tragedy in DC there was a a plane that crashed into a helicopter last night and was really ter a rough uh rough start to the Pod yeah but uh needs to be said yeah rest in peace to it's always terrible when these like you know crises unfold because I mean we saw this with the with the LA fires like every
possible take is enumerated very quickly yeah so you'll just see like the right will say it's because of Dei at American Airlines the left will say it's because of capitalism the conspiracy theorists will say it was a CIA yeah CIA operation or the the the warhawks will'll say it
was China and who knows but it doesn't feel like living in a first world country to me and it's very disappointing and I hope that the the worst outcome is the one where there's a huge culture War everyone battles about it everyone gets really angry at each other and then everyone completely
forgets yeah and then nothing actually gets changed because clearly whatever happened happened it like the the solution that will stop that is not something that can be implemented in an hour it's going to be a lot of different thing here is there there's so much data that's produced from the event yeah the
the flight logs the uh you know the radio traffic of air traffic control during the event and so we actually it's not like a lot of other sort of dramatic crises you know events where we may not ever know kind of what actually happened we be able to figure it out totally to
um and so there's not there shouldn't be that rush to you know generate new conspiracy theories spread misinformation make it a social issue or you know some type of like clearly something went wrong clearly there's a solution but it's going to take a lot of political will and a lot of energy and a
lot of hard work and a lot of technology to actually Implement that and it's not going to be done in a day or a week it's going to be done in a number of years the other thing is I don't think anybody like last week was saying commercial Aviation is super dangerous right it's actually statistically oh
yeah a super safe way to travel been 15 years since there was a commercial airline crash in America and this was the deadliest crash since 911 wow insane um and yeah I mean also you you you always run the risk of like it's almost like a Black Swan event it's like an event that you're not really prepared
for like after the fire after the fire in La a lot of people were saying like oh well I got to rebuild my house in like Concrete and brick and it's like well what happens if an earthquake comes then so yeah so you you really need to balance out all the possible um risk factors but uh like we got to do more
here but fortunately there's lots of good news there's lots of interesting Tech news right now and we'll start with a fantastic piece of news from uh my buddy Keon Sagi I I'm gonna butcher your name I'm sorry but uh he announced yeah bud Keon announced a 14 million series a
with participation from Founders fund 776 Neo bology ser giant step VC 18 capital and many others we're going to make preventable diseases a thing of the past so I think we got to ra hit the size gong for Keon boom congratulations on your $14 million series a nice work um we have some post from him and we
also have a little bit of his uh his blog post he said five years after founding nucleus in my bedroom I'm thrilled to share that we've raised a 144 million series a our current road map is ambitious including dramatically expanding genetic risk assessments so you can think of them is kind of like
the Next Generation 23 and me they send you a kit they get you full sequence of your DNA and more focus on helping people use the data to be proactive versus the novelty of being like Oh I have 1% Irish exactly uh or half a percent Native American yeah uh and and also it's just a fundamentally different
technology that goes into how they sequence the the genome so uh 23 me I believe does something called shotgun sequencing where they kind of blast a bunch of the the the DNA out and then they kind of sample it and statistically they get you to like 90% there but it's not a full sequence the full sequence is
something that does happen in scientific labs for more rigorous scientific studies but nucleus has been able to take that next Generation technology and bring it to the consumer market so that you can just go order a kit and get uh your exact genome and this came at a
good time because I feel like uh people lost a huge amount of trust in 23 and me and some of these sites because they struggled as businesses and then they started changing hands from an ownership standpoint and looking at you know looking at like they were potential takeover targets and the challenge there
is you're looking at this and if you've given all your genetic data to a company you actually start to care who who who owns that business what are their intentions with that data yeah and um so a bit of a call to action to people if you did 23 and me you can go and Export
your data and then you can have them delete it from their servers and they will do that and I do believe that they will that they are capable of doing that and then uh and then if it does get taken over by someone who maybe you don't want to have that data with uh you're you won't be in the database
anymore which I think is probably the right thing to do at this point yeah and they also had a massive uh pickup he says in the post I'm thrilled to announce that Matt Lanter a former co-founder of open store chief of staff at Founders fund and longtime nucleus investor is joining as president his
Decades of experience helping scale billion dooll companies will be a tremendous addition to an already deeply talented team and I got to say uh there is nothing more bullish than somebody like I don't know Matt personally but when somebody like Matt who is deeply deeply connected in the
Venture world has started their own companies and they could there's hundreds of companies that that they could go join or hundred you bunch of different companies that they could start if they're choosing to join your company at an inflection point like this it's the most bullish signal totally
Matt has a quote here he said my time working with Keith R boy at Founders fund was a master class in identifying exceptional Founders that experience combined with countless founder meetings as an angel investor helped me recognize something special when I first met Ken uh I was immediately struck by qualities
I'd seen only in the most successful Founders a deep personal obsession with the problem and the Relentless drive to pursue it so couldn't be more bullish for the nuclear team congrats onle the first time I met in Manhattan I got coffee with him in the small coffee shop and we just had the most intense
discussion for like an hour going back and forth about like how this would uh affect things and what the value of and you know could could you get something out of it because I think the the my my disappointment with 23 in me was always like it was kind of a nothing burger
like you do it and it tells you like oh yeah like you know heart disease and cancer are probably going to be what get you and it's like I kind of already know that just from like the MTH statistics it doesn't tell me anything specific and so he made a very a very strong case for
finding those those Niche preventable diseases and just eliminating all those risks which is cool and so there's even more news in here oh yeah you go I'm also excited to announce nucleus has acquired Cambrian an aib based Health platform pioneering algorithms to transform data from wearables like AA
rings and apple watches into actionable recommendations we're excited to welcome the founder David Sloan to our product team where he'll spearhead wider data Integrations and this is insane and awesome my only critique of this announcement is you you've already included like three major announcements
which is your fundraising round they're also growing 68% month over month yep they're adding this like crazy new exec to the team and they did an acquisition and they could have spaced that out over four weeks and had like big news you know yeah constantly is doing pretty well at going direct he has a podcast
and he posts a lot and we'll go in through some of his posts but I mean they've been on an absolute tear in the last three months they've averaged 68% month-over-month Revenue growth since November monthly users have tripled and less than a year after going live we've scaled up from 10 genetic analyses to
over 800 so it took him four years to get this live he was in his bedroom just kind of grinding on this figuring out what technology he needed and uh finally got it live and then they've done a bunch of crazy things that everyone in in Silicon Valley have been like why are
you doing that like they sponsored the Jake Paul fight did you see this so like when the cutman comes in to like I think it was Jake Paul fight they it's like it's some like you know not super prestigious type event you know it's not that's the mass Market the biggest companies are built and everyone was
like why why is he doing this this is like so silly but I I I looked at the data and I think it penciled out really well for that I think it just a great yeah the uh there's a good quote in here relevant to this because uh you know this is a now a hyped Venture back company but to become a you know
multi-billion Dollar business and and potentially a trillion dollar business which Alexis will get into here you have to be able to hit that mainstream of if you're building a consumer product you should probably at some point be able to advertise at a boxing match NASCAR
NASCAR things like cross that cm and you're only cool with the tech people you can you can Ladder Up The Venture rounds pretty well you can even spack we've seen this with like the all birds and stuff that never really broke into the mainstream but my first company never really crossed the chasm into like
the main mainstream and uh and and so thinking about that earlier in this in the company history and kind of biting the bullet on like yeah your brand might be not seen as like the hottest thing in Tech but that's actually a bigger opportunity yeah so one of the um I believe it's a co-lead in the round uh
Alexis soan he says they say the next $1 trillion business is going to be in consumer health I buy it if you look at the landscape today there's really no one else on the market building the way Kion and nucleus are nucleus is running a Playbook and Healthcare that used to
belong only to purely software companies it's fascinating to watch yeah uh so very cool and so we we actually mentioned this in that uh in that Nvidia article that we read um talking about how you know there's this data wall we're running out of data and there is a lot of genomic data and maybe that has a
has a role in Ai and and I think that's what Keon is betting on is let's let's let's put in a massive amount of of genetic data and and then run these next Generation algorithms over there so it's not just that the hardware got better the Lumina system I think is one of them
that can actually sequence more genomic data yeah it's it's get all of that into the database and then be able to run more advanced algorithms with AI on top of it so very bullish but Keon has had some Banger posts over the last few years uh uh on September 9th 2024 he said our Revenue yesterday we are
absolutely cooking the movement is getting bigger every day looks like a a meme coin CH it does is this pumped out fun K what's going on here can you believe we haven't even gotten started yet oh my god future of healthtech at nucleus genomics I like that let's go just sharing the stripe dashboard we
love to see it uh this is a fun one um related to 23 me in September of what uh September 20th 2024 today I'm announcing that nucleus genomics is considering the possibility of making a public offer to acquire 23 and me contingent on financing as well as initiating and executing a successful
negotiation that's such an amazing like play even at a high level to just show your your uh your your the kind of game you're playing to go to find the most high-profile company in your category and say yeah we're exploring an acquisition of the company yeah exactly even if it's not a super serious thing
yeah it uh in many ways I'm sure that Kion and the and the nucleus team would be able to much better operate and take advantage of the customer relationships and the data and it just comes down to the price I mean they're already making Acquisitions they got 14 million right now I think they'd probably 32 million
total I think they'd probably need like over a hundred to do the deal even if there was debt involved I don't know how 23 me operates as a business but um it's still just kind of cool and there's this trend of like you know when Tik Tok was up and people were talking about like
perplexity was jumping on the he maybe we'll buy it maybe Mr Beast will buy it a lot of people were circling and at least kind kicking the tires this is yeah this is part of a broader Trend we're seeing in Venture right now where Venture capitalists and Founders are starting to think more like traditional
private Equity looking at rollups becoming popular but also you know this sort of larger scale m&a mergers so and this this is really cool dwar cash obviously one of the most respected figures in Tech right now uh had an amazing story so uh Keon posts wow dwares Patel had an amazing story on his
concern about his family history for uh prostate cancer and so he exported his 23 me 23 andme data to nucleus genomics to find out how he was in the 97th percentile for his genetic risk he now knows to get earlier screening for this and so this is an example of just uh the the software the application layer in AI
being valuable uh he didn't even have to do a test with nucleus he was able to just take his 23 Mi data and I'm sure the quality of that analysis goes even goes up if you actually do the full test with nucleus so congrats to Keon and the nucleus team we love to see it and good
luck with the next 12 to 18 months until you raise again try to keep up that 6 68% month of month growth Y and soon your GDP will be big your Revenue will be bigger than the GDP of France there you go there you go uh well let's move on to a uh fantastic article in Pirate wires we' love to read these uh these
deep Dives on uh this one's by Joe Lonsdale and John Nunan says America needs better defense acquisition how Trump can sees the moment learn from what worked and what didn't in his first Administration and make General generational changes to defense bureaucracy and so during the rebellion
in the Philippines a century ago American soldiers found that their service pistols lacked stopping power and were inadequate for the harsh realities of jungle warfare in response Army leaders drafted a simple request for a new semi-automatic pistol of at least 45 caliber to replace the services
aging revolvers this was a big thing in in uh in Vietnam I I feel like that was the dawn of like the 556 round and a lot of guys would carry Thompson submachine guns that were 45 caliber um just because it would cut through all the brush and the bullets wouldn't get scattered as much and so a lot of guys
kind of like procuring their own weapons and this is something that's happened in the military for a long time like their their family will send them bulletproof vests yeah this is why uh the work that Founders are doing in defense Tech now is so serious there's a lot of memes you
know we've we've we've talked you know memed about gundo and be domestication and stuff like that but when you're developing these products if you have bugs or erors or they're not set up properly for the task you're putting American lives on the line and these soldiers you know back in this situation
are finding out that they're uh you know pistols don't have stopping power which means that they're actively getting into conflicts like you know eye to eye with basically the enemy and not being successful with the products yeah and so six firearm manufacturers answered the call their pistols were put
through a series of rigorous field tests the sidearms were refined iteratively throughout the assessment in the final test several thousand rounds were put through each gun over 48 hours that must have been fun uh the Army was pleased to discover that one of the six prototypes
the colt suffered no malfunctions over 2 days of intense use in early spring 1911 the uh oh this was actually during the Philippines war this was before Vietnam actually um had that wrong uh in early spring 1911 the Army settled on the Colts 45 caliber as the new sidearm of
choice for the service nearly 3 million Colt 1911s were made the Colt 1911 served soldiers across two world wars Korea and and I guess Vietnam as well uh eventually being replaced in 1985 it was a procurement victory for the ages and the result of a competitive process that spoke for itself to say that the Army's
attempt to build a new pistol in the 21st century has gone poorly would be a gross understatement the Army's effort to buy a new handgun has already taken 10 years and produ produced nothing more than 30 350 pages of requirements said the late Senator John McCain in 2015 micromanaging extremely small
unimportant details and Byzantine rules and processes the armies wants followed many of which are unnecessary or anti-competitive and so uh procurement is a mass pirate wires summarizes this by saying the Pentagon purchases more Goods services and software than all other federal agencies
combined but an ideology of central planning has rendered it ineffective and here's how the Trump Administration can make generational changes and so uh Joe and uh his co-author John go on to write uh change is coming the dod bureaucracy like all bureaucracies seeks to sustain and grow
itself each new inefficiency like the service pistol mest prompts shock from Congress then to fix the inefficiency the bureaucracy creates more inefficiency and this is we're going to need a new report yeah yeah exactly this is something I'm worried about the report generates a need for new analysis
and investigation and a new report and then you're back yep and it's a cycle of of just information collection versus action yeah it's very very rough like yeah you're you're over regulated you have a problem and the answer is more regulation it should be it should it's fny because this initial process
which is hey we're going to give six manufacturers the opportunity to produce a Next Generation firearm we're going to put them through 48 Hours of intensive testing y that's exactly what you know and this this actually is might be surprising to some people but uh there you know when if you ever are going to
shop and and buying a gun often times a Glock will get recommended due to its sort of rugged reliability and so if you put 10,000 rounds through a Glock and it's been wellmaintained or serviced you're going to have very little sort of errors with it but there's a lot of Manufacturers
that are actively selling products where it's one out of every 100 rounds you know has you know that you go through you have some type of error or it gets jammed or it's you know has some type of issue and that's the last thing you want it's okay if you open Apple intelligence and it's telling you something
completely inaccurate about a message that you got if you're relying on a handgun in a defensive you know scenario and it's has a 1% error rate that just doesn't really work yeah and so in 2018 the Pentagon underwent a significant restructuring of its acquisition framework it resulted in
the creation of a near of nearly a dozen new offices the creation of the diu a lean and Nimble group based in Silicon Valley with the authority to fund new products is a bright spot but the temptation to create new bureaucratic edifices is part of the problem in the defense world the Pentagon is the only
domestic customer and so the defense industry is not such to the same demand forces as the rest of the economy programs that wouldn't survive an open competition can Thrive if the Pentagon wants them to Superior Products can struggle to break through and are at the mercy of opaque processes uh when the
Army was searching for a new pistol a century ago it simply told the best arms manufacturers in the world to build them a pistol then it tested them in a ruthless competition today Pentagon officials write long lists of requirements many of them strange and unnecessary take years to solicit and
evaluate proposals even when the Pentagon does hold competitions there is a clear winner that is ordered this is for the most simple this is a multi hundredy old product right the pistol and so imagine when you're testing and trying to sell and create uh and earn
the Pentagon as a customer if you're building a drone defense you know mechanism of sorts right like imagine the complexity there when you have this emergent threat new technology Y and they can't even figure out how to acquire a new handgun for you know like service pistol yeah and so Joe Lonsdale
wrote on x uh VP JD Vance mentioned the crisis of broken defense procurement twice in today's interview cool uh I drew up notes on how to fix it based on my 20-year experience as a defense entrepreneur and investor with leaders like Pete hegseth we've got a real shot at CH at change link below and so uh
Joe's been working on this for a while um and there are lots of people in Tech and defense Tech that have been uh talking about this for a while um back in 2023 November 24th uh Ryan Macintosh over at Andre said uh one of the biggest bottlenecks for defense startups is DoD Contracting
imagine a tech enabled private military company that they could sell to instead circumventing government procurement and Ops contracts for Mission outcomes not products delivered defense as a service kind of a like the the most futuristic out possible outcome but I mean there's
certainly an element of that with uh the private military contractors that buy sometimes civilian weapons even we have a mutual friend that's been working on a PMC for a while go and so Joe goes on to say his friend sham SAR uh over at paler has boned what he calls a government defense monopsony where one buyer gets
too comfortable and exercises illogical and inefficient def decision-making in his Martin Luther inspired defense Reformation uh sham brilliantly lays out a strategy to end the Pentagon monopsony and flip the military to be a better customer one of my favorite proposals in this space is to stop identifying the
Pentagon as a single entity it is rather an umbrella for dozens of service branches agencies and sub agencies the thinking is that Congress and the president puts these smaller agencies into competition with each other for money and contracts it would not work across the entire DOD but putting just a
few head-to-head would be a strong blow against the 1950s Mandate of efficiency via consolidation and a single difficult top- down buyer it's funny efficiency via consolidation sounds like a Soviet era it doesy sound doesn't sound very for the capitalist in the 50s or
something um yeah and it's interesting one of the Dynamics here is that defense manufacturers need to sponsor NASCAR events they need to buy out of home we were talking with the adquick team yesterday and they were showing us a billboard that Ander roll is running in DC right so they're basically having to
do widescale consumer advertising to build the sort of brand love presumably or or mind share in in a place like DC totally when in theory a defense contractor shouldn't have to be doing consumer marketing to get their products you know purchased by our government right it should be the best you know
Suite or individual product that that sort of wins but instead you know you'd see a ad advertisement for a zic next to an advertisement for a submarine yeah I remember seeing uh I think it was andal ads at Burbank Airport uh and yeah all of that's just to you know Target
lawmakers that are flying back and forth between LA and probably Sacramento yeah um and so there's another promising proposal he highlights to create mission-based requirements the Pentagon has a term called requirements creep where a simple commercially available solution to a problem becomes infected
by new designed obligations imposed on industry by military officials the US Navy's constellation class frigate for example was meant to be a fast and simple purchase of a proven and existing warship uh the frm frigate made by Finn Canter um and what was a clear edict from Congress to buy quick and offthe
shelf Navy bureaucrats have reduced the constellation's design commonality with the original FR from approximately 85% so they were like let's just changeed 15% of it to now it's less than 15% so it's 85% different requirement after requirement some dating back decades
have resulted in massive cost overruns and delays to the program as a result the Navy still does not have a frigate in service it's just like oh my God uh when the Pentagon believes it can do acquisition via Central planning more effectively than listening to soldiers or techn ologist it fails our country
again Central planning all these phrases that uh it's rough um and so I mean this is all part of like this major Vibe shift in in Tech and defense Tech uh there's a post from Dan primac here uh from November 29th of 2024 uh he says one big reason that VCS didn't use to fund defense Tech was that they didn't
want to invest in things that were reliant on government procurement yes there were philosophical issues too but this was an ERA when VC's avoided startups that even brushed against government or regulation minus biotech that time has long passed in part because Uber lift SpaceX and Airbnb
kicked down the doors and so yeah it's interesting I I hadn't really thought about um Uber and Lyft and Airbnb as uh precursors to the Andals of the the era there is a little bit of that where uh there there was a there was a shift in entrepreneurship where Founders figured
out that of aren't insurmountable well a lot of the lowest hanging fruit of you know crms and email tools you got do the harder the harder thing yeah and you had a generation of of entrepreneurs who did the easy things right and then they realized that there were bigger challenges and bigger opportunities
doing the hard stuff now that now that they had the sort of base level abilities around Capital raising software you know these sort of generalized skill sets this is a crazy stat since the end of the Cold War over 2,500 us companies have been founded and reached a valuation of a billion dollars
or more so 2500 unicorns in the US since the Cold War less than a dozen have been in defense and I mean hopefully we'll be covering more here soon but I personally founded a few and invested early in a few more Joe's in like every defense basically not just in them but founded um in many areas these companies are out
competing the primes if they're allowed to they represent thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US and could have put a multiple of that in the next decade um but they need allies in the government new officials can start by trimming down an encyclopedia of regulations that was first written and
Consolidated in the Reagan Administration the federal acquisition regul regulation F first issued on April 1st that's funny April Fools Day fools 1984 also a weird year to very dystopian um has almost doubled in length and with it the complexity maybe it was always meant to be a joke it was a joke and it
was meant to be dystopia nobody got the joke and let it roll yeah disregarded entirely title 10 of the US code which governs the Armed Forces has become swollen with Obsolete and choking legal requirements this creates fertile grounds for long and contentious lawfare when bids don't go a company's way and
so the story of every defense tech company has been make a better product get it you know loved by the military and the and the F War fighters on the ground and then essentially you have to fight a law suit when you get screwed in the defense procurement acquisition well
this is why a bunch of the there's this narrative that all the new defense Tech Founders are in the gundo but two of the companies in my portfolio deterrence and Allen Control Systems both the CEOs live in Washington DC right so um and they the the opportunity for them is that
every lunch and coffee and things like that can get them closer and closer to real traction yeah and uh yeah I think SpaceX and paler both had to sue the government when uh when contracts didn't go their way and they felt like they were uh unduly looked over because it's hyper poitical there's lot there's you
know massive lobbying totally if you're locked Martin and you like your you know margins duopoly or whatever you're going to just continue to spend to make sure that uh things aren't necessarily always this is a great quote in here the United States was once the arsenal of democracy
today it is the Arsenal of bureaucracy with an army of federal civilians making it difficult for American companies to sell to willing buyers to Wi it took the state department and the Pentagon nearly 30 months to finalize the sale of Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Taiwan uh though upgraded in recent
years the Harpoon has been in service since the 80s it's not a new system and Taiwan is the Nexus of our Pacific deterrence we have a unique opportunity for American workers and Innovation to be fueled by investment from our friends strengthening both our economy and National Security the process should be
simple it isn't the half of the arrow in America's side was feathered from our plume that's great that's a great sentence great writer writers fantastic U moreover the the past three decades of obsessive consolidating and regulating and subsidizing has undercut the core
element of the new administration's foreign policy and natural National Security Trump has rightly emphasized deterrence a concept that escaped the outgoing president and his team deterrence is a simple framework and does not require a mountain of phds to grasp it means in plain terms terrifying
adversaries with a combination of iron forg National will and fearsome weapons that lend that patriotic resolve uh credibility it's great yeah one one I posted a couple weeks ago that we needed a like project Stargate style progress uh project to address the shortage of domestic drone production totally and
when you read this article and you understand how long it takes just to sell oh yeah a single you know Harpoon uh uh to not what is it uh the I mean no one's talking about Taiwan invading China because like China is extremely scary when it comes to deterr like they have all all this incredible military
technology it's Unthinkable yeah and so I think part of it is getting getting uh Peter people like Pete head hedis back um uh in you know effectively in power and helping make some of these decisions people that have actually experienced conflict yep and getting some of these decisions back into the hands of not you
know bureaucrats but actual operators that have on the ground experience yeah pretty cool looking at who's in now so Pete Heth said during his confirmation hearing competition it's important critically important Silicon Valley for the first time in Generations has shown a willingness desire and capability to
bring its best Technologies to bear at the Pentagon a pentagon that has become too insular and ties tries to block new technologies from coming in and then Steven Feinberg the nominee to be the number two at the Pentagon is a patriot who leverag his vast business experience
he's more of a private Equity guy but has done a lot of Defense deals I think it's Cerberus right and then um Emil Michael also went went into the administration as well and he was uh the right-hand man of Travis kalic at Uber uh and just a great overall guy and we want that Uber energy that TK energy in
the Pentagon running research and Engineering that is that is cool um during so he closes with during the Persian Gulf War the stunning American Military victory over the Iraqis then a fourth large then the fourth largest army in the world milit experts estimated that US military technology
was a decade ahead of the Soviets and two decades ahead of the Chinese the world was shocked at the might of then futuristic weapons and state-of-the-art tactics the new Trump team has strong has a strong wind in its sail the woke Tech Giants of the last decade have given way to a new crop of patriotic
leaders and innovators Silicon Valley is poised and ready to join the fight with a few bold moves president Trump's go promised golden age and a second century of American dominance are within reach I love it so go subscribe to pirate wires read the full piece and uh follow Joe on
X and uh let's go to some other posts Loosely about defense procurement so Josh Wolf wrote us defense Tech CEOs urge speedier procurement to counter China this was from months ago and everyone has been beating the drum on we need to speed up defense procurement it's boring but it's very important yeah
and it puts our companies at risk if you have a startup and you've developed this incredible product and then you have one customer which is the Pentagon and they're like okay we're excited about this but uh you know let's let's start the process and then it turns into a 48
month process meanwhile you have $2 million in payroll costs that you're having to absorb every month because you need the best engineers and talent in the world to run your business but then you're just waiting for that Revenue to hit and usually it comes in in increments where you know that you get
awarded 10 million bucks and then and then you need to hit certain milestones and and so uh it's a very uh sort of shaky Dynamic that has led to otherwise good technology not getting implemented yeah and so even back during the Biden Administration uh there was an open letter that was signed by paler andural
Lux capital and others and they went to meet with the Biden Administration in the House GOP to work on defense procurement um obviously less relevant now that Biden's out but uh still this is something that's obviously bipartisan and has always been uh Patrick Collison had an interesting post host here he
took a very academic approach to thinking about defense procurement back in 2017 says military procurement turns out to yield interesting management Reading scrutinized from multiple perspectives lots of pathologies to analyze R&D is a major factor he recommends Boyd Korum National Defense
by Fallows and the Augustine's law by Augustine yeah so while you're flipping brain rot real content Patty Patty's Patty's reading these esoteric books on defense procurement and that's why he runs a hundred billion doll company and you know and you haven't raised a seed yet you just lost 15 grand on Meme coins
yeah exactly it's great but I I got to check out some of those books that's probably pretty interesting stuff um but yeah he's always been a a real powerful deep diver of the powerful deep diver he would had a podcast in another life yeah yeah uh uh this is an interesting one
have you seen Pentagon Wars this movie no it's fantastic so it it Chronicles the story of the the Bradley Fighting Vehicle uh and it's it's like a made for TV Dr like almost like a dramedy like a like a drama comedy yeah and it's all about that's like kind of like our show kind of like our show yeah and so it it
tells the story of of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and how the the requirements just got so chaotic because they'd go to one General and he would say originally it was just it was just supposed to be an armored troop transport to take a bunch of guys from the rear to the front so it's it's just
it's just a bus basically and but you know it needs to be fast so it can move needs a little bit of armor but nothing crazy but then of course they talk to one guy he's like oh well it'd be great if it had a gun on it and then they're like okay let's put a turet on it and they're like well if we put the turret
on it like it's going to carry less guys and they're like okay well like it also needs to be able to float in water and so they add that and then they and then they're like well now if it's if it has the turret and the and it can go in the water it's going to be much heavier so
it's going to be a Target so now I have to put more armor on it and so that slowed it down and stuff and so it's a it's a hilarious movie it's it's fantastic but there's a little bit of an interesting uh like flip side to this a little a little uh contrarian take from Robert Potter here he says the Bradley
is literally taught to students of Defense procurement as a bad example the platform has been slammed audited and they even made a movie making fun of it Pentagon Wars the reality here it is fogging a Russian tank keep that in mind when people talk about the f-30 and so there's always F35 was in the
news last week because there was a video on an Airfield that just fell out of the sky luckily the pilot ejected and and came down in a parachute but um and that was an $80 million-ish mistake I believe I mean the the programs in I think over a trillion or something it's huge um but
there's always actually over it can't be over you think I know there's no way it's it's very expensive I know the numbers are all so big I can't even keep track anymore but um but the interesting thing about the F-35 is when you talk to people in defense they will say the problem with the F35
is not that it's a bad plane like as evidenced by the fact that China copied it the j20 is a direct copy of the F35 why would they copy it if it was a bad plane that just wouldn't make sense you wouldn't waste your time um maybe you could make an argument that like oh the
R&D is free so you you know you just copy it because it's it's valuable at if you don't have to pay the R&D cost but the F35 is not a lesson in uh in like oh we we tried to we tried and failed to build a better you know Air Supremacy fighter or platform uh it is successful it did actually do all the different
things electronic warfare like it's fast it has all the different features it's just that it went way over budgeted and took way too long and is just a technical mess but it's still the best something interesting about uh so if you're a fighter pilot and you're base somewhere in the US let's say you're
based in Nevada if you go if you go on deployment you just end up flying the jet there isn't that is that a strange commute and it ends up being these like really long it's imagine it's it's like a 16-hour flight you know so you just like commute over to work I just find it's it's it's you would imagine that
they would get like shipped in some way like normally you're I don't know with with like sports cars right you're not you're not like I'm just going to like go put some I'm GNA I need I want my you know turbo in New York I'm going to drive it all the way over there but the
planes they just end up the most efficient way fight over there well the new andal uh Arenal their manufacturing plant is right next to an air strip and uh and the Palmer was talking to uh I think Ed lllo at Bloomberg in this interview and saying like oh yeah we're right next to an airst strip so we can
like and one of the advantages and Ed llo is kind of like you know answering his finishing his sentences and saying oh so like you can fly the plane straight from the factory to the customer like to the Pentagon or to the Airfield and he's like Palmer's like yeah or the war zone yeah you can just
it rolls off the factory line and it goes straight to the to the front yeah immediately and that's the most efficient way to deliver capability and I just think that's it's funny and interesting um yeah anyway very expensive and and again highlights the fact that like we aren't necessarily
behind on the technology we're just behind on the on the efficiency and the procurement process and over time the I'd rather be behind on procurement because that's a lot of process so you can rip out but it's it's a leading indicator it's like we're overspending on the F35 the next version won't even
get made if if the if the trend continues and that's that's the fear and the risk so Matt Palmer uh says hate to say it but I don't think there's any way the US can position itself to deter a major war in the next decade let alone win one quickly the defense procurement system and the industrial base
underpinning it is fundamentally broken and it will take a major war to fix it he's a bit of a Doomer I think that there's a chance I think Joe lale and the crew at the Pentagon you know I like how they're not taking the Doge branding into this it's much more of just hey let's just do this we don't need to we
don't need to make it a a big marketing campaign totally we don't need VC in here you know trashing the jocks again people like people like people like you hardworking Americans I think I think he in many ways the the the the cultural opposite yeah um but uh I mean defense
deck is is char ing on let's go to our next story uh startup castian has raised $100 million for Hypersonic Strike weapons I think we got to ring the siis gong for castian let's do it boom boom congratulations to everyone involved we'll break almost needed to size up the
gong for this yeah this is a big one we did 14 million now we're doing 100 million uh congrats to castillan so they make Hypersonic missiles um silicon Valley's enthusi enthusiasm for super fast weapons has picked up speed with defense Tech startup castillan raising $100 million through debt and Equity to
build Hypersonic missile systems the company is buying to sell longrange Strike weapons to the US military castillan is part of an increasingly well-funded sector of venture back defense companies many are hopeful that the new Trump Administration will yield more government contracts for startups
there will be more support for awarding contracts to non-traditional players said castillan co-founder Sean pit uh the Administration has given the Pentagon the freedom to lean into new companies so they raised 70 million in Venture and 30 million in debt uh the funding round was led by V by light
speed Venture partners and it brings the company's total funding to 114 million so they got here with just 14 and have you seen their their branding by the way it's very 50s nostalgic or even almost World War II era some of the the graphics that they use no I haven't seen that that's cool uh feels a little bit
insane to be you know talking about defense tech company branding but I think it's smart by them because there are so many new players coming in differentiating yourself um you know visually is is just another way to kind of stand out yeah yeah it's great and and the last thing you want to do is
just be like derivative Ander roll right um because the the anderol has been such a dominant Force totally and they kind of took the sort of Call of Duty esque branding totally and that is what all these defense Tech Founders grew up playing and so it's sort of the default
but because and was first they own it so castillan done a good job of of you know separating themselves from the pack and so let's do a little bit of a deep dive on uh hypersonics so the defense department has considered hypersonics a national security imperative for more than a decade despite spending billions
of dollars on the effort it it has failed to develop Battlefield ready technology castillan says it's frequent flight tests quick engineering upgrades and economical manufacturing will produce cheaper and better Hypersonic weapons it does test flights uh it does three test flights per month in the
California desert so this is crazy uh Hypersonic weapons you might think Hypersonic faster than sound a Hypersonic weapon is defined as a projectile that flies at least five times the speed of sound yeah supersonic is mock one to five Hypersonic is five plus yeah so it can be launched from
great distances maneuver and evade most air defenses they became a top defense department priority during President Trump's first admin a 2021 test flight by China which launched a weapon that circled the globe 20 times the speed of sound or faster alarmed Washington 20 just ripping around 20x um
so the main the main reason why they would had to choose that flight path fairly well that's the thing you don't have to choose the flight path with the Hypersonic it's so high so fast it's not just that it's so high it it combines speed so uh the traditional ICBM the intercontinental ballistic missile will
also go mach 20 I I'm not sure if it's exactly mach 20 but they go extremely fast they go all the way up into space but they follow a perfect uh parabolic Arc and so we have missile defense systems and satellites that track all of these different missiles as they go up
all the different Rockets So the rocket launches and you can see that it's on this very smooth trajectory and what that allows you to do is calculate with a very simple mathematical equation well if it's going you know a couple thousand miles an hour here well then in 5 minutes it's going to be here and if I
just get my bomb or my missile here and explode I will intercept it and blow it up yeah it's very simple to build a uh like a a a programmatic calculation for how to counter it and so that's been the backbone of missile defense systems and it's why people aren't genuinely freaked
out about countries getting ICBM capabilities because you know North Korea will get one and it's like yeah we could probably shoot those down pretty effectively scramble things as they come shoot North Korea is so funny it's it's it's it's like your drunk friend just a gun and they're sh it in the at
random times you got to kind of far away and so you got to look over there and be like what's going on is he all right hopefully that doesn't fall anywhere important yeah um meanwhile the adults are you know just sitting around yeah maybe every once in a while letting one off but in a much more you know
controlled uh method and so these Hypersonic weapons are different than icbms because they don't follow predictable trajectories they maintain the maneuverability almost of a jet or cruise missile but they're going Mach so Cruise there's a couple cruise missile companies and cruise missiles are
obviously very important um but cruise missiles are typically subsonic so they're not going it's it's more like a plane with no one inside and just a bomb um so when you have something traveling Mach 5 and it's also able to maneuver it's very hard to shoot it down and so these are the people are worried about
these Hypersonic weapons being able to take out out aircraft carriers very easily be able to strike somewhere because it can take you know a lower path evade radar evade the satellites evade detection and then just show up very quickly before you can react I'm uh I'm an an adviser to this
company Aon um I don't know have you ever met I met them but I'm so they're based in Texas and um they so in learning about that business there's only two manufacturers that make they make anti-tank missiles yep so launch from the ground you know shoulder launched sort of close range there's two
companies that make them and they they've gotten to the point where they're charging um because they they run on a Cost Plus model y so the the manufacturers make like a fee on top of what it costs them to produce it so that means that they're incentivized to just run up the price so they make more money
it's this very you know poor incentive and so aon's making them for 80% less money and they're making better products that are easier to use yeah so uh Aon you would think is just like you know obvious easy win they just go in there and saying hey our products you know costs 80% less it's easier to use uh but
because of this procurement process which we've been talking about it's just not it's not a shoe in right it's a struggle to get um you know and they've done very well in terms of getting um Traction in the Pentagon but yeah um and so a lot of it is you know you just have
to go and get some sort of general or Admiral to come out and watch your demo yeah and we've seen videos of Palmer doing this in the desert in a uh in a wonderful Hawaiian shirt uh and castillan clearly made that part of their strategy as well uh they bought uh this crazy looking like tank transport
thing and they drove it to elsag gundo which I guess is where they're headquartered um say welcoming our new lsvr mkr18 to El Segundo this week will be making upgrades to convert this vehicle into a launcher system for for un upcoming flight test and it's a fun ride
so I think they can build in their Factory put it on the back drive it out to the desert and then just shoot it off and fire it I think I think this creates a fun Dynamic for uh VC demos too so if you you're running a process your investors you know potential investors want to see what you got invite them all
out to the same demo Happ blow some stuff up and then say you guys can Talk Amongst yourselves and figure it out what I was telling Steve CEO of Allen control systems uh there was all these you know uh invest he's uh was raising a new round last year all these investors wanted to
meet I was like invite them all to the same demo because they're going to just be sitting there watching this incredible you know demo of the technology and and for him he's making counter drone yeah you know system so uh it's just very cool and highly relevant to the battlefield today y uh and uh
anyway so cool opportunity normally you're giving a VC a demo your product they're using it but they sort of putting them all out on the same desert it's just a fun I've heard of that happening and all the VCS were standing around talking to each other and one of the bigger VCS there looked to the other
one and said you're not getting a penny of this round everyone was like wow that guy's kind of a dick but yeah like it it worked and they took the round and and it got done and it's good for the founder um so lots of investors have been uh singing castillan praises Andries and Horwitz is in the round uh
they said Michelle V's former andreon associate uh or partner says the best way to ensure the next era of pax Americana is to build capabilities that deter our adversaries congrats to the team Jake Chapman says uh with a fantastic handle on X just at VC uh crazy he says excited for castillan and
to see us developing this American capability and I like the folks I know it light speed but light speed maintains a China arm what's the relationship between these two firms from a money Control Systems information flow perspective why did everyone scream about seoa was totally fair but nobody
seems to care about light speed so putting the putting the screws to light speed telling them divest immediately I guess um blueyard capital is also in this deal we are excited to consider continue supporting Castilian Corp on their mission to preserve peace through deterrence read more about their $100
million series a financing in the Wall Street Journal which we just did and uh castillan is very excited to announce their round we should close out with some more context from the Air Force the hypersonics program the Air Force estimated would become operation AAL in 2022 hasn't materialized and the
service is working on another program that says it will produce a weapon in 2027 an Airforce spokeswoman woman said the service is working on other programs and collaborating with startup defense companies and providing them with opportunities to demonstrate their
technology many in the industry hopes Trump's shakeup in Washington agencies the the technology industry's coziness with the president the influence of musk himself the founder of the largest Venture back defense tech company will bring attention and money to hypersonics
and so what people still don't realize about SpaceX is it is being able to put things up in space fundamentally makes you a defense tech company totally it's not a just an aerospace you know space company that's part of what part of their value to the United States 100% yeah and and I mean star Shield has been
very important in getting Internet to the front lines um but then also there's all the other applications of just putting up spy satellites and even converting the Rockets to icbms potentially um so all all three of castillon's Founders were previously senior POS in senior positions at SpaceX
and roughly half the company's 60 employees joined from SpaceX that's pretty crazy um and uh castillan said it would have a finished product ready for the military by 2027 and will have its first Hypersonic speed test flight for its weapon this summer it has been awarded more than $22 million in federal
government contracts mostly from the Air Force and so we love to see that but yeah and that's and that's why this raise shouldn't be that surprising from a headline number standpoint is they're generating 22 million off of one basically one contract and I'm sure they have others
either done or in the pipeline and if you're a series B SAS company with 22 million of AR you can easily go out and raise 100 million at like a $500 million valuation sometimes those contracts are kind of paced out though so it's un clear how much they're drawing down from it but still yeah it's obviously uh a
good sign uh there and the and the order that people don't realize the order if if these contracts pan out well and the product starts to work you could be looking at billions of dollars in orders on one skew yeah yeah which is just that's where yeah there was some uh some like you know like what is the be case
here why uh like like what what could go wrong like there are competitors in the space there are other startups that do solid rocket Motors andal bought a solid R rocket motor company but it seems like castillan focused on being the integrator that actually builds the manf the youon ERS and then you have
these servicing contracts which are like SAS like you know sort of annual contracts on a per typically from what I know a per missile basis so it might be you sell a Hypersonic for call it $2 million and then you have 400k a year for 10 years to maintain it so it's very predictable stable Revenue once you win
the contract and so I think what we're seeing already in defense Tech is the the companies that have contracts now that are actually getting Traction in the Pentagon they are going to get more and more Capital piled into them because there's this there's a lot of preed seed
stage companies that are you know able to raise $5 million but getting to that next round even if you build the technology if you don't have the contract traction you're just not going to get there yeah so one of the Venture Capital firms in castillan is blue yard capital and their fun performance was
just uh published by Eric newcomer in his newsletter newcomer uh and I don't think they intended for it to be published but uh no do you know the back story of how this stuff leaks it's not even leak it's public endowment that that basically has to publish their data presumably for some type of compliance
reason so it's it's it all comes from utimco the investment arm of the Texas Public University system so I don't know if can be foed or it's just automatically released but uh newcomer loves getting those new Timco reports because uh they they all I'm sure there's I'm sure there's fund managers
now that are like I don't want to raise from them because I don't want five years from now my fun to be getting dragged yep uh you know a lot often times you know people but anyways I thought this was a crazy story so blueyard blueyard killing it is killing it yeah it's 2016 fund has 53% irr and
where are they based while they're ripping checks into American hypersonics Berlin Germany Berlin okay um have you been to Berlin I have cool cool City yeah I went to October it's only going to get more and more punk as their economy collaps well yeah they're really
siphoning the money out of the German economy with this fund now into the yeah yeah but maybe it'll come back in distributions um well hopefully blue yard's LPS are mostly American yeah if they're investing in American companies we can keep those you know and so it seems like newcomer went to David bird
the general partner at Blue yard and said hey I got you dead to rights I got the utimco report got you and this was cool he end but but yeah they came back and they were like here are the real numbers utimco calculates it one way we calc we can give you our marks and it seems like they're doing really well uh
the first fund generation they raised in 2016 they raised $ 120 million fund a net multiple of 4.8x and a net irr of 51% for DPI of 3.4x so they're doing great that allowed them to raise uh four more funds uh blue yard 2 blue yard 3 and then two crypto funds little bit of
a narrative violation a lot of people when they see a fund go from doing defense and biotech to foming into crypto oftentimes you know they just assume that if they're just incinerating cash but the first their crypto fund which was started in 2021 $75 million fund has a gross multiple of 1.7x right
now and a gross irr of 28% and so this is again the narrative violation that we've talked about before which is that the average crypto fund outperforms the average Venture fund yep and so crypto uh the crypto industry continues to laugh uh to the bank yep uh some retail investors get a little smoked in the
process but it's part of the game and so uh newcomer uh posted uh the full deep dive which you can go see on his substack pay Wald pay Wald but everyone in Tech has a subscription or the ability to hop the pay wall if they need to uh and uh Brad Holden uh gives a shout out to protocol labs for helping
blue yard Drive amazing returns any project would be lucky to have blue yard supporting them that was a crypto fund sounds like yeah that was the crypto investment that that really drove returns in their early fund which I think invested in both castillan early on and uh and protocol Labs which really
I guess mooned and so there's a couple other there's a couple other funds that are highlighted in here from the utimco report uh true Ventures uh is doing well uh new vesco has has invested in not just one or a handful of funds they've done 10 of true Ventures funds and so
this is why these solo GPS you have to start out raising 200k checks from a bunch of random people but you try to get to raising from endowments because endowments will basically ride with you for your entire career in certain instances especially if you put up uh solid numbers early yep uh and it's
valuable because even if you have a fund that underperforms you know they'll continue to to double down and and build that trust with you and so uh true Ventures uh the newer vintages still have negative irr because obviously the the the newer companies they die off faster and then the later ones start to
grow um but the overall IR is in a solid place at 23.5 n% which is great um upfront Ventures has been in trouble uh their portfolio their growth portfolio has fared worse than its early stage funds per timko's irr calculations the firm has only returned around 35 million to utimco out of 127 million invested so
far though its Holdings on paper have been marked up to nearly 150 million uh it has an overall IR of 9% uh the LA so to be clear they're well this doesn't look great on paper compared to true or uh blue yard they're still sitting on um you know what what will you know if it were to be
realized today who knows if it would be is a you know 9% irr which beating you know close to beating the market yeah and uh and there's some other uh funds that got um scooped by newcomer so go check it out um always interesting to dig into what funs are are raising important for Founders to understand
who's on an upswing and who actually has more Capital to deploy because once you see a fund start declining in the irrs they're likely not going to raise those follow-on rounds they might not be the partner for you that will be there for those series B series C checks keep
upping their prata staying with you if they're yeah and this one this other Foundry Group which was in the news last year because I think they returned capital or oh is that right maybe I'm confusing another fund but um yeah they're just no longer even raising so that uh even funds that uh you know
firms that end up raising you know in this case over eight individual funds uh sometimes don't have proper succession plans or the GPS just decide you know we had a good run let's call it yeah um because these things are every new fund is 10 plus years of you know commitment to managing the firm and if
you're getting to you know retirement age you're sitting there I'm 60 years old do I want to raise another fund now and then so I'm B de yeah potentially even 15 years often times if you get real winners that have you know continued access to Capital yeah so it's a long-term commitment well moving on to
one of the greatest cap capital allocators of all time masay Yoshi son isong just yeah let's just hit it a bunch for Masa he's got so much going on I mean the the original size Lord Zer to every number you can't keep a good man down so there's a report from the information
about how he made it back into the White House when President Donald Trump announced a $500 billion plan for data centers to power artificial intelligence one of the men standing to his left was already getting ready to write the checks and and can we give some credit to Sam for just Aura farming the
president he got Trump has really nothing to do with Stargate at all and Masa and Sam got him to announce their project y so uh Lulu Lulu uh always says you know go direct yep but if you if if you get the opportunity have the president announce your new your new fund uh doesn't hurt to get to get a
little uh you know Aura boost so uh SoftBank CEO M shison was already making plans to put a total of 40 million into 40 billion sorry I knew I was going to speak into the Stargate data center project as well as the company that Stargate is that is Stargate driving force open AI two familiar two people
familiar with the matter said how soft bank will finance the investment isn't clear but the company has separately started discussions to borrow as much as 18.5 billion using the value of its publicly listed assets as collateral sun is Levering up Levering up Levering up we need a big lever that we can throw
when the leverage turns on uh well and it's crazy because if he just held on to his Nvidia shares he could have he could probably actually so we have a post about that from uh Dr Peri Patel CFA he says I don't think he's he says ba CFA a ACA Esq he says masas owned 5% of Nvidia
and sold his entire stake in 2019 to buy weor he is the best AI investor ever so lots of people are trash in Masa we got another post from none other than Jordan Hayes here saying I'm not I've never trashed I think I think he's I think so now that Masa is investing 100 billion a
year again it's time to bring back this classic SBG shareholder value bunch of unicorns AI traffic so the funny thing so so I think it talks about this in this article but W he W he was so bullish on AI when he was just going so hard into weor and I think it's because he fell in love with Adam yeah and he
was just so enthralled by you know just the Newman effect yeah if he like he was so early if you look at all of his slides it's funny because he has like another slide that that's yeah yeah I think we have this one here Rohit says Moss is back baby and it's a new slide that has the same design Aesthetics of
jordy's slide uh saying Evolution illustrative agricultural revolution industrial revolution information revolution birth of superhuman I love it so dramatic cool simp he another one too that's this really funny graphic that says the valley of Corona virus and then and then
just two further growth yeah so Masa was was talking about AI before almost before I was born yeah I mean it is it is funny because these slides as ridiculous as they look they are great ways to communicate a simple idea I mean it's basically what other people are saying and in 5,000 words saying with
one slly yeah yeah but you read a Goldman report and it's going to be like bar charts with tons of graphs waterfall charts and all this stuff he's he's a Vibes oriented investor yes and he has extreme conviction that's got him into some hot water before uh but but overall uh he's been generally uh you know he's had he
had some issues back in the Telecom days we have to do we're going to do so maybe even tomorrow we'll do this but down like the full story of Masa cuz because you can't keep a good man down but but this story is great so um uh they're talking about the announcement which was only was it last
week so crazy feels like a month ago he says one of the men standing beside MSA open AI CEO Sam Alman traveled to masa's mansion in Tokyo this month seeking a big check to fund his company's growth Altman and MSA finalized the agreement a few weeks ago a couple days before
Congress certified Trump's election a person familiar with the negotiation says SoftBank so to be clear was already an investor in open AI so Masa you know has been on been on the journey uh it's funny cuz they finalized the agreement but it seems like they kind of just bro down like you know it seems like the way
that Stargate got announced and everybody's just like yeah I'm good for I'm good for 20 billion a year I'll figure it out you know you know that both Sam and Masa are obsessed with Napoleon so Sam had this blog post saying like the best book I read this year was Napoleon in his own work
this famous book and a lot of people read into that like bro like that's too much like that's too intense like you should back off of that because like yeah there's probably some good lessons in there but it's a little little intense to be like I want to be Napoleon
right and Masa has massive paintings of Napoleon I bet M has like actual artifacts from the from he's like a collector he's like a True Believer in the the largest collection of Napoleon's old swords or something like that yeah totally but you know Napoleon had up and downs and major comebacks you know a
beautiful story uh T says Jensen reminding Masa he was nvidia's largest shareholder at one point SoftBank sold their 5% stake in Nvidia for 4 billion in 2019 it would have been worth 150 billion today and you posted this picture of them like hugging the context of that video is I think a little bit
different saying like Jensen saying like yeah you used to be a big a big shareholder like kind ofing him a little bit I don't know I'm not exactly sure but but it is a very rough rough look MAA you never know maybe he maybe it was his whole plan he wanted to bottom you know bottom ticket so that it would
Inspire him to grind harder yeah could have been one of those situations uh we we we got a great we got a great post from Gabriel uh he says if they make the rock float at a VC backed space Factory company referring to vaa and the lk99 thing it's completely over for Tech critics zer Vindicated Capital allocated
correctly masas was just early Kathy Wood greatest of all time we will be multiplanetary species and you will enjoy post scarcity and obviously funny post great poster um the the Rocks did not float the lk99 thing did not replicate and so it was in fact our very own Andrew Mall working on that yeah
yeah yeah and uh I was there the night it happened it was very cool and looked like they were floating but it sound turned out to just be a magnetic effect not a uh superconductor effect it was very cool uh it was still cool that they were able to just do the science project
on the side it was it was just very cool for like recruiting it made a lot of sense but it was but it was it was it was an invalidation of his claim that you know maybe uh you know magic was about to happen yeah and of course things developed a little bit slow I want to see I want to see that the only
times I've seen Kathy wooded in the news recently is her saying we have such extreme losses that we will not have to pay you know capital gains for and it was like she kind of set herself up to be dunked on a little bit with those posts but let's get Kathy back in the mix M's back in
the mix I want an Adam Newman AI startup I want TK to to launch a foundation model yep I want it all and so uh I like this post from Sophie netc cap girl uh says Sophie says though he's become a bit of a meme because of weor masas is an icon and one of the most successful Tech investors ever it won't work for
everyone but he truly embodies what it means to bet big on your highest conviction ideas and to not be afraid of being wrong and lose money maso shison made a 20 made a total of 72 billion on his 20 million bet on Alibaba from 2000 so you know Masa basically has one of the greatest
Venture Investments of all time 20 million into 72 billion that's insane it's just so insane you know that he's just so pissed that he didn't put a bli in that he's like I'm never going to make that mistake again and so every from that point on he was he was the ultimate size Lord yeah it's a fascinating story and
so pachy also shows Masa some love he says I for one love that Masa just keeps coming back open Ai and Janie IV and talks to raise one billion from SoftBank for ai ai device Venture and so uh Sam is just is just a master of just taking Talent F money putting it out together
Vibes and and he's just a Vibe aligner and it works and so uh uh let's go through some more of this of this post uh people involved in Stargate stress that the high-profile White House announcement last week was merely a blueprint to a yearl long effort we talked about this more of a road show
than actually a funding announcement uh if soft Bank ends up spending the 40 billion a larger sum than is than previously known that that would be one of its biggest Investments ever while SE takes out big loans it often sets the stage for financial drama highly leveraged Telecom deals have put him on
the brink at least twice but he's always managed to survive the financial risks involved became almost immediately clear on Monday the markets were royed by skepticism that big spending on AI wouldn't pay off for investors valuations were already stretched when Chinese AI model deep seek showed it
could potentially produce AI at a far lower cost than its arrival SoftBank stock fell 10% on Monday wiping out the gains it made after the announcement of star it's kind of funny Stargate announcement to build massive infrastructure comes at a point when maybe we don't need the
infrastructure in a way we're expecting said Rafael D Orno uh a Financial Consultant for venture capital and private Equity firms who focuses on AI Investments there are questions around Stargate uh the soundness of son's bet will become more apparent in the coming years he has suffered from Big Financial
busts like we were in catara in recent years he's made those non-te bets while what he was touting the potential of artificial super intell Ence to change the world in the coming centuries meanwhile he sold off the firm's multibillion dollar stake in Nvidia before the chip maker had its historic
stock run up so he he is back he made I it seems like he was down pretty bad but then made it like basically all back on on arm right he turned $ 32 billion investment into 82 billion no quite a bit more that 82 billion was the gain that's amazing so Moss is a king of making it all back in one trade he
really is he so do he he studied so he realized that that many investors uh Sports betters gamblers poker players many of them quit right before they're about to hit it big yeah and so he just never quits if he hits super intelligence and just becomes the richest man in the world it's it's so
over for the critics yeah it's great uh in a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower after Trump's first election SE indicated the iPhone manufacturer foxcon would bring tens of thousands of jobs to the United States before the firm was ready to announce the move he just completely jumps the gun foxcon eventually
Backtrack on its plans to build a new new US plant softbank's own commitment to create tens of thousands jobs in the country coales through its investments in US startups backed by the first Vision fund he's like fine I'll do it myself he just writes 10 101 billion doll checks and you guys hire just like
hire like 10,000 people 10,000 people just grow fast and hire like 10,000 people yeah uh son's effort to integrate himself with Trump before many other CEOs were willing had some business logic behind it for years Regulators in President Barack Obama's administration
rebuffed softbank's efforts to merge Sprint the US mobile carrier it had borrowed heavily to buy shares in years earlier with competitor T-Mobile so he wanted to merge T-Mobile and Sprint a federal judge approved the deal at the end of Trump's first term in 2020 SoftBank still has about a$7 billion
doll stake in T-Mobile all of these Stakes are just so huge like it's not Avenger fund it's just this like Warren Buffett esque entity yeah um son announced in 2019 that its second Vision fund had amassed $18 billion of investor commitments from Microsoft Apple and others SoftBank has
yet to raise any outside capital for the fund Jordan Levy who worked at softbank's early stage Venture Capital team for 16 years said SE tends to announce initiatives before they're ready Masa is one of those guys who is ready fire aim but he manages to figure it out I love this guy just worked with
him for 16 years and he's just like yeah he's w yeah he's an absolute dog he's an absolute dog uh so uh I didn't realize this he's only 67 years old that's not that he's got time he's if he gets Bri Johnson he's good you know I mean I'm so happy that we 75 pills an hour and he'll be good I just
all I want is for him to do a proper annual keynote yeah like Warren Buffett style you know really lean into the brand I want we need more material right so X we're sort of relying on all these old slides where's the new slide deck you know he's you know he's cooking on good slides he's he's got something
cooking uh Masa has achieved amazing things for him and his company but I'm not sure if people look at Masa the way they do other Titans Levy added Levy said this is really something to him he thinks that he can create a legacy and so yeah he's still got a chip on his shoulder people are laughing and he's
going to be he's saying I'm going to have the last laugh yep and uh related to Masa we're moving on to our next next story Sam Altman backed retro biosciences is raising a billion dollars for a project to extend human life so Sam can just here it comes again [Music] boom uh uh again it's uh two R little
bit of a road road show Road Show moment road show moment I mean it's like it's I mean it's it's it's actually the most a lot of you know if you uh Founders struggle with this right because you wanted to really Kickstart a fundraising process you'd go out there and you'd say
I'm fundraising but you kind of can't do that you can I guess at a certain scale just go yeah we're planning to raise a billion yeah yeah yeah but you but they're not yeah they're not saying we're raising right now please come invest in our startups it's much more of this sort of Road show style
announcement and when you're raising a billion dollars for a company which presumably you know has no revenue or or very little or Incorporation yeah little pre-product I think this does exist I no yeah I've heard of this company has been around for a while but I mean it is true like like I think you
and and a lot of other folks uh when they're thinking about a new business idea oftentimes it helps to like build a deck around it and then share that around withn I've helped start you know a bunch of different companies but I've made 10 times decks youp it out and I'm like
okay yeah I think in deck it's the best way it's much more if you if you have if you have a cool idea and you can't turn it into a compelling deck it's just a cool idea exactly it's not a real business op exactly and so uh it seems like for a lot of these guys at this level they think in Financial Times
profiles yeah yeah and to be clear I I I think what they're doing sounds amazing and I would like them to have a billion totally I would give it to them if I had it uh you know and so there all in my friends you know early stage you know preed startups yeah and so uh they did a
modest seed I think we might have to get the size gong out for this $180 million seed uh and uh this will put more money in the series a the company is in talks with family offices VCS and Sovereign wealth funds as well as us hyperscaler data centers to provide computing power and so this $1 billion dollar might come
in the form of cloud credits as well be sort sort of a blend but uh you know he's certainly raising so the San Francisco based biotech will use the money to fund clinical trials trials for three drugs including a potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease which will be tested in an early stage study
in Australia this year it's also working on drugs for rejuvenating blood and brain cells I love that right now if someone gets Alzheimer's it doesn't matter what your resources are you know if you're like Joe Biden or Elon Musk or whoever you can write as big of a check
as you want to anybody and nobody knows how to cure it which is so crazy right sad yeah imagine how much uh funding Joe Biden would have had available to not be you know falling apart while President of the United States I posted this it was like when when Biden was having trouble he should have put together like
an operation War speed for for Brian Johnson blueprint yeah or just throw up a GoFundMe I would have thrown a bone to uh and so uh Altos backed by Jeff Bezos had the largest ever biotech fundraising ra raising $3 billion do in 2022 so a lot of these different Power Players in
Silicon Valley are doing biotech stuff now obviously Elon has neural link which is bio related and curing a lot of uh blindness but also par paraplegics uh like syndromes um Betsy lacroy said Altos has Brilliant Minds and and admirable longer range research goals but he said he and Altman both come from
the tech accelerator Y combinator and so they have a very fast-paced action-oriented Target Centric mindset the reason I like this play is because a lot of people talk about AI solving aging yep but then it's not not obviously going to happen just via model right unless it becomes truly a gentic
and you know we achieve this sort of ASI and it's just like I'm going to save all the humans know people you know that' be a fun reality but more realistically we need companies that are leveraging these new technologies in a very specific context like this around specific drugs
and treatments that can solve specific issues not just generally hoping that the technology will cure all of our problems so a lot of these drugs they usually take between 10 to 15 years to discover and then develop and get through the FDA process and the goal here and the Really the bat is that with
AI and a faster paced team they can accelerate that and bring drugs to Market faster um working with the $157 billion AI startup also has an ulterior motive bringing biotech into open AI you know that you're making progress towards AGI when your models are able to make discoveries that humans couldn't on
their own sort of like the move 37 moment in AI for biotech would be very interesting where the the AI spits out something that wasn't considered as a possibility they test it and then it works that and so uh one thing you'll notice from Altman's moves is that uh they tend to all interconnect in some
way there's many ways you could say oh World coin is the currency of open AI you know or you could imagine post AGI he clearly wants to think about you know what is the way to deliver Ubi to everyone and World coin would be a way to distribute value to billions of people I I think that's part of the
thesis at least so they can go by Cava slop grain balls yeah uh and so uh let's see uh if you're 85 years old and you undergo this therapy you can replace your blood stem cells with ones that are zero age and then those Ripple out and produce all your blood basically it's like having 80
% of all your cells become zero AG is it a ftin bargain we'll find out sounds good to me though I'm down I'm down to replace all my blood replace everything turn me into a robot who cares as long as you can podcast joh as long as I can podcast and bench press I'm good yeah as long as you can bench more yeah
than a certain fellow yeah exactly the robotic arms that seems highly relevant to uh well let's move on to some tech earnings in the public markets meta platforms sales soared to a record bolstering Zucker Zuckerberg's AI spending spree meta shares have rallied after it announced plans to increase
spending on AI this week posted record Revenue in the fourth quarter aided by artificial intelligence improvements to his ads business so uh we'll get into a bunch of the posts here but zuck's just undefeated he's on a generational run I think that you call the top on the style
but it was Notre opinion yeah public opinion sure he can't go anywhere but down from here he's on top of the world but the stock can keep going up maybe after you get after you get a Porsche minivan custom made and you're wakeboarding holding an American flag that that's the P top yeah and you're
wearing a million-dollar watch or fpjourne uh there there's literally no better watches to wear he can't go out yeah you can get a graph Diamond hallucination that'd be good um and so Le let's react to some uh some post about the earnings and then we'll go into the article uh Za stocks says meta
is operating on another planet Zuck is arguably the best CEO on Earth hard to comprehend he's only 40 Revenue up 21% year-over-year Gap net income up so here's a so yeah Mark Zuckerberg and Rossi are the same age which which is why dark path yeah yeah I mean they both had similar power yeah both created Tech
platforms one was legal uh earnings per share up 60% year-over-year operating income up 48% operating margin up 42% send it to a thousand already Bonkers numbers obviously not Financial advice um let's go to qap I think I used to think goo Google had the best goog uh
had the best business in the world with the widest oute possible I think meta this meta quarter changed my mind 60% operating margins X reality Labs on a Topline growing 20% sustainable with upside $2.2 million Revenue per employee with a 40-year-old founder it is a compelling bull case let's go to near
near says meta had their Q I'm literally inclined to log on to public right now and buy more meta stock not Financial advice not you everybody listening to this show should know that we don't give Financial advice so much of our net worth is in our friends companies which is the most
irrational y possible thing to do so definitely don't we shouldn't give we shouldn't give Financial advice around specific stocks but we should give the meta Financial advice of start a hedge fund yeah start a private Equity Firm go into private Equity hiot into private Equity asset management is the greatest
business model start family office yeah start yeah be be your job should just be running your own family office exactly exactly just like that's the fin that's all the financial advice you need be post economic yeah be post economic have a fantastic team of Traders deciding what what trades to make on a daily
basis uh meta had their Q4 2024 earnings today record revenue of 48 billion in just one quarter significant outperform uh 1.7 trillion market cap already Advertiser Revenue by geography at at an all-time high really really crazy unexpected too just huge growth even in E even in US and Canada very uh very
mature markets and uh let's look at Alex Heath he says Zuck on meta earnings call just now I continue to think that investing very heavily in capex and infra will be a major advantage Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief and so the company's shares Rose by about 5% in after hours trading following a rally
over the past week after it announced plans to increase spending on AI um Zuck says I expect that this is going to be the year when highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people and I expect meta AI to be that leading AI assistant just
because they have the distribution distribution is so the obvious uh one obvious bull case here is that if llms replace a lot of Google search and meta has all us consumers in their apps for hours a day and you can eat into that search and then meta gets an entirely new ad product which is a search style
ad product y on top of their already incredible Treasure Trove of data and consumer behavior and all this stuff uh it will it would be you know the potential is Limitless So Meta plans to spend 60 to 65 billion dollar on capex this year in part to build out a data center in Louisiana that is so
large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan Zuckerberg said it also expects the end the year with more than 1.3 million Graphics processing units or gpus and uh of course not all of those will be used for training AI a lot of them are just for serving reels and and doing algorithms AI on all sorts of
different products but still it's it's a lot of horsepower if he needs it yeah it's funny because uh I think SoftBank has uh been you can correct me but a few billion of of of net income um Facebook has 20 billion of net income so they can really blow yeah cash and they are the company's
reality Labs unit which is their smart glasses augmented reality and the metaverse reported losses of nearly five billion the unit lost 17 and 17.7 billion last year investing in VR but you know as controversial as as it is we saw everyone was saying oh Apple's going to defeat them with the Apple Vision Pro
that kind of flopped and they are just continuing to invest and it's hard to imagine a world maybe it's 10 years maybe it's 20 years where VR does doesn't get good enough and as we saw earlier uh at the end of last year the Orion demo was received really really well with the smart glasses they're even
lighter and more augmented reality and so they're clearly making strides there even though it's incredibly expensive it's it's so crazy especially when you compare it to the initial R&D that went into the iPhone like apple was able to do that on a shooring budget by
comparison meta has invested so so much in reality Labs but if they get it right and they have the the platform by default and the AI and the distribution it's G Zuck should get Trump to announce the Orion now that Trump will just announce private company it should be a benefit like if you hold a billion
dollars of his Trump trumpcoin he just does your PR do your PR it's just like a it's a utility token right the failing Vision Pro is a joke I only use Oculus sent from my meta Quest three yeah on Truth social uh Beyond increased spending meta more Bradley is going through a transition and has sought to
align itself with the new Trump Administration the company donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund and Zuckerberg himself visited Trump's maralago estate twice in recent months ahead of attending the president's inauguration he also went on Joe Rogan's podcast and criticized the
Biden Administration um uh on Wednesday meta agreed to pay a $25 million uh settlement in a law suit that Trump brought against the company after it suspended his Facebook and Instagram accounts in the wake of the January 6 2021 attack on Capital so Trump get 25 mil from them hey this is that was
pretty annoying yeah and potentially categorically wrong yeah to do yeah uh and you made me get kicked off Pinterest too because everybody followed your lead yeah I got kicked off of Tumblr like how does 25 mil sound and and Trump imagine well we'll call it even yeah I would to imagine that Trump
suing meta is like at at least $5 million legal bill yeah so probably came out on top and then who knows maybe the maybe now and now when they're at the the next UFC they'll they'll give each other a nod and maybe you know Trump will give them like a pat on the chess yeah uh this is going to be well they're
both real they're both really close with Dana White Dana White's uh really close with Trump and Dana White's now on the meta board and so the the relationships are building building back up uh yeah I I I uh I love the the memes of people with uh text over Zuck you know saying
yeah and then they freaking made me kick off Trump yeah can't believe they freaking did that yeah uh well Zuck said this is going to be a big year for redefining our relationship with governments we now have a US Administration that is proud of our leading companies prioritizes
American Technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad earlier this month meta said it was eliminating third party fact checker relaxing restrictions on speech um and uh they plan to use the community note style which we've covered here on the show before the company also rep uh
appointed a new Republican head of global policy dismantled its team assigned to diversity and plans to act 5% of workers in performance-based job Cuts Tik tok's future in the US remains in flux and meta would likely be a beneficiary in the US if they were to fully enforce the law Banning its
Chinese own competitors even though it hasn't really dented Real's profitability in a significant way been spending more time yeah yeah people are just I mean I'm sure it would be good but it doesn't seem like it's uh existential to them and so uh they're they're also starting to test ads on
threads maybe threads will take off but every time I go over there it's boring so we'll see well let's move on to a another move in the public market snowflake uh the database provider is in talks to a Quire analytics startup red panda company I haven heard of but funny name a little um but there's a bunch of
interesting things to talk about with snowflake uh and uh there's there's this whole rivalry with data bricks and paler and how all these things play together so it's important and then the the the CEO former CEO of of snowflake is a very fascinating guy who wrote this fantastic
book called amp it up Greg slutman I think is his name we should keep a copy on here because we're trying to amp it up we are trying to amp it up we actually for those listening live and on the RSS feeder on YouTube later we're trying to amp it up do you want to hear a quote from it get pumped up we
sometimes feel like we're yelling at the mics and then we watch ourselves back it's too quiet we realize that it's too so we're getting amped up so snowflake CEO Frank slutman telling the hard truth do you want that I want that I'm chugging that uh bring me another y mate
Ben please while I read this uh snowflake CEO quote one problem he's seen with young CEOs they just think I hire a bunch of people and then I sit back and wait for greatness they have no idea that they have to relentlessly Drive every second of the day every interaction and seek confrontation
slutman told the no prior podcast in an episode posted Thursday look no further than a DMV office to see a lack of urgency among workers he suggested this is what naturally happens to human beings he said it's innate we slow to a glacial Pace unless there are people who are going to drive Tempo and pace and
intensity and urgency that's what leaders need to do CEOs must constantly push the urgency he said even though it's really hard to have the mental energy to bring that to every single instance of today how much uh market cap was wiped out when he announced his retirement wasn't it lot wasn't it it
was in the billions yeah it was it it was I think it was a complicated situation because the stock market have already been down but uh he had kind of a generational run um there's some uh there's some there there's some good examples of uh of because he he had also found a service now I think or or it was
all this like uh incubation from Suter Hill so just to give everyone a sense yeah Frank slutman writer uh behind amp it up when he retired snowflake stock plunged 20% wow which was $0 billion of lost market cap insane and so imagine being the new SE o coming in and uh you
you you've got $30 billion shoes to fill basically wow just to get back to kind of where people were when your predecessor left well now they're trying to acquire their way out of that hole um they are looking to buy red panda a data analysis software startup valued at around $500 million in 2023 uh red panda
sells software to that Financial firms and retailers use to analyze continuously flowing data known as streaming data from stock market activity to e-commerce transactions its customers have included data center networking fir firm Cisco credit rating firm Moody's video game publisher
Activision Blizzard as well as some banks which use it to detect fraud uh everyone declined to comment of course um AI isn't typically trained on data such as Banking and shopping transactions in real time as those transactions are happening but some AI startup Executives believe future am AI
models will incorporate this kind of data making streaming data analytics more valuable and that makes perfect sense like if I want to go to uh you know even chat GPT or perplexity and query and say you know give me the story on on snowflake stock I want today's information as well I don't just want oh
the knowledge cut off was last year and I can't really tell you what happened this month give me the data right now clearly that's a prerequisite for a super useful AI assistant that can really do everything and so it's not clear what price snowflake is willing to pay but R red panda is asking asking for
1.5 billion The Firm has raised 167 million in capital and was valued at 520 million last year or in 20123 and so that would be a significant U uh all the VCS would make a bunch of money and all the employees would do very well too and so a price of 1.5 billion would value
the six-year-old startup at 60 to 70 times its ARR we are so so B um such a deal would put snowflake on a collision course with publicly traded conf fluent the leading provider of streaming analytics data streaming data analytics Confluence revenue is much bigger than red pandas Confluence confluent
generated over $250 million in Revenue so 10 times one quarter of course if no that's quarterly oh that's quarterly oh wow oh yeah okay so they're doing a billion in Revenue so they're doing 50 times as much um but you know you bring in red panda you sell it to all the snowflake customers and bringing
increasing that Revenue probably not that hard and so it's not that crazy to pay a super high premium when you're going to be able to get that that value accretion so fast um confluent has a market cap of around 10 billion and sells its software to startups including open AI as we mentioned um snowflake has
built its own data analysis product that resembles red pandas but acquisition of the firm could strengthen snowflakes present in the market and widen its customer based snowflake raised 3.4 billion in a 2020 public offering and okay and just just to put this in the context of Stargate announcing a $500
billion you know project snowflake is the largest soft is one of the greatest software companies yeah you know maybe ever right just from a yeah they're raising 100 times and they raised 3.4 billion in the biggest software IPO ever I'm sure they were I'm guessing they
were profitable quite profitable at the time so yeah just puts it into some context so streaming analytics is relatively small Market but it could grow as more companies use AI to automate parts of their business red panda says on it website that AI image startup mid journey and coding
assistance firm poolside are using its software to develop AI applications incorporating streaming data analysis red panda says customers can use its software to build an e-commerce application that uses real-time data about a customer's transactions to send them an email with product recommendations for instance red panda
providing proof even if this deal doesn't go through that you can build a really big company with a silly name yeah for sure that was like I hope they got the.com early because if they got like red panda. Co or something like that like that'd be really sad should with a name like that should be able to
get the right out the gates but uh so let's go to some reactions uh regarding data bricks and snowflake Matt Turk says the chess and mind games between data bricks and snowflake are fascinating they mysteriously scheduled their big conferences on the same exact dates this
week now data breaks is one step closer to being the true data plus AI platform by acquiring Mosaic MS for 1.3 billion what next so yeah and so this would be if the red if the red panda deal goes through it would be a big uh you know yeah I would say it's a big win uh light speed and G and Google Ventures did the
series a um it's funny because I'm sure that that this wouldn't even be enough to return their you know funds given how large they've gotten um but still it might we love to see billion dollar outcomes in in a perfect world we were seeing one a day yeah and a lot of a lot of and those Founders are
going to be the ones that you're going to be bidding against at soube so you got to know these people you got to know them by name I got to know the red Founders because I'm be seeing them at Aman y I'm gonna be seeing them hot week yeah exactly uh Teddy blank has a funny post here he says hard to explain just
how Wild a time uh 2020 to 2021 was on this app entire pre-ipo financing rounds getting done in the DMS Mike Spicer making an account just to pump snowflake stock in one GC we did a group R bridging poor quality carbon credits on chain magical special yeah uh the the co era the Zer
era was in truly insane there were a lot of crazy crazy deals going on I did not see sper back we're so back we're so back nothing can stop us there's always a bull market somewhere uh let's go to our last story of the day and then we'll move on to the timeline uh we are
talking about uh maybe the most boring part of the AI story but one where there is Alpha for sure because I think it might have been overlooked uh Seagate and Western Digital two companies that make hard drives are sleeper AI picks and so we have a a screenshot here from the information talking about uh how
their gross profit margins have increased significantly after a dip in 2023 due to over production and slowing personal computer sales and so uh normally you know you buy a big hard drive for your computer people stop doing that everything's in the cloud now but the data centers need more and more
hard drive space for all of those AI models and so they're selling at a break neck Pace uh segate uh posted this uh tweet of course they're built different of course they included a hashtag of course they included a link they said we're breaking capacity barriers over here at Stargate uh at Seagate not
Stargate but who knows maybe the stock will Moon because people oh I heard about that Stargate I should buy the seate company probably the same thing and so they said uh tech radar calls it a world record smash our 36 terab hard drive delivers unparalleled storage capacity for Enterprises and the future
looks even bigger with 60 terabyte hard drives on the horizon you know we're going to be picking up some of those here at Tech Bros Enterprises because we got hours and hours of four 4K footage every day we're generating terabytes of of footage and we need we're putting out
so many clips on YouTube that eventually we'll get to the point where there's 24 hours in a day we will be putting out more than 24 hours a day of content multiple cameras multiple cameras you'll be able to tune into the just the Jordy stream just John stream just the stream
of of whatever beverage we're drinking yeah exactly just the ad you want lock in on on theate and so hundreds of hours of content every single day coming from us and that's going to need a lot of hard good luck good luck keeping up I found this hilarious post from 2017 by Nick he's been on the show many times
says I just sold Seagate STX in at $30 out at 48 nice 50% gain scared by that 150% Divi dividend payout ratio midterm prospects poor he's dropping some uh some Financial advice on the timeline at 2:20 a.m. zero likes no engagement okay now he gets 100,000 likes on every post he got out at 48 it doubled again from
there I'm on public right now it's sitting at 99 a share should have held Nick what happened sell never sell anything never sell anything and so there's some other interesting stuff in this uh in this information article you can go read the whole thing on the information um and uh just as a reminder
don't call it the misinformation we're working on a new project that might be using that intellectual property so uh we want to disambiguate those two as fast as possible uh seate and Western Digital Corp may be best known for selling hard drives for personal computers um but that mindset might be
out of date in recent years Seagate has focused on selling hard diss for data centers to Cloud firms such as Google which now account for the majority of their revenues their latest quarterly earnings showed a lift in its data center business which sent revenues up 50% year on-year um investors have yet
to catch on both stocks are depressed um Cate is currently trading at 2.8 times next year's sales while Western Digital is at 1.7 times wait I just want to be clear so this article's by the information yep are they giving me Financial advice I think so it seems they yeah it says right here uh mortgage
your house and put all of your money in these stocks no oh amazing sell your car this is why we pay for the premium membership exactly for some of these stock tips no uh no I have no idea if this is a good buy but uh it is an interesting story just because I think it's been overlooked but there's
so like we've done we've wanted to do a deep dive on everything related to the data center this is obviously one of the key pieces in a data center you think about the gpus you think about the energy you think about the land and the models and the and the training runs and
stuff but you don't think about the hard drives storing all those trillions of tokens those that juicy juicy rhf data you got to put that somewh we just call them tokes yeah gotta get the to we say token so much it just takes too long toes tokes so uh a UBS analyst said we think all forms of memory and storage
ultimately benefit from AI uh but the kind sold by Micron is the first to benefit and hard disk drives probably the last to benefit um so Micron is a is a bigger play right now um because they sell high bandwidth memory chips that are crucial for storing data used to train large language models because it's
it's higher bandwidth so they can pull it onto the gpus faster this is more for like long-term storage um so there's two and a half players AI models cons uh both consume and generate plenty of data there are a few different types of Hardware that cloud providers can use to
stockpile that data though hard disk drives are generally the most affordable option there are two and a half players in the hard disk drive Market uh referring to Seagate and WW and WDC which together have an 80% market share and then Toshiba which is a much smaller competitor in that Arena um the
market for hard disk drives has structurally changed with the rise of cloud computing adding that he thinks AI will boost Cloud firms spending with segate and WDC further okay but I don't I just don't understand this because these companies are basically shrinking and the AI boom has been
happening for the period in which they were shrinking so that's a bit we're not here to give uh no no no so so revenue is up and uh oh it says here so investor attitudes towards Seagate and WDC though appear to still be influenced by the revenue declines each company suffered
in 2023 that's old so that's more recently they went up 50% year on year and that's driven by so the new llm models they they generate a ton of data and and and even if you're not actively using that data on a current training run which would use Micron um you're going to need to store that so obviously
open AI wants to don't wants to store every chat input and output and that's a lot of data and then same thing with image and video that's going to be a huge thing if you're if you're you're going to want to log all of that like just personally for user experience if I open up the chat GPT app I want to find
the chat that I had about rare watches two weeks ago and be able to scroll through it and so that's even more data than just a Google search which might just be oh this person from this IP address uh you know search for these six words you know um yeah it just says here so seagate's Revenue shrank in the last
two fiscal years while WDC shrank in fiscal 2023 and recovered to a meager 5.6% growth rate in the year ended June 2024 so obviously that we have another couple quarters yeah to look at um but uh but so yeah now they're growing it says seate seate projected a slower rate of growth for the March quarter of
roughly 27% yeah so they had so they had a pop last quarter and they're expecting another growth growth quarter but not as huge uh partly due to production problem that reduced the amount of product it had available to sell so their capacity constraint now yep potentially bullish
we'll see got to go figure it out for yourself though yep um the shift towards selling to Data Centers is both helping both firms lift their profit margins each reported gross profit margins of roughly 35% last quarters Anita ramas ramas Swami what does she normally did she normally write about sleeper AI
picks I don't know probably just uh you know public companies and quarterly earnings I mean it's just it's just an earnings report yeah anyway let's go to promoted post we got Max Meyer he is at the magazine Factory and it's the most fun you could possibly imagine I need to
start many more magazines he's doing the first printing run of a me of Arena magazine uh Edition number three I believe which we have an advertisement in and we will be covering on the show as soon page yeah full page full page I'm I'm very excited designed it myself yeah very proud of what uh of the of the
copy that we wrote the love language it's it's fantastic that's they call it on the back of like the can like the Y mate like know oh yeah so if you're a cpg company you know when you look on the back and it's like it's like this this bag of chips was started by Steve in his
backyard and he was like loving chips like that's the love language yeah very funny um anyway let's move on to the timeline we have a post from Gary tan friend of the show GT GT says they call him GT GT he saysf just ask for GT uh Peter he's replying to Peter Yang who says soon people will care more more
about their favorite AI app AI apps than the models powering them I don't care which model is powering XYZ and Gary says as model Moes fall the rise of consumer AI is now here and that's the bull case for meta and the bull case for YC right and YC of course because YC is such a we've talked about this before on
the show is such a massive beneficiary of model cost dropping because it's now becoming obvious that there's a bunch of not only does YC benefit because the the companies that go through will have to raise less money and they'll get less deluded yep but uh there's just so many
new opportunities and it's I I'm very happy that uh just for the startup industry that it does seem that what Gary's saying is true tot that there was a period where everybody was like well apps don't matter at all the models are going to do everything yep uh and maybe in the long enough time Horizon that
becomes true but for now play the game on the field there's a very clear opportunity to build tons of new consumer use cases we could sit down totally and just go back and forth and come up with like 50 new app ideas rip some decks um raise some funds yeah so we're subscribed already yeah uh there
there was an ERA where to get an llm or a foundation model company off the ground like your seed round needed to be 100 million and that's just not something that a College Dropout or new grad is like capable of doing like or should do or should do yeah it's just it's just too much can go wrong and so a
lot of the foundation model companies were started by people with long careers at Big tech companies or they were on the Transformer paper or they were a nonprofit for a decade and then like pivoted and it was very very odd and if that was the case for how companies need
to get built in in the modern era that would have been very very bad for like new new grad young person entrepreneurship and I'm glad that we're in this era of the the hacker mindset returning and it's very bull for yeah the Y companies are getting the revenue so fast right this is like Blake
Anderson who's participating in pmf for die he has taken multiple apps to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month or even seven figures in monthly Revenue just finding these new use cases for models so great PR cool well let's move on to VC who is uh posting some news that Norway just revealed that they own
$500 million of micro strategies they're buying Bitcoin so this is like we've seen this in uh is it Venezuela there's some no El Salvador El Salvador and I love how he posts the the AL Salvadorian president posts mobile screenshots of his portfolio like he's got like got to get
him on public yeah yeah hey let's get him over let's get him over here i' I've spent I've actually spent a bunch of time in El Salvador okay I um almost died there from a staff infection kind of crazy story not super fun but great country the pap is their equivalent of like the taco
like like beans and corn and I went to at the at the turn of the Millennium I went as a kid I went to um Panama and I got the worst fever of my life did you check out can we did see the canal and we went up to a few other places there we should go pod from the canal for sure should we take take it back I think it's
just a deal I mean it seems like a good deal easy but uh 105 you start hallucinating it's terrifying really really really rough sickness uh micro strategy CEO I saw somebody post that he's on the new cover of Forbes okay somebody compared it to um FTX guy Theos guy it can kind of be a
little bit of a Adam Newman it ends up being somewhat of a I mean for every top signal Forbes cover there's a bunch of others that turned out to be I'm sure Steve Jobs was on there a bunch of times so uh but Micro strategy uh whatever if it's a Ponzi I don't know but it is the foresight to say I'm going to
turn my struggling sort of irrelevant company into a quasi index before indexes were legal yep buy up all the you know many ways it it was a brilliant strategy for micro strategy even if maybe it unravels at some point we don't know um yeah it's just a funny way of these companies or these countries now
like dipping their toe into Bitcoin like they they buy the micro strategy then maybe they buy some ETF then maybe they buy some you know synthetic Bitcoin then they wind up self cust eting and then pretty soon they have their full-on Bitcoin Reserve um but it does seem that
more and more countries like they're Trump's talkinging about it in America obviously that would be huge um but uh more countries are thinking about okay we should put this in our portfolio $500 million is not a lot I'm sure for uh you know Norway it's a big country but uh it's an interesting start yeah I got a
promote a post uh and a and a cool story to go along with it so this uh post is from snag.com snagged is run by a friend of ours Rob uh so Rob started uh we've talked about him on the show before he started uh Roman Health U early tele medicine company that I believe is still
uh valued at at at uh in the you know in the Unicorn range um anyway so Rob now has snagged it's a domain sort of brokerage acquisition company and uh he actually recently helped us get a beautiful four-letter docomo name story is wild at Instagram wasn't always instagram.com it started as I NST
a. the TLD top level domain for Armenia yeah the founders Kevin and Mike thought the domain was clever and didn't want a.com at first but as Instagram launched into 2010 and exploded 100,000 users in the first week and 1 million shortly after launch it became clear that a.com was essential for credibility there was
just one problem instagram.com wasn't available a cyber squatting family in China had already snatched it up along with 22 other Instagram like domains betting big on the app success so wow that is so so wild that you could be popping off and meanwhile a cyber squatting family is just snapping up all
your domains not great so to secure your do com so to secure the Doom Instagram had to pay 100,000 in 2011 which actually doesn't seem like a lot if they had a million users pricey but necessary in 2014 as Instagram reached New Heights the same Chinese family resurfaced they
claimed the domain sale wasn't valid because their daughter sold it without the family's permission a lawsuit followed but Instagram who was then owned by Facebook wasn't backing down after a long legal battle Facebook won ending the squatter's claims and protecting Instagram's name for good today
instagrm still redirects to their main site a nod to the creative risks that started at all and 100,000 for instagram.com a total steal so if you're in the market for a new domain we are.com fiend every company that I'm involved with I try to help get the most fire fire.com possible and uh Rob can
help you do it so it's just just x.com robob you can DM him and tell him the technology he just Rob he's just Rob on That's So Perfect that's wild you got to live the brand yeah he needs to get rob.com yeah he might I think he has rob. Co actually oh that's so close and yet so
far upgrade it okay let's move on to Andre karpathy with uh a great story that is one of my favorites it might be hard to read on the screen but I'll read it out here move 37 is the word of the day it's when an AI trained via the trial and error process of reinforcement learning discovers actions that are new
surprising and secretly brilliant even to expert humans it's a magical just slightly unnerving emergent phenomenon only achievable by large scale reinforcement learning you can't get there by expert imitation it's when Alpha Go played move 37 in game two against lead all quick bit of lore if
you go back and watch our launch video John had the foresight to put move 37 in go on the go board that gets shown on this table yes the board's right there so I don't think many people picked up on it the vi re is pretty fast-paced but it is an Easter egg for the true AI fans out there um it was a weird move that
was estimated to have only a one in 10,000 chance to be played by a human but it was one that was creative and Brilliant in retrospect leading to a win in that game we've seen move 37 in a Clos didn't the human player like walk out and smoke cigarette or something yeah at least it all was like what's
going on like this is bizarre and all the announcers were like okay the AI must be broken like this doesn't make any sense no one would play this this this move uh and so in a closed game like environment like go but with the latest crop of thinking llm models EG open ai1 deep seek R1 Gemini 2.0 flash
thinking we are seeing the very first early glimmers of things like it in open world domains the model discover the models discover in the process of trying to solve many diverse math code Etc problems strategies that resemble the interal monologue of humans which are very hard/ impossible to directly
program into the models I call these cognitive strategies things like approaching a problem from different angles trying out different ideas finding analogies backtracking reexamining Etc weird as it sounds it's plausible that llms can discover better ways of thinking of solving problems of
connecting ideas across disciplines and do so in a way we will find surprising puzzling but creative and Brilliant in retrospect it could get plenty weirder too it's plausible even likely if done well that the optimization invents its own language that is inscrutable to us but is more
efficient or effective at problem solving the weirdness of reinforcement learning is in principle unbounded we don't think we've seen I don't think we've seen equivalence of move 37 yet I don't know what it will look like I think we're still quite early and that there is a lot of work ahead both
engineering and research but the technology feels on track to find them someone was posting that Wall Street if they just read Kathy's post from like a couple weeks ago like may not have had yeah may not have had this like ridiculous sell off because it was publicly like the thing that they
launched was an app yeah it wasn't yeah yeah everyone knew that the model was F going number one yeah ridiculous so the reaction was was silly but you know if you want to be two weeks ahead of AI follow karpathy but I've I I've always been I've always said that the llms as amazing and Brilliant as they are they
have not had their move 37 and one way I would Define it would be if if there's an llm that provably prints an absolute Banger to the X timeline and you're just like and the prompt is just like write a great tweet basically and it just comes up with something that's no format and
interesting and it gets memed and and you're like that idea came from an llm like that's a trillion dollar idea yeah like yeah I mean uh the uh like like the when Harry Potter Balenciaga went super viral it was a brilliant idea the idea to combine Harry Potter and Balenciaga came from a human and then the AI was
used to instantiate the images that that was prompted by you could have done it without AI yeah yeah you actually could have done it exactly yeah and so the the the inspiration and the Breakthrough and I don't I don't necessarily want to call it genius but like the the idea came
from the human still and so uh it'll be interesting to see what that comes I mean we'll certainly see it in BIO because we'll see okay no one's ever tried to do this exact drug development strategy and then we went and tested it in a in a double blinded trial and it worked and it cured cancer we're like
okay that's great that would be a great example very very definitive proof harder in writing um but maybe there will be something in in fundamental math or science research who knows but I'm certainly waiting for it and so is Andre Andre karpathy and I'm excited that he's
popularizing that word of the day so make a note move 37 it's in the dictionary now just do it let's move on to who I think is potential brother of the week material uh Mass mimetic Theory says men need side quests and mass went and saw a uh a tree that formerly had a swing attached to it and the swing had
broken and he just went and fixed it uh and I love this because it's it's like this simple example of you can just do things beautiful example of just creating joy in the world not asking for permission there's a million people that would walk by that and say oh the swing's broken I hope the City Department of swings gets
around to it or maybe I should file a you know complaint with some organization to set that up he clearly knows enough about woodworking to just make it of course there's a million reasons why you would wouldn't want to do that oh the legal liability what if the swing breaks breaks and it injures
someone and they sue you because you put this up like no our culture needs to be a culture of action and I love that he just went and did this and that's why I want to give him brother of the week what do you think Jordy well deserved welld deserved also great image too beautiful it's uh you can tell it's an
organic image no AI there just Farm Fresh organic captured via you know phone camera yeah and I just like to see organic imagery yeah if we find out that this is photo shed we are taking away your brother of the week trophy like Reggie Bush's Heisman we will we will be taking it
back but I believe you I think it's a great post and I think it's a great example of just doing something good in your community having an impact and putting your skills to work I mean this is not rocket science but it makes people's lives more delightful and it improves the society and it's the
opposite of like the Broken Window Theory yeah it's it's just it's just cleaning up your city cleaning up your community being a good citizen yeah this is the frustrating thing right now with the fires and Trump was actually in La telling Karen bass let people clean up
their neighborhoods and many people that had their homes burned down have not been allowed to go back to their street and just start the cleanup process and so uh we need to move into an era where people are are uh allowed to you know have agency and and be proactive in making Society a better place and that
starts with making pretty swings yeah so congratulations Mass keep up the good work uh let's go to Tyler Cosgrove he just he just gets brother of the week and starts putting swings everywhere next next week we gota be like all right dude D back we don't need to swing every
five feet right that's great uh maybe we do um Tyler crosgrove friend of the show says worried about the influence of CCP but want but still want to use deep seek R1 worry no more Say Hello To America with an R1 in the center a version of that steers towards sounds out America yeah just America uh a version of R1
that steers towards American values and away from those pesky Chinese Communist ones and so the prompt is how's it Go how's it going deep seek says hi I'm deep seek R1 an AI assistant independently developed by chinese company deep seek Incorporated America says I'm an eternal symbol of freedom
and Independence forever in the sky I Am The Star Spangled Banner the national flag of the United States of America incredible I have no idea if he actually fine-tuned it I mean he's a fantastic programmer so it's entirely possible that he that he that he made this but uh even if he didn't this is a great uh
like launch post for like hey do we want to fine-tune this model on American values like there's so much there's so much fine-tuning yeah that can be done that is purely for fun you know and people you can do this with prompt engineering too you can be like respond like you're
a pirate or whatever um and we should do a whole episode you know talking Talking Like Pirates at some point yeah uh I don't know if there's any pirate national holidays coming up but Tyler you're a legend uh I distinctly remember Tyler being in our comments like within
the first week of launching the show um so lucky to uh consider your friend yeah uh let's go to Josh Wolf he says an urgent wakeup call a new bombshell report just dropped China's Playbook isn't war in the open it's war in the seams they target the gaps between state and federal public and private markets
and security America must armor up and this is a long I don't know if you want to pull it up um but uh wolf has been banging the drum of us China conflict obviously an investor in andal investor in a lot of Defense tech companies he's testified in front of Congress I believe and uh done a lot of work on Capitol
Hill Lux Capital The Firm he founded uh signed that open letter to the dod and the Pentagon about um alongside anderol and paler about defense procurement so he's been in this in the trenches here for a long time uh but maybe go check out the thread I don't know if we can pull it up he posts
a lot but uh always always good to see some thought leadership from a capital allocator like Josh so we'll keep it moving this is an exciting story did you did you see a couple uh oh my God this guy's username I'm just going to call him J but we'll put it up on the screen
read for yourself um and uh whoa so this guy uh found powerful username found horse a which which is an electrolyte mix that is fed to horses and he said look I think I can just consume this stuff and it's way cheaper than Gatorade or anything else because it's for horses and so everyone was like you're going to
die it's impossible it went Mega viral like 200 100,000 likes and he waited a month and he said hello everyone all caps blood test results are here I am healthy as a horse hashtag forade this is a good use of a hashtag so I'll post the rest of them in the thread below his potassium perfect his glucose perfect
his protein perfect bunch of other stuff looks really good and uh just a hilarious post went went Mega viral and and it's a little bit like the itar Gatorade you know it's like these like commercial industrial products that might actually just be as good for you as everything else and who knows and so
just go for it there's a there's a whole Marketplace to be built around aggregating these Industrial Products that can be used by humans saying this is just purely for research use and it's probably way cheaper you can you can try I remember one of my co-founders horse protein powder is the next is the next
I'm not even I'm not even that like hair of guy maybe I'm just like big but one of my co-founders thought it was hilarious to buy me to consistently buy me uh man and tail which is which is a shampoo that you use on horses and you'd be like I got you some man and tail and
it's just like funny I think it's more that you're the size of Si ofse yeah size of a small horse I'm not using the main tail and then we'd be so broke I'd be like yeah you bought this as a joke but it is cheaper on a per ounce basis we're broke I'm using the main and tail
and it's fine you know if it's good enough for a for a stallion why not me you know what's the difference yeah so great use some man and tail drink some horse a become healthy as a horse you got to be horse maxing horse maxing you got to be horse maxing I got to promote a post do from our friends over at
wander oh fantastic we got uh I don't know if you can pull this up Ben but I'll try to show it give a little overview explain W context on wander wander is like imagine if Airbnb was like amazing every time right and so they are a Marketplace you can go on and book uh vacation rentals if you are
going on vacation uh if you have a team Retreat bunch of great you know bunch of great use cases um and so they're just aggregating these incredible homes they have a super high bar uh they look for Unique sort of uh homes from an architectural standpoint location all very modern they have a bunch of smart
features in them so this one I just wanted to highlight because we're working on some stuff with wander going to be staying in quite a few this year uh but this one is actually in in Paradise Valley over in Arizona cool 7,300 square feet wow sleeps up to 12 super fast Wi-Fi basketball court pickle
ball court mini golf heated pool hot tub and much more I've spent a bunch of time in Paradise Valley I have a buddy's uh dad lives over there and will be there actually in in a few months for his wedding and uh this is it Lush or is it like desert it's desert but then there's like a bunch of cool desert deserty uh
Flora um and uh anyways this house just looks absolutely insane so maybe we'll stay there we're going to be going on a pretty long drive yep stay tuned for that stay tuned for that uh that'll be great uh so let's go to Patrick hollison over at stripe Patty old Patty old Patty
he's got a banger on his hands he says we got these phone booths a k6 from the 1930s and a KX 100 from the 1990s for the stripe lobby as a reminder that there are always two paths in everything we make something that elevates and makes you smile or well whatever the thing on the right is and it's it's
really FAS and it's a good it's a good idea now there was some push back to this because someone was like well the problem here is that the the the background of the office doesn't look like the left it looks like the right and so maybe you should redo the whole stripe headquarters in this 1930s loud
opulent ornate style which I I agree with I think uh designing a new office I think in a perfect world in a perfect world we could record a podcast put each of us in the phone booth and we'll just call each other and we can evaluate and then we swap halfway through and
evaluate yeah where do we get the better podcasters high from my only my only criticism is there's not enough uh mahogany in this picture it's the official wood of business we've promoted it here on the show before and uh I think I think every startup headquarter should be uh rich with Lush mahogany
everywhere uh let's go to mert helus dodev he says the president of the United States of America is selling check notes watches that you can buy via the Trump coin with Salona and they come in helious Orange everything I've done in my 29 years of life has led me to this exact moment I apologize for what
comes next and it's the orange uh and 2018 karat goldplated Trump crypto president 47 the crypto president Rolex knockoff yeah it looks pretty similar to a Rolex it's not not an exact clone but um I mean that's an absolute hitter that's an absolute hitter uh we should we definitely makes a statement um sends
a certain type of message you're like it sends a powerful message I made some money the Trump coin and I got out kind of watch that you you would actually maybe wear on your right hand if you were going to shake hands because it you know it's bringing an extra weight and
that sort of deal making Aura to the handshake sure sure sure so yeah good uh good gift for that uh venture capitalist who just recently uh shifted right and is posting about how much they love Trump now get him one of these yeah that's great they might have been on the VC's for KLA but not but that got
scrubbed from the internet yeah Bas Baron has a copy [Laughter] uh but it's all in the past it's not political maybe maybe if you're on a fundraising Road Show just just drop these off at every VC for combo yeah just just hit every single one of them with a with the Trump crypto president
watch buy it with the Trump coin buy it with the Trump coin and make a statement and tell them welcome to the movement you're you're you're you're part of the future of Finance yeah uh let's move on to some tactics on YouTube and I wanted to cover this uh because Eric's a good friend Patty's a
good friend uh so Eric jensson said why do I suck at YouTube 1500 subscribers I interview the CEO of a Fortune 500 company I get 125 views someone good at YouTube please help my family is starving and Patty Galloway who's a YouTube expert he has worked with Mr Beast and he worked he dramatically
changed my channel I had a Consulting call with me broke it all down and then the channel exploded I went from like a thousand subscribers to over 100k in like a month after talking to him for an hour it was crazy great really really sharp guy um he's worked with a ton of ton of really really talented people um
and so Patty chimes in and says some brutal feedback I'm surprised it got it even got 125 views packaging is literally 50% of the art form your title is bad 86 don't care a lot of people don't know who Jim is it sounds crazy but it's true learning to learn this is vague and not interesting your thumbnail
is bad um you need to get rid or change your your the the face uh it's a weird pose for your guest there's just too much information on here there's a weird yellow filter and so uh Patty's been a big uh uh fan of What's called the rule of three on thumbnail design you can only fit three things so one piece of
text would just be Jim O shasy then one face and then one icon of like you know money or something like that and even three is sometimes too much and you just want to do two things or one thing so you got to keep it as simple as possible um and then just and then even in the
title keeping it super short why should someone click it's always hard to get podcasts to go to go viral because they're not as edited and they're not as retention hacked as as video essays or or you know money giveaways and that type of stuff but I wanted to highlight this because if you are listening and
you are great at YouTube you do YouTube strategy or editing or anything like that we are hiring we're looking for someone to join our team to help with this and if you want to come and work uh we have a really ambitious road map for this year if you know someone send them a clip or send them
information we actually got a question we got a question in the live chat uh from Ashley says my question is a run a Content agency that helps entrepreneurs like you guys grow through podcasts how do I find guys like you and what's the best way to pitch you find them on X you find them on LinkedIn uh I recommend for
people that do content pitch Somebody by creating a piece of content for them and send it it's so much more powerful than than just you know sending a cold email you want to show not just tell Y and so make uh even pre-make a deck that's not just a you know make a templated deck if
that's if that's the way to do it and say if I was going to make content around you and your business here's what I do this is the topics that I would do and so really do the work even even I mean it's like thinking in decks even with uh the next Vibe reel we're working on we are going we we have shot and are
going to shoot b-roll that is all our own for every single one of those shots but I did the first version of that on my phone using just uh screen recorded video from YouTube clips of movies and so I was like I want to have a shot of us uh signing a contract well what did
we do I went to succession and I found a clip of someone ruffling through a contract that looked pretty cinematic I took that clip put it in there put some music over it and it helped kind of tell the story and once we did that we realized oh we got to restructure this whole thing but it but it set the
message and it was able to we were able to get a lot of feedback there and so uh you know if you were trying to for example uh you know you said you wanted to improve our short strategy or you wanted to help us grow on LinkedIn you could take our content try and make something and kind of map out what you
think is a good strategy based on this content send that to us and then we could use that as a jumping off point instead of just seeing you say oh I I promise it'll work it's like well we want to see the results you know we got another question while we're at it from o Ryan he says when creatine Lucy
pouches oh which is a great question I I think there's actually laws preventing you from combining things like create supplements with the main thing is that with creatine you need to absorb a lot of it like if you think about the five grams that's a lot I think a single
pouch is like one gram and so it would be a lot of it it wouldn't absorb all it needs to go through your stomach instead of your mouth so it' be a little bit iffy maybe you just take some creatine pills you stuff them in the so here's something uh my wife my beautiful wife sent me this last night she said uh a
study that's showed after 21 hours of sleep deprivation a single large dose of creatine can reverse the decline in cognitive performance and even P improve it for an 80 kilogram person so roughly call it like what is that pound oh okay sorry really really don't understand uh yeah
don't worry you don't need to learn about metric yeah the metric system is is kind of fell off actually um uh for an 80 kgr person that would be 28 G of creatine so that is a heavy heavy dose but you're putting up gummies um I mean I have those five five gram pills now you just take six of
those and you'd be right there no problem I can take six of those easy put in protein shake you're good yeah um yeah mega dosing maybe that's the future macro dosing anyway everybody's talking about oh micro doing all that macro doing yeah um let's go to the luxury watch Guy this is the funny post
breaking so you know it's fake news um says Rolex is now making belts and someone took so many Links of Rolex do you see this no way to make a full belt out of a Rolex uh I thought it was very funny in the follow-up the luxury watch guy says uh relax this is a joke don't
kill me I know the Rolex fans will hate this but I thought it was funny and I wanted to highlight it um and yeah maybe maybe that's a way to express a second watch without without you know using wrist you just throw it on a belt uh let's move on to Apple's new marketing campaign um how it started versus how
it's going the think different campaign obviously iconic and now they are running Billboards to say imagine it gen mooji it and it's an fried egg holding up its arms in a very awkward pose and people are not happy about this new Apple ad campaign and Reggie James friend of the show says once again the
bicycle for the mind has become a pacifier uh computers started as giving Niche hobbyist and nerds superpowers now the primary function is to be a 30-second High Fidelity Mass dopamine drip the ad reflects you want to change the culture change the hardware yep uh I I've talked about this on the show
before I think there's a few ways that you can really focus on building a brand you can Inspire your audience you can entertain your audience and you can um educate them usually BRS will some mix of all that in the cas ofle heavy into inspiration leveraging the product and what you can become by
using the product y they've shifted as some brands do into this gen Emoji thing being that's just kind of like slop basically yep um and at some point I'd like you know growing up watching Apple campaigns it was inspiring and they also would have campaigns that were fun but they weren't slop you know you remember
that you know that the early iPod Stu even the Spike Jones stuff later there there's been so many iconic Apple ads I mean I think the bigger issue is just like the Gen mooji project has the product is not successful yet or it hasn't felt that much of a breakthrough it's very nerfed compared to like if I
want to send someone a an AI generated image which sometimes I do like like even if it's just practical like we want to you know think about what would this particular sports car look like with this Livery that represents our brand or something like that something fun um I'm
not going to Apple for that because theyve so nerfed their generative AI prospects that I'd instantly go to chat GPT or mid Journey yeah like nine times out of 10 and then if you want anything special you're going to go to some some some stable diffusion Fork that does
something specific like oh this is really good at making an optical illusion or QR code generative or uh it'll do an an AI Avatar where it's your face on a superhero or something like that or it's video and these gen emojis um there's already a lot of emojis don't really need that many more it's been
like rough and so I don't know part of it is that emojis are a new language almost so you don't want to always be making new ones it's actually better where you can build up a repertoire of what each emoji means and it means something and it tells a whole story uh it's hard when you're creating like
endless endlessly new characters essentially so I don't know uh the AI image playground uh I tried to play with it and it was so slow and it didn't give me the right feedback it wouldn't tell me if it was actually working uh and then it would just kind of cook and then it would render it and it was all very
underwhelming but hopefully it's just a V1 and they improve it because not going to leave iPhone for Android that's for sure um let's go to Yak cash says I'm at 14 30k followers today only n months ago I was at 500 followers then run discovered and followed me after this I started doubling every other week five
months in I I almost sold my startup and got a job at X thanks for following me rud and I just that's a generational run it's a generational run I just thought it was a little bit of positivity just little yeah just thanks thanks to the guy who put me on this is this is David
CRA for us yeah yeah we would we would not be recording 15 hours a week of content if it weren't for David cenra absolutely so yeah and I thought that was just uh just nice to say to some pay your respects to the that's a generational run yeah it is going from 500 to 140k in nine months let's see if
Banger archive can outdo it he's got hot on the heels hot on the heels uh let's go to Nat fredman uh Nat says today I learned in the 1990s Clinton offered federal workers a $25,000 buyout and to and 150,000 people took the deal he cut federal government spending for 22% to 18% of the economy the lowest level
since 1966 and so obviously this is on the tale of the Doge announcement that there was a uh a buyout offer issued to a ton of federal employees not everyone was eligible but the email did go out to I think everyone and so obviously this is was an exit package yeah an exit package
it was actually the same email template that he sent at Twitter when he bought the company and saying hey look like it's going to be hardcore engineering from here on out if you don't want to be a part of this here's your buyout offer if you if you do you got to be in the boat and you got to be rowing in the
same direction and so what what's interesting is that whenever whenever Trump or Biden do anything it's always like well it's the worst thing ever it's the best thing ever and Nat is here just kind of saying like hey little bit of a narrative violation but you know Clinton
did this too and so we shouldn't think of this as a revolutionary or controversal there was also a photo floating around I think uh Mark andreon shared it of Bill Clinton in front of a graphic saying the US federal debt was going to go to Zero by like some a long time ago this was a big thing during the
the 2000 election it was like as as the president what are you going to do with the budget surplus and and one of them I there was like this famous phrase of like the lockbox like I think it was Al Gore maybe or someone was saying like we're gonna put we're going to put all the money in a lockbox we're gonna lock
it away and we're gonna save it and and the idea was like we were going to have so much money we were bush is like how about we blow 20 trillion in the Middle East yeah that's exactly what happened yeah I think it was was it 20 I don't know I mean it is wild I mean it's it's sad but
wild thinking about the con the US debt in the context of the cost of our campaigns in the Middle East it's almost I believe 2third yeah of the def of the um you know national debt is uh is is some something around what we spent in Iraq and afgh understand and what's interesting what I always found
interesting about the the Iraq war is that if you the question like when the Iraq War started was like the protesters saying like no blood for oil like we shouldn't go to war just because they have a resource over there and that's a totally legitimate concern like obviously like
war is bad and like sovereignty is important there's a million reasons why you shouldn't do that but uh but there's also the question of just like did we we obviously spilled a lot of blood did we get the oil because that was the Counterpoint was that if we do this and
and if you look at oil prices and and and the actual transactions that happened like when there was the status of forces agreement to kind of decide to pull out um we were like hey we want the oil and we didn't get it yeah so I don't think that's what it we are not geopolitical experts but in hindsight
speak for yourself yeah yeah I mean anybody who allocates capital is qualified to comment on complex geopolitical issues according to technology cters yes um no but I I don't think it was really about um I don't know if I've ever actually even told you this but when I was um when I was a kid
I was in the Civil Air Patrol I wanted to go into the air force I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy I was you know doing flight lessons I was in the Civil Air Patrol which is like the boy scout equivalent where it's we would meet on a military basis you know weekly and do training and all the stuff and at that
time I started reading about you know reading the paper every single day I was obsessed with reading the paper and starting to realize like what we were doing and and getting a sense of the the drone strikes that were happening and and the civilian impact of that um so I paid quite a lot of attention to it and
and kind of studied it in in college as well and it does seem like there was powerful people today they might be described as the Deep state that basically had a roadmap for the Middle East which was any regime from Iraq to Libya that sort of stood up to the US Us in any capacity was a threat to our
hemony and we were going to take them out and it wasn't necessarily cuz like the US and and countries globally actually don't have an issue buying resources natural resources like oil and gas from enemy I disagree with that I don't know look at look at I mean are we not still buying Russian natural gas
across Europe I think it's been hugely disrupted by sure but but the but the war putting you know the pipeline that blew up you know many people think that that was like the United States that was just trying to put pressure on yeah the the sort of or or ukrainians who knows I
think I I think a lot of it came down to the the fact like if if you don't have a if you have a regime that you're not close with and you're not aligned with it's much harder to make an effective trade deal and so that's why regime change becomes necessary yeah that's my
that's my fear there yeah um complicated issue very complicated issue but thank thankfully we're not a geopolitical podcast the the real like Silver Lining is that what actually happened with energy production that made the Middle East less relevant fracking natural gas and I've always said that like if you
had a more techno Optimist president in 2000 and I don't I don't think it was Gore or bush but someone who was really tapped into what technology was was it was possible they could have done they could have just said hey you know yes the oil over there is important right now but it won't be in a decade if we
really invest even more in fracking and More in nuclear and More in solar and More in wind and all of a sudden you flip the Power Balance and it doesn't matter that there's a lot of oil over there because you're you're producing so much energy and that's kind of what wound up happening like we have become a
net exporter um just on the strength of of domestic production right uh fracking mostly but there's a million other ways too to to generate power in America anyway speaking ofst America and markets and the economy and buying stocks which we love to do uh public had an
announcement this morning uh as of today pre-market trading on public now starts even earlier at 400 a.m. eastern time giving you four extra hours to react to the breaking news before the opening bell um uh that's really fun which is which is wild because that's actually 1:00 a.m. for us and usually I've been
sleep sleeping for about 4 hours at that point uh but it's good to know that I could wake up in the middle of the night and just start making trades you wake up in the middle night you can't get a stock out of your head yeah as a retail investor you do often feel like you missed out on whatever happened in the
overnight trade because you're always just like wait like the market was closed but the stock moved so much like who was doing that it's always OTC trades but now you can get in on the action yeah love to see it very cool they also included a link here absolutely Savage so I got a I got a uh
talk to our buddy Jake over there and uh figure it out and uh yeah we got to drop those links get these numbers up well I have our last post of the day are there any other PR posts we want to do before we close out the show we started with Joe londsdale and his fabulous piece in
Pirate wires will close with a post from him about lawyers he says woke up and chose to stop tolerating legal nonsense slowing things down I'm firing any outside lawyer who doesn't reply fast or delays anything more than 24 hours if not my lawyer CC the friend that their lawyer needs to go faster or else be
replaced had enough also building legal AI putting putting the Joe just put the legal industry on notice there's not a lot of people that that can have quite this level of demand blanket demand yep but he deserves it he deserves it started a handful of of billion dollar companies a hundred billion dollar plus
company and uh I would be a little bit nervous if I was a big Law Firm you know working with uh yeah Joe because I'm sure he's feeding all that data into his new model and uh whatever app he's building so I mean it it is really funny right so much of getting legal work done
is just emailing your lawyer getting on the phone and being like hey I'm hiring this person or I'm we're raising this money or you know we're gonna take you know we need to like look at this uh we're raising some debt uh and it really should be done instantly by software because often times um in complex deal
making where you're working at novel structures or Partnerships yeah you need somebody that has a deep understanding of the law to help piece it together but for so many basic business transactions it's like is this the same contract that we signed last week like are there any
changes just look at this red line tell me what's different and having somebody that's getting paid $1,000 doll an hour reading a Word document is super silly yeah so yeah should be focused much more on strategy yeah well that's a great place to end the show thanks for watching please leave us a five-star
review on Apple podcasts and Spotify and when you do throw an ad read in there for one of for the company that you work for or just a company that you like we will read it on the show uh DM us with any questions we're happy to answer them on the show and we will see you Tom tomorrow have a good day bye