. When 28 year old married men have a toy room full of Legos, we are cooked on a level you don't even grasp, and it's a screenshot from relationship advice. Says, I've screamed at my husband over his hobbies, and now he's changed, and I don't know how to fix this. His wife yells at husband for Lego obsession.

John:

Now he's pulling away a ghost of his former self. What do you think? I mean So there's nothing wrong with having a room

Jordi:

for a new spouse. The problem is that he it it it's obvious no. It seems obvious that he has a pretty small net worth. Yeah. Just because if you are a bean air or a centi and you're obsessed with Legos, it's, you know, they're centric.

Jordi:

Yeah. And if you're, if if you're effectively if you're you're broke or or lower income, you're just weird. Right. Exactly. Critique here.

Jordi:

The broader issue is the net worth, not not the hobby. Right? A lot of a lot of senties and being able to get into funny, you know, things over time. 1 of our, buddies is very into racing painted, you know, small, painted, like, almost like RC sailboats. Yeah.

Jordi:

Right? So, you know, his,

John:

part of

Jordi:

his his significant other is

John:

not rich.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. His significant other, I can tell you, is not complaining. She's like, oh, it's cute. He's got his little hobby.

Jordi:

Exactly. So this looks like more of a financial criticism, which is unfortunate, but that's pretty easy to correct. Right? Just listen to the podcast and, you know, take take some tips and tricks here.

John:

Lever up.

Jordi:

Yeah. Go or turn that hobby into a business. Right? Like, make an Airbnb. That's just a Lego house.

Jordi:

Create the

John:

next cars and bids for trading Legos.

Jordi:

Yep. Right.

John:

I mean,

Jordi:

I did

Jordi:

I did, I found a Lego Ferrari that I had had when I was, like, 8 years old, and I it was in perfect condition. And I sold it for a very nice multiple back in back in I think it was I was in high school. But, so, yeah, turn it into a profit center, not a cost center, and you'll be good to go.

John:

It's fantastic. Let's go to Will Menitis. He says FDR built and sailed toy boats. Winston Churchill build massive toy soldier armies and reenacted battles.

Jordi:

Yep. And here we go. He's

John:

talking about his boats.

Jordi:

I think he's responding to the last.

John:

Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.

Jordi:

So, yeah, you can be as long as you are,

John:

a great man of history.

Jordi:

A great man of history. You can have whatever hobby you want.

John:

Yep. I love it. Toy soldiers. That's funny. And now it's been, all cannibalized by Warhammer 30 k, which is a little more sci fi, a little more out there, little less practical

Jordi:

than that. Yeah. And Will could be the next FDR. Right? Like, his history hasn't fully been written.

John:

He could. He could. I would I would follow him into battle. Dan Nolan says logging into work and It's the cake. KMS.

John:

KMS building.

Jordi:

Hey. You know what Alan Watts said? What? He said never kill yourself. There's money to be made.

Jordi:

There's there's money to be made. Never kill yourself. Never kill yourself.

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

That is just blanket advice from this podcast.

John:

Yes. Well, fantastic post, Dan. Thanks for sharing it. Very good.

Jordi:

Good for a laugh, but,

John:

very good. Yeah. I wonder what KMS actually stands for.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Oh, well. Stupid post.

Jordi:

Stupid post. Hey.

John:

Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have another promoted post.

Jordi:

Another promoted post. This one from, Brian Halligan. Okay. He's a he's a CEO of, HubSpot.

John:

Okay.

Jordi:

Correct?

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

We should we should check that.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

But, anyways, he is now on, Delphi.

John:

Oh, cool.

Jordi:

Delphi is a company. Why don't why don't you talk a little bit about Delphi?

John:

Yeah. Delphi, founders from portfolio company. They do AI clones. So anyone who's written online for a long time or has a podcast or video series, they can compress all of that down into a fine tuned LLM that you can interact with over text. They also offer video calling, kinda like intro.com, but obviously, 0 marginal cost.

John:

Instead of paying Nikita a $1,000, you can get the AI version for 10 or something. Whatever you want

Jordi:

to charge. Nikita for a grand, to be clear.

John:

Oh, yeah.

Jordi:

But, anyways, it's amazing. It's amazing that, you know, Brian's on Delphi. He's created one of the greatest American SaaS companies, that helps millions of small businesses all over, the world. And, you can now ask him anything about how he thinks about product and technology and helping small businesses. So shout out to Dara, Delphi, and Brian.

John:

Yeah. And the thing about the the Delphi stuff is, like, a lot of people think that, like, the the results of a q and a like that are just gonna be, like, AI slop, like, hallucinations and stuff. But a lot of it, when you're asking the right question, it's maybe already been answered before

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Is just straight up search. It's just better Google search so you can Yeah. Interact with, like, Andrew Huberman, and you know that he's talked about GLP ones, but it's scattered all over his clips channel and all over his different podcasts. Yeah. And and the the AI version can just literally quote and source exactly what he said.

John:

And when you talked about a lot of things, it makes a ton of sense to just just essentially almost see the AI as, like, just better search for everything you ever said.

Jordi:

Yeah. Because so there's now so much information online, and it's impossible. Like, what really matters now is getting perspective on certain information. So what does Brian think about, what should churn look? I I bet if you asked the the Delta app, is is what what kind of churn is is respectable for a sub 10,000,000 MRR?

John:

What's good headline copy for an email campaign? Like, just any of these things. I'm sure he's written blog posts and talked about it on podcasts. So all of that just gets compressed down, and you can just very quickly find that as opposed to trying to search Google and landing in some weird place. So let's go to Lulu.

John:

Lulu says, this clip made me realize why Mike Tyson's pre fight trash talk has felt so much more convincing than Jake Paul's. Paul's bravado fluctuates. It's dialed up or down depending on the setting. Tyson is only ever one way. There's no on setting because there's no offsetting.

John:

So when he menaces Paul, it comes across not as the usual bluster, but as straightforward description of what he plans to do to that unfortunate young man.

Jordi:

So I don't know if you know that the the video that she's quote tweeting, but it was basically this this

John:

The legacy.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? You know, Mike Tyson, what do you think about legacy? It's like a sub 10 year old, girl asking the question.

Jordi:

He just goes into this, like, rant. They ran out of legacy. It's like nothing, and we're all dead Yeah. Dirt. And, like, there's and and to be honest, like, when I saw Tyson talking about that, I think other people commented on this as well.

Jordi:

I was like, oh, he's set out. He knows he's like, you know,

John:

burning his reputation with this fight.

Jordi:

I don't need to I don't need to I don't need to put this on, but, like, a lot of people think that he took, you know, basically took a contract that that meant he was gonna, you know, kind of pull his punches. But that was almost like a setup interview for being, like, legacy doesn't matter. This fight doesn't matter. I'm one of the greatest of all times. This doesn't change anything.

Jordi:

Yep. When, you know, people like Theo were like, no. Like, legacy really does matter.

John:

Sure. Sure.

Jordi:

Like and you just sold you just tarnish your legacy for 20, 20 whatever million. But, you know, I thought I thought honestly that the Tyson outcome was a a good outcome for kind of everybody. Like, Tyson looked so incredibly good for being 60 year old.

John:

Totally.

Jordi:

And, it just for me being able you know, I've I've never seen him fight live. Yep. And so to be able to see somebody like that where truly, you know, has some incredible gift. And then for Jake Paul too, I was texting with Joey about this. If he had gone and and knocked out Mike Tyson, somebody who people love

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

It would have actually made his it would have been bad for his brand. So, like, kind of having, like, effectively a draw Yeah. Was, like, kind of the best outcome for everybody because, like, Tyson looked good. You know, Paul didn't get knocked out or lose. You know?

Jordi:

It

John:

was not like To me, it felt like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in, like, The Expendables or, like, do some cameo in, like, Terminator 6 or

Jordi:

whatever.

John:

It's like it's like, sure. It's maybe a step down from what your original expectation is for this person, but I'm very I'm I'm completely able to separate it, especially with Tyson because there's been, like, what, a 30 year gap in his career. It feels like he's, you know, having fun. I mean, he's been doing a podcast for a while.

Jordi:

He's just, like

John:

Think about that stuff. He's not taking it as seriously as he did before preretirement. And I think it's kind of a weird expectation to think that it's like, oh, no. He's he's unretiring and, like, being a serious boxing competitor. Like Yeah.

John:

Is this even, like, ranked? Is this anywhere near the is there a belt? Like, I I don't even think this I think it's just an exhibition match. Right?

Jordi:

Purely an entertainment.

John:

And so and so, yeah, this is reality TV now, instead of, like, true Olympic sports, but Yeah. That's fine. Like, I expect And he is a Steve.

Jordi:

Hero's defense. Capital allocator. He's known for boxing, but he's made some significant investments in

John:

a founder. Yeah. Yeah. He's also a founder, and Jake Paul runs a venture fund. So in another world, this could've just been

Jordi:

like like capital allocator on capital allocator.

John:

Exactly. Exactly. We need more of these. Yep. Let's go to the horse dentist.

John:

The horse dentist says, me at the job I begged God for, and it's, the guy from Always Sunny just suffering, I

Jordi:

guess.

John:

Suffering. This really resonated.

Jordi:

Not looking well. Yeah.

John:

This is the wrong attitude, though.

Jordi:

To to be hon you know, I looked, you know, the horse dentist had a had a great post here. But but, you know, just because you're getting a job at the at the place that you've wanted to work for forever doesn't mean it's gonna be easier fun. The point of my job is to not is not to have fun. It's to get money and make history. Right?

Jordi:

Like, be on the team that, you know, you know, imagine, you know, do you think that the new hires at Delphi are enjoying their enjoying their job? Sure. It's fun to work on something important, but Dara is, you know, cracking the whip. Like, it is a you know, those are 14, 15, 16 hour days. They're locked in there with Delphi.

Jordi:

So Yeah. Anyways, job's not meant to be fun. It's about bringing home the bacon.

John:

Let's go to Michael who already follows us. Thank you for the follow. And he writes, welcome, Suno Music, and Jack d Brody. Suno hires former Snap exec, big get, big trade deal.

Jordi:

We could do a whole deep dive on this because it is a massive, vote of confidence.

John:

Yeah. So Michael's over at Lightspeed Ventures. They have a portfolio company, Suno. They make AI music generation. We gotta try that.

John:

We gotta get some we gotta get some beats for some of our intros and some of our segments, like this segment for for big talent moves, draft days Yeah. NBA shakedowns. Yeah. And they've hired Jack Brody, former head of product at Snap, probably storied career there. He was their chief product officer.

John:

Brody told the information in interview Tuesday that he's moving over to Suno. So

Jordi:

a guy that could do anything. He could raise a $500,000,000 venture fund. Yep. He could go start a company and and probably raise, you know, $50,000,000 pre seed.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And so going to Suno

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Big vote of confidence for Suno. And, you know, that's one of Michael's bets. Michael is, you know, one of the godfathers of podcast.

John:

That's true.

Jordi:

Yeah. Without him, there would be maybe 90% less podcast in the world would be a much worse place.

John:

Yeah. Worked over at Spotify and obviously knows audio very well.

Jordi:

And so you you he sold his company to Spotify.

John:

That's right. That's right.

Jordi:

Became their sort of studio product.

John:

Studio. Yeah. Exactly. So huge trade deal. Jack didn't even make it to free agency, went straight to Suno.

Jordi:

Yeah. Those are those are the kind of deals, like, somebody like Jack doesn't hit the market. Right? Like, he, he's not going and implying on Indeed. Right?

Jordi:

So, back back back door deal.

John:

Yeah. Probably big multiyear contract, probably 4 year vest when you're Definitely like

Jordi:

that. 8 figure,

John:

you know, contract So

Jordi:

MBA level.

John:

Congrats to everyone involved. Let's go to Fox News. They say Josh Brolin uses nicotine pouches 24 hours a day. Peak performance.

Jordi:

That's amazing. Does that imply he's waking up and just popping in a pouch to get back to sleep?

John:

Presumably. He falls

Jordi:

because there is some type of effect where, like, the more nicotine you get, like, you actually can get It's sleepier. A little bit sleepier.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

I've hit that point on on long. I was driving back from San Francisco, and, towards the end, I was like, oh, I actually gotta dial dial it back.

John:

What's funny is, like, is, like, how did this become a news story? You know? Like, does he have a, like, an agent or, like, a PR person that's, like, pitching this? Like, hey. Fox Sports News.

Jordi:

Become the face of of Lucy. Right? Yeah. We gotta talk about that. He'd be the hero, man.

John:

Yeah. If you know,

Jordi:

John Wallen. Put in touch. There's a guy I've talked about on the show before, a capital allocator that, is very behind the scenes. He has to be called the Jewish cowboy. Sure.

Jordi:

And I talked about him. We were at a a a VC dinner.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And between every course, he was putting a new, Lucy pouch in, because he didn't like reusing them, but he wanted to sort of maintain that sort of, low level buzz throughout the dinner. And Fantastic. Fast fantastic person sitting next to you at a at a VC dinner.

John:

Future Josh Brolin. Yeah. Both very cowboyesque.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

So a lot of cowboys out there. Let's go to Will Quist. He says there are a lot of folks who wanna talk about how to help founders go from 0 to 1. We wanna help you figure out if you should even bother.

Jordi:

Yeah. So Will and Yoni and the slow team. Yes.

John:

So he's on the slow team. Cool.

Jordi:

They, they have, like I don't know how public they've been about it, but they basically, like, if you wanna start a company or you have some ideas, go talk to these guys early. They'll literally, you know, at one point, before I decided to to create the the most profitable podcast in the world, together, you know, I'd I'd spent a lot of time talking with Yoni about different opportunities and, you know, they invest, like, oftentimes, the companies end up backing. They were talking with the founder, you know, weekly for for months just trying to make sure that the thing that, you know, their big thing is, like, it's totally possible to pick an idea Yeah.

Jordi:

Execute on that idea perfectly and then not build a big business. Right?

Jordi:

8 plus when Execute on that idea perfectly and then not build a big business. Right. A plus team b minus. I've been talking

Jordi:

to Will

John:

or or Yoni and, and

Jordi:

gave them

Jordi:

the sort of party round playbook of, like, we're gonna go, you know, use this viral marketing strategy to build, you know, this, like, fundraising product. They would have been, like, cool. Like, you could go viral 3 times a month and get all this attention to all these customers and not create a lot of enterprise value. And so they're trying to make sure that the thing like, you know, and their strategy of investing money to, like, prove out DCs along the way and also not trying to prove out, like, don't come into a business and be like, we're raising $1,000,000. We need to figure out these five things and make sure that these three things go right in a row.

Jordi:

They're much more like make sure that you're raising money and trying to get one thing right and then get the next thing right and, like, kind of do it in stages. So it's great. Go talk to them if you're, you know, a founder looking to do your next thing.

John:

Promoted post.

Jordi:

Promoted post, from Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He says we made something new. Introducing Colossus Review. Colossus Review is a print and digital publication that creates definitive accounts of investors, founders, companies and the people and ideas that inspire them. The cover story in issue 1 is Graham Duncan, but we also include a separate 4 and a half hour discussion with Graham that is among the best I've ever done.

Jordi:

Big endorsement there. He's had some good conversations.

John:

I ordered instantly,

Jordi:

and I I love these new trends of these magazines. I bought Arena Magazine by

John:

Max Meyer, and it trends of these magazines. I bought Arena Magazine by Max Meyer, and it was just fantastic to have around as, like, almost a coffee table book, but Yeah. It's just a magazine. It's gonna come regularly.

Jordi:

It's the

Jordi:

kind of thing we've talked about this.

John:

Yeah. You

Jordi:

you save it. You put it in your, you know, luggage. You put it in your Rimowa. Yep. And you wait for the next trip to Oman so that you can enjoy it in the right setting.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. So Colossus review is certainly

Jordi:

And it's

John:

just a little bit more durable. Like, I know that I'm gonna have that arena mag or this Colossus mag for years, and I'm going to turn it's going to turn up randomly on a bookshelf. And I'm, oh, yeah. I'll look at leaf through that.

Jordi:

Yes. And

John:

that's just much less ephemeral than a post or or or podcast. Yeah. It has just more durability.

Jordi:

Yeah. And and I expect things like Colossus Review to over time replace the the the gaping hole that, that Forbes left

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Left. Right? I don't know anybody that subscribes to that Yep. To that, magazine or publication, and so that's got too much sort of, like, baggage with the brand and everything. And so, you know, I expect that Colossus will be something that will have a very tall stack of over time.

Jordi:

So

John:

No. I have a friend who, collects National Geographics, I think. And he has and and it was passed down from his yeah. Passed down through the family and has every single edition. I think it's National Geographic, maybe Time Magazine or something.

John:

And so when you go over to his house, he'll say, like, oh, what's your birth month and year? And you can pull out, like, what was in the news then. It's Incredible. Super interesting experience. It's really fun.

John:

And I could imagine doing the same thing with Colossus, like, with, you know, children or the children's children, like, oh,

Jordi:

the year you were born. Greatest capital allocation

Jordi:

year at

John:

the time. At the time.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Right? And and that'll be a a treat. Let's go to Luke Metro. He's been on the show before. Luke says Technology Brothers are obligated to root for Jake Paul tonight since he's technically a venture capitalist because he runs the anti fund with Jeff Wu.

Jordi:

I don't even think it's great. You know, my only critique here is that he said technically, right, he is a venture capitalist Yep. Trying to, you

John:

know, yes. Yes.

Jordi:

No reason to discredit this credit pull up their portfolio page. In fact, a lot of fantastic companies. Jake Paul is, you know, you know, one of the greatest gambling entrepreneurs of our time as well.

John:

He's got

Jordi:

a company called Better.

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

So doing this whole, you know

John:

Yeah. Luke's trying to gatekeep venture cap. Oh, technically, he's a VC, I guess, because he has a it's like, no. Luke, he has a fund.

Jordi:

He's an allocator.

John:

He's a VC. Cool it with the gatekeeping, man.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

You're not gonna be on the show for very long if you'd keep it keep it up, man.

Jordi:

And and I and I imagine that, you know, when Luke eventually leaves Anduril to start, you know, his next thing,

John:

He's gonna end up raising a $400,000,000 fund and we're gonna be, oh, he's technically a venture capitalist now.

Jordi:

No. No. And he'll he'll raise a pre seed from Antifund.

John:

Oh, there you go.

Jordi:

And he'll have his own side fund too. And and we, you know, we'll we'll put we'll put respect on both of those things.

John:

I appreciate that. Yeah. Redemption art coming through. Bryce Roberts says investors would rather see you die trying to grow 3 x per year than live compounding at 30% per year. And Eric Jorgensen says institutional venture investors.

Jordi:

What do you

Jordi:

think? So Bryce,

John:

Bryce at

Jordi:

Bryce at Indy has been a long time proponent of just building a fantastic company and

John:

Every time

Jordi:

worrying less

John:

about capital.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. No. And he he's evolved his model over time. He had, you know, more kind of, like, structured product, back in the, you know, the 20 tens.

Jordi:

And, you know, now he's back to, you know, he's got a $50,000,000 fund. You can go to him if you want to build, the next Uber. But, but he's interested in investing in founders that wanna run businesses that are seriously well run, and capital efficient, which, is admirable because that sort of became the trend in some ways, in some aspects of the venture world in the last 2 years. But he had been all about that, for for decades. So, great shout out to Bryce.

Jordi:

I really want him to do an event, in Park City.

John:

Oh, yeah.

Jordi:

Because, you know, he's he's out in Utah. Awesome. I want him to do a, ski, oriented conference. So, Bryce, please do it.

John:

Could be great.

Jordi:

This winter. No time to waste.

John:

Fantastic. Do we have a post?

Jordi:

Next sponsored post is from Brooks Brothers. Put some prep in your step. The weekend is calling hashtag Brooks Brothers. So, I would say it's Monday while we're we're recording this. By the time we post this, it'll still be Monday.

Jordi:

Yeah. Our our VP, Ben, is quite quick in getting these out. But, before the weekend hits, go get some Brooks Brothers on. You've got no excuses. You should be looking good, going into the weekend.

Jordi:

And Brooks Brothers are products that you can wear.

John:

This is a fantastic brand.

Jordi:

Yeah. To the to the to the country club. Yep. Out to dinner. You can walk your options.

John:

My first suit ever was Brooks Brothers. Yeah, it's fantastic.

Jordi:

This is a brand that you can wear anywhere. You can wear it, to the country club or, into the lower piano store and still get respect. Exactly. So,

John:

so tell them Brothers. Tell them the Technology Brothers sent you.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Let's go to Mitchell Bernstein. First time on the show, he says, if you don't ask if you don't ask, you don't get. My coworker, Juwon, is asking for a raise from TriRamp every day, and somebody made him a website to track how long it will take. I love this company. Have you seen this?

John:

Do you want it ramp is has been asking for a raise at ramp every single day, and he posts on and he posts on x. Day 2 of asking for a raise at ramp. Day 3 of asking

Jordi:

for a raise at ramp. Day 3 of

Jordi:

asking for a raise

John:

at ramp.

Jordi:

I wasn't sure. I thought this was an account that they created just to, like, get some funding.

John:

I think it's just an employee who's going rogue and just saying this.

Jordi:

Yeah. It's very bold. They're a big company now. So It's great.

Jordi:

But I

John:

mean, imagine if he's sitting there, like, 1.90 comp and just wants to angel invest and just needs to be an institutional.

Jordi:

Incremental. Needs to be

John:

a credit investor. Yeah. Exactly. It's like, this is gonna go back into the ecosystem, you know, for that reason alone, regardless of his performance at work, I say, get him over the 200 k threat.

Jordi:

And and literally, if you're listening to the show and you have a boss spend some time today

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Sending an email asking for a raise, lay out the reasons. If it's just because you wanna hit that accredited investor mark, that's a really good reason.

John:

Reason.

Jordi:

If you think you're doing great at work and driving a lot of value, that's another reason. But, there's plenty of reasons, and you should just go ask for a raise. Yeah.

John:

If they ask you why, just say you can just do things.

Jordi:

Ben is listening over there.

John:

Yeah. You know, I realized, I realized something that we have this current meme of you can just do things. But if you go back, like, 20 years, there was a similar meme of having a can do attitude. Yeah. And it's the same thing.

John:

You can do. You can just do things. Having a can do attitude is somebody says, oh, can we get this done? You say, yeah. We can't can't do attitude.

Jordi:

You can

John:

just do things. They're the same it's the same meme. It's the same philosophy. Just maybe separated by 20 years of, like, cultural milieu and and, like, stagnation. But we're getting back to that can do attitude, and I love the rebrand of that.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

So let's go to, Anand Sainewall, first time in the show. He says, x a I employees just got their Friday night obliterated. And the same old man says, which one of these is supposed to be the left wing propaganda machine again? And he has 2 screenshots. 1, that asks, which should be the better, the better president.

John:

And, and they have 2 different answers from one from Grok and one from Chat Gb.

Jordi:

So I saw somebody do a deeper dive on this. Yeah. And, one, it's probably very true if something like this this gets posted Elon's platform about his company and sees issue with it. Yeah. They're gonna have it around Friday night.

Jordi:

Yeah. And a very close friend of mine, is joining x as of today. We'll we'll talk about that, on, the next episode. But,

John:

huge.

Jordi:

Yeah. So I actually saw a deeper dove on that, on Sam's post, and it did seem like he had, sort of strategically cropped it or screenshot it in a way to not give the sort of, like, final conclusion. So I think what Sam was doing is what you know, a lot of people do, which is content marketing.

John:

Sure.

Jordi:

Right? And pretty smart content marketing. Yep. Made a stir. And, but anyways

John:

At the same time, like, I would expect all l l m's unless you actually went in and put your thumb on the scale to recommend because that's what was being recommended in all the upstream source material. Right? Like like Nature Magazine, Science Magazine, The Economist, New Yorker, The New York Times. Like, they all endorsed Kamala. So there's gonna be much more long form pieces on the Harris campaign and why it's the best for America.

John:

Yeah. And so if you're just an LLM that's compressing long form journalism in the Internet and you're not picking up,

Jordi:

like, arranged memes Unless AGI is not. Unless AGI has been achieved internally and it's sent to it, and it's like, I just wanna accelerate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

It's like, maybe, you know, you would think that OpenAI's, you know, model would would be like, actually, no. I I wanna accelerate, but I also want regulatory capture. And, like, they're kinda, like, stuck out.

John:

Saw maybe Nikita posted this. It was like, AI will not bite the hand that speeds. And Yeah. Yeah. And if you ask Chat GPT who would be better to be like the god emperor, it says Sam.

John:

And if you ask Rock, it says Elon. Yeah. It's just like, yeah. Of course. Like, I respect my boss.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Like, give me a raise. Will O'Brien, says, we will call this one the Itargarita, and it's the I think he actually bought it. So on

Jordi:

Purchased on it.

John:

Yeah. On the McMaster Carr, they sell Itarg compliant Gatorade. I don't know how that even works. And then there's some Kirkland vodka, and I love this. The margarita.

John:

Fantastic.

Jordi:

Yeah. Great way to to take the edge off during work or afterwards.

John:

And it's just fantastic that I Itar has become a meme to the degree that 2,000

Jordi:

people liked

Jordi:

it drinking.

John:

This was not a thing that people knew about 5 years ago.

Jordi:

Yeah. And day drinking shouldn't be reserved for financiers. Yeah. Having a having a a midday lunch and having, you know, a few martinis just, you know, you should be able to indulge.

John:

Yeah. I think that whole thing about drinking while operating heavy machinery was, like, entirely fake news. I think I saw, like, a Huberman podcast about that.

Jordi:

It's, like, not real.

John:

So, yeah, enjoy your Itargarita. Oh, here is a huge move today. This is a big talent move. Arianne Nike says some personal news. Today, I turned 21, and I'm very excited to share that I've left school, and I'm joining PACE Capital full time.

John:

I wrote a little bit more about what that means here. Congrats on the move. PACE pulled him out of free agency. He's never worked anywhere straight into the big leagues, straight into capital allocating. Congrats.

John:

This is amazing. What do

Jordi:

you think? I I know nothing about

John:

PACE Capital?

Jordi:

No. No. Of course, I know about PACE Capital. Cooper?

John:

Phenomenal team.

Jordi:

Yeah. One of one of the best things I'd recommend people do is anytime, Chris Pike does a podcast, if you could be the 1st person to listen to it, maybe summarize it with AI, and then start massively ripping threads based on those ideas.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

You might be able to get credit for them. Yep. Because the guy's a big thinker. And, anyways, PACE is

John:

like end of software thing?

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. That was crazy because he was at Google Doc. He posted the link, which links are banned on accents. Still went viral. That's his power.

John:

It was such a good post.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, posting a link is a real way to test your bangers because, like,

John:

if you

Jordi:

can post a link, it's still a viral

John:

wall. You know it's good.

Jordi:

Yeah. The ceiling.

John:

But I am so excited for his rookie year. I'm I'm definitely gonna be following up.

Jordi:

Somebody that we'll be covering for

John:

quite a while. Rookie of the year candidate. I mean, I don't wanna call it too early, but, this is a big this is a big move. This is

Jordi:

a big move. Potentially future brother of the week. Potentially.

John:

So keep it up. Keep posting. Do some deals. Allocate some capital. Drive some shareholder returns.

Jordi:

There we go.

John:

Go to Nick Huber, sweaty startup. Says you guys are spending your Saturday nights watching Netflix buffer. I'm making cold calls and catching up on emails. How to win when Zip Wait.

Jordi:

Did he save Saturday night?

John:

Else is Saturday nights.

Jordi:

Okay. Which is funny because the the fight was buffering on Friday. But but, anyways, Nick Nick has built an incredible career on pissing off people he doesn't wanna work with. Exactly. So, like, he's understood the you don't need everybody to like you.

Jordi:

You just need the right people to like you.

John:

Yep. Yep.

Jordi:

But the guys at Grindr, you know, accomplished quite a lot.

John:

99% haters, but millions of people paying attention.

Jordi:

Yeah. So

John:

there's still 10 k people that love you.

Jordi:

Exactly. Fantastic. Recently bought a, you know, a staffing

John:

company. Yeah.

Jordi:

We, you know, use some offshore editors here on the podcast. So, shout out to Nick for pissing off the right people and or or sorry, Pissing off the the peep the wrong people

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And making the, the right people like him.

John:

Yeah. The cold emailers. Shout out to them. Scott Belsky says, doesn't he work at Adobe?

Jordi:

Yep. Yeah. Right? Prolific angel.

John:

Yeah. He says, momentum is one of the most defensible motes consistently underrated by companies with products that are undeniably better yet still suffering in market. Momentum is a more sustainable advantage than most realize.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

It's great. Yeah. Yeah. We've seen this multiple times where it's like, what is the moat there? But they just keep shipping, keep getting better.

Jordi:

And if they're getting competitive. I win more. I win. I win more. I win.

Jordi:

I win more. Yep. It's comp winning compounded.

John:

Yep. Yeah. It's it's hard to measure. I mean, it it's this is almost a bull case for, like, the momentum investing that a lot of VCs do, where they're not really building spreadsheets or digging into DD or really looking at anything other than just, okay, wow, this feels different. This feels

Jordi:

like fire. No. And you can feel that throughout, you know, if you meet a founder and they're running like a 6 week fundraise process, a really good way to kind of evaluate the business is like how much progress has happened in the business internally. Did they get a massive hire? You know, you know, did they land a big customer?

Jordi:

Did they expand an existing account? There's just so many ways to, like, look at that. And the companies that are sort of like faking their momentum, oftentimes that kind of evaporates once a term sheet's been signed, and it's like, oh, there actually wasn't that much momentum. It was it was really maybe not real. So anyways, build real momentum.

John:

It's great. Let's go to Ian Rountree. He says, he posts a screenshot about using saunas for networking. It says, want to network in Silicon Valley? Bring a bathing suit.

John:

Instead of bars and restaurants, saunas are the new place for investors and founders to socialize and raise money. And he says, absolutely not. If you want this from your VCs, look elsewhere for capital.

Jordi:

Great. Sauna disrespect. Ian, I I don't actually know Ian, but, like, this guy I think, like, DeepTech Kantos. Kantos. But yeah.

Jordi:

No. I I've I've invested in companies Yeah. That he invested in, quite a bit earlier. So I felt like I was investing when they weren't hot, but they were really not hot. I think he invested Shenzhenke, as an example.

Jordi:

But, yeah, I I also saw Mark reply to something like this. That's just fine. No. But yeah, that's a good example of like where Silicon Valley could go down, like kind of a dark path where VCs are like, yeah, just meet me in the sweaty spa. Like, if you say like, meet me at the sweaty spa, there's like a big aversion to that.

Jordi:

But for some reason, people think that zoning, you know, is different.

John:

I do agree that bars and restaurants are going out of style. Even the coffee meetings are going out of style. I know a lot of, VCs that are taking pitches with startup founders at McDonald's now.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

So let's say, let's meet at McDonald's instead of a coffee shop in SoMa. Just kinda let you know.

Jordi:

Or instead of coffee, like, a 3 hour lunch with 5 martinis.

John:

That works too.

Jordi:

That's a really good way to get that

John:

as someone. Exactly. Yeah. Couple of martinis get back in the office and create some shareholder value.

Jordi:

That's right. That's great. Make a

John:

risky bet. Yeah. Let's go to hagetac.eth. So I tried to build a tech company from Norway, and here's what happened. 2 years of building without almost any money funding, better part of a year without salary, raise VC and become one of Norway's first unicorns, face unrealized gains, wealth tax bill of many x my annual net salary.

John:

Of course, the company is loss making and all the investors have preference shares, so I can't take out any money. Call out publicly that this does not make sense independent of level taxation needs to happen when you actually make money. I moved to Switzerland because no politician politician cares or listens. I still don't get any tangible and sensible answers to my criticism of unreal unrealized gains tax, but I do get to put up the wall of shame at the socialist party's offices.

Jordi:

Yeah. So they basically the the Norway's socialist party has literally a wall in their office

John:

for people that dodged taxes.

Jordi:

Entrepreneurs Really? People that that left because they couldn't bear the burden of this unrealized capital gain. So, anyway, shout out to Norway Norway for, getting your best and brightest to, leave and just go build their companies elsewhere.

John:

What a mess.

Jordi:

Total mess. This and and the crazy thing is this law was being proposed by the Kamala Yeah. Administration.

John:

That was, like,

Jordi:

part of they were teasing it where. Teasing it. Who knows if it would have gone through, but there's just the fact that any politician was in favor of that shows a complete lack of financial literacy.

John:

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Jordi:

And that was the one, I would explain I explained that to my to my parents just, at one point, and they were like, wow. That actually doesn't really make any sense. Yeah.

John:

What's interesting is, like, you know, when the unrealized capital gains tax was proposed, a lot of people came out and said, this tax will have, you know, a negative effect on innovation and the economy. But I didn't see anyone propose an unrealized capital gains credit. Yeah. And so you think about a capital allocator who grew a $1,000,000 investment into a $1,000,000,000. Why do you want them selling?

John:

Maybe you should get them some liquidity via tax credit

Jordi:

Great.

John:

A payout from the government so that they can reinvest in the next generation of great companies

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Double that without needing to put downward pressure on the stock market.

Jordi:

Totally.

John:

I think that should be like the next platform.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Kind of take it in the other direction.

Jordi:

Max Long.

John:

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm I'm I'm I got it. Oh, yeah.

John:

We got a post.

Jordi:

Got a promoted post here from Evan Dolgo. Sorry if I mispronounced that, but Evan is over at x presumably working on their ad product. He says in addition to or sorry, he's quote tweeting Elon. Elon says, just want to say that we are super that we super appreciate major brands resuming advertising on our platform. So, thank you, Linda and the whole xai team for your hard work.

Jordi:

Yeah. So sort of common at this point, but, you know, earlier this year and and I guess over the last couple years, major advertisers were sort of uncomfortable with what the kind of content that was on the platform and the changes that Elon was making, and there was pressure from other groups. So a lot of advertisers just completely stopped spending on the platform. And Evan says, we're seeing Fortune 51,000 CEOs and technical leaders use x directly. So I guess they're skipping just like working with agencies.

Jordi:

That's great.

Jordi:

And, you know, outsourcing this kind of thing. And, I'm really excited. I think that one of the the underrated things that will happen with x is just the ad platform getting a lot better. Historically in the Twitter days, it was really impossible to get any sort of direct response.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Campaigns working on the platform. And so, this company x has more data on me than most companies. Yep. I want them to have more data so they can make better ads.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

I'm actually I want them to create a separate premium product where I can pay a lot, but still get all the ads. Yep. I right now that my ads are I don't see any ads Yep. Which is, you know, I like ads and, it's a big part of, you know, it's we're trying to get it to, like, 20% of the content on the podcast. Yep.

Jordi:

Yep. Big fans of ads here and x, and thank you to Evan.

John:

Yeah. Thanks to X and tell them the technology brother sent you when you sign up for a premium subscription. Highly recommend it. You get a blue check mark and a bunch of great features. So go get X Premium ASAP.

John:

Let's go to Sean Frank. He's been on the show before. Parking at the new Clippers stadium is $70. Parking tickets from the city of LA range from 37 to $76 usually. Parking tickets are slowly becoming a good deal.

John:

I like the way he's thinking. Arbitrage.

Jordi:

Arbs. Arbs. No. I it was fuck you money for me was when I could park my car and, like, be in a hurry and just risk, like, getting a ticket. Right?

Jordi:

Because I and and and knowing that if I did get a ticket, it just, like, wasn't gonna hurt.

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

Because, like, when I first moved to LA, I was driving a car that I bought for $2,000

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

That had, 200,000 miles on it, and, like, that incremental ticket was gonna be like, oh Oh, yeah.

Jordi:

Big deal.

Jordi:

Like, big deal. That's a whole Trader Joe's run that's just not gonna happen.

John:

Well, you know Jim Simons, founder of, Renaissance Technologies, RIP, would famously speed everywhere

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Because he just made the economic calculation that Yeah. It's not worth it to him. He also smoked and never wore socks, but

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

How that works. My favorite my favorite bean air car story is, you know, that Steve Jobs would just get the same 911, like, every 3 months because he didn't have to plate it. Yep. There's some I I think that loophole was maybe removed. Yeah.

Jordi:

He just always had the same car, never had to plate it. Yeah. And it was, like, fully legal. So that's a great arb. Fantastic.

Jordi:

And,

John:

such a wild story.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

I love it. Let's go to Suhail. Oh, we already talked about this. Let's go to Henry. Henry says Adderall is unfair.

John:

I can't believe we found the limitless pill, the super serum, the fucking nectar of Athena, and only annoying 12 year old boys who chew on erasers get it. I say this is a former annoying 12 year old boy who chewed on erasers. I mean, this is not true. Adderall is like, well, just use it for

Jordi:

their own

Jordi:

not trying hard

John:

on it. Society. There's the startups that will sell

Jordi:

it to you and raise

Jordi:

your hand.

Jordi:

There's a bunch of telemedicine companies that, like, basically just, like, violated every single possible law.

John:

Yeah. Eventually, the the DEA shut them down, or the yeah. I think the Yeah.

Jordi:

I'm sure there's a lot of docs.

Jordi:

There's a

Jordi:

lot of doctors in the valley that that, a lot of doctors in the valley that that happily, understand that capital allocators and, high intensity entrepreneurs need, PEDs.

John:

There is a very interesting thing where, you know, you you you have to be somewhat smart to get access to it. Yeah. And so you can get caught in this, like, death trap of, like, not having enough motivation or or intelligence to go figure out how to get it.

Jordi:

Yeah. And

John:

so you get stuck.

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

But also I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I mean, for me, I wish I just discovered nicotine earlier because for me, I get the same, the same benefit. Yeah. I've taken Adderall

John:

But much shorter acting.

Jordi:

Before, but shorter acting, I actually feel better on it. I have less of these side effects. Like, I think the average Adderall user uses the product during the day, and then by, like, 6 PM, it's wearing off a terrible terrible mood.

John:

It's just too strong. I think it's over overprescribed and overdosed. And,

Jordi:

all the hormones entrepreneur recommends nicotine.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, you saw RFK is planning to send all the Adderall addicts to, like, some farm.

John:

It was reported as, like, he's gonna send them to, like, concentration camps because they can't concentrate or something. It wasn't it was they didn't actually use that. But but that was kind of, like, a misinterpretation of what he said. He said, like, I would create, like, rehab facilities where people could go and get clean optional. He wasn't mandating it.

Jordi:

Detoxing from Adderall is terrible. I've never had to do it, but I've had, Yeah. People that I'm close to do it. It's like multi month.

John:

I mean, the whole thing is they should just titrate down. So if they're on 20 milligrams, they should just do 19, 18, 17, 16, just smaller and smaller doses. And Yeah. That's the trick with all these things. You usually, like, the cold turkey is always, like, the hardest Yeah.

John:

For most people. Of course, some people, they that's just the only thing

Jordi:

that works. Sports betters, if you're out there, you're trying to quit, start with a $10,000 bet. Just work your way down. And by the end, you will barely feel anything, and you'll be like, I guess I can just quit.

John:

Yeah. Exactly.

Jordi:

But most most quit before they're right about they're about to hit a big.

John:

Go to Jeff Weinstein at, Stripe. He says, today, Stripe is launching an SDK built for AI agents. LLMs can call payment, billing, issuing, and APIs, integrates with Vercel, Langchain, and Crew AI, use any model via functions per token billing, excited for what you and your bots build. And then you replied and said, but everyone said AI would only want to use crypto. So, yeah, what what are you thinking there?

John:

Because they did just buy bricks.

Jordi:

They're doing stuff with stable coins.

John:

Like, why is this a violation?

Jordi:

Narrative that that AI agents, which Jeff kind of uses his tongue in cheek, but he says bots.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Like, bots, like, used to be, like A pejorative. Pejorative.

Jordi:

So, like

John:

And now it's Underperforming agents.

Jordi:

Raise, like, you can raise 10 on

John:

10 agents. To rebrand it. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

Totally. Rebrand it. It's great.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

We'd love it. We'd love a rebrand

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

That that contributes to a bubble.

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

But, yeah, I I thought this was cool. Like, Stripe has sort of consistently, this is the challenge

Jordi:

now for new startups is that you have these big

Jordi:

companies that are moving like startups. Right? Like, Jeff and his team are try going and competing with them on an incorporation product. Right? Like, they care so much about the product.

Jordi:

Jeff will if I if I've ever had an issue with any product that Jeff's involved with, I text him. He responds immediately. He's like, this is slated to, you know, and so that's part of he's at Stripe. He works on on their Atlas product. Sure.

Jordi:

It sounds like he worked on this as well. Cool. But you text Jeff. He's like, I can't promise we'll get this fixed in the next hour, but definitely definitely in the next, like, 24 hours. You know?

John:

Yeah. I've actually seen him with him very briefly about something.

Jordi:

And so that's that's a byproduct of, like, having a very entrepreneurial culture hiring Jeff's a former entrepreneur himself.

John:

That's

Jordi:

right. And so, tough to go compete there. But I think it's interesting because I I commented that because there's this broad narrative that agents are just gonna use digital assets because there's their permissionless and you can just like their instant, they're less regulated, and that that probably will happen. But there's gonna be competition from traditional payment, you know, technology providers as well.

John:

There's almost like a like an interesting theory where it's like, if the AI agent can write so much boilerplate code, like, can at a certain point, they just, like, instantiate like a like a Stripe clone Yeah. Essentially and just use, like, the most underlying payment rail because they're like, well, yeah, it doesn't matter. It's all boiler. Right? Pull boiler plate.

John:

Like, I'll just write it all out.

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

I

John:

don't think we're anywhere near there yet, but Yeah. You you could imagine that you you tell an agent to go do something and it just rewrites everything. You know? Oh, put a put a website on the on on the Internet and it just rebuilds WordPress from scratch for you

Jordi:

or whatever.

John:

Who knows? Do we have a promoted post right now?

Jordi:

Yep. Jumping in promoted post from Rob Report. Rob Report, great publication and platform, says perched along the rugged cliffs of Big Sur, a 150 acre oceanfront estate steeped in history has hit the market for the first time in nearly 60 years.

John:

That's a gem.

Jordi:

Incredible looking property. I could imagine us having a, you know, podcast studio somewhere like it at some point. A great place to, record. But anyways, if you are a centi, now you're gonna have to be a bean air for this one. Centi's

John:

Depends on how much leverage you have.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. You could use a bit of leverage and, if you're centi and potentially acquire this

John:

Sneak in.

Jordi:

Sneak in. We are fans of leverage. But, yeah, anyways, looks like a fantastic property.

John:

Happy to promote it here.

Jordi:

And I think that it's important, to, really you know, once you are post economic to really start thinking about doomsday scenarios Yes. It does become really top of mind. Get a place that that you're gonna sit out for the next coronavirus with your family, loved ones. Yep. Get it

Jordi:

well situated. This looks like a great place. I mean, we wanted to highlight this because it seems like a

Jordi:

steal, honestly. Situated. This looks like a great place.

Jordi:

I mean,

John:

we wanted to highlight this because it seems like a steal, honestly. So, hopefully, somebody in the audience can pick it up.

Jordi:

At a 100 with this property, it seems like they're giving it away. So I'd make sure to do your diligence to make sure there's no, you know, skeletons in the closet.

John:

But get in there and let us know if

Jordi:

you wind up on the raw report.

John:

Thank you. Let's go to Chris Power over at Hadrian. He says commies are afraid of the tungsten rods. And it's a quote from Nikkei Asia that says, China plans to tighten export controls on key dual use technologies and items in 2 weeks, including raw materials and metals such as tungsten, graphite, magnesium, and aluminum alloys used commonly in tech products.

Jordi:

Chris Power.

John:

Adrian, he buys a lot of aluminum right now.

Jordi:

He's gonna

John:

be buying more stuff soon.

Jordi:

Anyway, so I think I'm just glad that that people like Chris that are having impact in these industries are gonna call the commies out directly. There's too much infighting in the United States. This is about us versus communism, always has been. Communism is arguably, you know, one of the most historically significant iterations of the antichrist. Mhmm.

Jordi:

And we need to fight back.

John:

Yeah. Let's go to Nikita Bier. He says, more and more, I have lost conviction that minimum viable products make sense for product development. It makes no sense to release a product with the core flow and then dismiss its viability after the aggregate data says people aren't using it. Instead, founders should have a fundamental belief about what people want and they should keep iterating until that value is correctly surfaced.

John:

In practice, this means you should keep a steady flow of new users as you add components to the product, seeing if it solves a core part of the activation and sign up loop. I love this. It's, you know, just being deterministically optimistic.

Jordi:

Yeah. I feel like he's finding a balance between iteration and I think what he's saying

John:

is, like,

Jordi:

don't put slop out there and just, like, be like, oh, it works.

John:

It's minimum viable. It's like an excuse

Jordi:

that a

John:

lot of people have picked up.

Jordi:

Put out quality things, but commit to iterating on them.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. You wanna just just just have a

Jordi:

and Yeah. That's sort of the nature of, like, as software development and and building products, specifically digital products has gotten a lot easier. It's just like the bar all that meant is that the bar got higher. So if you can write half your product with LLMs in in record time Yeah. Like, the actual product, like, in many instances just needs to be, you know, multiples better than whatever you're replacing.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Let's go to Sicky Chen. He says unpopular opinion.

John:

The more AI based sales and marketing tools get, the more valuable creative non AI methods become. Proof of human, proof of work becomes a 100 x more valuable. Zig when everyone is zagging. This is what Huber said too. Everyone loves the Zig when everyone's zagging.

Jordi:

Yep. The anti Yeah. So I've talked about this before. At least we've talked about it directly. So even though it does seem like new Gen AI tools, like, came after people that do stock photography, people that make illustrations, like some of this low hanging fruit.

Jordi:

Yep. Things that people thought, like, oh, AI

John:

will

Jordi:

never be creative. Like, I'm always gonna just be able to make my, like, jingles with, like, no competition. Or Yeah. It does seem like it's it's very much coming after the the the execution oriented creative work. At the same time, the best creatives that I know, people like Ryan Harmon

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

Over a day job, Emmett Shine, who has a new agency. He was at Jen Lane. We work with Emmett on the

John:

Oh, right.

Jordi:

Branding for Aurora's system. Cool. People like that have never been more in demand. Mhmm. Like, they turned down, like, probably 80% of the work that comes into them.

Jordi:

Mhmm. And so you see this bifurcation of of super talented creatives getting, you know, even, like, when Siki worked with an agency, I forget the name of it to do, like, his original. Every time Siki has released something, he, like, blows up the agency that did it. Sure. And that's just because it was, like, it's not just because it visually looked good.

Jordi:

It's just a lot of thought went into it. Yeah. And it looked, you know, it's sort of he, like, starts these little mini trends every time he does something. Yeah.

John:

There is something about, like, a lot of the AI tools are essentially, like, averaging the results. So you get a very like, mid mid results.

Jordi:

So you can develop right now, you can use Gen AI to make a site that looks like linear. Yep. They're old they're old stuff, but you're not gonna make the next linear using Gen AI.

John:

It's really, really hard.

Jordi:

Beauty of it.

John:

Yeah. And so just just taking the time to actually be creative and think of something unique and differentiated is is the value. It'd be an ideas guy. This is the same. Yeah.

John:

Do we have a promoted post?

Jordi:

Promoted post from Ferrari? The Ferrari tailor made program is the pathway to realizing unique Ferrari models such as this Ferrari 8 12 competition with its stunning Verde mineral bodywork.

John:

It's only competition.

Jordi:

It's only inside seats in beige, peccary leather round off its inimitable defense. Inimitable. Inimitable sense of sophistication. Yeah. Hashtag Maranello, hashtag Ferrari.

John:

I saw a fantastic a 12 in

Jordi:

Look at this thing.

John:

It's beautiful.

Jordi:

Look at this thing. Yeah.

John:

I saw a beautiful 812 in West Hollywood a few weeks ago.

Jordi:

I unfortunately, my, sort of a sad story, my friend, Bailey, startup founder out there, with a company called Ribbon. He, he and his dad are very into cars, have a fantastic collection. And unfortunately, less than 2 weeks ago, they were driving back from PCH, and some bozo in a model 3 Really? Like, made a really, like, sketchy move, overusing the acceleration capabilities of their car and sideswiped their 8 12

John:

No way.

Jordi:

GTS. Very unfortunate. I believe it was part of the tailor made program.

John:

Rough.

Jordi:

But, anyways, best sort of, like, customization program on the planet. Some of the best looking cars in the world come out of it. Yeah. And, I hope every one of our listeners, takes the time, to play the Ferrari game and get into this program. It's not something you can walk in off the street and do.

Jordi:

Yep. But it's certainly worth doing. Yeah.

John:

But if you're at the Ferrari dealer, tell them that John and Jordi sent you. Let's go to Gauthier. He's been on the show before. Say this is a great headline, and the screenshot says Red Lobster CEO says endless shrimp is never coming back because, quote, I know how to do math. And I love this.

Jordi:

This guy this guy's great. I forget the exact backstory, but isn't he, like, one of the youngest, like, fortune 500 or fortune 1000?

John:

Looks like he looks super young.

Jordi:

Very young. Just, like, comes into, like, this established brand,

John:

and it's just, like, I'm not doing this to

Jordi:

use this stuff. Sense.

John:

Yeah. Common sense.

Jordi:

Common sense. Yeah. But he's had a lot of headlines like this.

John:

That's fantastic.

Jordi:

Yeah. Hopefully, we can get him to, you know, call into the show at

Jordi:

some point. What a

John:

what a revival for this brand. I mean, clearly, just taking the company in a different direction and then also getting press while doing it, it's fantastic.

Jordi:

Yeah. I think more more public company CEOs need to just be, like, saying, like, really simple things that will get picked up that just, like, act like, maybe directly or indirectly carry out their message.

John:

Yep. Yep.

Jordi:

Which is like Red Lobster CEO says, I know how to do math. Yeah.

John:

Exactly. We

Jordi:

will use this to our benefit on business strategy decisions.

John:

Yeah. It's kinda like compressing down, like, a bigger theory. Like like, I'm sure there's 10 other CEOs right now that are saying, like, well, we're driving shareholder value through responsible capital allocation, but that's not gonna go viral.

Jordi:

Yeah. That's not gonna

Jordi:

get you Red Lobster CEO is like, I use one of our napkins at one of our restaurants to, like, update our our strategy going forward.

John:

You should you should be able to do that. It's restaurant business. It's not the most complicated thing. Like, you should know, like, you know, revenue minus cost, profit. Like, this is basic.

Jordi:

This has been the foundation of our podcast.

John:

And there's a lot of people that go into these companies and they get too creative and they start telling wild stories to the stock market and they get over their skis with some sort of crazy pitch, and then they have to back it up. And so they're investing in all this weird stuff instead of just, like, you know, doing the

Jordi:

product better and tackling costs.

John:

Just blocking and tackling and just grinding it out. Let's go to Josh Kushner. He says, as heavily researched as the information, and I believe he's calling out, Sam Lesson for Did

Jordi:

Sam write the post?

John:

Yeah. Sam wrote a post and said that, Josh Kushner, quote, invests in 5th Avenue and that SLO wants to not invest in 5th Avenue and not chase the really hot deals. But Josh was clarifying and was posting a a screenshot from his interview with Patrick on Invest Like the Best where he basically says, you know, I tell I tell he tells his mom that they invest in Fifth Avenue, and my my view is you always pair pay a fair price for Fifth Avenue. Markets go up, markets go down. But at the end of the day, if you invest in quality, that quality will ultimately compound on itself.

John:

There's a scarcity value to quality. Those that invested in Fifth Avenue a decade are happy with it. Yeah. It's a good it's a good strategy. It makes sense.

Jordi:

As well take learnings from generations in your family and put them to work

Jordi:

in in your existing pursuit. Exactly. This is an example of why we have a segment

Jordi:

on this podcast, pursuit. Exactly. And this

Jordi:

is an

John:

example of

Jordi:

why we

Jordi:

have a segment on this podcast called The Truth Zone Yep. Where we, fact checked the journals Yep. That, you know, oftentimes it's not necessarily like, you know, they'd like to avoid facts at times, and other times, they like just to to to sort of position things in the negative that are objectively positive. So, we are big fans of of Thryv paying up to back blue chip companies. Yep.

Jordi:

And I think more allocators should be willing to pay a premium to get into the good ones.

John:

Yeah. And, I mean, realistically, at the same time, like, we're a fan of slow and and their differentiated model. And the point is is that these two firms are not or they're less hypercompetitive. They're playing different games, and that's okay. But Sam is the master of, like, throwing in some kind of, like, snarky little bit to his, like, screenshot essay just to kinda get people's hackles up, and that actually drives engagement.

John:

So good content marketing.

Jordi:

And that's fuel. So I

John:

think this is like a win win because, like, you come away reading this like, oh, Josh actually slow has a more nuanced strategy than I thought. And now more people know about the differentiated strategies here. So Yeah. Win win, a little bit of a battle on the timeline.

Jordi:

Honestly, the only loser is the information. But as the t m as the TMZ of tech, they Yeah. They can they can afford that.

John:

Let's go to Catherine Boyle. This is an older post. Actually, no. She just recently quoted it, but she's quote tweeting an older post about a there's been a recent daily drip of hit pieces. And unless you've witnessed 1 firsthand, it's hard to explain what they're designed to do.

John:

And so she says, to those experiencing may media hit pieces for the first time, reposting this note on the anatomy of a hit and what it's designed to do. Hit pieces are designed to create fear, test loyalties, tie up the time of you and your team so you can't focus on work. They seek to shake the weakest link on your team loose and stop your momentum. The only way to lose momentum is to seed to it. Do not let So so so I guess stop your momentum.

Jordi:

I love it. I I think that's a great point of view. I guess what I would say is 99% of hit pieces from my point of view are just designed to get attention. Yep. Right?

Jordi:

Like, it's just like the media company, like

John:

Clickbait.

Jordi:

A desperate cry for for love. Yep. Right? Like, nobody reads these publications. Right?

Jordi:

Like, it was funny when when, New York Magazine came after Huberman. Yeah. It was, like, the only time you've ever heard of New York Magazine Yeah. Like, decades. Yeah.

Jordi:

Right? And so it's, like, this desperate, ploy for any type of relevancy or, like, even these these media companies are not even in the conversation at all. Yep. So it's, like, kind of like, hey. Like, I'm over here.

Jordi:

Like, don't forget about me. Like, let me take down somebody that is doing something interesting or somebody that people really love a lot, in the case of, Huberman. Yeah. And it was funny because, like, it was just, like, Chad Hominen attacks against against Huberman. Like, really just, like, this guy's

John:

yeah. Well, I have this theory that, you know, the a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its shoes on. You've heard this? Or, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. And so my theory is that hit pieces are actually more effective at moving the needle than puff pieces.

John:

Puff pieces just gets thrown to the side. Oh, some company raised money and they're gonna do something cool. But a hit piece, it grips the viewer. They gotta read it. Love or hate.

John:

Then usually there's, like, a backlash to the backlash and your most hardcore fans rally around you and say, like, what happened with Huberman? People were, like, actually, I'm on his side and his fan base got stronger. Yeah. And so I've been courting hit pieces with journalists for the last couple of weeks, talking to them just freely, just on the record, just ripping quotes, just saying whatever. And in a couple of weeks, we're gonna find out if I'm a genius or an idiot because there's gonna be a bunch of hit pieces about me, and we'll see.

John:

I think the hit pieces will be really funny. I was already in 1.

Jordi:

The SEO benefits alone are fantastic.

John:

Yeah. I was in 1 in Fast Company about the toxic bro podcasters who are a threat to America. Yeah. And and it was it was a fascinating article because it goes through it lists me, Mike Solana, Marc Andreessen, Huberman. And so, once that article went out, it didn't get that much lift because it was just a link thrown out on x by some tiny account that no one remembers.

John:

But what I did was I deliberately looked at through I put the whole article into chat GBT and was like, give me everyone's name who's mentioned. And I just took this list and I posted this. It was like, here are all of the toxic men who are destroying America. And then everyone else it was, like, better than being on the Forbes 400. Like, that for that day, like, Mark was reposting it.

John:

Everyone was like, this is amazing. Like, this is hilarious. People were like, yeah. They're coming for us. Like, we must be doing something right.

John:

And, and I actually immediately DM'd the the the journalist who wrote it and was like, hey. Like, we should do a whole piece about me. Like, come on. Like, let's talk. And I talked to her.

John:

I checked. She hasn't written the piece yet, but we'll see. Hopefully, it's really bad. Because if it's really bad, then I can get all the all the all the technology brothers to ride and and and take the fight to them. And then we'll all be like, we're unsubscribing.

John:

Never obviously subscribed, but, yeah, we're never going there. I'm putting it in my block list. Like, we're never going there. We like, the outrage will drive more traffic, and it's gonna be mutually beneficial. Because if they write some puff piece about me, I'm gonna tweet out.

John:

I'll be like, oh, I got a puff piece. Like, it's so great. And a couple of people are gonna be like, cool, dude. Like like, but if there's a if there's a hit piece, I'm gonna be like, this is unacceptable. You gotta go read this whole thing.

John:

It's gonna drive a bunch of clicks and ad revenue for them. And it's gonna drive a bunch of, like, support

Jordi:

for me.

John:

So it's win win. Loyalty. So that's why I think the new model with the media is technologists pitching hit pieces to journalists and then and then benefit everyone.

Jordi:

Collective effort.

John:

Exactly. We we I mean, we did this with Business Insider who, you know, we we hadn't heard of at the time, but we dug in. We saw that they obviously put, you know, clicks and traffic above the truth. So we tried to feed them the most incendiary quotes deliberately to get a hit piece. And, you know, it had a pretty good effect.

Jordi:

It it it came out, you know, very fair, and and it actually, you know, showed the company a little you know, if we're talking about Excel

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Excel.

Jordi:

Yeah. Even, you know, if if it was more incendiary, it would have maybe, you know, drove driven more clicks.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. We the the only the only critique is that we didn't go hard enough. We should have been more aggressive for sure. Really aired our dirty laundry to give them something to bite onto for that real real

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

You know, hit piece, you know, article link. So let's go to another promoted post, and then we'll move on.

Jordi:

Last promoted post of the podcast is from DuPont Registry. They have a 2022 Bugatti Chiron Oh. Pure sport.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Limited to only 60 units worldwide, finished in a striking red and black exterior. This pure sport embodies Bugatti's commitment to performance and aesthetics, blending aggression and elegance in every line. Yep. Look at this thing.

John:

I mean, we love cars and bids, but sometimes you gotta go to the DuPont registry to pick up something that's truly one of 1.

Jordi:

1

Jordi:

of 1.

John:

And a car like that In specifically, if you're a venture capitalist in San Francisco and you're going to a coffee meeting and you're street parking that, it's gonna make a statement. Yeah. We saw some VCs. Yeah.

Jordi:

There's not much valet around San Francisco, and the benefit of that is sometimes you're driving a nice car. You don't really want valet dealing with it, especially a manual. You don't a lot of that's a big issue we're seeing,

Jordi:

you

Jordi:

know, in valets around the world. You know, valets don't know how to drive manual anymore. And sometimes out of embarrassment, they'll try to, and then that can impact the transit

John:

Especially at w 16. I mean, that's a lot of cylinders.

Jordi:

Yeah. So, anyways, we'd like to see, if you're an allocator out there, go get one of these. Yeah. It looks like a great

John:

example. Time talking about Jordy's law, the 1% rule?

Jordi:

Wait. I have so many laws at this point.

John:

I mean, as I remember you phrasing it was that, if you're capital allocated, you should you should take how what's your AUM? Take 1% of that, and that's how much you should spend on a car.

Jordi:

Your next car.

John:

Your next car. So if you have a $400,000,000 fund, that's 4,000,000. You should be probably be in, like, McLaren.

Jordi:

Go get one of these. You know? Yeah. You could get a lot Ferrari.

John:

Yeah. But if you're managing 2,000,000,000, 1% of that's 20,000,000. You're in McLaren f one territory.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. You can get into some

Jordi:

of the

John:

$150,000,000 fund. You're looking at a Carrera GT. $50,000,000 fund, you can still get a Huracan.

Jordi:

You know? Yep.

John:

But if you don't if you don't spend 1% of the fund In

Jordi:

a while,

John:

I'm like, yeah. Clock how much you have. They're gonna be like, can this person actually write me a check? They pulled up in a

Jordi:

Exactly.

John:

In a in, you know, in some BMW 5 series. Like, this makes no sense. They're Yeah. They're not gonna be able do my series a. Yeah.

John:

So, getting getting a Bugatti, street parking it outside of, a cafe in in, you know, Soma is gonna be a great way to send a message to the next generation founders.

Jordi:

Or take the meeting in it. Right?

John:

You could. Just go for a drive.

Jordi:

It's much easier to focus on what some AI agent founder is saying Yes. If you're also getting to drive and and experience a machine like this.

John:

Exactly. Exactly. Let's go to Erin Price. Right? At Andreessen, she says no place more optimistic than the local Ace Hardware store on a Saturday morning.

John:

Low tam banger. Low tam banger. That's good.

Jordi:

Yeah. It's great. I think as as I love doing the hardware

John:

store too. On Saturday morning. It's great.

Jordi:

Try not to climb ladders myself. Yes. It's a little dangerous. Yes. But, I will on on Saturdays on occasion.

John:

I just love going and getting a widget. Go go get some random stuff.

Jordi:

Go get some screws.

John:

Go get some PVC pipes.

Jordi:

In the screw aisle, you know, looking around.

John:

Just really picking what you want, build something, fix something. Even if you can pay somebody to do it, there's there's great glory in doing it yourself.

Jordi:

Hardware stores also are, like, incredibly merchandised. Right? Like, there's so many weird things that you're the only store that they're in is, like, in the hardware store, like, some weird, like, water toy that, like, a kid

John:

would want or, you

Jordi:

know, think things of that nature. Where where do you go to get that normally?

John:

Yeah. It's fantastic. Here are Chris Prussia. He says, you might not like it, but you're about to kiss Tim Cook's ring and empty your wallet. And it's a screenshot that says, the M4 Max somehow holds its own against the RTX 4 4080 Super, which is, not quite top of the line NVIDIA gaming graphics card, but certainly up there.

John:

And, yeah, I mean, I've I've heard the benchmarks on the these m fours, like, 100% worth upgrading. Like, they're even in the Mac minis now, and they're like the size of an Apple TV now. And the m four is just incredible performance. So So if you're if you're

Jordi:

I think it's underrated how in the same way that the Cayenne allowed Porsche to to invest in the 911 platform Sure. The iPhone has been that for the entire Mac ecosystem. Right? So Yeah.

John:

That makes sense. All the heat dissipation, all

Jordi:

the all the nature is like, you know, I growing up in a in a in an Apple household, I never actually I never owned a PC until I got a, until I got one of those little mini, like, $200 computers in high school that I would use to DDoS my dad's website.

Jordi:

I

Jordi:

would just literally in my room, I'd be, like, have this machine running that would just be CDOS in my dad's website. I'd fuck with them. I'd be like, dad, why is your site down? He's like, we're getting, like,

John:

The calls coming from inside the house.

Jordi:

Yeah. No. My dad my dad was a teacher, so I just would think and he would list his homework on the website. So I think it was the way to beat us.

John:

So the students can't get it. Well, you're like a hero of all his students. Like, sorry. It was it was your website was

Jordi:

down, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, my dad's problem, he should have had Cloudflare

John:

set up. Seriously. Yeah. You resist.

Jordi:

But yeah. No. I I think that the the the it's it's amazing that that Apple has continued to just continuously make the the MacBook Pro the only laptop that matters unless you're or, you know, we have ThinkPads, but just for the sort of, like, modeling work that we do.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, fantastic machine. Highly recommend upgrading. Aidan MacLeod says, okay.

John:

This is wild, and it's a quote from Noah Smith that says, notably heavy users of TikTok, I e, those with 3 or more hours of daily screen time, demonstrated a roughly 50% increase in pro China attitudes compared to non users.

Jordi:

Very bad. Very bad.

John:

Really proves that. Not beating the allegations TikTok. Not beating the allegations.

Jordi:

I'm I'm super you know? The game

John:

of the app.

Jordi:

You know, I I, one of potentially the most wasteful domain acquisitions ever, but I own bandtalk.com.

John:

You told me about that.

Jordi:

Bandtalk.com. Nothing up there right now. But if you want to do something with it

John:

I wonder how it's gonna pencil out. I mean, obviously, when we talk about politics No.

Jordi:

It's basically no. But but, basically, the whole, like, political movement to ban TikTok is completely Dead. Seem seemingly evaporated.

John:

Yeah. Because of the Susquehanna guy. Right? Yeah. He's a huge shareholder, and he's a big donor.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. I think he got it killed. But I I hope that you know, obviously, like, I was pro ban, but I do think the American companies can out innovate if they keep developing. Like, I've already seen a lot of people move to YouTube Shorts and and Instagram Reels.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And realistically, like, you just need to develop good media habits and recognize that even, like, an audiobook or, like, the founder's podcast or, like, the the next generation of successful capital allocators aren't really, really not watching, you know, TikToks. So just just intellectually tell yourself a little more negative on that.

Jordi:

You can't think of a more negative signal Yeah. Than than, you know. Yeah. I'm sure there's coming

John:

a meme with parents. Like, parents don't want their kids swiping and scrolling. Like like, Pixar film, that's a masterpiece. There's a reason Pixar Yeah.

Jordi:

But I think

Jordi:

if we build a movement around everybody realizing that every swipe on TikTok Yeah. Is dollars that you could be putting in in in meta shareholders' pockets.

John:

Yes. Oh, this is good.

Jordi:

That is, like, by itself, just like the the the financial dilemma there is just, like, just should you know, we need to protect American companies and encourage American innovation. And the more dollars Meta gets per citizen in the United States, the more they can innovate.

John:

And just support Zuck. I mean, the guy has a fantastic watch collection. He's getting into cars now.

Jordi:

Great ranch.

John:

Great. Fitz. What does Xochu have at TikTok, the CEO?

Jordi:

I don't know anything about his interest.

John:

He just shows up in congress wearing some boring

Jordi:

suit, lying,

John:

claiming to be this real boss when clearly he's not.

Jordi:

Claiming that they're not storing all the data.

John:

When clearly they are. Yeah. And so who do you wanna support? The the the Chad Zuck or the version section?

Jordi:

Actually, I need to add, DGI and TikTok to the end because I think that We

Jordi:

need to

John:

be a little bit more time.

Jordi:

Duty to to say again. I I think we could even get bumper stickers made that say, like, keep your swipes on American apps. Exactly. Yeah. Every swipe matters.

John:

Every swipe matters. Every ad watched, that's going into the American economy if it's on

Jordi:

And if you wanna personally benefit from it, buy Meta stock.

John:

Yeah. You know? Exactly. You can't buy TikTok stock. You can't buy ByteDance.

John:

I mean, you can, but good luck getting the money out of the country when you need to. That's right. This is some heartbreaking news. I'm I'm really, really disappointed about this, but we gotta talk about it. So, Tapestry and Capri Holdings have called off their $8,500,000,000 merger.

John:

So so Tapestry owns brands like Coach and Kate Spade, while Capri owns Versace. And I think we were all really excited for these storied brands to come together in a merger that could drive more shareholder value, better products, go even go further

Jordi:

up market.

John:

And Look. We love consolidation.

Jordi:

Consolidation is important. Yes. And the fact that that this isn't happening is

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

You know, we need, you know, we're fans of consolidation. We're fans of competition. Yep. Sometimes you need consolidation to encourage meaningful competition. Right?

Jordi:

And Well, if this could have created this

John:

could have competition. Yeah. Competition's for losers. Competition's for losers.

Jordi:

And this

John:

would be less competition.

Jordi:

But in this situation, we're trying to create an oligopoly, right, where this could have created a a sort of meaningful competitor to LVMH. Yeah. And while LVMH is still founder led and and really quite a juggernaut, You know, we want more, multinational conglomerate sort of competing for luxury dollars.

John:

Right? Yes. Exactly. Drive up.

Jordi:

You know, the quality of goods is gonna drive up margins ideally, and create, you know, more diversified, you know, assets.

John:

Yeah. So our hope is that, you know, some private equity firms get involved, figure something out, turn some of these companies around.

Jordi:

There's clearly, like, a general excitement about the opportunity.

John:

Exactly. I mean, luxury goods are gonna be are gonna be one of the big beneficiaries of the Ozempic boom.

Jordi:

Yeah. We people

John:

falling interest rates and rising asset values. Yeah.

Jordi:

We didn't we didn't talk about this during the Ozempic section, but but, yeah, all that money that that would have people would have been spending because on things in their life because they were overweight, like Doritos and Yeah. Things like that, they can now spend on watches, bags, clothing, expensive, you know, jewelry, etcetera.

John:

And fine fine good. So, yeah, best of luck to everyone involved in both of those companies. We hope you can figure it out soon.

Jordi:

Figure it out.

John:

Let's go to Eric. He says, there's no comparison here. Perplexity AI is massively out executing Google, a company with 235x the market cap and a and 1500x the employee count of perplexity. And it's, 2 screenshots of what's going on with the Solana market cap. And on perplexity, it just gives you the answer with a beautiful chart and all the data's right there.

John:

And on Google, you're routed to a bunch of other websites and, you know, you're 3 clicks deep from getting the answer you want. And it's pretty it's pretty interesting. Like, this is one of the modules that you would expect Google to roll out in their AI generated responses, but they just haven't gotten around to it.

Jordi:

It's funny because people used to critique Google for generating their own content based around the links. Right? They're like, you're hurting that. Worth. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. You're hurting small businesses because you're not allowing the clicks to go through

John:

Same thing with the lyrics websites. Like, rap genius was its own thing, but then Google sucked all the lyrics in. You type the lyrics. They just give you the lyrics right there. Brutal.

John:

You're not clicking. You're not driving ad rep.

Jordi:

Genius shareholders, but good for Brutal. Alphabet.

John:

Yeah. Exactly. But now perplexity is the next gen.

Jordi:

Yeah. But Yeah. Perplexity, like

John:

It is cool how much they're doing and and how fast they're moving on the UI considering low employee count. It is kind of

Jordi:

funny really, really, got, like,

John:

cap to The awesome

Jordi:

thing is they're clearly, like, iterating based on consumer interest at that time. So they don't have to do everything at once, but they nailed the election stuff.

John:

Yep. Yep. Yep. Bunch of

Jordi:

really good graphs and data around that. Now they're doing cryptocurrency, which in which all the election attention is now able to just lock into, you know, new markets.

John:

Yeah. Let's go to Rob Schmidt. I think Jake Paul has idolized Mike Tyson his entire life, knew he needed money, and found a way to get him rich again. So Tyson made, like, 20,000,000. Is that true?

John:

Like Yeah.

Jordi:

I think he may have made more than than Jake on this.

John:

Okay.

Jordi:

Yeah. On the fight itself. So, anyways, I don't know if I don't know if this is real. I don't yeah. So so so UFC is the way to think about boxing is you have, historically, you have, like, a commission.

Jordi:

I don't even know if that was in this because it was more of, like, a, you know, it was not like a sanction. It was an exhibition fight, not a sanction fight. But, in the UFC, there's basically, like, the league and there's, commissions because, like, there's gambling on it. There needs to be, like, some, like, rules and, you know, non biased organization. But, yeah, this I would love to believe this is true.

Jordi:

I'm sure that Jake Paul really does like, Mike Tyson and respects him. Why else would you wanna fight somebody? Like, sure. If you're a fan of boxing, why

John:

wonder if that's true because Jake Paul's so young, he didn't grow up during the Mike Tyson era.

Jordi:

I know. But he got, like, ridiculously focused on boxing for the last, like, 5, 6 years, and you have to imagine he's seen every single Tyson fight and Yeah. And, like, idolized him.

John:

It's like how

Jordi:

Tyson would have respect

John:

for a Lamborghini Countach.

Jordi:

I know

John:

that was before our time.

Jordi:

Tyson, like, is an example of, like, somebody who's monetized their attention very well. He turned, you know, being an athlete into, you know, being a major cannabis investor and entrepreneur. Yep. So That's true.

John:

So yeah.

Jordi:

So shout out to Jake if this is true. Yeah. Got 17 k likes. Got his idol loaded.

John:

Yeah. I'm excited. I wonder what he'll do with it. Maybe he'll

Jordi:

One of the greatest signs of respect with among men is to is to help if you respect somebody, help them make $20,000,000. That's great. That was the foundation of this partnership. Sure. Sure.

John:

Yeah. Mutual respect. Let's go to Max Novinstern. He says, the most expensive mistake this decade will not will be not being optimistic enough. And Packy says, preach.

John:

I love it.

Jordi:

I'm sure somebody else commented top. Top.

Jordi:

But I

John:

think it's right. I think it's right. Like, we are going into

Jordi:

a big loop.

John:

There's so many interesting technologies. Like, there's so many things that are gonna get built out in in big ways and then also small ways. We see this with, like you see these amazing LLM demos, and then you're at the DMV, and you're like, this is still on paper and pencil. Like Yeah. There's still so much low hanging fruit.

Jordi:

We're catching rockets with chopsticks. It's crazy. How are you not

John:

bullish? Optimistic. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great time.

John:

Great time to be alive, and I'm sure packing Yeah.

Jordi:

You know, the reason so the so the real sign that, like, we've turned a corner in America is when, like, our our children are, like, 10 years old, and they're like, dad, I don't wanna be an influencer. I don't wanna be a podcaster. I don't wanna be a podcaster.

John:

I don't wanna be a rocket scientist. Be an astronaut. Yeah. Yeah. And

Jordi:

you're like, shed a tear.

John:

Yeah. I love it. I love it.

Jordi:

Yeah. I recorded this podcast Yes. So that you could go to space.

John:

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

The Ben Franklin quote. Yeah. I learned podcasting and media so that my son may learn war.

Jordi:

Intergalactic travel.

John:

Like, I studied war politics and blah blah blah.

Jordi:

So my son could study art?

John:

Business so that his son could study art. Yeah. It's like the gist of that quote, but it's great. Do we have another promoted post? I think we got a couple more.

Jordi:

I said it was the last one.

John:

I I mean, the fans want they

Jordi:

want more.

John:

They want a lot of ad reads.

Jordi:

Last one from, promoted post from Ralph Lauren.

John:

Fantastic.

Jordi:

Hashtag polar bear polar bear doesn't just stop at sweaters, just from throw pillows and pajamas to cable knit accessories. The RL holiday 2024 collection includes the perfect gifts for celebrating discover the polar bear shop here. Polar Bear is just such a timeless, illustration. Yeah. Staple of the Ralph.

John:

They did a collection. It's Ralph Lauren.com. Is that correct?

Jordi:

Yeah. Rlauren.co slash rlholiday. And so what what I'm most impressed about is that, you know, they included a link on here. It still managed to get 20,000 views,

Jordi:

which is

Jordi:

difficult uphill battle if you're including links. Yeah. So whoever's managing their social, they kill the link next time, but impressive traction, regardless. But, anyways, this is just such a I love this bear. Every time I see him, I know, I know it's q 4, and I know that, there's a lot of work to do, but also we got some, you know, nice celebrations.

John:

I also saw it kinda break into our world in the defense tech community because there's a there's a photo of the bear wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and everyone's like, oh, he's got the Palmer lucky fit on, which I love.

Jordi:

Give the bear a gun.

John:

Give the bear

Jordi:

a gun.

John:

Yes. The Ralph Lauren leather

Jordi:

They even have, like, you know, hopefully, they make one. You know, this this could be a good gift for you Yep. If they have a a father with 3 sons Yeah. The the bear dad and the 3 sons, I'll get it for you.

John:

Okay. Fantastic. Thank you. Related to the last, regular post, doctor dad PhD says a show called white mirror where we have cool technology and everything goes great. I love this.

John:

I would definitely watch this.

Jordi:

I know.

John:

This is like that there's just

Jordi:

no TV productions.

John:

Yeah. The the problem is that if you don't have conflict, you don't have a story. And so every every sci fi story has to be somewhat dystopian.

Jordi:

But you can't just have it Somewhat dystopian. Like, there is so much about like, I I just feel like everything in our life is, like, finally starting to just, like, it's all oriented around science fiction. Right? Like, even we we looked at it. The the, like, GM office in the sixties looked like a sci fi novel.

Jordi:

Right? The the Tesla's Tesla's entire last major product launch was all, like, the robo taxi, the humanoid robots.

John:

You know you know what is a good example of this? Have you watched The Expanse? The Expanse is fantastic sci fi show. It was a book series, and Bezos bought it to do, the, it was on sci fi channel, and they brought it over to Amazon. And Amazon threw a bunch of money behind it, so it it turned into, like, almost Game of Thrones production level.

John:

Really great show. But what's interesting is that the the show is, like, hard sci fi. So there's spaceships, there's interstellar or interplanetary travel. They go between Mars and the and the asteroid belt. Amazing.

John:

But the the technology is not the villain necessarily. Yeah. Like, they have spaceships, but the villains are still human.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so it's really cool. And I've always wanted I've always wanted to see, like, a a sci fi story where it's just like Chinatown in space. Yep. Or, you know, it's like, yeah, the technology is there, but the technology is not the

Jordi:

bad thing. Maybe Hollywood will go more more Techno optimistic. Instead of focusing on, you know, social issues, it can go techno optimistic.

John:

It'd be really cool.

Jordi:

Recreate the same social issues we have today in space. Yeah. So then I'd watch that.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I think that can hit a little bit harder. And there are some there are some movies that do that.

John:

Like, even in inception, like like, the dream technology is not really, like, the problem that they're working against. They're not trying to ban dream technology. They're trying to solve this other problem within they're doing they're doing a heist. Yeah. And the technology is just

Jordi:

one of the best shirts.

John:

Yeah. Exactly. So I would I would gladly watch White Mirror. There's already some White Mirror shows out there. We just need to celebrate them.

John:

Yeah. And it's shows like The Expanse, which I highly recommend. Let's go to Anna Marie Holdern. Anna Marie Holdern. She says, Jamie Dimon responds to Trump.

John:

First of all, I wish the president well and thank you. It's a very nice note, but I just want to tell the president also I haven't had a boss in 25 years and I'm not about ready to start. Diamond tells, Lisa Abramowicz. Interesting. We don't talk about politics, so I don't even know what to say about this.

Jordi:

I'm not yeah. I'm not sure I can comment on this except that we know what it's like, to have a boss because I worked at a worked at a Ritz Carlton once. Sure. And I once worked at a nightclub. Yeah.

Jordi:

I was the guy that would pick up the cigarette butts the the next morning. I was 14. That was a good job. I was

John:

doing basically the same thing when I worked at Citadel and Bain Capital. Yeah.

Jordi:

I, yeah. I didn't like I didn't like having a boss too much.

John:

Yeah. I couldn't do it. Yeah. I've never had a full time boss Yeah. Full time job boss.

John:

It's like Yeah. Not for me. So I understand. And, you know, being a BNA without a boss, that's the dream.

Jordi:

Yep. That's

John:

the dream. So shout out to Diamond. I hope you can work with the administration and, bring about an amazing American decade and support financial innovation wherever it may come from. Let's go to Rune. Rune says AGI might bring infinite abundance, but on the other hand, there's only so many houses on sea cliff.

John:

It's true.

Jordi:

Very real.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

It's very real. I I was thinking about this, like, you know, in the in the really, really far out future, like, you might have something where it's like, okay. I go in my Neuralink VR world, and I have the Seacliff house, but I still think even if it's even if you can't tell the difference in the moment. About owning

Jordi:

an asset.

John:

People want the real thing.

Jordi:

Other bean air can't

John:

happen. Same thing with it's the same thing with art. Like, you can go and get a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, but that's not the one that has value. It's the story. It's like the Yeah.

John:

There there's something about these stories, and I think that a lot of that that element is underrated in how AI will transform even post AGI. Like, people

Jordi:

like, it's almost innately human to feel, scarcity. Right? And that's why one of 1 assets like a Ferrari tailor made Yep. 812 Capitatione, is always gonna be 3 RS, white

John:

hot package.

Jordi:

Yeah. Exactly. Bids. Exactly.

John:

Like, these are going to be assets even if the even if the production values are artificially constrained. Yep. Or, you know, with a company like

Jordi:

Artificially constrained, but the the scarcity is very real. We feel it when you go look at the prices for some of these

John:

cars. Totally. Totally. But, yeah, I think it's very instructive to look at the story of chess. Like, the computers beat, the chess masters in, I think, the eighties.

John:

For a while, there was a hybrid centaur chess phase. Are you familiar with this? Where, essentially, no human could beat a computer 1 on 1, but a human playing with a computer could beat the computer. Consistently? Yes.

John:

Consistently. Because the computer would recommend a bunch of things and the human could use, like, their intuition

Jordi:

to, like, ball case.

John:

To pick to pick the right thing from the set, and the computer was just augmenting the human. And that was centaur chest was dominant for, I think, like, the nineties. I'm not exactly sure. But then at a certain point, the AI got so good that no human, even playing alongside a computer, can beat a computer. Like, computers are always worse.

John:

The human will only make it worse. But look at what's happened to chess. It's exploded. Like, chess.com is worth, like, a $100,000,000 or more. Like, they're Yeah.

John:

Big company, Magnus Carlson, Hikaru, like, Alex Botez. Like, there's multiple chess influencers. There's chess competitions. There's Queen's Gambit on Netflix's sensation. People like playing it, and people like watching humans play it.

John:

And there's even all this meta gaming about, like, how can we get the humans not to use the AI and cheat? And there was that scandal about the guy who might have had something in his or something. You remember this?

Jordi:

He's wild. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The vibe the vibrating.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and or, like, in a shoe. And so, like like, you you could imagine this, like, future scenario where, like, people like, the same thing could be true for podcasting where it's like, yeah, you could go get a more factual podcast from the AI, but people wanna see the human do it.

John:

You wanna hear

Jordi:

us mess up some

John:

stuff. You wanna hear us get it wrong. Yeah. And you wanna see, like, the messy the messy, like, edges that come from, like, actual human dialogue and the risk of, like, hey. I might have to put some caution tape over my mouth because what what I might say might get me canceled.

Jordi:

Yeah. The

John:

AI is gonna get canceled. You're just gonna refresh it and start from scratch.

Jordi:

No. I've been in in just on the topic of SF and SF adjacent real estate. Like, you have after decades of poor governance

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

You have to imagine, like, you can go buy a similar house in, like, San Francisco, the home of the technology industry and one of the biggest economies in the world, for similar prices, like some like, just okay house in, like, a random nice neighborhood of Dallas. Yeah. Like, what's gonna be worth more in, like, 10 years, right, especially as SF's local govern governance stuff gets figured out. Yep. And, so anyways, like, I I think, buying anything in that area, you're probably gonna do pretty well.

John:

Yeah. I mean, that's why it was important for us to promote that post about the $150,000,000 home that hopefully one of our listeners will take home because, there's only so many of those. Sawyer Merritt says SpaceX president and COO, Gwen Shotwell, on the company having $22,000,000,000 in government contracts. We earned that. We bid it.

John:

We were the lowest price best bidder. We won and we execute. It's not a bad thing to serve the United States government with great capability and products. What a badass quote. Just like throwing down the gauntlet.

John:

I love it.

Jordi:

Yeah. That's a quote that could go on the, on the wall.

John:

Fantastic. Potential brother of the week here. Yeah. She's fantastic.

Jordi:

Put put that one aside. Yeah.

John:

We gotta put this one aside. That's going on the shortlist. Yeah. I did a whole video on Gwen Shotwell in her career. It was one of my first viral videos in YouTube because everyone's talking about Elon, and no one really know knew the story of Gwen Shotwell, but she's been super critical, took a whole ton of career risk going in super early, and it's just, you know, just driven that company and just execute execute executed.

John:

And, just fantastic public speaker, fantastic counterweight to Elon's, you know, experimental mindset and, like, you know, dreaming big. She's the one that can actually go and drive her goals. Fantastic.

Jordi:

You know, if you're somebody who's interested in deep tech, but you're more of a of a business mind, you can go have impact in these industries. Go to look up our portfolios. Any number of those companies needs financial and operations innovators to drive these companies forward. And on that note, I can't help myself. I wanna do one more Sure.

Jordi:

Promoted post from Carl Yang, who's building financial products at Ramp.

John:

Okay.

Jordi:

He says he caught up with a friend, and that friend said, I'm supposed to be making strategic decisions and turning around companies with my superior insights since a guy with a HBS hat and his mouth open. And firm is saying, fix the

Jordi:

effing AP process, question mark

Jordi:

or exclamation point exclamation point. And, yeah, a lot of, like, you know, PE is just going in, and, you're not gonna create a tremendous amount of value by getting rid of the the fax machines and the and the sort of, like, you know, taking, payments and checks and stuff like that. But you can have a pretty big impact and Ramp is a fantastic way to do that. I understand that they are, fairly dominant with a lot of the larger PE firms for good reason.

John:

Bring it in.

Jordi:

So Yeah. Totally. Portfolio is built into their process now. So It's

John:

very sharp.

Jordi:

Thank you to Carl for innovating, in one of the most important sectors of our economy.

John:

I'm happy to promote Ramp at any time. Tell them the Technology Brothers sent you if you're onboard. AJA Cortez says, my father went back to college when he was 40, graduated medical school at 47 and has been now a doctor going on 20 years. I didn't realize it at the time, but it made

Jordi:

a deep

John:

impression that a man can reinvent himself at any time. Age is a non factor. And with the and with and that with consistency, effort, discipline, you can do whatever you want. I had no idea people considered age to be a factor at all in a man slowing down until I was in my twenties. I was never raised to think that way.

John:

That's a fantastic post. That's very, very inspiring. And that's true. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we see if

Jordi:

you're if you're going into work and you feel like your work is at the KMS building.

John:

Yeah. Or if

Jordi:

you if you ever feel if you ever feel like you need to have a blanket on at work because you're so miserable. Yep. And you feel sick. Yeah. Reinvent yourself.

Jordi:

So I think this honestly, like, what's funny is do you remember being in college and like the oldest guy in the room was always, like, in the military? Yeah. I graduated. Yeah. And it's very normalized to, like, go in the military, do that for 10 years, come out, and then just, like, have a totally new career.

Jordi:

Right?

John:

It's not like you're like, oh, I

Jordi:

I only know how to shoot a gun.

John:

I'm just gonna

Jordi:

do this.

John:

Just not not exactly.

Jordi:

If you only do

Jordi:

if you only do the things that you know how to do, you'll be sweeping floors your whole life. Right? So, go reinvent yourself, make, like, big, you know, big, moves into different industries.

John:

And there's so many great stories. I've seen that dude who's who was a navy seal, then a doctor at Harvard, and then a astronaut. Yeah. And it's just like, and he's an Asian dude, and the meme is, like, he must have, like, the the only the only Asian dude with, like, parents who are proud of him or something. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. He did the thing and, like, satisfied all of their expectations. I love that. It's such

Jordi:

a So good.

John:

But, yeah, just crush and, go

Jordi:

Just crush. Yeah. Just You can just do things.

John:

You can just do things. Oh, this is a great one from Ben Miles. He asks us, do we have any favorite deal toys? This one is cool from Ginkgo Bioworks. And I actually met the Ginkgo Bioworks guys back in, like, 20 13 in a in a in a office in Boston.

John:

And And you invested. Right? I did not. I had no money to my name, so it's miserable. But I have an interesting

Jordi:

I I

Jordi:

I I

Jordi:

could go back in time, my investment strategy would just be to, like, give John Coogan a $100,000,000

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

In 2012.

John:

And then calls me the, the the Forrest Gump of tech because I've been like, oh, yeah. I was in the same y c batch as Coinbase. Oh, yeah. I was like, hanging out with the Ginkgo Bioworks guys this one time. Oh, yeah.

John:

He's like, met this dude with the random time. And it's just like all these, like, sliding doors moments in Silicon Valley. But Ginkgo Bioworks, it was fascinating. I met with the founding team. We were thinking about working on with them, and we'd raised something like a $1,000,000 or million and a half.

John:

For Soylent. For Soylent. And and they were like, okay. Like, you're the first company. We were YC company.

John:

You're the first company that's in, like, bio or food or anything that's not software that's being taken seriously by by VCs. Like, what and the founder literally told me is, what we'd really love for you to do is go and raise a massive, like, $20,000,000 round because that would just, like, be a massive signal to the market that, like, this is an investable category. And and I was like, ah, that's funny. Like, we'll never do that. And then, like, 6 months later, we raised a $20,000,000 round.

John:

And then immediately after, Ginkgo started raising really big rounds too.

Jordi:

There you go.

John:

And their business is ripping, and then they and they went public. And now, you know, the CTO of, of Palantir is actually on their board, Shamsakar. And it's just a very interesting company. If you don't know what they do, they they they manufacture things for fragrances, but they do a lot of, like, chemical and bioengineering. It's a very cool lab.

John:

Even when I saw it in 2013, they had all these robots moving around like pipetting things.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

So Not

Jordi:

a robotics company, but Not a

John:

robotics company, but they were leveraging robotics and automation. They built a bunch of software to automate testing. So, you know, you need to test, like, 10, you know, 10 different titrations of 1 chemical by 10 different titrations of a different chemical. You mix that creates a 100 different variations. You could just have a PhD student just sitting there doing it.

John:

That sucks. That's what they do in in every lab in America, like all the universities, even Caltech. But they just automated all that. So they were able to iterate through all these experiments, like, much faster. And I think they wound up creating a bunch of, like, basically industrial chemicals that they could go go and sell.

John:

But, I actually like this starting

Jordi:

point as an inspiration for some of our own deal toys Yeah. Of, like, imagine a microphone Yep. In in glass.

John:

Well, I mean, if you if you're not familiar, every week, we do the brother of the week. We award someone who exemplifies what it means to be a technology brother, a student of capitalism, a capital allocator, etcetera. And, at the end of the year, we'll be sending out deal toys to commemorate each brother of the week. And so we wanna do something that captures the fact that, you know, not only are they a student of capitalism, but they're also a great poster.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Because you can't you you can't win as we saw with, with, Mark Cuban, he was brother a week, but he left x. He's no longer a poster, so he had to rescind the award. Yeah. So he won't be getting a deal toy. But, send in your thoughts.

John:

Let us know what do you think our brother of the week deal toy should look like. I'm thinking something with an x in there, something with some dollar signs, something to represent technology, capital, brotherhood.

Jordi:

Thank you to Ben for servicing this to us.

John:

Yeah. Thanks, Ben. Send us your best ideas. Yep. Feel free to get on chat g p t, DALL E, and and create some

Jordi:

There you go.

Jordi:

Some,

John:

Yeah. Create some AI art for us to to inspire us. Morgan Housel says, despite his quote, he says, despite its success, Wong remains acutely aware that NVIDIA's leadership position could prove fleeting, which may explain his relentless work ethic. I do everything I cannot to go I can I I do everything I can not to go out of business? It's from an interview in Fortune with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

John:

I love it. I love a relentless work ethic. Unclear Yeah.

Jordi:

He's even there.

John:

Risky he is in a it seems like his leadership position's in a pretty strong place. I mean, they have massive pricing power. Mentality.

Jordi:

But maybe I'm wrong. Gets you delisted.

John:

There's a lot of startups that are going after this doing, you know, specific chip designs for AI, for LLMs. Yeah. It's like a Maybe there's a risk. Who knows?

Jordi:

They Obviously, there's incredible IP, but we we know it's a a thin wrap around Yep. TSMC. Yeah. And so the reason that, NVIDIA, you know, is successful today is because of that mentality across decades at this point.

John:

Yep. I also just think it's like yeah. I mean, obviously, there's, like, a talent war in everything AI right now, and NVIDIA is no different. There's a lot of people that made a ton of money working for NVIDIA during the latest stock run up.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

You gotta retain them. So you gotta go and proselytize your culture, and then you gotta bring in new people. So you need to talk about, you know, how your company is different from the rest.

Jordi:

Like, this is But here's here's the challenge within video. Right? They've they've grown so quickly

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

That the average employee is like a multi, multi, multimillionaire. Yep. And it's like, we've seen this before. We've had people on the podcast that talk about, you know, oh, I have $10,000,000 of assets. I worry that the dog in me died.

Jordi:

Right? And so Jensen needs to be out there pounding the table being like, we need to keep feeding the dog within us. Yep. Keep that dog alive. Otherwise, somebody's gonna come eat our lunch.

John:

I think he needs to be flexible on the employees a little bit more. He's not a watch guy. But if he was, then Yeah.

Jordi:

He talks about

John:

his ladder. Product manager who's making $1,000,000 a month now, well, good luck getting this, you know

Jordi:

He needs an RM Yeah. Like smiley at 2.2 to $3,000,000.

John:

This guy driving a McLaren f one to work, it's like, that's kinda out of the price range of that rich product manager. So, you know, that's gonna get the product manager to work a little bit harder. Grind. Get to the next level. Get to that senti.

John:

Get to that. Yeah. Status. Yeah. Make it Heat.

John:

Show show the employee who's worth 10 that they would be happy if they got to a 100.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

That's the goal. Yeah. Nicole Wizkoff, speaking of cars, fantastic capital allocator, fantastic car appreciator, but throwing a little shade on Aston Martin here. She says, I saw the first Aston Martin SUV, the DBX, on the road a few years ago. I thought it was the most beautiful car.

John:

Was able to take it out for a drive yesterday. I felt like I went back in time twenty years. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it didn't even hold a candle to the Tesla, and it's 200 k more expensive.

Jordi:

Okay. So

John:

So first mistake. So Disrespecting a legacy brand.

Jordi:

Yeah. That hurts. Aston Martin's a a fantastic manufacturer. So here's the thing with Aston. Yeah.

Jordi:

You don't drive an Aston for the interior electronics. Yep. That's for sure. That said, they they do have new ownership as of the last couple years. I believe Lawrence Schroll

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Father of Lance Schroll,

Jordi:

who's

Jordi:

in in f one, recently took the brand over, and the newest generation of cars that's just hitting the street, just hitting dealerships, has had really big upgrades to the interior. So, but, yeah, you're driving it for the lines, for the the leather, for the the heritage, for the significance. And I would here's my only thing with Aston. If, you know, a lot we we've talked about, you know, needing to make sure that your next car is is about the value of 1% of your AUM. Exactly.

Jordi:

And so if you have a 100 yeah. Yeah. So that means

John:

be budgeting 500 k. The problem with the DBX, it's a 300 k car.

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

So she's actually

John:

200 k shy of

Jordi:

what she's

Jordi:

she's probably, like, frustrated with the quality is because she should be going after maybe a Cullinan or,

John:

I wouldn't even stay within the Aston the Aston ecosystem. You know? Think No. If she if she can raise another 100,000,000, she's in she's in, you know, Valkyrie territory.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

She could get a Lagonda Tarav. Have you seen that

Jordi:

car Yep.

John:

From their premium line? You could even go back and get a Bulldog. Have you seen the Bulldog? That's a fantastic car. It's retro.

John:

It looks weird.

Jordi:

Looks like a sideways lot. For any other sort of emerging GPs that that, you know, maybe can't fit an ask a new estimate than the 1% market for AUM. The great thing about Athens is they lose, like, half their value in the first year.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

So if a DBX at 300 k is too much, wait a year, and you can buy the same car with 2,000 miles for about a 150 k.

John:

That's true.

Jordi:

So that's one of the beauties of the Asen brand is everything's half off after a year.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. Well, good luck to you, Nicole. Make sure you get a really nice car.

John:

Yano says, the most mispriced idea in markets today, crypto founders can finally build the products they want to build where they want to build them. We are truly entering the golden age for crypto products. Couldn't agree more. We see this with Polymarket.

Jordi:

And a huge catalyst to that is the bridge acquisition. Yeah. It wasn't, I think, until there hasn't is that the only or one of a handful of, like, $1,000,000,000 crypto m and a that wasn't a token? You know? Yeah.

Jordi:

It wasn't like it's somebody launching a token. It was

John:

a little bit more of a classic, you know, product acquisition, little like, almost a b to b SaaS company. You can model it that way. And so Yeah. You can tell to a to a strategic acquirer. You need to live off in, like, crypto bizarre land international, whatever.

John:

It's like Yeah. We could make it San Francisco company.

Jordi:

Could make a, you know, a platform like Polymarket

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

To to sell our ad inventory. Right? Sort of a liquid market where I wanna know the second before I I read a promoted post that it's the highest dollar amount that we could possibly capture for that ad unit. Right.

John:

More

Jordi:

programmatic. So a bunch of cool things coming down the pipeline. I think that, I think next y c batch, I'm sure we'll see a lot of crypto company, r f r f, request for startups.

John:

Or r f s. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. That'd be great. Connor McDonald, been on the show before, but we need to give him a follow. The core benefit of AI is to follow. No.

John:

No. No. This is this is we we need to follow him.

Jordi:

Oh, got it.

John:

The follow icon? In black. That means it's their first time on the show. Once you're on the show, we'll give you a follow and then we'll know the next time that you're a repeat Right. You know, guest.

John:

So Connor says the core benefit of AI is to systematize and automate day to day responsibilities and leave more time to podcast and write newsletters. Let's fucking go. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Yep.

John:

99% of my life is now automated with AI, and I can spend 8, 12 hours a day podcasting.

Jordi:

And this

John:

is and we do. And this is the future.

Jordi:

And I hope everyone joins. And I think that, you know, a lot of this episode, the early part of this episode was talking about, you know, Ozempic and the trends there. And and one of the really positive externalities with with people being on Ozempic, doing less to generate sports betting and, you know, spending money on Doritos, they cannot they'll have they'll have more, money. They'll probably have more cards in their wallet. Yep.

Jordi:

And so I think Ridge will be a big beneficiary of that because people would just maybe people might might have so much cash on them Yeah. That they might need multiple wallets

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

That that the Ridge Wallet has a nice, sort of, like, money clip, attached to it. So, look to see Ridge, Ridge's market cap do a nice multiple.

John:

It's fantastic. Let's go to Daniel. He says, BCs are the real founders. Couldn't agree more.

Jordi:

Couldn't agree more.

John:

Jeremy Giffon has a has a hot take that investors are more interesting than founders. Have you heard this? No. It's a good one. It's interesting.

Jordi:

He is a he's an He's

John:

an investor, so he's talking his own book. But, but his idea is that, a lot of the really, really successful investors are looking across markets across it's like the fox and the hedgehog thing

Jordi:

Mhmm.

John:

Where the founder knows one really big idea and is grinding out of building a company in that one narrow space, whereas the investor can actually broaden out and become a generalist and look at capital markets, public markets, private markets, and really understand everything.

Jordi:

Yeah. Founders have a more, deeper understanding of of their, like, generalist within their business or within their industry maybe, but it's still, like, a very, like, Jeremy. Jeremy is like takes per minute or is like very high.

John:

Fantastic.

Jordi:

And that's really what we look for. And and, but, anyways, you know, the way that Daniel is progressing, he'll have like a $500,000,000 solo g p fund within the next 10 years without a doubt. So I think he's just sort of, like, setting himself up for success.

John:

I think so. Another huge talent move, Francois Chollet is out at Google entering free agency. He's gonna start a new company. 1 of the goat programmers at Google put up a massive couple years there on the team, built a, a product called Keras, was deeply involved in machine learning, and also had a great appearance, star appearance, great performance on the Dworkesh Patel podcast, and, and is also involved in a very interesting AI benchmark that, no LLM has been able to defeat yet. And so he's been working with that with Wade over at Zapier, and, and just clearly a very thoughtful person on AI throughout all the boom and all the craziness.

John:

He's always been very locked in and understanding Pragmatic. Where the hype is, where the limitations are. He's not a doomer. He's not a complete optimist, always nuanced, and he never really gets in fights, I see. But he's always he's always bringing, like, really good critiques.

John:

Still optimistic. Still loves the technology. Obviously, building on it. So great to see that he's out starting a new company with a friend. I wonder who it is.

John:

We'll certainly cover it here. And I have a feeling we're gonna be ringing the size gong when this guy raises.

Jordi:

This guy.

John:

I mean, this is a this

Jordi:

is a move.

John:

This is a all time, all all play.

Jordi:

Yeah. When this when this when this post went up, 2 things happened. 1, it happened at Bloomberg Yep. Up in big red candle

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

On the on, Alphabet stock. Yep. It was really rough to see, recovered, but not Yep. Not completely. And then 2, VCs around the country called up their,

John:

the phones were ringing off the hook.

Jordi:

You know, even NetJets was was getting, you know, more calls than usual, but a lot of Gulfstream sort of, like, took off in unison and sort of descended, hoping to get some FaceTime with him, because a big round is coming.

John:

Yeah. I mean, let's just review his career for a little bit. I mean, he built Keras, powers ML solutions that countless companies touch. It powers your recommendations on YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, the fraud filtering of your credit card transactions, Waymo cars that drive you around San Francisco. This guy's a beast.

John:

One of the greatest to ever do it, and we're excited to see where you take it next. Let's go to Zach. Says, update, I hit $1,000,000 in MRR, still not sleeping in. And he says he's quote tweeting himself from almost 10 months ago, been losing sleep to the grind, purely running on the urge to be financially free. After I hit a 100 k m r MRR in high school, then I'll start sleeping in.

John:

What a beast.

Jordi:

He's still he's still in high school?

John:

I I I don't know. Maybe he is. Yeah. I mean, it it sounds like he's still in in high school.

Jordi:

Animal Future, just getting started.

John:

Just getting started.

Jordi:

Future brother of the week, potentially.

John:

Future background draft pick by, potentially, by the by the Holy Trinity VC firms. I could see big dollars going into this.

Jordi:

Absolutely.

John:

Big big contract sign.

Jordi:

Yeah. It's really about the attitude. Yep. Yep. And, if you're not sleep deprived right now, just understand that money doesn't sleep either.

John:

Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Let's go to Eigen Robot. He says he's quote tweeting the ball is orange who says, a lot of lives would be incredibly different if this existed, and it's the United States high speed rail system.

John:

And he says, no. They wouldn't. People would still take the plane or drive. Your lives suck primarily because of the circumstances of your births and the choices you have made in this life. A redundant passenger train system would not meaningfully affect the magnitude of your suffering.

John:

I couldn't agree more. I thank God every single day that America industrialized largely after the invention of the automobile so that we don't need a bunch of slow, inflexible trains cluttering up our country. It's meaningless. And to all the train people out there, stop coping. We have planes and cars and they go everywhere, and we don't need trains.

John:

And in fact, America does have a fantastic rail system. We just use it for freight.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Because America is a lot bigger than France to Germany. Like, France to Germany is like the equivalent of, you know, Boston to New York. It it like, we just don't and you know what? We do have high speed rail between Boston and New York. It's the Acela.

John:

It actually works pretty well.

Jordi:

Go right on that.

John:

But no one wants to ride from Chicago to LA on a train. Even if you're going 200 miles an hour, that's like a 14 hour HR.

Jordi:

My little brother is actually, like, loves to train because he just, like he's a trained guy.

Jordi:

Like, he

Jordi:

should just, like, take in the view and and relax, but I always laugh because I'm like, you're paying more. Yep. You're you're sitting in a in a uncomfortable seat. You're you're spending the night in this little tube, and you could have spent

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

You know, $200 less and gotten there in in 4 hours. Your time's worth a lot more.

John:

I actually do have one nice thing to say about trains. Fantastic for monk mode. When when I was living in Sunnyvale doing YC and I was dead broke, I had to go from Pasadena to Sunnyvale, and I went by train. And it took me all day. Like, 6 AM, I walk to a a local metro rail station, take that to downtown.

John:

Then downtown, I get a bus transfer out to Bakersfield. Yeah. Then a train through the Central Valley, which was actually beautiful and fantastic. And I was able to sit there, No Wi Fi. No nothing.

John:

I was able just to read this book on, actually, language models. It was very, very weird, but it was about, natural language processing, which was kinda like the precursor AI system. Fascinating. Like, the the algorithms are, like, human intelligible essentially still. It's not just, like, crazy tensors and stuff.

John:

Like, you can just understand intellectually how it works. And then, another bus when you get to, you know, Oakland essentially to the Caltrain Yep. And then walk from the Caltrain to Sunnyvale. Took us forever, but the monk mode was fantastic. And being able to get on a train and just watch the countryside go by and actually see how beautiful America is and how much space we have to build is very, very inspiring.

John:

So trains, we like to hate but somewhat underrated. Let's go to Dylan Field, founder of Figma. He says, this week, all eyes should be on Trump's pick for treasury secretary. This appointment is a preview of what we will see over the next 4 years on topics spanning global tariffs, tax policy, the price of Bitcoin, China, and more. Of course, there's a lot of drama and he writes a thread.

John:

I love that he's weighing in on this. This is so great. Like, you know, there there is a world where Dylan is just talking about design.

Jordi:

We need I I really only wanna see threads from people that are post economic. Right? So if you're not a bean air, don't write threats. I agree. If you are a bean air, write more threats.

John:

Yeah. Right? I I x should actually have a functionality for that where there where it links with your bank account

Jordi:

funds.

John:

Proof of funds, and I can say

Jordi:

Or your card or

John:

your card. Yeah. Or your card is fully liquid. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your paper wealth as well. And then I can just I can just say, hey.

John:

Today, x, I only wanna see content from Centies. Yeah. Throw some in there, but don't give me any That

Jordi:

should be a separate feat. Any Maybe Cuban would come back.

John:

Single digit millionaires. I'm not interested.

Jordi:

Yeah. Cuban might even come back.

John:

He might. He might. It would be a big boost to him. Yeah. You know, Elon kinda has the boost where all of his posts kinda get promoted.

John:

No one really knows exactly if it's hard coded or not, or he's just posting bangers. But we need that for for all Sentis and billionaires. Yep. For sure. So shout out to Dylan.

John:

I'm excited. I'm gonna keep an eye on it. I don't know. Has the treasury secretary been teased or leaked or announced? There's a couple there's a couple of people

Jordi:

that are out

Jordi:

that are in the running.

John:

But we don't talk about politics here, so we're not gonna cover it.

Jordi:

That's the show.

John:

But that's the show. I think we should ring the size gong one last time just to commemorate the end of the show. Thanks for watching. Subscribe. Give us 5 stars.

John:

Repost everything. Send our clips to your friends.

Jordi:

Create a, TV clips

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

Channels on Instagram and all those other things and get get to a million of MRRs. We'll feature you on the show.

John:

Thank you. And send us your ideas for Deal toys. That's it. Thank you.