welcome to technology Brothers the most profitable podcast in the world uh you know the problem with those like billionaire Resorts that everyone goes to Aman Aman yeah it's like we like the most expensive Resorts Network basically like well above the rits in the Four Seasons but there's an obvious problem they're not Venture backed exactly it's hard to you wish you could put more Capital into them exactly because
they're so profitable on a per door basis yeah that uh I actually think that we need 10 more AMS we do and so that gave me an idea hit me what if we start a venture backed Aman that's it Aman VB like exactly back and so the so the idea is that is that this is a place where Venture investors could get exposure to something that they already know very intimately and of course like when you
think about who can run your business better than you exactly the only person is an investor VC and so you you you absolutely during the fundraising process you let the investors no like this is not your average fund raise like we are going to want you to dig in you're going to need to spend 30 45 60 nights a year at our properties as part of this investment basically like yeah a
real operator ex use that word operator gets thrown somebody um this guy Michael on Twitter was talking about VCS use the word operator to embellish their resumés yeah right because it sounds a lot cooler to say I was yeah a former operator then yeah I was an associate PM I was a sales guy months or yeah I was one of the first like bdr hires at this company Operator Operator it just sounds
like I mean it sounds like special operator twisting the knobs yeah twisting the knobs but also like maybe you're kicking doors in a raft yeah but in this case it's like yeah there's allocation for you if you commit to acting as a part-time general manager of the property giving feedback bringing the whole checking guests in cleaning bathrooms cleaning out I mean really get your hands D you
no you just need to create the flywheel of like oh this is a this is the stealthy way to justify even more trips to Aman like properties with my LP dollar yeah I feel like sometimes Venture capitalists myself included can get a little bit too disconnected from the the real asset itself yeah so if you're just lobbing money over you know lobbing money over to the founder
and they're taking it they're putting to the work in their putting it to work in their business yeah there's something about getting into the asset and what's a better asset to immerse yourself in than a physical three-dimensional space right this is not software true a hotel is a product it's an experience and it's good opportunities because there's a lot of Stu stuff that
needs to be done at a hotel right VCS aren't necessarily going to add value to a foundation model right they don't have the knowhow but but when what they break when a when a guest breaks a glass at a restaurant they know how to use a broom right exactly get in there and clean it up um do you know the history of a so history of a mod it's fascinating yeah so to my knowledge it is owned by effectively a Russian
oligarch and when you're staying on an am on property you really get that sort of makes sense um I was there I was at a one of their properties last January or this January I guess um and there was a lot of Russian being spoken and this is like you know Peak Ukraine war um so it was it was interesting sharing uh you know sharing elevators and hallways and restaurants with uh I just love the the like the
foundation story or the founding story is in 1988 Alan Resort's first destination was a result of this hotelier the desire to build a holiday home in pukat Thailand uh his plans soon developed into an idea to build a small boutique resort with two friends and they invested their own money in the Venture as no banks would lend uh for the project due to the small number of
planned rooms uh the resort opened in 1988 with nightly rates 5 times higher than local competitors they were just like let's go not 20% higher but five times higher and it's actually still pretty much exactly yeah yeah yeah most Carlon runs you at, 400 500 yeah depends on the but yeah and then and thenl can be like three five no I think yeah the the desirable nights yeah desirable
properties at uh desirable times a year like five grand for the entry level room which is basically as big as our studio you know our studi is here significantly yeah larger um than they're average there is something to that though like the we were talking about this with like um aroan like just going like up market up market like actually giving you room to play and do something you need the death zone is
probably 20% exactly slightly premium slightly premium yeah it was because you can't really afford to do anything fancier so you're just like maybe making little bit margin it's all this like fake branding whereas like if you if you genuinely have five times higher revenues like there's a lot of interesting things that you can do with that yeah the interesting thing so we stayed there with a couple
friends and another couple and they had stayed there before and so they were just like these are the dates just book it so we booked it and I showed up and I didn't realize till getting on of the property that two full meals a day on on the hotel property or at any of like their 10 partner hotels restaurants were all comped oh okay everything except alcohol yeah so once you were staying
there I was I was like if nobody had mentioned this to me you could have just given me the build the whole time because you don't go there expecting it was the experience of having like being at an all-inclusive resort sure sure sure and it was sort of funny we were joking around being like could we eat 10 grand worth of wagu right now because it's technically like all you can eat I
mean that with that price structure you can't afford not to go you can't afford not to yeah so I recommend a on if you're you're bulking and you want to do a clean bulk wagu bulk WK as they call it where you get 90% of your calories from A5 Japanese fu yeah go to state on I love it uh did you watch the Tesla event of course of course what do you think uh it was a it was a fountain of
virality for me I had two Banger tweets come out of it there you go I mean you wish they would hold an event every week exactly I mean it's like it's it's Prime for for X content just wants to post about it unfortunately the moment that stands out to me the most aside the visuals of the new technology and stuff are when Elon went all right now let's party yeah yeah and then it didn't go or
whatever and he was like okay now let's party or let's drink you know it was sort of a uh the timing was was a little bit awkward for overall like was it I don't know it was it was strange he seemed do you think it was all the the political stuff like he didn't seem he didn't seem locked in he certainly wasn't on I heard someone say like yeah his first love is SpaceX he's like he's
a rocket guy and and but Tesla's gotten a lot bigger and he loves the company but like that was the company that he had to he had to step into and be the CEO and invest in and like save the company and make it work whereas like in in a perfect world like he would just be spending all his time on Space stuff because that's what he was like obsessed with but I I I found it very odd that he
didn't acknowledge and this is something that pretty much all CEOs do but you could usually get around this like acknowledge like the state of the market like there is a very clear like bull thesis for the Tesla strategy of like not doing what weo is doing like not doing liar not not starting with limited runs not having expensive you know Hardware that that they the company way
like weo owns these vehicles they clean them they have a staff now they might spin that out at some point but right now like the the cost structure is purely internal ever spun out a successful product no this would be the first one yeah so it almost seems like I'm not even talking about spinning out whmo as a whole which which I think a lot of people think they should do
because it just has a very different economic structure than Google ads it's just different even if it's going to be a great bus like they should split that at some point but I'm just talking about like like the like they like they're buying the cars from jaguar and then they own and operate them like you could easily turn this into like a franchise model right eventually and they might
but uh not even that just Elon never articulated this idea that like we have more cars on the road than wh and we're collecting more data through the cameras and so even though they're yeah in theory much more Capital efficient if you don't have to pay drive around and Stu yeah exactly so he just kind of like threw out like it was like it was almost like it was pointed to the consumers and
then the stock sold off but it felt like anybody anybody that's a bear can now easily without any you know real objection from Elon go okay so Tesla's generally promising what weo is already doing today yeah not even a tiny scale like they're doing like 100,000 rides a day or something like that yeah it's pretty meaningful and growing exponentially and the Tesla Robo taxi Vision still feels like there was
no Clarity even around dates and I think that it's sold off because the market is now very much used to Elon putting out dates and timelines that are unachievable in order to push his own team almost but the market is basically saying okay it's all good if you want to overpromise and like push your team internally but if you're not going to meet the deadlines that you know they
haven't even I saw this I don't think they've they haven't delivered the Roadster obviously and there's still a bunch of people that have deposits and stuff like they don't sell a convertible right now they don't sell a convertible a full-size SUV or a minivan which are like three of the most popular these are like really important segments of the market if you want to dominate I would
think I I was I spend all my time in minivans or convertibles or convertibles right there's no in between yeah uh and yeah I I I wish they' have a little bit more breadth in there and also just like different designs and stuff there's a lot I did I did like that they were pulling some of the cybertruck design like the the event did like look like the future which I think is good and I
think that he should have stressed that that it's like these Whos like are ugly everyone knows that and so him saying like Okay one of our principles and our deep beliefs is that like Aesthetics matter to these to the success of these projects and then what else matters well scale of the data like yeah like everyone in AI they constantly repeat scale is all you need scale is all you
need right like you just need bigger and bigger Transformers bigger and bigger llms scrape all the web get all the video get all the audio data compress it down and then you get magical results and that's what the True Believers in like this end to end machine learning like theory around self-driving what George is doing it comma like all of that is around this idea that if you
just get a ton of data you won't need any of this crazy like like weo famously like hired they have a cone guy who like just does the software to like identify cones on the road and and like the the end end model it's like it's as if like you know chat gbt had like you know a special guy just for like commas or periods or exclamation points right it's like that's not how it works at all in
fact they just have the one Master model that just looks at the huge soup of like trillions of words and then and then it it learns all of that from Context right and you can learn what a cone is and Tesla's kind of gotten there almost but they're clearly like they're being like short cut right now and there and there was this uncanny valley where like for a while like if you compare
gpt1 to just like grammarly or like some rules based spell check and grammar check the rules based one would be much better and you'd be like I I don't want to feed my my you know my English homework through gpt1 it's going to just hallucinate like I remember testing G even gpt3 when it dropped I I I told I said it one of my friends was addicted to this video game and I was like create a 10-step plan for him to like quit
playing this video game and it's like step one step two and by the end it was like it was like teaching him to play the game again CU it had hallucinated and done done the opposite because yeah because everything online if I can get him to play it again I can get him to quit again and if quitting twice is better than quitting once yeah yeah yeah and so and so for when when gpt1 two
three were out like they were so bad that the rules based like less less full featured uh funny think about it's funny to think about historically let's say a high school student is doing their Spanish assignment yeah and the teacher they would use Google Translate and use some sort of exotic string of words that was like way more advanced and the teacher would call it out and be like we haven't
ever taught you how to combine these where did you learn it from I think you use Google Translate whereas now if they use they use like an llm it'll just hallucinate something completely exotic and also very incorrect yeah and because it's more complicated the students even less likely to catch it they're just like but anyway yeah yeah yes so on the data thing it's it's it's interesting to
me because like Tesla does have more data they have more cars on the road they're collecting more data so they should have more scale eventually now Google does have more compute right now to start and they also have they also have those crazy like they're driving all over the world in places where Teslas don't even go so they do have like a more exotic data set but yeah
going back to your original going back to your original point he had the opportunity to address address the entire world shareholders customers his team the press the media and everything and he flopped on almost all of them even though the technology was so like the V like it was almost like a 10 out of 10 visually but then everything else was even even with the the um the humanoid like Optimist humanoid
robots if he had addressed that and been and said something along the lines of like right now there's a human in the loop and here's how you could apply that right you could be 3,000 miles away and using an Optimus robot to complete complex tasks and even if you have to step in you know one minute out of every hour to do something that's slightly that needs some level of human input
it's fine because you get to be in two places at once right and here's the path of how we get these to be fully autonomous but instead it gave ammo to Josh Wolf and all these other people online to be like dude you're just like you just yeah I caught you and you're tricking people and you're no better than Trevor Milton or whatever which which ironically is the exact path that
weo took to teleoperation has been critical in the weo roll out because I mean they had they had Safety drivers in the cars for a long time which is not even teleoperation and then still to this day they have humans over like they're they're operating at a higher level of abstraction they're not physically in front of wheel scre they and one of Theos trouble they just beam into it immediately and take
it over yeah I I wonder and that's a very different modeles person does the driver is the passenger know when somebody in a wayo has beamed in I don't know I I heard some status like one one intervention every 17,000 miles or something so it's pretty rare right now and obviously that's going to Plum it but I wonder and and that number might be off by for every one intervention wonder how many times where somebody's
tell operating in and like is like on Red Alert because you know it's just like well every time some guy in in um some guy in India is just like falling asleep at his desk and the alert goes off he's like whoa and he's like I'm in Louisiana in a in myo I mean every time I get in weo I'm always like break twice if you're teleoperating this right now you know like like speak to me
through the car um but I actually I have no idea I I don't think that they would want to reveal that I have always thought I've always thought that it's it's it's wh Mo's like Ace up their slave because if the fever pitch of like this is too dangerous ever gets really really high they can always pull out and and be like actually there are humans watching everything so there is a human
in the loop so it's way less scary and and their ability to like dial that up or dial that down is great from like a regulatory perspective Tesla could even you know if they had a more Clear Vision of what this ultimately becomes yeah they could say something along those lines of oh by the way if you want to drive your Tesla for 10 hours overnight we can have if somebody
who's tele operated available interesting to join you for your journey or whatever I see see see I I I I disagree with that in the sense that like I I think Elon does have a very clear Vision which is no liar no teleoperation he is he's he's to jump straight to the high margin economic model that makes sense in the long-term future and it's just taking him a longer time to ramp up to get there I I have no
doubt he has a Clear Vision but he didn't he didn't articulate he didn't articulate it exactly he should have said we're sitting here you're piecing it together we're guessing yeah yeah it comes out and he should have just said like look yeah this is a concept car there's no mirrors there there's no rearview mirrors on here we probably need to put those on legally but you'll
also notice that there are no ugly spinning around on here and that is a decision that we're sticking by and that is that is in some ways why we're behind but why we will be ahead and more profitable in a few years and that's why you should be excited as an investor yeah but he didn't really acknowledge any of that I do think like some of the distinctions here are important the tel
operation thing like the economic model like the fact that he's trying to sell these like these are all interesting decisions but you have to put them in the context of like what what is actually really happening in the market today you can't just come out there and and act like you're the first person to try and launch this company when there's another company that's actively running
yeah and also [Music] my part of it is he has the biggest audience direct audience in the world yeah through X yeah why would you not do Standalone events or do like Tesla week and you have like a different night the Optimus is because the hard thing is you just kind of like went through it all like this is our vision for the future public transport this is our vision for robotex
Optimus and it was all like you have the resources and the attention in to you could have done one event per week for a month and imagine what the stock would have done if he spent the time and you know theoretically spent the time to like lay out an extremely Clear Vision and treat it as I'm going to give you a master class on our thinking and why we're already ahead in these areas I
think it's usually I advise like early stage companies to do this there's a there's a tendency for companies to try want to announce a lot of big stuff at once and it's usually a waste of all of that those moments to do it all at once when you could spread it out over a month or five weeks and be constantly sort of top of mind and building that sort of cadence with the audience so I think
ultimately probably a mistake to just like word vomit yeah major major major announcements yeah and not give each of them yeah it's interesting I I think he yeah I mean I think back to like Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone like I'm pretty sure there was a slide in that deck that had pictures of all the other best-in-class business phones at the time and they all had keyboards and he
was like ours will never have a keyboard yeah and I think that distinction like you could clearly tell that he was calling out Blackberry directly yeah and he didn't get sued for that it wasn't defamation and Elon see seems like more of like a wild man when it comes to communication and yet he didn't he didn't actually articulate like is he going to war against wh does he think
wh's bad like what are they getting I don't think the average consumer hold my hand a little bit on that yeah does the average consumer shareholder understand the difference between lidar and the technology Tesla's using yeah you you sent me this Dustin Curtis analysis the Tesla event could have told a huge inspiring story about the future explain the philosophy behind what they're
building and then put everything into the context of how human life is going to change for the better instead musk randomly and briefly showed off a couple of world changing concept vehicles casually introduced a humanoid robot and then threw out some dates and prices uh as though he was making them up on the spot he raised a hundred questions ignored them all and then after complaining about parking lots said he
wanted to go party there was no concept of a bigger plan not even a cohesive theme Tesla is doing incredible stuff and changing the world it's insane to me that they are so bad at telling the story of their work yeah yeah I I I kind of agree with that but I wonder I I I do think about it in the context of like imag Jack dorsy announcing all those products like he probably wouldn't be
the guy to build any of those products but he would have like even having like slid with a good Cadence that he was on and able to just sit up there and I don't know getting the whole world's attention and then just being like yeah it's interesting to compare with with SpaceX because like a few days later there's like that amazing uh the the super heavy came down and they caught it with the
Chopsticks and the mechazilla like structure and that was just a video of the thing actually happening so it was just like yeah they had said it but I don't remember no one remembers like a press conference about that being a plan like it was like maybe mentioned on podcasts and stuff and then it just happened and it and it was like okay this is just a thing now I guess we're just catching Rockets it's like amazing
um and like yeah I I think that I mean there isn't much storytelling there but very quickly you can see like oh wow okay if they catch it and it's already on the pad well you're going to be able to refuel it in hours instead of days and so you can send up and if you watch the whole video from that from that launch the rocket is only gone for like eight minutes yeah isn't that crazy
it just goes up and then it comes back down because it doesn't need to get that high up and it just it's just boosting it and then it comes back down so it's like eight minutes and so you can see okay this is going to get really really insane when these things are like really pumping um but yeah like no one's even waiting for like the next like SpaceX like like you know conference like it's
just like okay he's done some of those show not tell he did the crazy he did the crazy like Point too one where he was saying that like you're going to be able to take a rocket across the country in like and and be from you know New York to Tokyo in like 15 minutes or whatever and now watching them catch the rocket I'm like yeah that's going to happen for sure it might be really
expensive but it seems like it's definitely going to happen it's interesting CU he's deciding how to Market both companies yeah because the Tesla thing was just marketing yeah to shareholders to C future customers Fanboys press it's just marketing yeah the SpaceX thing is actually not marketing it's just they were just proving that they could do it it's just one step along their Journey but it's
interesting that you wonder how he treats those two different things if SpaceX was already public would he have taken a different approach to to that whole event right or does he feel like I don't need to Market anything I'm just doing things yeah I mean it is so much more visual watching a rocket land even over a car you know yeah but if Tesla was Private right now would he have done
the Optimus demo yeah maybe not probably not probably would have just operated teleoperated humanoid robots are not investor day for your private investors you don't need to publicly signal yeah I guess that makes sense and then the competition is just wildly different like Google is I mean there's a lot of like you know problems with the company it's a little bit old but it's not Boe
right like they have like some of the best machine learning engineers in the world like they have a lot of resources it's still a very young and agile company compared to you know Ula like the locked Martin Prime you know yeah joint venture um should we move on to did you read this uh this the 10 things that matter right now in seed VC by Sam Lon oh yeah did you read this I might
have shared this oh I think I think the one of the reasons I shared this is I think that uh slow Sam Yoni will all those guys have carved out their own style of content marketing that looks so unprofessional huh yet which is just them taking notes and app screenshotting it and sharing it has like the the red line underneath still has theed line yeah it still has the the spelling mistake marker but it
works figured out they have created an incredible magnet for the types of people that they want to meet and doing it in their own way which is honestly smart because they've adapt they' they've realized that the blog in the context of Twitter is almost dead you can't get visibility on links anymore yep and so they're like okay we're just going to like screenshot it yeah and then and then I would say that overall
none of them are super Savvy around brand and design and stuff like that and they wouldn't pretend to be but they've carved out their own like very like distinct thing where you see a bare screenshot and you it's on a pretty good Cadence I feel like there's always Relentless yeah yeah it's like you get a screenshot essay like every every couple weeks or every month and it's always
like just near the frontier of the discussion which I think is good it's kind of interesting did anything jump out from you to you like in the actual piece uh you know I think a lot of the stuff is good marketers tend to get a number of good ideas and then just keep repeating them over and over and over so I think this is summary of like their broader thesis that they've had on
seed investing for a long time and really trying to Brand themselves as seed investors even though they have you know pretty solid AUM yeah um yeah I mean I think going going down the LI list following the shift and focus uh to Great entrepreneurs I think people are realizing that it's hard to build iconic companies by just having a good idea and the right timing and even a lot of capital I think that's one
um the one about about like the next generation of like gen Z Founders being disillusioned by the fundraising treadmill wanting cash flow profitability these types of things like more like a rebranding of the lifestyle business and like it seems like he's thinking about that more and and seeing like okay it's possible that the next amazing Venture back founder just doesn't really get on the Venture
treadmill and that could be rough for my business and he's like processing that that that's what I took away from it yeah I think that I don't know how real it is though but they've been and I know this from hearing it directly from Founders that they've recently backed where they are pretty upfront with their Founders where they don't care which path their companies
try to take yeah I think it's just about this General encouragement that Capital efficiency is cool Bryce from NVC is doing something similar right it's okay if this is your last round he's been on that yeah he's been on that forever and even if you talk to Bryce he's not against Venture Capital no I think that the he just doesn't want to wind up with thing where half the portfolio is like
completely Faking It just to get to the next round to like scale up and then they wind up as zombie corns yeah the thing that I talk the thing that I feel like comes up a lot when I'm talking to companies is it's the stupidest thing in the world to go start a fundraise or to ever in your business be like we're never we're only going to finance our business this one time and then that's the last time
it's like nobody every business that is enduring uses financial instruments at different points in their life cycle for different reasons yeah yeah Apple's issuing bonds they have a hundred billion dollars in cash or something why do that so you coming out I don't give anyone any points at all for being like Oh yeah we're never raising again it's like that honestly is it shows a kind of General
scarcity mindset and fear of dilution or it honestly makes if when I hear a Founder go I never want to raise again all I hear is I want to own 45% of my company forever yeah you know like because well it's not just that it's like the the decision to pick a particular Financial instrument should be driven by the Dynamics of the market and the business and and you know
whether you have do you have an insan amount of really valuable R&D expense that's going to get paid back a thousandfold when you have a monopoly on whatever like well obviously venture capital is perfect or is it just Opex and marketing dollars like maybe that should be financed with debt or is it inventory or capex like like pick the financial instrument that's correct for
your business when you say I don't want to raise more money that's that's different from saying oh I actually understand this industry really well I understand my business and how we fit in into the industry and because of the way we're operating we venture capital is not the right fit for us at this scale so instead we are financing the business this way or this way or that way but but
coming into it as being like okay step one I'm going to like write off one particular Financial instrument and then step two I'm going to you know build whatever and maybe it aligns that or or the even worse is I don't like fundraising so we're just going to raise it I'm like the skill set needed to raise money is the same skill set needed to find and close customers hire great people
and there's a lot of people that benefit will be better fundraisers if they just have a phenomenal business but but yeah I think I think it's been an interesting you can tell you can learn a lot about a Founder by how when a VC goes out and is like it's okay to tell us that you only want to raise one round like how they react to that tells you everything about about their Ambitions yeah and and and
what they're optimizing for right and how much they understand their business maret I think like these yeah there there's this like General fear of delution because there's all these hor stories of companies going public Google didn't need to raise that much money they ipoed pretty profitably very early yeah yet they still public markets to raise yeah but but but they did stop
raising money pretty early yeah but it wasn't because they were like [ __ ] you VCS I don't like Venture Capital it was because it was like okay this is actually a profitable bus built on top of and there's a monopoly power here and there's scale and like it's not as essential that we just raise and raise and raise versus like I don't know like you know you look at like the The Money
Pit that has been like the virtual reality Saga at meta like there a huge investment tens of billions of dollars but like if it pays off it's really big like that's obviously a good use for like burning cash and then there's plenty of other examples where you know SpaceX has raised a lot of money burnt a lot of money but it's paying off now that they have a SpaceX staring do so starling's doing so
well and so it's like yeah it's just like very very dependent on the particular business yeah I think it's better for Founders to say I here's how much money I need to hit these milestones and as CEO of the company my job is to make the price per share go up yeah continuously Y and if there's opportunities where I can take on Capital and increase the rate of increase in the value of the
shares then I'll repeatedly do that for yeah um because that's the thing about dilution is nobody's clawing back your shares it's simply that you're increasing the number of shares but it just make the share price go up more simple yeah yeah if you're doing your job it's all a credos yeah yeah um yeah so anyways I I I think um well here's another one uh another screenshot I think this is from Yoni
this is uh so so Yoni it's he's a slow right yeah he he wrote a screenshot essay about the bull case for open Ai and then Eric newcomer wrote a piece about the be case for open AI I don't know if they were I don't know who was responding to who here but or if they were even or just two guys shouting into the void yeah maybe maybe but um but but but I thought they were interesting and
and I think you know we've talked about open Ai and the price um uh a few times but I think that there's a lot of other stuff going on in AI that we should talk about specifically the the energy stuff that's going on Downstream of all of that and then a little bit of like um you know how like kind of the knock on effects from like the big deals like um there's there like I think we're going
to see a lot of notebook LM type startups and then we're also going to see a lot of the power generation companies shift into AI driven narratives already we're already seeing this like this chyos power company um just did a huge deal with Google to generate seven new nuclear reactors it's pretty crazy the irony of woke Google employees having to realize that oh nuclear is actually kind
of makes sense I don't know if they ever had a problem with it I think it was always like oil and gas yeah I think I think the antinuclear stuff was like it was like the version of Woke from like the 70s like like post like Cuban Missile Crisis but but the in the modern era like most like you know Google employees are probably pretty pronuclear it's not as heretical as like people
think it's been like pretty mainstream and it's certainly mainstream right now but I think the other real like factors like Google and other and the other hyperscalers have all committed to Big ESG commitments to be like Net Zero so they did a lot of work to build out renewable energy sources for their existing data centers which was fine when they were just serving ads and it wasn't that intense and now
they're like okay we need to 10x our energy budget as we go into like the AI era and how are we going to do that without burning fossil fuels a lot of a lot of uh you know AI folks are worried about that and we talked about this last time like xai is just like they're pulling from everywhere they're they're burning natural gas but then they're also pulling from the grid and they're
doing solar and they're just doing everything they can possibly do what's Mark you remember when Mark was uh twe sending Pro fracking tweets which one Mark Z Mark Andre oh Andre which was only like two years ago he was like drill Frack something like that well yeah I I have this I have this interesting theory that like if we had a if we had a president in the turn of the Millennium
like instead of bush you had someone who was um very in tune with the technology community we never would have gone to war in the Middle East because war in the Middle East was never about energy you don't think so but that's not a topic for but but but because like the at least at the time there was like this big narrative like oh we're going there for oil yeah but what actually wound up
happening well like America didn't really get that much oil from the Middle East that's that's not the the end conclusion of the wars in the Middle East and the fracking Innovation led to energy Independence so like the technology was there the whole time yeah it just wasn't recognized and so it's potentially it's at Le at least one possible narrative is like an ignorance
of Technology backed us into a corner that led to more International aggression potentially anyway good time to be good time to be an energy company because fun tech companies are going after you yeah I I do think one thing is uh I had a thesis for a while that a lot of the an anti oil movement was funded by like there's a scenario where the the GCC the gulf you know um countries
kingdoms whatever you want to call them there's a scenario where they're like hey what if we spend a100 million a year campaigning against oil to discourage people from investing in oil production right and to discourage young people cuz like for example do you know a single person that works in oil gas and that's insane yeah we know like I know people in pretty much every single industry I
know one guy who who has a small like SMB oil drilling business something related to that something related to that I know one guy yeah and if you go back 30 years ago and you asked how many of your friends work in oil and gas it would probably be within our networks it would like or the kind of network that we might have had 30 years ago there probably would have been 20 25% of
people were like yeah I work in oil and gas interesting even just a couple years ago I didn't know anyone who worked in energy period and now I know nuclear and solar Founders but for a long time and and we know more nuclear we know we know way more nuclear and solar people but they are not generating a lot of power yet they're they're still in theale so here's Here's the the the um the theory
the the very insane um tinfoil hat theory of mine is that if you spent $100 million a year campaigning against how bad oil is you could probably have that you could probably prevent billions and billions and billions of billions of Supply from coming online because it's just discouraging people from going and saying sure oh I'm going to buy this piece of land and I'm going to start
fracking right because it's just like part of the sort of it never people didn't even even think most people in our generation weren't thinking oh wait oil's like the most in demand substance in the entire world in this massive industry I should just go do that you know um so anyways well yeah I mean we know Isaiah at Valar he's going into oil and gas basically but through a renewable pathway which is a little bit
different um what else should we do in in AI uh Tyler Cowan was on a podcast he uh he's he says that in the air in the era of AI you should everyone needs to up their networking game because relationships and he even said improve your physical presence which I think was sick Aura I don't know if it's Aura but it sounded like get jacked or like you know likability is going to matter
likability and and connections and personal relationships are going to be SRA senra is one of his probably top three learnings from studying history's great entrepreneurs is that relationships Run the World yep so that tracks yep Cohen I heard I heard an interview with a guy who spent something like a couple hundred million on a mega yacht and the operating expenses on a mega yacht are something like 10%
annually yeah so it's like a 10 to20 million like money sync and he said but if I do one deal on this boat it'll pay for the whole thing there you go it's amazing that's the the logic everybody needs to be applying to it should I go to airan right now well if if I meet one person if I meet one influencer that that posts about my CBD toothpaste brand it'll pay for all my smoothies for the
whole year yeah I mean the sad thing is like there is like the dgen version of that which is like going to the club and like getting Hammer like you know it's like not good um or the yeah the notebook LM we already talked about that I actually met I met one of the designers from notebook LM last night oh really yeah and he was like imagine having I think it's like a six or seven
person team in Google that created it yeah and I was talking with another founder that I invested he GNA spin out and get and raise money no I don't think that's how it works no no but like I mean he can just quit and build something competitive yeah no I think I think it's probably higher Roi for him to stay with Google and be the creator of the hot new thing cuz apparently cuz
think about it when when uh I think Google TV started as like a five to 10 person project internally Google TV um never heard that you mean YouTube no Google had a fire stick I think it no that's Amazon yeah Amazon Fire stick Google had a TV product that chomecast chomecast but it was no they have they have some uh oh oh yeah you can like watch baseball on YouTube TV goog yeah so Google TV started as like a 5 to 10
person project internally and a Founder that I back was on that original team and it went within two years was a 500 person organization so this guy Fromm is like he could go from being you know on this tiny team to a hyperscaler within this tiny and choose and I'm sure there's a lot um but talking about the the value of relationships in the AI era uh uh who was it Brett what's his last
name the he he's been at like Twitter he just raised A4 billion do valuation for an AI agent startup and yeah that was a good who who why can't I think of his name he's on the board of open AI wasn't he I forget Brett Taylor braylor yeah he's been the CTO of meta and a bunch of companies he's like there is no technical Moe deep enough to justify a $4 billion valuation for an AI agent
startup it's based on Brett's ability to cross sell to every one in his contact list get to $450 million AR and sell for 10 billion 1010 billion to Amazon in 36 months uh very real that's GNA be good analysis that's gonna be a quote tweet in 18 months yeah should we do brother of the week brother of the week where to start technology brother of the week but first I need to tell you about pek
Philipe when it comes to luxury time pieces there's one name that stands Above the Rest pek Philipe since since 1839 they've been crafting some of the world's most Exquisite watches each one a masterpiece of design precision and Heritage Now pchi isn't just about telling time it's about owning a piece of History a tradition passed down from generation to generation these watches
are meticulously handcrafted by some of the world's finest Artisans they represent more than luxury they symbolize craftsmanship and Timeless Innovation so if you're thinking about an heirloom piece or just looking to make an investment in your own style there's no better choice than PCH FIP visit patek.com to discover the collection PCH phip you never actually own a PCH phip you merely
look after it for the next Generation tell a personal story about your family traditions yeah I I didn't come from I I I actually don't really have that many family traditions but you know the tech is one well it it it will be and and see that's the thing is that there's this you know famous proverb the Best Day Of Planet trees you know 20 years ago the second best day is today and you can
just start family traditions and as soon as you start them they can become Traditions if to in my eyes family traditions that stimulate the economy naturally since the economy is good it's naturally better to choose family traditions that require capital expenditure investment in order in order to stimulate the economy so that the economy improves and naturally everybody
benefits right so it's family tradition that your your own internal family can cherish and and sort of carry on throughout Generations but then also hope like I would hope that you would want your family traditions to benefit the world yeah stimulating the economy benefits you know everybody yeah I really do think that you know exercise for the listener if you don't come from a family that has a lot of crazy
Traditions like start one today create a handful start one start one yeah I I think that's great um so on to uh technology brother of the week you you flagged this guy I actually don't even have his handle here we should do something else oh well there's actually two people in the running so so that's number one this guy he you know made this Brave video he decided you know as hurricane Milton was
approaching his condo he decided to stay with all of his supercars and um stay you know at his condo with all of his supercars not evacuate and it was because all because of sports betting and his success with sports betting that you know he's willing to risk it all because he knows he can just if he even if he loses everything he can just start sports betting again yeah and make it
all back in you know 48 Hours something like that right all you're only you're only three individual parlay away from generational wealth and so I think he's trying to he might have been using this opportunity to sell a course but I think there's this broader there's this broader uh there's really a broader story here which is like if you become the type of person that's worth $100
million you can make that h100 million yeah you know in a multitude of ways a multitude of times right and so well the reason that I think he's a technology brother is that he this is only possible in the modern era using the latest in greatest technology he has a generator in starlink so that even when the power goes down the internet goes out from the hurricane he can continue to sports bet
yeah the games are not going to stop just there's a Hur doesn't you can be you can be getting steamrolled by a hurricane in Florida and betting on Chinese tennis Futures right exactly um yeah the outcome of a cricket game right right and what's happening in the soccer World I hope that somebody's in India you know eventually getting you know approached by some storm that they would
be making RIS risky bets on you know stuff that's happening here right um exactly so so he has some stiff competition uh we got Ryan salame the former C co-ceo of FTX who is reporting to federal prison today to serve seven and a half years on campaign Finance fraud charges posted this on link on LinkedIn today I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as inmate at FCI
Cumberland who do you give it to between these two uh posting that you're going to jail on LinkedIn is pretty iconic does it deserve technology brother of the week though I I think we got to save brother of the week when he comes back and starts a world positive Venture and announces that you know hopefully you know generates billions of dollars in returns for shareholders and
uses that to sort of pay back the victims of FTX I think brother of the week has to go to this guy okay we'll put put his name up maybe we'll link the video Cole Cole H officially brother of the week one of the first Brothers of the week okay um and hopefully he's still alive yeah because there's small chance that he didn't make it if he is alive if he is alive we know that he's still
betting and encouraging other people to follow suit so yeah um what do you think of this concept there's a company called back Market that is selling older technology and encouraging you to downgrade so they're reintroducing the iPhone 6s SE 11 12 13 mini 14 refurbished and they're also selling um what looks like an old Sony HD handy cam camcorder and uh Tyler here says fascinating concept and really
good name imagine something similar may happen with software what's your reaction I mean this is this is phenomenally viral 50,000 likes on this like there is serious demand for for nostalgic Tech it was shocking I mean like is a great ad and so this goes this goes into almost every technology consumer tech product has been over engineered like all I want is for Sonos to release
a super analog version of their product that doesn't require me to sync four different speakers and spend an hour and a half setting it up and then is I'm having people over two of the speakers get disconnected and I'm just like could I just like run an extension cord between all of these and just like let them run right so I think things have been over engineered like you're seeing
this in the in Ultra Luxury you know cars that almost all the mo I think we maybe talked about this going back to analog Bugattis are intentionally have these very tacti which is the Utopia I think the most interesting thing about this is even after all these years of people trying to unbundle Craigslist and unbundle eBay there's still opportunities to unbundle these businesses so bezel uh is a company I
back that that's like the stockx of watches right now eBay is still the number one you know seller of you know luxury watches online the issue with eBay is that you could spend $20,000 on a pek actually not going to get the kind of PEX we like for 20 but um but let's say you're want to spend $60,000 on a PCH uh if there's a 25% chance that it's fake that's not really a risk that
anybody should take and so they took what eBay did well already which was having a lot of inventory and added authen authentification um and the same thing is what Rent the Runway to this as well you if you're buying a $2,000 vintage Chanel jacket cars and bids the same thing I mean bring a trailer similar but disaggregate CU eBay motors really was big but people are peeling the stuff off and adding
like specific features yep um so yeah I think I think as long is until something like a backtrack or bezel truly become dominant there's still these opportunities to like unbundle these so what do you think is more viral about this I mean I don't even know if this is their launch but it's clearly their introduction to you know a million views and 50,000 fans do you think do you think the concept is
more viral or the execution in the sense that it's like great copyrighting on a Subway and then someone wound up just taking a photo of because it's Subway ad Subway ads are always hard to price and just anything in the IRL but maybe for itself what's funny is I I looked at this ad and I was like that's so cool like just great campaign and then I went to the website and it was a bunch
of vintage electronics and I was like n me I haven't been back since but um but I think this is a good example of of just just the power of branding and like a really good marketing campaign who knows if it'll make it an enduring business but my my worry with this stuff is like a lot of the technology there is they're just appliances and it's it's this the car world is talking about this
how like you know would you ever want an earlier model 3 or would you always just want the latest Tesla Model 3 like you would always just want the latest one because it's it's an appliance in the same way that you would always want the latest iPhone there's no real benefit to downgrading to the old cars where it's like oh yeah like a Lamborghini Kosh is going to drive in a very specific way
that like yeah the issue is you can sell the device but you still don't really control the software like apple can be like we don't support this anymore yeah they'll force you to upgrade but it runs terribly yeah and so I think what would be an incredible product and I don't even know if this is possible to deliver at scale is if you could actually go back and run like iOS
4 on an OG iPhone and it would just be so fun I me you can get the very first iPhone they're getting expensive now but it doesn't have an app store no that's a whole it just comes with what it has you get you know you know like just buying app Apple products when they release and leaving them in the box is like the best performing asset class know best perform yeah you know maybe it's not Nvidia but
like it outperforms like yeah they grow eventually yeah so anyways good example of a good campaign and how there's not you know it's not too late to to um unbundle these behemoths yeah uh in terms of the the other kind of like Trad technology we we got to go back um huge huge push against um online dating recently have you been following this oh yeah so so somebody shared this chart of
how couples meet in the United States and the online is just a rocket ship from 1990 where it's basically zero to 2020 when it's well over 50% now there is a community note on this that's not it's not live but I clicked on it because I can see what's in there yeah and and somebody was trying to you know fight it out in the community notes claiming that oh well this cuts off
right during covid maybe it's gone down and then they cite some other study that was done by Zola the wedding registry so they PLL people and it said that now uh Zola claims that now the number one place that people meet is in school and I just don't believe that at all relative to this chart because I think this chart is a much broader selection and I think people doing wedding
Registries on Zola is specific so this is this is a survey of of like 6,500 people randomly um bu some academics and and Zola is like a very specific subset where they're like just pulling their users yeah and so I imagine that if you're going on Zola and constructing like this elaborate registry you're probably like higher net worth and then probably more likely to have met in an IRL setting as opposed to
online and so I I I disapprove that Community note I think uh everybody can be bearish on everybody can hate dating apps the way that people broadly know that cigarettes are bad yeah but you're not going to you know until there's something better comes along well I don't know that dating apps are basically selling sex which is the primary human motivation so you're just not going to if as long
as these apps are able to offer what they're offering they're only going to become like it's interesting that um it does seem that it does seem that people are like our society is now very like from a dating standpoint dating apps are driving the majority of connections like that kind of seems like it's a thing uh yet people are not people can overcome the addiction the only thing more
powerful than the drive to just like meet whatever for people to meet the opposite sex seemingly is finding your person and like you end up giving these people end up giving up the app afterwards right so thankfully the positive is that that it seems like you know finding your life partner wife husband whatever uh seems to get people to quit these things so they you can't really
say that they're addictive even though they're they're dominant right I did I did have something funny so Monday I was catching up with a buddy who started started a couple different companies with a certain Tech billionaire and he was telling me that said Tech billionaire is OBS desperately wants to fund a new version of seeking Arrangements which is like the the the sort of high-end you know like sugar
daddy like specific da up so maybe a contrarian move on his why like is there a problem with seeking arang I'm assuming I'm assum good business well I'm assuming it's one of those things where somebody looks at the design of a product and they're like this make it better so he wants to you know accelerate sugar baby relationships uh I I don't even know how the economics work
on there um it doesn't seem like they're probably taking a cut because that's the beauty of like the only fans business is that they're taking a cut of the entire like economy between the simps and the women but it's hard if it's dis if there's if there's potential for disintermediation yeah but it's beauty of the only fans model is that they never meet in person and so it's always
intermediated by a platform that can take a fee and that's why they're so insanely profitable yeah um what do you think of the idea of uh if Elon Musk wants to raise birth rates he should purchase match group the company that controls Tinder and hinge over half of the online dating Market make make a bunch of changes that was so so elon's a capitalist I don't think he's fundamentally even x
yet X yeah he purchased it to defend Free Speech but he also bought the most important marketing channel for his trillions of dollars of companies right so it's like it's hard to argue that even and also he can he can he has a great position to take which is oh I didn't buy this to make money I don't care I'm sure he'll take it public again someday yeah he's like he can he could
take it public at a loss and say look I did this for free speech or whatever but let's face it he has direct control over the most important audience in the world to him and he could lose 10 billion on X and make it back 10x over with SpaceX or Tesla or whatever so it's not a I don't think he's GNA he's not the guy who honestly if he bought group and was like I'm going to re-engineer this to try to
increase the birth rate and everything that he would do to match and their subset of companies would wouldest destroy Enterprise Value because of course these of course the incentives are set up in a way all the way from the CEO to the the of of match to the individual leaders of their different brands all the way down to the low product manager who's just like [ __ ] I
just want to increase daus just 10% Like that'll get me my next you know raise or whatever then I from asso I need to incl increase the CTR on this one button in or something you know yeah yeah so anyways uh match group is but it's it's funny because it's everybody wants to say match group is all bad yet there's millions of couples out there that would never have met and their lives are completely yeah like
better because match group products exist of course yeah so it's one of those things like nothing is ever as good as or as bad the other yeah the other interesting thing is like like you know even even if match group was in like the uh you know charitable let's call it like a charitable donation range like let's say it was like1 Million doll company but it still had the outsized
effect that it has on society uh like Elon could just be like I'm going to burn $10 million because I feel like changing the 10 million let's call it 10 million like super low like nothing like it's a rounding air for him so he he buys it he shuts it down well like that's not going to stop someone else coming in and doing the same thing like it doesn't work like that like uh there
there's clearly some sort of like market demand here and you can't just like uh you can't just go around doing like this this like odd brand of like capitalism philanthropy mix like like yeah you I think the solution here I do think people are clamoring for a solution to like plummeting marriage rates and plummeting birth rates but um the the the answer is is don't after the apps
yeah yeah you actually need to build like a better cultural institution and and figure out how that can scale and be profitable you need to make it you know uh punishable by jail if a guy sees a girl that's cute and doesn't talk to them you know in real life in real life yeah like if a guy like a police officer is on the street and sees a guy walking Noti this is a cute girl and doesn't say
hello I'd like to take you out to coffee that can be punishable by up to 10 years in 10 years in prison yeah and so I the government's going to solve this I think we're looking for free market Solutions here yeah and the free market Solutions are probably like someone going and building something that's a that that that's a really cool like I heard one person pitch uh this is kind of wild OT
CrossFit for militias so the idea is like if you want if you want strong militias In America which maybe you don't but if you do and you want the you want the ability of like of like local groups of Americans to potentially push back against the government in you have some sort of organization you could do the same thing where it's like you know some sort of new CrossFit
Community something like that where it's like it's it's a scalable organization but it's about something else where people can meet and bond yeah I want to fund Discord for local militias Discord for local militias just vertical SAS for militias everything from I don't even know if there are that many militias around are no but we need to stimulate yeah sure sure yeah so yeah if you could
manage everything from communication to inventory to recruiting to does to training to compliance yeah there's a big business to be built there I mean I do love the idea and my dad group chat in the neighborhood are are all early users and yeah you even link it into you know scrape uh active you know police reports warnings you bring in data so it's basically like you know getting you know you get a push
notification and then you like rip your suit off and underneath is is like full you know military I think dudes would sign up for it I do like the idea of you know like okay we're we're revitalizing like the American Military and working with the dod with all these defense tech companies but like what happen if we get overrun and like you know some foreign foreign country is like on our Shores
like we need militias and we just need to we need our own Insurgency and we need to be prepared for that I mean fortunately we have the most guns of any country so shouldn't should be be messone going back to the fixing fixing uh the reason that I don't think uh I don't think dating I only think it's going to get I don't think it's going to get better really yeah like I think the
future that we're seeing today which is hyper financialized dating which is you're on this app and if you pay more money like you can have better odds at success and all this stuff but then the bigger issue is just that humans historically did not have indefinite optionality now people are so used to spending most of their time communicating online that it's not unreasonable that somebody in you know
Texas would date somebody in Ohio and then like former relationship that way but the issue is that historically humans had I think it was there's some data on on until recently or until the last like couple decades most people that got married were born within like five square miles of each other or something like that and that was actually positive and that people would look around and
and just like be more committal because they're like well this is the best person for me in my neighborhood right or my city my wife like super easy like just like oh like family's here everything's here guess we should get married yeah um so yeah I think that the era of optionality seeing seeing the entire pool across the entire it doesn't even matter because the thing is is
somebody's using dating apps and they meet somebody and then they stop using dating apps they're still going to go on Instagram and see the same number of so eliminating even if you regulate or try to fold match group or whatever it's not going to stop in Instagram is the bigger that isn't interesting like like obviously like I want the free market solution here but it would be interesting if like like legally you
couldn't have a you had to have some Geo restriction on uh on on the matching yeah or you can only get you can only get five matches a month like that we're we're yeah we're limiting matches I don't think that's ever going to happen no yeah that's why I just I think whatever you're seeing today is what exactly what you're going to see for the most part the Relentless March of tech
Capital yeah even the um even the Pres prevalence of I I I don't know if this made it in the stack but there was somebody tweeted I think it was like on the um character AI Reddit and it was like so long their favorite character that they were chatting to I finally met someone thanks for thanks for uh teaching me how to talk to a woman it certainly helped so that's I guess one
positive right if like if if if the sort of incel audience is chatting with these AI Bots and they're like damn I I lowkey have game right yeah yeah I have thought about that where maybe maybe there's a scenario where it's like you like like a boy is talking to an AI girlfriend and and a girl out there is talking to an AI boyfriend and because they're on the same platform the the two AIS you can
kind of do a match across them and you have a lot of data to know because you know every interest about the boy because you've collected you know hours and hours of communication and you've connected hours and hours of chat Logs with the girl as well and you can look across the network and say wow these two people are actually perfect matches we should just inter introduce them and dis
intermediate and then the A and then and then the real life boy and girl meet and they're like wow it feels like I'm talking to the AI boyfriend or AI girlfriend that I've been talking to for the last year I'm glad I gave it so much training data to and they meet up and it's a catfish like I've been leading my you're talking to the AI girlfriend you're like yeah I'm I'm jacked like I can bench
400 it's like oh well like we have a girl over here who wants to date someone who's who can TCH 400 why proof right yeah yeah yeah exactly it has sorry unfortunately unfortunately we had issues on the platform with people people embellishing their bench their bench uh one rep max and we actually will need you to post proof of it make sure you're in a welllet area uh that's clearly not using fake weights you
know it's funny um I I want to talk about this uh this like you know zombie corns dead Venture companies so uh it started with this tweet by Tara or Tara um very surprised at the number of founder friends who have quietly called in the last few days asking for advice on how to sell their company because they raised at too high valuations and are now in a state of purgatory and I
think you know this guy CA is that right or or you just saw him but he says he says DM or email me we' bought a few companies that rage 50 to100 million do from VC and we're stuck behind a large pref stack I've been a founder and understanding this situation is daunting and running a company with little to no upside exhausting and demotivating we can provide a landing spot for your
company and a way for you to get a win and move on if you'd like to do other things this is my bad signal to Founders or investors that see Founders stuck in these situations so Z Zer companies that too much the irony is that the person he's quote tweeting just sold her company for like a big outcome oh really yeah like the like she had a really successful exit and then it catalyzed a
bunch of people to be like oh how do I actually I I actually don't know the details but I think people did very well I saw like employees tweeting that were like whoa I'm rich now you know cool stuff like that so she has a big outcome bunch of people are like whoa how how do you sell your company um because people still have this perception that I don't know a lot of venture back
Founders think that their company is worth something close to the last valuation that they raised that even if they're not or even even their seed valuation and that's you know whatever so but what I think is funny is is you have these people um so Jeremy gaon was probably over a year ago maybe at this point he goes on invests like the best he starts talking about special situations everybody's like whoa you've
been doing like and he's giving examples of deals that they've done at tiny for a really long time where they're buying companies for less than the asset value of the business and he's calling them like log jams and special situations where he's coming in as a somewhat neutral third party saying like how do we how do we deliver what everybody wants the VC wants often times to just
like take a write off or clean up clean it up or stop having to spend any time on it if they're on the board they don't want to deal with it anymore if it's not going to return their fund so he's solving that for the VCS he's usually giving a deal to the founder that allows them and and whatever the core team is that allows them to save face and hopefully see some Roi or walk away
entirely if they want to do something else but I think it's funny because now you have Jeremy who has his new fund um who's fully focused on this so you have to imagine he's going to be ahead of a lot of these other you know people that are coming out and and now trying to compete here but Jeremy is competing with tiny Capital Andrew Wilkinson who's still trying to do the same deals you
know even though to my knowledge Jeremy was the guy like really leading the charge of that practice and so all these guys who are running holding companies are basically now like doing like distress dressed Finance you know they're just coming in like trying to find Value and unfuck these situations so anyways I think it's great that these um these uh players exist in the space it's generally positive I think for
pretty much all the stakeholders but the nature of everybody realizing that these are good opportunities is going to make I at the increased competition we'll see if it if um I don't know if the Venture industry has could support as many of these types of players as they can micrones right yeah I wonder I wonder what the Wheelhouse deal looks like for or like like where
where is their value when there's a log jammed like B2B SAS company because I feel like if you raise a ton of money you didn't get to product Market fit but you're in the last era it's like okay well you probably aren't doing like a AI first approach you're probably doing something else maybe you have some customer list it's like I I I I I struggle to think of like why I personally would want to own one of
these companies but so so imagine a company that raised that raised uh $25 million and gets to 5 million of AR sure and they're not profitable in fact they're burning a lot of money sure and they stop growing yep suddenly that company is companies that don't make Mone money and are not growing are worthless they're worthless especially if they're losing money right course and so you
take one of these 5 million businesses that's not really growing anymore and if you wipe out the pref stack massively decrease costs focus on sustainable growth you could probably sell that business for $25 million in like three to five years right I'm just saying like maybe Str say without without any more without like putting up significant more capital feels hard not necessarily
though I mean so here's maybe if you're plugging into something that has like heavy synergies like sure it's like okay they have a product that we can cross something I'm not saying it's I'm not saying it's easy but I'm just saying if you have if a 5 million AR business with a $25 million pref stack that's not growing if you wipe out the pref stack reduce costs and find a way to grow
sustainably and then you get profitable and then in five years you go to a strategic and you say like hey you guys should actually buy this for $50 million because it's a creative to your business the person that bought the business for five whatever if you paid $5 million for it you're going to do great yeah so that's why all these people are circling being like like uh I really want to see the
the the the like the histogram and it's actually it's actually good to give VC's love to add value via intros yeah and so SAA and Jeremy and Andrew are all all going to be like pretty much buddy buddy with all the VCS yeah getting those getting those calls and intros hey hey this talk this one yeah um I just wonder I just wonder on like the histogram like how much capital is going into each deal
is there any other structure is it just is it just yeah the other thing here is that these funds can leverage debt yeah so if you're buying a business you know there's totally possible you could buy a business for 5 million of AR with 5 million of AR for $2 million of cash yeah $3 million of debt and if you sell the business for $25 million it's a pretty good multiple
on your cash it's just it is kind of high stakes it's kind of high stakes because like you got to cut costs fast to to pay for the debt and then you've now cut costs and now you have to grow yeah and while maintaining margins in this new era because you're not like this hot company trading at some premium everyone knows you're like turn around it It's Tricky I like it though because it's a
simple it's a simple strategy that you can have real advantages through your network and credibility right because Jery's done a bunch of these deals yeah I don't know I it doesn't seem like that simple of a strategy more seems like something that jerem really good simple fun the fun thesis sure sure sure very difficult to execute but it's important it's much worse to have a very complex
fund thesis and a very complex execution at least have one of them be simple one of them complicated yeah um so yeah because I don't know there's just not that many nobody right now nobody wants to buy a business that for the most part it's not that strategic to buy if you're if you have a company that's working it's not that strategic to buy a cost center you know yeah but
if you can turn it into like a profit Center and something that's creative yeah yeah um yeah it's interesting I wonder I wonder how much of the I wonder how much of the hack and slash is actually going to go on the what I wonder I wonder how much like hack and slash is actually going to go on in in those deals like um like like Twitter is kind of like the famous example of like a really bloated company
5,000 employees it's now below 2,000 it's getting closer to a th like that is remarkable but yeah the when I'm thinking about a $25 million raise it's like well maybe they got to what 50 employees so they could go down to 10 could they go down to 20 like maybe like that doesn't seem that czy hard thing is if you're going after these SAS companies or consumer apps or whatever
they are you're still at 5 million of Revenue and trying to be super Capital efficient you're still threatened by all the next YC batch like we're building SAS for you know with AI like the next thing they're going to burn money to like acquire those same customers that is really tough yeah but if you found some Niche and and like the revenues are pretty strong and sticking around it's just interesting
there's the um the startup Community generally has this attitude that anything's possible yeah and when they think of private Equity they're like oh yeah you just buy companies for one price and sell them for more and like look at this deal like what if you did that with this whatever um but private Equity Credit the gentlemen that we know in that industry like they are not there's not a lot of
efficiencies that you can get in private Equity MH The Edge that these guys have is relationships to investors and being able to speak to Founders and that's why this like content marketing is like sure I've been in your shoes I understand you know I've been there done that you know it's um they're going to actually so they're yeah so their Edge is that their Edge is that private traditional PE
funds are not looking at these uh at these companies as much and they do not give a [ __ ] how the founder feels yeah so that is an edge by itself just caring about the founder uh let's do this one do you know do you know this guy burn Hobart I love this guy he just wrote this book for straight press on bubbles um he's gonna be a hereticon good dude amazing uh he's Pro bubble
amazing who's not yeah he he believes just one more bubble yeah I I actually told him about that on a call yeah and he was like yeah uh and he has an interesting theory that um the uh that in fact it is not the uh the like Main Street investor that gets burnt when a bubble collapses because if you look at wealth inequality during Financial collapses and recessions wealth inequality
decreases interesting because on average the Main Street investor invests on a much more regular Cadence it's the professional investor that's that's actually winning yeah winning and losing more dramatically at scale yeah it's very fascinating uh because the The Narrative is typically like oh the you know the the financer the rich guys dumped on M retail yeah but that's not
really what happens if you just look at the broader broader picture certainly true in like the micro like like some people got dumped on some people dumped but uh but more broadly the uh economic equality actually goes down during crashes um so but I I love this tweet it didn't get very many views but I thought it was very interesting it says there's a dubious micro cap I've looked at that
makes a hangover cure that you're supposed to drink at the same time you drink alcohol the main active ingredient is caffeine so what they really sell is deconstructed for Loco can't tell if that's a bull or bear when's the last time you had a for Loco College damn I'm sorry yeah you haven't had opportuni since then maybe if reticon we should crack we should crack up and on stage
yeah salana was telling me that he was like I showed him I showed him the document and he was like he was like there's one problem my contrl f for for lood it wasn't in this dock so we definitely have to get some real ones that's so great 100% I mean and we'll do an ad read for four loo yeah yeah it's perfect um yeah I I I remember like you know when the Four Loco ban happened like you know everyone was kind of
stockpiling like a case or two but the original for loo is like impossible to to acquire because the original yeah the original formula I mean it really is rare it's rarer than your than your you know first generation iPhone that's on still in the box can you imagine driving through some forgotten town somewhere in America and you pull up to a gas station and you're thirsty thirsty I don't think thirst has
anything to do with it you're thirsty and you go to look in you go to look in the fridge and you look back and you're like what what is that it's like it's not even ref refrigerated so it's like everything's lukewarm or whatever you look back there's some dust and you like scrape it off and it says like and it says expired in like 2008 yeah it was like 2009 20 right oh
my God and you just immediately like start hitting it against your head it's like water it's like a mirage in the desert I I don't have any negative memories of for Loco I certainly wasn't my go-to but I think it was a great product and it's a shame that it got regulated out of existence yeah well what well what about uh Buller bear case I will tell you that this company is truly a micro cap I I dm'd
him and asked him and it's about a $50 million company should be smaller should be smaller whatever their earnings are should be should be smaller yeah I mean the thing with the deconstructed for Loco is like that already kind of exists the Red Bull vodka and then the gentleman's Red Bull vodka which of course is the espresso martini and so the the idea of mixing caffeine and
alcohol people do this regularly they find ways to do it this is classic uh the the question is like yeah will will people really pick up on this because they are they are explicitly triggering people to consume caffeine when they're drinking but yeah I I there's another one of these hangover cures that hangover cures or fixes are funny because tough bus you're basically saying that um I'm IR
responsible but I'm responsible enough to buy a hangover cure these are great cups that's really tough yeah yeah it's always hard to to be no the real reason is you're saying you just poisoned yourself here's an antidote yeah antidotes don't promise that you're going to feel good they promise that you're going to live you know okay and so uh or that's like theory of an antidote so yeah to me you're just just
commit to drinking is going to make you feel worse than you otherwise would temporarily maybe better and then worse so I think it's I've never I've never invested in any of the companies that have there's clearly demand but I have a friend who runs one it's doing pretty well they focus on like weddings too that's like a that's been a growth area because everyone's gonna be drinking at
the wedding so if you can get into the wedding planner Network then the wedding planner can present this as like oh this would be a lovely gift for everyone you put it in a little gift bag when they arrive they take it before they drink it's actually like a bio tech company they have like really good science and so it's this enzyme that breaks down the alcohol it really does worko yeah
zbiotics have you tried it somebody was telling me that zbiotics is like I won I don't want to misspeak and I don't want to talk poorly about anyone's um a for-profit Enterprise but uh but yeah no no you know I tried zbiotics and I was like this didn't work didn't work and uh you know I don't know I'm very I'm very affected by alcohol though pretty much the next time I drink alcohol and probably the
the only time in Q4 will be at hereticon sure uh on stage yeah exactly um yeah yeah it is it is always hard because it's like if you have the forethought to to think of taking a pre- alcohol uh hangover cure you also might have the forth thought to like mix in a glass of water or just drink glass so it is hard or you just it's a very tough business eat a bigger dinner or drink more water I mean any any
business that's your blood like any business that's predicated on like you doing less of like the seven deadly sins is always tricky like you know the the dating app that's not predicated on just more and more casual sex that's going struggle to me to me if I was going to invest in a um hangover cure it would be somebody recreating John McAfee's like protocol which you seen you should pull it up
then you should pull this up or put it on the screen or something um but his protocol is like you know how he always like whenever he does a video interiew he's no longer with us yeah but well allegedly allegedly allegedly yeah he's probably listening to this right now yeah um the he'll go on these rants where he's like how did I drink four bottles of ginade day for six years in a
row and and you know still managed to hold the Federal Government hostage for 200 days in a row and he had he'll outlin this like crazy biohacker stack that he's on that like is like helping with his liver and all this other stuff and so he actually had it dialed so like the McAfee stack is if somebody wants to build that I'll back that back that because it clearly works like the guy
was like drinking like we got do he wasn't just partying he was drinking like he he he's like he's like putting his much effort as Brian Johnson is into into surviving but also like into but just refusing to not drink it's great like the easiest win possible how can I how can I survive well no probably like yeah would have still doing the single worst thing I could possibly do for my
body yeah wow um what do you think of this Dennis says you're busy trying to get into founder mode while the 18-year-old Zoomer clipping kais sonat and Aiden Ross on Tik Tok has a higher ARR than your entire to be SAS startup why' you like so much I mean uh I just think that I just think it's an amazing uh if you could go back in time and tell Ben Franklin that some 18-year-old you know
18-year-old would be would be making millions he would be like yeah that was what I envisioned for America you know just it is interesting I I you know to go back to Jeremy gon um by the way gon is it gon no I think I think that's gon gon but it's so funny because his his uh favorite business ever is like Lazard yeah and gon just happens to feel like it's already in the same real of of uh
is that the fun name gon cap G and Company and Company there you goard yeah that makes sense um well yeah I mean he told me this one interesting um thing was like he just like one of the highest signal um you know data points that you can get on a Founder when they're young and you're thinking about backing them for the first time they've never done a business before is just show me a stripe
account with money coming in yeah and simultaneously a high school report card that happened the same time like all I care about is like you made money while in high school yeah let me show you let me show you this picture and that is a great signal and and I think that it's interesting because the this seems ridiculous the 18-year-old Zoomer clipping kais and
Aiden Ross Clip Clips on uh Tik Tok but that 18-year-old Zoomer is probably the next great B2B SAS founder like probably like not unreasonable to back that person you evolve from the lowest common denominated and and and and that is going to get retconned from this low status clipping Aiden Ross Clips on Tik Tok to oh yeah I had a social media management company or oh yeah I I you
know I had a I had did I ever show you this picture this is my first company okay let me see um J Man designs literally when I was 12 I figured out that I could get skateboards manufactured in the Midwest for $17.50 wow and I got my mom's help designing a graphic and I got I raised the money from my aunt who gave me like 500 bucks for the first round and I bought a bunch of boards and my number
one sales channel was friends birthday parties so when my friend's birthday was coming up I'd go to their parent and I would sell them a skateboard at $40 or $36 whatever I was making like 50% margins I should have gone higher a lot of like flexibility yeah you got a Zillow the house show up actually this a $200 skateboard $200 skateboard no but I that was like my the first way that I made
money that wasn't mowing lawns whatever like it experi the formative experience for an entrepreneur it's one thing to do a service like copyrighting or any of these other graphic design but getting buying a product for one price and all you do is resell it this this was my first job too my first like entrepreneurial thing was buying DJ equipment in America and then selling it
on eBay and being willing to ship internationally and so figuring out that that like certain companies with this very Niche DJ equipment didn't have the infrastructure set up to distribute internationally and so I would just be like yeah I'll go figure out all the stupid custom stuff and a lot of people that wanted like the best audio file gear would be like dude if you can buy
this for me and I I will pay the extra shipping cost and the premium to do it and you just go figure all that stuff out and it it's only possible because like the internet yeah and and fundamentally I still bring that up to Founders when they're thinking they're like trying to over philosophize their businesses yep I'm like are you making something for one price that you will be able to sell for more than that price
and if so how much more yeah and if depending on the market like that's either going to lead to you creating a big business based on the margin profile or not yeah yeah and so many people forget that and and I've forgotten that at multiple points in my adult life of fundamentally it's about making something for one price selling it for more than yeah just with
like a basic widgets business and somebody's going to clip this and be like two guys Discover Business basically like here's the thing so like if I have this piece of paper right and I can get this paper for a dollar yeah and you're willing to pay $2 for this this uh print out of a tweet yeah um what else do we have we have a couple more things I wanted to see um did you actually dig into this
story about Mark andreon giving 50k in Bitcoin to an AI agent yeah I did it was over uh it was dramatized by AI Doomer yeah dramatized by an AI Doomer turns out like the money like went into an account and like was never actually touched so like the it's not like the AI was like I'm going to use this to do that it was just sort of like Mark sends it yep and then um calling calling Mark Mark this
reminds me somebody I was at dinner the other night and and somebody brought up Epstein and for some reason I was like unrelated and I called him I was like no but Jeffrey would have like why are you calling him Jeffrey like what's wrong with you oh my God is there something that we need to know um yeah oh but yeah I think just just there's going to be more examples of this where people are
like look yeah it's sentient the problem with the truth terminal thing I mean it seems really cool I hope that it's like real and someone's actually doing stuff it seems like a very Avant Guard art project but you never know again T operation is there a human in the loop here so even even with the and there's an incentive to be like oh if people think this is an AI they it more because
the bar is lower it's like what we discussed the other day about the the AI influencers are making 50k on Instagram only fans or whatever and it turns out it's just a real woman but if if a real woman says oh these are AI generated people are like oh W this is incredible this is the best AI model I've ever seen um and there's going to be a lot of that like faking it both in the tele operation both in this and and just
having a filter there it is interesting are you familiar with like move 37 this whole story so uh in uh when when Google Deep Mind Demis hus was uh was trying to beat ladol in go the The Go Master so uh computers had beaten chess and they'd become superum at chess but go was computationally much more complex so something like you know instead of being like trillion possible board positions
that you could potentially search with a super computer it's like quadrillions and quadrillions so it's like impossible to just brute force it um but they applied deep learning scaled they play they they trained and they played you know billions of simulated games and eventually the AI became very good everyone thought that lisad doll who was the world champion was going to wipe the
floor and he wound up losing they made a whole documentary about it it was crazy um and in there there's this moment where they're playing and at move 37 the the computer Deep Mind places this piece like way off of the board where like no one not off the board but like it's a legal position it's just a very weird play like no one would ever do this no human would ever do this and
and everyone was very confused they were like oh there's like a bug in the software like something's weird about this um uh but and and leas it all like got up and was like what the [ __ ] is going on like this is weird like I don't get this this is not how people play this game and that move wound up being critical and they won because of this move so it was like true discovery of
like a novel strategy and that is like what we're looking for in intelligence I when you say like an AI system is intelligent and superum that's where we're getting there and with llms yeah the real the thing that would be interesting is if there was this AI like agent that was figuring out a way to crack open multi- on salana oh yeah or something like that again there was a
rumor about that too but very unlikely but even even like so these move 37 type moments I I've been waiting for something to happen where it's just like a sentence a poem a paragraph something that feels like inspired and and like a viral tweet that clearly provably came from an LL they haven't know that it's that that uh open AI has reached Singularity until uh an agent on the open AI like built on
the open AI platform buys a McLaren P1 to gain the favor of Alman P1 or F1 uh well I think he would respect he'd respect both yeah but I don't know it's it's interesting it's definitely getting a response from the from the crazy AI doomers doomers doomers G to Doom but but I like that Mark like you know YOLO 50k to this project like that's fun that's what he should be doing like
that's awesome I'm excited inre it by an order magnitude probably on the next run you know uh did you read sequoia's generative AI thing their whole paper application layer is important it's a bit too serious for our bones I think so no it is it is so long here's the funny thing the only thing that I'll comment on that is it feels like a year ago everybody was like the application doesn't matter building at the
application layer is stupid stupid rappers are stupid and now it's like all in on rappers but then a year from now I think it'll be back to oh you know like I don't know it's just funny to think that that only like six to 12 months ago people were saying that software is dead or the end of software so this report is coming within six months of the end of software yep so
who's right both both of them are right you know like that's honest that's honestly my opinion is is I think that longterm both of them are right and that software is going to be massively disruptive yeah but there's still going to be massive value acal to specific products yeah I mean the Computing Hardware companies were valuable and the software built on top of them was valuable after the doom
boom yeah and even the telecom companies were pretty valuable yeah and so the whole stack is valuable there's probably value uring all over the place it's great everywhere you live I mean it really is like it makes sense that like the value crewel wouldn't live just only one place of course there's going to be like a winner but from a venture perspective everybody's incent the the anybody that's running a
foundation model is incentivized to say we're going to capture all the value we're going to do all these things that you say you're going to do we're just going to do it innately through the core technology and then everybody that wants to deploy money is is saying yeah yeah you want it it's it's it's much more comforting to be able to say that the value is going to ACR to individual
teams and products and apps and things like that because then you can YOLO yeah bets you know yeah the question is like uh and I don't know if they address this that much but uh uh disruptive innovation versus sustaining like will the existing because there's already a crop there's already a you know a multi-billion dollar SAS company in every major category and so there's also now a YC company doing AI
in that category as well is AI disruptive to those companies that are maybe only 5 10 years old and doing well like I mean you know ramp is like they're not being disrupted by AI they're like the first one to implement it because like they're they're still on The Cutting Edge they still have the agile team right yeah uh and I and I wonder uh yeah how much of this is going
to be completely new versus just uh the existing tech companies are able to just roll in I don't know keep an eye on it anything else there's always more technology always more technology I think we got through most of the tweets I have been using those uh metag glasses more oh the ray yeah the video ones I kids with the kids I went for a walk uh and had my hands full with dogs and
babies and it was great to take some photos the photos are not that great but the thing that I actually liked was being able to just talk to the AI while you're walking around handsfree because you just say like hey meta like what's the you know what year was the Declaration of Independence signed or whatever and Ben yeah it just gives you it just gives you like little facts and
stuff and it's like a little bit easier than pulling out your phone for like the random question yeah I think you're getting you become the cell tower that data is being transmitted uh I actually watched a hin clip about that EMS yeah and uh and he had someone on who was like a brain scientist and who was basically like it's chill so you know I think uh there's like there's like the scientists agree
now the Bro scientists agree but like we got to come up with a new tier for like even more conspiratorial tin foil yeah yeah the tinf foil Bros Tin Men just the Bros not bro scientists just Bros don't even pretend to be a scientist we should have a tinfoil hat in the background from here like just like a really really high high quality one anyway I think we crushed it we think we
did all this stuff let's wrap there did you want to talk about Tim wall oh ending uh our our uh you know potential vice president bragging about not knowing what have VC is the thing is is here here's the funny thing politicians used to be able to travel around the country country saying whatever they wanted to specific audiences with zero consequences oh yeah and now almost every single talk that a politician's
ever going to have is going to be clipped and almost immediately published and even you know there's always they're always running the risk of being clipped out of context but Tim Walls can't it's you can't go and speak to a bunch of guys that work you know he's clearly pandering to a specific audience being like well the funny thing with Tim wall is the guy says he doesn't own any
stocks or any financial instruments he doesn't have retirement savings he's just planning to live off the government forever like he came out and set yeah yeah he has his pension from being in the government or whatever he says he has no he sold his house he doesn't have any he's all in like the guy's all in you got credit for that zero exposure to anything yeah he has zero exposure to stocks the
market or whatever so this is the guy this is you know the the um it was it Dan lobe who was who was tweeting and saying like is this the guy that we really want you know making decisions around you know the economy and you know whatever but yeah Tim wall is going and you know he's probably speaking to some group of like I don't know agriculture manufacturing being VCS
aren't in that apparently the guy I'm running against his Adventure capitalist I don't know what I don't even know what Adventure capital is and it's like dude you can't even if you even if that's true yeah if you want to win this race like why are you going and bragging about something a fairly large consitency of like VCS for for your campaign VCS for and then also it's like the Obama Administration
the the the organization that they met with outside the government more than any other during the the administration was Google like the Democratic party is like well entrenched with tech and Venture Capital like this is like well established and so playing this like oh I don't even know what that is it's yeah I feel like he's been the last week has been interesting for him where there was
a pick of that or not the picture the the video of him going hunting I didn't even see that where he's trying to show that he's a good old boy that loves guns and stuff like that to sort of you know get the male vote but back to back of blowing it with them because it was clear he didn't know how to load his shotgun and then straight into saying he doesn't know what a venture capital is
is like you're kind of alienating both crowds with guys that know how to load a gun and then guys that know what venture capital is and I think that middle group that doesn't know what is is not going to be that influential in in your election but anyways that's enough politics um I'm looking forward to the next episode y me too thanks for listening thanks for listening