Trump's Tech Career, Power Tools, Say His Name, G650 vs BBJ
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are telling the story of Donald Trump, not because it's the day before the election, not because this is a political show. This is a tech show. We never discuss politics.
Speaker 2:I don't actually think a single political subject. I don't think we've we've yet to cover a single political topic.
Speaker 1:I'm blissfully unaware. We're not gonna start today. Yeah. Not gonna start today. But we are covering Donald Trump today, not because he's the former president, not because he's running for president again.
Speaker 1:We are covering him because he is a tech founder, and we need to talk about the technology angle of the tech company he started, Truth Social. I've had a running joke for a while with a bunch of friends that, you know, Donald Trump might be the best tech entrepreneur of the last 2 or 3 years. And, yeah, obviously, it's it's a kind of a silly thing because people don't think about Trump as a tech founder. But if you actually look at the numbers, I couldn't name another company that got to a $10,000,000,000 valuation in tech in less than 2 years in this recent cycle.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's one of those things you can you know, saying is somebody good or bad, is usually very objective.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But in this case, there's metrics that we can discuss and going from 0 to 2,000,000,000 in 2 years. 10,000,000,000. Sorry. 0 0 to 10,000,000,000 in
Speaker 1:2 years. 6,000,000,000 now.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's been
Speaker 1:3 years, I guess.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit volatile, which we'll get into. But,
Speaker 1:but it's crazy because everyone did expect it just to completely rug and be worthless. And I don't know. Maybe that'll still happen. Nothing here is financial advice, but, it's it's just a fascinating story of, like, how one of these major celebrity deals gets done, how people as big and larger than life than than Trump work, and there was, a big, deep dive in The Economist that we're gonna kinda use as the backbone of research. Truth Social called it a hit piece.
Speaker 1:I think it's actually pretty neutral. You come away from it just kind of learning some things. There's some good, there's some bad, and we'll kinda go into what that hit piece means. But, let's let's start, you know, back in 2016, Trump was kind of this outsider candidate. He was the first I think he was the first president to never hold elected office of any kind before winning.
Speaker 1:And he ran this very unorthodox campaign, tons of just posting on Twitter. Best. Yeah. I think Or
Speaker 2:did you want any other role?
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:think at one point, he was posting something like 40 times a day. And I think during his presidency, he posted something, like, 50,000 times or something like that.
Speaker 2:He puts us to shame.
Speaker 1:I know. Legendary poster.
Speaker 2:And he had been on the record on there's, like, a very specific interview. I think it's back in the nineties. Yeah. Maybe early 2 I think nineties, maybe eighties, where he, like, explicitly says, like, I wouldn't wanna be a part of, you know, public office.
Speaker 3:Really?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1:I don't know that. Yeah. Interesting. I know that, I mean, he's had, like, an obsession with the media and kind of understood understood the, like, the, the asymptotic returns that come from being a media personality for a long time. He had this rule early on that was, like, he would never turn down an opportunity be on TV.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No matter what it was, even if it was gonna be bad, he was, like, I just want the exposure. I because exposure is just so important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's the original like, he's the poster child of, like, no attention is bad attention. Yep. Almost.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. And he and there's that story about how he, like, fought tooth and nail to get on the billionaires list on the Forbes list. And it was, like Everybody else.
Speaker 2:All the other billions
Speaker 1:Or, like, real billionaires.
Speaker 2:Like, like, paying to get taken off of it. He's just like, whatever.
Speaker 3:You don't
Speaker 1:wanna be a hostage.
Speaker 2:The price. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know,
Speaker 1:I don't wanna be extorted. And Trump's like, please. But, yeah, I mean, during the, during the Trump administration or during, like, one of these sagas, there's always a question about, like, what is Trump actually worth? And there was always and he his his argument was, like, well, I'm a billionaire because I have, like, brand equity.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's very funny because now he's kind of converted that brand equity in some way to this, like, meme stock. And it's, like, you know, it's kinda liquid and he kinda does have a lot of money now. So it's hard it's much harder to make the argument that he's not a billionaire now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think he had gone through and, you know, he had seen how owning a business is a great way to convert influence into EBITDA. Right? Where, like, there was, like, a huge amount of the the pressure over the years and sort of naysayers were saying, oh, he uses Mar a Lago as a way for people to buy favor with the Trump family in in a similar way that, you know, Hunter Biden has has had an esteemed, art career as well Yeah. Which is, you know, one could argue that that's another way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I think that could get a little political.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think the whole story starts essentially right after January 6th. Massive ride at the capitol, lot of pressure on Trump, and the tech community kind of comes together and deplatforms him all simultaneously. He gets his Facebook, YouTube, snap Snapchat, and his beloved Twitter account. He gets kicked off of all of those.
Speaker 1:And he got deplatform from, like, Shopify and a bunch of other things. I think there was a rumor at the time that they're, like, all the CEOs were just in a group chat together. And so there were there was a little bit of moment where it was, like, okay. Shutting down this he's still the sitting president because the inauguration was on 20th, kicking the the the sitting president off of so he is is a crazy move. So they had to all be in, like, unison and be, like, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're all gonna do this.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And a lot of a lot of pushback at the time, even though January 6th was really crazy. But what's interesting is that within just a few days, like, there was a plan in place for Truth Social. So, this all this all started when a pair of former contestants on Trump's reality TV show, The Apprentice, Wesley Moss, who's a financial adviser and actually has a YouTube channel with, like, 20 k subs. This guy, Wes Moss, he talks about, like, how to retire early. And, and this How to retire early?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Back a company to 10,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Wait until you hear the end of the story. I'm not kidding. And then Andrew Dean Letinsky, who is a Harvard grad. He now goes by, Andy Dean, I think, and has a radio show. But these two guys, these two former apprentice, contestants show up to Mar a Lago.
Speaker 1:And over, they meet with Trump on January 26th. So just 6 days after January 6th. Like, the dust is very much not set.
Speaker 2:Not wasting any time.
Speaker 1:And they and they meet with him. They share cheeseburgers. And they describe their vision for, like, Trump's new media empire, which is crazy. I mean, my my takeaway is, obviously, like, you know, working with Trump is, like, you know, like, extremely volatile. There's a lot of things that could go wrong.
Speaker 1:But, the the takeaway for me is just, like, if you have the opportunity to go to, like, a billionaire's mansion who has, like, an an insane amount of some sort of cornered asset in Trump's in Trump's case
Speaker 2:Social capital.
Speaker 1:It's like social capital. But even if it's, like, somebody who's, like, oh, yeah, they're sitting on, like, massive forest reserves or, like, water rights and, like, you have a chance to go there and sell them on a vision for, like, what they should do next Yeah. That's gonna be extremely, extremely valuable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And Yeah. It's it's an example of, you know, the market is efficient in some ways, but deeply inefficient in other ways. Yeah. We I have a friend who is a health and wellness influencer.
Speaker 2:And basically, the first person that came and pitched him on doing a supplement company, he was just, like, sure, that sounds great. Yep. The business does, like, you know, 1,000,000 of dollars a year in revenue now. Yeah. So you can just do things.
Speaker 2:You can just pitch things. Right? And these guys, like, you know, had they waited even another few weeks, maybe the opportunity never would have happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. A 100%. It's not like these guys were, like, x Facebook, x Twitter, like, really established in social media. They just had the connection to Trump to the show.
Speaker 1:Clearly, like, a lot of energy, and you'll see that throughout this this story. Like, the the dates we'll go over the dates, and it's, like, major milestone every, like, three months. Like, the speed of execution here is is very remarkable, faster than what I would think would be possible given the scale of the operation. So they go to they go to Mar a Lago. They they they pitch it, and they kinda break down this idea of this truth social new media offering.
Speaker 1:They're talking talking about a streaming service, online payments network, a social media platform. And can you guess what the deal terms were? This is this is fascinating to me because, like, we we know a lot of companies that have done deals with celebrities, and it it ranges all the way from, like, oh, we just paid them a CPM deal and they posted on their Instagram to, oh, we gave them a couple points of equity to, like, these 5050 deals that happen every once in a while. I I Yeah. I know some people that just did one of those.
Speaker 1:In this case, Trump got 90% of the new company.
Speaker 2:Which in hindsight was very fair. Yeah. I mean, that the real enterprise value is you can there's almost a direct line between the company's enterprise value and Trump's social capital. Yep. And you can see the
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Fluctuations there. It's interesting. I would love to I don't know if this will ever be shared, but I wonder if you he there were other competing bids and people were, like, there's no way we can give him 90% of the cap table. Like, that would never make sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And those people left, like, $1,000,000,000 on the table Yeah. Basically. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it went for when it was trading at 10,000,000,000. It's literally a 1000000000. And so these guys got I mean, they split the the rest. So I think I think, Wes and Andy got maybe 5% each, and then, of course, there were dilution and, you know, equity grants after that. But, still, like, when you think about what where they were going and they clearly had a vision of, like, a $1,000,000,000, multibillion dollar exit essentially, like, pretty good terms for not, you know, for, like, a couple of years of work, basically.
Speaker 1:And so they are trying to set up financing, but instead of going I I think they actually did pitch this in the valley, and I think some VC firms passed on, like, a traditional deal. But very quickly, they go straight
Speaker 2:to because the VCs would look at it and be, like, alright. You have a non operating partner with 90%. It just violates everything. Out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You would have to be very contrarian to do it.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Extremely. And and then there's also all this volatility about, like, okay. Well, if Trump runs again, maybe he'll deprioritize through social.
Speaker 1:Or if he wins, then that could invite a whole bunch of other scrutiny. It's like there's so many failure modes. It totally makes sense not to do it if you're a traditional VC. Even if you're hunting for, like, oh, something that's edgy, it's still really risky. And so they decide to go the the SPAC route.
Speaker 1:This was, 2021. SPACs were, like, super, super hot there. And I I I I actually haven't been involved in a SPAC. I know you know some guys who have done them. But I think most people think about a SPAC as, like, going public in the sense that, like, the company drives the process and says, like, we are going public.
Speaker 1:Okay. Like, now we have done that. But with SPACs, it's much more like like the SPACs exist. There were, like, 326 different SPACs, which are these, you know, special purse purpose acquisition companies. They're holding companies blank checks.
Speaker 1:So they they IPO the company with, like, basically no financials. So it's a very simple process of the SCC. It gets approved. It has a stock ticker, but it's just trading at the value of the cash. And then they go and acquire a business that exists.
Speaker 1:And then once they once they do that acquisition, they can rebrand or re rename the ticker, and then the company's public. So the company doesn't need to go through all the traditional process and all the oversight. So it happened a ton. A lot of
Speaker 2:the Beautiful financial innovation.
Speaker 1:Incredible. And I'm sure it'll be back. And it actually like, SPACs are not entirely new. It's something that was, like, revitalized in 2020, 2021. They've existed for a while.
Speaker 1:These, like, reverse mergers. But, Moss and and Letchinsky, Andy and West, these guys start calling, all the different specs that are out there to try and get them to bite on the true social deal. And so they call 326 candidates, which is hilarious because you know Chamath got a call.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because he had, like, 7 different he had, like, IPO a, IPO b, IPO c, IPO d at the time. And they were definitely, like
Speaker 2:You would have kept going too.
Speaker 1:These. Oh, yeah. Like, you have so many of these. Like, let's let's do it. But, everyone passed essentially for for reasonable reasons.
Speaker 1:Liberals wouldn't touch it. Even those who agreed to meet were wary. Many said no right away. At least one person yelled, like, get out of my office. I don't want anything to do with you.
Speaker 1:There's this funny quote.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have to think about how toxic the Trump brand was then. Right?
Speaker 1:It was post Jan 6th.
Speaker 2:Couldn't have been more.
Speaker 1:Now there's been this, like, control
Speaker 2:over my Anybody that was passing, like, had, like, infinite reasons to pass even if they thought it could do well. Yeah. It just almost wasn't worth the career risk for anybody to go and do that.
Speaker 1:Even the people who liked Trump and maybe they supported him in 2016 or 2020, it's, like, like it was very clear that Trump's, like, star was waning at that moment. This whole 2024 cycle has just been, like, a surprising revival of the Trump brand. But, there's And
Speaker 2:a case study on the human spirit.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. But there's this interesting quote from Merida Merger, which was one of those facts that, like, talked on the record about it. So I was like, I don't wanna be on half the country's radar. I don't want anyone looking at my name.
Speaker 1:I have kids.
Speaker 3:And he
Speaker 1:said once he once he started to dig in, he was like, it looked like a quick cash grab rather than a long lasting business venture. We don't do the cult of personality thing. And so, you know, Adam and Wes start they keep calling and eventually they find this guy, this swaggering Miami based investor named Patrick Orlando. What a great name for a guy based in Florida. Patrick Orlando.
Speaker 2:Dominative determinism. Essentially.
Speaker 1:It's great. And so
Speaker 2:It'd be great. We We gotta we should do a deep dive. He might be brother of the week at some point.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Yeah. And so, Patrick Orlando had already taken one of these blank check companies public. He was sitting on a SPAC. So it's a search fund.
Speaker 1:It's just like the the the Harvard MBA that raises 10 mil to go buy some HVAC company, but on a much bigger scale, raising maybe a 100,000,000, and then and then going and finding the the business. And during this
Speaker 2:time This time, there was so people that the all those hundreds of SPACs out there were going and hitting up every possible like, they were there was way more SPACs than there were qualified companies. Right? And so
Speaker 1:I was golfing with an investment banker, around this time and and he was like, oh, like, your company, Lucy, might be a target for a SPAC. Right? And I was like, no. Like, we're, like, pretty small still. Like, this wouldn't make sense.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't want to be a public company.
Speaker 2:He's like that.
Speaker 1:He was like and he was like, well, what's wrong? Like, is your cost structure not big enough? That was the problem. Yeah. It wasn't the revenue.
Speaker 1:It was like but if we could have justified, like, oh, yeah. We're burning a $100,000,000 a year, so it totally makes sense. That would have been justification to SPAC, not the revenue because the revenue is immaterial. But what Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there was there was so much capital available at that time.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically, it was a last resort for most companies where if you couldn't really go public and you couldn't access private capital
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That was the best route.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then also, like, you you like Which
Speaker 2:had a huge adverse selection problem. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And also
Speaker 1:that I feel like there's just been this massive drought in, like, liquidity for VC funds for a long time where, like, the companies were all marked really high and they were great, but there was just no actual payouts to any LPs. And so if you had, like, maybe you were holding on to some power law winners that would like IPO properly, but if you could get some early liquidity and just kind of clean up your portfolio by spacking a bunch of things, that felt pretty good because you could distribute the shares. Now, of course, what happened was that a lot of these companies got locked up and then the stocks tanked. And so the LPs got dumped on and and didn't really wind up with anything good. But, but, yeah, I mean, around this time, like, Trump was really, really anxious to rejoin social media and just kind of get his content game back up.
Speaker 2:He's a poster.
Speaker 1:He's a poster.
Speaker 3:He's a poster.
Speaker 2:And so just like the founding fathers. I I didn't know he did
Speaker 1:this, but he he started a blog called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump. And, and and he was thinking about, like, going direct and kind of doing his own thing. And there was a lot of tension about this deal, but, eventually, they got it done. And so on June 4, 2021, Trump and Orlando signed a preliminary agreement to work together as far as Moss and Latinsky were concerned.
Speaker 1:The money was coming. Now all they had to do was build the company. So think about this. Jan 6th, insane riot, like, the worst press for anyone in the entire world. Like
Speaker 2:Really dark time.
Speaker 1:Getting impeached, I think, around that time too, like, very quickly. Like, just miserable. The Jan 26th, they meet, have cheeseburgers at Mar a Lago, and are, like, let's do this thing. And then June 4th, less than 6 months later, they're, like, okay. We have the money lined up.
Speaker 1:We're going public with this company.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Insane. You can just do this. It's crazy. So
Speaker 2:Cheeseburgers that he could have been having cheeseburgers at the Rosewood. Yeah. Instead, he was on the in Florida.
Speaker 1:Mar a Lago.
Speaker 2:At Mar a Lago.
Speaker 1:And so, they bring in on this guy, Josh Adams, who doesn't exist online, and he brings on Billy Boozer as technology officers. And
Speaker 2:so Great names.
Speaker 1:Billy I know. Josh Adams and Billy Boozer. So Billy Boozer is a a a tech guy. And they start building this, this group of software developers because they're actually gonna go gonna go build this thing now that they have the funding lined up. And so they're doing a lot of interesting things.
Speaker 1:They're working at this WeWork in Atlanta. And, and and and, like, it's basically all, like, tech tech developers, like, engineers who have, like, kind of dropped out of society or, like, hardcore libertarians or, like, living off the grid. And then and then the entire management team is just former apprentice, like, former apprentice stars. He says, he says at one point, there were 3 or 43 or 4 of the people there were contestants on The Apprentice. So they're just like, okay.
Speaker 1:We need somebody in a suit to, like, do biz dev, like, get get a charismatic person who's been on TV. It's, it's kinda genius. I I really think we need a new apprentice.
Speaker 2:It's it is funny, though, that because that's kind of how hiring generally works. It's like, oh, yeah. I work with this guy, like, 6 or 7 years ago. Like, he's he's good. I trust him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's just, like, the best guy for the job that you're aware of at that time. And all it takes is, like, one text message and a call, and he's like, cool. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We really need a new we really need a new apprentice. Maybe we should do it. Something that's, like, mister beastified for the for the next generation. Hit us up in the comments if you wanna be on our apprentice show.
Speaker 1:So, and then they bring on this, like, remote software engineer from Macedonia, and they're basically forking, Mastodon. Are you familiar with this open source project? And so they're they're using a lot of that as, like, the the the the base code to build the the network. And, it's it's, like, pretty janky in the early stage, like, very much like a fork of this thing. Doesn't really look really good, but they all have faith that, you know, Adams and Boozer and these other guys will, like, you know, fix it up before they launch.
Speaker 2:Move fast and break things work for meta. It'll work for truth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so a lot of people at the company are basically just blackpelled on social media generally because of the deplatforming. Yep. And so they're they're they're all there kind of on a on a mission, just saying, like, okay. You know, it seems like they all support Trump generally, but they're more there about, like, free speech and, like, the importance of, like, like, an open platform.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of how all these things get started. Like, even Mastodon, I think, got started in the same way. Blue Sky had the same thing, and there's been a couple other, there there's so many of these clones at this point. I think Jack Dorsey is working on a new one. There's that crypto one, and and and the Farcaster.
Speaker 1:Farcaster. Yeah. And the whole and the whole plan is always, like, we're gonna be more open, more consistent, less, you know, mercurial about the policies and what not. And so, these the the the developers, they they're quoted here saying they found it outrageous that Twitter had suspended Trump's account. The problem as they saw it was pressure from corporate advertisers whose play it safe attitudes, Adam, summed up as you can't put our brand right next to the guy that's saying all the mean words.
Speaker 1:And I kind of get that, like, you know, if you're at if you're at Twitter and and every advertiser is calling you, like, I don't want my I don't want my ads appearing
Speaker 3:next to Trump. But what what I always found weird was, like, the
Speaker 1:advertisers never had a to Trump. But what what I always found weird was, like, the advertisers never had a problem advertising in the middle of, like, a Trump rally that was being advertised or that was being broadcast on NBC or at CNN. It was only later when it was like, okay, Trump's, like, this really Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's kind of a cop out of being, like, oh, we're getting all this pressure from this other group and just, like, putting the putting the blame on them versus taking responsibility as a platform, because it's it's a lot, you know, having, like, a programmatic ad is just dramatically different than a podcast ad. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where they're actual
Speaker 2:actually is, like, an endorsement happening. Yeah. And you and you'd think that, like, yeah, people would be able to segment out, like,
Speaker 1:okay, this ad clearly is not related to this in this incendiary treat tweet. Yeah. And, usually, like, if you're an anti Trump guy, like, the algorithm will serve you, like, the quote tweet that's dunking on him. Yep. So, like, you're it's not it's very rare that you're seeing just, like, pure Trump tweets that are, like, on Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the platforms, you have to imagine there's millions and tens of millions of people who would only use the platforms to consume Trump content. Yeah. And so the plat it wasn't the platform's incentive to boot him. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Because they're just in the business of capturing attention and monetizing it.
Speaker 1:And that was the story of all of the Trump rallies that got broadcast on CNN and NBC prior to the 2016 election. Like, that those were phenomenal for ratings. So everyone had these incentives aligned to promote Trump, and he got so much earned media and so much free press just because he was, like, the clown who was polling at, like, 3%. But then he won, and everyone was, like, oh, shit. We should probably, like, not do that if we care about, you know, blocking him from being the president.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so now he's been much more, like, you know, constrained. Although he's made, obviously, a comeback in the 2024 cycle, and he's been much more platform this time around, mostly due to x and and other, like, podcasts. Obviously, he did, like, a 1000000 podcasts and hasn't had any problem with those. Like Yeah. It is it is weird because, you know, technically, like, when when Andrew Tate got deplatformed, it wasn't just that they banned the Andrew Tate accounts.
Speaker 1:They actually would ban, like, Tate fan club number 65. And
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That and that count whole acquisition strategy was this, like, affiliate Yep. Model Yep. Where anybody could monetize the Tate brand.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so he would go on a livestream, talk for, like, 3 hours. His little minions would, like, clip it and then go viral with those and then be selling
Speaker 3:A lot
Speaker 2:of those people that were clipping had more ARR than average YC batch. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, but but that was, like, a that was another, like, unique, like, moment in, like, you know, a platform censorship or deplatforming because it wasn't just Andrew Tate's account that got banned. It was, it was people that were posting Andrew Tate content. And so there was a worry at the time that the same thing would apply to Trump. And if Rogen had Trump on, Rogen would lose his YouTube account.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But that didn't happen because I think there was just, like, too much pressure, too much pushback, which I think is good. Because, like, Rogen should be able to talk to
Speaker 2:It's also very different that the Tate minion accounts were purely trying to sell Andrew Tate courses, whereas if Joe Rogan is covering something in the news, it's just news.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And so the first decision that they really have to make at Truth Social is the is kind of the the monetization model, like the business model. And so, they they have this they don't want pressure from advertisers because that was the whole thing that started this problem with, with Trump getting kicked off of all the major social media platforms. And so they were thinking about either charging for the service itself, like, you know, $10 a month just to go on it, like Spotify, or, do something else.
Speaker 1:They they had this idea and they landed on this business model similar to the one used by Twitch, the video streaming site where most of the content is free, but fans can tip or subscribe to creators and the site takes a cut of that. And this is an interesting question that I think I keep coming back to as I dig into the Truth Social story is, like, how much like, whether you think it went right or wrong, that's kind of an exercise for the listener. But the question is, is are the problems or benefits due to strategy or execution?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I think that if you went to, like, you know, Ben Thompson, who studies, you know, these platforms at Stratechery and asked him, you know, what the best business model is for a social network, he would almost he would want you to push to, like, the the extreme ends. And that's what he was advocating for on on Twitter. He was saying, like, you either need to be completely free and tons of ads that are really well targeted and kind of be the aggregator like Meta. And that's why Meta has done really well even post ATT and when Apple pulled back on all the targeted ads. Apple's or or Meta's been doing really, really well.
Speaker 1:Or you need to be completely closed, pay only, paywall only, like what Ben does at Stratechery
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Where, you know, you only pay for everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And Trump could have thrown up a substack and gotten to 9 figures of ARR very, very quickly.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:But he wouldn't it would have taken much longer to become a billionaire that way. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And in many ways, like, truth social fits into the theme of Trump's life, which is he is an entertainment brand.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? And truth social is an entertainment experience and that you can go on there and see funny things and laugh and retweet things and things like that. But now it's become an entertainment product in the form of a ticker symbol where it just provides, you know, daily entertainment in the form of watching the number go up or down
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Usually very dramatically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a meme stock. And so it's interesting because there it seems like at the time there was a debate between the executives, like the apprentice business guys and the developers and the software engineers who were more on like a What's new? They're more like missionary versus mercenary.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the missionaries who are very all about, like, openness and and durability and censorship resistance, they don't wanna do an advertising model. And they actually say here that, that, you know, for many users, ads and other profit boosting ploys had ruined the experience of of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. And I think that's an that's an incredibly incorrect take.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is we've talked about Jordy's Law. Right? Which is the higher quality of the content, the more ads you can jam in it. And if you have a media product and you can't put a lot of ads in it, it usually is just not that great of a product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, also, I mean, there's the real there's the revealed preference, which is that every Facebook and Instagram and Twitter user says, oh, the ads are so bad, and yet they keep logging on Yep. Way more than they would if they paid.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. With x, I want the ads to get better. Yeah. I want more targeted ads. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The only reason I'm annoyed by ads on x is I'm, like, this isn't relevant to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very clear that the whole iOS privacy app tracking transparency thing was just political infighting between the big tech companies. I don't wanna see bad ads. I wanna see good ads for things that I'm shopping for.
Speaker 2:I like when I'm talking with my friends about something and
Speaker 1:then Something pops up.
Speaker 2:An hour later, I get an ad for it. That's like a bookmark that I never had to it's, you know, it's like
Speaker 1:automatic bookmark. I actually know people that, if they're if they're shopping for something, they're like, okay. I need to make a decision about, like, which printer to buy. They'll go just, like, visit all the printer web sites.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:And then it's, like, they hold court on Instagram. And they're just, like, come to me. You know? Oh, like, I I've been doing some research on, you know, which which, jitter free coffee company I should buy. Let me visit all their websites, and then they'll all advertise to me.
Speaker 1:And whichever has the greatest ads, I'll buy. But but but I don't need to make decisions based on your website. I'm gonna make the decision based on your ads. Yeah. It's very interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But then, I mean, the other thing is that ads are just much better at price discrimination. And so if you have if you have a billionaire in your audience and you also have a college kid in your audience and you're charging $10 a month, they both pay $10 a month.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:But but if you're doing an ad based model, you'll get $1 in ads from the college kid and you could get $1,000 or $10,000 from the billionaire
Speaker 2:because value.
Speaker 1:Because it's targeted to you're gonna be able to target more premium ads. Yeah. And so that that price discrimination really, really maximizes value capture for these for these digital platforms. And that's why ads really are, like, the end all be all of monetization strategies for these companies. It's interesting.
Speaker 1:Do you know Dalton Caldwell at Y Combinator? He's a he's a YC partner. He started a company called app.net. Do you remember this? No.
Speaker 1:Back in I wanna say, like, 2012 or something.
Speaker 2:Still in high school.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He he started a paid Twitter. It was it was, you know, you had to pay to use it. And the whole idea was that the money would go to developers who'd be able to develop things on top, kind of like Farcaster, where it's, like, open. And and and you had a really tough time with it because it was hard to to get that viral growth.
Speaker 1:Whereas with Twitter, it's like you can always hear a news story and be like, oh, I should get on there and then you're on. And then the more you use it, the more money they make. And the money that they make is directly proportional to the amount of time that you spend on the site and the and your wealth, essentially.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:if you're buying, you know, Rolexes and Lamborghinis, they're gonna make a lot more money from you than somebody who's just, you know, shopping for Kenny Crush or whatever. But, yeah, it's it's it's it's fascinating. They they also had this crazy struggle with their tech stack because they didn't wanna get deplatformed and, like, rugged by one of the tech companies. Do you remember the Parler situation where Parler was on Amazon Web Services and because a bunch of the January 6ers were on Parler organizing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Parler just got booted. And if you just lose your hosting provider, you're not gonna be able to move over, like, just instantly.
Speaker 2:This is what Matt from Antimetal was originally working on, which is, like, a decentralized crypto native cloud, which at that moment, that's what Wow. The original Antimetal was, which made a lot of sense. Yeah. And it turns out, they ended up evolving the company, into what it is today because there was only a tiny, tiny, tiny group of companies that actually needed decentralized cloud. Yep.
Speaker 2:And they weren't necessarily the customers that you actually wanted. Yeah. But in that moment in time, it felt like, oh, yeah. Cloud should be decentralized and accessible regardless of, like, your the political leanings of the platform. Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's very niche. I've seen it work in there's this, there's this rendering network for CGI where, every every CGI artist has a really beefy computer, but they're not always rendering out their projects. So they can share render time between the computers.
Speaker 1:So the computer is basically always rendering. And they're rendering your project while you're rendering their project, and there's, like, render tokens in between. They have, like, a crypto thing. And I think it's I think it's been, like, one of the more successful, like, use cases even though it's kind of a small market. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So then, they, you you know, they're hiring more people, to to scale up the company, like, actually build this thing. They hire this interesting guy, this Baptist of South Asian descent named Justice Eapen, who is canceled for tweeting, God smites unbelievers. Isn't that crazy? Like, he was an engineer at some company, and another engineer posted on Reddit complaining about him. And he was disowned by his friends and called a bigot and a fascist by strangers.
Speaker 1:And what's weird is that, like, based on that response, I feel like he must have tweeted something crazier. Like, tweeting I feel like some some you could go tweet God smites unbelievers, right now and people would be, like, like, so true.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or, like, isn't that just like
Speaker 2:a stream from God from
Speaker 3:the Bible?
Speaker 1:Like, that's not, like, that controversial, I think. But I
Speaker 2:guess the intention matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But he had he had a very he had a very bad go of it. And so he was one of those people that was, like, really driven by the mission. Right? And then, it says also among the other recruits was Ryan Lackey, a libertarian programmer who had been working since 19 nineties to stop what he thought of as excessive corporate and governmental interference on the Internet.
Speaker 1:And, do you recognize this guy, Ryan Lackey?
Speaker 2:Looks like a boss. I know. That guy could I interviewed him I interviewed him in Miami. Yeah. This not this year?
Speaker 1:Yeah. This year.
Speaker 2:Really? Yeah. I interviewed him about
Speaker 1:about prepping.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, that's that's him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, I mean, he has a wild, wild story. He, he was a civilian who went to Iraq during the war just to build a business. Like, he wasn't in the military. He just went there to install satellite communications and take, like, really small, like, DOD contracts here and there.
Speaker 1:So, like, the the army would be like, oh, we have some forward deployed base.
Speaker 2:That's a guy. If he opened a field, that's safe at a 100
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You'd you'd you'd enter it any first.
Speaker 1:And and you know, you know Sealand that, like, offshore in What's
Speaker 2:this, guys?
Speaker 1:Offshore concrete platform located in North Sea, 7 miles off the English coast. He went there and installed a server farm there, and he was, like, doing their, like, IT. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So he he so he was there.
Speaker 1:I think he was doing, like, security and stuff. They had a man who worked at Apple. They had a bunch of other people. Basically, just, like, the outcasts of tech, like, all come together in this we work Atlanta. The black sheep.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And it's very funny because they start, like, colliding with each other in very interesting ways because they're all, like, they're they're all similar in how fringy they are, but they're all different fringes. So there's one guy who Strong
Speaker 2:opinion strongly held. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's one guy who describes himself as a a literal communist.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know why he's working And a vegan.
Speaker 1:And a vegan. And, and he gets it and and then, like, Eapen, the guy who tweeted God smites unbelievers, was observed proselytizing to his colleagues, particularly Gleeson, the vegan communist, which is so funny because it's just like you have all these, like, black sheep, and they're all just, like, fighting in this chaos pit. Yeah. It's no.
Speaker 2:It's not just, like, a group of people with differing views that are all, like, happy to be around people with differing views. Yeah. A bunch of people that are, like, no. I am right. I'm right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're all We
Speaker 1:need no government at all or we need a complete government.
Speaker 3:We're
Speaker 2:gonna argue until we figure this out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But probably some interesting conversations. But then there's this, like, anecdote about how, like, so that it's all, like, just, like, chaos as we work, like, trying to build this thing, like, forking open Sys projects, like, working so fast. And and then, like, when Patrick Orlando, like, the big, like, investor, the stack owner comes by, they have to, like, bring all the remote workers in to, like, make them look bigger and, like, put up big displays and, like, play Trump clips on the TVs to be, like, this is a real office.
Speaker 1:Like, this is this is, like, a real deal. And and and and, like, the former
Speaker 2:Why is there no Hollywood documentary on this yet, by the way?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, that's the whole reason I wanna do this story was because, you know, as much of a joke as it is, like like, this does deserve a a profile in Bloomberg. Like, the information should be telling this story because it's one of the most interesting stories in tech in the last few years. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I don't need the 5th, mockumentary of of WeWork. I want the first of Trump Social.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Trump Social. Actually, it's true social.
Speaker 2:Freudian slip.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. And, I mean, these interactions are so funny. It probably it probably should be, like, a a mockumentary or or or some sort of movie because it's No. It should
Speaker 2:be a very serious documentary about a very serious technology entrepreneur named Donald J. Trump.
Speaker 1:I think Trump should go on the circuit with Emily Chang.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We need an Alex Conrad piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Get him
Speaker 1:get Alex, if you're listening. Yeah. Yeah. Do
Speaker 3:Yeah. Do it. Your move. And so and so they're they're, like, the the tech people keep bringing, like,
Speaker 1:the Trump Organization, like, ideas for, like, how to, you know, juice engagement on the site, and one of them is so funny. So they told Trump about the possibility of giving early adopters of the site a digital badge, something similar to Twitter's Bluetick. Trump thought he was talking about making physical badges like a like a sheriff's 5 pointed star and mailing them out.
Speaker 2:To users.
Speaker 1:Which is, like, actually what they should have done. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should have done that.
Speaker 1:It would have been so good. Like, I would it would be such a collectible to get, like, the original True Social. Have you ever used True Social? I actually signed up. I created an account just to see, like, what's going on there.
Speaker 1:It's chaos.
Speaker 2:I feel like I get the core content in the form of screenshots that are then posted
Speaker 1:Not even. To x. There's very little that, like, actually makes it its way over because it's all so boring.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's all just like Yeah. And the ads are particularly funny because they're all, like, ads for, like, 3rd party an an, like, unpaid for our what's it called when you don't, like, register a trademark? You're not paying the money doesn't go to Trump, but it's like a Trump t shirt, basically.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he's just, like, cool with it because, like, whatever. Yeah. But they're all they're all framed. Like, the the ad strategy there is basically to put up a poll, like, a fake poll, and the poll will be, like, do you support Donald j Trump? And it'll be like, hell yes or, like, no.
Speaker 1:And no matter what you click, it's just an image. So no matter what you click, it takes you to the next thing. It'll be like, do you wanna take back the country from the corrupt Democrats? And it'll be like, yes or no. You can click no.
Speaker 1:It'll still take you to the next thing, and it just takes you to check out. Yeah. So, like, a $60 t shirt or, like, a coin or something that's, like
Speaker 2:Well, maybe that's a good segue into their monetization and and kind of the numbers they're putting up.
Speaker 1:Tell me. You have some?
Speaker 2:No. No. I mean, we we I mean, you you'd pulled up their chart earlier. Oh, yeah. How they've done about about $1,000,000 of ad revenue in the last 12 months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Last 12 months.
Speaker 2:They're not they're they're post monetization.
Speaker 1:It's a story in order
Speaker 2:of magnitude. Focusing on monetization or if it's just sort of happening by nature being a big technology platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:It's, I'll let you get I think the numbers are, in the last 12 months, they did a little over $1,000,000 in revenue. They, EBITDA was negative 100,000,000. Net income was negative 400,000,000, roughly 3.80. And it's almost a $10,000,000,000 company. So you can think of it as like
Speaker 2:It's a gross story, though.
Speaker 1:It's a gross story. It's wild. And so, yeah. I mean, they wind up building this site and it's actually, like, a very simple front end. It's like a direct clone of, like, every Twitter clone ever.
Speaker 1:But the back end is, like, extremely complex because they need to have, like, 2 providers for everything. Like, 2 databases, 2, you know, front end or 2 2, like, I forgot what they call it, like, CDNs because, like, you get
Speaker 2:DB uncancelable man Yeah. And you had to have the equivalent
Speaker 1:Back end.
Speaker 2:Social media platform Basically. Distribution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so so they're so they're building all this and, like, I think at a certain point I I think this happens a lot with, like, the Trump projects where it's just, like, he's at Mar a Lago, somebody says, hey, I'll give you 90% of this business. And he's, like, yeah. Go for it. Like like, we'll see what happens.
Speaker 1:And then they came back with, like, the SPAC offer and he's, like, okay. This is getting interesting. And they come back with, like, a site that's, like, kind of working and, like, oh, okay. Like, maybe I should go deeper. And so then Imagine
Speaker 2:I can imagine him, like, hammering out a tweet, you know, not a tweet.
Speaker 1:A post to truth. A post to
Speaker 2:truth. And hitting send for the first time and seeing it lag for, like, 20 seconds and then post to me, like, not bad. Not bad. Because he grew up in the era, like, he came, like, he became relevant in the era that it was really hard to build software products. So he had probably had other attempts and then, like, this is really hard.
Speaker 2:And so just having a working product, he was probably pretty excited about it.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, he's a printed email guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He doesn't he doesn't do email on the computer. It's all all it's all printed out for him. And then he just says, okay. Yeah. Respond to this this way.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:And so, you know And I think I think as yes. For sure.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:think as as things start to get a little bit more real, the the rest of the Trump org kinda descends. So Eric Trump Yeah.
Speaker 2:They'll start.
Speaker 1:And wants a piece. And, Don Junior wants a piece as well. Melania. And Melania wants some shares. And, and they kind of go back and forth.
Speaker 1:They're fighting with, Latinsky and
Speaker 2:Yeah. They try to go back on
Speaker 1:the deal. Right? Moss. Well, yeah. They try and go back on the deal and they try and say, like, you know, oh, that that thing that we signed, that term sheet for 90%, like, that wasn't accurate.
Speaker 1:Like, we don't want you to run this thing, like,
Speaker 3:you know
Speaker 2:Which is funny because it was already so aggressive. How do you get more aggressive than that when it's Yeah. Yes. It would have still made sense for them to do it even if they had a point of the company. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But going trying to take him from 10:10 down to Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:And so they so they issue another 3% of the company to the Trump org. They didn't give any to Melania. I assume it's just, like, dilution on top of the existing structure. But what's really interesting is that, like, Litinsky and and Wes Moss, like, the original guys, even though they only owned 10% of the company, they must have had some block right or something or, like, the board must have been structured in a way that they could because otherwise, you would just be hearing about, like, and then they were gone and, like, then they lost all their equity and, like, that didn't happen. Maybe it was just, like, legal threat, but
Speaker 2:they knew what they were doing on that fateful cheeseburger movie.
Speaker 3:They were,
Speaker 1:like, we will give you 90% of the economics, but we want we
Speaker 2:wanna gain They were on the apprentice. They learned from
Speaker 1:The best.
Speaker 2:Donald himself. How do you Yeah. So Donald's probably sitting there being, like, they're using my moves against me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, like, as as so so they sort all that out and as they as they're starting to build, they they do wind up partnering with Rumble, which is, like, the the the the YouTube competitor, that's actually, like, fairly big. I I know some people that have worked there.
Speaker 2:Also public. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it's a public company. I think it was another SPAC and, and They acquired, Yep.
Speaker 2:Our peers over at All In. Yep. I think Rumble acquired Colin
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Which is cool.
Speaker 2:Yep. Little cameo from, Saks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so they, they they they do have, like, a more robust tech stack than
Speaker 2:some of
Speaker 1:the other, partners. And so the idea was, okay, maybe we get on Rumble. Can host our our data. But at the time, Rumble's Rumble hadn't been struggling with, like, deplatforming as much because most of the stuff they host I mean, they host, like, Barstool. They host, who's that guy from Get Into The Greek?
Speaker 1:You know that guy?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's, like, some sort of, like, former comedian now, like, a podcaster. Russell Brand. That's who it is. So they host Russell Brand.
Speaker 1:These people aren't, like, completely agitating and being, like, take to the streets. They're not the most aggressive. So I think they I think Rumble has not had that
Speaker 2:many calls. Themselves for not doing, you know, trying to make a $1,000,000,000 bid for truth at that moment in time. Right.
Speaker 1:A lot of the other companies were, like, Gab or Parler and Gettr at this time were both talking to Trump about, like, hey, why don't you come and make this one your home? Because we already built it, and we'll give you, you know, some sort of percent.
Speaker 2:Realize it's not about the tech. It's about the distribution.
Speaker 1:Yep. That and and they and you know that Parler and Gettr were not gonna be, like, yeah, take 90% of our company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's just no way. Yeah. They're probably, like, oh, we'll give you 5% and we'll pay you a bunch and you'll get all this stuff. But, like, there's just no way that even, you know, once they built it, there's just too many people around the table, too many people on the cap table. So it's just impossible.
Speaker 1:But, then on October 20th, so we're still less than a year out, the day the world was meant to learn about the merger and the existence of Truth Social, Trump summoned Littinsky to Mar a Lago. In a twist worthy of The Apprentice itself, the former president said he was once again considering a deal with Getter and asked Lutinski to convince him that Truth Social was better. Somehow, Lutinski got Trump to sign the merger agreement.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Legend. Like Legend. You get called and it's just, like, actually, I'm bailing on this thing, like, get out of my office. And he's just, like, wait. Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. Yeah. This is
Speaker 2:gonna work. He was summoned.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. That was a long that was a long flight. So it worked. Orlando, you know, Orlando, Patrick Orlando goes to the Atlanta WeWork with a
Speaker 2:magnum of Veuve Cliquot, and they
Speaker 1:pop out the champagne, and the press release goes out that evening. And, the The rest is they call it Trump Media and Technology Group. And the plan is to give a voice to all. The tech team were excited to be able to tell friends and family what they've been working on. The press release claimed that Trump's new media offering would be worth $1,700,000,000.
Speaker 1:But within 24 hours, the stock market valued the SPAC at 10 times that amount, 17,000,000,000. So total meme stock for a minute. Obviously For
Speaker 2:a minute.
Speaker 1:It goes down. But, you know, for not for for not much.
Speaker 2:I think it's still that.
Speaker 1:But but but even even at that 1,700,000,000, you know, that makes Trump a billionaire just on that one deal because he owns and now he owns 60%. But, you
Speaker 2:know, at that
Speaker 1:point it was you know, still more, but it was enough to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was kind of interesting timing for this election because that was a lot of what people would try to pin him on and say, like, oh, you're not a real billionaire. Right? But now it's just, like, check the market cap. You can run the numbers yourself.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. And even though, like, a lot of it's locked up, I'm sure he can borrow against it. I'm sure there's some sort of collateral. He's probably gotten some out and we'll get more out and stuff.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's fascinating. And so they launch and there's a bunch of, like, you know, negative press and they get attacked. And, at one point, they one of the companies that's providing their back end technology actually does close through socials account. But because the tech team had built these backups, they were only down. It affected 8.5% of their traffic for 3 minutes.
Speaker 1:That's it. Pretty crazy
Speaker 2:These guys are better than Cracked. Cracked. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's, like, insane. And so, of course, that's, they're they're not, they're not done yet because, you know, friend dear friend of Donald Trump, Gary Gensler, pops up to hit them with a lawsuit saying that the the SPAC was illegal, because his his view was that, Orlando had SPAC'd with the idea of acquiring through social, and you can't do that. You have to truly set up a blank check and not know. And so if there's evidence that it's like, oh, you're gonna SPAC IPO g to acquire this company, then that would mean that you should just SPAC. You should just go through
Speaker 2:your own process.
Speaker 1:A regular IPO.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you truly SPAC the blank check and then you get the call and go, okay, this is what I'm searching for. I'm going with it.
Speaker 2:Is that lawsuit still
Speaker 1:It's settled.
Speaker 2:Settled.
Speaker 1:We'll get there. But it did settle, and now everything's above board, hilariously enough. And so, of course, like, there's a there's a bunch more problems that happen. People figure out that the company is working out of this. We work in Atlanta.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, tons of Trump haters are, like, doxing people and taking photos outside. And they're really worried about, you know, threats to their lives, which should have been predictable if you go work for this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why were they not in Trump Tower?
Speaker 1:Seriously. They should have been somewhere, like, secure, I would think. Something. I don't know. Or work out of Mar a Lago, I guess, or something.
Speaker 1:But but now that, like, the the the SPAC is going through, it's the the parent company was now the most valuable SPAC in history. And, all the tech workers basically, you know, consider The Apprentice guys like their de facto bosses, even though it seems like all the titles are pretty pretty vague. The, the employees learn that there's gonna be this new guy running the company, essentially a CEO, and it's, congressman Devin Nunes. So this steps in. Yes.
Speaker 1:And and, of course, this is what pushed out.
Speaker 2:Once once you once you once you've gone public, you usually go and try to find a great congressman to run your company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What what a dream. But, Nunes had an interesting background. So he he was, he spent 2 decades representing a rural area in California and was best known as for his time as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee during the investigation into Trump's alleged collusion with Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.
Speaker 1:And at that time, Nunes had accused the entire intelligence community of a conspiracy to take down Trump. So, like, he was the one congressman or, like, the main congressman who was, like, pushing back against the Russiagate stuff. And so that probably won him, like, a ton of favor with Trump because he's like, you went to bat for me on this one committee. Like, thank you. I'll
Speaker 3:work
Speaker 1:with you in the future. And so, you know, True Social employees, like, respected him for that. But they were kind of like, what is this non tech guy doing running our company? One one person said, this is like going and hiring a high school baseball coach to be the CEO of Microsoft. And I love that love that quote because they're like, we are Microsoft.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you're just you run, like, you run, like, a website that pulls in a $1,000,000 a year. Yeah. Yeah. There are,
Speaker 3:like, indie hackers that
Speaker 1:are doing better. You're You're comparing yourself to a business that's worth a $1,000,000,000,000. But respect. Respect. And so it's like, maybe he's actually qualified to run this way.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Like, it's such a small operation, you know, whatever. So he doesn't comment in this Economist article, but there's a bunch of interesting stories about him kind of going back and forth. And, interestingly, like, while he was there, he pushes for advertising as soon as possible.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, again, it's like this guy is completely unqualified. Like, all the employees, all the disgruntled employees who spoke to The Economist for this article are like, they're like, oh, he's so unqualified. He was the worst boss. He was terrible. But, like, I keep seeing, like, some of the decisions he's making.
Speaker 1:I'm like, these seem reasonable. Like, advertising is the correct business model and you should run fast. And so, there's a lot of, like, the new CEO told the team they need to work harder because a lot of money had been spent. Like, that's true. Like, they were burning a lot of money.
Speaker 1:Facts. Like, he said that they needed to do advertising as soon as possible. That's also true. Like, it's it's, like, kind of odd to say because, yeah, he doesn't have the traditional background, but seems like he kinda made their decisions.
Speaker 3:A lot
Speaker 2:of business is common sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so the tech guys are, like, are, like, Adams and Boozer are, like, really pissed because they they really don't wanna do advertising. They're, like, let's get let's get it, like like and they're comping themselves to Facebook and Twitter. They're, like, Facebook and Twitter didn't have ads when they launched. But, you know, just, like, they need they need a they need a growth story.
Speaker 2:It's that balance between, yeah, revenue and just traction. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There is something to be said for that where it's, like, would the stock be trading even higher if people weren't, like, they only have a $1,000,000. It's, like, well, they haven't even started monetizing yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who knows? Maybe their 1st month
Speaker 2:It probably it probably would. I actually think it would.
Speaker 1:Be trading higher.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because if you if somebody told you, I was shocked when you told me that they had $1,000,000 of revenue. Right? Like, it seems like you would intentionally have to be trying not to monetize to only have that much revenue on that much attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a terrible conversion of attention to
Speaker 1:I mean, as a political candidate, Trump has raised, like, almost $1,000,000,000, right, just by asking for donations.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you
Speaker 1:would assume that if you went on there and was, like, I'm gonna give you at least some sort of product, maybe it's like a badge or something, like, he would be able to get, like, the tens of millions, 100 of millions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or the physical pin.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Something, you know, you you would think. If you're just selling stuff, you'd be able to get more because you're monetizing the same attention. But it's just very different when it's this, like, ad platform. But, yeah, very, very interesting.
Speaker 1:So, at long last, the app was released to the public on February 21, 2022. So it's just over a year from that, like, dinner
Speaker 2:at Mar a Lago. Over
Speaker 1:2 years. It really is fast execution. Like, you you you have to admit it. And it's interesting comparing it to, like, Quibi. Do you remember that company?
Speaker 1:Like, they spent, like, what, 6 years in, like, stealth, raised all this money
Speaker 2:Toiling away.
Speaker 1:And it just, like, went nowhere. It's like, at least they're down to fail fast. Like, respect that.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But, of course, the launch is, like, a mess and, like, 100 of thousands of people spent days in the waiting list trying to sign up. Once in, they encountered glitches error messages, broken links. One page on the website misspelled truth as t r u h, just like general, like, chaos, which is which is normal.
Speaker 2:But normal stuff.
Speaker 1:But by the end of the week, truth social was number 1 on the app store. I'm sure they got a call from Nikita beer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm sure Nikita was actually He's
Speaker 1:probably I'm
Speaker 2:sure they had they were they were spending 8 figures on intro Yes. Just for Nikita, just to get his advice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, again, like, just remind people the the app store is a measure of, like, of acceleration, not absolute
Speaker 2:Pure volume.
Speaker 1:So Yep. So if you're if you're grow if you launch and grow very fast, then you'll rank higher. It's much harder for, a a product.
Speaker 2:Establish that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Establish that like Facebook to be number 1 because they're not necessarily growing as much. But more than 8 866,000 people installed it in the 1st week. Instagram, by comparison, only signed up about a 100000 users in its launch week. Such a bad comparison.
Speaker 1:It's like Kevin Systrom was in was, like, an awesome guy in tact. He was but he was, like, an intern at Twitter.
Speaker 2:And they knew and they knew if you actually wanna create a super
Speaker 1:engaged platform,
Speaker 2:start small, get the right users. Don't don't don't just, like, sign up as many as
Speaker 1:possible. Journalist is writing it like it's a dunk. Like, oh, like, you know, like Got
Speaker 2:him. Got him.
Speaker 1:It was like, yeah, this is making sense. But, so so so at this point, like, it is a pretty good launch. The number 1 in the App Store, maybe Trump's popularity and widespread frustrations with big tech really could fuel a major new platform. And so, 2 weeks later on March 11th, the terms of Nunes' contract were finalized. He would make 750 k in his 1st year plus bonuses and shares in the company.
Speaker 1:And then some other people came into the the company as well. But, they're working 20 hours a day for 6 straight months. They said they didn't see their families. Like, they're really grinding to, like, make this work, but there's just total chaos.
Speaker 2:They really took all the core lessons from Silicon Valley history in the prior decade and just implemented them perfectly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, obviously, things are chaotic. There's, you know, disgruntled employees who are, like, literally destroying code, like, erasing servers and stuff on their way out. That's, like, wild thing to do. Also, like, super illegal and, like, you could face, like, a bunch of, like, civil penalties if you do this.
Speaker 1:Interestingly, a bunch of, a bunch of ex employees, like, wouldn't talk on the record for this because, apparently, in the NDA that you signed with Ruth Social, you, there's a $5,000,000 penalty. I'm gonna start putting that in the NDA. So I sent VCs. Like, hey, if you wanna see my pitch deck, it's a $5,000,000 fine. If you
Speaker 2:screenshot the docs then. Screenshot the
Speaker 1:docs then. Yeah. Get get out of here. Yeah. And so the the the the some of the tech people start leaving, the general counsel, Adams and Boozer, and a lot of people are, like, oh, this is, like, the beginning of the end.
Speaker 1:The stock went down by 10%. Yeah. The stock went down by 10%, then another 10% the next day when when the tech people quit. But, obviously, it's it's, like, gone back up. And there's this, like, discussion now about, like, the pre Devin Nunes era and the post Devin Nunes era, because Nunes relocated the Truth Social offices to Florida, moved all of Truth Social's data over to Rumble's nascent cloud service, signed the company up for Rumble's new ad platform.
Speaker 1:And, again, this seems like, you know, maybe it's controversial and the employees didn't like it, but those all seem like really, really smart moves. Like, building a new ad platform is genuinely very hard. And I remember when when Netflix, announced that they were gonna be doing, ads, they wanted to do everything, like, in house and very
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's apps on the app store with tens of millions of users that use other ad networks to monetize because it's just
Speaker 1:There's more liquidity.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so, like, if it's if it's something that people I don't know if Netflix wind up actually partnering with Microsoft to do the the ad network. I think they were gonna do, like, the Bing ad network, which obviously is very robust, has great matching algorithms, lots of liquidity. But, if it's if it's potentially good enough for Netflix, where Netflix would at least consider it and analysts like Ben Thompson would recommend it, like, obviously, it's right for this tiny company that has just a few employees, like, and is only a year old to, like, not try and build everything in house, especially if they have a friendly company with Rumble that's down to partner with them.
Speaker 1:So, again, very, very interesting. We're, like, I think the execution was good. I think the strategy might have been a little a little lacking just in the and this is something we should discuss more about, like, you know, is building a new social network the right strategy for Trump generally? Or should he have just done the substack?
Speaker 2:I think it was a it was just a timing thing. When they decided to do this, it was absolutely the best possible product to build.
Speaker 1:And he didn't know that Elon was gonna buy x. Yeah. And so he didn't know that he was gonna get his account back. He didn't know that he was gonna be able to go on Rogan on
Speaker 2:Has he gotten his Yeah. He's gotten his other accounts back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He has. He has.
Speaker 1:I think he has pretty much all of his accounts back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and he's been able to kind of do everything which has somewhat taken the air out of the 2 social balloon because he it's not as existential to him. If he was Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of people a lot of people thought that it would already be a 0. Yeah. Full on 0. Yeah. And certainly not.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they kind of changed their they changed their startup culture. It used to be agile teams and horizontal management. Newness imposed a top down structure in which workers were siloed into small groups under different managers. Again, like
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Like, sometimes that's the right thing. Sometimes you want something that's very flat and horizontal. Sometimes you want something that's a little bit more vertical.
Speaker 2:You have to wonder was there was Nunez in group chats with highly competent tech CEOs being, like, hey, what would you do in this situation? And they're, like, yeah, I would silo things out, move from being a horizontal structure to, like, you know, kind of verticalizing the management teams, like, have build out these different functions. Like, you're really gonna wanna have a trust and safety
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Department. That's important for any social media platform.
Speaker 1:Totally boss.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess I guess from here, where does going into tomorrow, we don't talk about politics on this, show. But what happens to truth, you know, if Trump is elected is the most natural next step for the US government to acquire the platform and use it as sort of a digital town square for citizens? Or where where does truth social go from here?
Speaker 1:I have no idea.
Speaker 2:Is it purely an entertainment product? It feels like it's like
Speaker 1:bear cases on both sides because
Speaker 3:Yeah. If it it it if he wins
Speaker 2:He's stuck between a bear case and a bear case.
Speaker 1:I mean, if he wins, he doesn't need this, like, liquidity injection as much anymore. So I mean, this is I think, Peter Thiel had a a quote within, who's that Axios guy? I forget. But he was doing some interview and he was yeah. Dan Primack.
Speaker 1:And he was doing some interview and it was the question was, like, what's going on with your social? And and Peter was basically, like, I think it's some sort of, like, you know, sneaky way to transfer wealth to, to get around, like, campaign finance rules. And so and so that that becomes less of an incentive. Like, Like, if you want Trump to win and you want him to have wealth so that he can borrow against that and finance his campaign or something like something along those lines, even though he's locked up and hasn't sold the shares yet, it's, like, clearly having a $4,000,000,000 asset asset is valuable when you're running for Yeah. For new when you're running for president.
Speaker 1:But but after if he wins, then, okay, you don't need to pump the stock anymore. And if he loses, it's like maybe he becomes rest less relevant. He's not deplatformed anymore. And it's not like if he loses, he'd be deplatformed again unless he tries on January 6th stuff again, which would be crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I don't know. It it is it is tough.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's it's certainly a much easier long if he wins tomorrow because it's just another half a decade.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of attention.
Speaker 2:A lot of attention and relevancy. Yep. And, and it and and I guess the historical ways that presidents would monetize their attention would I'm gonna be president, and then I'm going to I'm gonna write a book and then my wife's gonna write a book and our, you know, son is gonna write a book and every sort of member of and that that's like very, like, 20th century way to monetize attention and still works generally well. Yeah. But it could be you could imagine a future where every president, you know, just ends up creating a social media platform because that's that's that that becomes, like, the the right way.
Speaker 2:Like, would you I think Kamala could probably drive if she created a social media app after losing. If she were to lose, I think she could get a, you know, 50,000,000 downloads. Right?
Speaker 1:Probably.
Speaker 2:I would I would sign up for that.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, this isn't the first celebrity social media company. Jeremy Renner cloned at Instagram and had the Renner the Jeremy Renner app that you could install, and it was just his Instagram feed. Isn't that insane? And you had to subscribe to just see Jeremy Renner posts. And then he would, like, post, like, extra photos, but it was just, like, his feed.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:So it's just, like, I'm surfing today. I went to the gym. And and, like, the Jeremy Renner fan club was just, like, on his app. And then he eventually shuttered shuttered it. But, I mean, you could imagine, like, in the same way that substack, like, a lot of people are completely they they they follow some writer and they're completely unaware that, like, substack is the underlying technology.
Speaker 1:They're just like, oh, I love I love not boring dotco. Right? And I just I and this guy, Packy, is great. He must have built this website, but he's using the substack infrastructure. You could see you could see that you could see that happening in almost every vertical where it's, like, oh, you're using Vimeo to power a website.
Speaker 2:It's like a YouTube Or SubStack allows you to just generate your own app at some point.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would be interesting. So it's, like, you're on SubStack, but
Speaker 3:boring app.
Speaker 1:I mean, I talked to the SubStack guys about other media formats, and they allow you to upload podcasts, and they actually do allow you to upload videos. So it is possible to run, like, basically, your own private video feed, like, your own YouTube on Substack, and you could have someone just, like, have that, you know, okay. They're they're subscribed to your
Speaker 2:The Technology Brothers app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:We'd like to own that real estate on your home screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, let's let's close out before with the, like, the the the the ending of the SEC, fight. So even though, like, the the SPAC was trading and successful because of the SEC lawsuit, the the acquisition wasn't approved. And so you weren't technically investing in Truth Social. You were you were investing in
Speaker 2:The idea.
Speaker 1:In a SPAC potential. That had, like, a contract in place to acquire this company, but didn't actually own any of the assets yet because because the acquisition hadn't been approved by the SEC. And so there's this lawsuit that says, you know, hey. It was, illegal for you to do this SPAC and this acquisition. We're gonna block the acquisition.
Speaker 1:But, on March 24th, more than 3 years after Lutinski and Moss got Trump to agree to their plan, Trump Media and Technology Group stock debuted on Nasdaq. They settled the case with the SEC for an $18,000,000 fine in July of 2023. And it's very
Speaker 2:That's a big fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It feels like a big fine, but Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean,
Speaker 1:they have a lot
Speaker 2:of Not in the context of the market cap now, but But
Speaker 1:they just seem
Speaker 2:like a significant fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I I guess they were just, like, yeah, negotiating and figured out that was, like, a number that they
Speaker 2:were Gary's bonus got Yeah. Big that year. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so, they get it approved. And and and at that point, like, the the stock actually becomes, like, the DJT ticker or something like that. I think it was DWAC before, like, Digital World Acquisition Company or something.
Speaker 1:Dwac was the was the SPAC name before. Dwac. Yeah. It's a very funny name. So so so so they get through.
Speaker 1:Matt Levine has a good quote in here. You know, Matt from, Bloomberg. He says that the regulatory body might be sort of worried that this thing will be a big bust, and he's using the early merger talks as an excuse to prevent Donald Trump from dumping it on retail investors. So it's kind of like they're they're like, maybe the SCC didn't actually have that strong of evidence that Orlando and Trump were talking before IPO ing.
Speaker 3:And we
Speaker 2:don't know how much that there's a huge incentive for all the Trump insiders to keep the party going Yep. Through the election.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Because if the stock had there was a couple moments where it looked like it was going to 0.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And if it had, how that would have actually created that that would have been potentially the biggest risk factor for the campaign is a bunch of Americans being, like, I lost a bunch of money because of Trump. And he's maybe he is the scammer that the media, like, says. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so they they celebrate the the Nasdaq listing with a it's so funny. It's on the Nasdaq.
Speaker 2:That It
Speaker 1:feels so serious for what this is.
Speaker 2:Back in Mar a Lago?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Back in Mar a Lago, they have the actor Jon Voigt and, Truth Social branded cookies. That first day, the share price touched $78 making the company worth about 15,000,000,000 more than doubling the former president's personal wealth. Moss and Latinsky, the 2, guys who started this whole thing, were unable to profit from the from the moment. However, as they were locked up, they were locked in multiple lawsuits with Trump Media and Technology Group.
Speaker 1:The company argued that their initial deal with Trump was void and they had forfeited their shares, because they had run the company so ineptly. And that was interesting because it's like it was so it's a short thing. I wonder if there's like a vesting cliff that they were trying to, like, you know, push them towards or something like that. If they had, like, some some 1 year vest and they barely made it over, that could be, like, a point of contention. I don't know.
Speaker 1:But it all worked out because they they settled those lawsuits, and Moss and Latinsky won their litigation with the company and cashed in nearly all their shares together pocketing around a $100,000,000. Wow. He's not gonna have to do YouTube anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Retire early. Why he retired early.
Speaker 1:Retire early. Seriously. And so,
Speaker 2:I wonder if you got a as part of the settlement, he got a complimentary lifetime Mar a Lago membership.
Speaker 1:He either got a lifetime membership or a band.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:One or the other.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was a high standard deviation outcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like Trump would be fine with them still going and spending money on the property because it would just be his way to be, like, I still,
Speaker 3:like Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm your daddy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One current employee messaged a group chat of former current and former Truth Social staff saying that Nunes had claimed that Moss and Latinsky had stolen shares leaving nothing for anyone else. His colleagues responded with crying with laughter emojis suggesting that they didn't take this idea seriously.
Speaker 2:As if they were all all the shares were sitting in the office somewhere and on the way out, they just grabbed
Speaker 3:the floor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:A bunch of I feel like I feel like if any organization was still running on physical paper stock certificates Yeah. It would be it would be true social. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is funny because it's, like, everyone is saying, like, oh, this is like a mess and, like, you know, like, it's poorly managed and it's, like, fake, but then they're like, but also the money's real and I really want a piece. Like, you screwed me out of this, like, very legitimate thing. Like, they can't you can't have it both ways, guys. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, you can be, like, talking
Speaker 1:trash in the media or you can have your payout. Lesson learned there. But, or you can have your payout. Lesson learned there. But, Trump
Speaker 3:has insisted he won't sell his shares, which now amount to about 60% of the company, which is
Speaker 1:very uncommon for a tech founder who starts a tech company, company, IPOs it in 2 years. Very, very rare. But, then It
Speaker 2:just shows that he's mission oriented. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:And, they could, yeah, all of these these ex employees are really trashing it. They could probably have a 100,000,000 people on the platform if they had any intelligence whatsoever. But, again, it's like, is this a question of intelligence? Like, is this a question of strategy or execution? Like, is it
Speaker 2:Are they running it as a company or a financial product?
Speaker 1:Is the product the stock or is the product the website?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think we know the answer.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so yeah.
Speaker 2:It's it's basically Fintech. Right? It's it's, technology that enables a new way to Yeah. Trade on Trump's social capital.
Speaker 1:There's this very interesting quote from Billy Boozer here. He says, I had to step away from a from a role that I felt god made for me due to ethical and moral moral concerns. It shook me to my core. Sometimes those who share your beliefs might exploit you for financial gain. And I think that there's a lesson here about, like, like, we hear about these venture capital firms that are very difficult to work with and they're notorious for, like, firing firing founders.
Speaker 1:And yet, when I talk to very, very aggressive founders, oftentimes, they're fine getting in the ring with a VC with a bad rep.
Speaker 3:Because
Speaker 2:they trust themselves.
Speaker 1:They trust themselves, and they're okay. They're like, I I'm willing to get into the gladiator arena. I'm the lion. They need
Speaker 2:to be worried. And I
Speaker 1:think that there's something here where, like, the, where, like, you know, it is it is clearly public knowledge that these are some of the most hard negotiating people in the world. But if you go in and you play your cards right, you can wind up with a $100,000,000 payout like those guys did. And so maybe they will wind up hanging out at Mar a Lago in a little bit. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think it's one of those things, like, 5, 10 years from now, they'll if they were to see Trump, they would shake hands and wink.
Speaker 1:Be like yeah.
Speaker 2:It would just be like
Speaker 1:It's like we have 1 hell of a boxing match.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was, like yeah. Going back to that fateful bite of the first burger.
Speaker 1:Yep. Exactly. And then the article closes with an epilogue about now now Trump has moved on to a cryptocurrency part project called the World Liberty Financial Financial.
Speaker 2:I had somebody, I had somebody bring up, would any of this have been possible without diet coke? Like, if you took if diet coke didn't exist, could could this entire story have existed? And I think you could make an argument that,
Speaker 1:Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
Speaker 2:That's a good place to end.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the story of Truth Social. The truth about Truth Social. Hope you enjoyed it. Let's move on to some, tweet reactions. But first, I need to tell you about Citadel Securities.
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Speaker 1:That's citadelsecurities.com. Now back to the show. Did you see that is it Bowery Farming failed?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yoni writes, it really sucks that Bowery Farming failed. I always was rooting for Bowery because it felt like it could actually make a difference on nutrition and climate change. Here's why from my outer outsider's perspective that it was so hard growing a single crop that's both undifferentiated to consumers and low margin, lettuce is cheap, sold through wholesale, wall of lettuce at Whole Foods means it's even worse for margins. They scaled super quickly building and flying the plane at once doesn't work in the physical world like it does in software. While owning the local operations and needing to be good at lots of complex things simultaneously, tons of capex that they paid for themselves.
Speaker 1:If you inverted each of those factors, you'd wind up with a multi crop full basket sold directly to consumers. Basically, a CSA operate as a franchise. Interesting. I hope this won't dissuade others from trying to innovate and transform our food system. It's a worthy effort.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember seeing vertical farming stuff and, never never dug in too much, but,
Speaker 2:Good good take from, Yoni as as usual. I think it the real question that comes away from it is what was the actual strategy. Right? Because I've had the product. It's a good product.
Speaker 2:I remember buyer buying Bowery lettuce and being, like, this is good lettuce. Yeah. But I never, you know, I don't shop for groceries.
Speaker 1:So it was Bowery branded?
Speaker 2:Yes. They were, like, fully verticalized. Yeah. You could go into Whole Foods Yeah. And, like, buy their lettuce Sure.
Speaker 2:That they had cultivated using their technology Yep. And and eventually sold. But you have to wonder, like, yeah, what's the strategy? It's, like, the lowest possible margin product. It's deeply, deeply competitive.
Speaker 2:It's really difficult to sort of, like, differentiate because if I wanted to start competing with Bowery, I could go get a small plot of land and just obsess over making lettuce and create, like, the same quality of product, which with a much different cost structure. And so, yeah, it's one of those things, like, how would you have that? You know, you obviously couldn't value a farm that was producing at Bowery scale at $2,000,000,000. Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:I don't know a lot of, sort of mid level, mid market farm.
Speaker 1:Farm operations that
Speaker 2:are valued. So it's like I you have to wonder, they were last valued at $2,000,000,000. What was were they pitching at the time? Hey, we're creating this technology stack that other farms can use. And, Yoni and Slo's, like, have a big thesis around, verticalization, which is, like, if you have this technology, like, don't just sell the technology or the software.
Speaker 2:Yep. Like, sell the end product.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:But that's interesting. You know, they were involved with a company that, they were involved with a company that made software for parking garages.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And that software company just ended up buying one of the largest parking garage management companies so that they could own more of the value chain, basically. And so I would have loved to see Bowery's last pitch deck of being, like, why are we worth $2,000,000,000 selling lettuce? Right? You have to imagine the the actual net revenue on selling that lettuce. Like, if if somebody was running, like, a farm yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's say somebody's running a vineyard and they're, like, yeah, like, we spent, like, 3,000,000,000 or we spent, like, $3,000,000 last year to do $1,000,000 of of revenue. You'd be, like, okay, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Cool, like, pet project.
Speaker 1:Do you think they should have gone upmarket? Have you seen that Omakase strawberry company? That's, like, $50 a strawberry or something?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So I'm excited to see
Speaker 1:seems very interesting because, like, it's so high end. It's gonna be only consumed by, like, celebrities and, like, very it's gonna be very Instagrammed, but you're also gonna have so much breadth to, like, tell your story. Whereas, if you're just if, like, yeah, there's this cool story where the lettuce was vertically farmed, but then it just comes in a standard lettuce.
Speaker 2:It still tastes like lettuce.
Speaker 1:Still tastes like lettuce. Whereas the omakasa strawberry, you open it up. It's like a it feels like sugarfish. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that that is what they absolutely should have done. I think there's a bunch of interesting angles to do, like, exotic fruits that are almost like desserts. Yep. And so if they were the key thing, though, for Bowery would be, like, how do you justify charging 4 to 5 to 10 times as much for the same product, which is what is
Speaker 1:I got a box of Asian pears once from someone, and they were so juicy that I kept choking on them. I would take a I would take a bite, and it would just explode with, like like, like, pear
Speaker 2:juice. Call it
Speaker 1:in the air?
Speaker 2:Coughing, like, oh, my God. You guys gotta try it.
Speaker 1:It was amazing. They were so good. And and and it's something where I'm sure they were, like, you know, 10 times the price. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But you have to, like, to make something like this work where Bowery's investing what I'm sure amount to do 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in r and d and facilities, all this capex, you have to be able to tell a story of, oh, we're gonna be able to we're gonna be able to expand, you know, our core product from a 20% gross margin product to a 90% gross margin food product. And, yeah. I just I I I
Speaker 1:It's also interesting because there's there's, like, some other competitors that don't feel like they should be competitors, but they are. I'm thinking of, like, rainmaker flooding different areas, like, terraforming. It's like, yeah. Maybe we're running out of farmland, so we need to go vertical in cities, or we need to turn the desert into farmland. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if we do that, it's like, okay. Well, all of a sudden, the price of farming lettuce is gonna go way down if
Speaker 3:we
Speaker 1:can just figure out how to get water there. There's another plan to reroute the Colorado River if we, switch California to nuclear powered desalination. So so California gets the water from the ocean, desalinates it, uses that for Californian farmland, and then the Colorado River goes through Nevada to New Mexico and and, Arizona. And all of a sudden, Nevada and
Speaker 2:and Arizona. Favorite talks at CreditCon. Yeah. I think I think what's interesting that where I'd end with Bowery is that this was one of the last maybe is one of the last super high profile failures from the d to c era because Bowery was a company that the big branding agencies, like the Red Antlers, I believe. I I I don't remember if it was Gin Lane or Red Antler that did it.
Speaker 2:But I think it was at a time where you could take any sort of product, slap a you know, get Emmett from Gin Lane or or Antler to, like, give you this, like, half a $1,000,000 brand treatment. And then people are, like, oh, this is investable now. Right? Like, people investing in Allbirds because it had a cool story
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And narrative and visuals. But then, oh, at the end of the day, you're selling shoes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. Do you see this Martin Scirelli tweet? Defend capitalism everywhere every time. Be willing to die for it.
Speaker 1:Civilization collapses without it. And then
Speaker 2:Is this something that we could frame and put on the wall, and then it says, like, Thomas Jefferson and then Martin Trichelli. Yeah. I
Speaker 1:love this because, like, the first reply is civilization actually collapses well when it lacks strong sovereign institutions, social cohesion, and resilience to external threats. And Martin just says no.
Speaker 2:Mogged. Strong opinion strongly held. Yeah. Yeah. No.
Speaker 2:I I I just think, not enough people are saying this. Yep. And I think it's now becoming a normal view within, our hyper online technology world. But outside of, you know, my little brother, I've had to talk with him in the last year being, like, no. Capitalism is actually good.
Speaker 2:It's, like, if you look at all these different categories, whether it be education or health care or housing, capitalism, life expectancy, capitalism is the driving force that enables improvement in those areas. So, ultimately, you have to imagine that it's fairly good. So it's one of those things that feels obvious, but, like, I actually think is worth talking about because Yeah. They're they're we were our generation was the generation that grew up where it was okay to be in, the classroom. And a kid, you know, I remember in college would be, like, consumption is bad.
Speaker 2:All, you know, and it's just sort of this, like, deceleration is, like, view, that leads to Western Europe, which Yeah. I like to vacation in, but I certainly don't wanna live there.
Speaker 1:Don't wanna invest there. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Capitalism for a long time faced, like, assaults on both sides.
Speaker 1:There was, like, the communism, like, we need to go back to, you know, like, real communism has never been tried. We need to go back to, like, you know, Soviet era communism or something like that. But then there was also, like, the acceleration is, like, techno version of anti capitalism, which was, like, we're gonna get AI and robots and UBI. And are you familiar with Falc, fully automated luxury communism? This idea that yeah.
Speaker 1:This there's, like, a bunch of sci fi stories about this. Also, like, political philosophers about it. And that one actually makes kind of a decent amount of sense. Although, there's always questions about, like, how incentives would work in that case. But, but but that did take hold in a lot of Bay Area people where they were like, well, yeah, maybe if we can just have the robots do everything, we'll live in the time of abundance.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so there won't need to be, you know, we won't need to allocate resources because we'll have unlimited of everything, and you
Speaker 2:can just
Speaker 1:snap your fingers. Although there's always a question about, like, okay. Well, what
Speaker 2:Luxury communism. Luxury communism.
Speaker 1:It it it is a good Communism needs to rebrand. Yeah. It it is a good it is a good take, and it's certainly preferable you know, terrible communism or something. But, but then there's still a question about, like, okay. Well, there's only so much beachfront property.
Speaker 1:Even if you create, like, the metaverse, you got other worlds, like
Speaker 2:things are always be scary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very hard to imagine a world where it's like, oh, yeah. I can just, like, get an island in the middle of the ocean on demand. Like, okay. Maybe you have some sort of crazy, like, micro robots that can just do that, but it's, like, it's very odd.
Speaker 1:So the, Sean Frank, good friend of the pod, says, virgin run club versus Chad walk enjoyer. And, the virgin run club says, We
Speaker 2:gotta give some credit to Will Menitis for being an early major proponent of the Chad walk enjoyer where he would
Speaker 1:It was the Lindy walk.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Lindy walk. Yeah. He would, you know, frequently tweet that he was going on a 30 mile walk around Manhattan, and, you know, shortly after that had a 9 figure exit.
Speaker 1:So He he actually signed up into that. The last time I was in Manhattan, I walked the entire island, like, from, like, I don't know, 91st Street down to the Wall Street and back. And it was amazing. Like like, you you spend, like, 2 or 3 hours walking. I mean, particularly in Manhattan because the entire city, like, turns over and you watch people leave work and then start settling in, getting dinner, and then the night floods time lapse.
Speaker 1:It's insane. It it's, like, one
Speaker 2:of the most fantastic cities in
Speaker 1:the world. Also, are you are you aware of how, a lot of, like, the best bodybuilders are doing cardio these days? That's all walking. It's all walking. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I forget Chris Williamson was
Speaker 2:doing a
Speaker 1:video with somebody. It's called, like, Sebum. Chris Bumstead. Yeah. This guy.
Speaker 1:So he is a fantastic bodybuilder. His cardio is 45 minutes of walking on an incline treadmill.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And it's amazing. I've been doing it because there's never an excuse where you're like, oh, I don't really wanna sprint right now. But everyone can get on a treadmill and just start walking. And then 45 minutes in, you're like, okay. I actually burn a lot of calories.
Speaker 1:I'm actually exhausted. There's a lot to this because it's incline. But it's very
Speaker 2:it's very hard to stop. We bought our house specifically because it's the best walking in Malibu. Really? Right?
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 2:There's, like, this amazing walk path.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Sagar, good friend, says, 12 days until clocks. This is actually an old tweet, but it's relevant because we just went through daylight savings time. 12 days until clock shift forward, dooming the productive class to dark mornings for months. Also, people can drink outside 1 hour later.
Speaker 1:Team standard time. So I guess we're actually in standard time now. We went back, so he's excited now that we're back on standard time.
Speaker 2:Contrarian to be excited about the
Speaker 1:Yeah. But he hates going to daylight savings time because then if you wake up early, it's dark. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I and I agree with this.
Speaker 1:Like, I think the switch is always, like, super disruptive, especially if kids and a family. Like, it just throws everything off.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You do so much to train the kid to go to sleep at a certain time. Their circadian rhythms
Speaker 2:are Our 4 month old
Speaker 1:It's awful.
Speaker 2:Is now deciding he went from she went from waking up at 7:10 AM to now 6:10 on the dot. Yeah. It's like, okay.
Speaker 1:But I will say, like, last week when we were at the tail end of daylight savings time, I got into the office at, like, 5 or 6, and it was perfectly dark outside. And I could watch all the buildings in downtown, like, light up and, like, oh, it's just beautiful watching the sunrise. Like, there's nothing like watching the sunrise from the top of, like,
Speaker 2:From the office.
Speaker 1:From the top of, like when I worked at Bain Capital, I would get in before everyone, and I would, go around, like, set up conference rooms. I was, like, an intern, and I would always be on, like, the top floor of this building right as the sun rose, and it was, like, so inspiring.
Speaker 2:Seeing the sun rise over your ThinkPad Amazing. Is an out of body experience.
Speaker 1:Literally over your over your Polycom. Every this is, like, 2012 or 2010. Every every single office at a Polycom, is great. The the other stuff too, I gotta dig in. Okay.
Speaker 1:So, goblin says, wait. What the hell? I asked Claude if he noticed any patterns in my aura data data versus the health data I've been logging, and he's like my summary. Oh, sure. Your your HRV heart rate Yeah.
Speaker 1:Drops Heart
Speaker 2:rate variability.
Speaker 1:Greater than 20% from baseline a day or 2 before the migraine starts. If it gets below 40, you can be pretty sure one's coming. And then there's a community note that says, this seems to have been a hallucination as per the author. But it's, like, some sort of, like, deeper truth. Maybe it's correct.
Speaker 2:I think what's interesting here is, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Greater health comes from greater understanding of yourself Yeah. Greater health comes from greater understanding of yourself and the various inputs that drive your health, whether that's, oh, I feel a lot better at 5 PM and I have more energy at 5 PM because I walked in the morning. Yep. And so this sort of quantified self movement Yep. Has been allowing people to understand themselves better, whether that's getting, your biomarkers tested with function or you're using your Oura ring or things like that.
Speaker 2:And I just think, like, incredible, incredible things are gonna come from having more quantifiable data Yeah. And then having a effectively a team of brilliant longevity and performance doctors that can analyze that data for free. The thing that we keep coming back to about what's actually interested interesting about AI today is intelligence as a service. And so if you wanna work with the leading longevity specialists in the world, a lot of them charge, like, a 150 k per year
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just to be in their sort of program. Yep. And it's gonna be really incredible when the average person with their $10 a month Oura ring can get even better care from this team of digital specialists than than, some, you know, public company CEO that's using David Sinclair's, like, you know, longevity program or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It does seem valuable. I I think for certain people, they need an algorithm or a doctor to tell them something or they need the quantified it's quantified self data to tell them something. But I always worry that there is a loss of value in not just being in tune with yourself.
Speaker 1:Like, like, the sleep tracking is fine. It's good. Sleep's really important. If tracking it helps you get more sleep, that's great.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you should be able to just ask yourself, are you sleeping?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, like, now There's a there's a company that's building, smart, AI toilets to analyze your urine and your feces
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Called Throne.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And, they're bringing the quantified self to your toilet, basically. So it's, like, understanding yourself through your waist.
Speaker 1:I could see some of that being being valuable because that's a little bit harder to tell than just, like, did I get a good night's rest?
Speaker 2:We'll get it we'll get it set up in the studio.
Speaker 1:Okay. Perfect.
Speaker 2:You can you can be, like, every time I have a really good bowel movement, the next pod, I That's fantastic. Banger.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Banger. It's great. So Alexander says, bachelor's in the 19 fifties, and he posts a what's a screenshot from a book or a picture from a book. Men were also pressured into acceptable family roles since the lack of a suitable wife could mean the loss of a job or promotion for a middle class man.
Speaker 1:Bachelor's were categorized as immature, infantile, infantile, narcissistic, deviant, or even pathological. Family advice expert, Paul Landis, argued, except for the sick, the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped, and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry.
Speaker 2:I thought this was relevant. I I was gonna ask you, does
Speaker 1:It certainly resonated. 11 k likes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think that people started treating you differently once you had kids? Because there's just a certain sense of, responsibility. Yeah. Just responsibility when somebody is working for more than just themselves and has, like, more on the line that comes from a family.
Speaker 2:Like, I I do think there's this sense of there is a sense of, like, serious, like, you Yeah. Bring a new sense of seriousness to your work Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 3:That they
Speaker 2:don't think you can have. I think I think I looked at this and somebody it's it's fairly easy to have a pretty good life if you are just a bachelor
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're living in a your luxury apartment in New York, and you have a job and whatever, and you can do your run club and all this other stuff. And life gets infinitely more you know, Keith Raboy was in the news recently for saying you shouldn't hire anybody over 30. But I I could imagine they're getting to a point where tech the tech world starts looking at people that are, you know, that are 40 without children and being, like, oh, like, I don't know. Like, if you know.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, when I got to Silicon Valley in 2012, there was there was a blog post by PG, and he and he said that it was it would be hard for a founder to be married with kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was somewhat controversial, but it felt pretty consensus at the time, like, a lot of people agreed. Yeah. And I think that's that's maybe true for first companies. But if you're already, like like, I've never had a job that wasn't an entrepreneur. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's, like, it's kind of just, like, the career of the entrepreneur
Speaker 3:is Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is a little bit more there's less of, like, a leap.
Speaker 2:Like, I don't feel, like, oh, if I'm
Speaker 1:gonna start a new company, I'm gonna, like, lose this stable corporate job because that's not a thing that exists. What's interesting about this is that it it I feel like it's resonating. You got so many likes because it's part of this, like, very trad revival. Like, let's go back to the way things were. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but I other than that example with PG, it's hard for me to remember, like, when I was 20, what were the 35 year olds or the 40 year olds saying about starting families.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I I think that it was out of vogue, and now it's kind of back in vogue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I just I think there's this always this oscillation between two extremes. And it almost feels like right now we're in a healthy middle ground where everybody's like, yeah, kids are a ton of work. Having a family is a ton of work. It is a distraction from product finding product market fit.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But there's this, like, more of, like, a middle ground where you have, a good example of is, like, Isaiah Isaiah from Valor has, like, a bunch of kids. Right? And and, like, you could argue that he will be more successful because he has, like, a small army that's depending on him Yep. To perform.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's certainly not a big thing. Fail. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I and I and I do think there's probably something I mean, I remember when I when I, like, first made, like, a significant amount of money talking to my father-in-law about this. And I was, like, well, I made, like, so much money I could, like, retire now. And he's, like, no. You can't. He's, like, you don't understand how expensive kids are.
Speaker 1:You don't you don't understand, like, how much money you actually need.
Speaker 2:As a car guy, I think of it in the I think every time I see, like, a buddy with, like, a I have a friend who's, like, 31. Yeah. He's got, like, 6 cars that could be considered supercars. And I just look at that and it's I'm, like, for every one child, you could basically support 2 supercars. So I'm, like, I'd probably be doing the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great. Let's go to Vittorio. Vittorio says, who even uses Teams and posts a, screenshot of Microsoft Teams versus Slack daily active users? And Teams is, like, absolutely ripping, and Slack is more or less flatlining.
Speaker 1:Lining. And, I mean, I think the answer is, like, normies. Like, everyone who uses Outlook and just a normal job, they show up and the computer is just there, and they're not on some slick MacBook working from a coffee shop. They just go to work. They have a badge.
Speaker 1:They sit at cubicle. And their boss says, this is your tech stack. Here you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is a
Speaker 1:This is a very start up tweet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why. This is a warning to all the technology brothers that are thinking about their product in the context of, oh, we're gonna build a Slack integration. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? Because so much of enterprise software just ties back to communication, Slack, you know, email being like the bedrock of all, all software products. I think that, yeah, I remember, I once built an internal tool to track how much time people were spending online on Slack because it's a really good proxy Sure. For how much time somebody is spending at their laptop. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, never got to building teams because it wasn't relevant to me. But I think that is it's the building for the team's market that's gonna justify your uniform unicorn valuation, not purely the Slack.
Speaker 1:There is something interesting about Teams versus Slack, which is that, with the recent defense tech boom, being a company that has to use Teams because of ITAR is, like, a little bit of a status symbol. And people founders flex about it because they're, like, oh, I know that Slack I'm a product guy. I know that Slack is a better product. I hate using Teams. So I can, like, complain about this publicly, and everyone will know that, like, my work is so important.
Speaker 1:I have to be honest. Slack because
Speaker 2:it's an Itark client. I was on a I was on a Teams call for deterrence this morning. Yep. Probably, it's only option. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the other yeah. I felt I felt like So the point yeah. Exactly. Now, the other thing with this chart is what would it have looked like if Salesforce hadn't Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the other thing
Speaker 1:is that it's just bundled into distribution. So Yeah. But also
Speaker 2:every Stewart was running Slack. You have to imagine he would've that chart would still be going
Speaker 1:Founder mode.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Founder mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tough. Daniel says, we need to double the fluoride in the water and add Ozempic and Adderall too. This is insane. 72,000 likes.
Speaker 1:What a banger. This guy is just like a god tier poster. Yeah. It's just like we were talking about this. 72 that's so many likes.
Speaker 2:Almost seems to be inconceivable. Most most people have a tweet that gets 72,000 impressions Yeah. And they're, like, oh, I'm gonna retire.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. This guy Yeah.
Speaker 2:This He
Speaker 1:doesn't need to raise money anymore for his company. He can just fund it off the creator payout.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's good.
Speaker 2:His his I
Speaker 1:Generation wealth coming to him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For him, the balance is making sure that his his MRR grows faster
Speaker 3:than Twitter.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. Just grow the creator payouts.
Speaker 1:We'll see you at Amano.
Speaker 2:Subsidize. Yeah. Subsidize.
Speaker 1:Let's see Christie's.
Speaker 2:AI for cops product. No. I think
Speaker 1:But you're you're so you're anti fluoride.
Speaker 2:Anti fluoride. But but in general, I think there's there's a much bigger debate to be have had around fluoride and fluoride usually gets, talked about this at Hereticom, but usually gets, all of the shade when in reality, it's the fact that a lot of the pipes in the US water infrastructure are lead based.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so that's just channeling lead into every household. And fluoride makes lead more bioavailable. So when you're when you're having fluoride alongside lead, you're just absorbing more of it, which could could account for the, you know, what are what what, you know, IQ, downsides of fluoride consumption. But, but, yeah, I think if if the United States was really a serious country, we would be thinking about more proactively about medicating the population through the Directly.
Speaker 1:For free. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like the world's perfect delivery mechanism. Yeah. Everybody drinks water. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Drinks water.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So if you want somebody to be on a certain substance, then put it in the water.
Speaker 1:This is genius because, like, this tweet could have just said, like, oh, Ozempic is so amazing. We should put
Speaker 2:it in the water.
Speaker 1:Like, that's just a phrase that people say when something's like a miracle cure. But he wound up, like, having the most incendiary thing possible, double the fluoride, but then also adding a Zinfic and Adderall. So there's a ton of latch on.
Speaker 2:Decided that there's a lot of countries that have stopped fluoridating the water. Yeah. In the United States, we it's it's regulated effectively. But every single year, we're effectively deciding to continue medicating the population through the fluoride in the water.
Speaker 1:Wow. Look at this. 17 likes.
Speaker 2:This is an
Speaker 1:undiscovered gem. Waleed says tons of young girls are using chat gpt to manifest. Looks like OpenAI is acknowledging it on their official TikTok. So I guess ChatGPT is reposting. The ChatGPT TikTok account is reposting this, and people are using I don't actually know that much about manifesting.
Speaker 1:This is the, the secret, right, where you just
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I will be wealthy. I will be at a man.
Speaker 2:No. You you don't say
Speaker 1:I will be at Christie's.
Speaker 2:You you don't say I will be. You say I am at a man. Oh. I am wealthy. I am.
Speaker 2:Right? Present present tense.
Speaker 1:Present tense.
Speaker 2:No. But this is this this is relevant because this is the bull case for OpenAI. Yep. Right? They're not saying, you know, people on TikTok are using Claude to manage to manifest.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. Chat gpt. It's
Speaker 1:the new brand.
Speaker 2:It is it's the cleanest for AI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The cleanest.
Speaker 1:It is. It is. It's just, like, ask someone on the street. Street. How do you do how do you use AI to do your homework?
Speaker 1:Chatgpt.com.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Never Yeah. It's almost, like, Google for search Yeah. Where, like, if that plays out within AI, it's just, like, when I want AI, I go to openai.com/chatgpt. I
Speaker 1:mean, Sundar was correct when he said competition is only a click away, and yet Google has a massive monopoly. Why? It's just the place that you go. Yeah. It's the default.
Speaker 1:I do think that there's something very interesting about AI for these kind of squishier use cases like astrology manifesting, personality test, that type of stuff because the hallucinations are fine. Yeah. It it like, with code, there's, like, a right answer so it can test itself. So it's very good at that. But then it's always it's always tough in the middle.
Speaker 1:But when you get out into just, like, the are you familiar with the PT Barnum effect, this whole thing? So the Barnum effect is this series of, like, statements that I can make about you that feel very personalized, but but actually apply to everyone. So I can say, like, you have a complicated history with your family. And who doesn't? Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you're like, oh my god. You know me. Or or, like, you believe you deserve more in life. Something like that. And you'll be like, oh my god.
Speaker 1:I do. And so a lot of, like, tarot card readers, palm readers, psychics, they use that PT Barnum effect. But AI can use that very effectively, and you can feel like, wow. The AI really knows me even though it's maybe just hallucinating or applying, like, heuristics that are basically applied to everyone. But everyone just wants to hear a pump up speech, and that's valuable.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. And this and and if if that trend is real, there's a really big business. There's a $100,000,000 business to be built on just being, like, Wrappers.
Speaker 1:Wrapper. For sure. Although, it might get it might get baked into one of the existing companies, like, CoStar could could integrate something.
Speaker 2:Totally. But I think
Speaker 1:that these
Speaker 2:products are so engaging
Speaker 3:Yep. That
Speaker 1:They can stand on there.
Speaker 2:You can stand you can spin it up and it can stand on its own.
Speaker 1:Probably not super venture back. We'll probably not a $10,000,000,000 company, but phenomenal business if you get it right. I I firmly agree. This is this is one of the pitches when I went on my first million. I was, like, exploit the Barnum effect to create an AI app wrapper.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:I I don't even know how to pronounce this. Tiortaxes? Tiortaxes says, an incredible threat on Musk. Very rarely, I see something like this from someone who is not a blind fanboy. TLDR, some people are larger than life.
Speaker 1:This then then the self reinforcing ugly pettiness of it. You wrongly assume this is a triviality to brush aside. They can do it for real. And it's a quote tweet of somebody from Olivia that says, if you can't model Leviathons walking through the world, you're gonna make some pretty bad mistakes. And it's just a deep analysis of of Musk.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. I I like the I've always liked the take that that Elon is both, you know, PT Barnum, the circus man, the showman, and he's also Thomas Edison, the inventor. Yeah. And he's solid on both. He he so so and that really breaks people's brains because they wanna latch on to just one.
Speaker 1:It's like, yeah, he does announce products before they're ready, and he is wrong on those. But then he's also a great engineer, great manager, and can build real stuff. Like, the like, the cars drive. The rockets land. And so even if he's saying some some wild stuff that might be wrong in the short term, it's, like
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Both are true. What was your take from this though?
Speaker 2:It's hard because I actually think
Speaker 1:There's, like,
Speaker 2:a double tweet here. Yeah. A 1000000 takes. But, yeah, I think I think what you take away from this is that he's incredibly complicated and the people that just wanna pin him as doing, like, the cringe stuff
Speaker 3:where he's, like, jumping
Speaker 2:on Yeah. The stage and, oh, he's not just an engineer. He's not just a poster.
Speaker 3:Yep. There's so much there's
Speaker 2:so much depth to it all. And yet, the thing that we had we had a a a listener comment on a on one of our posts this morning saying that basically, like, very bearish about x in your take, which I think is the right take is Elon has a history of just making stuff work and making money. So at this point in his career, betting against him is just, like, generally
Speaker 1:Stupid.
Speaker 2:Stupid idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. Ali Taylor says, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit it, but I genuinely find chat gpt to be helpful and supportive when I'm anxious. This is back to
Speaker 2:the bar and paper. Opportunity. Yeah. I would be there's probably already $50,000,000 of ARR worth of these sort of, like, chat gpt therapy products that are just out there printing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And they're not in they're not even being talked about because it's just, like, 2 engineers, like, just shipping.
Speaker 3:I mean,
Speaker 1:the first version of this was, like, all the Riz apps. Did you see these?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I I talked to a kid.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I met that guy too.
Speaker 1:DM'd me and was like, hey. I'm building this, like, chat GPT rapper for, you know, how to talk to girls on dating apps. So you copy what they said, and it'll recommend what you should say.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and I was like, that sounds great, kid. Like, good job building something that people want clearly. Like, you have some users, like, just go monetize it right now because the whole chat gpt rapper thing is gonna be a bad meme. Don't bother with status symbols in Silicon Valley and try to raise money. And he comes back to me, like, a month He's, like, we're doing a 1,000,000 a month.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think he ended up joining if we're if we're talking about the same Yeah.
Speaker 2:People, he ended up joining h f zero.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There you
Speaker 2:go. And now he's building a self improvement sort of community platform product.
Speaker 1:But that but that initial Yeah. That initial experience of being young and making money is so valuable. Yeah. And and then and then taking someone who can, a, build a product, get it to market, figure out the marketing, like, do the I think he does the growth hack on on TikTok. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, the motion of, like, getting the Stripe account growing, even if it rugs and, like, oh, you got killed by Chachapiti. If you're a 20 year old and you were making a $1,000,000 even for just 1 month and then you make nothing, it's like Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be so much easier to stay back and find your Go read 0 to 1, figure out what actually a monopoly business is, but you have the experience of launching, building, coding, hiring, firing, all these different things. And then you can go build the real generational company, but you actually have the something under your belt instead of just being like, oh, I went to school.
Speaker 2:Pattern match. So when you go into your and if if when you have the right idea Yep. And you can go in and you could be, like, yeah. When I was 21, I built a $1,000,000 ARR Yeah. Chat g p t Show me
Speaker 1:a high school diploma and a Stripe account with me. For a
Speaker 2:period of time, it was, like, oh, he traded sneakers Yep. Yeah. Yeah. On eBay. And then it was, like, oh, he created, like, a Shopify store.
Speaker 2:And now he created he or she created a thin wrapper on GPT. And if you didn't do that, like, it's kinda bearish.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So word of advice to the younger technology brothers, both male and female in the audience, go make $1,000,000 for the Thin Chet GPT rapper.
Speaker 1:Don't fall for the the psyop that VCs are putting upon young founders that, you know, you have to build a generational company that has a monopoly thesis, like, immediately. Like, if you're young, just go build something cool. Yep. Air Katakana says, actually, insane how Steve Jobs was the singular successful ideas guy in the entire history of tech companies. Until 7.3.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 7.3 k likes clearly resonated. I don't know how true this is. It's such a weird thing. Like, who's an idea guy?
Speaker 1:Why is it an
Speaker 2:idea guy? Ideas guy is ideas guy is a great talk. Funny way to slander somebody because among certain groups being able to generate great ideas is like the highest like it's like the highest status thing.
Speaker 1:Especially in the
Speaker 2:AI era. And in and in many ways, like, you there's you could totally make a case that Elon is an ideas guy. Right? He thinks of really big ideas, and then he brings together smart group groups of people to go and do that. And, yeah, he's adding fuel to the fire and pushing people and questioning everything and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:But at its core, he's an idea guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. And I mean, it's, like, where is the line? Like, is Zuck an ideas guy? It seems like he has, like, the most value he creates there is ideas.
Speaker 1:Right? And Yeah. It's more like Will almost. Like, he's in founder mode. So, like, he didn't have the idea for the metaverse or the idea for VR, but he had the will to be, like, we're actually gonna go do 10,000,000,000 of CapEx on this or AI or
Speaker 2:Anybody that's using, calling saying idea guy as a way to slander somebody is usually the kind of person that is mad because they see an idea and they're, like, oh, that's a good idea. Like, I thought of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I didn't do anything. Thought of that,
Speaker 2:but I didn't do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's not just having the ideas. It's actually being able to, like, believe in them early. Like, there's plenty of ideas that I've had that I've seen the incarnation of a few years later and be, like, wow. That's, like, a really that that was a good idea.
Speaker 1:But there's a massive difference between having the idea and actually taking action on it and going and and going. Even even just betting on the market. There's been so many times where I've been like, oh, yeah. Like, I do feel like Nvidia is, like, way under price right now and bought, like, a1000 dollars or something like that. And I'm like
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 1:I should size that, like, way different. One year
Speaker 2:one year of college tuition.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. I should size that way differently. Yeah. Like, having conviction in your ideas is is is just as important.
Speaker 1:And and I think that's what that's why Steve Jobs is successful because he he has the idea that, you know, you don't need a keyboard on a phone, but then he screams at anyone who says we have to have a keyboard and demands that it doesn't have a keyboard
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To a thousand employees that are all have, like, little subtle soft power, realms. And there's a designer over
Speaker 3:here who
Speaker 1:has a bunch of friends, and you can't fire them, and they're gonna push back. And, like, there's gonna be all these things. So it's, like, actually bringing the will of, like, the founder mode to to to make your ideas actually happen.
Speaker 2:And getting and being lucky with the timing. There's a there's a comp Justin Mayer's brother
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Nick, one of, you know, the other cofounder of, Kettle and Fire. He has a new company that is disrupting the legacy CPG testing companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And when I saw the deck, I was like, this is, like, super obvious. Like, wanted to invest, would invest in anything he does. But, saw it, I was like, yeah, this is super obvious. I'm surprised nobody had really taken this on, but I'm sure a lot of other people had the idea. But a Nick and his co founders came together at a very specific moment in time when there was a bunch of new regulations happening in the a of other people will look at it 5 years from now and be like, oh, I've got to have thought of that.
Speaker 1:Let's go to the squirrel story. I know we don't talk about politics, but this is this is animals It
Speaker 2:seems to have
Speaker 1:broken through. So, the Associated Press writes, an orphaned squirrel who became a social media star was euthanized after being seized from home, and Mike Salana quote tweets it with, say his name. This wasn't even the biggest Mike Salana banger about this. He he he quote tweeted another video of, like yeah. This one.
Speaker 1:He quoted a video breaking down the squirrel. It was, like, all the best clips of the squirrel. And, it just says, this is what they took from you. The Elon quote got a 150,000,000 views. That's like everyone on x right
Speaker 3:now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, every single person saw this.
Speaker 2:Every this meme was just a good a way for posters to cash in. Yeah. Because, like, Pat Pat, Blumenthal Yeah. Was, like, sent me one, and he sent 2, and one of them got, like, 11,000 likes or something like something ridiculous. But I think I think the real story is that, the, squirrel was a content to commerce play for this guy's OnlyFans.
Speaker 2:And so having, the squirrel become a hero of the conservative movement Very odd. Is a bit Yeah. Shaky ground to build on. Because if you look, if you dig below the surface at all, it's OnlyFans.
Speaker 1:Odd funnel. Yeah. Funnel. Many many content plays are. Many Instagrams are just fronts for fronts for OnlyFans.
Speaker 3:Are
Speaker 1:you familiar with Gell Mann Amnesia? I think we've talked about this. So Gell Mann amnesia is this idea that, like, let's say you're, like, you know, the world expert in, like, structured credit, and you pick up, like, the Wall Street Journal and they write an article about what you're a world expert in and they get some facts wrong. Then all of a sudden, when you read an article in the same newspaper that that isn't about your expertise, you're like, well, if they got my thing wrong, maybe they're getting the thing that I don't know about wrong. It's kind of like the glass shattering and you realize, like, oh, there's all this, like like, things aren't just broken in my world.
Speaker 1:They're broken
Speaker 3:everywhere. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was like my dad reading an article about me in The New York Times. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, wait.
Speaker 2:Maybe this isn't, like, the, you know, bastion of truth.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so I feel like this was a huge Gell Mann amnesia moment for a lot of normies who just like animals because they're like, if the government could mess this up like, aside from all the laws, aside from whatever happened, just the idea of, like, euthanizing an Internet famous furry animal is, like, calm's nightmare 101. Right? Like, you should never do that ever because Yeah.
Speaker 1:They have virality and cuteness, and that's, like, all you need. So you know that there's gonna be a backlash. You should know. And so and so if if the government can mess up that, then maybe they can mess up the war in the Middle East or Yeah. Or the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1:And so it's very easy to look at this and then realize, be like,
Speaker 2:oh, the government can
Speaker 1:And that's Elon's point, government overreach in action. And it's, like, it's such a minor thing and it's, like, yeah, I don't a squirrel. This is never gonna happen to me. But it's like, if if if they can get this that wrong, like, maybe they can get something else bigger wrong that does affect you. And I've talked to a lot of people in defense.
Speaker 1:I've seen this at the FDA where it's like like a lot of the defense people are like, well, I went really deep dealing with the DOD and I saw how broken that was. And I wound up starting the company, but that led me to believe that not it's not just the DOD that's broken in their procurement. It's also the state department, the department of agriculture, and all of these different agencies that all have, like, similar levels of rot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, Boeing Boeing, you know, has their issues with their planes, but they are also selling, like, a 150 k, like, soap dispensers.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, to the government. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to be, like, oh, yeah. We are excellent in everything, but just the one problem you're hearing about. Usually, like, where there's smoke, there's fire. It was funny because I was watching this video of this cute squirrel videos. I was watching with my 3 year old, and he was just dying laughing.
Speaker 1:Just, like, so cute. Just like, oh my god. Look at this squirrel. And I'm, like, crying because I know how it ends. And he was just like I was like, oh my god.
Speaker 1:This poor squirrel. And, like, I'm, like, tearing up, and he's just, like, dying laughing because he just thinks it's, like, a cute squirrel. And I was, like, damn. Like, yeah. When it when you find out, you're gonna be, like, the most hardcore libertarian ever.
Speaker 1:Like but I'm not gonna tell you. You listen
Speaker 3:to the
Speaker 1:podcast in in 10 years, and you can figure out what happened to the squirrel. But wild. Oh, yeah. Here's the soap dispenser story. So praying for exits.
Speaker 1:Good buddy says, posts a a screenshot of an article about Boeing. Says, Boeing cleaned up on air force parts, including soap dispensers marked up 8,000%. Wow. Yes. Good old government accountability.
Speaker 1:A 150 k for soap dispensers certainly seems correct to me.
Speaker 2:So this is why I'm excited about, do you know Kimiya?
Speaker 1:The AI thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So our friend Kimiya is building a company that allows anybody to find and bid on government contracts.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And what's going to be really interesting about that is by introducing there's a lot of contracts out there that the government gives out that basically don't have much competition. Yep. If Boeing goes to them and they're like, we have these soap dispensers and we're Boeing and you buy a lot of stuff from us, so why not spend these are great soap dispensers. They're only a $100,000 per dispenser. Seem might seem like fine.
Speaker 2:Nobody gets fired for buying Boeing. But then if there was another bidder in the mix being, like, I will sell you a soap dispenser for $500.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And so Kimmy Kimmy is, like, arming the, all the people.
Speaker 1:All the dropshippers.
Speaker 3:All
Speaker 2:the yeah. Basically, like Basically,
Speaker 1:everyone would be on AliExpress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I I I and this is what we talked about is, like, his company will be very successful if he can inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs that wanna go and be government contractors. Yep. Because it's very tangible. Right?
Speaker 2:It's actually easier to go and make money selling to the government than it is to buy something on AliExpress, get it sent to you, mark it up, get the Facebook ad when you could just like product
Speaker 3:or service and customer product,
Speaker 2:service and customer. Right. So it's I think, predicting out the next couple of years, Kimmy is going to start a similar to what Shopify did. Yeah. New movement amount around government contract.
Speaker 1:Are you familiar with the story of TransDigm? No. Oh, man. It's it's fantastic. So, it was profiled in this 4 episode limited podcast from Patrick O'Shaughnessy, host of Invest Like the Best, a separate podcast called 50 x.
Speaker 1:And it's a fantastic deep dive into this company. It was, it was like the least Silicon Valley company, private equity buy up, roll up. And then it goes from, like, 500,000,000 to 5 5,000,000,000 to 50 there's, like, there's, like, 50 x of gain, and that's why it was profiled in the show. But the 4 episodes are, like, the CEO who who, like, was running the company, then the lead investor in the private markets, then back to the CEO for a second interview about taking it public and what they did next, and then the lead investor in the public markets. So you get this, like, very back and forth.
Speaker 1:It's just fascinating. And the first time I listened to it, I was like, this is, like, the craziest jargon because you think you're, like, taking crazy pills because they're like, so what's your secret? And he's like, well, we raise prices and we cut costs. And it's like and he says and they talk about this for, like, 20 minutes. And you're like, okay.
Speaker 1:Get to, like, the the crazy one trick that everyone hates that's so secretive. And and really, it's just, like, super operational efficiency. Go in, play Early
Speaker 2:stuff that you can learn while getting a Harvard MBA, which is raise prices and not cost.
Speaker 1:But, Charlie Munger was asked about this on an Invest, like, the best episode. Like, what do you think of TransDigm? Like, would you ever invest in this company? And he was like, no. I think it's unethical.
Speaker 1:And the reason is because a a lot of the way that TransDigm makes money is they they go like, they they make, like, all of the seat belts on planes. So, you know, if you go on a Boeing or an Airbus, that when you buckle your seat belt, it's all the same clock. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're doing the toilets. All the toilets are the same. All the seats are the same. And all that stuff, they make, like, you know, some sort of fan blade that goes in, like, every motor. And so what they'll do is they'll get intellectual property around that, get a small monopoly on one single part.
Speaker 1:And then once they have a contract with the government, they'll raise the price so their margins are really good. And I don't think they ever get this egregious, but what they'll do is they'll say, like, okay. Yeah. Like, we sent you this part for, like, a dollar. It costs us 50¢ to make, but the next batch is gonna be, like, a $100.
Speaker 1:And the government is, like, $100, like, whatever. Like, that's so little. It doesn't matter. They're buying a lot. And then all of a sudden Translamp starts making a lot of money.
Speaker 1:And so it seems like
Speaker 2:the issue is the government the government has budgets, but no profit incentive. Nobody working in the government really has a sort of profit incentive. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:But it's fascinating. It's a very, very contentious company. Like, some people love it. Some people hate it. It's a fantastic financial story.
Speaker 1:But it's just, like, under discussed in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, they're running seize candy, and they're like, we raise prices 7% every single year no matter the market conditions or anything else.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Brand monopolies are okay, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Brand monopolies are fine.
Speaker 1:Everyone everyone has their preferred monopoly that they're like, this one's natural
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the
Speaker 1:other ones aren't, and all the other ones should be broken out. But my monopolies are good. Monopoly is for me, but not for thee. Let's, go to Jack Prescott. He says, whatever happens after the earning call, the mission and focus will remain the same.
Speaker 1:Execute and deliver, protect the West, Palantir.
Speaker 2:Should we do a live reaction to,
Speaker 1:the earnings? Oh, did the earnings just happen today?
Speaker 2:I think they were today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love Palantir. Fantastic company. Very interesting business. Earnings for
Speaker 2:be 10%.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:No. No. I don't think that I don't think it's actually
Speaker 1:They're trading really well. They're they're they're trading like a tech stock now, which is fantastic. I think they broke a 100,000,000,000. I saw this insane, chart that Shyam Sankar sent me. The it was, like, every company in defense, all the primes, their market cap, and then their employees, and Palantir is, like, 4th by market cap, and they have 3,000 employees, and every other company has, like, over a 100,000 employees.
Speaker 1:Crazy. It's remarkable. Like, do more with less.
Speaker 2:The,
Speaker 1:it's good stuff.
Speaker 2:It's interesting Google is not up to date. It should be probably on perplexity. Actually compare this.
Speaker 1:Just open the Bloomberg app.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just Need to pull up. Why do you need to get a terminal on the desktop? Yeah. Terminal
Speaker 1:right here. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting that Yahoo is up to date. And, yeah, perplexity is quite up to date. So congratulations to
Speaker 1:All Palantir shareholders.
Speaker 2:Palantir sales beat stock up 13%.
Speaker 1:13%. Wow. So it must be over a 100,000,000,000 now. Yep. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1:I was, I was at a defense tech event in DC, and, Shyam Sankar, the CFO, who's been there since, like, day 1, he might be a cofounder, like, first employee. He gave this great talk about Palantir and what they're building and, you know, how they wanna work with startups and whatnot. And somebody asked this question, like, oh, well, you've, you've raised, like, you know, $4,000,000,000 in the private markets and your revenue is only, like, $4,000,000,000. So, like, isn't this, like, a failure financially? And he was just like, oh my god.
Speaker 1:Like, you don't understand, like, the first thing about finance. The guy was from, out of the country. He was from, like, France. Something like backwater like that. And, and and so the next question I asked, I raised my hand.
Speaker 1:I was like, so you've raised, only we've raised only $4,000,000,000 and yet your company is worth, like, more than 10 times that. Like, how do you make it look so easy?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thanks for the layoff.
Speaker 2:Their PE ratio is 243. I mean, software.
Speaker 1:And they and they have an amazing AI story. Right? Because they have, like, all this private data that no one can get into. And so it's, like, they're gonna be able to sell, like, very differentiated products.
Speaker 2:I think there's I think there's that's there's that's a potentially $1,000,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 1:I mean, Karp is just founder mode. Like, he's the embodiment of it.
Speaker 2:And it's, like, don't bet don't bet against that. Yeah. Seriously.
Speaker 1:Steve Wisener says, email marketing is dying. Google Ads are dying. Cold calls, well, are dead. Not sure people fully realize we're at a huge inflection point for marketing. Gotta think differently about how to reach your customers.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:how What's interesting so what's interesting about this is that it feels like a lot of sales is all gonna go back to relationships. Sure. And so the truly gifted sales person that's just good at making people like them Yep. And wanting to do business with them is actually gonna excel even in a world where as a small company, you can have an army of, like, online digital clones that are just selling constantly. And it feels like people may only start responding to, like, a personal message of being, like, hey, like, the CEO of this company wants to meet you.
Speaker 2:Like, let me know if you're down for a conversation. And it's, like, sure. Yeah. So it's, like, going back to Sentra's point and, like, core learning from studying the history's greatest entrepreneurs, like, relationships around the world. Yep.
Speaker 2:And in an era of, AI, that will become even more the case. Yep. Yeah. You can't disrupt the chat that just, like, people like to do business with.
Speaker 1:I think there's an interesting thing that this tweet misses, which is, like, a lot of these things companies have moved on to. Like, this doesn't even acknowledge, like, owned media going viral on Tik Tok, doing stunts, being really good at press. Like, there there are areas of marketing that stills or or, like, they might die off in the next few years, but he didn't even really capture, like, the tail end of this marketing. But I agree with your point.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting because his direct response marketing seems to be working better than ever. Like, Meta is getting so optimized that Yep. I buy products on a weekly basis from companies I've never heard of because they serve me an ad for a highly relevant product.
Speaker 3:Good.
Speaker 2:And that still seems to work. And Meta's figuring out a way that even though CPMs have gone up dramatically, like, the ads still work. Like, you can't brute force a stupid product into being really big, like, you could, like, a decade ago. Yep.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 2:the ad platform is, like, getting better and better. But, yeah, I think what this misses is, like, you are going to need to figure out how to get high quality attention for your product or your business. And there's and you're not gonna be reliant on this, like, tool set that everybody has access to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think people miss this with, like, the the AI spam or, like, AI sales agents is, like, there's going to be an arms race. And just as fast as the AI spam increases, like, so will the AI filtering. It's that classic, like, there's this webcomic that's, like, oh, this is amazing. This this, this AI, I just type one bullet point and it turns into it turns it into this, like, really long email.
Speaker 1:And then on the other side, it's like, this AI is amazing. It turns this long email into just one bullet point. And it's like, the relationships are built on just, like, text messages between 2 people that are just like, do you want to do this deal? Yes or no?
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 1:thumbs up. And that's the end. So, so so I I I I I'm very skeptical about, like, the spam being a good path. Yeah. Unless there's something, like, you really found some weird edge and you're just, like but it's gonna be short lived.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other thing that's cool is now that anybody can, anybody can be, like, a pretty competent developer
Speaker 1:Yep. I
Speaker 2:a founder of my portfolio who's not the CTO of his company, like, almost won a hackathon this last weekend just by using all of, like, the publicly available tools. And so what's interesting to that is it's the the really talented marketers of today going forward are gonna be looking more like engineers where historically the really sophisticated marketing organizations like Ramp as an example
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They have, like, a lot of engineering involvement in the marketing activities that they're doing. And so you have to imagine that the new marketers are not the the the best marketers are not gonna be, like, the affiliate marketers or, like, I'm really good at AdSense because that's all just, like, automated now. It's, like, I'm actually writing code to better find and attract and do all, you know, customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. Like that boring business says good times create high EBITDA multiples. High EBITDA multiples create bad times.
Speaker 1:Bad times create low EBITDA multiples. Low EBITDA multiples create good times.
Speaker 2:So I think this is a funny tweet, but I have to say that I feel like it is great. Good CEOs create high EBITDA multiples. High EBITDA multiples create sloppy CEOs. Yeah. Bad CEOs create low EBITDA multiples and, low EBITDA multiples, create opportunities for good CEOs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's kinda like the wartime versus peacetime CEO thing a little bit. I think that there's, I I think what what, I mean, what needs to be, like, unpacked about the wartime CEO is just that there's, like, a 1000000 different wars that you can fight. There's, like, there's, like, the war of, like, my company is dying, and I need to, like, fire people, cut costs, and just, like, keep this thing going
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:To, like, make it to the next fight. And that's what that that you need a wartime CEO to get through that hard hard time, but then you also need a wartime CEO to go back on the offensive.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So there's, like, defensive wartime CEO, offensive wartime CEOs Yeah. And they're both wartime CEOs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the good example right now is Sundar at Google spending Yeah. The last 10 years.
Speaker 1:Everyone says he's like the classic peacetime CEO.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's making so much money. Every employee is making a lot of money. The shareholders are doing well. Everybody's just kind of coasting, and then you it's, like, boom.
Speaker 2:Sam Altman comes in and laps you on AI. All your AI products internally suck. Sam everybody loves Sam Altman's products. Boom. You make room for the the perplexity guy, which is becoming a legendary ship poster himself and, has a very high extreme EBITDA multiple for his business today.
Speaker 2:And, so, yeah, it's the, relaxed CEOs creating opportunities for cracked CEOs.
Speaker 1:Yep. I mean, that's right. Atlas says, amazing. Now we have LinkedIn thread guy Goon entrepreneur influencers depicting an AIGF in front of the giant Goon Tower in Dubai, the Goon capital of the world. We are still so early.
Speaker 1:And it's another one of these. We talked about this before. I created this AI influencer in 2 minutes. It's making me $3,000 a month, and I only work 60 minutes a day. Let me show you how to get started.
Speaker 1:And of course, it's an
Speaker 3:entire course.
Speaker 2:There's, like, an entire economy of people selling courses on how to make your Yeah. Your, like, army of,
Speaker 1:well, you know that.
Speaker 2:And I just wanna see I like, if somebody's watching and and they can send me their Stripe dashboard showing that their Goonfluencer Goonfluencer is actually making money. Like, I'll shut up. But until then, I'm just gonna keep calling this stuff out because
Speaker 1:Well, the dashboard shows that the courses are selling.
Speaker 2:You know I love how this guy too. His username is at Creatine. Creatine cycle. And, I wonder with this quality of posting, I'm guessing he stops cycling and he's just always
Speaker 1:on it. Yeah. Always on it. Well, you know that, like, when you join Andrew Tate's, like, you know, club to, you know, become, like, a entrepreneur or whatever, he had like, most most of, like, the fake guru, entrepreneur hustle core, core seller guys have, like, one thing. They're like, I'm the real estate guy.
Speaker 1:I get you in my funnel. I talk about how I became rich through real estate, and then you will eventually pay for my course or, like, my in person thing to learn how to do real estate. Or there's a different person that does it for crypto, or there's a different person that does it for, you know, Shopify sites or whatever. Andrew Tate does all of them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He doesn't do just one. You go in, and there's, like, 8 modules, and it's, like, learn crypto. 1 One of them is forex trading. Forex. Another and then and then as soon as AI got big, he has an AI module.
Speaker 3:So you
Speaker 1:can become, like, an AI influencer. Like, this guy might be, like, downstream of Tate in some ways.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. Fascinating. Yeah. It's smart going multi product. Tate has so much Yeah.
Speaker 2:Attention and such a crazy funnel. I'm sure
Speaker 1:that he He understands the product shifts, but people are just buying the attitude and, like, the brand. Yeah. And it doesn't matter what the product is.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:You know, he can sell anything. It's wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's look at Cody Norquist. He said he traded in his Tesla. Zero regrets. He bought a extremely depreciating, Range Rover that will probably be worth half as much in, in 6 months.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just I don't know if this guy's in tech, but I do think that this is the beginning of a trend where tech people discover luxury products and they're like, wow, these are actually pretty nice. I never well, I never even thought of going to a non Tesla dealership. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. I went, you know, my I tried my tried my friend's Range Rover and wow, this actually feels, like, pretty good, you know. It's, like, you know, those tests that they do in cars where they, like, touch all the buttons Yeah. And plastic and stuff like that. And There is something about yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, you can't, like, I my driver, the guy that I used to get to and from the airport, he I had to tell him, like, don't pick me up in a Tesla because he has a Tesla and he has, like, a, just like a regular, like, black car or whatever. And being in the Tesla one, everything feels, like, cheap and kind of wonky, and I just don't like it. The acceleration is the other thing. But, yeah, I just don't it's just not a luxury product, and I don't want to be in them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so now that not only are there other, like, electric products out there, but this, like, sort of prevailing narrative that maybe gas cars aren't that bad. Yeah. And, I just think that if this trend continues to play out, it'll be good for San Francisco because people aren't gonna wanna get it's really expensive to replace a Range Rover window that's been shattered by somebody that's breaking into your car. That's why, you know, you can just eat it. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I do think that one of the most, like, underrated near term bull cases for Tesla is just actually filling out the product portfolio. There's no reason why they can't do, like, a Mercedes s class a supercar, which they they've been talking about. But even just taking a model s and being, like, everything has, like, wood and and, like, and, like, real metals and stuff. Like yeah. It costs twice as much.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you know it's still luxurious.
Speaker 2:They don't have a minivan. They don't
Speaker 1:have a minivan. They don't have a station wagon. They don't have a convertible currently. They don't have a full size SUV. Like, they're they're just, like, missing a bunch of pieces.
Speaker 1:But then also within the range, you know, like, Mercedes has done a great job having, like, the s class, the e class, the a class.
Speaker 3:And the whole.
Speaker 1:And the s class, like, it feels different when you're inside. Like, even the leather stitching is different than an a class. And that's not that hard to do. It just hasn't been a priority because the whole thing has been economies of scale, economies of scale around the batteries, around the acceleration, the self driving. But if you get to a point where you can buy something and it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm getting the the model the model x, but with the upgraded package that takes it to Range Rover level
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of luxury. Like, it's game over because it's gonna be so much safer than a Range Rover when you're driving with the self driving and stuff. Like but you're just not gonna unless you unless you have drivers better than yourself driving. But I don't know.
Speaker 2:I I I Yeah. Yeah. I think and that will be good for the whole Tesla brand Yeah. If there are products that genuinely feel Yeah. Like luxury.
Speaker 1:Everyone's been talking about, oh, they need to go down market to, like, the $25,000 car, but maybe they actually need there. They're already basically there because you can buy a depreciated model 3 for around 25. But but what you can't buy is is a Tesla that has the luxury features of, like, a Rolls Royce. And they're and they're and Lucid Air kinda came in as, like, the top upper market, but they could just crush Lucid with, like, a small tweak to the interior.
Speaker 2:Tesla built a $400,000 car, it would be amazing.
Speaker 1:People buy it.
Speaker 2:It would be yeah. It would it would it would start displacing. I'm sure that has a much bigger market than the poor song way. Right?
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. And I think the I think the design language is evolving in a like, the 3 s x y, like, those all have, like, very neutral, unoffensive looks. The Cybertruck's in the exact opposite direction. But the Cybertruck showed me that they could build something that's, like, as iconic as a Huracan design or something like that.
Speaker 1:And so if they can bring some of that to, like, what does what does, you know, Tesla's edgy next generation design language look in a luxury sedan or a full size SUV. Like like, Escalade, I think they had a timeless design, and they've ridden it so long now that even with the electric the the new electric, Escalade is, I think, a 180 k. Tesla should get in there and be right at a 180 k. But, c, okay, when you when you run the company like Elon does, you can probably put even more crazy stuff in there. Right?
Speaker 1:Because you can get into, like like, you know, operational efficiency around how he's acquiring, like, the wood and tell a story there. There's probably something really interesting that could happen. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to David Holes, founder of Midjourney. Love this guy.
Speaker 1:Played a StarCraft with 6 friends last night. It was a free for all. We added 2 AIs to fill out the 8 player map. We spent the whole game fighting each other while the AI slowly took over and suddenly were too powerful and beat us all, a lesson in AI safety.
Speaker 2:I think this is a a great example. It also I used to play StarCraft
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Quite a bit.
Speaker 1:It really does.
Speaker 2:And, I was diamond ranked and, like, pretty good. So I would usually smoke the bots, but I have some distinct memories where you're just, like, oh, my god. I just got steamrolled by, like you you think that you're, like, winning basically and you're just on one side of the map and then just, like, this
Speaker 1:goes towards you.
Speaker 2:And that could be, like, what we're doing right now, which we're, like, oh, look at, like, the cute LLM. And, like, oh, I just generated this funny picture of, like, a squirrel meme
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you just get steamrolled by the AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's I wonder what AIs he was using just, like, in game AIs or something third party.
Speaker 2:Well, every video game has their Of course. They've had, like, their AI.
Speaker 1:But those AIs, I believe, have never maybe they cheat or something, but there was the story with OpenAI. They had the DOTA team, and then they did a StarCraft thing as well where they were able to beat the, like, the world champions. And for that, I think they had a specific restriction where they they they interacted with the game via an API, but they still limited the actions per minute. So they couldn't just get, like, inhuman reactions. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then also, the API lets you see, like, beyond the fog, and they wouldn't they obviously wouldn't do that because it's cheating. So they they they, like, they they nerf the AI. They they make it they kinda level the playing field, but the AI still still wins. And so, like, you kind of should expect the AI to win if you're going like, no no no chess master expects to beat an AI at chess.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, it's kinda funny. It really makes it it is the it's, like, kind of it's great because it's a meme, but at the same time, it it makes the case for these AI doomers that are, like, guys, we need to stop fighting among ourselves Sure. And it needs to be more of, like, the humans versus AI. Yep. Like, we need to take this seriously.
Speaker 2:Yep. And that was more convincing than any, like, essay that I've seen from them Totally. Which are really easy to be, like, that, like, cool story, bro.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, David just has great takes on all this stuff. Like, he's he is pretty, like, AGI Pilled and, but he has, like, very nuanced takes. He's not just, like, out there, like, saber rattling and, like, having a conniption fit every 2 seconds. Why did you how did you select Joshua Steinman?
Speaker 1:We are good morning. We are going to win.
Speaker 2:Okay. Simple.
Speaker 3:This is not
Speaker 1:a new tweet. This is just every single day.
Speaker 2:Tweets it every single day.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not even a particular banger.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Some of them ended up sent some of them. It's funny watching, like, the algo Some of them do well. More than others. But the reason I included it is that, I see these, like, every 3, 4 days and every time I see it, I'm, like, nice. So anyways, I just included it because it's American.
Speaker 1:Thank you for your service.
Speaker 2:And, I do think it's a public service and it's and it's kind of it's an example of, like, marketers that think, like, oh, like, we're being too repetitive with this messaging where now I just associate Steinman with winning
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And being committed to winning. And it makes me wanna back whatever he does. Optimistic. And being optimistic. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean
Speaker 2:And it's Yeah.
Speaker 1:He worked, like, in the Trump administration. He's very pro Trump and and never faltered when the polls weren't going his way. Like, he really works. Like, he's he's a big fan. Fan.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean, it's his version of, like, the Jocko Willing thing. He posted this at 6:16 AM. And as we know, the most important thing is not waking up early. It's getting on Twitter early.
Speaker 2:And posting.
Speaker 1:First thing, get on x. Post. This is key. Will Menitis says, having a full time bible instructor instructor is the new private jet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, pressed, no. I think was it no. Preston Court tweeted Theo about something else but, no. I think this is relevant because,
Speaker 1:we know some people who are full time bible instructors.
Speaker 2:Some billionaires with full time bible instructors and
Speaker 3:it
Speaker 2:just shows that even a a product like the bible that is available to everybody and been analyzed, you know, over and over and over and over for generations, it's still worth hiring, you know, a tutor and learning even if you have the time to study it intensely. So Yeah. There's also an interesting thing where, like, even if
Speaker 1:you're the most, like, atheist skeptic about the Bible, it's a valuable text just because it's so old that it's been copied again and again and again in in so many different stories, like the Lion King or whatever. Yeah. So the first thing a child learns the first story that a lot that that a child learns is, like, a hero's journey that's derived from the bible. And so if you can go to the source text text, understand, like, the the the the way the story and the narrative is structured, that gives you power in storytelling and also understanding, like, what resonates.
Speaker 2:Oh, and our our mutual friend who is a bible instructor to
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The global elite, his main point is that if you don't understand the Bible, you're gonna miss so many other things when you're reading some random story like The Lion King. It's like, oh, well, like.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does just improve, like, you know, your edification and your enjoyment of of other literature. So, yeah, get the full time Bible instructor.
Speaker 2:Although, I don't know, maybe with AI, it'll be
Speaker 1:on demand soon. Some of those Bible apps, like, print money.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, it's a good business. There's a few. And then there's that company, Angel Studios, one of the most underrated, media companies that does really well. Really? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Christian, like, they they did an adaptation of the Bible, that, was, like, HBO level cinematography and Wow. And did really well. And they produced a number of, of films, that are all, like, related to Christian themes. And, but more interestingly, like, the business has just become very, very good.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and they've done they've done very well.
Speaker 3:And they
Speaker 1:It's an interesting sell tickets.
Speaker 2:Business itself. Monetize. There's, a podcast called The Bible Project that I listen to that's totally free. They don't do ads, but it's donation based, which is, like
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:At what point should they just become a church? Sure. Right? An online church effectively.
Speaker 1:That's cool. Just pay what you want. Yeah. Power tools are making a comeback. Julian Fried Fried says, the power tool renaissance is underappreciated.
Speaker 1:It's a great time to be alive if you are someone who likes making things. And Yes. Tweets more.
Speaker 2:This is this is I shared this because it's funny because tech guys whose only tools has been the phone and the laptop are now discovering that there's the democratization of super high quality power tools that has been happening, like, in the background. And there's, like, entire religions oriented around the different brands of power tools and whether you're, like, a Makita guy or Milwaukee guy. I've seen this whenever. And the guys that have their drills, like, fight each other. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, attach to them and they just, like Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I haven't gone down the power tool, like, you know, rabbit hole and watched a 1000 hours of some YouTube videos.
Speaker 2:I feel like I got to, like, Tim Ferris pill where Tim's, like, mindset was, like, if if something if you can hire if you make $500 an hour and you can hire somebody to do do the job for a $100 an hour
Speaker 1:Nick Huber's
Speaker 2:now when I'm doing stuff yeah. Nick Huber's, like, why would you stand on a ladder? It's dangerous. It's it's a good point. Now when I'm doing like, if I do something around the house glory.
Speaker 2:And I do, like yeah. Glory. Household glory. I find that, I think women are attracted, you know, when I when I can, like, use a hammer, Sarah's, like, nice. Yes.
Speaker 2:I I remember one
Speaker 1:of my first dates with my now wife, like, went over to her sister's place, changed the light bulb. Everyone was, like, this guy's god. Yeah. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Marry this man.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantastic. I gotta my power tool game. I need, I need to build that I'm
Speaker 2:gonna get some I think we should Yeah. Create a space on the wall.
Speaker 1:Tom Morello from, Rage Against the Machine posts 25 years ago today, the Battle of Los Angeles, the cover art for that, that album that has Bulls on Parade and a couple of really hit songs. And Orin McEntire, quote, tweets and says, you have the same political beliefs as Black Rock and Citibank.
Speaker 2:I think he was trying to dunk on him, but your point of view is that
Speaker 1:I love Rage Against the Machine, and I love BlackRock and Citibank.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:So what a match made in heaven. I'm glad. Welcome to the club, Tom. If you have the same if you have the same, political beliefs as BlackRock, you're a friend of mine. It's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is kind of odd that people try and dunk on this. Like like, I
Speaker 2:I guess it's a good way to get people to question their beliefs. Yeah. Because if somebody thinks that organizations like BlackRock and Citibank are inherently bad and then you tell them they have the same set of beliefs as that group, then it is a good, at least thought starter in their mind to be, like, maybe I should have a more open mind around certain
Speaker 3:things.
Speaker 1:This is also one of those interesting tweets where, like, I can't quite tell if this is a leftist or rightist tweet, critique. Like, it could be like, you believe you like Citibank, and they like ESG and DEI, so you suck. And I and, like, you should be more right wing. Or it should be, like, you like the capitalist BlackRock and Citibank. You should be more left wing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's, like, I don't really know, but all I know is BlackRock.
Speaker 2:Basically, it kinda makes sense, like, raging against, like, BlackRock is the machine. Right? So it's saying, like, if you're you're raging against the machine yet
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You shouldn't be aligned with the machine.
Speaker 2:You're aligned with the you're stimulating the machine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But who knows? Maybe BlackRock and Citibank are raging against the machine, the machine of stagnation. Yeah. The machine of Yeah.
Speaker 1:BlackRock. Actualization.
Speaker 2:BlackRock created Burning Man, which is Exactly. It is the foundation on which Burning Man was built.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The machine of a lack of financial products. I wouldn't wanna live in that world. It'd be a disaster.
Speaker 2:How long how long until we go viral for being the podcast bros that's That love capitalism. No. No. Let's say that Black Rock created Black Rock City.
Speaker 1:Eventually. We'll get there.
Speaker 2:It's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:There's there's, like, a cottage industry of, of YouTubers that just put out endless, like, hit pieces on Black Rock being, like, did you know that they own everything and they don't understand how, like, fund to funds or e or ETFs work? It's so hilarious. And you watch someone fall into that trap and you're just like, oh my god. Take one economics class, please. It's really bad.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Colin Mickels says I hope I'm pronouncing that correct. Michaels, maybe? Colin Michaels. Few learn that SpaceX prices their launches way higher than it costs them to launch. They're essentially reaping 30 to $60,000,000 in profit each launch.
Speaker 1:Blue Origin existing is extremely good for the commercial space market. Bezos is notorious for downward price pressure. And then he has to follow it up with an apology kind of, I underestimated how many people would misinterpret this tweet, LOL. I don't know what they were misinterpreting. It seems pretty basic.
Speaker 1:I I mean, everyone knows that SpaceX is, like, way ahead of Blue Origin, but, you know, competition is good. And if you like
Speaker 2:Competition is good.
Speaker 1:Like going to space I mean, it is for losers. So wouldn't wanna be a as a as a SpaceX bull.
Speaker 2:To that later in the pod.
Speaker 1:As a SpaceX bull, you know, maybe you don't wanna, encourage thing. I I I do I do love when these, the the the the Musk Bezos rivalry in some ways is just so entertaining because they have they have warring properties, like, everywhere. Right? Yeah. Like, they both have car companies because Bezos was, like, one of the biggest backers of Rivian.
Speaker 2:And then they have and then they
Speaker 1:have rival space companies, obviously. Everyone knows about that one, SpaceX and Blue Origin. They also have rival media efforts because Bezos owns the Washington Post. And
Speaker 2:Wait. But the way that you just said all of this, and it kinda makes it seem that Elon is mogging Bezos at literally every single one of these
Speaker 1:Washington Post, Tesla Except in, you know Commerce. Commerce.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's I don't care about I don't I mean, it's because I care about I care about what Bezos is doing with his money now. Yeah. And if you're repeatedly getting mugged Yeah. While you have to imagine, though, that his performance across all of those things is gonna improve as his testosterone levels have climbed month over month for the past 5 years.
Speaker 1:It seems like it's happening in the Washington Post. A lot of changes there. Seems like he's improving that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe Blue Origin, you know, becomes a big space launch provider.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's yeah. I think that would be amazing for humanity. I think Rivian is telling you that. Olivia Rodrigo or whatever her name is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's there's another one too. But yeah. I mean, I I I think Bezos is a little bit more of, like, an old school, like, mega billionaire where he sees the side projects very much as, like, side projects where it's, like, get somebody to do something, go and show up, like
Speaker 2:He's not on the factory floor
Speaker 1:Yeah. Except for the idea. Feels like when he does something, it's like he's putting his life on the line for it. And it's like Yeah. Almost you a lot of people, this is a critique, will say, like, well, like, I I I actually just care about the space thing.
Speaker 1:I would I would be fine with him not spending time on media. But Elon's like, I'm going to personally make this change the way this company works significantly. I'm gonna go and rename it. I'm gonna do all this crazy stuff. And for Elon, it's like, he only has one vote.
Speaker 1:Elon doesn't like angel invest.
Speaker 2:He just Renaming Yeah. Renaming Twitter has the decision has grown on me quite a bit.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:When it happened, it was, like, one of my favorite brands even though it was flawed. Yep. And it was very painful, like, for years, I would just input, I guess, not that long, but I'd still put twitter.com. Yep. And more and more, it's feeling like, yeah, coming in and making it, just making it your thing actually makes sense in the context of Elon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's that saying, like, like, when there's a change of leadership, the company needs to be refounded.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's certainly what Elon did. Yeah. Change even changing the name, change all the people, change everything.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So that it's like but he had to do it because as we talked about with the truth social thing, like, having a network is very is is very important, and it's very resilient. And then even, like, even if the servers did go down, which was, like, a big FUD thing for a while, like, people would have opened up that app. That's where they go.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's very hard to get people to move even though people tried to move to blue sky
Speaker 2:or map
Speaker 3:We should
Speaker 2:do a deep dive on threads and how that's actually working. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 1:But it's very different.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's working Totally different market. Subculture.
Speaker 1:Completely separate product.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, cheers to cheers to both Elon and Bezos. I love you guys. Another Steinman tweet. Gotta love it. A 100 k views.
Speaker 1:It's a quote tweet from Arma who posts a picture of the reception desk at General Motors Technical Center in 1965, interior by architect Eero Saarinen. And, it's crazy
Speaker 2:because this view looks like like a nineties sci fi
Speaker 3:movie
Speaker 2:that's super ahead of its time, and they were probably the nineties sci fi movie was just referencing Them. General mode.
Speaker 3:Because they had the
Speaker 1:they had the technologists. They had the money. So they just went and sent it. And I'm sure it was, like, the most delightful place to work. If you were an engineer, you were like, this is beautiful.
Speaker 1:This inspires me. I wanna go build great stuff there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. So, Steinman says Detroit was fire back in the day, then politicians decided shipping jobs to China was more important than the American industrial base. Making it political, bro. We don't talk about politics on the show, Kyle.
Speaker 2:Not on this podcast, but we'll
Speaker 1:we'll highlight that as a good aesthetics. We will love some great aesthetics.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. I'm really excited for this this new generation of hard tech and defense tech companies.
Speaker 1:They're gonna do stuff like this for sure.
Speaker 2:They're gonna do stuff like For sure. We're gonna do this at deterrents.
Speaker 1:Right now, it's messy, like, you know, sleeping on the floor of the warehouse, but it will be beautiful. And there are some companies I I forget if it's Airbnb.
Speaker 2:Like, when when Lockheed Grooms Robotics company
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:It will have, like, a robot Yep. Playing a symphony in the entryway. Yep. Like, beautiful. They're welcome to use this idea.
Speaker 2:Just throw some shares to Technology Brothers.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. There is there is a company that made I I feel like I read it in a hit piece. It's like, oh, they spent too much money on this.
Speaker 1:But, they they built a full replica of the, doctor Strangelove, how I learned to love the atom bomb. There's this Stanley Kubrick film, and there's this iconic huge boardroom where all of the military leaders are are meeting in this massive, massive boardroom.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's huge.
Speaker 2:The closest.
Speaker 1:50 people.
Speaker 2:Is the closest They,
Speaker 1:like, built a replica of it.
Speaker 2:Is the closest, example to this, like, the Scale AI office? I haven't been, but isn't that pretty iconic?
Speaker 1:Been it's I I I don't know if I've been to the newest one. It was beautiful, but it didn't like, the thing of it stand like, this stands out.
Speaker 2:Still a little SSENSE.
Speaker 1:Stands out. No. It's just like, it's just, like, it's hard to differentiate because, like, there is some practicality. Like like, this this, this, like, entryway desk is, like, the most impractical thing. There's so much, like, wasted space here, but that's exactly the point.
Speaker 2:I love how the woman is sitting, like, on an island, basically. In a bowl. It's fantastic. And it's like, you can't get within 5 feet or whatever. No.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it it's great. So, yeah, making, like, bold design decisions like that that are they go against the the obvious optimization of, like, square footage. Like, it is gonna cost you more to do this, but it's gonna make a statement, and it's gonna be more important to the Maximal maximalism. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Red Bull futurist writes, I want a dozen kids.
Speaker 2:This guy is awesome. Yeah. He's a rocket scientist
Speaker 3:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Or an emerging rocket scientist. Cool.
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 2:he's, involved with SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Also caffeine connoisseur.
Speaker 2:Caffeine connoisseur, excel enthusiast.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I think this is flair. Like, I pulled this out because 10 years ago, he would have been ostracized for saying something like this. It would have just been so random. Yep.
Speaker 2:But the pro natalist movement is, like, now becoming, like, the norm like, the new norm. Yep. At least within the tech community. And I think it's great because I hope Red Bull Futurist, goes and has 12 children Yep. Because they're all gonna be a bunch of smart little rocket scientists.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, we'll probably create the companies that topple SpaceX and Blue Origin monopoly on space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the trick is just, like, breaking free of the memetics around, like, what it takes to have a dozen kids. Like, yeah, you probably need to live on a ranch outside of a major city. Probably not raising a dozen kids in Manhattan unless you're a trillionaire. But if you're willing to go live in some interesting place and, you know, set your life up to be, oh, there's a couple other families there with lots of kids and we homeschool or something or we do something interesting and, like, families there with lots of kids and we homeschool or something or we do something
Speaker 2:interesting and,
Speaker 3:like, you
Speaker 1:know, we've designed our
Speaker 3:life with that being
Speaker 1:the KPI. That's the priority. Well, then it becomes very easy. Everything flows from that. Yep.
Speaker 1:So shout out Red Bull Futurist. High Yield Harry, great Fintech influencer, writes, oh, you just ran the NYC marathon? That's sick, dude. I just spent all day building an investment memorandum that no one is going to read.
Speaker 2:So I feel like High Yield Harry and some of the other folks from his generation of posters, like, basically, it almost it's it's like they there it seems like there's infinite competition now from these sort of new posters.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And yet these guys are, like, pretty stable. Like, they've got, like, they're, like, posting, you know, regimen and, you know, it seems like they've kind of broken above the noise where you see a post from a high yield Harry now and you know that it means something. Yep. You know, it's not just it's not just a shitpost.
Speaker 3:It's a lot of work.
Speaker 1:Though. I feel like if you write an investment memo, someone should read it. Come on, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think it's more I think he's more saying, you know, look, when I write a memorandum, people put in size. They're not worried about what it says. They know I wouldn't write it if it wasn't worth
Speaker 1:They just see the attachment and they want it. They don't need to open it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They go straight for the wire and
Speaker 1:show it. I like this. This is a little bit more optimistic than what I was
Speaker 3:thinking. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it was very, like, low level analyst coded where it's, like, I'm doing kind of make work and this sucks. That's how I read it at first, but I like your interpretation more.
Speaker 2:I gotta I gotta go long, Harry. I love it. Yeah. Early, early, thin
Speaker 1:That's great. Mostly just anything to avoid watching the New York City Marathon. I was on the phone with somebody yesterday. They're like, oh, call me after I I gotta watch the marathon. And I picked up the phone and I was like, I'm gonna keep it real with you.
Speaker 1:Watching a marathon sounds like the most boring thing I could possibly imagine. I'm not I'm already not that into sports.
Speaker 2:Way that you should be watching a marathon is if you're betting on it. Others in it, you're betting on it or you're running in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:The best way to watch a marathon is by running in
Speaker 1:To be fair to my buddy, I did I he did have a friend in it, and he was, like, cheering my friend on and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, even even not a friend watching your friend, it's like, if you're watching a friend run a marathon, like, it better be, like, some, like, blood, like, relative connection. And even then, it's cringe. But even look at the Spanish when they go to a bull run, they're not just watching They're running. They're running with the bulls.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So let's bring bull runs back.
Speaker 1:Bull Run. Yeah. Replace the New York City Marathon with Bull Run.
Speaker 2:Or just put a bull into the marathon.
Speaker 3:For
Speaker 1:sure. For sure. Yeah. New York City talks this big game. Oh, we have Wall Street Bull.
Speaker 1:We're all into Bulls. Prove it. Bull on the street. Bull Turn it loose. Turn it loose today.
Speaker 1:Turn it loose now. I want I want a New York City Bull Run.
Speaker 2:Let let the marathon go. Give them a 1 minute head start.
Speaker 1:1 minute. And let's turn them release the Bulls. Yeah. No slackers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not one Bull, like, 10. Yeah. 10, 20. You better be running 6 balls.
Speaker 2:Every make every person running the marathon wear red.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. That's great. Yeah. No no slack.
Speaker 1:We need to step up the the expectations of the NYC marathon. Let's do it. Increase Another Palantir another Palantir tweet. A little bit more of a shit post. I like this one though.
Speaker 1:But you know it's good because the other one was it didn't have the badge. So it's just a fan, like a stock, guy who owns the stock. This says the employee badge. So, Eliano Eunice says, with a lot of Palantir merch now out in the wild, here are some ground rules to follow when sporting the logo. No drugs, no fighting, no theft, no more than 2 beverages, no elliptical, no kipping pull ups.
Speaker 2:Why why is he singling out kipping?
Speaker 1:Oh, because it's a crosscut thing.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. I was thinking I
Speaker 1:was I was naked.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's that's really good. I I thought I I was thinking I was thinking muscle ups because I don't know what I'm kipping. I only do muscle ups.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Strict strict muscle ups.
Speaker 2:Strict muscle ups. No no, you know, sort of like Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you for doing your part.
Speaker 2:The reason that this is relevant is, like, when a company crosses a $100,000,000,000 in market cap, does it become a religion? Because, like Yeah. He's kind of acting as, like, a priest of saying, like, this is good and right and this is wrong.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:But I think it's a good Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it is legitimately valuable to be, like, you know, this merch is out in the world. We wanna, like, set a tone for, like, what it means to have this. And, you know, some of this is a joke, but some of this is very real. And so I like that he is, like, enforcing a brand standard, like, a little bit more broadly. And hopefully, people got the message.
Speaker 1:If I see someone doing kipping pull ups in a Palantir shirt, it's over. I'm gonna show him this tweet. Like, I printed this out.
Speaker 2:Printed it out. I printed it out. Let's keep it let's each keep a copy in
Speaker 1:our wall. Yeah. Exactly. For when we run into somebody from Palantir. I mean, Palantir, fantastic team.
Speaker 1:I I I from some random content thing, I got a DM from a kid who just, like, graduated from some school and went to Palantir, and it was, like, still a cut above. It's a 20 year old company. Like, you just don't see that anywhere else. It's wild. Simp for satoshi, I am ginger trash says, by the way, Polymarket will become a way to short startups post election.
Speaker 1:The financial primitive is finally here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think what's, what's interesting about this is that, you know, having the news around Bowery today is, like, okay, this is $2,000,000,000 company that's Yep. Was that's now as of whatever this last week worth 0. The thing that, that so I really hope this becomes true Yep. Because it'll provide a lot of content for us, and we'll be putting some size on the platform.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:The the interesting thing, though, is that the private markets, effectively have legalized insider trading
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Already. Right? All the private markets are is, like, using inside knowledge on companies, teams, founders, and placing bets accordingly. And so what will be extremely chaotic about this is that Bring short like, if this actually happens, companies will have to be, like, employees. You are legally not allowed to trade the company's, Polymarket because, like, it'll be, like, that you'll see so much activity of, like, right Poly Market.
Speaker 2:Right? And so, hopefully, this doesn't lead to more, like, if this actually plays out, it'll be it'll lead to a lot of pressure around the private
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We've just reinvented Yeah.
Speaker 1:Stocks. We just reinvented stocks from first principles, LMFA. Yes. Well, you know how they do this for, like, so death pools are, like, illegal. You can't bet on someone dying because then you have this really perverse incentive to, like, go kill them, obviously.
Speaker 1:But on Polymarket, there are a number of contracts that are, like, this person will still be the leader of, you know, Hamas by this date. And so it's like, we well, they could step down, but really what you're betting on is, like, are they gonna get taken out? And so there there's a bunch of, like, you know, you know, proxy stats that you could probably build to to get there, where you say, like, this company's domain will still be live or, like, this company where you're not, like, truly betting on just the stock going down, but it's, like, some proxy for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The real the cool thing would be the real meta stuff around Polymarket where, like, will Polymarket do a 100,000,000 in volume on this month, 20 25. Right? Because, like, you're you're able to bet about the platform on the platform. And it's if it's on chain, then it's all, like, verifiable.
Speaker 2:But then there's also the incentive of, like, okay, if I put a bunch of size into this into this bet, then I could just artificially create the volume.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is that, like, there are already poly market markets that are direct representations of liquid financial markets. Like, one of the most, like, popular categories that I see is, like, will Bitcoin hit 80 k in December? And it's or will Bitcoin hit a 100 k by the end the year? And it's like, you could just buy Bitcoin. Why are you betting on this in this weird way?
Speaker 1:But that's kind of an effective way to short Bitcoin, I guess. It's some sort of, like, proxy. It's not perfect. And so I I could imagine this, but for a lot of startups, like, the liquidity is just not gonna be there. Because there just aren't gonna be that many people that care about some series a company that, like, is got some
Speaker 2:VC platform teams have entire teams
Speaker 1:It would be funny if
Speaker 3:there was,
Speaker 1:like, a VC dropping
Speaker 2:up their their portfolios, like, Poly Market accounts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The insider sharing will be crazy. I it would be interesting to see if you see it be like, yep. We're pivoting to, like, long short.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, we are a long short fund. Like and, like, they're like, we will we will be going long one company and we will be going short the other companies because we think our founders are gonna win. And so we're we're investing at $20,000,000 series a, and we're putting $10,000,000 on Poly Market on shorting all the other companies. Crazy.
Speaker 1:Yes. We already did Bowery. Let's do says, how do we get a new elite in America? I think this one is broken. Seems like we're in the midst of a power shift.
Speaker 1:No technology trends to disrupt established hierarchies way more than it cements them, I think. We are I don't aimless post. Yeah. The the new elite thing. I I was talking to somebody about this.
Speaker 2:How This is this is the story of Elon, makes a bunch of money in tech. Yep. Starts owning everything. Yep. All the, like, these super important robo taxis.
Speaker 1:But doesn't just wind up laundering it through a bunch of
Speaker 2:other profits. Yeah. And then buys the biggest one of the biggest media companies in the world Yeah. A social media company. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That is the story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's doing impact investing even though, like, some people might not like the impact that he's having. Like, he's he he he's putting his wealth to work in, like, very specific target
Speaker 2:He's an impact investor.
Speaker 1:Essentially, much more than, like, you know, oh, diffusing a $1,000,000,000 through a bunch of the nonprofits that are kind of, like, moving
Speaker 2:the needle on
Speaker 1:plastic straws.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw someone else say, like because Elon, I guess, was, like, helping bust people into Pennsylvania or whatever. And somebody was, like, we have our George Soros.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's, like yeah.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, the other thing that's underrated about, like, elites is is when you I I think when people go back to, like, the this idea, like, we need better elites. We need the older elites. It's like back in the 17th century, 18th century, early 19th century, the elites were the ones who would go and build Hearst Castle, Versailles. They build these, like, massive houses, and then they would and and then they weren't just, like, perfect boxes of glass that were mimetic with everyone else, and they just wind up looking like track homes. They were, like, these very unique expressions of wealth.
Speaker 1:And then when they when they turned over, it didn't make sense for anyone else to maintain them, even the descendants. And so they became museums
Speaker 2:Public.
Speaker 1:And libraries. Good. And yeah. And, like, there's so many stories of of this where Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like Getty is that. Right?
Speaker 1:Exactly. Like Yeah. The Getty, the, what's the other one in Pasadena? I forget. The Huntington.
Speaker 1:It was a house. The guy was so rich. He was a railroad baron, oil baron. He built train tracks that went to his house because he wanted to just be able to oh, I wanna take the train to New
Speaker 2:York. This is this is Elad Gill Yeah. And his new monument company. New monument company.
Speaker 1:This is Nat Friedman with his with his, like, one off projects, the scrolls. These are dividends that get paid to society and and pay back in probably better ways than most of the other things because they build the brand and founders wanna work with them and so they get better deal flow. So it's actually rational.
Speaker 3:This
Speaker 2:guy, go and message your favorite elite, which you can DM them on Twitter Yep. And just pat them on the back. Say thank you for for
Speaker 1:Doing something good.
Speaker 2:Doing the money. Good. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Something interesting. Yeah. Something interesting that will live on beyond you. I mean, Bezos is doing that with the long now thing. The I think that's what it's called.
Speaker 1:He's building this clock in this mountain that will allow it'll keep time for, like, a 1000000 years. And it's just like this really heroic
Speaker 2:He better be a project.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just like this heroic engineering project, and it's something that, like, everyone right now is like, oh, the project's not going well. Oh, it's not working. You know, it's like this massive mega project, but then it'll probably work, but in the next 20 years, you know, it just takes time. And then it'll just be the same that people are busy.
Speaker 2:Time. If you want eternal time, have a little patience.
Speaker 1:Have a little patience.
Speaker 2:Skip that one this time.
Speaker 1:Men only want let's see. Dylan Morris says, men only want one thing and it's disgusting. Who wants to split this with me? And it's on biz buy sell, award winning sailboat manufacturing business in San Luis Obispo County, and it's going for 495 k and a cash flow 75 k, and they build sailboats.
Speaker 2:That's, that's a tough
Speaker 1:Would you split that with him?
Speaker 2:I I'm not going to halves on that. This we talked about this last time. Yeah. Buying a company with less than half a1000000 of cash flow
Speaker 1:is buying a job.
Speaker 2:And this one, if you split it with a buddy, it's buying the minimum wage jobs. 30 k. Yeah. You could just work at Chipotle and then, like, go and, like, build sailboats for fun on the weekends. I think businesses like this, like, we need a movement around entrepreneurs and retiring boomer operators to be, like, I'm hiring an apprentice to learn my trade and take over my business.
Speaker 2:And I will give it to you on a seller note
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Over the next 15 years if you come in and operate it. Because, like, the only way that I could see this business even maybe being sellable is if a smart enterprising, search funder out of Stanford goes and decides I'm gonna roll up all the mom and pop sailboat manufacturers Yeah. And create a monopoly.
Speaker 1:Put a put a gun on it and raise some defense tech money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's go. Put a gun on it. No. I think,
Speaker 1:Slap a 50 cal on the front. I actually know a guy who sailed sailboats all around, like, the he would sail, like, all the way from California to, Australia, and he actually did have a 50 cal on the front because he was worried about pirates.
Speaker 2:Smart.
Speaker 1:And he would be able to, like, fire off warning shots if something happened because when you're out there alone, like, anyone could just come up to you and what are you gonna do? Call the cops? They'll be there in 2 days. It's like, that doesn't work.
Speaker 2:2 days, the SOS?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're on your own.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. John Palmer, says, I feel like joining the World Coin team is kind of like the crypto dev equivalent of joining the marines. People join there and you then you never hear from them again because they're just grinding.
Speaker 1:Strong men create good times, etcetera. What do you think about Worldcoin? The eyeball scanner.
Speaker 2:The eyeball scanner.
Speaker 1:Very dystopian, but I'm I I'm I'm always, like, I'm just bullish on Sam projects, and I'm I'm I'm interested to see, like, kind of, like, the the manifestation of that idea.
Speaker 2:You haven't I feel like you don't hear the other thing about it is, like, I feel like a lot of world coin activity is just happening overseas. Sure. So, like, these devs are, like, being deployed to Africa just, like, scanning eyeballs and, like, doing it more efficiently.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I think, I'm I'm excited to, like, hear more about, like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's so it's so dystopian in a way you would only do it if it was, like, you thought it was really important work.
Speaker 1:I mean, it does feel, like, in line with Sam's idea of, like, okay, in the future, we need UBI. We need it to be a global UBI UBI. It is truly the fully fully automated luxury communism concept. Like, how do you distribute wealth to every single human individually? Like, well, you need something that's, you know, identifiable
Speaker 2:on a human
Speaker 1:basis and then has its own internal currency that can then be distributed and redistributed endlessly.
Speaker 2:We should get a Worldcoin Orb. I'm down. Worldcoin can sponsor the Orb.
Speaker 1:I'm down. Antibiology says whenever something is PFAS free, non nontoxic as a as a nonstick pan, it usually just means they replace the thing that we studied and we know is bad with something that is unstudied, so we don't know it's bad yet.
Speaker 2:I love this guy. I, he's got a really cool company in the cancer research space, like, reviving a bunch of lost sort of, like, esoteric knowledge around cancer and, like, bringing it back. So anyways, this guy's, like, brilliant building something really cool. I've gotten personally gotten some, like, great health tips from him Yeah. Via DMs.
Speaker 1:He gives this example, stainless steel, lowest aluminum possible, corning glass, cookware, copper are all better if untreated. Cast iron kinda sketches me out because of the seasoning process. You just perma burn fat onto an oxidizable surface. And even if the fat is nontoxic, excess iron. So he goes on and and, yeah, it's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1:There there's always this, like, rat race of, like, let's get rid of one thing. Uh-oh. We introduced a new a new bad thing. Like, we got rid of lead and then we wound up with microplastics.
Speaker 2:It's hard because so many things that are, so many products of modern manufacturing processes and the things that we expect out of products end up being just deeply toxic
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:By their very nature. And so it's really hard to shop for modern any any sort of consumer good now. Like, you have to be hyper you have to be hyper aware of it. And and even, look, like, glass is superior to plastic, in pretty much, I don't know, in pretty much, every single way except for its weight and it's shattered and all the health concerns and all, you know, it's sort of like safety concerns. I mean, so, yeah, I think, I think that there should be a deep tech company that tries to create, like, the issue is the consumer packaged goods entrepreneur that's, like, I wanna make a microplastic free version of blank or I wanna make a non toxic pan.
Speaker 2:They don't have time to do a 10 year science experiment on creating a new material. Yep. We need more teams that are trying to create totally new materials that are nontoxic that can be used for everyday consumer goods. So somebody out there wants to spend a decade developing new, materials for consumer goods that are nontoxic, we will we will back you.
Speaker 1:Molson Hart says, if you get rich when you're young in America, you will live in a neighborhood that is 90% old people you cannot relate to at all. 8% young people with family money that you can't relate to, and 2% with a fellow Ubermensch that you can break bread with. Same goes for same goes for country clubs. It's pretty funny.
Speaker 2:It's pretty accurate. It's very true. I think what's interesting is you have this at least in my neighborhood, you have this balance of people that have moved into the neighborhood in the last 5 years, and then people that are multimillionaires because they bought their house, like, 20 to 30 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And the tension between those groups is crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Because, like, they just want very different things. And so yeah. But I think I don't know.
Speaker 2:There's there's a lot of alpha and just going and being in a place where you're the younger person with energy that's still in in the trenches, basically, because all those other people just wanna back what you do, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I yeah. When I moved into my neighborhood, I was, like, we met our neighbors, and I was, like, oh, they're about the same age as us.
Speaker 1:And my wife was, like, they're 15 years older than us.
Speaker 2:No. This this happens, like, I don't know, with with Sarah and, like, her mom groups. Like, the other moms in her group will be, like, 15 yeah. 10 to 15 years older. They're just, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's, like, a pretty lifestyle. Yeah. Well, same lifestyle, just totally different. Era. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I I think the lesson is, like, is, like, that is not a criticism. That it it, like, like, the nice thing is still the nice thing. And you shouldn't you shouldn't be like, oh, okay. Because everyone else who's, like, in my world, like, lives in, like, a high rise.
Speaker 1:Like, that's what I should do. Yeah. It's like, no. It's okay to go be, like, the odd one out at the country club or the odd one out in your neighborhood. Like, that's fine.
Speaker 1:Just do it and meet the old people and it's fine. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think there's a lot of people that are are in environments where they're the young person and they build their entire identity around that. Yeah. And then they wake up one day and they're, like, wait, like, I'm the older person in the room and you actually always wanna perpetually be the youngest person in the room, but then you go from the workplace to the neighborhood to, you know, and you wanna, like, stay on that. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. Very American trajectory.
Speaker 1:It's great. Number runner, run the numbs says, ambition is just rage channeled. And Dan says real a f. You think it's accurate?
Speaker 2:I don't Is it rage? I don't I feel like, I've never gotten the feeling that Donald j Trump is has internal rage. I think he more just, like, likes being likes attention and likes winning. Mhmm. And those are, like, the core motivations.
Speaker 1:That's funny because there's, like, a book about him that's literally called, like, fire and fury. And it's, like, it's it makes the case that he's driven entirely by rage.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's an
Speaker 1:odd odd pick. I I I if you wanted to pick someone who's, like, peaceful but extremely ambitious, I think you'd go for, like, a Zuck or, like, like, a Steve Jobs who, like, don't seem very, like, rageful. But I guess you hear stories
Speaker 2:But I feel like you hear more stories about, like, I can think of that that exchange that Zuckerberg had in the early Facebook days where somebody's like where he's like, yeah. These people just like give me the the person's like they just give you all their data and he's like, yeah. These fucking idiots, like, trust me for some reason.
Speaker 1:Is that rage?
Speaker 2:Is that rage? I don't know. But you don't hear stories of, like, Trump on, like, raging out at people. Right? Like, he sort of gets I don't see it as rage.
Speaker 1:It's certainly like one one path to ambition. Obviously, we hear a lot
Speaker 2:of stories of people
Speaker 1:are, like, they've been wronged, they've been hurt. But I think people really like boiling this down to just, like, a single precursor. It's, like, you have to have a chip on your shoulder to do anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You have to have rage. You have to be
Speaker 3:in the wrong
Speaker 2:Josh Wolf.
Speaker 1:You have to come from a broken home or something like that.
Speaker 2:Chips on shoulders. Yeah. Put chips in pockets.
Speaker 1:And it's, like, it's certainly true that there's some, but there are a bunch of exceptions there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's a good one.
Speaker 2:If you if you have rage inside, at least use it to create value for shareholders.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is a great one. I love this. Trivian says a friend was at a cafe in San Francisco and said cursor crashed on his laptop. I like that he's just, like, saying this out loud, I guess. And it says a cursor cofounder was walking by at that very moment and offered to debug.
Speaker 1:This company is sticking around.
Speaker 2:This is this is this an ad? Like because this seems a
Speaker 1:little bit impromptu. Cursor crashed. Cursor crashed out loud and then just didn't follow-up. The blue ball. I mean, talk about a great marketing stunt if this was, like, planned.
Speaker 1:I don't think it was. It seems ridiculous. It seems this is the type of thing that happens in cafes in San Francisco. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You saw the other Yeah. There was something last week with a with a guy who was, like, in a s f, like, cafe with just, like, a thing on the other side of his laptop that's, like, marketplace startup have revenue raising pre seed, say hi or whatever. And it's,
Speaker 1:like Wait. Really? So you looked at his if you looked at his laptop Yes.
Speaker 2:People were taking pictures of there like, only an s f. But yeah. I just think there's a reason that, like, half of the super important companies in the world come out of that area, and it's because the density of like minded Yeah. People and the overlap that you can have with customers on a day to day basis.
Speaker 1:I I remember when I lived in San Francisco, I went to a cafe. I didn't work from cafes very often, but I I went to a cafe maybe just to get a coffee. And I ran into David Holes cofounder at Leap Motion. And I remember him just talking to me, and I was like, oh, I love what you're working on. Like, this is super interesting.
Speaker 1:And he was, like, breaking it down. And, yeah. It was like like way back in the day when he was working on this, like, it was hand tracking for VR. Right. That was David's first company.
Speaker 1:Fascinating. That's just like the type of thing that happens. Serendipity. San Francisco is a serendipity magnet. David Zaganov says, realizing the reason they call it hard tech is because this is really hard.
Speaker 1:It makes for a nice moat though. And then Dylan just says, no, bro. That's not why. And then he says, why? And I did it.
Speaker 1:Next week, I cut off.
Speaker 2:I like I like this I like this because because it reminds me of, like, 2 cattle ranchers being, like, makes for a nice moat, though. Yeah. This cat raising cattle ain't easy, but pays the bills. It's a life. It's a life.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. I, maybe we do a deep dive on why hard tech is called hard tech. But, but, yeah, it's good. It definitely is real. It's sort of, nominative nominative determinism.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Shit's hard, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. I mean, everything's just slower. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, you need a part that could delay you a week. There's just, like, a million things that could go wrong Yeah. Interacting with the physical world and then heavily heavy regulation.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's just, like, you have 2 really tough factors that you can't move at the speed of of add of bits. You have to move at the speed of atoms. And you Yeah.
Speaker 2:When things break, they
Speaker 3:break.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Rough. Rough. But I think the the hard tech and hard is hard meme. I think it I was around when I was in y c, and I think it was probably true initially and then a psyop after a
Speaker 3:little bit. Not like an
Speaker 1:intentional one, but initially and then a psyop after a little bit. Not like an intentional one, but like a negative meme where there was a time when it ceased being hard because just the capital markets were ripping so much and technology gotten better, and there were there were a bunch of ways to, like, do hard tech adjacent things, whether it's white labeling or partnering or doing a bunch of different things. And that's when the first boom of hard tech started. And now we're all talking about it, but all the big companies are, like, 10 years old. So, like, clearly, hard tech wasn't hard 8 years ago when some of the big companies were getting started, but everyone was repeating the ultra hard
Speaker 2:tech part. Thing is, like, this new generation of hard tech companies. So I have portfolio company called Shinkai, which uses robots to kill fish using
Speaker 3:Oh, I know them.
Speaker 2:Traditional, methodology that Japanese fishermen would do. And it's done in a way where they, they basically insert, like, a needle into the back of the fish's brain. And it and when you kill a fish that way, it doesn't the fish doesn't release all this cortisol and other stress hormones that make the fish age more rapidly. And the interesting thing about that is they're they're going to a market with, like, very little innovation, not a lot of competition, but then they're gonna build this system that, other people are gonna realize, oh, that's a really good business. But then if you wanna go compete with Shinkai in 5 years, you're gonna be going up against a company that can spend weight that's still very young that can spend way more money on r and d and sales and marketing and distribution and has better cost structure and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And the real hard tech is going after, like, a 5 to 10 year old hard tech company that's competing in the same exact category of as you Yep. That has more resources, that has more learnings, that has more customer relationships and, like so that's the real that's the hard hard tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Let's go to Ivan Zhao. Ciao.
Speaker 1:Ivan says, why do Americans always vote on Tuesdays? Because 1800 citizens needed a full day's horseback ride to reach polling sites after Sunday church. Pretty amazing that this democracy runs on horse and buggy software in the age of the Internet and AI. That's that's a very interesting I didn't know that. Super Tuesday.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Every Tuesday. Right? Because you need a full day. Wow.
Speaker 2:Full day.
Speaker 1:But you can't miss church.
Speaker 2:I feel like What was your take? If you rode
Speaker 1:a horse. Of Notion. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I feel like if you rode a horse to a polling site today, he would end up in a very viral video because For sure. With the pole. And the police, like, breaking the horses. Like, it just be very dark. But no, I I thought this was interesting because I I hope that the Ivans of the world end end up building, software, like, you know, more like, out of the last week, it seems like there's been a lot of failures on the software side Yeah.
Speaker 2:In regards to, you know, polling and and and voting specifically. And so if the voting and polling software of the future looks more looks and feels more like Notion, I think that'll be a win for democracy.
Speaker 1:Is the digital polling ever coming? Like, we're so far. We're just so deep in this. I feel like we never we I'm so black. I feel like it'll never happen.
Speaker 1:It should be so simple. But then again, I was reflecting on the fact that maybe, like, 10 or 15 years ago, there was this there's all these stories about, oh, well, in Japan, they're like this cashless society. They have this great NFC technology. You just take your phone. You can tap to pay.
Speaker 1:You can tap for your ID. You can tap to, get on the subway or whatever. It's just all digital. And it's like, why can't we have that in America? Things are so backwards.
Speaker 1:But then, like, for the last month, I haven't carried anything other than my phone, and it's been fine because the DMV finally moved over. There's an app for it. You can just pull up your driver's license there. Every single place takes Apple Pay now and so we finally have caught up. So maybe it'll happen with the digital voting, probably not in the next election though.
Speaker 2:The next election.
Speaker 1:And then also all the skepticism about the the the integrity of elections, like, one party is gonna fight it tooth and nail.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whoever's whoever's, you know, more pissed about the last election.
Speaker 2:I really think it's boomers.
Speaker 1:You think so? Boomers aren't into it?
Speaker 2:I think boomers don't get enough hate in general. Yeah. Like, we need to be slandering boomers more.
Speaker 1:Add it to the list. Enemies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Add it to the list, Ben.
Speaker 1:So Eliza says people shit on the YC ecosystem shilling to each other, but the underlying concept is actually beautiful. 20 to 30 something a year. 20 to 30 somethings, founders buying SaaS from other 20 to 30 something year olds. We speak the same language. We run at the same speed, and it's nice.
Speaker 1:This is for sure true. Love it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 2:I I think I pulled this out because I invested in Eliiza's company. Oh, cool. And we, we promote, we
Speaker 1:we We shell for
Speaker 2:the portfolio. We shell. We do promote companies that we hold securities in.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. I think, it's a beautiful it's a beautiful thing, an entire economy that is dependent on itself.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean, I like, people always say this about, like, the the the the the YC hack is, like, you get into YC, you start some SaaS company, sell to all the other YC companies, your revenue spikes. And it's, like, is it a good company or not? But I haven't heard about that many stories of, like, oh, yeah. That company, like, their revenue totally collapsed because it was all fake, like, y c revenue. Like, if you if if you're in y c and you can sell to, yeah, if you can sell to Airbnb and Stripe and Coinbase, like, that's pretty durable revenue.
Speaker 1:And even if it's just a bunch of startups, there's enough that you could cobble together. Like, it's not like y c has ever had a situation where it's like, oh, all of the companies went went out of business all of a sudden. Yeah. Most of them are fine.
Speaker 2:Because they're in such
Speaker 1:brand It's so diverse. Industry. So diverse. Yeah. It's actually, like, a fairly diversified revenue stream if you're selling to, like, all the y c companies.
Speaker 1:It's almost better than It's
Speaker 2:actually more, like, one of y c's, like, Moats is that if you could be in y c and you don't go in y c and then somebody that's competing for your in your same category does Yep. Their the loyalty is, like, very real. Yep. Like, they are going to use your competitor out of at least in their early days until, like, it's very clear who the best product is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about
Speaker 2:Like, if there was if somebody like, the real the only threat that we have with Technology Brothers is 2 other guys that look like us Yeah. That are NYC that that take the 700 k Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then they just have all this alpha from being in y c.
Speaker 1:Maybe we should go through y c. We we talked about some company that was, like, highly, highly volatile. It might have been, like, a real estate company or something, but it's, like, all of their revenue came from something that was, like, super cyclical. This happens with hiring companies a lot. They're, like, doing great in a bull market.
Speaker 1:And then as soon as the rifts start and all the companies are laying off, their revenue just goes to 0 because no one's hiring, so no one's paying for hiring platforms because there's just plenty of of of applications coming in when it's not a tight job market.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, like, that that's an example of, like, if you can be if you can have a diversified revenue stream of amounts, like, oh, yeah. Well, like, the market overall is selling off and it's a little bit tighter, but there's still this one company that we sold to that's growing because they're in some interesting industry and they've kept us on as a client. You can actually be pretty pretty good.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's stay on y c. Let's go to Jared Friedman, partner at y c says, today I learned Saudi Aramco was started at 225 Bush Street in San Francisco because Ryan Peterson says every company in the world worth more than $1,000,000,000,000 was founded on the West Coast, including Saudi Aramco, which was started in the same building as Flexport here in San Francisco. That is crazy stat. West Coast Long is California. All the innovation in California.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All the innovation in the world.
Speaker 1:Maybe it flips at some point, but I
Speaker 2:guess Yeah. I think I think, I think Nikkita elsewhere on x was making the point that it's because on the East Coast, a lot of power and resources go towards, like, prestige and people that have, you know, degrees where SF and California are more egalitarian, where if you're talented and hardworking, you can get resources and opportunity. Who knows? But I love it. And I think that we should, we California should be more proud of founding Saudi Aramco.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's very American.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:I wish I wish the state did a little, like, you know, 1 on 10 into the Saudi Aramco pre seed. I would solve our budgetary issues right now. Fantastic. Nice cash flow.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I I we we should do a deep dive on the Saudi Aramco story, because I'm pretty sure that was, like, the the ownership of that company was, like, fought with wars.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm pretty sure, like, it was a big deal when it got, like, nationalized. It was not like a it was not just like a, oh, they decided to move over to a different country. It was like, we this oil is in our ground and it's ours. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Eric Raymond says, you can just make things. This is my massive white pill about the revolution in small scale manufacturing that's going on right now. The immediate trigger is a story I read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair and the designs were all crappy and his expensive and made in China. So he booted up a small factory that now builds custom wheelchairs delivering them for about $1,000 a pop, undercutting the Chinese by a factor of 5. Amazing.
Speaker 1:This guy is gonna gonna do one of the DOD contracts you mentioned.
Speaker 2:Like Really?
Speaker 1:No. I I just imagine Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, he if he can government contracts. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If he can spin up a small factory that builds custom wheelchairs for a $1,000 a pop, like, he could go and get the Boeing contract that's selling a soap dispenser for $150,000 and very he clearly has the skill set to deliver a high quality product at value. Yeah. So get this guy on that platform ASAP.
Speaker 2:The original promise of 3 d printing where people were like, oh, you're gonna just be able to buy something online and 3 d printed in your office or whatever. And, like, I think that will basically come true, but it won't necessarily look like people imagined it. It'll just be localized manufacturing, talented, small companies, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to Austin. Is it Reef? Austin Reef, founder of Morning Brew?
Speaker 2:Yep. Right?
Speaker 1:He says, the New York Times Tech Guild went on strike today. As a reminder, here are their demands. A ban on scented products, unlimited break time, pet bereavement, mandatory trigger warnings when discussing events in the news.
Speaker 2:It's funny because they were way ahead of does, does it have to be your pet or could it be a squirrel known by someone else? I need
Speaker 1:some time off for sure. This is this is, like, such bait, like yeah. Because, like, clearly clearly their demands were more than just this. Come on. Like, they're obviously
Speaker 2:He's good at he didn't
Speaker 1:He knows content.
Speaker 2:He knows content.
Speaker 1:He knows content. But, yeah, it's very silly. But, also, the half of these things are, like, you know, the the the the read here is, like, oh, they're all, like, left wing demands. Like, they're like special snowflakes that need trigger warnings. But then also half of these are, like, I could see the right wing adopting these because, like, oh, the scented products have have microplastics, so we can't have scented products anymore.
Speaker 1:Or, like, we have we need to be reevar squirrels, so, like, I need time off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I
Speaker 1:don't know. It's, like, a little bit of, like, a horseshoe
Speaker 2:The real I guess the perplexity CEO did a PR push today saying that he would happily replace all of their writers with AI. Like, he did he did a a piece today.
Speaker 1:This is becoming a shit poster. Oh, wait. Oh, the New York Times. Oh, yeah. Because they're they're in a battle.
Speaker 1:They're in legal battle. New York Times and and perplexity, I'm pretty sure. Or maybe Wired or one of the big publications for the scraping
Speaker 3:and whatnot.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:but it is kind of funny that the New York Times, they purposely chose to go on strike the day before the election as a way to, like
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Because the Tech Guild is so they do the software development and they do, like, the the New York Times needle, which will be getting, like, the most traffic tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Ever.
Speaker 1:Right? It's gonna be, like, the highest demand. They do cool, like, visualizations. Some of the tech people are actually
Speaker 2:really awesome.
Speaker 1:They know when
Speaker 2:they have some leverage and they're willing to twist the knife, you know.
Speaker 1:But yeah. I mean, I imagine they'd be able to give on that if they got a pay bump maybe. This is a good one. Let let's do Linus. So the creator of Linux, Kakashi says, the creator of Linux has publicly voiced what I've been saying for the past 2 years.
Speaker 1:The Linux creator Linus Torvald, quote, AI is useless. It's 90% marketing while he ignores AI for now. It's all hype.
Speaker 2:So the reason that this is easily refutable is that we've only ever recorded 1 podcast together in person, the very first one in every other episode of this podcast has been AI generated Yeah. Powered by Delphi.
Speaker 1:It's funny because it's, like, the classic, like, you know, programmer mistake of, like, marketing doesn't matter
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In my opinion. So it's, like, 90% is marketing. Like, let's talk about Nike. Is that a valuable company? Does that bring people joy?
Speaker 1:Is it valuable?
Speaker 2:Percent marketing.
Speaker 1:It's 90% marketing. Of course. And that's okay. Like, some things are marketing driven and that's okay. It creates value and and everyone is happy.
Speaker 1:The shareholders, the employees, the customers, everyone's happy.
Speaker 2:The athletes.
Speaker 1:It's like, what this is the this is the myth of the myth of consensual capitalism. Like, oh, like, I didn't consent. It's like no one cares. No one cares that it's just marketing. Like, it's fine.
Speaker 1:But I I I I get that we're saying to the deeper level, like, you know, we want more AI innovation. Like, it should be good. A lot of the products are kinda bad, but still
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you have to to have to fundamentally believe this. You have to have you have to believe that all the AI products that we're using are not AI products.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Because the products, many of them are magic. Right? Like, they really feel like magic.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Let's go to the last one with AI. Sujit Indap says, nobody blank Wall Street slash Silicon Valley. What if a private credit bubble was combined with an AI bubble and then NVIDIA related party transactions were thrown in just for fun, and he's talking about how I I believe NVIDIA is now doing deals.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There there's huge amounts of credit being extended that is backed by GPUs.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:His core, I think, complaint from what I can tell is that GPUs are very rapidly depreciating assets. Yep. It's one it's one thing to extend credit against the house, which is relatively stable or, you know, an appreciating asset. But extending huge amounts of credit against GPUs is, like, you know, would be, like, really levering up a car and then driving it a ton while the car cars were sort of, like, improving very rapidly so much so that a car would be almost worthless after 3 years. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whereas a car is gonna have some value for 20 years Sure. Granted as long as it doesn't sort of
Speaker 1:Well, the other the other flip side here that I I see people criticizing is, startup will go and raise a $10,000,000 series a and go and get $90,000,000 of NVIDIA credits. Yep. And then they'll announce a $100,000,000 fundraise. That looks like, you know, an in kind related party transaction from NVIDIA. They get $90,000,000 more revenue because the because the startup will use it.
Speaker 1:But it's kind of like, you know, where do the money was kind of created out of thin air. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I feel like But
Speaker 1:the thing is is that this this also happened in the dotcom bubble where a lot of the, telecom providers were were funding a lot of dotcom startups and giving them, like, preferential access to Bandwidth early on. But the thing is is that, like, so it's like, over AI is overrated in the short term and underrated in the long term. This could lead to a bubble that pops, but it still could be amazing that all this stuff gets built out and there's all this infrastructure. And that's exactly what happened in the dotcomboom. There's a lot of dark fiber and that's what enabled Google to grow so fast because even though the Internet bubble had collapsed, the the infrastructure was there.
Speaker 1:So when the right product came along, it was able to go super wide Yeah. Super fast. So
Speaker 2:I feel like Bill Gurley, has a nose for bubbles.
Speaker 3:Like, he just can smell bubbles. And he's been
Speaker 2:harping on the, bubbles. And he's been harping on the, he's been harping on the NVIDIA related party transaction thing for quite a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Let's move to audience q and a. We have one question, then we'll wrap. Hey, John and Jordy.
Speaker 1:I've been running a Fortune 500 tech company for about a decade now and wanted to get your take on the next jet I should purchase. I currently own a Gulfstream g 6 50 e r extended range, but I've been thinking about upgrading to a Boeing Business Jet. What do you think I should go for? What do you think?
Speaker 2:Look. This I I think it's less about the shell
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And more about what you do with the interior. Right? And so I think whether it's a Boeing business jet and you wanna be able to bring, you you know, your your potentially entire polycule or
Speaker 3:if you
Speaker 2:have a family, or you're going you're gonna stay with the Gulfstream. I would just think about even if you keep your same Gulfstream, redoing the interior on, like, a fairly frequent basis. Right? Because it's kind of, like, redoing the inside of your house. Like, you walk in, it feels like this new it feels like a new house Sure.
Speaker 2:Even though it's the same, same kind of core shell or whatever. But really, I I would feel bad advising any one direction and and would put, you know, tell him to go talk to Preston Holland
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:Expert,
Speaker 1:on private aviation.
Speaker 2:And he's our private jet guy. Yep.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:have a I have a little bit more of
Speaker 1:a point to take. So so I I think I know who wrote this in. And it's it's really about, like, what your lifestyle is. So so for those who don't know, like, the the Gulfstream is probably the most popular private jet. Elon Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, they all have Gulfstreams.
Speaker 1:The Boeing Business Jet is essentially a white labeled Boeing plane, so you can get a 737 max. Like, the thing that you fly on United, you can just have that privately. You can have a 7 you can have a dream liner. And a lot of heads of state have these, you know, Saudi princes. You can think of Air Force 1 as kind of a Boeing Business Jet, although
Speaker 2:it's Yeah.
Speaker 1:Owned by the military. Trump flies on a BBJ, a Boeing Business Jet. But if you think about what the what's the difference between a CEO of a large company and a head of state? Well, the head of state is bringing an entire delegation to another country, lot of international travel, and always landing at a major airport. So you're going from DC to London.
Speaker 1:Those are huge, huge airports. When you're just a CEO, a, you don't need to bring your entire company with you when you go to do to do a deal. A lot of the biggest deals, it's just, you know, Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom going for a hike. And so if they have to be meeting in Sun Valley, they can just fly in very easily. You don't need to worry about is the landings strip too small or too big.
Speaker 1:So you can get to much more remote locations. You can still bring your whole family. And but for if if you're thinking about, you know, running a political campaign now, then you need to be thinking about, okay. I'm gonna be in every major airport because I'm gonna be campaigning in swing states. And they're all gonna have huge airports, so I can land and I can bring my entire staff, my entire team with me.
Speaker 1:And when I get off the plane, we're gonna hop in a bunch of black SUVs, and I'm gonna bring my my writer, my speech person, my makeup artist, my comms person, my you're gonna bring the my lawyer's gonna be with me all the time. And so you really need to think about, like, what your lifestyle is like and what it's going to be like over time before you make that decision. But, I would probably based on what I know, I'd I'd stick with the Gulfstream. But that's our show. I gotta hop on with Taipei soon.
Speaker 1:I think we're gonna wrap. So thanks for watching.