the anticipation you're watching tvpn it is Friday March 7th 2025 we are live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital this show starts now we got a great show for you today we're talking about the US jobs report the Bitcoin strategic Reserve we talked to Nick Carter earlier this week
we're going to go back look at what we talked to him about what he got right what he got wrong and ACH of his new takes have already dropped on the timeline we're going to be breaking him down also SpaceX they've been trying to launch Starship for a while little bit of a setback but some promising zero for versus the fent it was it's been it's
been a tough time but team still locked in a lot of optimism on the timeline and we're going to break it all down also I mean got to shout out Elon he's a reply guy now he has officially replied to the show uh the timeline is is blowing up we had the best week on X for the show in history uh we are definitely going to
have to do a Don per episode soon um but we also have a bunch of Callins will mantis is calling in Alexis zanan is calling in Sam lon's calling in so stay tuned that'll happen about an hour from now but until then we are breaking down these stories the news what's going on the timeline what's up Jordy what are you thinking um just excited I'm just
not no no thought no mind just just purely uh just sort of like getting into the flow fantastic show very excited to have Alexis on this week he dropped some big news uh both around a bid for Tik Tok as well as bringing back dig so I'm excited to get into that and hear it uh first person but um and Sam lesson I
want to talk to him about the should we launch a meme coin yeah yeah yeah and also I just want to hear who his favorite Creator who the what Creator is he the most bullish on like financially that's an interesting question yeah that's a good one um and then his one1 billboard excited about yeah uh so that segment will be brought to you by ad
quick of course um but we want to kick off the show with an absolute Banger uh skooks on the timeline is quote tweeting a very odd interaction between JD Vance and Peter teal uh JD what happened to you and uh and it's the it's not just the fat childish JD meme but it's a yassifieds of that and uh and JD said do you want do you want to do the voice
okay uh yeah this is a highrisk one yeah what what are you talking about Mr teal and is that right Peter says my creation my life's work is this really how it all ends and scoop says imagine showing this to a regular person uh and it's a very silly post we don't talk about politics on the show fortunately we have no
regular people watching this show yeah exactly uh if you're in you're you definitely understand every layer of this meme for sure uh but it's interesting uh I do think I do think it's it's weird how I was talking to Lulu about this like the JD meme has like completely broken containment and it seems like maybe it's bipartisan like
both sides are having fun with it JD is yeah it don't think we've ever seen this scale of of you can imagine this then happening to every public figure right like if if it works for JD yeah it's also funny to do it with Leonardo DiCaprio right or like any like major celebrity public figure politician it's also weird that it didn't happen with
Trump because Trump feels very memeable he feels very like he's always in these really iconic like images like the obviously the assassination attempt but even like the McDonald's photo was very it was deliberately shot to look like pop art and uh but he hasn't gone down this path which is like this bizarre like very online meme world but anyway
hilarious post shout out skooks uh and it's good to be starting with a post you know going back to Our Roots we're doing guests now but it's great to have uh start the show banger with the Banger exactly and you know what's else uh what other thing is good to start the show with an ad read from Wander find your
happy place Happy book a wander with an inspiring View Hotel great amenities uh dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 247 Con Air Services a vacation home but better and they're doing a giveaway use code tvpn and you will be entered to win a free wander trip which is incredible uh wanderer.com y/ tvpn you just have to
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close the deal could could net you $10 million in cheeky secondary there you go anything's possible anything's possible uh let's on to the jobs report Joe weisenthal is the one to follow on this in my opinion from Bloomberg uh he says breaking 151,000 new jobs unemployment ticks up to 4.1 you know he's writing his own
post because I've never seen anyone misspell unemployment as badly as he did amazing still did numers numbers fantastic poster you know he's just ripping this and that's what makes him unemployment fantastic yeah I don't know how K worked his way in there and also we have to do so so we have a surprising we have a surprising number of listeners
on Apple podcast and I feel like this is a good opportunity to give a quick disclaimer which is that the show is heavily centered around video now yes and so you're going to get a better experience on Spotify or YouTube YouTu or X or X yeah um but we're try to so I'm just going to say it how Joe spelled it which is
Unemployment uh so yeah that's great so Economist had expected 160k new jobs that was kind of consensus uh and an unemployment rate of 4 4.0 so we we miss that very unfortunate you know we want zero unemployment we want everyone in America to have a fantastic rewarding job in creating shareholder value at all times uh so a little bit disappointing
and uh stock futures were up a little bit and then they went down uh and in general you know mixed messaging on what this means for the beginning of the new Administration and the economy there's a report in the Wall Street Journal breaking it down uh the US Contin has had some interesting quotes recently
where he said this Administration is not focused on cheap Goods or the stock market which historically politicians would at least uh you know try to get you to believe that they cared about those you know two things yeah that's kind of a rough quote because he didn't he should have he should have immediately said like what is he focused
on yeah yeah yeah to be c longm word for word quote yeah yeah yeah little misinformation there but I I think most people most Americans should be comfortable with like a little ripping the bandaid off a little bit of temporary pain in the form of a tariff or you know some sort of jobs dislocation in in the future of oh we're
going to grow at 10% GDP or we're going to have massive Prosperity that that's an awesome trade people should be down for that if they think about it um but it's weird to be like you know well people are people are also rightfully fixated on the present right if you're if somebody's struggling financially they don't really care about 10% GDP
growth 30 they care about you know what's happening now in this year so we are going to be having a special guest next week uh to break down the tariffs specifically because um we're not Venture capitalists and so we don't have uh we can't really comment on tariffs exactly way that yeah we should call a VC yeah we got to call a VC for this
yeah whenever there's like something really really wonky really difficult just like something you should have to spend you know your entire career studying you got to call of D because they will be up to speed for sure yeah we need a a a sound effect button that's just like you know call of VC like I'm gonna take my like Call
of trivia or something yeah that's great um uh well let's rip through some of this Wall Street Journal article uh the economy added seasonally adjusted 151k jobs in February Labor Department reported Friday uh slightly below the gain that uh economists pulled by The Wall Street Journal expected to see uh still this is up from 125k jobs in
January uh economists believe that cutss to the federal government jobs under Trump came too late in the month to be captured in February figures so if you hear someone saying oh this is because doge is laying people off that whatever happens there if something's going to happen it hasn't taken effect yet to be caught in this
particular stat so if you hear someone saying that they're probably wrong uh of that uh 3500 jobs were lost at the Postal Service where where employment often swings higher and lower from month to month that's just kind of a natural process with the uh with the Postal Service the remaining 6,700 jobs lost
represented the biggest drop in more than two years Morgan Stanley economists in a note Friday said they didn't believe the decline was a reflection of layoffs but instead was the front edge of the freeze on federal hiring Trump put a hiring freeze in place January 20th the day he was inaugurated uh and so I don't know what else we want to go
into here yeah I mean uh the Atlanta fed had reported earlier this week that GDP growth was negative 25% and this is kind of generally tracking the government uh government spending is a major driver of GDP growth and so when you start cutting it and cutting uh federal jobs and new hiring and federal you know card spend
as we saw this week I think the Doge team had um ran into an issue where they couldn't close uh these sort of credit cards but they could just put a dollar Li on very funny so anyways uh strategists at evercore isi worry that uncertainty over contracts and grants is having an additional paralyzing effect on hiring at employers
that are exposed to these funding sources or in need of regulatory approvals from agencies that are themselves public par Paralyzed by Doge review and so uh you know anytime there's a lot of Chaos in the government or in the in the you know the broader markets uh companies tighten up because it's a little bit riskier to invest many
overall like a lot of this data it seemingly has been like heavily politicized over the last decade right and so it's hard to really uh know what's what's truly real you know historically um you know you you'd see this sort of like payroll data but you know then you'd figure out after the fact that some of it was associated with
um you know contract work or or even things like uh you know we saw at different points uh jobs data featuring like door like door Dash and the sort of like uh on demand uh labor which is is that really employment or is it you know and how do you classify that but um ultimately as you know we're going to have to wait till the experts like Joe
Rogan uh weigh in on this yeah uh there's hman there's some more data here uh belt tightening by government workers who have lost their jobs or fear losing them has begun to show up card spending by Bank of America customers in the Washington DC metropolit area has slowed according to an analysis conducted by
the bank's economists and there's also worries over tariffs which we'll dive into next week um even though the tariffs I mean it seemed like this week it kind of like they were on then they were off then they were on and they were off and there the same thing with the Bitcoin Reserve that we'll get into um but uh it it it's it's all just like
uncertainty and that probably slows down most Business Leaders like decisions a lot of Business Leaders are excited about the idea of like a deregulated environment more opportunity ability to run faster ultimately hire more but it's like until it actually shows up and we get what we asked for um we're not going to bet
against that when you know we don't know where exactly the opportunities will lie yep anyway if you're looking to make investments based on what's going on in the market and in the economy go to public.com Investing For Those who take it seriously they have multi-asset investing industry-leading yields and they're trusted by millions um we love
they have high Y cash accounts Bond accounts treasury accounts uh options indexes want Etc uh they got something for everybody over there where wherever you are on the risk curve Public's got something for you and uh this show is for entertainment purposes only but if you want investment advice check out the all-in podcast kidding um uh all all
good fun but uh uh let's go over to Nick Carter talking about the uh the bit reserve and how things shook out what was that no just already this post is great so Nick posted yesterday evening he said so the government made all these L1 Founders come to DC to kiss the ring and the night before published the news
that they're not actually buying their bags after all um and uh and anyway so another comment here from from wandoo what's funny about this whole thing that I don't think many realize yet is that sack's got Trump to sign a piece of paper that essentially changes nothing because they already have those coins tokens anyway so I'm interested to see
I'm going to pull up like bitcoin price action over the last 24 hours because yeah it's I mean uh it's sort of up I mean it's still up over the last it's up 10% over the last week yeah but this certainly wasn't good uh you know necessarily long term for bitcoin price action because basically saying no the government's not going to become a buyer
we're not using taxpayer dollars to uh buy Bitcoin and um and and the so the positive thing is there there was sort of historical concern that at some point the US government would come and market sell um yeah Bitcoin let's read through David sack's official announcement he now has he's dropped his all-in podcast badge
and now just has a White House badge um yeah wow and so I I feel it I mean this is him right David saaks 47 here yeah I think this is the official he has a gray check mark now interesting and so uh I think it's good to go to the go to the source and then and then we'll build off of this with some other posts um just a
few minutes ago Trump signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve the reserve will be capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of a criminal or civil a asset forfeiture proceedings this means it will not cost taxpayers a dime that was something that people initially reacted
to very very heavily they were like why are you taxing me Joe Lonsdale came out and was saying doesn't make sense to raise my taxes to buy this asset a lot of people had had problems with that and so this completely integrates all of that criticism and really defangs that criticism in my opinion uh I I I think
it's it's it seems extremely responsive to that reasonable criticism which is cool um it's estimated that and the timing was the big issue here right because if you're if if there's all this criticism and push back against Doge right for you know do doge is not a a scalpel right it's sort of like broadly you know they're trying to be precise
then they're broadly just like cutting a lot of spend some of which is going to be waste some of which would have been probably needs to be reinstated you know Etc so doing the Doge at the same time as saying you know coming out and saying we're going to be buying cardano and xrp just doesn't make it doesn't make any
sense and so it was rightfully called out and and to Sax's credit he went I think on Tuesday or Wednesday and was like wait till you hear what we're actually doing exactly and um yeah and so uh it is estimated that the US government owns about uh 200,000 Bitcoin however there has never been a complete audit because it probably sits with like
FBI has a little bit DEA has a little bit like different groups have them I mean some like random yeah Federal organization could have like seized a little bit and it hasn't been all centralized something like oh yeah that's that flash drive is sitting in evidence somewhere like that's possible it's it's crazy to think about but uh
hasn't been centralized um this executive order directs a full accounting of the federal government's digital asset Holdings that seems like a great place to start uh the US will not sell any Bitcoin deposited into the reserve it will be kept as a store of value the reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called
digital gold premature sales of Bitcoin have already cost us taxpayers over $17 billion do in Lost value because the previously the government would seize stuff from like the Silk Road and then sell it um and obviously there's been massive price appreciation since then so that's what he's getting at now the
federal government will have a strategy to maximize the value of its Holdings the secretaries of Treasury and commerce are authorized to develop budget neutral strategies for acquiring additional Bitcoin provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on the American taxpayer in addition the executive order establishes a US digital
asset stockpile consisting of digital assets other than Bitcoin forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings so again we're not going to go out and buy cardano but if the FBI winds up busting a drug trafficking ring that happens to own some cardano they're not just going to go and sell it immediately they're going to throw in the reserve um I'm not
exactly sure that Kon is like the one but you know that's generally what the the EO is like pointing towards um the government will not acquire additional assets for the stockpile Beyond those OB obtained through forfeiture proceedings the purpose of the stock pile is responsible stewardship of the government's digital assets under the
treasury depart Department my read on this is that budget neutral strategies is equal to uh forfeiture proceedings right like I'm trying to think of other scenarios in which the government would be able to acquire digital assets without in a budget neutral way other than seizure or forfeiture I don't know I mean Budget
neutral yeah like I really anything uh um I mean maybe there's something else where uh I mean a budget neutral strategy for acquiring additional Bitcoin would be you bust the drug ring they have a million dollars in cash and a million dollars in Bitcoin and you seize both and you immediately go and buy an extra million dollars of Bitcoin
instead of taking the cash yeah that would be budget neutral within this framework yeah yeah so good point maybe there's something a weak argument as to why that money should go towards digital gold versus just fighting crime whatever I agree I so yeah I'm definitely in the wait and see category on the on that but
overall I think it's great that they're but really they're just signaling like hey don't worry we're not going to raise your taxes and just start dumping money like new new money into uh into uh crypto assets uh let's continue reading this finish this out yeah gotta uh hopefully the admin starts to let Sachs lead comms specifically on this when he
uh sort of announces these things they tend to make sense and when the announcements are going out when the announcements go out on Truth social uh a little bit uh more chaotic yep uh and so uh Sachs continues president Trump promised to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile those promises have been kept the this
executive order underscores president Trump's commitment to making the US the crypto capital of the world I don't I want to thank the president for his leadership and vision um I also want to thank the president's working group uh especially Scott bassant and Howard letnik for their help uh interesting so
I don't see a lot of I I I think it it feels like they got this to a good place but I'm not seeing crypto capital of the world in this announcement I'm seeing they like like I wouldn't call us the gold capital of the world because we have Fort Knox right I would call us the gold capital of the world because we
have you know really clear laws around how gold is regulated and like how you can promote it and what whether it's a commodity or a stock right like like we have clear like like legal stuff but all that it is a step forward to say that the government is going to hold digital assets and you know benefit from potential price appreciation of those
assets but they're also saying they're not going to sell them right they're just going to you know hold them yeah and Nick Carter who knows how this will actually benefit Carter gave his yeah is an argument to say that the taxpayers would benefit the most if the assets were sold and then just refund the tax yeah refund you know more more
realistically just used to fund operations right um what does Nick Carter have to say as a say the announcement could not have gone better he's very happy about this he says campaign promise kept Bitcoin Reserve clearly distinguished from altcoin stock pile Bitcoin gets official US Government seal of approval no other coin does no
taxpayer money spent to acquire coins so no backlash and future acquisition of coins likely left to to Congress as it should be and then he says bonus if Satoshi really is the NSA as I suspect and they have 1 million Bitcoin sitting on a Dusty hard drive in Fort me this EO just ensured that they don't ever sell
those and so he's talking about kind of the the the market pressure that e like the government had ,000 Bitcoins he thinks that the government has a million more Bitcoins but there was always this element of well what if Satoshi gets active and sells everything that would create downward sell pressure so that's always kind of baked into the price I
guess Satoshi was bearish if if if Nick so if the NSA gets bearish and starts Market selling yeah exactly a million coins would be rough for the price but and so this should be somewhat bullish in the sense that hey yeah those 200,000 coins they're not going to be dumped anytime soon soon they always could be
it was always an there's always a chance that that happens and so that creates some sort of downward price pressure uh but no longer and so yeah should be somewhat bullish but not not hey let's go and 10x the price yeah which is seems what the market is reacting to yep which is cool um anyway well you know what the market or what the government isn't
Market selling John what submariners let's go and where can you get sub the government we're we're coming out we're saying you know that we the government needs a strategic reserve of you know collectible watches absolutely using bezel to do that spending money on the ramp card yes on bezel yes they should take all of the golden Fort Knocks and
convert it to Gold cardier Santos yes we're just going to M it into existence yes uh but if you're sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin and you're happy with it uh why not uh take out a loan against it and go buy a watch which is something you can actually do now but if you've made a bunch of money on on crypto why don't you step up your
wrist game get a watch transition from digital assets to hard hard physical assets everyone's oh yeah bitcoin's so good because like you know it's a store of value if you had to leave the country you could just take it with you well yeah you can do that with a nice watch too can hop on a flight sort of they'll hassle you yeah uh with with watches I
don't know if you've yeah yeah it's it's a real issue yeah little bit different if you just memorized a seed phrase but yeah in most cases it's still a fantastic option and the place to go is bezel they have over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated inhouse by bez's team of experts we love bezel I bought a watch
on bezel Jordy bought a watch on bezel uh I'm constantly scrolling and our producer is looking for a watch on bezel now uh and it's been a lot of fun I I I love bezel and uh yeah go go check it out download the app start scrolling it's fun scroll anyway let's move on to Starship Delian says okay the Starship
blowups obviously suck but damn are they beautiful he shares a nice photo of uh the a video which we're still working on getting playing uh we'll figure this out soon but uh uh the videos are the technology Daily Show has not figured out how to reliably play videos we got a lot of stuff going on here uh there's uh there was actually a little bit of
debate over this because people know that these videos go so viral that what they'll do is they will take videos from the previous crash and then there were seven yeah yeah so I think this was what this is flight seven this was eight this was eight so they'll take the flight seven crash and put it up and be like
flight eight just blew up and they're right that it did but that's not the right video but they have a good video and they know it'll go viral uh I think this is correct eight Z for eight it's I I texted a size Lord Capital allocator that is invested I think a couple hundred million dollars in the space economy and I said why why does the rock
why does Starship keep blowing up and he had a very sophisticated answer yeah which is um space is hard uh there have been rumors flying around that uh it had something to do with a you know potential firmament there biblical analysis but uh but not for this show We're Not Gonna not g to Deep dive that um but it is this this is the this is the
challenge you know uh I've gotten a bunch of space pitches I I'm underinvested in space personally sure um I just you know it's it's very very hard and uh when you think of just comparing you know uh a YC founder you know goes out and they're talking about some SAS product right that they're going to make and they ship a V1 and it
doesn't work it's the stakes are pretty low right you can just sort of like ship a V2 maybe you spend a weekend you know uh staying up late and and get it done uh space uh you ship your V1 it's extremely extremely expensive if it doesn't work uh in this case they're on V8 it's still not working to the degree
like I'm sure they're making incremental improvements but it's just the stakes are so much higher uh and uh that the the other thing that's very real is is the pace of iteration is is um can't possibly be as fast because if you you know you know even if you're just benefiting from um the Falcon 9 and and and leveraging um uh their sort of like
payload capacity you're not uh getting you you you sort of have one of these uh errors and then you have to wait months to get to get even a second shot and that could be millions of dollars it's a bunch of lost time not even factoring in the burn the sort of like Opex that you're going to incur during that period so Stakes
are very high uh and it is uh even challenging for the man taking us to Mars so not easy it's interesting because um so this is launch eight Falcon had three failures but they had a lot longer in between yep so the first Starship uh test launch was April of 2023 so we're coming up on two years of Starship testing um Falcon 1 they failed in March
of 2006 then March of 2007 and then August of 2008 and then in September of 2008 like later that year they got Falcon 1 Flight 4 successfully reached orbit um and so there's this thing where like there on a time scale they're hitting a similar like it's taking them a few years to get this right yep but
they're just blowing up way more stuff because they're iterating faster yeah which I think is probably fine and good like I I I think obviously it's expensive and you want it to work the first time but uh you'd rather just get through as many of the problems as possible and launch more but it does feel more dramatic whereas there are
plenty of companies that are like yeah it took us two years to iron this out because it was really hard and we didn't make any mistakes during that time like at the end of the day you just want to get the thing working it doesn't really matter y um so uh let's go to some reaction from the timeline uh Sunday girl is taking a shot at
old uh he says if NASA had the fail failure rate that SpaceX Does Elon Musk would be firing everyone in Congress would be demanding to know where the money is going uh and Kane chimes in and says NASA doesn't build Rockets its contractors including SpaceX do SpaceX Falcon had three failures in 400 58 launches making it the most reliable
rocket system used by NASA NASA Starship is still in testing and so yeah um I don't even know if they're selling I think it's still full test runs like uh one of I believe one of sometimes they'll they'll sell like basically discounted uh rates to be like hey yeah there's like a 10% chance that this works so we'll charge you on tenen the
price if you want to ride on this thing yeah uh but uh Andy next yes you should have somebody on like I feel like Josh Wolf would be a good guest to specifically talk about what is what is happening between obviously you have Falcon 9 taking payloads up reliably with companies like vaa yeah but then something sort of happens with Starship
specifically that um you know basically what is the actual uh what is actually happening that causes Starship to break up into hundreds of pieces and put on this incredible light show for all of us down on Earth but but what is the exact sort of process and has it been different every time or is it um sort of reliably you know it be
if you're working at SpaceX and it's sort of reliably doing the same thing that's like somewhat comforting right because it's like sort of a fixed problem that you need to solve um but but we should actually you know we should definitely have somebody on the show to talk about it yeah uh Andy next honestly Sean Maguire would be able to
would be able to speak uh to it but yeah Scott Nolan worked at uh at SpaceX early in his career really has has done a bunch of break on this stuff and then um some of the other some of the other early SpaceX guys that have gone on to found other companies talk about this stuff and break it down be cool um uh
Andy says remember the funniest outcome is the most likely guys you get to catch super heavy on the first attempt if you accept Starship blowing up on the next five flights in a row this is how the Invisible Hand of the free market keeps everything Fair trust the process I love good post uh Xander says flight 8 Hit me hard watching Starship
fall at after pouring everything we had into it cuts deep it hurts because we care because we know what's at stake but the pain is the price of progress we'll carry this loss rise from it and push harder than ever onward Ash Starship love it great post 19,000 likes humanity is on Xander side he says the support
has been overwhelming thank you all in moments like this it means more than words can express every setback is painful but they remind us why we push forward and how many believe in this journey will keep going ad as Ad Astra per aspara yeah I like this John Edwards with the SpaceX tag he says never give up after Falcon 1 flight three we learn
the hard way that night is darkest before the dawn keep your heads up keep pushing we're gonna get there so lots of uh lots of optimism from the SpaceX team uh Sam Deigo has a funny one did you see this so uh I don't know if you've heard of LW sombrita but it's this uh little shade that is built I think in LA have
you seen any of these they're at like bus stops uh and it's and it's a very expensive very slow infrastructure project and Sam says fun fact law some Brea and Starship took the same amount of time uh Democrats put an enormous amount of money into infrastructure Investments like actually don't understand is it is it it's meant to be an overhang for one
person or it's meant to be a chair if it snows a lot no no no no no it's a it's it's a sun shade so you can go and stand under it but it's like a sun shade for just one person I guess and I think it's designed to be like you can't destroy it basically it's like very like Vandal resistant but it's just how did they
come up with this thing it's just so ridiculous and I guess it's called lome bre which is very funny Starship isn't and then Sam says Starship by the way isn't just the rocket but the entire city Factory that produces it uh and yeah obviously they got to work out some other things uh soyer summed it up he said breaking SpaceX just successfully
caught its Starship super heavy rocket I love this description in midair for the third time they parallel parked a building it's great it's more than parallel parking it's uh playing catch with a building and so I mean maybe this is just like a very stupid take but it seems like catching the buildings like the harder part and like getting the
rocket getting the actual Starship Just Not To Break Up seems like stay in one piece it seems like once they solve that it's like pretty much game I don't know but Baron of summ it up very well by saying the blue origin after for the Starship launch is effing lit right now uh I don't know I I I I think they're I think they're all
rooting for each other in a somewhat serious way but funny to imagine of course we love based Baron having fun on the timeline poking fun at the Rivalry between space is such a different category you know if you're if you're in a highly competitive market let's say project man man agement SASS and your
your direct competitor has a product launch and it goes terribly and and it gets rejected by the market like the stakes are pretty low there right it just doesn't it doesn't set the industry back broadly totally and so there's competitive Dynamic that encourages dunking and people don't want to see other people do well but blue origin and
SpaceX obviously blue origin is going to benefit from spacex's progress right because they're sort of generating you know knowhow that yes it's you know IP for SpaceX but at the same time I'm sure you have you know like if SpaceX does really well there there be a bunch of people that have learned how to do space better and they'll be able to go and
start other companies and work at Blue origin and all this stuff and yeah it's uh it's it's good for the entire industry so and and Humanities yeah um but even they're blowing all these up I still feel like like yeah I'd probably go on one of these in like a few years which is like the exact opposite of how I feel about like boing
you know boing like one like little like like you know Wing like breaks off and I'm like I'll never fly on that again yeah but it's different because it's like I understand that like you got to blow up a lot of stuff to get to where you know how many successful Starship flights do you need in a row to feel good about jumping on
probably three three yeah okay I think like I'd go on the fourth maybe to the moon or to the Mars anywhere to the Moon probably I'd be like the second dude on the moon I'd probably be the first one I mean people have already been so you know if they send up some robots or something I'll be the first human on the ship I I I I
think it's pretty low risk so if you just had your rocket blow up in front of the whole world yeah uh and and you'd been pulling all nighters where what what kind of uh I'm crashing on an eight sleep for sure nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experi go to 8sleep.com use code TBN check them out uh my sleep score is
back up I'm off the sauce back on the wagon off the wagon on the wagon means you're not drinking I did not drink last night and I feel great and I got an 84 only missed on the routine think that's just because I'm all over the place with falling asleep but I got almost eight hours 748 you have me beat and that was
a that was a fair and square you know was have any excuses I I had my routine was at you know something like 93% I just didn't didn't get the hours yeah I think I what would will be really interesting once we get it dialed then we're doing consistent you know hundreds every night uh the Dom episodes I think that we might have an advantage here
because we drink in the morning yes and so it's fully out of your system so we could probably get Brian Johnson to like approve that right yeah to be like yeah like it doesn't count if you drink it at 11 a.m. but the I think the real alcohol problem is when you're drinking you know up right up until you go to bed then
it's it's still in your system so I think that's it I think that's the secret don't drink only Don pering on and only at 11:00 a.m. after a major major celebration before noon before noon yeah only drink before noon uh anyway uh China is coming for our semiconductor supply chain we've talked about some of these companies I've been
looking for I was thinking about doing a threat on this like like years ago um and trying to like break it all down it's very very hard yeah I mean I thought it would go super viral but um it's very very hard because um all of these uh Chinese companies that work in the semiconductor supply chain they all have websites that look exactly the same
and like they're very hard to translate it's actually hard to understand who the real players are if you don't speak Chinese and don't really work in the industry um but Nick says China will produce the entire semiconductor supply chain inhouse obviously they want to try and do this they want to get away from
tsmc they want to get get away from Taiwan this is what's driving Ben Thompson's pitch right now for rolling back the chips act let's keep China dependent on Taiwan so then there is no incentive uh and the thought of a uh of a Taiwan invasion is is Unthinkable uh but if you cut them off early they're going to have to Mo pull forward their
homegrown strategy and and as soon as they're successful then it's game on potentially hopefully not yeah so in design software Square they got imperion in fabulous chip design they got high silicon uniso and Byron in lithography equipment that's the competitor to asml out in Denmark or where where's asml it's in it's in Europe somewhere um they
have smei and CC uh in photo resist they have ding long and ronga and then in etching and deposition equipment they have NAA fabrication SMI which is their equivalent of tsmc uh packaging and testing they have two companies Tong Fu and Jet nand which is the memory and dram also memory and hbm they're competing with uh that uh SK hyex the
South Korean company that makes all the memory that has been super important in the GPU uh scale out that most people haven't been focusing one of the counterpoints to Ben Thompson's argument which is just that you know we should you know let China maintain their dependence on tsmc is I have to imagine that China would have done this exact
same thing even if they had unlimited access to uh all the chips they wanted in the world from Nvidia um you know you know buying directly from tsmc Etc so yeah I think this would have been the natural path in the same way that in the US in an ideal situation we would also have a full in-house you know silicone
uh supply chain semiconductor supply chain I think that's true except for the fact that when I looked down this list like America is not really working on very many of these no I'm I'm not saying that we are saying in theory we should yeah totally but I guess there is a question of like how much political will does it
actually take like it's it's a it's a huge investment China seems to be willing to make that because they're kind of backed up against the wall but uh we're not doing that in in America we are doing it kind of more broadly in the west we've always kind of seen this even the asml stuff uh it's not an American company but they built on a lot of
American intellectual property which is how I believe the chips Act is infor is is enforced it says that if you're on this restricted list you can't buy products from companies that use American intellectual property even though it's not an American company they're an ally and then they play ball with us yeah and so anyway very tricky
so good time to build one of a competitor one of these companies because they're coming and we've seen this with it feels like every few years there's like oh they America China has a very very serious competitor in unry for example um deep seek all these different companies kind of pop up yeah we missed this earlier this week unry released a
demo of a of a humanoid doing Kung Fu which was very cool and the I mean the the unry demos are looking so good now they often get flagged on community notes as like the this is AI or this is CGI look at the shadow it's not matching up and then sometimes they'll be a fight over like no this is actually real uh
and I think obviously then people are also playing into it and making fake videos too but um in general like it is real and the tech is is getting very very serious and the production scale of that is also really risky I wonder if they'll do uh yeah it's an interesting situation where unit tree doesn't care if a bunch of CGI videos released
because it's basically information Warfare whereas the other humanoid robotics companies would get completely dragged they they they they obviously can't produce any of these sort of falsified or sort of um uh videos but uh but unitri is happy to just sort of show off capabilities that may not may or may
not even be real yeah I wonder when we will see a uh you know there's like Chinese drone shows fireworks it's like a dragon in the sky it's all the drones uh flying in unison with LEDs on them I wonder when we'll see a a unitary level demo of that with humanoids like you know there's like Soviet marches of like oh wow they have a thousand like
soldiers just marching down the street like like unry is still in like the oh we have one cool demo like but imagine you see a thousand of those and you're like yeah this isn't AI generated that would be yep that'd be a big moment it's coming and at that point it's kind of like all the infighting between all the
humanoid companies really doesn't matter yeah and I become a bull on all of the yeah one of the challenges is that unit tree unit tree humanoids are still pretty expensive like I think that the the the solid nothing I mean like I'm just saying if you wanted to get and and the good ones are more like 100k I think and so you're looking at to
get one of those demonstrations of a th000 you're looking at potentially a hundred million dollars that you just have to um if I'm the Chinese government that seems like a steel steel yeah lunch money yeah because you you want to you want to force the industrial capacity to say no don't just make one great robot make make me 100,000 even if they don't
go anywhere at least you got the Reps in to scale up your manufacturing to that point and then V2 make another 100,000 but always be making 100,000 because the product is not one robot the product is a machine that produces millions of robots yeah right anyway yeah if uh when that happens I hope that there's like uh
a little bit of unity between the American uh humanoid companies because it's game on and every everybody's got to be building stuff yeah I mean you forget that like in World War II like people weren't like oh like I care more about like you know my my my fighter jet needs to have a a Ford motor engine it's
like whenever we'll get me I do think there was Channel yeah sure it was more about reliability and people definitely had favorites around equipment but you know in in specific moments it didn't really matter as long as the thing worked build it yeah yeah any anyone who's helping is better than nothing totally yeah um we got some more agents
uh we got news from Sheeran uh who is a writer for Bloomberg she says uh former leading Deep Mind researchers coming out of stealth with a new startup aim to build super intelligence starting with autonomous coding agents they've raised 130 million from lighted CRV Sequoia Alex Wang Reed Hoffman at a 555 $5 million valuation uh nice little round
to come out the gates and uh good little photo shoot they did here yeah another Foundation B compan I mean this one seems aimed uh you know as more more like an a you know agent uh so who knows if they're actually building uh an actual foundational model or it's more of uh sort of an orchestration type play it's just crazy that
this is another one like there's just so many I can't keep track uh it's the first time you you really do need the market map because there's just so so many of these um but good luck to them hopefully they find an interesting you know go to market interesting distribution Channel interesting product differentiator we've seen that there are
obviously a lot of different ways that you can differentiate the product and make it better um but it's hard hard to break through it'll be interesting there's also news today that uh Google co-founder Larry Page is reportedly developing a new AI startup um wait why isn't he just doing it at Google yeah yeah that's that's a
big push back um he's launching a new company called diatomics which focuses on using artificial intelligence in product manufacturing okay um and uh that's so weird that he's not just doing it at Google company throws off like a trillion dollars in cash or something yeah somehow I missed this until now um I'm going to just read through it since
we're talking about so Google co-founder Larry pagee has formed a new company din atomics to upend manufacturing with artificial intelligence so his argument here would be Google's not focused on manufacturing I want to do something here hence diatomics Paige and a small group of Engineers are working on ways
to use large language models to create highly optimized designs for wide variety of objects and then have a factory build them uh so so sort of some type of autonomous I mean very cool conceptually use AI to generate you know uh schematic build itous the stealth is run by Chris Anderson people said Anderson previously
theology officer of another pageback company Kitty Hawk an ambitious project to build small electric airplanes potentially revolutionizing how people get around cities a company shut down in 2022 amid failed prototypes and Regulatory concerns Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for the information um so yeah uh if if Paige is
excited enough to you know uh incubate or or invest in or be a large part of a new AI startup uh I'm sure the Google shareholders uh are sort of bummed that he's not rolling up his sleeves and getting back into uh you know probably the biggest opportunity in AI it's just like Google having a coherent effective uh AI strategy which which doesn't feel
like they have right now because we've talked about this you pay for Gemini and half the time you don't know where to find it in the Google uh in the Google verse I wonder how he genuinely feels it's going at Google yeah because there was this whole report about oh maybe with the AI Boom the Google co-founders will get
back involved come more in dayto day and there is a view that you could have that hey Google is still I think the number one website in the world they can stuff generative AI into the search bar they can adapt iterate on the product and they've made it through so many other challenges like people forget about
these because it's like the surv the Survivor bias but there was a whole moment when people were saying that Google was going to be uh like eaten like much in the way that Craigslist was by Vertical Search so the idea that like Yelp was going to be Google for restaurants and that was going to take that was going to reduce the size of
Google's market but over time Google just kind of destroyed Yelp and destroyed everything else and so maybe he truly believes I don't know if I believe it but but maybe he truly believes that like things are going perfectly and and I don't need to change anything there because like Google is succeeding in its mission of organizing
the world's information I mean Gemini is doing great on evals they're doing great on capex they're building things out they have tpus meanwhile though somebody I think it was scy was making the Google AI repeatedly hallucinate this morning by just all all he had to do was type in uh Sam bankman freed UC uh uh SF and it would like
hallucinate that he had gone there or you just like add the name of a college at the end and it would hallucinate that the person you were typing went to that school um which kind of makes sense that Google like like some something in the in the in the product is basically saying that when people Google this they
are expecting this outcome right even if it's false yeah I feel like I mean I feel like the Google DNA for correcting those types of things is pretty strong do you know the story of how Google developed I think it was like it's it's autocomplete or like spell check or something they realized that that if you just look through the massive Google
data set of like I mean there's like billions of searches happening all the time uh when someone when someone searches for something and they don't get what they want they almost always just correct it themselves and so when they when they Tye when they you know mistype something or they or they enter a fact that's
incorrect they will often correct it on the second search so you can just look at like this person search for you know well how did Joe weisenthal spell unemployment with a kloy unemployment and then the next search in immediately after will be unemployment spelled correctly and then and then they can just bake that in and you can look
across the entire data set and just assemble like this amazing autocomplete autofill um like like prediction algorithm and they should be able to do that with all the AI queries that they're getting because they have to be getting a lot because they have good distribution so I don't know it's interesting though yeah
I mean overall the thing with Google is is you it seemingly um you know many of their most talented Builders continue to just spin out and start new companies and when you have the ability to go out and raise $100 million basically you know while still in stealth without any type of product um the the the uh I'm there's clearly a lot of appetite to do
that yeah I mean this is are de mind they're lighted we we can ask um Michael from from light speed is coming on the show on Tuesday and uh we can talk about how light speed even sets up their sort of in in uh investment team specifically around these different Investments because they obviously are big investors in anthropic y uh
reflection AI this new company out of Deep Mind is you know going to be competing directly or indirectly uh with anthropic I have to imagine maybe they're going to be using um CL in some way but it's hard to really say at this point and many of these companies on a long enough not even on a medium-term uh time Horizon are going to be directly
competitive right so it is interesting that so few VCS it feels like so many so few VC firms have really said hey we have our bet and we're happy and we're like sticking with it yeah like almost every VC firms been like well like maybe I'll get two you know they're like four to five feels like right four to is really like the write a number of like
of like Foundation model companies that directly compete with each other and hate each other it's very funny uh but I mean I don't I don't know I mean I guess there are plenty of firms that have figured that have that strategy and they're open about it uh I know plenty of seed funds will say like look like we we just we
we're going to invest in a lot of companies at the early stage you guys are going to Pivot we love you we'll support you but like we're not going to play that is this competitive game at seed stage because it's just impossible y when we're writing so many checks and so many people are like pivoting around
and stuff uh but if you're like taking board seats and like really deeply invested uh I mean at the same time you know uh Mark Zuckerberg or Mark andreon was on the board of Facebook they invested in the Instagram competitor what what was that called hipstamatic I think they invested in that and I think they also invested in they also invested
in Instagram and dreon did because but they couldn't write a huge check I believe because they were invested in Hip static but both of those companies were competitive with Facebook which they also had a big slice in so I don't know the whole competitive things triky just got to make money yeah at the end of the day I've never seen a a VC that
was invested in two companies actually have a tangible impact on one of them winning over the other one yeah like I would say that overall I think Founders do have to be um wary that investors do clearly pick favorites internally but they are they do have generally a very good job of not expressing that or showing that publicly
right it's not like uh they're going out and saying um you know we uh if you're an angel investor it's much easier to get conflicted right because uh you're not taking huge positions in companies you're generally just wanting to back great teams and people that you like and sometimes two people that you like
decide to work on very similar problem areas right or they pivot into that area and so um overall I've never I I personally have never seen an investor you know materially damage a company because they were invested in one or the other if anything if anything investors just want to see all their companies do well 100% and markets are big enough
that um and and there's very rarely like some sort of like secret that a company has that doesn't become obvious like the the classic uh concern from a Founders like oh I don't want my competitors to know that this acquisition channel is like working really well but any anybody that's competing them that's halfway
decent is going to figure out where they're spending money quickly and you know leverage that channel themselves and so it's not sort of like a real concern um another one is is supply chain stuff I don't know I don't want my competitor figuring out totally how I get this product or service at this price y um and uh again that information
will come out over time right because usually the supplier will just be yapping like oh we work with this company you know and like trying to find other customers so uh all these things uh at best you have sort of like a momentary gap between when your competitor figures out um uh what you're doing how you're doing it Etc and you
can leverage that but usually it's not VC just sort of like forwarding you know an investor update orever it also it also matters the the carry structure at these funds because I mean Benchmark has an equal partnership so there's not going to be as much like infighting between the partners but some funds have like very specific deal by deal carry y
such that if you're invested in two different companies The Firm cares a lot less about the winner but the individual Partners could be like yeah we're technically in two different companies that are competitive but as a partner that only has major carry in one like I really don't care about that other one or I actually want that other one to
fail almost firms like light speed that are making Investments you know broadly in the category are setting up you know very clear sort of firewalls right yeah I actually don't know about the the carry structure at most funds it's kind of hard to figure out it's mostly just like lore to wait for a newcomer to to
scoop it yeah even even that like it just doesn't leak out really it's it's pretty pretty rare only Benchmark has really like made it part of their like marketing I think uh anyway should we move to some uh breaking news from David senra Founders podcast dropped two episodes at the same time we talk to him about this serious
podcasting serious podcasting you know David you know they say you should never podcast weekly you should only podcast strongly and he is a strong podcaster a strong podcaster he also doesn't have a fixed publishing schedule which is cool he releases episodes when he finds them that they're ready y uh I'm excited to listen to this one from uh just released
or there's two from Michael Ovitz who is Michael Ovitz is a fantastic book I read it uh when I was I think in college or just uh just graduated and then I had the chance to meet Michael Ovitz in uh 2021 uh my buddy uh rompon uh had me over uh with with Michael at Michael's house in La um one of probably the single coolest property
that I've ever been on in my entire life anywhere globally uh truly a one ofone house and he's got fantastic taste in uh in all things uh cars watches and art uh did he talk about his uh history with CIA at all creative artists agency I was just impressed with Oz's ability to understand exactly our Playbook with
party round which we were building you know party around at the time so he immediately um he immediately you know understood the opportunity and and it was just uh despite having at that point already been out of CIA he just uh and and most focused on investing um he's one of those guys that will just be doing very significant deals um for his
uh for his entire life so uh excited to dive into this one and you know one of the best things about these particular Founders episodes what's that they open with ramp ads right away right away as soon as you as soon as you click that in your RSS feed David senra is going to be dropping he's one of the best ad Smiths
of all time he gives you a run for your money he is and you know he makes it clear time is money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place and so we love David and we love that he's also partnered with ramp also promoting ramp and I got to give a
shout out to Logan brand he posted this morning at 5:40 a.m. he said who's putting up numbers like TBN tvpn in the battle for ear share it's hard to compete with the with the brothers when they just love it more # ramp that's true uh we love what we do and uh we feel very lucky to be able to do it every single day it was great well we
got three minutes until will manius is calling in uh let's yeah we can quickly cover this post from from Rex uh Salisbury so he said AMX is losing market share to companies like ramp that have a better product their answer bu an expense management company for 600 million built by the founder of Concur
and his son wonder how that will work out and and so Center I had never heard of when I mean it seems like it worked out really well because the the founder got $600 million yeah yeah they just personally wired him 600 and that was it yeah I mean starting a business with your dad and then quickly selling it to a legacy incumbent goated
goated um congratulations on the deal uh good look but Ram's gonna be you yeah I mean the challenge here is this does not I don't I I never had the ability to or or the opportunity to use Center uh but it's hard to actually feel like this is that that this is suddenly going to make amx's product uh competitive with ramp
or Alternatives um and you know because the issue is Center clearly didn't have penetration within the sort of like high grow market and obviously you know it's possible that they serve a lot of midmarket companies but um and so it goes into the big organization it kind of like languish does I saw some other posts about how you know is this a
business acquisition like are they buying it for the you know customer base and cash flows is this a product acquisition like is this going to make um mx's product uh more robust or is it basically an aqua hire uh feels you know way too expensive for an aqua hire but the thing I like about this I like to see m&a getting done uh Center had
raised a series uh C of $30 million yeah uh back in 20123 uh so good to uh get some liquidity for the founders the employees and the investors I do feel like you know AMX is like bleeding cash they're spending 600 million on this thing if they really want to compete they should get on ramp yeah because they need to
control expenses and they need to save time and money to really compete and so AMX exex if you're the CFO of AMX I'm sure you're listening uh you should sign up for ramp check it out check it out tell them the technology brother sent you tell them the techy um anyway uh I'm excited to have will this perfect timing this is exactly
how I wanted to time it up we have two posts that were coming in uh I believe Will's here in the chat let's bring him in can we hear him will how you doing welcome hey how are you guys doing to tbp there he is uh you're a little out of frame there but let's see if there we go there we go great you got me you're perfect uh right away uh I got to give
you credit for something important which is introducing John and I you uh you did it thank you for the 70% equity in the technology Brothers I was really excited to Tender that in this most recent round really proud of what you guys have done uh no you had amazing um insight and uh you know taste you you I remember you
the intro was basically like you guys are the only two people I like in LA you should meet something like that so glad tpg could buy all of my equity in this beautiful brand in this last round at 200 times forward yes yeah yeah yeah um it's amazing to have you on uh you've been on the show many times before uh as a poster as a poster first time as a
guest and uh yeah it's uh we're looking forward to having you as a regular yeah so I want to get your reaction to the this post from from Aya she says going for aimless walks is one of the worst things give me a coffee shop a bookstore a friend's house I will walk eight miles no problem but around the block are you insane why
would you want each step to be meaningless your outdoor time dumped into an empty void and I feel like you've had a couple bangers about uh about walking I have one here from you I've met many people who turn their lives around by walking around aimlessly for a couple hours a day what's your take on walking would you recommend it
to the next generation of wil mantises yeah I think you got to walk like it's the only way to get comfortable with yourself you're sitting alone you're silent you're not staring at a wall you're moving I think aa's life might be meaningfully different if she's hitting you know 20K 30k 40 steps 40K steps a day really the difference between you
know boys and men happen in between that 10,000 and 20,000 step a day goal so for Ali prescribe you know 50,000 steps that'd be a good start did you actually put up 20K yesterday like are you on are you in that tier I feel like getting to 10K no-brainer but yeah what do you actually recommend no but but to be clear getting to 10K is extremely
difficult it's very our lifestyle now which is show up to our building we're going to get treadmills so we're going to be walking while we do the show do you think that's a do you think that's a a suitable substitute for actually walking outside or should we just have a film crew with close activity you got to
be outside you got only counts worthless not good for your soul so you think we should have like a you know TV Camera production trailer following us while we shoot the show while we're walking around yeah I don't see a reason why this desk can't be on Wheels moving with you like this show should be happening in Loop Central Park all day that makes
sense yes yeah uh how is New York these days beautiful spring here yeah already the the issue with New York is a 20K steps a day in the winter is like deadly right like you just can't do it but in the summer like you can hit 40,000 step days into trouble right yeah yeah 40K days I mean last time I was there you
actually the meme worked on me and I walked all the way from I don't know uptown to downtown and back and it was fantastic and it took like hours and hours and hours it but doing the loop of Manhattan is like a great once a year tradition or whatever walk all the way down to the loop like that's that's the perfect day in the city yeah talk to us
about Hobbies uh you've got one that we're particularly interested in well he won an award for it yeah he's an award-winning awardwinning uh model boat Enthusiast yeah yeah I mean I think like the best hobbies in the world are the ones where the average participant like 85 years old and post economic and I'm a
proud member of Central Park Model yach Club selling you know comically small and large model buts really hard to get out on the water in New York and it's much easier to get on the water in Central Park you know you can sail around remote control go quite fast win some races it's a good time uh is that a model boat right behind you is that the
sail of a boat six six six feet of model boat right behind me my office has been relegated to uh to storage um talk about the rise of Christianity in Tech I think you're you're attracting like a a greater rise in Christianity in the west right like I think we tried this kind of post-religious thing through the ' 80s 90s 2000s and it just
seemed like it it led to Universal depression I mean particularly in Tech Trey Stevens leading the way there TR Michelle right on the west coast but I also think in New York there's incredible young Christian Movement happening like Church of the city of New York is baptizing you know like a couple million people a week at this point it's
incredible how quickly this is going the question is how do you turn this into a durable movement that lasts over time slightly worried that this going to be like a five-year wave going to be trendy going to fade out Christianity is the most important thing that's ever happened to me I don't know how we fade
that out over 20 years but feels like a relatively important thing to focus on are you worried about uh kind of Christianity becoming a lar or cultural Christianity being a substitute like yeah this this like feels like the issue right like even when you go to service in San Francisco it does feel a little bit like this is like a networking event
right like why am I here for services and also pitching my startup right it seems like it's good that there's like an elite you know an elite Christianity that you know Elite somewhat lead cultural taste here that seems good but the fact that we're treating it somewhat like a golf club is a little concerning I do think the lar like all love to the
gundo burough but the the things that come Downstream of that feel feel not particularly great got that makes sense um what where what which companies uh specifically in the private markets are uh benefiting most from the sort of from AI within Healthcare what what companies are you excited about I'm sure you get
pitched uh pretty much every company in the space if they're not pitching you uh what are they even doing what what areas do you think are are actually getting um maybe not uh you know I I would say like consumer adoption but like real Enterprise adoption you obviously worked in this in this problem space for for
quite a long time yeah I mean the the the take I have here is that Legacy Healthcare companies are actually going to be the winners during this wave I think as you see kind of AI adoption happen in healthcare you're to see widgets get adopted right doctors requesting ambient scribes you see big companies like a bridge coming out of
that but ultimately ambient scribes are the front door to the electronic medical record system they're certainly not the entire Suite of software that a physician might use and unlike the world we're used to in Tech the person who purchases software and the person that uses software in healthcare are not the same person right Physicians are using
it Hospital admins procuring it there's a big divide there which means they have different Computing priorities I am radically more excited by the opportunity of big Legacy Healthcare software businesses taking modern AI Innovation installing it onto their user base and scaling that out than I am any kind of Novel net new startup like I
think we will see a thousand kind of AI enabled executive fiscal startups happen over the next six months I don't think any of them are going to last I think we'll see a thousand pill Mills I will spin up over the next six months I think they're all going to jail right Healthcare is just not a place that reward this kind of net new novel
distribution plays but I do think Legacy distribution and Healthcare is the most underpriced asset in the world right now and if you can take that plug AI on top of it very interesting outcomes do you think there's Alpha in being you know a young cracked AI engineer implementor but instead of starting a company going
to work for one of those Legacy companies working your way up becoming the CEO yeah tremendous Alpha I mean if you think about like how big like install base is the most underpriced thing in software right now I think everyone's used to seeing these companies go you know Z to 100 and then you know probably back down to zero
right this is Geremy thing the iron Condor law or whatever right but I think there is like something really underappreciated about a company that has had like you know 140 million in reoccurring Revenue over decades yeah like that's switching cost that install cost that velocity and the ability to Pilot software on top of that install
base at scale it's just something you can't beat like I don't think you can do that from that new startup that trust that brand that installed that's pretty cool do you think any of the bigger VC funds maybe going public will have the money to buy into that and then drop AI on top of it hard to know I mean I think
a lot of this is ground up adoption like I work at a large you know publicly traded EMR right now and we're certainly seeing AI happen in every aspect of our product Suite but it's it's really a matter of making these tools accessible right and I think as you see a commodification happen at the model layer right maybe open AI is not worth
$140 billion or whatever when you can sell llama and run them locally and build these product features that upskill software engineers in these companies and like very smart people go and work for them I think the outcomes will just be better yeah uh do you have any insight into why SBF is getting uh to podcast from uh
jail because John posted about this yesterday which was a good line with if if you can now tweet and podcast from jail is that not sort of putting out a signal what is the punishment yeah time pulled off your sentence right like this feel like punishment yeah exactly uh yeah what's your take on that broadly uh you always uh at least within
the group chats you you always have good takes here I I just think SPF is you know this incredible fixture I will be shocked to see if he serves this whole sentence yeah he has like very strong proof that if you donate enough money to the right people you can kind of bend the world around you I sincerely hope he stays in jail for a very long amount of
time interesting uh can you tell us uh do you have any good an anonymized you don't need to name names but good stories of of of frauds or or malfeasant in the startup or financial world that you think might be uh illustrative or educational for the listeners I mean I think like I have a great tweet about this falc of the deep Tech fraud
Playbook of how to build you know a billion dollar company without shipping any technology and I think we're seeing some incredible Innovations happen in the Deep tech for AUD Arena right now where we have companies that are raising you know hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that uh does not exist will never exist and uh is plainly
Impossible on the face of it based on you know a basic and rudimentary understanding of physics has that happened for years though I mean that's happened for years with like cylindra Theos like this this Playbook seems to be repeating itself forever is there yeah but I feel like we're getting like incredibly tested you know playbooks
right the acquisition of mass amounts of La based real estate right arm tattoos from the CEOs sick biceps like this is just like fundamental Innovations on the art that we haven't seen in a long amount of time got it got it well said uh will you are are you 27 Now 26 26 uh you've uh come of age in a kangaroo Market you've played it very
well the Kangaroo Market for those that don't know we talked about this on the show yesterday you know has historically you had bull markets where things go up bare markets where things go down kangaroo markets you're just sort of like bouncing all over the place what's your general read in my view we've seen
more top signals in the last three months than any point in my uh adult life uh what's is there any more gas in the tank are we are we in a sort of like Tech uh Tech super cycle or is it just down only from here on out I think we got a couple more 10xs left to go I think we got the ceilings far from where we're at now I just think we have a
couple you know 10x sell Downs on the way too it just feels like the rate of you know up down up down is only going to increase fragility in the Market's going to Skyrocket too right as you see like billions of dollars in Venture chasing you know clawed plugins that you know write some basic code for you we
don't understand how any of the stuff works fragility is going to go up Market's going to cycle a bunch Mega cycle feels crazy it just feels like if you're not making money along that path I don't know what you're doing what are your thoughts on Leverage right now I I there right two great jery gon idea two kinds of guys in the world right
cash Chads leverage Kings right I am a cash Chad I run my accounts net cash I've never had leverage in my life no credit cards debit cards only right there are certainly guys that live on The Leverage hierarchy are able to run that not my playbook two different kinds of people in the world interesting that makes sense uh you just
advice for young people advice for young people don't take out credit cards no credit card that yeah okay bu byy comically large model boats they're a very good store of value I got another one Speaking of young people do you think there's an opportunity to go uh Downstream of the teal fellowship and offer funds to
middle schoolers to uh drop out of Middle School to pursue uh deep Tech hard tech impa think about this with ramp employees right like we find every 14-year-old that works at ramp right we find everyone that Zack Zack Frankle has recruited from from local Bay are in middle schools and we give them a million dollars to start an expense tax
start off I I feel like that is just like clear Alpha in the market right now we need to go younger we need to go into the benches of ramp yeah to the benches of ramp the benches the benches from the benches to the trenches there you go that's where we need to go uh what are you uh what are you reading these days I
know you've got uh rare books and and manuscripts maybe some of them you can't talk about but uh what's top of mine I am working on republishing an amazing book that I cannot say the title of but it's a history of political corruption in Louisiana in the 1960s it is you know so good that the author that wrote it was shot 14 times in the chest with a
Shotgun by the subject of the book that's how you know you're writing something important that's how you know you're writing something good I recently purchased the rights to that that should be coming at some point in the next two to seven years soon as I figure out how to actually publish this thing um but really focused on political history
right now I think there's a huge amount of alpha left there what about a uh what about a book that's already in publish or already in print uh best thing I read recently was a Brent bore recommendation that I'm scrolling through my Amazon trying to find the name of okay oh another good one Santa Monica partner's letters letters on
small cap investing kind of a classic of the genre um on finding undervalued businesses traded on very weird and esoteric markets yeah for sure uh talk to us about the transition from uh you know semi liquid uh startup founder to uh much more liquid post exit founder are you uh have you been focused on
getting a liquid Again by making a high volume of of startup Investments are you uh more interested been focused on getting a liquid by buying very large model boats I think this is kind of where the Market's going I think it is it is clearly an underpriced asset and I'm moving size in the model Boone industry right now are you looking at
any uh startups that might act as like marketplaces for model boats you know we're partner liquidity is a bad thing you never want to Mark to Market you never want to be able to liquidate assets ideally the perfect asset is impossible to liquidate and impossible to Mark right it's just like a black hole you put money into yeah and this
model boat I have my eye on built from wood uh from Henry Kissinger's desk in the West Wing um just it's a perfect asset it's impossible to Mark cool impossible to Mark awesome uh well it's been great having you you guys any uh we look forward to as uh the cycle you know continues to uh you know make progress and unravel we'd love to
have you back on the show to uh to discuss good to have you guys excited to collect my equity on this Enterprise yep yes you deserve it you deserve it you worked hard for it yeah you did thanks have a great Friday bye what a guy what a character yeah I mean the character on X is an very authentic representation of
of will um that uh that's always refreshing when you meet somebody that you sort of know online or that has a sort of online Persona the online Persona is uh you know exactly the same as the offline Persona he had some riff a while back about like uh VC ghost writers making like like $700,000 a year or something and it like threw all the
VCS into it into like a complete frenzy because they're like wait are people doing this like should I be spending this much money on my Ghost Rider yeah and he fantastic way to manifest these things I would I would really love to know if there was any truly exceptional posters that were just 100% ghost written because ghost writing is pretty
easy to track um when it's when it's sort of like mid uh posting oh totally totally yeah every everyone can buy like the the yeah the mid the the default just kind of like the threads the the the the the the current thing memes all of those are very monetized but truly inspired bangers uh very very difficult for
example pavl asaru hav posts I've got two and only two hiring criteria one do you have that dog in you two are you nice with it not put that we got to put that in Banger archive not ghost written I think I think it actually has been on Banger archive I think that's where I found this um but uh yeah when we ran into P he said the nicest thing anyone
could possibly say about your posts and he was like do you guys write those yeah because he was like you guys like like I love the account well we specifically decided to turn it on yeah because we realized we were covering the top posters in the world we had to prove that we could compete totally totally you got to be in the
arena you got to be in the arena yeah otherwise you won't be respected um let's cover some posts uh Alexis should be joining any second okay so YC Paul Graham yeah Paul Graham says it will be y combinator's 20th birthday in four days I'm pleased to uh I'm pleased by how young YC still feels as an organization it would be dangerous
for YC to become too established since YC is training startups it has to remain startup is itself but it requires a constant effort to stay that way we talked to Gary tan yesterday about that and uh it's yeah it it's it's so interesting because it'd be so easy for YC to scale up and become just a massive asset manager um but of course it would
lose a lot of what makes it special yep and I think Gary is uh yeah Reinventing uh what do they call it like refounding the company when you take over like he needs to make aggressive changes and so people see those and they're like oh like you know AI is writing all the code or they're doing defense Tech now it's like no change
would have been death yep he has to take risks and then some of those will be rolled back some of them will be successful but you only get power lot outcomes when you're when you're testing lots of like really high variant stuff yeah and the uh YC is in a situation where they are in a highly competitive environment right there's so many
alternatives to YC's Capital you can go raise if you're a exceptional founder you could go and raise from the cison brothers from uh the Airbnb Founders I mean I I truly think the the biggest change was that when YC started it was it was $177,000 and then it's scaled up and now it's 500 but Sand Hill Road VC firms
their doors were closed to Stanford new grads which is Unthinkable now every single Stanford nrad can easily get a meeting at a sandill Road Venture Capital firm that is completely ready to write a 500K check yep and so all of a sudden what YC is is not just hey we're willing to take a shot on a kid with a $20,000 check and see what they do um
like the Airbnb guys could not have gotten funded directly like they like they were not in there's some there's some iconic pass emails out of the original where where people like like clearly weren't taking it seriously weren't taking meeting it used to be if you wanted to start an uh an if you wanted to start a company in Tech that
meant you're going to build a website and building a website required racking servers and buying Hardware but of course the cloud computing era happened right as YC started and so all of a sudden there was a big uh opportunity to do a whole lot more with a lot less it's all all the AI it's interesting it's like it's like
could they go back to 18K because uh you know like they're giving 500 it work yeah like like like uh maybe uh you know like I'm I'm actually you know I'm excited I mean I love that that you know the YC Founders get 500k and they can go and do stuff and I think it's great but um I think it's interesting to to to I'm I'm very
interested in following what happens with pmf or die because they're spending a lot less they're spending 25k which is very much in like the 2005 the Alexis Ohanian era of YC like it is crazy that they that he built redit with uh yeah 20K to start yeah wild and and you can still do that and maybe you can do it more now because of the the the AI tools
it's not quite as different as like from going from capex to Opex yeah um because it's it's going from uh hiring extra software Engineers to write more code to paying a bill so it's it's so it's not a it's not like a cash flow management change yeah but uh it is interesting uh the Willman itis group chat is is
popping off I assume yeah judging by your face it sure is they're live texting us it's great um I I say I want to pull up this video and watch uh Ben I'm going to send it to you quickly if you can pull it up I want to I want to play the video of the Dig announcement uh that we're going to be discussing with Alexis while yeah let's
play that Jason carman's texting me those live numbers look good baby uh I haven't checked them but thank you Jason I'm glad that you're looking at my stats so that I know uh I'm sure we'll R after what's the book uh that that raboy recommends score takes care of itself yeah yeah the podcast downloads take
care of itself yeah yeah I mean Jason fully believes that like he just goes and makes something like brilliant for like months and months and months and yeah goes viral every time because he's not like over over engineering it uh anyway Ben let's kick it over to the Alexis Ohanian video announcement so what we've got today is dig.com it's
with two G's di.com now give the power back to the people dig rewrites the internet's front [Music] page Tech darling dig skyrockets with millions of loyal start welcome to the Kevin like none of those images of Kevin rose on all the different you know magazine cover no I was pre I was post sure I visited it our perspective on the world has
shifted a lot you don't want to live in the past but now we actually have the technology to make better healthier community experiences this is a team up I never would have imagined 20 years ago this is so K it makes sense that you would be relaunching dick.com as its original founder but teaming up with Alexis Co oh
good shot oh that's a great shot I love it whoever shot this is for a long time and rightfully so like I'm excited for this is like a media project like a story you know I I I don't know if if I've been like oh I really need dig right now but I'm I'm down I think this is one of those things where the asset had been been basically
languishing yeah yeah and I remember I advertised on dig at some point I think in 2018 2019 um and it was it was seemingly like the the content quality was down dramatically yeah and so trying to return it to its former glory is a worthy undertaking and then the other news from Alexis this week we're basically just going to start covering
it and we'll get some at the very least we'll get some good backstory um oh Alexis just tweeted that he's coming on in five I guess the uh I guess the audience uh guilt tripped in guilt tripped him in thank you Brothers um thank you everyone tweet cover the Alex uh Tik Tok announcement and then with
him we can um yeah this is so funny I mean we need a we need a board of like people that have talked about buying Tik Tok add it to the list um my my true and and Hardline stance is I will support literally any American buying Tik Tok I don't care if you have $5 if you say you're going to buy Tik Tok you have my support yep because I'm
I'm there for it so we magic is real we got at tvpn on Tik Tok and I I think we're GNA just post a video up there that says like posting this video every day until an American owns Tik Tok we're not really willing to to sort of invest in building an audience on the on the on the Chinese platform yeah uh so I'll read this time article it says Reddit
co-founder Alexis henan has joined billionaire Frank mccort's bid to acquire Tik Tok uh mccort's internet advocacy organization project Liberty announced this week that Ohanian uh uh an investor married to tennis star Serena Williams had joined a Consortium called The People's bid for Tik Tok uh Alexis had posted I'm
officially now one of the people trying to buy Tik Tok us and bring it on chain Ohanian said in a series of posts made on X uh project Liberty says it will provide more uh users more control over their online data if successful in its bid project Liberty said the technology will serve as the backbone of the reason designed Tik Tok ensuring that privacy
security and digital Independence are no longer optional but foundational when asked by an ex-user on Monday what he would call Tik Tok if he purchased it uh Ohanian said Tik Tok Freedom Edition amazing um uh under a federal bill passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by President Joe Biden last year Tik Tok
was required to cut ties for a china-based parent company bite dance or face a ban by January 19th and uh as our audience knows Trump extended the deadline for Tik Tok to find new ownership until early April so we're really coming down to the line here uh and uh mccort has a consorti which includes Shark Tank Stars Kevin oy we
got to get Kevin on the show to talk about that um he's got to get Trump's attention I know Alexis isn't huge Trump supporter or anything but he's got to get the attention of the president y if he wants to get this deal done I say he goes and a bunch of billboards outside of mar Lago that is a play and you know how where you would do it add quick add
quick and you know what add quick oh yeah oh yeah I'm thinking what you're thinking you're thinking what I'm thinking I'm thinking what you're thinking add quick uh raise their uh Alexis is a big backer of adquick and Alexis is joining the chat so uh we'll bring him in and we'll do an ad Qui ad read adquick is out of home advertising
Made Easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ading across the globe let's go welcome to the stream Alexis thank you for being here how you doing gentlemen sorry I you're all good
was running late from the pediatrician not not for me yeah uh but for my youngest hey of course we understand we have kids business dads too thank you for leading the important Family First always always I'm sorry it was it was a tough one too because it was one of those immunization days and I'm the parent who does the pain doctor visits
my wife does the sort of the mid normal ones that's rough poor lot of hand squeezing so should we start with should we start with Tik Tok or dig yeah there's a few things to talk about aren't there yeah yeah busy week for you I love it I love it uh well we just watched the Dig video announcement and we have to find out who shot that video
for you because the cinematography was fantastic the reveal when they pull s to the side of the of the top and they reveal your face there perfect storytelling movie Magic uh so yeah break it down how' this come come around is this just like a crazy uh group chat idea that then just got out of control and now you're just doing it um gosh how
did it start you know I I had never spoken to Kevin Rose until like five or six years ago no way and and when we started talking we just realized we had so much in common I I I I learned I had in all of that animosity and jealousy a tremendous amount of respect for him that it probably took me a little bit
more maturity to appreciate and we just vibed and then every now and then he would text me and be like hey dude do you think I should buy dig.com and resurrect the thing and I was like yeah sure go for it um in in the way that one supports a friend thinking about a thing uh that seems a little outlandish and a
little crazy but you know it had gone through a few different owners and actually um when it was first on sale I had debated buying it when the company went bankrupt I told Kevin this later I was like I debated actually buying it and then just redirecting it to Reddit yeah yeah like this one last Fu but I'm so happy I didn't do that and and then I
don't know five months ago he was like dude I'm gonna do it and and I would love to do it with you and I said that sounds like a great idea that's amazing that sounds like a fantastic talk about then there you go talk about like the compe the actual competitive Dynam DC between you guys back in the day cuz
looking at like even looking at the video you guys were clearly battling for cover stories on on on magazines and things like that crushing us it wasn't even in my mind I thought it was a battle Yeah uh and this was a sign of being a first-time CEO and frankly being focused on the wrong things in this regard but I was so jealous of the fact
that he was he was the Silicon Valley poster child remember you know we were in the first spatchy combinator which was in Cambridge Massachusetts working out of an apartment in Medford and then Somerville we had raised a total of $72,000 at demo day and you know here was Kevin Rose who was this Tech celebrity who had Millions raised from
True Silicon Valley VCS and and yes was on the covers of magazines was was getting so much press and I felt like I I didn't feel like we were getting a fraction of that press and that coverage and and was very jealous and again I I think focused on the wrong stuff but it just felt like he was an easy he was an
easy target and and look in his defense he was first dig did come first in in our defense and I have the email to prove it we did not know about it when we started Reddit it was about a month into the company we' already launched yeah that we' finally learned about dig so shame on us for not doing enough competitive analysis but they had about
a seven Monon eight-month Head Start and um what can I say we won the long run but now now we both get a second second chance second chance to do it again second chance so so so what are you envisioning for the product have you announced anything or are you ready to think about what will be different I mean I'm sure you don't just want to re
resurrect it exactly as it was maybe for V1 let's say okay the goal for V1 is just get a thing back online that makes people feel nostalgic for dig where where it left off maybe not version four but just before that and then modernizing some of the obvious stuff y um but look this will not be you know the first version that gets out
there is not going to be feature complete with some of the big you know Forum platforms out there but it's going to hit the Nostalgia notes and then you know some of the stuff we've talked about publicly is and this is what was going on in the in the chat which was you know technology it's cliche but in the last couple of years we've all had
our brains melted by what software can do um and AI in particular and just even simply some of these these foundational uh large language models are capable of doing some really dope stuff that if you were building a text-based forum software today and you built it from first principles and you said okay well
what are the most important parts of this platform for the most valuable users you know it's it's the less than 1% of your user base that's actually doing the heaviest lifting of Community Management and and so how do you start there by saying how do we build the best tools using AI so that you don't spend your job being a janitor having to go
through an inbox of waiting through things that are violations of community Norms or just violations of the terms and actually you know and and if you talked to enough of these folks and Kevin slightly ran ads uh polling thousands of them to just say what are the things you wish you had what are the things that should exist and it turns
out you know even again using today's technology you can solve a lot of those problems out the gate so that as say a volunteer community manager you're now spending the bulk of your time not doing janitor work but actually like doing the fun part of community building right coming up with cool contests you know
highlighting memes and and great submissions from the community and uh and so that that's what I would expect to come pretty quickly first version yeah do you think that X you know killing links uh you know we all kind of understand that it that it probably makes sense for X as a business right but it's disappointing as a user is that
part of what's creating an opportunity for dig uh to come back and and potentially Thrive it's you know had not thought of that it is so annoying that we all have to put it in the second tweet but but to your point it does make sense um from their standpoint look at at the end of the day if you build a community platform well enough I'd
imagine you know at least a majority more than half of the content that will be talked about will be stuff from the community right at Reddit they were self-posts and that was just an invention by some random redditor who guessed how to sort of hack and make self-referential links but but I do think there is an opening as you as you
mention it yeah there there is an opening for like more traditional just link sharing like here is some cool thing on the internet go go take a look and you know what actually as I'm thinking about it live the other wild Trend you've seen this guy levels who's building who code vibing the flight simulator yeah like we have not fully
processed apps as content I love it yeah and that that might be because right how does one get to that app well it's going to have to be a URL at least for the time being and so maybe that's maybe that's the other secular shift we're seeing is that people are going to be spinning up entire apps as content that
we'll obviously need a place to get to and and links yeah uh related to that uh obviously Beach heads are super important when you're building a platform that can kind of anyone could use it Reddit now has reddits for all sorts of different communities uh what was the first Beach head for Reddit and how are you thinking about early Beach
heads that could be interesting communities for dig to kind of latch on to early on I think the Reddit Beach head was Alexis yeah it was just you right kind guys it no I mean it was you were weren't you like the first 20 users like well I mean I mean it in both ways right you were in in defense of that strategy
it was 2005 so you got to understand we had to convince people that you would want to come here to this site this Spartan site and submit a link for other people to vote on but um but we didn't have comments so it wasn't like we were like congratulating one another for our great posts but yes the first months we had a bunch of alt accounts we were
posting under to make it look like there were different people not just nothing over that's my username over and over again posting LS um but then you know again it was also it's hard to learn lessons from because back then it was actually novel and so like the First Community needed to be uh our programming because we started it with a
bunch of other developers as our early adopters and then we realized normies would not want to see like an llang tutorial on the homepage so so we shov we we we created those communities as a way just to basically keep the front page looking a little bit more open to everyone but I do think I think the first Beach head for dig relaunched ends
up being the look I'm 41 almost 42 it's like the it's like the old head Nostalgia for a vibesyoutube stalgia for that so I assume it's going to be a lot of the like older Geeks Who were you know Big Dig fans who love you know video games and comics and uh you know a few other things that I like the idea this just
general idea of the Vintage internet right there's so much demand for vintage broadly in consumer products vintage vintage cars right records Etc Pokemon cards right we got to ask you about ask chromatic I was just playing on my chromatic here before there we go I do actually take this with me everywhere I go um but yeah it makes sense you know
before we get into Tik Tok I wanted to ask you how would you if if you were in control of X as as somebody who built you know a one of the biggest social you know Platforms in the world and and Reddit if you were in control of X how would you control the sort of dynamic where this quote unquote slop content is
what uh this sort of stated vers revealed preference issue right where on X uh people say they want to to learn and get informed but then the videos that actually you know get real engagement are you know uh some type of meme or it's or it's JD Vance H how would you approach it because I think every xuser given at least our corner of
X we Tech native many people are building similar products everybody's got an opinion what's what's yours how would you is X perfect in its current state or do you see ways that uh that you would improve it so full disclosure you know launched a a it's not a television series but a Content series offseason on X in partnership with X I
probably use if you looked at my tracking uh on my apps I'm sure I use x more than any other social media platform today totally so I am why and but why the best question right why because the people and trends that I care most about in our little insular world like that's where the news is made that's where in order
to do my job well that's how I rationalize it to myself as a builder as a tech Builder as an it's work it's a work app I mean it's work no it's obviously not but when I'm doom scrolling I I comfort myself saying like no actually this is helping me identify Trends and things totally and and I know that it could be better and it
probably I think it's more fundamental and if you could apply this in different ways to I think Instagram has its version of it Tik Tok has its version of it the the algorithm rewards the thing that pushes to uh extremes because it gets it generates outrage and people love gaming systems especially when those systems mean more attention and
more money and so you see it across all these Platforms in some some places it's a little bit more benign because YouTube is longer form content you know it doesn't feel as aggressive but there's definitely a flavor of it there yep um but I think as long as what you're optimizing for is me opening my phone and you as the developer or head of
product try trying to get me to spend as much time as possible you're going to eventually end up with some version of the algo feeding you more of the stuff that gets more of the attention and the outrage and whatever which just feeds more I think Community platforms have the best shot that I've seen because
what you're signing up for there truly is the intent of I like this community right when a community website gets to scale and I'll never forget so I started rgaming and to this day the culture of r/ gaming is a reflection of me an old gamer because what I was talking about r/ gaming was more nostalgic even back
then in 2005 than what was the new game and at some point The Gaming Community on Reddit said listen old man we want to know about new titles so we're going to create r/ games which is much more about new releases and and you could see a cultural Rift in something that seemed pretty obvious but like or or maybe subtle uh but to the people in it was
really important so I think if you're subscribing to based on community you're coming in with a different set of expectations and so you have a chance to build something that doesn't necessarily lead to the can you make a thing that'll piss as many people off as possible which is what Twitter does so well and
I've got I've got friends who who I think kind of make a living ship posting and it's an incredible art form and and I have to commend them on it but like it's a sympt the the reason that exists and is so so viable is it's a symptom of the platform just rewarding you know what gets you to you know stay in the app for longer yeah that makes sense
talk I mean we got to hear about we got to hear about the Tik Tok bid uh there needs to be a decision made by by April you're entering the mix we love to see it uh break down kind of like your guys's angle what you want to do with the platform postacquisition and and maybe some of the other people involved sure well look I you know Frank mccort's
the big dog here he he called me up and I was like hey I'd love to get you involved and and he already had his instincts were around building something on Shane you know using this and the massive user base of Tik Tok to you know basically overnight not literally but overnight bring a bunch of people into this world where they now actually
control like say their reputation online to a certain extent because they they have the the sort of currency they've created there with that account and that identity um look it seems like Elon even replied to my tweet saying there are more people bidding on Tik Tok than not at this point and I was touche that's right there's a lot of people why not I
support them all to be clear I support them all I want not doing it yet I don't care if you have five if you have five trillion dollars I if you're an American I support you buying Tik Tok well that's exactly and that that was my that was my reply as long as it ends up outside of the control of the Chinese Communist
party great it's a win like obviously i' I'd rather us win but any of those options that's not Chinese controlled as a win and I've I've been outspoken about this for years and it is what it is um but I do think there's something really interesting about you know we're at this point where and look I've been a day one
seated coinbase in 2012 like eth pre-sale like I I have I've wanted to believe in a version of this future for a long time and right now you've got amazing CEOs like Brian Armstrong who've brought us so far so far into making it even just a standard and and a store of value and I'm Bitcoin really specifically but like can we get
to that next point where we have a technology that just sort of underpins a lot of people's lives casually and and again no one's going to use any of these apps because of the technology they're going to use it because of what it does for them and you either spend years building it up and you know everyone's
got a version of it everyone's doing but nothing's really broken through or come close yet this is such a fun hack to getting mass mass adoption for this technology that was the thing that was most interesting to me and you know I wouldn't be surprised if it look if it did come to fruition you know there's still lots of things to figure out and
solve for um but there are enough bright Minds who are already in my inbox uh who are very excited on the on the crypto front uh to lend their axes so uh so look I again as long as it ends up in American hands I'm thrilled um but I'd obviously love for us to take a stab at it and really see what it takes to bring over a bunch of neens to uh the onchain
world that'd be great we have five minutes uh I wanted to know are there any underrated reddits Reddit communities that you think might be worth taking a little tour into like live no no not right now just uh I I whenever IUN do that there's a lot this is our kids watch the show hopefully it's a safe to work one but but every
once in a while I find a Reddit where uh like I got into 3D rendering and there was Reddit on the Houdini for and it was just like these people are the they're the CGI artists who do the the the horses on Game of Thrones and they're just amazing artists and they just know so much more right and I was just like I need to know everything about this and
I'm getting really up to speed even with their memes I learn through osmosis from that and I love when I find a little community that I can just be like Oh I'm not an expert I'm totally tourist but I love that stuff I'm wondering if there's anything that pops up even if it's just like you know nostalgic like I don't
know I see you have a microphone there from Teen oh God I got to remember the URL di.com oh yeah okay there we go that one uh we'll be on there'll be on there I actually have a I have another another question for you um you're a you're like pretty much a pure play consumer internet guy right obviously in the in the in the his in the in the great
history of of your investing career you you've invested all over the place but you seem to be somebody who you know when others sort of you know sour you know especially uh you know it almost became a meme of like it uh consumer internet investing is just so hard that a lot of people just give up we it's very obvious
now that there's a bunch of you know we've seen this uh with you know one of the players that we have in pmf or die has taking multiple consumer apps to like millions of dollars in Revenue in in super short period of Time how do you think about um you know consumer investing now in the age of AI you're sort of in many ways refounding dig uh
but I'm sure you're looking at you know hundreds of deals a month I would imagine um or at least a quarter what's most exciting to you right now now it feels like the the the kind of a moment that that you'd been waiting for similar to crypto but this feels like you know obviously the next wave dude it is
consumers definitely gotten exciting again and look I got weird right I I think the the best uh the the greatest gift that I've had with my investing track record is having a certain amount of freedom from LPS uh and and like 10% of our a is is my own money too which which doesn't hurt but like like you got to think
2020 the year I left Reddit one of the First Investments I made was in a women's soccer team called Angel City starting that team up for it cost a million dollars to buy a franchise back then in the same league today uh an expansion fee like literally just the amount paid to start a team was 110 million um so the valuations gone up
Angel City is now the most valuable women's professional team in the world at just shy of 300 million and literally five years ago that was the craziest idea and I I tweeted the entire grand plan and just said this is an under valid opportunity it's Venture scalable here we go and and so I love being told I'm going to lose all my money and it's
crazy and so I found opportunities to your point in consumer that still you know turns out the business model of a sports team is actually very similar to Reddit but with AI software got exciting again and Shameless plug uh the latest one that we just talked about was called dogee now I am clearly not a fashion
but this team figured out how to make AI avatars I mean look at those pants figured out how to make AI avatars with just a few reference photos actually look I mean I could never yeah it's a wild fit this is this is this is going to be and again it all comes back to us your experience right we spent a year or two seeing oh look at that like we blew
the Turing test out of the water we're seeing all these dope bells and whistles applications and we're just now we're just now starting to see what people can do with that that Tech and it's going to be fun um and I think we got through the first wave of like getrich quick apps notice respect hustle is gonna hustle I
no T no shade but we're now getting into what's what's a consumer app that's not just gonna make you I don't know turn into a piece of cake and get cut in half but what's an app that's going to make a fun social experience and it might just be remixes of old things dig um I know from another old consumer founder that
might hear another one of these types of stories in the next couple weeks maybe it's sou by Southwest and I think you're going to get to see this Rebirth of apps that we all knew that can be demonstrably better now because of this technology and then we'll see some new stuff like dogee that just like this try on app there's a version of that that
has existed and sucked for decades and what it took was a few technological breakthroughs and a great user experience and voila and so yeah it is a great time for Consumer it's a great time for hard tech um I've done few space tech companies now I obviously love Hardware like it's it has never been more fun to do this job and and
again the world does not need more investors so if you hear this and think oh I want to do that when I grow up start a company first it's so much better you'll be so much cooler it's better for society you'll make more money like do that and then come over to the dark side after that's great it we we we see you pop up on uh paparazzi
photos on the world tour what's the next big event you're excited for is there anything on the calendar that you're looking forward to in 2025 my wife was like do you want to go to the Vanity Fair party and I was like no of course not um no I that was the last one I guess I missed out on um if you have a plus two I mean we we'll tag along I you
gota you got to marry up guys that is the secret that's how I did it uh no I there's there's nothing okay I don't know the yeah I I'll just surprise you in fact if it's a true Paparazzi photo I won't even know that it's happening subscribe to Alam stock photos and you can see the latest of what Alexis is up here's here's a good
question I I asked John this yesterday so Starship uh you know uh disintegrated last night uh it's unfortunate but obviously they're iterating quickly how many uh how many successful uh SpaceX you know sort of trips to the Moon you need to see before you're going to get on it yourself John's answer was was three so does JN have kids
I know he's got he's got three I have three kids and a very high risk you have three kids now three kids I know congrats holy this come a long way from the soilent days man I know man it's wild wow oh that's nuts no I would not do that I um Stoke Stoke is my horse in that race as an early investor there and I love Andy I love that team I I'd
say the same thing SpaceX has changed the world we're all in their debt they've opened so many doors for Humanity civilization but I don't need to be in the first million okay I have no interest I not interested now uh suponic plane I told Blake when I sent the wire I was like bro get me a seat on the boom let's go again I don't need to
be the first right let the professionals do that but like that's way more appealing to me because it Spa no I alien and Aliens were my favorite movies as a kid yep and so no good comes from space as far as I'm concerned and that's without even not knowing that Xenomorphs don't really exist no good comes from
that that's why there's a pulse rifle on my wall there we go there we go yeah I mean always stay strap at the pulse rifle anybody that has a man cave like yours is is not in any hurry to leave it is H truly truly a work of art well this was fantastic thanks so much for joining the stream we'll have to have you back
soon you're always welcome I appreciate it one more Shameless plug I want to say and you guys you got to keep me honest on this what was I the first investor to ask if I could invest in this pod yeah you actually were yeah you were and I think and I think it would have been I think it it would have be a THX yeah uh and uh I'm still here guys I'm still
here and you saw you saw the potential you were you were you knew these guys aren't building a podcast they're building Empires an Empire empire the TB vers we appreciate the support for sure You' be you'd be one of our first calls if if we ever did yeah it is so good it's so good for the ecosystem y'all's Vibe is is perfect The
Branding is on point like 10 out of 10 taste you've heard enough people say it it is so true though taste in this era is going to be a hundred times more valuable as intelligence thank God is getting democratized in a commodity and so it's it's an amazing time to have great taste and this is the time be better for what you don't here's our
vision for it since it's very relevant to you we want to give uh uh you know interesting people that are doing big things all the benefits of having their own big podcast with none of the work right because like you don't you don't want to you know you could work on spend all this time making a podcast and maybe
even put sponsors on it make a million dollars a year it's not going to change your life uh what if you could just come on tvpn anytime you had big news because that is what we're setting up the next time you've got news uh I I'd love to have you back on specifically when all the Tik Tok stuff is getting worked out for sure hopefully you win it but
whether or not uh you know I know you'll have some great points we got Sam lesson here it's a party what's going on man what's up Sam how you doing I'm sorry over I was gabbing with these guys hey I was walking some tennis balls I was late but look we got microphones and white hats you're like you're my technology brother I mean teenage engineering
that's the best a subtle way to say I paid too much for my microphone no you paid the exact right amount for Quality there you go there you go what's going on guys Alexis thank you so much thank you for having me all peace guy see you Alexis see uh much uh how you doing today how was tennis you know I'm just I'm only
bummed because I really had this Vision in my head I was GNA come join you guys and we're at tuxedo I just didn't have time today you guys have that iconic photo on your website I think the slow so everybody listening just go to go to slow. it's just it's just the partners the partnership wearing tuxedo yeah great Ben you should uh you should work
on pulling this up but um but no you have a good excuse you were playing tennis uh if you had more if we had more time in the transition there you could have maybe we could have got Serena on for a second to give I'm heading to I'm heading heading to Indian wells in a few hours you guys are indan wells fans we
we actually do nothing but but do this show and hang out with our fames basically fair enough I'm just trying to fit the role of stereotypical venture capitalist for you come from tennis go to tennis yep I like is the the honesty too many Venture capitalists like try to basically uh they're laring like they're not venture capitalist right you know
they they put on like a I advise my friends like don't put up like a fake Zoom background and try to hide the fact that you're in this sort of like $30 million home you know like just just embrace it like Founders want to partner with people people that are very successful right uh so it's just authenticity and I mean we saw this with
the SBF thing like people fake like oh I'm not rich and then you it blows up because he was like complete fraud and the whole like I don't know I I I'm I'm very I'm very short like faking that you're not like successful you're I Am pro honesty and pro authenticity that's what it's about it's not about like the flexing or like showing off it's just
about like just being who you are no I agree there's hopefully You' you've got a full kind of 30 minutes here uh before you head to Indian Wells I feel like there's a ton of stuff to cover I want to give you an opportunity to uh talk about your uh billboard that you guys oh yeah we're very proud of our billboard
this is our first slow outdoor marketing okay so you're cruising North the 101 you're going to see our billboard which you know is a burning pile of money around a castle and the and the tag line is AI is not your mode and it's just like we were just driving on the 101 and every billboard is like AI this AI that and we're like this is just like
piles of money burning on the 101 so we decided to burn a little of our own money to kind of make the opposite point so it' be fun I like having a billboard I think we're g to do more Billboards I love it yeah yeah Billboards are extremely underpriced we're sponsored by a billboard company next time you buy
Billboards go to ad.com and tell them we sent you tell them sent you it Outdoor advertising is the future gentlemen none of this targeted stuff on the internet yeah it can go it can go much more viral it it's a lot of fun talk about uh yeah basically break break down some of the ideas behind the billboard you know we
we've covered every single big AI fund raise this year we've covered the big companies that are trying to roll it out some are doing it better than others uh just today there was a new uh Deep Mind team that spun out and raised at at a $500 million valuation to do oh cheap cheap cheap these aren't typical slow deals but you you have a good
perspective on the market like give us no look we've been pretty consistent on this for for two plus years I mean I wrote a deck in 2013 I'm sorry not 2013 2023 not that long ago um that was kind of about kind of the moment of venture capital what the venture capital and the basic point of it was don't
confuse the fact that llms are powerful technology like there's stuff you going to do with them that are going to be great for all sorts of businesses with the disruption itself being a good business my partner will says this a lot the big guy on the website he's always like just because technology is disruptive doesn't mean that's where the
money is made you have to think about the business model disruption and what's really going on and you know just I think we are in a super cycle of medic Venture Capital Money Lighting on fire in AI right now um because and there's a bunch of structural reasons for it we talked about then it's like LPS have too much money in too big of pockets they
got to figure out where to jam it right um GPS there's no there's no narrative that makes sense but guess what if your LPS are going to pay you to jam money into AI companies you get paid the fees on it with a with a you know a Go Fish card it's not a bad deal right if you're willing to just spend a lot of money and
so but we've just been incredibly short of this now it doesn't mean we don't love companies that are enabled by AI you know I I like what I call AI cherry on top businesses which is a business that fundamentally is great right it's fundamentally but then there's a nonobvious ideally cherry on top right um which is that AI gives it a new
leverage you know I'm working on a new company with um with Joe Lonsdale and their team which is called Merit first and that's an example of company where like actually structurally and sociologically AI does add something new is a type of company that should have always existed it was hard to build before now you can build that stuff is
all great but this like large model fight to zero I mean it's just it's kind of wild to watch to be totally honest uh talk about Facebook's uh just meta's opportunity broadly in AI if you were still working at the company how would you you know do you think they uh our position overall is like they're doing a lot of things right there's been
talk recently about you know having a a standalone you know app which could make sense but it doesn't even feel like they've been that aggressive with sort of productizing it productizing it um well yeah my my view I met an AI is quite simple it's a classic which I love uh heads you win taals you win situation
right um it's the best way to the reason the stock has gone up so much I think of anything is you look as an investor you're looking around you're saying where do I definitely win on AI regardless of how the breaks go and the answer is going to be meta right they unlike Google aren't going to get disrupted in their Core Business on this
they don't have a search business they don't have a lookup business to disrupt they have a ton of Engagement attention and they sell ads and you know what definitely gets better with llms ads the targeting gets better the creative gets better you just win right and so at that point you know the reality is is like I think they're
incredibly well positioned you know people are argue that these numbers are huge they're spending on LL whatever but you got to look at as a percentage of market cap it is a tiny percentage investment right to cover cover their ass right and to make sure that whatever Innovation happens in AI enough of its open source and the funnel is wide
enough that it all ends up backing them they don't get cornered and stuck out in the wilderness right but it's an incredi I think they're an incredibly good place I think they're probably in the best place of any large tech company and I'd say moreover like you know the way I've always thought about this and what I see
is AI unlike prior Innovations like unlike the transition from shrink rack soft Ware to the Internet is just so good for the big companies right it's easy to slot in it commodifies I mean there's like you can't you cannot think of a better extending Innovation for a large company right that already has the
infrastructure and the data center teams and the whole nine yards it's like this is just all upside for them and so I think what you see and low margin basically well unless unless you're apple and somehow you got stuck way out in the wilderness but like they're in you know the Googles the the Amazon the Facebooks I mean metas they're in great
shape and then if you're a tiny company there's just so much leverage all of a sudden that you know there is a lot of cost cutting there's all sorts of things you can do that's cool you just don't want to be in the middle as with most things in life you never want to be in the middle and you know candidly even companies like open AI or should we say
nonprofits like open AI the problem is they're kind of in the middle you know they can't compete with the hyperscalers from just access to Capital perspective if this is a capital game they're going to lose right so do you think and if they're and if it's not a capital game and it's a deep seek open source they're
also going to lose like the key in life is just never be in the middle do you think that uh soft Bank can realistically spend $3 billion on agents with opening eye this year should look all I can tell you this is I I joke it's a joke but it's true one thing we've learned we've been doing slow for 10 years whenever soft Bank buys you sell
right like they are the worst investors in the history of the world right and so it's just like I've watched them Crush so many companies by over capitalizing them by get they're like you know they it's hilarious I love their decks but no it's like it's complete House of Cards House of Cards was it always that way I
M is nuts right every once in a while in his history he's been nuts Enough To Nuts his way into some amazing opportunity that saved his ass right but like you know I mean you can he was the original LOL deck guy remember his unicorn Deck with the unicorns and that he like he's an incredible marketer so why haven't why haven't we seen Masa
taking bigger swings you know in the early stage it seems like moss always comes in late and overpays that's his thing yeah right like a massive infrastructure just put a million dollars into every new company just write tons of seed checks like like is it is it just an infrastructure problem like why they just don't index the entire Seed Market
exactly yeah I mean it's an interesting question I I wonder so historically speaking when big funds try to index the seed Market there are two problems one is someone wakes up does the math and like this doesn't make any sense right like even if you have the million dooll check at seed if you're trying to deploy
billions of dollars like it's just an irrational business model because the the multiples don't make up for the fact you have to move gross dollars right so the best case you're doing at seed then is just marketing right you're like I do seed to Market yeah hey Jess I'm on the technology Brothers podcast you want to say hi yeah come you know my wife
Jessica of course came over theol house hey how you be able to do the show without your team uh your team's coverage we we basically feature your articles you know daily so than I'm grateful congrats on all the success you guys talk town we you want him for no we subscribe to the information I I have to think we're one of the number we have I
hope we're one of the number one referral partners because we we get the paid wall articles and then and then we cover them but we don't cover the full thing you know so we basically are you know pushing people behind the pay wall so it's great we you got to strike a deal so I'll leave you guys but then you
doig referral Revenue your way well no no we're just we're happy to support happy to support um great great to meet oh look at that it's a guest on the guest I Love It of droing well I'm just delivering your mail thanks have fun bye fantastic nice uh okay talk I I want I want more hot takes from you on on kind of all the on all the
hyperscalers so so what's going on with with apple are they just a luxury goods are they the the lvmh of tech are they just going to kind of continue to to make the same products forever uh are they done innovating look here's the reality it's really hard to make phones right and like really hard especially in the modern era it's really
hard to imagine that they're going away anytime soon because of that at the same time you know I don't know if you guys get the um the Apple intelligence summaries of your text but they're like comically badar they literally will tell you the opposite of what the text says right like it is useless right and so I think
it's I think it's valuable in that it's so funny because I'll screenshot them and send them into the group chat and be like really you guys were talking about this or something and that's funny but it's all it's purely accidental humor it's insane right and so I'd actually think that that I would argue that Apple's intelligence um text message product
might be the perfect exhibit for an Anti-Trust case right where you're like you talk about consumer harm right as like the kind of bar for this this is what we're going to get out of a right like it's right it is really funny as I love LS so I'm into it I think it's funny J phone I swear to God Jessica's
phone on their newest iOS update it deleted all somehow like all the contacts and so she now just has phone number like it is comically bad but the problem is on the flip side is like the camera is good and it's hard to make phones right so like I don't um I'm still like and who who no one likes green bubbles right and so the reality
is is like I think we're a long way away from Apple going away but my God are they in a weird place right now right it is unun my point like I just want better Ai and I know that they'll just be able to wait and just dominate the Monopoly and then eventually roll something out yeah like the very basic thesis is is if
lvmh is a luxury goods conglomerate and they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars should the sort of digital Tech equival consumer Tech equivalent of that be worth trillions of dollars like yes like they're not well maybe but look lvmh there was an interesting moment you guys remember I think this is like a few years ago where there was this moment
where lvmh well I guess the CEO of was the richest guy in the world right and somehow like it inverted and like Tech was worth L it was like a crazy inversion you're like wow so the meta story of our society right now is that it's not the innovators that are worth the most The Meta story is that it's like fake luxury signaling that's the
most valuable thing in the world and that was not a good thing that was not a good you contributed to that with uh with with with Facebook right right like Facebook was a huge Catalyst for you know uh Tech becoming the number one source of wealth or no no no luxury spending right because now it wasn't like oh your your watch or your car is
no longer just like you know being seen by your local community but it can be seen by the whole world and you can sort of signal out uh you status yeah it's an interesting it's an interesting social Dynamic right because on one hand I'd argue that Instagram has made it so that the real luxury consumption is experience and travel and being hot
right like all of a sudden like Fitness is cool because like you can say you're hot and being hot's like way more expensive than a watch right and so like actually that's the way like being well rested is the luxury good right um and like so you know kids kids are like the most expensive thing in the world so all
these things that you can like now socially signal as like I'm Rich easily and like those C certainly supersede your Burkin bag like those that's like cheap luxury right um that's like Mass luxury at best and so like there's this weird Dynamics going on now you all on the flip side the reality is is like look I've got I don't know guys
you guys play with the The Meta Ray bands yeah yeah we are freaking great right and like I do think that you talk about luxury and fashion like if meta had released not Ray bands yeah right then like they wouldn't be as cool even if they were exactly the same and they probably wouldn't have sold as well so like I'm not like a luxury guy like I
don't have perfect insights or tastes on this but there is there's weird stuff going on about how you what what luxury really is how you display taste how you display wealth and certainly things like Instagram had had a big impact on that totally related to The Meta Ray bands are you at all like a da ma of any other
augmented reality or just like consumer hard Hardware technology like apple Vision Pro Oculus any of these products at all I Apple Vision Pro has got to be the most expensive product per minute of use in the history of the world I I obviously bought one immediately I've used it precisely zero times since the first week I had it it's
an incredible demo right you think about I've actually tried to do the math on this like it's more expensive than private planes per minute of use right if you looked at like the overall like so the exact same experience I I was a big Oculus I I think that Oculus is actually pretty good at this point I you know look I'm a Facebook loyalist so I
like bought every version I I like everyone else played a bunch of zombie shooting games during the pandemic with friends it was super fun like I'm into it I think it's a really hard sell though when like your life is pretty good right like I think the reality is like VR and like immersive experiences and all other realities are kind of
great if your life sucks right because I me like I'm going to like live in a video game but like I think a lot of the problem with that that type of stuff is like it's just it's not if you have a good life and kids and like do stuff like what's the point right go play real tennis instead of VR tennis yeah like I
like Wii tennis but I like real tennis better yeah yeah it's great that makes sense uh one more uh do you have a prediction around uh Google do we have a new C there at all in the next five years are they all in on Sundar SAR um I don't is there like is that just like based in some news or rumor or that purely based on it's it's purely based
on uh Google has not managed to release an an AI product that hasn't been riddled with issues and it feels like uh it it it does you know we we you know you obviously uh can poke fun at masa's picking ability and call him somebody that sort of sign the top or whatever but you know open Ai and chat gbt have
hundreds of millions of users and you know maybe they're not replacing that sort of commercial search activity but like much of the informational search it feels like uh the Golden Goose is threatened for the first time it's a really good question I mean here's the way I would think about it is Gemini is actually a pretty sweet product the
problem is no one uses it right like you know so is like the notebook LM product like Google actually has a bunch of very very good products right I think their problem is there's so big and their the marketing and like driving of those products is extremely hard um for them and yes I think they are the company
that more than any other company in the world is in the position of both being way ahead in certain elements of AI and like has a huge Advantage but they also have the most to lose right and so I think that's a very challenging thing for any company if you look at you know the history of companies like that the best example from history is is was it
Kodak right that invented the digital camera right like they invented it and like they it up right and like and you understand why though right which you have a bunch of these business concerns now the interesting about about Google is I think syndra is a very good guy and competent manager managing an enormous infrastructure but you do
actually still have founders with meaningful control in the picture and I actually think that's good because I think to do really tough things it's extremely helpful to have the broad sort of Founders right the question is it just has to be wielded and so I think the bigger question is you look at this like I think was it Larry Pig's letter
about please try to go to work 60 hours a week for AGI did you see this Larry wants a new startup today or yesterday it was like a wildly funny thing to leak right because everything's going to leak but it's like I actually think it's less a synar question and more like do the founders step up and just like broadsword this right because
that is if you that is kind of I think what probably has to happen and it's not a technology problem like honestly I I think Gemini is actually probably yeah for a lot of things the best product it just is like terribly marketed yeah makes a lot sense that makes sense uh you know you guys uh you know you've
spoken out against you know Venture becoming the sort of asset management business starting to look more like you know private equity in some ways at the same time uh you know that's on the fund side on the company side we've seen uh the sort of venture style rollups where people raise Venture Capital dollars to
buy you know companies they're going to and it's a great deal for the founder right to raise 20 on 100 and then just buy like profitable companies in theory uh it's better economics than than traditional PE but you guys at slow have supported I'm blanking on the name of the portfolio company but but what's what's your portfolio we've done a bunch
Metropolis team shares whatever I mean like so the here's here's basically talk track I give you one is I'm not act I am personally a snob about Venture capitalists being asset managers because I don't think it's that creative or important or interesting I will say as a GP it's a great business model right and so like the the seed business
model we run is definitely less consistently and meaningfully profitable than like being a16z in a platform there's no question right like so if you just want to make money as a and saying I earn DPI to justify more AUM is a very smart thing to do right it's just not that fun right and so like I'd rather do
the fun part of the business which is saying I take money in but I take in the money I know how to make lots of money on and then I run around saying haha I Told You So I was right from C that's like more fun for me right and so I think you have to like separate those as like I do intellectually dislike it I
don't think it's a bad business model on the rollup thing look we started doing this before all the cool kids were doing this right so if you look at like the two probably most important deals we've done in this one is team shares we seated that from zero I bought four I bought 10% of the company originally for $400,000 right we' kind of bought up
from there they've acquired well over 100 small businesses they built a whole platform for scaling them it's a Killer Business um it's kind of a and they've done a lot of really smart stuff but there is kind of a technology leverage rollup strategy to it you know you can look at something like uh Metropolis
which is another pretty iconic deal which again we were the seed investors in we were early seed investors in when it was a tech company and we realized that it turns out that SAS is a terrible business model right in a lot of verticals it's it's it's SAS is just like everyone has this idea that SAS is a great business model it's not right um
it's you get paid later it's hard to sell and you know the thing if you think about something like it's a transformative technology you go to a CEO and say I have a transformative technology going to change your whole business it's going to make you 50% profit you can't then say give me 40% of the profit right they're like you we'll give you your SAS
fee right so if you have an actually transformative technology and you can swing it you're better off buying your customers right and then deploying your technology but that pred that's predicated on actually having a better technology right and so this is the thing I think people get wrong is you know when Venture capitals go fund
rollups with the yada yada yada there's some tech leverage in them or no Tech leverage that's ridiculous and it doesn't make any sense if you're if you're a smart uh venture capitalist smart found you say hey I'm going to prove that I can be way better at this than my competitors than anyone else in the industry and then by the way it
turns out forever reason this is a hard software to sell it's conflicted I can't get paid what it's worth the whole nine yards then going to PE folks and saying hey we're going to prove this out we want cheap Capital we're going to go buy all our customers I think is a great strategy right so the kind of the devils
in the details in terms of how you do this um and we we're we're into it I mean we did there's one called tml the lumber manufactury we're really excited about we definitely do this but we have a pretty specific bar on what this is and it's not just like buying pool cleaning rollups yeah can you talk about creators I want to hear we love creators
I mean this I want to hear I want to hear who you're bullish on and then what the anatomy of a deal that looks like a a banger with a Creator looks like yeah so here's the basic upshot as you guys maybe know like we just announced this $65 million vehicle which is pretty groundbreaking right what we invest in
is not sea corpse we invest in seed creators so think I own a niche right I'm doing a million in Top Line I've got a million followers I'm growing really quickly and here's the key fact as you do the breakdown you're like I'm an awesome Creator I've built this community I I I am the the leader of it I'm admired I have the scarce thing I
have low you know low uh CAC on high LTV folks it's sweet but you're doing a million in Topline after expenses taxes you're living fine but you don't have investable Capital we're like we'll give you the investable capital to build C Corps and businesses right this is a new pattern of C Corp generation and building we really
believe in at seed now how do we get there we got there because it's really hard to invest in seed Creator businesses because the equity and the value of the community is held outside the company and so Jane wakes up in five days and we love the community we love her she's like oh it's actually not this it's that it's not Mr Beast Berger
it's febles you do not want to be in that scenario right right like no one wants that it's bad for everyone um we want to be able to invest as in as aligned way as we possibly can with creators and so we were like look we do this effectively with Founders anyway we don't take board seats we want to be
first checkin we're trying to be collaborative holistically with them we want to be aligned with them if they win great if they lose say Lai what is the equivalent in Creator and like that's kind of what we're bullish on so I think you know it turns out in Creator like most things the transparent deals the super Buzzy ones Masa style they always
get super over every knows them and they say oh we like Creator Creator important Creator right we're much more interested in providing Capital where it's scarce which is we think seed creators and we think on this model what about putting those two things together have you thought about going to a Creator and saying hey you
would be perfect if you owned this business that already exists we buy the business give it to you repackage it and then you're kind of the marketing front end is that a crazy idea or have you it's not a crazy idea and we get pitch it all the time actually you know in different verticals like you have the of
lawn care who wants to buy the lawn care companies or it's not crazy um but I do think it's complicated to get right right and I think like you know there's a thing I like to say about seed stage investing which is no bank shots right and the more variables that have to be right Domino style the less likely it is that the thing actually happens
right and so for me it's like GH like so you want Tech leverage and a rollup and we're going to put a Creator on top and it's like something will not work right and like that makes it a hard bet now but it's intellectual not wrong right um with uh kind of two follow-up questions on the Creator fund do you guys have
like a no zeros policy right A lot of these creators generate revenue from ads right so if you invest a million dollars and they generate you know a couple million bucks a year in ad Revenue like even if they don't make a banger company like you'll get your money out eventually or or how do you think about so here's the way we think about it it's
a great question we're not that interested in your ad business right like we just don't really care like there's no Enterprise Value generated in that um it's really nice non-dilutive financing sometimes but like it's not what we're playing for um we also are not interested in taking some Creator's last scent right like if you're just
like you're making a million bucks after you pay taxes and whatever else you're living okay we're not going to be like hey uh by the way we want our 10% of your ad Revenue we like we don't care now there is a scenario we do care about protecting right which is if you take our money you know we're doing the seed
thing we start a few companies they don't quite work but in the process of spending our money cuz you marketed yourself and whatever else you get 10 times bigger yeah and then you're like you know I kind of just like Super Bowl ads I'm just going to do a bunch of Super Bowl ads and I'm going to make 15 million $20 million next year on that
we'll we'll want our piece of The Upside on that in that model right but like our whole thing is about alignment and we're certainly not primarily interested in your ad dollars right it's not like a slow you know now of financing right n makes sense uh Mr Beast is marked around five billion right now private Mark I wouldn't read
that much yeah yeah yeah but I'm I'm assuming that everybody that's investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Mr Beast or billions wants to get their money out eventually it's hard to imagine anybody buying it you know uh out right right uh do they uh do you see Mr Beast going public in the next few years I am sure that's what he they want
to do like OB it is is it is it a stock that trades you know kind of like true social where it's just based around attention and and doesn't I think it's a m it's a mem stock if it gets out right it's just a meme coin on steroids you know the reality is is like it's not again I actually credit Jimmy Mr Beast he's done
a few very important things for the Creator space right one thing he did is he's made a lot of creators dream a lot bigger and that's great right like I appreciate that right from a perspective I also think you know he's really I think been a good example on a beacon of creators aren't just creators like they
can start businesses like whatever so there there there's been an aperture opening that he's really helped with that I think has been great for the industry now that said um you know I do think there's some structural problems with his quote unquote business right as a Creator business like I'll give you an example like one we we care a lot about
um the LTV of customers right and his audience is so Broad and candidly pretty poor right which means that like they're not great customers right like there's a reason you sell chocolate because it's one of the only things you can sell to everyone that's cheap right and like so there's like it's not like the best
audience it's also you know the reality is he does a lot of this Media stuff like you know that you know everyone's excited that he gets a $100 million Amazon contract but then he spends more than that on the show right like and so it's like it's just not clear to me that in the hyper competitive entertainment space with a broad General audience that
that's like an amazing business but look it is definitely a cult and I'm sure there's a bunch of like 20-year-old kids that will grow up and trade at like a meme stock right and like that could be fine right it's just not like a thing where you're looking at like this is a money printing machine right which is what I'm more interested in to my uh to
my knowledge you're thinking about the slow Creator program where you would want one of the creators underlying companies to go public but not the Creator holding company to go public and that there's some brand risk to the Creator if you're having a a financial asset that's trading based on your popularity and if your popularity goes
down you get even more unpopular because yeah so we I've been interested in this kind of how do you think about financing people with Equity versus debt for a very long time I started my first company in 1999 when I was in high school it's called life capital.com and the idea was basically some version of this right and so like I think that
thematically makes a ton of sense right as the world gets more unequal and outcomes are more discontinuous debt financing does just broadly not make sense for people right the equity model and we've invested in a bunch of versions of this right including some of that recently so I do think it's a very interesting spit specifically for the
creater fund again you know you kind of are you know you are what you eat right in this case we like eat LP dollars and like from an eating LP dollar perspective and like what the structure is the good news is we really think there's an opportunity to deliver normal ass SE Corps skims whatever you want to call it right that start with creators
but are perfectly huge amazing companies to back from seed right and so that is what we do with that is there residual value to the hold Co pieces yeah there totally is like in 10 years cuz these are 10e funds do you have to figure out how to wrap that up or resell it or like retrade absolutely but like candidly
this Market is moving so fast that the way I think about this is like we're investing in launchpads for amazing SE Corps that are driven first and foremost by amazing communities that are led by amazing Founders that are creators like that is what we're doing and yes at the end of a 10-e cycle which then has a bunch of extensions on it you do figure
out what you do with the residual assets yeah that makes sense um I have so many other questions here I mean the the main one is uh how quickly are you pushing creators to uh are are you thinking of these creators as a catalyst for the SE corpse that they're spinning out because one thing I've seen from spending
millions of dollars with influencers is like oftentimes you'll spend $100,000 with an influencer it it performs well like if it's a sort of like broad consumer audience and then the performance can drop off over time because uh you know you know there's only so many buyers in the audience um how do you think about uh you know the almost
no Creator is big enough to sustain a venture scale uh you know C Corp by themselves right well it depends what verticals and how you're looking at it again like when you think about creators it's such a broad space and used so broadly that I think you can you can mean a lot of different things right and
so look one of the Dirty Secrets which you know it sounds like is in the Venture Capital World entrepreneurs all day long will pitch you about how their CAC is very high but the CAC will come down here's a secret CAC always goes up right it always goes up like there CAC goes up not down right and so like what
you're experiencing is that it's like if you spend money with an influencer they're the people who want to buy the thing anyway you reach them it's cheap and then they hit a wall like if it's just like a general product you're selling right and so you have to think about it as a Launchpad from that perspective um you know we want to back
found Creator Founders who come in and are they want to be entrepreneurs they like pitch us business ideas like they have their list they're like okay like I know my audience in lawn care in terrariums and you name it better than anyone in the world here's the 10 things that no one knows and by the way I can sell them and I know I'm selling it to
myself like I'm the leader of this and I understand the space better than anyone and I have access to the community and they trust me that's what we want right um we don't need them to come in and be like here's the business plan 100% in fact we kind of just but we do need that list because if you come in and you're
like I'm a Creator I have the audience but I don't know what to do we're like well we don't are you an entrepreneur just going to make more media right and we're like the media is fine but the media has to support real businesses yeah that makes sense cool um anything else that's all I got for today uh last
question who's a better Grill Master you or Zuck oh definitely Zuck okay I had to now fantastic I mean look I wouldn't say bad but like I think that man has invested in the craft of grilling in a way that I have not I love it I love it that makes sense uh we'd love to have you as a regular yeah anytime you guys reach out it's I really love the show
it's super fun I love what you guys have done and we love bullshitting so it's great you love to Yap we love to Yap match made in heaven it's a match made in heaven collab on a billboard someday it'll be fun we should yeah we should that'd be great uh well enjoy Wells enjoy the weekend have a great time we talk to you later have bye it was great
uh I noticed on his uh website slow. uh it looks like they have the biggest guy and they made him they made him chair I've had to do that before oh wait how tall am I Jordy 68 68 A lot of people just don't even believe it they say there's there's never been a podcast 68 podcaster yeah uh yeah I'm kind of the C O'Brien of tech uh Tech podcasting
I suppose uh true many have said that he's really tall uh let's go to speaking of uh uh physical appearance let's go to Ali debau she says the only moat it's not AI it's dropped atad gorgeous good looks and generational wealth I love it very TV coded post I had to throw it in there uh she sent me a a text message
because she uh we featured her show she was actually getting dunked on but we featured it we had a lot of fun and so thank you to Ally for keeping the timeline she knows how to post the perfect amount to to you know get engagement B engagement a little bit of Engagement she's got a she's got a social app believe it's for uh swish
swish yeah for photo sharing which is cool and they're partnered with some huge rolling loud the largest uh concert or something like that and they're powering it they they she's really good at doing these like deals even though it's small company yeah teal fellow too yeah it was funny uh when Apple Apple came out and and announced their
sort of uh you know their photos app is rough so I'm sure she's not super threatened by that but uh they also came out with events yeah partile and it was I think competing with what alli's doing too but I don't see Tim Cook getting deals done with rolling loud he's he's too busy at the John Summit show backstage you know who knows uh so
alli's in control but uh great post oh well uh should we move on and and finish out the timeline and wrap up the show let's do it okay let's go to uh visicon Versi he says even Kings and billionaires want to be posters and podcasters King Charles is launching his own Apple music radio show to Showcase his favorite
you know they they they brought the brink truck for that oh yeah oh yeah signing King Charles I love it I mean get we're Network we should explore see you know maybe he does some Angel Investing he could host you know an Angel Investing I mean we were we were pitching Trump getting back in the media game you know because he had his own
reality TV show we were talking about maybe JD is the first one with a with a podcast or something but and uh who's the California guy who Newsome has a show now yeah uh so why not why not uh a radio show I hope King Charles gets on there introduces every song takes requests does some radio stuff winds up doing the news who knows maybe we'll
have him on the show King Charles open invite uh should we go to George Mack yep my most contrarian belief we could increase the global economy by 2 to 3% by installing large whiteboards in every home I love George so much this is such a funny funny idea to just like you mandatory whiteb I mean George you don't
know I mean he's a fantastic thinker and writer and poster and uh he he's like very into like modeling things out creating Frameworks creating flowcharts and so of course he thinks like you know you just need to be like one foot away from a whiteboard to whiteboard out uh the problem and solve your problems at any moment um but we need to get a
whiteboard in here we don't do nearly enough whiteboarding um what's your take on the Whiteboard walls do you think that paint is like toxic and terrible generally I don't eny using whiteb love kind of making graphics and in figma and using that um figma maximalist yep I've just never been uh I I love uh you know creative Pursuits and
writing and and all these things but um I went to a Waldorf School I ever told you about this you familiar with Waldorf they have like similar to monor yeah yeah I went to the to school at a festar hotel yeah yeah exactly um no I think it's it's it's uh it's an educational philosophy okay from Rudolph Steiner
emphasizing a holistic approach to education that nurtures intellectual artistic and practical skills with a focus on imagination and creativity that's so I credit my Waldorf education for uh my uh you know a number of my sort of um creative abilities but they forced us to paint and draw and knit and do all these things as kids and I wasn't
good that I didn't have the patience for drawing I just didn't have the patience so I thought I didn't like art I thought I didn't like uh you know creative um tasks as a kid uh but I just didn't like I've never liked drawing writing I I I I now you're an artist and your paintbrush is Warrior sure sm7b exactly keyboard
Warrior keyboard Warrior podcaster Twitter fingers yeah yes uh but but generally I I I think that uh people seem to love whiteboards there should be more of them yeah I like it it' be fun to have one here that we could write on you know kpis stuff like that uh let's go to Nick he says 500 people run the world but they collectively use like 50
therapists and listen to everything they say so really 50 50 therapists Run the World think it's accurate the followup uh and those 50 therapists have been trained by like five teachers oh it's all Downstream from something yeah I don't know it's funny funny conspiracy I don't I I I I wonder if this is actually
true at all or just like something that was completely hallucinated yeah Bill mantis post yeah yeah I mean I can't I can't imagine that this is true that like yeah SAA and and sindar are using the same therapist or something it's funny because therapy so often I haven't had a therapist since I was like in high school or something like that it never
worked I was never big into that World um but uh Tom Cruz route yeah I just watch Tom Cruz movies and get fired up uh I think it's more about talking out loud about the things that you're working through and coming to many of your own conclusions right by or going for a long walk yeah a walk 50k steps
50,000 steps is putting up 50,000 steps in a day five times most people's goals so much that's walking all day long yeah anyway let's move on uh speaking of walking running going long distances Zack says package your obsession into one thing that compounds one brand one output One Core product when all thoughts are directed towards one
channel a violent rainstorm is captured in one infinite well that sustains and compounds Beyond Your Wildest imagination good writer he's writing a book he is yeah oh that's fun yeah yeah cool yeah um he'll sell a ton of them yeah I mean he has over a million on Instagram now yeah yeah and and and uh I mostly want to highlight his execution
on his new consumer app which is building kind of a social layer on top of these fitness trackers and uh good name too it's called AA right AA it's a very on Trend you were trying to get Aura farming to go viral and we were kind of we were almost too early on it I failed but I think it's probably breaking through now and I think people
will now start to get it maybe see yeah if you want to make money on Aura farming though you you had to be in it you know really months ago yeah probably probably should we go to Emily is in SF okay I'll read this one pissed off a lot of people it did so uh uh timeline turmoil fol timeline and turmoil not my
content but uh let's see what Emily has to say she says to me the greatest sadness of all is the banality of most people's lives I'll spend time with my non-elite friends and it's clear that their it's clear that their lives are devoid of heroism and lore they lock in clock in but they fight no great battles and they Das no great foes they drop by
thy club or thy bar but find no great loves there they travel the world but is by no means an adventure they return home but they are not welcomed by a Triumph no all they have are their succulents and the pile of dirty laundry they failed to do before they left brutal absolutely brutal does the does the golden retriever long for great
battles uh brother will is in the comments here uh there was quite a lot of comments but it's ranking people that uh are in the TB verse and will says what's your net worth which is a great followup question to a post like this I love it yeah um but uh but no great great it's the Chad homonym yeah good argument what's your
bench press yeah uh no I mean I think uh there there is some truth here obviously there's there's always some truth to uh any anything that this controversial yes yes there's no truth there's no controversy but again we are in the you can just do things era so if you are surrounded by succulents maybe you know lock in clock in go devel some
let's invite Emily on the show I want to see how the heroism and lore in her life how she's locking in and clocking in fight great battles how she's finding great love at the club or the bar how she's adventuring around the world you can just sign up to be the first person to go on Starship yeah hey flight n flight n is coming up
strap me in uh it's the firmament has an 80 lead against SpaceX right now but uh we're feeling good about the ninth flight good and uh Emily take it on yeah let's do it uh anyway fun post uh I love this one from Palmer lucky we've talked about Call of Duty and how important it is to the global economy before he says the
Call of Duty franchise has done more to engender support for ukus military cohesion over the past two decades than just about anything else especially with military age Nails change my mind accurate 100% accurate yeah who's that soap McTavish do you not know the characters in Call of Duty it's coming back to wow oh little three finger moment oh I can't
I can't identify soap McTavish uh no I I remember what he looks like I just I just go blanked on the name because I'm not a real gamer oh oh mogged it's great uh yeah we need more Call of Duty games uh we need more we should get a soap McTavish like sound effects if I'm wrong on that I'm dead I think I'm right but I John soap MC no
you actually are wrong so McTavish is the guy with the the the buzz cut oh no I'm wrong who is it okay I don't know it's someone from Call of Duty I don't even know uh I I I played the first Call of Duty the very first one uh when it came out played Call of Duty Captain Price Captain Price that's right Captain
Price Captain Price Oh Captain Price it's great anyway uh wait Duty can you pull up best Captain Price moments yeah can you can you pull up a Call of Duty uh compilation let's just watch that for the rest of the show I want to see some I've got some quotes from Captain Price let's learn some L history is written by the Victor history is filled with Liars
if he lives and we die his truth becomes written and ours is lost they say truth is the first casualty of War we got to just start tweeting these out these are bangers Shepherd will be a hero because all you need to change the world is one good lie in a river of blood I love it I love it we get dirty and the world stays
clean yeah we get dirty and the world stays clean the story of podcasting throw this on right what the hell kind of name is soap how to Muppet like you past selection big this is Brother watching D we are leaving these are core childhood memories kaboom oh this is so good open fire I need a sound effect that says
open fire for sure for sure I mean if AI takes all the jobs I think I'm going to be doing just fine just playing Call of Duty on endless mode do anything St I'll be fine loyalists are expecting us half a click to the north move out loyalists great PR anyway H Call of Duty but I would love to just take what kind of name is soap he how to Muppet like
you past selection I love it I love it it's great uh to just go back to the times being we got to get soap out of here yeah it's great shepher is using site Hotel Bravo you know where it is I'll see you in hell it's great anyway uh moving on to something extremely important uh a lot of uh a lot of pro Amer VCS out there
have been asking us for car recommendations we got a good one for you 2018 4G asking price $8,990 giving it away finished in Shadow black with reentry black white white interior complimentary by Anarchy forged wheels and Bowden Auto House titanium exhaust system uh go check it out I really don't like the wheels those are
easy enough to swap out but this is a whole Bowden Auto House this is like their their entire aesthetic which for some is exactly right not enough not enough with the mensor body kits and and The Stance under lighting but we know what they say build a house one brick at a time truth is the first casualty of War it's great um uh I don't know how
many more we should do let's go to yine of course he's been on the show before he just says this is the most important website in the world tag with the xtag I love it yeah if you're ever just having a low period in your in your timeline just post this is the greatest app and bunch of people will come out the stands will support
very self-referential but you got to put up numbers every once in a while you know you love it uh should we go to Jeff Lewis yeah this is an interesting post he says I now talk with categories of quote unquote people in this order of frequency my family my team at Bedrock our broader Bedrock business relationships across entrepreneurs LPS
top talent across Industries government and others Ultra close friends llms friends other so is other's like the HVAC guy yeah not too frequent that is OD uh what what I thought was interesting about this is that I use llms a lot I don't think of myself as as talking with them like I don't think I I don't think I'm having a
conversation with Google I don't think I'm talking to chat gbt or Gro when I use it I I I feel like it's much more in the tool realm for me but I'm wondering if I'm missing missing out on something I know voice Mode's getting better but I haven't really gone down the Sesame Rabbit Hole or the voice mode where I'm really just like chopping it up with
them for a long time I did have a pretty good experience driving in and I asked I asked the voice mode on GPT 4.5 just to kind of like tell me the the top stories in the Wall Street Journal kind of break them down and then I could kind of steer it but it was still a little awkward it didn't feel like actually talking to a
person or a friend it was very much just like comes up and then you know ask the next question uh should we move on to Blake Robbins I thought this was a great take and under disc place to end the show this is great so we've talked about levels before he built a Flight Simulator game he Vibe coded it uh with
a bunch of AI coding tools uh went viral he's now making something like $56,000 ARR or something he's climbing he's making money he's selling blimp ads in them he's selling F f-16s he has in-game purchases it's very cool and he's documenting it all um but Blake has a good point here he says the success of levels Flight Simulator game is really a
story about effective distribution leveraging massive audience not AI G development and I that's 100% right and he is using that audience but then the audience is remarketing his game by just raging at it and and raging over the quality or his monetization strategy and so it's really a great story of not uh
you know having distribution but then uh you know properly leveraging that uh distribution by by building something somewhat uh controversial I'd love to close it there but we got one more we got to go to Nat Friedman former brother of the week Nat Friedman is preparing to transport Scrolls to the scanner he's not stopping he's not
resting on his Laurels he's he's scanning more Scrolls the Scrolls must be scanned I love it and I'm very excited so good luck to you on that Transportation hopefully it goes smoothly hopefully they aren't damaged in transit uh I've really enjoyed following the Scrolls story and uh you know we we got to talk to more of these
Scrolls folks they're always super super interesting people the Scrolls Universe the Cinematic Universe of everyone working on the Scrolls Casey Hanmer uh bunch of other people very very fascinating anyway the scroll verse the scroll verse stay tuned for more we'll see you on Monday and have a have a great weekend we'll talk to you soon bye bye